I just bought Dylan’s Bootleg Series Vol. 8 and I must say it was one of those perfect purchases. The music just comes shining through in all its subtle glory. There are many delightful alternate versions of several recent Dylan classics including “Mississippi” and “Most of the Time“. The net effect of this album for me is that it puts me at ease. With the world on fire as it seems to be this not an emotion that is easy to come by. But Dylan delivers and it has been good for my psychological state of mind and my adjustment to the unravelling we are witnessing all around us. At the moment I have a guarded optimism about the future, but also a heavy feeling that it is going to take a lot work to put it all back together.
The end result is that I feel at ease “most of the time”.
Most of the Time
My head is on straight
Most of the Time
I am strong enough not to hate
I got enough faith I got enough strength
I keep it all away way beyond arms length
I can smile in the face of mankind…
Most of the time.
I recently got an iPhone it is probably the single most useful tech device I have ever owned. However blogging with it is a hassle. But now I found wphone, a plugin that optimizes wordpress for the iPhone. This post was created on my iPhone. Expect to see more frequent short posts now that I can blog from my phone.
I know it will never happen, but just once I want to see Hillary Clinton play Eminem’s “Business” at one of her rally’s just to get these lines put out there:
Quick gotta move fast, gotta perform miracles
Gee willikers Dre, holy bat syllables
Look at all the bullshit that goes on in Gotham
When I’m gone time to get rid of these rap criminals
So, skip to ya lou, while I do what I do best
You ain’t even impressed no more, you used to it
Flows too wet, nobody close to it
Nobody says it was till everyone knows the shit
The most hated on outta all those who say they get hated
On eighties songs
Exaggerate it all so much
They make it all up
If applied to the Clintons and their treatment by the media, truer words have never been spoken. And the more they hate on her the more and more I think she is right for the presidency.
The world seems awash in poker metaphors these days. These are interesting, often trite, but meaningful nonetheless. I don’t have much to add to the discussion but it is a topic that has consumed me for awhile. The sheer poetry of poker is a fundamental theme in American culture. The song that best captures it for me is “Loser” by the Grateful Dead.
All that I am asking for is ten gold dollars,
and I could pay you back with one good hand.
You can look around about the wide world over,
and you’ll never find another honest man.
This line sums it up for me. The promise of the next moment. The turn of the card. The eternal optimism of the loser. Whatever the consequences, this seems like the most correct way to live life and it is quintessential to the spirit of americana. Or maybe that is just a silly romantic notion I just can’t shirk. But when you have been down so long you only have upwards to look. And what can be better for the soul than a spirit of renewal and rebirth, an opportunity to start over, and fix things anew? That is how I feel about this upcoming political season. Frankly the Bush presidency doesn’t have me down anymore. I know that 2008 will bring a turn of the cards, and all it takes is one good hand and this country will be back on track.
Others have criticized Bush and compared his actions to a desperate gambler. Kos blog makes pretty compelling poker analogy about the Republicans and the war. But I don’t think this is giving enough credit to gamblers. These metaphors while seemingly apt, are a little too pretentious to me. Bush certainly is a degenerate gambler, but I don’t think he encapuslates the more positive aspects of the game. And it is a shame to draw the analogy. Bush and the behavior of his cronies strike me more as assuming the characteristics of card sharps, the deck is stacked and they behave with such arrogance because they truly know the next card in the deck. The people are being taken for a ride because they are operating under the assumption of a fair deal. There is another side to it. The election cycle represents a reshuffle of the cards and a reinvigorated determination on the part of the American public.
Don’t you push me baby
because I’m moaning low
I know a little something
you won’t ever know
Don’t you touch hard liquor just
a cup of cold coffee
Gonna get up
in the morning and go
And that is it isn’t it? “I know a little something you won’t ever know…” Only experience can reap positive benefits. There is a moment of truth in this experience. An appreciation of the randomness of life. A reassertion of positive determination. No liquor and distraction for me, just some cold coffee and I am going to refocus my efforts and get up and go.
This is americana and this is what makes this country great. It is not the cynicism, the cheats, and the desperation. It is the people who look at things with a clear head, redouble their efforts and work positively towards a new, brighter future. There is a little gamble in everything because the future is unknown. But there is something positively constructive about this American optimism.
I can tell the Queen of Diamonds by the way she shines
Come to Daddy on an inside straight
I got no chance of losing this time
Ok enough rambling on my part. I will leave you with an early performance of Loser by the Dead.
Have been exploring the guts of wordpress lately. So I decided to build my own theme from the ground up rather than simply bolt onto someone else’s theme. I have borrowed some layout ideas from other themes, but for the most part this theme is a substantial rewrite particularly in the CSS department. I am feeling in a Red mood, so I went with a Wharhol inpsired Mao header. Of course this is not to say I am a card carrying member of the Chairman’s movement. To me this is more an attempt at subversion in a post-ironic age. Besides, China has enough human rights problems that followers of Mao would do good to remedy. For example what they have been doing to the Falun Gong is not good.
Anyway, the header image in this blog comes from an original photograph I took last year at the Andy Wharhol museum in Pittsburgh. I will be working on this theme in incremental stages with additional improvements so stay tuned.
Listening to the third movement of Gustav Mahler’s first symphony. I can’t really explain why but the music just makes me want to be alive in the 19th century. There is a mood to the music that makes me think of an atmosphere, pace, time and space that is quintessentially 19th century. It is an atmosphere I wouldn’t mind inhabiting far away from modern conveniences.
However I recognize the impossiblity of recapturing this atmosphere and abandoning the modern conveniences. Even though the music was composed in the 19th century the atmosphere it creates is not necessarily of that time. My experience of the music is mediated by modern conveniences. I am able to call up the digital replication of the music and listen to it over and over as I like. Psychologically invoking the mood and atmosphere with each listen. This is an experience not possible in the 19th century. Even the most ardent symphony buffs in the 19th century probably were only able to hear Mahler’s symphony a few times in their lifetime. And moreover, this experience would have been mediated through a great concert hall and live performance. In other words, in the 19th century listening to Mahler would have been an “event” not a mere casual experience in the middle of the night when one is prone to specific moods and atmospheric modalities.
So in essence I am alive in the music today. The atmosphere is present in my phenomenological experience of my headphones. There is no 19th century, there is no past, only a trace of it and my experience of the here and now. The next song in my playlist is a song by Johnny Cash. Now that is an experience that nobody in the 19th century has ever been able to experience, concert hall or no concert hall.
The Republican party has long tried to assert its libertarian underpinnings. But the reality has been that Freedom is just another effective political buzz word that conservatives like the bandy around. Republicans are no more the party of freedom than they are same party of Lincoln. They have been shot through with radical and often times conflicting social agendas that are self serving in the extreme. The current state of the party leaves much to be desired in the protection of freedom and liberty. One of the most shameful displays of this betrayal was the passage of a port sercurity bill that included a rider outlawing internet gambling and poker. During the debate of this unlawful gambling bill Democrat Barney Frank makes some very great points and sounds like a true patriot of freedom:
Now there is lots to be said about gambling, its addictive qualities, and the moral and aesthetic pros and cons. But my interest politically is much broader. This is a genuine opportunity for Democrats on the left to take back and own the concept of freedom and the positive aspects of libertarian philosohpy. Many on the left deeply understand the problems of fascism and the tangible ways that the republicans have eroded civil liberties in this country. Whether it is hadeas corpus, secrecy, circumvention of due process, anti choice for women, etc. But poker and gambling is one of those things that connects to a lot of people, not just the ones who subscribe to ACLU newsletters and the Nation. Taking up the cause of gambling is a way to show consistency on issues of freedom. There is a reason so much is going on in Nevada this primary season and it is time for Democrats to claim its rightful place as the party of freedom.
We need to remind people that Democrats stand for sensible policy and personal freedom. That is what “Liberalism” has always been about. Throughout the 20th century and especially after WWII and Fascism in Europe, America has been a bastion of Liberal democratic principle and enlightenment. The Democrats were the dominant party in this era, times were good, and the country and the world moved forward. Geoofrey Nunberg makes a compelling argument about the rhetorical power of “freedom” and how it was captured by the right sometime around Reagan’s presidency.
Along with the trashing of the liberal label, the modern right can count the capture of the language of freedom as one of its signal linguistic triumphs. Indeed, you could argue that it’s even more crucial for liberals to recapture freedom than to recapture their own name, and certainly more important than recapturing “values”.
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When you [the right] invoke the ideal of freedom to defend your opposition to the minimum wage or motor-voter laws, you have to pretend that it’s exactly what George Washington’s troops suffered for at Valley forge–the same thing, not a new, metaphorical sort of freedom. That’s why “freedom” isinevitably a commodius and expansive word. As the historian Daniel Rodgers noted, it’s used to “bind together the confusions and discordances of American life with a single, powerfully flexible noun.”
The defense of our right to gamble anywhere we choose as Barney Frank so elengantly does in the above you tube clip is one cause Democrats would do well champion. This is the kind of issue that resonates with a wide swath of people, especially people not tuned into the minutia of the political landscape. And when it comes to poker in particular we should remind them that the buck stops here when it comes social cultural authoritarianism. And by the way that phrase “the buck stops here“… that’s was orginally a poker term that was made famous by our gambler in chief Harry Truman, an avid poker player and a Democrat.
I have been listening to Tom Waits’ latest effort “Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers, & Bastards”. Far and away my favorite track is The Long Way Home. Norah Jones covered this song on her second album but Tom Waits’ version is much, much, more haunting and sadly beautiful. My favorite line of all time is in this song:
Got a head full of lightning
A hat full of rain
What a succint way to sum up existence and individual experience. Running and bumping around full of ideas but rarely the time, means, or opportunity to actualize our dreams. The droning pace of existence can be unbearable at times for the inspired and excited. So many ways in which our mind is telling us yes (the lightning) and so many times reality and the world puts up roadblocks of no (the rain).
If I seem scattered, uncertain, manic or depressed its all because I have a head full of lightning and a hat full of rain.
And that is the problem with becoming a cultural phenomenon. The law ceases to protect you. What is happening to Google is what Gilles Deleuze would call a deterritorialization or line of flight.
“Multiplicities are defined by the outside: by the abstract line, the line of flight or deterritorialization according to which they change in nature and connect with other multiplicities. The plane of consistency (grid) is the outside of all multiplicities. The line of flight marks: the reality of a finite number of dimensions that the multiplicity effectively fills; the impossibility of a supplementary dimension, unless the multiplicity is transformed by the line of flight; the possibility and necessity of flattening all of the multiplicities on a single plane of consistency or exteriority, regardless of their number of dimensions.”
~ Gilles Deleuze Thousand Plateaus
The semantic disruption of Google is possible because of its multiplicitous nature. Googling is a nomadic experience. A process by which one moves adrift through the chance encounters of reality and linguistic relationships that bind them together. The network that Google corporation glues together traces out the very grid that we live within. In a word Google has become ours because it has weaved together through its tapestry of search algorithms, technologies, and interstitial existences the very fabric of our being. When you become that co-aligned with the grid you no longer continue operating as a separate autonomous unit of being. Your identity is lost, you become nomad.
It is remarkable the rhetoric and logic of ownership, trademark, and corporatism. To presume that things are fundamentally discrete and can be owned, or even that language can be owned and controlled because it is part of a brand. Rarely is it mentioned that Google is the product of us. What is compelling about Google is that it weaves together the products of our being, whether they be blogs, news, video clips, webpages, text, audio, utterances and disclosures. That is the soup of life and tapestry of our weaved web. Google owns it no more than you or I own it. It is a territory that defies territorialization. And Google, being successful in providing the services that effectively allow us to traverse this web, finds that their brand has become something that they no longer really have any control over. And so goes the logic of control when confronted with the force of deterritorialization. Google is a line of flight that traces, it is no longer a stable place, entity, or idea.
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