before they put you on the torture table
Just had a bit of a Greil Marcus flash: in a great and kind of moving article in Salon about the first theatrical production in post-war Baghdad, one of the actors, asked to interpret a part of the play, is quoted as follows:

"The moon is the symbol of death and the Dictator was trying his best to seize the symbol for himself. But he could not succeed. He could only succeed in leaving his fingerprints on our memory."

Now, the question has to be asked: is this a deliberate Elvis Costello reference or just a coincidence? From "Green Shirt" (Armed Forces, 1979):

Never said I was a stool pigeon, I never said I was a diplomat
Everybody is under suspicion but you don't want to hear about that.

[...]Better send the begging letter to the big investigation
Who put these fingerprints on my imagination?

It's not as far-fetched as it might otherwise be, since the actor had previously said he was a Nirvana fan. But it's almost too perfect to come up in regular conversation: the song, which starts off as a critique of TV news, turns into a portrayal of a 1984-ish police state (albeit one far less nuanced than Leonard Cohen's "the rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor," etc.) not too far removed from the conditions as described in Iraq under Sadaam. Well, I guess there's no way to peg the intention, although it was a little weird to read after listening to "Green Shirt" on the train this morning. But it does bring up two interesting points.

First is the fact that in recent months Costello has been doing impassioned versions of "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding" at every opportunity, presumably as an anti-war statement. But as the actor's comment points out, if you're going to write anti-fascist songs, you'd think those would be just as appropriate when talking about Iraq. I can't dictate what Elvis' position should have been (and, truthfully, he never made it explicit) but I do know that both of these songs come from the same album and they both seem like valid points to make at this moment. I mean, OK, you could say (were you inclined to this kind of overstatement) that American's recent foreign policy has been leaning toward the fascist, so a criticism of that foreign policy could be taken as anti-fascist in and of itself, but clearly the Iraqi regime is far worse and far more deserving of the critique. (The beginning of "Green Shirt" might be better targeted at the US, though: "There's a smart young woman on a light blue screen who comes into my house every night / she takes all the red, yellow, orange and green and she turns them into black and white.") So this confusion, and this conscious choice to focus on the anti-war song, indicates the occasional emptiness of progressives' "anti" statements: OK, you're anti-racism, or anti-fascism, but what are you for? More importantly, what would you do to get rid of racism or fascism (or war or homophobia or poverty or...)? Clearly, in the case of Iraq, many people who would probably have identified themselves as anti-fascist (had that term not gone out of vogue) were against one particular method of eliminating it, and while I'm not saying that's an inaccurate position, it is a somewhat untenable one. This issue is, as they say, thorny.

The other thing is the way it reflects upon art under censorship. This quote highlights the way that art is eager to make connections (the play itself references the Beatles and an Iraqi filmmaker, among others) and the way that censored art seems to be primarily characterized by its lack of connectivity. An oppressive regime both restricts what outside art can come into a society and what kind of art that society can produce, resulting in art that often seems weirdly self-contained. Soviet socialist realist art, for instance, all seems similar due in no small part to its reliance upon iconography, and Japanese imperial dramas (for instance) are beautiful but not really moving or intellectually resonant, at least to me, presumably due to its need to be apolitical and not offend the rulers. (Ditto for a lot of offically-sanctioned Christian art.) Those pieces of art-under-repression that seem resonant to us in the outside world (and, presumably, to those poised to receive the signals under the eye of the regime) are meaningful only in reference to a single subject: the oppressive regime itself (c.f. Shostakovitch) and this seems the only connection capable of being made. All else seems cut off from the dialogue of cultural production, oddly stilted, beautiful sometimes but lacking that particular spark of individuality or resonance that we look for in art.

What that means to me is that the connectivity of art is actually a way for it to express its freedom--to break free (regularly) from the self-imposed limitations of singularity and reach out to other singularities to produce a web, to move beyond expression to communication. The joy of intertextuality, these days sometimes dismissed as being overly "postmodern" (tell that to Shakespeare), is a primary pleasure and purpose of art. So it seems weird to me when people praise their art or others' art for being "subversive," at least when such art is being produced in a reasonably free society, like America: no matter how repressed you might feel, the fact remains that you're not living under a totalitarian regime (see the Salon article for a description of what that's like), so anything you think of as "subversion"--usually defined as sneaking "naughty" messages past a commercial entity--is really just plain ol' intertextuality in the context of an artist willingly changing his message to adapt to an audience. There's very specific offenders I'm thinking of here, and I'll rant about it soon, but suffice to say that the ethic of "subversion" seems primarily to result in assigning more power to a given entity than it really posesses.


posted by Mike B. at 3:04 PM 0 comments

The Salon article, by the way, blames the tendency to focus on the backstage machinations of a campaign on Maureen Dowd's coverage of the 1992 race, although it seems like she's seen the error of her ways a bit, although she still has an irrational hatred of Gore. The rise of Paul "I basically just read the news and write about it" Krugman at the Times indicates that they've seen this error, too.

Oops, gotta do some work...

posted by Mike B. at 12:28 PM 0 comments

..but then whoops, NAFTA
Salon's lead story today is on the "Gore-ing" of John Kerry. It's nice to see the assumption that Gore was screwed by the media in 2000 move closer to the mainstream, I guess, but Salon does seem to be missing the point that Kerry is more or less unelectable, and fair or not, the evidence of this early treatment by the press should be an indicator that he's not the best pick for a Democrat who actually wants to see their party retake the White House.

Reading this bit, however, brought up a thought:

Media accounts describe him as phony and calculating, incapable of making a heartfelt statement. His history is analyzed cynically, sometimes falsely: Misrepresentations of his statements and actions metastasize into myth. As a result, he is seen as the archetypal slippery, soulless politician. That much of the supporting evidence is false seems utterly beside the point.

[...]Like Gore, the Massachusetts Democrat has been characterized, with some justice, as being aloof and cold. On Saturday, when asked about his haughty image during the first debate among the Democratic candidates, he tried to laugh it off (in much the same way Gore unsuccessfully joked about being stiff in 2000) by suggesting he "ought to just disappear and contemplate that by myself."

Now, it's conventional wisdom that the most electable Presidential candidates come from the South, and that they are "populist," which is a weird code word for "stupid." This all holds up under the evidence, and is explicable by assumptions that voters want someone they can relate to and someone who is "outside the Washington system," but when you tie electability to a candidate's likely treatment by the press, the question become a bit more murky. Why, for instance, wouldn't a largely eastern-elite press corps feel close to someone like Kerry? Why, in other words, would a bunch of eastern elites seem to find dumb Southerners a lot more likable?

The distressing answer would seem to be that the press corps doesn't want to cover anyone smarter than them--or, at least, anyone who acts smarter than them. (Clinton: smarter than almost everyone else, but smart enough to eat at McDonald's.) People like Gore they find annoying, phony, and stiff. Good ol' Southern boys, on the other hand, are charming, fun, and a barrel o'laughs. Clinton, for instance, kind of tricked the press with the sex-scandal stuff--oh, I'm just a dumb cheatin' redneck like you'd find on Springer, but then whoops, NAFTA. This is, needless to say, almost incredibly dumb of the press and destructive of the electoral process, but it does seem to be the way things are.

So maybe the major fallout of this is that it's rare to find someone smart enough to govern in an actual elected position, particularly at the national level, since the press is rabidly resistant to those kind of images. Instead, smart people end up on staff, and the result is that the people actually running things aren't elected and are therefore far less transparent in their policies, motivations, and actions. If your staff really runs everything, it's a lot harder for your constituents to actually find out what's going on. That also means that is that the people running things couldn't be elected. Now, does that mean they shouldn't be running things? Certainly not--a lot of good ideas have come out of Democratic cabinet members and congressional staffers. (And the think tanks that end up writing policy a lot of the time, staffed, again, by unelectable nerds.) But it does suggest that we've made only a lateral move since the days of party machines that ended up spawning primaries, the Freedom of Information Act, etc., and in many ways we might be worse, since party loyalty has been greatly weakened and, with it, the power of Congress--and we know the trouble that's gotten us into lately.

So can the press help with this? Of course they can. They should be less intimidated by smart candidates and (old chestnut here) focus on the actual substance of the race rather than recycling the endless indie-speak of whether move X was a good PR move or a bad PR move. Say, occasionally, whether it would a bad or a good thing for the country, not just the candidate, and be willing to say that something (an AWOL President landing a jet, say) is transparently a PR move--but also be willing to give politicians the benefit of the doubt from time to time and analyze their policy proposals instead of assuming they're just a political ploy. (Well, of course it's a political ploy--they're trying to get elected. That's obvious. Now what else can you say?) I don't expect them to do this anytime soon, mind, but it would be nice.

posted by Mike B. at 12:19 PM 0 comments

A booth will be set up at Grand Central where New Yorkers will record brief oral histories. You'll come with a friend and you'll interview each other. At the end you get a CD of the interview and a copy goes into an archive.

Oh, the opportunities for pranks...and samples...mmm...

posted by Mike B. at 11:57 AM 0 comments

Because you may have seen the headline but not actually read the story about Cheney saying "hell yes!" to running as VP in 2004, allow me to highlight one particular tidbit of information:

Cheney's position on the 2004 ticket has been the subject of heightened speculation because of his heart condition. He has had four heart attacks, though none as vice president.

``I've got a doc with me 24 hours a day who watches me very carefully,'' said Cheney. ``If I ran into problems where I felt I couldn't serve, I'd be the first to say so and step down.''

Oh dear god, all the hack comics and lazy cartoonists were right! He really is a withered old supervillain! He's got a "doc" ready to jump-start the Cheneybot at any moment with, I assume, an injection of the blood of young boys into a nearly-collapsed vein in his left temple. The doctor is a shadowy German presence in white lab coat and reflective glasses, carrying a battered old leather satchel and never speaking...

Well, maybe I'm extrapolating a bit from the article, but does anyone else get a similar picture?

posted by Mike B. at 11:51 AM 0 comments

Tuesday, May 06, 2003

we don't even want your stupid life-saving medical supplies
From a Reuters article charmingly titled First E.U. Aid Airlift to Iraq Finally Takes Off comes the following tidbit:

The aircraft, loaded with 19 tonnes of supplies such as surgical equipment, vaccines and anesthetics, left Melsbroek military airport outside Brussels but was due to stop in Athens and only reach Baghdad on Wednesday, an EU spokesman said.

The Belgian airforce C-130 had been due to take off last Tuesday, but departure was repeatedly delayed pending a green light from the U.S. military in Baghdad, ostensibly for security reasons. The flight path was changed several times.

Here are some other links to the story, most from last week.

So clearly someone is fucking with this for a political advantage, but to be fair, it's hard to tell who it is. It could be the EU trying to make the US look bad, although presumably in that case the Army would have issued a denial of the "flight path" thing. Or it could be the US is deliberately delaying the shipment in order to minimize the credit Europeans could get for helping Iraqis. Or I guess it could just be honest stupidity on the part of the European planners or the US military, or a real problem on the ground, but these seem unlikely.

But whoever's fault it is--seriously, guys, fucking stop it.

posted by Mike B. at 11:25 AM 0 comments

Monday, May 05, 2003

Pretty interesting article on auditory halucinations in schizophrenics and new treatments for it. There are some pretty horrifying stories about voices advocating suicide, telling you you're Jesus and then making fun of you for thinking you're Jesus, etc., but then there's this bit:

A small minority of the patients said the voices they heard were always or almost always supportive and positive in tone.

What's that like? Having voices in your head just going, "Great job, guy!" "Keep up the good work!" "Lookin' gooooood!" Must be nice.

posted by Mike B. at 6:06 PM 0 comments

William Safire gets it wrong--"accidentally," I'm sure:

The segment that required candidates to question one another allowed Representative Dick Gephardt to shine. His plan to raise taxes to subsidize corporations' providing health care to workers separates him from the pack. As a hawk on the war, Gephardt needed an issue to appeal to the Democratic antiwar left, and was clearly delighted when his opponents had to wriggle away from his unabashed tax-and-spend proposal.

Saying Gephardt's proposal raises taxes to subsidize corporations is like saying Bush's proposal raises taxes to subsidize dividends. Gephardt's proposal would actually result in a tax break for corporations, and that this would be paid for by a tax raise for some other people doesn't seem any different than the Bush "tax cut" which will presumably have to be paid for with higher taxes at some point. Besides which, the Gephardt proposal only "raises taxes" in the sense that it eliminates a tax cut that hasn't even been passed yet. This constitutes a tax hike like repairing a house damaged in a tornado constitutes adding on a few rooms.

posted by Mike B. at 5:38 PM 0 comments

my fried seduction, the petulant of your assholes
Better than that damn blog poetry generator is the Bukowski poetry generator.

that moved vaginal
his teeth past those schlocky egos
like you
i strolled joyous elevators
the shriveled
he slaved ruthless pants
she dove under the tears
it caught throughout joints
lubricated those constructions
hiredladies you exploded around
she axed when a aloof ink
he touched before a any crumb
to small cocksuckers
sometimes you were the stench
i mounted behind the flat space
my fried seduction
the petulant of your assholes
you were lost
and oedipal carried matted streetwalkers
we shot behind the slippery bach
axed a addict
you were a tongue
her fan from
it mastered these viny payments
a lie slid

(thanks to Gawker)

posted by Mike B. at 5:12 PM 0 comments

This quote's all over the blogosphere, but for my readers who don't get as obsessive about that stuff as I do, here it is:

"We ought to be beating our chests every day. We ought to look in a mirror and get proud and stick out our chests and suck in our bellies and say: 'Damn, we're Americans!'"
- Gen. Jay Garner (ret.), head of Iraq

Whooooooooa.

posted by Mike B. at 5:09 PM 0 comments

Atrios points to an entry in The Sideshow in which an article by Todd Gitlin (not necessarily my favorite journalist in the world, but he's down with the crew, I think) in which Todd explains why the left maybe isn't doing so well ("The left is left with its 'no.' A no has its occasions. But for a force that aims for power, it won't do.") is criticized for speaking ill of the left. Viz:

Huh? The Democratic left, at least, has perfectly good policies - they just aren't as dramatic-sounding as Invading a Country! and Winning a War! and Enormous Tax Cuts! and what-have-you. They are, in fact, policies that have worked all along, whether we're talking about diplomacy or school programs or Social Security. From where comes the mentality that says that the right has some sort of "answer" just because they want to re-introduce policies that were such dismal failures for centuries all over the world? Who says diplomacy, maintaining alliances, and working to keep the peace isn't a positive policy?

I just can't help the feeling that Todd Gitlin, who I used to like, has been taken over by the Borg.

This seems to be missing a number of points. One is that the left may have great policies, but it obviously isn't doing a very good job of getting them out there right now. Their main response to tax cuts, say, is, "Smaller tax cuts!" instead of "Well, here's how we think we should balance the budget and stimulate the economy," and while simply oppositional responses like "Smaller tax cuts!" may be a perfectly fine response intellectually, politically it means you're always playing catch-up instead of leapfrogging the other side and leading the agenda. Which leads to another important point: if you don't lead with the issues, you have to respond to them rather than simply refusing to acknowledge that it's an issue. With Iraq, for instance, the left faced a major hurdle because it wasn't even on its agenda; it didn't have an "Iraq policy" (aside from that of some activists that demanded an end to sanctions, which looked especially weak in this context) and so it was constantly playing catch-up. The problem became that a lot of leftists had sour grapes about this and kept complaining that we shouldn't have been even thinking about war in the first place instead of acknowledging that we are and responding to that. "No war!" may be a fine sentiment, but it doesn't really get you what you want.

The main point--and I think this is one that the left is critically missing--is that old policies can be good, but you need to repackage them to look like new ones. Yes, yes, that's hypocritical and dishonest, but it's probably better to be hypocritical than to have the UN gutted, right? It's good to respond to a negative conservative policy with an old positive one repackaged as something new; it's even better to respond by doing the same thing but not look like you're responding, but are instead proposing a whole new issue. Gephardt's idea for health care, while flawed, fits nicely in this catagory. So would a positive proposal to reform international institutions, which from our perspective have the problem of not being able to restrain the US. You gettit?

Even more important, maybe, is the ability to differntiate between a bad policy and bad politics. You can have a bad policy with it still being good politics--i.e. being a net gain in the long run.

posted by Mike B. at 4:54 PM 0 comments

The Freaky Trigger blog notifies us that Ian Penman has a blog and directs us to an example of his work, which concerns dub and Tricky and Greil Marcus. I can't entirely speak for the worth of the piece, since I've never been able to care that much about dub or reggae (as Jesse knows) but I do care about Tricky, and on that count the piece was very interesting seeing as how it was from the height of Tricky-mania in 1995, just after the release of Maxinquaye. This is nothing against Mr. Penman, who presumably has revised his opinion since then, but after calling it "the most feted, discussed and misunderstood record of the moment," he does a bit of slobbering on the ol' Trickster himself. Obviously Tricky's status in the pantheon has suffered a bit since that initial grope-fest, the reasons for which I'll discuss in a second. But first, check out this:

It is fairly obvious after a few spins through the infected micro-cosmos of Maxinquaye that Tricky knows more than he is letting on. Knows, as in: a secret knowledge he quite rightly fears to name. This silent discourse echoes around Maxinquaye as a kind of rhythmic ebb or evaporation, voices trailing in and out, never settling on one definite past or present: "Confused by different memories/Details of Asian remedies..."

We may read that Tricky shies away from `theorising' about his work, but this may just be the sane response of a man suddenly confronted by the representatives of a music press desperate to slot everything into its lazily reductive `Bristol as the new Seattle' strap-line. Besides which, the opposition won't stand: Maxinquaye is a work of theory. There is nothing theory can say that is not already embedded in this wily, uncanny text. (Tricky even helpfully sings so: "I think ahead of you/I think instead of you..." Perhaps it would be more accurate to say that Tricky is unwilling to S-P-E-L-L out to interviewers stuff which he has already toiled long and hard to find the correct way of saying on Maxinquaye. Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of certain Gnostic, magickal and African traditions will know that it is considered foolhardy, dangerous even, to spell out to one's inferiors things for which the maker has already found an effective formula.

(hey, have you guessed that this was published in the Wire yet? *cough*)

Aside from the painfully overwrought tone of the selection, what stands out is that Penman seems to expect Tricky to be an absolutely inscrutable presence, some weird black voodoo-god with a Secret Knowledge that White Journalists aren't privy to, instead of a regular guy who sometimes doesn't know quite what he's doing at the time and sometimes does stuff just 'cos he thinks it's cool. (And whose boasts of knowledge are maybe less transcendent and more a nerdy version of b-boy braggadocio.) The only way for someone to live up to the image Penman projects would seem to be for them to be, in fact, mentally ill, which we wouldn't wish on anyone, right, guys? Of course, as it turned out, Tricky went on to make some straight hip-hop albums and do guest bits in a few movies (5th Element, etc.) and so just wasn't mysterious anymore. His critical reception has, I think, suffered accordingly, and the question this begs is: do critics really just value mysteriousness above all? You can explain, for instance, all that "sellout" bullshit as a simple objection to the revelation that an artist is, in fact, somewhat interested in making money (not mysterious! Too banal and material!); "cred" stuff as a reductionary way of saying that an artist no longer has that certain something; "overly slick" as disappointment at the revelation that an artist doesn't record all their material in a shack in the woods; and "insincere" as annoyance that the artist is not, in fact, dumber than the critic and is aware of the implications of their own work, or, worse, that the previous pose that convinced a critic of this mysteriousness was in fact a trick and the critic has been fooled. And why would critics value inscrutability so highly? Why, so they could be more free in their interpretations, of course--critics being weirdly hesitant to ignore an artist's assessment of their own work in the mistaken belief that this is the definitive interpretation, the musician-as-cipher model allows them to more easily assume their own take on a work is at least possible.

Of course, there's the argument that the later albums (Pre-Millennial Tension excepted) were simply not as good, but this simply begs the question of why someone like Penman would have to go to such lengths to justify a great album like Maxinquaye in the first place. If it's just a fanciful interpretation that's fine, but Penman does seem at pains to refer to Tricky as "the Other" repeatedly throughout the piece, and instead of focusing on the impression Tricky creates through the lyrics (a suggestion of Character reinforced by the pseudonym) he chooses to peg the actual person as a Gnostic shaman or some such nonsense. Highbrow critics seem weirdly susceptible to "falling" for musicians who are outwardly weirdoes and freaks, and leaving aside issues of sympathy, there does seem to be a very real danger in assigning critical weight to what essentially amounts to mental instability.

The other weird bit of this piece is about its view of the political song. This is a subject I obviously (given the coupling of subjects on this blog if nothing else) have a primary interest in, and I agree with Penman to a certain extent, particularly in his questioning of Greil Marcus' model of the political musician as someone who outwardly spouts political slogans, i.e. the Clash, Sex Pistols, Bruce Springsteen, etc. It's true that politics is, in fact, a far more complicated and ambiguous field than the classification of musical demagoguery-as-theory would indicate, but Penman then goes on to assert (which he does, were I giving him the benefit of the doubt, simply because he has been assigned to write about Tricky, although there are some self-serving notes there too) that Maxinquaye turns out to be the first example of this more nuanced model of the political song. I disagree on both levels: I don't think it's particularly political in the way he's getting at (and, indeed, is political in the Marcus way with its cover of Public Enemy's "Black Steel") and I think there have been a number of examples of the other model throughout pop's history. (Briefly: Leonard Cohen's "First We Take Manhattan" and PJ Harvey's "Sheela-Na-Gig" spring to mind.) My idea of a political song is something I've actually given a great deal of thought to, but regrettably its delineation would require more effort than I'm willing to put forth at 4:30 on a Monday, quite frankly. It would have a large component of comedy, though, suffice to say.

(If you're really interested, let me know and I can maybe send you an old essay that approached the subject from the angle of literature.)

posted by Mike B. at 4:20 PM 0 comments