jane dark's sugarhigh!

Dear Visitors,

This site has moved to sugarhigh.abstractdynamics.org; come by!

This will be the last post to be found here. However, this site will remain for archival purposes, until the propritors decide otherwise.

The reading of French Poetry in Translation at the Maison Francaise, organized by Belladonnna* Press, was ten translators working mostly on contemporary writing, mostly by women. Alas! I most enjoyed Paul Eluard, the ringer in the queue, translated with a direct serenity by Lisa Lubasch. Apparently, a book will come out from Green Integer this year or next. The evening was well-attended (they often are, with ten readers; if everyone has four friends, that’s a minyan de la poesie, ami) and good-spirited.

Afterward, the local posse by which I had been adopted and supplied a cranberry shade of lipstick adjourned to an Upper West party, rumored to involve elite journalists, none of whom I encountered unless one numbers main celebrant/birthday girl Alissa Quart. Mostly I met Finns. The one who resembled an unattractive Jurgen Prochnow immediately pointed at a colleague and said “We are...too drunk...to fuck.” This was bad news for somebody, I am sure. The red-dredded Finn (who looked like he was on vacation from Bomfunk MCs, claimed he was from “Mack-a-donia,” and did not quantify his innebriation) and I stood there taking pictures of each other until Kenny Goldsmith arrived. From this point, things get hazy. The action and setting combine gentrification and streetfighting: This makes a fine opportunity to reinvent the term ferngully, as in, “that party at the Time Magazine foreign correspondent’s crib was all ferngully.” Goldsmith is equipped with a furry man-purse and some Lubriderm, and at some juncture, after a fractious debate about exchanging iPods, certain objects are defenestrated to the gravitational tune of twelve stories and they pursue their destiny. Brian Kim Stefans presides; Ange Mlinko is bored, but recovers from her ennui well enough to give a thoroughly pleasing reading the next night at the Anthroposophical Society (pleasing for the audience; her style is premised on seeming to regret that poetry ever crossed her path, while making it delight in same).

Hello to all. I am blogging from the Apple Store in Manhattan because a) that's what you do, and a.1) now I can have written the phrase " I am blogging from the Apple Store" and meant it.

The lines "The most awful thing / About the phrase 'Every Germinal must have its Thermidor' /Is that one never gets to say so anymore / And really mean it" did not get a laff, even a rueful or despairing one, in Orono, Maine. This filled me with inertia, but the reading was generally a happy one. I felt like my set lasted about 55 minutes but when I sat down Steve's stopwatch was just switching to 30:00. "Perfect," I muttered, forgetting I was still miked with the mobile lavalier, which I suppose means there's an archival tape now in which I conclude that the just-finished set was sans flaw. It was not. But my three poet friends at the University helped me read "Their Ambiguity"; I wish I had Jennifer Moxley's voice, but then I would miss our conversations.

Karen MacCormack's set was hard for me to focus on, but I enjoyed our co-unease taking questions afterward. There was an incapacity to find a comfortable rhythm, and this was itself reassuring, that people could still be legitimately different, and that difference had, along with its discomforts, a negation of the mechanical. Still, it tasted like tin.

Report on the New York reading of French poetry in translation to follow...

[the alarm has just gone off here, either because someone has walked out with a digital camera, or Paris Hilton just walked in]

Money follows money like coochie follows hoochie in the eternal dance of the entertainment industry. So with a certain movie about the religious aspects of repressed homoeroticism slouching toward a 400 million gross including tie-ins (I haven’t really been keeping up with Catholicism since Vatican II: The Encyclicaling, but isn’t it still somehow wrong to vend fake martyrdom doodads? Isn’t it, perhaps, some sort of heresy?), you can bet the marketing gurus are going to get their ass in the conga line and start churning out trendriding product to capitalize on exactly what brought all these dollars to market. That’s right, ready yourself for lots and lots of Rock en Aramaic. It is Aramaic’s time to shine. Serious beatheads have been bobbing to “Technnomaic” and “Drum’n’Bassyrian” (as well as its more intellectual comrade, “deepsand”) since the late Nineties, and one Aramaic death metal band (Mount Terrorat) has developed a loyal following online. But the combination of scenester trickledown, an ongoing interest in exotic sounds, and the sudden flood of “flow-follow” capital should lift numerous boats from passionate subculture to the pop charts. One report has leading Aramaic alternarockers The Dead See preparing not one but two new discs: one is a rerelease of their failed English-language release Down Comes The Bliss Bower, restored to its original tongue. The other is apparently a soundtrack for The Passion’s sequel, The Harrowing: Three Days in the Valley of Death. Joel Silver, who will produce the film, suggested that the band (whom he befriended while shooting parts of The Matrix: Resurrections “in Aramaica”) had the same relation to System of a Down that The Pixies had to Nirvana, and that they were, in a word, “Gethseminal.” Said the lead singer, “I’m not sure language matters so much. Rock has always been about nailing the passion.”

Sugarhigh! is on the road for a week; now would be a superlative time to break into my house and make off with all the CDs with titles longer than four words. Enjoy your emo! I will endeavor to blog about the various poetry events in Maine and New York, but in general, traffic will be lighter. This is why I encourage The Lost Unicorn, The Lazy Flaneur, and The Noise Formerly Known as Useful to pick up the slack and kick it up a notch, like the great ones do at crunch time.

Reminder: upon my return, this site will be relocating to the tony, lucky neighborhood of Abstract Dynamics.

I had a bad bicycle accident once, bad enough on my smashed head that sometimes I would try to say someone's name and say another instead, even if I was really concentrating. During this time I was staying at Maison du Louis and Jen, who dressed my wounds in the kitchen and rented that Jenny Shimizu movie, Foxfire. Jen was strangely compelled by the film's other star, which did not presage good things for my hosts' marriage.

This was the night right after the accident, after a stranger in a passing car had driven me back to the Maison Albany and I had failed an online IQ test. There was something pressingly wrong with my head and I was having trouble speaking. It wasn't just names; there was a sensation that whatever sentence I was trying to say was out of countrol and I didn't know where it was supposed to go; there was a lot of stopping and fumbling. I was fearful, each second more than the last, as the aphasia writhed and did not relent, as my inability to form basic thoughts gathered into the evening. Making sentences was what I did. I was terrified.

However Joyce Carol Oatesy the movie is, Mazzy Star is on the track, and when that song came on -- I don't even remember now; was it "Halah" or "Fade"? -- I wasn't afraid for a couple of minutes. It's not that Mazzy Star is "soothing," exactly; the song wasn't oil on troubled waters. Instead, something in its weather matched my interior weather. Not the terror but the blankness; my thinking was becalmed, without dynamics, an upright coma. In this it did not resemble the world wired with activity, threat, desire. But for the Mazzy duration the world was as vacant and easy as my mind, I didn't feel all wrong, and I was so grateful for this that I wept, as I had wept the first time I ever got high on dope.

The corollary realization was that, for all the rigs that try, almost no band gets heroin right (and that includes VU, all my doxological cheries). And for this, Mazzy Star, which is good at essentially nothing else, gets called "psychedelic" by All Music Guide.

Transcend, dental medication! Twelve years before that I took two Percocets and read Jonathan Livingston Seagull, lying on a cot in a friend's girlfriend's apartment. There was so little in that experience that could be called experience that nothing seemed to be happening at all, and I thought being dead must feel just like that.

The Experience Music Project, as part of its annual pop music conference, is hosting a panel called "Critical Karaoke," in which the most amazing people (Daphne Brooks, Jessica Hopper, Greil Marcus, Elizabeth Mendez Berry, Ange Mlinko, and Carrie Brownstein) will be mic-rocking about one song each: a song they thought, if even for a second one afternoon long ago, was the greatest song of all time. The gimmick (because it's all about marketing) is that they'll have exactly the length of the song to make their case, with the song playing in the background.

In my life, I've probably thought this very thing about more than forty and less than 100 songs. In trying to imagine actually making a case, I narrowed the field to more like twelve. Then I decided. Then I changed my mind. Here are some of that last dozen that didn't make it -- listed with the age I was when I first had the thought in question:

Paid In Full (29)
Wannabe (34)
Bombs Over Baghdad (37)
Roadrunner (17)
I Feel For You (Chaka Khan version) (22)
Uptown (19)
Shameless (28)
One Nation Under A Groove (16)
I Want It That Way (36)
Angel From Montgomery (23)
Rock&Roll Nigger (25)
Doowutchalike (album version) (27)
Working Class Hero (Marianne Faithfull version) (32)
Freedom '90 (27)

East Coasters, beloveds, the weather here must be slid through to be believed. True, we are far from the gilded life with its antics of the antiques, but the quotidian over here is so fucking solarized plus comical blue of sky that one recalls what it is that makes Oasis so stupid, and so stupidly pleasing. Hypervivid and exaggerated, rock like that can only work on days like this. Specifically, "All Around The World," "Girl in the Dirty Shirt," and "Live Forever."

Two days ago was also a day like this; Chris and I left school and slid through the rayon air to where sangria bleeds and every other round is on the house if the house employs your former student. En route we talked about sex and drugs and pop music...but not as a trinity or a Buddhist tricycle so much as a series of synthetic pairs: drugs and sex, sex and music, music and drugs (special note to EMPaths: this conversation was pursuant to the Critical Karaoke panel in April; look for a post soon listing songs that almost made the cut for greatest song ever...but not quite).

The concept of "joy" had come up a couple of times, though Chris and I use it so differently it's challenging to have a conversation in which it carries a real burden. Here's an example of the gap:
C: Refusing to vote because there's no such thing as an ethical vote doesn't seem like anarchy to me; that seems Puritanical. I associate anarchism with joy.
J: You have no idea how much joy it gives me not to vote.

I won't summarize Chris's conception, as I would damage it, but I understood him when he confessed (I think it was a confession) that when he was joyful, when everything was right -- not that it happened all that much -- he didn't like listening to music. He wasn't nattering about , oh, just wanting to be, I don't think -- no such retrograde state-of-naturism. There was a sense of music as something added to the world, a happiness additive which had no purpose when one was perfectly happy.

About people who put milk (much less sugar) in their coffee, I can say two things:
1) They are not drinking coffee but coffee-flavored beverages, and
2) They are insane.

Putting anything in coffee is patently absurd, as such an addition can only make coffee less itself and more something else, and as coffee is the thing par excellance (remember, sucker East Coasters -- I live in Berkeley), adulteration can achieve only a lessening and worsening.

Apparently, the thing I think about coffee is the thing Chris thinks about joy. This makes me think his joy is better than mine, that my joy is an iced mocha with soy milk. But perhaps, in this conversation which continues only in my head as Chris has fled to DC, I might massage the analogy to say that music is my coffee bean. Not, I repeat not my aeroplane.

Reader, I moved it.

This blog will be shifting addresses around March 29, thanks to the good graces of Abe from Abstract Dynamics. The new address will, I believe, be sugarhigh.abstractdynamics.org — I will post a day before moving, and again on moving day.

Meanwhile teaser: interesting conversation with Chris yesterday. Will endeavor to hit the high spots later on.

The last time I was in school I had two jobs. One was very good. One was the best job ever; I worked at the dearly-departed 6:20 Club on Thursdays and Saturdays, one night to freestyle, one night to give the people what they wanted (Dee-lite and "3 A.M. Eternal"; okey-doke!) and then hanging out drinking for free on Fridays. Louis would decide my name for the night and put it on the board by the door: DJ Squarehead Ivan Boesky, or some such.

But my favorite part was getting done at two (it was Iowa, my people), taking the trash to the dumpster, and catching up with my international biker posse: monumental Ines, the mysterious Ragnheidur, and her husband Chris. Sometimes we would ride down to the all-night supermarket by Highway 1, drunk and high, and wander though the aisles sampling of this and that, like heroes at a fluorescent Valhalla. Mostly we just pedaled around in the midwestern summer night like bats out of Germany, Iceland, Vietnam, Iowa, and California. The regime of cornfields obtained. We went nowhere, but we varied our pace. The town was quiet and the world was calm.

Recently I have been carless, which has been mostly aggravating (this is California, my good people). But last night I rode up to campus to meet a friend and get a burrito, which I never got because Cancun was closed on account of power outage. Diagonally-striped orange and white civic sawhorses had been set out at each lightless intersection as provisional stop signs. Biking through the dark downtown, there was a sense of the serene that is of course much more interesting in the center of a city -- the hotels dark, the convenience stores and noodle shops dark, the windows for all the stores on Shattuck suddenly reflective because they are no longer lit from within -- than in some already-too-pacific Iowa village. It was as close as I could get to magical realism, or at least as close as that sense in European cities when everyone's on strike and the character of the day changes completely. Not only a decrease in urban phenomena, but the sense that work-as-usual, the absolute and brutal spine of daily life, is for the moment disturbed.

The incredible elation I felt on Black Monday of 1987, day of the deepest stock decline in history. Imagining the burghers of my town finally slumped inside their great homes, adrift in fear and nausea. That feeling is to revolution as newspapers are to poetry.

Charles Kupchan was President Clinton's director for European affairs on the National Security Council. His swiftly aging analysis of the political fallout from the Madrid bombings, should they turn out to be blamed on radical islamists, offered variation after variation on his basic assertion: "In the short run, I think the attack in Madrid will strengthen the center-right in Spain, and make it more likely that Aznar's party continues to rule by a relatively wide margin. One could hypothesize that it would be in the interest of a group like al-Qaida to carry out pre-election attacks to strengthen the political right, in order to escalate the conflict."

Kupchan looks like the copy guy all dressed up for his annual perf review, but he speaks like he was trained by Lizzie Grubman in the "many questions, one answer" method of spin: "There will be an effort by the conservatives -- who are likely to win again in the election in Spain this Sunday -- to say, "Bush is right, and Aznar was right to stand behind Bush, because we all face this problem in common."

Or, "On balance, I think it will edge Europe a little closer to the U.S., because of an increasing sense of a threat posed by a common enemy."

Or, "I do think it will make more Europeans sympathetic to the concerns that Americans have been voicing."

Study questions, group 1: did the events of September 11th make Americans more sympathetic to the concerns that "Europeans" have been facing? Did it give us more in common with "Europe"?

Today's news: "The leader of Spain's victorious Socialists said Monday that he will bring his nation's troops home from Iraq by June 30."

Study questions, group 2: How did Kupchan get his [former] job? What is an expert? Where are the people who believe that political yogis come by their soapboxes via keen insight, rather than a convivial willingness to put a business suit's imprimatur on the child's narcissistic certainty that every story is about them?

Oh ideology, up yours.

I go to stand in the place where he stood. The modern town, already old, stands in front of the old town. I try to see through. I try to see the new town as a ghost-character of the old town. The canals are soupy and dull. Without admitting it I hope to feel what he felt, if I stand there long enough. But I don’t, I feel what I felt some time back, a summer whose main quality was that it wasn’t another.

“The age for romantic plans was past. I had found the incense of vainglory stupefying rather than flattering. So the last hope I had was to live...eternally at leisure. Such is the life of the blessed in the other world, and henceforth I saw it as my supreme felicity in this.

Those who reproach me for my many inconsistencies will not fail to reproach me for this one too. I have said that the idleness of society made it unbearable to me; and here I am, seeking for solitude solely in order to give myself up to idleness...The idleness of society is deadly because it is obligatory; the idleness of solitude is delightful because it is free and voluntary.”

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Les Confessions, ed. Hilsun (Paris 1931), vol.IV, p.173

The sentences "It all sounds the same" and "I am not familiar with that music" are always interchangeable.

The supremacy with which none of my friends -- even my blog friends! -- care about Nashville music as a living entity is unparalleled; even my mom, formerly a fine interlocutor, has retreated into Dolly Parton and Tanya Tucker. It’s starting to feel like collecting vintage vacuum cleaners. Soon I will be living in my practice space. However, I did get a check for 15 bucks from Nashville Scene yesterday; I forget why, but I mean to spend a reasonable portion of it on waffles.

In case, like Pierre, you are today vomited forth from a lion and realize that you care, there’s a beautiful ballad to be heard on country radio. It’s by Keith Urban, who is Australian, and cute in a dwarfy, early Brad Pitt kind of way, and is called “You’ll Think Of Me.” A problem, and I recognize this is a basic problem with Nashville country, is that the song sounds almost identical to thirty or forty others, each one of which is more tawdry and sentimental than the last. This one is tawdry and sentimental as well; it just happens to be beautiful. It’s the most Garthlike choon since mid-Nineties Garth, though his people would have sent it back one more time for a rewrite: there’s a rhyme in the chorus that’s not quite good enough.

But there’s also a lovely, eerie minor-chord opening a la “The Thunder Rolls,” and the kind of quiet romantic melancholy that has been slowly drained from “rock” since a) the rise of Keith Forsey’s production style, which made melancholia bombastic in the early Eighties, or similarly b) the rise of the power ballad, which is the single greatest form ever planted in our minds by aliens who visited the Earth in the early Seventies but sometimes you don’t want to overdramatize, you know? As it happens, I miss Mark Slaughter’s “Fly to the Angels” (saw him opening for, fuck, who remembers, it wasn’t Skid Row, oh yeah, Poison! in 1990), but that’s a different beast. Here’s Urban: “Take your records, take your freedom, take your memories I don’t need’em, take your space and take your reasons but you’ll think of me.” It’s so great it makes me specifically sad without my having to reflect on a specific woman -- that is, it’s the song’s excellence more than my unregenerate broken heart.

This customer also bought: “You Can Feel Bad,” Patty Loveless.

If I had a fancy web host and a fancy digital camera like Sasha, best believe I would be throwing up a picture of S dot Mallarme right here. But since I am merely a scab on the knee of everything, all I can do is point you to a couple pix of the fellow, who was apparently stylish enough to get himself painted by Manet and Renoir. Aside from that he was no big deal: a little tutoring, a few decorated folding fans, a handful of inventing literary Modernism.

Stephane Mallarme is also the patron saint of blogs, I do believe. At least he is the patron saint of zines, and objective transference can handle it from there. What most folks don’t know about the poet, theorist, and art critic is that, for a couple of years, he self-published a little fashion mag, La derniere mode ("the latest style"), which also covered vacation destinations, home furnishings, and entertainment, as well as a few scene reports. Naturally he wrote the whole shebang, under a dizzying array of assumed names, masculin, feminin, and indetermin.

That’s why he should be near our blogging hearts on the daily. But today in particular I recall that in a letter he referred to “the Thirty,” an aggregate of anarchists wildly reviled by the popular press and then on trial in France, as “angels of purity.” To think that he would say that! the same character who wrote, by way of advice to the couturiennes, “That’s why I prefer you to wear to this party, since it is out of season, and just official and administrative, some marvelously crafted artificial flowers.” Such a combination is surely gangster.

Which leads me to my point: no matter how you slice it, ETA is gangster. Gangster enough that the deadliest terrorist attack on a European target (does this include Guernica? Dresden?) was immediately blamed on the Basque separatists, though Islamic fundamentalists now look better for the boom. Strange collisions: the Spanish bombings were on the Atocha line; everybody reach for their Ashbery (this book) to revisit his poem "Leaving the Atocha Station."

How does it feel to live in a time of terror? I don't have the words, yet. More awake, or more aware of a life not awake? There is sleeping in the state, and there is dreaming against it, and sleeping and dreaming are dialectical. The bricks break open...

Starting paragraphs without pronouns leads directly to deixis.

Meanwhile, here at Hits Package Utility Factor Headquarters, or TCSN, we are prepared to answer the following questions:

Should I get the new Ultimate Daryl Hall + John Oates collection and jettison my carefully-built catalog?

And what about The Very Best of Jackson Browne?

Thank you for asking. In the first case, I am delighted to offer an almost-unqualified yes. It's all there and, as generally with double-discs, then some. NB, however: the "then some" includes the duo's long-after-the-fire ballad "So Close," which if you spaced it in 1990 because you were occuppied in dealing with K-Solo or Bleach, is extraordinarily lovely. The only thing I miss: "Dance On Your Knees," the Philly faux-juju lead-in to "Out Of Touch" on Big Bam Boom. I felt John Oates really shined on that one.

In the second case, not really. That would mean abandoning, say, "Shaky Town," which is probably the best song that session guitarist Danny Kortchmar ever wrote (was he in on Henley's "All She Wants To Do Is Dance"? I'd guess he was); and you'd also find yourself without "That Girl Could Sing," and the song worth keeping on title value alone, "Disco Apocalypse" (who knew Jackson listened to The Trammps? Well, there is that moment on "The Load-Out" when he mentions "we got disco, and 8-tracks and cassettes and stereo"). You'll have to keep Running On Empty and the undervalued Hold Out, or risk being just another dilettante. Dave Marsh wouldn't like that, and he wrote the liner notes. They are funny. Funny in an if-I-ever-find-myself-writing-liner-notes-for-Greatest-Hits-packages-please-kill-me sort of way.

Listen, this is an amazing world. If you would like to read some semi-Fan Fiction in which the narrator is a lead vocalist whose band plays a lot of Jackson Browne, go here! First line of Chapter 5: "Okay, Atlanta, art thou ready to rock?" I shout into the microphone.

Meanwhile, who can recommend a good French-English dictionary on CD-ROM...for Macintosh? How about any good collections of Soviet Constructivist/Suprematist art, also on disc?

This infection of films that depend on short-term memory loss must be about something. Amnesia films used to be about what happened in the lost time, the lost weekend, the year of living forgetfully...as is still the case, sort of, in Memento. But that film, more fundamentally, is about the daily labor to reconstruct a coherent self when you don't have one on file (I can hear spittin’ mumblin’ Slavoj from here: “So what else is new?”)

In this, Memento resembles less Lost Weekend than 50 First Dates; meanwhile one ought consider Dory in Finding Nemo, and the conceit of The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though perhaps they start with the paradigmatically unmemorable Dana Carvey vehicle Blank Slate. In these movies people must learn the same thing starting every time they awaken, in a repetition paradoxically both painful and numbing, with the distant promise that by laboring a little harder and better each day, they will overcome their alienation from their selves, escape the steel cycle into a total existence where, realized and self-aware, they can begin to live real life.

Is that the dream of Heaven? Or is that the dream where hard work makes you a millionaire at 30 so you can sail around the world -- the paradigm of class mobility, the eternal sunshine of the bourgeoisie? In that regard, 50 First Dates is the most interesting of these tales, ending as it does with Lucy on a large boat in a pseudo-Baffin Bay, having found her way to the sail-around-the-world dream despite being no closer to resolving her memory deficiency. As Hollywood endings go, this one is horrifying. Hey real life, how ya like me now? Even when one graduates to the leisure class, one still awakens to the mute fact of awful daily labor.

Comes a day when it's not so much warm as so much warmer than anyone had expected, so that folks overreact and when you go out into the street at 1:30, bicycling down from the base of the hills to your apartment near the water, everywhere are people wearing shorts and t-shirts, tank tops and flip-flops -- "the return of the body to the public sphere" -- and sex is in the air with enough carefree intensity that the light wind can't blow it away until the sun goes down.

Yesterday was that day in my town. March 7th. The calendar is the sun of relevant numbers, to which others are merely shadows: calories, on-base percentage, time of low tide, amount of zinc in your Emergen-C, lead in your paint, remaining number of warm rains you are likely to encounter, dimensions of the living room, miles per gallon. All this secret and social counting, this methodical hubbub of trying to know the finite for what it is. All statistics concern mortality.

Did anyone ever notice that the Outfield song with the semi-haunting melody seems, more or less, to concern something entendred toward statutory rape?

Meanwhile, like Josie, I am on vacation far away; no posts until Sunday, I fear. Be very well. And when I come home, we're gonna throw down the jam til the girls say when.

The sun puddled on the cellophane of my shoplifted Marlboros as I walked across the bridge over the ‘Pike en route to the Busy Bee diner, where I would count out my change and, if I had enough, get an old-fashioned milkshake in a big paper cone tucked into a stainless steel base, soda fountain-style, and if not then I would settle for a coke. The sun was warm and alien; inside my candy-coated red walkman, Jonathan Richman sang “put down yr cigaRETTE, and DROP out of B.U.!”

Yeah. Fuck yeah. Fucking BU kids, with their hundred grand to blow on no education at all, their Five Towns families, their Henry Bendel boots and IROC-Zs for graduation. I was trying to understand Richman in fucking depth, like whether he wanted to keep one foot in the arcade or arcane? My cheap and old TDK tape was too messed up for this subtle distinction to be discernible, and I was walking across the bridge thinking how “astral plane” rhymed more with “arcane” but wouldn’t Richman be more likely to pair off items of different resonance for the sake of contrast and complexity, the abstraction of the astral plane, the iconically delinquent arcade? And all around me, the students with their hoax adulthood and perfectly insulated lives, their Tab and intramural basketball.

The thing is, at that moment, I was a BU student. I was a student there for four years and a summer and never put down the cigarette, never dropped out, though I did take all incompletes one Fall because I was sad about a girl. One of the things that helped me get through was the ability to imagine myself as not being a BU student, or at least not being “a BU student.” It was easy. I wasn’t from Long Island, I was broke via supporting myself entirely, I paid no tuition, I didn’t even have a bicycle. And I had Jonathan Richman; while listening to him, I could be utterly infused with a sardonic critique of the worst version of myself, the weak flame of the awfullest me that the everyday me was always flickering near, like a lazy moth. I needed that.

Tom Frank over at The Baffler, Inc., has done very well for himself by giving this phenomenon, in its most cynical form, a snappy name: “commodifying your dissent.” You know, when you consume stuff that allows you to fashion a self-construction in which you are not a consumer, basically. This is not Mr. Frank’s idea even a tiny bit, though he has been happy to take credit for it. The idea dates back quite a way: to track it merely as far as the Sixties, a guy once demanded “not the spectacle of refusal, but the refusal of the spectacle.” This is the exact same concept phrased as a demand.

What’s puzzling to me about the spirited and interesting debates over Kanye West’s snapping on things collegiate (some thoughts can be found with O-Dubby Bastard and A Cowboy Among Poodles) is how no one seems to read it as a pretty obvious sales strategy. Now as it happens, I think that young Mr. West may have a sort of interesting critique, but it’s not in his ideas. That way he keeps his flow so far out of the pocket that he seems to have transcended the prison-house of rhythm entirely is sort of modernist, a form of dissent in a happy “I see your rules and laugh and mumble” way; Kanye is to the beat as Biz is to the melody.

But his philosophy? That’s not thinking, that’s marketing. How do you reach out to those college kids who are a little too far on the liberal-progressivist tip to conscion Too Short or Lil Jon? Well, you can always appeal to their desire to see through the banalities of their own experience, to be a notch superior and all ironic about their own toolishness. This is the very heart of liberal humanism: the endlessly-produced recognition of how silly/vile “the system” is, with its concurrent promise that, if you recognized this, you must not be part of it. It strikes me that Kanye’s litany, while it may bring some satisfaction to folks who never had a shot at college and/or never wanted one, is basically for students, for the millions of students who -- like me when I was twenty -- all believe, in an identical way, that they’re different, that they’re not like the other kids on that bridge.

Freed from self-expression, poetry escapes from representation to drug.

The first life of a pop song, in the relationship cycle, is arbitrary contact: the radio encounter (just like a real relationship, you find yourself staging more frequent and intimate meetings still haunted by chance).

The second life is when you "have" the single, and listen to it over and over until the feeling fades (not entirely, but below a threshhold. The sense of excess and certainty is gone).

In the third life, you run up against the song, sometimes by choice, sometimes in the street, and find yourself measuring your response against former urgencies and delights.

Question: for any given song, what's the frequency of the third life, such that the song is magnificent and moving in the way one dimly recalls that it deserves?

For "November Rain," if I hear it every 13 months, I understand why I thought it was the greatest song ever. If I heard it every 7 weeks, I am not sure I would.

What's the periodicity for "MMMBop," "Got Til It's Gone," "Chains Of Love," "Move The Crowd," "Anarchy In the U.K.," and "Tubthumping"?

Weblogs are simple objects.

All I mean by that is that the thing that's worst about them is the same thing that's best about them. Rub it and pub it, spit it and quit it, boast and post.

Though I have liked most glossy editors I've met as people, I don't much like what they do (which is, basically, make everything okay). Available anonymity and the lack of editing make the blog a playground for passing and particular intensities, not to mention enduring and grand ones. I am always looking for writing with local intensity. In return, I suffer through (and perhaps create) a portion of superego-free, solipsistic onanism, and micro-grievances disguised as thinking. That's the trade, and it's not just a fair one, but a bargain.

But the ratio of virtue to vice is close enough that a shift in context might throw it radically out of balance. Why is anyone the tiniest bit surprised to discover that if you re-enact blogging within a purely corporate context, you get the worst of both worlds: small-minded promotion, advertising writ small? Only the shit and none of the fresh-squeezed orange juice.

It might be compared to a genre of hip-hop, in which a compelling social desire -- excruciating ambition in the face of systematic limits on achievement -- must appear as accumulation: the enthralling, disgusting stacking of chips. When forced to speak in the language of the marketplace, the dream of autonomy and power can only say bling.

But perhaps it's more worth noting not the outrage around the Amazon non-fiasco, but the lack thereof. We all knew it was going on. If we pretended not to, this was a convenience, a social fiction in which everyone participates, like college roommates pretending one isn't jerking off under the sheets while the other rushes through Go Tell It On The Mountain for a midterm. Isn't the Amazon revelation in fact the ultimate non-story, just an allegory for life in the econosphere, in which petty self-interest doesn't have to be forgiven because everyone pretends it's something else?

"On a treadmill to death's door and back..."

Which makes we wish to say "I've been to here and back again." I could link this, but the rest of the review is just a review. This is genius. Or it's fully nonsensical. It proves jho's point (see very last paragraph).

Someone once said that Arnold Schwarzeneggar resembled a handful of walnuts stuffed into a condom. Though nuts and rubbers may feel slighted by this, it remains an image of which I am fond.

Now he is my Governor and nominally my boss. And the only thing that has brought me cheer of late is what Attorney General Bill Lockyer said when Arnold directed him to stop the whole damn San Francisco gay marriage romp in its tracks: "The governor can direct the Highway Patrol. He can direct the next Terminator 4 movie if he chooses. But he can't direct the attorney general in the way he's attempted to do."

Don't get me wrong, Lockyer's a creep from here to Tehachapi. I am particularly dismayed by his hurry to kill death row residents even if it means suspending decisions of appellate courts to get the killin' done. But talking public smack to Arnold gets him a 15-minute pass. Moreover, he just sent me a check for $13.86.

This is because I joined the suit known as CD MAP, or the Compact Disc Minimum Advertised Price Antitrust Litigation, wherein the major record labels were found, you know, guilty of price-fixing. Guilty enough that they had to send money to hundreds of thousands of persons, enough that every single one of us could buy a copy of the Cortazar collection Blow-Up and Other Stories, which contains "The End of the Game." I lent my old copy to someone and can't remember who.

Which begs the question: How does anyone take seriously the RIAA's claim that downloading damages them financially by interfering with the market? The RIAA represents the very group which has been found guilty, in 43 states and some territories -- about 140 million dollars worth of guilty -- of damaging music fans by interfering with the market. Even the most retrograde economic conservative would have to laugh at the suggestion that the record labels have even a teeny tiny appeal to economic justice.

If anyone out there has stopped downloading out of fear, well, I can understand that. I slow down near known speed traps, but it's not because I believe that cops have any moral authority. What a hoot. If anyone out there has chosen not to download for moral reasons, I am dying to hear your reasoning. And please don't explain to me that downloading interferes with the income of, say, the second sound engineer in some studio. If you believe that, you had better be building barricades for socialism. If you're okay with the current superstructure, I remind you that it's the company's duty to pay employees a living wage. If those companies want me to stop "stealing" from them, a good first step would be to stop stealing from me.

Hello lovely persons,

I have three things I'd like to post about. Because I believe in clarity of purpose, I will make three separate posts. This one is about shopping. No, wait, I just checked, and it turns out they are all about shopping. Nonetheless: clarity.

Perhaps you have been thinking, as I sometimes do, should I get this greatest hits package and lose the couple-few original discs I have lying around, by way of slimming my collection and even gaining a few euros along the way?

If you are wondering this about the new Del tha Funkee Homosapien collection, it sure is tempting. Although it's painful to conceive of selling his debut, one of the best-titled albums ever (though not as well-dubbed as this one), the selections here are pretty good. Sure, it could use "Sunny Meadowz" but life is short, you may never listen to that song again, and the new package cuts through the considerable dross of latter discs. Besides, it has remixes!

Cool it now, and I mean yesterday. The thing is: this collection has a remix of "Catch A Bad One," but not the original from No Need For Alarm. And this remix is a singular atrocity, in that it usurps and obliterates the finest cello abuse that hip-hop has ever known, or will ever know. I'm not talking about that jazzy upright bass on Low-End Theory; I'm talking about an actual cello, played with a sibilant bowing technique by someone who may well have a deep knowledge of Jacqueline Du Pre, Band-Aids on her or his knees, and have been there when the Devil went down to Georgia. It is a once-in-a-lifetime moment, in the original version; don't let it slip away.

Alternative: what part of rip mix burn don't we understand?

You may have concluded that the free democratic elections on offer in the U.S.A. provide no hope for the changes you have every right to demand.

You may think that the functional gains of supporting a presidential candidate, who might get to appoint a Supreme Court Justice, who could act to protect reproductive rights, or provide various benefits to domestic partners, is not enough of a good to justify signing your name to the outsourcing of immiseration, or the removal of social protection for many many poor people. You may especially think this if you feel that the misery of people whom you will never meet, both within and without our current national borders, diminishes you as much as the sufferings of your friends, family and neighbors.

You may indeed have concluded that to vote in the national elections is explicitly to declare that such voting is a true expression of your interests -- a declaration which helps to preserve the mechanism as such -- and that you cannot make such a declaration.

Don't vote. Ignore the people pawning off banalities like "If you don't vote, don't bitch." The idea that the only legitimate form of refusal must take place within the bounds of the constraints offered you is, to put it simply, both logically and historically laughable.

If you vote, don't bitch; you're agreeing, as we all do, to bolster a ravenous regime, to benefit some select and specific population at the expense of others.

This is an awful fact. It makes me unhappy and my unhappiness is mere, in even the most local contexts. Such sorrow builds fantasies, just to make itself endurable. As is the way with fantasies, categories are confused to manage certain unmanageable concepts. And so one dreams that one might cast an ethical vote. This is a defensive imagining. Another might certainly have compassion for such a dream, but that doesn't make it either plausible or just.

Voting as it currently exists can only be a selection of the interests of specific populations, with an understanding of the costs to other populations. It cannot be an expression of ethics. I am sorry. We are all sorry about this. Do not vote for Ralph Nader.

My own utopia for bourgeois kittens is a terrorshow in early Fall when parents of Berkeley students drive around town like confused stoners, making late August a daily death match for pedestrians, bikers, and other drivers. Worse, they leave behind a deposit of about 3500 Freshman, who are cute but also actual confused stoners armed with what is often their first vehicle, meaning the Traffic ThreatCon remains scarlet for months.

So here was my idea: change University policy such that Freshmen were not allowed to have cars (exceptions for disabled students). In return, give every one of them a free bike on matriculation. After all, our town has a collective bike shop, an idiosyncratic internationalist bike culture atelier, and a world-famous custom studio. The economics of this are actually pretty easy to pull off, even if one doesn't seek out a sponsorship from some huge vendor; the only loser is the City of Berkeley's parking enforcement goonsquad, who have been getting schooled for the last few years anyway (the millennium trend of beheading meters, filling them with soil, and planting seeds makes me weep with love for my fellow citizens). Much as with the white bicycle plan (see previous entry), the city would become more pleasant in numerous ways. I'm talking about the joy of urban perambulation; you can throw in the less-oil, less-exhaust benefits like whipped cream on top.

But, as Steve notes, enforcement would be near impossible; any Californian could scarcely be stopped from registering a vehicle, and what are we proposing: dorm room key searches? Random stops? So I gave up on my plan.

In return, might every Freshman be given a free copy of Keywords, by Raymond Williams? The full title is Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, and it's gotten me through the last few months -- just a few words every night. The entries average about a page or two. They generally start with derivations and earliest appearances in English. The distinguishing gesture, however, happens in the very first sentence of entry after entry: "Mass is not only a very common but a very complex word in social description." Or, "Literature is a difficult word, in part because its contemporary meaning appears, at first sight, so simple."

Rather than merely listing the meanings of his chosen entries, or even settling for tracing the development of each, he shows how the often-quite-similar (but not identical; the clarity of his fine but crucial distinctions is staggering) uses of a word have come to bleed into and interfere with each other. It becomes apparent that arguments over the most basic concepts falter less on inherent ambiguities of the kind that philosophy worries about, and far more often on what are actually resolvable smearings of the ink in which history is written. It's like getting new glasses. And: did you know that the old French word jargon referred to the warbling of birds?

"The question of art was posed for a while in an extreme form, as an all or nothing choice. I know why I opted for the 'all.' And of course those of us who did so knew full well at the time that opting for the all--the all of the end of art, and art's realization in revolutionary practice--might end up as opting for nothing." (T.J. Clark; there's not a free copy online, but your local library might have the journal October, #100).

The Provos (a decent backstory originally appeared in High Times, itself a remarkable historical fact) were not quite all-or-nothing, and in the end were condemned by the most radical social visionaries (as well as being written off as hippie freaks via the usual protocol). Nonetheless, they have a place in the revolutionary tradition. They may not have been the Communards, but neither were they Burning Man, Inc.. A remarkably effective document put it like this: "The Provos are the first supersession of the experience of the delinquents, the organization of its first political expression."

Their legacy is, white bicycles.

The white bicycle plan seems unlikely to lead to revolution; it has not, as yet, in the Netherlands, where the scheme has been awkwardly recuperated by civic bureaucracy. That said, I don't think it inteferes with such goals. One can certainly say the concept has both sprung forth from and helped build a lovely biking culture (see previous entry). There is something to be said for this, even if we will never live in Amsterdam, New Babylon, nor cold Utopia.

In Delft my hotel looks down a canal-street to the raised train tracks across which the yellow and blue or yellow and purple trains (the sneltren and the stoptren?), running from Rotterdam to the Amsterdam and back, pass with surprising frequency, it being Sunday morning, and chilled-looking bicyclists peddle along the bricks.

Delft has its charms -- is there any midsized town in western Europe without charms? -- but not many. The canals are soupy and dull unless one can catch them at the exact angle of light so they reflect the houses and lampposts along side. There is a nice river which reminds me of western Massachusetts, though there is an improbably larger poulation here of little kids with dyed hair. Despite this splash of color, Delft exemplifies the dissipated melancholy of the Old World; one has the sense that not much of interest has happened here since before the Spanish Armada. But of course this can't be true; we are after all only a few miles from Rotterdam which, no less then Dresden or Guernica, was bombed with mythological ferocity. But the town still manages to seem as if history ended with the assassination of William the Silent; after that, it was up to Vermeer to fix the place in the historical imagination. Then everyone could get on with their lives, which mostly involve inventing new uses for doubled vowels, and riding bicycles.

These are in fact the charm of Delft. Americans like to note the community faith involved in how everyone in the Netherlands (and Sweden and Croatia and so on) leaves their bicycles unlocked -- here and there and hundreds at the train station -- but it's the machine's cultural centrality which gets me. Even around the tourist-geared Great Market, amidst the dark woody cafes and pushers of insipid Delftware, several bicycle shops: community centers of sorts under the shadows of the old churches, cluttered with sturdy gear. In the corner of a window, to make sure that the spheres of transportation and pleasure are seen as overlapping, some ice skates. But I am most taken by the pairedness of the local bicyclists, the way people ride around Delft in couples or, even more sweetly, two-to-a-bike with one sidesaddle on the rear. Like vowels. The kids doing this -- flash of pink hair on the stone bridge -- are heartbreakingly adorable. Moreover it makes the more precariously-balanced adults seem awkward, childlike: a secret account of the romantic.

The Master of Santa Chiara, The Master of San Francesco, The Master of 1333, The Master of The Rebel Angels.

I unhesitatingly respect Nate Patrin for naming names when calling out the Pazz & Jop poll on ideological grounds; all too often, folks here in the floating world (which is, after all, saturated with the seduction of anonymity) will call down the lightning on alleged villains without quite saying who the villains are--a particularly noxious cowardice when it's obviously about protecting potentially profitable relationships ("All editors are jackasses! Except for everyone who might read this. I didn't mean you. Call me!") Ethics are only ethics when they're applied to the social relations of actual persons, not offered as general claims that never point at one's friends and business associates. Mr. Patrin, by risking specific human wrath at his analysis, gets cred.

He loses cred just as fast. If general moralizing for which one doesn't finally have to be accountable is a leading disingenuity of the floating world, another is what you might call the letter/spirit slide. His list (of the many voters for whom Outkast's winning album or single appeared as their only hip-hop-related vote, basically) doesn't explicitly mention racism; to suggest that a claim about race wasn't the neon centerpiece of the project ("what the fuck does this have to do with who's white or hispanic or whatever? This is about genre tokenism") is absurdly dishonest.

Why did participants on I Love Music let him back out? There are more answers than I'd care to list, or imagine. A leader must be: that the suggestion No, I am not really calling anyone a racist, despite all evidence to the contrary will always be accepted by folks who wish the issue of race not to be on the table.

While we are dealing with ideologies of race visible in the Pazz & Jop poll, I'm not sure the issue of tokenism is the most interesting (and has, moreover, been well-documented and discussed at least since the great triumph of Arrested Development in 1994). I'd still like to hear a good discussion of why, exactly, artists of color are staggeringly better-represented in the singles vote than in the albums, year in and year out. I wasn't put on God's green earth to crunch numbers, but this year there are something like five non-white-identified acts in the Top 40 albums; on the singles list, there are six in the Top 10, and that's not counting Johnny Cash, the Man in Black whose body is moldering in the grave like John Brown. So tell me: are people of color just plain better at making what a German guy calls "the song-hit" and whitefolk the masters of the long form? Or is this voting imbalance about the beliefs of voters? Are polls even interesting for anything but that question?

"I think there should be a term other than 'exile' when you can afford to travel," I said to Charlie. "Eurotrash," he suggested, grinning like a guilty boy. But he didn't know about whom I was thinking. In the last year I've read three books by Etel Adnan, Beirut native who has spent much of her life elsewhere: France, California, and less branded places. The blind absoluteness with which the writing is at once aestheticized and politicized without synthesizing the two, or even allegorizing one to the other, defies WB's version where total systems colonize one with the other ("This is the situation of politics that Fascism is rendering aesthetic. Commmunism responds by politicizing art.")

Here's a passage from Adnan's Of Cities and Women, a collection of letters sent as a kind of answer to a colloquium request regarding feminism: "I should tell you that my visit to the Vatican left me extenuated, fatigued. (It was as though I were haunted with Beirut again and the entire Mediterranean culture based on the adoration of the son)... What a burdensome world, brimming with treasures, sure of itself, domineering, brimming, of course, with some of the world's most beautiful works, channeling crowds of mortals, of tourists from corridor to corridor, from signpost to signpost, toward the Exit. What has happened to the freedom to dream, to loiter, to reverse one's steps, to doubt, to be uncertain?"

Steve doesn't like any representational painting at all. I, having seen Vermeer and Parmigianino and Eliz Peyton, think this is crazy.

And yet. I was thinking today about the necessity of a revolution against pronouns — how they were the root of all ennui in writing and needed to be cast down, because from thence springs character, and from character springs realism...and truth be told, every bit as bad as Steve, I confess that I don't like a single bit of realist (which is different from "realistic"; sir, it's all realistic) fiction or poetry, and it seems perfectly obvious to me. I get more or less the right dosage of real life from real life; why in the world would I read something that portrays it accurately?

Keith Harris linked to this site, implying (rightly, I think) this is exactly what the Web is for.* Though this particular annotation could be better ("heavy metal suicide" should be of a piece, I suspect), I would be happy to see a thousand pages to flourish just like it. Obvious places to start: "It's The End of the World As We Know It," "Waiting For The End of the World," "Stagger Lee," Kurtis Blow's "Basketball," Reunion's "Life Is A Rock," and "Angel of Death." Volunteers?

* The other thing the Web is for is to allow many many people to determine their Q rating by Googling themselves. This is in fact the main causal factor in the proliferation of blogs. It would be nice to say that this means civilians now have the same ambient ghostpresence as celebs, just qualitatively less -- but this would be to suggest that everyone who Googles themselves gets some hits. Which is of course not true; all over the world are people who, if they had a computer and knew what to do, would discover they n'existe pas.** All of which suggests that the civilians/celebs split is a loser, and that if one is a Westerner of a certain social class or higher, one is already a celebrity by some measure. VH-1 Fabulous Life home game: imagine the person for whom it would be compelling to watch a show about your shopping habits. This should not cheer anyone up, anyone at all.

** Seen from the position of the working class, sez WB, "the state of emergency in which we live is not the exception but the rule."

I had zine called sugarhigh! It came out twice, in the mid-Nineties. It also caused me to become employed (note passive construction; it sure felt that way) by The Village Voice, which caused me to become employed by Spin, which caused me to become a very predictable kind of boring writer and feel like a whore. Eventually I stopped; quitting is actually a perturbing story which involves, in more and less obvious ways, a review of The Coup, backstage passes to a U2 concert, September 11th, being threatened with a lawsuit by Sia Michel, and a shady helicopter rental in Rio. Anyway, I hope to write some about music on this site, in a way that might be predictable and boring but not whoresque. I also plan to post some poetry-related material, and odes to the excellence of my friends. I am not your enemy.

The minimum requirement for participation in the social is a willingess to take in travelers.