jane dark's sugarhigh!

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.