Talk Show Host

Crater

2011-12-31T11:13:00.001-06:00

Top 10 Albums of 2011

Absence | Snowman: a haunting album full of lonely textures, minor piano chords, pounding drums, & creepy falsetto. Snowman's style reminds me most of Liars, perhaps because of the vocal similarities (falsetto melodies & the occasional screaming) but their instrumentation is actually more lush. Spooky arpeggios & breathy vocals that should sound comforting ("don't let anybody drag you down") result in songs that are more menacing than most metal music.
[S/T] | Clams Casino: good instrumental hip-hop that relies far more on textures than beats or melodies. Perhaps the most distinctive part of Clams Casino's style is the use of vocal samples, which are often bathed in distortion, echoing, & moan-like. It is a textural use of vocals as opposed to traditional hip-hop sampling & comes across as both unique & haunting. Also – I would hate this album if all the Lil B & Soulja Boy lyrics were on top of it, so I'm very glad its instrumental. One could easily add the Rainforest EP to this list as well, since it's an equally excellent work.
As High as the Highest Heavens and From the Center of the Circumference of the Earth | True Widow: this is a type of music I’ve largely stopped listening to & yet this album hit home with me. It’s mid-tempo distorted guitar chords, not even riffs most of the time, with plain & plaintive vocal melodies, but perfectly done. The pacing & guitars are powerful, not flashy but strong & simple. I probably couldn't cite a single line of the lyrics but I like they way that they're low in the mix & drenched in reverb, giving them the "voice lost in the machine" quality of a band like Tool.
The King of Limbs | Radiohead: To be honest, this may be the Radiohead album with the lowest average rating in my iTunes (& I don’t have Pablo Honey :). But that’s a little misleading, because the best tracks of tKoL are better than the best tracks of In Rainbows. “Bloom” & “Lotus Flower” in particular are amazing, gorgeous atmospheres topped by charming melodies. The beats throughout the album are very interesting too, organic with shuffling snares are opposed to the tinny drum machines Kid A & Amnesiac. Another unique aspect: this may be the happiest Radiohead album ever, at times it sounds positively ecstatic as in the closer “Separator.”
Own Your Ghost | 13 & God: similar to TKoL above, this album does not have the transcendent individual songs of 13 & God’s last work (“Superman on Ice”, “Tin Strong”) but is a more complete album overall. The songs tend to swing between Notwist glitch pop & Subtle post-electronica rap but in a balanced, coherent way exemplified by the persistent lyrical themes of senescence & death.
apoLLo1ne3hree | iL: one of the most unique albums I’ve heard lately, iL’s music is composed primarily of spliced vocal samples up front & melodramatic atmospheres in the background. That may not seem too original, but everything is off kilter in a deranged way, like a mistuned radio. Burial is perhaps the closest reference point, but Burial’s pacing is far more restrained & consistent, he never hammers you with sample after sample. The album ends up being both very moving & very draining, which is handled masterfully by making all the songs around a minute long. The 17-song album comes in at 20 minutes but is so vivid & original that it feels like a long play.
Conatus | Zola Jesus: the vocals on this album are, without exception, powerful & haunting. The music is mostly synth textures but they're interesting enough. A minor piano chord here, little synth blurps there, & the atmosphere falls together in a way that complements the mesmerizing vocals without being distracting. After seeing Zola Jesus live, I realized that the beats on the album are surprisingly good, too.
Tomboy | Panda Bear: catchy as hell. It doesn't live up to Person Pitch, lacking the epic quality of that album's longer songs, but you could listen to almost any single song on repeat for an hour before it gets dull. Animal Collective & Panda Bear have been on a winning streak for a long time now. Avey Tare’s album from last year was pretty disappointing, though.
Dedication | Zomby: I can't figure out why this album is so addictive but I find myself wanting to listen to it all the time. The songs are quite simple, as each only has 2-3 simultaneous parts at work, but that helps draw attention to how catchy & well-chosen each piece is. Even cheesy gunshot samples which I've long written off as tasteless sound good in the menacing, mysterious atmosphere that Zomby so carefully builds throughout the album. As with Clams Casino, Zomby's EP this year (Nothing) is also worth mentioning as it's every bit as good as Dedication.
Work (Work, Work) | HTRK: like the #1 band here Snowman, I just discovered HTRK this year & instantly fell in love. There's something sort of 1980s about them, almost like early Talking Heads except even bleaker. The vocals have the same lonely reverb quality as True Widow, but the instrumentation is more focused on synths & samples.

Centipede

2011-12-04T14:29:00.001-06:00

I see loathsome little legs,
my God.
I see You as a centipede.

I see loathsome claws,
my God.
I see You as a scorpion.

I see loathsome antennae,
my God.
I see You as a grasshopper.

I see loathsome sabellaria worms,
my God.
You are my wounds.

—Edmond Jabès, The Book of Questions Vol. 1, pp. 241-2.

Crucial

2011-10-09T16:40:00.000-05:00

Simulation is no crime. Credibility is only a special effect...—Jean Baudrillard

Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael

Bay

Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay Michael Bay

Crucial

2011-10-05T22:47:00.005-05:00

On the metro to meet my fiancé, who is beautiful. I have a beautiful fiancé and mostly the life I've mainly wanted, by the way. It's not enough.

On the metro and listening to Sun Glitters and I stop reading about 4chan to look out the window. We're above ground. McDonald's. 7/11. Football field of a parking lot. Traffic lights lingering on red. Wendy's. Abandoned brick building. Abandoned brick building with a few windows shattered. There's nothing so serene. I can't quite touch the quiddity of its quintessence, of its lessons. Dark energy of an accelerating universe. Part of me wants to call it nostalgia but there's no past here, nothing to harken back to. It's the sort of sadness you wish would never leave, the sort of sadness you could crawl under the covers with. KFC. Liberty. Crackle stomp shine goes the music in my mind. The brick buildings continue. They are all abandoned. They are all newspaper offices. Washington Post, Washington Times, Washington Daily, Washington Examiner. None of this exists or ever has. Burger King. Crackle stomp shine. Pitch-shifted vocals murmur something I can't make out and don't attempt to. Crackle stomp shine. What's left to conquer once I've made you mine.

Crucial

2011-09-29T16:08:00.000-05:00

It was a dark time in my life. I was watching a lot of CNBC.

Caustic Window

2011-09-25T18:35:00.002-05:00

Hot Mama

MΣČĦΛÑIČΛŁŁŸ ŞΣPΛЯΛTΣĐ ČĦIČKΣÑ
PǾЯK
ŞǾŸ PЯǾTΣIÑ ČǾÑČΣÑTЯΛTΣ
ŞΛŁT
╒ŁΛVǾЯIÑĜ
ŁΣŞŞ TĦΛÑ 2% Ǿ╒:
ČǾЯÑ ŞŸЯUP ŞǾŁIĐŞ
BΣΣ╒
PΛPЯIKΛ
ŞǾĐIUM ΣЯŸTĦǾЯBΛTΣ
ŞǾĐIUM ÑITЯΛTΣ
ЯΣĐ 40.
PIČKŁΣĐ IÑ VIÑΣĜΛЯ
ẄΛTΣЯ
ŞΛŁT
ЯΣĐ 40.

once more, with feeling...

MΣČĦΛÑIČΛŁŁŸ ŞΣPΛЯΛTΣĐ ČĦIČKΣÑ
Moments spent hoping
PǾЯK
Gelded horses
ŞǾŸ PЯǾTΣIÑ ČǾÑČΣÑTЯΛTΣ
Succotash of your inner workings
ŞΛŁT
Succotash of your scarlet desire
╒ŁΛVǾЯIÑĜ
Trees are meat
ŁΣŞŞ TĦΛÑ 2% Ǿ╒:\
Lives are meat
ČǾЯÑ ŞŸЯUP ŞǾŁIĐŞ
You can't escape meat
BΣΣ╒
Internet insomnia
PΛPЯIKΛ
Brilliant mines
ŞǾĐIUM ΣЯŸTĦǾЯBΛTΣ
Lithium elope
ŞǾĐIUM ÑITЯΛTΣ
Mansion elope
ЯΣĐ 40.
Are we all we are we
PIČKŁΣĐ IÑ VIÑΣĜΛЯ
Rodentia survival
ẄΛTΣЯ
Future esteemed
ŞΛŁT
Dearth
ЯΣĐ 40.

Byte

2011-07-02T11:04:00.002-05:00

Apple annihilate us
comfort castrate us.
Receive seethe receive
node abode node
you'd say you were wired
but the wires are obsolete {ctrl alt del}
which is to say everywhere & nowhere
which is to say
the wires are the very air itself
very scared of self
barely stealth.
Read me my
recondite rights
euthanize me with EULAs
'sall good 'sall straight
rather die than wait
rather annihilate.

Boorishness

2011-05-04T23:10:00.000-05:00

yearn cohesive

albeit inveterate

inure alonelessness

envy excedrin

stut stutters and rants

corraded nerves

but we'll wallow in welcome

bask in the luculence of our love

supple syntaxis

agreed upon arrangements

a motley sanity

hypersomnia

I like it that way.

Soft river of love

carry me home, make

this poem happen

in earth as in mind.

Pastel waters lie in wait for us

Beyond marriage, beyond lust

A formality no document

can truly attest to

a bond more covalent

than contractual.

Bromide Poisoning

2011-02-23T23:19:00.000-06:00

saxicolous subconsciousness

albeit inveterate

orgy umbrage hours

strangled with felt

strangled with health

orthorexic nervosa

albeit inveterate

coccyx succor

the only way to get those fuckers gone

another oneirocriticon

another list of elaborate lies

swell gucci swell ribcage swell

triskaidekaphobia

but I already said that

I already wrote it in ruination's unaverse intonations

overt or otherwise

chelation therapy

iridectomy

recovery indefinite

obstreperous

with devilish delectation

with a joy no job could cancel

no chore could incarcerate

-_- -_- -_-

Mark Foley was right / there are no barriers for medicine

Mark Foley was right / there are no barriers for shame, shame!

—Manchasm / Future of the Left

I have effectively divided my online persona into two pieces: the professional and the questionable. There is no reason to risk exposing potential employers to the instability that is Talk Show Host, to the inaniloquence of my linguistic aptitudes. Unemployment is no time to perk up with pride.

Neither portion of my personality is the least artificial, either. I'm genuinely elated to be working where I am, to be studying what I am, and I also really like weird poetry, politics, perusals, protuberances.

By the way, no one ever tells you when you don't make the first cut. This has become a fact of our information/underemployed age. More people apply to positions both because A) it's easier, with the Internet and all, and B) the unemployment rate is fairly high. At the other end of this is not the toothless grin of an administrative demon but more likely an overworked Human Resources peon. HR is an easy area to cut from, a likely start to the cutting of corners, so I'm assuming they're understaffed everywhere nowadays. The last private company I worked for—true story—fired the only HR person in a forty-some person office. The boss had to call her up to ask where things like insurance forms and various waivers were for months afterwards. So I'm not saying it's great, but when you're applying to jobs you get used to being utterly silent, utterly powerless, utterly divided in two / truncated. Sigh, shake your head, move on, but not dot org. Just move. On.

~_~ ~_~ ~_~

Unique Aspects of Radiohead Albums

Worst in every way - Pablo Honey

Most guitar riffs - The Bends

Most grandiose narratives (Airbag, Paranoid Android, Lucky) - OK Computer

Debatably best album ever, only with "secret song" after album's end - Kid A

Best b-sides - Amnesiac

Longest, least cohesive - Hail to the Thief

Best vocal melodies, least interesting lyrics, cheapest - In Rainbows

Best beats, shortest, happiest, no distorted guitars[?] - The King of Limbs

Which would you say has the best artwork? In a way, I'm saddened that I won't be able to afford the "newspaper album" version of King of Limbs, which I'm sure will be awesome. Radiohead has always been one of those bands whose physical editions are well worth the artwork: from the re-appropriated street signs and bathroom figures of OK Computer, to the strange wintry landscapes of Kid A, to the awesome little bear theme of Amnesiac, it's always good. I look forward to seeing pictures posted online once the newspaper album ships.

Also, Amnesiac was a hard one. What I put is true (Cuttooth! Kinetic! The Amazing Sounds of Orgy!) but very tangential. I'd be interested if anyone has a better idea.

Bombilation

2011-02-09T20:40:00.000-06:00

I will start writing poetry again.

I will rant and rave like a scansion slave.

I will emerge unperturbed.

I will lay me down in a bunker underground.

::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::

enough ice cream

to feed the world

ten times over

so støp

every landscape is Los Angeles

so støp

purple skies until the day she dies

støp

animal 42

so støp

tamper with the temperature

støp

free enterprise system

so støp

nothing is fucked here, dude

so støp

støp

breaking into homes

cracking housewife skull

with wrench for Tiffany's

and gruyere out the fridge

stripping the copper from abandoned tenements

stealing fertilizer from Fresno industrial farms

jacking Erlenmeyer flasks from high school science classrooms

cooking meth in motel rooms

støp that.

støp bigots

støp poets

støp rap.

Quality valium is available, no doctor needed!

So støp.

Feelings are overrated

so støp.

Marginalized is just a word

America is just a word

Michael Bay is just a person

støp.

http://bit.ly/GTV

so støp

rotting rot rotten

shizocarp

støp

sex nøt love

cloth nøt skin

støp

nøt knøtted up

like Mobius strips

Mobius drip

radically disconnected

globalization as anachronism

an idioticon for each and every one

insulate your yourself

insulate

støp

Bring in the New Fear

2011-01-03T13:48:00.001-06:00

Top 11 Albums of 2011

...because I couldn't make a top ten because that would entail pushing Flying Lotus off the list.

All Waters of the Earth Shall Turn to Blood / The Body: Not only is this the best album title of 2010, it's also the best album. It sounds much like the third item on this list in its use of vocals-only choruses to contrast with metal, except this metal is more drone or dirge-like whereas Liturgy are standard Black Metal fare. The Body's album is better because it nails the dynamic: it's truly frightening right from the start, where just a hint of dissonance in the chorus leads to a horror movie uber-climax of zombies, decapitation, and unending death. But in a good way.
King Night / Salem: Loud, distorted dance music, chopped-n-screwed hip-hop, and even a sort of punk rock song at the end of the album. King Night is pretty weird and varied but maintains a threatening, dangerous dynamic throughout, whether it's a half-speed baritone talking about abusing you or ten layers of synths emitting beautiful drones. I look forward to hearing more of this, which apparently is in the "witch house" genre.
Renihilation / Liturgy: While Black Metal is arguably my second-favorite genre behind experimental hip-hop, I rarely come across an album that captivates me throughout its entire runtime. Black Metal bands love long songs with incoherent screaming and neverending tremolo-picking; it's a defensible stylistic choice, but one which wears you down after ninety nonstop minutes (this is why Krallice's album is further down this list). Liturgy, however, takes expert advantage of Gregorian interludes and lo-fi production here, managing to tap both into primal anger but also mysticism in a way which Black Metal hasn't seen since Wolves in the Throne Room released the near-perfect Two Hunters.
To Realize / Clipd Beaks: Noise rock that somehow sounds harmonized. What amazes about this album is that the noise never grates, the out-of-tune pubescent-voice-cracking vocals somehow insinuate a gorgeous and insecure melody, and the whole record has such astounding depth and coherence. It drags towards the second half of the album, where it becomes more instrumental and the melodies are buried, but that's also simply because the first half has the best songs released in 2010, like "Blood" and "Strangler".
Sisterworld / Liars: This album is really solid but unspectacular, with most songs failing to evoke a unique atmosphere. The lyrics and melodies are some of the best Liars have done ("Scissor", "No Barrier Fun", and "Proud Evolution" are all exemplary), and they mesh well with the slacker-jazz noise rock instrumentation, but the whole doesn't coalesce so well as their 2nd and 3rd albums which were so transcendent in their synergy. Also, I actually liked the remixes (almost every one is enjoyable, despite Thom Yorke's being surprisingly boring) and found that the remixes and originals make a nice long-play together.
All Creatures Will Make Merry / Meursault: This album has wind blowing throughout it, whether it be a distorted chord hanging over an entire song or simply a healthy dose of reverb. Combine the atmospherics with a delightful Scottish accent belting out emotive verses and you've got a really melodramatic but somehow excellent album. The instrumentation ranges from folky acoustic to orchestral pounding drums and strings but it's really the consistency of the vocals, always there alternatively either blowing you over or holding you up, that make the album so moving. The last song is perfect too, the vocals quiet down a bit as a piano mumbles some chords. It reminds me of the way Radiohead ends Kid A and In Rainbows, which is a good thing.
Spirituals / Spirituals: Compelling blend of electronic and acoustic instruments, another album of sampler-jazz freak-outs, though much less beat-oriented than FlyLo. Actually better than the Four Tet album which came out this year, which is really saying something. Witness "Manzanita", where disjointed clusters of bells ring against a background of shuffling drums and analog synths, a Four Tet simulation that exceeds the original.
My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy / Kanye West: I'm not a big Kanye fan but this album really is brilliant. Every song veers towards a sort of megalomania but in the most charismatic way possible and tropes that I would usually find tiring (the Chris Rock bit, excessive use of autotune, Kanye's less-than-amazing rhymes) actually work well in the context of the album as a whole. The fact that most songs far outrun the usually four-minute pop song formula, e.g. the amazing Runaway which clocks in just over nine minutes long, but don't get boring is a testament to the incredible flow of structure and production at work here. Avant garde pop hip-hop on par with the best of Outkast's oeuvre.
Dimensional Bleedthrough / Krallice: I really love Krallice but this album is just too long. Their EP is amazing because it's focused—4 long songs which mesh well—but this album just wears you down with 14-minute tracks. The music is great, but it's too much of a good thing.
There is Love in You / Four Tet: I love Four Tet and keep hoping he'll make something better than Rounds or Pause, two of the best instrumental albums ever. So far, this album is the closest yet, but it doesn't surpass those two in any way.
Cosmogramma / Flying Lotus: I think my insanely high hopes for this one rendered it disappointing. It's still a landmark album but feels diluted and—surprisingly—unfocused. Unlike precursor Los Angeles, which stuck to a basic theme of fuzzed out off-beat hip-hop, Cosmogramma incorporates jazz and live instruments alongside video game sound effects and IDM. Reading about it ahead of time, I was ecstatic; FlyLo does jazz? IT'S GONNA BE THE SECOND COMING OF MILES DAVIS! Unfortunately, it's not the Miles of Bitches Brew and the album wanders between uninteresting experiments and slightly successful fusions with no real sense of direction.

Honorable Mentions:

[S/T] / Blue Water White Death
Dear God, I Hate Myself / Xiu Xiu
Maniac Meat / Tobacco
Glass Eights / John Roberts
See Birds EP / Balam Acab
[S/T] EP / oOoOO

Those last two are really excellent releases but I cannot bring myself to put an EP on the list, simply because they're too short. Balam Acab is excellent but leaves me wanting so much more. RELEASE AN LP, KID!

Behold Our Headlessness

2010-10-21T15:23:00.000-05:00

This is a big fckng deal.

Nebuchadnezzar's debut album, Difference & Repetition, is now up and running. You can visit the website for lyrics, credits, and related derangement, or head straight on down to the ol' Internet Archive to download it, comes complete with album insert pdf. I just uploaded some higher-quality AIFFs but they may not be available yet.
Many thanks to the parties who made this possible, who are numerous but may not want to be associated. So nlogic is the only one I'll thank by name.

Basketball's Positional Glut

2010-09-15T14:51:00.001-05:00

Top 10 NBA Point Guards

There is an amazing glut of talent at the Point Guard position in the NBA right now, so much so that I feel a need to
sort some of it out in list form. While we've seen various eras be defined by different positions (think of when
Ewing, Olajuwon, Shaq, and David Robinson were all in the league at the same time, or earlier eras when 3-4
historically great centers were in the league simultaneously, though now there is only 1 great center in the entire
NBA), the present era is shifting towards PGs even as the league's two best players (LeBron James and Kevin
Durant) are short forwards. Many of the names on this list are young players, having entered the league in the last
3-5 years, and each of the last three drafts has had all-star caliber point guards.

Statistics: All are taken from Basketball-Reference.com. Ast/TO = assist to turnover ratio. You want at least 2 from a PG, but great PGs are
3+. | TS% = true shooting percentage. Should be above 50%; really great players are 55% and up. | PPS = points per
shot. 1.1 is about average, 1.2 is good, 1.3 and up is great. | PER = player efficiency rating. 10-15 is average,
15-20 is good, 20-30 is great. STL36: steals per 36 minutes. 2 is good, 1 is bad, 1.5 is average for a PG. | I have
taken stats from the past 2-3 years and averaged them (each year weighted equally, not according to totals. Which is
just for my own convenience and not effectiveness).

Chris Paul (New Orleans Hornets): Paul is a historically-good point guard, perhaps the best we've seen since
Magic Johnson. I still put him at the top because his injuries don't seem to be chronic (unlike Baron Davis,
for instance) and, when in the game, he is still far-and-away the most productive PG. Stats - Ast/TO: 4.16 -
TS%: 58.6 - PPS: 1.35 - PER: 27.3 - STL36: 2.4
Rajon Rondo (Boston Celtics): Rondo has the 2nd-lowest scoring average of anyone on this list, but that's
also part of what makes him great. Rondo does everything well except shoot 3s, creates for others as good as
anyone in the league, and is arguably the best defensive point guard in the NBA. Because of the new hand-check
rules, people still get around him, but Rondo piles up steals, defensive rebounds, and can handle most shooting
guards (he spent an inordinate amount of time guarding Kobe Bryant in last year's finals, a feat only Jason
Kidd could match). A PG who can guard SGs (and you'll see several on this list) is one of the most under-rated
assets in the NBA, because one of the most consistent weakness across disparate defenses is when a PG gets
switched onto a bigger perimeter player and subsequently overpowered. Stats - Ast/TO: 3.05 - TS%: 53.3 - PPS:
1.21 - PER: 17.8 - STL36: 2.1
Deron Williams (Utah Jazz): Only slightly inferior to Paul in almost every area; only his 3-point shooting stands
out as a superior skill, and Paul has gained ground in that category over the past two years. Williams' weak
defense and strangely low rebound totals are why he falls below Rondo. It will be interested to see how Deron
fairs as the sole focus of an offense, without Boozer as his pick-and-roll buddy. Stats - Ast/TO: 3.14 - TS%:
58.1 - PPS: 1.36 - PER: 20.8 - STL36: 1.1
Jason Kidd (Dallas Mavericks): Kidd, in his prime, was better than anyone else on this list (even Chris Paul, thus
far), and all the while he was never even an efficient scorer. Rather, Kidd has excelled in the NBA by doing
EVERYTHING other than scoring better than any other PG. In fact, in most categories, his competitors aren't
even close. Unless you count Oscar Robinson as a PG, Kidd is by far the best rebounder the position has ever seen,
on top of being an amazing man-to-man defender who generates 2 steals a game without gambling too much. Now that
he's added a decent 3-pt shot to his game—and spends all his time guarding SGs whilst the quicker,
smaller Maverick shooting guards pick up the opposing PG—he is perhaps underrated and still a vital element
on one of the West's best teams. That Kidd's Wins Produced are second only to Paul (and just by a smidgen) is
a testament to how incredible a PG he is. Stats - Ast/TO: 3.46 - TS%: 54.3 - PPS: 1.16 - PER: 17.1 - STL36:
1.8
Steve Nash (Phoenix Suns): Nash is nearly-perfect offensively (he makes too many risky passes that result in
turnovers to be truly perfect), the best pure shooter in the NBA (yes, there is a reason his True Shooting % reads
like a typo) combined with an amazing ability to create offense for others. Unfortunately, he is also one of the
worst defenders in the NBA. Despite having decent height for a PG, his arms are short, his horizontal quickness
nonexistent, and he fails to challenge shots in any meaningful manner. The fact that he's really good at
drawing charges stops him from being a complete detriment on that end of the floor, and thus stops him from
falling further on this list. While he probably did not deserve his two MVPs, I enjoy watching Nash as much as
anyone in the NBA and he has aged amazingly well, probably due to the fact that he has always relied on skill
rather than athleticism. Stats - Ast/TO: 2.99 - TS%: 62.4 - PPS: 1.38 - PER: 20.7 - STL36: .7
Chauncey Billups (Denver Nuggets): Billups is a bit weird offensively because he shoots a fairly low percentage
but is extremely efficient because of his high 3-pt percentage and ability draw fouls and convert at the line
(sort of the opposite of Derrick Rose). On top of that, Billups' best asset, through his Detroit years and up
to the present, has been his ability to run an offense without turning the ball over. He won't make the fancy
passes that others on this list will, but his Ast/TO ratio reflects a higher basketball IQ which improves those
around him. Stats - Ast/TO: 2.63 - TS%: 59.6 - PPS: 1.45 - PER: 19.3 - STL36: 1.2
Stephen Curry (Oakland Warriors): Curry is already one of the league's best 3-pt shooters, will be among the
leaders in steals every year, and will probably become an 8-9 assist per game guy if he is allowed to run a team
(as opposed to sharing responsibilities with Monta Ellis). My hope is he becomes the next Steve Nash, an
insanely-efficient shooter but one who looks to set up others first before creating his own looks. His only real
knock, at this point, is his substandard defense, which is compounded by the Warriors' reckless style. But
Curry is still learning the NBA game and has tremendous quickness, passable size, and an obvious intelligence.
Chances are, in a couple years, he will not only no longer be a liability on D, but he'll be one of the top-10
defensive point guards in the NBA. Stats - Ast/TO: 1.97 - TS%: 56.8 - PPS: 1.23 - PER: 16.3 - STL36:
1.9
Tyreke Evans (Sacramento Kings): Tyreke is another PG with great size who can effortlessly switch onto a SG or
even a SF. He is probably the best perimeter defender on his team. Some would argue that he is a shooting
guard, but he played an awful lot of PG last year. Then again, perhaps LeBron belongs on this list, since he
essentially plays PG on the offensive end as well. Evans didn't shoot a great percentage, but that is more a
function of the Kings' limited options than his abilities. His combination of strength and speed is unmatched
on this list and—best of all—he seems to recognize this and spends almost all his possessions driving
towards the basket. Stats - Ast/TO: 1.93 - TS%: 52.9 - PPS: 1.24 - PER: 18.2 - STL36: 1.5
Russell Westbrook (Oklahoma City Thunder): Westbrook is here despite having terrible shot selection. His excellent
defense and manageable passing makes up for a horrendous (worst on this list) shooting percentage. I think he will
improve his percentages over the next few years, as OKC develops more offensive options behind him and Durant.
Westbrook was more efficient at UCLA and it is hard to believe that the NBA game is so drastically different as to
turn him into an offensive liability. Stats - Ast/TO: 2.01 - TS%: 49.0 - PPS: 1.14 - PER: 16.5 - STL36:
1.5
Derrick Rose (Chicago Bulls): Rose is a bit of a conundrum. He has great size and athleticism, the potential to be
a standout defender, but has yet to effectively apply himself in any way. He shoots a high percentage for a point
guard, but because he doesn't shoot 3s or draw fouls, his points-per-shot is mediocre. His presence on this
list is entirely due to potential; without increased scoring efficiency and more consistent defense, he's a
worse PG than many of the honorable mentions below.Stats - Ast/TO: 2.35 - TS%: 52.4 - PPS: 1.15 - WS48: .089 -
PER: 17.3 - STL36: .8

Near all-stars left off this list (in no particular order): Tony Parker, Baron Davis, Jose Calderon, Brandon Jennings,
Devin Harris, Andre Miller, Jameer Nelson, Mo Williams, John Wall.

P.S. - The first thing I noticed upon constructing this list was how prone to overestimating the potential of youth I
am. Most of the honorable mentions have significantly better stats than the bottom of my list in more than a few
categories, yet I cannot bring myself to put Miller, Parker, or Calderon above Rose, Westbrook, or Evans. Jennings is
the only exception to this rule: he had one good game last year and then spent the rest of the season shooting his
team out of the game. He is an excellent defender, but I'm unconvinced he belongs above the other young talents of the
game.

P.P.S. - I really wanted to use the Wins Produced (WP) metric, which has a loyal cadre of blogs if you're
interested, rather than PER, which is a fairly useless measure (which is why there is little correlation between PER
ranking and my top 10). But, alas, I just didn't have time to manually average out WP per 48 stats, which are not as
easy to find as PER. I think you would find, however, that my rankings are only solidified by WP48, which tends not to
reward offensive stat stuffing but pays attention to solid all-around PGs like Rondo and Kidd.

Buy Nothing

2010-08-19T13:54:00.002-05:00

Because paying for software is now the exclusive domain of suckers...

Top Ten OpenSource/Freeware Programs

My prior top ten lists were presented as objective, but I know so little about software that I'll actually put a disclaimer here: these are programs that I've found useful and elegant, but there are doubtless better ones out there that hackers know about. Further, while I have put these in an ordered list, the numeration for these (especially the bottom half) is probably more fluid than the other lists, since they are all recent discoveries and I'm constantly finding new programs. Audacity is probably the only item which I've used over a long (> 1 year) period of time.

QuickSilver: Awe-inspiring productivity app. I've pretty much abandoned the Dock in Mac OS X, and my Desktop and Finder usage is drastically decreasing. Not only does QuickSilver launch apps, but you can move files and folders around faster than in Finder. Have a document buried in seven layers of folders? You can do anything to it in about six keystrokes. QS is very customizable too and someone with more Terminal skills than I can probably do wondrous operations with it.
GIMP: Never buy Photoshop. GIMP does everything Adobe does but is free. The usability isn't great, but then again neither is Photoshop's. I have been using this to make the album insert for Difference & Repetition and it's been very effective.
Firefox: Still the best web browser ever, though now entirely because of its prevalence in the design community (every website works on Firefox) and the vast array of plugins. Personally, I use Firefox exclusively for web design, with the Firebug and Web toolbar plugins which make it a more powerful design tool than any other browser.
Chrome: Though I've ranked 'fox ahead of it here, Chrome is my primary browser because it integrates best with my Google apps (mainly Gmail & Reader), is far faster than Firefox, and the killer, minimalist layout (while my Firefox is very much maximalist, due to all the plugins) with the brilliant Omnibar. I wish Chrome could completely supplant Firefox, but sadly Moodle's editing tools don't display in Chrome, OpenCMS won't work, and Netflix streaming doesn't either. In the end, though, I would probably have to use two browsers anyways, since it's best to have one sleek one and one overloaded with features used during specific work sessions. Is there a browser which allows multiple installs (Update: Firefox allows multiple profiles)? Just different settings and extensions? Also, Safari is a pretty great, fast browser (I have to think its plugins will never catch up to Firefox or Chrome, though) but it's annoying to keep bookmarks synced across all three.
Audacity: I don't use Audacity much anymore but it's a great tool for finishing touches on sound files. If you're either interested in doing something fairly basic, like making the sound on a podcast a little better, or performing global edits on a file made elsewhere (I run a lot of my GarageBand work through Audacity) this is an invaluable resource which only keeps improving.
Subversion/SCPlugin: An essential versioning tool which was indispensable for our group web design project this summer. Subversion (and it's Mac OS X client, SCPlugin) allows a group to edit files held on a server and resolve issues caused by overlap. It's sort of like Google Docs except file-type agnostic, less synchronous, and more powerful. Honestly, of all the items on this list Subversion is probably the one I'm most inept at, but I truly appreciate what it does.
OpenOffice: Never buy Microsoft Office. For one, Open Office seems to handle Microsoft's own file formats better than they do, and for two the immense export options of OO make MS Office obsolete. You can still communicate with your closed-source colleagues, only now you don't have to spend money to do so. I haven't explored the other features as much as the word processor, but I look forward to trying them out.
HTML Editors (Multi-party entry): NVu, KompoZer, Gedit, Aquamacs Emacs. I'm curious if anyone out there has a preference and why. I've finagled an <oXygen> license out of my department and have been doing all my XHTML/CSS editing in it because of the bells and whistles (real-time validation, automatic tag generation/alteration) but NVu seems pretty good and hopefully I will get around to the others.
PaintBrush: Sort of like MS Paint but free and for Mac, I use this quite a bit for minor tweaks when GIMP or the Drawing portion of OpenOffice are clearly overkill.
CyberDuck: the FTP software I use. There are several good, free ones available but I like the duck icon :)

I was going to list some of the other programs I use or want to try out, but they're really too numerous. If anyone has suggestions or recommendations, hit me with it. I'm new to this free software stuff and it has been really great sampling the wares and finding so much ability out there. Never buy a Microsoft (or Apple, for that matter) program again!

Blackwater Park (The Opeth Album)

2010-08-13T13:17:00.002-05:00

The Purposes of Religion
Religion seems to have two purposes: to ground a particular politics and to assuage the fear of death⁄nihilism.
The first of these is the most expressly problematic. In trying to make the laws of the State embody those of God, Religion meets two contradictions. The first is that such practice undermines God, as if transcendent authority were not enough on its own and must be supplemented by—inevitably flawed—human laws. This seems to cover up the fact that God does not mediate or control our earthly lives enough already and thus God's will must be done by people, OR that merely mediating our access to the Beyond⁄afterlife is not enough. Either way, the first contradiction belies a certain insecurity with God's omnipotency; we do not see God punish the wicked enough to be truly secure in our conviction that Religion dictates Right and Wrong OR we are not confident enough in the transcendent plane's ultimate dominance over the immanent. If God is real and the ultimate authority, then there is be no need to enact God's laws on Earth via the State (since God could enact them if God so chose, and far be it from us…) OR it would be enough that God's laws are the sieve presiding over access to the afterlife, thus they needn't exist here on Earth. It is as if Religion enters politics only after sensing its own irrelevance. What other anxiety could compel a transcendent order to actualize itself in the empirical world? It is for this precise reason that Religion as grounds for politics utterly collapses. Either you are content with God's ultimate judgment and thus need no supplemental laws OR you admit the inadequacy of the transcendent plane, revealing that your purpose all along was never really to save people but merely to eliminate acts you do not like. Homosexuality is, as always, the perfect example: here is an act which has no detrimental consequences to society or the human body, but because our culture has traditionally been disgusted with it we require immanent laws to keep it at bay. Religion merely serves as a shield here, a transcendent justification for worldly concerns. Even the religious should be able to see this flaw: if homosexuality is wrong, why not let God punish sinners instead of the government? Who gave you the right to dole out what is rightfully God's? And rather than prohibit the act, shouldn't you be busy trying to convert the sinner?
That brings me to the second contradiction: State laws are based on force whereas Religion claims to base itself on belief. Even if there were a perfectly Christian State, it would miss the point because the fear of worldly punishment—and not divine—would be the motivating factor in people's actions. But Religion has little interest in promoting belief in and fear of the State, it needs belief in and fear of God. Once again, it appears as if religious politics come about precisely because of God's nonexistence, only this time the State laws actively harm Religion by decreasing conversion. Conversion, it should be noted, is not an effect of insecurity with God's omnipotence: one can still go about saving people in a pagan State, and one does so not out of fear of Religion's dwindling power but love of fellow people. But when the State stands in for conversion, all is lost. People no longer act properly because of God's imperatives, but because of the State's. Fewer people actually end up being saved because they act properly but without belief, thus they are denied access to the Beyond.
As a mostly polemical aside, many of the American conservatives who support religious politics also rail against "big government." But what is more "big government" than presuming that God is not enough, that government must enact God's law? On this issue at least, libertarians are the only conservatives who seem to be on solid footing, and yet they tend to be less religious than mainstream Republicans.
Returning to my opening, the fear of death is a bit trickier to refute. I am of the opinion that Religion developed purely as a defense mechanism within Reason itself: Reason proves unable to find an ultimate cause or end which impregnates existence with meaning. In short, Reason can never answer the question “Why should I live?” Thus Religion steps in to posit a Beyond which is the guarantor of our existence's meaning, much as early Religion and myths served to fill in scientific ignorance about phenomena like rainfall, earthquakes, and the stars (a function which has fallen by the wayside). But Religion has serious difficulty with this question as well. It posits a reward, be it a beautiful afterlife or movement up a reincarnation food chain, but then must supplement this reward with the caveat that suicide would annul it (because otherwise everyone would immediately kill themselves so they could achieve Heaven⁄Nirvana). The suicide prohibition is mere evidence to me, and does little to damage Religion's effectiveness. In fact, I think Religion is pretty useful in reducing the fear of death, I just wish that the price wasn't all sorts of ulterior ignorances. In particular, every religion seems to elevate the human to a higher, more exclusive plane of existence, which results in all sorts of environmental degradation because we think we're special when really the same laws apply to us as any other species.
And finally, a couple disclaimers: I have tried to speak of Religion with a capital R, but it is quite possible nothing said herein applies beyond the domain of Christianity. Much of my struggle with Religion involves the Christianity⁄Judaism⁄Islam triumvirate which I know far better than Eastern or less popular religions. Even critiquing these 3 is tough, since Judaism, as I understand it, does not have an idea of heaven, instead choosing to posit that “the reward for a life well-lived is a life well-lived”, a tautology which also circumvents the problem of meaninglessness albeit in a much more agreeable manner. Secondly, I am sure there are specific passages of scripture which function as counterexamples to my arguments. But that misses my point entirely: these passages which justify embodying transcendent laws here on Earth are the very symptom of my argument and not its refutation. Whether God or a prophet says that we need to enact religious law on Earth, the problem is still why this need be done. And “because Moses said so” is pretty much the most asinine answer possible, falling back on the very authority of the transcendent which by its very nature cannot demonstrate its purpose here in the corporeal world.

Black Square (Malevich)

2010-07-15T14:51:00.000-05:00

I think I can finally articulate why I find stereotypical modern art—as embodied by Malevich's Suprematist Composition: White on White—so detestable. The reason is that this utterly useless art feels that it's actually articulating something new or pertinent, making a sophisticated meta-aesthetic argument, when really it is just repeating the obvious. Take, for instance, another prototypical work: La Trahison Des Images (the treachery/treason of images) which is a painting of a pipe with the sentence Ceci N'est Pas Une Pipe. ("this is not a pipe.") written below it. Now, this work of art is famous for its theoretical statement, not its artistry (however one defines that). It makes a point about the relation between signifier and signified.

But it takes a philosopher to think that this wasn't ludicrously obvious already: has anyone ever tried to smoke that painting? Did a frog ever try to hang out inside Monet's Water Lilies? No organism is so asinine, and none should think it amazing to have such pointed out to them in such a limpid work. The value of art lies not in its theoretical underpinnings or tricky sophistries but in its affect, in its ability to shape one's life, views, reality, mood. I would argue that the same is largely true of theory itself, which is why Nietzsche is so powerful despite being a priori wrong in so many instances. "Modern Art", by pointing out the obvious, only insults its audience by presuming they don't already know what is self-evident (further, that which is so self-evident that you need not know it, since in your every action you affirm its truth whether or not you are aware of it) and amputating its ability to affect its audience.

It should be noted that this argument does equate to the fairly vulgar "but anyone could paint that" retort. I, above all, am an advocate of removing mastery from art. These supposed masters, with their expensive University training and works chock full of allusions to other works which I have never heard of, are often worse at their trade due to their own mastery. They start from such a secluded, incestuous frame of reference that it dulls the pure potency of their work: Joyce's Ulysses is best read by someone with no knowledge of the Bible or the Odyssey because it transcends its allusions. Acting like it is a vital work simply because it reworks old ones into a new context is far too reductionist and ignores the truly spectacular elements of the novel which anyone can understand: namely, the formal innovation above and beyond any referential content. On another note, there is plenty of Outsider Art which is created by these same "anyone"s but is nonetheless stunning in its grandeur. Similarly, there are plenty of bands playing music that anyone can play (Nirvana being perhaps the finest example; anyone can play "Smells Like Teen Spirit" but no one but Kurt Cobain is capable of writing it) which is fantastic not for its complexity (if that was true, everyone would listen to nothing but Prog Rock and Joe Satriani) but its emotive effectiveness. The amount of skill or time put into a work can only ever be a blunt and inaccurate proxy for the work's artistry.

There was an anecdote I recall, though I cannot recall from whence it came, that relates a conversation between Slavoj Zizek and Judith Butler.

Z: This is a cup.
B: You can't say that. The correct, philosophically rigorous, statement is: "Within our patriarchal, hetero-normative society which marginalizes not only women and gays but simply anyone who does fit the convenient definitions of genders and sexualities which we possess, this is a cup."
Z: But, my dear, that is precisely the point: everything you just said is implicit in the statement "This is a cup." All of that is implied by the symbolic order within which we are operating; its repetition is mere redundancy.

This conversation replicates what I am talking about: while Butler's (and Malevich's) point is absolutely true, it articulates nothing new, merely making explicit that which was already obvious though implicit. And those who would argue that, for most people, the patriarchal/heteronormative nature of our society is not obvious, I would say that making such a statement does not suddenly change their mind to the contrary. You need persuasion, not truth, to do that, and persuasion is precisely the rhetorical compliment to the affect of art which I discussed above.

Exeunt

Brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel

2010-07-09T14:39:00.000-05:00

So I have a few things to say about LeBron James, which I know no one wants to hear probably, and then about education. Bear with me.

LeBron to the Heat is not going to guarantee a championship in the least, and it's mainly because his style and Dwayne Wade's are far too similar. They both are at their best driving to the hoop and neither is a very good three-point shooter, though they both think they are. This means that the defensive strategy against the Heat is going to be fairly simple: pack in the paint, have your wing defenders switch as much as possible, and hope Chris Bosh (the real X-factor here) doesn't go off. Even Bosh isn't really a traditional back-to-the-basket big man. He'll be able to play off of Wade and James' penetration and put up easy numbers (probably a 55% shooting percentage, not unlike Amar'e after Steve Nash came to town) but I'm not sure that his isolation face-ups will be of much use. What the Heat need now is shooters (Mike Miller anyone?) or their spacing will suffer.

On the other end of the court, who is going to hold down the fort? James and Wade also have similar defensive styles; they make tons of plays (seriously, look at their combined blocks/steals per game. It's just not fair) due to their immense athleticism, but that also points to how fundamentally shakey they can be. They're maybe the two best help defenders in the league, but neither is a real stopper one-on-one. On top of that, Bosh is honestly a pretty mediocre defender for a big. So without a true center to guard the paint (I actually love Jarvis Varnado as a draft pick here, he will be able to contribute a block or two and 6 fouls every game) I'm not sure this team can be among the defensive elite without a serious commitment from one of their two wingmen superstars.

To go into further detail, how does this skeleton of a roster match up with the two biggest competitors in the East, the Magic and the Celtics? The Celtics have a defensive commitment from all their players and actually, across the roster, would be about as capable as any team ever of defending this Miami behemoth. KG on Bosh, Paul Pierce on LeBron, Ray Allen (with liberal help from Rajon Rondo) on Wade; that is a pretty good setup. Further, Rondo is actually the Celtics best player now, and point guard is one of the two positions the Heat don't have an All-Star at. Looking over at the Magic, the other position the Heat don't have an All-Star at is center, where Dwight Howard looms large. Further, Howard is the best defensive answer to the Wade/'Bron duo; he intimidates drivers like no other and didn't win back-to-back defensive player of the year awards because of his good looks. The well-balanced and unselfish Magic roster, built around a very distinct offensive style (almost every play they run is out of the 4-out, 1-in set), should be considered the favorites in the East until proven otherwise.

To be quite frank, the way I had hoped this free agency would work out: James goes to NYC with Stoudemire to team up in D'Antoni's offense. That would be perfect because Stoudemire's game actually compliments James': they could pick-and-roll any team to death, and the small lineup with LeBron at the 4 and Amar'e at center would be devastating in the open court. It may have taken a few years to get the right set of roleplayers, but that duo would have been potent. Actually, the Knicks quietly made a great deal yesterday, netting three Golden State players who will fit right into their system whilst giving up (admittedly) their best player in David Lee, so that is a step forward for a franchise that has looked lost for years now. And back in Miami, I'm excited but also a little apprehensive. Two non-point-guards who need to have the ball in their hands to be effective? It's not the way I would build a roster.

I came across this video via the blog Flowing Data recently and it really ticked me off. It is not that I don't think education is a noble goal, or that our education system as presently constructed is somewhere on the spectrum of seriously flawed to utterly broken. The problem is that the issue of education tends to get framed in this context of graduation rates and nothing else. While part of the illogic of this is that graduating alone means nothing without proof that graduates have certain skill sets (much as good grades mean little if the students have no real-world—contextualized and useful—knowledge), the real disturbing part is when people act like graduating more students is going to have a ripple effect across society, leading to more jobs, a more involved citizenry, a better economy, less crime, etc. This is precisely the argument put forth in the above video; the direct implication of improved education is improved economy.

Now one could argue that this is unfair to education, subordinating it to some external goal and neglecting its innate value, but I think it's also just false. I graduated with a double-degree from an elite university and then went to work at a job where the only skill I utilized was my typing speed. One of my friends here just graduated with an Astronomy degree; he's working at a grocery store. The truth is, in the race to educate more people, we're just making it harder for the educated to find ways to apply their learning. We're producing legions of college graduates who will soon find out they went to school for no reason, who will soon be employed in jobs they could have acquired straight out of high school (even a high school degree is overkill for most of these positions). I really think that college should be more of an option and less an assumption; many, many people can make a good living without a Bachelor's degree, or by saving thousands of dollars by getting an Associate's from their local community college. Increasing the graduation rate might actually increase the disillusionment and despair of the populace as we put a bunch of overeducated youths to work in the very positions they went to school to avoid; they think they're above this labor but the market thinks otherwise.

My other major gripe with the video is that it ignores the somewhat-enigmatic maxim "correlation does not imply causation." People who don't graduate high school are more likely to use drugs and be imprisoned, it argues. Now, is the problem that people who don't graduate get into trouble or that people who get into trouble don't graduate ? You cannot simply assume that the causality only goes in one direction, there needs to be genuine empirical proof. The solutions to these two problems are totally different and a perfect educational institution might have little affect on the myriad of other social ills which lead to addiction and imprisonment.

In sum, I'm always too content to criticize so I would like to propose a couple courses of action, ones that I am less an advocate of than simply curious about. First, could we filter students towards beneficial courses of study, for themselves and for our society? This is not a matter of forcing as much as incentivizing. The government has a handle on labor markets, it knows where demand for educated employees will come from, so let's subsidize nursing and outpatient care providers, let's revamp elementary school computer labs while making a certain level of computer literacy mandatory. The primary counter-argument that I can think of—that people should have a choice and equal opportunity to study whatever they want—is so obviously false when you take the status quo into consideration. First of all, there isn't equal opportunity across disciplines now (when was the last time an English department had the same sort of administrative support as Engineering?) and secondly, this whole project is about finding educated people meaningful employment; the alternative of letting them study what they want for 4-7 years and then end up working as a convenience store clerk for 40 years is not ideal, to say the least.

My second plan would be to attack things from the other end; try to alter the job market to reflect the populace's skills and interests. This is not easy without a massive Keynesian support, and that's not the direction our neoliberal politicians are headed (the growing deficit and jobs bills aside). But it's also essential. The easiest and most important example is of "green jobs". Green jobs don't really exist in a substantive quantity now, but they need to. This isn't a matter of remaining profitable and growing the GDP, it's about surviving in the coming decades of scarcity. The market has little incentive, since it's myopic and geared towards creating individual wealth as opposed to societal wealth, but the government can use taxes on polluters and systematic regulation to shift funds into more promising areas. Environmental Science programs, and green courses within other disciplines, are growing greatly, but that won't matter if there isn't a productive outlet for all the knowledge and skills they create. The fate of our society will largely depend on how we handle environmental issues, not on the Dow Jones or even the National Debt. So let's start getting started.

Bye Bye Bombie

2010-07-03T15:01:00.001-05:00

In honor of this imminent 4^th of July, considering reading "Letter 16" by Charles Olson in his collection The Maximus Poems.

|- -| |- - -| |- - - -| |- - - - - - -| |- - - -| |- - -| |- -|

He represents, then, that movement of NE monies

away from primary production & trade

to the several cankers of profit-making

which have, like Agyasta, made American great.

Meantime, of course, swallowing up

the land and labor. And now,

the world.

...and then, continued...

In other words, he marks that most neglected of all

economic law: how the coming into existence of benevolence

(the 19th century, left and right)

is the worst, leads to the worst, breeds

what we have:

that the good drives the goods

after the worst,

what we have a word for

That word, for those who are still interested, is "perjorocracy", a most delightful port-manteau. And, while I think that the distinction between "primary production" and "profit-making" is, on the one hand, useful and if anything more relevant today than ever (think of investment banks, think of exchange-traded funds and hedge funds and mutual funds and their fundamental difference from the objects they must manipulate to be profitable), it also does not stand up to any sort of rigorous scrutiny, much like Marx's distinction between "use value" and "exchange value" (see, for instance, some Baudrillard's most persuasive arguments on this latter issue).

On an unrelated (except spatially) note, HTML seems to be made for poetry (no, it was made for physics research papers...strange that those two could be so close stylistically) and now that I know it, I will write my posts directly in the "Edit HTML" page since it gives me much more control over layout and accessibility. The code that the "Compose" tab generates is hideous (see this page's source code for evidence). I also want to write a poem using HTML, something which I am certain has been done before but is nonetheless necessary.

Signing off,

Ejypt

Bely the Blood / Rely on Love

2010-07-01T17:51:00.003-05:00

Two poems & a quote from the author of Cyclonopedia: Complicity with Anonymous Materials.

{0} - - {0}

___

Nuclear ratiocination / extinction imminent
set this fucker aflame sententious profanity.
Partial parturition makes all myrmidons squirm
with maternal minions' umbilical umbrage

as a rock
wants to
go on being
a rock
for all time

operative word wants
as if inanimate was but
an exceptionally stupid
class of sentient, as if

we will live out our lifetimes without being wiped out.


   ___{0} - - {0}

I'd Rather Be a Hopeless Nihilist

Than Doomed & Devout

or ToTellTheTruthToATumor

I hear you hollering
from every trailer park on Earth
from within tourniquet quotation marks
"You're one harrowed terrapin
on a Laodicean odyssey / over seas of apathy
/ didn't vote for decades
thus
don't deserve a dime more.
Might as well march about
strutting signs with insane axioms
proclaiming postulates no policy 
can affirm / keep your goddamn
government hands off of my Medicare."
The Talking Heads and I
can agree on one thing:
the hands of a government man.
We all need a witness
we all beg for forgiveness.
I will take your paranoia
and make it real / graph 
the apophenia in Excel.
I hear you hollering
"Do what you will
just don't, don't make
it meaningless. Confirm
the cancer / cancel 
every check
I ever
wrote / cremate
all creation
/ but don't bely TRVTH
just because
you were a nihilist
in your youth."

My only rebuttal:
nothing has more
hope than your
world ever will.

{0} - - {0}{0} - - {0}{0} - - {0}

"If there is putsch against the established order, it is conducted by developing a heretical nomality and dismantling the myth of transgression" - Reza Negarestani, Lessons in Schizophrenia

Bodies, Be Them Docile or Destructive

2010-06-09T19:35:00.000-05:00

We have trouble with these incorporeal corporations incorporated in
corporeal effects and/or an unwavering numen
they’re warped whether you’re pragmatic or idealist.
Give me a power forward who can shoot
jumpers, rebound the ball, & space the floor.
In Foucault, there’s always again this problem of focus
where power is both micro and macro
but never quite in itself and an individual at once. Power is a change
in the relations between subjects and for that very reason its meaning
must be differential, sloped if you will—dribble drives
to the proverbial bucket, be them blunted or broke—
and there’s no reason to think that power is a verb
with a consistent subject and object.
It’s a fallacy to expect its relations to be dualistic,
ruler-ruled,

colonizer-colonized
even if these oversimplifications can be useful in the larger context
of an abstract plane where power flows through subjects.
Add the advanced layers

players & teams
subjective causality. How my transcripts
arrive at PR companies
who then lie to news reporters about products
that have been recalled in the U.S.
shipping containers on a saffron freight slug
-ing across the country, tagged by AZTEmiC &
icy frillz to be sold in some Mexico
cornerstores and Dutch cafes.

We have a better chance of winning because of it.

Boom Bap Doom Rap

2010-05-20T15:43:00.006-05:00

"Above all, revolutionary change is not a matter of instantaneous redemption, but of generating a critical desire in the people, a desire capable not only capable of questioning authority or the status quo (such desires are almost ubiquitous on the far Right), but of questioning itself. The people must become critical of their own desires, they must ask why they want what they want, rather than always criticizing from a position of certainty." --Planomenology, Revolution LOL *Update Again*

"Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone. It is a communist chocolate hellhole and I'm here to stop it ever happening."--Eloi Cole, man from the future

/(-)\thehillshaveeyes/(-)\

Working on the Nebuchadnezzar album has me thinking about and listening to hip-hop a lot a lot so, instead of attacking the tens of items on my to do lists, I decided to write-up another Top Ten. There's little to no hope of ordering these albums in a hierarchy, so I'm just going to annotate the list and leave it at that. There's a lengthy honorable mentions section because, predictably, I find it hard to leave out so much amazing music. Comments encouraged.

Top Ten Hip-Hop Albums

36 Chambers / Wu-Tang Clan. A tour-de-force of brilliant beats, piano riffs sprinkled around threatening verses. Even if you hate drug talk gangster rap, this album is still a landmark just for the production, but Wu-Tang's rhymes have always transcended their peers as well. They own the group dynamic, building songs by interweaving their different tones and cadences. "Homicide's illegal and death is the penalty"
The No Music / Themselves. Doseone is one of my favorite rappers, and this probably isn't even my favorite album of his (perhaps Subtle's A New White would take that honor) but it's an important work for avant garde hip-hop. Dose displays such a variety of flows, from simple and anthemic on standout Good People Check to unbelievably fast and schizophrenic on Live Trap, that the album has something for everyone, but as a whole confounds everyone. "There were two skies that day, one in the air and one's yolk reflecting off a twelve-story building's glass"
The Cold Vein / Cannibal Ox. I needed an El-P production on the list and this album beats out Fantastic Damage because of the Can Ox duo's superior flows. Vordul and Vast Aire complement each other well, with Aire spitting slow puns and Vordul focusing on stream-of-consciousness continuity, and El-P's harsh electronica evokes a perfect grim city background to their lyrics. "Early bird gets that worm but the early worm finds a spot in early bird's stomach and can't escape from it"
Labor Days / Aesop Rock. In terms of hip-hop theme albums, only the bizarre The Weather comes close to this epic. Aesop deals with work, alienation, poverty, and creativity in an inspiring and provocative manner over a series of similar, organic Blockhead beats. I love Bazooka Tooth more than most, but it doesn't hold a stick to the lyrical and musical coherence of LD. "I want to be something spectacular on the day the sun runs out of batteries"
Madvillainy / Madvillain. The combination of Madlib's old school, fuzzed-out beats and MF Doom's ridiculous wordplay makes for entertaining and often mindbending music. More lighthearted than the other albums on this list, the album has a sense of cartoonish humor and is easily digestible, even for mainstream hip-hop fans. "Four blasts from the blunt, been 'shrooming since last month"
cLOUDDEAD / cLOUDDEAD. This might be the first hip-hop album that really blew my mind and made me realize its limitless potentials. Odd Nosdam's production, distorted and slow with plenty of street noise and power drills, sounds like Houston hip-hop gone industrial, while Doseone and Why?'s harmony raps and bipolar back-and-forth are at turns poetic and silly. Their self-mockery and emotional vulnerability counteract the pretentiousness of abstract poetry rap. "God, did you remember to render everything?"
Boy in da Corner / Dizzee Rascal. Dizzee's raps are less esoteric than the other fare here (i.e. Aesop and Dose) but very three dimensional. He alternates between typical braggadocio (Fix Up, Look Sharp) and insecure introversion (Sittin' Here) in a way that's less contradictory than simply human. The grime production complements the lyrics quite well, a mixture of pretty melodies and atonal distortion. "Review the situation: take part, take over"
Revolutionary, Vol. I / Immortal Technique. While the production is nothing special, Technique's flow and intelligence is. His rhymes are expertly interlocked, tough and witty all at once, but--most importantly--backed by critical thought and legit politics. While none of the albums herein approach pop rap's greed and vapidity, the two Revolutionary albums are the most thoughtful and effective rejoinder to that wasteland. "I drop knowledge so heavy it leaves the world unbalanced"
Arrhythmia / Anti-Pop Consortium. I almost prefer The Ends Against the Middle EP, but this album wins out by virtue of quantity and not necessarily quality. APC, like Can Ox and Wu-Tang, use the group dynamic to great effect, playing slower flows (Beans) off of more rapid ones (M. Sayyid). But APC's production was just as innovative as their abstract flows; witness the table tennis sample on aptly-titled Ping Pong or the elephant noises and operatic midsection of seminal track Mega. "My symphonic monopoly philosophy sloppily etches notes awkwardly"
Two/Three / Dabrye. The last album to make the list, this was a difficult choice because of its newness. Will I still love this album in ten years, or will it be rendered irrelevant by better releases in the same style? In any case, Dabrye's first mostly-non-instrumental album is impressive both for the keyboard-heavy, masterful beats as the unparalleled collection of eclectic and talented guest rappers. Almost half of the Top Ten is represented, as Aesop Rock, Beans, MF Doom, and Vast Aire are sprinkled throughout the first seven tracks. "Signifier of the colonized mind"

Honorable Mentions in No Particular Order

Temporary Forever - Busdriver
Fantastic Damage - El-P
Funcrusher Plus - Company Flow
Abandoned Language - Dälek
Octagonecologyst - Dr. Octagon
Liquid Swords - The GZA
Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II - Raekwon
Illmatic - Nas
Vocal Studies + Uprock Narratives - Prefuse 73
It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back - Public Enemy

Breeding a Better Mind

2010-05-11T14:55:00.000-05:00

First—and most importantly—if you are interested in reading good writing and/or strange historical/pseudoscientific retellings, then you simply must check out The Hair and Teeth of Every Atom. There will be a link in the right-hand nav panel from now on.

Secondly, Nebuchadnezzar’s debut album will be out sometime in between late June and mid-July. Once that project is complete, this blog figures to be more active, as I have plans for it once I delve into writing-as-primary-form-of-expression again.

Notes on Higher Education

Sometimes I think about how much more beneficial it would have been for me to have obtained a two-year associate’s degree rather than attend Stanford for four years and then spend two additional years in graduate school. Fiscally, going to an elite university for a Humanities degree is indefensible: it is simple not possible that the “higher earning potential” of an advanced degree outweighs either A) the relatively modest student loan debt I’ve incurred, but especially B) that same debt with my parents’ contributions factored in. To throw a rancid estimation out there, my education costs plus interest will be at least $200,000. If I had an associate’s degree, my guess is the four extra years of professional experience I could have acquired would very nearly make up for my supposed higher earnings. Now, $2,356 is the average community college tuition for a year. Let’s assume I pay $5,000 though, thus

$200,000 - $5,000*(2 years) = $190,000

in extra costs, which means (over a 40 year working career; I expect that to be about average by the time I retire) I would have to earn

$190,000/40 years = $4,750

more per year with my advanced degree to come out even, which will not happen (surprise surprise, librarianship is not the most lucrative field).

So what were the ancillary benefits of this excellent education I received? I could name a couple of things: a more meaningful career and the critical thinking skills which the liberal arts are so proud of. But I am not such an elitist intellectual that I could not bear being a plumber, nurse, or accountant. Manual labor is delightful, especially with regards to provoking contemplation. Further, our society truly needs these professions and I could’ve easily identified an area with a shortage, making the job search that much easier. I am less convinced that society needs more academics, or more people with advanced degrees.

Which brings me to the second point: I am not certain that I learned critical thinking from the University. The primary purpose of the University (and we hear this again and again in the Humanities PhD crisis [2nd link, Chronicle of Higher Ed., may be subscriber-only], the serials crisis, the tenure-track crisis) is not to educate, but to produce academics. Thus I primarily was taught how to write papers in the academic style, one which involves immense bloviation, the use of multisyllabic words where shorter ones would do, rampant citation and allusion because originality has little value, and hours of research on subjects I did not care about. That last item was the gist of the liberal arts at Stanford for me: the requirements were far too stringent and the course offerings too uniform to speak to my particular interests. If you’re into Jane Austen and pre-1800 British literature, you’re set; if you’re into anything written 1970 or later, you will have to take student-taught courses, as I did. Even the creative writing courses, which I loved, were burdened by formulaic assignments (write a sonnet, write a villanelle, write a pantoum. Even though I like pantoums, would it be so horrible to give the students some choice?). If anything, I learned all my critical thinking skills in debate class at my excellent public high school and Stanford somewhat diluted those skills, prejudicing good academic form over substantive content.

I am no a philistine apathetic; I am genuinely, emotionally involved in philosophy, art, music, creation, mathematics, data, computers. I have a reading list which will never dissipate and spend hours each week mulling over infographics. So the cumulative effect of spending extra time in higher education was suffering from forced research rather than motivated self-learning—and I happen to be quite adept at self-teaching. In fact, for certain mathematics courses I found lectures to be confused whereas reading the textbook was useful (after all, professors are not selected for their pedagogical talents, strange but true).

In conclusion, I want to temper these notes in two ways. First off, finances rarely play a part in my decisions, so that opening paragraph is rather worthless. If I wanted more money, I would have either A) never studied the Humanities in the first place, or B) become a day-trader after I graduated. I hated my last private-sector job more because it was soulless than undercompensated, and clearly I want to be a librarian for non-monetary reasons. Perhaps this will change once I start a family and am still making student loan payments.

Secondly, It should be noted that much of this reasoning is personal: people who were less fortunate in terms of their high school, or who have different learning styles which are more acclimated to sage-on-stage lectures, can stand to benefit from an University education. But I feel cheated that going to the best available college—and often spending multiple years in graduate school beyond that—seems to be the assumed course for our brightest youths, while many might benefit from a more realistic perspective. Society itself could benefit from having more intellectuals out in the workforce, advocating for intelligent policies and molding conscientious organizations, rather than holed up in the academy producing volume upon volume of incestuous research.

Bevan, William

2010-05-03T01:38:00.000-05:00

The grass are as all round us
sexed and such. Life
looms. Clinton is probably present
in some form or another

bethroned begotten. Good luck
image search selection.

We attempt to tap into something other
some enshrined beyond.

Good luck with that
carry on carrion.

Copyrighted canons
abundant as dancing.
Hate on strip clubs
but carry a naked body

beneath the clothes.

Business Aethics

2010-03-20T17:34:00.001-05:00

as abnormal as nomos
as aesthetic as Theandric androids
as exigent as anything unimportant.

"You are a place where dust roams, a devil without any details."

|---|

The most recent episode of The Office, while not exceptionally funny, is a reminder of just how relevant and powerful this show is. It relieves me to see a show which pushes real (extremely banal) issues to the forefront and dramatizes them in a productive way. While most television seems content to valorize objectives and actions which I can only classify as inane or idiotic (see: Jersey Shore, any reality TV show really, anything dramatic, Lost even), The Office operates on much the same plane as everyday life. It manages to present issues within which we are so immersed that we can go entire lifespans without ever really confronting or naming them, it creates a degree of realism unmatched in some lives due to delusion, due to refusal to face facts. This can be seen in the fairly frank treatment of motherhood recently (the baby's inability to latch onto Pam's nipple, the labor carrying on so long that party plans are ruined), but in "New Leads" the new business model of Sabre shows something I have had to deal with in my professional life: the valorization of sales staff to the detriment of everyone else.
At my former job, the sales staff were, as far as I could tell, the only staff the company cared about retaining, as every other entry-level position was abysmal and we were repeatedly made scapegoats for sales' mistakes. For instance, a salesperson promises a client something which our software cannot do, the client gets angry when promises are not delivered, the salesperson (who either deliberately lied or was simply too ignorant to know how our system actually worked, and it was much more often the latter I believe) emails us, and we are under instructions to say it's our fault rather than A) explain the situation, or B) try to fix things, compromise, etc. Further, going through every day at work unquestioned causes the sales staff to develop a superiority complex, as if they could never be wrong, not to mentioned they're the only ones getting commission, whether their sales are attributable to their skills or otherwise. Many clients were on consistent contracts which were renewed yearly; now did they choose to renew because the salesperson remembered to email them the contract on time or because, throughout the whole year, the service staff provided what they needed?
It's not just a banal workplace example, it's everywhere in our society that incentives are broken, as in insurance where companies profit by denying service or in financials where people profit by creating volatility, pushing flawed mortgages, creating systemic insecurities. The larger question, however, is if it is even possible within the current system to fix these misincentives, or if they are in fact a product of the system and as such about as inherent to it as its values and structures. I forget the exact reference and won't try to look it up without any recollection, but I remember Zizek had an argument against a fellow progressive who argued that capitalism is not wrong, but merely the inequalities within capitalism (i.e. we need more regulations, better laws, more rights, etc.), to which Z's response was: but don't you understand all these problems are precisely because of the system? Far from being mere imperfections in an improvable system, they represent real limits within our frame of reference which cannot be fixed without (to use more Zizek terminology) accomplishing the impossible, without changing the very coordinates (the axioms which define what is possible) within which laws, rights, and economics operate.

Bold Print

2010-03-15T19:14:00.000-05:00

further...

"Questions beyond a simple count are Constitutional
It is constitutional to include questions in the decennial census beyond those concerning a simple count of the number of people. On numerous occasions, the courts have said the Constitution gives Congress the authority to collect statistics in the census. As early as 1870, the Supreme Court characterized as unquestionable the power of Congress to require both an enumeration and the collection of statistics in the census. The Legal Tender Cases, Tex.1870; 12 Wall., U.S., 457, 536, 20 L.Ed. 287. In 1901, a District Court said the Constitution's census clause (Art. 1, Sec. 2, Clause 3) is not limited to a headcount of the population and "does not prohibit the gathering of other statistics, if 'necessary and proper,' for the intelligent exercise of other powers enumerated in the constitution, and in such case there could be no objection to acquiring this information through the same machinery by which the population is enumerated." United States v. Moriarity, 106 F. 886, 891 (S.D.N.Y.1901).
In 2000, another District Court agreed and found that it there is no constitutional limit on collecting additional data, when necessary for governance. That court also said responses to census questions are not a violation of a citizen's right to privacy or speech. Morales v. Daley, 116 F. Supp. 2d 801, 809 and 816. (S.D. Tex. 2000). These decisions are consistent with the Supreme Court's recent description of the census as the "linchpin of the federal statistical system ... collecting data on the characteristics of individuals, households, and housing units throughout the country." Dept. of Commerce v. U.S. House of Representatives, 525 U.S. 316, 341 (1999)."

from Census in the Constitution / 2010 Census

So your Constitutional arguments...not so good.

Blizzard of Unknowing (Curtain Call, Drape Death)

2010-03-15T13:39:00.001-05:00

I have a libertarian friend on Facebook who had a series of posts encouraging people not to respond to the census and providing a letter* for like-minded souls to disseminate. I feel the same way about this argument as I do those who complain that Google knows too much about them: you're guilty until proven innocent and just as the Government does not abuse census data, Google does not (ok, ok...Google Buzz was a fiasco, but it was a stupid error which they corrected the next day, not a malicious plot to make everyone's email contacts public information) abuse your search and email information. And who does use census information? Largely researchers and students at educational institutions, or marketers (who the libertarians should love, after all) seeking to appeal to an area's demographics. Castrating the census doesn't lead to more liberties, it reduces the effectiveness of public policy, research, education, and the free market.

Not to mention that there seems to be a huge contradiction in libertarian and anti-government rhetoric: the government is A) always the most inefficient way of doing things, the longest distance between two points, and B) an evil behemoth out to conquer our very souls, a wraith casting a pall over everything and everyone. Are these two postulates in any way reconcilable? How come the pernicious inefficiency which makes free market products and services superior to government ones does not affect the government's ability to control us? As a corollary, how come the free market's obscene efficiency doesn't apply to the way that it controls us (through advertising, through manipulating people's desires and irrational behaviors, through fraud, through ineluctable industries like finance which have little to do with the welfare of the public or corporeal production of any sort)? Don't get me wrong, I am not in love with the U.S. government, but my answer is to change it, not abolish it altogether. And while libertarians have some valuable political points and are a great voice to have in our country's discussions, their strong ethical instinct and love of freedom seems to come at the cost of any critical insight into how capitalism actually operates, into how the private market is often cruel in its efficiency and inefficient in its benevolence. End rant, let's move on, shall we?

How today's college students use Wikipedia for course-related research

Great article in First Monday about Wikipedia usage. This basically confirms my suspicions about Wikipedia usage (that it is only used as an introductory tool to get one's bearings, just like--gasp!--an encyclopedia) and I think it also speaks well of students information literacy: they are using Wikipedia exactly as they should, generally not relying on it for during the later stages of research or citing it, and taking advantage of its interface, whose best feature is the hyperlinks to related terms.

But beyond that, there was a delicious little nugget about Community Colleges in there:
"We also found students enrolled in four–year institutions were more likely to use Wikipedia than students in our sample enrolled in two–year institutions (i.e., community colleges).

This finding suggests respondents from two—year institutions may have received more hands–on training about how to conduct scholarly research than at four–year institutions, given the curriculum and accreditation requirements in community colleges."

That's pretty fascinating and I would love to see more studies. While it would certainly seem counter-intuitive to some that CCs could be better at teaching scholarly research, my experience at Stanford confirms this: we were basically expected to already know how to do research (which I did, though many did not) and the Freshman-Sophomore level courses designed to teach us research and writing skills (Program in Writing and Rhetoric [PWR] and Intro to Humanities [IHUM]) were basically failures, in my opinion. Rather than actually show us how to research, how to evaluate articles, how to construct an argument, we were given assignments whose completion would require knowledge of those steps and expected to figure it out on our own. These sorts of presumptions, combined with more of an emphasis on a professor's research than their sound pedagogy, can really limit the effectiveness of University education, to such a degree that I've come to admire CCs for their efficiency and practicality.

*"To Whom it May Concern,

Pursuant to Article I, Section 2, Clause 3 of the Constitution, the only information you are empowered to request is the total number of occupants at this address. My “name, sex, age, date of birth, race, ethnicity, telephone number, relationship and housing tenure” have absolutely nothing to do with apportioning direct taxes or determining the number of representatives in the House of Representatives. Therefore, neither Congress nor the Census Bureau have the constitutional authority to make that information request a component of the enumeration outlined in Article I, Section 2, Clause 3. In addition, I cannot be subject to a fine for basing my conduct on the Constitution because that document trumps laws passed by Congress.

Interstate Commerce Commission v. Brimson, 154 U.S. 447, 479 (May 26, 1894)

“Neither branch of the legislative department [House of Representatives or Senate], still less any merely administrative body [such as the Census Bureau], established by congress, possesses, or can be invested with, a general power of making inquiry into the private affairs of the citizen. Kilbourn v. Thompson, 103 U.S. 168, 190. We said in Boyd v. U.S., 116 U. S. 616, 630, 6 Sup. Ct. 524,―and it cannot be too often repeated,―that the principles that embody the essence of constitutional liberty and security forbid all invasions on the part of government and it’s employees of the sanctity of a man’s home and the privacies of his life. As said by Mr. Justice Field in Re Pacific Ry. Commission, 32 Fed. 241, 250, ‘of all the rights of the citizen, few are of greater importance or more essential to his peace and happiness than the right of personal security, and that involves, not merely protection of his person from assault, but exemption of his private affairs, books, and papers from inspection and scrutiny of others. Without the enjoyment of this right, all others would lose half their value.’”

Note: This United States Supreme Court case has never been overturned.

Respectfully,

A Citizen of the United States of America"

Blood Bank

2010-02-28T19:00:00.001-06:00

"A great civilization is first and foremost a civilization that has a waste-disposal system."
-Jacques Lacan, My Teaching pg. 65

|--|

A profession should strive to render itself obsolete. Computer programmers work towards the ultimate metaprogram, so intuitive that a child could articulate its desires and the requisite program would be assembled posthaste. Engineers work to build structures which need no maintenance, graced to sit forever embedded in an unimpeachable landscape. But the real impetus for this maxim is, of course, librarians. I hear a lot of complaints from librarians that people turn to Google first, that the internet is ushering in an era of "disintermediation" when people seek to find information themselves rather than through the proxy of a professional, such as a librarian. First, I'm not sure that this is as statistically valid as it might seem at first: we recently read a Pew Internet study which suggested that A) people with high internet access are actually more likely than those with low access to use libraries, B) the youth are the greatest user of libraries, despite their egregious computer literacy, and C) per capita library usage remains more or less equivalent to what it was some 60 years ago (this study was pre-recession and all the data I've seen indicates that libraries are seeing record levels of patronage nowadays, such as the Chicago Public Library). But beyond the factual flaws in such a position is a much greater idealistic flaw: isn't it great that Google is doing our job better than we ever could? Shouldn't librarians be ranting and raving about how free information is now, about how much easier than ever it is to access data, literature, and tax forms, about how wonderfully accessible some rare books are now that they've been digitized?
Instead, you are far more likely to hear curmudgeonly rants that things are changing and the internet is making us dumber (contrary to Pew Internet IV, their most recent study) as if librarianship has strayed from some ill-defined platonic ideal involving fusillades of arcane abbreviations, an intimate knowledge of the Dewey Decimal System, and the technology of shushing (to tap into Ben Marcus' prose, whose Notable American Women I have been reading and enjoying). The reason these measures are wrong is they are happy to make librarians necessary rather than redundant, they seek empowerment through obscurity rather than transparency. Why is DDC good? Why do we make our Online Public-Access Catalogs so labyrinthine? So that librarians are necessary to mediate the confused through the insane structures we've created. Thus our profession ensures it survival by creating, rather than removing, obstacles, and new technology appears as a threat to the hurdles we spent so long constructing. And this is obviously harsh: DDC was inventing to make everyone's life easier, to organize a growing morass of publications, but nowadays it seems dilapidated. Is it easier to find books in the library, where they're sectioned off into 107.1-132.2, or in Borders, where they're sectioned off into Fiction and Biography? And OPACs were originally a huge leap forward from the card catalog, but now they lag significantly behind other search engines and still feature manifold irrelevancies leftover from the card catalog (rule of three anyone? main vs. added entry? these don't make sense in an online context).
One final, more general, observation: this striving-towards-obsolescence is clearly asymptotic. It is an unreachable goal for most professions, at least for the broadest definition of a position (i.e. if we think of things in terms of communications technology specialist as opposed to telegraph or switchboard operator), and should be more of an orientation for progress than a distinct finish line marked out in space-time. It is librarians who embrace disintermediation, who recognize what their users want and rather than combat it use it to enhance their services, which will thrive in the coming millienia, and those that remain tied to the past and its objects (the reference desk, the print index, the silence of stacks)--rather than the objectives of a profession and their implications for future practice--will fail, miserably so.

|--|

"Rationalize your own revolution / it can be easily compressed / without the young and the desperate / there won't be anyone left"
-Future of the Left, That Damned Fly

Battle of the Bulge

2010-01-14T21:44:00.001-06:00

"The condition of possessing capital; the position of a capitalist; a system which favours the existence of capitalists."
-Oxford English Dictionary, Capitalism

"In simple terms, capitalism is a society ruled by money and those who possess it. The wealthy hold disproportionate power within capitalism and use it to preserve their interests, especially the ability to make more money."
-The End of Capitalism, What is Capitalism? (http://endofcapitalism.com/about/2-what-is-capitalism/)

Both decent definitions, these tie capitalism not to any particular economic form but specifically to the bourgeoisie. Democracy, individual rights, and free markets are noticeably absent, which I think is quite fair: what would you call the economic system operating in countries which have limited democracy, rights, and trade such as China? It is no longer Communist, assuredly, but a sort of pseudo-centralized capitalism. I think these definitions are a solid starting point because they strip away what is inessential fluff and relay a definition of an economy based on whom it benefits, much as Feudalism might be thought of as "a system which favours [sic] the existence of royalty."

"Economic system characterized by the following: private property ownership exists; individuals and companies are allowed to compete for their own economic gain; and free market forces determine the prices of goods and services. Such a system is based on the premise of separating the state and business activities. Capitalists believe that markets are efficient and should thus function without interference, and the role of the state is to regulate and protect."
-Investorwords.com, capitalism Definition (http://www.investorwords.com/713/capitalism.html)

"In order to have an economic system in which "production and distribution are privately or corporately owned", you must have individual rights and specifically property rights. The only way to have an economic system fitting the first definition is to have a political system fitting the second definition. The first is an implication of the second. Because the second, political, definition is fundamental and the cause of the first, it is the more useful definition and is preferable...It is important to define 'Capitalism' correctly because a proper definition is a prerequisite to a proper defense. Capitalism is the only moral political system because it is the only system dedicated to the protection of rights, which is a requirement for human survival and flourishing. This is the only proper role of a government. Capitalism should be defended vigorously on a moral basis, not an economic or utilitarian basis."
-Importance of Philosophy, Definition of Capitalism (http://www.importanceofphilosophy.com/Politics_Capitalism.html)

This strikes me as absolutely one of the most dangerous and misguided definitions of capitalism, obviously intended for corporate apologists and conservatives, not critical thinkers. There are a million things wrong with it, here are a few: capitalism doesn't protect economic rights or economic equality, actually-existing-capitalism may interfere with individual rights which contradicts this definition, it is easily possible to conceive of a society with individual rights and no private property, without competition being inscribed in your definition we can imagine a world wherein one company/capitalist owns EVERYTHING and this fits the definition of capitalism even though it's more dystopian than the worst Stalinist State (no protection against monopoly or plutocracy in general), not necessarily democratic which further indicates that they decline to specify exactly what "individual rights" capitalism consists of and clearly some rights must be voided for others to exist, et cetera.

"There is no consensus on the definition of capitalism, nor how it should be used as an analytical category. There are a variety of historical cases over which it is applied, varying in time, geography, politics and culture. Economists, political economists and historians have taken different perspectives on the analysis of capitalism. Scholars in the social sciences, including historians, economic sociologists, economists, anthropologists and philosophers have debated over how to define capitalism, however there is little controversy that private ownership of the means of production, creation of goods or services for profit in a market, and prices and wages are elements of capitalism."
-Wikipedia, Capitalism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capitalism) - note, 2 superscript links removed.

Perhaps the most objective of all the definitions here, the first 3 paragraphs of Wikipedia live up to its reputation as a resource impartially displaying multiple paradigms in a lucid manner.

Actor-Network Theory (ANT): capitalism does not exist, there are a plurality of markets operating according to local and contingent logics which we lazily call capitalism. Really these markets are in the process of ever-constructing and redefining what we refer to as capitalism. See Michel Callon, ANT economist. I couldn't find a good quote easily and don't trust me on how accurate this synopsis is.

"These new ideas are all the more important when we move on to the social sciences, particularly economics. In this discipline, we tend to uncritically assume systematicity, as when one talks of the "capitalist system", instead of showing exactly how such systematic properties of the whole emerge from concrete historical processes. Worse yet, we then tend to reify such unaccounted-for systematicity, ascribing all kinds of causal powers to capitalism, to the extent that a clever writer can make it seem as if anything at all (from nonlinear dynamics itself to postmodernism or cyberculture) is the product of late capitalism. This basic mistake, which is, I believe, a major obstacle to a correct understanding of the nature of economic power, is partly the result of the purely top-down, analytical style that has dominated economic modeling from the eighteenth century. Both macroeconomics, which begins at the top with concepts like gross national product, as well as microeconomics, in which a system of preferences guides individual choice, are purely analytical in approach. Neither the properties of a national economy nor the ranked preferences of consumers are shown to emerge from historical dynamics."
-Manuel De Landa, Markets and Antimarkets in the World Economy (http://www.t0.or.at/delanda/a-market.htm)

I've read De Landa's A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History and the worst aspects of capitalism, such as corporate monoliths and the trade abuses of powerful actors, tend to get labeled as "antimarkets," that is actors which seek to use their aggregate strength to actually eliminate real competition and establish monopolies. It's an excellent text and I recommend the whole thing, not just the section on economics.

"'[C]apitalism' is a process, or a collection of processes, rather than a thing or an entity. We might substitute for 'capitalism' the wordier formulations of capital accumulation, exploitation, 'primitive accumulation,' and commodification — since all these are nouns that more clearly indicate process than 'capitalism' on its own does. But in any case, the systematicity of these processes is itself something that is largely empirical, rather than somehow a priori. Capitalism is a grouping of mutually-reinforcing processes and relations that insinuate themselves into more and more areas of human existence — and not just 'human' existence, if we are thinking, for instance, of ecological effects."
-Steven Shaviro, "Totalizing" Marxism? (http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p=782)

I like this processual definition quite a bit, I might spend more time looking for a more thorough Shaviro analysis.

"Underneath all reason lies delirium, drift. Everything is rational in capitalism, except capital or capitalism itself. The stock market is certainly rational; one can understand it, study it, the capitalists know how to use it, and yet it is completely delirious, it's mad. It is in this sense that we say: the rational is always the rationality of an irrational."
-Gilles Deleuze, Capitalism: A Very Special Delirium an interview (http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpdeleuze7.htm)

More lyrical than anything, this isn't a definition, just a really great interview. READ IT READ IT READ IT.

Guattari's list of various capitalisms, the original inspiration for this post:

Hardt & Negri

Bibliography:
Empire (2000)
Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004)

And lastly, something that's quickly risen to the top of my reading list: J.K. Gibson-Graham's post-Marxist work.

Bibliography:
The End of Capitalism as We Knew It (1996)
A Postcapitalist Politics (2006)
Class and its Others (2000) along with Stephen Resnick & Richard Wolff
Re/presenting Class: essays in postmodern Marxism (2001) with Resnick & Wolff again

I am not entirely sure what their argument is, but I've heard it described like this: the Marxist conception of a totalizing capitalism makes resistance impossible, their description of capitalism becomes an obstacle which can't be avoided because it appears everywhere overdetermining all other sorts of economies. Gibson-Graham focus on the multiplicity of capitals (social, cultural, linguistic, et cetera) which interact with Capitalism and could serve as pieces of its replacement after a revolution. Seems akin to Actor-Network Theory to me and extremely important in terms of revolutionary praxis.

Just a quick note to tie this last one into the opening definitions: there's a consistency between them because all these other capitals do not favor the wealthy. Intelligence, artistic ability, kindness, charisma--all these can be directly valued in and of themselves via a certain type of capital, rather than filtered through the proxy of capitalism's Kapital , i.e. your artistic ability is valued only through how many paintings or books you sell, as opposed to say through how it affects others and inspires fellow artists, which could be considered its "artistic capital." Thus we could imagine society's based on those values, which benefit a certain type of person and disposition, though arguably any modern society would be heterogeneous in composition and in terms of who it benefits.

So there are several elements identified throughout and some capitalisms include only a subset and the pinnacle of Kapital would include all.
-private property
-ruling class based on ownership of the means of production (wealthy, bourgeoisie)
-individual rights, up to treating corporations as individuals with their own rights
-a certain subjectivity based on individual responsibility and a definition of productivity
-a will to expand indefinitely
-valorization of the profit motive
-corporate influence of State functions (i.e. lobbying)
-globalization, tendency to eliminate local cultures and national sovereignty
-probably more...

Burden of the Beast (666)

2009-12-25T16:12:00.003-06:00

Awhile ago in Chicago, I participated in an interesting and informal discussion about feudalism and capitalism. My basic point was that, under feudalism power is transmitted via heredity, whereas capitalism strives to transmit power via a person's usefulness to Capital, to their business acumen. A king is put in his place because his father was king; Warren Buffet is the richest man in the world because his investments are the best use of Capital (in its own terms), regardless of whether or not he was related to a great investment banker. As Larval Subjects stated awhile back, in order for what LS calls "neo-liberal capitalist ideology" to "present itself as just" it must make its subjects believe "that distributions of wealth are not systematic effects of social structure and how it is organized, but rather is an effect of the individual industry of agents within the social field" (emphasis author's). However, I argue that even a cursory review of society proves this to be untrue in certain regards, and I don't really think anyone (even the most adamant capitalist) believes otherwise. The most obvious example is inheritance: people who inherit vast sums of money, people with whom everyone is familiar with (i.e. Paris Hilton, not to single her out but she's a good example), clearly owe their position in society according to arbitrary relations of heredity and not a value inherent to their person or abilities.

From this I theorize that, if we were really to follow capitalism to its logical conclusion, the structure of society would have to be radically altered; heredity and charity (many of which run on the funds of rich capitalists like Bill Gates) play far too large a role in the distribution of assets. So why are the capitalists against the estate tax and for bank bailouts? Because they don't subscribe to the ideology of Capital, only the ideology of greed. "Capitalism is good" is an insufficient defense of almost any conservative or libertarian position because those schools of thought are, at base, not really for Capital, they're only for Capital inasmuch as it benefits them. Just witness the complaints of conservatives regarding outsourcing or immigrants "taking American jobs"; that's capitalism, dummy, and it's the most efficient means to profit. You should be careful to rant against our "Marxist, Leninist, Socialist" president (3:19 into the video) and then implicitly advocate a planned economy. Furthermore, a parallel can be drawn to state socialism or Stalinism; the bureaucrats in control are not really for genuine communism, whose radical rearrangement of assets would threaten their stranglehold on affluence, they're for communism inasmuch as it benefits them. The only true ideologues are those that sacrifice everything for their abstract cause—in short, the terrorists—while the rest of us do not really have beliefs or even ideals, we only have a shallow but hegemonic egoism. Insert citation of anything Zizek ever said right here.

The solitary value of capitalism can be summed up in one axiom: that which increases profits is good. The profit motive is the only motive. Thus anyone who argues for capitalism on the basis of any other value—to cite archidiot Larry Kudlow, "We believe that free market capitalism is the best path to prosperity," something he says at the beginning of every goddamn show—is implicitly stating that it is impossible to found a society on the basis of that value, that we can only achieve it via the proxy of profit. There is no innate value in capitalism. Capitalism is always a conduit for something more valuable, and if you believe the conservatives that value is often extremely nebulous, such as the "prosperity" of Kudlow's quote or the "freedom" so present in Sarah Palin's speeches. One would think it sufficient to cite the numerous instances wherein capitalism has lead to the annihilation of said secondary value, such as the lack of prosperity in Ghana brought about by globalization and an inability to compete with foreign industries or an issue like that of net neutrality where the interests of Capital lie obverse to those of "freedom," "innovation," or "choice." It is apparently unthinkable that one could claim, "innovation is good, therefore we will organize our State and society to promote it and eradicate all barriers to research and development, including those within our current institutions and the free market itself." Note that I'm not even calling for the demolition of capitalism in this restructuring; such a mission statement could easily be executed within the confines of a capitalist economy, but the fact that innovation is paramount and not profit would result in many, many changes, especially in the fields of intellectual property, patent legislation, as well as the handling of monopolies and our present plutocracy.

My final point is this: I have heard numerous arguments that communism assumes the goodness of people, that it requires perfectly just citizens to operate at all. But it seems to me that capitalism would require much the same subject; if our only motive is to generate profit and profit often assaults freedom, prosperity, human decency, the environment, national sovereignty, personal autonomy, religious belief, innovation, art, and even itself (i.e. The Credit Crunch), then don't we need some sort of innate goodness on the part of the capitalists, don't we require a blind faith in their ability to pursue profit only when it just so happens to be the means to something else like freedom? when, if they were to disregard freedom, they could probably be more profitable?

There is no theoretical defense of capitalism, unfortunately there are a number of practical and rhetorical defenses which more than suffice to convince the public that capitalism is a bounteous word akin to the tooth fairy and communism an evil one, somewhat resembling the orcs in Lord of the Rings. I do not mean to assert an elitism here, merely to make it clear that the task of our leftist intelligentsia has less to do with formulating innovative critiques of power and Capital and more to do with marketing what is already known. We need to become popular, persuasive, sexy. And maybe then we can have a revolution, but only then.
|-/-\-|
|-\-/-|

Next Time: a multiplicity of capitalisms. What is capitalism exactly? Does it even exist? or do we just throw the word around cuz we're too lazy to analyze specific economic arrangements? I've been collecting views from some theorists and will present several along with my own opinion, which is fairly fluid at this point in time.

Borough2Borough, Fertile&Furrowed

2009-12-14T19:19:00.001-06:00

Some excellent quotes from my community informatics textbook, edited by Michael Gurstein.

"The consequences of powerlessness, real or perceived, transcend the individual: society as a whole suffers, for it is deprived of social intelligence and energy which could be tapped for the amelioration of social and other problems."
-Doug Schuler, New Communities and New Community Networks

"If we reflect on the highly dispersed nature of today's industrial systems of production, distribution, consumption, and waste disposal, the cause of many problems is clear: the pattern of increasing globalization has lead to a delinking of production and consumption activities. As both a cause and a result, consumers tacitly agree to have minimal involvement in the production of their needs, including the management of their wastes, and instead simply purchase products and waste disposal using monetary exchange. The list of undesirable outcomes resulting from this situation is too long to mention here, but a crucial aspect of the process is that informational and tangible feedback between producers and consumers is lost. The results is that a great deal of resource exploitation is not limited by any controlling (negative) feedback, and proceeds as if there were no limits to the resource base, leading to the environmental predicaments of our time. Secondly, due to the illusion of infinite production, consumption itself has almost no limits placed upon it, and is growing out of control. In this process, the marketplace itself has become a globalized mechanism encouraging endless environmental destruction."
-Thomas Beale, Requirements for a Regional Information Infrastructure for Sustainable Communities - The Case for Community Informatics [all emphasis in the original]

Great stuff.

Bloomington-Strange

2009-12-13T16:17:00.000-06:00

Aerosolized amnesia
dispersed sheen

amidst the mass of masses
if such could be said to exist. Atoms
in an atom farm / carbon chauvinism. Death
is as

useless as incunabula in a cybernetic age
as rare as
excretionary and ablutional acts

when we can vacuum out the ear wax
suction strip the stomach fat. Obesity
you're my only hope

you remind me of my body
benign neglect / sessile affect.
Human papillomavirus never felt
so right, so certain / rubella

never rubbed me the wrong way.
Unaverse. Apis mellifera

buzzing till they burst.
All of this water
and not a drop of thirst.

Baroque Presumptions

2009-12-10T10:24:00.004-06:00

I realize the year's not over, but I wouldn't be able to buy anything new even if it did come out. So here's a half-annotated list I've been working on for like 6 months.

|---Top 10 Albums of 2009---|

1. Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion
-Not perfect, but damn close. I don't like happy music, thus the affinity for morose bands like Radiohead, but this album is contagious. It also has some decent values (see "My Girls") as opposed to just hedonist party pop or idealist "why can't we love one another" hippie folk. "Daily Routine" was the best song released in 2009; "My Girls" a close second.
2. Zu, Carboniferous
-I listened to a lot of heavy music in 2009 but nothing rattled my eardrums quite as much as Zu. Just drums, bass, and saxophone and yet the music destroys. Also very satisfying to my prog rock predilection, as weird time signatures and insane rhythms abound. The sort of music that is probably playing full blast on a Borg cube as it devours whole planets.
3. Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II
-This probably could've been my album of the year if it was a little shorter and more focused. It starts off incredible, with "House of Flying Daggers" being maybe the 2nd-best Wu-Tang song on a solo album (the best, of course, being "Fourth Chamber" off GZA's Liquid Swords) and there's a series of similar-quality in songs in the album's first half. Raekwon has tons of story-telling raps but there's also a fair amount of bubbly wordplay a la MF Doom. From "Surgical Gloves" on, the record isn't bad but clearly loses a lot of steam, sort of stumbling to a disappointing halt.
4. Future of the Left, Travels with Myself and Another
-With their sophomore release, Future of the Left have officially vaulted themselves into my "immediately purchase whatever they put out" category of band. They have a perfect combination of ambiguously political vitriol ("Arming Eritrea", "The Hope that House Built") and outright silliness ("Stand by your Manatee"). I've always thought that diatribes are healthy, but anything good grows stale if it's taken too seriously, if it's taken as scripture. Punk rock is all about mixing angst just enough goofiness, and Future of the Left (and their predecessor, Mclusky) never fail to execute their blends perfectly. "You Need Satan More Than He Needs You" is my 3rd favorite song of 2009.
5. Dirty Projectors, Bitte Orca
-DP are a tease, with great songs and great lyrics repeatedly ruined by strange aesthetic decisions and all-too-much melisma. But Bitte Orca overcomes that, keeping all the strange quirks but stuffing them in the crushd tin box of pop music, and it comes out quite beautiful. "Stillness is the Move" (my 4th favorite song of 2009) and "Useful Chamber" are EPIC successes.
6. Antipop Consortium, Fluorescent Black
7. Nadja, The Sun Always Shines on TV
8. Mount Eerie, Wind's Poem
9. Black Moth Super Rainbow, Eating Us
10. Polvo, In Prism

Honorable Mentions:

| Bell Orchestre, As Seen Through Windows | Themselves, CrownsDown | Tyondai Braxton, Central Market |

Bortz in his Blood

2009-12-02T23:15:00.001-06:00

"Yes, there are still men who know the distance between one feeling and the next, who know how to create levels and stop their desires, who know how to stand aloof from their desires and souls and return to them later as false victors. And there are those thinkers who laboriously circumscribe their ideas, who bring pretense into their dreams, those scholars who ferret out laws by means of baleful machinations!"
-Antonin Artaud, Letter to the Clairvoyante

What does it mean to be a communist today? Lecture given by Slavoj Zizek at the University of Helsinki. Audio courtesy of Mariborchan.

-

DELAYING THE INEVITABLE SINCE 1968.

-

Death metal & white wine
trade tariffs & Barack Obama.
What's worthwhile nowadays
fragmentary penile / borscht
bubbling on someone's stove.
I will eat your eyes out
and you
you'll love every second of it.

Borrowed from a Better Man

2009-12-01T01:30:00.002-06:00

"We've got to hijack speech. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control."
-Gilles Deleuze, Control and Becoming

Bullet From a Pretty Blue Gun

2009-11-26T01:22:00.000-06:00

I started reading Gilles Deleuze's Negotiations today and it's already wowing me, lots of stuff I've seen quoted elsewhere but didn't know where it came from. Some excerpts, all from the first piece "Letter to a Harsh Critic":

"There's a piece you know that explains this innate spitefulness of people who come from the militant left: 'If you like big ideas, then try talking about kindness and fraternity at a leftist meeting. They specialize in all forms of carefully calculated animosity, in greeting anybody, present or absent, friend or foe, and anything they say, with aggressiveness and put-downs. They don't want to understand people, but to check them over.'" [pg. 4]

"I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy. The history of philosophy plays a patently repressive role in philosophy, it's philosophy's own version of the Oedipus Complex: 'You can't seriously consider what you yourself think until you've read this and that, and that on this, and this on that.'" [pg. 5]

"But I'm struck by the way it's the people who've read lots of other books, and psychoanalytic books in particular, who find [Anti-Oedipus] difficult. They say: What exactly is a body without organs? What exactly do you mean by 'desiring machines'? Those, on the other hand, who don't know much, who haven't been addled by psychoanalysis, have less of a problem and happily pass over what they don't understand." [pg. 8]

Deleuze goes on to talk about two different reading strategies, one the interpretative (what does this text mean? as in the well-read psychoanalytic reading) and the other the intensive (how does this text work? as in how someone less-versed in philosophy would read a book as dense as Anti-Oedipus). I must say that this speaks directly to my own experience; I read a lot of philosophy, but I have little interest in situating what I read in the history of philosophy and understanding each thesis perfectly. To me, the way the rhetoric functions and the connections being made are much more fascinating. It just goes to show why A Thousand Plateaus is my favorite non-fiction book (and probably like 3rd favorite book behind Naked Lunch and Ulysses); it was written with readers like me in mind.

______
*/*\*/*
|| || ||

Top 10 Wu-Tang Clan Albums

10. The Resident Patient - Inspectah Deck
9. The W - Wu-Tang Clan
8. 8 Diagrams - Wu-Tang Clan
7. Supreme Clientele - Ghostface Killah
6. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx - Raekwon
5. Tical - Method Man
4. Birth of a Prince - RZA
3. Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II - Raekwon
2. Liquid Swords - GZA
1. Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) - Wu-Tang Clan

I spent a lot of time researching this list, so appreciate it.

Borromean

2009-11-20T12:18:00.001-06:00

Desire is constituted before the crystallization of the body and the organs, before the division of the sexes, before the separation between the familiarized self and the social field. It is enough to observe children, the insane, and the primitive without prejudice in order to understand that desire can make love with humans as well as with flowers, machines, or celebrations.
-Felix Guattari, "A Cinema of Desire"

So the SR Pathfinder has been getting some criticism. I expected that. God forbid someone who doesn't have a graduate degree and read Heidegger in their free time should try to make a philosophy website for beginners. I guess the particular blogger whose really attacking me--kvond--is mainly a Larval Subjects/Object-Oriented Philosophy hater more than anything, and took offense that I said they answer their comments, which, it's true, they don't necessarily. But those blogs were just particulate filler, the point is that SR really does engage its audience on blogs and answer a lot of comments; that just wasn't possible in, say, Kant's heyday. I'm not obligated to defend Levi Bryant or Graham Harman, I just wanted to make a simple collection of items which serve as an introduction to Speculative Realism and its variants. Which I guess makes me an evil ignoramus who must be crushed. Sigh.

Also, the GEO won their strike, securing tuition waivers in their contract for the next three years. The strike only lasted one-and-a-half days, ending around noon on Tuesday to much celebration. There was a discussion last night about the strikes of 1934 and our own and just generally what works, what doesn't, why unions are important. I brought up what I thought was a pretty reasonable point, that a revolutionary politics needs cutbacks and visible oppression in order to generate resistance movements, and the socialists present sort of jumped on that and tried repeatedly to say that strikes only occur when the economy is rebounding from a slump. Which is fine, except they still only occur because there has been a depression, recession, whathaveyou, which caused the employer to try and cutback to retain a profit level, which caused the union to strike. I think there's this fear that socialists don't want to be seen acknowledging that what's bad for the working class is good for them (since, after all, they sympathize with the working class), but I'm just not sure there's any theoretical foundation for that. If things continue and the GDP grows 2-3% a year while wages remain flat, that doesn't really generate much fight in people. When times are tough and employers reduce wages (furloughs, or holding back raises which, with inflation, is a pay cut) then you see strikes.

Broken & Bruised, It Barely Keeps Us Amused

2009-11-19T16:50:00.000-06:00

your ideals verge on tonic
ice pick to the skull of Trotsky.
Construct a sky out of chlorine
construct a sky out of spleen.
Earth to Eric; all items are ugly
boxed in and incontinent. You
cut off a Civic, half crash
into asemia. Depression
in his chin / convex as eyeballs.
One day they will make a marble out of me
all the children cackle. Needles to say.
Skin a cat / cut a scatter morgue loaf
Orc float.

Peace is an internal state that manifests itself externally.

Few things have been so false.

Beowulf's Wellbeing

2009-11-17T08:24:00.001-06:00

2 announcements here.

I've created a Speculative Realism Pathfinder as an introductory guide to this exciting and emerging school of thought. There's a link in the right-hand column. I realize most people who read this blog come from distinct philosophical backgrounds that probably resent something like SR, which moves away from semiotic politics to apolitical (even nihilistic, in the case of Ray Brassier and others) ontology. But it's also clear from recent debates within the SR community itself that this paradigm has a lot of tools for politics and the primary figures in the blog debates are almost all leftists. You're going to find more interesting takes on Marxism here than elsewhere in academia, and there's a distinct sheen of hope coming from SR which is noticeably absent from postmodernism. Thus why Zizek and Badiou, two change-oriented and fairly optimistic philosophers, have been associated with SR more so than PM. Each has an essay in The Speculative Turn which promises to be an amazing set of essays.

Secondly, as anyone on campus with me knows, our graduate employee union, the GEO, is on strike. If you don't know, there's articles in the Huffington Post (no time to link!) and Socialist Worker about it. Do a search for GEO strike and UIUC and it'll probably come up. Any support possible would help, especially from faculty at other institutions. Please consider emailing our administrators. The GEO's website is the best source of information.

Love everything. Steal love from the leaves, from the oxygen. Love.

Bursting or Barren, Caring or Carrion

2009-11-05T16:11:00.000-06:00

New Nezza track up, hit up the link on the right to listen to "Doom Rap."

There'll be a limited-release B-side emailed out to loyal fans sometime this month. It samples a popular and recognizable song so I can't release it online.

I've been wasting soooo much time today on delicious and twitter and Facebook and I have like 10 things to do for class and my job. I blame you, internet, for actualizing my worst desires.

Awesome album of the day: "Run Rabbit Run" by Osso. Crazy violins scraping your ganglion.

Awesome genre of the day: experimental metal.

Bright Day Dawning

2009-10-12T18:10:00.001-05:00

Amphibians fawning / selfless merchants subtle in their solicitations.

|- -|

A trio of resources for budding communists:

A Communist Revival? (article in The Guardian [UK])
The Common in Communism (YouTube video)
Revisiting Plutonomy: The Rich Getting Richer (internal Citigroup memo, leaked to the press and mentioned in Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story)

The second is a nine-part, hour-and-a-half-long lecture by neomarxist (and Deleuzoguattarian!) Michael Hardt, he of Empire coauthor (with Antoni Negri) fame. That’s a big investment for us all attention-deficient, timestricken subservient, but well worthwhile. Before I summarize, a chart is in order:

Mode of Production | Product          | Source of Power
Feudalism | Agriculture | King and his court
Capitalism    | Commodities   | Upper class
Communism    | Information    | Local communities

“Source of Power” could easily be translated into “owner of the means of production,” except I shy away from that because it’s exactly the sort of notion that begins to get undermined/inadequate in a true communist society (i.e. ownership is fundamentally an individual concept—and, on another level, I think an ideal society would recognize that ownership is an extra-human concept such that the environment itself has a stake in the means of production, an idea which would be lost in a narrower term).
Hardt’s argument is that, like feudalism before it, capitalism has facilitated the production of products which no longer fit in its metrics, thus creating revolutionary pressures for a new societal arrangement. In more concrete terms, as centralized industrial production overtook dispersed agriculture helped capitalism assert itself as a mode of social organization, so will the information economy aid communism in its development. Hardt brilliantly cuts off a major counterargument by drawing a further parallel between feudalism->capitalism and capitalism->communism: while industrial production is still the majority of GDP (and other less-vomit-inducing production metrics) and the information economy a fairly small portion, the form of all jobs and production is beginning to be modeled on information economy arrangements. The parallel is that, as Marx said of years past, while industrial production was not yet the majority of production, all jobs and production were beginning to take on the form of industrial production (i.e. wage labor as opposed to peasant farming, sharecropping, whathaveyou) as the feudalist arrangement weighed on productive forces. Today, we can see the parallel in a number of developments: workplace wikis, the importance of email & IM in most jobs, as well as a number of “products” which strain the commodity format, like the mapped genome, ideas/patents in general, and Monsanto patenting the use of certain seeds or plant usages and then suing indigenous people who have been using them for centuries. A further example would be people who work from home; this becomes widely possible in the internet age and it’s archaic conceptions of the way labor is organized that keep it from being more frequently employed. The benefits of telecommuting are manifold (employees are more comfortable working from home, they save money spent on transportation, employers save money wasted on infrastructure such as large offices, and the whole damn planet is a little happier from less energy being spent in transit) and many jobs—not the majority, but many—could advantageously be done from a remote location, including the last several miserable jobs I’ve had.
Hardt’s point is that capitalism, far from being the ever-beating heart at the center of all production, has become burdensome to production because of it’s outdated modes. The replacement? Why, none other than the Open Access (a.k.a. Open Source) movement, which has a pretty good argument for being a more effective model, especially in terms of information and ideas, and is premised on communal property. It’s a good time to be a communist.

|-,-| |-,-|

One last item: libraries and information.

Since the 1980s and the rise of “people” like Ronald Reagan and Milton Friedman, there has been a wave of privatization in the United States, fueled by rabid “the free market can solve all problems” rhetoric, to the extent that there was even talk of privatizing public parks and the Postal Service. Now, very recently this trend has reversed, with an obvious example being the Obamacare plan, but there’s also been a wave of reregulation in the finance sector (because—surprise, surprise—when you remove tons of banking regulations, shit hits the fan). In the Library and Information Science field, the free market trend was never present; in fact, public archival institutions in the 1980s had been expanding their responsibilities and developing consortiums to deal with their rapidly changing environment. With the explosion of databases and journal aggregators, libraries began to take leadership in providing for their preservation, backing up large quantities of documents, as well as doing a lot of cataloging and classification of materials which were shifting in format. Why weren’t the private publishers who print and produce these journals and databases making their own metadata and preserving their own content? Because that’s not what private companies do. For-profit companies, no matter what industry they’re in, do not function to produce quality products, or services, or employment for the masses, or anything other than profit. That’s the logic of the market. So while it may seem logical that Wilson, Cambridge Scientific Abstracts, EBSCO, Elsevier, and other massive information conglomerates would preserve and index all the data they’re producing, they don’t, because it’s not profitable, and the public sector is forced to step in and do the dirty work.

Burnt, Charred, Reduced to Ash

2009-10-08T20:49:00.003-05:00

Smuggled into a military spending bill, the U.S. House of Representatives just passed a measure which would expand the Federal definition of discrimination to sexual orientation and other gender/sexuality-type mores. It's long overdue, and is probably happening (just like Obama speaking at that Gay Rights dinner) just so that the politicians can claim to be on board with the movement when several thousand angry protesters show up at their front step this Sunday.
But I want to talk about the (largely) Republican bigots who opposed this motion, with two reasons: 1) hate crimes legislation amounts to "thought policing" wherein someone is punished for their intentions and not their actions, 2) it was opprobriously slipped into a military spending bill with tons of things that just get conservatives hard, like money for guns and ammo and "defense" which happens thousands of miles away from American soil. Let me just debunk this bullshit, not because anyone who reads this blog isn't capable of that them self, or because a conservative reading this would become enlightened and recognize the error of their leaders' ways, but because I'm having a bad evening and need to vent.
1) our entire criminal system is already premised around intent and "thought crimes." Citing the hate legislation that already exists--and which no Republican would ever dispute, because it's not popular to be racist anymore, but gay-bashing is still okay--isn't even the first step here; premeditation is a HUGE part of determining sentences, as in the difference between first and third degree murder, so you can shut the fuck up now. I am so, so, so sick of how "family values," "states' rights," and "government spending bad" get trotted out every time there's a proposal that threatens to make America a more equitable place to live. If you would just admit it already, that it's about greed and keeping what's yours and fucking the less fortunate, I would admire you and we could finally have some decent clash and productive discussion, but sadly that will never, ever happen.

2) that's how politics works, you conservative bastards have snuck bullshit onto democrat bills repeatedly in the past and will do so again in the future. The only reason you can even make this argument is that public education is so dismal in this country that most people have no idea what ordinary legislative action looks like. So, just to give an example which you should supposedly agree with but hypocritically don't, when the first bailout bills were being passed (back in the Bush II era, remember him? what a socialist, with his massive government spending. Somebody should've organized a march, a tea party of sorts...oh wait, he's white and Republican. Never mind.) there was a ton of pork barrel bullshit attached (like money for arrow manufacturers and Puerto Rican rum distributors...I shit you not, go look it up on MSNBC and they'll be all whining about it) specifically aimed at culling Republican votes by giving money to their home states.

Sometimes I wish that calling a politician out on their hypocrisy could be a trump card resulting in their explusion. But, like I say, we're all hypocrites and it's a pretty meaningless charge nowadays, seeing that both parties' platforms are built on irreconcilable contradictions. Also, another pet pieve I want to rant about while I'm on a roll: it's never about "class envy," okay? I do not envy the rich and powerful. I pity them, I really do, and this isn't some rhetorical device. These people are totally deluded; they've mistaken wealth, fame, and authority for what's truly meaningful in life, and they live vain, desperate lives, crying alone on the can while wondering which of their loveless mistresses they should sodomize that night. It's not a good life and I don't want anything to do with it. If you gave me a million dollars, I would give it away. I don't want what you have and I will never attempt to get it. I don't even believe in ownership, to be honest. I think it's laughable to claim possession over pieces of an autonomous Earth, an Earth that's much more autonomous than you will ever be, as long as you keep score in terms of dollars and cents, living vicariously through votes and Valium. And really on top of all this, I just don't think there's any answer to "being rich is immoral" when there are about a billion people starving on this Earth. You earned your money? That's great, here's a candy bar. Your obstinance is murder. Your pride is rape. You're better off dead, then at least you'd nourish something, albeit worms and maggots. I'm sorry you feel that way.

I had some other things building up to say but I keep forgetting about them. One was about the Annie Le murder in New Haven and how angry the coverage of that made me. The basic point is: Annie Le spent her time in YALE, which is safe; people get murdered in NEW HAVEN, which is not. So shut up. OMG AN IVY LEAGUER DIED WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO?!?! Meanwhile how many people die on the streets of New Haven and don't get two weeks worth of media coverage? It just goes to show how the media preys on spectacle while we're all ignorant to the systemic evils which are much greater. More people died in car accidents in 2001 than from September 11th, and you wouldn't find that from watching the news.

And then, on the brighter side, I've been listening to and rating a ton of Wu-Tang Clan albums. I'm going to post a top 10 list sometime soon, when I'm done. I won't be able to listen to every single album (the major blindspots right now are all Method Man's non-Tical albums, which I'm avoiding because I've heard bad things and I don't really like MM's flow anyways, and then all these Vatican mixtape things that Raekwon released, what's the deal with those?) I'm hitting up all the major ones and finding some really great, under-represented shit. So that's been good.

And then, I've got another rap track that's coming together nicely, will probably finish this weekend. It's in 5/4. You heard right, 5/4. Is the world ready? My instincts say, "No."

If any of this makes it sound like I have free time then I've misrepresented my state of affairs. Grad school and my graduate assistantship have got me busier than I've ever been in my life. So I'm going to reiterate that this blog will be fairly barren in the coming months, with possible exceptions coming over Thanksgiving and Christmas breaks.

Boredom is a Product

2009-09-15T16:49:00.002-05:00

and we bought it we bought it

|*_*|

Designing the Sign

An a-signifying semiotic is...
A) Gibberish
B) An Oxymoron
C) Both of the Above
D) Perhaps the most brilliant and underrated idea in the history of linguistics/semiotics?

-—-—-

Saussure, who I know shit-all about, is thought of as the father of modern semiotics with his signified-signified binary. As with almost anything thought up almost a century ago, or by Swiss people, or both, this is a once-novel concept which caused a great deal of progress in its field and now must be (and pretty much has been) burned alive. The signifier-signified relation is what we will call symbolic because it serves to show how one material (and it is a material, you smithereens of postcoital ramparts you) represents, stands in for, symbolizes another. I think it's easy enough to misunderstand postmodernists like Baudrillard (who I admire) and Derrida (who I discard) as criticisms of representation or the signifier-signified; they seem to speak of how the dyad becomes unbalanced to the detriment of that which is symbolized. Which is true, partially. But their critiques operate primarily on the signifier-signifier binary, which we will call sign because that's probably the most confusing term available, given its proximity to so much else that's percolating up in this brioche. Critiques of the sign focus on the irreducibility of language to reality, the takeoff that never lands, the play and the slippage, they idolize feral children and remain motionless while masturbating, one cloyed oval in an ocean of irrepentance.
So what is lost in this diagram?:?:

Signifier—Signified
|----(Semiotics)----|
Signifier—Signifier

Only the most important dyad of all, signified-signified. I mean, who can really find the relation of a text to its trace fascinating after they've read Darwin's Fertilisation of Orchids, with its coevolution between flower and insect, insect and flower? If you thinks that signs are slippery, go the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, pay the personage behind the counter seven dollars, check your coat and/or bag, go down the stairs to your right, and try to pick up one of those fat and colorful fish. Or pick up the big black one, who is naturally the most genial. If you think that signs are playful, purchase a puppy from your local pound. And let's just all agree that, oh my garsh, these are all in flux, to greater or lesser degrees, but it's nothing novel that the same word signifies different items over times (get it?), the relations of objects change, the relations of words change. Relation itself could be defined as a sort of change, a bidirectional translation wherein two twist and twine and the result's divine.

-----------------Signifier—Signified
--------------------/----(Life)----\
Signifier—Signifier — Signified—Signified

—_—_—

A lesbian Women's Studies professor who splits her free time between the Lexington Club and the Feminist Majority Foundation. This is all quite admirable in isolation, but in sum it's disturbing; this is a (hypothetical) individual who has excised difference from their daily existence. Their sexual, professional, personal, and political worlds are homogeneous and interlocked. I'm an opinionated person and I have beliefs which skein throughout every facet of my life, as does this woman, but I'm also willing to engage others on a basis which isn't purely antagonistic, others who have an apparently antithetical worldview, because I believe in clash, debate, difference, in attempting to place myself in shoes I can barely imagine much less physically wear. Send me your hate mail and I will show you that blackened recess that some call a soul.

Allies, Agnates, and their Absolute Brethren

2009-08-14T19:50:00.001-05:00

This will be a scattered and digressive treatment. It's my nature rather than my intent.

Moral Relativity

The fundamental contradiction of moral relativism is how, in its quest to render all imperatives dogmatic and arbitrary, it must affirm one axiom: that morality is an equivocal plane. There is no right or wrong, only contingent conceptions of right and wrong; but what about that very statement itself? Is it not stating that it is wrong (or at least incorrect, which is analogous enough for my purposes) to affirm absolute values? This is not at all fatal for relativists. On the contrary, all philosophy or use of logic seems to have a sort of Möbius strip structure wherein a system, when reflected back upon itself, collapses into contradiction/its opposite. There's no convincing reason why this would be a function of the limitations of language as opposed to ontological. I could give a thousand examples, but here are a smattering that occurred to me recently:

Baudrillard's critique of Foucault, as seen in the seminal first paragraph of his otherwise-mediocre Forget Foucault, is to apply Foucault's analyses to his own discourse and reveal that power operates there as well, if only as a simulacra (whether or not you buy the second part here doesn't really affect the damage of B's critique).
The famous division of all propositions into synthetic, analytic, and nonsense...the problem being that this division itself is, within the definitions of its system, nonsense.
Badiou's critique of Deleuze, wherein D tries to affirm multiplicities but ends up dissolving the world into one giant "clamor of being", i.e. a univocity reminiscent of straight-up monism.
One of my favorite (sophistic?) formulations: every rule has an exception. The trick being, of course, that this rule is its own exception.

Now that I've been sufficiently sidetracked, we can relapse to relativism. The relativist above all has values by virtue of their being alive. It is impossible not to affirm certain (and thus deny other) acts; the relativist will recognize the legitimacy of belief in Allah and women wearing veils, but will not raise their children in a similar manner. They will breathe and eat and live (conatus!) and thus deny suffocation, starvation, and death. If these truisms do not demolish relativism it is because they do not touch it's vital core: relativism, far from leveling all moralities onto the same playing field and giving us no means of deciding between them, actively plays values off against one another and opens up potential syntheses and power struggles.
Previously, when dogmas came into combat both systems perceived themselves as absolute and so the only possible course of action was total annihilation of the opponent (think: The Crusades / think: Nazism). Counterexamples include certain strains of Buddhism or other relativist-precursor religions. Nowadays there are still more absolute systems around than relative ones, but the relative ones are capable of assimilation, morphing, evolving alongside the real with its ever-changing conditions. In this way one no longer needs to directly engage the absolute systems (i.e. spray paint "God is dead!" on churches. This sort of hysterical assault only causes people to entrench their antiquated views further) because they are naturally disadvantaged and will become irrelevant as their ability to adapt remains minimal; Jesus has less and less to tell us about which airline we should fly, whether we should eat organic foods, how much time is too much time spent on the Internet, et cetera. Christianity and Islam will both die out eventually unless they find more up-to-date prophets.
If there's a problem with this, it's that the relativist moralities are probably causally connected to capitalism. There's certainly a correlation (capitalism dissolves all values and works in much the same manner; it doesn't need to attack anything because it evolves quicker than any religion, ethnic culture, nation, etc... so it just goes about its business and wins the game simply by playing) but I basically do not have time to trace the causal connection, so I'm just going to assume it's there. The thing is, capitalism does have its axioms (see D&G's A Thousand Plateaus on this and on the capitalism/relativism connection [their term "decoding" is linked to relativism], but profit motive, i.e. surplus value for the Marxists out there, is pretty exemplary) and I fully believe that we are capable of developing a relativism which outpaces even capital in its evolution, expansion, hegemoney [sic]. I've been championing a certain set of moral axioms (i.e. human sustainability) over the past few years as a sort of return to sanity, a return to real values, but the fact is that the praxis of obtaining such absolutes is always fluid, based not only on the real (think: natural disasters, for an inexhaustive example) but also on our knowledge of it (think: science and the technology it enables).

This has been the most hopeful post in awhile, I bet, but I'm not about to research and find out.

Exeunt.

Alkahest Ascertained

2009-08-11T18:24:00.000-05:00

so I'm going to grad school for library science in less than a week and I wanted to warn y'all that there will probably be a dearth of posts, possibly spanning the next two years (minus the summer) but maybe not. I'm taking classes and working so chances are I'll be busier than ever. The ultimate intention is to put myself in a position to work for the public, to empower people who want to better themselves and their communities—which, even for librarians, requires a lot of selection: I really want to avoid working for an elite university or a private archive if at all possible. A community college would be simply divine.

This decision comes primarily from spending two years working for a multinational corporation. It was a meaningful experience and I would do it again, because I wanted to feel what I believe the vast majority of people feel: they bear a living wage with wit and coworker camaraderie. I have plenty of friends who are following their dreams, doing good work and enjoying the results, yet I cannot help but observe that they were—without exception—lucky, they've worked hard but they were handed the opportunity to get results from their work, an opportunity unavailable to most. A life handed to you is not your life, a success is so much less than the struggles through which it was actualized.

Antipodes (drudge work)

2009-08-05T23:08:00.000-05:00

get your cells in agreement
play by play / more and more
all alleles inoculated against
concrescence / rinse then
shellac. Common as an
estral silence / sinking into
disarry. We arm ourselves
against death like what. Tachycardia absolved.

Some stricken some walled in. We tried
to help them, we really did. We gave
them medicare, mournful melismas
an open casket of cakes and love.
Cedars Sinai saved one, she
basks forever after in smog
and circus peanuts. San

Jose streets fill with puke.
A job application a day
keeps starvation at bay.
Orthorexic nervosa
is much better
than aneurysms and lifestyle diseases

/ is much like
wonder

warming bodies through winter.

Ankylose Demented

2009-07-28T19:31:00.000-05:00

but at least we're dangerous.

---Power---
I have been reading The Deleuze Dictionary lately and while it's fairly enjoyable, there's a trite tendency to reduce most of his concepts (all of which are tools without valuations inherent in them---if, as Zizek argues, Deleuzian rhetoric is a perfect complement to modern capitalism, it is because he is not at all a Marxist dogmatist, but a fairly objective thinker) to affirmation, creativity, and active over reactive forces. There seems to be a fairly massive blind spot in all discourse of power, affirmation, active force, and creativity. In the valorization of process we lose sight of positive processes generating negative results. What if creativity entails the manufacture of nerve gas in enormous quantities? What if my active force, affirming life and increasing my body's power, is only but the first myopic step to affirming my own self-destructive and idiotic tendencies? And Deleuze is just an irrelevant starting point here, because what I want to talk about is Humanity and its "power". Humanity is, in the guise of the most powerful species, the weakest of all known species. Humans have a capacity to create technology which far exceeds its capacity to predict effects, to operate in a sustainable manner, and to harmonize as a whole. Thus all the supposed benefits of civilization are but mere stepping stones to making us one of the shortest-lived distinct species in our solar system's history. Because as we've worked to gain control over the environment, shrinking distances and increasing intracommunication, we've failed to gain control over ourselves, our deranged libidos have run wild. Which is why we're the only known species that's developed a means to destroy the planet hundreds of times over. Which is why we're undoubtedly pathological relative to any other species (when not in captivity. Humanity does much resemble interactions of, say, Octopuses in captivity) and repeatedly kill one other in large quantities for reasons that often make no objective sense. I have little to no doubt that---barring alien intervention---we will destroy ourselves within the next two centuries. I'm open to counterarguments but at this point progress is a irreversible march to extinction. We can hope for a universal, united, and (more important than either of the former) regulated species, but right now I see no signs of that developing. We're fucked. I would be a Luddite if there was any chance of that being an effective politics, but it's utterly impotent in the face of the pleasure commodities give us.
And so you say, "Ejypt, you've grown cold. Where is the blithe optimist who so enthusiastically discusses bowel movements and Communism?" Well, fear not, comrades, he is still here, and he will fight to continue existence until it becomes evident that destruction itself is all there is to be affirmed. And at that point (which may only last the few seconds nuclear annihilation will take, or may last the centuries that environmental degradation. It's all quite up in the air) I will be as happy as I've ever been, because the Earth finally will have fulfilled its goal of ridding itself of our tragically flawed effacement. Amen.
But let me be clear; humanity may survive. But I cannot conceive of a value system by which the present course we've taken is good, unless all this insanity is needed to slap some sense into us. Perhaps in a thousand years, Cyborgs will read this and cry, saddened by the deathly lives that were necessary for their ascension.
---Difference---
The vast majority of distinctions that humans choose to affirm are useless. Nationality, Ethnicity, Religion, Gender, Orientation; these are so many vacuoles, pores on the face of Earth waiting to be filled with pestilence. I have difficulty conceiving how people are willing to die for America, to lynch blacks to affirm white superiority, to be Jihadist or Zionist, to affirm matriarchy or male dominance, to say that heterosexuality is natural (and homosexuality, which developed in the same "nature" as its antithesis, not). Do we need to fight others to affirm ourselves? Is it impossible to have a group based on something other than exclusionary and elitist premises? Yee of little faith get fucked like cunts. Yee of little life get a two-car garage and good grades for your obnoxious offspring. We need nihilism more than it needs us. It stuns me into silence when I contemplate how little I share with other people, and how much I want to.

I didn't list political party on that list. I think a person's politics (meaning: how they envision the becoming of humanity, with indifference being a vote for status quo stasis) are one of the few meaningful differences there are, and that sometimes you need to kill someone because of what they believe. If a person is willing to accept the destruction of the planet rather over the destruction of something lesser (their way of life, their nation, their elite status) then they should be shot in public, made an example of, exterminated like any other insect.

Or maybe not. But I'm leaning towards that rather than "it's okay to think whatever you want!" since that's just reckless. There's a lot that's not okay, y'all. Maybe we can salvage capitalism, but if so we'll need a lot of regulations, a lot of checks and balances, and we'll need 'em soon, before the damage is irreversible.

Autotomy

2009-07-21T23:30:00.000-05:00

An indulgent destruction.

A mind mired in semiotics
the real some rodent in a

cage under your childhood bed. Chromatophores
in each pore, you move like a cuttlefish
blend with each bookcase and computer.

Coccyx sets a razor / sly Malone dies
in drawer of women's underwear.
We could collapse into utopia
bring a bathroom wherever we go

but it's soft, it's soft to watch
television and tylenol / bubble
baths and umbrage. Snide nihilist
can take anything / turn it to a desert

can destitute a rich man in no time.

Amorphous Solid

2009-07-10T19:13:00.000-05:00

2 Things:

A) Communism must relieve itself of all the "egalitarian" and oppression-ending delusions: power exists and will continue to, nothing short of a Borg-like hive mind could level humans ontologically. The argument for Communism will not be based in the freedom to be reckless nor the unity of complete equality but because how and what we produce with self-management are transformative materials of subjectivation. Does that grows helplessly lost at the end? Because this isn't some postmodern sophism, some exorbitant splurge of Guattarian terminology: people can devote themselves to the empowerment of owning their history and the knowledge that if everyone cooperates we all grow a greater assemblage, we reach the potential to colonize planets / we live on this one as many cardplayers maneuvering, perfectly cycled like carbon / repetition and difference.

Communism is the only movement which cannot picture the society it aims to bring about.

B) Aberration, temporary
warmth in winter. Gentle
machinations gone to war with
one another. Everything inordinate
subsides. Reason resumes
its march: parking tickets
outsourcing, food
stamps.

The boy living at bus stop never seen again.

We can't be brought to care for each
when one underwrites insurance and
one writes Bleach in epidermal damage.

If we cannot be honest about our bowels movements how will we ever learn to live together.

Animus Animals

2009-06-23T17:08:00.000-05:00

"The computer will show that 70 percent of all jobs in America and probably an equivalently high percentage of the jobs in other Western private-enterprise countries are preoccupied with work that is not producing any wealth or life support—inspectors of inspectors, reunderwriters of insurance reinsurers, Obnoxico promoters, spies and counterspies, military personnel, gunmakers, etc."—Buckminster Fuller, Critical Path.

to which he could have added advertising and PR, two industries whose functions are respectively to delude people into buying things they do not need and admire companies which do evil doings.

-

The set of curves can put straight to the Â £ nica curve men.
For further € is the engine.
Of life.
No, the broom.
For further € are minibuses or pesera.
Zizek should not matter because an otherwise transferred.
Barbaro Qua.
MA s respect.
For further € sorceress as women have to be.
Qua nice because Â ¨?
Why lift things without touching.
Wait.
Listen to define for us to be men.
Let's see.
For further € € photographer are like as, because they emerge from the darkness.

-|-

Drat.

-|-|-

What is the 36th Chamber

No fatal caprice
all omni every
empyrean real.

Sky eats airplane.
Stare indecisis. A
weaponized wit

charisma bordering on murderous.
A home appliances company
dead as diphtheria. Without
disease is without welcome
in an expedient world, Virilio
on top of each toilet
to explain the pains
of aseptic progress.

-|-|-|-

Here is my latest track. The title is tentative, selected from the following fields:
-This is What Happens, Larry
-Ustorious Universal
-Usurious Universal
-Laclau and Mouffe
-Universal Odiom
-Eviscerate
-Fuck a Holistic Approach / Division is Dope

|-|-|-|

apophasis is just a phase but I use it

2009-06-16T22:03:00.000-05:00

Basketball / Wealth Redistribution / Outlets of Subjectivation

One of the many incongruent aspects of my personality is a love for basketball. I can't really articulate why this amorousness exists other than "the alley-oop is the coolest-looking play in all of sports", but I do know it contradicts with several of the other archetypes battling for control of my psyche (the Marxist who knows that all pro athletes are savagely overpaid, the artist who is supposed to be reading T.S. Eliot and hating on jocks, the pragmatist who sees sports as full of sound and fury, signifying nothing). That being said, I don't think that basketball is as innately evil as other industries: for decades the sport (along with almost every sport other than golf) has functioned as a terrific wealth distribution engine, less targeted but perhaps more effective than programs like welfare, since the athletes are culled from a largley black lower-class culture. Every basketball player contributes some of their excessive wealth back to the community, whether it be through mandatory PR campaigns ("The NBA, where caring happens"...a fairly dystopian slogan) or the simple fact that most ballers give back to their family, their community, the high schools and colleges they attended.

I'm not delusional; there are numerous mitigating factors in this equation. The same group which is empowered through redistribution is also manipulated by the NBA: they buy shoes which are functionally identical to cheaper products simply because they say "LeBron James" on the side, they buy tickets whose price is greatly inflated by said astronomical salaries (not to mention the corporate owners peeling some off the top), and worst of all they live in such a dismal situation that it may seem like basketball is their only way out and thus they limit down other escape options by relying on the sport too much while not seeking out other, educational, opportunities. I still think the net impact of the NBA is positive in terms of social mobility, while other mechanisms which are purportedly designed to promote redistribution can become means of economic stratification (i.e. diversity quotients at elite colleges dominated by black, Indian, Chinese, etc... students from middle-to-upper class backgrounds. Is it not clear that we need class-based affirmative action?). A class-conscious athlete should be aware that their wealth is at least partially derived from people who can't really afford to buy their products and thus should recognize the imperative to "give back to the community".

But beyond the purely economic equation of the NBA (and this rant obviously parallels the aesthetics one), the NBA is perhaps most meaningful as a source of subjectivation. The question becomes whether a society could possibly remove the taint of wealth and capitalization to get back to what's timeless and true in sports: athletic competitions, far from being subordinated to some innate capitalist urge to compete or the origin of such a drive, have been around since before economics involved currency and fulfill a much more vital function in terms of fostering community identity, unity, and examples of individual greatness. Kobe Bryant is an idol / Kobe Bryant is insane; he is a more-than-human admired by millions for his total devotion to something which is totally meaningless (I tried to watch the NCAA tournament one year while I was shrooming alone in my college dorm and found myself unable to. Why are they doing this? What is the point? When the game ends, there will be another game; when the tournament ends, there will be another tournament. That shit just does not compute on mushrooms). One can only hope that Kobe would do what he does for $200,000 a year (my completely arbitrary salary cap which I do fully believe in; anyone who makes more is legitimately evil and I have the prose to prove it) and the benefits of living in a society where fame, power, and identity are freed from the whims of Kapital. That's the overarching flavor of every "capitalism bad" impact for me: we're outsourcing our politics, our personalities, our autonomy to the free market. The market is free and we are not. The religion is lively nihilistic and I do not think that economics knows what's best for the planet / I do not want the GDP to grow.

|_|

anaphoric forums and their flagellum flagposts

2009-06-13T01:28:00.000-05:00

lyrics to some sort of song you've inscribed in your slumbers

-

the people who disagree with you are full of shit and should be shot

\rat tattoo/

this ain’t, no, [laugh] track [ju]king like a [half]back
[fuck] a phat, [black], whip | that’s [en]ough for some
[half], wit, [shits], crawled , [out] an ass, [crack], itch,
|,where, [death] in life, [lives],, and [Der]rida’s pissed
|, at the [poor], white, [kids],,, [rot]ting in ghet-
-[tos], at the [fat], white, [kids], playing [vid]eo games
|,, they’re [fate]d to their [cor]ner office [fu]tures as,
[in]famous, [C]EOs of [in],solvent [comp]anies,

eviscerate your friends and family or anneal the nation anew
go to the nearest pawnshop see what their bones get you

|, so I [try] and rap, [hot] into a [mac]book, lap
| top,, |, belly [back],flop, |, I don’t
[act], flawed, [talk], slack, [jawed], to my [dem]ograph’s,
[gods],,, | I’ll flirt with [Kurt], Cobain, | inert,
[and] vain, [in] his Earthly [grave],,, |, and am
[I], to be [blamed], for the [mir]ror stage, [stain], for the
[sick]ening grin |, stuck in[side], the tain, |,,,

I think [not] Pol [Pot] drinks [hot] souls [bought]
and stocked in [pink] ink[blots],,, |,,,

bloviating bloggers and their woe begotten fathers
woe begotten bloggers and their bloviating fathers
bloviating bloggers and their woe begotten fathers
woe begotten bloggers and their bloviating fathers

defend your daughter’s honor immoderately moderate
own a home and kill your family when you get fired.

-|-

Almost Everything I have to say about Aesthetics

Art, like everything else, cannot be isolated and evaluated, it cannot carry inherent value as a mythical Platonic form. The "power" of a work of art is reducible to its affectivity: how many people does it touch and how much does it change them? (setting aside material matters for now, which are important: the trees cut down to write novels, the electricity to power servers which hold this post). In this rubric, which avoids the irresolvable disputes of canon & quality, James Joyce's Ulysses is undoubtedly weaker than the 2008 film Ironman. Ulysses takes maybe two hundred hours of intellectual effort to extract any message from (the best I've heard was: "the definitive ethical act is placing one's self in another's shoes") while in a weekend millions can watch Robert Downey Jr. snark it up and come away with something much more tangible (war profiteering is bad, alright then). The takeaway is that mastery is castration: all forms of l'art pour l'art limit themselves to an audience of sufficient context (academic or otherwise) as well as limit their emotive possibilities through dilution (DFW's Infinite Jest), complexity (Joyce's Finnegans Wake), abstraction (D&G's A Thousand Plateaus), and every other esotericism. To be effective in art one must avoid the temptation of perfection, the appearance of mastery, writing for writers (every poet ever is guilty of this), making movies for filmmakers (David Lynch's Inland Empire), painting for painters (I know almost nothing of painting but your stereotypical modern art is exemplary: who but a painter could possibly give a flying fuck about a bunch of colored blocks?).

Yet to reduce each artwork to its affects on humans and matter misses almost everything: art is the carrot at the end of the rope. Without my songs and my writing, without the songs and writing that I love, I would be suicidal. There is nothing for me to look forward to in an artless world, even if I can see that art is largely jouissance and "true art" cannot be meaningfully separated from banal cultural products like Gossip Girl and Danielle Steel. In fact, in my rubric, supposedly vapid artworks like those are more art than l'art pour l'art because they reach a larger audience, and even more so because they exploit their audience's emotional weaknesses. An artwork with poor or utterly incomprehensible values can still achieve good things by acting as sustenance for good people: my love for Infinite Jest, Finnegans Wake, A Thousand Plateaus, and Inland Empire will carry me where Kapital cannot.

-|-|-

Iron lemonade

wash my friends away...

-|-|-|-

Loving vs. the State of Virginia

Each esculent imagination owes its all
to you, 1 solid axiom in an erring World
2 souls stable in their finite bodies / in
interlocked linger, loiter, lull. Make me

a system, evil & effective / make me
plural pounding sounds in the ears of insects

the anthems of their kind / ablated

clean beings / doomed to survive us.

-|-|-|-|-

4) Physical Requirements of The Position:
• Must be able to

Exist for extended periods of time.

Stand, walk, bend over, kneel, sit, crouch, reach overhead, grasp, push, and pull.
- Move, lift, and/or carry up to 30 pounds at shoulder height for a distance of 30 yards.
• Bending at the waist, kneeling, or crouching to assist coworkers.
• Repetitive use of hands
- (i.e.,
  - fine manipulation
  - simple grasping
  - complex grasping
  - and power gripping).
- A dexterity verging on sublime / ability of hands and fingers to operate
  - a computer keyboard
  - standard office equipment
  - and rotary telephone.

Demonstrate and practice normal depth perception.
See and read a computer screen and printed matter
- with or without vision aids.
Distinguish colors and basic geometrical shapes such as
- the circle
- square
- or triangle.
Read and understand rules, policies, labels, instructions, emails, letters, manuals, novellas, poetry, and nutritional labels
- written in English.
Hear and understand speech at normal levels
- on the telephone
- and in person.
Verbal communications, including the ability to speak
- and hear
  - at normal room levels
    - and on the telephone.

|_|_|_|_|_|

Anaphylaxis

2009-06-02T21:56:00.000-05:00

in a quiet corridor
inside a bank vault. There's only one thing you're wrong about and you can never know what it is. Stultified charms / dead wedding gowns. The kind of climate equivalent of nausea, horrid humidity,
set us up the calm
meaty ochre

noisome cloy.
Paralympic heresiarch
say what say

come what may
corporeal chains
or worthless pleasures
jouissance jails
a muse bouche

mighty mouse caught in the cupboard / imbroglio bound.
Half expect an aardvark / roll in on your llama bumping
Enya eulogies / death metal doldrums. Oolong tea &

Romulan. Exercent inactivist. Crate makeshift
motives overseas / move to Oakland and eat
pieaya aloe. Half expect an unintended exit
/ Mike Tyson's daughter Exodus dead. A

home appliance company portends a clean and well-lit future where Whirlpool Corporation can sell you a car or a career or a company. Essentially everything unknown is now known! Expect and accept! Each other is a stranger's self! Bastion of disaster! For they know what they do! Chow on vetiver! Strewn on lawns! Forties for my neighbors! Faceless fucks for the lustful! Development hell has ended, history has been realized: the human is over with, time for all that ails aliens, excoriates extraterrestials.

-|-

Even if you've never heard of Xiu Xiu you should read this. To put myself out in the open: I have never been sexually abused, or even psychologically assaulted beyond the typical "Eric goddamnit put the lid down" childhood chastisements, but I am aroused by a vast range of sadomasochistic fantasies. In fact there's a whole eerie arc to my desires which continues and will continue to develop. It is my hope that the "sexual revolution" (quoted because it might as well be called "the hedonist revolution" thus far) will ultimately result in a greater acceptance of all alterity, all abnormality, all the weird shit which lurks in split and splitting psyches.

-|-

To clarify: there's nothing wrong with watching pale anime girls get violated by dozens of green tentacles. You flinch, but you're wrong to.

-|-

I define my paradigm and politics primarily through reference to two extremes: Marxism and Libertarianism. While my values are mostly derived from Marxism, I constantly combat its tendency to exaggerate its case and limit all actions down to a utopian ideal (either anarchy or communism, as if either of those systems could possibly come about in America in the next century). Navigating extremes is a necessary process in reason and particularly praxis, but let’s look at the 2 limit scenarios first:

Marxism says structure overdetermines individuals: there are no singular subjects, only a base which controls the derivative superstructure. In this way the superstructure doesn’t properly exist because it is 100% reducible to the base and only changes in the base can affect social change. The “individual” is a fetish, a convenient capitalist fiction created to prop up private property and its relations.
Libertarianism says individuals overdetermine the structures they compose: there is no base or superstructure, just a large quantity of atomic units. These are creationist individuals; they come pre-packaged, fully-formed, they’re rational actors without genesis (as opposed to D&G’s collective subjectivation, Freud & Lacan’s familialism, education, etc). Ayn Rand never wrote a children’s book.
The middle way is thus: while individuals are partially defined by societal structures, there is a certain irreducible core to each person which cannot be explained in terms of structural causality. The only viable counterargument to this is: while we may not be able to explain how structure caused certain eccentricities in an individual, that is a limitation of finite human reason/understanding, which does not necessarily imply that structure doesn’t compose everyone. My answer to this would be: well fine, I am willing to say “each individual is exactly equal to their unexplainable kernel” and move on without sacrificing my point.

-|-

The sesquapedalian, although half the size of the pterodactyl, strikes with just as much veracity, using its massive beak and pulchritudinous teeth to gnash through even the thickest snide.

-|-

Zionfist

Mouthus music in an industrial elevator

God can carry us only so far before dragging us down.

aletheia

2009-05-19T21:31:00.000-05:00

love me like lupus
break bones on stone
below l'Arc de Triomphe
an earthquake owns the moment.

Answer me, please something plausible
alien DNA, stigmata on each digit &
a second stomach to digest the dirt.

Can you phrase that in the form of a metaphor?
Can you watch House every afternoon and live

repentant?

<&> - <&> - <&>

and drain the waste. EBMUD gives us a thirty-four cent refund because I shower twice a week and shit almost exclusively at work. I wouldn't have it any other way. There's a brain inside my brain, there's a seam splitting our souls. This fracture plasters us forever after
this break is a glue that blinds human minds through luminous time.

<&> - <&> - <&>

Ejypt's Top 10 Radiohead Songs

because you care what I think.

1. Talk Show Host
2. Idioteque
3. Exit Music (for a film)
4. Myxomatosis
5. Like Spinning Plates (live version)
6. Packt like Sardines in a Crushd Tin Box
7. Street Spirit
8. Cuttooth
9. Let Down
10. Optimistic

Acerbic Invective II: The Vast and the Various

2009-04-22T22:53:00.000-05:00

by the end of this post you'll've lost
one billion brain cells, you know those
things that matter. All the
righteousness gave you gas
the strong don’t answer what the weak won’t ask.
We won't calcify contentions:
every axiom we know now
will be overturned
in the future, in the future
we will regard our former selves as bigots
for discriminations that are currently invisible.
I've committed myself to a country
after a terrifying century of national insanity.
You're trilingual, biracial / stolen plexus
given to inanity. Origins everywhere.

Recover to your own man or woman or inbetween
as even Christians know of transgendered humans
as even straight white males can be oppressed. I am
not. I have never been arrested

broken a bone or slept on the street.
There are humans who would kill each
other for this life, there are apes
that wouldn't. Defensive discipline

murder when necessary.
Good offensive execution
no one complains when we win wars

and everyone expects Iraq to end.
Everyone drives a car and owns a home
/ pays taxes and plays backgammon
/ never before seen scene.

Pay a penance
say a sentence
stress abandon
unblighted newborn

After curfew
rafters ferlough
clumped rot
potato bug pestilence

Right triangle regularity.

Dikembe Mutumbo's busted legs
Daichi's potent palatial trills.

We break down all the action
substitute teacher shot in the neck.
Less for a brand Toyota. The blue feel

altruistic intentions and evil outcomes.
The red snaps wrists. The white sucks air. The green
slither through electrical sockets / the meal

grows cold

as ice

cubes

in drinks

melt. Fork

clicks

& carnivores
/ damages &

Lacan.

Concession is inevitable
those who acheive their aims
adapt to them / them's that trickle
them's that's in our collective closet.

Only united against lascivious aliens will we stand
a house devised against itself can change, a city
can stand up and move one hundred miles away.

New Orleans should move, San Francisco should move.

Animal collective albums / freak folk on freeways
and the whole world be united as against aliens
with their hive mind and death star, with their
home world carbon copied. Nature is normal. Nature

hates us. To the tune of ten thousands dollars
to a death waltz in E minor. Love Dangerously.
And that's not some virus either, not some
Conflicker worm fucking with you like ether.

Downadup

Hatred and pity are weak emotions; pity for the self-serving and hatred for the myopic. They would be more so but for the short-circuit between them, the easy route reason provides to bugger one with the other: hate those you pity for their inability to overcome, hate them for their insistence on suffering / pity those you hate because they know not what they do, they work within such meager margins. Can we collapse these two emotions, can we cleanse our progeny of their jejune ennui? Am I a fucking prick or do I just really, really like strange words? Do you live a life that can be reasonably extrapolated from your breakfast routine?

Outcome critical
or otherwise, we
strive to transform
to beatle the eyes
off this planet.

Do not be alarmed
There is no one there
but your father and mother
touching themselves in lust

laboring on Outlook
lost in Word. It
couldn't have come
about any other way.

Adverse Conditions

2009-04-21T21:39:00.001-05:00

fallen down a salt mine

homing pigeons on powerlines

what's time is time

movement repeated

unforgivable excess
of anyone who owns a Hummer. Americans are amenities men / worker women. Migrate up a couple income levels. Lenscrafters and Levy's. Byproduct. Microwaves and stellar raves, crackled keyboard bits over one interchangeable pulse or another. Anus on tape. They turn us into monsters, our bodies do, they push shit stowaway on Titanic, mercurial. Rely on mind. Worrywort towards tomorrow. Bring us cheese and beef to stalk our sleep / make up a massive debt with gallons of espresso, with novels of coworker complaints. Pet peeves. Domesticated animal a source of annoyance or irritation. This is what that means / misses the rat spleen, the insects breath. The question that mutes pose: "a specifying or particularizing effect in a sentence in an interrogative form, addressed to someone in order to get information in reply to indicate a person, idea, state, event, time, remark, etc., as pointed out or present, mentioned before, supposed to be understood, or by way of emphasis multiple people incapable of speech assume or hold a particular position or posture, as in sitting for a portrait." I'm sorry you had to hear that, but it was for the best. You can

punch holes

in the symbolic / live in lack
or abscond with the aporias

make a meal of absence.
I do not judge you by your

vocabulary or clothing, as
others might.

Apostate Priest / Phosphate Belief

2009-04-06T14:12:00.000-05:00

How Goes the How

All organ donors dead
each armpit unshaven.

The Fox is in my ears
my mouth my mental mush.

Truth is truer these days
truth is manmade

fatnecks in Texas
pawning their Rolexes

churches in Berkeley
unattended and susceptible
to eminent domain
withered plantains

point / counterpoint.

I am become unstained by sanity
I can has the death qua quota when I wants it

say this to yourself as you sleep at night
—We were not sunsorched mud and blight,
say this to yourself as you sleep at night
—We were not the morning after pill plight,
say this to yourself as you sleep at night
—We were not the words we used to describe ourselves,
say this to yourself as you sleep at night
—We were not responsible for our entire species.

nor murder nor anointment
see you as somewhere in
between eras / eggs buried in beaches

blunts smoked at midnight. We've lowered
the price of more color. One fallen apple
and not a pie crust in sight. Weave a

fabric to fall into, quilt always

one into another:

like Slavoj Žižek, I have not given up on violence. The oddity is that, from a consequentialist standpoint, I think assassinating leaders you sympathize with is likely to be more effective than assassinating those you despise. I've already written about how counterproductive killing GWBII would've been, and here's the inverse example: I develop a reputation as a raving misogynist, posting blog rants about Judith Butler and Catherine MacKinnon. My ideology on display, I send handwritten vitriol to major TV networks and shoot Hillary Rodham Clinton in her head with a .44 Magnum. The media martyrs her, a foundation is set up in her honor, feminists everywhere emit a justified public rage; the reaction brings popular opinion closer to equality.
Now let me be clear—because I really don't feel like getting arrested for a hypothetical—I do NOT support this action. One would need to devote half a lifetime to research to make sure that Hillary's opportunity to become the 45th president of the United States of America and her current empowerment do not outweigh potential benefits; the other half of that lifetime would be needed to establish oneself as a hater. I just want to state what I think is an intriguing opinion: striking at what we love most may help more than following the cause.

Asea

2009-04-05T22:38:00.000-05:00

I inscribed this song
on the . . inside of . . my skull

Albescence

2009-03-31T20:41:00.000-05:00

what it's like to be white
sunscreen conceits & science's insight
what it's like to be white
half fork half spoon / half life half blight

what it's like to be white
mortgage the moment on hopes of a hygienic future
what it's like to be white
half brain half byte.

*/*\*

On the door is a blue stick figure, male because it does not wear a dress. You push your right hand against the rectangular steel slab located flush with wall on the right side of the door, approximately 2/5ths of the way up its side. You enter an all white room with 5 gray components: 2 faucets, 1 towel dispenser, 1 large divider with a door sectioning off 1/3rd of the room, 1 small divider between 2 open-faced porcelain ovals. You move forward curling to the right, bringing yourself 3 inches in front of 1 of the porcelain apertures. You unzip the zipper located in front of the pelvic region of your Calvin Klein jeans and retrieve a fleshy pole from within your undergarments. A small coil of white fabric is stuck to the darker-colored knob at the end of the pole; you remove the coil and flick it in the porcelain mouth using your right thumb and index fingers. You proceed to push a bright yellow fluid composed of urea, dissolved salts, and tiny organic compounds through a tube that runs down the center of the cylindrical member. For 6 seconds the stream is continuous, an amber pillar linking your internal fluids to a vast network of waste, then the stream becomes sporadic, the link is shaken, spurts remain. When fluid has stopped flowing entirely, you grip the fleshy column towards its bottom and squeeze forward as if coaxing a sodium fluoride gel from an aesthetically pleasing Crest container. These last few drops expelled, you deposit your pole back in your undergarments, zip up your Calvin Klein jeans, turn approximately 270 degrees counterclockwise, and exit the dichromatic room.

*\*/*

Albeit True

2009-03-27T15:19:00.000-05:00

my last post was entirely too long and I had near conniption when I read it over again. I'm sorry. I really do have a problem with philosophical discourse, at least my own, because it comes off as pompous. I don't mind pompousness that much--and I'll always affirm my right to say "this is the way it is" rather than "this is way I think it is" because the "I think" or "I believe" is always implied and repeating it over and over is aesthetically bankrupt--but it just doesn't work, there's no ironic distance to the pompousness, there's no sense of urgency or insanity, and I am urgently insane or insanely urgent depending on whether the day is odd or even numbered.

Content and form, while inextricably intertwined, make for a useful dichotomy, and I'm going to stick with the forms I love rather than the ones I'm not so good at. Proust is a sort of inversion of this: his form is excellent, the writing is wise and well-paced, but his content is abominably boring (social relations, petty jealousies, trivial concerns of the well-to-do).

That said the cat bled from his halved head and fell smack dead on the black shed.

there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit / there is no one who is not a hypocrit.

Assault Infancy

2009-03-25T17:07:00.000-05:00

The innovations we've achieved in violence are another unique aspect of humanity, like language. It is not just that we can organize our social units so effectively (meerkats exhibit similar clan-based combat structures) but that our technologies of violence are vast and intricate. Violence will be, the foreseeable future is violent, people will kill one another, sometimes with reasons sometimes without, sometimes in units and sometimes alone. To deny violence is to deny: nature, humanity, living organisms, evolution, power, on and on anon. Pacifism is laughable. Given a pacifist, I would give an example of their violence. Gandhi caused power structures to collapse, he facilitated warfare--provided it a reason and moral center--elsewhere even if he did not participate in it locally. Any American pacifist participates in the violence of our economy, of our government, of our ecosystem. Life feeds on life feeds on life feeds on.
The reduction of violence to physical violence is plainly false, it is a fetish promoted by the media, by idiots everywhere. On the news, we are told that people get shot, people are murdered. But mostly people do not get shot, people are not murdered: people die in car crashes, people get cancer, they get heart disease, they starve. Systemic violence, especially since most individual murders are facilitated by systems more than unique mentalities, is much greater than individual, physical violence, though that sort of violence does exist independently of systems. I do not want to act as if "the system" overdetermines each human subject: there are acts which are irreducible to society and cannot be explained by recourse to larger units, there are passionate murders which emanate from that ineffable husk which is ourselves (always plural). The media portrays both systemic and individual violences but often does not explicate where it could (or should): a horrible car accident can be caused by drunkenness, idiocy, poor roads, lack of public transportation, and a society where alcohol is a valorized escape from meaninglessness.
The two most violent acts most Americans in the last few generations will ever do are: consume energy and purchase a house, both of which are tied to systemic economic effects greater than anything inherent in either action itself and thus more morally relevant. I will not go into energy here, and I chose such a broad term so that it would encase both transportation and stationary electricity usage. But it is purchasing a house, participating in the U.S. housing bubble, which is far more interesting presently. Governments are collapsing around the globe, not many of them, but some (a penny for your thoughts, Prime Minister Topolanek) and I'm fairly certain there will be more. People are going to starve to death because of the U.S. housing market. And I am not going to place the blame solely on either the aggregate consumer or Wall Street because this issue is so fucking complicated that all you can do is sound like an ill-informed asshole when you talk about its causes (honestly, with my new-found acceptance of adverse opinions, I cannot assimilate this event into reason. Both sides MUST exaggerate greatly in order to have a case. A sort of correlate of this is that no one knows whether the bailout will work or not), so we'll move on with the explicit assumption that both networks of actors caused the economic crisis. Thus, from my starting points, it's impossible to trace the effects of an individual action to, say, the vote of no confidence in The Czech Republic, but when many individuals make purchases, and these purchases are siphoned through intricate credit infrastructures, global markets collapse, and the result is not only systemic but also very individual*: people lose their jobs, people kill each other.
A man loses his job at Bear Stearns/Merrill Lynch/Wachovia, goes home, shoots his wife and four children. This happens in Los Angeles County, where the cars are practically implanted in peoples' flesh. The media publishes this story because it is so horrid that it inspires dramatic responses—an appealing tragedy about wealth turned insane mass murder of one's loved ones—but the cause lies as much in the financial climate as in the mind of the investment banker, who has sutured his emotions to the American economy. Violence is difficult to advocate not because it is morally wrong; that's preposterous hippie bullshit from people who are better off buried alive in the middle of a forest according to their own paradigm. Violence is difficult conceptually because in society its relations to bodies and their environment are so abstracted, so networked, so staggeringly complex that connecting an action to a result becomes a dissertation. Thus I've known for a long time that to assassinate George Bush would've been a politically impotent act in the guise of the ultimate efficiency: one bullet = revolution, when in actuality one bullet = Cheney in charge and an ungodly retribution from the government, not only that but their retribution will probably have the sympathy of the public—which they worked so hard to destroy—on their side. Calculation must come before the act if it is to achieve its end: no violence is ever self-evident for society, in its cause or result.

A brief list of violences which I wholeheartedly endorse: cigarette smoking, cancer in any form, almost any disease (diseases of over-consumption, like some diabetes, some obesity, some heart diseases, are the only exceptions that come to mind), suicide, abortion, cannibalism, predator-prey relationships, certain uses of the death penalty, accidental death without significant environmental impact (a car crash, for example), World War II minus the environmental devastation, and anything in close enough proximity to something on this list. Everything here is only Good when justified by a retroactive consequentialist calculation: there are instances of each which are not justified, as in when a death deprives humanity of a Jesus-like savior who would've revolutionized social relations. Violences which I would tend to disagree with include excessive consumption and wars fought for petty reasons.

*Once again—and I can't make this point enough—it is individually justifiable actions which in aggregate lead to disastrous results, despite the usual "the USFG caused this crisis" bullshit. Said bullshit usually relies on the evidence that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac sold a trillion dollars in subprime mortgages, but those were PARTIALLY government-owned entities and there were many, many more trillions of subprime produced by private banks who, unknowingly, acted against their own and everyone else's interests by precipitating this crisis.

Acephalic Imperative

2009-03-17T19:28:00.000-05:00

We're welcome here
caregivers one & all. I brought you tapwater with
2 ice cubes, you ate up my vermilion vomit. Entice

a bear trap
/ inculcate one's will in others like Oprah. Play by
play and color commentators talking while the world

ends, while the women make the welkin ring with woeful
moans. Mona Lisa sick subtlety. A sidereal rip / suddenly

gravity reverses.
Hardware stores across the nation go bankrupt.
Largess allele.

As far as
skeptics, they're dead every second they spend in themselves.
Dulled cutlery and damp armpits. You heart it hear first

I'll sleep your insides out
You'll need no more

turmoil foiled.
Spread understanding in amphiboly
smuggle wisdom braised in contradiction

life-sized bagel
jeweled veins
forlorn shark

all our appetencys annealed
on the cusp of lust for life
on the precipice of ascesis

immolated monks / selfless priestess
bend them back into shape / meld
their shoulders to napes / slice a

thin line down their spine, the valley
that it forms, grapes and leaves,
high afternoons, dead rodents

resuscitated.

-*-*-
Essentialism means that a particular social group takes its cause to be the most important cause or that there's some inherent value found solely within their particular group. The tragedy of this is that it circumscribes the humans contained in the group: I've already mentioned that stunning sentence of Cherrie Moraga's here, but she chose to identify as female, gay, and chicana in an effort to participate in the liberation of those sects when she herself transcends all these normalizing* categories. She shares traits with many straight white males, which may seem like a weak claim, but to me (drawing on Deleuze and Guattari) the individual is inherently collective: our egos are traversed by multitudinous and contradictory desires, and the will of society is inscribed in our own will. It's always easy to draw examples from the person I know best, so I should note that my being an avid Marxist/atheist (which already has its contradictions) doesn't stop me from loving what I read of Nietzsche (who was pro-aristocracy) or Jesus, or buying Apple products and professing religious maxims for that matter.

In the midst of a truly fantastic discussion awhile ago, my neighbor Andy proffered that all an individual's actions are selfish because even if they involve sacrifice (i.e. charity or volunteer work) it is a willed sacrifice, thus the individual makes a calculation that whatever is lost (money, time) is outweighed by what's gained (often self-esteem, the ability to think of oneself as an upright citizen). But to me this argument, something I myself formulated in Gene Hackman's philosophy class back in high school, is flawed because it assumes a false idea of the individual, an individual without genesis or contradiction. To illustrate: say I am a child with a sibling. I take my sibling's toy because I want to play with it. My mother retrieves the toy and punishes me for my theft. In the future, I do not steal the toy because of the memory of retribution, thus my action is not motivated by a genuine concern for my sibling but by self-serving fear. However, is it not obvious that my sibling's desire to play with their toy and my mother's desire for us to get along and share are being inscribed in me? I am selfish but within a feedback loop, in such a way as to serve the desires of a social unit; selfishness makes no sense in a vacuum, and the same can be said of morality.

Thus the path is, as usual, somewhere between two extremes: the libertarian, ultra-individualist conception of Good, and the Marxist, ultra-collective conception of Good. The collective nature of subjectivation (the making of a psychological subject) points to the false nature of this dichotomy, but the divide is useful to demonstrate the flaws in each radical position: libertarianism cannot comprehend (or rather: will not accept, because these are generally very smart people who believe stupid things) how atomic units acting in their own best interest could result in a catastrophe for the collective; Marxism cannot comprehend how the collective acting for its best interest could result in catastrophic individuals (think of all the dystopias which decry the bland uniformity of socialism...overwrought, but poignant). Part of the message I draw from Deleuze and Guattari, and my own mental wanderings, is that the lone human being is not only an arbitrary unit to found anything on (an ethics, an ontology), but perhaps an entirely ludicrous one. Much as the critique of deontology starts by noting that an action removed from all context no longer resembles anything in this world (think of what killing means where you take location, time, murderer, and victim out of the equation), one should note that a human being removed from society is either inconceivable or conceptually worthless.

* I consider liberation movements to be normalizing because they function by constructing an ideal (female/latina/gay/insert whatever here) subject and discourage any deviations from their model. Thus one can see how feminists disparage the traditional housewives they claim to be liberating (when in fact they're happy as they are), or the radical lesbians whose definition of proper femininity is different but might be no less exclusive. Judith Butler has written extensively about feminism in this regard and how it relies on a normalizing set of gender rules, but her argument can be extended to any social movement: in my freshman dorm, there was a shy boy named Russell who was black but was much less interested in dancing and basketball than doing his homework and going to bed by 10. I may have made this up, but I believe he once told me that he felt pressured to perform in a certain manner because of his race, and this pressure can come as much from internally-enforced stereotypes as external ones.

Aggregate, Of The

2009-03-11T14:48:00.000-05:00

the two biggest moral tenants that must be attacked are

1) death is always bad / longevity is always good
and
2) the right to the pursuit of happiness.
These are perfectly reasonable in isolation, but in aggregate they ensure our ultimate demise, thus undermining their own premises: more life now will only lead to an eventual Malthusian Crunch (Big Death) and unhindered happiness now will only lead to massive suffering later when the resources we raped to satisfy our urges become scarce.
Note that Kant is useless: his categorical imperative, because of its isolated and universal character, is unable to understand actions that lead to antithetical outcomes in aggregate. Thus, vis-à-vis these 2 tenants, one would conclude that everyone should have a right to live as long and as happily as possibly, when in actuality the realization of such a system would be disastrous and make longevity and happiness for anyone impossible. I’ve become a moralist and the categorical imperative, because it is so reasonable sounding while at once being completely counterproductive, is the first system that must be overcome. Christianity is less troublesome because it’s so obviously arbitrary, it doesn’t present itself as deduced through reason but as handed down on stone tablets, which makes it a priori ridiculous. But ridiculousness never prevented anything from being persuasive, and I do tend to think that, in the final analysis, whatever axioms you derive your tenants from must be just as arbitrarily arrived at.

Watchmen

wasn't that good, but at least it was morally provocative. There was no Star Wars idiocy, obviously-Good versus obviously-Evil when in the present day it becomes increasingly impossible to certify anything as definitely either. In fact—as far as I can tell—this was a comic book movie without any bad guys. The bad guy was society in aggregate, the sociopolitical relations that had come to dominate this hypothetical history (which, other than the escalated nature of the Cold War, is largely our own). So in the end I absolutely agree with Adrian’s actions; nothing else could be done. And I am, for once, elated that a movie could suggest such a morality, though it’s not that entertaining. Perhaps my larval, neo-Malthusian/Marxist movement can gain some cultural traction now.

Natural Born Killers

is a far better movie but much less successful morally. One can draw from it the message that serial killers, essentially the pathological as a class, should not be hastily judged and have as good a justification for their murdering as others do for their living (and are equally guilty, a point the film does make explicitly). But the problem is precisely this equivalence: the pathological are just as guilty as the supposedly non-pathological populace. The killer does not transcend society; the killer is an element in society and fulfills a role like any other, a role of entertainment and ordering. Entertainment because people are fascinated with killers; ordering because they encourage people to run into the welcoming arms of the police and proper morality. The inextricable intertwining between the media and the killers, both in the film and in our society, indicates as much: if the killer class really were objectionable to society, media coverage would be suppressed, not encouraged.
So how can one overcome the logical contradiction that killers want to kill the populace as individuals and yet they’re not really destructive to society as a whole? Because killers are, firstly, individuals themselves: there’s no organization amongst them, there’s no politics to their actions and the overthrow of society is an expressly political action. The killer is simply a hedonist like everyone else, and Natural Born Killers is perhaps most brilliant because it is so visually indulgent, so incredibly entertaining and over-the-top. The Revolution will likely be boring and collective; the killer is entertaining and singular.

NEXT TIME ON TALK SHOW HOST: an anti-essentialism rant. I’m truly sick of blacks, Muslims, Marxists, Christians, gays, Democrats, etc… using community as an exclusive device and creating incestuous cultures wherein the only things of value come from similar-minded folk. If the inherent antagonism of cultural groups is to be managed, it will not be through segregation and elitism, it will not be through exploring the realms of one’s own group without investigating the roles and relations your groups form with others.

Analeptic Laxatives

2009-02-27T15:47:00.000-06:00

::SOLVE::

- sixth sensual - opulence embodied -
There are people who own private jets
there are pawns inside of chess sets.
- everything thinks - enter genesis -
A hiring frost to chill excess skill in this
winter of our stunted growth. Speed
vs. slowness :: recalibration vs. lust.
Can is nothing next to the moral must.
- oral fluff - or lonely lucubrations -
The stuff of scalps and generations
baldness gene vicarious causation.
- cheap rhymes - make the welkin ring -
Make the magic sing evilly analeptic
iff harmful hectic iff a human humidifier
could come to desiccation's dissertation
could scalp your very synderesis as is.

/...Falun Gong is fucked.../

::COAGULA::

So stick to your sudoku
and leave the harvest to us
uncommon phenomenon best left
uninvestigated. I could fill a truck
with world leaders dumb as fuck
I could fill a truck with all you want to change but won't
assisted suicides / green burials / cigarette taxes.
The TOXIC MEGACOLON cannot be left unbound
cannot suffer from commitment or marriage
to the material realm, the corporeal copse.
It will take millions of years to recover the Earth's surface
it will take billions of deaths to let us live with purpose.
The Knights Templar had it right: sodomy and spitting
on the cross / the less love the less loss. No holds barred
no arms amputated. Delve into this dementia
like an unclorinated pool / in the words of

Manuel DeLanda, we forget that even the most rigid of hierarchies have a meshwork component / inject a FALSE UNITY into structures that are, at base, heterogeneous: democratic States are not actors with a singular purpose involving the oppression of various minorities because they are composed of a (supposedly representative) sample of the population over which they reside. There are black police and gay senators in America. Similarly, "Capitalists" are not a coherent group. They don't hold an annual meeting where they decide how to exploit the proletariat this year. In fact, it is easy enough to say that capitalists expend far more energy in competition amongst themselves than in battling socialists, unions, and egalitarian legislation; the proletariat oppress themselves so efficiently that trying to improve upon the status quo is near futile.

Rich Text Format

HURT / ME NOT WEANED OFF SPLEEN COUGH / PUKE
AND DID I MENTION TOXIC FUCKING MEGACOLON?!?
HOW COULD YOU POSSIBLY FEEL ABOUT THAT -> ->
HARTMARX HAS FILED FOR BANKRUPTCY / WHERE'LL
YOU VARNISH YOUR VANITY NOW? UPON WHOSE
SHAMPOOED SKULL WILL YOU SHARPEN YOUR
CYNICISM NOW? / MAELSTORM VERSUS
FEMAELSTROM / __ vs. || - PAIRED
OFF LIKE LOVERS / WELDED TO
WEALTH / KNIGHTS TEMPLAR
VERSUS AMERICAN IDOL
CONTESTANTS / AS THE
SEPSIS SETS IN / AS
YR PRECIOUS IRA
INCINERATES /
AS YOU WRITE
MY # DOWN /
AS THE EARTH
UNDOES US /
AS IF IT'S AS IS
/ AS ASPIRIN AND ASPIRATION TAKE US WHERE THEY WILL...

Art And/Or Opium

2009-02-19T18:13:00.000-06:00

What’s More

Central conceit of other Eric is
artistic integrity, Tom Waits, &
wine out of Dixie cups. Stellar
stasis at heart of a black hole

love for a person you’ve never met
fall fallen down the fault mine. Set
a course and sabotage yourself
as soon as boredom occurs. E

Coli from Jack in the Box burgers.

Communists Under Capitalist Kingdoms Enjoying Despair

Wilt grabs a rebound and hesitates frantically
like he just really needs to scratch his nuts
but has to pass the ball first. Theothanatos
if ever there was and then some / then

slums. The fat and dreaded
homeless man who lives in Jack London Square. He sits all day completely immovable, lost in his axioms, at the center of a sphere of socially unacceptable stench. Someone hands him leftovers in Styrofoam containers. On the one hand he’s out there in the unGoogleable earth of everyday is an orphan, on the other he’s just as lost. Sympathy can only extend so much before it snaps. And I can only hope he loved me more than the litigation that ensued. And I will take him to work with me one day, and I will force him to witness the whims of capital

soap

imbued with causality

knife

optimal as could become.

I know why the caged bird sings
and it's not cuz 'is IRA is insulated
and it's not cuz the television told 'im so.
I fight evil with evil

I ask only for entertainment from my artwork
and suffer only from boredom and its obituary
tone / I have all the right ideas and none
of the mass marketing needed to cull culture

to turn these dogmas into weapons
to turn these weapons into experiments
to prolongate or propagate

to empower or perish.

I refuse to apologize for the way I feel.

I refuse to give up on fascism just yet
when it's been raining but no one's wet
I refuse to lend longevity a hand
better dead than crippled /

better expired than extinct
and I refuse to apologize for the way I think.

Access To The In-Itself

2009-02-11T15:07:00.000-06:00

I finally got around to reading the January issue of Poetry, a publication which seems to bore me more and more with each issue. As usual, the poem that moved me the most in this issue moved me in a negative way. The last 3 stanzas of "The First Line is the Deepest" by Kim Addonizio are

Why does one month have to be the cruelest,
can't they all be equally cruel? I have seen the best

gamers of your generation, joysticking their M1 tanks through
the sewage-filled streets. Whose

world is this I think I know.

I had a visceral reaction to that and wrote some very angry, all-caps rants in the margins of the page. If you don't recognize the 2 adjacent, and atrocious, allusions, then you're a better person than I. I can only hope the last line is yet another allusion, yet one which I don't recognize.

A) Stealing: allusions smuggle meaning into a text without the corresponding literary work by the author, it enables someone to capture larger ideas and arguments without ever establishing them properly. Thus someone who doesn't recognize these lines will read them on a surface level (as if one could ever read poetry on its "surface") and they'll be less potent; some of the best allusions make for the worst lines, and, ironically, The Waste Land is an excellent example of this: Eliot just smashes in lines from other writers (the Parsifal line is particularly egregious) wherever he pleases and they feel incongruent and rhythm-crushing, even after you've read the footnotes and figured out what's up.
B) Pretension: it's one thing to be arrogant (that I'll defend because I am arrogant) but being pretentious is like diet arrogance. It's more of a weakness because you appear unable to lower yourself to someone else's level, even if only to smash their ideas to bits. There's this feeling that either "you must've read X and Y" or "you MUST read X and Y" in order to understand the poem and the end result of this is that a relatively small work (once again, The Waste Land is an excellent example) might necessitate a massive reading list to reach its base sources, as opposed to it simply building its base sources right in front of your eyes. Furthermore, when you allude to a work full of allusions, the process of getting to the base becomes exponentially inflated.
C) Incest: allusion segregates a work from the people at large, it produces discourses where only particular types of people (i.e. poets) are able to participate or even grasp the full extent of the significations. Rather than produce new word-formations, allusion encourages the recycling of your favorite old ones, as if you are unable to attain their expressivity by yourself. This is largely my problem with the current state of philosophy, wherein one can toss around names and theories in such a way as to not only exclude all but the hyper-literate from the dialogue but also to fail to engage the core of the ideas you're so brazenly furnishing, i.e. someone talking about Kant usually refers to the results of his ideas ("people are denied acces to the in-itself," the categorical imperative) without answering the larger analyses which lead to those results (and I'm certainly guilty of such things, as I've pointed out before, seeing as I haven't read a fucking thing by Kant and hopefully never will).

I could make a further argument that the rise of allusions corresponds to the loss of originality in our society, to the rise of simulation. Just as there is no "original text" (a formulation of Nietzsche's, I believe) from which all others are derived, there is no final base to the allusion; the allusion sends us further down the spiral which almost always traverses The Bible or some similarly archaic idiocy which could not be more irrelevant to the matter at hand. Allusion makes a fraud of literature and signification itself. The reason why I find this so repulsive is because The Bible signifies the heighth of alienation to me: rather than realize the meaning of our lives here in our lived actions on Earth, we outsource EVERTHING (morality, the spirit, ontology, God) to a definitively unattainable (whilst alive) elsewhere. Allusion willingly participates in this process, it defers to our "wiser" elders, it removes the presence of meaning (and to answer any of you Deconstructionists out there: even if meaning is never 100% present, there are certainly degrees of presence and my argument is that allusions reduce the intensity of a presence), and it does so optionally. Because we don't have to be alienated, we can construct our own meaning every day, we can build a morality, an artistic expression, even a God, and we can do it right now and right here. I, for one, am at least trying where others are content to recycle the efforts of their predescessors. But I have no predescessor. And someday someone will saunter itself out of my life, but that day is not today and never will be today.

P.S. The rest of the poem is pretty good and the first line is pretty damn deep.

All That Ails Us Eliminated

2009-01-31T00:27:00.001-06:00

Seven Killed in Arizona bush crash
& they give me these gifts for my
intelligence. Many made hungry w/
wants reckless. Broke ghosts and
their bustop conversations avec tu.

Active Indifference

2009-01-28T13:45:00.000-06:00

My roommate does not do the dishes. He is indifferent to the accumulation of dirty dishes in the sink, and should we run completely out of clean cookware, he will simply wash the one pot and one bowl he needs to eat whatever he wants to eat, use them, and place them back in the sink. I, however, have the disease of order (at least in this instance) instilled in me, so I end up doing all the dishes because I want to avoid the aforementioned accumulation. So essentially Endler wins because he cares less. The minor annoyance of this fact is less disturbing to me than the general structure, the fact that oftentimes those who are indifferent benefit from it and are empowered as such. But lately I've come to recognize that, dishes aside, there are many realms where my own indifference empowers me: the most pertinent example in my mental ecology, as evidenced by the recent philosophical trend in Talk Show Host, is in my relative indifference towards logical rigour in argumentation. In my engagements with many thinkers, I am able to overcome their in-depth analysis simply because I don't care all that much about logic itself; it's the results of arguments and ideas, the valuations they promote, that are important to me. Thus I can disregard a critic like Baudrillard, whose thorough and convincing nihilism is expressly problematic for both political progress as well as artistic expression, because I'm ultimately uninterested in a society of simulacra.

The larger point here is that indifference, and its stronger cousin ignorance, can be productive tools, not just for philosophy, but in numerous quotidian instances. I am able to create my values, ideas, and expressions largely by ignoring that which I perceive as irrelevant and circumventing that which is inconvenient. These operations are somewhat limited, of course. Capitalism, for instance, is very inconvenient for me, but nonetheless I refuse to remain indifferent to its operations (unlike a number of my progressive-minded friends, who try to change the system from within, who undoubtedly believe in the dubios refrains of "business ethics") out of a sense that capitalism can feed off indifference as easily as it does resistance (think of the markets for Marxist texts). Nonetheless, many major concerns for your average person are functionally irrelevant for me: avoiding death, having a soul and the moral burden that might come with that, accomplishing anything, making money, going to the dentist, showering regularly, and, well, yougetthepoint.

The Panpsychiatrist Analyzes The Depressed Rock

You need. But not just now. Ever. A cancelled term inhibits articulation; your self is a snake wrapped around an iron pole, a symbol that you enter into. Grass. Rain. I refuse to read books by ascetics. A delve into opioids can undo so much self as to intuit togetherness from a worm's puke, from an air pocket filled in with water. Glasnost now. Percocet can calm convictions that you weren't meant to make. Can you really obviate the violence of revolution? Geriatric actors. Can you just justify yourself for a fucking second? Drop drop it like you're genetically predisposed to doing so. I can exclude the evils of scion with my words, whether lucid or ludic. Be them too perfect or brewed broken? Be them silent or spoken. What ineliminable opprobrium lurks in this love of life? Vitiated virgins and situated surgeons. You can't just cut out cancers and expect the rest to return to normal, lay claim to an eidetic understanding of all that hitherto happened. Triple overitme at Oracle. The Warriors will win on open jumpers and Turiaf blocks. Sense will circumvent that stream yet. You can't cut Kant out of the history of philosophy so easily.

See she exudes a certain sensitivity. Waves and their constituent currents. Glass seagulls succumb to overgrown grass. A plural pared down to the this: paranoia explains all while sanity can't explain a single thing. Footsteps of overhead and overweight neighbors. Death metal drone through the ceiling. I'm a brief crease in perversion and an easy mistake to make. Christian love as opposed to its actualization in innumerable idiocies. A feminist claims patriachy is the origin of capitalism, a Marxist claims capitalism is the origin of racism, a black preacher participates in Oakland's Oscar Grant riots: we no longer know how to apply power. Laicize yourself or suffer from the sodden soul of an organism denied the health of death (renewall). Civilization is not so much the invincible hegemony of exploitative systems as the perpetual self-sebotage, analysis paralysis, and essentialist bickering of the Left. Negentropy from now until forever. Seizing power is as simple as pulling a trigger, it is taking responsibility for the violence and radicality of one's actions that daunts: Marxists are unable to accept that most working class people are not only aware of their plight but actively endorse it because they share in the aspirational values of America (lottery tickets, anything on television), similarly feminists can't accept that many women ascribe to patriarchal values (Islamic women, for instance), and blacks to values that reify racist relations (rap music provides plenty of examples). But the crucial point is that these people are not under illusions, they actually prefer life as it is to some alien utopia, they actually vote for Democrats or Republicans and believe in the difference between them. She's a slow sinking into dermatitis and its aftermath. Buccal smear.

Anaphora Forums and their Pellucid Politics

2009-01-22T13:11:00.000-06:00

"It does not love. It wants out. Five out of six, seven out of eight. The temperaments of cushioned seats at varying degrees of recline. Fossil fuels forever. The fate of progress is in itself. Chances are good that civilization (i.e. language and technology, extensivity and its intricate networks) has always already occurred on Earth, but is periodically erased, either from within (pollution, nuclear weapons, immunodeficiencies developed in response to civilization's attempt to eradicate disease, Ted Haggard) or without (asteroids, aliens, & anamnesia, oh my!). There are ways in which I am the final judgment, more so than the rapture could ever be."

Philosophy is too much juggling of terms, playing with other people's words. Literature falls into this trap with the proliferation of allusions in modernism, but for the most part it remains about creating word-clusters, inventive arrangements, new expressions. If Deleuze thought philosophy's job was to "create concepts," it does so at a significantly constipated pace relative to avant garde art. This is most notable in that nearly all philosophers come up through the academic ranks (please provide a counterexample to this...DeLanda? Anyone?) and are trained in an academic writing which functions through textual observation and encourages such mind-sodomizing essay titles as "The Logic of Anal Sex in Hegel's Phenomenology of Our Inherent Fuckedness: Silent Inbred Signs and/or the Material Futurity of the Future Materialism"; you pick a book, you analyze it using other books, because you're incapable otherwise. If art is creative production, philosophy is analytical recycling. Literature lacks a similarly singular point of genesis; you could pick another novel, an experience, or even start with your refusal to select anything at all (Beckett). You can write philosophy in third-person narration or you can collect transcripts of conversations at the 12th and Broadway bus stop in Oakland; more importantly, you can collide the two. Even the best philosopher, the one whose rhetoric is more potent than their logic (Baudrillard, Nietzsche, Žižek) constantly refers to others and their ideas, they ensure the incestuous cycle will continue its reign indefinitely. I, for one, have already failed herein. But oneday I will write a book that refuses to allude to, reference, or analyze anything previously written, not because I am hysterically searching for singular, non-collectively-constructed meaning, but because I am already inundated with such and want to add ideas nominally my own atop the dilapidated heap, like taking a shit on top of your college transcripts.

This is a great example of over-referential philosophy, though—to be fair—Žižek is one of the least egregious philosophers because of his commitment to analyzing contemporary culture. Hopefully—and this is undoubtedly overestimating my readership, which may or may not exist—someone who knows nothing of philosophy will glance at this and recognize it as nothing but hyper-literate gossip. What value, within or without philosophy, is there to organizing its history into the trinities Spinoza-Kant-Hegel/Deleuze-Derrida-Lacan? Endler and I have had conversations recently about how one must narritivize a sport in order to derive meaning from it, otherwise it becomes an infinite sequence without recourse to an overarching term which explains the significance of the sequence: a win only adds to a team's record, a record only helps to lead to a championship, the championship is erased each year and the cycle begun again. Perhaps philosophy, as practiced by academia, has a similar need: without a narritivization of its history and society, philosophy becomes an infinite sequence of ideas and thinkers whose incestuous interrelations ensure their ultimate irrelevance, both internal and external to the discourse.

If Need Be

Vocal revolt
anguish intuition

the charred
carbon footprint of my future will be infinitesimal.

Immense jargon
won't elude elision
and can't connote
convincingly. Real

life, enlightened
suffering. The psychotherapeutic sessions I sat in on

sat in on me as well.
we as people / we as weather
allow heal

allow feet

to what extent

ends extension. Often I'm anything
other than that, aleatory as a
life lived in valence

with what's immanence or its opposite.

Adolf Merckle Is Dead

2009-01-07T10:41:00.000-06:00

94th on Forbes no more
wormfood from ever on.

Dressed for Distress

In this month's O magazine, I talk all about how I fell off the wagon last year, so starting—that's one of me and my fat self and my skinny self on the cover—so starting now, I want all of us to make ourselves a priority—I talk a lot about that in the magazine—and making 2009 the year to love yourself. Before the break, I asked all of you to write down the answer to this question: "Why are you worthy of getting healthy this year?" Uh, one of the things I wrote was "I recognize I was created healthy, strong, and vital, and so it, it's the fulfillment of my creation because health is the foundation for all other good things, good health is the foundation for all other good things." So I understand this intellectually, it's just acting on it.
-Oprah Winfrey, 1/6/2009

This inspired a lot of disgust in me: equating "loving yourself" with health, "good health is the foundation for all other good things" (an idiotic statement...a healthy terrorist isn't good, at least not according to Oprah's paradigm), "fulfillment of my creation" which has a decidedly religious bent to it, and then the skinny=healthy assumption that mainstream "feminists" to this day continue to make. I'm going to go easy on Oprah though; her arguments are about as nuanced as can be given her audience, and probably seem like common sense to 99% of the populace and/or anyone who hasn't read Birth of the Clinic. The aggregate irresponsibility of health is something that the masses are incapable of understanding "intellectually". YOU NEED TO DIE SOONER. There is no longer a reason for people to have healthy bodies; office jobs require fingers and eyes / professional athletes as hyperreal hunter-gatherers. But there are positive aspects to my unhealthy iconoclasm, some present in this quote: Oprah, as many Americans are, is still easily persuaded by food and laziness. And for once action is on my side; all my other political beliefs suffer from this same dichotomy of intellectual understanding and inaction, but unhealthiness is inverted along those axes.

Unethical Allotment: Capitalism turns purchasing power into policy power, it organically matches private demand with social supply. But demand is measured in terms of capital and not the number of needy humans, thus 1,000,000 starving Kenyans who want rice&beans < 100 American execs who want private jets.

The problem of historical/spatial scale: "zoomed out" enough, the actions of the human species and in particular myself as but a single member are infinestimal on scales of both time and space in a—for all intents and purposes—infinitely large and unending ontic. On the other hand, when fully "zoomed in" existence is random and amoral; how to assign values to quarks & leptons or electrons & protons? How to narrativize their movements and interrelations? Scale is less of a problem than an obvious beginning: one must focus such that human agency is visible and its effects meaningful. This metric best suits our theoretical tools, ennables the most debate, is the most emotionally relevant. Any other zoom lens can be translated back into this frame by the effects it has on the subject utilizing it; thus someone who ascribes to the ethics of electrons might be, on a human scale, a force for randomness, disorder, orbit around the Other (proton = order, State, Big Other), et cetera.

Annectent Nimrod Toward the Ubermensch

2008-12-24T09:50:00.000-06:00

yo
yo
your isotope is broke homes
foreclosed poems bitches w/
choked biomes' dried bones.

! been in that
desert

chocked
sputum

drunk wagers
disputed in the dilation of dawn
Earth off axis and
also sound. The

talk of some
day one let
of no. The

results vary
anneal or not.
But one's

carried
along a quiet acquiescence / grows brisk
if not jovial

take with two forties and fortune cookies
just enough cash for cigarettes and shit.

*\*/*

A Deleuzian Argument for Obama

When Obama talks about the “audacity to hope,” about “a change we can believe in,” he is using a rhetoric of change that lacks specific content: To hope for what? To change what?--Slavoj Žižek, "The Audacity of Rhetoric"

so we deterritorialize our politics and reterritorialize on the gradient of change itself, make the Left a movement pushing in a direction, always forcing the spectrum rather than demanding that immediate singularities be changed (what does Prop 8 matter if people in society at large are okay with the gay? what do larger chicken coups achieve when we don't even realize we're in them?) and this would be a party I could back despite disagreements over particulars. This is a non-essentialist argument; the Left is a state of mind and while our ideologies are often conflicting (I experienced the racism of the Women's Movement, the elitism of the Gay and Lesbian Movement, the homophobia and sexism of the Chicano Movement, and the benign cultural imperialism of the Latin American Solidarity Movement.--Cherríe Moraga, The Last Generation) we all need popular opinion to be shifted along the same axis before any of our separate movements can gain traction and effectuate social change.

*/*\*

False Cognate

dose that mean that
clarion call came too
late? Stopgap can't
counter cataracts
in the iris of our

unending attrition
entropy's always.
Assured of exit
rot or otherwise

renewal waiting in the wings
of passenger planes, drunken mothers
worrisome as ever.

Joblessness in excelsius deo
come canvassing to our door
despite monsoon season, des
-pite perestroika struck each

innocent abroad. American canopeners
can't close off doubt, cordon up the fraudulent
arguments of our founding fathers
contaminating the Constitution.

Save your rights
for the weak. I just need
drugs and some more sleep

aspirin cereal and additives in
ideation, elaborate or mystic
sugary insistence. In the inside
of instances denied, repression

repressed. You could unravel
like Bjork
or any one of my friends on mushrooms.

You could cut loose from whatever chains you are even now unwilling to lose.

The financial ones they strike because commerce brings disparate people together, it cuts across conventional national and regional boundaries. Trade connects. But also they strike airports, railway stations, hotels, markets, department stores. Why not unremarkable residential areas? Because residential areas are figured out -- there is a stability of our knowledge about them. When people are at such places, they are leading settled and somewhat ordered lives. Spectacular Terrorists strike at places of transience. These are places with some or other element of movement and change. No one lives in a hotel or a railway station or an airport. In these place, people are mixed up, their bodies and identities are in motion, this multiplicity is anathema to the fundamentalists. Strategically, it is easier to create chaos at such incompletely stable locations, but it is also a symbolic lashing out against mixing, against travel, against mobile identities.--Nitasha Kaul, "Who Carries Out Spectacular Acts of Terrorism and Why?" @ http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=602

Terrorism is hardly a disaster; 173 people died in Mumbai, 308 were injured. In any metric other than media appeal, car accidents are more of a disaster. A year's worth of car accidents in the US (40,000+ people) is far worse than another 9/11. The reason why the media focuses on terrorism is not merely that the acts themselves are spectacular (the Mumbai footage was pretty boring, after all) but that it's easy to handle with their tools: X are the attackers, Y are the innocents, those poor civilians, those crazy fundamentalists, look at all this hatred&death isn't that amazing? Car accidents are explainable in some instances (X was drunk, Y merged without blinker) but as a set they're random; they require reading Virilio before comprehension, or at least a sociology of some sort.
Terrorism creates such backlash (in the populace as well as policy) that it seems destined to irrelevance; the only way They could possibly "win" their cause is if leaders continue to react in such a way as to recruit more terrorists (Bush). As it is, terrorism strikes me as a desperate measure, an attempt at simplification in a complex world: the easy antagonisms of old are lost or losing (Christian/Muslim and many other ethnic and national divisions swept away by globalization), one turns to violence almost like a childish tantrum, a fit of undirected death because we can no longer distinguish our enemies from our friends.

Auratic As Evil Itself

2008-12-17T16:21:00.000-06:00

Parataxis can hide so much emptiness / also
wreak order on otherwise anarchic dominions
epicene everyone and their flaccid libidos /
cuz sex can't create karma / cuz sex ain't
indulgence demise or numinous flux illiminal

fuck hymnals, we want rap / be it blanched or black
to bestow havoc / thread a threnodial rhythm thru
whack aesthetics like mental laxatives loosening
those habits and prejudices that compose you

evil artifice above

the flows you know are true but can't let loose
from sheetrock cranium / Big Bird's yellow dick
decayed by death, dirge unworthy. Eaten by
beetles and returned to the Earth / sleeping with

a member of another species and the morality of
that act. In arrears or on the cusp of. Rent control
can't increase median incomes, can't redistribute
from the myopic executives to the mindless
consumers that prop them up by their penises.

---on the one hand
my vocabulary is such that I routinely use words not recognized by spellcheckers. But being articulate is a means to destroy one's thoughts, finalizing and annihiliating; the push of impossible expression disappears / the prime mover lapses into satisfaction, that most devastating of states which I am even now ever encroached upon always.---on the other

weird will overcome
the constant coronach

the colossal carnage of a world where
the land is like death metal album covers:
decapitated corpses, burning crosses, blood

outside of its body. It's easy enough to make myself into an equation: enter Earth's atmosphere, coffee, hamburger, Wikipedia pages & exit processed breath, piss, shit, poetry. Those of you who chew through new truths with bluetooths do this to tattooed youths imbued with Zeus spoof spirits.

a problem with Baudrillard's formulation that reality is dead/unreachable is that he constructs an absolute statement from relative evidence: when he says "we", he means the West, and he constantly references technology & certain events as not merely symptomatic of but actually causal in the disappearance of the Real. Therefore reality does exist somewhere--in the mountains of Tibet, in the hamstrings of hermits anywhere--and it does not seem a stretch to extend this back into the locus of the hyperreal: reality is everywhere because nowhere is fully Western, completely assimilated into simulation. Even the epitome of the Baudrillian subject (envision someone who spends every waking hour on the interweb, makes a living selling World of Warcraft artifacts and then converting the game's currency to real world capital) must have some vestige of premodern reality inside, in their upbringing, in their encounters with those who are untouched by simulations (even such a person possesses a conception of hermits and how they could exist untainted by technology, thus maintaining a reality principal somewhere in their consciousness even if this position is ignored/villified/mocked). In any case, JB uses numerous reference points to language and structures of civilization which are, at base, historical: if humanity were to revert to a primitive state, say post-nuclear-apocalypse-or-what, his formulations become useless except as a warning against following the same course as our civilization has, a trait shared with every other remotely accurate criticism. True nihilism needs nothing to prove that there is nothing and finds its evidence everywhere (i.e. nØwhere).
This is an amateur and imperfect reading, but the larger point is that every innovator overestimates the worth of their creation. Thus Marxists interpret all evils as the work of capital, thus psychoanalysts attribute every action to unconscious urges (*cough* Zizek *cough*), thus Foucauldians (why is this not Foucaultian?) use biopower as an all-encompassing explanation, et cetera. These theories become simple panaceas whose use precludes the sort of rigorous analysis which was used in their initial articulations. To some extent this is healthy; it would be tiresome to read critics who constantly decry the limits of their analysis, who situate it so specifically as to make it useless elsewhere. But it also speaks to the dogmatism of all followers, those who apply a new idea so indiscriminately as to abolish its usefulness in universality, and even the inventor (JB) can kill their own theory this way.

New York is taxing soft drinks now, two dollar Coke in a city where cigarettes are eight dollars a pack. Biopower is only a useful concept for me when applied to legislating health as such: no one has any perspective, we blindly follow lengthened longevity and a dearth of disease to our own extinction. Few things could be as great for me, politically and practically, as banning cigarette taxation and incinerating all extant hospitals. I am in no way exaggerating.

I strongly dislike Judith Butler for reasons that are probably mere masks for a suppressed sexism. Some quotes from "Irrational Exuberance", an essay whose topic should be made obvious quite quickly:
--"The election of Barack Obama is historically significant in ways that are yet to be gauged, but it is not, and cannot be, a redemption, and if we subscribe to the heightened modes of identification that he proposes ("we are all united") or that we propose ("he is one of us"), we risk believing that this political moment can overcome the antagonisms that are constitutive of political life, especially political life in these times."
There is nothing specific to "these times" that makes us more constitutively antagonistic. Not only is this a blatant conflation of universal with particular, something Butler is typically bitchy (I'm going to use that word without fear of retribution) about, but any modern antagonism (Gay-Christian, Life-Choice, War-Peace, Right-Left) is not only at least 50 years old, but in most instances timeless (Life-Choice is the only one of these I would consider temporal, due to reliance on abortive technology). At its base though, I like this quote and agree with its content.
--"In other words, we are faced with new configurations of political belief that make it possible to hold apparently discrepant views at the same time: someone can, for instance, disagree with Obama on certain issues, but still have voted for him."
Once again, there's nothing fucking new about this! It's called democracy. I, for one, have never encountered another human being, much less someone who's on the American ballot, who share each and every one of my political beliefs. Let me again state my disagreements with Obama: American hegemony, the existence of god and utility of Christian morality, capitalism, health care reform. That's a fairly huge portion of the political spectrum, and yet Obama is still the candidate I've been most aligned with in my short lifespan, with Jimmy Carter probably being the only other president this century that can even come close.
--"Fulfilling that representative-function, he is at once black and not-black (some say "not black enough" and others say "too black"), and, as a result, he can appeal to voters who not only have no way of resolving their ambivalence on this issue, but do not want one."
Retardation makes interpreting this difficult (um, one what, bitch?), but I think what Judy's trying to say is "I have been sodomized in my nasal passage with a screwdriver." But seriously, I think racial ambiguity is key here, and in that way I'd rather have Obama specifically than someone who is definitively black because I think ambivalence is dangerous in a world where racism still exists, but ambiguity opens up multifarious potentialities. For instance, charges of racism can be effectively leveled at whoever votes for or against Obama because he's black, and that's a beneficial situation if we really want racial equality and not mere affirmative action forever.
--"If there are avowed racists who have said, "I know that he is a Muslim and a terrorist, but I will vote for him anyway," there are surely also people on the left who say, "I know that he has sold out gay rights and Palestine, but he is still our redemption." I know very well, but still: this is the classic formulation of disavowal. Through what means do we sustain and mask conflicting beliefs of this sort? And at what political cost?"
More conflation of particular and universal. As a function of the impossibility of perfect representative government, of course Obama will dissatisfy everyone in some way (the phrase "perfection is fiction" pretty much nullifies this entire article) and "disavowal", "mask"s, and "conflicting beliefs" are constitutive of people as such. Maybe not academics like Butler who have the potent rhetoric to articulate internally consistent paradigms (which, of course, will always contradict her actions: Butler does little to effectuate the gender revolution she theorizes, including her conspicuous lack of campaigning against Prop 8, and she's hardly anti-capitalist in a noticeable way), but I've never met anyone who can fully justify their beliefs. The contradictions inherent in both major party platforms are indicative of this. For instance, capitalism (economic conservatism) erodes and contradicts Christianity (social conservatism) and the democratic efforts at health care contradict environmentalism, which must advocate human death to formulate a consistent politics. There's much more where that came from. Logic is flawed in itself. Also, this article is supposed to be about Obama letting us down; why anyone voted for him is utterly irrelevant.
--Also, she repeatedly notes that Obama is not pro-gay, but he did say gays are equal immediately after winning the election. Maybe that's not an explicit advocacy of gay marriage, but I'm going to assume he does support it and if he hasn't said so it's because of practical party concerns ("In what ways will his actions be constrained by party politics, economic interests, and state power; in what ways have they been compromised already?" good one, Judy).
--The end conclusion here is "We will doubtless agree and disagree with various actions he takes and fails to take. But if the initial expectation is that he is and will be "redemption" itself, then we will punish him mercilessly when he fails us" which seems obvious from the start. Seriously, I figured this out about eight months ago.
--She does end on a nice note, with a recommendation of policies to be implemented ASAP (close Guantanamo, end the Iraq war) that I think we can all agree with. It's very refreshing to see a theorist refer to real world actions. But this essay is making the blog rounds because it's written by one of the most overrated academics of the last few decades, not because it has any worthwhile content. Bitch.
--I'm missing the point. I repeatedly accuse Butler of telling us what we either already know or are incapable or accepting, but that is the point of this essay: it's not formulating theories, it is merely reminding us of how politics work, bringing us back down to Earth. Overall, I should be happy with an article that is not a theorization but a reminder accompanied by pratical policy recommendations. This is why I think I dislike Butler totally irrationally, though perhaps more for her diction than gender.

Sum fin / dumb sin / dim sum suckers.

Arbiter of Anuses Everywhere

2008-12-03T16:35:00.000-06:00

that blind spot in your body
that rueful sphincter / inverted iris...

Anyone who shits is
accomplice to an injustice the enormity of New York City, bilious boroughs and all. White grout 'round gray tile as if to stratify the very air itself, the volatilized traces of chemical compounds which trigger odor. And I don't mind the smell of my own. And I don't want to rub the beautiful in shit, blood, and cum; that would be too easy, it would do a disservice. We won't reify the dichotomy via deliberate obfuscation. We won't eat at McDonald's because they brought back the Monopoly sweepstakes, one cancerous carrot at the end of our rope carrying an undetectable viral load. Lavish noose for my friend Fortuity. I say it like I see it and I see it structured sound as Transamerica Tower hierarch happenings: comfort in isolation, ignorance of waste. The banality of evil irrupting in on everywhere you can call a restroom. The dyslexic sex of supermodels and vagabonds / faggot blonds (disclaimer: I'm extremely pro-gay, I just really like this rhyme). Loathe to fertilize. Gasp gulp and gurgle pride. Tape a tragedy to your rectum. Silence a stellar parallax
with reversion to the mean / a perversion of the cream of crops, dreams of cops, the unnecessary infrastructure, the adjudicated adolescents, juvenile justice of Jesuits and their entire arsenal of tactics cabalistic. Impaired as imps. I fuck their virgin minds with the wooden handle of an old toilet plunger. I live in a lonely corner of Colorado, a front lawn I can piss on and watch redeem / no purchase necessary (more often than not / more coffin than cot). Tampons and test tubes cuz I've been doing biome blood work, I've been tampering with the possible. They're astonished as people in the presence of papal aliens. They claim a cure for caricature is in the arch of cumulus clouds but I'm better than benign and it's nothing but salt sprinkled by government helicopters / a set of severed arms atrophy in the cool calm of evening. I'm a fecal particulate pariah and don't discard plum seeds like in Ulysses. Scum breathes. Septic tank effluents emote more than most
refrigerator moms
as well as
weak priests and their pulverent pontifications. Those ring true blight precursor / whether whispered or written, unenamored or smitten.

Fatal/Lucid

Does anyone else have these sudden impulses to act in the most dangerous way currently available? I'm spreading mayonnaise on a sandwich and I stab my nearby father with the steak knife. I'm talking to my roommate and plant a wet kiss on his lips. I'm driving and I accelerate until I hit a concrete tenement. These paroxysms happen to me daily and I never act on them, I'm not even sure if I'm capable of acting on them, but they occur without fail / without veil. What's interesting is not the danger, the inaction, even the impulse itself, but the fact that the form is always the same, always the movement most destructive to my present stasis. It reminds me of the erotic effect of repression, of how a taboo becomes alluring merely because it is inhibited, not for any apparent inherent pleasure.

And in case you're wondering what I put for my top 5 of the year on Pitchfork's year-end survey, here goes:

1) Subtle -- ExitingARM
2) Xiu Xiu -- Women as Lovers
3) Parts & Labor -- Receivers
4) Why? -- Alopecia
5) Marnie Stern -- This Is It and I am It and You Are It and So Is That and He Is It and She Is It and It Is It and That Is That

I don't own #s 3 or 5, but have heard most of them and just love their general styles. I also can't believe Subtle wasn't even given as an option on the "Best Live Band of 2008" list; hipsters don't know much about hip-hop. Some of the more overrated 'fork favorites include: Vampire Weekend, Fleet Foxes, & Girl Talk. That's canon to them and has to be crap to me. Happily blasphemy.

Atavist Revisitor Pattern

2008-11-26T16:18:00.000-06:00

1've been listening to an entirely unhealthy amount of black metal recently. 1'd love it if anyone could sing; as it is, they just scream and scream and you can't make out a word. Not that 1 really listen to any music that 1 can understand the lyrics of. No glory hole in a just-so story told, homes. Dub trouble over repose / rife bodies, empty clothes.

Uncle Encased cannot concieve
of the deadbeat doldrum, custody
determined by winsome lawyers

no paunch or acne scars
pure pustule pulchritude.
Consider yourself enticed.

///\\\Love's Ugly Other\\\///

Possibility of movement is itself movement
atavist revisitor pattern. ! surmise an
impotent aggravation in chrysalis of night.
Stay home and hate work. Destroy your cell
phone fabric sutures. The needle regresses
archaic enigma removed. We vital as
we Universal Flowering. Thriller proves
anything you could ever want to be true
ricochet collective. S/he bathroom binary
brought to bear on nothing native
no soil
or efficient technology
all accidents assimilated.

No Castro can liberate
what capital creates.
We're all capitalists now
and if not ! have a website
where ! can recommend methods
of painless suicide, or alternatively
proper targets for terrorism

certain 7/11s and laundromats.
Why we're where we are is
apopletic apophenia & all else
annihilated. Tarpit Carnivore
lurch alert like mastodon genes
or hactivist code cutters

who solicit and rescind
lascivious waves of
random whims:

...take care
off of / off of
...deft killed
off of / off of

as a seance assails us and

abeyance belies
assay otherwise
ascent contrived
acescent sublime.

Attn: PR Departments Everywhere

2008-11-18T14:29:00.001-06:00

much of this was lost due to our email servers
crashing at work / jaundice. "One of the year's
most exhiliarting and obliterating releases."
If I had a hydrogen bomb, I would hollow out
a place in its heart just for you, you

le Coup au Coeur / servile as medicine, encapsulated cocoon / The Accursed Share insists severance / hem hemorrhage cash / dour environs / an affect lethal lassitudes and always-already evil attitudes / Larry Craig's crotch contaminant / leery of strangers who speak to you unprompted / deaf deferent to the published / conducive to disease / endeavor denied / vagary in vain / stay it and rot / in infant surplus / there's a shadow without source, a dark matter sitting central to our pineal-eye potentiality / unreason reigns / "The sea continually jerks off." / I am the Alphabet / I am a fantastic battle / the color of a sun dying / I'm immanence without opposition / feel fields without soil / Iceland and its magma formations / thought's strange attractor / dementia praecox / while away / so be it / violent daylight by the wayside / this job splinters your scion/ prying eyes of pivate enterprise / eHarmony hemorrhoidal / blithe and loyal / qwerty combustion / Ceci n'est past une pomme / C'est

Perennial Gale

I severed Adam Smith's hand
and sublimated its sequins.
He's a handsome mannequin
and I'm a prop in the parody.

In this town, the blood of the children is laced with lead from disassembled cathode ray tubes. They dismantle and disperse, grasp and galvanize the invidious afterlife of your monitor's internal organs. Slush fund futures / effusive abstruse / recondite ratiocination. Follow me to fortuity you orphaned infants, you drudge magnets. Cancerous as asinine aspersions in political commercials. Strum of palp around perianal area. I'm one of divine divagation and your order is more arbitrary than static, more emotive than stolid. Parallax Error Beheads You. I'd like to admit an injustice: I hate you how I love myself. I'd like to kill Jay Leno's cars.

retrieve / relapse
shoegaze serenity
honesty as excuse
chaste suction cup
last one left
these porches that are ears
these unfurnished rooms that are infant minds
out in that cervix of a world
the cold hard streets of Hanover, New Hampshire
where all the lampposts wear corduroy
epicurean executives and their sycophant secretaries
lumpen proles and their cavity search job security
draconian measures / Lacanian equations...

Felicitate or fellate / yourself and your superiors. In so much as Deleuze endorses Creative Destruction (Nietzsche & Schumpeter argue on ant hills, agree at altitude) he endorses capitalism and the free market. Luckily, there will never be a free market and its ideologues will continue to ignore utilities, farm subsidies, Treasury bonds, interest rates, foreign interests and every other endogenous economic inevitability born of necessity's natal notoriety / motor immaterial. Ron Paul can interpret any event to fit into his pertinacious paradigm. I recalcitrant can do the same. Enforce consumer constraints & cap income @ $1,000,000 'cause anyone who needs more must be feeble as vegetables souped in a hospital bed bent. Penchant for drenched mulch meals and divisive dolorous. Proclivity for misgivings / thrift living. E*TRADE has commercials with a talking baby telling you to buy stocks when everyone sees recession in their everyday. It's like advertising for timeshares in Darfur. It's like falling in love with Barney Frank but being unable to marry him. Vacate sentience or sulk forever sorry / it's the whim in him to sin the skin / constant caprice / invariant vagary / he

owns his own
airline / irrespective renown
how wretched we've grown
cold sores trump lust
the hemorrhoids of your most stolid heroes

the week in review: artichokes in gouged out
eye sockets, Freaky Prose for HMOs, diets
and their discontents, disgorged commodity.

To the detriment of
this industry of drugs
this lurid lord above.

To the detriment of
price shocks and spiced lox
righteous Stonewall Riots.

It looks like HR 5843 will decriminalize marijuana, finally. Co-sponsored by Ron Paul and Barney Frank, among others. To divagate: these corporations that we seem to be just dying for to force subjectivities upon (within? within.), these capricious markets. What you're saying to me is that you can't decide, you don't know how to, you think humanity doesn't know how to, and you'd rather leave it up to capitalism to. That's what's at stake. You've chosen the whims of production and consumption (not supply and demand...which seem irrelevant. If that had anything to do with capitalism, no one would go hungry) over those of humanity, the electorate, their leaders, whathaveyou. So stop acting democratic, stop acting powerful: you're a nihilist and you can do nothing but host a virus with a will which you believe you lack.

Sum Fin. Magnum Obvious. Fuck Rot.

Averse to Verse

2008-11-05T23:08:00.001-06:00

but first to burst.

"The President confessed to having had limited experience with enraged rabbits. He was unable to reach a definite conclusion about its state of mind. What was obvious, however, was that this large, wet animal, making strange hissing noises and gnashing its teeth, was intent upon climbing into the Presidential boat."

"...the urban Meanderthal and the urban environment exist together within a chiasmatic relationship in which each draws on the other to produce a product -- a desire path -- that exposes and explores the potential existence of paths not yet taken."
--http://www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=583

Love is a Bull Market :

...where others would poison, you dismember...

/-/--\-\

The Mother Node

better off imbibed / unblighted unborn

opiatic bias like a carbonated beverage
be it cola blackened or corn blanched

placebo ergo sum therefore I am one
cha cha chant that to yourself at night
sing it through your laptop's speakers

but I've hedged my bets with cracked
cytokinetic psyches screaming Nirvana's
Tourette's in infinite and sporadic division
then recombination 'round the central spindle

the illicit invective of all utterances inane
the sad and disaffected subsumed / vector
of enthralled to ecstatic / embellish frame
until the picture's an unread footnote / sigma
citation in vulture couture / girls & dudes

pervs & prudes / We sum / We concatenate
Emmett Grogan arise and dig a new grave
(there are narcs in your nuptials and bowel
movement menace in every sentence of the
Bible) through frayed to paid / sooths spayed
who slew coups made / and unironic drama

comma comatose Alcoa cobra all over Crepuscular
Dawn of telematic trvth / disavowal of all appellate deities
how unbecoming of you now / sow some social celerity
cut down corporate incarnates / consensus stigmatic
/ secede from the state vitriol / political sublimate
join a fleet in being awash in cantankerous waves
rancor wrath writ large in tanker or barge / death

metal and Deleuzian criticism. Jimmy Carter is quickly becoming
my favorite US president, although this new guy we got has
a ton of potential. Govern from the center / whether populace
is drearily rational or dementedly religious. I'm both and bitch
you better believe I'm waiting for the revolution with a DEagle
and some 1968 Bordeaux. Poor vintage but strong symbol.
A vernal vernacular and averse to virtue / xenoglossia on
Mondays, hamstrings and halitosis. Fuck an incumbent.

Atrial Fibrillation

2008-10-28T12:05:00.000-05:00

When Dick Cheney's dead and I'm peripatetic andor itinerant aneurysm will take to two-hand tapping like licking Kaki King's callused fingers clean. One avid aphid, analysis averse and intensive unedited. Restraint restrained. It has all the precision of soporific scissions, late night open art surgery, a frisson faded. Presidential sinecure. Come inside my carotid arteries. Oxygenated or otherwise. Inaugurate Eschaton Now:
the same people that
push pork barrel projects
drown the essential in auxiliary and/or ancillary
(you're in your youth
and yet decrepit, no net-net
lease on life / sheath on strife)
Privatization of Profit
Socialization of Loss
as if an IRA's descent could be called loss
as if a job is something you could hold.
You think you
have to have
one on one
to hold should be to do
on time & in tact
the artist formerly known as cathartic
gone down like the Dow
dirty like layman's germs
and weak witticisms.
Make Sure:
Expel
expectations /
cultivate anarchy /
the inveterate violated /
the possible and the real
cannot collude / excommunicate
a crop-duster dearth, the handshakes
that insist civil syntax reigns / burgeon
/ keep a closed eye on / decrepit prestige
/ cloudy water credence / and uneven seasons.

My girlfriend: "I think of you as a decimal point."

I conduct my business like an atonal symphony
(enemies' ears and assholes hang from my death metal diadem)

Michael Endler: "You have no sense of wonder."

Chew through the true like corporate lawyers through
clawback clauses. Well-compensated but not sated.

Take No Scriveners also known as
I Got 99 Problems, but Bartleby Ain't One.

A peristaltic plinth to mount your savior's stomach on.

Innervate your dinner date with a sinner's hate.

One would have to assume as indicated: an atavistic taint
the size and structure of St. Louis sewers, which still consist
of wooden pipes. The what you want and why you want it.
One ornate onus that I'm trying to birth here. You best

take umbrage or tread new tracks west.

Autarky Turkey (Towards An)

2008-10-13T13:15:00.000-05:00

We're widely regarded as once and for all that which can accrue the inane as it has to do with what you know you have no idea of as in ours are all out there on a terraqueous trope a distillate moon which evades ablation even ever after an usurious AIG insurance incident and we glean those elusive isotopes that evince an apotropaic immune to the apodictic most obstinate minus even minor vicissitude some stringent dogma which implies loads of logjam logistics that fecundate naught but ferocious networks strung celestial from the decorticated corpses of maple oak and pine an extirpation of unearthly proportions an arboreal abrogation but when what is slaughtered the executioners bade rise again we nominate such as slavery and not evisceration as evidenced by their vassals pockmarked in the armpits of city streets and public parks their husks adzed with the initials of malcontents and middlemen the straie of sinners and their saviors linger there alike as an awful offal portentous of the coming age of scarcity
(be it shorn or shored).

Lethe Lauded: I know what happens when I push the buttons but I push them all the same. And these are literal buttons consubstantial with neural ones, loci of nostalgia & jealousy triggered when I Google an ex-girlfriend or discover a Stanford acquaintance has published their first novel. It's the only way I ever feel depressed despite the more morose sense that meaningful work does not exist / a general disdain for progeny (the very larvae of the future) & the paradigms of my peers.
Age-old remedy of ignorance and alcohol
a lethargy as lax as a corpse's respiration regimen
so civil as your pink progeny's circumcision
(pass the blade and antiseptic / a void bends light
from blue to red and nullifies the skeptics) lessened
by life / take taken from behind. Device unnerved
as in afferent axons removed by medical instruments
electronic or otherwise.
Have you ever read the posts that people put on public opinion boards beneath articles on politics? If you did you might stop repping democracy and drop it like a split condom and its lascivious leakage. And I quote: "Use the ballot box (where still available) to send a message. For me, that's Muhammad (peace be upon him). For Christians, Jews and others it might be someone else. In any case, if large numbers of Americans voted for their favorite religious figures, it would send a message to the geniuses leading both parties who gave us the choice of Obama and McCain that if they want to pick up more votes then maybe next time they better find someone who at least has minimal moral decency."

What really strikes me though is that, in contrast to the last election where Kerry was a Not-Bush vote, McCain has become a Not-Obama vote. None of the republican politicians or bloviating bloggers want to talk about the positive ideas that McCain has, they want to bump Obama-Ayers & terrorist trash talk et ceteras.
But let me be clear: The Weather Underground was right. You can call them terrorists because they did indeed blow shit up, but they never killed anyone (empty buildings leave no bodies and Ayers was never convicted of a crime), and they protested a war that killed hundreds of thousands of civilians. The patriots would have you believe that no American dies in vain; everyone in Vietnam died in vain. We didn't win, we didn't have a reason to be there, and we resorted to totally inhumane tactics, tactics much worse than, say, flying a plane into a particularly tall building. There's simply no sense of international accountability in Amnesiamerica, where we're at our most bipartisan when we talk about Iran like they're children and Israel like they're saints and even the democrats refuse to argue that the The Second Iraq War galvanized terrorism more than 9/11 ever could by blowing our one chance to take the role of pitied victim and instead slipping into the familiar role of asshole aggressor.

glory hole governments and their corresponding pundits in the press / an empurpled penis pulsates no other way / as if I'm caught up in a color-graphemic synesthesia wherein all they say is blackened crisp to its pith

_--__--_The Deadline Is Now--_---_--__--____
We hold these truths to be self evident:
a soulless serenity the size of the Defense Department budget
An Arras Unraveled if ever there was
one locust submerged & sublime in some
honey slash the oddity effect which posits
predators preferentially target shoal members that stand out
in appearance, tending to further homogenize the shoal
slash filial imprinting slash the sound your mother makes
in the ballot booth, hand on her heart and uterus united

as in a country that can't contain tragedy in a lesson
as sodden as remora meals and paint thinner aporia
in place of a pretty slash pellucid as our identities slash
Shorn Or Shored
together like mortgages in a special investment vehicle

Asphyxiate Your Friends and Family
or Anneal Your Bones Anew
beneath Plato's contemplative caverns, a basilisk musk
and preeminence of empty arteries / scent amorous of antipathy
like will you love the labor that sustains your consumption
but constricts the fields of flight, will you kill
those responsible for the state
of affairs, be it bipartisan & retarded
or brilliantly singular
Arabic enumerations (xenophobic Christians
control our kind and kindred)
like gallows blazoned with an incarnadine juice
you'd thought you'd lost so long ago.

Asthma Incarnate

2008-10-08T11:57:00.000-05:00

Leviathan Leveled

or pluralis excellentiae in iota deo.

Asthma incarnate indicts wrongdoing like lung cancer
& a life not worth dying for / strife of convenience: couch
& comforter & pillow & television; now all you need
is to sink into it sumptuous. Consult the statute
of limitations for rape. "We will comment no further."

Umbilical grip. A calm like someone else's erasure.
Euphoria through material thresholds. Blue renewal. Lick
spine / split cordons. Invertebrate or aortal enemies aware
of imminent / tempt scoliosis solution. Underling anamnesis
contraption vis-à-vis criminal neglect and incompetence

cedes some spent buck / bent luck. Morose fabric decrepit
Toronto snows & women with iced thighs / by rote devise
\[\"rare, unrelated, 'roar of the surf' sense is circa 1600,
from Old Norse, rot ('breaking of waves')"/]/ new & real
method / melismatic openings of aerial orchestrae

the limelight that tapers & shields
or is tapered & shielded. Immune
to souvenir sentiment. Isolated
from fear / brazen gratuity
/ citrus cynicism / sluts.

That's no knife
vengeful poignant
it's a sad state of affairs
except at Berkshire Hathaway
and it ancillaries / affiliates / home furnishing hauteur.

Nevertheless, I consider my selves plenary and potent
as in an in-
finitely dense
iota vs.
a drab and diluted behemoth.

Doxologia Minor

kill kill yourself with health care
stalk a talk show host of issues
that range from crucial to can't comment on
worry whether over or under the table
no nutritional label / well-situated to enhance amenables
(we specialize in crab bisque and systemic risk)
I presume you're tailored to the teeth
with prehensile politics and aborted beliefs
/ antiquated & automatic / modern & manual /
as if these hands had touched anything other than a button
as if one of these two will become president.

A shit the size of Reagan screams
"Manumit me! The nutrient is now!"

I've decided to live in a place where I can piss on my front (unmowed because mowing is fascism) lawn in peace, though not necessarily quiet (I'll have my iPod on).

Available Only at Participating Locutions

2008-10-03T15:54:00.000-05:00

mural turpitude / headquartered magnetism begat aquatic fathoms sum equate foment aphasic sleek / untimely eternals hold no taciturn woebegone ripe nor mismanage as truncated municipal parks bulk litter litanies / forgotten anoints naught but nominal fissure in aggregate financials index / sinistral assumptions of senators from social oasis ignominy end or alter omnificence / malignant Cadillac hubris / migrant crises come quicker as after dew drop Dionysus bent told left / lift up some sulk's leper brain chock / burnt loan turn tiles to hurt joy fucks straight / bridge blurred name luck ice weird crime / half a dioxide strike heterogeneity turnpike schism / yr Outlook on / yr toothpaste preference / sour an offering / shore up the sheer insane troth longer than targeted these / droll hiccups / rescue misgivings arise / homeowner alleviate partial implement put in place price in the recovery Roth pressures / trope broadening / blackmail polish / feel eleven shade Edward knuckle brought biopic / rustic renewal / flex tense to similar demeanor / total assent / he knows he knows he knows but never learns / the eyes of the IRS / whereas we were withered with withdrawal when weird weekends went without Wiccan World / Ash

sounds just like summertime to me

Act Prodromal

2008-09-29T16:36:00.000-05:00

subtle’s ExitingARM is an allegory of the triumph of consumerism over American life in the form of oblique symbols, such as fork-birds (“the spirit animal of the American consumer”—Doseone in an amazing Pitchfork interview) and a man with a black and white striped face (“Hour Hero Yes / one part endless, two parts death”). But framing a critique of consumerism by referring to consumers as “empty”, “goners”, etc… is ineffective, because it is precisely to prevent confronting the limitless abyss of our desire that we consume both symbolic and perishable products. Consumerism feeds off people’s desire to identify, to be something and not nothing, to consume as a means of filling up a perceived emptiness, both literally and figuratively. The more subversive move is to recognize in nothingness, emptiness, “goner”-ness the salve for consumerism: rather than continuing to perpetuate worry of being nil, we should embrace our own innate nothingness, we should strive to be as little as humanly possible. And I mean this in as radical a sense as possible: suicide and vagrancy are the first two examples that come to mind. / Actionable politics: develop a disease that can be dispersed globally, killing one in two people at random. Actionable aesthetics: valorization of death, emptiness, asceticism (though technically there’s nothing wrong with sex, as long as it doesn’t lead to children) / I would not promote asceticism necessarily, as one can immerse oneself in sensation without product, without consumption. One must divorce the idea of consumption from sensuality, find the sensuality possible in renewable actions, like conversation and observation. Sex is an obvious example, as it is as viciously rejected by ascetics as it is deified by hedonists, but it once again leads to my foundational argument: sex has been largely co-opted such that its pleasure is primarily attained via diets, movies, magazines, exercise machines, clothing, pornography, dinners with attractive dates, and other such ephemera which skirt around their central phenomenon as slyly as possible so as to prolong the enjoyment and siphon out the flows of sexual desire into whirlpool-like traps surrounding products.As I see it, the pinnacle of society is the deliberately-homeless recyclers, who not only operate on miniscule resources, but in the end produce more material (out of waste, no less) than they could possibly consume. I think it’s indisputable that humanity cannot maintain a population increasing at current rates in combination with an increasing “standard of living,” a valuation unrelated to happiness and arbitrary as monetary metrics themselves. But this line of reasoning is rather distracting, because happiness is also utterly irrelevant: better to be a sustainable species full of misers than a doomed bunch of overjoyed gluttons. I love humanity far too much to let it go on like this without protest. I am unafraid of death, my own and that of others. A single value: sustain the species. If that means no microwaves, no carpeting, no philosophy, no art, then fine. We’ve devolved, because we were already the dominant species five thousand years ago, only now we’ve developed into a threat to ourselves. And what did we gain? A “soaring and sordid appetite,” to quote ExitingARM; an incredibly seductive set of ideas and products, none of which has the inherent value of life itself.

Signifier Signified

She means well
as in water
the one we drowned our brightest
babies in.

I must have
fallen into disarray
bandaged plantains
fraught / boon and bane.

He holds her
trapper keeper disposition
less taken
than given.

We repeat
the dissolution of our parents
into atomic omens
fraught / same and same

within the twin of the pane. [Number numb]
///and if and when influx elates
reap repercussions' sweet scintillae
malignant credit market crisis
will succumb to torrential serenity
transience as destination///
(Old adage addendum:
some crux bereft tumult
deemed a Tudor
in the wilt orthodox staccato
till occasion climbs climes
wither and then stark rapt
an enunciated despot
of your crippled understanding.)

Apotropaic Gift

2008-09-22T16:03:00.000-05:00

from me to you / through forest or marsh

make ends meet
/people get shot in South Berkeley/
take pills then sleep
late beneath still sheets
/and problem is we're divorced from natural selection/
of broke teeth and choked beliefs
/so we'll settle for handguns and damaged lungs/
as alabaster as the day's demise
or a white man's daylight-denied thighs.

this is not wet concrete for some song's street
not song not more raw wheat

Adultery simply saturates contemporary literature, to the point where novels featuring faithful couples comply with the tenebrous tenets of cynical surrealism / the safety submerged in the cleaning products under your kitchen sink / meek hebetude of our forefathers. Impeach Pascal. Criticize Christ. Admonish Aquinas.

Agonistics vs. Pacifist Mystics

Leaguered as if I'm a illiquid asset
slight tilt of the investment bank imbalance
sheets as white as blow or brokers' bodies
I will cut you up with a linoleum knife
only in strife / lonely as life
hold me upright / show me the light
one cavernous caveat of a cornea
making music to make truth to.

Karma police, arrest this girl...

Sex workers' soliloquies can cover-up
constellations like city lights at night.
Do you strive for
a terse, muscular prose
or the vaginal envelopment
of explication softened emporiums
peruse help's motley surface
bottom trawling for transcendence

in a riparian buffer zone
some nightcrawler's throne

and if need be
we'll bleed sweet peas
make ends meet means.
The Holocene Extinction Event

of the holding company
an orderly unwinding

of an iceberg's psyche.

I can see myself assassinating Larry Kudlow (blood stains an expensive suit) and/or Charlie Gasparino, who liberally interjects"listen" into his monologues, as if anyone forced to converse with or merely exist in the same room as him would have any other choice. There are few political activities as effective as assassination. Sex can sell an underwear that no one other than the owner will ever see, lime green and livid, defrayed or deferred, as either is adequate to express the sentiments of frozen flies awakening on an arbitrarily warm winter morning only to succumb to selection's avid pincers mere minutes later. What we miss and to what degree we miss it (an absence measured like an abscess: diameter and depth / salivation and scent. Then again, if you're wrong, you've wagered that little that you can't afford to lose).

I shall suck out your liquid autism like a leech and return it to you as a crystalline schizophrenia, the alveolate pith of your nasal drip neurosis and all that it implicates i.e. your parents, your teachers, & your employers as well as the TV shows those watch.

Post Scriptum: A Note on Form or How to Fail Spectacularly Where Others Only Banally Succeed

Aestheticists would have you think that the fragmentary form of the present (poetry: The Waste Land / prose: Naked Lunch / academia: Symbolic Systems or whatever pronoun best befits the most illustrative of interdisciplinary studies programs at your present institution) is a representation of our fractured reality, i.e. the dissolution of grand narratives known as postmodernism. We, however, claim that it is precisely because our existence is becoming more and more ordered (geography: Google Maps and urban extensivity in general / knowledge: computerization and networking / art: continual depth of allusion and co-option of all form under) that fragmentary forms must become an instrument in the deterriolization of means and ends into mends, quilting together the philosophical and inane into a patchwork pariah to perturb the dominant in all its designs.

An Atheist's Ascension

2008-09-12T15:34:00.000-05:00

subtly dissuade flux
or come canvassing with us
corner store contravallations
of upper class neighborhoods
incoherent fliers and cardboard cut-outs of
Mount Eerie moans
erroneous corrode
sync tandem hands / relent
diapered diadems morose
candy tonic spent splits. Melt
more than mingle, splice
more than separate. She's a song
silenced, a salting of some psycho's
human ham. Online
there are communities where no one
has touched, sniffed one anothers' necks.
There's a surfeit of knowledge
and intelligence even
colossal effulgence
when the world's weary for fists
and faded pastels. Find little
fault with this, trade your days
for toys and superiors praise. In Symbolic
Exchange and Death

Jean Baudrillard wrote about the World Trade Center towers as perfect symbol(s) for our modern area, twin replicas replete with financial instruments lacking a parallel in the real world, displaying the logic of simulacra, or copy without original, or the loss of the signified amid the doubling of floating signifiers. This was his first work to move away from Post-Marxism towards his own unique paradigm, described as nihilist by those too lazy to truly investigate its theories, doubtless the same people who call Bush fascist and in doing so manage to ignore how America creates all variety of differences of opinion, self-expression, questioning authority, et cetera as means of keeping people complacently eclectic, unable to summon the violence which is radical change or its suppression. Symbolic Exchange and Death also has a prescient passage on how democracies will tend towards binary party systems where both parties, in an attempt to find the middle of the road, will increasingly resemble one another and the elections will gravitate towards the 50%-50% asymptote achieved in each of the last two. I see this in Palin/Biden, as each party has chosen a VP that reflects the other's presidential nominee, and it seems no coincidence that in doing so all the polls converge to margins lower than their sampling errors.

Altricial (On a Clear Day)

2008-09-08T16:24:00.000-05:00

a wholly holy
sows so much dirt in
beauty: something to be
suffered like
a colonoscopy
or what we would go through
without those. I would be remiss
stark sift through my memories
like belated Christmas gifts
newspaper wrapped and utterly inedible.
And I asked Chinese or pizza?
And he said You're right,
life is suffering. Static cling
and capsized capitalism
lives lived off commission.
I wouldn't trade my San Pablo
busride for a private Leer:
slouched sleeper in a black sweatshirt
had All City a Bitch tattooed
in Old English font on his left hand / on a clear day
you can spot the knots
in hearsay / followed by cops
on the freeway / close-captioned
and pinioned to opinions
of others in more public positions
supermarket clerks
and Astralwerks LPs
the avionics arm
of Honeywell Aerospace, the taste
of salted quarks, peppered leptons
and arthroscopic attitudinal inherency.
Pardon the jargon
cocksure stardom
and similar shit
but I've got somewhere
to get and your slander
needs an anathema
like Palin needs another pregnancy.
Are you scared of the spaces
between sentences, between words,
between letters, and the ones
in the letters themselves
the iris aporia
of an altogether
airborne altophobic
suspended from the heavens
of our most hallucinogenic hopes.

I just found out that altophobia is the correct term for fear of heights, when for years I'd been telling people that I'm acrophobic. It turns out acrophobia is a "pathological" "abnormal" or "morbid" fear of heights, which I don't think I qualify as, seeing as my fear comes and goes, sometimes in the space of mild hours / taste of biopower. It would not surprise me if Palin procures female votes for McCain, even though their anti-abortion, "family values" stance is patently oppressive of females. No different from the poor churchgoers who've been suckered in similar ways for years. Silver is just another gold, and gold is just a shiny bit of spittle on the tip of the tongue of a trendy transcendence. You know the type, "small hands, smell like cabbage," shifty eyes, work for people who wear jeans every day of the week, friends with carnies, shake skulls with spinal stretches every hour on the hour as if its copasetic and/or orthodoxy. Children and old people should be sedated, for different reasons.

I started writing a massive response to Jared's inquiry earlier, but decided it was way too long / analytical for herein. Maybe an excerpt or abstract will make it through the gregarious gauntlet of my need to be inane, but more likely the next post will involve a piece of my incomplete treatise on ExitingARM which critiques the terminology of the critique of consumerism. I read about 500 pages of The Recognitions while I was in Iceland, my only achievement therein. I'm on a philosophy binge, and can't decide whether it will be De Landa (A Nonlinear History), Deleuze (Difference and Repetition), Foucault (Ethics), Nietzsche (The Gay Science) or Schopenhauer (some selected aphorisms) next.

Another Equation, Offensive as Fashion

2008-08-30T14:45:00.000-05:00

inevitable as Islam

worm food wealth for Wells Fargo

weapons we don't yet know how to wield

Prevalent

personal belongings / prescient as osmosis in anything opulent / here we have / as to why / we are the flies of the Lord, the Roman circus sacrifices rotting in the dead of the day / orphaned items escape foster family lost and found bins / bound by the blank whims of adjustable interest rate victims / Dow Chemical class action lawsuit / with a businessmen's acumen / kill a kissed lip / I don't prescribe to individualism. The drab uniformity of characters in We or every book that recycles the thesis of We (I'm looking at you, Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, and you, Eric Arthur Blair, both of whom welcome the "free world" but need to use pseudonyms to say what's already been said) is preferable to the drab uniformity of everybody's unending and equivocal wants. Define you through your clothes | define you through your nose ring / The Greater Eric Phetteplace Area / so send your children to me on great black and yellow buses and I will feed them fried rocks and top soil, teach each how to be as a hornet and harm the bodies of those enemies in close proximity / enriched yeast / bitch please / here we have / lure the weak with common cold cures and paid vacation weeks / incentivize with demented pride / a taxpayer's Pyrrhic triumph / a waged war, tax credit tactics of two mutually militant municipalities / forlorn scalpel / earmarked for excising a skinhead's cerebrum / psychic scintillae / punch a pacificist / fists for forgiveness / bite the seam / feel it bleed

I smoke weed like toke is a synonym for breath

I have no philosophical or religious justification for the vast majority of things I do. Blurred faces in documentaries. Well-off young people looking for sex. It's so much easier to cut straight to the bone ( the spirit is a bone says Hegel, drunk as destiny) and declare all pleasure and all suffering as meaningless. Survival anointed.

Better off dead

in the water

than alive

and beached.

On the airplane, I wrote this sentence and only this sentence in my notebook:

"I am capable of a moral calculus which others are unwilling or unable to affect."

We like to think of ourselves as special. It lessens the great equalizer, which is not death (because death is a petty illusion perpetuated by weak consciousnesses), but worm as a gerund.

Arithmetic for Arthitics

2008-08-21T14:38:00.000-05:00

I know no / limits / flow acidic / The Music Industry / traipses Mithraic Ithaca / scours the dive bars for / We Versus The Shark / trapped men inure / in kennel collusion / as if all your civil liberties could erase innate misery / wooden face and marble mind / not that I'm dyspeptic / twisted metric: Jeffrey Dahmer has done more for the environment than Ralph Nader / that mothering instinct / that that Ed Gein / soporific cloying of inbred dreams / Apartment 213 / We use your IP address to help diagnose problems with our server / sentenced to 957 years in prison / one out of every three cancers start in the gastrointestinal newspaper testimonials of hormone-harrowed impotency ads / too much information / flaunt your cultural affiliations like the aseptic spectrum of the NBC peacock / We will not share personally identifying information with these partners or any third parties without your consent, except under the narrow circumstances described in the Google Privacy Policy / trepanned Marxist iconoclasts / try making intellect / out of mint floss and nicorette / sometime this year, the Millenium Tower will stand completed as the tallest tower in San Francisco / sometime this century, Haight-Ashbery will be unpopulated and peaceful, a few leagues beneath the Pacific / when I lived at Market & Valencia, I had a slight obsession with the new San Francisco Mint which sits on a three-story throne of solid rock laminated in dirt and sickly shrubs, above "Social" Safeway, wherein we purchased our stocks of 76 South and Wonderbread without conversing with anyone other than the flamboyant cashier / the most idiotic / of revolutions / subliminal: to sink below the sea level of our synaptic activities / Artesian aquifer of our sexual envy (tap tap it like a keg / deviance in the dregs) / liminal: social equations to amplify even the most ineffable of persuasions / obviate inert emotions with an engorged idiom / and that would've been great but someone has already written the book The Apocryphal Apocalypse / gelid glands of Antarctic [X] / Aerial Boundaries / true meaning imbecilic / through moats internal / the me-i / pandemic / rot

Talk Show Host

Crater

Top 10 Albums of 2011

Centipede

Crucial

Crucial

Crucial

Caustic Window

Hot Mama

Byte

Boorishness

Bromide Poisoning

Bombilation

Bring in the New Fear

Behold Our Headlessness

This is a big f*ck*ng deal.

Basketball's Positional Glut

Buy Nothing

Blackwater Park (The Opeth Album)

Black Square (Malevich)

Brought up in this city, at the feet of Gamaliel

Bye Bye Bombie

Bely the Blood / Rely on Love

Bodies, Be Them Docile or Destructive

Boom Bap Doom Rap

Breeding a Better Mind

Bevan, William

Business Aethics

Bold Print

Blizzard of Unknowing (Curtain Call, Drape Death)

Blood Bank

Battle of the Bulge

Burden of the Beast (666)

Borough2Borough, Fertile&Furrowed

Bloomington-Strange

Baroque Presumptions

Bortz in his Blood

Borrowed from a Better Man

Bullet From a Pretty Blue Gun

Borromean

Broken & Bruised, It Barely Keeps Us Amused

Beowulf's Wellbeing

Bursting or Barren, Caring or Carrion

Bright Day Dawning

Burnt, Charred, Reduced to Ash

Boredom is a Product

Allies, Agnates, and their Absolute Brethren

Alkahest Ascertained

Antipodes (drudge work)

Ankylose Demented

Autotomy

Amorphous Solid

Animus Animals

apophasis is just a phase but I use it

anaphoric forums and their flagellum flagposts

Anaphylaxis

aletheia

Acerbic Invective II: The Vast and the Various

Adverse Conditions

Apostate Priest / Phosphate Belief

Asea

Albescence

Albeit True

Assault Infancy

Acephalic Imperative

Aggregate, Of The

Analeptic Laxatives

Art And/Or Opium

Access To The In-Itself

All That Ails Us Eliminated

Active Indifference

Anaphora Forums and their Pellucid Politics

Adolf Merckle Is Dead

Annectent Nimrod Toward the Ubermensch

Auratic As Evil Itself

Arbiter of Anuses Everywhere

Atavist Revisitor Pattern

Attn: PR Departments Everywhere

Averse to Verse

Atrial Fibrillation

This is a big fckng deal.