25 September 2009
This week's edition of Laural's Dish has been postponed due to inclement weather (in my throat, nose, eyes, head). We will resume our high-brow juvenalia, and extraordinarily insightful consideration of the cosmos, next week.
18 September 2009
http://new.wsau.com/news/articles/2009/sep/17/feingold-senate-health-care-bill-comes-short/
First of all let's get rid of this ridiculous nonsense about President Obama being the "last" president to engage in health reform. The only way that would be possible is if he (a) steamrolled through a single-payer system (which is apparently about the only thing he's NOT considering), and (b) could ensure that subsequent presidents wouldn't be idiots inspired to screw it back up. The phrase is shameless hyperbole that barely falls on the "traditional puffery" side of "misleading the public."*
*I'm not shouting "liar," but when a congressman believes that he's being lied to he has every right to-a duty to-scream it loud. That being said, Rep. Joe Wilson was wrong and is additionally an idiot and a particularly ugly horse's ass. He's an embarrassment to South Carolina, there's good people in South Carolina!
The leading indicator of which way smart money thinks the president is heading is that medical stocks rose sharply AFTER the president's speech that was supposed to be about drawing lines in the sand. Apparently they strongly believe that there's going to be plenty of money to be made by continuing to rip off sick people on every which side of those rather vague lines.
They no doubt feel such confidence because President Obama said that there are a lot of ways of getting what he wants done, though a public option (whereby the government goes into competition with insurance corporations) is his preferred one. (If corporations really believe that they're more efficient than government, why are they so afraid of this?)
What the president didn't say, and what has given so much comfort to corporate greed, is that he wouldn't accept reform without the public option. So corporate greed thinking goes like this: "Put down whatever kinds of regulations you want President Midget, who will be gone in three or seven years anyway. We'll put your silly papers in court for the next 40 years and shoot holes in them the size of giraffes-as we've done with the Clean Water Act, Clean Air Act, and Environmental Protection Act...and when our lawyers are done working with our judges your peons are going to have to buy insurance by law, and get whatever we say they get for it: which is, as you know, as little as possible. Ok, everybody, back to work! Especially you moronic malingers facing bankruptcy, you've got interest to pay!"
Q: Is there a marker you would lay down at the end of your first term where you say, "If this has happened or not happened, I would consider it a negative mark on my government"?
A: If I haven't gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal healthcare and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we've missed the boat.
--Barack Obama, presidential candidate, Rolling Stone interview (July 10, 2008)
toot!.......TOOT, TOOT dammit!!!!!
If the President gets through healthcare reform that includes a public option, it's time to start thinking of him in terms of the giants in the history of Western governance. If he gets something through with triggers inevitably giving rise to the public option* he's pretty damn good. If he muddles through with anything less it probably wasn't worth it, and if he crows about anything less being a great achievement it may be time to start wondering how much more than an opportunistic used Buick salesman he really is.
*e.g. automatically vesting upon the filing of the second insurance corporation "legally" attacking the definitions of its responsibilities to insure everyone and anyone at a set and reasonable rate (with disputes to be adjudicated after treatment)
I have faith that the president is going to bring about real and meaningful reform (though he may have to horse trade more than I'd like on limitations on jury awards in tort cases, and reproductive treatment; but I'll love him more than ever if he goes to the mat on it, regardless of result).
Next up: the public option applied to banking. As opposition to the public option has demonstrated, no one is less confident of their ability to succeed/survive/ profit (swindle) in a free market that includes the government than the chest-beating "free marketers." Doctrinaire wimps...
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Thank heavens he married Courtney Love!!! Now Kurt Cobain can torment the vulgar greed monkeys even from the grave! Yeah she's inconsistent as hell, but who says everyone has to enjoy every little virtue!? My goodness, she's certainly virtuous enough... My favorite was when they asked her about online file sharing and she launched into a tirade about record companies that don't pay honest royalties anyway!
Probably Kurt's big life mistake was finding anything appealing about heroin. But maybe it was a close second to leaving Sub Pop for DGC Records.
When we lived on Orcas Island, Theresa was friends with (Sub Pop founder/guru) Bruce Pavitt's wife. They have a very cool solar energy house panelled with all kinds of incredible African wood. I met him a few times, never for more than a few minutes, usually at school events. He's pretty out there, he's got those visionary eyes like endless wells, he goes to South America once a year and hangs out in the jungle for inspiration. He was someone capable of getting in Kurt's face and getting his attention. The sections of the biographies where Kurt tells Bruce that he's leaving Sub Pop-apparently without actually mentioning it-are heart breaking.
Sub Pop's still going strong, and Courtney's still getting in people's faces for Kurt. Bless.
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Laural's Dish is starting to sound a little bit like Joe Morgan during baseball games, when he'll go "Yeah, I was just playing golf with Tiger Woods and Harry Belafonte and Quincy Jones the other day, and we were talking about a barbeque we recently had attended at Colin Powell's house. Willie Mays was there of course, talking about how they had even more trouble throwing me out than Johnny Bench did Willie, and there was a great moment when Hank Aaron and Frank Robinson were laughing about something with Sidney Poitier and Halle Berry walked up...."
Sorry. Though I have to admit that I love it when Joe goes into his name-dropping rants. Unlike bat speed, it's a subject that I don't think he'll ever run into the ground. If I'm ever fortunate enough to be at a barbeque with Joe, I'm just going to listen to the man. Yeah, I say that...
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projected courtroom rant for Courtney Love:
THOSE JACK-BOOTED PENCIL-NECKED BASTARDS AREN'T FIT TO HELP KURT PICK OUT A GRANDPA SWEATER FROM THE FUCKING SALVATION ARMY ACROSS THE STREET FROM THE FUCKING DEAD-ASS KINGDOME, AND GODDAMMIT THEY SURE COULDN'T FUCKING BRING AN ANT TO ORGASM!!! IF YOU DON'T THROW THE MUTHERFUCKERS IN JAIL RIGHT THIS FUCKING SECOND I'M GONNA GO STRAIGHT OVER THERE AND RING THAT BASTARD'S CRAVAT WITH MY FUCKING BRA-STRAP!!!! AND ONE OTHER THING, HOW DO YOU GET OFF WEARING BLACK, MUTHERFUCKER? YOU'RE NOT SINISTER, YOU'RE NOT ARTSY, YOU'RE JUST SOME FUCKING PATHETIC MORON WHO NEVER FOUND ANYTHING BETTER TO DO THAN HOMEWORK AND KISS DADDY'S ASS SO NOW YOU'RE SOME PATHETIC JUDGE IN A ROOM THAT SMELLS BAD FULL OF DROP-BOOTY SECRETARIES RUNNING AROUND THAT SMELL WORSE. ...WHAT MORON BITCH DID THAT DESK? IT'S BEAUTIFUL. HAHA, I REMEMBER A DESK LIKE THAT IN OLYMPIA, I CARVED "I DON'T FUCK TO REPRODUCE" ON IT AND I WISH YOU DUMB BASTARDS WOULDN'T REPRODUCE AT ALL...I DEMAND FORTY-TWO JIVE-ASS INJUNCTIONS AGAINST ANYONE IN THIS FUCKING ROOM EVER EVEN THINKING ABOUT ANYONE HALF AS FUCKING GREAT AS KURT FUCKING COBAIN!!!!!! PSYCHIC POLLUTION, THAT'S ALL IT FUCKING IS, LOW-LIFE CLOWN SHIT IN WEASEL SUITS TRYING TO MAKE MONEY OFF SOMEONE WHO AT LEAST DISCOVERED HOW TO BE INTERESTING....
[fade sound as she wheels out of the courtroom simultaneously laughing, coughing and shouting back] MY STUPID FUCKING LAWYERS ARE FUCKING FIRED FOR ALLOWING ME TO SHOW UP AT A GIG THIS FUCKING STUPID, U.S. OUT OF MY FUCKING UTERUS INVADE WALL STREET!!! (do you have a fucking light? thanks)
PUT THIS ON YOUR iPOD: COURTNEY LOVE – "Pieces of Jennifer's Body" (1994) I've got no idea what it's about and figure I don't want to know. The girl can throw a tantrum, can't she?
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POP SONG OF THE WEEK: The Clash- "ROCK THE CASBAH " (1982) Of two definitive foreign policy giants of the turn of the decade into the '80s, it's probably impossible to look back and think anything other than Joe Strummer was right and Ronald Reagan was wrong. I had a kinder, gentler, artsier variation on Joe's "working-class fuelled global revolution," that probably deserved more consideration than it received at the time. A corollary was to create a Palestinian homeland in Alabama, but more central was my approach to Islamic fundamentalism. As the only honky at LSU favoring the (re-)creation of a Palestinian state I got into some interesting discussions with some of the scions of Middle East neo-nobility (who attended the school because of its English as a second language program). I was way ahead of the curve on problems presented by Islamic zealots (the ruling class didn't/doesn't want 'em taking over, either), and I generally suggested taking care of the problem more or less the same way we took care of the KKK/religious nuts who were still largely running the United States at least as late as the 1920s. We'd put together* "aesthetic care package" rafts and send them upriver to anywhere suffering under the yolk of Sharia Law**. The rafts would contain Rolling Stones tapes and bottles of Jack Daniel's and cases of Budweiser*** and garbage bags full of sensimilla and Bo Derek movies. The lunatics might never get it, but the normal man on the unpaved street would have quickly realized that he was dealing with a civilization far superior to the one enslaving him, as most American religious nuts eventually did. I mean, c'mon, who really believes that the Soviet Union collapsed because of the arms race? They were fucking winning! (at least in terms that they could blow up the world a few more hundred times than the few hundred we could blow it up). The Soviet Union collapsed because of Levi's and the Rolling Stones. The wisdom of the common folk longed for some freedom like that in quantities that became a torrent and simply**** washed the Iron Curtain away. So anyway, in conclusion, I think we would have done better rocking the Casbah than blowing up the venerable vegetable market.
*I'm only saying my proposals were heard, as opposed to considered, for obvious diiplomatic reasons; the main problem, I believe, being that Shahs and Sheiks and Osama the Hider are every bit as afraid of Led Zeppelin as Jerry Falwell was
**a bastardized version of which I did try to impose in my home, without apparent effect other than pointing and laughter
***obviously the plan was imperfect, but substitute Rogue River Brewery Shakespeare Stout here, and I still think you've got something
****see Gogol Bordello, on how they felt once they realized that Western civilization wasn't all Levi's and Rolling Stones
11 September 2009
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32767954/ns/politics-health_care_reform/
Q: Is there a marker you would lay down at the end of your first term where you say, "If this has happened or not happened, I would consider it a negative mark on my government"?
A: If I haven't gotten combat troops out of Iraq, passed universal healthcare and created a new energy policy that speaks to our dependence on foreign oil and deals seriously with global warming, then we've missed the boat.
--Barack Obama, presidential candidate, Rolling Stone interview (July 10, 2008)
What is morally negative in human nature, i.e., what is hard for the conscience to bear, is revealed in the inclination to assume the collective form, to carry out one's individual mission only to the minimum.
--Josef Safarik, Seven Letters to Melin
Toot.....toooooooooooot!!
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I have no idea why I was watching-it must have been right before a baseball game-an interview with ESPN's Roy Firestone ten years ago or so. He's a wildly successful analyst, I've never noticed him much. We were both at a Super Bowl party at the incredible Hotel Del Coronado in San Diego once. People made a big deal over him, but not like over Joan Van Ark (I'll never forget some corporate dilettante optimist saying, "She has that come-hither look...") It's a brilliant hotel, they didn't even object when my old Fiat stalled in valet parking [they must have had to push it]....anyway...
He [Roy F] was talking about growing up a young black man in the ghetto. He was saying how his hero and everyone else's was Muhammad Ali. He was saying how they were all huddled around a black & white tv for The Fight of the Century, when Smokin' Joe Frazier beat The Champ. He was sayin' how he wasn't heartbroken when The Champ lost, nor was anyone else, because for him, for them, the defining moment of the fight wasn't the decision.
He said that the defining moment was in the 14th Round when Smokin' Joe threw one of the most hellacious and ferocious and finalized punches in the history of mankind, and it landed without interruption on Ali's pretty face, and Ali landed flat on his back with an alacrity giving lie to any previous conceptions of gravity, physics or momentum. That wasn't the defining moment.
The defining moment was when The Champ jumped right back up like nuthin' had happened. Roy said in all the multi-million dollar eighty-thousand-seat stadiums and situations he'd ever been in, he'd never heard a louder noise than he heard right then in his living room.
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I have mentioned that, at least for the early going, I'll take most of Wednesday off to go pick Myles up from his new school. Get off the train in Totnes, where the local stoner delegation has clearly taken over the sign-making office. Off the train, a few strides past the taxis through the parking lot and a nice sign suggests Dartington to be "2.5 miles." A few more steps around the corner and you're encouraged with "Dartington-2 miles." Then you walk down the river for a few miles to the half mile sign...
But, not to be discouraged...
So actually, last week I also went on Thursday, to help Myles line up his bus ride to the train, train ride to Exeter (if he misses the stop, he ends up in Honiton-International Galactic Headquarters of the Hawkwind Fan Club; a bit early for all that, methinks; though of course they do rule), and so on.
Of course Myles wanted to sit with his Star Wars Lego-trading friend on the bus, so I strode all the way to the back, flopping myself down behind a long-haired if graying-bearded fellow-parent. "Ah," I calculated, bringing my standing to a close, "this looks like where all the cool people sit."
He looked up sadly, "I'm afraid at our age we're just getting in the cool people's way."
Turned out he'd played guitar with Saint Etienne for a decade or so. I tried to straighten him out about the glory of (the city) Boston and we traded stories relating to the quite nearly amphibious psyche of Axl Rose. I'm pretty sure Myles knows how to ride the bus now.
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Here's a recent picture of my Mom. I was really into Noddy, very shortly after I was born, in the days of Noddy and Smarties. All these years later-nearly 47 of 'em-she's found a very nice monument to Noddy (in Indiana I think, but maybe Michigan) Yea, Noddy! YEA, MOM!!!!!:
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When I lived in Heilbronn, West Germany, in the 1970s, there was a very prominent (giant, took up the entire side of a like six-story building) Coca-Cola advertisement on the main street. It had the big round Coke logo, accompanied by the recommendation "Trink Coca-Cola da mit!" This translates "Drink Coca-Cola with it," an exhortation to include a coke with your wienerschnitzel or bratwurst (McDonald's still being at least a decade away from Heilbronn), or pizza or whatever.
We were riding downtown, me in the spacious elegance of the back seat of our big black 1964 Cadillac DeVille sedan, and it transpired that a rurally raised American friend of my parents who had lived in Heilbronn for several years...she inadvertently revealed that she'd believed the interpretation to be "Drink Coca-Cola dammit!" She specifically objected to the forcefulness of the directive.
I don't think that my father and I have ever reached an agreement on when the appropriate times for me to laugh might be.
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AUTUMN MUSIC OF THE WEEK: The Decemberists – The Hazards of Love (2009) Another one of my brother Jonathan's recommendations, in his ongoing and largely successful effort to sustain the tentative link between myself and music of the 21st century. Portland band that recorded some of this in an abandoned church, no doubt in heavy rain. It's an interplay of landgeists und seasons....Portland is an autumn/winter town in the first place. Melancholic even in the summer sun, as these guys are sombre even when they're being loud and faster. There are a lot of emotional strains that go into seasons. Ok, into the Autumn Heavy Rotation stack! Man, if I'm this agreeably morose the first week of September, it's going to be along season for my old Neil Young tapes.
PUT THIS ON YOUR iPOD: Decemberists - "Hazards of Love 1 (The Prettiest Whistles Won't Wrestle the Thistles Undone)" -
(check out Laural's stylin' autumn line!)
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LOUD MUSIC OF THE WEEK: Red Rockers - "Guns of Revolution" (1981) I was just listening to this on the train down to Totnes, blowing down the coast past the beaches at Dawlish and Teignmouth. I remember when it came out very clearly, as the Rockers were friends of my New Orleans friends. Same high school and everything. In fact I saw them play that high school (can't remember which one, a working-class one), right after the record came out. It was rabid: proud, arrogant, snotty high school kids and stacks of New Orleans' hardest core punkers in what was basically an assembly hall. It was very loud, there was no ventilation, it was tremendous. They'd come into Andy Capp's every once in awhile, the bar where we hung out between midnight and 4 or 5 a.m. most of the time. Went back for Mardi Gras a year or two later, ended up in a small group that included Darren Hill (bass)-with a very psychedelic sun coming up over steaming apartment parking lot cement on Fat Tuesday morning-being offered a job as a roadie for 'em. I didn't take it and I've never wondered much about it. They were a good band, and it's an audacious track.
Just saw on Wikipedia that the singer's singing for the band Cowboy Mouth (no doubt named after the brilliant Sam Shepard/Patti Smith play--"Mick Jagger was almost it, but he was too conscious..." something like that anyway, it's been awhile since I read it ), and Darren manages the New York Dolls and (ex-Replacement frontman and lyricist...saw them at least twice but that's five more stories, easy) Paul Westerberg. O joy that is a wayward youth, don't leave me down the line... To paraphrase Johnny Carson, we've all got to go somewhere, I'm glad they found good stations along the way.
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It was movie time a lot this summer at the old Living Room Drive-In & Diner again (listed in order of general preference):
4 September 2009
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090828/ap_on_go_pr_wh/us_kennedy_and_nixon
I'm not usually much for hypothetical history games. If the Nazis had won the war would we all be speaking German? ( I doubt it, we can barely speak English and have you seen how they conjugate verbs?) If McGovern had won the '72 election, would be have got out of Vietnam faster? (hard to see how we could have got out faster than the 'Cong ran post-Watergate Nixon out) If Bush the Younger had choked to death on that pretzel would there be a world left? (doubtful, see Cheney's thoughts on anything) You get the idea, these stupid questions give birth to others more than lend themselves to resolution. But some people think it's fun and I usually don't.
But I have to admit that the above link set me on just such an intellectual fool's errand. (please don't tell me that you don't believe in intellectual fools ).
What if Ted Kennedy had run for president in 1972. Lots of most everyone thought he would. Not could he have won. I doubt it. He wasn't in his sharpest state of mind (don't forget that he had more range-from brilliant to awful-than damn near anyone), and was still figuratively drying out from the waters of Chappaquiddick. But he would have taken out Muskie in the Democratic primaries even faster than everyone else did, and he would have at worst split the peace vote with McGovern, like Bobby on Eugene McCarthy the previous election. So to cut to the chase he would have been the Democratic nominee and, as no less than Dr. Hunter S. Thompson pointed out repeatedly in the definitive book on American politics, Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, Nixon was right to be very, very afraid of him.
Whether Ted could have beat Tricky Dick or not isn't what got me going on this. My guess is that he would not have, but I was only eleven years old and raised to respect President Nixon and get very suspicious whenever anyone else promised anything. So my best guess probably ain't worth all that much.
But I think that I have about as good an understanding of what's happened since 1979 as anyone. So my thoughts turn not so much on whether Midwest women would have voted for Teddy because they found his compassion attractive, or whether their cowboy men (yes, there were still cowboys in America until government regulation wiped out the family farm in the '80s) would have voted for Nixon because their wives found Teddy attractive, as that other erstwhile playboy, Senator Gary Hart of the mountain state of Colorado.
Of course President John F. Kennedy is the most famous loose cocksman in the history of American, if not world, politics; but the simple reality is that history is just chock full o' 'em. The legendary French President (1981-1995, and they said he was throwing his career down the merdehole when he marched with the students against the police and government in '68) Francois Mitterrand's funeral found his wife and mistress marching arm in arm, for example. The French applauded them all, thanks for good government. The historical situation is such that a political scholar once assured me how devoutly President Lyndon B. Johnson loved Lady Bird, but that he cheated on her "because he thought he was supposed to." Surely if there is anything that deserves to be private in this world it's what one does with their own genitalia-and I honestly have no idea how anyone in their right mind could ever make a sensible political issue out of it.....which to its credit the American media never did, before Gary Hart.
The questions presented are: (1) What would the American public have done, once Nixon drove the media to put the issue out there, as he would have no doubt very effectively done? (2) How would this have made any difference to anything that did or didn't happen on the Monkey Business boat, that decade or so later?
For once the answer is a simple one, I think. Had Kennedy sustained the storm and become president, no one would have cared about genitals much (as a political issue, I mean) for the foreseeable future and Senator Hart would have done what he did. However, if Ted lost and the issue upon which the election turned (as I suspect it would have) was genitalia deployment, Gary would have at least been more discreet.
Why does this matter? Because going into the 1988 presidential election Gary Hart led George H. W. Bush in the "hypothetical"/presumptive match-up by better than 30 points and 2-1 ( 63-28 nationally, for example). Because Gary Hart was/is an economic moderate, and with a mandate like that he would have rolled back Reaganomics a lot faster than President Obama has been able to do with a gutless congress afraid to move at all. Because we wouldn't have ended up in the economic mess that we're in.
Once it turned out that Senator Hart had perhaps enjoyed a liaison with a young lady who was not for legal purposes his wife, the media would not hear him on anything else. The campaign quickly degenerated to the final, heroic scene, where he trawled a bowling alley bar in Des Moines, his 650 page economic program in one hand and a glass of beer in the other, looking for anyone to listen to him. No one would, adultery was the issue that pre-empted everything else in that political milieu.
It matters, too, because there never would have been a President Bill Clinton, emasculator of his own party and caretaker of the Reagan revolution. It's well worth noting that when-going immediately into the primary season-the corporate darling Clinton was demonstrated to suffer exactly the same "problem" as Hart, and responded in precisely the same way (by stupidly and absurdly, demonstrably inaccurately denying it)...the corporate media decided that it was only a very minor issue after all, and quickly brushed it under the carpet.
HOORAY FOR BILLION DOLLAR TAX BREAKS, neh?
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ANDY ROONEY* EXCURSION OF THE WEEK: HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!!! No, no, I'm not just looking for a reason to take another glass of Italian red (I'm a firm devotee of the Lennon Sentiment: "I, I, I..I, I...dig a pony...you can celebrate anything you want!").
*Andy Rooney is a 90 year-old American all-time all-star curmudgeon and news editorialist, who opens his segments on 60 Minutes by looking askance at the camera and parrying the cosmos with some dizzying thrust like "Have you ever wondered why crabs walk sideways?" He then explores his own concern ad nauseam , often with more entertaining results than anyone has any right to hope for.
Why is New Year's on January 1? I don't know, really, something from those same religious blighters in funny robes that couldn't even agree what year it was for quite a long time, I'd guess. Who cares, really? So now we have to act like they knew everything all along. And the Eastern Orthodox Christians don't agree anyway (or is it only Christmas that they disagree on? I don't know, nice beards, wonderful people), nor the Muslims, Buddhists...definitely not the Chinese, who name their years after animals, as the Caribbeans do baseball players. So why should you?
As you see, I've been wondering about any number of things this week. (waiting for school to start, and everyone to go off so I can get down to the serious business of unfettered pathology and writing really weird stuff) So far as I know even the apocrypha records no preference of Jesus on the matter, and the pagans had something more sensible along the lines of the year starts when the moon eats mars and the elf leaves turn green.
That's certainly better, but it does demand an update. The New Year starts, obviously, when vacation ends and everyone goes back to work. When school starts and you look at your new schedule and see if the powers that be had the decency to put any of your friends in your class. I admit that it's a little bit weird that that's also the time when the trees' hair starts falling out, but pagan regeneration in the springtime and....yeah, ok, I can't get around that one, but it's all obvious enough anyway.
School is starting, work is starting, new contracts are in effect, everyone's filing new lawsuits, the train schedule changed, how can it not be a new year? Happy New Year to you!!!
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LOUD MUSIC OF THE WEEK: MÖTLEY CRÜE - Too Fast For Love (1981) This stuff is so funny. Maybe the best line of rock "critique" ever was a guy in the Encyclopedia of Rock declaring that anyone who "loves rock and roll for all the right reasons" would love the Ramones. It's only slightly less true here, for reasons relating to the relatively minor matter of quality and peripheral issues like that. I remember when this shit came out, I couldn't get behind it, I didn't want to listen to it—too much hair spray and spandex androgyny taken beyond the more sensible and sophisticated limits established by Jagger in his corset and Bowie's codpiece collection...but eventually I did, and it's....not GREAT, but, you know, a lot of fun. Hairspray, metal spiked dog choke-collars, disco boots, what the hell's any of that against extraordinary power chord progressions and snotty lyrics? They'd never be quite this glorious again, but they'd get a lot more popular. (some guy in the San Diego Union reviewing the concert in the late '80s going something like "...and all of these teenage girls in short black skirts on their feet as one, shaking their little fists against whatever it is that oppresses teenage girls in short black skirts...)
PUT THIS IN YOUR iPOD: "TAKE ME TO THE TOP" – MÖTLEY CRÜE I don't know if this is the best track on the album, probably not, but it's the one with the metal hook that I was lurching on as we were entering Inverness. Young ladies often have some difficulty understanding why, in moments of joy, their young men go "bwahnh, bwuh, bneeeeuow-ooooh, whomp" in accordance with the power chords in their heads. And so thirty years on lovely wives may wonder why post-adolescent husbands look out the window at the North Sea and wind blowing through the tall grasses and go "womp-wuh-wuh-wuh..." But that's what I did, and it made good sense to me (and Theresa wasn't embarrassed for me, so far as I know, she's dealt with these symptoms for some time).
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Organized capitalism has sublimated and turned to socially productive use frustration and primary aggressiveness on an unprecedented scale-unprecedented not in terms of the quality of violence but rather in terms of its capacity to produce long-range contentment and satisfaction, to reproduce the "voluntary servitude."
--Herbert Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation
The natives, by and large, had to be driven to work with clubs, they preserved that much dignity, whereas the whites, perfected by public education, worked of their own free will.
Wielding a club is fatiguing in the long run. The white men's hearts and minds, on the other hand, have been crammed full of the hope of becoming rich and powerful, and that costs nothing, absolutely nothing. We've heard enough about Egypt and the Tatar tyrants! In the art of squeezing the last ounce of labor out of a two-legged animal, those primitive ancients were pretentious incompetents! Did they ever think of calling their slave "Monsieur" or letting him vote now and then, or giving him his newspaper?
--Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Journey to the Edge of the Night
And there you have it, from the poet and the scientist. Where's the harm? Happy people going to their graves in servitude. Marcuse's place is secure and celebrated, I'm wondering about Céline.
He has been, and not without any supporting evidence at all, denounced as an anti-Semite. Reading his works, it's also easy enough to attach the "anti-Black" label to him, his depiction of Africans is hardly an endorsement. But this all ignores his depiction of the French, his home boys, who come out worse than anyone. If he had written about the Chinese there is no doubt in my mind but that they would not have fared much better, no one comes off very well in his books.
Céline was no racist and no hypocrite: he was a low-level misanthrope. The kind who vaguely hopes for the best in people, but is not-so-secretly relieved when they turn out to be dispicable. He enjoyed despising everyone, not least himself. Think Nietzsche without the optimism. He very rarely has anything nice to say about anyone (though when he does, he does so beautifully), and even then he turns on them within a page or two. I don't know if I could have put up with him for three beers, but I do know this: Louis-Ferdinand Céline is one of the greatest, most unique, and most important writers of the 20th century. His cause is not helped by the fact that he was not as consistently brilliant as most of the few others that have ever written with his skill, passion and insight.
Taking things out of the context of his work, you could use them to prove that he was almost anything (altruist, devil, lazy, industrious, etc.). "Kind of like the Bible," I suspect he'd say if he ever saw Venice Beach, to any bewildered lack of opposition.
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PUT THIS ON YOUR iPOD, TOO "The Big Country" - Talking Heads (1978). The concept set forth above by Marcuse and Céline is a central one to rock and roll, of course. Gotta rebel against something, how about enslavement, impending or realized? This is the most powerful musical recitation, for me. "and ah say....I wouldn't do those things..."
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