Continued ephemera

On the top of a pay phone, I found the following message on a piece of paper:

You have 9 years (max)
till Judgement [sic] 2017
(Jesus coming in wrath)

And, as they say, that was all she wrote.

I also finished Melville's Moby-Dick, a rambling epic of a book. Expansive in time and space, with a scope stretching back into Biblical archives and across the known world, and a cosmic nemesis, a white whale invested with all the symbolism of the uncanny. A catastrophe prewritten by grim portents and mad forebodings.

The afterlife of utopia

If you walk down Lambton Quay, the central shopping street in Wellington, you'll see a blue sign that simply reads "UTOPIA." It's a shoe store.

Utopia has a beautiful and tragic history in the western tradition. It's stuck with us since Thomas More first gave the name to his precise dream of an ideal society - or, some might say, since Plato's proposal for a cautiously measured Republic. In the intervening years, it's undergone many permutations, including small-scale utopian communities dotted throughout America, and the Soviet Union. It's never seemed to work as planned.

And so utopia has, seemingly, come to an end. The USSR fell in 1991, China has unleashed social chaos once again, this time hoping to grasp the invisible hand, and Cuba survives as a zombie remnant, vivified only by a sense of opposition to the U.S. embargo. My generation has grown up without the dream or spectre of socialism - it can not be menaced or enraptured by the existence of a possible utopia. We are simply suspended in a network created by the action of billions of imperfect, creatively-destructive individual rationalities. We have no cognitive space for utopia.

Nevertheless, utopia is not dead - it, along with everything else that once stood for itself but now exists under the sorcerer's sway of capital, has shambled into the marketplace. It has been defeated, and badly.

Where once utopia stood for opposition, resistance to the mismeasured conditions of human existence, it now sells shoes. But as Walter Benjamin would probably observe, its capitulation betrays a shade of triumph.

By placing "UTOPIA" on its billboard, shoe salesmen concede the power of utopia. Even existing as it does, as a ghost of an idea, a rotting fruit from the dustbin of history, it seems to have the power to draw customers. Shoes do not sell themselves; they must be invested with some utopian promise.

In other words, we long for more than utilitarian foot coverings. Rather, we seek shoes that will transform our lives, transfigure our social world, remake our future. But whatever we buy from UTOPIA won't satisfy those needs, and when we realize that, the subversive idea of utopia will be waiting for us, embalmed on storefront marquees.

Oh I wish I was in Wellington...

Yo, if you want a postcard (and the associated three heartfelt cliches), send me your address.

This morning Geoff and I flew down to Wellington, the capitol of NZ - a trip that was novel for the fact that we were treated like humans rather than a curious species of airborne cattle. They even served us tasty, fresh-baked muffins on our flight. The metal detector procedure was distinguished by a lack of paranoia. We were not assumed to be hiding explosives in our shoes or water bottles.

In New Zealand

And I don't think I can totally relax until I've actually found a job.

Oy vey.

History and memory

Borges writes a fable in which the narrator discovers a minor caesura in history. A frontier cowboy, a rustic figure who fought in an almost-forgotten border conflict has died, and after his death, the recorded and remembered details of his life begin to change.

The gaucho had survived a skirmish through an act of cowardice that he proceeded to regret for the remainder of his provincial life. But a void subsequently opened up under the traces of that life, and in the end he was recalled only dimly by a few old cowboys as having died while leading the decisive charge of that long-ago battle.

The narrator speculated that the man had spent his unmemorable years wishing for a heroic death, and that his longings had restructured history after the fact.

The story speaks to the fragility of reality itself. Our history, which we assume to be very solid, only assumes stability through the operation of memory, which is itself mutable. In short: Who's to say whether or not the dead gaucho changed history through an act of will, or if his friends merely remembered him wrongly or differently? There is no clear distinction between the two.

Recall Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, in which he suggested that the "messianic" role of each generation was to repair the damage that had been done to the "oppressed" of past generations.

Such a task is comparable to the humble act of Borges' self-abnegating gaucho. Humanity, like that character, seeks to be restored to "the fullness of its past" - that is to say, it wants to be able to recall all that has happened without shame or dread. Slavery, genocide and war scar our history, and we turn away from remembering such horrors. In doing so, we turn away from the past.

However, Benjamin argues, in the image of the Angel of History, we cannot look away. Our faces are also turned towards the refuge of past catastrophe - the dead and the smashed - and like him, we are blown irresistibly into the future, away from the painful moment.

There is a certain futility to the Angel's desire "to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed."

What is required is a caesura like that of Borges' gaucho. Slavoj Žižek describes such an act in terms of psychoanalysis, referring to Freud's concept of das Ungeschehenmachen, or the "radical effacement" of a symbolic universe. This is a moment of "retroactive cancellation", "in which one action is cancelled out by a second, so that it is as though neither action had taken place."

Žižek goes on to comment that this "supreme power of Spirit," the ability to rewrite one's own past, is "conceivable only on the symbolic level." In "immediate life," where memory and records are least mutable, it is not possible.

But when history appears on the level of text, when it passes out of our immediate life and into the symbolic universe of recorded memory, "one is able to wind back what has already occurred, or erase the past." One is able to satisfy the desire of Benjamin's Angel.

We cannot be too suspicious of this notion. Žižek writes of the erasure and nullification of history, referring to retroactive cancellation as a fulfillment of the "death drive." This treatment of history inevitably recalls the protagonist of George Orwell's 1984, who had the peculiar job of editing historical records. On more than one occasion, he erased the existence of the state's crimes by erasing all records of a political prisoner's existence.

What, then, separates the notion of rewriting history put forth by Borges and Žižek from the fascistic erasure of history operating in 1984?

If this idea is to be saved for Benjaminian purposes, it is necessary to remember that Žižek discussed retroactive cancellation as the final stage of the Lacanian psychoanalytic process - the goal of which was the reconciliation of the individual with his or her own past. Benjamin, similarly, calls for a humanity-wide reconciliation with history, one in which the downtrodden and oppressed would take their equal place. But were that to happen, might we not simply vanish from history, like the Borges character who decided not to be blown away from his day of glory in the first place?

The artist at the end of history

After visiting France and the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, Walter Benjamin commented that artists found themselves in opposite positions under socialism and capitalism. In the capitalist democracies, artists had freedom but no power; in the USSR, they had power but no freedom.

He pointed out a curious truth about liberal free-market societies. In them, we have freedom to create, write, and speak freely, but our works are only socially relevant insofar as they are directly profitable. Art is no more than a private passion - much like this diary.

By contrast, art was held up as a means of social transformation in the bad old spaces of communism - but artists could only hew into reality works that had been approved by the Party. Art could be a public passion, but it could not represent its creator's own view.

Benjamin sought, or hoped for, a world in which the artist, with his expressive individuality, could be reconciled with the interests of society. A world in which the artist would have both freedom and power. Although the latter part of Benjamin's dilemma passed out of existence almost two decades ago, we are still pierced by the first clause.

I would venture the speculation that the marketing and advertisement industry is the largest employer of art-school graduates in the country. In today's capitalized America, artists are only deemed useful when they can augment the bottom line. To survive - and create - they (we?) must turn their talents to works that have been approved by the upper management.

The interesting question, of course, is this: At what point does a lack of power lead directly to a lack of freedom?

When one can't live (or pay for canvas and paint) without selling all of their creative labour to a corporation, when health care is unavailable without doing so, when rents are too high to live near other artists and gas prices are too high to commute - then we might say that artists lose the license to create freely. If us creative individuals have no power over our society, we rapidly lose our practical freedom of expression.

When television rips all the eyeballs away from paperback fictions and zines, when advertising posters cover all the walls, when public space is supplanted by skyscrapers, what does the First Amendment mean? We become vox clamantis in deserto - voices silenced by the lack of an audience in the desert of the real.

The anxiety list

This has gone slightly undiscussed, to the point where it surprises my close friends: I am moving to New Zealand in a week.

Well, not quite - I'm visiting NZ for six weeks to see relatives and look for a job. But if all goes well, I will find a job and live there for a few years. I've got a Kiwi passport, and a girlfriend who is willing to try living overseas (thanks Anne!), so it's a genuine possibility.

Nevertheless, things are anything but settled. I don't actually have employment yet, and if I can't get one soon I will run my bank account dry. I will be flying halfway across the globe to bring myself to market. I will be talking to people I have never met, in a country that is strange to me despite family history. There is no guarantee that any of this will work. I am very nervous about doing this.

However: I would regret taking this opportunity to radically dislocate myself. 22 and at a loose end - there's never going to be a better time to move across the world. I hope it works out.

The old Tom Waits

I search the place for your lost face, guess I'll have another round
And I think that I just fell in love with you...
-Tom Waits, "Hope I Don't Fall In Love With You"

Ink and needles

After I graduated from high schoo, my crosscountry coach advised me not to get a tattoo in college. It's a time of personal growth, he suggested, and the last thing you're going to want later on is an inked-in reminder of your larval stages.

It seemed like sound advice, so I never thought seriously about tattooing myself. When one of my friends, who had transferred out to Deep Springs College, showed up with a handdrawn tattoo of the Deep Springs cattle brand on his ass, Coach's advice seemed somewhat vindicated.

I don't think that it's a great idea to get a tattoo immediately after leaving college, either, for basically the same reason. Let's face it: We come up with a lot of stupid shit in our twenties, and we're not going to want to explain it all to our kids later on.

Nevertheless, I have thought up a few good designs. I started out with the idea of a circle - just the outline, in black.



After all, the problem with tattoos is keeping them confined. Apparently it goes like this: You start out with something small, like a two-letter homage to your mom, and then one day you wake up and you're tattooed all over like a lizard or a zombie. But if you confine the little buggers, it's much harder for them to escape to the rest of your body.

I can think of a few different things that I would like to fill the circle with.

One: The most vivid image I have encountered within a theoretical text is from Walter Benjamin's On the Concept of History, in which he is describing his view of history:

There is a picture by Klee called Angelus Novus. It shows an angel who seems about to move away from something he stares at. His eyes are wide, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how the angel of history must look. His face is turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe, which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it at his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise and has got caught in his wings; it is so strong that the angel can longer close them. This storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows toward the sky. What we call progress is this storm.

This is a text that has shaped my way of thinking. It rejects the linear notion of historical progress, in which time passes on smoothly, leaving in its wake a string of successes. It injects longing for completeness into the persona of the historian - and desperation at having to constantly face an unrepairable past. Most of all, it reminds one that we are being blown, endlessly, into the future.

In other words, Paul Klee's Angelus Novus would be a fitting interior to the circle. An image with a secret affinity to other Benjaminians.



Two: Do you recall the maps of the 18th century? The globe had long since been discovered, and most of it mapped, using an azimuthal projection onto two side-by-side hemispheres. It was a time of dawning imperial ambitions and shipbuilding optimism. New Zealand, the most recently settled landmass, had been mapped by a British explorer in 1769; Australia, which had been inhabited for over 42 millennia, was set up as a penal colony in 1788. They had this Western Hemisphere thing figured out, as this 1779 map shows.



It also shows how recent European history is in this half of the world. The U.S. was begun only three years before the making of this map. Not even two and a half centuries. The Treaty of Waitangi was signed sixy-one years later. New Zealand has spent less than 160 years incorporated under that name. California broke away from Mexico six years after that: It is even younger.

Fill in the circle, therefore, with an antiquated image of the Western Hemisphere, to remind me that I exist in a "new" hemisphere, settled recently by the Europeans, who patted a thin layer of dirt over the ashes and historical ruin piled up in their conquest.

Military coups and military popularity

A recent Gallup poll revealed that, in America, the military is far and away the most popular institution. The president is out of favor as are Congress and the media, for erecting a foundation of lies for a ghastly war. The military, which has merely carried out the politicians' whims, is still trusted. 45% of Americans have "a great deal" of confidence in it, and another 26% have "quite a lot."

Americans have distressingly little confidence in the institutions that feed us (Big Business: 20% "a great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence), care for our bodies (HMOs: 13%), educate our children (public education: 33%), provide us with news (newspapers: 24%, television: 23%), and rule us (presidency: an inexplicable 26%, Congress: 12%, Supreme Court: 32%). Perhaps this lack of trust is entirely warranted - it may be the case that we have untrustworthy institutions. Unaccountable power is being consolidated in the presidency; the media reports nothing but trivialities (in a mendacious fashion); the education system is (in spite of countless dedicated and smart teachers) becoming a bureaucratized monstrosity that fails to impart even the most essential information; the health care industry is more interested in sucking our purses dry than healing us; Congress bends over backwards to enable lawbreaking on the part of the president and big business.

In short, there is a little bit of a crisis in civil society.

A bit of history for this situation: Shortly after Argentina became democratic, with universal male suffrage in 1916, it fell prey to six military coups between 1930 and 1976. The first unseated Hipólito Yrigoyen's Radical government and installed a conservative oligarchy, the second, in 1943, unseated the oligarchy and, after three years of military rule, restored power to the elected populist Juan Perón. After the unraveling of Perón's popular coalition, the military deposed and exiled him in 1955, restoring power to his "class enemies." They intervened again in 1962, but stood by when democracy was restored in 1973, resulting in the return of Perón's Partida Justicialista. Three years later, the military took over for good, plunging the country into seven years of brutal dictatorship.

In each of these instances, a political or economic crisis - the Great Depression, a slump in export earnings, internal guerrilla warfare, etc - called the legitimacy of the standing government into question. When the military stepped in at these points, they were a popular institution carrying out the will of (a certain subset of) the people.

Needless to say, the army in Argentina is no longer viewed in such a manner. When the country faced a grievous collapse in 2001, with >25% unemployment and the failure of three successive governments, no military coup was attempted. The legacy of the desaparecidos (see above) and the catastrophic Falklands War had finally put that idea to rest.

We have not undergone such a disastrous experiment with military rule, and our military is, as the polls show, the most trusted institution in the country. It would not be entirely erroneous to comment that conditions are ripening for a repeat of the Argentine experience.

Argentina offers up 30,000 reasons to not go down that road; 30,000 crushed families, ruined hopes, disappeared lives.

Beautiful non-sequiturs

"He went back through the years, levering each year up like a stone, to see what lay beneath; he never seemed to find anything."
-Maurice Shadbolt, "The People Before"

There is some good progress happening on the job search front. I may end up in New Zealand for a few years.

You cast a long shadow
and that is your testament.
-Joe Strummer and the Mescaleros, "Long Shadow"

Old shoes

While you traveled into every state
Except the obvious...
-The Mutton Birds, "Last Year's Shoes"

The shoes never change size, any more: they have remained the same size twelve for the last seven years. Yet the old ones are always different, worn in by different necessities, different trails, and each pair with its own peculiar odor. A new pair always holds such optimism, by comparison, having yet to be broken in.

How to have your government and eat it too

I have been thinking about governments again, lately, by way of three fuentes:

1. JM Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year, part of which is the anti-political musings of an elderly novelist. He describes himself as a "pessimistic quietist anarchist": someone who thinks that the system is rotten, that it won't change, and that there's no sense in trying to change it. He constructs the government as a unified entity - centralized, with single acts of voting "determining" the state of the system (i.e. candidate A or candidate B in control).

2. Mike Davis' City of Quartz, an excavatory history of Los Angeles, which comments upon the crazy patchwork of local authorities that constitutes the region. In his account, various municipal governments alternately fight and codepend, with absurd results. He gives the account of a growing (wealthy) suburb, which wanted to secede in order to control their residential zoning (nothing but McMansions, no sirree!) and avoid paying for any body's schooling but their own. But they didn't want to pay to set up their own police and fire departments, so they contracted those services out from the city (essentially getting a subsidy from the poorer taxpayers of the City proper). The result of this sort of thing has been, at least in Southern California, a vicious race to the bottom between local governments competing to attract dollars from developers, and the resulting sprawl, smog, and segregation.

Met a stranger on a train
He bumped right into me
-Sonic Youth, "Shadow of a Doubt"

3. A conversation with a Williams alum who works in the Bay Area's Metropolitan Transportation Commission. She described the regimes of governance for transit, land use, and utilities in the Bay as another style of patchwork. The MTA makes plans for transit in the area, and then disburses money to city governments and other organizations (such as BART) to carry out those plans. Another agency provides a forum for all the local governments to discuss their land use plans; yet another manages water, and a third regulates air quality. These regional governmental agencies are bordered from below, by a multitude of complex city governments, and from above, by the state government, and its San Francisco-based Public Utilities Commission.

Although there are secessions and cutthroat competitions (Piedmont's escape from Oakland comes to mind), she explained the regional governance as a generally cooperative and democratic system: When MTA proposed an expansion of the bus lines down Telegraph Avenue to the city of Berkeley, the city council asked citizens for an advisory vote.

This tangle of strong opinions provides no easy answers. As someone who believes that politics are (sometimes for the better, sometimes for the worse) inescapable, embedded in our social nature, I am skeptical of the viewpoint of Coetzee's protagonist. As Davis and the MTA (whose hands are continually tied by the still-popular Proposition 13, a death warrant on quality schools and good government services disguised as an initiative for lower taxes) may reply, there is a high degree of heterogeneity within the tiers of our federal system.

One of the interesting consequences of this is that local and state governments have been quite effective at taking action against climate change despite the Bush administration's national foot-dragging. California has historically been a leader in this area - higher emissions standards, and a recent state plan to reduce CO2 production.

Or look at the matter a different way: the world economy is commonly assumed to be structured by the actions of nation-states, the decisions of world-bestriding corporations, or both. But, as Darel Paul objects, regions and cities play a key role in organizing a global economy. The policies of the city government of San Francisco can have a strong impact on trade and capital flows.

Elliot Spitzer, before his schadenfreude-laced downfall, showed that actions on the part of a local government can play a role in restraining the power of supposedly free-floating finance capital. The lesson from that, and from California's success in climate change legislation, is that global phenomena (or national phenomena such as the effects of the monolithic state abhorred by Coetzee's protagonist) can be organized and responded to through regional governance.

Must've been a dream
from a thousand years ago
-Sonic Youth, "Shadow of a Doubt"

Is this the potential for the regional realization of the new desire (or necessity?) to live in an enclave protected from the fierce winds of globalization. Or is it perhaps just an old dream of control, offering us another rigged choice in which can only assent to the existence of the oldest profession, politics?

Bring me a mango from the south
Pour me a drink from the bottle
And one for you
'cause we're empty as the desert
As we drift from west to east.
-Camper van Beethoven, "Borderline"

An inner connection between far-flung commodities, alcohol, and ennui. Not a bad one, in my estimation: I find that the confusion of modern consumerism, with its eclecticism of origins and purposes, inevitably requires one to seek out a stiff drink. Which, taken in such a mood, inevitably provokes grim thoughts and dull nerves.

Drunk on a weekday night, the tires of big-rig trucks hum though our brains, burning gasoline on an endless quest from west to east and back again, bringing to market the goods of our dreams.

Astronauts

I will try, and undoubtedly fail, to do this without excessive commentary:

I speak this with the marked mistakes of minors learning
How to build a better book of matches by watching the fire burning
Count all my dreams on a pair of Pinocchio fingers
And trace a trail back home by the tumbling splinters
A silly beginner, basic apprentice aggression
In the absence of a master, trying to make up my own lesson
-Astronautalis, "Oceanwalk"

There are more beautiful pieces to this song: The rushed alliteration in "The list of lies, lengthened longer, left life laymen honest" comes to mind (even if it passes in a second), as does the broken rhyme in "All the while stalking, walking, awkward through the night..."

But what is a graduate, a new adult, if not someone who has begun to light up matches in the hope of creating their own? We work office jobs dreaming of our own businesses, take classes that will certify us to teach others, and read books while the dim shapes of our own charging around the back of our minds.

The professors are gone, although we still wanted to learn more from them. The lessons, from now on, are our own, as are our handful of dreams.

Life during language

A disorienting experience, for me: Reading Ada, by Vladimir Nabakov. Word-games abound, the prose spools out with linguistic elan. It's a sliding novel: assonance and alliteration abound, allowing sentences to flow smoothly together.

In the early stages of the book are intriguing: The scene-setting is patchy at best. It's a story of two lovers, set in Tsarist Russia? Canada? It's not exactly clear, and the technological and social backdrop isn't either.

In fact, the setting seems to be semi-irrelevant; it mutates depending upon the needs of the language. I mentioned this peculiarity to Anne, who gave me the book, and she commented that I was, perhaps, being a little bit too anachronistic: "The setting is the language."

I had always supposed that to be true in a trivial sense - in a story written down in a book, everything does take place only in language. But there are a variety of things described (however imperfectly) by the language; those would seem to be the setting of the action. To consider stories to be set entirely in language is to cut away a certain mysticism of language: the assumption that it always refers to an object beyond itself.

This idea has some major implications. For example, if we think of our lives as stories, or phenomena with some narrative shape to them, we can now (after a reading of Nabakov) see that our setting is also language. (This is known, in academia, as the linguistic turn.) It's not a tree, it's a word. It's not a socioeconomic structure, it's a bunch of words.

I remain uncomfortable with this idea, which is why Nabakov is so disconcerting. But then, I am narrating my life, here...

Olallieberry pie

We crawled towards the ocean through brambles of olallieberry thorns.
-Cracker, "Where Have Those Days Gone"

One more Fourth of July past; I have been writing this for three years now.

Fourths of July have always been odd. What does it mean to be as American as apple pie, anyway?

America, as I found out recently, is too big - it's an enormously heterogeneous swathe of territory. Skimming across its surface, as Anne and I did recently, reveals a multitude of places, each one with a history that runs deep beneath the surface. Given the immigrant nature of the country, some histories spread halfway across the world: Greeks founding diners from Buffalo to Pismo Beach, Dutch immigrants raising a windmill in Iowa, Navajo people pushed off to the distant reaches of the desert.

It's easy to be intrigued by such stories, and hard to take them to heart when you haven't lived a lifetime with them.

As a result, my feelings are regional. I am never going to be as American as apple pie, but I might be as American as olallieberry pie, which I tried the first time with Anne at Duarte's. A strange crossbreed berry that is grown only in a thin strip of California.

America lacks public space

Things are back to normal; my brain has restarted. I'm mining books and everyday experience in search of illumination, and using theory as my shovel.

No can't do this!
No can't do that!
What the hell can you do, my friend
In this place that you call your town?
Noooooooo!
-Gogol Bordello, "Tribal Connections"

One of my continual goals is to resist the "naturalization" of the quotidian. That is to say, I want to avoid seeing the features of everyday American lives (four-lane freeways, Made in China tags, credit-card debts, suburban sprawl, cheap, illegally-immigrated labour...) as the normal state of affairs. The fact of that matter: It's strange. American growth is abnormal both historically and internationally. That's not necessarily to say that it's right or wrong - just that it is by no means the only possible outcome.



A memory from Buenos Aires: The Plaza de Mayo lies at the terminus of the three main arteries of the city, and faces the Pink House (the local equivalent of the White House). Although it's in the heart of downtown, right next to the financial district, the Plaza is always buzzing. It is citizens' space at the heart of the city: all marches terminate there, rallies are commonly held there, and the last gray-haired Madres still march on Thursdays, holding vigil (as they have done for thirty years) for children who will never be returned to them. It is, literally, a place for the people to speak truth to power; to physically face down the executive branch, City Hall, the outpost of finance capital. (And, at times, for presidents to organize the shirtless masses around them.)

I've spent several days in San Francisco over the past few weeks, some of it spent wandering up and down Market Street, which cuts the city in half. Before it terminates, on the eastern end, at Embarcadero Street, buildings loom around the central artery: Skyscrapers (physical embodiments of concentrations of capital) bulge up, the Transamerica Pyramid displays its modern-pharaonic splendor, and the massive dome of City Hall shines. At the street level there is little to do.



This downtown is not strange due to its skyscrapers but because no space ever opens up within it. There is no equivalent of the Plaza de Mayo in San Francisco; no citizens' clearing in a corporate redwood grove. As a result, marches may pass down Market, but they have no place to go, no rally point, no platform from which to speak. Where does the peoples' politics go?

I'm not just picking on San Francisco - the lack of central public space is symptomatic of American towns and cities, especially in the West. We stay inside, in our single-family homes and our air-conditioned automobiles; we mingle with others only in the commercialized space of the mall, and fall asleep only to dream of alienation, of frustrated community. We need a place for those dreams; some space in which we can speak and realize that our dreams are shared.

How the hell can we ever think the city is ours, otherwise?

Un sueño del dos mil uno y del tres mil tambíen...

Soy mezcla de baguala, Internet y tango viejo
-Leon Gieco, "Idolo de los Quemados"

Eclecticism, the degree zero of today's aesthetic. (Lyotard) Take rock music, for example: It exists only by pillaging the community property of "subaltern" cultures (most often African-American musical innovations). It was born as a way of whitewashing rhythm and blues, which it then mined until the 1970s, for America's new suburban population. In the early 1960s, it cannibalized (Appalachian) folk music, which temporarily restored some dynamism.

The entire enterprise fell into crisis in the 1970s, when Black Sabbath's hard-edged appropriation of the blues gave way to diminishing musical returns. In response, punk rock started to feed off Jamaican reggae, whose progenitors were at that point was immigrating into Britain. Reggae provided musical nourishment for another decade, followed by a brief time in which mainstream rock fed off the underground punk scene.

After that point, rock-and-roll entered into another period of crisis. Challenged by hip-hop, it had nothing more to say. It responded by flaccidly attempting to implant rap into itself. It goes without saying that the only result of that experiment was unlistenable drivel; people started talking about the end of rock.

Faced with this crisis of accumulation, rock-and-roll attempted a different spatial/racial fix. Rather than exploiting the culture created by the descendants of its former slave populations, Western music would capitalize upon the shreds of its former socialist enemy. In short: The end of the Cold War opened up the entire world to musical exploitation (or, to put it kindly: musical influence).

One of the most dynamic sectors within today's music industry is Eastern-European-influenced rock, with Gogol Bordello as its prophet. A prediction: While no actual klezmer bands will ever attain popularity (just as no pioneering bluesmen reaped their share of the rewards) we will experience a lot of "gypsy punk" in the next few years.

To sum up: Gieco, quoted above, claims to be a mix of baguala (indigenous folk from northern Argentina), digital technology, and old tango music. He assimilates, eclectically, cutting-edge technology, antiquated musical forms, and the home-grown culture of the disenfranchised periphery-dwellers. To put it less kindly, he is a musical carpetbagger.

More to the point, he speaks for rock-and-roll, which has, as I have described above, acted on the logic of capital. Rock music has relentlessly privatized the musical knowledge of disenfranchised communities, displaying a continual tendency to escape from artistic dead-ends by seeking out new rhythms to appropriate. Its eclecticism, therefore, follows a pattern of continual accumulation: It lives only by feeding upon the living flesh of subordinated musical traditions.

God's Top 10 for the 21st Century

I read that on a sign outside a local church. I'm not actually going to go inside the church to find out, but it got me thinking: If there was a god, what would he want us to do during this century?

Let's make it easy on god, though: Ten is a little bit tough, and the last time he had a crack at it, there were a lot of "filler" commandments. (Speaking of which: RIP George. Never thought you'd go.) So let's make things easier on the poor invisible being: Let's hear god's Top 5.

Or at any rate, my biased and highly inaccurate speculations about it.

1. Thou shalt privatize, buy, sell, loot, copyright, and accumulate.
2. In the process, try to despoil, pollute, emit, bulldoze, and deregulate.
3. Thou shalt not fornicate, adulterate, sodomize, or fetishize, unless it is accompanied by hypocritical denial.
4. To the extent that thou shalt recognize that it is now the 21st century, it shalt be to attempt to suppress any social progress that has occurred in those centuries.
5. While thou art at it, finish off the rest of those heathens that have been so much trouble all these years.