Multi-Platform Raconteur Release
Just got this in the newsletter:
The Raconteurs are happy to announce that in one week’s time their second album, entitled “Consolers Of The Lonely”, will be available EVERYWHERE Tuesday, March 25th.
“Album” meaning: full length vinyl, CD and digital formats; and “everywhere” meaning: local mom and pop Indie retailers, corporate superstores, supermarkets, iTunes, Amazon, the band’s own website and any other location that could get the record up and going this quickly (some places couldn’t move this fast, so they will join in as soon as they can).
The purpose: to get the album to the fans as soon as possible and as we promised. We wanted to get this record to fans, the press, radio, etc., all at the EXACT SAME TIME so that no one has an upper hand on anyone else regarding it’s availability, reception or perception.
A very cool idea, and dare I say that this is how releases should always have been done, and hopefully will be done in the future. None of that Wal-Mart, iTunes prerelease stuff.
I have high hopes, the Conquest EP was an amazing release.
The man has amazing stage presence.
It’s the Economy, Stupid
Larry Elliott writing for the Guardian:
Ultimately, though, action will be taken because there will be political pressure for it. Indeed, it is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.
Just another reason why America should return to the gold standard!
No Offense, but You Don’t Deserve Your Salary
Chris Colin in the SF Gate:
So what if our work ethic is better than that of the guy down the hall? Any talents, work ethic, intelligence or ambition strike me as qualities we inherited or learned along the way — or else cultivated thanks to other qualities we inherited or learned… So given the capricious and arbitrary nature of this arrangement, isn’t it capricious and arbitrary whatever rewards we get?
(Via I Cite.)
Personally, My Answer to the Link is “No”
To the Editor:
Harold Ickes, a senior adviser to Hillary Rodham Clinton, claims, “Obama’s supporters are going to support whoever is leading our ticket.”
I disagree.
If Barack Obama goes into the convention with more delegates and more of the popular vote and doesn’t come out as the nominee, you cannot expect his supporters — many of whom are first-time voters — to simply “get over” a system that does not acknowledge their vote.
Tim Rehwaldt, Kerhonkson, N.Y., March 12, 2008
Even though I think Obama’s too conservative on many issues, I agree with the sentiment of Mr. Rehwaldt, and… drumroll… will be voting for Nader if Hillary is the candidate! Take that disgusting campaign tactics. You’ll have one less left-elitist college student to push around.
Let’s face it, if I’m voting for Nader I’m basically voting for McCain. Even if I decide not to throw away my vote, this list would still be relevant if Hillary was the candidate…
- I would not be engaged with the election in any radical way.
- I like Jon McCain as a person more than Hillary.
- I don’t see a big difference between Hillary and McCain politically.
- How many elections has Jon McCain won using race baiting?
- There’s always this strategy.
The War and the Working Class
This is somewhat of an old topic of discussion, but Michael Zweig’s recent article in The Nation does an excellent job at fleshing out in detail all of the problems associated with it.
New Left vs. Psychedelic Left
Please forgive the long quote… but how else am I supposed to get you to read it?
So I wrote “An Open Letter to John Lennon” which was published in the October 27 issue of the Black Dwarf… In my letter I pompously pronounced: “Perhaps now you’ll see what it is you’re (we’re) up against. Not nasty people. Not even neurosis, or spiritual under-nourishment. What we’re confronted with is a repressive, vicious, authoritarian system.” …
To our utter amazement at the Black Dwarf, Lennon wrote back… “[I] don’t remember saying that Revolution was revolutionary - fuck Mrs Dale… You say: ‘In order to change the world we’ve got to understand what’s wrong with the world. And then - destroy it. Ruthlessly.’ You’re obviously on a destruction kick I’ll tell you what’s wrong with the world - people - so do you want to destroy them?” …
These letters were syndicated round the world and were described by Richard Neville, the editor of the hippy magazine Oz, as “a classic New Left/psychedelic left dialogue”. They summed up a tension between two tendencies in the counterculture - the hippy strand that had come to the fore in the mid-60s and embraced self-expression, spirituality and “love”, and the leftwing radicalism that was sweeping the world in 1968 and was concerned with changing structures. These weren’t necessarily exclusive positions; they were more a question of emphasis and a lot of people had a foot in both camps. But there was still a tension between them, and the “Dear John” letters epitomised that tension.
Interesting article, save the obligatory blog-age autobiography that leads up to the important parts. I’d say the argument certainly still has some relevancy
Proposal: The Tyrrany of the Fork is Over
Posted at 6:12 PMYou now have no need for cutlery. If you cannot eat it with your hands, you are no longer interested. A straw should still be acceptable, but you don’t really need it, do you?
Let me know if you try this out.
Has J. Crew surpassed it’s ugly pants? This is the ugliest jacket in the world.
Only $350. Snatch it up, while you still can!
White Out
K-punk has written a great analysis of the BBC’s new show, White:
Ethnicization spirits away class in favour of categories that are made to appear natural. The Far Right have profited from this, but New Labour has had its own reasons to collude with it. In addition to fitting New Labour’s intrinsic suspicion of working class cultures, ethnicizing the working class has clear strategic benefits. It obstructs the possibility of class solidarity between indigenous British workers and immigrant labour by positing the two groups as competitors for resources whilst deflecting attention from the reasons that resources are scarce in the first place.
What Eliot Spitzer Teaches Us
Posted at 10:49 PM
One of the big themes in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle is his skepticism of science (and we shouldn’t forget that Vonnegut studied mechanical engineering). There is a very telling passage (it would be even more telling if I could find it) when the main character is sitting in a bar and overhears a discussion about the recent discovery of DNA, yet no one reacts to the news. No one cares, because it hasn’t altered their lives in any inexorable manner. I had always been a strong supporter of the so-called “Enlightenment,” whatever the hell that means (and after all, who wants to call themselves “unenlightened”?), and I’ve always enjoyed Vonnegut’s books, but was nonetheless skeptical of his Neo-Luddism. Yet, as is clear to me now, I could only appreciate his insight in retrospect.
There is much talk today amongst the bourgeoisie about the role of science in the sphere of the political, from debates over evolution to stem cell research, as if these were somehow the most pivotal political issues at stake. And then you have radical reductionist materialists like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, who have become quite fashionable amongst large swaths of the very same libertine intelligentsiia. Yet, and I am hardly the first to point this out, the opposition between science and the new “fundamentalisms” (usually delimited to religious or political “totalitarianisms,” hardly ever the democratic one, which is spread by tanks and cluster bombs…) is fairly obviously overstated, and I think this has become an uncontroversial claim. And the problem isn’t the stupid pseudo-Leftist one that science is really just another form of religion, and all of that twaddle. The problem is rather that, as a rule, no one who is “seriously” oppressed (in the sense of being one of today’s “Excluded” slum-dwellers) is really concerned with upholding the virtuous nature of Scientific Reason. The contradiction is that in refashioning the debate between this science-fundamentalism binary opposition, the bourgeoisie seem to be positioning themselves in the status of victim, the same logic which dominates their liberal multiculturalist ideology. They are perceived as the victim of unchecked religious fervor, which is typically then associated with the stupid poor masses. In other ways, too, however, this straight out class antagonism is often side-stepped or obfuscated by a confrontation with the wealthy conservatives who are seen as manipulating the working-class people, such that one exclaims, “If only they knew the truth, the world would be a better place.” This view is perhaps even more patronizing, as it suggests that not only are the masses poor and stupid, but they are also passive. Their stupidity even precludes them from acting, so they can only find a real voice through their rich lords. Consequently, when they talk about science qua the political, they are not really talking about science at all. Instead, what they are really after is the right to preside over the mastery of the canaille, a right they see as their own rather than the proto-fascists.
It is a difficult issue to navigate, however, because on the one hand I’m not interested in defending any anti-scientific position, like, for example, doubting evolution. With science one cannot be “for” or “against” it, that is the entire point. This reached humorous levels under High Stalinism, when experimental physics research of “free-floating radicals” was outlawed due to a misunderstanding of what “free-floating radical” meant. The problem, then, is a paradigmatic one: who will be responsible for asserting a claim to Universality? The biggest problem with arguing that science should occupy the status of a Universal, as it was in the Enlightenment (another indication, following Badiou’s “The Communist Hypothesis,” that we are regressing back to the 19th century), is that it essentially requires a new domain of authority. Because science inhabits a privileged, largely academic discourse, those who “know,” who have the special knowledge, occupy the (Lacanian) position of “subjects supposed to know.” They are like Sherlock Holmes-esque figures, the same sort of logic which aptly fits the dynamics of the TV show Monk. Why is this? It’s because the assumption is as follows: “Wow, I don’t understand what the hell a legless Russian trapese artist has to do with a mysterious murder, but I’m sure Monk does, and he will put all of the pieces together.” The formula is always the same: Monk spots what appears to us and the idiot cops (interpellated “subjects supposed to believe”) as a meaningless stain, which for him exposes the entire logical chain (akin to the anamorphosis that takes place in Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors). So essentially, when one insists on the primacy of scientific discourse as a new political paradigm, it is implicitly an assertion of political authority.
This assertion of political authority disguised as Reason, and, unbeknownst to it, in the service of its cunning, perfectly fits the depoliticalizing trend of the past decades following the collapse of Actually Existing Socialism and the ordaining of the End of History. It involves eliminating the political will of the masses and dismissing the real problems of today’s new, slum-dwelling proletarian, instead opting to address them as a “human rights” concern, to incorporate them into state bureaucracy and so on. It involves eliminating political antagonism, which is understood as another form of totalitarian fundamentalism (like Hugo Chávez’s socialist project in Venezuela). And it involves instituting the program of the liberal utopia.
So what is the truth of the liberal utopia? To go back to the example of the detective novel, the truth seems to lie in the passage from classic detective novel to the film noir universe, where the detective is no longer outside, as it were, of the seedy underbelly of criminal life, but interjected within its perverse machinations. This is the example we learn from the recent scandal involving Eliot Spitzer: the faults of one expert administrator expose the entire perverse core of the logic underlying the liberal utopia; so-called inflexible ethics merely mask the prostitution rings, child molestation and other seeming “aberrations” that occupy the lives of the bureaucratic elite.
The only goal then, following Badiou, is to continue to insist on the primacy of the communist hypothesis:
In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th-century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways to express the communist hypothesis … Which is no doubt why, as in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and on the ground.1
- Alain Badiou, The Communist Hypothesis. ↩
Zizek on Democracy Now!
Slavoj Zizek:
This may amuse you. It’s going to—when I was asked by a academic journal to say if I were to hold the power for one day as president, what—and I would have kind of absolute power to introduce a law, what law that would have been? My immediate answer was not as some humanist suggested, since United States at least thinks they are a global empire, so let every adult in the world be allowed to vote; my advice would be the opposite one: let’s everybody in the world, except US citizens, be allowed to vote and elect the American government. I think it would have been much better for you, even, because we all outside the United States would project our desires into how you should be.
(Via I Cite.)
Media Overlook Fed Bailout in Plain View
Dean Baker, writing for The American Prospect:
Can’t the media find any economists who don’t think that handing hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars to the big banks and the incredibly rich people who own and manage them is a good idea? Apparently not, given the coverage so far to the Fed’s proposal to lend $200 billion to the banks using mortgage backed securities as collateral.
(Via A Tiny Revolution.)
Can the People Speak?
Jodi Dean:
Perhaps paradoxically division best appears under compulsion to choose when there are no grounds for choice. Clinton and Obama have similar plans, programs, voting records. What appears in the contest between them is the fact of division, just like in the past two elections, elections that nearly perfectly captured divide because there were no differences that mattered.
Saving Spitzer
After today’s revelation that Senator Eliot Spitzer, who built his career on the platform of ethics reform, is implicated in a prostitution ring, it would appear that his political career is, by and large, over. But I think one thing could ‘save’ Spitzer: convert to Christianity. He could then run as a born-again Republican, a “compassionate conservative,” if you will, to show everyone just how much the touch of Christ has changed his life. After all, you gotta sin to be saved.
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