Nation

Counter-Insurgency Preceding the End of the World

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The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism. One reason why Fascism has a chance is that in the name of progress its opponents treat it as a historical norm. The current amazement that the things we are experiencing are ‘still’ possible in the twentieth century is not philosophical. This amazement is not the beginning of knowledge–unless it is the knowledge that the view of history which gives rise to it is untenable. –Walter Benjamin

Paul Feyerabend—a half-forgotten Calibanal apostle straddling the right-wing Vienna side of European modernism and California anti/pseudo-science counterculture—was shot three times by the Red Army while retreating from the Eastern Front. His injuries left him neuralgic, prone to a particularly (in/post-)fertile depression, and impotent.

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Post-1968

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Why the blank,
or conversely the horror
around recalling, telling
the 60s/early 70s?
Ulay 3/14/2015 (in the context of the performance ethos then): “Unless you have lived there it is difficult to imagine
because no one can articulate it.”

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Primary Wallow

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Slightly compacted familial e-mails on the Campaign Trail.

First Thought, Best Thought

Here’s the first thing about Bill to remember:

He betrayed Hillary (I’m not just talking the once-licking and future pig). And he CONTINUES to betray her daily–by defending a regime of shit (welfare “reform,” tax “reform,” SEC rules “reform,” prison “reform,” drug penalties “reform,” why stop here?) that she has outright rejected.

And he calls publicly defending his shit that she has rejected, as Senator and as Mme Secretary for Obama, and that she publicly rejects everyday,

“campaigning for her.”

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Donald Trump & Professional Wrestling: How the Billionaire Body-Slammed the G.O.P.

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Chauncey DeVega’s account of Trump’s ties to professional wrestling manages to be both shocking and predictable. (Try the footage of Trump with Vince McMahon in “The Battle of the Billionaires” above.)  DeVega grew up watching pro wrestling and his piece melds his clarities about the American version of that spectacle with Roland Barthes’ classic analysis of the French form.  

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The Politics of Anger

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Mario Cuomo’s often quoted adage, “you campaign in poetry, you govern in prose,” neglects to say that the poetry more often than not is bad poetry.  Campaign speeches are cliché ridden, repetitious, rarely inspired by genuine conviction and filled with promises that the speakers know can’t be kept.  It is an insult to poetry to associate it with the banality of campaigning.  The election of 2016 so far is singularly devoid of the semblance of poetry.

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George Ohr: A Free Man in Biloxi

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“I love George Ohr. More freedom in his head then in just about anyone’s.

Ohr was a 19th century ceramic futurist.  Looking at his work rubbing my fingers together, thinking about the feel of wet clay. his mind must have moved like clay moves when you throw it on a wheel or pinch it…it always seeks freedom…the potter seeks control…the dance is between the authority of the material and the will of the potter.   It can be a discussion or a debate.  A lot of talking.”—Michael Brod

Brod’s musings prompted your editor to ask him to say more on George Ohr, “mad potter of Biloxi,” (who surely looked the part—see the photo at the bottom of this post). Ohr, himself, was more than willing to think out loud about his works and days: “I brood over [each pot] with the same tenderness a mortal child awakens in its parent.”[1] A few of Ohr’s numberless creations were exhibited in NYC last year at the Craig F. Starr gallery. These three were in that show. (You can find many more examples of Ohr’s art pots here.)

3-double-handed-vases_1895-1910 (1)

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Double Trouble: Dramas of American Communism

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News an Oxford don has bought into b.s. about Alger Hiss’s innocence sent your editor back to Aram Saroyan’s play, UNAMERICAN, which is based on the public record of the confrontation between Whittaker Chambers and Hiss. UNAMERICAN is posted below along with the second act of My Confession, Saroyan’s “solo performance play” based on Mary McCarthy’s memoir of her encounters with Stalinists in the 30s  (which she published in Encounter in 1954).

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Trumpery

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Googling “Trump fascist” yields 25 pages of hits and the caveat that “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 237 already displayed”. 

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In Transit

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I was on the train last night heading home. Two young brothers–early teens–were standing in front of me. Both were wearing worn but clean clothes, one had his hoodie up, the other didn’t. Both had light jackets—too flimsy for the weather and knockoff hightop sneakers. It was a look I knew all too well. It reminded me of an entire winter I spent with a blue double-knit jacket as my “winter coat.”

They were chatting usual urban teen talk. I paid little attention until I heard one of them mention what Trump had said earlier in the day about the Pope.

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The Witnesses

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Whittaker Chambers is my idea of an exemplary conservative. He dug Beats and Sorrow Songs, did in Ayn Rand in a definitive National Review piece, distanced himself from William Buckley, hung tight with his old friend James Agee, and tried to convince other conservatives Khrushchev wasn’t Stalin.

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Street Life…and Death

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Ghettoside: A True Story of Murder in America by Jill Leovy, Spiegel & Grau, 2015

I was raised during the Seventies on a cramped block of rundown tenements in Brooklyn’s Bushwick neighborhood. Each building on my block was a five-floor walk-up. Each apartment–two to a floor–was a railroad-style flat. And in those apartments lived poor families raising passels of kids. Not only was this pre-gentrification but by modern hipster standards, this was downright prehistoric.

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Group Grope: The Theory of Microaggression

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Eugene Goodheart has invited responses to his new First piece (posted below) which takes in student protests against microaggressions and the more macro analysis of Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me.[1] I’m skeptical of Goodheart’s attempt to hook-up the world-view of those students with Coates’s World. (More on that anon.) But his critique of the protesters has pushed me to think through the theory of microaggression.

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The Price of Victimhood

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Instances of police brutality and killing of unarmed Blacks, first revealed by social media, have been a catalyst for widespread expression of grievances about racism in colleges and universities.  According to 538, “the most frequently requested data by protestors was for a survey on the atmosphere in classrooms that would collect information as part of end terms evaluations of subtle forms of racism, often called microaggressions, that are committed by specific professors and lecturers.”  Microaggression: “everyday verbal, non verbal and environmental slights, or insults, whether intentional or unintentional, which communicate hostile, derogatory or negative messages to target persons based solely upon their marginalized group membership.”

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Morning in Iowa

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A report from an Iowa Caucus-goer.

It looks to be a long winter; Ted Cruz woke up this morning, saw his shadow, but then absolutely refused to go back in his hole.

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Roots Moves II

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Part 2 of an essay that begins here.

It is absolutely false to imagine that there is some providential mechanism by which what is best in any given period is transmitted to the memory of posterity. By the very nature of things, it is false greatness which is transmitted. There is, indeed, a providential mechanism, but it only works in such a way as to mix a little genuine greatness with a lot of spurious greatness; leaving us to pick out which is which. Without it we should be lost.—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”

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Roots Moves

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“Loss of the past, whether it be collectively or individually, is the supreme human tragedy, and we have thrown ours away just like a child picking off the petals of a rose… We owe our respect to a collectivity, of whatever kind—country, family or any other—not for itself, but because it is food for a certain number of human souls.”—Simone Weil, “The Need for Roots”

Simone Weil once lived in a building around the corner from Tiemann Place in West Harlem where we held our 29th annual “Anti-Gentrification Street Fair” in October. 

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