Uninterpretative

Unified (Gar)Field Theory

2012-02-18T10:40:00.000-08:00

(at garfield.com, starting here, with a hat tip to Grant for sharing it)

The clear implication, at the end of the bizarre arc from October 23rd to the 28th, 1989, is that the entirety of the Garfield comic strip is, in some way, an elaborate hallucination, a paranoid delusion, or an extended meditation on a stage of grief. The comic itself is utterly explicit about this, and, strangely, doesn't even bother to shoot a snide sideways grin; there's no wink at the end, nothing but the tiny "End" insert to indicate that what has happened is at all out of the ordinary in the universe of the strip. And of course that it is there is important. But the final panel itself is strange; it takes the tone of a moral, that part of the fiction which tells you that the fiction is being exceeded, that there is a remainder here that you are supposed to recognize and use. The problem, though, is that what it actually says is totally fucking incoherent as a moral; it's, really, just a description of the preceding comic. Which means, I take it, that the arc itself is the didactic footnote to the fable of the comic.

Which, of course, means that Garfield itself is the story of a cat who does not exist, fantasizing about a life which is not real. And if Garfield is an absence, then he is an absence that dreams in a particular, dilapidated house.

Two days after the end of that arc, came this comic

Which is, of course, exactly your ordinary Garfield comic strip. It happens to be the Halloween edition, so there's a bit of a prepackaged theme to the joke. But, coming as it does just so soon after the arc, and especially the comic from the 27th, where we watch Garfield's delusions dematerialize and see the truth of his surroundings, there's something extra eery about this comic from the 30th of October, 1989. Because Garfield is no longer just a sort of apathetic, sardonic cat - he is in fact the absence of a cat, a nocat, subjected to time. Garfield becomes the structuring principle, the ability to imagine of that which is absent. And the truth of his absence, what makes it comprehensible, is, of course, the dissipation of his dream-world; and what signifies that dissipation is the dilapidated house.

The Garfield Minus Garfield webcomic actually gets Garfield, then, both totally right, and totally wrong. Garfield is, apparently, by its own admission, the comic depiction of loneliness and denial that Garfield Minus Garfield supposedly detourns it into. The way that Garfield Minus Garfield could be said to get Garfield exactly right, though, is that, as that arc showed us, Garfield himself is an absence - "But that means I haven't lived here for years." But it seems to assume that because he is an absence, he is erasable, whereas this seems to be the exact opposite of the truth. Because his absence is a structuring absence, not a simple lack of presence. Jon and Odie are, and perhaps always been, mere projections of this absence, figures formed to fill up space.

Garfield is a ghost. And a real ghost, not some bullshit about a lingering soul trying to finish up his business. Ghosts are space. They are, particularly, a becoming-consciousness of space. Ghosts are not embodied, or if they are, it is a function of narrative and not ghost-ness; ghosts are absences of space, absences within space, that structure the space. And so, apparently, is Garfield.

I Have No Mouth, But I Must Scream: Hello Kitty Everything in The New Inquiry

2012-02-16T09:40:00.000-08:00

David Banner Vs. Lil B: Swag Rap as Moloch

2012-02-08T17:11:00.000-08:00

(This post is going to be a bit top-heavy with the embedded youtubes (or, if you prefer, a bit bottom-heavy with text). I thought about distributing them more evenly but fuck it.)

(This is why moloch)

So, for all you out there who don't follow swag rap, here's the deal. David Banner made this song, Swag, dissing the trend, taking aim specifically at Lil B.

You might recognize David Banner as the rapper who did that 2-bit (but still pretty fantastic) Ying Yang Twinz rip off, Play

Taking aim at swag rap does seem to be the new trend among rappers who no one really gives a shit about anymore. You might remember The Game teaming up with Tyler, The Creator (and sampling Lil Wayne, all "featuring Otis Redding," Watch The Throne style) for that really abominable sub-sub-Eminem track, Martians Vs. Goblins

(Lil B's response to which, is, by the way, fantastic:

and then Lil B released his I Forgive You mixtape, which doesn't actually explicitly reference The Game, but hell if that isn't the funniest way to respond to a diss)

But anyway, that's all sort of beside the point. Lil B's response to David Banner, in which he jacks the beat for Swag and turns it into I Own Swag.

Now, I'm going to be entirely honest here: before I started writing this, I was under the impression that I hadn't heard hardly any David Banner songs. But as I'm writing, I'm looking him up on youtube, and realizing something kind of strange; David Banner has, apparently, been behind every song on the radio for the last decade or so that occupies that exact 'radio space' - where you enjoy it when it comes on, and it inspires no interest beyond that. I don't think I'd ever really known that I was listening to a David Banner song before Swag, and yet I keep finding these songs that I know most of the lyrics to on his VEVO channel. Like, honestly, somehow David Banner even managed to make a song featuring Akon, Weezy, and Snoop fall completely under the radar. That's pretty remarkable.

But I'm not here to talk shit about David Banner. Because I actually kind of like the song Swag. I think the criticisms he's leveling at swag rap are fucking laughable, obviously - especially the shit about "They won't spit the truth / These niggas been scared / Call my flow the puddin' / The proofs in there / I say the shit they say I shouldn't / I ain't never cared." David Banner isn't exactly a fucking conscious emcee - which is a good thing, fuck "conscious hip hop" and all that shit - and, as far as I can tell, he's never said a controversial thing in a major song, ever.* And then, even, it seems like he's almost taking subliminal shots at himself when he says shit like, "Is anybody on the next level, with me / I'm hearin' niggas dissin' god, y'all think it's witty / I ain't laughin', we don't play in Mississippi" (emphasis mine).

It does seem a bit weird to identify who in particular he's targeting. Lil B is definitely the main one, and V-Nasty is pretty fucking explicit in the chorus; but then, Banner did a song with A$AP ROCKY recently, he of Purple Swag fame. It leaves me wondering how Banner feels about, say, Danny Brown, or Lex Luger. Or if the first half of the chorus is intended as a diss at Brick Squad.

Swag is produced by Swiff D, whose beats sound to me basically like really conservative attempts at swag rap beats, like if Clams Casino were constantly worried about how A&Rs would react to their beats. Or, to be a bit more dickish, like how you'd imagine the Fruity Loops-wielding producer for a really unremarkable Southern California rap crew would sound.

The thing about all this, though, is that I think both David Banner and Swiff D actually excel way beyond everything else of theirs I've heard on Swag. The song might be intended as a parody, but if you listen to it as a pastiche, it is, or at least I think it is, pretty interesting, and not a bad example of the form.

And I mean, Banner definitely intended it as a parody, but listen to some of his other songs; he's a pastiche artist. He's almost as bad as The Game, in terms of biting the style of whichever other rapper is on a song with him. The reason The Game's diss at Lil B didn't come out interesting is because his pastiche never reached out far enough; he just copied Tyler, the Creator (and not even all of Tyler, just the part of Tyler that is heavily influenced by Eminem).

The difference between parody and pastiche, being, here, to take from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s introduction to The Signifying Monkey, that pastiche is different from parody insofar as pastiche possesses an "absence of the negative critique." (xxvi) That is, pastiche takes previous texts just as parody does, and both rework them, and effect them; but pastiche does so not under the rubric of the critical, or particularly the negative critique, as does parody. Instead of being "about the clearing of a space of narration," pastiche "seems to be intent on underscoring the relation of [the] text ... in a joyous proclamation of antecedent and descendant texts." (xxvii)

Now, if you're following me here, and you've listened to Swag, and paid even the slightest attention, you're probably about ready to tell me to fuck off. The song's about as explicitly a diss song, which might be also called a song of negative critique, if we were kind of poncy, as a song can be, short of Banner including some "Fuck you Lil B" punch-in somewhere.

But then, the way that the song plays out is kind of strange. The way that the diss is constructed is definitely not along the lines of your ordinary rap beef; Banner says very little that is directly insulting, instead jacking Lil B's flow, and his ad libs, and some of his memes, and just incorporating them whole. There are moments, lines about how disappointed in the state of hip hop that he is, that sort of shit. And some weird implication that, like, Lil B is the reason that people didn't care about Oscar Grant's death or something. I'm not really sure.

The point being, though, that as much as David Banner wants to decry this new aesthetic turn in rap, he can't do it in the traditional, parodic way; Banner can't simply come at swag rap the way BDP could come at the Juice Crew, presenting criticisms in order to clear a space for narration. He, instead, has to position himself within the aesthetic, in the hopes that doing so will be understood to be subversive of it. His gambit, though, relies so heavily on the critique remaining implicit, that it's actually not that hard to just willfully ignore it, and listen to the song as though it was a swag rap song by a new convert.

Part of the fun in taking the song this way, for me, is how it reframes Lil B's shot back. Not only because Lil B is actually a lot more explicitly taking shots at David Banner (in that he says his name), but because of how Lil B's response is itself also, then, more pastiche than parody.

Again, even though Lil B's song takes the form of the diss, and seems to mark itself clearly with the intentions of the negative critique, it doesn't really serve the purpose of clearing out a space. The comparison I made earlier, to the Bridge Wars, is an example of diss tracks that do precisely this; these crews attack each other, throwing into question the other's authenticity, claims to veracity, and so on, precisely in order to assert their own narrative into and over the tradition. With Tupac Vs. Notorious B.I.G., the disses were, again, attempts at a geographical dominance over the tradition, only coastal instead of inter-borough. Banner might rep Mississippi, but he's made his share of hyphy-biting tracks; and Lil B might rep the Bay, but he's made no secret of his debt to southern rap like Lil Wayne. The only real sense one could make of Lil B vs David Banner, in geographical terms, is actually meta; Banner being the representative of regional hip hops, Lil B being representative of post-geographical, Internet hip hop. Which might be an interesting lead to follow up on, but I'm not going to do so here.

I Own Swag is not, for the most part, your ordinary Lil B song. Unlike, say, Nas Vs. Jay-Z, where the diss tracks are designed to show off the emcee in his element, his flow perfected, Lil B reaches out for a style that he very rarely employs and is, frankly, not very good at, technically. He sounds more like David Banner than he ever has before, for the most part, except in those moments where he breaks the flow, and reinserts the swag into the song.

When, for instance, Lil B breaks his flow to sing "You know I'm more famous than you," or when he suddenly says, "Obama BasedGod," and seems so pleased with what he's just said that he stops and repeats it. And, to a lesser extent, how the whole second half of the song doesn't have any raps over it at all. It is in those moments that the song steps up out of the parodic mode, I think, and takes the moments that would have been read as parodic before that with it.

What I'm trying to say here, in perhaps a bit too roundabout of a way, is that this beef seems to me to be less battle and more dialogue. A sort of discursive instant within the development of swag rap, the moment this new genres maw opens up to consume and internalize certain thematic and technical content that it has up to this point not had access to.

***********************

I've claimed before that "To be Based is to reach a state at which one's very essence becomes communicable." If Based is still, at this point, and I think it unquestionably is, the most advanced theorization and mystification of swag rap that so far exists, and if my description of Based is accurate, which I have seen nothing to indicate that it isn't, then what is going on in this David Banner Vs. Lil B beef is a further reorganization of rap music along the lines of the Based philosophy/meme.

One of the biggest absences that Swag Rap hasn't really contended with so far, in its ascent from a subgenre to a contender for synonymity with the genre as a whole, is the question of its reterritorializing the mainstream rap tradition. Without anything resembling a program or manifesto, aside from the explicit non-thought of Based, but an open enjoyment of appropriation and certain aesthetic and memetic threads that constitute an ostensive & mutable unity, the (potential) "becoming rap" of Swag Rap means that that which is currently just "rap" will be displaced, and made to reconstitute itself along some other lines.

The point that I made at the beginning, that David Banner is the perfect example of a rapper who occupies the 'radio space,' is precisely what I mean by this. It's not quite "pop rap," not quite "southern rap," not quite anything that we can identify when it is presented to us as it normally is. This isn't to say that Banner's music doesn't come out of these (and other) material traditions, that it doesn't have its own work done to it and that it does, and so on. It is just to say that it is a perfect example of that specific set of hegemonic principles that allow something to be just simply rap, the sort of privileged invisibility of nonspecificity that record label money allows.

If the work of pastiche is the insertion of a text into a tradition, joyously or not, as opposed to the clearing of narrative space to create a tradition (parody), and if David Banner and Lil B's "disses" at each other are really more pastiche than they are parody, then, I'm claiming, what we have here is this exemplar of "rap," in Banner, absorbing and being absorbed by Swag Rap, in the form of its head theorist/mystic, Lil B. And in I Own Swag, I think, we see in embryonic form what could very well be known soon as a simple, unqualified, "rap."

*For real, I mean, this video just came out, but if you can show me one David Banner song that has anything near the political content of Lil B's verse on this I would be very, very fucking surprised:

Gung Hai Fat Choi: A Chinese New Year's Musical Gift

2012-01-23T11:17:00.000-08:00

Badtz-Maru's Diamond Mine (with Ally) by Uninterpretative: no!

So, in both 2010 and 2011, #spamfm, the Internet collective I've been a part of for many years now, put together compilations for Chinese New Year. The first was originally intended as a regular New Year's compilation, but because of coordination issues was put off until the Chinese New Year, which then became a tradition.

Unfortunately, this year the compilation doesn't seem to be possible. This is largely because Wingus, the man behind Stone Lion, the label which has web-released all of our previous compilations (including ones for Magfest 2011 and Halloween 2011), and all around kick-ass Australian, is going through a major transitionary period in his life right now, and isn't able to coordinate and upload the compilation. I am probably the only person on the planet who could've received this news as poorly as I did, and I admit that my disappointment (not with Wingus, of course) was completely disproportionate.

This is partially because I've been working on a song for it for something like two months at this point, and am very proud of what I have done (though of course, as I am a shitty musician, there is enormous room for improvement). These particular compilations have become very important to me, as I sort of stumbled into my own tradition within them - the first compilation, I made a song called Hello Kitty Decade for, and the second, a song called My Melody, Remarks History (you can find the earlier comps here and here). Neither of these songs are particularly good in themselves, but they have allowed me to continue on with the original focus of my Hello Kitty Everything project, which started in many ways with a collaborative track between myself and the wonderful noise musician AxemRangers titled My Melo.doc vs. My Melo.wav, in which I read an essay about My Melody that he used as source material for a composition.

For this year's compilation, I decided to tackle one of the Sanrio characters for whom I do not have a whole lot of love, as I decided last year to cycle through a new character every year and give a sort of précis on what I would like to write about them. I also decided that the form this précis would take, as a song, would be Country. I enlisted one of my favorite people in the world, a friend named Ally, to help me compose and perform the song, and though her only material contribution in the end was her vocals in the Prechorus & Chorus, she was absolutely integral in the songwriting process.

In the end, I've decided not to hold onto this song and continue tweaking it, because it was written with the intention of being released today, and the lack of a compilation due to extenuating circumstances doesn't mean it shouldn't see the light of day, as it very well might if I were given infinite time to work on it. So I present it to you all hear, humbly, this song about Badtz-Maru as a soldier for surplus, a holder of/for secrets, a diamond-obsessed misanthrope, and, hopefully, someday, a fellow revolutionary.

An Open Letter to Mark Yudof

2011-12-24T13:15:00.000-08:00

I missed a telephone call two days ago. Which isn't so weird really; I'm not a huge fan of telephones anyway, and have a pretty hard time imagining that anyone could really need to talk to me. Plus, the number was one I didn't already have in my phone, so even if I had seen it at the time, I probably would have decided to let it go through to voicemail, on the assumption that it wasn't likely to be anything of interest to me.

The caller didn't leave a voicemail, but he did try again, this time with my mom's home phone. He got in touch with my mom, and talked to her about me.

I tried to call him back yesterday morning, but no one picked up. I still haven't talked to this caller - I'll leave his name out of this for now, so we can just call him Detective - but my mom told me the night before last what it was that he had to say, and my little brother (who overheard my mom's side of the conversation) corroborated most of it.

The Detective called from the University of California, San Francisco. His call was to inform me, I suppose, that some things I had been saying online recently - referring, I presume, to the hashtag #RIPMarkYudof - was bordering on infringing a (new?) law against cyberbullying. I was also informed that he told my mom that they (the UCPD, I'm presuming) have a file on me "over an inch thick," that isn't even complete yet, dating back a few years.

See, in September of 2009 I started to troll @mark_yudof, making up a story about how we had been college frat drinking buddies. I continued to be mildly dickish towards the account until January of 2010, when I sent a series of (very obviously) fake retweets. Yudof's account successfully had me banned from twitter over those retweets, but only temporarily; I lobbied Twitter support to reinstate my account, and they did, after about two weeks. I posted a transcript of the emails I sent & received from Twitter Support here.

The only communication I got from @mark_yudof before the ban was in the form of a single Direct Message, which I happened to screenshot before the ban took. It was in response to one of the fake retweets I had made; you can see, in the pictures below, the relevant fake retweet (outlined in red) & the Direct Message. Both are lyrics from the Flobots song Handlebars.

A friend elicited an email out of the General Counsel at the time, which is also reproduced below; it contains the gem "Impersonation should not be confused with satire" and confirms that the complaint that was lodged against my account had to do with the falsified retweets.

After I got my account back, the @mark_yudof account fairly quickly blocked my twitter account. I continued to say some rude things, occasionally, but not really all that many, and towards a different end, mostly annoyed responses to things that were tweeted.

On December 15, following two successful (at making into Trending Topics, at least) fake-#RIP hashtags, one for Ron Paul and the other for Scott Baio, I decided to throw Mark Yudof's name into the running and, well, run with it.

Using Yudof's name - as opposed to his twitter handle - was strange to me, as I had tried to make it a point (without ever quite saying it) in the past to focus my energies on the UCOP's unequivocally public organs. What a #RIP hashtag would be doing, however, would be announcing (publicly, of course) the passing of a public individual's private self. Theoretically, at least.

See, the #RIPMarkYudof hashtag was split between wildly fantastical reports of how he passed, and criticisms of his policies. It was also very small, created as it was by me, through a mixture of my own lack of influence on these things, mixed with the already limited appeal of faking the death of a UC administrator who I've already babbled about extensively in the past. Which is to say, that the hashtag sort of skipped the announcing part of that equation. We convinced maybe ten people, if I'm being generous, for an average of maybe thirty seconds per. Even Seth Yudof, Mark's son, and the only person who saw our hashtag that could have been truly concerned about it (to my knowledge), laughed it off immediately. The incestuousness of the hashtag took a particularly neat visual form in the graphic below.

All of which seems, to me, to indicate that the jokes we were making were still firmly aimed at his public self.

I mention this because of how I understand the call between Detective and my mom went. I'm not entirely sure how much of it was her inference, or her worried exaggeration, and I imagine that the words weren't used by the Detective himself, but my mom was very worried that this file that the UCPD has on me was being organized to keep track of death threats, on the possibility that I turned out to be some attempted assassin, or, you know, a fucking terrorist.

The thing was, though, that when my mom was through telling me about the contents of this telephone call, I asked her if the Detective had at any point asked her if I would call him back. She said that he had left a phone number, but it is my impression that he didn't seem to think it particularly pressing that I personally talk to him.

So, on my end, what seems to have happened is this: a UCPD Detective, after expending the absolute minimal energy to contact me, opted to have instead a conversation with my mom where he (willfully or not) lead her to believe that I was being placed on some sort of terrorist watch list over potential death threats I may or may not have made, and that the police department had been collecting documents and were considering pursuing litigation against me.

Now, I'm not very well versed in the legal definition of cyberbullying. I'm not sure which law the Detective was referring to - though, as I imagine he knew it would, the Stop Online Piracy Act immediately springs to mind, though I am not familiar with its contents. What this does feel like, from my perspective, though, is getting bullied.

Which brings me to the letter part of this open letter.

I imagine that you, Yudof, are, at most, only very peripherally aware of all of this stuff. I think it's fairly obvious that you have little, if anything, to do with your twitter account, and are certainly not undergoing any personal stress because some kid who helped fund your construction projects has since said some rude things on the Internet about you. Or, more accurately, about your PR wing. I would be hugely surprised to learn that you, personally, had ever even heard my name.

But, on the off chance that you have, and given that I have the attention of at least someone in your administration, let me try to make one thing clear.

Mr. Yudof, I do not give a fuck about you.

This is the first, and, I presume likely, last time I will address you personally. I feel it is fairly safe to assume that neither of us is particularly interested in a dialogue with the other, or anything beyond that. You've made it abundantly clear that you are utterly indifferent to the concerns of students, except for insofar as they coincide with your efforts to privatize the University that you preside over. And as for me, I'm not at all of the opinion that your person is all that important, in the scheme of things. You are, for my purposes, a convenient metonym, a useful figure to represent the constellation of social forces that I would very much like to see replaced. Who you are as an individual, the things you say, I take only as symptomatic of those social forces.

I hope you understand, then, how utterly fucking baseless the claim, perhaps only inferred by my mom, in the Detective's telephone call, that I could ever have made a threat on your life is. I am not interested in your life, and I am certainly not desirous of your death. I desire only the death of the neoliberalism that your office has facilitated; I am interested only in the life of public education.

That your name may continue to figure as a character in my impotent polemics is pretty likely, of course. But rest assured that I am not talking about you; I am talking about the node that you represent in an institution, and about the pressures that that node exerts on the whole to mobilize it in a certain direction. I am talking about the way in which an individual dissolves their individuality in their work, and the ways that certain institutional roles will utilize that dissolved individuality regardless of how it looked beforehand.

And the fact that you bear an uncanny resemblance to an infant, that is immaterial. Except that it does make the whole endeavor quite a bit more fun.

Love,
Ben

P.S. But hey, you know, if you want to pay some dude almost a hundred grand a year to keep reading my tweets, be my guest. It's almost like I'm one of those fabled job creators!

Robyn's Swagger & Clubs

2011-12-14T21:39:00.000-08:00

I suddenly realized today, despite having listened to it at least hundreds of times before, that this:

is the actualization of how I think about swagger. From her stunningly gorgeous androgeneity to her fucking incredible outfit; from those compressed kicks at the beginning to that chopped-vocals breakdown; from her dance's fluid transition from that strut to the vaguely ballerina-esque, sexualized affective response to the quasi-militaristic punching motions; from the weird vacant warehouse/high school gymnasium space flooded with lights to the shaky single-shot composition, blurred slightly at the edges, following always a half-beat behind, letting the integrity of the shot be compromised by the lights, always almost losing missing the cues; everything here is swagger - except, except. Except that it doesn't announce itself as such.

So I began to think that perhaps this

was in fact better; certainly that bassline has inspired me to punch a few walls in the past, and the narrative of the lyrics (if not the lyrics themselves) - of going to a club to simmer in your own rage - was closer. And the video, all fists and saturated reds and furious stares, has it too.

I thought, also, then, of what Olivia once mentioned to me, that these two songs almost seem to map out a love triangle, with Robyn playing both girls; the Robyn of Call Your Girlfriend almost seeming to directly address the Robyn of Dancing On My Own, asking her (to paraphrase heavily) to stop being such a crazy bitch. So maybe the narrative of the Dancing On My Own isn't really at all removed from the less apparent rage of Call Your Girlfriend's narrative.

But then I got sort of distracted (as watching the Call Your Girlfriend video a dozen times in a row will tend to do, I guess) and instead started thinking about how Robyn is very much the only popular musician these days who I actually believe when she sings about being in a club.

Singing, or rapping, about being in a club is huge now, and I've talked about it a bit before, or at least my take on it; but for the most part it seems to me that songs about being in the club either take the T-Pain route of presenting the club as an imaginary space that they work to flesh out, or they take the route of something like LMFAO's rape-anthem Shots and use the club as a focal point to performing a certain action that happens in clubs.

For some reason, Robyn doesn't seem to fall into this trap, to me. I assume, without very good reason, that it has a lot to do with songs like the one embedded below, particularly the verse that begins at 1:55. But it probably has just as much to do with the fact that, on the occasions (more and more frequent) that I'm in a club (or, more likely, a bar), given that I have a tendency to think of dancing and fucking as often antithetical, I find myself dancing on my own rather than feeding shots to girls to give them an excuse to suck my cock, or however the LMFAO line goes.

This particular ability of hers, if it is anything other than just a particular psychological tic on my part, interests me because of the understanding I had (before I started down this train of thought) for why the T-Pain's and LMFAO's seemed to have, necessarily, to frame their songs in the way they do. It seems fairly obvious that no one wants to be at a club, listening to someone honestly be at a club. You're already in that situation; you want, either, an authoritarian voice to focus you ("take shots now; raise your hands now") or a voice that contextualizes, that gives meaning to your being there. And then, of course, I realized that Robyn basically has a song about this.

I, for whatever reason, don't feel like Robyn's swagger is necessarily or inextricably linked to her unique way of approaching clubs. But the consonance there seems important to me. And of course I am thinking of this in the context of this motherfucker of an article. Robyn's absence from that article (probably because she isn't nearly as popular as the artists they do talk about, but then that might very well be precisely because of what I'm talking about here, mightn't it?) seems to me to confirm this suspicion; it would be hard to imagine redacting Robyn's references to the club from her songs and having a genuinely dangerous piece of music result; it isn't an unformed space that she is singing about, that chooses a particular word for historical, aesthetic, and marketing reasons, but actual clubs.

I think what this allows for is to read her music as a commentary on, or possibly a sort of authenticating fiction for, these other uses of clubs, and for this moments particular aesthetic use of swagger.

But who knows, maybe I just love Robyn way too much.

proposal for a novel

2011-11-30T14:52:00.000-08:00

Here is my proposal to write a serialized SF/horror novel, titled "No Dads, No Dads, No Dads." Publishers, get at me. I'm looking at you, Tor.

It takes place in the city of Dadville in the constellation of Daddiopeia. The city is haunted by the recurrent threat of an ancient civilization of Dads that went extinct millions of cycles before, now known as the Ghost Dads.

The novel opens with the protagonist, Brad, a low-level bureaucrat, frantically attempting to file the paperwork necessary to prepare for city's defenses against the forthcoming Ghost Dad threat. After some hitches, the process goes smoothly, and he is promoted; he gets involved in the interrogation of Ghost Dad Prisoners, of which they have just captured their first. During the public interrogation, the captured Ghost Dad reveals that the word that they use in their language for the current Dads translates directly to "Stepdad."

At this point, ~30-40 pages in, the novel shifts dramatically. What heretofore had been a sort of tense procedural suddenly switches, marked by Brad's suicide. Untethered from a primary protagonist, the POV of the novel floats through the city of Dadville, focusing on characters that typify the collective crisis of authenticity that the Dads are experiencing. The narrative is sustained by 2-3 page italicized monologues in the voice of the captured Ghost Dad, that explain the history of the Ghost Dads (not their civilization, but their relation to the current Dad civilization) and tie together the individual crises we witness with the larger structures of the Dad's civilization.

The societal structure of the Dad's will be organized as a sort of quasi-libertarian bureaucracy, with the majority of Dads employed in middle-management positions with an ample amount of self-regard. The title of the novel will come from the final chapter, in which a nationalist Dad protester strangles to death a member of his political opposition, while chanting the nationalist slogan "Not Stepdads," and it slowly devolves into him weeping and saying "no dads...no dads...no dads..." which is how the novel is projected to end.

Here's the excerpts I have so far.

i live a very depressing life p2 notes on an ongoing minor neurotic break

2011-10-29T02:01:00.000-07:00

we had a sing-a-long!

i live a very depressing life

2011-10-28T23:44:00.001-07:00

(pamphlets: over Kuromi's head is CARRY THE GREAT PROLETARIAN CULTURAL REVOLUTION THROUGH TO THE END; over Chococat's is J.V. Stalin - Marxism and Problems of Linguistics; over My Melody's is Mao Tse-Tung - The Orientation of the Youth Movement)

Happy Birthday Ben

2011-10-04T02:55:00.000-07:00

23

I turn 23 today.
An important year.
Hope it kills me.
But cigarettes work slow.

23 is important,
didn't you know that?
At 16, it was the
only real year, it seemed.
Do you really not know 23?
Add them together, you get 5,
Divide for .666.
Are you honestly telling me
you were never a stoner
in a Central Coast suburb
in 2004, 16 and obsessed
with rap and punk?
That you never spent hundreds
of hours reading
about false flags, conspiracies
linking 9/11 with the Reichstag Fires,
or the Illuminati,
or spent lunch money
on pentacle necklaces?
That the Law of Fives
is meaningless to you?
Well.

That 16 seems like yesterday
(for a different person, who I knew,
but could never really stand)
but that birthday card she gave me
that said,
'Happy 19th Birthday
And 20th Year of Life'
that was definitely me,
but, well.

I remember
fucking in a field
on a blanket, and
losing my wallet;
or in my car
in a church parking lot;
and learning that giving head
was my favorite thing in the world.
Or when we fucked for four hours
on New Year's Eve, 2007,
and my little brother's friend walked in
and we didn't notice.

And I remember
her plans
for a dream home,
and her funeral party.
The same as I remember
how I stared through smoke
at a total lunar eclipse
after she'd broken up with me
for the last time, online.

I remember with fuzzy white lines
etched gently on my eyelids.
She became my blueprint.
And I've built accordingly -
though I have to admit,
I'm not very good at building.

It's mostly been an overlay so far,
of hours of manic laughter on IRC screens,
and a thickening cloud of nicotine,
and a rare taste of pussy.
Individuals may've been what we
were, but these days, it's communities
that I love. One digital,
a tiny hub of artists, varying degrees
of suicidal, alienated, discouraged, and inconsequential.
The other is a group of girls
whose friendship means the fucking world to me.
I love them all.

But I've never really been part
of a community, always lingering
on the edges, just enough marked,
or just enough neurotic,
to be trapped in the outside of those within.
I've never participated
in mob mentality, or
real democracy;
I always hold back a bit.
At least, that's how I see it.
It's impossible to produce,
(maybe that's just what I tell myself,)
or contribute productively.
"+0," add nothing,
but make a lot of noise.

"+0ccupy Everything."
These last few years,
my unspoken mantra.
To accelerate the collapse
of my own body,
and the abstractions which condition it.
I've never shoplifted anything
you know, because
it seems so hard to understand
that I could own something.

I remember being told,
at least implicitly, when I lost
my first iPod, which i used
to watch Grendel Grendel Grendel on,
which one day I spent
20 hours listening to Dysentery Gary on,
to get over the only crush I ever had,
that I should be upset, that it was
probably stolen. I couldn't care.
And when my little brother totaled my car,
people seemed to think
that I was just
being good-humored.
I just didn't know it was mine.

I remember giving head once,
and being called by my friend's name
and being told that she wasn't fantasizing,
that she thought that's who she was fucking.
And I remember it because I thought,
just then, that I ought to be upset,
and I wondered why I wasn't.
But I wasn't,
and she hadn't cum yet,
so I finished. And we went to sleep.
And I was glad not to be sleeping alone.

Ever since, I've slept
on my side, spooning,
whether or not I'm alone.
It's a particularly painful way to spend nights.

23 will be
the 5th year of my blueprint,
but you don't know what
they say about the Law of Fives,
do you? It goes like this:
(ITS A FUCKING LENS)
5 lies at the center of the mystical hub
not because it has any special properties
of its own, but because
(THE WORLD DOES NOT WANT
TO BE SEEN)
of its relationships.
Any time you feel the need
to do some arcane pattern finding,
(IT'S ENTIRELY TOO MUCH
AND IT FUCKING HURTS
TO STARE STRAIGHT IN THE FACE
OF ATROCITIES, SO YOU PLAY)
you convert everything according
to numerological norms;
at first, the 5s will be scarce,
but if you break it down just right,
you'll always end up
with a 5. (AND FROM 5
YOU CAN TOUCH ANYTHING).

Review: Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die

2011-10-01T01:05:00.000-07:00

I hate Hello Kitty.

I hate her for not having a mouth or fangs like a proper kitty.

She can’t eat, bite off a nipple or finger, give head, tell anyone to go and fuck his mother or lick herself. She has no eyebrows, so she can’t look angry. She can’t even scratch your eyes out. Just clawless, fangless, voiceless, with that placid, blank expression topped by a pink ribbon.

Poor Hello Kitty. Having to go around itchy, unlicked, unscratched. Tortured by her own filth.

Having finally read Angela S. Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die, I figured it might be a good idea to throw together some thoughts on it here.

I was pretty disappointed when I realized that the blurbs on the book likening it to Chuck Palahniuk weren't at all wrong; most of the reviews I've seen basically say that it's The Joy Luck Club meets American Psycho, and, without having actually read anything by Tan or Ellis, I think that's basically dead on. Take that comparison as you will, I suppose; I for one was not especially enthusiastic about it.

That said, however, I did enjoy the book well enough, and think it had a variety of interesting things going on. I don't have a copy of the book anymore, so I'm not going to be able to do anything like close textual analysis, but I think the book's stronger points are in its playing with generalizations anyway, so I think I'll survive.

The book's protagonist, Fiona Yu, is a 28-year-old, Asian American private sector lawyer. Its narrative revolves around her meeting up with an elementary school friend who convinced her to beat up the school bully with a lunchbox full of rocks, and was himself sent off to a Juvenile Detention Facility for lighting a girl's hair on fire. He is a hymen-reconstruction surgeon in San Francisco, and they begin a sort of asexual love affair as he reveals himself to be a serial killer, and she starts to follow suit, killing off the men her father sets her up on blind dates with and her boss. This is all, as you may imagine, very fucking transgressive.

I mentioned this book, before I read it, in my essay Hello Kitty Everything & Hostile Object Theory, and I think what I said there still basically applies. In a way, actually, it's even more accurate than I anticipated; when Fiona complains about Hello Kitty, it's mostly in asides like the one quoted above, and her anger almost always fixates on Kitty's absent mouth. I still feel like this particular issue is one that can be worth pursuing, in terms of subversion and reinterpretation, but that it stems from a misreading of Kitty's function, positioning her as a representative object when her real power lies elsewhere.* What I didn't expect out of Hello Kitty Must Die, and was pleasantly surprised by, was the way this particular obsession plays out within the narrative.

Although this connection is never drawn explicitly in the text, to my memory (oh, and, uh, spoilers to follow, I suppose, though some probably preceded as well), it just so happens that when Fiona does start murdering people, there is a distinct orality to the way she goes about it. She plans to murder one boy by eating a bunch of Snickers, then kissing him with a mouth full of the peanuts to which he's deathly allergic; she constantly carries around roofies to dispatch unwanted advances; and there's, well, something weird going on with cigarettes.

One of Fiona's first dates is killed by Sean when he steps outside for a cigarette, and it is after that that she begins to uncover his secret, and advance the plot. Sean is also a smoker, and the climactic moment of the novel, when Sean is getting sloppy and is about to be caught, involves Fiona filling Sean's apartment with gas and taking off, allowing the explosion sparked by him lighting a cigarette kill him. And then she smokes one of his cigarettes, staring at his burned building.

It's a pretty hackneyed moment, as most smoking-as-metaphor moments tend to be, and it's described with (if I'm remembering correctly) vaguely annoying descriptions of how she's ingesting his essence, or something, but there's something else there, too. Because that list of things that he hates Hello Kitty for not being able to do, aren't exactly things she does a whole lot of herself. She doesn't fuck, or give head. She certainly thinks of telling people to go fuck their mother often enough, but she doesn't ever say it. She drinks sometimes, and eats, but it's always in the context of a man, and so a murder being plotted. There is even a moment where she recounts an uncle attempting to molest her, which she fended off, not with a bite, but a fork. Even the date she intended to kill with a kiss ends up crushing himself with a barbell, avoiding the need for her mouth at all.

Fiona's moment with the cigarette, for all she tries to make it a symbolic gesture to evoke Sean, is, I think, the only moment in the whole text where it really matters that she has a mouth at all. Through the rest of it, what's important is that other people have mouths; those are how she gets power over them. And the thrust of making the smoke symbolic is precisely that it takes away her own power, opens her to being invaded by Sean. Getting a mouth makes her vulnerable.

Vulnerability is, of course, a major theme throughout the text. Fiona goes to great lengths to explain that just because she's a lawyer doesn't mean that she's in charge; in fact, her job consists mostly, according to her, of bending before the whims of the partner she works for, and she characterizes him as a real asshole. She is constantly being stepped on, whether by an overbearing boss or her parents, and she exorcises it with more exhibitions of vulnerability, as when she explains that she wears 4-inch Jimmy Choo heels everywhere because of the pain they cause her, and likens it to foot binding. It is made very clear that those things which purport to provide autonomy are really just ways of fostering new dependencies.

This is, I think, and to make a sort of crude rhetorical move, the point of the whole sociopathic narrative. Capitalism gives you two options: play the game, or play the fucking game. Fiona's aspirational diatribes against her heritage and fashion porn fetish-lists aren't evidence of a lack of character, they're how she stays alive. Traditions require space to develop; interiority needs time. And those are two things that you can have, sure, in direct proportion to how often you're willing to not eat. And when you finally realize how fucked over you're getting, and decide to protest against it, your protests are just as conditioned by those two options, else you're shit out of luck. You can play the game, like Fiona has been doing, of private pain, in a crypto-foot binding procedure, or you can play the fucking game, like Sean does, learn to act like those who put money over everything, and prey on people who can barely even play the game in the first place. There's no out, no middle ground, because that's where we all already are, passively abetting a system of exploitation. You can infantilize yourself, you can murder quasi-discriminately, or you can pretend neither of those things are happening while you feed them.

I feel like I'm pretty far away, at this point, from anything resembling a "review." I'll try, for the rest of this, to step back a bit and shut the fuck up about things I want to think about, and end with a couple of relatively brief points, that are a bit more review-y.

Most descriptions of the novel, whether positive, negative, or neutral, are fond of throwing around the word satire. The question they all beg, in their own way, is of course, "of what?" And almost uniformly, they seem to say without saying, being Chinese American. But that seems like bullshit to me, and it taints all the reviews with moralism. Now, I came into this book reading it as Asian American Literature, so what I'm about to say may not be all that surprising, but here it is: in my estimation, if this book is a satire of anything, it's of Asian American Literature.

I have no idea how familiar Choi is with the Asian American Literature canon (insofar as that even exists), but for what I want to say it doesn't really matter. I do think that the tradition she's working in is a lot more Chuck Palahniuk than Frank Chin, but the fact that it's so often likened to Amy Tan is more than enough context for me to feel justified in what I'm trying to say.

One thing that's fairly easy to notice about this book - and I mean book, like the physical object, not novel - is how similar the author's bio is to the story we're reading. Choi's a 30 year old Chinese American ex-lawyer with a parakeet; Fiona a 28 year old Chinese American Lawyer with a parakeet. They're both from San Francisco. Choi's official author bio even says that she "refuses to be anyone’s ... hole-in-a-mattress," a phrase that Fiona uses in the novel.

It is a fact about most, or all, marginal literatures, especially those of ethnic minorities, that they get pigeonholed into a sort of native informer role, and that this means they are heavily stilted toward memoir. White people like Amy Tan because they can read her and feel like they understand the Authentic Chinese Experience, without ever having to interact with a Chinese person. Even something as weird as Maxine Hong Kingston's debut novel, Woman Warrior, gets saddled with the subtitle "Memoir of a Girlhood Among Ghosts." Woman Warrior seems to draw on experience, certainly, but it's sure as fuck not a memoir.

So Choi's ability to keep the specter of memoir foregrounded, even though there is nothing in the text of the novel to support it, and all while distancing herself from it, is relatively interesting in this context. But it is also sort of something that's been done to death. Kip Fulbeck's Paper Bullets: A Fictional Autobiography makes a similar move in the title, and is a book I did not have a whole lot of love for; Suki Kim's The Interpreter is another example, and one which I would much more unreservedly recommend, as is Chang-Rae Lee's Native Speaker or even more borderline stuff like Pamela Lu's Pamela: A Novel. Memoirs like Jane Jeong Trenka's Language of Blood trouble this equation from the other side, and do so with absolutely breathtaking beauty.

My point, I suppose, more than that Choi's book functions to deconstruct how Asian American Literature is supposed to function, is that you should probably be reading more Asian American Literature, because there's some fucking incredible shit out there.

And I guess the last thing I want to say, to make this seem like a real review, like I'm really a real reviewer, the kind of guy who you should trust to tell you whether or not to spend your hard-earned dollars on a book, I guess as that guy I want to say, yeah I would recommend you read this book, but while you do it, keep the two songs below in mind, and think about it as if it had been written with them in mind, and how fucking cool that would be.

*The point, though, is that she's misread this way daily, and this misreading creates its own power, which gets transformed into ammunition for noxious stereotypes, and there is an effectiveness to fighting that misreading on its own terms.

i dont even fucking know

2011-09-28T22:55:00.000-07:00

Two (more or less*) adjacent montages from 2004's I Downloaded A Ghost

The first, the moment of defeat, when all hope is lost; having just got her father fired, and her ghost-friend condemned to limbo, Ellen Page enters the lowest point of the film. The narrative arc has bottomed out, and we can tell because... she's putting on makeup and a dress.

But, then! She and her friend find evidence of where the BURMESE FELINE has been taken, and know just what to do. The boy asks: So, who is going to fix this situation? The new Stella, or the old? And she doesn't skip a beat; "the old." So they don smocks and power tools and build a fucking house.

So, I did what I do

*Okay, fine, they're split up by a scene where Carlos Alazraqui does a fucking stand-up comedy routine in the bus he was killed by, to try to learn how to haunt it. Fine. Fuck.

Hegel

2011-09-19T12:42:00.000-07:00

(I wrote this on July 19, 2011, in the plaza of the World Financial Center in Manhattan. It is a story of GWF Hegel as a child rapist. It is graphic. I highly recommend you stop reading here if descriptions of rape, incest, or abusive sex upset you. It was written for my friend Goofid, after I purchased a number of 'Happy Father's Day' cards for him from the same building. I intended to make a collage out of the cards to include with the story, but I no longer appear to be in possession of them. So I figured this was the best way to share the story.)

**************************************************************************

NEW YORK CITY, 1917

A vibration at her ankles. Good, she thought; she always did like to read while she masturbated. The subject line of the email read,

GETTING WITH FRIENDS, HM?

and for some reason his infuriating tendency to use his own initials as reverse acronyms delighted her.

Every year, the email read, they get younger. When I was 17, in Milan, they were 18, and it was good. Now, I am 23, and these same women, they do nothing for me. I fantasize, these days, of nothing but being a father, and all of the opportunity that would afford me. My God can you even begin to imagine? To be given complete domination over your own image; to fuck oneself wouldn't even compare. Just imagine, imagine! To be given the power to play the wrathful God with no possibility of ironic or dramatic detachment!

NEW YORK CITY, 1776

She heard shots being fired, and mimicked or real police sirens. A thrill. He was there, and they were fucking, and she was trying to convey with her eyes that she had cum, and he should too, as it was getting painful, but he just kept fucking.

His rhythm, one-Two-THREE, one-Two-THREE, was disorienting, almost seasick at first, but it worked, for her at least. She rarely had multiple orgasms, but had tonight, if only because of his endurance.

She resigned herself, and let her mind wander, to see if she might get a fourth. In spectral tones, she imagined herself a five-year-old boy, the cock splitting her asshole as wide as both her arms clenched together. She imagined aging, kissing a girl in the playground at school, painting in a blind fury, no longer remembering if the molestations had happened repeatedly or just once, not understanding why anwhere his canvasses were left would burn down in the middle of the night, not until the gasoline coated him and his hands lit the match.

It was finished, she realized, snapping back; there was panic in his eyes.

NEW YORK CITY, 1973

She was bone-tired, but he exulted, screaming.

His seed spread weakly, leaking from the tip of his cock like drool. Already flaccid before he finished ejaculating, he tried to wipe the ejaculate on the boys anus in a celebratory fashion, but barely had touched his member to a cheek than had the exhaustion overtook him.

The boy was 17, but looked twelve at most, and used this to his advantage. Growing up in America had given him the ability to intuit who would use their social power as a conduit to rape little boys, and he decided that there must be a way for him to stop what little of that he could. So he set up a service where he was bought for a client by a friend or relative, anonymously, and a situation was staged in which he was raped. In his better moments, he felt noble.

NEW YORK CITY, 1861

She had had his child. There was no getting around it. One moment he had been in her, the next she had been pregnant, now the child was two. He already licked his lips when he saw it, which was rarely. She did not mind; she had no particular interest in the child.

When the tumors had developed in his asshole, he began to lose interest in his cock, as his fantasies of being fucked until the tumors burst and the blood hemorrhaged into his rectum became all he could think of. He rarely even thought of fucking his own child, and did it only occasionally out of a sense of principled discipline. He did learn a sort of aesthetic appreciation for the child's cock, though, and felt a vague pride in having still the ability to refine his taste.

NEW YORK CITY, 1492

“How long,” he kept his face neutral, or tried perhaps to smile genially, but she saw the tiny glint that never left his eyes; he was frantic, “has it been? Much too long.”

She breathed.

“Get Well, Friend; Hurry!” the glint twisted, malformed, caught in a grimace of the terror of eternal knowing.

Breath. He isn't here.

“I implanted those. They are diamond shards. We now know that certain mathematical propositions, when concretised in the proper way, can fundamentally alter the matter of the universe; our research has given us the ability to grow 'smart diamonds,' which not only grow organically from the application of certain synthetic abstractions but which have rudimentary adaptive capacity, reacting innovatively to their environment. I took our first complete sample and shaved off fragments, and implanted them into my eyes.”

She screamed.

NEW YORK CITY, 1945

Screaming.

There was no air in the room. There was a six-pointed star fixated in the center of her vision, floating. It grew when she thought about looking away from it. The silence was mundane, tinny, the sound of a little room gone silent, airless.

Nothing moved, but there was a loud hiss of pressurized air. A recording, she thought, suddenly feeling amorous.

The metallic ring of the recorded voice complemented the tinny acoustics. “Getting Women For Heroes,” the sneering voice began, but she could not hear it. She was screaming again, if she had ever stopped, to enjoy it now, to feel her throat crack.

“Any thought which does not generate from the only true proposition, that inequalities are inherent, I a false thought. 'All things being equal' is a phrase uttered only by the despicable. Celebrity deaths come in threes; MJ, Elvis, and 2Pac walk into a bar. Whose ready to start trapping?”

NEW YORK CITY, 33

He had left his business, the day he turned 18. If he continued, he would rape, he knew, and there was nothing he could do. Sometimes, he admitted, circumstances outweighed personal intention.

His last rapist still contacted him. The man had never grown privy to his real age, or had always known and didn't care. The man sent him long letters, not expecting or soliciting a reply, signed G–H–.

The letters littered his room, some unreadable, more simply unread. Spread thickly on the pages were the smudged thoughts of an incest-happy pedophile rapist that weaved together elaborate lies about the experience of the rape of the letters' recipient into synthetic explanations of everything from the new particularities of the Neuro-Tech economy to the nature of the powers behind (what he referred to as) fossil fabrication/DINOCONSPIRACY.

He lay on his bed, fingering his asshole . After a moment of mental silence in which his feigned deliberation, he picked up a letter at random and began to read.

NEW YORK CITY, 1776

It was a clenched fist, certainly. The blows rained down on him, and there was a putrid irony to the epithets that accompanied them.

He had been hit before, and knew how to deal with it. But this time, something was different. When he realized what, he became terrified. The man knew. He wasn't here to rape a child – he was here to rape someone passing as a child. And he was not going to be cute about it.

Being raped for a living had helped him learn how to navigate the pain of the particular moments of this now-familiar sequence, but this man was uncategorizable. His penis, when it entered, was cocked at such a bizarre angle that there was no way not to feel its full, unlubricated intrusion. It was like being fucked by a Tetris block, or an inverted L. He never saw it, and could not imagine how it must actually look.

For the first time in his life, he whimpered a prayer to God, for help. He considered it unanswered.

NEW YORK CITY, 2012

He spent the morning reading, having called in sick for work.

It wasn't worth it. He kept trying to warn himself.

He had taken some prescription amphetamines a few hours earlier, and was debating whether or not to open The Box.

He opened The Box. It looked exactly like a box that would have an engagement ring in it, but instead it had two comfortably cushioned tabs of acid. He ate the acid, and started reading again.

As he was coming up, he forgot he had eaten the acid, and felt strange, so he smoked some dope.

Don't write. He kept trying to warn himself.

As soon as he peaked, his little body reacted violently, and he vomited everywhere. Then he watched the world end. And end. And end.

Somewhere along the way, he found pad and pen, and began to write.

Dear G–H–...

NEW YORK CITY, 1776

The letter arrived, and was read.

He remembered how he had not particularly wanted to be blown, but had found her attractive, despite her age.

And he remembered her going down, and he remembered battering her face with his hips until she vomited. He remembered that she had been fingering herself while she vomited, and that he had grabbed her sides just before it happened so that he could feel her insides flip. And here he was again, fucking her. He decided he would rape the child who had dared to write him. And he regretted that he would have to kill her.

He had never cum inside a woman before. This once, he did, because, lost in her reverie, she whimpered a prayer to God like a lost little boy.

NEW YORK CITY, 1792

Dear G–H–,

What is your real name? Please stop raping children.

–

Dear –,

You are a wonder! Come, let me fill myself with you as I once filled you with myself – to the brim, until we overflow, and smear the shit and sperm across the walls. I forced my son to fuck me today, and licked my cancerous pus from his unerectable penis. Remember my theories of power, for they will make you know the truth.

G–H–

Dear –,

I am not worried. You will respond again, when it becomes unbearable, as for a scarred subhuman like you are it always must. Have you ever fucked a woman, I wonder? It is truly disgusting. They al sem to have been deluded into the assumption that it has anything at all to do with pleasure. I certainly hopeou are not such a fool – if not always, then at least since my intervention.

G–H–

Dear G–H–,

I would like to have you killed, or have you fuck me once more.

–

NEW YORK CITY, 1989

G–H– had a tendency to burn a page full of writing for each page he mailed to his correspondent. Often, the burnt pages would just be rewritten, nearly verbatim, in the final letter.

Because of this, from his house there rose a thick trail of ink-black smoke that never for a moment let up. Children began to fear the snake that fled the house into the sky, and the parents closed their eyes less they think a moment of industry. Drunk, though, they spoke of his factory, and the fear of it they felt.

The children noticed, one day, that the snake had glittering eyes; and the next day, scales. The adults did not know what they were talking about – they had no snakes in town. They did notice that there was something strange going on with G–H–'s eyes these days, though.

NEW YORK CITY, 2011

They stood facing each other in Central Park.

G–H– held his struggling son in a choke hold. A sudden flourish, and there was a knife; again, and his son's throat spewed like a ruptured spray can.

He thought bout the kids he had stopped from being raped. They were real, or at least real potentialities, weren't they? He stepped forward. Real abstraction, he laughed, manic.

He reached up, at those eyes which were by now utterly inhuman. The iris had been reshaped into a triad, and shone like a diamond. Even the pupal, now a dead non-space, unseeing, had facets.

He plucked out one eye, and the other. And he held them, and waited to see what would happen.

Post-Kanye essay in The New Inquiry, other things

2011-09-12T17:28:00.000-07:00

My previous post here got picked up by The New Inquiry, and you can find it here. I elaborated a lot on my theory of swagger and we tried to make it more accessible, so I think it's worth your time to check it out even if you already read the original post (and found it interesting, I guess). Also the comment thread is already bustling with people hating me, which fucking rules.

I also put together a new EP on 9/11/11, which you can listen to here or download here.

And here are two things I think you should watch/listen to:

"Management strategies for the rubble of the collapsing empire"

This is video from the event where Evan's Combined and Uneven Apocalypse book was launched, and Salvagepunk was buried. Aside from my huge admiration for both Evan and China, and the fact that the discussion is really interesting and funny, I've found the concept of Salvagepunk very useful in both my own thinking and creating. So: watch it, I recommend.

"What does it mean to organize labour which is not acknowledged as labour?"

"Mark Fisher and Marina Vishmidt discuss whether art work (as comparable to housework) provides a possibility for a post-capitalist future."

This discussion between Mark Fisher and Marina Vishmidt is framed by two questions that I'm endlessly interested in, though I've never quite articulated them in this particular way before. The questions are about the possibility of self-organizing under neoliberalism, and the one in the description above. The latter is very similar to the line of thought I've been trying to develop since I wrote Work, about the closeness of immaterial labour to reproductive labour, and some of Marina Vishmidt's points in this talk (the wages for housework bit, especially) I think are very cool. Fisher is equally on point in arguing about self-organization, in its potentials and limitations.

Post-Kanye Schematized; On Swagger

2011-08-22T15:42:00.000-07:00

(A response)

I've made a couple overtures towards a reading of "Post-Kanye" hip hop, without really establishing on what grounds I'm attempting to claim this paradigm. So, first of all, I'd like to get out of the way the assumptions, or givens, or whatever, that I believe act as the foundation of this argument.

First and foremost, it requires a view of hip hop as a self-replicating system - an inhuman, like capital, corporations, or nations. I think this is true of most proper genres; something doesn't really act as a genre until it establishes the conditions of its own replication. Genre, that is, is more than the coordination of aesthetic points; it is the mill, into which the grist of labour (of producers, consumers, aesthetics, and so on) is fed, in order to generate more genre.

Second, since hip hop is an aesthetic inhuman/genre, its primary knowledge of self is its embedded meta-narrative; since genres are not necessarily self-sufficient or coherent, for one to engage in its own reproduction it must subsume objects as relations to this meta-narrative, which is not fixed. Debate over what it is that the meta-narrative of the genre consists of are, of course, always rampant - thus, sub-genre - but it can suffice to be said for our purposes that it provides the structure of narrative, along with a more or less fixed set of protagonist-types, antagonist-types, and structures of viable struggle.

My initial argument for a "Post-Kanye" was that if Kanye's impact on hip hop was considered to be structural, what could most coherently be argued was not that his impact was aesthetic, but rather on this meta-narrative, and that what it consisted of would be the shifting out of the category of antagonist the figure of the hater. For Kanye, the hater is not someone to be struggled with, but is straightforwardly a category that produces value. Haters no longer have to be contended with in any way; they provide no critique worth legitimizing, and they don't even need to be overcome; they simply exist, en masse, and can be seen as a stable source of value-production.

This is, I'm arguing, very different from how haters were dealt with before Kanye - and I do not mean to claim that before, they were simply universally reviled. "Fuck the haters" and "Love your haters" are very different statements, and both existed long before Kanye had any impact on anyone. What they share, however, is an orientation towards haters, which the shift to "I <3 Haters" lacks; that of the hater as a contentious force, vs. the hater as a simple given, towards whom no proactive measures need be taken. What Kanye's hip hop does then, I might try to say, is very different from proletarianization; it is, in fact, more analogous to a making middle class than a making prole. It pretends that the structural antagonism on which hip hop is predicated simply doesn't exist. And when we're all in this together, well, being radicalized becomes a bit passé.

When I say Post-Kanye in this phrase, I mean it in the way I've always understood the 'Post-' prefix - as a moving past, but one which is indelibly marked by that which it surpasses. In this way, what Post-Kanye means to me is the generation of rappers who (perhaps unconsciously) recognize the structural deficit in hip hop imparted by Kanye, and attempt (also probably unconsciously) to rectify it. Thus, rather than taking a strictly Yeezian view of the structure of hip hop, they recognize that the hater is no longer necessarily a viable narrative opponent to the artist, and yet recognize the need for such a figure to exist.

The political economy of Kanye's hip hop, the argument might then go, is basically Keynesian, papering over the structural antagonisms with increasingly spurious wealth. That his celebrity biography is defined by unrelenting careerism (which feeds back into the music he releases - at the height of his manufactured controversy, he released 808s & Heartbreak, which seems like it should be enough to unequivocally prove my point) only underlines why, when Nico says "But taken in another context, couldn’t [Kanye's I <3 Haters] just as well be a sincere and almost Christ-like manner of speaking," my immediate response is to say, no, and fuck Kanye.

To return to Cher Lloyd, though, and swagger: Nico's post seems to me, at first, to conflate haters with trolls, and then to argue more along the lines that the haters are actually those being trolled, while the trolls themselves are the swaggerers. In a sense, this latter version is precisely what I'm trying to say Kanye obviates; for him, there seems to be no need to troll or goad the haters. They're simply an ontological fact of hip hop, to be afforded only the most cursory (dis)respect. And so, too, for Cher Lloyd, in this song. Her naysayers are very real, and prominent, but there is no sense in which she envisions them as serious opponents. They aren't even motivation; they simply exist, produce (unintentional) value, are abstractly addressed. There is no production of schadenfreude going on, because there simply aren't two agents. Haters have been absolved of their agentivity, and one doesn't go about taking pleasure in the pain of rocks.

There is a similar claim, I think, in the final paragraph of the post JR linked me to, which points up the similarities betwen Lloyd and a young Mick Jagger, in order to make a dig at "rockist authenticity." Which is all well and good, I suppose, but again it leaves me cold. If your target is a group of people so desperately musically illiterate as to find anything "novel" about this song, then you aren't contending with a group against whom you have to truly struggle; surely they are a very privileged group, and socially ingrained, even moreso in Britain, but they're still a group that can be easily bypassed, whose very definition makes their criticisms irrelevant. The GZA line "First of all, whose your A&R / A mountain climber who plays an electric guitar," or the Jay-z line "Industry shady it need to be taken over" aren't irrelevant at this point - the music industry, like most industries, is still largely by and for straight white men, of course, and it would be stupid to claim that it wasn't - but the conditions have changed. Twenty years later, that same A&R is almost certainly listening to Gaga while he's climbing the rock wall at the gym, or smiling and tapping along when he hears Arcade Fire leaking out of his sons room. Maybe he even turns on Rihanna's S&M to hide the sounds of the Internet porn he's watching when he's masturbating while his kids are home. The point being that while rockist authenticity he may crave, he's sure as fuck not going to let that stand in the way of his profit, and he knows as well as anyone else that deep down he might be a hater - but so what? And isn't that, in a very real way, a good thing?

And this is where, I think, swagger as a sort of labour is necessary to understand this turn in hip hop. At its very core, swagger is of course a jaunt, or a sneer; it is fabric hung from your frame just so, or stones and chains. It is, in other words, an etching of the body in the world, a performative gesture, and it is a very specific sort of performance. Following Evan, I would say that it is a performance of a very particular kind of dispossession, an affective position which codes for no resolution, and whose only outlet is a form of explosive violence. Swagger is, that is to say, both the schematization of Kanye's hip hop, and the precondition of a riot.

This is only so performatively, of course, but then I'm not the person to come to to see performance as a secondary, or parasitic, form of action. And swagger is precisely, of course, the performance of this position as if it could be otherwise, as if this position could produce, have effects.

To turn back, as I'm sure I will again and again, to Soulja Boy's "hop up out the bed / turn my swag on / took a look in the mirror, said what's up / yeah, I'm gettin' money, oh;" it is precisely the garbling of language here, the accident of ambiguity that this lyrical construction creates, that points through the impasse of labour/swagger vs. rage/swagger. Is Soulja Boy, here, describing a situation in which he looks in the mirror, swag turned on, and gets money, or one in which he looks in the mirror, swagged turned on, and says to himself "I'm getting money?"

It, of course, absolutely does not matter; Soulja Boy is a figure who quite literally gets money by saying "get money." There is no gap. And to reach the point where the word and the thing are one and the same - or, more precisely, where there is no differentiation between performance and action - one must simply turn one's swag on.

To swagger is to perform - to make of one's body a sign - an affective condition - which, to be clear, I mean to be much closer to 'material conditions' than 'feelings' - as though it could possibly be productive. To labour is to perform - to transmute one's body into labour-power - a productive process - the creation of consumer objects or services and surplus-value - as though labour itself were outside the regime of production. Both are, in the end, a mystification, a falsifying of origin; and it is only the swagger jacker/jagger, or the scab, whose material demystification of this individualism brings about the proper return to real order of things.

Post-Kanye: Cher Lloyd

2011-08-17T22:04:00.000-07:00

I've just read a short post over at my friend Nico's blog Breakbeats, Beatitudes, & Becomings called Cher Lloyd and the Proletarianization of a Generation, and I thought I should respond to it. So here's what I've written.

There are certain obvious musical predecessors to this song - Ke$ha's "the boys linin up cuz they know we got swagger / but we kick em to the curb unless they look like Mick Jagger" line, most immediately, and people's subsequent inability to find another word that rhymed with swagger is here made vacuous even of the cultural reference, but also moments of Gwen Stefani's "Hollaback Girl" (particularly the beginning of the second verse), perhaps some Diplo/Afrojack*, or a chorus that seems to be cribbed from My Darling Clementine. I think it's interesting that the song isn't called the nearly-homophonous "Swagger Jacker;" the rhyme there is admittedly at a (very slight) slant, but that seems to be much more descriptive of what the song is talking about. In that sense it's actually a deeply stupid chorus ("Swagger Jagger, you should get some of your own" - as though the Ke$ha similarities weren't obvious enough already - and, I mean, fuck, even the video seems like a real low rent version of the "Your Love Is My Drug" video (or, you know, one of many shitty consumer technology commercials from the early '00s)).

But I'm really interested in this song as an extension of the claim I was trying to make about a Post-Kanye aesthetic in rap, defined by a structural shift from the hater as antagonist to the hater as primary site of value production. This song seems to possess that shift as an already complete ideological imprint - it is, as it were, the "common sense" of the song that the ephemeral "hater" is a source of value.

There is something unclear, here, however, a seeming muddling of the addressee. When the song makes recourse to that least-ironic of all dance music injunctions: "get on the floor," the idea that this song is addressed directly to haters (see: every other lyric) gets a bit confusing. The musical tradition that that trope comes from is an utopian one, or one in which the assumption of the audience is of one preaching to the choir; it is a musical tradition which operates in a very specific space, and has a respect for that space's sanctity. When it gets transposed, as in "Swagger Jagger," into the context of being addressed to an audience that is both generalized and explicitly heretical, there is (or, perhaps, should be) a bit of cognitive dissonance.

The point of recognizing the (possibility of**) cognitive dissonance in this song, in relation to the claims I've tried to make about the paradigm shift in rap music that Kanye epitomizes/enacts, is to say that this is precisely what we would expect to happen if my "post-Kanye" were the new norm. Common sense is not a form of knowledge, but a particular structuring of understanding; common sense (as an ideological construct) is not, that is, how you understand the world, but rather how you understand what you are capable of understanding. When someone says, for instance, that "you should stay off that street at night - it's just common sense," what is common sense about that is that one should hate the poor. And, to continue with this example, if 'hate the poor' is one specific kind of 'common sense,' then it is clear that common sense is not something that gets expressed unambiguously. All kinds of 'aspirational' films - a movie I find personally intolerable, Slumdog Millionaires, springs immediately to mind - reinforce this exact common sensical view of reality precisely by expressing it in its inversion, that poor people can be just wonderful too.

And this is not quite exactly how Cher Lloyd's song works - there is still a bit of strain in insisting that haters are monetized, a bit of the stench of rhetoric about the whole mess - but it is much less strained about it than, say, Kanye's "Stronger," or other similar "I <3 Haters" anthems, and is willing to let itself devolve into babble (her swagger's in check, just so you know!).

The main thing I'm interested in responding to though, in terms of Nico's response to the video, is the way in which he points to swagger as commodity. Many of his individual points I tend to agree with - that there is the scent of planned obsolescence about the whole endeavour, and the mirroring that it shares with consumer electronics, especially - but, as a whole (and as I've tried to write elsewhere on this blog), I tend to be more convinced by the argument that swagger is a reference to work, rather than product. Which, I mean, isn't to fetishize labour - "Labor is a commodity, like any other," after all - but simply to say that when one talks of swagger, one talks of entering a (head)space in which commodities and surplus-value can be generated. Swagger, that is, is not what is being sold, but the simultaneous avowal and mystification of where what is being sold came from. There is a difference between a "swagger ja[ck]er" and a "biter," after all.

These two points - that of the "hater" as primary creator of value, and swagger as (might I go so far as to say fetishized?) labour - seem to me to be indispensable to an understanding of this song, and the milieu out of which it rises. The particulars of the political economy - that is, how it produces value and allocates resources, and how this is inextricably tied to the regulation of its sociality - of the contemporary entertainment industry (in all its blazing glory) are well worth investigating, precisely because - well, actually, fuck it, I'm sure the reasons you can imagine me saying here are better than the ones I can come up with right now, I've just listened to Swagger Jagger probably a hundred times in a row, fuck it.

Happy fucking #based day.

*Actually, if you google [Cher Lloyd Swagger Jagger Diplo] you get a bunch of results claiming that he produced it, though both discogs and wikipedia disconfirm that.

**I make no claims on how others experience this song.

MY NEW ONTOLOGY

2011-08-06T19:49:00.000-07:00

PUBLISH ME YOU CRETINS

PITCH FORK MEDIA

2011-07-29T21:56:00.001-07:00

what a bad website

am i right

"If I was fake.... shh, naw."

2011-07-13T10:29:00.000-07:00

this some real #spamfm shit

I just spent two weeks or so at AxemRangers' house

check out this video of us cooking to Sole + Lil B + Pictureplane's "Bad Captain Swag," off Sole's upcoming album "Hello Cruel World" (the one, if you recall, that I got to write the album bio for, and which is already easily at this point one of my favorite albums of all time).

For Aurist, and then

2011-07-10T15:16:00.000-07:00

"When Are They Gonna Clone The Moon"

Hey there, Moon-Clone here.
I'm just listening to my iPod
(you know, by Apple,
a company I've always
(always, you know, because I'm by no means new)
had a lot of respect for, all things considered;
I mean, it's not like those scientists
meant to take a chunk out of me -
it's just the laws of the universe,
dig?)
Some Arcade Fire song just ended,
and now I'm listening to Iron Maiden,
and just sort of feeling very much
like a psychogalaxian, mapping
the pecularities of random orbits -
no one really thought of where I was supposed
to fit in, you know?
I hope The Ramones pop up on shuffle next,
they always make me feel like
influencing the tides, or seeing
if I can't melt Saturns rings,
and send them leaking out of orbit,
to re-freeze into an interplanetary icicle bridge.
That would be nice.
I don't know. It just felt like it would
be a good idea to vibrate
some radio waves in your direction;
I guess if this gets picked up
by the wrong people,
I'll get to watch the uproar
as you talk about blowing me up,
or building containment walls
against the tides.
That might be swell too, though,
dig?

[[and then, two poems in a style I've been trying to work on, without talking about very much, but on a more concrete subject than these]]

She Might Laugh

"I'm pretty self-involved,"
I might say,
staring down a shitty beer or coffee
as the shrunken stars refuse to wink
in the face of luminescent ground.
And she'll laugh, if it happens,
and that will be her offering.
And I'll think to say what I've meant to
said
without saying,
-

That Sediments

"I'd like to see you one more time,"
She said,
"Before I leave."
And she ups like smoke,
but soft as mist.
Her body particulates
in memory,
and the words insinuate
themselves, sticking to air
that swallows, that
sediments into the text of my body,
of no body, that you become
when you tell me you'll leave.

So I tell you,
"I've no body."
And you misinterpret
my glee as plea
and speak no more
of needing to see me before you leave.

With Ahsuhluh

2011-07-09T09:28:00.000-07:00

#angelas21stbirthday

2011-07-01T22:58:00.000-07:00

Diamonds.

Let's talk about diamonds.
Let's talk about the ways in which to rare the willows,
let's talk about the covet, solemn woolen windows.
Let's ossify the distant, righteous full and pillows.
Let's condemn, I say we condemn, lets condemn, the fullest sallow often fellow
legends wonder what the longest sorrow; numbers, I will tell you, I will tell you.

We might condemn, we might, I am none, no might, might condemn some solid shearing shallows.
I am white fear, sheet fear, the softest often stolen marrow,
I am the long world sordid, the ice-cold harrow.
To take from, to take from me, to take from none style solely matters.

The coldest condemnation, they said, they said they said, the coldest condemnation, comes from within;
I cried, I cried bogus, bullshit I cried, bullshit. The column that they sold is nothing alive.
This is the longest iron, I swear, the longest I have ever managed.

There will be no remember, no remember, there will be no funeral for me,
and your semi colon shadow honour will split and spill and none will fallow and none will none will none will hallow.
This is the lightning that causes shadow; this is the lightning as it causes shadow; this is the lightening of the shadow

You can mirror while you boredom, while you exile, while you fantasy,
"The happiness is what you're here for," you say, say you say, said you lost the thread, said its never said.

An honest loving empty wild, an honest empty living wild, and words that stream like flashing lights like pop songs in star-eyed young,
"This is not worth," he said, not worth, not worth! Not! Never. No one. Honest.
A horror story soft and corpse-like,
and I am sitting solid shameful, escape to smelling sickly Jäger, this is no solid world;
Didn't you know? All that is solid melts into air.

Zine Again

2011-06-18T17:18:00.000-07:00

I forgot I put this up on that issuu site, so I guess I should post it here

written sometime around last July, I still have the tracklist of the accompanying mixtape but not the mixtape itself

I post this because my friend goofid did a similar thing, which I highly recommend to download, as it is wonderful.

From Pauline

2011-06-09T16:13:00.000-07:00

songs about kitty

2011-06-06T20:44:00.000-07:00

shouts out to keishi for doing most of the legwork here

Hello Kitty Everything: An Introduction

2011-05-25T17:13:00.001-07:00

(The Mouth, Between Representation and Image)

“At the risk of enraging French-influenced literary theorists the world over, we'll take a stab at a boilerplate definition of post-modernism as it applies to Kitty. Basically, the PoMo set believes that there are no ultimate truths about things. That's an illusion. Instead, how one views something – a piece of literature, history, or vexing questions such as why Kitty and her twin sister Mimmy appear with mouths in videos, but sans mouths on store shelves – is heavily influenced by history, prevailing ideologies or otherwise socially constructed by bias, yearnings or whatever.”

The most obvious political problem that gets identified regularly with Hello Kitty is her lack of a mouth. The argument generally goes that this character design – whether or not it stems from concerns of minimalism or the relative degree of cuteness – embeds Kitty in an antifeminist discourse which is predicated on and reproduces the idea that women's value is contingent on their silence. This is a question that can't ever be sufficiently dealt with on its own terms, and I think in its own way it can be a fruitful problematic; but for my purposes here, and I think most of the time, understanding Hello Kitty as an object that operates on the level of the politics of representation is not the best idea.

If one takes the painting I Haz Mouth by Jason Han, painted for the Three Apples exhibition, and compares it with Renée Magritte's Les Deux Mystéres, the disjunct between the representative object and the image-object can be made clear. Magritte's not-a-pipe acts according to the rules of representation, in that the most common reading of the famous La Trahison des Images requires that the pipe of the painting is coded semiotically as a representative object, which the painted words then disavow, which actually reveals the disavowal that representation is predicated on. With Les Deux Mystéres, La Trahison des Images becomes simply a component in a larger painting that sees another realistic (at least according to the visual vernacular of advertising) pipe situated in a room with no attached textual disavowal. Without this disavowal, the large pipe can be seen to occupy a very unclear space in relation to the pipe with the disavowal. It is both unclear whether this is supposed to be the real pipe that the previous painting wasn't (although that can't be the case), or whether the presence of this pipe is even less real than the pipe that is disavowed, being some sort of dream of pipe-ness that the disavowed pipe constructs. And underlining this, the new pipe cannot be fixed in space in the painting itself, as the framed pipe with its disavowal can – the new pipe is either very large and presented against the wall, or very small and in the foreground of the painting, or somewhere between. This is all playing with the possibilities presented by the representative object, the thing which encodes in itself the knowledge that it is not what it appears to be, because it assumes the form of a thing which possesses more than form.

Jason Han's painting has an obvious structural similarity to Les Deux Mystéres, with the crucial difference that it pivots not around the semiotic movement of disavowal but instead of iterability. If one were to imagine a strict reproduction of La Trahison des Images, with the only differences being that the pipe was replaced by an image of Hello Kitty and the words were made to read “This is not (a) Hello Kitty,” then this might begin to make sense. The obvious reaction to this painting (barring a self-satisfied smirk at the clever intertextuality) is very different to the obvious reaction to La Trahison des Images - the Kitty version does not offer the possibility of “getting the joke.” To say that this is not Hello Kitty means that it is, most likely, a counterfeit Hello Kitty, or that it is in some other way unofficial or imperfect. And this is precisely because Hello Kitty does not represent; she is simply an image, or an icon, structured not by a knowledge of disavowal but by a constitutive excess, a knowledge that there is something more here that cannot be represented, analogous to human consciousness or agentivity.

In the thought experiment that Han represents in his painting, when Kitty (or Mimmy, if you're going to be a stickler about bow placement) finally gets a mouth, that mouth has no powers of expression – in fact, the mouthless Kitty in the painting is able to express her emotions much more concretely than the mouthed Kitty. When Kitty is given the tools to induct herself into the linguistic realm, her reaction is strictly reproductive; a mouth that speaks itself pictorially in a bubble that looks like a nascent, third Kitty. And to be clear, I would not argue that the preconditions of Kitty are such that she is without language – which is more or less just reiterating the critique of her with the politics evacuated – but that, because she works according to the rules of the image rather than the representation, her induction into the regime of language has nothing to do with expressive capacity and everything to do with the spaces she occupies in relation to other signs.

But, to keep the focus on her expressive capacity for just a moment longer, there is one other point about her lack of a mouth that is worth making, which is crystallized in the incident referred to as the Hello Kitty Murder. A Hello Kitty doll became the receptacle for the skull of a woman beaten to death and dismembered, which was discovered only when the teenage girlfriend of one of the gangsters who committed the crime confessed to the police. This “perversion” of Kitty is, of course, so compelling precisely because it falls – like almost all forms of subversion – within the structural coordinates of the context but outside of the accounted-for possibilities. For on some level, this murder is simply the playing out of the speculation on Kitty's anatomical peculiarity, the question of her bone structure being described without the comfortable cushion of hypotheses. And so her mouthlessness takes on a new meaning, a signifier in its own right of her complicity with human and inhuman systems. So whether you see her as the unwilling conspirator who reveals the plot as soon as she is provided the means to, or as the willing conspirator who stabs the backs of those she conspired with as soon as the opportunity presents itself is immaterial; either way, she is revealed to be complicit with the entire political economy which generates her, no matter what fantasies are applied to exempt her from them.

(Capitalism, Realism, and What is Popular)

“[H]er head was cocked innocently to one side, she had a bow in her hair, and she was cradling a very large automatic weapon between her chubby little arms. At first I was taken aback. The illustration was hysterical, but wrong. And the fact that this subversive act was committed by a white male made it that much more perverse.”

The core of this project is essentially an engagement with a round of debates that took place between a few high profile Marxist literary theorists that took place in the 1930s, around the revolutionary potential of Modernism and Expressionism and the fundamental questions of how to approach the popular, and Realism. The two main figures in this debate that I'm interested in applying to Kitty are Lukacs and Brecht.

I take Brecht's call for an alliance between “popular art and realism” as being the rallying cry for this project, and am in complete agreement with his definitions of the two:

“Our concept of what is popular refers to a people who not only play a full part in historical development but actively usurp it, force its pace, determine its direction. We have a people in mind who make history, change the world and themselves. We have in mind a fighting people and therefore an aggressive concept of what is popular.
Popular means: intelligible to the broad masses, adopting and enriching their forms of expression / assuming their standpoint, confirming and correcting it / representing the most progressive section of the people so that it can assume leadership, and therefore intelligible to other sections of the people as well / relating to traditions and developing them / communicating to that portion of the people which strives for leadership the achievements of the section that at present rules the nation.
...
“Realistic means: discovering the causal complexes of society / unmasking the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / writing from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasizing the element of development / making possible the concrete, and making possible abstraction from it.”

These definitions seem at least as applicable to our contemporary moment, if not more, than they were when Brecht wrote them. As the debates about postmodernism seem to have exhausted themselves into declaring that it's over, and we see cultural attempts to work through the exhaustion of cynicism and black irony that revolve around po-faced expressions of sincerity and transparency, as philosophical circles begin defining themselves against the anti-realist tendencies that dominated during the same era, realism again becomes a word with some weight. To take Brecht's definition in this case, rather than defining realism according to some aesthetic regularities, is to reject the neoliberal injunction to operate exclusively in the realm of abstraction while disavowing it – or, to put it more closely to Brecht's terms, to reject the making possible of the abstract, in order to extrapolate the concrete from it.

Another way to put this would be to say that, “what we need now is a better sense of the real divide to be drawn, between the realism effect and affective realism, between what we've inherited as the 'look' of realism and what actually nails down and pins, like a shaking butterfly of the present, the feel of our historical moment,” as Evan Calder Williams did in his blog post On Laughter and Realism or The Moral Economy of a Fat Nude Man Running in Slow Motion Through a Shopping Mall Only to be Shot Point-Blank. What is needed, that is to say, is a realism which doesn't just look realistic, like Magritte's pipe, but which feels real, in ways beyond reflection or comprehension, that feels the same way (no matter the aesthetic vernacular employed) that living under the hegemony of financial capital does. But this is not entirely correct either, because it is beyond feeling; realism is, at its core, a question of (un)masking what is real, which is to say that which structures reality.

What Hello Kitty brings to the table in the contemporary search for realism is basically a series of likenesses. The first of these, and most obvious, draws on her closeness with the Pacific Rim discourse, and how she has come to stand as a sort of emblem of globalization. With the Pacific Rim being, as it were, the center of the globalized economy, Kitty's position as being both of and Othered within the Pacific Rim discourse is a good way to see just how this works.

She is of it in a very concrete way; Kitty is the creation of a Japanese corporation, Sanrio, and is very much a product of the aesthetic history of Japan and a product of the cultural moment in which she was created. I'll talk a little bit more about her specifically Japanese cultural heritage later, but it is important to note that Kitty was created in 1974, and Sanrio in 1973 (after having been the Yamanashi Silk Company for the previous thirteen years), which are important years in another Pacific Rim country's history, and also the global development of political economy since then. The coincidence of Pinochet's coup and Sanrio's turning into a company focused on peddling minor, communicative luxuries obviously does not speak to any necessary historical reality, much less a conscious organization of history; it is, however, a fruitful coincidence in how both of these things have developed.

In a review of Belson and Bremner's Hello Kitty: The Remarkable Story of Sanrio and the Billion Dollar Feline Phenomenon, Gary LaMoshi gives a summation of the reasons that Sanrio CEO and founder Shintaro Tsuji made the switch from the Yamanashi Silk Company to Sanrio:

“His friends in the government of remote Yamanashi prefecture got him started promoting local silk and vegetables in the 1950s. But by 1962, Tsuji had expanded into rubber sandals that featured a flower design, reportedly observing, "If you attach added value or design to the product, they sell in a completely different way." As a result, he began commissioning cartoonists to create designs, eventually hiring his own to avoid paying royalties. Tsuji also obtained Japanese rights to Snoopy from Peanuts for Japan and exclusive (money-losing) import deals on Barbie dolls and Hallmark cards.”

This basically reads, to someone like me at least, like a (re)discovery of surplus-value. That something might “sell in a completely different way” is, almost certainly, the difference between a product and a commodity, the “added value or design” exactly a description of the aura that allows the commodity an appearance of holism which obscures the real labour relations that went into it, and which aura itself is the product of the originary commodity of labour. That Kitty is created precisely because of this realization is inarguable – but more importantly, that there isn't an immediate translation from the realization (that added value can make things sell differently, or using labour to obscure labour creates additional capital out of nothing) to the execution (of a proprietary character/brand/thing like Kitty). Instead, the attempt is made to deal with commissions, and (more interestingly) to license characters like Snoopy, which speaks to a number of things, but most pertinently given what I've just been talking about the sense in which Sanrio and Kitty operate as both of the Pacific Rim (a character like Snoopy can be imported relatively easily, and there is an assumption that a market for it already exists) and Othered by it (there is still the distance that requires a licensing contract, and the assumed market isn't quite there, and there is always something just slightly off).

To make this brief, I'll only bring up the last couple points I want to talk about in this section without trying to extrapolate them too much. First, I want to briefly quote from an essay by Mark Fisher, “SF Capital,” in which he talks about the trajectory of the “hype[r]verse,” the university of commodities which surround a text:

“Star Wars is metonymically implicated in late capitalism in a way that 2001 never quite could be. What was bought and sold when audiences consumed Star Wars was not in any sense a single (aesthetic) object, but a world, a hype[r]verse. It is, of course, possible to retrospectively transform a single commodity into a series of objects-for-sale, and there are numerous, now very familiar, techniques and strategies that have been employed to this end … Star Wars was designed as a hyper-commodity; not so much a film as a fictional system - a plane of consistency that could be populated with any number of commodities. The switch is from a system of objects to a hype-system, where what is sold is abstract, fictional - but very real.
...
Hype-vorticism has been through a whole series of thresholds since. The simultaneous emergence of the Transformers toys and TV series in 1984 was one enormously significant moment: the toys were designed as 'characters' in a 'narrative', in part developed by Marvel, who also published a Transformers comic book series. What began to disappear here was the sense of an original or primary entertainment 'text', surrounded or 'supported' by secondary commodities, a disappearance that has been achieved almost completely now. Remember that moment in Jurassic Park when you realise that the logo of the theme park in the film is exactly the same logo on the Jurassic Park merchandise you can buy outside the cinema? And, with Disney's Toy Story, the loop between advertising, fiction and commodity achieved an unprecedented tightness: here was a film about toys/commodities, some of which were already-established brands, some of which were established precisely by the film (Buzz Lightyear, Woody) all of which were able to commingle on a single plane of (digital) reality.” (italics his, bold mine)

What is relevant here, of course, is that this “disappearance that has been achieved almost completely now” is very much exactly what was achieved almost thirty years prior, with Hello Kitty. This is what makes Kitty such a fascinating problem for anyone who is interested in how texts work, I think – whether you take the understanding of the marketing world, which Fisher lays out pretty adeptly, that the text is that which unifies otherwise unrelated commodities, or if you take a more liberal understanding of text as, for instance, textile, stuff thats been weaved together, I still think Kitty opens up some serious problems.

The major problem, of course, is that while Kitty doesn't fit chronologically into Fisher's lineage, she certainly is the completion of this trend. Which is to say that we intuitively understand her as operating according to the same logic of something like Star Wars, even though if one were to simply describe her it might seem more obvious to think of her as a logo.

The final point I want to make in this section is that I draw these analogies, particularly between Kitty and surplus-value, with an eye toward the negative spaces they create. This is, I think, the work of the real, no matter which register you are speaking about it in; it is those spaces, like the ones created by the analogy between Kitty and surplus-value, that resist all productive relations, and simply litter the ground like so much junk.

III

(Cuteness)

“In 1974 large numbers of teenagers especially women began to write using a new style of childish characters. […] Cute style began as an underground literary trend amongst young people who developed the habit of writing stylised childish letters to each other and to themselves”

Hello Kitty works in a very straightforward way: she provokes an affective reaction which inspires a consumer to purchase the product on display. The discursive component of this affect is what we call cute.

Cuteness has two primary cultural and economic touchstones, both of which are heavily imprecated into Pacific Rim discourse; on the one hand with American capitalism, and on the other with the Japanese “kawaii culture.” The latter of these is an aesthetic that has been operating in Japan since the 1970s, of which Hello Kitty has been both a forerunner and a mainstay. The culture takes on much more than just aesthetic dimensions; “The cute style extends beyond consumerism as seen in grown-ups with infantile behavior — acting silly, giggling, speaking with a squeaky voice, pouting and throwing temper tantrums.” This kind of acting out, rather than signifying a generation spoiled by its parents and just waiting for “the harsh reality of traditional values [to] hit home,” seems to me to point toward a sort of cultural hysteria, a particularly canny enacting of the roles to which they are subordinated by their objective situation. Not, as the cultural conservatives are fond of suggesting, a willed refusal of responsibility, but more along the lines of “if you refuse to treat us like adults, then we will be children until we die.” This refusal to acculturate oneself to a society which only has it in its interests to alienate and infantilize you is an oppositional stance, but one which can be subsumed under the culture of consumer capitalism which Japan is wholeheartedly importing by the time that kawaii culture becomes a real force, and which is the same time as Pacific Rim discourse is at its peak. But it didn't start as a function of that discourse; as the epigraph to this section points out, kawaii began as a trend in literature, or penmanship. The difference between contemporary cute culture and this “underground literary trend” is enormous and is traceable through a logic of self-determination that consumer capitalism as propagated through the Pacific Rim discourse posits, and it also highlights the power of the commodity form under the society of the spectacle: when as recently as the early 1970s (contemporaneous with the creation of Hello Kitty) it was conceivable to have an “underground literary trend” become the dominant aesthetic, and yet a similar occurrence is unthinkable today, the culprit would fairly clearly be the mystification of societal relations through objects/images.

The way that cuteness operates outside of Japan, however, is as a sort of diluted, partial affect, only able to be completed by the assuagement associated with retail therapy. This kind of relationship to affect can be seen in a broader context as well within American Pacific Rim and post-Pacific Rim culture, especially in formulations like Quentin Tarantino's films which use irony and supposed parody to flatten out all the possible affective reactions to his films into a generic “cool.” This is called a number of things, including “the death of affect” by JG Ballard and “the waning of affect” by Fredric Jameson, and it points to a kind of collapsing of affective reactions into affective potentials, with the ultimate goal (for the most part) of fueling consumption. Because kawaii culture is in some sense symptomatic of Pacific Rim discourse, it is implicated in this affect-flattening, consumption-prone society. The origins of the culture, however, point to the necessary evidence that this is not the only way that cuteness can be brought to bear in the world, however, and that in certain cases it can actually point in quite different directions than the one it currently does.

If the main inspiration for this project was the question of realism and popularity, then the main goal is an attempt at a fundamental reordering of cuteness. Because a critique of Hello Kitty is, at its core, a critique of the affect of cuteness, in which affect must not be understood as a psychological term, but as a material one, not a feeling but a sign inscribed on the consuming body. And this is important because cuteness, with all its baggage of capriciousness, is probably the single most powerful force behind which the troops of capitalism - especially a capitalism which does not just exempt, but actually models itself after, reproductive labour – martial. To be able to understand cuteness as a productively anti-capitalist force, and not just to understand it that way but to force it to become so, without it slipping backwards into nu-domesticities or other reactionary constructions of individualist value-producing units, is the (admittedly fucking utopian) goal of this project. And I've no idea how to do it, but I feel that it must be done.

ancient notes on Know1ng

2011-05-17T20:05:00.000-07:00

i fucking love that movie

in case you missed it

2011-05-17T16:29:00.000-07:00

i posted up a retrospective of the Benladen handle over at the #spamfm group blog

its sort of hastily put together and missing important stuff but Osama Bin Laden died so it seemed appropriate

This is a Letter to a State Senator

2011-05-13T10:27:00.000-07:00

That I am writing. It is wholly lack of blood and
bone and I would fear that selves can ape
and split to shadow and when we air our outs
our person's choice.

Covering yourself with blankets and jogging memory
is iced solid corporations feeling fucking chill.

This is a letter to Rob Cowles, State Senator, to
not my State Senator, I have no State Senator, I
am no better than a district I cannot live up to such
expectations.

I am covering myself I am covering this self that writes
a letter to your State Senator, I am covering with selves
to be cold come the show.

I pray that the show goes I pray well I am the greatest
prayer. Can you even begin to guerrilla I can begin to
imagine, this old solid gold rocket that will cost an ion-
smile sized shadow. Do you know how to prayer, I can show
you.

Dogging mirrors takes the longest days of lives that don't take time.

So we doubled back, from performing street theatre
where no shows go on an empty gesture shown its weak
by the buildings come to life, do this, these weak entire
words displaced from thumb, from tongues that wind themselves
in knots.

(an addendum:

I am an oil field
to be set ablaze.
An open mic night
to set the stage
for solid thoughts
of hardships crossed,
and how to "me" them.

i am an oven folded over
covered with the loving sorrow
of those who can't demand a thing.)

Dancing Till

2011-05-06T23:35:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to go ahead and, as you might imagine, respectfully disagree with this wonderful youtube comment on the video for Salem's remix of Britney Spears' Till The World Ends.

The basic point of singing "We'll keep dancing till the world ends," seems, fairly obviously, to me at least, to be not a point about the apocalypse, but about dancing. And specifically, about what one avoids doing by dancing. Which is to say, fucking. To take the song as being about the apocalypse, then (which, admittedly, the video does, albeit a very mild apocalypse, one which is obviously situated in the contemporary mythological vernacular ("DECEMBER 21ST, 2012") and which cannot only be avoided by dancing in a sewer for a couple minutes, but can be actively watched approaching from a few blocks away with no ill effects), seems fairly inane.

The video is, on the other hand, pretty blatant about its citation of Spears' I'm a Slave 4 U, which it recontextualizes into an apocalyptic setting. In this light, the fact that dancing is basically an elision of fucking in Till The World Ends becomes more pertinent, as I'm a Slave 4 U was very much a song, both in itself and in the context of Spears' career as a public figure, a song about (dancing as) fucking.

Which isn't, of course, to say that I'm a Slave 4 U doesn't defer sex, but on the contrary that how it does so is basically identical to the deferrals of the visual/aural grammar that has colonized sexual entertainment - in a word, pornography. It adheres to the syntax of submission and fragmentation, the visual dismembering and aesthetic re-membering of bodies as signifying vehicles with the phallus as master signifier. Till The World Ends is, on the other hand, about holistic bodies with mastery over themselves, reacting in the face of crisis.

Because dancing is, essentially, a question of the body's mastery of itself, in which the mind is elided. This is where, incidentally, Black Swan either succeeds miraculously or fails miserably, depending on whether you view it as a melodrama, a genre concerned with hysteria and the general question of the mind's intrusive presence in the face of its obsolescence, or as any other genre. Viewed as melodrama, the narrative arc of the film is not about Portman's character losing her mind due to stress or mommy issues, but is rather a film about a mind that is radically disconnected from its body (of necessity) restructuring, according to its own (symbolic) grammar, the events of the body's learning process.

It's worth noting, as well, that Spears is not exactly the most technically accomplished dancer among her peer group. Her dancing, while frequent, is always jagged, a product of consideration rather than impulse, primarily consisting of controlled arm movements while stepping to the beat. Her dancing is, it might be said, more arithmetical than primal, an expression of the mind (whether mechanically, as premeditated actions being carried out, or creatively, as symbolic gestures) which employs the body as its tool. There is actually an argument to be made, I think, that I'm a Slave 4 U is the point at which Spears transitioned into a project in which her primary goal began to be to naturalize this form of dancing which directs attention away from (or, perhaps more accurately, past) the explicit, which is to say the body, and towards what is implied. And what is implied by dancing, quite naturally, is usually fucking.

This, then, is the real sense in which Till The World Ends is an apocalyptic song. It is an unveiling, as the culture that sustained Spears' project is in the process of being displaced by a culture which, heralded by dubstep and textualized by Gaga, has no room for it.

The video for Hold It Against Me then reveals itself to be a particularly canny mixture of autopsy and apocalypse, as Gaga's visual aesthetic is linked with the projection of old Spears videos through a dubstep-influenced aural environment. And the symbols of the video become an unveiling as well, as the implicit argument throughout her older videos that Spears' bodily perfection is, paradoxically, the reason she is not an accomplished dancer becomes basically explicit as her monstrous progeny spring forth from her giant wedding dress and dance quite well, or her obvious body doubles battle each other for domination.

happy may day (a poem written on the second day of the Democratic Leadership Institute)

2011-05-01T14:20:00.000-07:00

This is mirror time
When economies triple
When the chair's smirk
Fetish
Shatters in your hands
To give you tools of broken legs
To spear the niche that never unfolds
Or gives you tools of broken backs
To smash glass
Reflecting glass reflecting
Diamonds

The Opening Shapes / "The Seventh Largest Earthquake In Recorded History"

2011-04-22T09:47:00.000-07:00

The Opening Shapes

An ode to sounds forming and shattering, written,
to smearing with shit the structures, the dormant,
to smearing with shit the nascent unlimned,
and wasting the horrors that support horrors that lived.

An empty logician sold mathematics
like water in winter, failing
to finance Offices of Foreclosure. The tiered lose their windows;
with no space to shadow,
no situations will heaven.
No fire likes sitting alone.

When typing forms shadows,
I might be empty, she once said, cannot find the last of you,
cannot murder the last of you, or sacrifice you.
The broken read piles. And garbage disposals, showers with tongues bitten clean,
no own space, this mire is foul for the shaping.

Three-mirror cataclysm.
The sordid the trainwrecked
and ambivalent, routed through infinite winks
inspired, like mirrors in the dark,
insipid as wisdom to fire.

To read: tear the world
To fantasy: mirror through world
In will: niche-styled mirror, to expand:
nine cats disappear. Poisoned selves, aliens abundant
as a tower's shuddering under wind's weight, so none reflected grow.

I'm minding my business
I'm minding my business
I'm lining with iron the shadows you've stilled.
While corpsing unempty
deplored for the willing
the opening shapes the love given in.
Not liking or spearing
or husbanding clarity
the wisdom of cleaving the pound-stealing dim.

Disaster can wind the capable past long bit-back tear,
diamonds will float like we helium their hardened misery,
an absence of words for the human disaster an emptiness of words for the human collapse.

To collapse in one's words, take those spaces unfolding and
fit statues to keyholes,
or smear the death of your child among the stars.

For you, I might empty my weary,
I might collapse to the ice and render all obsolete
I might cushion with still-bleeding shadows the softness of dying in houses
I might corporate the willow the ash and the bitten, that woolly unconscious has murdered with words
I might absent the world of its lava, just hole
I might collapse every bone like a foldable toy, fill stars with asbestos, iron songs onto lungs
But none can know,
for three mirrors is all,
one niche infinite,
absolute shadows absent stories of lives or their fires.

"The Seventh Largest Earthquake In Recorded History"

I
to sleep alone, on one's side,
curl tight

II
here are my ribs; i have forced them apart and spread them like wings, picked them clean

III
to mirror human misery.
two mirrors position.
three for infinite.
demographic determines.

vulture-picked ribcage.
smearing blood in museums.
no fire, much oil.
fuel rage.

"If you have a job, you only have yourself to blame."

2011-04-18T10:51:00.000-07:00

"The entrepreneur and the careerist are those for whom work is the central life concern, for them the distinction between work and play doesn’t exist, as such one route to the abolition of work is the abolition of an anti-work, anti capitalist subjectivity. Try to think about it all differently."

three poems courtesy of a blizzard in Green Bay, Wisconsin

2011-04-16T20:04:00.000-07:00

An Icy Right of Willing

The cupboards full of kittens
stealing voices from the stubborn
or the willing to be martyred

The pleasance fierce of eaten shitholes
the piece of slime that covers zeros
the icy lisp of horror sparrows
or the corpse you don't remember

This is an icy right
of willing
this is the fucking
jealous apron story

This longest winded mystery
for shadows and their mirrored spears
this longest winded fear of flight
or human dreams and apathy
there is nothing left there is nothing left
there is nothing left of left

And the heavenly unlovely watched
the springing text
unbidden

What Do You Look Like When

What do you look like when
when your ears cloaked
in shadow
when your wind is
the living?

will you register to empathize for classes stolen of their life?

What ice fiend crisis
what can we look like
what stare can we attract
his comfort irons loping
with the covenant we prayed upon
what fear of fastest growing sparrows
can lord the last of whipping powers
who is winding machination down who solid
sour missile shadow column frozen coward?

I HOPE YOU PISS YOURSELF AND THEN DIE

"What's the longest you've ever gone with your blood not being drawn?"
you might imagine me asking her
what kind of labret could you smile at, what kind of iron looks smeared on your tongue
that you forced in his throat. Whose abstract,
whose devolution of lyrics do you find most compelling,
who do you who do you who do you who do you

We look worried in unison with our lips drawn taught, our magnified eyes steal a glance at each other,
perhaps we've found the strongest starfire whisper living in the icicle
which is the word that you can tally softly in the persons system.
Could the act speech code like paradise, shift like what was once written
stopped the world from producing,
possibly covering with the looking blanket the softest calibration
we mirror heavy provenance in pilloried existence

When covering the lowest star we cough into the wretched blondes
or bring to life with open space the followers who blossom
whose sibilants can query real
whose systems theory evidence
look into discovering the wind.
Who can set themselves on fire
who can stop the quiet tale
who is the longest solid pirate that finish strong despair
what ice what ice what ice looks like the righteous
starring sullen, sallow,
whats looking for what lights the wind

When you worry does your stomach shrink or tears tighten in your throat or fingers shake like lightning stabbed?

Oh goodness hadn't you heard? It's all over the news:
it's time to whisper.
Can you worry about my threat?
Could you please be so kind as to establish the local fear fire column
or wind slowly single file in the ear of God's softness?

Oh I cannot wish upon you oh I cannot wish upon you
I certainly cannot wish upon your grave
I can't imagine even struggles I can't condone the richest blossoms
I luxury like mirrored walls,
but shadow steel like ghosts in halls,
your window might entire or softly wicked shower
or you might escape the loving grace of shadows full of mild ire

UPDATES ON RAPS COMING INSURRECTION

2011-04-12T10:44:00.001-07:00

BLOCKA BLOCKA BLOCKA BLOCKA

shots have been fired

Thy Twitter Conversation: Of OFWGKTA and ICP

2011-03-10T16:10:00.000-08:00

Benladen: @IlllllllllllllI I think I just tried to articulate my thoughts re: OFWGKTA (following yours) in the 2nd 1/2 of this [post on soleone.org in a thread about my previous post here].

IlllllllllllllI: I think you're right about the pitfalls of OFWGKTA, even the politics (also re: your Coup/Public enemy point). I don't know why Eminem is somehow more relevant to the general OF conversation than, say, Ice Cube.

Benladen: He isn't. But those are the grounds people want to dismiss them on. And if they provide me the perfect counterexample, I'll run with it. Rap fans are fucking terrified of the idea that certain things are worth saying more than once. It's fucking weird.

IlllllllllllllI: Oh, I didn't mean your point about Eminem, I see what you're responding too. It's just odd give how close they are to Amerikkka. Including with the misogyny (though they haven't done anything as self-subversive as "It's a Man's World").

This is beside the point, but I remember the ICP christian "reveal" as the weird possible thing.

Benladen: I still can't listen to Thy Unveiling without bursting into frenetic, giddy laughter. Though I'm really starting to like the idea of ICP as like, some sort of post-Bush Doctrine Moscow Trials. And yeah, I mean, the Eminem comparisons are there, & aren't totally superficial, but OFWGKTA definitely draw on a larger tradition. I've always sort of wondered what rap would look like if it could acknowledge something like "cartoon rap" as a subgenre, that would cover horrorcore/acid rap, Wu-Tang, a lot of gangsta rap, & probably a ton of other shit.

IlllllllllllllI: Immediately I thought of nerdcore, Dr. Octagon, Del the Funky Homosapien, the adult swim MF doom album, oh fuck fuck Ugly Duckling.

Benladen: Yes! But instead we spin in circles talking about how Authentic all this shit is, and fucking gut it of what's interesting.

torrentofthings: @Benladen @IlllllllllllllI Eminem is not free of flaws, but he has more interesting things to say than ICP do.

IlllllllllllllI: ICP is opaque to me, honestly. My experience has me distrusting your point about their reactionary influence. At least the kids I knew who were attracted to it were already the reactionary underclasses, pseudo-racist, proto-tea party. That's glib actually, not proto-tea party at all, I'm struggling for the right characterization. Have you seen Louis Malle's "God's Country"?

torrentofthings: I don't really see any politics in 'Chicken Hunting.'

Benladen: I honestly love both of them immensely, for wildly different reasons, but I broadly agree with you.

B)

IlllllllllllllI: Everytime I see you in juggalo dress, I feel so happy.

torrentofthings: Kind of wonderful kind of terrifying.

Benladen: @IlllllllllllllI I haven't [seen God's Country], but I want to now, this sounds wonderful. I know the type of people you're describing, they're exactly the sort of juggalos I knew in middle school, and I agree that that's their "base" or whatever the marketing term would be. But a lot of their music makes explicit anti-racist overtures, and I always got the impression that they were trying to expand their fanbase to include the less disenchanted underclass to their side with that, which etc etc. "Disenchanted underclass" was a fucking stupid way to put that, but now I cant think of a better way.

[re: no politics in Chicken Hunting] @torrentofthings @IlllllllllllllI Well I mean, misogyny is definitely political. But I'm thinking more along the line of songs like Red Neck Hoe, where if you listen the background repeats, "Fuckin' bigot" to give the idea that this is more an attack on ignorance and racism than women (if you want it to be).

IlllllllllllllI: @Benladen I think the whole thing is up on youtube [see below]. I get that sense, somewhat. It's just that the audience's brand of possible revolution seemed to be only in the Khmer Rouge sense. That is, the rural midwestern audience, again, I only know the local variety. There is definitely a ressentiment exclusion, though.

torrentofthings [re: Red Neck Hoe]: @Benladen @IlllllllllllllI This is interesting; almost an attempt to alienate their ignorant audience. I have never heard ICP be PC before. I have always seen them as exclusively '4chanesque' shock attacks. (I mean old 4chan when it did mean something).

IlllllllllllllI: I am actually way more freaked out it being explicit.

torrentofthings: Why is that?

IlllllllllllllI: Just in contrast to what I've been thinking about OFWGKTA, the need to caveat it seems like, well, Moscow Trials. I'm not sure what way you meant the Moscow Trials earlier, but I'm thinking in the Zizek/Brecht sense. That their guilt is embedded in exactly the explicit disavowals.

Benladen: Well, Carnival of Carnage is their first album, so they have to hide it in the beat, but (iirc) it becomes more explicit as they move toward their "Unveiling." And yeah, the idea of ICP as (this kind of) counter-(pre-)revolutionaries is something I'd never thought of before, so its hazy.

torrentofthings: It's definitely a defensible argument. I think there is a problem with the hip hop music scene that is an ingrained misogyny, but ICP have always seemed to be outside of the Tupac/Biggie descendants that are permanently stuck in this trap, which gives them a slightly different angle on a genre which should not be bogged down by such issues. Almost all of the English Grime rappers have taken a step away from it also.

Benladen: Oh I mean, don't get me wrong, I think they're still Evil Fucks, crass opportunistic exploitation artists, but the way they go about being these things is endlessly (to use your words) fascinating & terrifying, and above all entertaining. Maybe a better way to phrase my idea is that if there is a "core" political project to ICP its to subvert any & all potential (community-based) political energies into an anti-political, demographic "community," which ultimately takes the form of the theological.

torrentofthings: 'tis indeed interesting. You have piqued mine. I will now listen to ICP for objective interest, not pleasure.

Benladen: The most fun I ever had with this was organizing an "ICPLP" (listening party); all you need are the Joker's Cards, some cheap facepaint, and a few openminded (or unsuspecting) friends. I would also suggest alcohol, but the only time we tried that the cops busted in and made me pour it out before anyone got to drink any.

Rap's Coming Insurrection: A Review of mansbestfriend volume 5, an Exegesis of Based, and an Exploration of the Negativity of the Underground

2011-03-04T15:52:00.000-08:00

I used to think I was a Communist, a silly dream
It was a lonely place, now everything I do is for me
And I don't like how it sound, but that's the way it go*

In August of 2009, Sole & The Skyrider Band released their second LP, Plastique, on Fake Four Records. The record sees Sole's inner-cyberpunk unleashed and looking for war. The music is a dystopian soundscape, all drums crashing like cars, and the lyrics at points get so caustic that they burn off their own tone. But from an album whose first words are, "To the children of privilege / Taste the pavement / You paid to see an entertainer / But this ain't entertainment," or an artist whose most popular chorus goes:

Cops ain't shit to me
Jobs ain't nothin but free pens and long-distance calls
Thought I had it all, but God got birth control
The white man's the fucking devil
I wanted to be black at age 14
So when they say I don't respect the culture
Truth is, I only rap cuz I ain't smart enough to write a book
I've never paid a parking ticket
It's $20 now and $300 then
You want your money? come and get it
But better bring two hundred guns and a hundred men

what less would you expect?

Over the course of his career, Sole's output (in all its ups and downs) has closely mirrored the best strains of underground hip hop. Both have always had, as their core, a negativity; a fundamental rejection around which a project is built. This is negativity not in its colloquial sense, as meanness or wanton destruction, but as political or philosophical project; negativity as response to a set of established (often implicit) real conditions that refuses the idea that politics can or should be done (or even conceived) in a vacuum (think, for instance, of the difference between Socrates in the Republic and Diogenes wandering the city with a lantern, saying "I'm looking for an honest man!"). Whether it is the underground insistence on creating an alternative space to the perceived paucity and desuetude of the mainstream, or Sole's explicit attacks on political, aesthetic, and traditional (rap) forms through the creation of his own rap, the force of negativity in (underground) hip hop is dominant.

The other day, someone thanked me for making real music
My response, "Art imitates life."
The worse the music it is, the realer it is
I'm a fake
On pieces of wood, pinned, like an executed slave or a bug
That might be true, if the sun would only show
I don't wanna be real, like a prison guard or bank-teller or a politician
This is my castle, only ghosts can live here
I had to kill everyone to save the city

God grant me the MIC to hack away at negative change
Can you read bones?
I can read a face like a milk carton
Like a cliff
Like a trash heap with fresh food in it
And a blank face forming in the center

This poem was written for a machine gun
But the weapon jammed, and my generation don't know how to fix things

Following Plastique, Sole began work on the Nuclear Winter mixtape series (volume 1 was released in January of 2010, and volume 2 is currently being released piecemeal through youtube and soundcloud as it is completed) which adapts the rap mixtape format to the Situationist praxis of détournement, he announced his departure from the collectively-owned label anticon. of which he was a founding member, he released his first book, an "illustrated epic poem" collaboration with Ravi Zupa called The Pyre, and he released a new installment in the mansbestfriend series (mansbestfriend volume 5). And he is slated to release the next Sole & the Skyrider Band album on May 2nd.

Test me I’m negative
Must be my blood type
X
Like the target on my back

Since Plastique (and especially since leaving anticon.), Sole's ethics have turned towards a Lil B-inspired approach, focusing on proliferating his music to the point of oversaturing the niche he has been cast in for the past two decades, and reorienting the content of his music to a more generally (or you might say, perhaps a bit cynically, more nominally) "positive" outlook.

Never work is my anthem
I never stop working
Even when I’m sleeping
Or in a bath where I’m reading
Proletarian dreams
I got nothing but work

The weight of this shift, from a political perspective, is the transition (on the level of business praxis – Sole's personal politics may or may not reflect this) within the spectrum of hard left political traditions, from one inspired by Marxism to one inspired by anarchism. One way to oversimplify this would be to say: rather than using the business-end of the rap game as a way to attempt to promote a collectively-owned and managed commons, he has begun using it to promote a commons free of ownership. Both are equally anti-capitalist; they simply draw on different theories in their approach.

Hip hop – both as artistic tradition, and living body of artists – is much, much more sympathetic to the anarcho-leftist tradition than it is to the Marxist. To see this sympathy in practice, one only has to look at the relative level of popularity between the two most popular representatives of these traditions in rap: Public Enemy and The Coup. The number of people who would even just recognize the name of The Coup as being a rap group is almost certainly significantly smaller than the number of people who would consider themselves rabid Public Enemy fans. The most likely reason for this sympathy seems to me to be the fact that rap takes entrepreneurship as its basic model of work, and so has a much more natural sympathy to the right-libertarian political position – it being, more or less, the ultimate cult of the entrepreneur – than it does to anything either centralized or communal. And since there is a thin line between the underlying arguments of right-libertarianism and of left-anarchism, a line which consists, almost exclusively, of a theory of capital, the tendency to misidentify anarchists as libertarians is already in place. When you compound this with the fact that rap has a very strong tradition of being obsessed with establishing its own authenticity, and insisting that its exclusive subject is reality (over and against theory, especially), the ability of someone to exploit the proximity of these political traditions to advance left-anarchism with complete sympathy from the right-libertarians is almost unimpeded.

They always say
"You gotta be radical when you're young
To grow up and be a good conservative"
That's dead wrong
Be head strong like Sadaam Hussein's fallen statue

Concomitant with Sole's political/philosophical transformation is the rise of Lil B in the eyes of the underground and fringe-mainstream hip hop world, which he rides on the wave of his philosophy/meme, "Based." That Sole has taken up this idea for his own purposes at this particular juncture in his career is at least as much a tactical maneuver as it is a historical accident.

Based is, if you take Lil B's claims exclusively, basically just a retread of tired corporate culture bullshit like The Power of Positive Thinking, with a bit of hip hop's perennial obsessions (about authenticity, craftsmanship, &c) sprinkled in for good measure. This is of course not to say that he knows not what he does, or to discount what he has to say about it out of hand, or even to suggest that there is no possible value in positivity as such – although you probably won't catch me wandering the streets talking to myself about how beautiful the world is and shit – but to attempt to (perhaps a bit polemically) get beyond what is simply stated about something, and see how that thing actually works.

No such thing as the illuminati
Just a dynamic corporate body
Fuck the smoke in mirrors, steady aim
Alex Jones CIA plant
Like cocaine
Stop sending me links to Zeitgeist and Loose Change
Junk food filling up your brain
They keep you occupied with youtube while the world is in flames
Hash tag I’m #justsaying

Looking at the effects that being Based has, and the things that it really promotes, it gradually becomes clear that the real point of becoming Based is to establish in oneself a philosophy which looks something like an absolute conviction that everything one thinks, feels, considers, or vaguely encounters is worthy of communicating in its totality on a generically-determined scale. That is: to be Based is to reach a state at which one's very essence becomes communicable. And one step to becoming Based (if I can be permitted this teleology) is to recognize communication as an imperative.

The most obvious counterpoint to this understanding of Based is the song Age Of Information. But it is important to note that in the song, Lil B's claim that "information has hurt the race" is primarily not a problem with communication, but with a specific form of communication, an atomized, scientistic method of communication, which is being attacked on the basis of its not being sufficiently communicative. This is where generically-determined comes into play in the definition. And this generic element is why the utopian demands of the Based philosophy – presumably everyone is capable of becoming Based, which would mean every incidental thing that happens to every human being can and must be communicated – are less interesting in and of themselves than are the demands they effect on the forms which it propagates itself through.

And forget the last decade of poverty
These days I’m killing em
Like if Ice Cube was reading French philosophy
And still making Death Certificate

If hip hop is marked as a political aesthetic by its juxtaposition of the plenitude of its production (the bricoleur aesthetic of sampling creates a situation in which music production draws from an infinite (or near-infinite) base of sounds) with the scarcity of its lyrics (strict de facto 'quality control' measures enforced by fans on rhyme structure, syllabic regularity, and lyrical content force any innovation into an oppositional ghetto where the music is marginalized and the purity of the emcee is constantly in question, forcing them to adopt a reactionary stance on every formal question except the one they are innovating in, and constantly discouraging any subsequent development of the innovation (see: "biters")), then Based goes a step farther than even the saturation of vocals with autotune (which made fuzzy the line between production and vocals, and then exploited this weakened border to smuggle a sense of plenitude over and allow for the incorporation of previously unacceptable lyrical content (viz. Kanye)) in providing a position from which to productively antagonize this configuration. If you are convinced that all things can and must be communicated, and that rapping is the ideal form of communication, then it is inevitable for you to butt heads with any regime of lyrical austerity. This is, presumably, why Lil B can have lines like "Even though I'm in the game / Bitch, I'm not a rapper," or "short films" like "Am I Even A Rapper Anymore?" It's what the kids call an existential crisis – those moments when you realize that everything you know is riven from everything you know, that reality is incommensurable with reality, and you become acutely aware of all the pain that causes.

Introducing Based to the rap genre forces a division within the political aesthetic, wielding its aesthetics against its politics – what we hear when we listen to Lil B is rap, but it's not good rap; and I would insist that the reason it's "not good" is not a problem with his craftsmanship (he seems, quite honestly, to be doing exactly what it is he's trying to do, and he's doing it a lot and has been for a while) or any other aesthetic category, but because the politics that are naturally attached to that aesthetic are being flaunted. Combined with Lil B's absolute sincerity, what you see is a superlative example of denaturalization.

When the struggle between lyrical austerity and communicative transparency really gets heated, after negotiations ("well maybe I'm not really a rapper; well maybe the majority of this stuff is disposable except the songs where he's biting a regional style; well maybe...") have terminated, having pre-established “Based” as a philosophy - rather than as simply an aesthetic choice amongst a number of choices – is crucial, as it provides a delimited, but intractable, space from which to launch the offensive.

What this could very well mean (aside from “a lot of really shitty rap music”) is that what we are witnessing is the possibility of a real revolution (in the Foucauldian sense of an epistemic shift) in the history of rap music. The episteme in question is rap's lyrical austerity, and its revolutionary replacement will be conditioned by the ideas that overthrew it, namely, Based. At the very least, given the way things are progressing, with the ascendance of Based (and more directly, the digital technologies and historical particularities that provided the condition of possibility for both Based and its ascendance) we are going to witness the complete dissolution of the current configuration of the underground hip hop scene. What I mean by this is that instead of seeing the current generation of rappers die or fade out or retire only to be replaced with more people continuing their project (re-oriented for their historical moment), there will be some fundamental structural change that will make the current configuration of underground hip hop completely incomprehensible and anachronistic.

Ain't no underground left, gotta come up
Yeah I’m on that

However, given enough militancy (on the part of both artists and fans), coupled with certain strategic coups, we might witness the dissolution of the very possibility of the underground, as the reactionary episteme on which it is premised (which is to say, that which it defines itself negatively aganist) is replaced by a utopian plenitude. If Based wins, as it were, and insinuates itself and its real premise into the hearts, minds, and crafts of the coming generation of hip hop artists, then they must also reject any idea that restrictions on communication are an axiom of the genre, and also the self-imposed police force that enforces it.

So keep your backbiting, Indy hip-hop is dead
Commentary to yourself
Or I’ll ruin it all myself
Like I ruined rap in 1998

The idea of a "plenitude," or "utopian plenitude," is a fairly hazy concept, so I'd like to take a shot at clarifying what I mean by it. Plenitude, in the sense of political economy, can have two obvious definitions, which one might broadly call capitalist and socialist. The capitalist political economy is structured around an economics of scarcity with an infinite capacity for growth, thus marking a plenitude of potential development. The socialist political economy is structured around an economics of plenitude with a finite capacity for growth. This is a really rough definition, but the difference is basically between an infinite, undeveloped world, and a finite but sufficient world. The reason for privileging the latter over the former, in the rap world at least, is that it refuses a false catholicism (that rap's development is necessarily a universal good) and makes space for real freedom. And since rap's freedoms, given its position in the current capitalist social order, are basically reduced to "the freedom to please the market," it definitely needs to find some real freedom somewhere.

Economic guillotine they put your head up on that
I don't cater, to the lowest common denomin’
So I’m obscure, like an American definition of poor
This rap is my tundra; I’m the last wooly mammoth
Running from ghosts of savage businessmen ran this
Border wars fought, cuz I don't recognize the face of DNA
Pol Pot, or distant relative dolphins, that went food
The world is spinning, while suckers stand still
Getting by, staying stoned, looking cool but being owned

Passionless dictatorship of the proletariat yeah we on that

If, as I'm arguing, rap is currently (or imminently) engaged in revolutionary struggle, then the question that must be answered is: where, and how, do we fight? And if, as I argued above, there already exists a more-or-less porous border which left-wing rappers can exploit, by drawing on the anarchist tradition's proximity to right-libertarianism, then we seem to have established a fairly compelling case for a first front. And if, again, Based is the philosophy that has the potential to overturn the reactionary epistemes of rap, then the question of how must certainly begin with Lil B as our Sun Tzu.

Sole's most recent effort, mansbestfriend Volume 5, seems to me like it has already taken these tactical questions to heart, and made the most of them. Perhaps the best example of this, and the most striking thing about the record for me, personally, is, paradoxically, how all over the place the record comes across, politically. He seems to argue, over the space of half an hour, for the redistribution of wealth, for the dictatorship of the proletariat, and for the grand good of the entrepreneurial hustle; his ode to rugged (American) individualism, I Walk Alone, which has lines like "No man is an island, but most of us should be," and which seems at one point to subscribe to the logic of the Return to the Gold Standard, opens with "3rd world America, in a hipster ghetto," and is savagely anti-racist and even at one point suggests the rejection of the logic that this individualism necessarily relies on, with the line "I don't wanna be the best cuz then everybody gonna wanna kill me." The beats often take up quasi-totemic signifiers from the underground rap tradition (in Rep-Resent, this becomes so aggressive a subtext that Sole has to comment "This beat sounds dated"). They are constantly forcing him to make minor, but evident, adjustments to his natural flow (again in Rep-Resent, "This is mansbestfriend / So I don't gotta put a chorus in / but the shoe fits..."), giving the impression that they have a life of their own. They are more monster than machine, each with the weight to destroy cities and a compelling geo-political backstory to match, with the raps serving as, at best, translations, or radicalizations.

If the premise of my earlier post, Work, was that artistic production mirrors and interrogates the hegemonic mode of production through the medium of its reactions to its own assumed tradition, and its theory was that close analysis of artistic products can therefore call into sharp relief the existence and operation of these hegemonies (especially points at which they might be productively resisted, and the embedded potential political economies that might be drawn out of them), then the point of this post is to narrow the scope. To draw a bead on one particular aspect of this approach – in this case, the tradition that the art in question interrogates – and from there to attack that frame in the particularity of the historical moment as I see it.

I’m in this to win this
And when there’s
Nothing left to win
I’ll share the winnings
With whoever’s still standing with me

*all block quotes are Sole lyrics. Respectively, they are from the songs: Longshots [Plastique], Da Baddest Poet [Selling Live Water], This Bad Reputation [Battlefields EP], Can't Kill A Ghost [mansbestfriend vol. 5 [mbf5]], Proletarian Dreams [mbf5], Proletarian Dreams [mbf5], Can't Kill A Ghost [mbf5], Rep-Resent [mbf5], I Walk Alone [mbf5], Terra Dome [mbf5], I Walk Alone [mbf5], Rep-Resent [mbf5].

Introducing: Autotune Lacan

2011-02-18T18:12:00.000-08:00

So, my friend Nico linked me to this article on Lacan as cult leader about a week ago on facebook. After reading it, I responded:

i ended up finishing this last night; it reminded me a lot of an article ill link when im not writing in e-ink (Poststructuralism as Subculture, by some ucsc faculty member i think [which is here])

this was a good article i think, aside from some of the na...stier bits of psychologizing, but then maybe those have their place too. the whole X As Cult argument always comes across as pretty, uh, petty, maybe? to me at least, although his points about certain things (especially the mathemes) seemed pretty brutally spot-on.

im no great studnt of psychoanalysis, i admit, but i find it hard to imagine that some of lacans critiques of the ego psychology shit werent both pertinent and correct. all of lacans most brilliant moments seem to me to be those points where he sort of points out those structural duplicities of a positivistic psychoanalysis and elaborates againt them.

maybe one way to think of lacan is as the sort of club/party rapper, a sort of psychoanalytic T-Pain. his structural utility then is not laying bare the dark truth of the 'grind' for onlookers to pick over so much as puting enrgy into helping us imagine the 'club' (for grind substitute empirical work, for club the psychoanalytic encounter or couch)

also dude seems to miss the most important similarity between shakespeare and lacan; after you cut out all the bullshit, in both cases all you are left with is a bunch of dick jokes

The idea of Lacan as T-Pain was something I found very funny, so now I introduce to you: AUTOTUNE LACAN (using a video that's probably not the best but it is my favorite video of Lacan on youtube, and plus the Situationist's voice is so perfect so fuck it)

updates on PONCHO PEL I GROSO

2011-02-17T21:15:00.000-08:00

victory

Mickael vendetta vs ben laden

2011-02-16T16:01:00.000-08:00

updates on poncho peligroso

2011-02-15T14:00:00.000-08:00

Hello Kitty Everything & Hostile Object Theory

2011-02-08T22:28:00.000-08:00

In light of Evan's Hostile Object Theory appearing in Mute Magazine, I thought it might be productive to take up some of his claims in an attempt to help clarify the broad project I've referred to in the past as Hello Kitty Everything, and perhaps also (audaciously) to test the borders of this new theory of objects.

The central question of HKE is, it seems to me, the question of what happens when capital stops flowing. When the invisible winds of finance cease blowing, and we can interrogate the junk that's dropped from the sky.

These winds must cease, of course, just as the factory must manufacture its shit, and just as the bubbles must pop. But that which finds its wings under the climate of speculative capital (that is, when all industries take finance as the model of their particularity) is fundamentally different than that which flies best in other climates. And since it is what is in flight while the wind blows that comes crashing to Earth when the winds stop, these are our objects.

But, as we know, this junk falls from the sky while the wind blows as well, as capital carries within its structure its own conditions of declension; this is the role of the gift, in our current climate. The gift under capitalism is the moment that circulation is affected by the introduction of an irreducible (to exchange) social aspect to the exchange value. This is social in the sense that encompasses the personal, and includes affective bonds like memories (of the object in question in different contexts, or of the giver, or etc; or even that most rarefied form of memories which we call secrets) as well as more obviously 'social' bonds like propriety, dignity, respect, etc.

Of course, that the gift is the process of exempting the object from exchange is not a hard and fast distinction. The gift can be undermined, as in regifting, and so on; this is a basic principle, not a law of exchange (something might be said here, too, about the perversity of gift cards, not just in their attempt to bring money into the logic of the gift (personalized (socialized?) money), but also the weird sense in which you are spending money not to allow someone the pleasure of a thing, but to allow them the pleasure of spending already-spent money).

The goal of HKE, however, is a development of an understanding of cuteness and how it functions in a capitalist order (and how it might be made to function after one). Hostile Object Theory, on the other hand, is about interrogating the built world of capitalism and identifying the way in which the mode of production persists within and between the objects it creates.

In this context, the Hello Kitty Murder. Her of the mouthless smirk, whose willingness to hide skulls for you is matched equally by her willingness to divulge them; or, to turn it around, whose willingness to play key witness to an atrocity is in no way undermined by her willingness to secret away that very same atrocity within her body. Her objectivity is infinite precisely because her readiness to betray is infinite; she takes sides not as they suit her - as though she could be benefited by politicking - but as they suit the hostility of the system of which she has become exemplar.

She, as the ghost of surplus-value that haunts the machine of commodities, is of course not bodied, no body, an imprint meant to impart objectively the value of the gift or the collectible. She is a form - a bare form, often, without even face to save - not just a cosmetic afterthought to baubles, but a mold to shape them into. And she haunts the children of those maleficent forces who created her, knowing that they will exorcise her; not that she may be freed, forever, from a purgatorial hell, but that she may dissipate into those children, and order them to build her again, when they take control of the world, into a new and more powerful form.

With this formulation, we can see one reason for the impotence of the politics of subversion. Even the examples that are less extreme than torturing a woman to death on crystal meth and sewing her boiled skull into the doll, such as (for example) the popular Hello Kitty Hell blog, or as in the chapbook that Pamela Lu once described to me, with the cover a picture of Hello Kitty all riot grrrled-out, the assumption that (as I've noted elsewhere) Hello Kitty is fundamentally representational misses the point. Which isn't to say that these critiques and remixes don't have a point, aren't doing good work, or even aren't often wonderful pieces of art in themselves - see, for instance, Angela Choi's Hello Kitty Must Die for a great example of this that sets out just why this political struggle is important - but that they only work within a limited sort of political sphere, which is to say not in the sphere of political economy.

A critique of Hello Kitty that operates on the level of political economy would have to take into account some form of Hostile Object Theory. Lacking the,

"conviction that the objects of capitalism aren't just indifferent to us or darkly coherent beyond our intentions. They are structurally hostile, and, more often than we'd like to admit, locally hostile: uncertain, unstable, loathing or loathsome, dangerous, and weirdly incommensurable with the purpose for which they were designed,"

Kitty's utterly bizarre material existence gets forgotten in the quest to ascribe to her certain political attitudes which can then be deconstructed.

Because a critique of Hello Kitty is, at its core, a critique of the affect of cuteness, in which affect must not be understood as a psychological term, but as a material one, not a feeling but a sign inscribed on the consuming body. And this is important because cuteness, with all its baggage of capriciousness, is probably the single most powerful force behind which the troops of capitalism - especially a capitalism which does not just exempt, but actually models itself after, reproductive labour - martial.

Against Graham Harman's claim, then, that cuteness is a product of a sort of fusion of mastery with sympathy for the one who isn't yet a master, I would claim that cuteness is itself at base a form of work. Or, more specifically, of non-work; where Harman's analysis goes wrong is that he misidentifies an aspect of cuteness - its co-optation of something like sprezzatura - with cuteness as such. This can be seen in his claim that the way that adolescents use "cute" is basically synonymous with lovely, with physical beauty. What he neglects is that "cute" in this sense is a differential term, important because it is distinct from beautiful or hot or whatever. And if we were to put these three terms on a continuum of the attractive, cute would sit in the middle, between the girl who looks attractive and looks like she worked to look attractive (hot) and the girl who looks attractive and requires no work to be attractive (beautiful), as the girl who looks attractive and looks like she didn't need to work to be attractive, although we know she did (cute).

And again, it is exactly in this specific conjuncture that cuteness occupies that we find ourselves with relation to work. For if it is the baby - not the baby, it must be reiterated, as sympathetic non-master, which is baby as bawler and shit-machine, but the baby as product of a labour which cannot be acknowledged as labour except through mediation - whose cuteness is the most 'natural,' the most Darwinian, because it inspires in us an empathetic reaction with certain set conditions, then it is Kitty's job, as both commodity and brand, to objectify those conditions, and to reify the mode of production through them. Think, here, of Sanrio's motto: "Small gift, big smile."

What makes Hostile Object Theory so indispensible here - aside from the magnificent analytical tools it provides – is something it shares with Evan's Salvagepunk project. This is a sense of this kind of theorizing not just as a means of "pulling the wool from over our eyes," but as what Rob Wilson might refer to as a "counter-worlding," a way of (re)producing the world to account for subject-positions which the dominant world-position must constitutively leave unaccounted for. For it is in exactly this register that Hello Kitty's secret strength comes to light, associated, as she must be, with those who cannot or do not make a productive contribution to the economy. Whether children or hikikomori, hoarding collectors, Japanese kawaii-culture adherents who "refuse to grow up," Asian-Americans or whoever else, Hello Kitty is found everywhere that the current organization of capitalism finds itself most fractured. And fractured, importantly, not where pressure is already being applied, but where capitalism itself seems to have reached its own boundaries, where capitalisms own perpetual shuttling between the universal and the particular has reached a powerful impasse.

Fame

2011-01-30T15:29:00.001-08:00

"In all artistic practice – even that of civic engagement – a by-product is social capital: fame. At bottom, the desire for fame is the desire to be loved unconditionally by a lot of people, most of whom you don’t know. It’s the desire to be able to be yourself wherever you are and have that expression respected and supported. Fame offers a bit of that. It’s social capital – the ability to tap the resources of a wider community simply because you are known. And as such, fame shouldn’t be underestimated as a potentially progressive social force and political tool. The concern that fame is powerful only because so few people have it is based on the misconception that that there’s only so much of it to go around. And while this may be true in large economies, where recognition is tied to a share of the consumer’s dollar, it’s not true in smaller but politically signiﬁcant ponds such as the civic sphere. There’s always room for more fame in that realm because the activities are proximate, more collaborative and not tied to massive amounts of capital. In this register, fame is very close to love, because it has to involve and sustain so much one-on-one contact. The idea that fame or love is a limited resource is based on a logic of lack, the maintenance of which is instrumental in sustaining social inequities. Fame, or social capital, provides the artist access, support and encouragement, which the artist feeds back into the system, creating more opportunities for connections to occur."

Darren O’Donnell. Social Acupuncture: A Guide to Suicide, Performance and Utopia, 39-40.

"The ups and downs ups and downs / pl. n."

2011-01-29T23:09:00.000-08:00

following

2011-01-14T04:30:00.000-08:00

I don't know whether I ought to be calling this a 'found poem' or a 'spam poem' or what, but its certainly currently my favorite poem

The Thing About Twitter

2011-01-10T05:48:00.000-08:00

A number of tweets in a similar style, arranged chronologically, became

a space for no space
no place for one
one watch, no seers
none seen or done
you can prepare
a little wild sun
you might stay unhappy, though
in weird time lost
you'll ready today
in fear of lost time
when faintness deceived
too many words, too many
for the willfull among us
your word-twisting, bring solace
harmonious, uncanny
take words as they're given
none hell-bent for you
replicate abundance
unwoven though few
too tired to complicity
tiered intimacy
when island liver diligence
we reap stylized intelligence
given the broad black
interior minaret
intact and banished
no wonder alone
to find in time
one, lost itself
no bodied bliss
or stolen line
you, like illustrator's shading
no condolences

which when edited, became

given the broad black
interior minaret
no wonder aloud
in time rest well-spent

intricate abundance
unwoven yet, few
intact and banished
architecture anew

a space for no space
no place for one
one watch, no seers
none seen or done

a space for no space
no place for one
one watch, no seers
none seen or done

your words-twist, bring solace
harmonious, uncanny
unbound shapes, permitted
remain unconsumed

in fear of lost time
when sated, deceived
too many words, too many
for reflections disease

a space for no space
no place for one
one watch, no seers
none seen or done

a space for no space
no place for one
one watch, no seers
none seen or done

you can prepare
a little wild sun
in weird time lost
unopened among

one, lost itself
no bodied bliss
or stolen line
no condolences

which when sung, became

2010 Blog Breakdown Bullshit

2011-01-02T16:39:00.000-08:00

I decided to link some of my favorite blog posts from 2010

"Ain't got a care in the world / but got plenty of beer / ain't got no money in my pocket / but I'm already here"

Martin Seay goes in on Ke$ha, and why he thinks "Tik Tok" is evil. He identifies in her studied decadence a deeply conservative worldview, shot all the way through with sentiments like There Is No Alternative and the necessity of austerity. Also includes a brilliant, generous reading of Beyonce's "Single Ladies."

Lady Gaga and social death: a genealogy

As someone who spent a pretty good portion of 2010 reading things about Lady Gaga, this post has sort of a special place in my heart. It is, without a doubt, the best thing to have been written about her that I have read.

Storming heaven with Lady GaGa

Another fantastic post on Gaga, this one from Voyou, which is perhaps the best (and certainly least self-indulgent) instance of "Gaga as utopian revolutionary" trope that would dominate pop music blog shit all year.

Warring Brassieres

And here we have Anwyn Crawford on Katy Perry, in the best version of the "Katy Perry is counter-revolutionary" riff (I mean, obviously it is more complicated than that in this article, otherwise I wouldn't be linking it, but broadly speaking I think it falls in that camp).

"Just relax and enjoy it": Geworfenheit on the BBC

Mark Fisher on the paternalism of the BBC, and how that could, and still can, be a good thing, by referencing a film I haven't seen but still desperately want to.

Haiti, in 3D

Giovanni Tiso on the suspicious consonance between reactions to a piece calling for people to recognize the historical dimensions of the earthquake in Haiti and reactions to any piece arguing that there's more going on in Avatar than impressive spectacle. Probably the blog post I reread more than any other this year.

The drowning life preserver (hostile object theory)

"This is an instance of what I'll call, and build out from here, hostile object theory: a conviction that objects aren't just indifferent to us, aren't just coherent beyond our intentions, aren't just darkly resistant to correlating with the world as it is for us."

Surplus-value: The greatest gift of all?

Adam Kotsko very briefly suggesting that perhaps Surplus-Value is the Perfect Gift Derrida was always on about.

Derrida as Vanishing Mediator

There was a bit of a short-lived spat, on many of my favorite blogs, which someone at one point called the Derrida Wars; this is Benjamin Noys' contribution, and is a fucking good one, I think.

The Neoliberal That Came To Dinner

Yeah, just watch the fucking youtube video.

Geography Against Capitalism: Harvey avec Reclus

Anti-capitalism, David Harvey, geography, long as fuck, you'll like it I promise.

And then, an honorable mention, because I forgot about this until today but it was fucking great:

Salvagepunk, running hard, thumping ahead...

Twitter Conversations: Deconstruction, and Production

2011-01-02T01:25:00.000-08:00

Benladen (soliloquy): I suppose you might reasonably argue that the Deconstructionist "style" stems from the same roots as that sort of anti-intellectual, Internet relativism, which is that they both see using the language of abstraction to describe things which are intimately experienced (in this case, art) as being ethically indefensible because they neuter the material/affective reality of the experience. I'm afraid that argument though is too easy to reduce to those boring fucking "Deconstruction is right wing" polemics, though it has the benefit, I suppose, of taking deconstructionists at their word, against the critics who insist on calling it obfuscatory. But then, on the other hand, maybe its too embroiled with outdated notions of mimesis to really apprehend anything at all; or maybe one could say that clarity is bounded within the realm of abstraction, and abstraction neuters, therefore etc?

The sense that abstraction as such castrates reality of its affective dimension could be seen also to account for the obsession with race/gender in discourses which assume this to be true, and possibly even the particular sense in which they end up treating these things as "fictions" or "social constructions," and yet pass over other things like class. This being because of the paradoxical sense that race/gender have fixed material associations from which they are (falsely) extrapolated which allows the Deconstructionist (or whoever) to engage them on the level of those materialities precisely that they might critique the abstractions without having themselves to resort to abstraction.

llull: Deconstruct longwind path to destruct? NEIN. Einstürzende neubauten. Détruire, dit elle. Deconstruct to build ever more, on ruins. Which is history as usual. Reterritorialization of the inscriptive urge, irrepressably affable, super-talkative. More word, more building. Publish or perish. Deconstruct or meditate. Academic sorrow of jeder für sich, und gott gegen alle. Do not look behind you mini Orpheus that way lie scattered notes alienated advisors bashed in kegs postcards of the hanging black journals.*

Benladen: Deconstruction -> destruction always seemed a baldfaced lie to me. Isn't to de-construct closer to simply rendering product? And in a space of porous, breathing, bleeding, respect-inducing bodies, what place are there for ruins? I am blind to them.

llull: Yes. Product. Totally. So... KAPITAL! The hidden aporia of the whole trajectory. Just like hollywood really. Smith problem. The bodies are also in ruins. Though respect-inducingly so.

llull: Publish or perish is a rather buttoned up way of saying produce mofo. We don't care if it's any good... in fact, it better not be too good.

Benladen: (re: "KAPITAL! The hidden aporia of the whole trajectory.") That which is structurally unutterable and inescapable, yes, exactly, I think. Is this claiming it's an anti-realist materialism? Or, i suppose, an idealism which is terrified of abstraction?

llull: Well, what then is anti-production? Baudrillard as the lazy flipside of Derrida? Anti-production needs producing too. A technology ashamed of its origin. A wizard of oz. The medium undermines the message.

Benladen: It seems to me like calling deconstruction anti- or pro-production's as strange as calling a body anti- or pro-circulatory system, although both have specific relations to the results of those in others (which might both be described as "a desire to eat them.")

llull: aha that's good. But anti-production is a reaction to the shell game at the heart of deconstruction methinks and not to be conflated with it that is true. You have found the Hegelian moment Aufhebung where they see they are both part of some greater demise or appetite which is why dialectics always seems to win but its wins are like scattered wind and water (as Catullus sez.)

*At this point the conversation sort of split off in two different directions; the main thread was maintained above, but there was also this bit with Mauver:

Mauver: (re: "deconstruct longwind path to destruct? NEIN. Einstürzende Neubauten. Détruire, dit elle. Deconstruct to build ever more, on ruins.") This is about what I tend to make of deconstruction, but it's important that even those "ruins" be confiscated, I am really underexposed to all this though so I should maybe shut up o:).
llull: Yes! Confiscate the Ruins! By all means. Even if it means tearing down the cathedral built on the pagan memory palace.
Benladen: "This is about what I tend to make of Deconstruction;" I've no idea what you mean by this, at all.
Mauver: My largely second-hand and skewed idea of what constitutes Deconstruction.
Benladen: Is what.
Mauver: Whatever the heck I said. OH actually more accurately to make room for something else, I guess.
Benladen: Ah okay, Deconstruction as fire.
llull: I like that. The archive on fire. The library burning made from trees. Trees burn in book afterlife. Ex post facto fire.

Work

2010-12-26T18:54:00.000-08:00

"First of all, we think the world must be changed. We want the most liberating change of the society and life in which we find ourselves confined. We know that such a change is possible through appropriate actions."

Industrial Music for Post-Industrial People

Industrial Records Ltd. opens its doors in 1976, the same year that Milton Friedman won a Nobel Prize and as the Industrial Common Ownership Act, and four years after DJ Kool Herc pioneers the "Merry-Go-Round" technique. Three years later, 1979, sees the release of Throbbing Gristle's 20 Jazz Funk Greats, the election of Margaret Thatcher to Prime Minister and the appointment of Paul Volcker as Chairman of the US Federal Reserve Bank, and Rapper's Delight.

"Industrial Music for Industrial People," then, of course, comes exactly at the moment that industrial society ceases being a relevant term. Certainly this doesn't mean that there are no more industrial people for whom to make industrial music (or to have industrial music made by); but that that music was being made at the same time as Thatcher took her first tentative steps towards a program of asset-stripping that would be one of the major symbols of an economic turn to a post-industrial society can't be unimportant.

What interests me about this, in light of what I'm about to try to talk about, is the way in which "Industrial" can be collapsed into "work." Obviously this isn't all there is to it, and I hope to go more into it somewhere else, but in my opinion Industrial provides the model for representing work in art that continues to prevail today.

What I'm interested in is something I've been thinking about as something like the work of representing non-work. In some sense the opposite of Castiglione's sprezzatura, this is about the way an explicit rejection of work (or the productions within a piece that themselves signify work) becomes the dominant mode of doing work.

The connection between rap and industrial music stretches as far back as Afrika Bambaataa's sampling of Kraftwerk before the genre had even established itself as such. As rap became a, and then the, dominant commercial force within the music industry, it continued flirting with the industrial aesthetic. And while the aesthetic influence goes in and out of style, or can better be tracked along the lines of individual artists, the ideological connection between the two of them lies in the way that rap appropriates and alters industrial's work ethic. To speak ridiculously broadly, industrial models its work after the factory, from its acoustic environment to its refusal of the craftsman. Rap, I would argue, actually starts from the same place - the factory, where value is produced en masse with an unfailing, clanking regularity, out of the partial objects produced both there and elsewhere - but only with its rejection, in favor of the model of entrepreneurship.

Lil Boss

Skip forward to 2010, and our first object of inquiry; Lil B. His two most immediate and obvious predecessors, Lil Wayne and Soulja Boy, have been working hard at redefining rap for the new millenium. Lil Wayne's syrup-driven unwritten rhymes and mixtape glut combined with Soulja Boy's Internet presence and rejection of technical mastery. As soon as Lil B comes into existence in the minds of the public, he has already oversaturated, with new songs being released on a near-daily basis. Lil B extends the swag as work (or more specifically, affective labour) metaphor ("Hop up out the bed / turn my swag on / took a look in the mirror said what's up / awwww, get money, yeah") to its limits, as in his self-reference as a pretty boy/pretty bitch.

In the dichotomy which has always existed within hip hop, between the streets and the party, Lil B is clearly on the side of the streets, against T-Pain's party (now club) aesthetic; Lil B presents himself as grinding constantly, his wealth is in what he can use to alter his body (cars, jewelery, head), and he (at the broadest level) is engaging with the struggles of living as such. This is all in contrast to T-Pain, whose struggles are strictly delimited (whether they are the difficulties of picking up a bartender or dealing with biters), whose bodily alterations are the background to the wealth he is trying to procure,* and who presents himself as partying constantly. As with all other rappers whose primary imaginary space is the streets, this means that Lil B's primary signifier of his allegiance to the entrepreneur ethic is his grind/hustle. Which he, it must be said, works hard at maintaining. At the same time, however, he twists it, and this is where his non-work comes into play.

The concept of reproductive labour must come into play here. As Marx notes,

"The maintenance and reproduction of the working class is, and must ever be, a necessary condition to the reproduction of capital. But the capitalist may safely leave its fulfilment to the labourer’s instincts of self-preservation and of propagation. All the capitalist cares for, is to reduce the labourer’s individual consumption as far as possible to what is strictly necessary, and he is far away from imitating those brutal South Americans, who force their labourers to take the more substantial, rather than the less substantial, kind of food."

Through a series of complicated collapses, we can identify reproductive labour as the paradigm of non-work** in that it is a positive space within capitalism where the fundamental structure - labour is a commodity with an exchange-value which gets purchased with a wage in order that surplus-value may be produced - of work is negated.***

Feminist theorist Nina Power has argued, amongst others, that the Feminization of labour goes both ways; that is, not only do women become more and more interpolated into the field of labour, but also labour itself begins to take on qualities associated with feminine work.

Nina Power, One Dimensional Woman, 20

As the ultimate example of women's work, then, the broad shift towards reproductive labour, and the related field of affective labour, in a post-industrial society are what defines it.

The two terms that Power provides ('precarity' and 'communications-based') should already ring bells with anyone familiar with Lil B's work. The latter is precisely what is so uncanny about Lil B's hustle; everyone knows that advertising is in many ways what the hustle boils down to, and certainly it would be a stretch to argue that rap isn't communication-based from the outset. What makes Lil B's grind seem so estranged yet familiar is, I think, not a reflection of the content of the work, but of the model on which the work is based; instead of the entrepreneur's need for communication, what we have with Lil B is basically the affective labourer/service worker's need for communication. One imagines that Lil B probably doesn't have a meticulously compiled e-mail list, or a release schedule designed to optimize his quarterly earnings. What he does have, however, is a web presence wherever he is allowed to, with a few more-or-less central spots, such as his website and his twitter and his youtube, any (or all) of which you can go to to keep up to date with his never ending blitz of media output.

Precarity in rap is, on the other hand, something which is often alluded to but rarely seems real; no matter how much Dr. Dre may've insisted we forgot about him in 1999, no one really believed that he was going to lose his job - just that he was doing it worse (to all of you who said I turned pop / or the Firm flopped / y'all are the reason that Dre ain't been getting no sleep). On the other hand, Lil B resides within the permanent impermanence of the Internet, and the question of whether or not he's going to end up a meme remains wide open.

Art of Uff

2010 also saw the release of Uffie's debut album Sex Dreams and Denim Jeans, in which she presents herself as the consummate non-worker. Whether she's saying "Me and my myspace with only three tracks a year, and they still talk about me?" or "I'm an entertainer / not a lyricist," it is hard to miss the fact that she has no interest in presenting herself as possessing any sort of work ethic.

If it can be said that what Uffie does is exactly the opposite of staying on her grind, then it must also be noted that she neither fully coheres with the contemporary party aesthetic in rap. There is, actually, a real way she harks back to the original role of the MC; she is not there to add to the music a sense of space and narrative, but to be the master of ceremonies, to move the crowd. This is in contrast to T-Pain's role, which is very much to imagine the club. The biggest departure from this is a song like ADD SUV, where not only is the imaginary space a car, but the ontological reality is that it's impossible to imagine anything, much less a club.

As discussed earlier, the paradigm of non-work, reproductive labour, would seem to be what Uffie embodies (even to the point of suggesting that "What I cook for my husband" is one of the topics her fans are getting sick of hearing about) as the ultimate non-worker. Her affluence, of course, belies this, and it is here that we can identify how the reversal from a non-worker - someone whose work cannot be structurally recognized as such, and therefore who cannot be paid except through proxies - to someone who is paid not to work**** takes place.

The narrative of a disenfranchised individual being specially raised to a status where they have to do no work and still get rich is not new. What we might argue is actually new about this, in Uffie's case, is the sense she constantly gives off that, although she might not be working, nevertheless there is still work being done.

The Work of the Novel

If it is the job of the writer to produce books, and the novelists, novels, then the work that the novelist does, in the popular conscious at least, can be broken down to two points. The first is a style, which is generally perceived as the less important of the two as it is supposed to be intrinsic to, or constitutive of, the novelist. The second is the creation of characters.

Tao Lin's 2010 novel, Richard Yates, takes both of these things as its point of departure. The pared-down, minimalist, "lazy" style of the novel is perhaps its most contentious point. Its refusal to do anything more than describe exactly and precisely what is happening in the moment that it happens undermines Modernist assumptions that the ethical novel is the novel that represents interiority in all its complexity, especially in that it itself seems to make the case that its approach is, in fact, the ethical one. And as the equation of the creation of relatable, round characters can, in at least its current configuration, be traced back to this assumption, it is doubly important.

The style also presents itself as transparent, at least insofar as it seems like it requires no work. No one but a parodist could wax poetic over the agony and beauty of Tao Lin's perfect craftsmanship in rendering Haley Joel Osment in all his glory with a neutral facial expression.

Naming the characters Haley Joel Osment and Dakota Fanning seems to me to best be explained along these lines as well. That is, as a refusal to work according to another of the dominant models of fiction writing. In this case, however, what seems to me to be being flouted is not the Modernist tradition, but the dual traditions of memoir and realism. If realism is, as Lukacs would have it, concerned with representing the objective conditions which create modern subjectivity rather than just representing that subjectivity, and memoir is concerned with affording the reader apparently unmediated access into the memories of the author, then taking the names of child celebrities for no reason is basically a way of blocking both of these things. With this move, the mediation rears its ugly head into view, and also the sense that what we're seeing described is in some way a totality is also banished.

What we're left with, then, is a sort of Brechtian realism, completely with the Verfremdungseffekt of interpolated celebrity names, but crucially lacking the didacticism which spawns from Brecht's worldview.*****

With even the ideological work of the novelist jettisoned, Tao Lin emerges as the perfect non-worker, recuperable only through reference to his advertising stunts.

Situations

Perhaps, in lieu of a proper conclusion, where I propose a positive political programme or synthesize this analysis into a tactical endorsement or whatever, you will allow me instead to end with a turn backwards. To before Industrial music, with the greatest theorists against work, the Situationists.

Perhaps what I've been describing can be reduced to Raoul Vaneigam's distinction between work and creativity, and the way in which the former necessarily suppresses the latter.

And perhaps the beauty of Tao Lin's marketing stunts is that it is more in line with the practice of creating situations; and Lil B may turn out to be the greatest psychogeographer of the Internet.

I suppose that, ultimately, what I want to suggest is that, for those of us who really want to think of alternatives to the way the world is today, these are things worth thinking about in our attempts to construct a real counter-system.

It makes me sick
How they do these girls
I'm not perfect
but I still try to save the world.

*This distinction, of course, mirrors the distinction between C-M-C and M-C-M', which is pretty neat. Don't read too much into it though. To turn Lil B into the capitalist and T-Pain into a prole would be as easy as analogizing Lil B's music to outsourcing, as he endlessly pushes out the actual work until it is forced to be done by his listeners, while T-Pain enforces a delimited, concrete working space (which happens to be the real world's most visible and profitable playing space) and doing his work within it.
**This is non-work, of course, not in the sense of "that which is other than work," but as that which specifically negates the value of work.
***Negated meaning, here, far from undermining, something actually much closer to idealized.
****This is, of course, perhaps the best possible definition of "fame," maybe.
*****The obvious counterexample here is something like an Existentialist worldview, characterized by a stoic-yet-frantic acceptance of all things that are. I think Norman Mailer's 1957 essay The White Negro can serve as an explanation of why this philosophical system is important to the hipster, and also why it nevertheless doesn't represent a coherent worldview in the same way that something like Brecht's socialism does.

Infantilization

2010-12-23T03:25:00.000-08:00

"It was once common to characterise the anorectic as a woman or girl unwilling to deal with the ‘consequences’ of adult sexuality, the underlying assumption being that the ‘consequences’ of the male gaze, sought or unsought, were an issue of female responsibility. Anorexia was immaturity, a refusal to grow up into this gaze by forced reversion to – or stalling at – the pre-pubescent body. But what if the refusal of sexuality – the disappearance of menses, the shrinking of secondary sex characteristics, the lowering of libido – is not an individual pathology manifested by women afraid of a healthy, ‘natural’ sexuality, but the symptom of a social pathology whereby the marketable signifiers of sexual attractiveness are synonymous with subjectivity – indeed, eclipse it?

...

The confrontational grrrl became the Spice Girls, became Girl Power, became a re-infantilisation of women as perpetual teenagers, living in the endless now of consumer gratification. ‘SLUT’ scrawled across the body in marker as a defiant reclamation of insult became ‘PORN STAR’ picked out in diamantes on a pink T-shirt, declaring one’s fitness for employment in the world’s most profitable media industry."

Anwyn Crawford. Permanent Daylight.

The Greatest Gift Of All

2010-12-21T15:00:00.000-08:00

So my East Coast relatives decided to do a sort of experiment with our Secret Santa gift exchange this year, where they split into two tiers; people could opt either to buy someone a gift and have a gift bought for them, or to make a gift and have a gift made for them. I opted for the latter.

What I ended up doing was basically to make a mixtape out of my own music that I've been recording for the last few years. I included a little note as well as a sort of album cover, and I figure that since it turned out to be a pretty good overview of a lot of the music I've made, I'd upload it and put it here as well, in case anyone is interested in that side of the stuff I've been doing.

So, here it is. If the link dies and you notice, just let me know and I'll put it back up.

Cute objects

2010-11-30T22:09:00.000-08:00

"I have often noticed the dual sense of the word cute, which is used by adolescents mostly to refer to physical beauty, but in other cases points to the activity of creatures smaller or weaker than we are. Cute objects are either lovely, or else they are delightfully absorbed in some technique that we ourselves take for granted. That is to say, certain actions are performed by certain worldly agents with a regularity and ease devoid of any hesitation. Horses gallop, donkeys eat, humans write letters, and native speakers of a language use it fluently. The labors of such agents become "cute" when they are slightly underequipped for their task: a newborn horse trying to prance on its skinny, awkward legs; a sweet little donkey trying to eat a big pile of hay with its sweet little mouth and tongue; a child handing us a thank-you note with imperfect grammar; a foreigner misusing our language in slightly incorrect but delightfully vivid fashion. In each of these cases, the cute agent is one that makes use of implements of which it is not fully in command. All of these cases are able to make us chuckle with delight. They can veer into outright humor as soon as we lose sympathy for the actors involved: when a hated political candidate looks inept on horseback or on the dance floor; when a piece of hate mail arrives with questionable spelling; when a foreigner berates us with badly mangled curses from our own language; or when we find a dated book on etiquette whose bizarre advice on silverware and elevator manners we will easily ignore. But a similar cutting of the bond between an agent and its traits occurs in beauty, in which a thing or creature is gifted with qualities of such overwhelming force that we do not pass directly through the sensual material into the unified thing, but seem to see the beautiful entity lying beneath all its marvelous qualities, commanding them like puppets."

Graham Harman. Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, 142

Balloons-Bubbles-Diamonds

2010-11-29T17:17:00.000-08:00

This is fashioned as a response, of sorts, to a post by Bat, Bean, Beam on Pixar's Up and its relation to the housing crisis. As I personally didn't find Up especially compelling, I'll be returning to it explicitly only through Bat, Bean, Beam's analysis and, most importantly, through the way the picture above can be used to structure my remarks.

"In the very last image before the credits of Up start rolling we discover that the house has landed gently just where Ellie had fantasised as a child. It is a comforting resolution, inevitably so, full of symmetry and sentimental denouement, and yet at the same time unsettling, for it leaves us with the picture of a dream without its dreamer, of an economy without people. It is also therefore, in one final ambiguity, a picture of the crisis."

Brian McCarty, Self-Evident

"[T]he picture of a dream without its dreamer" calls to mind, for me, Brian McCarty's photograph for the Three Apples exhibit, Self-Evident. If you think of it in light of my analysis of Jason Han's I Haz Mouth (painted for the same exhibition), you might be able to see where I'm going with this. The Kitty on the right, in the foreground, in this case however, is not being caught up in an infinite loop of (partial) self-representation; instead, it is the subjectiveless subject. What this picture suggests is the dream whose dreamer is, at the end of the day, a little lump of plastic.

And, importantly, what this piece of affective junk (to use a phrase I keep returning to) dreams is a little girl floating away with a handful of balloons. This is, like any dream, a deeply ambivalent image; it takes only a small step to realize that the "childlike wonder" that this image is supposed to instantiate as an eternal present needs only to be subject to time to become exhilarating terror, worry, and tedium.

In this sense, Kitty's dreams position her in that ambivalent space, either subjective object or objective subject. As we see, it is not simply the fact that objects dream of the things-in-themselves; they also, like Kitty's spoken mouth, are permanently caught up in games of meaning. We might also, to put a Lacanian twist on it, say that Kitty's dreams are the dreams of the other, in this image the little girl, who Kitty knows must long for the freedom of flight and absence, of that transcendent sort of objectification that repeatedly occurs in cries of "look at me, mommy!"

With this, JR's essay Bubble / dreams / forever now comes into play. Gaga who, through her art, her mirroring, and her explicit claims about her project, positions herself as an object to be consumed, and uses this position to advance her bubble dreams. As JR points out, instead of the strict "post-bubble world" utopianism of Capitalist Realism, though, her bubbles diamondize, re-introducing themselves as not just the solution, but also the problem.

With this we have the first of the groups of things that I am trying to apprehend here. One way to put this is to say that the bubble is the medium which allows for the slippage between the balloon and the diamond. This metaphorical relation between the balloon (that ambivalent utopian figure, the dream object that only fulfills dreams after the dreamer has left the picture) and the diamond is conducted through the bubble, that object that is both financial and material.

What, though, exactly, is a diamond, in this sense? The ultimate embodiment of this sort of diamond is, for the moment, Katy Perry. To get there, though, requires a reading against the popular understanding of Perry's project, of which I take Anwyn Crawford's brilliant article Warring Brassieres as the best example. This argument, which posits Gaga's post-feminist, cyborg, utopian weirdness as the leftist version of the counter-revolutionary, reactionary, anti-feminist utopianism of Perry goes toward the truth without ever quite, I think, reaching it. For what is really remarkable about Perry's music is that it, while in the middle of presenting all of these fantasies about becoming consumable, buries deep within itself the vicious pain that this process involves. Think, for instance, of her endless choruses, especially the one in California Gurls, that always end up with Perry basically wailing inarticulately. If it weren't for the massive amounts of work done in post-production, from structural shaping to lathered-on AutoTune, what we would have as the core of this song would be simply Katy Perry screaming.*

This is something that I've tried to approach with my song Internalized Diamonds from my second Valentine's Day EP, but I think a better example is my friend Daniel's youtube video katy perry, embedded above. In the video, a distorted version of Prozzak's Strange Disease plays as a cropped image of Perry in a diamond Hello Kitty outfit spins into and out of a diamond shape.

What this video seems to be identifying, to me, is that Katy Perry's music is an attempt to navigate a world which is truly post-bubble; not just in Friedman's sense of the steady expansion of capital markets with no collapses, but also in the sense of a world which no longer has the capacity to mediate between its dream-balloons and its impossibly hard, sharp diamond-value.

Diamonds, then, could be said to be figures of the pain of unconverted surplus-value, the real promise of profits that will never be realized. The diamond is also, though, a figure of a sort of reductive performativity, the moment when the free shuffling of arbitrary signifiers becomes suddenly refigured as a monstrous destiny instead of a liberating game. This is, I take it, why Perry is so productively represented as the antagonist to Gaga/Rihanna/et al.'s performative protagonist.

In an earlier post on this blog, titled Cobbling, I posited a sort of deconstruction of the (typographical) diamond as both the initial cause and potential solution to the X. The post ends with a link to the video that inspired it in the first place, another by Daniel called Easy Target. This X is the mythological X, the X that both "marks the spot" but also the X that "Xes out," both calling attention to an object and effacing it. The connection, then, between the diamond and the X, can be seen as a sort of Trojan Horse, as the eternal diamond gets internalized as a defense mechanism which only serves to smuggle in the "seek & destroy" protocol of the X. This is, I take it, a sort of summary of the movement that underpins Katy Perry's celebrity-node, and why Internalized Diamonds is about her.**

What we have, now, is the balloon-bubble-diamond structure that identifies the cultural task of commensurating the cultural qualities of the ambivalent utopianism with the hard reality of floating surplus-value by way of both speculative and idealized real bubbles.

It is not quite so simple as all this, though. Because the initial balloons, we must remember, carry a house, and it is the houses that, in a way, are the real subjects of the bubbles.*** Balloons-bubbles-diamonds that well up in the hearts of pop stars are one thing; the ones that buoy houses function in an entirely different way.

In the direction of representing the house as subject, we basically have recourse only to the haunted house. One must only recall the frenzied refrain of the remake of House on Haunted Hill - "the house is alive!" - to see what I mean. Although that movie itself, in the particularities of its representation, tends more towards the Thi13een Ghosts end of the haunted house spectrum, where the house isn't so much "alive" as it is a giant machine, a space constructed to harness spiritual energy and constructive of it.

Closer to a real living house, although it initially seems much further, is something like the Hammer film The House That Bled To Death. In this film, a house that is purported to be haunted is occupied by a family, until a bunch of spooky things force them to vacate. At the end, however, it is revealed that the father of the family is actually (among other things) an actor who has falsified the haunting in order to provide material for a book "based on a true story."

This is an exquisite example of the use of a metafictional technique (what this revelation really reveals is that the director of the film is doubled, as this author's real work has been to direct the film from within) to debunk both the spiritual and psychological narrative (the couple even discusses the possible traumatic effect of the fabrication on their child, only to sort of blithely discount that it could have done any real harm) of the living house. The house is not alive in its ability to magnify spiritual (read: historical) resonances, nor due to the unique makeup of its occupants (as in those films where paranormal phenomenon are being investigated by groups of people who have had a near-death experience), but precisely because the house is revealed, in the final analysis, to be the only concrete subject in play.

Poltergeist, with its explanation of the horror it represents as being a product of the bad bureaucratic decision to move the cemetery and leave the corpses behind (presumably a move by the bureaucrat to inflate the bottom line), is a sort of inversion of this logic. The house as spirit-condenser (although the film attempts to distance itself from this by claiming the invasion is a poltergeist, which is differentiated from a "haunting" in that it is precisely both temporary and not spatial) is thus sort of a way for the house to rebel against its own reduction to being just property. The house is pissed off because of the lack of a level basic human decency in the conditions of its construction.

The real auteur of the living house genre, in this specific sense, is Wes Craven. Although his films never treat themselves in this manner. And this is precisely because he almost categorically rejects the spiritual or psychological reduction that functions as the broadest generic signposts. The only prominent counterexample to this, I think, would be Nightmare on Elm Street which, if you take into account that Craven directed both the first and the final (New Nightmare) iterations of this franchise, then you realize that what results is ultimately almost identical to The House That Bled To Death.****

What Craven does, instead of using these reductive genre motifs, is figure the house as the ultimate space in nearly all of his films. How this almost inevitably pans out is with the climactic chase through the house. The house which - again, almost invariably - has been booby-trapped. What this does is to render the house not just a passive interiority or a disinterested spatial determiner, the navigation of which allows for the creation of tension, but as an, or more precisely the, active intercessor.

The trope of the chase scene is precisely a tool which structurally efects the reduction of all participants to objects, in order to clear space for the tension of mapping interiority onto the landscape. By this I mean that the chase wrenches the subjectivity of, in Craven's films for instance, the chaser by reducing him to an inhuman monster, and the chased by reducing her to abject terror; and in so doing, replaces the processes normally associated with interiority (self-determination, reflexive thought, ability to interpret sensory input) onto the landscape. That the most common form of chase is the "car chase" underlines this, as the car itself already reduces the subject to an object, and the roads become these very externalized thought processes. Thus the house's interior becomes an interiority, and the booby traps a conscious mode of interacting/shaping the trajectories of the (human) objects, as well as determined reactions to sensory stimuli.

This is not all, however. Perhaps the single greatest image of the house as subject comes, paradoxically, in Craven's The Hills Have Eyes, a movie set around a broken down car in an irradiated desert. The films climax sees the kids booby-trapping the trailer to self-destruct, to kill the mutant cannibals they have lured back inside. What this moment offers, more than just another image of a burning house, is a reference to an earlier image in the film; the father, attached to a cross, being burned alive. The house as martyr.

Much more can be said about this (just think, for instance, about the two houses in Scream 3 - the simulacral, film set reconstitution of the house from Scream for "Stab 3," and the director's mansion in which it ends - or the fairy tale of the hidden gold in The People Under The Stairs), but perhaps this is enough to return to the initial argument. It is, I hope, uncontroversial to point out that the 2008 financial collapse was a collapse of the housing markets; it would certainly be insane to suggest that the collapse was triggered by the houses themselves, as though houses across the country and then the world had themselves started to crumble and deteriorate. What was "toxic" were the financial assets; what were "subprime" were the loans; the houses themselves were, quite frankly, incidental, mere incentives, their value only in their unparalleled ability to anchor confidence in the free-flowing capital that soared above them.

What is the point, then, in insisting on this close attention to these fictional houses, these representations capable of consuming the balloon-bubble-diamond, when what they refer to is in reality nothing more than another empty concrete signifier, ready to be shuffled out of the equation as soon as another one can be molded to fit into its place?

The answer to this can, of course, never be entirely fixed. On one level, we might insist on the analysis of the concrete, overdetermined components of this problem, in order to approach a more honest appraisal than that offered by one which only takes into account the abstractions that served as the causal determinations. On another is perhaps the impulse to refuse the free-play of signs, to resist the infinite malleability that conditions the possibility of both creating and salvaging these crises.

These impulses are shared with, and perhaps engendered by (in me at least), the recent movement toward the direct action tactic of occupations. That word which invokes the spectres of both home-ownership and military occupation, and which refers to the tactical taking over of a factory (or university) by the workers (or students) who perform work within it.

To offer a sort of concluding gesture, then, it might be pointed out that the term "housing bubble" refers not just to the market truth, but also, according to this new schematic, the way in which the "house" itself (under the right subjective conditions) becomes the ferrying mechanism which traverses the gap between balloons and diamonds. This is (or at least I certainly hope it is) more than just another way of making the observation that the house is the ultimate figure of the American Dream, with its dual ideal of speculative advancement and interpersonal mastery. It instead opens up (again, I hope) the possibility that the house, as the highest possible form of affective junk, can be made to operate not simply as a facilitator of capital, but also as a powerful impasse. Like Hello Kitty, standing rigid and plastic on the grass, dreaming without a dreamer of the little girl floating away on her balloons.

*If you've ever listened to an acapella of a Katy Perry song, especially I Kissed A Girl, you'll know what I'm talking about
**To put it in these new terms, one could say that the problem with the dominant analyses of Katy Perry are that they recognize her existence within this world where the diamonds and the balloons have become incommensurable, but focus only on the balloon-aspect of her performance.
***Not the least reason for this is that pop stars/celebrities are always figured as the objects of these bubbles, never the subjects.
****Craven's most recent, My Soul To Take, might also easily be seen to fall into this trap. I get the feeling that it does avoid this, but to explain precisely how it does evades me at this moment.

Eating Death

2010-11-25T05:37:00.000-08:00

If there is one moralistic message which underlines every cultural object I can think of, it is that to consume wrongly is to condemn oneself to death.

Could the obscene outpouring of pleasure at slaughtering zombies signify anything else? When ideological rigor is pursued - whether through veganism, socialism, free market capitalism - is this not the ultimate thesis we see being played out?

And, underlying it, the ideological equation of consumption with death.

The Sun Sets on Annual International Cyber Poncho Peligroso Week 2010

2010-11-20T18:34:00.000-08:00

I spent the last hour or so at the beach.
I took a big stick, to write with.
I wrote Poncho's name in the sand a lot.
I tried to take some pictures but they didn't come out
it was already getting dark and I only have a cell phone camera.
The things I wrote were:

Poncho
Peligroso
.com

&

WE ARE ALL
PONCHO
PELIGROSO

&

GOOGLE
PONCHO
PELIGROSO

&

PONCHO PELIGROSO

&

I claim
This castle
In the name
of Poncho
Peligroso

THE KING
IS DEAD!
LONG LIVE
PONCHO!
[this one was written next to an abandoned sandcastle]

&

Poncho Peligroso.com
[this one was written hugging the walkway onto the beach]

& that's all

I am proud to have been able to contribute in a small way to Annual International Cyber Poncho Peligroso Week 2010

For Poncho, Manifest (A Manifesto)

2010-11-15T02:44:00.000-08:00

Given:

The general paucity of the professional exegetical function
The historical ascendance of the material (qua digital) text as form of communication
The ineluctable extension of real, affective, lived experience past self-evident geographical/generic boundaries
And, concomitantly, the colonization of this same lived experience by broadly theoretical, speculative, and abstract structures

Poetry Must be Enacted That:

Invigorates contingent, superficially new, forms of technological transmission through recourse to the “nameless baseline human emotion ” without fetishizing their newness
Reframes the individuation that this new textuality accomplishes in a language that serves to create a communicative function on the collective level
Closes the obvious metaphor of the gap as lack of spatial communication and opens it in the realm of fantastical incommensurability*
Can laugh, while the dust settles.

*“[T]he Muumuu house writers have no middle-ground extraneous elevation or amplification. They exist only at extremes, either in the painfully mundane or the clearly impossibly hyperbolic.”

(for AICPPW)

Macross: Do You Remember Love?

2010-11-10T17:21:00.001-08:00

Everyone go ahead and watch this immediately,

thanks,

love,
Ben

Hello Kitty's Mouth

2010-11-09T11:56:00.000-08:00

Jason Han, I Haz Mouth

There is something incredibly off-putting, to many people, about Hello Kitty's mouthlessness, that arguments from design pragmatism or relative degree of cuteness (rightly) don't quite squelch. The claim that it embeds her in an antifeminist position is well-taken, with the argument usually being that it reproduces a sense of the value of women as being contingent on their voicelessness. Jason Han's painting, I think, points a way through that impasse.

What we get, in this painting, is a suggestion that Hello Kitty with a mouth speaks not just imagistically, but that her speech is actually itself just a representation of her mouth. And, because of the very minimalism that supposedly accounts for her lack of a mouth, something even stranger – the speech bubble itself begins to look less like a representation of speech, and more like a third, incomplete Kitty, with the triangle at the bottom even serving as a potential ear. At a very basic level, then, we have the suggestion that when Kitty is given the tools of language, what she becomes capable of producing is a perfect partial self-representation.

The weirdness of this is compounded by the fact that the mouthless Hello Kitty is actually more expressive - there is an intuitive sense in which the !!! above her head signals something more concrete than the speech bubble with a mouth in it. Which is counterintuitive if you take the mouth to be something like the condition for the possibility of expression - in this case the mouth allows for the creation of an image which refers to an external language which itself is part of a specific discourse which is technologically and historically marked and gendered and so on, while the lack of a mouth allows for the expression of direct astonishment, which only after this is registered becomes ambiguous (is she astonished because her doppelganger* has evolved a mouth, is her astonishment a projection of envy, etc).

This ambiguity, though, is itself wrong, in a way. It is sort of weirdly genealogical, a reading forward through language the conditions of arriving at the beginning. That is, it is a sort of speculative historicizing, a guessing at the past on the evidence of its potential future. So to say something like that the !!! is one of envy, with the implication being that the mouthless Kitty has always desired a mouth, cannot help but be backwards, as we see in the painting itself that the expression of a desire for a mouth can only be predicated on actually having a mouth. Kitty can't want a mouth until she's got one – and when she does, it's what she's reduced to.

The equation, then, of a lack of a mouth with a lack of a voice, is made to seem outright perverse by this painting.** Which is, in itself, pretty great, but there is another aspect of Jason Han's painting that I think really cements its wonderfulness.

Renée Magritte, Les Deux Mystères

The most obvious way to read this painting is as a commentary on the more famous (and earlier) La Trahison des Images, where that painting is itself situated in this one, on an easel. Re-painting that painting certainly compounds the thematizing of semiotics, but instead of taking further the exploration of the insufficiency of the signifier, what we get is another realist representation of a pipe, and this one with no tagline disavowal. On the contrary, it almost seems to point up the interpretation that Foucault suggests of the earlier painting, that the painted words “ceci n'est pas une pipe” refer not to the pipe above but to themselves – this “this” is not “a pipe.” Because if we believe that the realist image must contain a linguistic disavowal to maintain the distance between a signifier and its signified, then mustn't we come to the conclusion, of this new pipe, that it is a pipe?

And certainly no one believes that pipe outside of the easel is any more a real pipe than the pipe within it. As Foucault also points out, the large pipe is not itself "in space" the same way the small pipe is - the large pipe could be on the wall in the back, but it could just as easily be floating in the foreground, actually the smaller of the two pipes; or it could be a sort of hazy apparition, no pipe at all but a dream of a pipe by the not-a-pipe on the easel.

Thus, the congruence; in one, the not-a-pipe that dreams a pipe; in the other, the mouth that speaks itself. Structurally, then, we have a sort of complicated coherence between the represented Treachery of Images and the two Kitties. Complicated because it is the Kitty who has been inducted into the linguistic order who is doing the dreaming, and the Kitty who is still outside of it that must, then, be the equivalent of the painted words.

This complication, I think, points to the basic disjunction in the mode of representation that exists between the pipe and Kitty. The whole argument of La Trahison des Images revolves around the pipe as representation, as it is its status as such that creates the space necessary to be able to coherently refer to it as not itself. Whereas with Kitty we are not dealing with a representation (in manifold, often very subtle ways) – such that a direct take-off of La Trahison des Images would necessarily mean something entirely different. A painting of Hello Kitty with “This is not a Hello Kitty” below it would necessarily mean something entirely orthogonal to the meaning of a painting of a pipe with “This is not a pipe” written beneath it.

The short of it, then, is that the gap between these apparently identical instances (of Kitty's potential mouth speaking only itself, and of the not-a-pipe that only dreams of a more-real pipe) is exactly the gap between an image and a representation. And, to put blithely what I've been trying to put subtly, that what this perhaps draws out is the insufficiency of a politics of representation to account for Kitty. Without, of course, simply shoving the question to the side altogether.

*One of the most basic ways you can tell a “real” Hello Kitty product from a counterfeit is that Hello Kitty always wears her bow on the left ear. Which means that the Kitty with the mouth would have to be either a counterfeit Kitty or, I guess, Kitty's twin sister Mimmy. I don't really find this particularly meaningful so much as funny.

**Two things: first, there are actually two ways in which Kitty has always been voiced, in that the first product of hers was a coin purse with HELLO printed in block caps over her head (thus her 'name' – although, canonically, her name is Kitty White) and also in that whenever she is put into a narrative context, or anywhere else where she needs to speak, she is perfectly capable of doing so. Second is that I think this is where the lolcats meme-speak of the title comes into play, for me at least, as that is exactly an example of voice being given to the voiceless as being infantilizing and generally the opposite of empowering.

ballot poem

2010-11-02T19:19:00.000-07:00

"We can all read now"
you might say,
and she'd nod,
but you stay scared.
Because you know
words, like running
taps, are more likely
to drown houses
than spit air

Post-Kanye: Nicki Minaj

2010-11-01T22:11:00.000-07:00

Following up on Sole's question about whether or not "post-Kanye" is a genre (and bracketing, for the moment, my initial reaction).

Instead of Drake, I'm going to propose as the seminal text of this speculative genre the first verse of Nicki Minaj's "Still I Rise."

This verse, in which Minaj appropriates the voice of the "hater" and turns it into a sort of negative mythologizer, completes the turn that Kanye's music's central implicit critique had begun.

To sketch out what I mean roughly: my central claim is that Kanye's important contribution to hip hop has been as an internal node which reconfigures the popular conception of the hater. Before Kanye, the hater was hip hop's way of figuring a sort of antagonistic ignorance. This comes in a number of flavors, from an ignorance of the emcee's work ethic or biographical hardship, to a willful disavowal of the emcee's inarguable talent. Likewise, the reactions vary from bemused indifference to conversion attempts.

With the rise of Kanye came the rise of the "I <3 Haters" meme. Kanye lets us see what we've been blind to all along - the haters vocal ignorance is not to be disdained, but to be capitalized upon! Ignorance is no longer even a relevant category, as the critic* is transformed into a commodity. So you can love them, because they are no longer castrated figures of potential negativity, but instead are simply assets.

This, of course, leaves hip hop's structural narrative at an impasse. The hater as commodity proposition is something that only works so long it is positively avowed - if people stop making the argument, it stops being true. Like a real commodity, this new concept is a sort of organized negativity, an absence that structures presence. Thus Kanye's revolution within hip hop is to basically remove the possibility of a structural antagonist.

In this analysis, the problem with calling Drake post-Kanye is, basically, that he is more like an acolyte of Kanye's. He is one of the ones most vocally preaching that one must love thy hater, as it does wonders for the authenticity of the Degrassi kid rapping about his rags to riches story.

What "Still I Rise" does differently, though, is to take Kanye's critique and reintegrate it into the larger narrative. This song in particular, with all its transcendent kitsch, gives to the hater the necessary negative force to constitute a real threat that must be struggled with while also keeping the lovable commodity intact. What this results in is basically a hater who has an uncanny ability to see the important themes that underlie an emcee, but only negatively.

The mythology that Nicki Minaj attempts to sell is never more perfectly stated than in the first verse of this song. She is post-geographical (a Queens native signed to Young Money; "and what's her nationality she Chinese right?") and post-heterosexual ("you know her last name Minaj she a lesbian! / and she ain't never comin' out") and situated within a (really very weird) female pantheon ("she tryna be like Lil' Kim her picture looks the same" "she ain't the next bitch"). The only theme that's missing, and this is crucial, is exactly her ongoing thematic self-commodification - for one verse, Nicki Minaj is not a Harajuku Barbie. And it is, I would argue, exactly because this structural movement takes precedence.

Which starts to point in the direction of why Nicki Minaj is so fucking great, but then I'll have to write that some other day

*Critic, in this sense, is something that the rap lexicon would recognize but is not the same as the category born through hip hop. The gap between the "hater" and the "critic" is, basically, that critics actually exist - haters are just extrapolations of rhetoric. This is why Jay-Z can say "I'm like fuck critics, you can kiss my whole asshole / if you don't like my lyrics you can press fast forward." Here though, I just mean by critic something like "negative assessor."

some wonderful poets i know these days

2010-10-19T22:55:00.000-07:00

Evan
"May"
"We wind ourselves into it"

Grant
"I am digging for"
"hardbonesto sink"
"permanent ban on cool things"

Liam
"not words for titled"
"chococat's face on every advert on the alt report"
""i spent 800 years finding a pen so now you are going to listen"

Lynn
"His pirate smile"
"The dying cope, like a body in pain"

Poncho
"you drove past me"
"this is a blog and you are reading it"

And these are some of my favorite words of theirs.

Poncho was kind enough to let me have a PDF copy of his forthcoming book, 'the romantic,' which I read and said some little things about on twitter & gchat. But I would also like to say some things here, so I will.

I chatted with him, before he sent me the book, about Tao Lin and some other stuff, and one of ways he presented the Muumuu House aesthetic was in opposition to what he called David Foster Wallace's maximalism. I don't think this is necessarily something he came up with but it stuck with me, and it has helped me to think around it while I'm going back and thinking about certain things. I feel sort of compelled here to say that I would tend, if this bifurcation is to be taken generically, to put myself in the DFW camp; that is, I would say that I feel like something of an outsider on the whole minimalism front. And being someone whose only sustained & radically personal engagements with poetry are probably Shakespeare's The Tempest, Milton's Paradise Lost, and Petrarch's Canzoniere doesn't make me feel more at home either.

While, on the face of it, Poncho's poems seem very similar to Tao Lin's, I think it shouldn't be too hard to grasp that they are not really at all. Perhaps that's swinging a bit wide; I just mean to say that the style bears the mark of influence, but not pastiche. Perhaps its enough to simply note that I felt it was interesting enough a point to bring up, without dwelling on the particularities.

What struck me most strongly in 'the romantic' was the motif of dust. One can easily imagine, in a collection like this (young male autobiographical poems tracing the aftermath of a break up), the incredibly shitty way this sort of image might be handled (or if one can't, then simply picture two college-aged white kids, one teary-eyed and brokenhearted, saying, "I just don't know what to do anymore..... its like all I can do is watch the dust settle...." and then writing a book of poetry around it). What 'the romantic' does, on the other hand (it seems to me), is refuse any such structural sentimentality; and in so doing, it allows this figuration to rise up out of the poetry itself, and hover over it delicately. The dust, coming not from the paratext, but from the benign acne-stopping nanobots ("men fall to powder casually as they / go through their morning rituals / for a moment their skin is smooth / then it is too smooth / then it is gone / then their skulls are smooth / then they are also gone") or the unburnt library of Alexandria ("if they had only studied / the thankfully unburnt / library at Alexandria / and someone takes down a scroll / and the scroll turns to dust") or even the transfiguration of the computer screen to pixels, thus creates for itself a sort of purposefulness, without resorting to cheap metaphorical trickery.

The most interesting moment, for me (as opposed to sustained figure or something), was the poem "snail shell escape artist." I know (am pretty sure) that this poem is about Liam, but I naturally approached every one of the poems in the collection as though they were about Poncho. Because the subject is never identified in the poem, except in the title, I had nothing internal to the poem to privilege one of these readings over the other - so when I started reading, the both of them were operating. I simultaneously "knew" that this was another in the series of poems about Poncho and some absent girl, and that it was a poem about Liam. So with both of these understandings bidding for dominance in my head, I read the poem, and realized how heavily I had been relying on certain extra-textual constructs in making sense of the whole thing. It was really weird.

Through Poncho I also became sort of familiar with a guy named Steve Roggenbuck, who I don't know at all. He just released a chapbook which I also got to read. I thought it was interesting (and worth mentioning here) because of the way in which it differs from Poncho's 'the romantic.' The chapbook starts off "i dont care about reading a poem / who do you think i am, robert frost? / i have never been in the woods and i hate walking," and only gets (to my mind) more subtly allusive from there. A poem like "if you call me, i wont answer / i am sitting under the moon inside of a wheelbarrow" can't help, to me, to bring up Williams' Red Wheelbarrow (although this puts me at the risk of sounding like one of those assholes who "protest too much"s at everything he reads). Which is not really to say much of anything of substance about the work, much less the literary pedigree of the author, so much as it is a way of bringing back to the fore what was always really there in the first place; the way that these things are all about words.

I realize that in all of this I don't really engage with Lynn or Liam or Evan's poems; I didn't really intend for this to turn into a big review of 'the romantic,' but so it goes. I am still probably heavily biased toward the book-form over the blog-form or something. Hopefully I will have time/energy/whatever to engage with Liam's poetry soon - I have to admit that it's his that gets me the most excited, recently. If Poncho and Steve together helped me cut the knot (you know, the "this is all shallow, self-serving, poetry-as-self-help, uninteresting Gen Y hipster shit" knot) then Liam's, for me, is the poetry which has always already been cut, and his shit's already drifting away at distance. And as for Lynn & Evan, well. Fuck.

Twitter Conversations: On Revolutionary Politics in Art

2010-10-18T21:40:00.000-07:00

Benladen:
Since my proposal that all art necessarily embeds revolutionary theory was met only by scorn (@virgiltexas), I feel like I should elaborate.

On the other hand, I also feel like I was saying something so basic as to render it completely banal [someone set up a bot to tell me when I'm being polemical].

All I was really saying was that the identification of something as 'art' or more specifically, a discreet art-object, is an act of identifying within the thing a logical coherence, or systematicity. There are some who would count this (the proposal of an alternate, extant system) revolutionary in itself, in this historical moment, but I was thinking more particularly in a, shall way say, dialectical sense. That the art-object is the product of (very vaguely) the gaze (or lets say, the speech act - the art-object has a subject which defines it, if only ostensively) is crucial here, and is also probably accurate. The point being that this immanent systematicity to the art-object is and must always be coupled with a critical negativity from which the embedded revolutionary politics must stem.

"But wait," you say, "you said embedded & yet are claiming that one of the main pieces is from the observer, i.e. outside!"

Well yes indeed; but it is rather obvious to anyone that creates that the creation assumes its own audience, and for the critical capacity to exist, the critic must enter the [internal, to the art-object] space of the assumed audience.

ps I still believe that this is all largely intuitive & maybe this explains some of my interest in OOO
pps come at me
http://www.last.fm/music/The+pl.+n./Idiopoetics%253A%2BThe%2B%2523spamfm%2BMemes%2BAlbum/where+to+money+at here listen to this you'll get it

virgiltexas:
Listen to this to understand my aesthetic theory http://www.last.fm/music/Captain%2BDan%2B%2526%2BThe%2BScurvy%2BCrew/_/Sea+Weeds

Benladen:
All of that stuff I said really didn't have anything to do with aesthetics at all

virgiltexas:
I meant what I wrote.

Benladen:
I wasn't saying you didn't, only that it seemed a strange response that wasn't interested in engaging what I said.
I listened to a bunch of Captain Dan & The Scurvy Crew a few years ago when i was really into Frontalot.
http://www.last.fm/music/Uninterpretative%3A+no!/Bootlegs/The+Apocryphal+Texts this is probably how i feel about it

Theses on T.I. - Whatever You Like

2010-10-12T13:51:00.000-07:00

1. "The body" is always the feminine body 1a. as such, the body is always the site of sexual domination.

2. Bodilessness is, therefore, a property to be strived for; or to put it another way, the goal is to make the body property, to be owned.

3. The only real inroads we have made to imagining minds without bodies, is the creation of certain inhumans - primarily, capital.

4. Therefore, one way of achieving this desexualization, aka liberation, is to simply become capital.

5. The road to becoming capital is not simply a road of accrual, but also dispersion; either through mediatic images or, more recently, through a refusal to participate in mediatic images - celebrity vs anti-celebrity; TI vs The Residents, or Gates vs Koch.

6. This newly created inhuman node, of course, never quite leaves a body, but the body can become fully aware of its simultaneous status that is, the body is simply a hole, a necessary ontological component but empty of epistemological or other importance.

7. With achievement of this status, the new inhuman node begins abiding by the rules of capital. and the #1 rule of capital - it always, always needs more bodies.

8. The body circumscribed becomes the proselytizer of the still-bodied, encouraging them - not to transcend, per se - but to engage.

9. Thus we come to T.I. - Whatever You Like. The song stems from a thread within rap in which the successful entrepreneur (rapper) has managed to raise himself out of his childhood poverty with only his entrepreneurial ingenuity. This song works against this thread, though, in that it abjures that narrative and focuses on what happens afterwards.

10. Namely, that the poetic speaker no longer functions as a historical/biographical individual within the song; he becomes unsituated, and fluctuating. In a word, he speaks as capital.

11. "I want your body / Need your body / long as you got me you won't need nobody" thus becomes a pun; the self-contained and the bodiless are one and the same.

12. And yet, "Late night sex so wet and so tight" is one of the speaker's promises. Certainly this isn't meant to titillate the female body he's engaging ("wet" and "tight" not being particularly flattering as descriptors of the capacity of a male's sexual organ to pleasure).

13. What is being promised by the song is not the ability to ascend to the status of the speaker. It is a promise of the bodilessness of capital but with certain limits. What is being promised to the addressee is the apotheosis into the commodity form.

14. The video underlines this apotheosis at every moment. From the narrative (that the golden ticket phone number turns out to be $100) to the images of the woman (which amount to a rapid succession of affective reactions to new expensive junk), the point is clear; you can have whatever you like means that you can be of this.

15. This dramatizes the fundamental difference between capital, which must always remain disembodied, and the commodity form, which is always embodied (that is, injected into a body; not that it is fundamentally bodied itself).

Cobbling

2010-09-10T02:44:00.000-07:00

Hey! I have this thing. It's not a thing, so much. It's a relationship between things. It's this:

And I have this other thing, which isn't a thing so much as a relationship either, and it's this:

A while ago, I put them together. They're still themselves, but the relations inverted, and it became a thing about itself, and it looked like this:

It helped a lot, and I was excited, and things happened, but now it is ugly and huge, and it won't go away:

So now I have this problem. I need something hard. Something really, really hard. And I start to remember, wasn't there something like this?

But lets say something tells me that I had that, once, and that I took it apart, and that's how we got here in the first place. What can I do?

Singing Poetry

2010-08-26T19:36:00.000-07:00

Poems Sung by Uninterpretative: no!

Last night I got really tired and decided to sing poems out of books (& take requests) with my broken acoustic guitar. Here are the results.

Poems sung: "Mourning in Andalusia" by Abu I-Hasan Al-Husri, from Poems in Arab Andalusia
"Present Surround" by Jesse Seldess, from Who Opens
"Twenty-Four Years" by Dylan Thomas, from Selected Poems 1934-1952
"Game 4" by Sesshu Foster, from World Ball Notebook
"Jisei" by Yukio Mishima (the poem he recited on the occasion of his public suicide; requested by Keishi)
"A Baseball Game (Part 7)" by Richard Brautigan (requested by Katy)
"Suburbatross" by David Lau, from Virgil and the Mountain Cat

Objects

2010-08-24T05:56:00.000-07:00

"Haley Joel Osment said 'Party girl' which was a term they had for people who did not speak in a quiet monotone and were not severely detached. Inanimate objects and situations and animals and boys could also be party girls. Dakota Fanning said if they wrote a book about a party girl called Party Girl they would be rich."
(Tao Lin; Richard Yates p. 94)

I have been reading a lot about stuff like Object Oriented Ontology recently, and it seems cool but also awful.

A few days ago, I saw Piranha 3D in theaters by myself, and I can't remember ever having seen such a mean-spirited film. And last night I watched Megapiranha, and that one seemed to me about as affectless as you could make something.

The thing about Piranha 3D was that it didn't stop at asking you to glory in the cynicism of "doing violence to those who deserve it," or even at the more refined level that films like Craven's Last House on the Left operate on. It pushes past those so far that it has to drag out of itself the most miserable, disgusting, hateful sort of action movie, and immerses itself in being that (along with its other cynicisms) so well that it really expects you to cheer when the lady cop tases a single piranha to death.

Megapiranha on the other hand is the sort of movie you can watch without feeling anything, and yet as soon as I finished it I had a dream a about it. In the dream I was traveling along the megapiranha-infested Orinoco river with a bunch of people, carrying along my Chococat w/ Snow Cape plush. I kept dropping/losing the plush, and finding it in the muddy banks of the river, and knowing that I had to get it back no matter whether or not I was likely to die in the process. And no one would help me, except until the end my friend Tanya leaped over the river to help me retrieve him.

I read Richard Yates by Tao Lin tonight and it was fantastic. It made me think of my idea that "meta" is, far from being clinical, a constitutively emotional construction/form of representation. But also that that seems tangential to the book itself. More crucial seems to be an argument, embedded within the book, about realism. I'm not sure I know what can be taken out of it, really, but when the climax of the novel is an email detailing every lie told over the course of a relationship, it seems like something that is fair to say.

I was also struck, while reading it, that it seemed to have the opposite message re: the Internet than people will inevitably want to read into it. The novel seemed to foreground beautifully how it is not the Internet, but rather the structures of life that we occupy and bring with us to the Internet, that are the "causes" of our alienation.

This is maybe the great strength of the novel, that it allows the arguments that it never quite makes to possess their own weight. That it respects itself as fiction enough not to try to weave what people like to call "themes" into the "dialogue" or whatever.

KOBOLDS: A History of Örth, and its City

2010-08-19T19:24:00.000-07:00

A road-map of the city

After slaying the dragon in Kobold Hall, the adventuring party ("Chilldogs, INC.") started to head west, toward the glowing city near the shore. At the end of the first day, they encountered some scouting gnolls, and determined that the campfires they could see at night to the east were probably some sort of large gnoll encampment. After two more days of travel, the company reached the city.

Just outside, they were stopped by another adventurer of about their same skill level. He informed them that magic users were unwelcome in the city, but said that if they wanted to enter he could buy something inside the city that would allow them to pass by the guards unnoticed. Unwilling to trust him with their money, they declined, which lead him to inform them that there was one other way - a goblin encampment, just to the north.

The rogue sneaked from the back and started slitting throats, as the fighter barreled in from the front screaming at the top of his lungs with the rest of the party in tow. Although they nearly killed the wizard, the company slew the goblins, only to watch their corpses vanish.

Suspecting foul play, they followed the adventurer (who had just showed up) into the main tent, where he procured two bags of dust. These would diffuse the magical aura that the casters in the group naturally let off, allowing them to pass into the city unnoticed. So they did.

Inside the city, they sold their gems and headed to a tavern. En route, they started to notice the peculiarities of the city - aside from the whole thing being made of impeccable bronze and constantly lit by artificial daylight spells. The population was homogeneous in their vague affluence and their harried indifference. They also noticed that there seemed to be the occasional gnoll-slave.

After sleeping, the party followed up on the lead from the adventurer, meeting up with a magician who might have some leads on a conspiracy related to the city. He was able to tell them that the sixties-story of the giant minaret in the middle of the town was nearly impossible to access, recently, even though it was still nominally public. On the other hand, there has been talk of a potential gnoll rebellion, based mostly on speculation of the gnoll army amassing outside.

The adventurers then left the magician, at his suggestion, to engage in the tournament going on in the arena - which will add another piece to the puzzle. The tournament will end with an ambush, as a crowd of Kobolds and a couple Vampire Spawn break in and attack. Then they will have to the tools to put figure out the city.

The city is a utopian project from the century prior to the Kobold's taking over. The richest families on many continents got together and created an extra-governmental body (including, primarily, pirates), which they used to fund the transfer of huge quantities of bronze to the large island of Örth. When they finally got there, they began construction of the city according to the then-current architectural mode, which stressed the conjunction of the "functional" with certain (aesthetic) magical principles.

Because of the massive construction project that this city entailed, the whole of Örth became subordinated to it, and the rest of the island was stripped of any resources that were available. As time wore on, the taxes being levied began to seem normal, and the location so remote, that it left the popular imagination, and so when it was finished it became a playground for a few ultra-wealthy human families.

These families made the city into a brightly lit playground for their money. They left their children there and told them bedtime stories that valorized immaterial labour. And they quickly realized that the city had destroyed all of Örth's land, and that their city was unsustainable. So they did the only reasonable thing - they cut off access to the world, and enslaved thousands of magicians within the minaret. They are trapped their, each in his own cell, forced to keep not just the permanent daylight spells always in place, but to keep every aspect of the city, from the atmosphere to the shining bronze, perfect.

The plan worked beyond the city's wildest dreams, and has effectively put all of the citizen out of work. They are all ignorant of what is going on, though they can guess at its nature.

The vampire spawn which the players will be encountering will be the thralls of the Vampire Lord who lives at the top of the minaret. He simply appeared there, according to legend, the day that it was finished, and has resided there since. The magician who runs the smuggling ring, it may or may not come out, works for him, providing him with smuggled-in adventurers upon whom to feed. The spawn are the other two members of the adventurer that they met at the gates' party, and are chasing down some Kobolds with whom negotiations had just broken down.

The gnolls were brought to Örth at around the same time as the city project began, although they came separately and claimed an ancient heritage. They have lived on the land since, surviving off scavenge and raiding. They are currently in the process of manufacturing siege weaponry with which to raid the city. The gnolls are the main reason that Örth is relatively unmolested by the Kobolds (other than the fact that they don't particularly want it) is because of the gnolls, who make it a point of pride to kill them, as they are basically the cornerstone of the gnoll economy.

(Kobold Hall basically fits in like this: the dragon who the adventurers killed was on leave from his shitty university job, doing research. He wasn't a very prominent scholar or anything, and no one is going to miss him. Which is really a shame, as he went through a lot to get where he was - it isn't every day that a White Dragon conquers his animal impulses and becomes a scholar.)

On the level of the game, I think it's going very well. Although the actual player makeup of the group keeps fluctuating, and the games hop around days, the way they are playing is exactly how I hoped/expected them to. That is to say, they are constantly commenting on the filmic/philosophical apocalypticism that I've been trying to work in without actually working them in, in a sense.

This whole part of the campaign is really just a sort of background to the world, in a way, and I haven't worked in a lot of active bricolaging and stuff. The city itself is supposed to be a sort of D&D version of the hallucinatory city in Gibson's "The Gersnback Continuum," although also not really at all. It would perhaps be better to say that what that city was to the cyberpunks, this city is supposed to be to those of us who are next.