I haven't given proper attention to the new John Cale. It's don't think it's very good - I think it's bad, actually - but I feel a need to honor it because his voice still unlocks doors to treasured touchstones. So untrustworthy do I consider the judgment of my fandom but to loved ones these days, I know I could convince myself it's Cale's best album if I just give myself a beating or two.
- Policing dissent.
- Yes, Jill Stein staged a political stunt. At a political stunt.
- Of course Romney is repellent.Maybe a little is enough.
- Peace with horror.
- Ellsberg for Obama.
- The paradox of demographic doom: And of course the obverse is true in the case of the Democrats’ inevitable demographic victory: it is precisely what makes them so radically ineffective, so prone to compromise and give up. Just as the tendency toward defeat makes the Republicans more powerful and dangerous, so too does the tendency toward automatic victory in the long run lead to defeat or, at best, heartbreaking mediocrity in the short run. (Relying on the inevitable growth of the political power of minorities, for instance, leads to Republican attempts to suppress that power preemptively — and Democrats are partly hamstrung in their attempts to push back because advocating too one-sidedly for “their” voters doesn’t fit with the framework of pure procedural fairness that their long-term demographic advantage has led them to put forward.)
- Oil's well that ends welfarish.
- Age of counterrevolution.
- Behind the headlines.
- An example of why I both wish I'd been good at philosophy and am glad I'm not. But sure, plasticity, that's as good a word as any most times.
- My future hell.
- If forced to live in Virginia, I'd petition to live in Arlington.
- The heavy bear that goes with me.
- Substance.
- Moby Dick, new reviews: Environmentalists believe they know the moral of this story: that we live in a delicately balanced world – ‘fragile’ and ‘complex’ are favourite words in their vernacular – where one life-form depends on another. But no doubt we’ll manage if the Antarctic minke becomes extinct. By then, like Ishmael, we’ll have a myriad related problems to ponder, including how to minimise our own casualties and confine the worst of the damage to poorer parts of the world. In a symbolic sense, however, the depletion of whale populations touches us closely, somewhere in what’s left of the ‘mute calm’ that Ishmael felt beneath his own turmoil. Like him, we seem to know a great deal but are powerless to alter the course of things as a regiment of Ahabs might.
- Coetzee, for those of you who do.
- An 1987 doc on Sonic Youth I'd forgotten about.
- No, yes I thought of it, I'm tired of that gag, plus no one knows if Max Boot is still alive anyway.
- Marianne is 74 today. I'm old too.
- Mining the audio motherlode.
POLITICAL REFLECTION
Howard Nemerov
loquitor the sparrow in the zoo
No bars are set too close, no mesh too fine,
To keep me from the eagle and the lion,
Whom keepers feed that I may freely dine.
This goes to show that if you have the wit
To be small, common, cute, and live on shit,
Though the cage frets kings, you may make free with it.
