Thursday, February 3, 2011

If You're Lucky, After a Number of Revolutions, You'll Feel Something Catch

I've been negligent re: Egypt yap-wise. During the last motherfucking crisis - when and what the fuck was the last motherfucking crisis, wasn't long ago - I wrote something to the effect - I remember, the Giffords shooting! I wrote:
Regardless the ultimate motives of the shooter, watch this play out in the media, in Corporate's boardrooms, in your head, exactly like you think it's going to play out.
The Giffords' shooting is a toss-away carnival toy in Americana yet everyone sprang to their default position and brayed. I'm not comparing the significance of the two events, I'm observing what reflexive barking asses we are.

I'm not comparing the predictability of the Giffords' story with predicting what will happen in Egypt: the stakes and dynamic are far different than progressives flinging poop at crackers and yadda and etc.... though I'm betting on Corporate winning this shitty hand in a long slow losing poker game, like it won/lost the Israel-Hezbollah war in 2006, like it won/lost the Gaza War in 2009.....

I'm not saying Corporate's death by a thousand stabs isn't fair and deserved and inevitable. I'm not dismissing what is occurring in Egypt (and Yemen) as futile or counter-productive. I am saying that I'm not as eager to yodel at each passing shadow of a paradigm shift as I used to be. I'm not enjoying this most pivotal moment in history as much as some of you. Yes I'm old and complicit, but with that experience comes the knowledge there will be another most pivotal moment in history next week.

And it's not like I'm not assuming my assigned position.




  • Another in the same dilemma.
  • The plot thickens.
  • Clarification.
  • Dreams from our sponsor.
  • Mubarak Obama.
  • Capitalism.
  • Capitalism.
  • Fuck CBN.
  • Heh! I understand why you were upset by this article. By unkindly focusing only on the negative aspect of your ownership, the author, Dave McKenna, is suggesting that you are an avaricious, imperious, conscienceless plutocrat with callous contempt for the fans; a man whose Napoleonic, pouter-pigeon swagger conceals a doofus-like understanding of the game and whose pernicious, autocratic meddling has consigned the team to perpetual mediocrity and its players and coaches to a perennial state of harrowing anxiety, all of this starting virtually from the moment you arrived and continuing to this very minute. 
  • PEPCO!


  • Blogroll Amnesty Day. Again, if you're bumping me and I'm not bumping you, let me know.
  • Best bookstores in DC. Bridge Street is awesome.
  • Novel ideas.
  • Sillimans' always generous lit-links.
  • UPDATE! Jesusfuck, imagine my reaction when I saw on my blogroll that The Guardian was announcing that Neil Young has died.
  • Who the fuck cares? The same KEXP dj who wouldn't play Beefheart the day after he died played a block of White Stripes music as soon as this news broke. Fucking moron. 
  • Today's music brought to you by Ken's shift on WFMU yesterday.
  • Obscure Sound's Best of Dec/Jan, with MP3.



INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD

Matthea Harvey

For the time being
call me Home.

All the ingénues do.

Units are the engines
I understand best.

One betrayal, two.
Merrily, merrily, merrily.

Define hope. Machine.
Define machine.  Nope.

Like thoughts,
the geniuses race through.

If you're lucky

after a number of
revolutions, you'll

feel something catch.

14 comments:

  1. Agreed, especially since the next fake paradigm shift comes on Sunday. Thank Jack White for sports, something - unlike the Real World, whatever that is - I can at least semi-convincingly pretend to know a smidgen about unless the Colonel comes to the rescue.

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  2. We're vicarious because it's fairly inconceivable that we'd do the same in the US, or the UK, or Australia, or Canada.

    Perhaps something coded in the English language itself?

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  3. So, BFF, what exactly is Corporate's whole plot on this wogs-shouting-and-burning-stuff thing? Inexplicably, I got neither the meme-oh nor my marching orders. They're usually so good about beaming that stuff straight to my implant, even when I'm on assignment out here in Jeebustan, rather than hanging 7 miles from the Beltway making sure I'm meaner to crackers than they are to me.

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  4. We've been through this. Though you made me dance. Well played.

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  5. One of the real treats of living in northern NJ for as many years as I did: WFMU. A true national treasure!

    Oh, and fuck Jack White and the people who consider him a "genius." When such mediocre rehashing of others is "genius," the world really has sunk to a new low!

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  6. Jack, my first thought is that I once read then had a Polish colleague at work confirm an idea that Polish is as nightmarish a language to learn because for the past millennium someone's been invading Poland.

    My second thought is I want to think about this some more.

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  7. Longish Comment:

    First things first: It's Meg that's the genius behind the White Stripes. Screw Georgia.

    Second: CFO: nice to meet a fellow WFMU-nik. When I lived in Manhattan I used to listen to it fade in and out—esp. in the old Uppsala days—all the time, including late nights alone at work. It should still be in East Orange.

    Third: I'm with Landru here: I'm not sure Corporate knows what to want out of Egypt, tho' it's getting its talking points out to its spokesman (the Kenyan in chief) as fast as its little minions can hype. Maybe it just doesn't yet realize how much it can realistically hope to gain.

    Fourth: Say you want a revolution? Well, y'know.

    Fifth: @JackCrow: We've got lots to bitch and moan about, but nothing nearly as severe as they have.

    Sixth: Steelers by five.

    Seventh: @Dog: A Hilltop-franked bubble-wrapped Hall arrived this day. Much obliged. And even more so for the kind linkage above. I'm forever in your debt.

    That is all (probably).

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  8. Thanks, but apparently not well played enough, despite your feint toward the barcalounger.

    Jim: It's an effing Steelers blog in disguise. Peer into the extreme right and left margins for revealed truth.

    All in all, the fundamental things apply:

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rp6-wG5LLqE

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  9. It was the RED that threw me off. I thought subliminal rooting was illegal anyway. Horrors! I've become the Dog's willing thrall.

    Well, I for one won't get fooled again either.!

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  10. Jim, BDR -

    It's just a pet theory of mine, and one I'm fairly willing to abandon at the first sign of...I dunno, whatever.

    Revolt and insurrection are not likely in the former colonies of the British Empire. They are likely in those places once ruled by Spain, France and Portugal.

    I think part of it has to do with Saxon natural law, its pervasiveness in former Crown possessions, and the ideational character of English itself. I think most of it has to do with the fact that the Crown obtained most of those colonies as part of its early and middle capitalist expansion, and so the social structures which took root and provided initial conditions were all, well, conducive to bourgeois transfers of power, capital stabilization and personalism.

    Where the French and the Spanish ruled, personalism didn't and couldn't take as much hold, because the Catholic and maximalist organization of society sort of precludes it. Those societies are and were corporative, not individualist. Families in the Crown possessions produce highly atomized persons. Families in the continental empires produced corporative persons.

    Or something like that.

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  11. Interesting theory. Common law has a certain flexibility.

    But: India. South Africa.

    Even: U.S. (too early?)

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  12. I think India and S. Africa are different because the natives remained in the majority. In Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US the indigenous cultures were obliterated and marginalized to touristy cuteness. English law, in India, is not family law, or the dominant culture mode. It never penetrated into the masses. The sahibs certainly embraced it, but not their populations. The US didn't really change British culture. Its "revolution" formalized the de facto control of the proprietors and merchant princes, and then actual revolutionaries (Paine) were not long after no longer welcome.

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  13. I think I see, tho' I'm not yet convinced. Call me dense; you wouldn't be the first.

    Law = intellectual/political infrastructure. What about material infrastructure, that which the Brits are most famous for leaving in their tail?

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  14. Jim:

    Attitudes change around buildings, but few buildings actually change the attitudes of those who'll never inhabit them, in my humble and limited experience.

    The British left behind roads, railways and grand architecture, especially in India.

    But, short of the managerial class they superimposed upon Manu's Mission (oh, so poorly clever, Jack...) India took in England and spit it out again.

    Assume, for a moment, a plague which sweeps across India - a new thing which sidesteps the immunities won hard from countless Greek, Mongol, Kipshak, Cuman and Chagatai invasions.

    The British don't leave India, in that imagined event. They repopulate it, perhaps with more and more Irish. Or with Canadians. I dunno.

    What exists there, afterward, would have the same or similar roads, railways and grand stone gestures. But its people would be more roundly British, and the culture which rooted there would probably be far more alike to that which keeps keeps Brits, Aussies, Kiwis, Canadians and Americans so similar.

    The culture to which people assimilate would be more thoroughly English - and that culture is still not done rejecting its Labor and Fabian interregnum.

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