Das Randy Dandy; Da Durnan HisSelf

Of the lyric poet Sappho, who hailed from Lesbos in the time of Solon, Harry E. Barnes writes:

Though only a few of her poems are extant we get from them an impression of the purest lyric ecstasy. It is as though her words were “tipped with fire.” We have here the clearest and simplest communication of personal passion in language of exquisite simplicity and grace, with a poignancy and an insight never excelled. One or two examples must convey a suggestion of this simple beauty. A girl who failed to get married is compared to an apple that ripens out of reach—“Like an apple that ripens on the tip of the bough, yes on the very tip—for the gatherers had forgotten it; no they had not forgotten it but they were unable to reach it.”

Da Durnan, rapt & transported by the scent of an rose;

poolside, American Embassy in Cairo, c. 1846

Reality Fatigue

From The New Yorker (again…not cool, I realize…):

Finally, as Obama said, “there remains the question of detainees at Guantánamo who cannot be prosecuted yet who pose a clear danger to the American people. And I have to be honest here—this is the toughest single issue that we will face.” This group, “who cannot be prosecuted for past crimes, in some cases because evidence may be tainted,” might be held in preventive detention, perhaps forever. It’s a sobering thought, that Obama could consider approving this kind of long-term detention, and it remains to be seen how much evidence would be required to justify such an extraordinary step and how many cases it would involve…In any case, it’s hard to imagine any President agreeing to release people who, as Obama put it, “in effect, remain at war with the United States.”

Doesn’t need to be said again, but still:

Yes, it is hard to imagine any President releasing prisoners who are at war with the United States. But why do we care about the United States if the rule of law is applied randomly or to complement political moods? What exactly is worth protecting (besides all of our stuff) in a nation with no legal or theoretical skeleton?
I’ll answer my own question: The sun rising/setting over the Grand Canyon, the towering majesty of the Redwood; Pollack’s manic manifestations of the modern human psyche, Coltrane’s quest for musical union with the Divine; the taut prose of Raymond Carver, and the excitement of televised professional football. Let’s not forget the quiet, God-like smile that curves the corners of your firstborn, wrapped in swaddling clothes as she is, cradled in warmth and light.

Queen Christina

Toto Wampage

From The New Yorker:

Cast of characters:

Margaret Mitchell, author of the thousand-page blockbuster novel “Gone With the Wind.”
David O. Selznick, the legendary, manic producer of “Gone With the Wind.”
Victor Fleming, a vigorous and resourceful man who was then directing “The Wizard of Oz” — few considered him an artist.
Sidney Howard, East Coast playwright and screenwriter.
Ben Hecht, the greatest and most cynical of Hollywood screenwriters.

The story:

When summoned by Selznick, Fleming hadn’t read Mitchell’s novel, but he took a look at the screenplay and immediately told the producer, “Your fucking script is no fucking good.”

*    *    *

Hecht agreed to work on the script as long as he didn’t have to read the book. Selznick told him the plot, but he couldn’t make any sense of it, so Selznick retrieved Howard’s version, and, as Hecht listened, Selznick and Fleming read it aloud, Selznick taking the role of Scarlett, Fleming reading Rhett.

In this manner, the three men worked eighteen or twenty hours a day, sustained by Dexedrine, peanuts, and bananas, a combination that Selznick believed would stimulate the creative process. On the fourth day, according to Hecht, a blood vessel burst in Fleming’s eye. On the fifth, Selznick, eating a banana, swooned, and had to be revived by a doctor.

Athletica (only two months until the article on Marto’s new bistro)

In addition to namechecking Lululemon the NYT’s article on some ex-junkie no-nonsense yoga guru to the stars has this choice 1990s post-modern fiction nonsense:

“Come on people, let’s get started,” he said in a New York accent, as if leading a conference call.

Then he cranked up “Misty Mountain Hop” by Led Zeppelin and led the students through a warm-up of sun salutations. Soon he had them stretching into a difficult split pose.

“Didn’t you see the torture memos this week?” called out Jane Harman, a 63-year-old devoted student in the front row, who also happens to be the United States Representative for the South Bay region of Los Angeles County.

The teacher responded, “That’s why I’m doing this.”

“I can’t feel my face”

The NYT review of Reynolds Price’s “Arden Spirits,” an memoir of his student daze in 1950s Oxford, includes the below paragraph with a metaphorical punchline of dubious acceptability:

Mr. Price was hardly on the sexual sidelines while at Oxford, however. While traveling in Italy with a friend, he began loitering in the Borghese Gardens in Rome at night, where the “wooded throughways and bushes also converted, almost instantly at sundown, into the central pick-up spot for whores of all gender.” He takes a lover who, Mr. Price imagines, carried “a whiff of genetic memory of the passage of Attila and his Huns through medieval Europe.” Now there, you think, was some face-melting sex.

What Immortal Hand or Eye?

All Very Interesting

From NYRB:

Specifically, Bion challenged Beckett—whose devotion to the Cartesians shows how much he had invested in the notion of a private, inviolable, nonphysical mental realm—to reevaluate the priority he gave to pure thought. Bion’s Grid, which accords phantasy processes their full due in mental activity, is in effect an analytic deconstruction of the Cartesian model of thinking. In the psychic menagerie of Bion and Klein, Beckett may also have found hints for the protohuman organisms, the worms and bodiless heads in pots, that populate his various underworlds.

Bion seems to have empathized with the need felt by creative personalities of Beckett’s type to regress to prerational darkness and chaos as a preliminary to an act of creation. Bion’s major theoretical work, Attention and Interpretation (1970), describes a mode of presence of analyst to patient, stripped of all authority and directedness, that is much the same (minus the jokes) as that adopted by the mature Beckett toward the phantom beings who speak through him. Bion writes:

To attain the state of mind essential for the practice of psycho-analysis I avoid any exercise of memory; I make no notes…. If I find that I am without any clue to what the patient is doing and am tempted to feel that this secret lies hidden in something I have forgotten, I resist any impulse to remember….

A similar procedure is followed with regard to desires: I avoid entertaining desires and attempt to dismiss them from my mind….

By rendering oneself “artificially blind” [a phrase that Bion quotes from Freud] through the exclusion of memory and desire, one achieves…the piercing shaft of darkness [that] can be directed on the dark features of the analytic situation.

Fave Trax: Kate Bush

Perhaps these songs have been overexposed at this point (partial blame belongs to my fabulous mixtapes), but aside from being the best song of all time, “Sat in Your Lap” also sports the best cover image of any music recording ever released, so I thought it was worth sharing. Click on the picture or “the song” for the song.

Sat in Your Lap 7" cover

I included “The Big Sky” on one of the aforementioned mixtapes, but again, the picture on the back of the 12″ is very, very cool looking indeed. Click on the very cool picture for alternate mixes and a b-side, if you’re so inclined.

The Big Sky (12" back cover)

Hope Spiral, the Anti-Blogger

The opposite of our humble weblog, marshmallow Care Bears notwithstanding.

Cf. L. Cohen quip below.

Is it Monday? Feels Like a Monday!

Leonard Cohen interview; Steve Turner, NME, 29 June 1974:

Finally I ask him whether he finds a lot of joy in his life. He laughs a little to himself. “I don’t know,” he says. “I don’t look at it in that way.”

“I don’t go around looking for joy. I don’t go around looking for melancholy either. I don’t have a programme. I’m not on an archeological expedition.”

Archeological expedition! LOLZ!!

Neo-Situ

The zeitgeist had a Sitatutionist color for me today:

First I read in the NYT about the New School students protesting Bob Kerrey’s ineptitude as president of their university, which took the form of locking themselves in a building and reading Situationist tracts from Strasbourg ‘66 to the crowd outside – Knowing nothing about the New School situation my main criticism of their “action” is directed towards their reading of ancient revolutionary pamphlets. Though an excellent provocation and elucidating a still relevant general critique, “On The Poverty…” was part of an effort by a particular group of people at a particular time to confront and undermine the dang Spectacle on their own terms. Today the enemy is the same and yet not, and so must our rebellion retain its essential antagonistic refusal while damning the nasty particulars in our midst (duh). I then checked up on ye olde anarcho news wire to-day and found some cryptic bits about the “tarnac 9“, some French maybe-colleagues that seem to have gotten the boot stuck in by them French pigs. – If I read French I might be able to get at their Programme a little more – A preliminary sampling of their translated theses/statements leads me to believe that they have arrived at notions about insurrection/rebellion similar to my own, and aren’t we always pleased to find our wisdom confirmed by like minds? Lots of talk of a rejection of the metropolis via a kind of commune, of undermining the hyper-specialized world of helplessness we live in through mutual education, etc – nothing novel in the sphere of ideas but rarely encountered outside of my conversations with Tim -

Which is why I was tickled to find the Tarnac fellows, whose “Coming Insurrection” is more or less a modern chapter of “The Revolution of Everyday Life”, which is to say a contemporary critique written by those who have learned from the endeavors of our predecessors but aren’t oppressed by their failures. I have found it strange and frustrating over the years to find so little in the way of relatively mature “situationist” flavored thinking and writing as I troll the interweb – there’s no shortage of hagiography and handwringing about the legacy of ‘68, and I’ve found a lot of primitivists and New Age white mystic bullshitters and hare-brained TAZ types and earnest syndicalists who sprinkle a few Debordisms around but few who express a tolerably well-reasoned, anti-Work philosophy of refusal (I’m talking about white people, white formally educated goobers like myself living in Europe or North America) – Of course this is the sort of thing that I should be doing, if I’m so in to it.

Depression makes one lazy, the mind entropic, etc.

My last Situationist encounter of the day came via a link on bookforum, which in turn brought me to an article written by Hal Foster in the LRB, wherein he discusses a collection of Debord’s correspondence – it’s not too shabby.

Külture Jammin’

From the New York Times:

But the drop of Mr. Reed’s name allows “Adventureland” to make heartfelt use of “Satellite of Love,” one of his loveliest songs and part of a soundtrack that runs the gamut of more or less period-appropriate sounds, from the sublimity of Hüsker Dü to the ridiculousness of a bar band covering Foreigner. Otherwise Mr. Mottola is careful not to fetishize or lampoon the 1980s with silly hairdos or too-obvious topical references.

Ha ha ha!! Ha ha!!! No comment!!!  Ha ha ha, etc:

Maybe Just One…

I hope the recession ends soon:

A world where 8 billion to 10 billion people are competing for diminishing resources will not be peaceful. The industrialized nations will, as we have done in Iraq, turn to their militaries to ensure a steady supply of fossil fuels, minerals and other nonrenewable resources in the vain effort to sustain a lifestyle that will, in the end, be unsustainable. The collapse of industrial farming, which is made possible only with cheap oil, will lead to an increase in famine, disease and starvation. And the reaction of those on the bottom will be the low-tech tactic of terrorism and war. Perhaps the chaos and bloodshed will be so massive that overpopulation will be solved through violence, but this is hardly a comfort.

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/20090309_we_are_breeding_ourselves_to_extinction/

Not Fair

So this one is about how those belonging to the  “lower upper” class may be starting to feel that our economic system is unfair:

In the old days, if you didn’t end up on top, it didn’t say anything about you personally. It was God’s will; you were playing your role in the great chain of being; you’d get your reward in the next life. But now, if you’re merely a corporate lawyer or a senior vice president of marketing in a world where your former classmates have private planes, something has to be wrong with you. And if they got the plane by engaging in activity that wrecked the national economy, the insult is even more galling – and the world itself more perverse.

*   *   *

“I’ve seen it in my research,” says Doug Schoen, a pollster who has counseled Mike Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. “If you look at the lower part of the upper class, or the upper part of the upper middle class, there’s a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional ‘success’ would leave them without worries over the quality of their lives. It’s opening their eyes to things that are wrong with the economy more broadly.

Brain Science and the Grail of Money

This is the last section of this NYT article about Dr. Joseph Biderman, an huge asshole who also appears in this NYRB article (if only I had a Harper’s link!) – I have nothing particularly to add to the discussion, rather I simply continue to marvel at the audacious mendacity of pricks of this nature, and wonder when oh when there will be some effort to rein in this flavor of monstrous corruption in our craven lil’ culture. What fiendishness! Utilizing utterly biased research, these wild eyed motherfuckers claiming to be scientists fabricate a medical consensus prescribing expensive pills for everyone (infants on up) with an Attitude Problem, thereby placing tremendous financial, sociological, psychological strain on vast segments of the subject population as they spend years and years and thousands and thousands worrying about Fixing their bad brains, which are probably not bad at all, and which might to the benefit of all be better engaged examining and critiquing this world of bullshit. Not that I’m a raving crank or anything.

In a contentious Feb. 26 deposition between Dr. Biederman and lawyers for the states, he was asked what rank he held at Harvard. “Full professor,” he answered. “What’s after that?” asked a lawyer, Fletch Trammell. “God,” Dr. Biederman responded. “Did you say God?” Mr. Trammell asked. “Yeah,” Dr. Biederman said.

Corner Office

From http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/business/15cornerweb.html?pagewanted=1&em:

Q. Do you have a favorite gadget?

A. I’m pretty addicted to the BlackBerry. I love the iPhoneApple because I think they’ve so figured out computing. It’s hard in business to make that leap when you’ve distributed systems that use I.B.M. and Microsoft so much. But I’m pretty addicted to that BlackBerry.

I started taking them away in meetings at Quiznos, but the C.F.O. there is just addicted to it, beyond probably what most people are, and he was just watching that light, and he wouldn’t answer it because I said you couldn’t answer your BlackBerry in this meeting. But he’d look at the light and the light would drive him nuts, so I had him turn it over. And then, of course, I took it. He was doodling during the meeting as we were talking, and when he got up to leave the room I grabbed the paper he was doodling on, and he had doodled a complete, to scale, picture of a BlackBerry. Subconsciously, he doodled one while we were sitting in the meeting. That’s how addicted he was to it. I actually still have this. I’m going to give it to him framed.

*  *  *  *  *

I think it’s important to talk to people about how we’re in a fundamentally different world. Ask the question, “If compensation isn’t going to be the same for a while, where do you get your fulfillment in life?” Certainly, work is a big piece of that and work is rewarding well beyond compensation. But faith, family, friends and hobbies create real balance. The conversation I’ve had with a lot of people, both in large groups and small, is make sure you have balance in your life and make sure that all your fulfillment doesn’t come out of economic gain.

I’ve talked to a lot of people on Wall Street where their entire fulfillment came from the answer to, “Is my bonus bigger this year than last year?” Or, “If I worked 100 hours a week this year, can I work 101 next year?” It’s actually a great time for us as leaders to help people to step back and ask the question: “Where do I get the fulfillment in my life? And how do I make sure my job is a big piece of that?” I’ve found that employees who are fulfilled on a much broader basis in their lives usually do a much better job of work than those that are completely, single-mindedly focused on and get all their value out of work.

I think that’s one of the bigger questions we have as a society. We’ve gotten so used to every generation doing better economically than their parents. Are our kids going to do better than we’ve done? I hope so, but I’m not sure. So it seems like we ought to tell them that socioeconomic wealth is not the only, or even the most important, metric of personal happiness.

Good old days

Music from the opening credits of Kit Kat. Posted for the Mumkin 3 Boys who used to do their fair share of hanging out on the houseboats near Midan Kit Kat. (And for Tritone, who did some backround coughing of his own [and "saw out of the sides of his eyes"?])

Big Deal

New York Times / February 12, 2009

Judges Approve Warrant for Sudan’s President

THE HAGUE – Judges at the International Criminal Court have decided to issue an arrest warrant for President Omar Hassan al-Bashir of Sudan, brushing aside diplomatic requests to allow more time for peace negotiations in the conflict-riddled Darfur region of his country, according to court lawyers and diplomats.

It is the first time the court has sought the detention of a sitting head of state, and it could further complicate the tense, international debate over how to solve the crisis in Darfur.

Ever since international prosecutors began seeking an arrest warrant last year, opponents have pressed the United Nations Security Council to use its power to suspend the proceedings. But a majority of Council members have argued that the case should go forward, saying Mr. Bashir has not done enough to stop the bloodshed to deserve a reprieve.

Many African and Arab nations counter that issuing a warrant for Mr. Bashir’s arrest could backfire, diminishing Sudan’s willingness to compromise for the sake of peace. Others, including some United Nations officials, worry that a warrant could inspire reprisal attacks against civilians, aid groups or the thousands of international peacekeepers deployed there.

The precise charges cited by the judges against Mr. Bashir have not been disclosed. But when the court’s chief prosecutor, Luis Moreno-Ocampo, first requested an arrest warrant in July, he said he had evidence to support charges of war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide related to a military campaign that “purposefully targeted civilians” and had been “masterminded” by Mr. Bashir.

Lawyers familiar with the case said the court had already sought to freeze the president’s assets but had found his possessions to be hidden behind other names.

The decision to issue a warrant against him, reached by a panel of judges in The Hague, has been conveyed to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon, and is expected to be formally announced at the court, officials at the United Nations said.

The prosecutor became involved in the case after the Security Council asked him to investigate the conflict in Darfur, where massacres, disease and starvation have led to the deaths of up to 300,000 people and driven millions from their homes.

Although there has been sporadic fighting in Darfur for decades, the conflict significantly intensified in 2003, when rebel groups demanding greater autonomy for the region attacked Sudanese forces. The Arab-led government responded with a ferocious counterinsurgency campaign, which the court’s prosecutor called a genocidal strategy against Darfur’s black African ethnic groups.

Relations between Mr. Ban and Mr. Bashir continue to be strained by Sudanese government actions in Darfur and by Mr. Ban’s refusal to deal with Mr. Bashir directly.

But on Sunday the two men had an unscheduled encounter at a summit meeting in Ethiopia. Diplomats described it as “a stormy meeting” and “a shouting match” in which Mr. Bashir vented his anger at the court, though it is independent of the United Nations. Mr. Ban, in turn, insisted on the safety of United Nations staff members and peacekeepers, and demanded that Mr. Bashir stop the attacks on civilians.

The prospect of an arrest warrant for Mr. Bashir has already caused a diplomatic rift, with the African Union and members of the Arab League asking the Security Council to exercise its right to postpone any moves against the president for a year, arguing that he might still help bring a settlement in Darfur. Once an arrest warrant is issued, the Council can request that it be postponed.

There is broad concern that removing Mr. Bashir from power could threaten a landmark peace treaty between the Sudanese government and rebels in the southern part of the country. The treaty was signed in 2005 to end a civil war in which 2.2 million people died, far more than in Darfur.

Mr. Bashir fought members of his own party to approve that peace deal, and it is widely seen as critical to holding the country together.

On Wednesday, the Sudanese ambassador to the United Nations, Abdalmahmood Abdalhaleem, dismissed the court’s decision as “not deserving the ink used to print it.” The ambassador accused the court of being a political tool of mostly Western powers that want to fragment Sudan.

Mr. Abdalhaleem contended that in separate talks at the United Nations last fall with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and top European officials, Sudan was promised that Western powers would support a suspension of the prosecution if the country cooperated with United Nations peacekeeping efforts, pursued peace talks and more aggressively pursued war criminals.

“We are moving on all those tracks,” he said, though human rights groups and diplomats disagree.

A top United Nations official said Mr. Ban’s advisers were now struggling to forge a policy that supports the court’s pursuit of justice but avoids wrecking Sudanese cooperation with the complex missions there.

The court has issued two other arrest warrants in connection with the Darfur conflict, one for a former government minister, Ahmad Harun, and another for Ali Kushayb, a leader of a government-backed militia. Neither has been arrested.

The prosecutor has also accused three rebel leaders of the killing of 12 African Union peacekeepers. They have said publicly that they will surrender to the court.

Marlise Simons reported from The Hague, and Neil MacFarquhar from the United Nations.

Words: stranger than fiction!

Of ”reality’s” ongoing joke of naming things with a strange wink, a new–possibly emo–entry has come to light.

Former entries include: *That the most infamous military cover-up of the Vietnam War is known as My Lai (and that the middle name of the only man found guilty for the massacre–whose life sentence in prison was subsequently reduced to 3.5 years under house arrest–is Laws). *That following a utilities consiracy orchestrated by Enron which crippled the state of California and precipitated an obscure electoral procedure called a “Recall”, the sitting governor was challenged by an Austrian-born muscle-man who famously starred in a movie called Total Recall.

Well now we learn that the intricate tissue complex that helps regulate the rhythm of the human heart is known as the Bundle of His. Yes, woe is the heart of man, that bungling bundle of sorrow!

[To lend a shading of the struggle found in the breast of man, the OED also notes: bundle (slang) a fight or scrap. As in: "If there was going to be a bundle, he was not going to be bashed sitting down" -James Curtis The Gilt Kid (1936). To lend a shading of the tragedic irony found in the breast of man, Dr. Wiki notes: "James Curtis died in North London after suffering a heart attack in a chemist shop" (1977).]