@damienneva shared this little capsule of a mind (and ear) blowingly great performance from @netherrockers. I can’t think of much more I could ask for from this. Fun, intricate, LOUD AS HELL, stupid-smart, and tight.

doomandgloomfromthetomb:

The Darkness Doubles

…

Tom Verlaine, Fred Smith, Bill Ficca and Richard Lloyd make their bid for the coveted Best Band Ever title with this unbelievable show,  … If the version of “Little Johnny Jewel” here doesn’t convince you of the greatness of Television … well, I feel bad for you, son.

Download

Powerful pills created [for things like] schizophrenia are excessively given to developmentally disabled. http://nyti.ms/ukcI4M via @ablerism,@triangleinc

Thad Salter, with his lovely studies on guitar, has finally managed to make me listen to Christmas music at home, and with much delight.

I try my best to stifle my USian tendency towards seeing everything in apocalyptic terms, but Glenn Beck’s perverse speech last weekend at the Washington Mall puts me in mind of Yeats.

I can’t shake these words:

The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

and there’s something deaf in me, even as I write this, something unable to react as I believe I should.

I remind myself we’ve been through worse bouts of xenophobia and “purification,” and sometimes transcended it magnificently.

But that all happened during this country’s ascension, not during its decline. So I’m not sure there’s good precedent.

Aging gracefully seems to depend on an acceptance of oblivion, and a happy marvelling at the diversity that keeps life roaring on.

But there is no way to communicate, in political terms, a mature vision for this country without running afoul of our need for pep-rallies.

the falcon cannot hear the falconer

There’s that deaf feeling, circling and yet pin-pointed.

The figure of the dangerous lover crops up in blockbuster movies, pulp fiction, harlequin romance novels, as well as more literary fiction and films. He is a staple figure of our collective imagination and his presence seems almost synonymous with romance—excepting perhaps feature films of the romantic comedy variety.

Strange then, that this book by Dr. Deborah Lutz should be the first and only one I’ve run across to explore and dissect this figure, his character and history.

An academic book of this nature could easily become just an exercise in collating footnotes and obscure material; instead, Dr. Lutz opts for a more meditative, essayistic approach to her subject, something akin perhaps to Didion, Barthes, or Benjamin. The method fits the subject matter well as the dangerous lover could be considered part of our collective dreamscape and therefore benefits from a study that ambles through our cultural sensorium and recollections in a fashion largely informed and choreographed by the character of the dangerous lover himself. What is thrilling about the book is its ability to deal in Heidegger as well as harlequin romance without missing a beat or without making these different literary realms seem incongruous or affected.

While at times the arguments in Dr. Lutz’s prose can meander disconcertingly as it explores her topic, it nevertheless is guided by a prevailing wind of deep, thoughtful, and studious reflection on her subject—a subject that, whether we like to admit it or not, has an incredibly deep hold on our inner life, whether in our romantic attachments, our sense of self, or our consumption of entertainment.

I found it very well worth the read for its ability to both broaden my understanding of various literary genres, as well as helping me understand aspects of my self and self-development in new and interesting light.

Romance teaches us that love, like philosophy and thinking itself, is never completed. Each declaration of “I love you” is finite and utterly singular, yet in its abundance of meaning, it means both everything and nothing. To say “I love you” points to a singular place and time, with a unique and always changing self that speaks, an “I” and a “you” whose status is always uncertain. In this sense, its meaning is so fleeting; we might say that we can never agree on a meaning for this utterance. Yet, everyone knows what love means; to love is, as Nancy writes, to exist as such: to think, to be , to philosophize. The “I love you” is what can be repeated, perhaps must be repeated. “Love in its singularity, when it is grasped absolutely, is itself perhaps nothing but the indefinite abundance of all possible loves, and an abandonment to their dissemination, indeed to the disorder of these explosions” (Inoperative Community, 83). The prodigiousness of the “I love you” is that, while it ends a particular love story, it also stretches beyond it, indicating a future “I love you.”

Ragan Sutterfield. “No Easy Saint: Bonhoeffer and Just War” in Books and Culture, May/June 2005.

http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2005/mayjun/25.34.html?paging=off

About A Border Passage, my friend writes me:

“it’s a memoir
it was very interesting how she went over
the history of the middle east
and what being ‘arab’ means

her critique of said’s orientalism was interesting

as well as her comment on the state of feminism in the
US in the 70s
…
if you ever read it,
i’d love to know what you think of it
for me, the good part came at the very end
in the beginning, i was worried she was
going to be another amy tang (joy luck club)”

I am sending this for Christmas to three people close to me. The time to take the time for something like understanding.

Regarding the current situation with the United States’ undeclared war on Iraq, perhaps a quote from the German National Socialist (Nazi) Hermann Göring is in order:

“Naturally, the common people don’t want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag people along whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.”

—Hermann Göring, at the Nüremberg trials after WWII

My cynicism about computers and the power hungry ways of operating system (OS) manufacturers have tended to temper my willingness to enter the “PC vs. Mac” debate. However, I have just read the most articulate and beautiful exposition as to why Mac OS X is so much better than Windows, and I have found it reverberating in unexpected ways in terms of how I think about all the little things I immerse myself in daily. Compared to what computers should be, both OS options (as well as Linux, Solaris, etc.) are quite terrible. But within the general failings, there are differences, and significant differences. Some differences might even lead to inspiration. An excerpt:

“The bouncing icons (and the puffs of smoke and the pipe-organ speech synthesizer and the way dialogs tidily resize and the drop-shadows on the windows and the jellybean buttons and the eject key on the keyboard) are not individually rationalizable on utilitarian grounds, and they do not pretend they mean to be. They are there to, in aggregate, change the nature of your relationship with the device. They are joyful, and they hope their joy is infectious. The more you use a Mac, and the more of its secrets you learn (and the bizarre truth is that although simple tasks are designed to be much simpler on the Mac than on a PC, the Mac is also much more deeply and pervasively capable of being tweaked and customized and automated and shortcutted), the more you will like it. This is exactly, radically, totally the opposite of what happens in Windows, where every damn thing you learn after the first ten minutes will make you hate it more and more violently.” Source: <http://www.furia.com/twas/twas0415.html>