I haven't done one of these in a while, in part because I'd sort of painted myself into a corner with the length of my writeups and didn't have the time for that. So I expect these to be shorter, but, hey, maybe that means they'll happen more often. The self-imposed rules: note the first fifteen songs that come up when I listen to my iPod on shuffle at work in the morning; write about them. I've settled on Thursdays as the day of the week to do this.
1. Mr. Lif - "Collapse": So-called underground, "indie" rapper (or, groan, "undie"). Def Jux. Given my former tendency to assume that the mainstream--in any genre--was not worth paying any attention to at all, I had had high hopes for the Def Jux crew, but I've been generally disappointed. Mr. Lif is no exception. Some of his songs are pretty cool, but I tend to be put off by the timbre of his voice. This one gets better as it goes along.
2. DJ Spooky - "Variation Cybernetique: Rhythmic Pataphysic": How's that for a song title? I first heard of Spooky around the time DJ Shadow was getting big. I bought a random cd of his expecting it to be something like the noisy, hip-hop-ish Riddim Warfare, but it ended up being more of a musique concrète urban soundscape sort of thing. It wasn't what I was looking for at the time, and I eventually got rid of it (I don't remember the title). Later, he did Optometry as part of the Matthew Shipp-curated Blue Series on Thirsty Ear, with contributions from Shipp, William Parker, Daniel Carter, Joe McPhee, and numerous others. I've been up and down about this album (it was on the chopping block last year), but it has enough on it of interest for me to keep. This short track features Daniel Bernard Roumain on violin and is nice and shimmery.
3. The Unicorns - "Ghost Mountain": I loved Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone? Loved the ramshackle, half-formed pop songs, the crunchy guitar sound and largely non-sensical lyrics, the sense the songs gave that they were barely holding together. Listened to it incessantly for about a year, not much in the last couple. They seem to be obsessed with ghosts.
4. Scott Walker - "Cockfighter": Very dramatic. I still need to spend some quality time with the two Walker cds I have, and work is oddly not the best place for that kind of thing. This song is interesting--begins with some metallic percussion before settling into its groove--but drifts by without my really being able to get a handle on it. From Tilt.
5. The Flatlanders - "The Stars in my life": More a Legend Than a Band is one of my favorite albums of all time. Great country music.
6. Liz Phair - "Help Me Mary": Exile in Guyville is really the only Liz Phair album I like, and even it I don't like that much. I've always thought it was good, not great, but with a few fantastic songs (like "Divorce Song"). This one's ok. I've always thought it was sort of creepy how obsessed certain male listeners were with Phair, given the sexually explicit lyrics, and I'd tended to think that her popularity was mainly with that crowd (boy wannabe critics). But that was before I met Aimée and saw how much she and her girlfriends (who are all six or seven years younger than I am) love Phair and especially Exile in Guyville. (Incidentally, I have no opinion on the controversial self-titled cd; since I'd already lost interest by the time it came out, I never bothered to listen to it, though I was a little curious when I became aware that it had serious defenders in the "poptimist" crowd.)
7. Mandy Barnett - "Funny, Familiar, Forgotten Feelings": I bought Barnett's I've Got a Right to Cry cd several years ago, partly because she has a pretty voice and sounds like Patsy Cline. The album is not bad, but not thrilling. Not really in line with mainstream country, which is usually fine by me. Never got a lot of play. I've given it to my father as part of the purge.
8. The Mountain Goats - "You or Your Memory": The first track on The Sunset Tree. I love the Mountain Goats, of course, but I did not immediately like this song. It's grown on me.
9. Pixies - "Rock Music": I never feel like listening to a Pixies album anymore, but damn their songs sound good when they come up like this, like the great pop songs they are. From Bossanova.
10. Neutral Milk Hotel - "Untitled": This is an instrumental version of one of the main themes, I think, from In the Aeroplane Over the Sea. I've never been able to hear what it is that makes everyone go apeshit over them. Can anyone explain to me why I should care?
11. Wayne Shorter - "Chief Crazy Horse": I've been enjoying listening to a lot of Shorter's music lately--I have a clutch of the Blue Notes. This is from Adam's Apple; I think my favorites are Etc. and The All Seeing Eye.
12. Sly & the Family Stone - "Dance to the Music": There's no doubting the historical importance of this group, but I've never been able to love them. All I have is the single-disc Anthology. It's interesting: when it comes to rock or pop from the 1960s or 1970s, I tend to have full albums and discographies from white artists, and compilations from black artists. I should probably explore the reasons for that. It makes me more than a little uncomfortable. No doubt there are several complex socio-cultural underlying reasons.
13. Basehead - "Hoes on Tour Deal Drie": Not in Kansas Anymore. One of those super-short (36 seconds) between song bridges. I inherited this rap album from a friend who was getting rid of a lot of stuff before leaving the country. It's pretty good; has a loping, drugged out feel.
14. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Planet of Fools": I think David Thomas' albums with Two Pale Boys have been a lot more interesting than the recent Pere Ubu releases. This is from Erehwon and features the group's standard accordian/guitar/trumpet instrumentation.
15. Pet Shop Boys - "It's Alright": There are, what?, eighteen songs on Discography, and I have more than 11,000 songs on my iPod, and yet the Pet Shop Boys keep coming up on these things. Typically chilly disco, not bad, not great.
Bonus rundown from last week (so much for shorter, eh?):
1. Jackie-O Motherfucker - "777 (Tombstone Massive)": I'd like to be able to describe this song, probably the best track on Change, but I don't think I can, not without spending a lot of time listening to it over and over (which I'm not against, but it won't happen just for this post). JOMF seem to be able to organically combine most of my musical interests in one place: blues, Appalachian folk, skronky free jazz, electronics, drone, and post-rock come together in a glorious clamor. Change is not as good as Fig. 5 or Liberation, but it's still pretty damn good. Slightly more conventional, heavier on the blues.
2. Mission of Burma - "That's When I Reach for my Revolver": Perhaps the best known Mission of Burma song. I love the group, but this song does not excite me. Is it wrong that I heard the Moby version first?
3. James Brown - "Papa's Got a Brand New Bag": What, I'm supposed to have something original to say about this song? It's always been one of my favorites of Brown's singles from the 1960s.
4. Jack Rose - "Black Pearls": Rose is in the group Pelt, which draws heavily from folk and raga, often in the service of the drone. This is virtuosic solo acoustic guitar from Two Originals...
5. Nick Drake - "From the Morning": Pleasant. Pink Moon.
6. Pixies - "All over the World": Another one from Bossanova.
7. Michaela Melian "Brautlied [edit]": A song from one of those Wire magazine comps. Bells, chugging strings; don't know much about it, but I like it.
8. Gastr del Sol - "Thos. Dudley Ah! Old Must Dye": Crookt, Crackt, or Fly. Prickly acoustic guitar fragment with David Grubb's customary crisp, clear, if not mannered vocals, and sound effects. One of my favorite groups.
9. Chris Bell - "You and Your Sister": Bell was in Big Star. I have this song from one of those Oxford American samplers. A nice enough pop ballad.
10. David Thomas & Two Pale Boys - "Numbers Man": More Thomas and Two Pale Boys, this time from 18 Monkeys on a Dead Man's Chest; harder rocking than most of this group's music.
11. Pixies - "Where is my Mind?": Again with the Pixies. Surfer Rosa.
12. Supersilent - "5.2": Glacial. Lovely.
13. Smog - "Everything You Touch Becomes a Crutch": From the great, early album, The Doctor Came at Dawn. The song is short, with acoustic guitar and piano backing. That can be said about many Smog songs, so it basically tells you nothing; sorry about that.
14. Dntel - "Last Songs": Electronic pop. I bought Life is Full of Possibilities because I'd been listening to Death Cab For Cutie a lot and front-band Ben Gibbard's appearance on the album was hyped. By now, a few years on, I have very little interest in the increasingly boring Death Cab (I've discarded most of what I had), didn't even really like that Postal Service record that everyone loved (I've grown to hate Gibbard's voice), but this album gets better and better.
15. Spontaneous Music Ensemble - "Oliv 1": I bought the classic Karyobin while on a trip in London (actually at a Derek Bailey gig in Stoke Newington). I like this (1969) incarnation of the group better. This track is long (19 minutes), with a folky vibe that I find appealing. I downloaded the song from Destination: OUT. Of all the records they've showcased on their site, this is among the handful of albums I'd most like to track down.
Cockburn on Klein
The Sharp Side points to Alexander Cockburn's article in CounterPunch about Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine. Cockburn correctly observes that capitalism has always been brutal, as any reading of the history of English enclosures or the Irish famine will tell you. One point I had in mind in my recent post on "Disaster Capitalism", which used a review of Klein's book as a starting point, is that Neoliberalism essentially is capitalism. What’s “neo” about it is the re-assertion of the liberalization of trade, money, etc, from regulation, to the purpose of class war, disguised by the rhetoric of freedom for all. Milton Friedman, of course, is the big name, along with his Chicago boys. But Cockburn makes an important point that singling out Friedman misses the extent to which the mainstream liberal economists were touting the same line of bullshit throughout the 1980s and 19990s. Citing the left economist Robert Pollin (who I've been meaning to read; his Contours of Descent looks very good), he writes:
Cockburn also chides Klein for her "catastrophism", pointing out that "[j]ust as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance". It's a point worth making. In a sense I was trying to hint in this direction in my post when I said that removing states from the equation makes it more difficult for resistance to take place. For how does one really resist a faceless, placeless corporation? But the truth is that I must admit that I am all too susceptible to a certain kind of catastrophism in my own thinking. I've been trying to rise above that kind of thinking, but it's a struggle for me. The interview with Iain Boal, also in CounterPunch, which I linked to last week, was an important reminder in this regard, as is this article by Cockburn, not to mention all of the writings of Noam Chomsky. There is work to do--and resistance does happen, it can happen, it has happened, victories large and small have been attained, many of which have indeed been overturned or undermined by neoliberal policies--hence, again, "neo"--but all the more reason to resist again, but resist better, win fuller, more secure victories. Things may look pretty shitty on many fronts right now, but that's no reason to succumb to thoughts of doom.
"Shock therapy" neoliberalism really isn't most closely associated with Milton Friedman, but rather with Jeffrey Sachs, to whom Klein does certainly give many useful pages, even though Friedman remains the dark star of her story. Sachs first introduced shock therapy in Bolivia in the early 1990s. Then he went into Poland, Russia, etc, with the same shock therapy model. Sachs' catchy phrase then was that "you can't leap over an abyss step-by-step," or words to that effect. This is really where contemporary neoliberalism took shape. And, it wasn't just Sachs.Cockburn quotes Pollin directly: "it's important to pummel the Sachs's of the world on this point, because they are changing, slowly. To get the world to change, their 1980s-1990s views need to be totally discredited. It's not enough to just say Milton Friedman was an ultra right winger and leave it at that."
It was also other slightly left of center mainstream economists, most notably Summers and Paul Krugman as well. To his credit, Krugman has now recanted; Sachs also, but only partially. It's true that you can make a case that this all goes back to Friedman. [. . .] But [. . .] to blame Friedman for the whole thing, and not how the entire economics mainstream went along--including the "liberals" like Sachs, Krugman, and Summers--is to let these people off the hook and to misrepresent history.
Cockburn also chides Klein for her "catastrophism", pointing out that "[j]ust as there is continuity in capitalist predation, there is continuity in resistance". It's a point worth making. In a sense I was trying to hint in this direction in my post when I said that removing states from the equation makes it more difficult for resistance to take place. For how does one really resist a faceless, placeless corporation? But the truth is that I must admit that I am all too susceptible to a certain kind of catastrophism in my own thinking. I've been trying to rise above that kind of thinking, but it's a struggle for me. The interview with Iain Boal, also in CounterPunch, which I linked to last week, was an important reminder in this regard, as is this article by Cockburn, not to mention all of the writings of Noam Chomsky. There is work to do--and resistance does happen, it can happen, it has happened, victories large and small have been attained, many of which have indeed been overturned or undermined by neoliberal policies--hence, again, "neo"--but all the more reason to resist again, but resist better, win fuller, more secure victories. Things may look pretty shitty on many fronts right now, but that's no reason to succumb to thoughts of doom.
The Mountain Goats
I think my wife Aimée may have sort of fallen in love with John Darnielle. We saw the Mountain Goats last night at Sonar here in Baltimore, and it was a great, great, joyous, life-affirming show (Aimée: "Oh my god he is so adorable!"). If you like the Mountain Goats and haven't seen them, I strongly urge you take the opportunity to do so when it arises. If you don't know the Mountain Goats, well, you should get to know them. I place Darnielle in my inner circle of great working songwriters--with Bill Callahan, Will Oldham, and, at his best, Jason Molina.
He obviously loves performing, and he and bassist Peter Hughes were having a great time and sound terrific together. Of many great moments, the delivery of this line from Tallahassee's "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" was among the most memorable:
"People say friends don't destroy one another/what do they know about friends?"
And--yay!--the encore was "No Children" (also from Tallahassee). Fantastic.
Darnielle faves the Bowerbirds opened, and they were quite good. Also definitely worth checking out.
He obviously loves performing, and he and bassist Peter Hughes were having a great time and sound terrific together. Of many great moments, the delivery of this line from Tallahassee's "Game Shows Touch Our Lives" was among the most memorable:
"People say friends don't destroy one another/what do they know about friends?"
And--yay!--the encore was "No Children" (also from Tallahassee). Fantastic.
Darnielle faves the Bowerbirds opened, and they were quite good. Also definitely worth checking out.
Boilerplate Stones
[I began this post last Saturday, sitting amidst stacks of potential cd discards. I stopped because something else came up, and I wasn't sure how to finish it; also, it somehow didn't seem to fit, whatever that means. I'd felt like I painted myself into some big-claim corner (a pitfall of longwindedness), when really it was meant to be much more modest. Anyway, here goes, rambly and incomplete as it is...]
I want to argue in favor of a band's catalog, in favor of an artist's minor works. As I begin this post, I am listening to Steel Wheels, the Rolling Stones' 1989 album that kicked off their massive world tour of the same name, effectively ending the post-Dirty Work animosity between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Since then the Stones have released an album every five years or so (generally, as with every Stones album since 1981's Tattoo You, praised in certain quarters as their best record since either Exile On Main Street or Some Girls, depending) and toured the world, making boatloads of money in the process.
I'm listening to Steel Wheels, for the first time in probably 15 years, because I am culling the collection, more aggressively than ever before. I listen to this album, and I'm reminded again of how great the Rolling Stones are. I'm not trying to argue that Steel Wheels is a lost classic or an underappreciated gem. Hardly. I'm not even going to keep it. But, it's fine, you know? It's a perfectly pleasant 45 minutes or so of listening. The band is in fine form, even if the songs generally aren't terribly memorable. Very few Stones albums are unlistenable, and there is plenty to enjoy on Steel Wheels ("Sad Sad Sad", "Terrifying", and "Hold on to Your Hat" would fit in just fine in some comprehensive, career-spanning compilation). It's boilerplate Stones, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Like any normal Stones fan, my favorite album is one of the big, obvious, famous ones. Many opt for Beggars Banquet or Sticky Fingers. I go for Exile on Main Street. Exile, in 1972, finished off their great run of classic records, after which they settled into their period of rock-star excess (as any retread bio will tell you). Ironically, perhaps, the music from this point on seemed modest by comparison, even when they scored a big hit. You could make a kick-ass two cd collection just cherry-picking the singles from the last 35 years, and in truth that would be all you'd really need from that period. But, as ever, there's some good music to be had looking past the obvious.
I've always thought this, but I was struck by this anew a few weeks ago, after returning home from a friend's wedding in Rhode Island. One of the songs played at the reception was the Stones' "It's Only Rock'n Roll". I had great fun pretending to preen like Mick Jagger (seriously). The song is a classic rock radio staple, or used to be anyway. There's something faintly ridiculous about its lyrics, and I had never listened to the music closely before. But I now had the song, especially its opening, stuck in my head, so when I got home, I pulled out my It's Only Rock'n Roll cd and listened to it several times over that next weekend. Somewhere Lester Bangs calls It's Only Rock'n Roll "the first Rolling Stones album that doesn't matter, and thank God for that" (not a direct quote; I could go get my Bangs anthology to check, but that seems like a lot of work). What this album offers is good, solid Rolling Stones music. By the time "Fingerprint File"--the six-plus minute last song--was half done, I realized that here was a damn fine rock album. Nothing on it sticks out like, say, "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Paint it Black"--even "It's Only Rock'n Roll", its big chorus notwithstanding, just sounds like, well, rock and roll, like the Rolling Stones, which I mean in the best possible way. When I think of the Stones, I think of a grimy, swaggering professionalism, if that isn't too much of a contradiction, and this album exudes this quality. If Exile is the quintessential, classic album representing my idea of what the Stones were really about, It's Only Rock'n Roll is the workmanlike entry providing ample evidence that the band lived and breathed this kind of music.
I want to argue in favor of a band's catalog, in favor of an artist's minor works. As I begin this post, I am listening to Steel Wheels, the Rolling Stones' 1989 album that kicked off their massive world tour of the same name, effectively ending the post-Dirty Work animosity between Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Since then the Stones have released an album every five years or so (generally, as with every Stones album since 1981's Tattoo You, praised in certain quarters as their best record since either Exile On Main Street or Some Girls, depending) and toured the world, making boatloads of money in the process.
I'm listening to Steel Wheels, for the first time in probably 15 years, because I am culling the collection, more aggressively than ever before. I listen to this album, and I'm reminded again of how great the Rolling Stones are. I'm not trying to argue that Steel Wheels is a lost classic or an underappreciated gem. Hardly. I'm not even going to keep it. But, it's fine, you know? It's a perfectly pleasant 45 minutes or so of listening. The band is in fine form, even if the songs generally aren't terribly memorable. Very few Stones albums are unlistenable, and there is plenty to enjoy on Steel Wheels ("Sad Sad Sad", "Terrifying", and "Hold on to Your Hat" would fit in just fine in some comprehensive, career-spanning compilation). It's boilerplate Stones, and there's nothing wrong with that.
Like any normal Stones fan, my favorite album is one of the big, obvious, famous ones. Many opt for Beggars Banquet or Sticky Fingers. I go for Exile on Main Street. Exile, in 1972, finished off their great run of classic records, after which they settled into their period of rock-star excess (as any retread bio will tell you). Ironically, perhaps, the music from this point on seemed modest by comparison, even when they scored a big hit. You could make a kick-ass two cd collection just cherry-picking the singles from the last 35 years, and in truth that would be all you'd really need from that period. But, as ever, there's some good music to be had looking past the obvious.
I've always thought this, but I was struck by this anew a few weeks ago, after returning home from a friend's wedding in Rhode Island. One of the songs played at the reception was the Stones' "It's Only Rock'n Roll". I had great fun pretending to preen like Mick Jagger (seriously). The song is a classic rock radio staple, or used to be anyway. There's something faintly ridiculous about its lyrics, and I had never listened to the music closely before. But I now had the song, especially its opening, stuck in my head, so when I got home, I pulled out my It's Only Rock'n Roll cd and listened to it several times over that next weekend. Somewhere Lester Bangs calls It's Only Rock'n Roll "the first Rolling Stones album that doesn't matter, and thank God for that" (not a direct quote; I could go get my Bangs anthology to check, but that seems like a lot of work). What this album offers is good, solid Rolling Stones music. By the time "Fingerprint File"--the six-plus minute last song--was half done, I realized that here was a damn fine rock album. Nothing on it sticks out like, say, "Sympathy for the Devil" or "Paint it Black"--even "It's Only Rock'n Roll", its big chorus notwithstanding, just sounds like, well, rock and roll, like the Rolling Stones, which I mean in the best possible way. When I think of the Stones, I think of a grimy, swaggering professionalism, if that isn't too much of a contradiction, and this album exudes this quality. If Exile is the quintessential, classic album representing my idea of what the Stones were really about, It's Only Rock'n Roll is the workmanlike entry providing ample evidence that the band lived and breathed this kind of music.
Talking Music
I haven't posted about music in a while, for a variety of reasons. Time, as ever, is one of them. Another is that my relationship toward music, particularly the acquisition of music and keeping up with new music, has changed dramatically this year, perhaps definitively. I am, for example, in the early stages of getting rid of a lot of the music I currently own. I will be allowing my subscription to The Wire to lapse. I may talk more about this later, but for now I'll leave this as a preamble.
I may be listening to less music, or buying less anyway, and unable to keep up in the manner I'd become habituated to, but I still read about it a lot online. And there's some great writing about music going on and some great conversations taking place. So I'm going to try to point to some of this stuff more. Here are a few:
The Bad Plus is a jazz trio that has become known ("notorious") for playing covers of rock and electronic songs. I've never heard them, though I'd like to. They have a blog. They seem really cool. I noted the word "notorious" because a lot of the press they've received has assumed that they are taking the piss when they cover this material. In this post, they take issue with this idea. A sample:
Brian at the new musicology blog People Listen to It wades into the authenticity wars with Why Beefheart? Paraphrasing Christgau, he says, "both Zappa and Beefheart are weird, but Zappa is being weird. Beefheart is weird. Thus Zappa is a poser and Beefheart is the authentic artist, worthy of reverence and whatever else." I disagree with this, for my own purposes. This kind of thing has nothing to do with why I like Captain Beefheart and don't like Zappa. Besides, I've been counter-conditioned to be suspicious of these kinds of claims to authenticity. (Though I think there is an authenticity that resides outside the familiar tropes, but I've no time to flesh that idea out here.)
Finally for here, at Parlando, in "Cool Ain't Shit", Scraps writes on the theme of "No one wants to hear that something they like is crap."
I may be listening to less music, or buying less anyway, and unable to keep up in the manner I'd become habituated to, but I still read about it a lot online. And there's some great writing about music going on and some great conversations taking place. So I'm going to try to point to some of this stuff more. Here are a few:
The Bad Plus is a jazz trio that has become known ("notorious") for playing covers of rock and electronic songs. I've never heard them, though I'd like to. They have a blog. They seem really cool. I noted the word "notorious" because a lot of the press they've received has assumed that they are taking the piss when they cover this material. In this post, they take issue with this idea. A sample:
With the rare exception, TBP doesn't choose to improvise on music written from 1920 to 1965. Instead, we find it really interesting to search for ways to make rock, pop and electronica songs vehicles for contemporary improvisation. One reason that this material is not "standard" is that you can't call "Iron Man" at a jam session and pull off a mediocre interpretation of it the way you can with "All the Things You Are." There simply isn't a common language for it.The whole post is worth reading, as is their blog generally, if you care about this sort of thing. I came to their post by way of this post at James Darcy Argue's Secret Society, one of the better jazz-focused blogs I've seen. And it was this excellent Secret Society post about irony and humor in music that led me there (link via be.jazz).
But just because the non-original songs we play can't be called at a jam session isn't the reason 10 English critics think it's a joke. Why do they think it is a joke? There are two possible reasons:
A) The original music itself is a joke: in other words, Nirvana, Blondie, Aphex
Twin, ABBA, Neil Young, The Police, David Bowie, Burt Bacharach, Tears for Fears, Black Sabbath, Pixies, Vangelis, Rush, Led Zeppelin, Queen, Radiohead, Bjork, The Bee Gees, and Interpol is just inferior and not at the level of Tin Pan Alley, Broadway, and Hollywood. Implied is the phrase "rock is not worthy of the jazz tradition."
B) The way we play the covers appears like parody or at least highly ironic.
Both are wrong.
Brian at the new musicology blog People Listen to It wades into the authenticity wars with Why Beefheart? Paraphrasing Christgau, he says, "both Zappa and Beefheart are weird, but Zappa is being weird. Beefheart is weird. Thus Zappa is a poser and Beefheart is the authentic artist, worthy of reverence and whatever else." I disagree with this, for my own purposes. This kind of thing has nothing to do with why I like Captain Beefheart and don't like Zappa. Besides, I've been counter-conditioned to be suspicious of these kinds of claims to authenticity. (Though I think there is an authenticity that resides outside the familiar tropes, but I've no time to flesh that idea out here.)
Finally for here, at Parlando, in "Cool Ain't Shit", Scraps writes on the theme of "No one wants to hear that something they like is crap."
Handke and Bernhard in Harper's
I usually like John Leonard's "New Books" column in Harper's, but his review of Peter Handke's Crossing the Sierra de Gredos in the August 2007 issue irritates. First, he tells us that Handke probably lost any chance he had at a Nobel Prize "when he blamed Western politicians and the media for the disintegration of Yugoslavia, took the side of Slobodan Milošević in the Balkan bloodlettings, and published an agitprop travelogue called Justice for Serbia (1996)." Much could be written about the West's role in the dissolution of Yugoslavia, but I'm not going to do so here (I recommend Fool's Crusade: Yugoslavia, NATO, and Western Delusions by Diana Johnstone). Second, this "is Handke's first novel since he surfed this wave of ethnic cleansing". Whatever that means. I'm no expert on Peter Handke's politics, but from what I've seen elsewhere, these kinds of comments seem wrong, if all too typical. And I wonder what it all has to do with Crossing the Sierra de Gredos, though I've yet to see a review that hasn't mentioned this business. Leonard writes: "Naturally, we read it for clues to his disorderly state of mind." Do we? Naturally? Handke, it seems is not so helpful: "Just as naturally, he is hiding out in allegory, wearing veils." Hiding out! Leonard proceeds to discuss the novel for a short while, taking time out to praise earlier "allegorical voyages" such as A Moment of True Feeling (1975), The Afternoon of a Writer (1987), and Absence (1987), before closing with this:
Also in the August issue of Harper's, in the "Readings" section, is an excerpt from a 1986 interview with Thomas Bernhard, by Werner Wögerbauer. The full English version appeared in signandsight. Here is an extract (oddly, I notice that the extract is somewhat different--including some strange rearrangements--than the same bits in the full version, though the translation is the same, by Nicholas Grindell; since I saw it first in Harper's I'm putting what they have, if only because it's weird that it was so modified):
But never before has Handke gone on at such inordinate length, 480 pages, before arriving at that same old post-modern solipsisim that feels sorry for itself because it no longer believes that anything else is real, certainly no Srebrenica.Priceless. (For what it's worth, see what Handke himself has said about the "Balkan bloodlettings" here and here.)
Also in the August issue of Harper's, in the "Readings" section, is an excerpt from a 1986 interview with Thomas Bernhard, by Werner Wögerbauer. The full English version appeared in signandsight. Here is an extract (oddly, I notice that the extract is somewhat different--including some strange rearrangements--than the same bits in the full version, though the translation is the same, by Nicholas Grindell; since I saw it first in Harper's I'm putting what they have, if only because it's weird that it was so modified):
Wögerbauer: What kind of intellectual aims do you--
Bernhard: No one asks themselves that sort of thing. People don't have aims. Young people, up to twenty-three, they still fall for that. A person who has lived five decades has no aims, because there's no goal.
Wögerbauer: But when you describe yourself as a "destroyer of stories," that is a theoretical statement.
Bernhard: Well, people say a lot of things in fifty years of life. If a reporter is sitting in a restaurant somewhere and he hears you say the beef's no good, then he'll always claim you're someone who doesn't like beef, for the rest of your life. You go for a walk in the woods, and someone takes a photo of you, then for the next eighty years you're always walking in the woods. There's nothing you can do about it.
[. . .]
Wögerbauer: What, in your view, is a conversation?
Bernhard: I don't usually have them. To me people who want to have a conversation are suspect, because that raises particular expectations they're unable to satisfy. It all gets thrown in together and then one person stirs this way, the other stirs that, and an unbearable stinking turd comes out the bottom. No matter who it is. There are collected conversations, hundreds of them, books full. Entire publishing houses live off them. Like something coming out of an anus, and then it gets squashed in between book covers. It's all just for the workers at the paper factory, so they have something to do, which might make some sense. Because they have a terrible life anyway and lose all their limbs--at fifty most of them have lost a leg or five fingers. Paper machines are cruel. At least it has some meaning, the family can get something extra. I live next to two paper factories, so I know how it is. In ten years you'll see how stupid it all was. This wasn't a conversation either.
Disaster Capitalism
Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, has been getting a lot of attention lately. I’m interested in reading it. I liked what I read of her earlier book, No Logo (I read about 3/4 of it), and have appreciated her work in recent years.
At ads without products, I came across the following short advertising film for the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame:
In the film, and it appears the book, Klein draws comparisons between the use of torture in U.S. interrogation techniques (laid out in the CIA manuals) and the methods of “crisis capitalism”, or what she calls the economic “shock doctrine”: each is intended to soften up the victim so that they are more likely to bend, less likely to resist.
In a respectful review in the Guardian (link via The Reading Experience), John Gray puts Klein's thesis like this:
In an earlier post in which I briefly asserted that capitalism needs states, I quoted a passage from a Noam Chomsky essay from 1977 ("American Foreign Policy in the Middle East", collected in Towards a New Cold War). As the titles makes plain, the essay was specifically about American policy in the Middle East and, in part, about the role of the oil companies in the region. Here is how the passage began:
In his book, Harvey traces the development of, experimentation with, and eventual widespread political accommodation to neoliberal ideas and policies. The bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s; the assassination of Allende of Chile in 1973, followed by the first imposition of Milton Friedman's neoliberal ideas on a nationwide scale by Pinochet, guided by Chicago-trained economists; Thatcherite England; Carter and Reagan; the capitalization of China: Harvey discusses all of this and more, along the way comparing the rhetoric of neoliberalism with the practice. Where Gray paints Friedman and his followers as deluded "utopians" (not unlike popular conceptions of communist revolutionaries), Harvey shows that "the theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has . . . primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve" the goal of "restoring, or some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite". In short, class war, justified by the attractive but ultimately empty rhetoric of freedom. That is, they knew what they were doing, even if Gray is right (and I think he probably is) that "disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than [the system] can handle". (For more on what happened to New York City in the 1970s, see "Neoliberalism and the City" from Studies in Social Justice (the link is to a pdf); for an even briefer history of neoliberalism than offered by Harvey's book, see this excellent interview with Harvey at The Monthly Review's MRZine.)
"They knew what they were doing." Who is "they" in this case? If Gray's review is any indication, it sounds as if Naomi Klein focuses on the depredations of "disaster capitalism" through the prism of large corporations. If so, this isn't surprising, given the balance of her work in the past, including No Logo. It's not unimportant, of course. We need to know what those corporations are up to. But, as suggested by the Chomsky passage, there are general systemic interests over and above the short-term needs of even the most powerful corporations. Who attends to the system? Whereas many have observed the existence of hugely powerful multinational corporations and organizations such as the WTO and concluded that we are living in a period of the declining importance of states, in Empire of Capital Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that
There is a lot more that can be said about Wood's book (I found the idea of the state as the enforcer of not only the system of property but also "propertylessness" extremely important, and now that she's brought it to my attention, obvious), but I'll leave with one more thing before finishing up here. She points out that the idea that states are declining in importance, the premise that "the nation state is giving way to a new form of stateless 'sovereignty' that is everywhere and nowhere" (as argued by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their popular book Empire, which I have not read)--"such views", she says, "not only miss something truly essential in today's global order but also leave us powerless to resist the empire of capital." Recognizing the remaining importance of states means that there can be--and are--centers of power, potential loci of resistance. Many of us feel powerless enough as it is, but without political entities (in this case states) to resist against, without a place to act politically, that sense of powerlessness can only increase.
I like what I've heard about Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and I look forward to learning a lot from it. For those interested in understanding the present world, I highly recommend also reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Empire of Capital.
At ads without products, I came across the following short advertising film for the book, directed by Alfonso Cuarón of Children of Men fame:
In the film, and it appears the book, Klein draws comparisons between the use of torture in U.S. interrogation techniques (laid out in the CIA manuals) and the methods of “crisis capitalism”, or what she calls the economic “shock doctrine”: each is intended to soften up the victim so that they are more likely to bend, less likely to resist.
In a respectful review in the Guardian (link via The Reading Experience), John Gray puts Klein's thesis like this:
As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters.In his penultimate paragraph, he writes:
[. . .]
Klein uses torture as a metaphor, and does not claim any cause-and-effect link between its re-emergence and the rise of neo-liberal shock therapy; but she does point to some disquieting similarities. Individuals and societies have been "de-patterned" with the aim of remaking them on a better, more rational model. In each case, the experiments have failed, while inflicting lasting and often irreparable damage on those who were subjected to them.
There can be no doubt that fortunes have been reaped from the Iraq war as they have been from other experiments in disaster capitalism. Yet I remain unconvinced that the corporations Klein berates throughout the book understand, let alone control, the anarchic global capitalism that has been allowed to develop over the past couple of decades - any more than the neo-liberal ideologues who helped create it foresaw where it would lead. Rightly, Klein insists that free market ideology must bear responsibility for the crimes committed on its behalf - just as Marxist ideology must be held to account for the crimes of communism. But she says remarkably little about the illusions by which neo-liberal ideologues were themselves blinded. Milton Friedman and his disciples believed a western-style free market would spring up spontaneously in post-communist Russia. They were left gawping when central planning was followed by the criminalised free-for-all of the 90s, and were unprepared for the rise of Putin's resource-based state capitalism. These ideologues were not the sinister, Dr Strangelove-like figures of the anti-capitalist imagination. They were comically deluded bien-pensants, who promoted their utopian schemes with messianic fervour and have been left stranded by history, as the radiant future they confidently predicted has failed to arrive.I disagree with most of this paragraph, which is packed with a lot of questionable assumptions. I won't attempt a point-by-point response, but let me try to address some of them.
In an earlier post in which I briefly asserted that capitalism needs states, I quoted a passage from a Noam Chomsky essay from 1977 ("American Foreign Policy in the Middle East", collected in Towards a New Cold War). As the titles makes plain, the essay was specifically about American policy in the Middle East and, in part, about the role of the oil companies in the region. Here is how the passage began:
The oil companies face local problems as a result of continued American barriers to a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli crisis in the only possible manner, that is, with a two-state settlement along roughly the 1967 borders. But the basic long-term interests of American capitalism have, so far, been adequately served by this policy. As noted before, this is not the first time that the oil companies, despite their power, have been subordinated to more general interests.And what are these more general interests? They are the maintenance of the capitalist system as a whole. This is where the idea that capitalism needs states comes in. In his review, Gray says: "There are very few books that really help us understand the present." I agree. Gray suggests that Klein's is just such a book. Here are two more: A Brief History of Neoliberalism, by David Harvey, and Empire of Capital, by Ellen Meiksins Wood.
In his book, Harvey traces the development of, experimentation with, and eventual widespread political accommodation to neoliberal ideas and policies. The bankruptcy of New York City in the 1970s; the assassination of Allende of Chile in 1973, followed by the first imposition of Milton Friedman's neoliberal ideas on a nationwide scale by Pinochet, guided by Chicago-trained economists; Thatcherite England; Carter and Reagan; the capitalization of China: Harvey discusses all of this and more, along the way comparing the rhetoric of neoliberalism with the practice. Where Gray paints Friedman and his followers as deluded "utopians" (not unlike popular conceptions of communist revolutionaries), Harvey shows that "the theoretical utopianism of neoliberal argument has . . . primarily worked as a system of justification and legitimation for whatever needed to be done to achieve" the goal of "restoring, or some instances (as in Russia and China) creating, the power of an economic elite". In short, class war, justified by the attractive but ultimately empty rhetoric of freedom. That is, they knew what they were doing, even if Gray is right (and I think he probably is) that "disaster capitalism is now creating disasters larger than [the system] can handle". (For more on what happened to New York City in the 1970s, see "Neoliberalism and the City" from Studies in Social Justice (the link is to a pdf); for an even briefer history of neoliberalism than offered by Harvey's book, see this excellent interview with Harvey at The Monthly Review's MRZine.)
"They knew what they were doing." Who is "they" in this case? If Gray's review is any indication, it sounds as if Naomi Klein focuses on the depredations of "disaster capitalism" through the prism of large corporations. If so, this isn't surprising, given the balance of her work in the past, including No Logo. It's not unimportant, of course. We need to know what those corporations are up to. But, as suggested by the Chomsky passage, there are general systemic interests over and above the short-term needs of even the most powerful corporations. Who attends to the system? Whereas many have observed the existence of hugely powerful multinational corporations and organizations such as the WTO and concluded that we are living in a period of the declining importance of states, in Empire of Capital Ellen Meiksins Wood argues that
. . . for all the globalizing tendencies of capitalism, the world has become more, not less, a world of nation states, not only as a result of national liberation struggles, but also under pressure from imperial powers.Where formerly it was the British who enforced the nascent global system (Mike Davis' Late Victorian Holocausts, which I am currently reading, is proving invaluably instructive on this score), with the end of World War II (and adverserial inter-ally politics during the war) the United States emerged as its guarantor. Wood spends some time discussing the differences between various empires throughout history (Roman, Chinese, Spanish, Arab Muslim, Dutch, Venetian, British) in order to show how the empire presided over by the United States is different: the first truly capitalist empire. If capitalist imperatives are self-replicating and "purely economic", and neoliberalism promises freedom for all, where is the problem? The problem is
These powers have found the nation state the most reliable guarantor of the conditions necessary for accumulation, and the only means by which capital can freely expand beyond the boundaries of direct political domination. As market imperatives have become a means of manipulating local elites, local states have proved to be far more useful transmission belts for capitalist imperatives than were the old colonial agents and settlers who originally carried the capitalist market throughout the world.
this mode of imperialism, like capitalism itself, has contradictions at its very core. One the one hand, it depends on the separation of the ‘economic’ and ‘political’, which makes possible the unbounded expansion of capitalist appropriation by purely economic means and the extension of the capitalist economy far beyond the limits of the nation state. Capitalism has a unique drive for self-expansion. Capital cannot survive without constant accumulation, and its requirements relentlessly drive it to expand its geographic scope beyond national boundaries too. Yet, on the other hand, capital has always needed the support of territorial states; and while the wide-ranging expansion of capitalist appropriation has moved far beyond national borders, the national organization of capitalist economies has remained stubbornly persistent. At the same time, the nation state has remained an indispensable instrument – perhaps the only indispensable ‘extra-economic’ instrument – of global capital.'Extra-economic' means politics; 'extra-economic' instrument means the political state, usually in the form of a monopoly on violence. Within countries, the process is more straightforward: "capital appropriates, while the 'neutral' state enforces the system of property, and propertylessness." It's a lot more complicated in the global system, but I think the actions taken by the United States since the end of World War II--from containment policy, including the wars in Korea and Vietnam, to "support" for not only Israel and, earlier, South Africa, but countless Third World despots--make a whole lot more sense when viewed within the conceptual framework of the United States as enforcer and guarantor of the capitalist world system (which is not to say that individual personalities don't impact the political situation in their own ways). Now, as American economic hegemony has all but collapsed, American attempts to throw its weight around militarily seem increasingly desperate.
There is a lot more that can be said about Wood's book (I found the idea of the state as the enforcer of not only the system of property but also "propertylessness" extremely important, and now that she's brought it to my attention, obvious), but I'll leave with one more thing before finishing up here. She points out that the idea that states are declining in importance, the premise that "the nation state is giving way to a new form of stateless 'sovereignty' that is everywhere and nowhere" (as argued by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their popular book Empire, which I have not read)--"such views", she says, "not only miss something truly essential in today's global order but also leave us powerless to resist the empire of capital." Recognizing the remaining importance of states means that there can be--and are--centers of power, potential loci of resistance. Many of us feel powerless enough as it is, but without political entities (in this case states) to resist against, without a place to act politically, that sense of powerlessness can only increase.
I like what I've heard about Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctrine, and I look forward to learning a lot from it. For those interested in understanding the present world, I highly recommend also reading A Brief History of Neoliberalism and Empire of Capital.
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