Raving on into the New Year! latest letter to Morning Edition

I'm aliiiive!

Oh my god! I just had to slam the radio off when you played that Trout Fishing in America “children’s” song about Martin Luther King and Rosa Parks. Not that I don’t believe we should teach history to children; but this is a sure fire way to kill it. Except for the politically correct lyrics, it did not sound any different than the inane children songs that annoyingly emanate from “children sections” at bookstores. If I were a parent who had to be held hostage to that song, I would ask my captors to simply kill me. This stuff is not educational in any sense of the word: it does not educate about history and certainly has nothing to do with music. It’s just unimaginative, 2-4 twangy, Americo-centric indoctrination. I rather listen to commercial jingles about hemorrhoid medicine. Maybe Kathy O’Connell went on to discuss more creative picks; but like I said, I couldn’t get past her favorite.

Sincerely,
Katya Cohen

Using Baudrillard to explain Devendra Banhart

The advantage of working with younger generations is that they can turn you onto things you would not otherwise seek on your own. Such is the case with the music of Devendra Banhart: one of my students used to play a medley that, to my delight, included “Chinese Children” in class, and another sent me a couple of his CD’s recently (Cripple Crow and Smokey Rolls Down Thunder Canyon). I slipped them (one at a time) into the CD player and took to them immediately. The Ranting Economist, on the other hand, upon hearing Cripple Crow in the car, called it “derivative boring crap” (-;

I know what it is that I like about these records; it’s comfortable music. It shape shifts among a myriad of familiar genres that make up my musical consciousness and that, for the most part, I like: the receptors in my brain are already configured to respond to it. The following is a partial list of ingredients others have invoked to describe Banhart’s music: Funk, Samba, Eisenhower-era doo-wop, Tropicalia, Reggae, Beatles, Tiny Tim, Caetano Veloso, David Crosby, Donovan, Santana, Nick Drake, Skip Spence, Jerry Garcia, Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen, The Byrds, Conga, Groove, bossa nova, psychedelia, folk, and I definitely hear The Doors... One of the favorable reviews of SRDTC on Amazon does say the CD “has something for everyone” with the assumption that that’s a good thing. It obviously does nothing for The Ranting Economist; and although I love listening to the albums, one of my favorite unfavorable reviews of Cripple Crow is: Este CD e espantosamente horrible... no tiene estilo proprio. I love the word “espantosamente”; but it is the phrase “no tiene estilo proprio” that interests me, and brings me back to Baudrillard and the ‘80’s.[1]

Although I first learned about the word “bricolage” from my French uncle while he tinkered around the construction site that was to be his future house, if I recall correctly, it went from fun to theory with Derrida[2], and was quite in vogue during the 80’s to describe what visual artists and writers were doing with their art and texts---or was everything just “text” then (?)... Baudrillard does not seem to use the word to describe the state of the arts in the 80’s; but what he describes as being postmodern in his interview Game with Vestiges[3] seems to fit under its definition (gestalt being what it is, of course it would). "Art can no longer operate as radical critique or deconstructive metaphor. So art at the moment is adrift in a kind of weightlessness. It has brought about a sphere where all forms can coexist. One can play in all possible ways, but no longer against each other. It amounts to this: art is losing its specificity. ...It is becoming mosaic... it cannot do anything more than operate out of a combinatory mode..... The postmodern is characteristic of a universe where there are no more definitions possible... It has all been done. The extreme limit of these possibilities has been reached. It has deconstructed its entire universe; so all that’s left are pieces. All that remains to be done is to play with the pieces.” Visual Art seems to have gotten past this; but could this be what Banhart is doing consciously or not?

By the 80’s Baudriallard could sound melodramatic and nostalgic, and he seems to imply a sadness to this postmodern form of play: “Postmodernism tries to bring back all past cultures, to bring back everything that one has destroyed in joy and which one is reconstructing in sadness in order to try to live, to survive...” And although I see Banhart’s music as quintessentially postmodern[4] and thus utterly digestible, I don’t see it as a “reconstruction in sadness” but one that is done in “joy”; it remains to be seen where he can take it from here.

[1] Once I finish reading Postmodern Theory, I’ll hopefully get off this “let’s revisit the 80’s" kick... though given our current state of economic affairs, it feels rather natural...
[2] Well it was first used by Claude Levi Strauss (if the memories of Anthro 101 serve me well); but it r-e-a-l-l-y got s-e-r-i-o-u-s after Derrida got adopted by the visual arts critical establishment. ...and then it disappeared...
[3] Interviews have titles?
[4] weightless, combinatory, and “bricolaged”

More Postmodern Thoughts for ’08: This Time Courtesy of Lyotard

...So my mother calls me and asks me if I have been following the latest instance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict... How can one avoid it; although a (pathetic) constant, it seems to invariably show up (again and again) as news. The solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict seems to be exactly what these two (again, pathetic) groups of people have come up with: this killing, rocket launching and rock throwing is obviously a state of equilibrium. Faced with this clear example of unbridgeable differences I feel like quoting from Lyotard (p. xi) : As distinguished from a litigation, a differend (‘scuse the invented word, but anybody who has ever tried to read a postmodern text knows that they are inevitable and that their definition becomes comprehensible in the reading) would be a case of conflict, between (at least) two parties, that cannot be equitably resolved for lack of a rule of judgment applicable to both arguments. One side’s legitimacy does not imply the other’s lack of legitimacy. However, applying a single rule of judgement to both in order to settle their differend as though it were merely a litigation would wrong (at least) one of them (and both of them if neither side admits this rule). Happy New Year...

a voice of reason : they exist, they're just are never heard

Thinking of Baudriallrd for the closing of '08

Oh, I don’t know, I must be into pain or something because I decided, for no reason whatsoever, to read an old book I had once picked up (and not read) on Postmodern Theory as bed-time reading. My conscious life-span coincides with the period of time in which Pomo also became "self-consscious", I’ve studied it and absorbed its lessons, and... it’s over right (?)- hah- so why trudge through it “one more again”. Why spend time with theories that always seem to dead-end in cultural determinism; and which, when I am being ornery, I tell my students that had we “believed” in when we were tree-dwelling hominids, we would still be clinging to tree branches discussing our different interpretations of the “reality” of the ground below and how going down there would affect power relations.

I had been thinking of Adorno and was interested in what these authors, Steven Best and Douglas Kellner, had to say about him in the context of their book. And instead of just reading the one chapter, I decided, “What the hell, let’s see how the authors fit all of these guys together.” At five pages a night before passing out, it has been slow going and I am one half a Lyotard chapter and one Feminism and Marxism chapter away form what I set out to look for in the first place. But on my way, after revisiting Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, I got to the chapter on Baudriallard; and I can’t help myself, full of shit or not, and a lot of the time he is, the man is extremely exciting to read! No matter how hyperbolic his pronouncements, they seem to resonate with present experience...information dissolves meaning and the social into a sort of nebulous state leading not at all to a surfeit of innovation but to the very contrary, to total entropy...

I don’t seem to be the only one thinking of Baudriallard at this end of year. In the “On the Ground” section of December’s Art Forum, where authors write concluding thoughts about the year in different cities, both Wahlead Bashty and Emily Pethick invoke his name to help describe the scenes in LA and London respectively... One wonders where else he will crop up.

So today I stopped at the bank to get some Cash. The ATM machine was blocked by an armored car, so I parked and walked into the bank for a face to face with a teller. Surprisingly enough the transaction only took seconds; and in some of those seconds, the teller looked at me and said, "You probably don't want to hear this, but you've been approved for $50,000 dollar credit card..." I raised my hand and she smiled knowing I was not interested. I looked at her and said, "My, you're actually lending to people?!" ...Apparently to me, yes, to car companies, no.

The Public Angry at GM: Wha' the Fu'?!

Truly the dumbest urban vehicle know to woman

You know, I’m not a big fan of how the Big Three have done their business; however, for the public to be angry at them at this point in time is a travesty. The Big Three would not have delivered the pathetic automobiles they have done for the past decade had not the American public gobbled them up! In the end they supplied what was being demanded. It’s not like there were no normal fuel efficient cars out there for people to buy; they chose to buy SUV’s. Hell, they looked nice in the four car garages of the houses they were about to default on.

not the future unless we start getting serious about taxing foreign oil