Freudian slips (etc)
Sounds accurate to me: “Superstar artist Greg Land and master of action Chuck Dixon unleash America’s new living weapons in the war against terror! They bomb civilians, hurt innocents, and spread fear.â€?
Also: “Deconstruction can be scientifically proven to be more rigorous than New Criticism or whatever Freudo-marxist synthesis struggling to be born we can find in the belle-lettristic Trilling or Wilson, and I don’t even like deconstruction.â€? And there’s plenty more where that came from.
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The non-philosopher’s magazine
The Philosophers’ Magazine entered the world of philosophy about the same time I did, but I fear its decline has been even more precipitous than my own . While I sit here not reading Hegel, I am at least aware that reading Hegel would be a good thing to do. TPM, meanwhile, seems to think that publishing complete nonsense is the thing to do. As a summary of feminism, “the argument runs something like this. Men have all the power, men are evil, so all power relationships with men are evil,� would be execrable on a right-wing blog. I can’t think what could posess a website with intellectual pretensions to publish it (amusingly, it also gets bell hooks’s name wrong, but that’s probably a subbing error).
Still, looking at the contents for the most recent issue, it looks like the paper edition still publishes proper philosophy, and it’s just the website that is full of crap. The website is also edited by a different person from the print magazine, so I guess we know who to blame. Maybe I’m being a bit elitist, but wouldn’t you expect the editor of the Philosophers’ Magazine to be, well, a philosopher?
Incidentally, I do plan to read some Hegel in the near future (probably when I’ve finished the Larousse Encyclopedia of Music). I was thinking of tackling the shorter Logic again (which I attempted to skim through as background for reading the Lectures on Aesthetics as an undergraduate — it’s not really the sort of book where that works), or having a go at the Phenomenology of Spirit. Any recommendations on what to read, or which editions? I’m particularly interested in stuff which influenced Marx and/or Deleuze.
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The same piano loop, again
Stargate have made a career out of covering SWV’s ‘Right Here’. I’m startled it’s taken me – what , five years? – to realise that.
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Why environmentalism is wrong
I hate to sound like the SWP before they embarked on the road to Seattle via Damascus in 1999, but environmentalism without a class analysis is worse than useless. You end up like one of the founders of Greenpeace, quoting books by Ayn Rand and saying things like: “Just from a brief scan of the Monsanto, Syngenta, and Council for Biotechnology Web sites, it is clear that these companies and organizations are trying to project positive, clean, and calming thoughts.� Well, if the Biotech companies say it’s good for the environment, hooray for genetic modification, eh?
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The same piano loops over and over
I wonder if any human intervention is required to produce an Almighty remix? 4/4 drum track, a synth bass line, loop the first line of the song a couple of times, and an instant classic. It has to be said, it’s unusual for an Almighty remix to be worse than the original track – take their splendid version of ‘Torn’, for example. Their ‘sister label’ Euphoric, meanwhile, has just released a CD containing a number of gay dance remixes, including Nickelback’s ‘How I remind you’ and ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ by Deep Blue Something.
Away from their faceless remixer robots, though, they’re a bit less impressive. Listening to some of their original records brought to mind the old homophobic cliche that catwalk fashion looks so wierd because gay designers want to humiliate women. At least, ‘Funky G’, who’s responsible for getting Candi Staton to sing a DJ Otzi-style cover of ‘Suspicious Minds’ clearly had a deep subconscious hatred of soul divas. Better stick with her version of ‘Stand by your man’, I think.
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Cabbage-heads and Kings
Bernard Henri-Levi says something interesting in an interview with Johann Hari, about the lack of public intellectuals in Britain: “Perhaps it is because you did not have a revolution. Intellectuals have never rebuilt your country. They have always been incidental.�
It’s interesting, of course, because it isn’t really true. In the middle of the 17th century something not unlike a revolution did happen in England, and it was as much a revolution of ideas as of material forces. It’s always struck me as a great shame that, unlike the French, the English are unaware, ambivalent or even hostile to our revolutionary past. Of course there are difficulties (particularly Ireland, where the ‘heroes’ of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were definitely villains); but still, we got rid of our King over 350 years ago, and we can do it again, as 1688 proved. More importantly, perhaps, we argued about it passionately every step of the way. That’s something to be proud of surely?
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‘You’re not even a real bird, you’re a geezer dressed up’
Michael Brooke reminds me of the existence of the Leningrad Cowboys. I first encountered them on a New Year’s Eve many years ago, when, after staggering back from the market square (favoured location for drinking and shouting at the Dean of Ripon), I switched on the TV to see a group of Finns, dressed like the early Beatles and quiffed like mutant Elvises, performing with the Red Army Choir. I later dismissed the whole event as a drink-induced hallicuination, but it seems not. Michael mentions their cover of ‘Happy Together’, which is absolutely great: it takes the original, which sounds a bit like Donovan performing ‘Forever Changes’, and makes it sound like… well, like the Red Army Choir performing ‘Forever Changes’. They also perform the national anthem of the Soviet Union, which is always a pleasure to hear.
Meanwhile, I stumbled across a comparison between Ludacris and eighties UK ska titan, Judge Dread, which cheered me up no end. He did a cover of ‘Je t’aime’, you know.
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Whore of Babylon
I’ve added pictures of books and CDs I’ve recently acquired to the links. They link to Amazon, but don’t take that as any kind of encouragement to buy from there. Unfortunately, although there are non-commercial sources of information about films and music, I don’t know of one which covers books as well, so I’m stuck with whoring for Amazon in return for their pretty pictures. Sorry about that.
Also, going to Amazon to get the information may make the page load slowly. I can’t really tell, because any slowness is swallowed up by the slowness of my modem, but if it’s slowing down the page enough to annoy anyone, let me know and I may be able to fix it.
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Like a box of chocolates
Here’s a transcript of Negri at the ESF. He has interesting things to say about pacifism. And an old interview with Žižek with some amusing stories about his time on the Central Committee in Slovenia. Another interview, this time with Daniel Clowes, author of Ghost world, among other things, talking about irony and alternativeness. On which note, a report from the SXSW festival thing.
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Essentially phenomenological rather than doxastic
Would it be unacceptably pretentious to categorise my papers at work into box files labelled επιστημη and δοξα? Are these even spelled correctly?
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