Not much time...

Yes it's coming to that part of the semester. Not much time to blog or do anything else for that matter. I am listening to music though as always. Heavy rotation:
1. Ray Davies, Other People's Lives. Wow -- this is such a great record. His first solo after the Kinks. Much of it written and recorded in New Orleans, and a reflection on America rather than his usual Brit-centric outlook.
2. Strokes, First Impressions of Earth. When I heard "juicebox" I thought it was crap. The video was annoying too. Turns out the record isn't bad.
3. the Eat, Live. Recorded in 1981 or something. If you're not a fan of the Eat, then you won't care too much about this record. It is really good though if you like early 80s punk of the KBD variety. It's hand-silkscreened and comes with a bunch of baseball cards inside.
4. Live Fast Die, Bandana Thrash Record. This is my favorite record right now. It totally rules.
5. Destroyer, Streethawk: A Seduction. Marijke, I want my copy of this cd back along with the Clinic cd.

I miss winter

This is crazy. It's almost December, and it was almost 70 degrees today. Global warming is not making me very happy.

Still, hot and polluted skies make for good pictures. Here's another shot of the steam plant, November 07. My hope is that we'll eventually get some snow to go with these holiday lights.

Ruins -- a flaneur in the rustbelt

Went to the Quad Cities this weekend. Damn -- old river towns are great. Especially the thrift stores: you can find things there that would go for $$$ in shops on either coast. But don't ask me where I went for my thrift scores. It's secret.

Anyway I went for a run on the Mississippi River and got a shot of this ruin. Turns out it was the only part standing of a factory (John Deere?) that was once a quarter-mile long. This picture doesn't really do it justice: it just looked so ominous standing there in a field of empty concrete space.

Looking for a realistic assessment of what's going on in Iraq? Read the following story, from today's New York Times. It's horrific.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/20/world/middleeast/20revenge.html?hp&ex=1164085200&en=438b8e8a360603e9&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Also, thinking briefly about some comments made by Bush over the weekend, in Vietnam of all places. Someone asked him about parallels between Vietnam and Iraq (he had to have known that that would happen), and his response was typical: the only way we'll lose is if we withdraw prematurely. We're basically guaranteed to win if we can just remain resolute, etc. A kind of reduction of war to the willpower of an occupying army. This is patently ridiculous, and it ironically affirms what Bush was trying to deny: that winning or losing depends all on us. If this isn't a rerun of Vietnam-thinking, I don't know what is.

Read the article quoted above, and you'll see that war unleashes forces of violence that "resolution" cannot restrain. It's not a matter of willpower or staying the course now: Iraq is out of our hands.

Last night. The Magnetix from Bordeaux, France. This guy's guitar made the most hellish racket -- it was wonderful.

al Jazeera English

Ok, so the al Jazeera English service started up yesterday. This is an unqualified good thing. For those who want to know more about the station, the documentary Control Room is an excellent place to start. As soon as you see the movie, you begin to realize that the journalists for the station are not anti-American automatons but deadly serious journalists with a decidedly pro-democracy bent. The only thing: their vision of democracy doesn't square with the vision pushed and pursued by some in America. Let's be clear too: it *is* America that feels unhappy and threatened with the station's English service: there are five cable companies in Germany for example that are running the station while none in the US are.

Maybe they should run ads on other stations like the old "I want my MTV" commercials from the early 80s? To show my age, I actually remember those commercials.

Here we are again.

bonfire shot

Here's another "experimental" shot done at the party last Sat.

OED!!!

I mentioned that I'm a geek right?

I just got the whole set of the OED, unabridged. It's twelve volumes long. It weighs a ton. It won't fit on my bookshelves.

I am so excited. Now when my students come to me with some citation from wikipedia, I can point them in the right direction.

I mentioned that I hate wikipedia right?

weekend post

Long and interesting weekend. Saw a friend's band play on Friday. Here's a shot from that night. Fountain Square is pretty cool.

Reprieve

Read Krugman's piece this morning, and I have to agree: I'm feeling pretty good. One thing that's crucial to remember however: THE WAR'S NOT OVER. I mean this in the broadest Schmittian sense possible: the momentum generated by these elections needs to be sustained and aimed towards 08. If the race really was a "referendum on the President," then what really matters is the next presidential election.

STEAM PLANT -- 7 pm

Here's a shot I took with my Canon 530 last night, on the way to the reception. Pollution does some interesting things to light.

feeling a little better

So yes things are better than I'd expected. Surprising -- the front page of the Times yesterday had a long article about Bush's attempt to shore-up support among his base, and a few days prior was a poll showing that the Rs were catching up. But no: Dems won handily. What does this mean?
1. Americans like the Constitution. The Constitution means divided government (remember my Pol 101 kids?)
2. The Democratic victory is actually bigger than it seems. I'm not talking here about registration and polling irregularities (like the arbitrarily strict ID policies here in IN and elsewhere), or other structural advantages (the bully pulpit, etc), although they do matter. If you combine the 28 seats the Ds won in the HR, and add that to the Senate (which I predict the Ds will win once the votes are counted and re-counted), and add that to the governorships, this means an impressive majority of voters supported change.
3. "Change" here means a lot of things, but most importantly it refers to Iraq. The best thing Bush could do right now would be to fire Rumsfeld. The Dems can take heart that he won't, however. This bodes ill for the country (and especially for the troops), but it bodes well for Democratic chances in 2008. Rumsfeld is the face of failure, and both parties know it.

prepared to be disappointed

Pessimism -- ah yes, you're my friend.

Another election day, and I've imposed a 12-hour news blackout on myself. I'll tune in tonight after all the polls have closed and probably call a couple friends, but I'm not feeling good about things. A reading, therefore from a fellow left radical about pessimism and patience and failure:
"Pragmatists make success a criterion: what failed was bad and false. For his part, Nietzsche the anti-pragmatist understood that the decadent sometimes choose what is bad for them, propelling them along the path of decline. Unintended consequences and reverses have their perverse reasons. Moreover, for those who observe the radical labor of the negative, failures are not only failures: since Hegel and Marx, we have known that things also progress by the 'bad side'" (Henri Lefebvre, Critique of Everyday Life III, 36).

Acceleration and politics

Attended/presented at an academic conference this weekend, and one of things discussed was time and its implication for democratic politics. An interesting problem, and yet it would be a mistake to think that the acceleration of life is an entirely technological phenomenon. From a political standpoint, the current state of exception defined by ideas like the "unitary executive," and by practices like presidential signing statements, preemptive war, the ongoing GWOT, the practice of defining prisoners of that war as "detainees" without Geneva conventions protections, etc. etc. is animated and reinforced by a sense of urgency. Urgency implies speed. The idea is that we have to "act before they strike first." That we have the technological means to allow this spirit of urgency to be concretized in acts is merely contingent: it's not the technology that drives the policy but the other way round.

Also, consider the role that technology and the speed of communication have played in undermining the sense of exceptionality and urgency. The photos at Abu Ghraib for example.

another postpunk post

A few days ago watched the movie "Kill Your Idols," about the whole New York No Wave scene of the early 80s. I came away unimpressed and in fact a little depressed: I mean I certainly like the destructive *idea* of stripping rock and roll down to its essence, but in practice it ends up being a bunch of pretense. What's wrong with Chuck Berry? In the film, all these no-wavers (Lydia Lunch especially) went off about the fact that punk bands were just ripping off early rock and roll, but then again so what? If you actually *listen* to the guitar work of Bob Quine or Lou Reed or John Morton, there's nothing "bluesy" about it. It's scratchy and angular and spare. And yet it rocks too: give me the rock any day. If I want to think about music, I'll read Richard Meltzer. If I want to get away from rock, I'll listen to Ornette.