Leadership
June 23, 2009
Until I get my official City Year Journal blog up, this journal will be the conduit.
Upcoming if You’re all about New York
June 19, 2009
Iran and the Demand-Centered
June 18, 2009
From A World to Win, this news sequence, which was sent via email as the events in Iran unfolded over the past few days, has definitely been as emotionally palpable as the videos and pictures on websites like the Huffington Post, but the literary efforts and the analytical approach, which is a mixture of objective and revolutionary prose, has trumped the others I’ve encountered.
Live from the streets of Tehran
15 June 2009. A World to Win News Service. Following are reports sent to Bazr, which describes itself as a Marxist Iranian student organisation. These reports have been selected, excerpted and edited slightly for clarity, but they are basically “raw footage“ from students and others active in the political turmoil preceding and especially following the 12 June elections. They are in reverse chronology.
Saturday 13 June
Fatima Square was tense starting this morning. People who were there then say that many were viciously arrested. The special police were controlling all the streets leading to the Interior Ministry. They were everywhere. Passers-by were not allowed to stop. Anyone who made the slightest objection was arrested or hit with electric batons. But not many people had gathered yet. Chants of “Death to the dictator” rang out from every street corner. Motorists responded by honking; the police responded to any gathering with batons, kicking and beatings. Shops had pulled their shutters halfway down, and the owners were allowing people to take shelter there. A police loudspeaker ordered all the merchants to close down completely, warning that everything was being filmed and that anyone who failed to comply with orders would be in trouble.
After office hours more people rushed to Fatima Square and Vali Asr Street. First on the sidewalks and then in the street people were chanting “Death to the dictator”. [There was some ambiguity as to whether the “dictator” was Ahmadinejad or both him and Khamenei – the plural of dictator doesn’t rhyme in Farsi.] When the police attacked, people ran, then stopped and went back to shouting slogans, but there still was no coordination among them and they were scattered. The support local residents gave demonstrators was amazing. The people in the area sheltered escaping protestors in their homes.
Amidst all this we heard that a contingent of a thousand demonstrators was walking from Vanak (northern Tehran) towards Fatima Square. This news encouraged the protesters around the Interior Ministry and many of those watching from the sidewalks joined them. People blocked Vali Asr Street waiting for the marchers to arrive. They sat on the street and didn’t let cars go north. After 20 minutes the marchers arrived and more people joined the protest. Then the police charged into the crowd, but the crowd counter-attacked. Several police were beaten and four police motorcycles and three police cars were burned. From this moment the crowd moved with more courage and determination. Teargas grenades were streaming toward the crowd but people kept chanting slogans and shouting. They broke bank windows, burned city garbage cans and pulled down fences along the street while marching towards theInterior Ministry. Two city buses were also set on fire. Gunshots were heard everywhere [although at that point the police were apparently firing into the air].
Later we heard many stories of arrests and vicious police attacks, including against young kids and elderly people in the crowd. The fighting continued until 8 pm when the fully-armed special forces were brought in. It was announced that they would have the right to shoot. At first they tried to scatter people and lure them into the side streets. They never attacked alone. Instead, groups of them, armed to the teeth, would all attack one person at a time. Soon they had scattered the crowd and were not afraid any more. They took back control of Vali Asr Street.
Many youth didn’t expect such brutality from the police. Some even refused to believe that they were really Iranian. Despite the many witnesses and cameras the police broke the neck of one young woman, beat up an elderly woman with an electric baton and committed many more crimes. But people helped each other. They didn’t let the police ambulances grab the injured and took them to local clinics and hospitals themselves. There were rumours that some soldiers were overheard speaking Arabic and turned out to be Lebanese [a total fantasy]. Some of the soldiers, in response to people protesting their viciousness, would say: “Your time is up, now it’s our turn.”
A young student: Everybody is flabbergasted. The text messaging system has been shut down since two days before the election and half an hour ago (about 18 GMT 13 June) the whole mobile phone system was cut off. The [state-run] TV is not saying anything about the protests, but the Leader [Ayatollah Ali Khamenei] said in a broadcast, “Our enemies want to rob the people of the sweetness of their victory. Be vigilant.” Nobody else is being shown on the telly. We are getting information through Facebook (filtered during the elections but clear for the last two days) and Web sites (most of which are filtered too). Where I live, many people are depressed, but in Vanak and Zartosht and Vali Asr (downtown Teheran) as well as in front of the Interior Ministry, things are moving…
Latest news: the police have attacked the hospitals in order to arrest the injured. And there have been altercations between the police and the nurses and doctors who resisted this.
“The Hope of the Hopeless” – A leaflet some worker activists distributed 13 June
The deceiving presidential elections ended with predetermined results: Ahmadinejad’s victory. The people who in the last few weeks marched in the streets with many hopes and small dreams and who thought “This time is different” are flabbergasted and disillusioned. The organized security and law and order forces and a part of Shiite clergy who have put their outrageous and lying peons in power as planned are in a state of readiness. Anyone looking with open eyes at what was going on behind the scenes in the campaign, anyone not resting content with the expressions of naïve enthusiasm of young women and men, could predict the enormous fraud. The Islamic Republic’s intelligence services were assured that Ahmadinejad would be the victor. Intelligence agency rumour-mongers and those organising the government’s opinion poles over the last two weeks were saying, “the Leader is with Ahmadinejad, so he’ll be the winner for sure.” The threats against unauthorized demonstrations issued by the commanders of the repressive forces – even before the election – were a powerful clue that a fraud was being organised.
Isn’t what is going on in front of people’s eyes yet more proof of the regime’s illegitimacy? Do the conciliatory forces and reactionaries turned “democrats” – who bombarded the people’s minds in the last two weeks and drew many people to the ballot box by giving them hope of change – have anything to say today? The reality is that, as usual, the ruling system was the winner of elections. The vast participation of the masses was taken as legitimising the system. And this was the main goal of the election game.
Convincing or pushing the discontented masses to vote in this reactionary game was the common point agreed upon by not only various factions of the IRI but also the imperialist powers. They tried to convince the masses who had not trusted the regime for a long time that they should chose between the lesser of two evils, and be happy that one of those evils would win. It’s enough to pay attention to the propaganda broadcasts of the Voice of America and the BBC Persian service to see how they helped heat up the oven of the elections and convinced undecided and distrustful people that by taking their hopes to the temples of Mousavi and Karoubi [the two reform candidates] things could change for the better. Now, after the results have been announced, we see the same imperialist media trying as hard as they can to persuade angry youth from expressing their dissatisfaction and revolt. Has the influence of reformist thinking and illusion-creating policies been so strong that it saps the strength of the system’s opponents and dampens the fire of struggle against these outrageous oppressors?
All these events should at least have the positive side of dealing a blow to illusions and pipe-dreaming among the people. The youth who were chanting slogans, singing and dancing night and day with the hope of breaking the wall of oppression and suppression – will they accept such injustice? Amidst all this, the question we struggling workers and activists related to the workers’ movement want to pose is this: Can one be the vanguard of change by staying aloof from events? The positions and scattered leaflets here and there of worker activists against the election farce are far from enough. There is danger in this. The situation must be understood and correct slogans and politics developed rapidly and taken to workplaces, neighbourhoods and streets. Once again this fundamental truth must loudly resound throughout society so that bewilderment and disillusionment does not lead to demoralization: Revolution is the hope of the hopeless!
Reports from the days leading up to elections
Ever since the campaign started, the debate was on among the people. Many youth wore [Islamic] green headbands or armbands to show allegiance to Mousavi. The colour of Karoubi was off-white and Ahmadinejad supporters wore black (but later started carrying the tricolour Iranian flag). Everywhere we go, in taxis, bus, the tube, even street corners, there is talk about the election. Almost everybody expresses an opinion. Even people wearing green ribbons are saying, “We know it’s a matter of choosing between two evils, that Mousavi is not our man, but we’ll vote to keep Ahmadinejad from being re-elected.”
I was on a bus. At one stop a young man came on and started distributing green ribbons. When he reached me, I didn’t take it. He said, “What’s wrong with you? You’re young, aren’t you?” I said, “I’m young but my brain does work. I don’t want to vote.” After he left debate raged. A middle-aged woman said, “Who the fuck is Mousavi? We haven’t forgotten that when he was prime minister the Sarollah [Islamic morality police] patrols cut young women’s faces and lips because they were wearing makeup, and cut women’s hands or legs for wearing short sleeves. Now he pretends to be our saviour?” A young woman said, “Mousavi is not my candidate but I’ll vote for him anyway since I don’t want Ahmadinejad.. The country should be fixed through reforms. See what happened when you made revolution once?!” It was a great bus trip.
The next day in the tube I heard a young man screaming, “I don’t want to vote, nobody should vote, they’re all the same. Nothing changes.” Somebody responded, “If you don’t want to vote, don’t, but why create a bad atmosphere?” Another young woman said, “We vote because we want freedom.” A woman asked, “What kind of freedom is Mousavi going to give you?” The other answered, “They say Iran will be like Turkey; the veil will be voluntary.” I was shocked. At one point Mousavi said that he would discontinue the morality police patrols, but he stopped even saying that. The same kind of discussion was repeated in taxis…
A week before the elections: from some worker activists
The night of the televised debate between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi, a lot of people were watching their TV sets.. The candidates’ mutual insults and boasting had filled the newspapers for months. The day after the debate, the discussion among the people was hot. Even people not usually interested in politics took part in these passionate arguments. Ahmadinejad made some sharp exposures of Mousavi, Khatami [the ex-"reform" president], Rafsanjani [Iran's richest man, a pillar of the Islamic regime and a powerful backer of Mousavi, widely hated for his personal corruption], and many others in such a way that made many people change their mind about who they were going to vote for and even incited people who didn’t want to vote to go and vote anyway. The reality was that these exposures did not reveal even a thousandth what is really happening and yet Mousavi had nothing to say in response.
Night. Street. Constant honking and the voices of people shouting slogans. I went out. There were supporters of Mousavi and Ahmadinejad, and some people watching. This was the result of last night’s TV debate. The slogans were ridiculous. People were out until 3 or 4 in the morning. The forces of order were only watching. They were trying to be polite, asking people to go home. I asked myself if they were thinking: “Wait until the election is over, we’ll show you, just wait.”
The streets are filled with women and youth. The colour most visible is green…. The Ahmadinejad-Mousavi TV debate produced contradictory results. Some people really liked the exposures Ahmadinejad did of Rafsanjani and Nateghnouri and they completely forget who was saying these things. It shows you how over the last 30 years these questions of “self-enrichment”, “theft” and “privileges” have created such complex hatred in the society that even Ahmadinejad can manoeuvre in it. Many people liked Mousavi’s poise… Ironically a backward sentiment about a man’s “honour” acted against Ahmadinejad – some people didn’t like his disparaging treatment of Mousavi’s wife….
Now a lot of people who were cursing and promised they wouldn’t be fooled into participating in the elections ever again have changed their mind and are saying that it’s different this time. They’re not just saying that we have this Ahmadinejad problem, they’re saying we can win this time. They’ve started having hope.
The situation is really different from previous elections. The last time the sentiment for boycotting them was strong. And you didn’t see this enthusiasm in the streets. But now a lot of people come out and argue against boycotting the elections. I can firmly say that the schools for these various arguments against the boycott are the satellite TV stations! People are mouthing the same arguments voiced over the BBC or VOA by the various reactionaries and vacillating forces these media invite… What’s interesting is that the forces of repression have been deliberately taken off the streets. The few officers you see here and there just observe.
Excrescences of the Phone Cam
June 15, 2009
This cell phone photo series, which takes from eight months of cell phone pictures wasn’t really inspired by anything in particular; it was more of the lack of any good ideas surrounding the great Bachelard quotes that I had sitting around, cited in my notebook, in my post-Poetics of Space reading. With all these random cultural snaps taken around Philadelphia, I had to put them to use. There will be a bigger slideshow project produced for the Fringe Festival in September, and a larger poetry project created with the significantly longer Bachelard quotes.
“If we cannot imagine, we cannot foresee.” – XXXIV
“All aggression, whether it comes from man or from the world, is of animal origin.” – 44
“Life begins less by reaching upward, than by turning upon itself.” – 106
“Well-being takes us back to the primitiveness of the refuge.” – 91
“In order to surpass, one must first enlarge.” – 112
“Beauty of substance is added to beauty of geometrical form.” – 127
“If need be, mere absurdity can be a source of freedom.” – 150
“We seek to determine being and, in so doing, transcend all situations, to give a situation of all situations.” – 212
“If there exists a border-line surface between such an inside and an outside, this surface is painful on both sides.” – 218
“But is he who opens a door and he who closes it the same being?” – 224
“And then, onto what, toward what, do doors open? Do they open for the world of men, or for the world of solitude?” – 224
“We have to designate the space of our immobility by making it the space of our being.” – 137
“The two kinds of space, intimate space and exterior space, keep encouraging each other, as it were, in their growth.” – 201
“There is consolation in knowing that one is in an atmosphere of calm, in a narrow space.” – 229
“Through its light alone, the house becomes human. It sees like a man. It is an eye open to night.” – 35
“The house helps us to say: I will be an inhabitant of the world, in spite of the world.” – 46-47
“In the realm of absolute imagination, we remain young late in life.” – 33
“Images are more demanding than ideas.” – 79
“Exaggeration is always at the summit of any living image.” – 80
“A wardrobe’s inner space is also intimate space, space that is not open to just anybody.” – 78
“The lock doesn’t exist that could resist absolute violence, and all locks are an invitation to thieves.” – 81
“Here the past, the present and a future are condensed. Thus the casket is memory of what is immemorial.” – 84
“Mankind’s nest, like his world, is never finished. And imagination helps us to continue it.” – 104
“For one “living” shell, how many dead ones there are! For one inhabited shell, how many empty!” – 107
“Words are clamor-filled shells.” – 179
Created by Gregory Bem in June 2009.
A bird is almost completely spherical.
June 11, 2009
“The bird, which is almost completely spherical, is certainly the sublime and divine summit of living concentration. One can neither see, nor even imagine, a higher degree of unity. Excess of concentration, which consistutes the great personal force of the brid, but which implies its extreme individuality, its isolation, its social weakness.”
- Michelet
To moue is to pout
June 8, 2009
At work I read short stories. Many of them. I try to keep it systematic: one story from one book and then move on to the next book. I made an exception the other day–I read two stories by David Foster Wallace. Exceptions must be made in such cases. When I get to Sixty Stories by Barthelme, I’ll probably read a couple instead of just one. Stories that are ultra short are ultra short for the same reason short poems are ultra short. But a good story often makes you want to read another good story in succession. Maybe poetry works the same way.
Anyway, here are some pouts of 140 characters (or less), reviewing said stories.
“Chekhov and Zulu” by Salman Rushdie
Review: THREE STARS
Star Trek-obsessed terrorists really know how to talk to audiences like they don’t exist. Just where does this story take place, and what is all the coded fuss saying?
“Entropy” by Thomas Pynchon
in Slow Learner: Early Stories (Back Bay Books, 1985)
Review: FOUR STARS
Replace the cute jazz pacifism of Kerouac with writing detective, harmful: a wallop noticeable more for the smeary aftermath than the slumped crack opening.
“The Fasting Artist” by Franza Kafka
in The Transformation and Other Stories (Penguin, 1995)
Review: TWO STARS
It’s still tough to find a good translation of this classic. Hunger doesn’t have to mean archaic language. Starvation doesn’t have to mean words let out to dry.
“The Sandbank Sage” by Jack Kerouac
in Atop an Underwood: Early Stories and Other Writings (Penguin, 2000)
Review: THREE STARS
To get to know the Beats is to read them before they were Beats. Kerouac’s early work is an obvious quest-leg toward bop-prosody, but he hasn’t found his voice yet.
“Remains of the Night” by John McNally
in Who Can Save Us Now? (Free Press, 2008)
Review: TWO STARS
If you want to read about a faux-superhero/villain dejection called the Silverfish, check out this witty, disgusting, and highly blasé tale told by the bug’s butler.
Deed Land
June 6, 2009
As abstemious fools hankering for new bruises,
we called out to our Saturday selves aglimmer.
Quizzing along in cars leaking gasoline
but still driven paranoid we held two frozen hands.
Who punctured those holes in the tin-like boxes?
Who siphoned with a plastic disposable straw
to such an other, ugly gaping gap of shadow maw?
Underneath a chestnut sign, billboard cracked,
we glanced and was it rosewood or a fingersnap?
Or a sleeping suspicious stream? A gravel dream.
The digital pounds of the keys’ collapsing tings.
One rusted turn for good will, grinding to right,
and one final snap to an echoing hall down the left.
The sailor’s sun glimmers away above warehouses,
aged like a drunk on the verge of the final slump.
The handheld bottle shines though brown and dirty.
We left this land for stable foundations aged thirty.
Word for the Day –recently–
June 6, 2009
abstemious \ab-STEE-mee-uhs\, adjective:
1. Sparing in eating and drinking; temperate; abstinent.
2. Sparingly used or consumed; used with temperance or moderation.
3. Marked by or spent in abstinence.
They were healthy and abstemious; their chief pleasure was reading and Oliver was a life member of the London Library.
— Sylvia Townsend Warner, The Music at Long Verney
For a man who trafficked in excess, he was surprisingly abstemious.
— Ralph Blumenthal, Stork Club
When the 1796 outbreak of yellow fever turned into an epidemic, the frightened citizens followed each preventive vogue: herb tea, cold baths, cream of tartar, vinegar, camphor and abstemious diets.
— Christina Vella, Intimate Enemies
Abstemious comes from Latin abstemius, from ab-, abs-, “away from” + the root of temetum, “intoxicating drink.”
Responding to: So Many Books (pt. 2)
May 19, 2009
First of all, if you’re interested in this great little book by Gabriel Zaid that tackles publishing, reading, and writing in the 21st century, you may want to read the first part of my response here.
“And just a few thousand copies, read by the right people, are enough to change the course of conversation, the boundaries of literature, and our intellectual life. What sense is there, then, in lunching books into infinity so that they are lost in the chaos?” (pg. 49)
Though it often reaches sentimental altitudes when a book-buyer stumbles into a shop and finds something rare, dignified, and gleaming through all of its rarity, the great implications of large printings is that they are potentially in many places for many uses; while certain texts, such as a new James Paterson novel or Eat This Not That pocket-book, are not at face value worth much of anything historically-speaking, even these texts represent our culture at the very moment, at this very statis in time.
To fill future shelves in Albania, Nigeria, and Haiti with books of these, which have value in their historo-cultural content, as well as perhaps intro-to-English dialectics, there may in fact be an imperialistic attitude reached with trying to send books to other countries. It’s like an invasion, to some degree; I remember working at my college book store and at the end of the semester, during the “buy-back period,” any books that were not resold to the book store would be thrown into the “send to Africa” bins located conveniently outside the book store’s exit. I can’t imagine Plato’s Cave or advanced Chemistry having much relevance in Somalia or Ethiopia, but I still argue that the presence of them is better than the presence of zero books at all. Having some sort of material to give away (though the material would probably be sold to these countries through our intricate, ever-arching web of consumerist non-profit and humanitarian organizations at some level) might help somebody. The chances might rise with every book you’ve got flying over there.
And at the same time, regardless of the language and the country the book comes from, its presence somewhere on this earth is tangible; it will likely exist, pages white or darkly yellowed or molding to mush, continuously. If human beings wipe their digital megaverses out (through cyber terrorism or technological evolution or what-have-you), the many pages in the many books will last in lockers, walls, chests, coffins, time-capsules, monuments, bunkers, and on and on and on. Our dependency on the intangible, the digital to be specific about it, is worrying; the presence of the physical object is balancing.
Of course the book-burning groups, which I recently fantasized about and which equally stem from the Nazis, Ray Bradbury and Wall-E, will probably come along after they realize how much paper trash really is out there, and will make it their primary goal to rid us of our archivable literature. You can already see such disposals through recycling bins, and even way before our “green age” began, at the local dumps. Ever been to a trash center? The piles of magazines are outstanding. One time in grade school we had to visit a local trash crematorium of sorts. I went off on my own and found the paper disposal building, on the floor of which were many a porn magazine. As you can imagine, a youth of the countryside like myself was enamored, enraptured even, by all the smut on the ground. I even wanted to steal the shit and take it back with me to drool over during the endless yellow busride back to school. Thankfully, fortunately, I never got that chance.
“[T]he true role of books, which is to continue our conversation by other means.” (pg. 49)
If the role of books is to continue conversation, then it means that conversation can be continued outside of the verbal communication environment; is another way of expressing language(s). But is it necessary? Here’s a brief, premature rundown of what books do: create ownership (ownership of art, ownership of material goods, collectors, et cetera), create hubris and pride (again, view the owner(s) of the creation), influence society on a cultural level both positively and negatively (especially via marketing tactics), cause isolation (and yes it’s good for an escape once in a while from the throws and exhaustion of living in a good or bad society, but what is that saying about the society if we want to escape it?), provide information to those that might not be able to get it via a real, living person or conversational voice, allow referencing (our memories are like balloons and do have limits), allow for studying (see previous isolation note), and are generally a displacement of information (instead of just telling you what I want to say, I’m going to write it down first, and maybe be more elegant, poetic, and refined, but you’ll have to wait a second or minute or hour or day because the book has to be printed and shipped and so on and so on . . .)–but there’s more!
Books are wonderful items in that they allow for the mass presentation of ideas (of the author and editor, yes, but also extending to the ideas of many others) through a conversation that cannot possibly take place between the voice in the book and the entire globe. Though oral histories could still, perhaps, be continued today even with our zany technologies, the written language allows you to take something valuable (contraceptive pamphlets) or influential (the Bible) and distribute it to an audience that normally wouldn’t be had. They are amazingly spreadable, and amazingly efficient. “Oh, I read this great book the other day about this guy who died on a cross in the name of forgiveness and I want you to read it, but I see I have to go to work way over here right now and you over there right now, and it’d just be easier for me to give you the damn thing!” Books are also great ways for developing ideas because they all for a concentrated form of interpretation; something you may or may not have gotten to the same degree through verbal communication, that standard Socratic conversation.
But do we need books to continue on? Evolution and revolution would probably be much slower, yes, but all the shit we get bombarded with, the tabloids and the faux-news, the advertising and the slush-culture, all of which probably numbs us down more than anything else, would not be as concentrated if the only medium of idea-exchange was through verbal communication. I can just imagine a busy Egyptian or Indian street, books not available to anyone, where everyone is yelling and trying to get a conversation going, for better or for worse, to buy, to sell, to trade, to exchange, nobody in their homes reading, everyone jabbering away. Maybe life would be too overwhelming without books; especially with a population like that of todays.
I’d definitely want to pull an Edward Abbey and head for the hills; or am I thinking of the Unibomber? Or am I thinking of Emily Dickenson? Or am I thinking of or last president? Or am I thinking of all the Mainers up there right now sucking in the sweet pine air, canoeing and paddling . . . but then again, it’s reaching a point where the huddled masses have relieved themselves of nearly all verbal communication with text messaging, cell phone emails, and of course our personal computer station hubs where we can live out our non-verbal existence surfing the net, writing blog posts, or living in virtual gaming realities; soon we won’t have to talk to each other at all, verbally. Remember those headsets that came out for some of those games on the PS2 and X-Box? Did those even take off after a year or so of being in existence? I wouldn’t have anything to say to the guy I just fragged with a grenade launcher for the 5000th time either.
“Culture isn’t a product, of course. But what then are oranges, orchids, birds, sunsets? Anything can begin as revelation and become currency, an object, a commodity. To avoid this, a process of certification is invented, as ambiguous as the object itself. The word becomes a notarized contract; the academic title provides a guarantee; the insitution legitimizes; the stamp of cognoscenti certifies.” (pg. 53)
There are numerous issues with this statement, many to which are obvious and widely debatable–I mean come on, culture isn’t a product? Are we sure? What about Disney World culture? What part of that isn’t merely the selling of souls in order to please some cash-holder? And aren’t we under one huge gridded umbrella of control and systematic sales, anyway? African music: Putamayo; Alabama quilts: art museum posters; poetry books: college Creative Writing markets (which is chronologically linear, ascending steeply). Hip hop is arguably one of the biggest sold cultures, or pieces of culture, in America (and in other countries today); in America hip hop not only has an audience through the African American communities (and most of the emcees marketed come directly from these communities because they know, they “know,” these communities, and how better to push a product than by having someone who bought and ate up the product in the first place teaching you about the market?), but also has an audience through the middle and upper classes–it’s very cool and emotionally, socially rewarding for hip white kid A (like myself, for instance) to enjoy hip hop, even though hip hops largest roots didn’t come from my own background.
I remember loving Busta Rhymes, Notorious BIG, and Jermaine Dupree in 5th grade; I went on to like the Beastie Boys and Eminem and Limp Bizkit, those rappers/rap groups I could racially identify myself with (being from Maine, race was always a big thing, though a subconscious and repressed thing) in high school, and then continued the white rapper obsession with artists like Sage Francis in early college. Fascinatingly, I really got into Lil Wayne due to the music site Pitchfork in Junior and Senior year of college, and since then have been blending my fascination for white hip hop emcees (including Aesop Rock and Atmosphere) with old school, gangsta, crunk, Lil Wayne, and other shitty contemporary hip hop.
Lately I’ve been on a deejay kick with Peanut Butter Wolf and Charizma, and have gotten into some of the whackiest, though prolific, emcees like MF Doom and Q-Tip, but I still think it’s funny when I listen to Clipse and pretend like Atlanta coke dealing is any way relevant to me, or that there is something beyond the absurd that I’m gaining from listening to it. Though the beats are pretty cool. Also of importance is the new “white kids hip hop” that is cropping up in response to the interest gentrifiers and boojie hip kids with their interest in a predominantly black genre: artists like Cool Kids are coming around and providing hip hop directed particularly toward this audience; it’s no longer about the streets, but about growing up playing video games, going to house parties, and one-two-buckle-my-shoe. Is this really a bad thing? It’s certainly the way of the biz, so to speak, and its pretty obvious; but there are tons of undergrond circles I’m not even touching. The poetry of the emcees that you will never hear is still going on out there, regardless of entire cultures, subcultures, and art forms being sold off like hotcakes. People are spouting their rhymes, just like they are writing their books, and providing them (not even with monetary charge, sometimes, like in the case of e-books like the one I just released, Toward Pandemic!) for smaller circles, narrowed audiences.
Going back to the quote, I instantly tried to think of things in the world that aren’t looked at as objects, as commodities, today. I instantly thought of the article with CA Conrad and Brenda Iijima: the Interlude on Poetics as Dirt, and I thought about dirt. While land, this semi-tangible, semi-corporeal concept we humans, Americans in particular, zoom onto through our wonderful capitalist system, is all about dirt, it’s not really about dirt. Unless you’re a geologist or gardener, you probably won’t walk down the street, especially in an urban environment, and say: look at all this prosperous DIRT I have on my hands. Yet we could, and I’m sure it’s only a matter of time. Maybe it will eventually be used in terms of fuel or maybe we will start selling handfuls of earth for bottlecaps. There are strange things in this world like dirt, and perhaps rain, that many of us probably wouldn’t hold as objects. I mean, going after the thing itself, we could easily classify all of this as object this and object that, but it’s not the same in the sense that you might ever want it to be an object. For lack of a bigger vocabulary, things like dirt, rain, and . . . you can see I’m struggling with additional examples here . . . even dustballs are resources but they remain neglected resources. The source of the neglect is that we are distracted; however, once we have (if we do) completely wrecked our state of affairs/existences and have nothing left, we may turn to these resources and certify them, legitimize them, but until that time, they remain passive.
But here’s a curious thought: for such a passive thing that we deal with regularly, weather has a presence in our daily life (usually a hatred or bland regard) that takes up space in conversation more than anything else; and yet, we never go beyond the step of liking or hating weather. Another standardization of our daily life to keep us from getting a little too worked up, a little too out of the daily grind? I can just imagine another world, very similar to ours, only sans weather channel, where shamanic businessmen do rain dances in the morning before getting their grande lattes and jumping on the el for a quick trip to the office, in a world where water is scarce and begged for. I can just imagine people doing lightning dances, when all the lightning comes all the time and people are shitting their minds apart hoping they are one of thousands getting zapped on that particular day. I can just imagine people doing earth dances, eating dirt, crafting dirt, art-ifying dirt, because all the book burners came and burned their books, and all their virtual reality servers crashed, and all the bottlecaps were spent, and then all we would have would be the dust and the dustballs, that last part of our bodies floating around in the corners of the room. I think people would love and hate and acknowledge and interact with each and every thing in this world before they went after the gray dirt/skin particles hiding out in the corners of the rooms. Yeah, sweep away, dust away; the object as anti-object. Maybe poets turn into dustballs after they die.
Part three of this article series will be written soon, but until then, buy the book, and for goodness sake, pay attention!
