Jug Eyes

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Originally posted at First in 2012.

The Boss is Back! The album was on the Prestige label, the first Gene Ammons made after being released in 1969 from Stateville Penitentiary following a seven-year term for heroin possession. With Junior Mance on piano and Buster Williams on bass. Bernard Purdie on drums, Candido on conga, it’s a hell of a record. Ammons’s tenor holler breaks loose over the hard funk backing, out of the horn something like a contagious fire catching on the fills and slides and the stuttering beats.

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Stubborn Leaves

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On the stairs up the deck,
Or walking through piles of curling leaves
Still waiting for spunky Japanese red maple compadres
To drop and join them in flat bouquets

The racket above is like an old school, non-green,
New York City traffic jam where cabbies blast
exhausted horns and Yiddish-bang their steering wheels—not too hard—
not to get anywhere, just on a Racing Form stage for their passengers’ tips

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Tease

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Molly Klein is working on a piece for First that links Trump’s spectacles to “a war on rationality that began in Baltimore in 1966 with the Johns Hopkins conference on structuralism/post-structuralism, which introduced the mountebanks Lacan and Derrida to US academia.” In the meantime, here’s a taste from her recent demolition of Slavoj Žižek, “The Protocols of the Learned Lacanian of Slovitzie,” published this year in a Belgrade academic journal. Klein’s clarity about “ecstasy of the bullying” makes her a national resource for Americans in our time of the Don. 

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The Interpretation of Dreams

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Friday, January 23rd, 2016

In the few days prior to Trump becoming the President of the United States, even through a flickering awakeness, we know that given the power of the United States however in decline, the whole world is right now being funneled together for the long march into dreamland.

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Post-Election Reflections

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The role of identity politics in Trump’s victory and Clinton’s defeat:  Identity politics, the invention of the multicultural left, has been taken over by Trump and his hard right supporters. 

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Long Weekend

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Excerpts from familial emails.

12/11

BEFORE THE ELECTION

Mid-September, “Obama dispatched [Lisa] Monaco, FBI Director James B. Comey and Homeland Security Director Jeh Johnson to make the pitch for a ‘show of solidarity and bipartisan unity’ against Russian interference in the election.” —WashPost, story then scrubbed for particularities and replaced with blander version (about voting machine worry, discounting intelligence agencies’ consensus about Russian subversion of the Clinton campaign).

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The Manchurian Candidate

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The final item in Greil Marcus’s last Real Life Rock column (originally posted at Pitchfork.com) has taken on a new urgency in the light of Trump’s pick for Secretary of State and the leaked CIA “assessment” confirming “Russia intervened in the 2016 election for the purpose of helping Donald Trump win the presidency.”

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Bad Faith

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Oliver Hall notes this quotation from Sartre’s “Anti-Semite and Jew” which first turned up on twitter in late August is now “stuck in my head like a blues melody.  ‘The anti-Semites have the right to play.’ MSNBC could run it as a permanent crawl…”

 “

sartre

 

Patriotism of the Scream

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Re: The Torture Report Must Be Saved. (See the New York Times, p. A23, December 10).

Historians will increasingly find much to admire in the Obama presidency, but not the fact that in the years of his first administration he failed openly to review the mendacity and nationally inflicted deludedness of the Bush years. A struggle for the truth was at that moment urgently needed. Wherever that inquiry might have led, it would have been a moment  past that would now calmingly come to the support of the present. For we face the increasingly bewildering question of how to parry the dislocation of mind—a reign of disinformation—that a president-elect with an impinged sense of reality now uses to keep in turmoil and uproar a nation that has itself for decades dodged knowing its own reality. It is sickening to say, but however everyday everyday life continues to seem from a sidewalk view, we are in the midst of a struggle for the truth that is propelling us to the edge of what is felt as impulses for self-preservation where any comprehension of what is actually occurring could be lost for good.

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My Path to Perdition

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That craggy-faced master of the art, Thomas Phillip “Tip” O’Neill Jr., famously pointed out that all politics are local.

I’m here to tell you about that.

It began for me in mid-summer this year when I was taking my usual morning walk on the Boardwalk in Wildwood, NJ, and a bunch of young teenage punks on bikes came busting by, and the nearest one yelled at me, “Hey, buddy —  vote for Trump!”

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Silence = Trump

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As they say in the corridors of officialdom, mistakes were made. Enough of them to go around––and I guess it’s always like that. You see your mistakes when you fail, and overlook them when you succeed. Well, we failed. Not just some sect, race, or gender, but everyone who didn’t vote. Their silence gave us Trump.

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Where the Heart Is

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They [Mexicans] brought their third-world ****hole here and while it’s a little bit better than what they had in the process of doing it they dragged us into the gutter with them.

What’s one more racist projection now when Alt Rightists give Nazi salutes and the President-elect’s consiglieres are (brutish or kinder/gentler) white supremacists? Acts speak louder than spew. Still, the line above jumped out at me because of where I came across it. Not at an Alt Right conclave or website, not in a bar or…locker-room, but in an email by a distinguished D.C. cardiologist, Dr. Oskoui, to a group who read and sometimes respond to William Greider’s Nation articles.

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It’s Time for the Stone to Flower

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On the Anniversary of Kristallnacht, Donald Trump is Elected President

It starts with breaking glass,
a brick thrown,
Jewish storefront shattered.
Businesses destroyed.
The vile Other punished.
(All that has been worked for
in ruins.)

If I didn’t know,
the German word sounds pretty,
tinkles, conjures flutes of champagne
raised in toast.

If we didn’t know.

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Pop Crit

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NBA coach Gregg Popovitch’s commentary on the election got some play but in case you missed it….

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Compline 2016

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The very heart of the very last hour of the daily rhythm of prayer, both in the very ancient and contemporary rites of the liturgy of the hours, is psalm 91, especially these lines:

“For you he has commanded the angels,
to keep you in all your ways,
they will bear you upon their hands,
lest you strike your foot against a stone.” Ps 91:11-12

I learned some deeper meanings to these words in the last weeks. Bear with me, as I try to explain.

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