idealogues and the philosophical pragmatist

We're heading into the final hours of this historic campaign and it seems as good a time as any to look at the nature of Obama the candidate. This entry over at Phronesisaical truly renders why there should be excitement and interest in Obama the President. It also reminds me what is sadly missing from not only the GOP but our national punditry at large. I highly recommend you spend the time to read the full post.

Here are some of the juicier bits from Helmut:

To put it simply, Obama seems to me an experimentalist problem-solver of a pragmatic stripe.

A pragmatist thinks in terms of problems and tools and experiments for solving them. A problem arises, which is such precisely because we don't have the conceptual or normative tools at hand to solve it. The pragmatist looks around for explanations, interpretations, analyses, arguments, and new understandings to try help us resolve the problem. If it's political, or a matter of policy, or a matter of ethics or legal interpretation, the pragmatist understands that we start from an irreducible pluralism of values that are crucial to even understanding the problem, let alone resolving it. In a pluralistic country such as the US, policy and political disputes are often disputes involving complex, competing values and ideas. They are problems of intelligent cooperation.

Ideological commitment of the sort that drives the US political system is problematic here - it may provide us with some useful interpretive tools, but it more than likely frames and constricts our understanding of the nature of the problem and the range of possible solutions a priori, prior to investigating the problem. This suggests that the truth of the matter comes prior to testing ideas and policies. The ideologist ends up, by default, resolving problems from a partial and usually self-interested perspective. Pragmatists think this has it all backwards.

continues-

The pragmatist seeks to suspend prior ideological commitments and focus rather on generating ongoing dialogue, attempting to build a community of public discussion, in order to gain the fullest possible view of the problem as well as in order to eventually engage the most democratic means for resolving it.

What does this mean for Obama the president? I'd like to hope that the office doesn't convert Obama into yet another pragmatist of the crass, non-philosophical version I mentioned above. I'm not worried about him being an ideologue. Despite the right's best efforts to paint him as such, there's little evidence that he's that sort of person. He's going to make a lot of people unhappy on both the left and the right when he doesn't follow the rules of prior ideological commitments. That unhappiness will unwittingly reflect something profoundly wrong with the older and hopefully dying form of polarized ideological politics in the US. But, unlike how many pundits put it, the problem is less "polarization" than it is the epistemological backwardness of ideology-driven politics.

But can Obama function as a genuine philosophical pragmatist? I think so. Given the serious nature of the problems he'll be dealing with as president - from the wars to climate change to poverty and economic collapse to education and healthcare - we really do need someone who's not blinkered by prior ideological commitments and hackneyed policy ideas and tools. We need a philosophical pragmatist with a rich understanding of the complex diversity of the US and the world, a morally reflective person who's willing to listen, to experiment, to involve and engage, and to lead when it is time to lead. Everything in his background says this is precisely who Obama is.

Now vote Obama!


Via: Phronesisaical

votevotevotevotevotevote

Tomorrow is the big day even though millions have cast early ballots. Here’s a video worth watching about a very important ongoing project called Video the Vote.Everyone who goes to vote, and has the technology to do it, should document their experience. Disinformation? Purged from the list? Long lines? Vote flipping machines? Turned away because of "missing" registration information? Harassment by partisan "monitors"? This collective effort will go a long way towards election reform, which I hope will be a big priority for the new congress and president but it can only happen with a mandate from us.

The clip above is from Video the Vote, a national initiative to protect voting rights by monitoring the electoral process. They organize citizen journalists—ordinary folks like you and me—to document election problems as they occur. VV then distributes their footage to the mainstream media and online to make sure the full story of Election Day 2008 gets told. You can watch another video here. If you have footage from your polling place you can upload it at the videothevote site.


via: Mudflats/videothevote

happy halloween

voter crunch time

Yes, we're still old school in NY and rockin the lever machines. I have to say, I love these things. They really are time capsules. Things are coming to a close after almost 2 grueling years for this presidential contest. Hard to believe because it seems more like 10 years on most days. I'm anxious to be less anxious and also fear the huge depression that may come as a result of a McCain coup. Regardless, if you want to follow what is happening state to state with all the controversy over fraudulent registration forms, voter purges, touch screens and intimidation in these waning days please saty tuned to the following blogs.

1. The Brad blog

2. Election Law blog

Artist Lecture Series/ Bidonville Cafe, Nov. 2

The next installment of this intimate lecture series continues this Sunday. I encourage any readers to make it out or inquire about participating.So far so good with this fledgling effort.

Sunday, Nov. 2 @ 7:00 pm
Bidonville Cafe in Fort Greene
Willoughby Ave. (b/w Clermont & Adelphi)
Bklyn, NY 11205
718.855.4515
G or C train to Clinton/ Washington and march north

This month's artists:

Josh Jordan

Jordan's ideas stem from his prepubescent and high school experiences from there. They were the emotional basis for his desire to pursue art as a young adult. These ideas are expressed in scenes of various delusions of grandeur. He creates passive/aggressive and sometimes self-deprecating scenarios of heroism, glory, or ardor to illustrate these delusions.The content of his work focuses on adolescence, its persona, and its tendency toward dreams, melodrama, fantasy, and infatuation. The focus of those states of consciousness is motivated by the seemingly mystical energy of adolescent girls and their ability to inspire longing, elusive flirtation, clumsy acts of chivalry, and inevitable humiliation. Jordan also calls upon the psychic, social, erotic power of pop idolatry to realize the extent and scope of the delusional narrative.

Timothy Hutchings:

"Some time ago I consciously chose to adopt a lackadaisical approach to the intellectual rigor of my art making. I'd decided that I was out to make work to amuse myself, not to communicate carefully crafted ideas about the world. By letting my brain go slack, I could accidentally create things which I could find pleasure in for myself - just as a sloppy hand can create a line which surprises it's owner. This has something to do with the structure of joke making, I think. My brain finds pleasure in the off-handed quip more than the finely crafted story, and finds little joy in telling the same joke twice. In retrospect, this may not have proven to be a very good tactic.

hidden water atlas

This is fascinating (via BLDGBLOG):

An "atlas of hidden water" has been created to reveal where the world's freshwater aquifers really lie. "The hope," New Scientist reports, "is that it will help pave the way to an international law to govern how water is shared around the world."
This prospective hydro-geopolitical legislation currently includes a "draft Convention on transboundary aquifers."

"What the UNESCO map reveals," New Scientist adds, "is just how many aquifers cross international borders. So far, the organisation has identified 273 trans-boundary aquifers: 68 in the Americas, 38 in Africa, 155 in Eastern and Western Europe and 12 in Asia." One of these is the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, whose waters are nearly a million years old.
According – somewhat oddly – to the International Atomic Energy Agency:

The ancient system’s massive reserves, estimated at 375,000 cu km of water (equivalent to about 500 years of Nile River discharge), are confined deep inside the earth’s underground chambers – staggered, tiered, and pooled beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, oasis settlements, wadis (dry riverbeds that contain water only during times of heavy rain), small villages, towns, and large cities.

obama-quins

This election has permeated all walks of life here in the city. A friend and I saw these funny, enthusiastic (and creepy) "Obamas" at Triple Five Soul downtown on Lafayette Street.


image: Lucas Thorpe

country first

ha ha ...art imitating life once again.

oh shit

Finally, a snarky piece that actually made me laugh instead of implying that I'm supposed to laugh. The ultimate salesman strikes again.

A piece of art by Damien Hirst has set the new record for a single item at auction. The piece entitled ‘Oh Shit’ fetched £2.3bn after frantic bidding by an anonymous investor. The work, which features a Merrill Lynch employee suspended in a tank of formaldehyde secured the highest price yet paid for a single piece of banking history.

my friends

my friends, who IS that dark knight, hengghhhh... priceless parallel to the prez debates!



via Wonkette

sticky sublime and the pusuit of strangeness

I've been thinking about this comment recently:

But to get back to the sublime, if you start out academically and you are a student and you are trying to understand some of the networks behind art, and you are getting more comfortable with what might be, what it could be, what some of the apparatus might be, there still is this very self-conscious deliberate journey you are on and that is much of what I felt in graduate school. This journey oriented to assuming a belief that through this intelligence, through mental acuity, you are going to try to pressure these doors open and to give you some sight. And all that is done without being in tune, necessarily, with the enormous levels an artist can bring into himself, and assume, and let open, once you are relaxed about the arena you are in. Your mind is like a blowtorch, trying to burn down things so you can find a home. You’re in the woods, and now it’s time to both feel the repercussions of what you did, and to flavor yourself with a little more feedback from Camus. I thought a lot of that early stuff of mine was deliberate and intellectually oriented. The piece with the spider, where I coaxed the spider through the tube, some of that stuff started to allow certain chemical and psychological things in, that didn’t get in at the start, because you were too targeted. Like the case about the object, the anti-object and the role of galleries. Soon there came a time when the decisions were made in less calculated ways. They were a bit more mysterious. These are the elements that were going to separate you from other people. They were not strategic. They were violating strategy, and in its place there was a kind of uncertainty. So through this mystique I would find references operating in a large universal, or perhaps, in an arena more capable of strangeness.

Dennis Oppenheim speaking with Bill Beckley

Sticky Sublime, 2001 – pg. 109

faking it

October 18, 2006 -St. Louis

via Kos

U.S.A. #1

I had to reduce my posting this month and have made a conscious effort to scale back my news consumption for my own sanity. Still, my friends and I have been batting around McPalin rally footage during the last 2 weeks to diffuse our horror with some sarcastic nervous wit. It helps, but watching these crowds makes us all sick and alarmed at yet unsurprised. Huge swaths of our peers are still mired in a 1960's and increasingly a 1950's culture war of bigotry and willful ignorance. You really begin to understand how easy it is to sway ordinary law abiding people into acts of hate. Imagine how little it might take to insight these people at this stage of the campaigns. How will they handle an Obama victory? Will it be excepted on any level? The GOP is morphing real time into a national "white's only" party right. The apartheid mentality is deafening.

video: TPM

the sky IS falling

Like many of you I have been trying to overcome a major learning curve regarding the economic shock waves over the last couple of weeks. I’m somewhat more educated but still a ways to go.
I’m at least far enough along to know that deregulation and Fannie/Freddie are not the sole causes – no thanks to the candidate sound bites. One positive development has been the emergence of the British /Swedish proposal as the front runner of a solution, even by an increasingly humble Hank Paulson whose warts are abundantly clear. We all can be glad he did not act on his initial unitary money grab. I’m also pleased to observe the emergence of Paul Krugman and Brad Delong as leading voices on the meltdown. They’ve been on course from the beginning and seem to be getting more play in the MSM because of it. A less familiar name is Nouriel Roubini, who is now likely to be a household name. Oracular in scope, the economist is now being echoed by the IMF.

Here’s the latest somber insight from Roubini:

At this point severe damage is done and one cannot rule out a systemic collapse and a global depression. It will take a significant change in leadership of economic policy and very radical, coordinated policy actions among all advanced and emerging market economies to avoid this economic and financial disaster. Urgent and immediate necessary actions that need to be done globally (with some variants across countries depending on the severity of the problem and the overall resources available to the sovereigns) include:

- another rapid round of policy rate cuts of the order of at least 150 basis points on average globally;

- a temporary blanket guarantee of all deposits while a triage between insolvent financial institutions that need to be shut down and distressed but solvent institutions that need to be partially nationalized with injections of public capital is made;
- a rapid reduction of the debt burden of insolvent households preceded by a temporary freeze on all foreclosures;

- massive and unlimited provision of liquidity to solvent financial institutions;
- public provision of credit to the solvent parts of the corporate sector to avoid a short-term debt refinancing crisis for solvent but illiquid corporations and small businesses;

- a massive direct government fiscal stimulus packages that includes public works, infrastructure spending, unemployment benefits, tax rebates to lower income households and provision of grants to strapped and crunched state and local government;

- a rapid resolution of the banking problems via triage, public recapitalization of financial institutions and reduction of the debt burden of distressed households and borrowers;

- an agreement between lender and creditor countries running current account surpluses and borrowing and debtor countries running current account deficits to maintain an orderly financing of deficits and a recycling of the surpluses of creditors to avoid a disorderly adjustment of such imbalances.

At this point anything short of these radical and coordinated actions may lead to a market crash, a global systemic financial meltdown and to a global depression. At this stage central banks that are usually supposed to be the "lenders of last resort" need to become the "lenders of first and only resort" as, under conditions of panic and total loss of confidence, no one in the private sector is lending to anyone else since counterparty risk is extreme. And fiscal authorities that usually are spenders and insurers of last resort need to temporarily become the spenders and insurers of first resort. The fiscal costs of these actions will be large but the economic and fiscal costs of inaction would be of a much larger and severe magnitude. Thus, the time to act is now as all the policy officials of the world are meeting this weekend in Washington at the IMF and World Bank annual meetings.

In closing, cheers to Krugman for his Nobel!

read the minutes - Wasilla town

those Fleet Foxes

A great show on Sunday at Webster Hall, the above clip is a new song debuted by Fleet Foxes. Another studio soundtrack staple, I was super impressed with the force of their vocals. It is not a studio trick – these guys are for real. Obviously, the triumphant quality for me in their music is the harmony of the vocals. Harkening back to that Laurel Canyon sound, FF conjures two of my favorite records from that era– David Crosby/If I Could Only Remember My Name and John Philips/ Wolf King of L.A. This coupled with some Beachwood Sparks, Shins, and the Blue Ridge Mountains, you’ve got a hell of a sound for making art.

Artist lecture series at Bidonville Cafe (Oct. 5)

Last month I mentioned a new grass roots lecture series put together by some friends of mine in an effort to get a conversation going. This Sunday is the next installment. If you can travel out to Brooklyn it will be worth the trip. We had a great discussion last month and I think it safe to say that each presenting artist walked away a little re-charged. This series is happening the first Sunday of every month. If you want to participate send me an email and I'll put you in contact with the peeps in charge. Here are the event details for those interested in attending.

Sunday, Oct. 5 @ 7:00 pm
Bidonville Cafe in Fort Greene
Willoughby Ave. (b/w Clermont & Adelphi)
Bklyn, NY 11205
718.855.4515
G or C train to Clinton/ Washington and march north

This month’s artists are:

Josh Peters:

“Photography taken from 1960s and 70s advertisements and other sources of popular culture are seen through the distorting prism of memory. The images are viewed from a psychic distance, but it is not ironic or coldly critical. Instead the images are imbued with even more mystery and desire, and underlying darkness is brought to the fore.”

Bill Powhida:

“Last year around this time I was in panic mode of a different sort trying to finish a solo show and make enough work for Aqua Art and Pulse in Miami. I managed to get my show A Study for Sofia Coppola’s Film ‘Powhida’ finished and sent off to San Francisco by the end of September. The show opened enthusiastically, but I quickly realized I wasn’t going to sell out the show at the opening. In fact, I only sold two small works—one to the gallery and the other to a collector who explained that he found my work ‘both intellectually challenged and challenging.’ After I assured him that I wasn’t going to suddenly start painting landscapes and would indeed continue developing work about William Powhida, a fictional artist of dubious worth, he bought a modest painting.”

anatomy of a painting [3]

It is a kind of immersion in substances, a wonder and a delight in their unexpected shapes and feels. When nothing much is known about the world, everything is possible, and painters watch their paints very closely to see exactly what they will do. Even though there is no contemporary language for t hat kind of experience.... James Elkins

Well, I promised an update in a couple of weeks but that was 2 months ago ! You see how this works, timeless meandering apparently. Above is the stage of this from a week ago and I have already made some new changes but mostly with color. The overall composition is the same as you see here. What's being introduced is primarily a push/pull composition for the atmospherics above and introducing the perspectival grid below. Since the last installment, I agreed upon the orientation of the ground and introduced a new color scheme which is more naturalistic in range and also beefed up the light element. This trend towards announcing the light will continue but I will likely reintroduce more dramatic color elements as the painting moves closer to conclusion. As to the grid imposed on the weathered ground, I'm uncertain. I want to readjust it somewhat as there are some errors in the diagonals, as well needed improvement on the spacing to further induce a recession of space. The other lingering question is whether this grid is a dimensional structure, a second tier of the ground or a reflection of light. I'm about to figure that out.

In closing, here's a detail:

Putin rising

political speech

Dedicated to the McPalin campaign. Bring on the debates!





recording: Peter Sellers 1958

MBV - Kevin Shields on high

I waited 20 years to finally see My Bloody Valentine. There were a couple of chances in the early '90s but the struggle to procure a ride or the ticket price always seemed to impede us from getting to a show. Luckily for me, the "do-over" came last night(9/23) at Roseland here in NY. The band did not disappoint. It was without doubt one the greatest musical experiences I have ever had. I felt out of body at times - many times. It was beautiful and immense. I was flooded by memories of people and places in my past. I was reminded of how much of an impact Loveless had on all of us. How our whole dorm floor obsessed over this record, how it became a soundtrack to late nights and long drives on I-95. That sound protected us in some way and opened up passages within our psyches. As 19 year old students we were just discovering this new consciousness. Nothing had actually sounded like it before. It was singularly new, complete.

I even had some rare flashes that only artists understand. Points you remember while creating a work, trouble spots or successes that only you know. Experiments and accidents that may or may not be part of the final version, but stay with you in some physical memory bank of your body. I was remembering not just current works but stuff from 15 years ago as well. That was a catharsis I did not expect

The whole show was a sublime spectacle of the senses, from the incredible volume to an endless onslaught of light as you can see from the above video. The highlight for everyone in attendance was easily the finale of You Made Me Realise, one of the true classics from Creation Records.
What ensued was a blistering wall of sound for 20 - 30 minutes? It sounded like a herd of cyclones trampling a microphone. It was art.

Here are 2 of the better videos from last nights finale. The sound is compromised because nothing could really capture this. It's the best I could find to share. enjoy.

Trap

Crack up: the establishment blues

Management’s disposition to maintain and inflate profits while holding down wages and raw material prices meant that workers and farmers were denied the benefits of increase in their own productivity. The consequence was a relative decline of mass purchasing power. As goods flowed out of the expanding capital plant in ever greater quantities, there was proportionately less and less cash in hands of buyers to carry goods off the market. The pattern of income distribution in short, was incapable of long maintaining prosperity.

The Crisis of the Old Order – Arthur Schlesinger

Chris Dodd today called Henry Paulson’s bailout a Constitutional crisis as much as a financial one. The Goldman Sachs plan seeks to effectively give $700 billion to one man with no oversight, whether it Congressional or Judicial. The crisis looks increasingly like another executive power grab on par with the Patriot Act except this time using the Treasury Department as a surrogate of “change”. To add insult to the situation it looking like Paulson has been crafting this plan for months as cited by a Bush surrogate today. A string along perhaps as the summer’s $300 billion bailout for mortgages hasn’t stopped the hemorrhaging. So what does any of it mean?

I’m no economist and trying to get answers in laymen terms is not so easy. However I think these are helpful perspectives that speak to deregulation and economic policies that are the backbone of this mess. This is a good back history on Washington and Wall Street through the years.

Steve Fraser for TomDispatch.

And that's the point. At moments of crisis since the mid-1980s, the relationship between Washington and Wall Street has changed fundamentally, at least when compared to anything that would have been recognizable in the previous century. As a result, the road ahead is dark and unknown.

During the nineteenth century, Washington was generally happy to do favors for Wall Street financiers. Railroad tycoons, who often used those railroads as vehicles of extravagant speculation, enjoyed subsidies, tax exemptions, loans, and a whole smorgasbord of financial fringe benefits supplied by pliable Congressmen and Senators (not to mention armadas of state and local officials).

Since the political establishment was committed to laissez-faire, legerdemain by greedy bankers was immune from public scrutiny, which was also useful (for them). But when panic struck, the mighty, as well as the meek, went down with the ship. Washington felt no obligation to rush to the rescue of the reckless. The bracing, if merciless, discipline of the free market did its work and there was blood on the floor.

By early in the twentieth century, however, the savage anarchy of the financial marketplace had been at least partially domesticated under the reign of the greatest financier of them all, J.P. Morgan. Ever since the panic of 1907, the legend of Morgan's heroics in single-handedly stopping a meltdown that threatened to become worldwide, the iron discipline he imposed on more timorous bankers, has been told and re-told each time an analogous implosion looms.

As it turned out, though, the days of Washington agnosticism about Wall Street were numbered. The economy had become too complex and delicate a mechanism and, in 1907, had come far too close to meltdown -- even Morgan's efforts couldn't prevent several years of recession -- to leave financial matters entirely in the hands of the private sector.

First came the Federal Reserve. It was established in 1913 under President Woodrow Wilson as a quasi-public authority meant to regulate the country's credit markets -- albeit one heavily influenced by the viewpoints and interests of the country's principal bankers. That worked well enough until the Great Crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed and lasted until World War II. The depth of the country's trauma in those long years vastly expanded the scope of Washington's involvement in the financial marketplace.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal did, as a start, engage in some bail-out operations. The Reconstruction Finance Corporation, actually created by President Herbert Hoover, continued to rescue major railroads and other key businesses, while some of the New Deal's efforts to help homeowners also rewarded real estate interests. The main emphasis, however, now switched to regulation. The Glass-Steagall Banking Act, the two laws of 1933 and 1934 regulating the stock exchange, the creation of the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other similar measures subjected the financial sector to fairly rigorous public supervision.

This lasted for at least two political generations. Wall Street, after all, had been convicted in the court of public opinion of reckless, incompetent, self-interested, even felonious behavior with consequences so devastating for the rest of the country that government was licensed to make sure it didn't happen again.

The undoing of that New Deal regulatory regime, and its replacement, largely under Republican administrations (although Glass-Steagall was repealed on Clinton's watch), with what some have called the "socialization of risk" has contributed in a major way to the mess we're in today. Beginning most emphatically with the massive bail-out of the savings and loan industry in the late 1980s, Washington committed itself, at least under conditions of acute crisis, to off-loading the risks taken by major financial institutions, no matter how irrationally speculative and wasteful, onto the backs of the American taxpaying public.

Despite free market/anti-big-government rhetoric, real-life Washington has tacitly acknowledged the degree to which our national economy has become dependent on the financial sector (Finance, Insurance, and Real Estate -- or FIRE). It will do whatever it takes to keep it afloat.

Regarding those deregulation culprits and the apparent misguided repeal of Glass Steagall, former Senator Phil Gramm stands tall and his shadow is dark.

Daily Kos:

Even so, by 1999 Sen. Phil Gramm (TX, McCain surrogate) -- who had entered the Senate two years after McCain and quickly become the economic guru of the Keating Five maverick -- put forward the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act. This Act passed out of the Senate on a party line vote with 100% Republican support, including that of John McCain. (To be fair, the bill eventually passed again with a wide margin following revisions in the House.)

This act repealed part of the Glass-Steagall Act. This may sound like a bunch of Congressperson soup, but the gist of it is that Glass-Steagall was put in place in 1933 to control the rampant speculation that had helped cause the collapse of banking at the outset of the depression, and to prevent such consolidation of the banks that the nation had all its eggs in one fiscal basket.

Gramm-Leach-Bliley reversed those rules, allowing not only more bank mergers, but for banks to become directly involved in the stock market, bonds, and insurance. Remember the bit about how S&Ls failed because they didn't have the regulations that protected banks? After Gramm-Leach-Bliley, banks didn't have that protection either.

Gramm wasn't done. The next year he was back with the Commodity Futures Modernization Act, which was slipped into a "must pass" spending bill on the last day of the 106th Congress. This Act greatly expanded the scope of futures trading, created new vehicles for speculation, and sheltered several investments from regulation.

As with both Gramm-Leach-Bliley and Garn-St. Germain, large parts of this bill were written by industry lobbyists. This famously included the "Enron Loophole" that exempted energy trading from regulation and was written by (big suprise) Enron Lobbyists working with Gramm. Not coincidentally, Senator Gramm, the second largest recipient of campaign contributions from Enron, was also key to legislating the deregulation of California's energy commodity trading.

If you want to go deep into the economic policies of the last eight years I highly recommend this pdf: Bushonomics from the Center for American Progress

image: Tony Bevan

Urgent help needed

Your Urgent Help Needed

Dear American:

I need to ask you to support an urgent secret business relationship with a
transfer of funds of great magnitude.I am Ministry of the Treasury of the Republic of America. My country has had crisis that has caused the need for large transfer of funds of 800 billion dollars US. If you would assist me in this transfer, it would be most
profitable to you.I am working with Mr. Phil Gram, lobbyist for UBS, who will be my
replacement as Ministry of the Treasury in January. As a Senator, you may
know him as the leader of the American banking deregulation movement in the
1990s. This transaction is 100% safe.

This is a matter of great urgency. We need a blank check. We need the funds
as quickly as possible. We cannot directly transfer these funds in the names
of our close friends because we are constantly under surveillance. My family
lawyer advised me that I should look for a reliable and trustworthy person
who will act as a next of kin so the funds can be transferred.Please reply with all of your bank account, IRA and college fund account numbers and those of your children and grandchildren to wallstreetbailout@treasury.gov so that we may transfer your commission for this transaction. After I receive that information, I will respond with
detailed information about safeguards that will be used to protect the
funds.

Yours Faithfully Minister of Treasury Paulson

--

via: Angry Bear

Dear Mr. Bailout

To the Editor:

Dear Mr. Bernanke and Mr. Paulson:

My student loans are too big and it is hurting the economy. Can I have a bailout, please? I need $92,000.

Thanks.

Nathan Kottke
St. Paul, Sept.
17, 2008

via: Letters to the Editor/NY Times/Matt Yglesias

will they raise your taxes ?

Economic collapse withstanding, we've heard nothing but the mantra of raising taxes over the last weeks from a certain camp and their talking heads. So the question is will they? and by how much?
This widget lets you input your financial situation and calculates the change in your tax bill.
Plain and simple.



via: Ezra Klein

Luc Sante interview

Guernica magazine has a great interview with author Luc Sante currently on their site. Those close to me know how much Low Life was a book that impacted my life and imagination in way that is often hard to describe. I still feel it resonate inside of me when I walk down certain streets. If you are into histories of place, there is no better read. If you live NY, you better get a copy asap. It should be required with your driver's license.

Some interesting discussion about rhythm in the interview.

Excerpt from Sante::

Actually, songs don’t provoke visual images for me. I hadn’t exactly been aware of this before. What I get from songs is language, but not necessarily the actual lyrics. Hmm. This line of thought seems to be getting neurological… Anyway, I sometimes get words from instrumentals, but mostly from music I get rhythm. And timbre and inflection, stuff like that, which makes it sound much drier than it actually is, but in any event the image-generating portion of my brain involves some entirely other lode.

It’s funny—if music produces words, words do produce images. Despite this, music and images seem to live in different sides of the brain. I guess I think in analogies, which tend to be visual. And images produce images—the more images I see the more I can imagine, which, in part, accounts for my addiction to images and my stamina for consuming vast numbers of them at a time.

Whenever I’ve searched for the origins of rhythm in my life the only thing I’ve ever been able to find is the rhythm of the litanies in the Latin mass—the ora pro nobis iteration in funeral services and the antiphonal ceremony of rogations in the fields. Otherwise music was pretty much absent from my early life—my family didn’t get a record player until I was nine, and the radio only seemed to issue news and soccer, later baseball. Music crept up on me in childhood from a variety of ambient sources. In any case, soul music came to seem like something I’d always known, and—beginning when I was nineteen—reggae even more so, as if I’d somehow heard it in infancy.

Rhythm in writing is somehow analogous, but it’s a completely intuitive matter. I don’t really understand the process. It’s related to the substance of Flaubert’s famous letter to George Sand: “When I come upon a bad assonance or a repetition in my sentences, I’m sure I’m floundering in the false. By searching I find the proper expression, which was always the only one, and which is also harmonious. The word is never lacking when one possesses the idea. Is there not, in this precise fitting of parts, something eternal, like a principal? If not, why should there be a relation between the right word and the musical word? Or why should the greatest compression of thought always result in a line of poetry?” This is crucial stuff for me. I write intuitively, not knowing where I’m going, not knowing what the next sentence will be until this one has guided me there, and knowing how the sentence goes begins with my hearing its rhythm in my head, and then filling in the specific words. If the sentence is cloddish and clunky, it’s simply wrong—and not just wrong-sounding but wrong in its meaning. I realize at this point that I seem to be conflating two separate senses of the word “rhythm”—beat and flow—but they are inextricably linked in my mind and the matter lies largely outside my ability to articulate it. Rhythm also guides my reading, that part of which has nothing to do with acquiring information. There are certain writers whose rhythm is immediately congenial to me. Among the living, I think of Geoff Dyer, whose books I’d devour even if they were about metallurgy or stamp collecting. His rhythm carries me through, exactly the way the rhythm of a dancehall number takes over my body.

image via Guernica