when this video for my current favourite song in the world was sent my way, it came with the note, "name the film by a prominent member of the Iranian New Waves that it's a homage to and i'll send you a cookie." the answer, incidentally, is abbas kiarostami's close up, namely its final scene.
eat yr heart out, concordia. new york is showing you how it's done and, what's more, they'll win their fight. of course, it was never about suppressing free speech, concordia; i know that. it was about the fact that war criminals like netanyahu and sharon will speak a million times before ahmadinejad will speak once. but what are you going to do? they'll just accuse you of talking about nebulous zionist conspiracies and denying the holocaust. which, of course, is not to say that ahmadinejad isn't a bad dude. just saying we might listen to what he's saying is all.
9/12/07
I'M SO OUT OF HERE WHEN I TURN EIGHTEEN
as an addendum to my last entry (in more ways than one), i want to share this song.
9/11/07
NOW YOU WILL BE FREE, NOW THAT NOTHING DEPENDS ON ME
No one knew it, but the fiddler standing against a bare wall outside the Metro in an indoor arcade at the top of the escalators was one of the finest classical musicians in the world, playing some of the most elegant music ever written on one of the most valuable violins ever made. His performance was arranged by The Washington Post as an experiment in context, perception and priorities — as well as an unblinking assessment of public taste: In a banal setting at an inconvenient time, would beauty transcend?
i like how "some of the most elegant music ever" is incontestable. it's significant, however, that "some of the most elegant music ever" isn't self-evident. it's that kantian thing sensus communis; if nobody was stupid and nobody acted in self-interest, if everybody had the same cognitive faculties and education, things like "some of the most elegant music ever" would be self-evident and beauty would transcend. like everything else (including politics and government), culture functions according to a logic and, so, what this particular washington post writer calls "some of the most elegant music ever" is inevitable, is autonomous, is truth. mainstream academics still believed this up to thirty years ago and probably most of the mainstream arts and culture writers in this world still believe this. scary, no?
of course, what leading scholars once thought to be inevitable, what they once thought to represent truth, many of us now understand as the provence of white people. art, as i like to say, is what white people do. or to be more charitable, as adorno said, "it is self-evident that nothing concerning art is self-evident anymore." which is to say, the qualities that the most sophisticated musicologists, literary critics, and art historians once thought to be objectively valuable were actually what aristocratic white people had decided (over the course of generations and centuries) they liked. "beauty is truth, truth beauty" turned out to be a kind of crypto-white supremacism.
i bring all of this up because my friend em-dawg gave a paper on the EZLN's radio station, radio insurgente, in st. louis today. in it, she told an anecdote about the station's listeners, indigenous peoples of the chiapas, phoning in to request that radio insurgente stop playing classical music. they didn't like it.
9/08/07
THESES ON FEUERBACH
who said this? ——
as you liberated yourselves before from the slavery of monks, kings and feudalism, you should liberate yourselves from the deception, shackles and attrition of the capitalist system.
