I imagine most people have seen this already but in case they haven’t: Sarah Palin’s “cheating on high school math test” style crib notes from her appearance at the Tea Party convention. I always thought putting a little piece of paper with the answers written on it in my sock worked better. In case you can’t make it out, it says:
Energy
Budget Tax
Lift American Spirits
Kind of amazing.
- Who dat say dey gonna beat them Saints?
- Ok, congratulations New Orleans, but isn’t Who Dat just a really slightly changed version of the Bengals’ ‘Who dey say they gonna beat dem Bengals’?
- After the game, there was a really nice shot of Drew Brees holding his child, looking into the child’s eyes and crying with joy. The announcer managed to completely rob the image of its pathos, transform it into pure kitsch, and make 99.999 percent of the audience feel bad by going on about how we were watching the most beautiful thing a father can share with his son. This of course prompted a million living rooms to resound with the thought: ‘Man, I feel bad about my relationship with my father.’
- The Saints pulled off two wins in a row by way of huge late-game interceptions off of future Hall of Fame quarterbacks. The Favre pick wasn’t that much of a surprise, but Peyton Manning’s lack of poise at the end was pretty shocking.
- Finally, in actual analysis: I give the Saints coaching staff a ton of credit for this win. They were outmanned and they knew it, but they made a series of extremely gutsy and (mostly) well executed calls. These included going for it on 4th and goal from the 1, making a two point conversion, and kicking an onside kick to start the second half. Further, early in the game it looked like the Colts were going to run away in a blow out. The Saints made the key adjustments to clamp down on defense and stop Manning & Co. Anyways, it was really nice to see the braver and more entertaining team pull off a win.
This will make you smile wide. Thanks torture garden.
I would like to hold a conference and exhibition as an extension of Ghost Island’s multidisciplinary artistic/philosophic/community-building project. This will be an opportunity both to share our work and plan our goals for the future of the Ghost Island project.
There will be a series of panels, performances, and presentations relating to the individual scholarly and artistic practices of Ghost Island friends and members, dedicated space for dialogues about Ghost Island and our various projects, and lots of potlucking.
The conference will take place over the span of a weekend (date tba). The evenings will culminate in dance parties.
Please contact me if you are interested in presenting, attending, performing, or helping to organize the event. I hope to hold it in the Sping or early Summer.
1. Singing in tune is not easy. To aspire towards long, sustained, beatless tones with the voice, moves the singing past personal expressiveness– the materiality of the infinite possibility of scales rises up in the voice. Singing in tune is not easy. Roughly 20 cents, 1/10 of an equal-tempered semitone, is the difference between a just Major Third and an equal-tempered one, yet the difference in clarity and consonance is like that between linear perspective and the actual functioning of the eye. La Monte Young’s “Well-Tuned Piano” is an example of the difference in sound.
2. The piano as we hear it, its 12 tones and chromatic scale, are fabrications of the industrial revolution. Its tones are approximations of geometrically exact tunings and musical space. Just tuning is an art–its scales are aesthetic choices, a choice of structure, an architecture of frequencies. The equal-tempered piano was produced to make all musics exchangeable. Qualitative difference of sound, and pitches, vanished.
3. Neither Bach nor Beethoven composed on equal-tempered pianos. We don’t hear their music in the concert hall. Musical education, like all education, is in desperate need of reform. Music should be studied within a geometric-spatial field, first. Not as the reproduction of dissonance meant to naturalize untutored ears to equal-tempered scales.
4. ”Voyelles” by Rimbaud. Even vowel-sounds have specific and qualitatively different timbres. The study of sound-color as a poetic and literary art lays fallow, since sound is not considered in the most basic musical study as a material in itself. Just scales, the first production of melodies, where intervals do not repeat, became rigidified in an unmusical, dissonant form so that each step, each key of the piano, would be exactly the same distance apart.
“I’m not an ideologue.”
“It’s time for something new. Let’s try common sense.”
Obama, during his meeting with House Republicans 1/30/10
“…Mr. Obama’s coolness, even his seeming detachment, became a political virtue. The corollary to that belief is that he won because he was the anti-ideologue after eight years of an intensely ideological presidency.” NYTimes
The state of the union address tirelessly emphasized utilizing collaboration and post-partisan expert knowledge to fix our nations crises. This message was even more strongly delivered in Obama’s open discussion with House Republicans. In the latter address, Obama adroitly navigated between policy debates. Baseless assertions cost free governmental solutions to the economy and health care were repeated by Republicans. While it was of slight encouragement that a U.S. president could honor a series of baseless questions with articulate responses, Obama’s invocation of the so-called ‘neutral’ and ‘practical knowledge of experts’ was deeply problematic.
True, the ineffectual proposals of Republicans for health care and the economy are rooted in a steadfast commitment to minimal government interference, which calls for a critical examination of how their principles connect with any method. However, the the idea of ‘what works,’ is deeply contextual. The current crisis necessitates an interrogation not of ‘what works,’ but instead of the principles that account for a ‘healthy’ market in terms of the relative benefits across social strata.
Neoliberalism incessantly perpetuates a mythology of post ideology. It is common parlance in the media and popular discourse to characterize ideology as a negative attribute associated with various forms of “extremism” that plague our lovely democratic world. The eight year reign of Bush is constantly portrayed as an era of ideology and ideologues, such as Paul Wolfowitz. Yes, it is true, Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney, and Bush had horrible world views premised on a problematic notion of the United States sovereign power over the world. While their ideology was problematic, it is not the case that ideology itself was the cause. Ideology is merely the set of principles used to interpret the world. Pretending to operate outside, beyond, or above ideology is arguably ideology’s most pernicious form.
The pretension to post-ideology is a particularly juridical concept, so it is not a surprise that Obama would latch on to it. The concept of a law or power that operates without any force, as if directly transcribed from “nature” or “God,” is problematic on numerous levels. This idea is a type of theology that has no way of constituting itself or allowing for alteration.
In legal theory, there is an ongoing debate over functions of negative and positive liberty. Negative liberty is ‘freedom from,’ and positive liberty is the ‘freedom to.’ There is a strong fear of the latter within the capitalist nations, particularly as it is seen as potentially tyrannical and conducive to dictatorial policies. Hence, one hears ‘the function of justice is not to make laws, but to enforce them.’ A social context of slavery, segregation, and the informal segregation of today, with banks red lining neighborhoods, such that whiteness is a form of a property upkeep, necessitates a positive law, rather than a blind one.
Historically, the ideology of ‘post-ideology’ is deeply entangled in an imperialism, which (mis)translates things like “U.S. interests” and the advanced capitalist nations of the west universal into universal rights and world peace. It is the type of ideology that supports the claim that the wars in the United States’ wars in the middle east are wars of liberation from the “ideology” and “extremism” that bars people from experiencing peace and universal rights.
In the words of my friend Chris Madak, “the worst form of negativity is that waged in the name of positivity,” to which I would also add ‘hope.’ This strikes at the heart of the liberal nightmare social-scape, founded upon mutual complacency, humility, and a ferocious resistance to critical thought. Thus, our supposed FDR big government liberal president’s address promised: tax cuts, earmark reform, (an eventual) spending freeze, off-shore drilling, and the notorious oxymoron “clean coal,” assertions, which inspired Chris Matthews to characterize Obama’s address (particularly his orchestration of the bailout) as “conservative.”
Scott Brown got you down? Well, here’s the way out: Believe the universe is made of math. The logical inevitability of reason (or complete destruction) becomes apparent, and then it’s only a matter of time before the Tea Partiers fall away. Not like you’ll be around to see it, unless you’re lucky enough to reach the age of biotechnological immortality, but even then the idea of a self (much less rugged individualism) gets fuzzy. In the mean time, Elitism and his cousin Hedonism will keep you going, just as long as you can get a hold of some dollar bills. Let Lie E-8 show you the light, and the futility and redundancy of human government won’t be so depressing.
“We Can Do This”
Proof
The only way I could think to make it work was to buy a building and name the building love and then invite you over and then say to you we are in love and since you said you’d get married when and only when you were in love that is why I have worn this very nice suit and hired a justice of the peace and I only hope you will like this dress it was my mother’s.
-
That is what I told her before she didn’t marry me but at least I knew we had been in love and it wasn’t just all in my head like my less supportive friends and parents would often say. I paid the justice of the peace when she – that is she ‘you’ not she the justice of the peace – when she said she did not think that her version of love worked like that and walked out of love and back into love’s parking lot. I did not follow her because I like being in love and I mostly just felt sad that she was so confused to think that she was not in love with me when yes obviously we were both standing there together and if she says she was never in love with me like she says now sometimes I have video from the security camera that proves it.
He holds a 62-49 lifetime record, with an E.R.A. of 4.22 and 607 career strikeouts. I still think he looks weird with the forward facing ball cap.
