A Report on the Durruti Free Skool

[General]

Brian Ang

The Durruti Free Skool project, conceived by Joshua Clover and Juliana Spahr, had its meet up this past weekend with participants from the San Francisco Bay Area, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, San Diego, Denver, Philadelphia, Hawaii, and Vancouver

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A Report on Can Art and Politics Be Thought?

[Art]

Brian Ang

Any work that obtains the level of a genre problem and wants to address the moment of political economy could use Capital as its conceptual upper limit.

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Mark to Market: Michael Clune's Metafiction

[Books]

Jasper Bernes

For Clune, Frank O'Hara's "market" ode, aestheticizing his choice of this commodity over that one – a book of Verlaine, a bottle of Strega –“has a collective dimension.”· O’Hara is the great poet of city life because the critic finds “an omnipresent commerce knits everyone and everything into the fictional system’s vast nervous system.”

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War, a Book Review

[Books]

Cal Bedient

There is a problem it makes war a sacred thing

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You Just Tarried with the Wrong Mexican: Machete and the Aesthetic Politics of Negation

[Film]

Johanna Isaacson

Cartoonish and action-packed, Machete belongs to a different world than the contemporary political film.  It contains no rich psychology, no subtlety, no complex logic, historical detail or rational explanation of realpolitik.  Rather, it points to an earlier moment when it was taken for granted that genre film was political to the bone, reflecting the subjectivity, anger and tastes of a radicalized proletarian sensibility.

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Vomiting Up Tequila & Glitter: Pop 2010

[Music]

Council on 5-Paragraph Essays

Paragraph 1, wherein the matter of the post-teen arises. Katy Perry's implausible transformation from crass post-Christian popsploitation Barbie to crass post-Christian popsploitation Barbie with better hooks than anybody else was complete by July when the feelgood song of the summer not only owned the charts but had more or less displaced every other song in the world. In a market where technological flux has substantially shortened the average stay at the top, and iTunes — the source that matters — can effectively list a new chart leader every hour on the hour if it so desires,·"California Gurls"·spent six weeks at #1. It·is incredibly bouncy and obvious and mind-meltingly catchy, and seems to have contrived a synthesis that appears as near-impossible and utterly obvious: a stylistics and atmospherics that conjoins Kelly Clarkson and Lady Gaga. Genius. The song's only mystery is that she calls her guest rapper "Snoop Doggy Dogg," which no one has called him since Monica Lewinsky was president. It was hard to tell if she was a New Jill saluting the oldskool, or was just an old lady in teen's clothing, someone about to let fly with "fly," or "the bee's knees," or "forsooth." This particular problem of the non-teen teen turned out to be at the heart of her next number one hit,"Teenage Dream": when she says "I'll be your teenaged dream tonight" it's not entirely clear whether the singer is supposed to be an actual teen delivering something dreamy to another teen ("let's go all...the way tonight") or whether the scenario is one of nostalgic recollection for a lost moment of teenagerdom. Are we still in the teen moment, or is it so far gone that we can only peer behind ourselves wistfully? This might be what is most decisive about Katy Perry: her look, her style, her entire way of being uncertainly in the middle of those two instants allows this ambiguity and this question to present itself, allows the simultaneous persistence and loss of the teenage dream.

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Lacking the Courage to Do Nothing: A Review of Every Man for Himself

[Film]

Matt Lau

Jean-Luc Godard’s 1980 film Sauve Qui Peut (La Vie), known in the US as Everyman for Himself and in the UK as Slow Motion (on account of its most conspicuous special effect), has just finished a welcome revival at Film Forum.  Often hailed as Godard’s “second first film,” a moniker that originated with Godard himself, on balance the film both fits and eludes this definition.  What is not in question is that the film marked Godard’s return to the European film industry, and it was his first film to have a theatrical run in the US since Tout Va Bien in 1971.  He has been working steadily, if not as prolifically as in his unsurpassed first decade, ever since: promoting his work at the usual festivals, granting interviews, and doing his best to remain the enfant terrible of the cinema with his generally oracular persona.  While even by Hollywood’s low standards the last thirty years have marked a coarsening of movies (with the rise of the Spielberg “Blockbuster” as an emblem for this trend in Godard’s own view), Godard’s work has become more difficult, relentlessly so in some cases (see King Lear), to the point where critical opinion, noblesse oblige aside, is thoroughly divided between enthusiasm and bewilderment, to say nothing of the experience of the casual viewer or even the fan of Godard’s earlier work.

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In and Out of Afghanistan

[Books]

Cal Bedient

1. George W. Bush’s wars, now Obama’s wars, our wars, have been and continue to be dishonestly-reasoned, lackwitted missions. The war that now absorbs the Pentagon’s love of a contest, its will to strategize, deploy, deny, destroy, “win,” is of course the one in Afghanistan. The bastard of the Cold War and 9/1l, what else could this war be but crazed and deformed? Beating up on the Taliban so as to get back at al Qaeda, who were once useful to us as guerilla fighters against the Russians and their unacceptable ism, communism, and then, in blow back, got in our face with their extremism, their terrorism, tearing up US soldiers’ far-from-home bodies—does that make any sense? None at all, but it’s the idea that ruled in the fall, 2009, White House deliberations on Afghanistan war strategy (those of Obama, his cabinet and aides, and the Pentagon brass)—sessions which Bob Woodward traces with dull prose and plodding fidelity in Obama’s Wars (Simon and Schuster, 2010).

Post-industrial Blues

[Books]

Mario Diaz-Perez

There is perhaps no period more difficult to judge than the recent past. Indeed, the complexity and unprecedented scale of recent convulsions in world financial markets make reflection on the fate of neo-liberalism in our ‘crisis moment’ all the more difficult. Though John Bellamy Foster and Fred Magdoff, the authors of The Great Financial Crisis, offer little consideration of the lifespan of neoliberal ideology, they offer a rather productive and illuminating integration of Marxist and Keynesian approaches to the study of postwar capitalism. Long-time writers for·Monthly Review, both are explicitly following the tradition of Baran and Sweezy who in the 1960s wrote·Monopoly Capital – shifting the emphasis of Marxist analysis of the economy from the competitive logics between firms to full recognition of the monopolistic practices of business elites. The essays organized in the book stretch from November 2006 to December 2008 and are meant to reflect Bellamy and Foster’s ongoing application of·Monopoly Capital’s “stagnation theory” to the study of economic developments unforeseen by the authors of that now largely forgotten Marxist tome.

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Jerry Lee Lewis, “Mean Old Man”

[Music]

Kelley Lehr

With its eclectic mix of standards spanning genres and eras, Jerry Lee Lewis's "Mean Old Man" (Verve), much like his 2006 comeback, "Last Man Standing," is like a really good dive bar’s jukebox. Each track pairs the Killer with a big name admirer or two, many of them icons and idols in their own right, on a collection of well-chosen, well-executed rock, country, and gospel covers. It gives the album a sense of historical importance. The supporting performances (by Jagger, Richards, Clapton, Slash, Willie Nelson, Merle Haggard Mavis Staples, and others) are far from restrained, but no one tries to shadow Jerry Lee's shine. And though it's not a live album per se, it was recorded live in the studio (with many tracks captured in one take, "like we used to do"). Lee gave the musicians minimal musical direction or lead-time; he'd just take off, dragging them out of their comfort zones and eliciting some inspired performances in the process. Some of the raw heat and energy of live is preserved, and the result feels spontaneous.