Monday, May 19, 2008

amazing news from the relative impoverishment front!

You don't know me I am an introverted excavator...

Alas, LI is up to his keister (whose word is that, I wonder? my mom’s? My grammie’s? the words that come out of a person went into a person first, and that mild word for butt, ass, or – for my Americanismophobe, Mr. Lawrence – arse must have been put in me a long ago) with editing. There is nobody quite as demanding as a Ph.D. student with a week to turn in the final product. I think this is a truth universally recognized.

LI found the tussle of the comment thread that followed Amie’s post totally cool. For me, thinking about the the construction not only of a marketbased industrial system, but of a shift in emotional norms and in the legitimation of political action, there was a lot of good hints about paths to follow. We’d like to write a post about, say, Marx, ideology, liberalism. I’d like to write it today, and drop everything, but, ho ho ho, the spirits of the telephone bill and the electric bill will have something to say about that. They will say: no.

Today, the article to read is in the Financial Times. I was turned onto it by Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism. I should include more of the biz bloggers on my roll – Smith and Tanta at Calculated Risk are especially worth reading. The FT article is the result of a poll that shows that worldwide (drumroll please) most people don’t want to become relatively poorer. Astonishing! The poll asked people if income inequality had become too great. Read the results here.

Now, back to editing. At the moment, I take breaks by going to YouTube and watching vids of live performances of Santi White of Santogold, like this one, or this one.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

I do not have problems with Americanisms as such, but with the all too common situation where existing meanings are over-written and occasions for confusion are created. To show that ass/arse is just such a one, consider that the film Shrek at one point has Shrek telling the princess as his reason for leaving her alone, "I've got to save my ass" - and then rescuing his donkey. Another is using "tear" as a verb meaning "weep"; I frequently get part way into a sentence that does this, expecting to find an object that is being torn, only to have to back up. It hinders the flow, all the more so as, in this case, there is not enough redundancy left between the existing meanings of "tear" as noun and verb to sort it out conveniently on the fly.

Anonymous said...

LI, so I saw Santogold "live" as one says at Union Square in NYC not so long ago. And she did sing the song you have linked to. If that isn't a Derridean song I don't know what is. Thanks for turning me on to her. It is a music a voice that is a more than a welcome change it is a fucking necessity - change the change as Marx would say - from grim faced "materialists" reciting their lectures and dogmas as "universal".

Dance, and not at the command of the cabal of materialists/idealists who each pretend to have it down to to a tee, to the last step - dance and history. I'm not so surprised at the (non)responses(s) to my little post on LI. The (non) responses let me just point out, only confirm a lot of what Derrida is saying in Spectres. The more one wants to have done with "ghosts" the more they keep on returning, etc. What does that say about "materiality"?

And dancing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VHa-fEpMkJ0


Amie

Roger Gathmann said...

Amie, you have stabbed me through the heart with envy. Man, I do wish I lived in NYC! So, what kind of pants was Santi White wearing this time? That woman is doing for pants what Bridget Bardot did, I think, for the bikini - or was it B.B.? I'm psyched, really, that you saw her perform, and in such a small space. Hope she did Aha. I have a feeling about Santogold, which may be pretty stupidly wrong - but I think they are the new thing, what hardcore was in the nineties. Santogold is the first music of the Obama era.

As for materiality, in the wake of your post, I've scribbled a few lines about that myself, but can't put them up yet. However, you post the very good question - what is the 'matter' of dance? As I've tried to discretely emphasize in past posts, the regulation of singing and dancing in the nineteenth century is one of the paths of alienation in popular culture. No singing at work! No dancing at harvest!

But you know this already.

Anonymous said...

LI, I might take a stab or two at writing about Marx, but am at a total loss for words to describe Santogold's pants! She was great though!
But now I have to run and post something on the Phantom of Liberty post, in response to one of your comments.

Amie

Lovecraft

“If Lovecraft was an odd child,” his biographer L. Sprague de Camp writes, “his mother showed signs of becoming even odder. In fact, she gav...