Spoon: Girls Can Tell
This is a great, understated album that merits repeated plays. Spoon have made a literate, rocking, breakthrough record that occupies a funny place--the songs are not unconventional, per se, yet they're somehow really special. Girls Can Tell displays the emotional resonance and big rock power of, say, Thin Lizzy and Mott the Hoople; the sonically referential, indie-rock smarts of a band like Versus; and amazing hooks that recall Colin Blunstone of the Zombies. Like Jennyanykind, Moviola, and the Lilys, this Austin, Texas, trio has chosen to work on perfecting their craft without paying much heed to mainstream or trends. In spite of (but mostly because of) wrenching breakup-centered lyrical material delivered in a very real, matter-of-fact way, Girls Can Tell is one of those life-affirming pop albums you know you'll return to in years to come. --Mike McGonigal (*****)
Michael Hardt: Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire
Empire (2000)—the surprise hit that made its term for U.S global hegemony stick and presciently set the agenda for post–9/11 political theory on the left—was written by this same somewhat unlikely duo: Hardt, an American political scientist at Duke University, and Negri, a former Italian parliament member and political exile, trained political scientist and sometime inmate of Rome's Rebibbia prison. This book follows up on Empire's promise of imagining a full-blown global democracy. Though the authors admit that they can't provide the final means for bringing that entity about (or the forms for maintaining it), the book is rich in ideas and agitational ends. The "multitude" is Hardt and Negri's term for the earth's six billion increasingly networked citizens, an enormous potential force for "the destruction of sovereignty in favor of democracy." The middle section on the nature of that multitude is bookended by two others. The first describes the situation in which the multitude finds itself: "permanent war." The last grounds demands for and historical precursors of global democracy. Written for activists to provide a solid goal (with digressions into history and theory) toward which protest actions might move, this timely book brings together myriad loose strands of far left thinking with clarity, measured reasoning and humor, major accomplishments in and of themselves. (****)
« September 17, 2006 - September 23, 2006 | Main | October 1, 2006 - October 7, 2006 »
“Courageous, untroubled, mocking and violent-that is what Wisdom wants us to be. Wisdom is a woman, and loves only a warrior.”
--Friedrich Nietzsche
The New York Times' list of female soldiers fallen in Iraq.
Link: The Fallen: 2002 - New York Times.
The great philosopher is speaking of violence to concretized concepts, of course. Also, though we at Wit doubt the cause for which these women died, we still salute them.
"Debbie Harry is probably the single most interesting and important woman in the history of rock. Well, maybe not, but all rock bios should start with hyperbole, and if anyone deserves hyperbole, it's Harry. This photo book/biography works wildly well in both its media. Chris Stein's pictures of Harry, Blondie, and the New York rock scene are not only fun in a nostalgic way, they're damn good pictures that you can stare at for hours--even without having taken the drugs that inspired them. And the story of Debbie Harry's life, as written by Harry and rock critic Victor Bockris, is two steps past weird. Who knew that Debbie was a flower child in the '60s and saw the Doors, Janis Joplin and the Velvet Underground live at some of their most celebrated shows? Or what about Debbie's stint in the psychedelic folk band Wind in the Willows? Or that Debbie was 35 years old when Blondie hit it big? Her career crosses and overruns so many moments and people in rock history that reading her bio is like driving through rock & roll heaven. And, frankly, the fact that the book is full of photos of the cutest rock star in history doesn't hurt. A must for fans of Harry and historians of rock."
--James DiGiovanna
Link: Amazon.com: Making Tracks: The Rise of Blondie: Books: Debbie Harry,Chris Stein,Victor Bockris.
No shit.
Link: Clever devils get the bird - Sunday Times - Times Online.
The Wit Of The Staircase has over 4,000 books in its offices. The Los Angeles Lunar Society, where Wit is the head librarian, has over 40,000 volumes. If Wit walks into another home or office with intriquing shelves we are lost for hours to whatever other purpose--orgy, séance, cocktail party or other metaphysical house call--brought us there. A bibliophile below writes about similarly coveting his neighbors' volumes.
"I still remember going to visit a friend in Scotland, long ago. He lived in a tiny house in a back alley in St. Andrews, where I spent many years as a university student. He had a pristine row of novels by Vladimir Nabokov, one of my favorite writers, then and now. I often used to go to his house for afternoon tea, and the conversation was absorbing. But it was hard to keep my eyes off that uniform edition: the colorful spines, the remarkable titles (Ada, Bend Sinister, Lolita, Pnin, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight). I liked the elegant typeface, and the sense of a complex international life captured in a shelf of books. Decades later, when I got my own house, in Vermont, I went to some trouble to acquire from British booksellers that exact row of Nabokov, recreated volume by volume at considerable expense."
Proustian, even.
"Time seems to be a given: it's just there, flowing along. But to me, time is a construct; this it seems to me is obvious, even from a purely intellectual point of view. It is possible, however, to experience this directly; my subjective experience is not of a fixed external world filled with things and events carried along inexorably by a river of time ... instead, I experience time as being far less structured, in which the past and future and present are not as cleanly separated and delineated as they appear --- where the simple flow of past through present to the future is somewhat questionable. I feel this, and it is source of great comfort even as it seems to question the orderliness of clock time."
A lovely look at details from the recent Jovovich-Hawk fashion show as posed on pretty maids all in a row.
Wit loves an outre theory, a new religion, a Freud basher (especially Deleuze) or a wiggy idea, but we have become increasingly wary of the chaos magicians, Crowleyites, Buddhists, Bonesmen, Scientologists, acid casualties, CIA spooks, Luciferians, vampires, Bavarian Illuminati, airhead exiled aristocrats, potheads, mystic momma's boys, slutty seekers, Yogargoyles, Rand Corporation Strangeloves, Lawrence Livermore MK Ultra madmen, and others of their a-little-knowledge-is-a-dangerous-thing Los Angeles ilk.
All this doesn't seem open minded and charmingly L.A. vernacular anymore. It seems like constant earthquake weather with spooky protofascist mental malleability in the extended forecast. (Read Lawrence Rickels' excellent The Case Of California for an uncannily accurate prediction of the current Cali status quo.)
The Modernist project is starting to look pretty good compared to all the equally vain and increasingly certain mysticism from where we sit. So it is with pleasure that we recommend the following event with cultural critic Douglas Rushkoff and "mystical guru" Daniel Pinchbeck tonight in New York City. Together these fine men may help sort things out a bit.
"Post-Modern Prophecy: Urgent Myths for Urgent Times?
A dialogue between authors Daniel Pinchbeck and Douglas Rushkoff"
Link: MAGPIE » THIS THURSDAY IN NYC: RUSHKOFF & PINCHBECK DIALOGUE — FREE..
Wit, despite having been made to suffer for this opinion time and again, still maintains that democratic culture is now dashing itself on the rocks of the aging Baby Boomers' immaturity and neurotic refusal of and displacement of death onto the young. Read Rickels on this subject below.
"In California, Rickels locates 'the intersection between technology and the unconscious' and thus reconstructs the political front of psychoanalysis which arose to combat National Socialism. California and Germany, he contends, are two coasts of an era that 'lets roll' in the Enlightenment and continues to this day. Kafka is the 'ultimate Kalifornian'. The fall of the Berlin wall and the San Francisco Earthquake appear 'symptomatically in sync'. And the invention of the California teenager - the archetypical adolescent - begins with 'a certain central European refusal of death'."
Link: Amazon.com: The Case of California: Books: Laurence A. Rickels,Laurence A. Rickels.
Wit had a profound experience on the staircase of this museum, where the smell of violets rushed in from the open doors to the back garden downstairs, giving me deja vu and making me woozy...
"Regardless of the recurrence of archaeological tropes in Freud’s texts, standing in this room crowded with nearly two thousand relics, the heavy curtains drawn, it becomes easy to understand why archaeology has sometimes been seen as the master metaphor for psychoanalysis.
The room is a plush version of an ancient burial chamber. As tribal leader, Freud operated from inside his own encrypted tomb. Nowadays, the one thing lacking is a coffin containing his corpse. Instead, the focus shifts to the most famous couch in the world. Although haunting and atmospheric, considering the subject matter, the room is strangely static. A theatrical time capsule. His dead brain reconfigured as interior design. Meanwhile, Freud’s provocative significance remains fascinatingly susceptible to the radical disagreements that helped to keep his thoughts in a productive state of flux throughout his long life.
Leaving the museum, I walk down the short path to the empty pavement and spot a cluster of yellow petals arranged in the shape of three numbers on the small front lawn: 150. Happy Birthday, Sigmund."
Link: outsideleft: Tomb Raider.
"To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one's unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second."
Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War
