Salinas, California - Birthplace of American literary legend John Steinbeck, and now the most populous city in the country without functioning public libraries, thanks to a failed motion to increase the municipal sales tax by half a cent.

It's even more of a shame, as well as an acute embarrassment, when you discover just how vital these vital public services are to Salinas's citizens:

"Because of Salinas's large number of poor farmworkers and immigrants, the city's libraries are popular destinations for people seeking citizenship primers, literacy courses, English-as-a-second language tapes, Internet access and after-school programs. Roughly 1,900 people visit on an average day."

If you go to Yahoo! on a semi-regular basis and give their news headlines a once-over, you'll notice that the last of the 4 or 5 stories is always at best a throwaway piece of superficial trash, and at worst an advertisement for something or other masquerading as news. How then, do you account for the fact that this piece on some dork's 2500-strong petition (!) to release Fiona Apple's "lost album" (surely another Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, if not another Smile) actually sat in the news section of the Yahoo!'s front page for a while this afternoon?

Why not Free Ron Artest?

Or better yet, Free Annyong?

It looks like the whole Bush Monkeys painting furor, which caused the (ridiculous) closing of an art display at Chelsea Market last week, has worked out for the best: the piece will now be blown up and put on a billboard over the outbound entrance to the Holland Tunnel. With traffic at that location reported to be in the region of 400k drivers a day, I'll make a conservative estimate and say that it will be seen by 50 times as many people per day as it would have if it had been left where it was.

Nice work, snivelling Bushie complainers! Ya can't stop the meme rush.

I don't know which one of these is the better quote:

She said she worked on the design for the dress for four years, though she acknowledged that some might find the Confederate flag offensive.

or

Duty, now a college student, said school officials told her before the prom not to wear the dress, but she didn't have another one and decided to see if administrators would change their minds.

If you worked on your own prom dress for your entire high school career AND it's the only dress you own....you might be a...well, you know the rest.


Go Red States! You fucked up our country something awful yet again, but offer us all endless amounts of amusement in return.

I've finally started my no-doubt slapdash Habermas paper today.

Jurgen Habermas, interviewed in Logos, Summer 2004

Q: In the United States, the “War on Terrorism” has veered off into a “War on Civil Liberties,” poisoning the legal infrastructure that makes a living democratic culture possible. The Orwellian “Patriot Act” is a Pyrrhic victory in which we and our democracy are the vanquished. Has the “War on Terrorism” similarly affected the European Union? Or has its experience with the terrorism of the 70s made it immune to the surrender of civil liberties to the security-state?

A: I don’t actually believe that. In the Bundesrepublik, the reactions in the autumn of ‘77 were hysterical enough. Furthermore, we’re encountering today a different sort of terrorism. I don’t know what would have happened if the twin towers had collapsed in Berlin or Frankfurt. Naturally, we would not, after September 11, have laced up for ourselves “security packets” so suffocatingly tight, nor of such an unconstitutional reach, as the frightening regulations in America, which have been so clearly skewered and dissected by my friend Ronald Dworkin. If, in this regard, distinctions were to be drawn between mentality and practice here and beyond the Atlantic, I would endeavor to place them in the context of historical experience. Maybe the very understandable shock in the USA after September 11 was, in fact, greater than it would have been in a European country accustomed to war. How to prove this?

Certainly, the patriotic upsurge following upon September 11, had an American character. But the key to the curtailment of fundamental law, which you’ve referred to, to the breach of the Geneva Convention in Guantanamo, to the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, etc., I would locate elsewhere. The militarization of life domestically and abroad, the bellicose policies which open themselves up to infection by their opponent’s own methods, and which return the Hobbesian state to the world stage where the globalization of markets had seemed to have driven the political into the wings, all this the politically enlightened American populace would have overwhelmingly rejected, if the administration had not, with force, shameless propaganda, and manipulated insecurity, exploited the shock of September 11. For a European observer and a twice-shy child such as I, the systematic intimidation and indoctrination of the population and the restrictions on the scope of permitted opinion in the months of October and November of 2002, (when I was in Chicago), were unnerving. This was not “my” America. From my 16th year onward, my political thinking, thanks to the sensible re-education policy of the Occupation, has been nourished by the American ideals of the late 18th century.

(which I suppose is a lot better than the first post title that came to mind - "4 All My N****z in New Canaan")

Courtesy the Pitchfork Top 50 Re-issues list....

I need this album. Badly.



The Third Unheard: Connecticut Hip Hop 1979-1983

"Mr. Magic, who built the Southern Connecticut hip-hop scene on his own after hearing Kurtis Blow's "Christmas Rappin'", spends nine minutes defending the rap abilities of the Constitution State, concluding with an ode to loyalty: a roll call of Connecticut towns. Magic's point is that the Connecticut scene could step to anything coming out of NYC, and while that may not have been completely true, CT did produce a worthwhile crop."

"It's reasonable to assume, then, that Mr. Magic's scene was extremely committed to itself, yet still reaped the benefits of New York's close proximity-- it was an insular scene, but not devoid of influences."

Recently I've been trying to hash out, in my own mind and in prose, the mix of geographic, social, economic, ethnic and cultural particularities that make this place that I grew up in, that I come back to, this tiny, rocky (geologically, mentally), oft-discounted region that I cannot quite escape being colored by - southern Connecticut - unlike any other place I've been to or know of. I can't help it, this is just what I do. It's a project to uncover a parallel to something like the idea of a "Polish mentality" - call it the "Connecticut mentality". That reviewer's remark may indeed describe the CT hip hop scene of the early 80s - but it is more insightful than he knows. Proximity to NYC, and a barrier of comfortable, sturdy provinciality riddled by well-chosen influences are just a couple of the many aspects of Connecticutness, as I see it.

So that's the historical stuff; obviously, though, the tracks here are fun as hell. Mr. Magic's introduction is followed by two tracks from Magic's 12-year-old nephew Pookey Blow: one of them, "Get Up (And Go to School)" samples the heavy auxiliary percussion and sparse guitar hits of Herman Kelly's "Dance to the Drummer's Beat", adding some cartoon-dreary synth and kazoo solos, all while Pookey laments being in school, falling asleep in English class, and wasting time when he could be rapping. In the end, though, Pookey agrees with the title's directive: "You gotta go to school and learn all you can, if you wanna be the president of"-- I think (and hope)-- "Japan."

Seriously, how cool does that sound?

If you bet on Do They Know It's Christmas redux to top the UK pop charts at Christmas - and who in their right mind didn't? - you were right.

What's happening here? Pop stars of the moment banding together for a good cause - check. That 'good cause' being victims of strife, famine and disease in the Sahel - check. Bob Geldof and Bono present - check. Mentally retarded Republican leadership - check. We really have come a long way in twenty years, haven't we?

Blog-trolling has taken up more of my morning than I thought it would...but not without profit. I was actually wondering yesterday what compells guys (you know the sort) to wear shorts right through the winter - not to mention how they manage it. Here's how.


Creepy blog of the day.

Earlier this evening my friend b.f. of the pleasingly erratic (erratically pleasing?) extrawack opined that this blog has become, in the last few days, a bit...dismal. Was that the word he used? No, no...was it..."more tragic than a plane full of nuns and orphans crashing into a bus carrying Holocaust survivors"? Er...not really. I think he just said it had gotten a little downbeat of late.

Well dammit, I have feelings too, you know.

But he's right, absolutely right. I never meant to turn this thing into my diary of woe and sadness - I already have a couple of those, and no one gets to read them. Nor can I see why anyone would want to. That's my own private activity, usually accomplished with the draining a bottle of Popov and a six hour crying jag. In the shower. In the fetal position. Rocking slowly and uncontrollably.

Besides, I like looking at my hit counter each day and seeing 20s, 30s, 40s (Who ARE you people? Dear God, this passes for worthwhile, interesting reading in your world?) Much more of the melancholy sadsackery and that count goes back down to 1s and 2s post haste. So I'll try and turn on the tap marked "positive energy" (cringe), and leave the miseriblogging to the kids at Livejournal etc. They're so much better than me at it, anyway. (I own them on creating neologisms, though).

So I guess I'll hold off about the nervous breakdown I sensed looming this afternoon. You wouldn't wanna know, anyway.

What to do with a winter Sunday? Anything but go where people are Christmas shopping. I worked for/with Dad tonight - barely a customer there from 4 till we closed at 8 - then headed home just ahead of the oncoming Noreaster (or is it a SouSouwester?). It caught me. The rain turned to snow halfway, around the time I started climbing up and around little hills that my poor little summer car, its snow tires stacked under the deck, struggled with heroically. I slid, spun, fishtailed up hills, and nearly bought the farm going around Dead Man’s Curve…or more realistically, I almost dinged up a fender flirting with a guardrail in the woodsy ess-curves.

Here at home, my ears are burning, my body warm, my hair ice-crusted, my tummy full, my fingers wrinkly, my heart and soul crinkly.

I've long had the suspicion that Neil Hannon wrote that line for me. If it weren't so damn cold outside, I'd drive to the airport and fly to Sweden tonight.

And who wouldn't want to live in Sweden forever, when their pop charts are topped by the likes of Goteburg's own sweet, sorrowful melodic, melancholic Jens Lekman?



And I've heard all those stories about the black cabs, and the way they drive
And if you take a ride with them you might not come back alive
They might be psycho killers but tonight, I really don't care
So I said turn up the music, take me home or take me anywhere...

But then, who needs a little gentle pathos and heart in their music charts, when we've got big-titted, dour, manufactured Protoolbots like Lindsey frigging Lohan?

It is getting cold here in Connecticut. Lately the mornings have been bright and blue and half-filled with clouds that just rush across without ever completely vanishing or filling up the sky. Too blustery the other day to go do much of anything out there; yesterday I wanted to catch up inside on writing and I did; today I worked for Dad. The ground is already frozen; I feel it beneath my boots as I take the dog out for a walk, or at night when I step out in bare feet, drop off the stoop into the leaves alongside the house to unplug the multicolored net-lights slung over three of the six or seven bushes in front. When the snow comes - and it's supposed to come Sunday - it's going to stick, not just melt and seep away. For that I am glad. December too many times cold without snow; what's the point of that? Iron-hard ground, bristly grass, stiff white branches, dog shit like little black rocks. I am about halfway through my R & R now.

I spent yesterday stuck here; a dead battery kept me from getting to the doctor's for a checkup on my knee, which keeps me from making a PT appointment, which keeps me from knowing how long until I can start running, kicking, stressing it again. I am lazy and housebound enough without machines aiding and abetting me. Brother, while setting the trickle charger up in the finger-chilling dark, suggests the problem might be the fan belt that squeals for a minute or two every time I start the car. The belt slips; the alternator isn't recharging the battery as I drive - something like that. That would explain how my battery died while I filled up at a station in NJ, nine hours into the drive back from Ohio. Suggests I take it down to the station that his buddy's family owns and runs, let them have a look at it. The same place that supposedly fixed this squeaking belt problem a year ago. The squealing started up again the morning I got the car back. Brother is a mechanic, though, so I'll listen.

I fell asleep in the late afternoon reading Bertrand Russell on Kant. And I still haven't started what should really be a rudimentary paper on Habermas. I haven't registered for classes, nor do I even know what I should be taking - problematic since I plan on returning the day before the quarter starts. Choices for my committee? Dissertation ideas? Surely you jest.

I am not really saying much about Kyra. I don't know what to say, which goes hand in hand with having nothing to say just now. I have no control over what she does or doesn't do, if she says hello to me or remains cut off - she's too far away and I've got no way to get her closer or me closer. She reads this and she knows that well. I just don't want our story - a wild and weird and pretty twisted story, now that I think about it - to end like this. No one but the two of us know the whole of the story...not even close...but I'm working on that now. I always deferred to her wish not to tell it, as long as she was with me (so to speak), but its hard to hold it in now.

AOL Radio's Bossa Nova channel isn't all that great (and what is it doing in "Latino", anyway?), but man, I love Marisa Monte.

Now I'll go grab a beer, slide into the hot tub, and later settle down with an old friend, Max Frisch (Sketchbook, 1946-49). Hope that I'm able to pluck something sharp and steady to round off this with, to dilute the LiveJournalish tone of it...

Funny, a quick google search for something reveals that this is not the only "Parallel Campaign" on Blogspot. That site's first and only post - a lengthy elaboration on Hamann's Ontology - shows them to be a good deal more intelligent and philosophically scrupulous than I. Either that or they read way too much into Liverpool's midfield.

I've been meaning to write a bit about why I called this "The Parallel Campaign" in the first place, for the benefit of myself and for Zoran de Hyperborea, if no one else (read some Musil, Z!) Will try and do that in the next few days.

In the meantime, I'm putting that, um, parallel site into the sidebar of fame.

Which of these popular music lyrics - uncannily heard in the same hour at the gym tonight - best fits the demolished, self-destructive, honestly frightening state of mind that has ruled me these last few days, since Kyra napalmed what was my happiness?


a) All because of you/all because of you...

b) Say it ain't so, your drug is a heartbreaker/say it ain't so, my love is a life-taker...

c) It's a bittersweet symphony, that's life/Try to make ends meet, you're a slave to money, then you die...

d) all of the above

I really don't like feeling this way at all.

Earlier this evening, when I read about what could be the most grotesque injury suffered while celebrating a goal in the history of soccer, I thought about asking the obvious but cynical question - in these joylessly over-proscribed days, when lifting your shirt up over your head to declare your love for your girlfriend, announce your kid's birth, or self-aggrandizingly proclaim your patriotism wins you automatic caution points, did the referee card hapless goal-provider Diogo (note, he didn't even score the damn goal) for over-celebration, as well as auto-amputation?
Well, it turns out he did.
Insult to injury could not find a more literal definition. Seeing that it was the 3rd goal of a 4-1 win, one can only imagine that everyone involved with the fourth goal stayed away from anything sharp or nasty looking. Better stick to the hips-a-swiveling Elvis impressions by the corner flag, the hop-over-the-sidings-and-preen--at-the-crowd pose, or the Robbie Keane-esque demented, aborted cartwheel - my personal favorite.

A week and a half into my break from school, and I feel like I'm starting to find my feet back home at the ranch. It's taken time to retrench; my rope, if not at its end, was pretty frayed by the end of the quarter, more so than it ever got all of last year. Grades have come in - A's in the two classes I completed, an incomplete in the one I haven't done the proverbial Twenty Page Paper for, yet. This is good, considering I thought I had the quarter from hell - though that had to less to do with schoolwork than the feeling I was blowing it all through chronic, congenital indiscipline. And some things outside of that. What I've left undone is a theory class; I really do like theory (the most significant and surprising thing I've learned since moving into this discipline from a more artsy, creative one) and I'm reckoning I'll do a paper on Habermas and the public sphere. I should be doing it these days, getting it over with well before the whole holiday hullabaloo kicks off. Actually, I should have it done already. Actually, I should take a pragmatic approach and do the thing on some theory I've done papers on before, instead of one I'm superficially acquainted with but surmise might be useful in future research. The shortcut, Michael, take the shortcut. Do I do that? No.

Now that I'm at home (funny, most of my earthly possessions are out in Ohio, but Connecticut is, and will always be, "home"; the more I move about, the more I clutch at and cling to a constructed Connecticut Mentality) I spend my waking hours reading, writing a bit, and involving myself with this daunting project of transposing old writing journals on to the computer. I play an endless game of catch-up, first churning out three or four notebook pages' worth of new daily rambling, snatches of poetry, plagiarized insight - a way to get my brain firing, my eyes searching, my senses limbered up. No expectations, no decided form to it. Then I let it go for weeks, months at a time...I turn the page, and unfailingly forget what I wrote. It falls out of mind. I don't look at it. I'm not even tempted to look at it. After a while, maybe when I reach the end of the notebook a couple months later, I start transposing it back, seeing what I was thinking then, sometimes viscerally reliving where I was, what I was doing. This thickens the present. Remarkable how the most vapid, quotidian and seemingly banal details, once written down, help reclaim an experience, a phenomenon. Good terms - there's a lot here that resonates with the phenomenological experience. I don't write every day, unfortunately, but the discovery that simple, specific, unspectacular writing can recall and deepen the least of days impels me to try.

This method has been my surrogate for writing short stories and (attempting) novels - the only thing I thought I'd ever do, only I don't - for a while now. Certainly not since I started doing this MA a year and a half ago, and even before that. There are reasons. Lack of discipline, lack of rigor, lack of tenacity, lack of stories I feel I have to tell, lack of attention; being necessarily but laboriously broken down beginning at the point when I realized doing an MFA in Writing in NYC wasn't for me, and being slowly but appreciably built back up now, in a far more structured, distant field. I'll write about it all here at some point.

But for now, the project of these twice-recorded notes, systematically printed out, stuffed in ring binders three inches thick, and now sitting in my travel bag, is manifold; to gather up my written self - my body of work, so to speak - in one place, and then to probe it, analyze it all for recurrent motifs of thought, emphasis, development, structure. My ragged, quasi-fictional Bildungsroman; how to conceptualize it, physically, structurally, metaphorically? It is a task of divining a metanarrative of living, of detecting the undetected. Pattern recognition. Trying to make some sense of myself first, before I even start trying to make sense of others, other things, or the world.
It is a precursor to art, if not proven in the end to be a lame, time-wasting substitute for it. A couple years ago I intuited that, contrary to the self-evident proofs that I knew how to write decently (a schoolboy reputation, a few early but unhelpful successes) I had to stop and start all over again if I was ever going to create anything I was proud of. I may have been right, I may have been wrong. This could go either way.

Enough navel-gazing for one night.

***


In honor of the fact that I'm re-reading Media Virus, I'm inducting Douglas Rushkoff's blog into the Sidebar of Fame.

Jason Giambi applying "the clear".