From Somewhere Else

I haven't been able to figure out what any of this means yet, but it's from a source I trust to usually be interesting and enlightening, and it's short enough to plunk it right on here for further consideration:

Five thresholds of the remote:
i. If it is to preserve its categorical integrity, the Law must suspend itself at whichever place there has been a transgression against it – or else decant itself into the lowly posture of taking offence.
ii. If Law must recoil from every possibility of transgression against it (as an ideal evades contamination by experience) it must constitute itself generally as a preparedness for flight. If it is to preserve itself as Law, it must retreat from, in anticipation of, every likely or unlikely occurrence of violation.
iii. Similarly, Crime, if it is to establish its own reasons within its own world, must not infringe upon the Law, and thereby provide opportunity for other, external reasons to be ascribed to it. 
iv. The secret of successful transgression is forbearance – that is, if the would-be transgressor does not wish to draw the Law into a place where it otherwise would have no business.
v. Community must shrink from the touch of its members – that is, if it is not to be reduced to the level of naming an agreement, or common cause. 

The Beer Test Again

From the New York Review of Books blog:

Part of it is a recognition that Romney has a specific problem, that like Al Gore or John Kerry before him, the former Massachusetts governor comes over as stiff and wooden and fails the beer test: he’s not somebody most voters would choose to have a drink with.

In an earlier post, an EARLIER POST I say (but it's not really a link because I don't know how), I suggested this was an iron-clad indicator of who would win an election. So Romney is doomed, or we'll have to rewrite the book on politics.

I Hate

anti-lock brakes. The way I learned to drive is, you pump the brakes when in slippery conditions rather than lock them. Anti-lock brakes render you helpless, taking your fate out of your hands, and they result in the brakes turning off when you hit big bumps or really want to lock them, which is dangerous. Why does anyone think they are a good idea??

The Kinks

In the rock genre, I think I would say that my three favorite bands are the Grateful Dead, the Ramones, and the Kinks. The case of the Kinks is more difficult than the other two--I could give somewhat objective reasons why the former two are among the very few greatest rock bands, but in the case of the Kinks I'd be hard pressed to say they are superior to the Beatles, for instance (I made a case for the Ramones being in the same league as the Beatles in a previous post. I'd make the words "previous post" a link if I knew how to do so).

If we compare a Kinks album from 1967, Something Else, to Sgt. Pepper of the same year, we'd have to say that, while the high points of the Kinks' album match or surpass the high points of Sgt. Pepper, the minor songs on the former are not of the same quality as the minor songs on the latter (however much I may like them). But I'm not sure that is the truest criterion; anyway, I can say I like the Kinks more than I like the Beatles.

Part of it is Ray Davies' singing, and Dave Davies' harmonies; part of it is the songwriting, and the rest I am not sure of.

The two early Kinks singles, "You Really Got Me" and "All Day and All of the Night," present a picture of the band that isn't really sustained beyond these songs, not in the rest of their LP material from the time and certainly not in their later work. But the combination of a raucous, distorted guitar riff and Ray Davies' unsure, almost hesitating, jerky and self-effacing vocal delivery does display the essence of the Kinks in a very concentrated way, even if that exact formula was soon abandoned.

I think the Kinks are a kind of band one comes to love for different reasons than one has for loving the Beatles; there's a certain insistence on minor pleasures and a less triumphalist feel to the whole thing. Even the name, the Kinks, seems to suggest a shadowy and maginalized perspective, as well as a crooked path taken.

Wonderment

A proper sense of wonder seems to me to be an achieved thing--childhood is more a time of ignorance than wonder. We think of a child as open to the miraculous, but it is more the case that children take the miraculous as a matter of course, because they don't know any better. I liked a lot of things as a child and as a teenager, but they didn't amaze me the way they do now, at least not to the same extent. The enormity of a Jerry Garcia solo, a great poem or novel, even something as cliched (as an example in this context, not in itself) as a sunset or the moon is much more astounding or amazing to me as I get older. In the case of cultural artifacts, I suppose part of it is that the older one gets, the more the experience of a life of failure weighs against examples of resounding success, the more things one has tried and the longer one has worked at things so the difficulty of things becomes more intelligible to one, and the portion of one's life that one can defer to some time of future achievement becomes smaller in comparison to the actual record of a completed life of frustration and incompetence. But that is not all, or people who have been wildly successful most of their lives would not have an increased capacity for wonder as they get older, and I think they do. I think whatever reason this is probably bridges the gap from wonderment at Jerry to wonderment at sunsets and moons, but I don't know what the reason actually is. Maybe it's that as we learn and comprehend and taxonomize the world, some portions of it stand out more to the extent that it has become more articulated for us. Maybe, I'm not sure, but I think that's part of it, anyway.

A New Post--A Question is Answered (But Perhaps Not Asked)

The imaginary readers that I imagine closely following my blog and hanging on my every word (narcissistic medium that in many ways is) I now imagine asking themselves the question, "But what is he listening to lately?"

There was quite a bit of stuff about the Ramones on here for the past year, as I listened to almost nothing else from October to June. That, for some reason, is the way I listen to music; I don't wake up and look at my cds and think "What am I in the mood for today?" as so many people claim they do. That is an impossible question to answer, and when I get to that point I usually just listen to talk radio. Instead, I usually get sucked into one band (or sometimes genre) for an extended period of time. I listened to nothing, voluntarily, besides bluegrass from around 1998 to about 2004 or 2005. At the time, I thought that was about all I'd ever listen to, at least in the deepest throes of it around 2001 or so.

If I was blogging between 2009 and 2011, there would have been a lot of posts about the Grateful Dead. There is a vast supply of live shows available by them, each one different, so one could go a lot longer than two years devoting one's days to Jerry & co., and indeed a lot of people do.

But there is one band that I have long admired and to a certain extent loved, and that has become one of my top few favorite bands this summer, i.e. the Kinks. I liked them as a lad but never got really deep into their catalogue until fairly recently (and there is still work to do in that regard). I realized with surprise a couple of days ago that The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society is probably the cd I've listened to the most times over the past five years or so. And after the recent Ramones period I listened to Cheap Trick for a couple of weeks, and since then it's been all Kinks.

So the curiosity of my imaginary readers has been satisfied.

I haven't had much to say about the Kinks though and that, coupled with completing my dissertation, is why I haven't posted here lately. But there are posts now to come; take heart, imaginary reader!