The Wretched Timesheeters of the Earth

I'm in the furniture trade  Got a new job today  But stick the cretin  On the number-three lathe

Went down the town To a HM club The sign had a cross Through a couple well-dressed They looked at my coat They looked at my hair An Easy Rider coot Grabbed the edge of my coat Said: 'You're too smart for here' I said: 'I'll see the manager'


He was the manager!

Eat y'self fitter!

Up the stairs mister!

Eat y'self fitter!


Analytics have got My type worked out Analytics on me The poison render I grope about And when I go out My mind splits My eyes doth hurt The musical chairs Have been swallowed up By a cuddly group Who land and rub off Hoping thatWhatever it is Will land and drop off

I met a hero of mine I shook his hand Got trapped in the door Felt a fool, I tell ya


Charmed to meet ya

Eat y'self fitter!

Up the stairs mister

Eat y'self fitter!


Became a recluse  And bought a computer Set it up in the home Elusive big one On the screen Saw the Holy Ghost, I swear On the screen


Where's the cursor?Where's the eraser?Where's the cursor?Where's the eraser?

G-O-H-O-H-O-9-OG-O-H-O-H-O-9-OG-O-H-O-H-O-9-OH-O-9-O-G-O-H-O

What's a computer?

Eat y'self fitter!

What's a computer?

Eat y'self fitter!

The Kevin Ayers scene South of France Plush velvet 

Aback! Aback!Aback! Aback!

Levis Fridays Greek holidays Barratt heritance 


Mit-Dem! Don't wanna be a mit-dem! 

Pick the fleas mister

Eat y'self fitter!

Eat y'self fitter?

Eat y'self fitter!

Who tells you what To tape on your vid. chip How do you know the progs you miss Are worse than those you single out? And what'll you do when the rental's up? And your bottom rack is full of vids Of programs you will nay look at The way they act is, oh, sheer delight Cardboard copyright Make it right! Panic in Sudan! Panic in Wardour! Panic in Granadaland! Panic all over! 

By the wretched timesheeters Of my delight One starry night The powers that be will have to meet And have no choice but to...

Eat each other!

Eat y'self fitter

Eat each other?

Eat y'self fitter!

Portly and with good grace The secret straight-back ogre entered His brain aflame With all the dreams It had conjured It had conjured It had conjured It had conjured

Mit-dem! Don't wanna be amid dem!

The centimeter square

Eat y'self fitter!

Said it purged fear

Eat y'self fitter!

These lyrics are certainly sublime, but what's an HM club? Not that the rest of it is pellucid, but for some reason that's a sticking point for me.

Presidential Politics

During the course of my life, it seems like people have made generalizations about the different parties' success at winning presidential elections--for a while it was said the G.O.P. had done better, during the period when Jimmy Carter's one term came amid 20 years of G.O.P. administrations (20 out of 24 years, with Carter's term making up the other four). However, if we take a longitudinal view of the matter, since World War Two up until 2017 when Obama's next term will end, the two parties are exactly even. In fact, the White House has switched hands every eight years in that period, with the two exceptions balancing each other out.

If we start with Truman (although Roosevelt won the election and served a few months before dying, I'll count the beginning of the post-Roosevelt era from the beginning of that term, which I trust is a benign enough decision as far as its implications go), there were 8 years D (Roosevelt/Truman), 8 years R (Eisenhower), 8 years D (Kennedy/Johnson), 8 years R (Nixon/Ford), 4 years D (Carter), 12 years R (Reagan then Bush), 8 years D, 8 years R, 8 years D (up until the end of Obama's coming term, in 2017).

So it looked like the Republicans had a little advantage if you were around when there were 8 years of Nixon/Ford, Carter, then 12 years of Reagan/Bush. But from a wider angle, it can be seen that there were two times when the party held the White House for only one term during our time period, one each for the Democrats and Republicans. If we draw a line between the Carter--Reagan period and the Bush--Clinton period, they basically cancel each other out, each being a one-termer followed by a two-termer from the other party. The fact that Bush followed another Republican doesn't have much significance if we do the math from Truman through Obama, which shows that there will have been 36 years of Republican administrations and 36 years of Democratic administrations in the period from 1945--2017.

Roosevelt was clearly a special case, since he was elected to four terms, and since he left office that has been made illegal. Before Roosevelt it was an entirely different era, before World War Two, and it seems reasonable to designate the period beginning with the first Truman administration as an "era," although I am not being too rigorous or placing too much importance on that. My thinking is basically  that, since presidential terms are four years and there can  be two for any president, any trend will take a long time to identify, and 72 years is probably a long enough time, whereas things were too different before that to lump in the data with current phenomena. So that's my specimen--1945--2017.

If we accept that as a reasonable sample, then the conclusion seems to be that the Republicans and Democrats basically trade off the White House every 8 years, with no party having much of an advantage, or really any long-term advantage. I am pretty skeptical about the claims currently being made that the G.O.P. is down for the count, if for no other reason than because Romney only lost by about three percentage points. Maybe the demographics are changing, as has been constantly pointed out recently, but there's no reason to think the Republicans can't figure it out, make some adjustment, maybe run a Latino woman, that sort of thing. Not that I think my observations here can help us predict the future very much, there are a lot of variables, but the numbers show that the two parties have split the White House down the middle for 72 years (or will have by 2017, anyway).

Yaargh

I planned to write a series of posts on the Kinks, but job hunting, teaching, and finishing my dissertation have sapped my will to allocate enough time to blog. If anyone is reading, I will get back to this blog when I have more time. 

By the way, if Mitt Romney wins this election, it will seriously challenge the "beer" theory. Is there anyone alive who would be willing to have a beer with Mitt Romney if I paid you 100 dollars? I may have mentioned this before though.

WIlliam Faulkner Resigns From the Post Office

As long as I live under the capitalistic system, I expect to have my life influenced by the demands of moneyed people. But I will be damned if I propose to be at the beck and call of every itinerant scoundrel who has two cents to invest in a postage stamp. 
This, sir, is my resignation.

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!

Chuck Berry

Fantastic article about Chuck Berry's lyrics:

http://www.themillions.com/2012/07/chuck-berry-neoclassicist.html/comment-page-1#comment-67863

Who could argue with this:

Compare:
I want to run, I want to hide
I want to tear down the walls that hold me inside
I want to reach out and touch the flame
Where the streets have no name.
(U2, “Where the Streets Have No Name”)
Way down South they gave a jubilee
Them Georgia folks they had a jamboree
They’re drinking home brew from a wooden cup
The folks dancing there got all shook up.
(Chuck Berry, “Rock and Roll Music”)
Now, I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings, and because I’m one myself I know how devoted rock and roll fans are to their favorite bands, but it must be seen that compared to the Chuck Berry lyric, the U2 lyric is, well, shit. I say this as a fervent admirer of U2 and one who was lucky enough to witness the band perform “Where the Streets Have No Name” in 1987 or so, when to hear it for the first time was to be swept up in a tide of communal idealism. Who could argue with such lofty sentiments, especially when accompanied by the surge of the Edge’s ringing guitar and the most propulsive rhythm section in all of rock? Alas, there isn’t a word, phrase, or image in the whole song not utterly staled by cliché. As in much of the best rock and roll, the majesty of the music disguises the triteness of the lyrics.There’s no triteness to be disguised in “Rock and Roll Music.” It is what “Where the Streets Have No Name” manifestly is not: poetry, or at least a variety of folk poetry that delights in language and its own expressiveness. 

?

Ideology, Science, and Existence

It strikes me that, at the time of The German Ideology, Marx has become (under the influence of Stirner, whom he nevertheless appropriates in a very critical manner) basically an 'existentialist,' in the broadest and most generic sense of the term. His text centers on a critique of ideology. What ideology means for Marx is the following: Ideology is first of all (1) the mistaken notion that human beings suffer under “the rule of concepts.” Secondly, (2) Marx and Engels call these concepts themselves ideology, and thirdly (3) certain spheres of society or “estates” are said to be ideological.

In other words, concepts abstracted from actual existence are ideological. But actual existence can never be apprehended without abstraction because actual existence is singular. Therefore all concepts have an ideological drive, as it were, and any concept can be ideological if it is not in some way referred to existence.

There is not one but two term complements to "ideology"--on the one hand "science," and on the other revolutionary activity, or praxis. Marx does not consider that thinking can be anything other than representation: the method of science is abstraction, but warranted abstraction that is not ideological because it remains referred to existence, and in doing so recognizes its own inherent incompletion. 

Marx leaves the middle ground between existence and representation vacant, and this is why he has often been misinterpreted as some sort of economic or even technological determinist. This is a misinterpretation because it assumes that there is some sort of pure activity or process that is distinct from thinking, but that is wrong--in fact there is no pure process, it's just that there is always a remainder in any representation. Since representation is conceptual abstraction, at the very least it cannot account for its own singularity. Marx does not want to give a complete representation of a pure process, rather he recognizes the constitutive incompletion of representation as such and thus wants to limit thinking, which is his biggest differend in relation to Hegel, of course. Theory is always referred back to practice, not as something wholly other (unlike for Althusser, who thus gets into an epistemological quandary) but as otherwise incomplete. 

What Marx does not consider is the possibility that there may be a non-representational thinking that is precisely concerned with singularity. Marx's thought points to the necessity of (without fully cashing out) an 'existentialism' that does not simply invert the traditional order of priority between essence and existence but (to use an apt but lamentably loaded term) deconstructs the polarity between the two. This would not simply be a method of abstraction, but a hermeneutic approach to the world-forming potency of that which exists. 

Ultimately, however, in order to do this a constructive approach, which goes wholly beyond Marx, would also be needed--to think without representing. This is what Heidegger often describes and also, less often, attempts to enact.  His most notable attempts at enacting such a thinking are probably his essays that deal with the fourfold. 

This non-representational thinking would open up possibilities for thought and action that are non-ideological, in other words it would not be a conceptual precis of what lies in existence but a signpost and guide for a kind of thinking and action (the polarity of which would thus also become entirely questionable) that shelter singularity rather than seizing it conceptually. In other words, this sort of thinking would be neither science nor ideology, nor even distinct from action in any essential manner.

Hence: Marx and Heidegger, Heidegger and Marx.

P.S.

Here is my current best attempt at star ratings for all the Ramones studio albums (except Acid Eaters) and Joey's solo albums:

Ramones *****

Leave Home*****

Rocket to Russia *****

Road to Ruin *****

End of the Century ****

Pleasant Dreams ****

Subterranean Jungle ***1/2

Too Tough to Die ***

Animal Boy **

Halfway to Sanity **1/2

Brain Drain **1/2

Mondo Bizarro ***1/2

Adios Amigos*1/2

Joey Ramone:

Don't Worry About Me ***

...Ya Know?  ***1/2

Leave Home and (maybe) Final (for now) Ramones Thoughts

First, Leave Home:  This is probably the greatest Ramones album, especially now that it's the 90s and "Carbona Not Glue" has been restored to it. For one thing, it has three of the greatest two-song pairs in music history: "Glad to See You Go" then "Gimme Gimme Shock Treatment," "Oh, Oh, I Love Her So" then "Carbona," and "Swallow My Pride" then "What's Your Game?" Oddly this is treated as the weak sister of the first three, judging by the internet and the musical press. The cd version has an entire show from 1976 on the special features, and it is amazing. But that doesn't factor into my judgment of course, that would be wrong.

I never heard "Carbona" until 2005! That is like a little gift from heaven, to be allowed to come upon something like that so late in life. Also, "Babysitter" is included in the special features, and that is also a fantastic song that I never knew until '05.

Least Favorite Ramones Classics

One thing about the early Ramones is, the songs are so incredibly great that it's hard to know which ones I like less than the others, since I can potentially always be talked out of it, by myself or by others. In any case, they are all songs I've sang along to and loved and cranked and cherished for decades. Looking at the first four albums, these are probably the songs that hit me a little less than others (leaving aside the covers, of which "Surfing Bird" is the only one that I don't love unequivocally).

First album: nothing.

Leave Home: Sometimes "Suzy is a Headbanger" seems less great than some of the others. This confuses me, since it is clearly so great and I never would think of skipping it, and I love every second of it when I listen to it. "Now I Wanna Be A Good Boy" has at times been one of my favorites on the album but right now it seems to me to be less than, say, "Commando." The last two ("You're Gonna Kill That Girl" and "You Should Never Have Opened That Door") are also confusingly brilliant but nevertheless maybe slightly inferior to "Swallow My Pride," for instance.

"Oh, Oh, I Love Her So"--I used to like this less than others. A friend recently mentioned it was a favorite of his, and for some reason something clicked after that and now it is my current favorite Ramones song. This is why this question is so confusing. (And I have no doubt it is also uninteresting to anyone but a Ramones maniac. You don't have to keep reading. I'll even do the little page break thing.)

Road to Ruin

I have been listening near-obsessively, or anyway pretty much exclusively, to the Ramones lately. Looking at the blog history, I was surprised--I thought this latest Ramones phase had lasted a couple of months, but I was listening to Too Tough to Die back in October, and I know by the time I bought Mondo Bizarro I was listening to nothing but Ramones. I would have guessed this was in April, but the blog tells me it was February. So almost half a year of nothing (voluntarily) but Ramones! Anyway I should have been able to review all the albums by now, but I'm running out of stamina--recently I've been listening to The Kinks, Cheap Trick and Big Star, so the Ramones phase is winding down a bit and that means I may not even listen to them at all for a while--I usually have tunnel vision when it comes to music, I may like a variety of things but I am generally passionately in love with one band, artist, or at least style at a time, and at these times I'm unable to enjoy large doses of much of anything else.

So I will wrap it up (maybe) with a few comments. First, Road to Ruin. This is the hardest album for me to figure out. First of all, there is no question in my mind that this is a five out of five, in terms of stars. Not the slightest doubt, it is a masterpiece. But within that range, when put up against the other three five star Ramones albums, I vacillate about its status. Sometimes I am sure that it is their best album--on paper it would have the best claim to that title apart from the first, which has simplicity, brilliance and epoch-making significance to recommend it. I mean, all of their albums have simplicity and brilliance, of course...the first one has the most simplicity, and also earns a lot of cachet by coming first.

...Ya Know?

This is the title of the new Joey Ramone album released a few weeks ago. The album consists of demos that were stripped down to just the vocals, then instruments were added. It is a lot better than I expected it to be, considering it is composed of leftovers. In fact, it's better than Joey's previous solo album Don't Worry About Me. This clearly isn't four stars out of five; it's definitely three and a half. Hence, this makes me realize I need to downgrade Don't Worry About Me to three stars (which I consider a good rating; a three-star album on Allmusic is usually crap, at least when the rating isn't just random and unrelated to the review! Anyone who reads Allmusic knows what I'm talking about...)

Every song is at least decent, several are very good, and there is one masterpiece, a number called "Waiting for that Railroad." My only quibble is that this song is done up to be basically a power ballad; it might have been better served keeping it a little more understated (for comparison, listen to the acoustic radio version from the early 90s on Youtube). In any case, it's still clearly the rock & roll classic of 2012. Not that anyone seems to have realized this.

There is more stylistic variety on this album than its predecessor, and that is also good. It is a long album (15 songs) and might be better in two installments. This is because, despite the fact that there is more variety, there is a certain similarity of tempo throughout.

Ed Stasium, the producer, said Joey's pitch was perfect on the demos, and so nothing was auto-tuned. I was a little skeptical about this, but today I saw a short promo video with Richie Ramone (who plays drums on a few tracks) and he also said that Joey's pitch was perfect--and then added that this is surprising because, if you listen to a live Ramones recording, no matter how well or poorly the band could hear themselves, Joey's pitch was always off! This seems like a bit of an exaggeration but Joey's live vocals in the 80s were often definitely not great (although in the studio they usually were great. [According to me, not Richie] ).

Other highlights: "Going Nowhere Fast," "New York City," "What Did I Do To Deserve You?", "Seven Days of Gloom,""Party Line." That's a lot of highlights, but it is a long album. Again, nothing on it is bad.

DMC on the Beastie Boys

"The Beastie Boys are one of the greatest groups, and I'm not just talking hip-hop — the Beastie Boys are one of the greatest groups in history. You could call them the Ramones of hip-hop."

Don't Worry About Me

Joey Ramone's 2002 solo album of that name, which I finally caught up to a few days ago, is way better than I expected it to be. I suppose I didn't expect as much based on the things I've read about it, on the internet and elsewhere, which for the most part were by no means negative but rather sort of lukewarm.

The cover of "What A Wonderful World," the only widely familiar thing from the album (I think it was in a movie or two), is really a beautiful piece of work. So is the second song, "Stop Thinking About It," which is a nearly perfect song in the way that so many of the best Ramones songs are. "Maria Bartiromo" and the title track also stand out, and "Searching for Something" is something remarkable--catchy, beautifully constructed, musically mature and narratively complex--it seems like the kind of thing the Ramones might have done if Johnny let them grow up.

There's nothing really bad on the album, but it will take some more listens for me to decide how high to rank a few of the songs. The cover of "1969", while well-executed, doesn't do much for me, and "Venting" and "I Got Knocked Down" don't seem like particularly strong songwriting efforts after three listens.

Anyway, the new Joey album comes out this month, we'll see if they're just scraping the bottom of the barrel or if his left over recordings have more to offer (at the very least it will include "Waiting for that Railroad," so it has to be obtained). This one I am inclined to give 3.5 stars out of five.

***1/2

UPDATE: after living with this for a little while, I have downgraded it to three stars (still a good rating in my system).

***

The Seventies: Am I Deluded?

Warning: this is an extremely idiosyncratic and self-indulgent post; feel free to tell me I'm delusional or incoherent.

Lately I have been thinking that I grew up during a time of cultural richness that was perhaps unique for generations of American children. Most people my age, I think, are aware of most of the things I'm talking about below, but there's not much comparable that I've seen among younger folk, and to a lesser extent maybe not as much among older folk (the edge over the latter being that in my time high culture and politics were mixed in with popular culture for kids as a matter of course). But this seems absurd, and has never occurred to me before, so maybe I'm just getting old and nostalgic.