jane dark's sugarhigh!

Wittgenstein sez,

Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.

Whether such a hope might also attach to "the internet" seems to subtend much of the principled and/or churlish debate found here and here. The most pessimistic answer, but not the least reasonable, about poetry and the internet: neither/nor.

A new web resource from the Museum of the Moving Image, Moving Image Source, is now live online (includes a sugary note regarding a ten-minute doc shot 40 years ago next Tuesday, along with a hi-qual stream of the metrage in question).

Sasha Frere-Jones is among pop music columnists an estimable combination of influential and excellent. We follow his work with care and admiration. And he is our man. But periodically, though we here at sugarhigh! are just a blog, we find ourselves in such consternation that we must lay out our disagreements. This is one of those times.

The matter at hand is American Idol, and S-Freezy's account thereof. It is well-written in the eloquent-yet-jocular style which feels like a happy medium of authorial and house style. Here is a pivotal passage:

The judges on the show—Cowell, the singer and choreographer Paula Abdul, and the musician Randy Jackson—critique contestants on their vocal ability, song choice, presentation, and other aspects of pop craftsmanship. The American public, though, decides who remains in the running, by phoning and texting in votes after Tuesday night’s broadcast. On Wednesday night, a singer is eliminated, at the end of the episode. Except for the early stages of the competition, when the judges winnow a group of about two hundred down to twenty-four, they can only file amicus briefs. They can say, “It was just O.K. for me, dog,” banish singers to cruise ships, and make everyone cry, but the people have the power.

As description, it seems to draw a quite broad distinction between what unfolds on Idol, and how a Billboard-pointed pop performer might otherwise end up with a label contract. Is this right? At the label we would have a little group of savants auditioning an act: the A&R dude who brought them in and plies the assembly with enthusiastic blandishments (Paula: "you're standing there in your truth"); the technician who knows what can and can't be fixed in the mix (Randy: "a little pitchy, dawg"); and the no-nonsense exec with the overview (Simon: etc etc). They are charged with choosing a performer who is exactly distinct enough from like performers to establish product differentiation in a crowded market, but not so distinct as to freak out any potential customer. Hence the judges' (largely Simon's, as the big picture exec) oscillation between you have to make it your own and why would you do that to a great song? — which seems schizophrenic only until you recognize the expression of a music label's monolithic marketing imperative. At this point, before investing vast sums in recording, marketing, and distribution, any capable music label will test-market the shit out of the artist (they used to do it rooms that looked like lecture halls, gathering responses from gizmos that looked a lot like remote controls, or cell phones for that matter). Once a contract and then a product is derived, customers do or don't buy the product. If there is a change in Idol's process, it is simply that the test marketing is now conducted via remote technologies of video monitor and cell phone (distanced learning redux!); respondents solicit themselves for participation; and the latter two phases have been brought closer together, such that the voting-with-your-dollar phase begins a bit earlier for the "people." In terms of the making of the pop star, they retain the exact "power" they might have had before; that there are more of them involved sooner does not change the structure of the overall event into something more democratic.

But this is not to say that there is no real novelty in the AI process. There is. Pop Idol debuted less than three months after the MPAA awoke with a start from the industrial nightmare that was Napster, and confronted the new day that dream presaged. The Idol franchise should be understood in no other way than as a specific solution to a historical problem: how to re-monetize pop music in the face of a certain decline sales of both in hardware (CDs, players) and software (songs as such). Idol is perhaps the most successful — and clearest — response to this economic crisis. Whether or not anyone buys the David products Cook or Archuleta, the revenue is shifted to advertising, and to service providers for downloads, online views, and cell phone usage. Which is to say that the reputed "democracy" of the Idol process is nothing other than the industry's monetizing of participation in its own marketing plan.

SFJ would perhaps back away from the phrase "the people have the power" as something meant lightly, in a flighty context — and regret that it might be taken as an actual political claim. We would. The problem with the claim is that, however flippant, it just happens to partake exactly of The New Yorker's house ideology (a failing that SFJ has in large been at pains to avoid during his tenure). The equation in brief: active participation in the market = real freedom. The incredible corollary: intensifications of that market = even more freedom.

We aren't saying watching American Idol — perhaps even rooting for a David, a Syesha, or rooting for Paula's spasmodic poetry (as we do) — isn't a good time. We also prefer buying a Coke™ to being thirsty, but try not to misrecognize this as people having the power. We do, however, recognize in The New Yorker a fairly clear (kneejerk, even) articulation of liberalism as nothing but capital's official ideology — a logic and alibi for its drive to marketize more and more of human life.

In other news, Chris Hitchens scribes a trenchant essay concerning the fact that when he's at a restaurant, the waiter sometimes pours wine for customers. With his rapier insight, Mr. Hitchens calculates that this "barbaric custom" is driven not simply by rudeness but also "conveys a none-too-subtle and mercenary message: Hurry up and order another bottle." Really.

The comedy here has precious little with HItch's mastery of the obvious, but what is revealed in his stout little pique regarding this infringement. Here's the nut:

It completely usurps my prerogative if I am a host. ("Can I refill your glass? Try this wine—I think you may care for it.") It also tends to undermine me as a guest, since at any moment when I try to sing for my supper, I may find an unwanted person lunging carelessly into the middle of my sentence.

And just as waves are anchored to the bottom of the sea
we must reach the shallows before God cuts us free.

For a while we caught the spirit of things
as they had drifted in the past. And we got
to know them really well.

all was certain on the Via Negativa
except the certainty of return, return
to the approximate.

It will be over in a minute, you said. We both
believed that, and the clock's ticking. Flame on, flame on.

one or two distinct crises remain to be finessed.

We're leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains streaked by canals,
maybe. Amorous ghosts will pursue us
for a time, but sometimes they get, you know, confused and
forget to stop when we do, as they continue to populate this
fertile land with their own bizarre self-imaginings.

I guess what I'm saying is
don't be more passive-aggressive
or purposely vague than you have to
to clinch the argument.

In all plays, even Hamlet, the scenery
is the best part.

It's been real. I mean really real,
like you can't imagine it. The city was leaving anyway,
closing its ranks behind him. Soon no one
would remember the boy in dross who used to come
and stare through the skateboards at the abandoned furniture warehouses.

I said, in times of war
we make good warriors.
In peace we are as nothing:
good dads or bankers.

Why not give real life a chance? I was here
and did nothing about it. Therefore I am condemned
to the punishment of the just: long, loose-skeined parades
along service routs. Is there a perfect tense for that?

We're leaving again of our own volition
for bogus patterned plains, shreds of maps recurring
like waves on a beach, each unimaginable
and likely to go on being so.

The wraparound flux we intuit

as time has other claims on our inventiveness.
A lot of retail figures in it.

In 1917:

In an epoch when the popular art par excellence, the cinema, is in essence a picture-book, it would be strange if poets did not try to create pictures for meditative, more sophisticated persons who find the productions of the film makers too crude. Eventually films will be more refined, and it is possible to see the day when the phonograph and the cinema will be the only current forms of reproduction, and when as a result poets will enjoy a freedom hitherto unknown.

And also:

When a modern poet gives polyphonic expression to the whirring of an airplane, we must see it above all as the poet's desire to accustom his mind to reality.

There is no question other than the relation of freedom to reality. This is in every regard a historical question.

Guess what? If you view the world through New York Times-golored glasses, none of the significant music releases slated for this summer — as measured by the music industry! — are country music. This narrative convention is now so far into the counterfactual that you have to start assuming these music critics have strange aphasias or had moms who were country singers who beat them. Though come to think of it, "class" remains both a more plausible and a simpler explanation.

...and then suddenly two at once, or maybe even three. LeAnn Rimes' single "Good Friend and a Glass of Wine" is already a few weeks old, and sort of a gimme—it's as good as you'd suspect it might be, which is plenty. As a voice, Julianne Hough can scarcely compete (who could?); indeed, she seems to be a professional ballroom dancer from that TV show who has decided to be a country singer — wtf? — and as the latter she's new and alive and happy to be a Deana Carter manqué, which makes "That Song In My Head" somehow more satisfying as the summer starts to rise here in the Valley, plus there's that video with breakdancers on the pier — wtf pt deux! — leaving us on the right side of bemused. But not as delighted as you will be with this Emily West person, a little gawky and plucky and vivacious and with a fuller voice than Hough but not nearly as authoritative as Rimes which is sort of the point for this song "Rocks In Your Shoes" and she sort of sidesteps the overwritten lyrics in the verse and rides the melody because she knows the chorus is coming and it is! — and is is as irresistible as summer itself.

Born four years apart: two faces of one feeling: the ambiance of the bureaucratic city: not the management of affect but the affect of management: this as the sensation of the modern: both in their own languages named after the crow: finally a single fact this feeling: Kafkorbu...

If you left a million Martians in a room with a million copies of Windows Office for an infinite length of time, one of them would type the Communist Manifesto. In Martian. Unfortunately, one of them would also type the script for the current world order in which it's okay to make fascist salutes on the steps of Rome's city hall and rape your own daughter for quarter of a century in the basement of your apparently respectable home.

It was a good day to listen to "Isis."

But it was also a good day to listen to "MMMBop."

It was a good day to have last thoughts about the race for the Democratic nomination.

It was a good day to catch up on the Grey Goose's ascending melody of China coverage as an index of national Chinapanik (comically telling detail in the book review: one of the few non-China-related books reviewed this week is titled "While America Aged").

It was a good day for Fox News and especially that sadsack Sean Hannity. Lovelorn Sean has a hardon for Marx reminiscent of your average second grader socking a girl in the playground, so the last few years have been very sad for him. But now, with the "discovery" that Jeremiah Wright's Black Liberation Theology has roots in Liberation Theology which the crack team has determined has roots in...Marxism...you can practically feel that caprine Mr. Hannity oozing into his khakis. It's on like Fanon!

...there is only accounting for taste.

Discussed last night (Hopper, Bruno, Hiller, Grandy):

Badiouizm.

The Village Voice, current issue:

Considering that the war in Iraq has proven to be Washington's shot-by-shot remake of Vietnam, it's only natural that Hollywood has followed suit...

In light of the Number One Leader's recent visit to Vietnam, we wonder if it makes sense to situate the last several years in Iraq in relation to the economic logic of Hollywood that tells us it's economically safer to pursue franchises, sequels, and remakes (up to and including the art-school variant of "shot-by-shot" covers of previous films)...

Immanent critique is a practice entirely distinct from (New Critical) formalism's holding that poetic language should be considered as autonomous from the knowability of an author's intentions and from its conditions of production. Neither is it an Adornian concept.

Rooted in Hegelian Marxism, the practice is made explicit by Adorno and Horkeimer writing together in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. The book is a critique of the Enlightenment using Enlightenment methods, which defines the concept of immanent critique: "the theory that adequate description and criticism of a philosophical or cultural text must be carried out in the same terms that text itself employs."

Immanent critique is, thus, in no way proposed as a way of understanding art, much less poetry, in particular. And it surely doesn't mean to understand art as art, as self-sustaining and autonomous object. A central goal of immanent critique is rather to uncover the internal contradictions of a philosophy or text objectively, rather than incidentally imposing the inherent contradictions of a pre-determined method or ideology. This uncovering is done exactly so as to reveal the impress of social conditions on the reputedly but not actually objective or autonomous philosophy or text (and specifically, as articulated by Marx, Lukacs, Adorno & Horkheimer et al., the contradictions and deformations of capitalist relations). "As pointed out by Lukacs in his History and Class Consciousness, the essence of immanent critique is therefore dialectics." Which reminds us that it means to understand its object not as an aesthetic object but a historical process.

The frictionless, immediate, and unremarked slippage from immanent critique to intentional fallacy is a useful index of the problematic of enlisting partial concepts from one philosophical practice to bolster a quite different aesthetic claim. Indeed, to register this very slippage in recent discussions on the Poetry Foundation's blog might well be the beginning of an immanent critique of the ideologies objectified there.

Until you order, they give you bread and water — to remind you that you are, until you have committed to pay, a prisoner.

You cannot spell

Marxist without Matrix,
Marlo without Omar,
Beijing without Being.

Cheney + Oprah = Chopra

China + France = Chance

Out of humble origins in a dry region: immense, inconceivable success, first national and then international. A sense that the revenue torrent will never slow, that the capital couldn't even be real. First celebration and then the makeover begins: a project that will break the family structure on the wheel of fantastical development. At enormous cost in cash and misery, the physiognomy is Westernized, whitened: a series of radical modifications that smack of mad egotism and self-loathing at once, leaving a bizarrerie that can be seen from space. The body becomes a surface for the inscription of an architectural fantastic, a horror designed to seduce an imagined audience while demonstrating the pharaonic power to make the unamakeable. Eventually: disgust, boredom, desuetude, collapse. At the 25th anniversary of Thriller, so stand things with Michael Jackson.

But so stand things as well in his adopted exile of Dubai. Or at least they're halfway down the road. Neverland (now under the auctioneer's gavel) might be seen as an intermediate phase between MJ's visage and the "World Islands"/Burj Dubai. The story of Michael Jackson suggests to us that the story of Dubai will end in the not-terribly-distant future as a failed state, descending to darkness and dismay while its architects parade about in quasi-military garb, on to the next last appointment.