Les said, the better II

a self-imposed one beer limmit is the way to go.

i am way too skinny

Dubya trshed the ABM treaty, so Russia’s beuilding new nukes. (Note that Dubya said we needed to get rid of anti-nuklear proliferation treaties in order to fight terrorism as soon as he got in office, before we were at war with terrorism). Pundits say the way for Democrats to win is to become more fascist, and since they are not an ideologically driven party by any means, the new minority leader is an anti-choice Mormon. Anti-choice is called moderate. Time magazine thinsk this is a great idea. time magazine wants to put Bush’s head on Mount Rushmore. Time magazine is owned by the far left AOL Time Warner Corporation. Time Magazine is as left as all the rest of the media, which was brave enough to defend the baselessly smeared swift boat vets. Sure, everything they said was a lie, but they were war heroes damnit, not like that pruple heart faking John Kerry. and the right wing owns fucking everything. And making pieces of music using evil things Rush Limbaugh says is not going to stop them, because it’s like, I dunno, throwing a pebble at the tide to stop it. The cities and the rural areas hate eahc other and it’s because of these pundits and they don’t care if they drive everyone away and nobody votes again. The way to bridge this divide is with art, but cities have urban contemporary and rural areas have country music and there’s not much common ground there, more like animosity. And how do you reach out artistically to somebody who likes Thomas Kinkade? But that sort of elitism urban-culture-is-superior will drive rural folks away, no matter how true it is goddamn it.

My first string quartet is being played this evening (November 18) at 8:00 at Crowell Concert Hall on the Wesleyan University Campus in Middletown, CT

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There’s a map going around the internets which compares red states to pre-civil war slave states and territories. And Blue staters have noted that areas that supported slavery now vote republican.

The popular assumption is that any system which relied on race-based chattel slavery was obviously racist. Racist systems contain racist people. Racist people are also undoubtedly sexist and homophobic because if they beleive in the dominance of whites, they must also beleive in the dominance of heterosexual white males. And the red stateness of certain areas shows they’re still mired in attitudes of the past.
I don’t want to comment on the above paragraph, but rather discuss the economic aspects of slavery. Slaves are best suited for grunt agricultural labor. Not because of anything intrinsic to slvaes themselves, but rather, economies intrinsic to slavery. The Roman Empire could ahve industrialized, but it did not, possibly because of slavery. Slaves are the ultimate cheap labor. You can get them to do anything by hand. You don’t want to give them specialized skills. They’re slaves. They’re not worth investing in. For a slave to use machinery, that machinery must be extremely simple to operate, such that almost no training is required. Slaves could use the cotton gin, but slaves would not be sent to work in the mills. Slavery is incompatible with industrialization.
In the non-slave areas, industrialization did occur. Labor was inherently more valuable. Free workers are worth training. The earliest industrialization was in the textile industry. Giant looms. Industrializing countries all had or wanted access to cheap cotton. The US got in a war with Mexico to seize the prme cotton-growing land in Texas. England seized India. The cotton for England was cheap because it was imported from a subjegated colony. Cotton was cheap for the US because it was harvested by subjegated slaves. However, like colonialization hurt the economy of India, slavery harmed the economy of the south. In the north, industrialized cities sprang up, where there were workers and factories. In the south, labor was too cheap to bother building a factory. The south failed to urbanize in the same was as the north because it failed to industrialize.
Blue staters feel as if something is seperating them from the red state brethren, but they may be surprised to learn that red is all around them. Urban voters voted blue. Rural voters went red. The cities in the south are as much specs of bluein a sea fo red as are the cities in the north. So the fact that former slave areas went red may show more the economic consequences of slavery, where urban centerss did not develop, more than it points to a geographic character flaw.
It’s worth noting that rural political movements of the past have sometimes been extremely progressive. If you want to reach out to your out-of-town neighbors, instead of acting as if they are flawed or stupid, perhaps it would be better to make the positions of their candidates more clear, so that it is more obvious when people are voting according to their own self-interest. How do we do this?
Sources: slavery and industrialization from class notes from Prof Noonan, Mills College, 1995. Industrialization and cottom from Noam Chomsky

If gender is socially constucted, then how can the catagory “woman” exist, and therefore, how can anyone claim to be feminist or speak for women if the whole catagory is in question?

I’ll get back to you kn this after the pay gap goes away, when congress is 51% woman, when the university faculty is 51% women and whent he works of women composers are taken seriously in their lifetimes and posthumously.
Did it cause a major need to papers, books and scholarship in ethnic studies departments when somebody realized that race was socially constructed, or was race always obviously socially constructed, what with it’s “one drop” rules and other contortions of reason?
Noam Chomksy says that if somebody is causing you trouble by agitating and you want them to go away, a good way to do it is to appoint them to things, give them tenure, get them in a system where they talk about stuff a lot and don’t take any action. Jane Alden (music professor at Wesleyan) notes that there is gonzo amounts of feminist scholarship, but that the pay gap is generally getting worse and the condition of women (or “women” for those of you who have just been awed by Judith Butler) is not improving. She hypothesizes that having so much scholarship is making people lazy and they think things must be ok since so many papers are going around. I think perhaps instead that activists are being drawn to scholarship. Out of the street and into the campus.
I want to write a piece where a narrator repeats “the woman question” a lot and then “what is the role of women?” “what is the role of ‘women’?”
Of course I think that theory is important! Wasn’t I just talking about Cixous a couple posts ago?

Thought has always worked through opposition,
Speaking/Writing
Parole/Écriture
High/Low
Through dual, heirarchical oppotiotions. Suprior/ Inferior. Myths, legends, books. Philosophical systems. Everywhere (where) ordering intervenes, where a law organizes what is thinkable by oppositions (dual, irreconcilable; or sublatable, dialectical). And all these pairs of oppositions are couples. Does that mean something? Is the fact that Logocentrism subjects throughout – all concepts, codes and values – to a binary systems, related to “the” couple, man/woman?

Ok, that paragraph has heavily influenced not only my thinking but my sense of self. Theory is totally important. But still, real-world problems persist. They’re getting worse. People who do not read theory, people who are anti-theory are busy smashing everything. And we’re not mounting an effective resistance. Why? Because they control mass media? Because the theory of progress makes us complacent? (There are laws against sex discrimination. They’re not perfectly enforced, but once they are, everything will be fine.)
I just went to a lecture about feminst theory and my head is spinning. Maybe I’ll go to the post-lecture discussion tomorrow morning. Or maybe I’ll continue deconstructing the Star Spangled Banner and finding it’s points of commonality with The International. Not opposition, of course. Male domination is what got us into this mess.

Philosophy is constructe on the premise of woman;s abasement. Subordination of the feminine to the masculine roder, which gives the appearance of being the condition for the macinery’s functioning.
Now it has become rather urgent to question this solidarity between logocentrism and phallocentrism – bringing to light the fate dealt to woman, her burial – to threaten the stability of the masculine structure that passed itself off as eternal-natural, by conjusring up from femininity the reflections and hypothesis that are necessarily runious for the strong-hold still in posession of authority, What would happen to logocentrism, to the great philosophical systems, to the order fo the world in general if the rock upon which they founded this church should crumble?
If some fine day, it suddenly came out that the logocentric plan had always, inadmissably, been to create a foundation for (to found and fund) phallocentrism, to garuntee the masculine order a rationale equal to history itself.

From “Sorties” in The Newly Born Woman, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press. Trans Betsy Wang. Exerpted in The Hélène Cixous Reader, New York: Routledge. Ed. Susan Sellers p 38 – 40
Theory is useless. Music is useless. Except that art and thought and theory are how we understand ourselves and construct ourselves and how we think about things and how we see (or don’t see) problems. So really, it’s very very useful. but one must always be willing and ready to take to the streets, which must be done often. Eternal vigelence is the price of freedom.

I have a draft of my percussion and vocal pice. Except that it’s 100% glockenspiel. I have a vague idea of giving Anne (the vocalist) a text about how binary oppositions are a masculinist construct that imply comparison and otherness.
And how instead of trying to create an opposition, i’m trying to create a transformation.
However, Cixous, the french crit-theorist i want to cite is not out of copyright. Also, it could be problematic to deconstruct the piece in the peice. Although it would be very post-modern.

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snow noun – Frozen preceiptiation in a six sided crystal shape. Myth has it that no two of them look alike, but they do strongly resemble those flat six spined sprinkles that you see on cupcakes.
verb this shit is falling on my head!

Two beers should not get me this drunk. I am a light weight. I bought some soynog and brandy today, apparently just in time for the weather, but i haven’t drunk any yet. Porter is good for the winter. Coffee porter is good for being energetic and drunk. Just two pints, tho. For peets sake. one of those pints was an anchor steam liberty ale, which is cheep but not very good. better than pbr or budwiper, mind you. aparently it has something to it. or i’ve lost too much weight. one or the other. i think i should just go to sleep.

Sleet – noun rain that falls in below freezing weather, so that some of the rain drops turn to ice as the fall. others are parially frozen.
verb to shower sleet.

The best thing about somebody dying is that you can make anything up about them that you want. Did you know that Reagan was a peace maker? And that Arafat was responcible for the massacre of Palestian refugees in Lebanon? It’s true! I read it in the Chronicle.

I heard a rumor that some Chronicle witer found a scrap of paper by accident that said that wasn’t true. He started to doubt Big Brother. But then he got re-educated and everything is fine now. Because you can burn the past without shredding documents or burning them if nobody ever bothers to look. Just keep watching TV. Everything’s fine.

Two Tanks Arrived at an Anti-War Protest in LA. The protestors did not start chanting “this is what democracy looks like” or any variant, but broke out with a long chorus of “bring the troops home now.” The tanks hung around for about ten minutes and then one of the soldiers yelled “go home” at the protestors and they drove off. This all gleamed from watching the video.

1. Isn’t it illegal to use the armed forces for domestic police actions?
2. Why isn’t this story on the front of the LA Times

Protests with big speakers where people with signs stand around in the dark chanting while cops circle meancingly around really really suck. And then they sent tanks. That protest needed a band or some singing. Aside from The Little Red Song Book is there a good source of protest songs? Is anybody writing them? There needs to be an internet site dedicated to lyrics and sheet music for peace hymns and protest songs and also band arrnagements of said songs, like Down by the Riverside and La Internationale. If this is going to be a police state that sends marines to peaceful demonstrations, the demonstrations should at least be fun.

10 Steps to Making the World Suck Less. Worth implementing. Think globally, act locally.