So, I feel I have to write about Harry Potter. I will put it under a cut, so don't click it unless you want to read about stuff that happens in the most recent book. Though it is not really a discussion about the plot, per se.
Three new albums from bands I adored in middle school and early high school have come out or are about to. And they are... weird.
Marilyn Manson has released a sappy love album (Eat Me, Drink Me).
NIN has released an album (Year Zero) that is suppose to be about a totalitarian near future, but feels like hyper nostalgia for the potential of industrial rock when Pretty Hate Machine came out.
The new Pumpkins (Zietgeist) is neither (timely or ghostly, much less a spirit of the times).
Does anyone have any of this music? I cannot seem to download music right now, and there is a lot of stuff I want. Just thought I would send out a shout of help, and maybe some of you would have this and put it online or tell me to IM you sometime. If other people want music, I can post some online too.
I've been going through a big country phase recently (really music to drink to). So if you have anything by the following bands/artists I would be thrilled.
The Blacks, Trailer Bride, Ramsay Midwood, Drive-by Truckers, Freakwater, The Meat Purveyors, Old 97s, Chris LeDoux, Johnny Cash, Leftover Salmon, Lucero, John Hiatt, Anna Fermin's Trigger Gospel, Kelly Hogan, The Cowboy Junkies.
Yeah, I'm sure I'm leaving off a bunch of the more amazing ones. But you get the idea.
The biggest one for me right now is probably The Blacks' Just Like Home.
My new musical obsession, humanwine, is coming to A-town, but of course I won't be there. So Atlantians! you need to go and show your support for me. The info is here http://www.humanwine.org/home.html but it is the following: Five Spot 1123 Euclid Ave. (L5P) [404] 223-1100 doors @ 8:00 $10 / $12 / All Ages. The show is 9pm.
Now, I know that unless you saw them while they were touring with the Dresden Dolls, you probably have no clue who they are. If you have a myspace, so do they. You can listen to music there. Also, you can go to http://www.nervousrelatives.com/FN/PressPage.html where the webpage will play their new three song EP and you can read all the crazy shit people tell about them. To sum them up, they are a gypsy-punk-gothic band with socio-political overtones. or as one blurb put it: "Each HUMANWINE song is conceived as a mini movie soundtrack involving actors, color schemes and a plot filled with antagonists, protagonists, conflicts, resolutions that take place in the fictional ‘Vinland’. Like any good surrealism, it is the realism that packs the artful punch, and the emotional content of HUMANWINE‘s songs are as real, powerful and accessible as their very human composers." - Sonja Tordorovich, Northeast Performer"
also, you can catch some youtube concert clips, but they look like fucking amazing performers.
So I am writing my dissertation on animals, pretty sure.
My current thought (I'll play with this in my field paper this summer), is to divide it up into three sections: a hauntology, the term comes from Derrida, but to exam the place of animal in western philosophy. So far particularly in Aristotle and Heidegger. We are haunted by our animal others. The second section is how to fight this hauntology we have constituted an ontology, the ontology being a cause and justification for violence and atrocity. The last section is our need for a vitology, a radical vitalism that affirms life as a ground of ethos and politics.
So I've been in Oklahoma for CEDA nationals (which is a debate national tournament). For those trying to call me, expect return phone calls to start today, if I don't get to you today I will tomorrow.
CEDA nationals is a very dangerous debate tournament, because it is the only one I have been to that makes me want to keep being a debate coach rather than quit. I also have no clue what my relationship to debate will be next year. There are five people applying to grad school here to be a debate coach. I have promised Joe that if none of them get in, I will continue serving in this role, but I assume that out of five applications someone will show up. So I really don't know what I will do, honestly, if I end up in an unoffical role with the team. I may end up doing next to nothing, going to the occasional tournament to judge and make a bit more money, but nothing more. On the other hand, I've made a promise to a group of people (one which is true) that I will work with anyone that does something I find interesting. And at least one person, Ben, is pretty committed to rolling that way next year. So if that happens, I will have to find some way to at least keep coaching one team. The next thing is that there is a debater I have been trying to recruit since I saw him debate in about the middle of last semester. He ended up being 14th speaker at CEDA nats, which is kinda awesome. While it looks like he won't be coming here to debate next year, if he does, I will be even more tempted to have a serious role in our debate team. Because not only will he want to do interesting things, but also he should be fairly successful at doing them, which to be honest I'd really like to have coached one very successful team. Oh well, Love you all.
March 24: Stephen Colbert To Be Presented With Speaker Of The Year Award By The Cross Examination Debate Association
The Cross Examination Debate Association (CEDA) has selected Stephen Colbert as its Speaker of the Year. The Speaker of the Year award is given to a public figure that provides a meaningful service to others by being an ethical speaker.
MEDIA ADVISORY NEW YORK, NY / PR FREE / Mar 20 2007 --
The Speaker of the Year award is given to a public figure that provides a meaningful service to others by being an ethical speaker. Colbert’s drive to expose the rhetorical shortcomings of contemporary political discourse makes him an ideal candidate for the inaugural issuance of this Award. Specifically, Mr. Colbert’s character's unswerving lack of warranted arguments forces viewers as citizens to question whether the “established” leadership of the country have any warrants of their own. For that service to the national dialogue, Mr. Colbert will be recognized.
The Speaker of the Year award will be presented during CEDA’s annual national debate tournament, held this year at the University of Oklahoma (OU). The awards ceremony will take place on March 24, 2007 at 7:30 p.m. (CST) on the OU campus at the Paul F. Sharp Concert Hall, Catlett Music Center.
Founded in 1971, the Cross-Examination Debate Association (CEDA) is the primary national association sanctioning and promoting intercollegiate academic policy debate. Throughout the school year, CEDA sanctions over 60 tournaments throughout the nation, including an annual National Championship Tournament that brings together over 175 individual debate teams from across the nation to compete for a national team championship. For further information, contact Kathryn Rubino, chair of the CEDA Public Relations committee by e-mail at kathrynrubino@gmail.com.
It's going to be a lot more difficult now for Sen. Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) to shirk his "Techno Ted" nickname (and techno-dunce reputation), what with the single weirdest message we've ever seen appearing on his campaign Web site.
Almost as freaky as his infamously disjointed "series-of-tubes" speech last year about the Internet (which briefly earned him the Most Lampooned Politician on the Web award), Stevens's reelection site asks visitors to enter a username and password and then -- as they unsuccessfully fumble for a password -- condemns them with a warning that begins:
"Through a series of highly sophisticated and complex algorithms, this system has determined that you are not presently authorized to use this system function. It could be that you simply mistyped a password, or, it could be that you are some sort of interplanetary alien-being that has no hands and, thus, cannot type." (See screenshot on 2nd page of this post.)
But wait, it gets even weirder:
"If I were a gambler, I would bet that a cat (an orange tabby named Sierra or Harley) somehow jumped onto your keyboard and forgot some of the more important pointers from those typing lessons you paid for. Based on the actual error encountered, I would guess that the feline in question simply forgot to place one or both paws on the appropriate home keys before starting. Then again, I suppose it could have been a keyboard error caused by some form of cosmic radiation; this would fit nicely with my interplanetary alien-being theory."
Um, senator? Are you OK? Have you decided not to run for reelection after all?
Stevens spokesman Aaron Saunders said he didn't know anything about the Web message and furthermore wouldn't comment anyway because of legal separations between Senate and campaign affairs.
No one seemed to know how the alien missive landed on the Senator's web site, including Stevens's campaign treasurer, Tim McKeever, who called it "bizarre." And like boss, like aide: McKeever claimed to be as technologically challenged as the senator.
"I have limited knowledge about the Internet, as my teenage son will tell you," McKeever said, maybe only half-jokingly. He insisted that Stevens is definitely running for reelection, just as the senator has announced, even though StevensforSenate.com is not "an active campaign Web site" yet.
So who left that whacky message on the campaign site, and why? We thought the tabby cat reference a bit curious, considering Stevens had a pet cat who died recently. How mean to tug at the senator's heart strings that way! Though we hear the senator's cat was named Tigger, not "Sierra Harley."
Senate Democratic political operatives professed innocence. Though they were down right gleeful over having an excuse to dredge up "Techno Ted," as Sen. Stevens came to be known after his Internet speech in which he declared, among other musings, that the Internet is "not a big truck."
"Unfortunately, this is the least crazy thing Ted Stevens has said about the Internet," said Matthew Miller, a spokesman for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee.
Below is a screenshot of the message that was on Stevens's campaign site. The site was not working on Thursday, though your Sleuth visited it on Wednesday and saw the text herself. The screenshot was provided by a trusty political operative who's clearly getting an early start on the '08 campaign season.
Seriously, I am in love with her sound. I totally understand there may be plenty of things wrong with any messages of the song, but it is such a luxurious sound.
Meet you downstairs in the bar and heard Your rolled up sleeves and your skull t-shirt You say why did you do it with him today? And sniff me out like I was Tanqueray
Cause you're my fella, my guy Hand me your stella and fly By the time I'm out the door You tear me down like roger moore
I cheated myself Like I knew I would I told ya, I was troubled You know that I'm no good
Upstairs in bed, with my ex boy, He’s in the place, but I cant get joy, Thinking of you in the final throws, this is when my buzzer goes
Run out to meet your chicks and bitter You say when we're married cause youre not bitter There'll be none of him no more I cried for you on the kitchen floor
I cheated myself Like I knew I would I told ya, I was troubled You know that I'm no good
Sweet reunion, jamaica and spain Were like how we were again I'm in the tub youre on the seat Lick your lips as I soak my feet
Then you notice little carpet burn My stomach drops and my guts churn You shrug and it's the worst To truly stuck the knife in first
I cheated myself like I knew I would I told ya I was troubled, you know that I'm no good I cheated myself, like I knew I would I told ya I was troubled, yeah ya know that I'm no good
I got this question off of cross-x. "I've thought over and over, but couldn't come up with a clear picture, in your oppinion, what would an anti-disciplinary society look like? Would there be a society? All of these types of questions. I understand fairly well the idea of an alternative Foucault discusses, and how resistance is a practice, but I can't picture what a 100 % success of this resistance would look like."
and here was my response: "Hello, Well, I don't know why you are asking this. I'm not sure if it is strictly for debate or not. If it is, I don't know how helpful my answer will be. So I will answer your question as if it is not a debate only question. You put your question kinda solely in the terms of Foucault, and I won't be answering it solely that way. It seems to me you want to know what society will look like after we manage to achieve the sort of goals that radical philosophy makes demands upon. My answer is not a satisfactory one, but here it goes: We don't know, and we necessarily cannot know. Gramsci understood this one, he explained in part of his prison notebooks that communist struggle demands an interesting kind of thought. It demands that we be able to fight for something that we cannot foresee. The reason we cannot see it, is that it is so radically different, it necessarily annuls our thought of it. We cannot know what a communist (or whatever your radical term here) society will look like. Even Marx understands this a bit when in the German Ideology he writes "Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established , an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence." Perhaps you read my paper on societies of control and experiment? There is two models of doing science, the demonstration and the experiment. In the demonstration we know what will happen, we are merely demonstrating the predicted outcome. In an experiment we really don't know what will happen. Radical struggle, and with it radical philosophy, is always an experiment. It is exactly this quality that sets it apart from mere liberalism. From what Foucault calls ministerial cabinet talk. Or to put it another way, this is what makes radical thought different from policy making. Policy making entails a way of standing outside of the conditions of things, of being able to say "This is the conditions and if we do X we will able to achieve Y." This approach is transcendental, or to use Haraway's phrase, it is a god-trick. Radical thought at its best is immanent, non-transcendental. Which means it only results in the midst of struggle, this is what Maria Lugones refers to as praxical thinking, thinking that occurs in the midst of practice. We can't know what will come, but it's worth fighting for anyway. It's the only thing worth fighting for. The society of equality and freedom is a dream that is not dead. As a matter of fact, Negri argues in Insurgencies that no revolution is a failed revolution. Because revolution exceeds its instrumentality, it exceeds merely some purpose, revolution itself develops radical subjectivity, which is always worthwhile. This is not utopianism. What is amazing is the profound anti-utopianism that is found among the french radical philosophers, the italian autonomists, the american anarchist tradition. Utopianism implies a desire for some world not here, some world that will happen in the future. But the revolutionary moment is here, now, with us. It is never any other time. We make the society of equality and freedom here, out of this concrete world. Just because we are not utopianists, doesn't mean we believe history is dead (see my Love:A Politics of Joy).
I'm drunk and it's been a long day, so I hope this makes sense. If there are any questions, or I didn't answer you in anyway, please feel free to keep asking.
So here is the life plan, at the end of this semester I will finish my PhD in three years. By the end of next school year I will have finished and defended my field paper, and then two years to finish my dissertation. And I need to think backwards to figure everything out. Think of the dissertation project, then think of the field paper, from there let the project guide me to an adviser, and build my committee around my adviser. Make sense? SO here is the snag.
Since I was a sophomore in undergrad I have had a project, Societies of Control, that I have been working on and off again. It's what I did my undergrad honors thesis on, and what I did my master's exam on. However, I have been wanting to write on animals/critical vegetarianism for a while, but had basically decided there was no jobs and no support here at binghamton. But I had a long talk with Bill, and he said I animals were hot right now, and I could find support here at the binghamton, but it wouldn't be preaching to the choir. So, I need to make a decision by the end of the semester. What do you all suggest?
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