Two-Minute Love Songs

Going into it, I thought Michael Cera is getting typecast, Mark Mothersbaugh soundtracks have run their course, and I questioned what could come of the oft-used plot where uber-hip youths embark on a journey throughout NYC while set to glamorous music and shots of cultural landmarks. Happily, and while these things might indeed be true, the movie is alright. In some respects, it relies upon and is about reinventing the tried and true narratives. Rather than looking for the next big thing, the characters, like Thom, are focused on classics like The Beatles' "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" because they celebrate the little things. It's not about sex and orgasm, but spending time with someone, holding their hand. The movie echoes this same ethos in its concern with the neighborhood places of NYC as opposed to Times Square or Rockefeller Center's ice rink. It's -- and Mothersbaugh's -- love for the mix tape (or CD) reinscribes this ethos. It's not about the next big CD, but the untold little ones, the shifts between bands and songs and the way they get interwoven with our lives.

Sounds a little McCartney-esque, I know, but the movie pulls it off. Where McCartney's ouve suggests it is all about the silly love songs, this movie starts to get at the tension between the big and little. The characters are self-consciously hip, they *do* want (and have) sex, they seek fame to what degree they can. But the self-conscisous attempts at labeling, crafting an image, selling a defined product, or wanting what others want all come to naught. Fame, it would seem, come out of some other activity, some other creative process that eludes the regulated and regulating switchboards of control and mastery. Even more, when the big things rule our lives, we are ruined in the process.

So, the trick is to live within the tension between Desire (big-D) and our desires (little-d). Accept jouissance when it comes (pun intended), but don't ruin it by making it a foundation for action. This seems timely to me, if only because our social jouissance has led us to some grim times. Not long ago there was talk of an endless rise in the market, a swift victory in the middle-east, and an endless Republican majority in government. Yet, for all the values and ethics of Karl Rove, George W., and Dick Cheney, no one ever told them it wasn't about national orgasm. Politics, at its best, is about holding hands.

"The Written Word is a Lie"

Tom Snyder's interview with John Lydon has to be one of the most sublime moments in all of television. The only was to save rock 'n roll was to kill it.



Snyder's insistence that Lydon defines himself and PIL simply demonstrates his inability to grasp what punk was all about and that Lydon and Levine intuited the postmodern condition. "There should be no difference between who's onstage and who's in the audience" (4:40).

This is an aesthetics consonant with much of deleuze's thinking. PIL, in Lydon's description is pure difference.



Snyder's query about "What do you like?" could easily be "what are you for?" as opposed to what are you against; be positive Snyder demands, but Lydon doesn't give up. He only against, only a rebel without a cause and endlessly at that. With so many having gotten the Sex Pistols wrong, there is more to the end of rock 'n roll. and PIL's endeavor is to expose that pure difference by melding with it. It is anti-stardom and Lydon is a consummate writer of anti-stardom.

Lydon's writing, of course, is preceded by Artaud and followed by Cobain. And Sirc has traced out how Cobain's writing is important as a heuristic. We might go so far as to follow Cobain back to Artaud through Lydon and apply the same description to them as Sirc does to Cobain: Orpheus, all of them, gazing from below and exposing the world of the dead.

Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you
Anger is an energy
May the road rise with you

Subdivision/ Line of Flight/ In-be-tween

Dissonance at the water park -- I am becoming-tween, repeating naive sexuality and desire balong the waves of music coming over the loudspeakers

Be cool or be cast out
Any escape might help to smooth
The unattractive truth
But the suburbs have no charms to soothe
The restless dreams of youth


An adult transported here, only even that was not it, but a repetition, different from 1982. Both it and me have traveled along different lines even though we are conjoined twins within Rush's music.

Subdivisions, conformity, escape; segmentations, molar bodies, lines of flight. There is desire and delirium at the water park. Seeing and desiring flesh like at a carnival, which is always also seeing and desiring a different flesh for the self. A desiring drawn from a delusion of one's own self-image, that seizure necessary from which we draw our name.

Drawn like moths we drift into the city
The timeless old attraction
Cruising for the action
Lit up like a firefly
Just to feel the living night

Nothing is quite so tween to me than Rush. Not the standard pop/ country of my youth, nor the alternative music of my teens, but the "intelligent," vaguely escapist rock of Neil Peart. A cumming-to-social-consciousness be-tween two segments in life. But this in-be-tween hasn't passed. The spirit hasn't marched on or how would the song evoke that affect, virtually replicate the feelings from over twenty years ago? It is this in-be-tween-ness that has defined this moment and already foretold of its coming. How else do you explain my family, my career, my location in a small town in Iowa where everyone prides themselves on keeping this town "safe"?

Somewhere out of a memory
Of lighted streets on quiet nights...

Younger than McCain

Pretty funny song, but I think the images make it funnier. It's a good use of multimodal literacies.

Becoming 2008

I had thought about doing a list of things that distinguished 2007 for me: Top albums, books, movies, etc. However, I have been reading too much Deleuze and criticism on Deleuze, so I figured Top-whatever lists were pretty segmentary. As an alternative in a more becoming sort of way, here is what is rattling around with those things now:

Let's jump right to music: After 15 years of listening to Rage Against the Machine's eponymous first album, I finally used a Best Buy gift card to buy it (oh, the irony!). Fascinating how it is only recently that I have had the need to buy it because of its ubiquity. Along with this, I picked up Patti Smith's Twelve, a cover of twelve classic rock hits from the Beatles to Nirvana. It's a bit heavy on sixties rock, covering "Within You and Without You," the Stones' "Gimme Shelter," the Doors' "Soul Kitchen," Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit" and Hendrix's "Are You Experienced?" These are all excellent remakes, as is her cover of Dylan's "Changing of the Guards" and Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The one I could do without, though was the remake of Tears for Fears' "Everybody Wants to Rule the World." On top of that, I checked out Kings of Leon's recent album, "Because of the Times." They are new to me, but I like their grit and sound.

Right now, I am re-reading Into the Wild since i assigned it for my Expository Writing course. I like the different ways Krakauer builds a case out of his research. It is an excellent model, I think for students in that it blends his researched data into a definite perspective, using multiple rhetorical appeals and strategies. While the weakest in terms of logic might be his own personal relation between him, his father, and his experience climbing Devil's Thumb, it is nonetheless HUGELY engrossing and persuasive. Here at the office, I am also skimming William Germano's From Dissertation to Book, which I highly recommend to anyone undergoing this process. He's more readable than the authors in The Thesis and the Book and for that, I appreciate his candor and style. Oh, and Deleuze? Criticism, mostly: Clare Colebrook's article from Topoi, Zizek's Organs Without Bodies, and Rajchman's (Again) Deleuze Connections. I also cracked Michael Smith's Toward the Outside, a book on Levinas. My main concern in the theory here is 1) that ecocomposition acknowledges what I think is a real thorn in its side: the connection between its subject and its object. Broadly, ecocomposition finds it to be socially constructed all the way down OR posits some reality that can be accessed and must be saved from all this constructivist nonsense. How, then, can we remain committed to "sustainability" or saving the planet? 2) to get at this, I am researching what the links are/ have been/ and how we might look at writers as ecologically situated. This means 3) that they are at the intersections of ecologies rather than their interfaces. It's not enough these ecologies meet clash and grapple, but that they are, in the figure of the writer, virtually indistinguishable.

While I have been interested in Deleuze, I haven't seen too many movies. I got a HDTV for Christmas, so LOTR looks better as does my gift copy of Easy Rider. Jess is going back through Harry Potter, both books and films, so we just got through half of Sorcerer's Stone.

Ah, well, there is more to become and I could go on about politics and war and environmentalism, which are also part of my work and life (volunteer for Obama, community screening and discussing War Made Easy in February, organizing Focus the Nation in January). But my syllabus for Professional Writing needs attention before a 2pm meeting.

Braiiiins!