http://soundcloud.com/mudede/burialmudede

Burialmudede  by  mudede

An image from the White House's official photostream:
What is most important here is not the men on the couch but the mirror above them. And what is most important about the mirror above them is not that it reflects another mirror but that the mirror within it does not open to infinity. The mirror in the mirror ends with a reflection of the wall. Now why is it important that the mirror within the mirror above Obama ends with a wall and encloses space? Because to have the vision of infinity above the head of the most powerful leader in the world would imply that his power is infinite. That kind of association is not desirable or polite. The powerful leader wants to show the public that his power is limited and sane. The infinite is always a sign of madness.

Excitement when I read the headline: "Humanity’s upright gait may have roots in trees." Disappointment when I read the theory:

A new analysis of apes’ wrist bones suggests that a two-legged stride evolved from tree climbing, not ground-based knuckle-walking...

“Our data show that there is no unequivocal evidence for a terrestrial, knuckle-walking phase in human evolution and provide strong support for a human evolutionary history in the trees,” says [Tracy Kivell of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthopology in Leipzig, Germany...]

Kivell and Schmitt [f Duke University in Durham, N.C.] convincingly show that the anatomy of knuckle-walking differs in chimps and gorillas, remarks anthropologist Susannah Thorpe of the University of Birmingham, England. Hominids retained the anatomical basis of an upright stance from a tree-dwelling great ape ancestor, Thorpe proposes.

I was rather hoping that the theory would not point to something as practical as tree-dwelling but to something as magical as imitation. I very much liked the idea of a distant, knuckle-walking ancestor coming across a beautiful tree, like the one in Magnolia Park, and being inspired to stand on two feet so that it too could be as beautiful, as upright, as slender as the tree.

To be on all fours is to be like a bush; to be on your feet is to be like a tree. This was the theory I so badly wanted read and think about all day.

Something new from the world of science:

In a research paper recently published online in the early edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the researchers report that all ants, both living and dead, have the "death chemicals" continually, but live ants have them along with other chemicals associated with life — the "life chemicals." When an ant dies, its life chemicals dissipate or are degraded, and only the death chemicals remain.

"It's because the dead ant no longer smells like a living ant that it gets carried to the graveyard, not because its body releases new, unique chemicals after death," said Dong-Hwan Choe, the lead author of the research paper and a graduate student working towards his doctoral degree with Michael Rust, a professor of entomology at UCR.

"There is no mistaking that it is the dissipation of chemical signals associated with life rather than the increase of a decomposition product 'death cue' that triggers necrophoric behavior by Argentine ants," he said.

The passage from the recent science report echoes a passage from a book written nearly 200 years ago, Science of Logic:

When we say of things that they are finite, we understand thereby that they not only have determinateness, that their quality is not only a reality and an intrinsic determination, that finite things are not merely limited—as such they still have determinate being outside the limit—but that, on the contrary, nonbeing constitutes their nature and being....

...[T]he truth of this being is their end. The finite not only alters, like something in general, but it ceases to be; and its ceasing to be is not merely a possibility, so that it could be without ceasing to be, but the being as such of finite things is to have the germ of decease as their being-within-self: the hour of their birth is the hour of their death.

Hegel's doctrine of being is identical with the mechanism for necrophoresis in Argentine ants.

This morning, around James and 5th, a woman across the street waves at me. She is around 50, black, and wearing a tracksuit. I think it is my mother. She is on her morning walk; she is waving at her son. But a closer look reveals the waving woman to be not my mother but a crackhead who has mistaken me for a crackhead or dealer. I look away from her and walk up the hill.

But to slip by a trick of light and colors into that split second was something wonderful. In that split second I believed that my dead mother was alive and out and about. She was in the world with her own body. The thing about a death is that it finishes not so much the person but the relationship with that person.  Instead of the subject/object relationship, there is now only a subject—you who survives.  The death of a close person is the total internalization of that person. Your living body becomes the site of their burial. It is here inside that the dead have something like an afterlife (alive but not alive, in time but not in time). They roam the body like a ghost roams a tomb.

To see my mother in the crackhead was a liberation.  For once she was outside instead of inside. The illusion of her freedom made me happy for a split second.

At the end of Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, the third novel in his Bridge series, the Japanese computer construct and popstar, Idoru (Idol), leaps out of machines that look like ATMs in stores that look like 7-Elevens. Cyberspace invades physical space. Similarly, the technology Pattie Maes's team is developing at MIT, wearable tech...



...this too is a kind of invasion: one type of space challenges the unity of another. By reversing the positions of the user and cyberspace, the space inhabited by a person becomes unified with the space of electronic information. Instead of looking into a screen, cyberspace leaps out and becomes a part of real space. This leap, this reversal, this invasion will represent the most radical development in the brief history of the internet. The leading heroes of the cyberpunk movement longed to escape the body (flesh, meat, blood, bone) and enter the eternal ether of electronic information. But the direction of this longing was wrong. The correct direction will not be inward but outward, not internalization but externalization.

It is this that truly separates wearable tech from smart phones. What the latter offers us is the ability to look into the invisible other world. Wearable tech projects this internal/invisible world onto actual space. What was inner becomes a part of what we understand, mark, index as real. The social, existential, and philosophical implications of this transformation will be profound. It's as if Hegel's geist in his grand narrative of the history of consciousness, Phenomenology of the Spirit, actually came true: in the end the subjective is united with the objective.

Again and again, we hear it in the depths of a dub. As the maze
darkens, as the haze thickens, out of nowhere we hear a beep. The beep
is like a red light in the dub maze/haze. But what is this beeping that
can be heard on dubs by Perry, Tubby, Scientist, Burial, and DJ
Spooky? It is the signal of life in the dub. The listener
is on a rescue operation in the "land of the aftermath." As LKJ put it,
"destruction is all around," buildings crumble, a layer of smog covers
the dead city. Suddenly there is a beep. We hear it and know for sure
that life is in this dub. In Basic Channel's dub, however, no such signals can been heard. There are no survivors, no humans in their dub.

One:
There can be no real separation between capitalism and the state, government and civil society. As the economist Ha-Joon Chang has pointed out in two books, the state is not a scaffolding from which
capitalism breaks and becomes its own, self-sufficient thing. Capitalism has always been dependent on the state.  For the past 30
years, the neoliberal idea of its independence has dominated global economic policy (in the
form of the Economic Structural Adjustment Program). But with the current bailout of the banking system, the truth is
way out in the open. The whole world can now see that capitalism is
impossible without state support—its infrastructure, general
intellect, and public resources.

Two:
It has been only an advantage to the rich to make a political
program out of an idea that places the individual and not the social as
the source of wealth. And at the heart of that program has been the maintenance of a distinction between capitalism and socialism--capitalism, the regime of the individual, being the reality; and socialism, the regime of cooperation, being an unrealistic ideal.   Socialism, however, is not exceptional or an ideal but the very state of things. Nothing is not socialism. Or better yet, nothing that is understood as human is not socialism. Because it is the condition of all human activity, socialism must be seen as either an order that benefits a few or many--and that is what it comes down to. It's not a matter of socialism and capitalism but a matter of privatized socialism of public socialism.
 
A synthesis of the two thoughts: If we understand that capitalism can not be separated form the state, and that capitalism is nothing but a privatized socialism, then can see why, as the economist Roubini has said, our economic sitution is organized in this way: profits are privitized and losses are socialized. The part of socialism that generates wealth is the part that we call capitalism.

What is it that unifies the three masters?  Each shares their peak position with another master. With King Tubby it was Lee "Scratch" Perry; with Juan Atkins it is Derrick May; with DJ Premier it is RZA. What is the pattern here? It is this: The other master in each form (Perry, May, RZA) is a genius and has this genius as the sole source of the greatness in their music. Now we can see what it is that unifies Tubby, Atkins, and Premier: the ability to make great music without genius.

This weekend, I was kidnapped and imprisoned by this Swedish pop tune...

The kidnapping happened at the Quarter Lounge, when the tune appeared on a massive, robotic jukebox. I immediately downloaded it into my Google phone, and that was that—my weekend was history.


A quick note: If I were to explain how Alfred North Whitehead's god works, I'd use this video. A person walking backwards, and only aware of what is happening and has happened (and has no idea what is about to happen), is precisely the kind of god that Whitehead had in mind.

This is the starting point.

What makes "Sucker M.C.'s" central to hiphop is what makes "No UFO's" central to techno. Each represents for its form a total breaking point and the distinction, and stabilization, of that form. What separates "The Breaks" or "Rapper's Delight" from "Sucker M.C.'s" is that the former have not broken with disco. Similarly what separates "No UFO's" from "Clear" is the former broke with electrofunk, which was the transitional form for both hiphop and techno. The electrofunk of Newcleus was the same as the electrofunk of Cybotron, yet Newcleus leads directly to Run DMC and Cybotron leads to Model 500 and Rhythm is Rhythm.

And so with "Sucker M.C.'s" we finally have a hiphop that is emptied of all disco. It also establishes minimalism as the hiphop standard and point of departure—a similar minimalism shapes techno. (Indeed, it is precisely this minimalism that facilitated techno's break from Chicago house, the very form it used to break from electrofunk—house, of course, continues disco.) The standard in hiphop is to  strip the beat "down to the bone" and use only a basic melody or to suggest melodies. That is the stating point: "Sucker M.C.'s."

The PI's architecture critic, Lawrence Cheek, recently wrote this:

The best decoration for a high-rise is built in, not tacked on. It grows out of a bold, intriguing and thoughtfully detailed sculptural form. The Columbia Center still may be Seattle's best skyscraper simply because it's so strong: No other building expresses attitude, ambition and power so nakedly.

Let's remove The Columbia Tower out of the mud of Cheek's doubt by saying this with no hesitation: It is the best skyscraper in Seattle. And this is so not only because of what it expresses ("attitude, ambition and power") but also because it facilitates cognitive mapping over the widest area. The tower can be seen from my mother's grave in the hills above Renton, and from the east side of Vashon Island, and from the Ave in the University District, and from a considerable length of Aurora Avenue. Its orienting power helps make the city readable and your place in it understandable. It connects you to the center of things—a center that radiates from this one and sure point. When you see it from Magnolia Park or Rainier Avenue or on I-5 not long after passing the exit to the airport, you feel as if you are one of many beings and buildings orbiting this core. And that feeling of being a person in an urban system is the same great feeling of being a planet in a solar system.

I finally got around to watching The Dark Knight.
Three problems with it. One, it's too long. Two, the Joker character is too much. And three (this concerns the very nature of the superhero), the billionaire's obsession with the maintenance of the law and order in the city that generated and stores his fortune. These laws not only protect his fortune but also block others from accumulating that kind of wealth. And, as we all know, any fortune of the size enjoyed by Wayne has raw robbery (dispossession, as David Harvey would put it) as its founding moment. In the last instance, Batman, the defender of the law, really defends his own money.

That was my impression of the madman/superhero of this endless movie.

As for the Joker, what other choice did he have but to be outrageously nihilistic? Only an evil person who is indifferent to money can sustain and strengthen the moral line that is instantly troubled and weakened when a proper robber, thief, crook is matched with the ultimate defender of the laws that protect and reinforce Wayne's wealth. Writes Herbert Marcus: "The ruling class, in order to justify its dominating position in the process of production, has to make the particular interest of its class seem valid as the general interest." This is the core of Batman.

If the dark core of Le Cercle Rouge is redemption through a criminal act—meaning, the morally ambiguous situation of a good arising from a wrong—then the dark core of Bresson's Pickpocket is a man's spiritualization through the mastery of a crime. Here the church and the saints have been replaced by the streets and crooks, and yet complete commitment to a life of crime ends at the same point as a life committed to the laws of God: holiness, grace, spiritual elongation.