Identity Theft 3.0

in which a fictional woman hoards power

theidentitythief — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 06:47:26 +0000

The Profit Motive

She knew she was beautiful. It was a simple fact, not a distracting one. Her expenditures on clothes and accessories were investments, investments free of any apparent risk. She could see this in the forcibly suppressed jealousy of other women, and in the pitiful complaisance of men.

There were a handful of men she kept around. They all seemed happy enough to spend money on her, happy also because she kept them all unaware of each other’s existence. Each thought himself indispensible to her; each remained inexplicably convinced of his own importance. They offered of themselves in pride, and she accepted their offerings with an artful sense of grace.

She had a younger sister who lived at home and took care of their sickly mother. The old woman’s descent into ill-tempered senility strained not only her relationship with her two daughters, but also the reationship between the daughters themselves. The younger sibling nursed hidden feelings of frustration and resentment, which began to manisfest themselves in the brusque manner with which she questioned her elder sister’s way of life.

“When are you going to settle down and lead a reasonable life? You aren’t getting any younger, you know.”

“Women aren’t built for monogamy. I don’t need a husband. Men have their own needs, and as far as I’m concerned, they can keep them.”

Some of the men she saw were rich and successful, while others lived in contented poverty. She knew how to keep them satisfied, and allowed them to believe that they satisfied her, although none was interesting enough to sate her restless thirst for fresh diversions. She sometimes suffered twinges of a nameless desperation, but she never felt powerless. She didn’t know how to explain this to anyone. There wasn’t anyone she wanted to explain it to.

“It’s not fair to treat people like that,” her sister complained. “You should be honest with them. You owe them that much, at least.”

“Men lie to me in order to sleep with me. I don’t owe them anything. I give them what they want, but I hide them from what they don’t want to know.”

“Which is what? That you don’t really care about them? That you’re stringing them along to amuse yourself?”

She answered questions like this with a crooked, sardonic grin.

Sometimes she pondered the men she knew: their thin, shallow senses of bravado that always collapsed like sand castles beneath waves of lust and wishful thinking. None of them wanted what they pretended to want; they preferred instead to dissimulate, to repeat rehearsed fantasies in order to make themselves seem interesting. Who did they think they were fooling?

On good days, such delusions amused her; other times, she found it difficult to conceal the disgust with the fact that these men had long since rendered themselves incapable of self-respect. The haze of pornography and video games clouded their vision. They stank of self-perpetuating ignorance.

“You’re not even being fair to yourself,” her sister scolded. “It’s not healthy that you can’t stand the thought of being alone. What kind of person are you going to be, ten years from now? You can’t decide what you want, and if you keep everyone around you in the dark, when you finally realize you can’t figure things out for yourself, no one will be able to help you.”

“I know what I want. I want power.”

“I remember how you used to be,” she continued, shaking her head sadly before turning to look her sister directly in the eye. “You used to be happy.”

“I remember too,” she replied quietly. Unable to meet her sibling’s steady gaze, her own eyes drifted away, up toward the ceiling. “I used to be a lot of things…”

in which a fictional woman dreams of her own anxiety

theidentitythief — Sat, 31 Dec 2011 03:01:39 +0000

I was standing in my kitchen, but it wasn’t my kitchen. I had a roast cooking in the oven – I don’t remember preparing it; I just remember that I was waiting, not in the anticipation of enjoying a meal, but under the weight of the need to feed my family. But they weren’t waiting like I was; my son was gone and my husband was just sitting at the table, glaring – not always directly at me, but I couldn’t ignore my awareness of a dark aura emanating from him, an aura of demand. He was radiating a negative energy that paralyzed me. I wanted to focus on it to figure out why, so I could decide what to do, but then I noticed the lawyers.

I was dressed casually, but both my husband and the two lawyers were wearing suits. They seemed calm, stern, businesslike. They had placed an enormous stack of papers on the table, and while I paced the kitchen, worried about the roast and whether it was going to burn, they just kept trying to get me to sign the papers.

“We need you to sign,” the first lawyer said. “Things will be a lot easier on all of us if you just sign.”

“A lot easier on all of us,” echoed the second lawyer, nodding in agreement. The first lawyer stared at me, holding an expensive pen. My husband was looking off into space.

“I need time to read it first. I don’t sign anything before I read it,” I protested. I wanted to mention the roast, but I was afraid.

The first lawyer looked disappointed and impatient, replying: “It’s just a standard contract. Boilerplate, really.”

“Just boilerplate,” the second lawyer said. My husband’s eyes flashed at me, and I approached the table, following a compulsion that violated both my will and all my natural instincts. The stack of papers seemed to have grown thicker and more imposing since I had last noticed it, and the pen the first lawyer brandished had also grown larger, its glossy faux marble finish appearing shinier and more elaborate. I looked at the words on the first page, trying to scan them for kernels of meaning, but the letters shifted into unintelligible shapes like figures underwater. While I tried to swallow through the growing knot in my throat, the first lawyer shoved the pen into my hands, thrust his index finger toward an empty line at the bottom of the paper, and quietly demanded, “We need your signature here.”

I hesitated. “Sign there,” said the second lawyer. I took the pen. My hand tried to sign my name, but all that came out was a nervous scribble. I felt torn between two urges: the urge to revise what I had written, and the urge to check the oven, but no sooner had I interpreted my own thoughts than the first lawyer had flipped through several pages and demanded my further compliance. “Initial here.”

“It’s just boilerplate,” said the second lawyer. I glanced toward my husband, whose slow reciprocation of my gaze filled me with an absurd conviction: I had to sign. I didn’t have a choice. Even though I didn’t want to, there were men in suits sitting around a table. Obviously, this was bigger than me. I still felt panicky about the roast, but my tongue was tied, and in my anxiety, I could barely keep up with the first lawyer, who continued to rifle through the document’s gibberish-filled pages, demanding more signatures and initials. Not only did I not understand what I was doing, what process I was aiding, or what sort of document I was signing, but my desperate indignation did nothing to weaken the compulsion to obey. I wanted to speak, to address the fact that the room had begun to smell like burning and it was the roast, that I had to take the roast out of the oven, but my tongue was tied, and I was afraid of being ridiculed by the men in suits. So I signed everything, but there were always more pages. And my husband just sat there, glaring into space. He never said a word.

almost pop

theidentitythief — Mon, 12 Dec 2011 07:43:08 +0000

So I’ve been reading Pitchfork again. When I was in college, I savored their high-concept prose like good wine. I revered their elevated critical perspective, holding it at arm’s length like something holy and dangerous. It was a while before I began to resent Pitchfork’s contented position as part of the Internet Tastemaking Machine, before realizing that the task of assigning value and context to art is a task that gets you drunk on imaginary power. After becoming something of a music writer myself, spending most of 2010 writing two or three reviews a month for Tiny Mix Tapes, I realized how strange it is to pass judgment on the work of people who you will never meet, whose perspectives will never become real or threatening to you. I realized how easy it is to dismiss something that you misunderstand as if it is unworthy, how easy it is to applaud something simply because it meets you where you are and fills you with a shallow sense of satisfaction.
As difficult as it is to sculpt a coherent written judgment of a (presumably) coherent work of art, the struggle for clarity sometimes masks the fact that criticism never exists on the same plane as the art it criticizes. The only way to really judge a work of art is by making another work of art. Revision cuts deeper than commentary. Criticism sometimes pretends to support art in its aim of embodying beauty; other times, it plays at being art’s enemy. Neither stance withstands scrutiny.

This compulsion to evlauate is located…in the works of art themselves….they refuse to be compared. They want to annihilate one another….Beauty, as single, true and liberated from appearance and individuation, manifests itself not in the synthesis of all works…but only as a physical reality: in the downfall of art itself. This downfall is the goal of every work of art, in that it seeks to bring death to all others. That all art aims to end art, is another way of saying the same thing. It is this impulse to self-destruction inherent in works of art, their innermost striving towards an image of beauty free of appearance, that is constantly stirring up the aesthetic disputes that are apparently so futile.

-Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia

This is what my intuition whispered in my ear: in the same way that art suggests its own death, criticism suggests its own futility.
There’s always a gap between what exists and what can be said about what exists. So while I read Pitchfork’s review of Emika’s new self-titled album, already being sufficiently acquainted with the over-discussed genre of dubstep and the well-developed but underappreciated identity of the Ninja Tune record label, my intuition whispered to me that although I had never heard Emika’s music, there was a fundamental disconnect between her self-titled album and all the things Jeff Weiss was saying about its origins and influences. Not that this was the fault of either the artist or her critic. Who can blame a critic for looking for sources? Who can blame an artist for trying to mask and evade them? But these aims contradict each other; the critic and the artist both seek the end of self-definition, and if they dream of success, they seek the realization of that dream through their chosen craft.

I listened to most of Emika’s album on YouTube, and after reading Jeff Weiss’s Pitchfork review about the uncommon breadth of her influences, about her subversion of convention, and about a personal endorsement from Thom Yorke, I was disappointed to find that her music didn’t provide the synthesis I expected. Not that I felt the reviewer was exaggerating, that Emika’s aesthetic sense was off-balance, or that Yorke was amiss in endorsing her. I decided that my expectations had wandered astray. Her music synthesizes a lot, but the synthesis is merely a process; it’s not the point.

While watching the video for “Double Edge,” I realized two things: Emika herself is the subject of this music video, and Emika is using the music video to hide. By “music video,” I mean both the music and the video. The song itself uses a shallow but elegant melody as a bewitching charm, juxtaposing the strange vocal stutters and silences with the unwavering emotional directness of Emika’s lyrics, framing the fragile simplicity of the lite classical piano melody against the aggressive futurism of the rhythm track. She murmurs her threats instead of snarling or shouting; her words creep out of her mouth like clouds of smoke while her drum patterns and bass lines punish the ears with unblinking violence. And the video itself fixes its eye on her face, on an expression that might be considered vulnerable and honest if its owner didn’t allow digital postproduction to drown out the implications of both eye contact and implied nudity.
This whole thing is about image, it’s about product, even though in this case, every relationship between subject and object is a negative one. Emika negates image by denying herself, she negates the power of her production by hiding her emotions in her voice, and she negates the power of her voice with her guarded, understated singing, and by letting the track’s low end dominate the entire sonic texture. There’s not much going on musically, and the music itself doesn’t have any message or intent besides provoking a profound effect on the listener.

This content-poor, effect-oriented existence is what links Emika’s music to pop, but the fact that her music achieves this end through negation rather than affirmation is the reason I bothered to listen to it and think about it. It’s the only reason I give a shit.

study for a poem

theidentitythief — Sun, 04 Dec 2011 05:46:19 +0000

ARCHITECTURE: There are some forms of art from which we expect a reflection of our selves, the conscious selves we carry around with us, the ones we try to project to the surrounding world. And the world watches, but not in the way we expect; others understand and judge us according to an impossible variety of perspectives, testing our image against their own thoughts and decisions, according to ideas and information unknown to us. To expect art to mirror consciousness, even the unachieved consciousness of our ideals, is to expect too little, to wallow in the shallow end of inner psychology.
Our architecture reflects the structures that support and define our conscious selves. Our buildings are the skeleton of civilization. They don’t merely provide shelter against the elements; they provide the spaces in which we perform our daily activities, the spaces in which we move and live and have our being.

Buildings express a conscious order as much as other forms of art, but the order is a higher one, since its purpose is to facilitate other routines. Ideally , it is invisible to us. It gives us the freedom to not have to think about it, even as we live with and within it.

We willingly subject ourselves to the harsh right angles, the opaque walls, the latched doors, the unavoidable patterns suggested to us by each particular arrangement of rooms.

We think of life as a flowing, organic whole, something that follows the ebb and flow of our thoughts and inclinations, something that responds naturally to the gentle shifts of our inner will. But a brick wall, for example, fulfills its function without doing any of these things. It stands as a mute, uniform plane that turns a deaf ear to life’s subtle, flowing music, one that welcomes our weak-hearted changes of mind with an inhuman stubbornness. The offset rows of small heavy bricks betray our illusions of individuality, suggesting instead that the strength of each body is an absolute only as an absolute part of a larger and more imposing unity, however little we may be aware of this unity at any given time. This rigid geometric truth exists at every level, from the individual brick, to the row, to the plane of the single wall, to the whole of the overall structure. Its existence is inescapable; you may be able to avoid it within the unrealities of the mind, but not in the world of real movements and actions.
IVY: The dark fingers of ivy embrace the bricks in their own way, curving along its surface but never against it, ignoring the grid of interlocking rows but fulfilling the truth of the plane, with the passive incompleteness of veins.
Each brick is necessary, but the ivy is innocent of necessity. Each brick is strong, but the ivy relies on strength, and without envy, without consciousness. It snakes up from the ground with the laziness of honesty, thinning as it ascends, like a genuine achievement. And while it may fill in the details later, if it happens to eclipse the expanse of mortar and clay, it will be because of the abundance of nature, not because of the artificial completeness of ambition.

The order we achieve is a whole that defies us. The lives that we lead are partial fictions that may never reach their natural climax. We rely on what exists beyond the narrow walls of waking consciousness, but this not mean that we ever become its equal, or even ever learn its name.

you know when it’s real vs. i’m lovin’ it

theidentitythief — Tue, 10 May 2011 02:10:12 +0000

possible subtitles:
a) impressions on the current state of fast food advertising
b) the fetish character of reality and the regression of choice

wendy’s: you know when it’s real

It’s strange to me that we live in a world where what’s at stake – or, at least, what’s perceived to be at stake – in our choice of fast food is its Reality. And not Reality as the hidden root where disparate perceptions and experiences are combined in a subterranean unity, but Reality, as such: Reality, starring as herself, in her own reality TV show.

You can’t sell someone something they already have. This Wendy’s slogan plays on the idea of Reality as something people desire and value, something they are eager to attach (in the subterranean unity that unites perception and experience) to a convenient financial transaction. Reality isn’t something you find or create; it’s something you choose, by eating at Wendy’s.

This goes a step further than when fast food companies would rely on the idea of Taste. Taste, on its own, is something that people have learned to associate with ingredients they perceive as unnatural, or chemicals that they have experienced to be unhealthy. Taste is involved in Wendy’s’ sales pitch, but it’s seen as the consequence or result of being Natural. This purifies Taste, freeing it from the corruption of the Unnatural. Taste, in this incarnation, is less of a threat, less likely to inspire guilt.

mcdonald’s: i’m lovin’ it

Wendy’s isn’t nearly as advanced as McDonald’s, a company whose ads give only passing mention to their food’s uniqueness or quality. With McDonald’s, you aren’t choosing something Pure or Natural; you are engaged in the process of “lovin’ it,” a process that is so Pure and Natural that the choice can hardly be called a choice at all. The choice borders on the hollow, effortless purity of childhood innocence; you’re eating at McDonald’s, after all; either you have never been wounded by the reality of evil, or the trauma of a coming of age moral awakening has driven you to despair.

McDonald’s advertises its specials as if they are mirrors that reflect your own personality traits. You don’t get the idea from the ads that there’s any specific type of person who eats at McDonald’s, but that there’s a specific type of person who would buy that specific sandwich, or get a certain size drink, or substitute some random afterthought of a side dish for fries. McDonald’s itself isn’t the result of a choice on the part of the consumer; it is an arena in which a variety of choices are made by a diverse population of independent, free human beings. And isn’t that what America is all about?

three possible definitions of love

theidentitythief — Thu, 05 May 2011 22:19:20 +0000

Among the several possible definitions of love: the two of us, after sunset, a lonely porch with no light, invisible clouds hiding behind distant stars, no moon. Our fingers brushing against each other, as if by accident, our bodies looming near each other, as if by accident; no words. Your eyes pretend to avoid me, but this focus still assumes my shape; when you finally happen upon my face – again, as if by accident – I can see something inside your mind tip off balance, and it isn’t the focus. No, the focus remains; what hangs in suspense is the sum of everything I mean to you, the constellation of impressions having wandered into the darkness here, ready to write the climax of its coming-of-age story. There are days, hours, moments – all balanced precariously on a single look, with my response preordained as definition. Don’t listen for the answer; in a moment, you’re going to feel it ripple through your body.
She’ll play along at first; she might even enjoy it. Not that she’s only humoring you; she wants to make you happy, and all the more so since it’s her whole self that’s required: this is one of the many definitions of love. But the content repeats itself, over and over again; although your desires always involve her, they don’t change; they stagnate and grow indolent while she grows and develops, discovering new horizons within her old composure, wearing maturity like an evening gown. Trying not to ruin her countenance by scowling your at your unbaptized passions, she shrinks from them instead. It’s not you that causes her body to recoil from your hollow-hearted touch; it’s the fact that the request requires almost nothing of her: the shell of action, or, worse, its corpse. She remembers times when the same action used to carry so much meaning. What meaning? A self compressed, not a self elided.
It was late at night, and I was carried away. It was a mixture of dejected fatigue, alcohol, and a stubborn sense of hope; you happened to be there with me. I say “happened,” but it wouldn’t have been what it was without you. Without the soft-burning lights behind the bar, illuminating your shy smile, without the constant din of conversation cloaking your voice in mystery, without the rough shoves of the indifferent crowd investing your touch with a precious secret meaning, the evening’s fragile ecstasy would have never assumed a human form. Not only did the night encourage me to forget who I was; I have since forgotten other things: what I whispered in your ear that made you recoil with modesty, how exactly I guided your gentle, willing body out of the chaos into the open seclusion of the nearby neighborhood streets, what you saw in my face that kept the sense of momentum alive. It’s all a blur now, especially since a few days afterward, when I saw you for the second time, around noon, at a park near where I work. You were carrying yourself with the same sense of dignity and compuosure, but you seemed somehow disconnected from your former ease. During the time since we met, I had tried to remember what it was that had existed between us; I thought I wanted clarity, but when clarity arrived, it only alerted me to the fact that grace had deserted us. I tried to say “hi,” to think of a way to start a conversation, to refer to the rapport that had vibrated between us in the warm half-drunk breath of evening, but I stammered in speech, I hesistated in gesture, and neither of us could maintain eye contact, failing to muster anything other than fleeting glances. I felt a sense of loss that I couldn’t name; if I had to give it a face, it would be your face, which is all the more bewildering to me since those same eyes that sought something in me at the bar and on the barren sidewalks either failed to recognize that something in the me that was washed out by sobriety and daylight, or they had learned to find it somewhere else. I felt ashamed and wanted to disappear, but it was a sunny day without clouds and without shadows.

parodies of masculinity

theidentitythief — Wed, 23 Feb 2011 19:23:33 +0000

subtitle: a sketch in five parts
or: an attempt to come to terms with some common illusions in the modern world
or: the private fancies of a confused and resentful idealist

1. GAMER
If you live a life that is not sufficiently goal-oriented, a life that never requires absolute concentration or quick judgments, a life that never has the courage to look you in the eye and resign your fate to life-or-death categories, then you will satisfy your craving for the true masculine vocation by simulating such situations in play.

2. ATHLETE
Sports are like wars where no one dies. From the participants, sports require teamwork, courage, and stamina. Grace and artistry are celebrated, but never for their own sake; such things always exist in the shadow of the game’s laws, in the shadow of the absolute realities: victory and defeat. From the spectators, sports require an unquestioned tribalism, in which people invest themselves in situations over which they have no influence, passively experiencing the emotional effects of the victories and defeats of others. The loyalty of fans extends the significance of each contest to a scope whose grandiosity defies reason.

3. ARTIST
The artist is an imitator who pretends to create. He pretends that his formal or stylistic innovation has required the pioneer’s courage, that his errand into the wilderness has cleared the way for the expansion and advancement of mankind’s collective mind. He pretends that his constructions – whether in word, sound, or some other medium – are supremely useful and durable, that they are essential to life. He pretends that the (imagined) value of his work elevates his own purposes beyond the realm of scrutiny. He believes that his expressions must be experienced, but never challenged or questioned. If he succeeds at securing the financial and spiritual indulgence of any significant audience, he begins to speak as if he is the archetype of a good man, as if he enjoys everything that is desirable in life, as if every man envies him and every woman wants to be with him. He does not admit that art’s existence is fleeting, or that its meaning is contingent on stronger and more permanent realities. He lives as if he is a god among men, and usually destroys himself in the process.

4. BUSINESSMAN
Money isn’t everything, but if you pretend that it is, you can have most of the money for yourself. The path to the human heart leads through the wallet; the understanding of the law that guides the flow of currency allows the astute businessman to manipulate the material reality of the masses. This type of influence is deceptive; rich men confuse monetary generosity for pure generosity; by performing acts of charity, they imagine that they shower their beneficiaries with divine grace. To them, poverty is a hell that must be escaped, and wealth is a reward, the natural result of inherent superiority. By conquering the market, they imagine that they have conquered man, and celebrate themselves as society’s rightful kings.

5. SEDUCER
They wear button up shirts and cologne, buy expensive alcohol, and hook up with chicks. It’s difficult to decide what it is that fills them with such ridiculous confidence. Alcohol is a notorious liar, but the bar crowd is all too willing to take it at its word. Lust is a flame that burns out quickly, but for some people, it is the only light they have to guide them through a dark and mysterious world. The arts of rhetoric and eloquence that were used in former days to persuade crowds of people toward political action has retreated from the public arena, living a decadent and ignoble life indoors, among congregations of jaded city-dwellers who have been deserted by the sunlight of virtue. Seducers funnel external symbols of social status and material success toward the most fleeting form of private gain: fornication. A man doesn’t secure the honor of his peers by protecting and guiding his community; he secures their envy by bagging pussy.

thoughts on slavery (a rant, in honor of black history month)

theidentitythief — Tue, 08 Feb 2011 06:16:27 +0000

Like most Americans, I was indoctrinated from an early age to believe that the institution of slavery was one of the darkest elements of our national past. I was taught to believe that racism is wrong, that slavery is inhuman, and that the ideals of freedom, justice, and opportunity are the ingredients that make our country such an appetizing dish for the millions of huddled masses who, for so many years, have been determined to live here. But somewhere in my brain, I always felt that I know why slavery makes sense.

I have never been a farmer, but I know that having a farm is hard work. If you have a small farm, you can do all the work yourself, but you will barely grow enough food to survive. If you want to have a bigger farm, you can have a lot of kids and make them do some of the work. Or you can train animals to help you, and have an even bigger farm. But if you can find and capture uncivilized people who you force to do the work for you, you can have a very large farm, and become very rich.

American slavery is only one chapter in the history of human slavery. In America, whites enslaved blacks, but blacks have enslaved whites before. Whites have enslaved other whites, and blacks have enslaved other blacks. Slavery, as a thing that humans do, isn’t really about race. Racism is bad science. It confuses things like education and culture with skin color. It is stupid, and essentially, it has nothing to do with slavery.

But even without considering race, isn’t slavery still a moral issue? Isn’t it wrong for people to own other people, and to force them to work toward a prosperity that has nothing to do with them?

The Bible talks a lot about morality, but it doesn’t condemn slavery. Ignoring the Old Testament, which is an orgy of nationalistic fervor and ethnic cleansing, the New Testament is divided pretty evenly between Pauline statements like “there is no slave or free…for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28) and “slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything” (Colossians 3:22). A lot of early Christians were slaves, but there were also a lot who owned slaves (see Paul’s epistle to Philemon). The early church didn’t side with the ideal of freedom the way Americans do. Within Christianity, the argument that a person should know his place in society and be obedient to authority is just as morally valid as the argument that the rich should not abuse their power over the poor. Christianity does not attack slavery head-on because slavery is not an inherently moral issue. It is an economic one.

A lot of American white people still feel bad about slavery, but not because they personally had anything to do with it. A lot of American black people feel that they deserve financial reparation for slavery, but not because they were ever slaves. The Civil Rights movement was about equality, not as the idea that all human beings are essentially the same (which is ridiculous), but as the idea that all human beings should have access to economic empowerment. The fact that Americans generally consider economic empowerment to be a good in itself, and that they consider iron-bound economic stratification to be inherently unjust, says more about American morality than any nagging guilt about the lingering effects of systems our ancestors were forced to abandon.

Slavery is an advanced system of organizing labor. One problem with slavery is that slaves revolt. This did not happen to the Romans or the Aztecs, but it happened to the Americans, and the Americans eventually reacted by abolishing slavery. Why did this happen? Because modern technology provided better, more effective methods of organizing labor, methods that were less vulnerable to the rebellious whims of society’s lower rungs. Without the industrialization of the North, there would have been no force capable of overcoming the agrarian slave society in the South. The North overcame the South not because the wage slavery of the northern factories was more moral than the old kind of slavery, but because a new system of organization came along that was more effective than the old one.

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates compares different types of government to different types of men. The type of man who corresponds to a democracy is an impulsive man, a man who might follow any of his contradictory tendencies at any moment. The type of man who corresponds to an oligarchy is a man who is ruled by the pursuit of wealth. The type of man who corresponds to an aristocracy is a man who knows what is best in himself, and subjugates his inferior parts to his better parts. His reason rules his passions; he is not led astray from his convictions by rebellious tendencies or foolish whims. In a roundabout way, this provides another explanation why Christianity does not speak out against slavery: for an imperfect thing to move toward perfection, whether this perfection is moral righteousness or economic development, a certain kind of enslavement is required: the enslavement of the lower to the higher.

A man is only able to master something when he is able to organize its elements according to a certain end. A master musician organizes notes into melodies and harmonies. A master painter organizes lines and colors into forms and figures. An master architect organizes steel and drywall into rooms and hallways. The end product is a better (more useful, more desirable) thing than the raw materials, and the materials must be subjected to the end product. A man who is not capable of subjecting worse things to better things, who is not able to shape raw elements into refined wholes, is a man who is not capable of accomplishing anything. In America, as in most economically developed nations, in the minds of the people who rule (CEOs, politicians), the definitions of “worse” and “better” frequently exist along economic lines. When the better rule the worse, it means that the rich rule the poor. To a developed society, this is the definition of virtue.

In elementary school, we used to read about how, for emancipated slaves, sharecropping was almost the same as slavery. The reality of being owned by white people was replaced by the reality of constantly being in debt to them. Emancipation provided the American dream of land ownership and self-sufficiency, but only as bait. There is an American dream, but its counterpart is the American reality; that reality is credit.

In this sense, little has changed in the past several decades. People borrow huge amounts of money to pay for houses and cars. They “own” these things, but a bank paid for them. People get payday loans to provide a better life for their children. The loan giveth, but the interest taketh away. People use credit cards to maintain a standard of living that has always and will always be beyond their economic means. They try to get ahead, but end up falling further and further behind. Most people who live lives that conform to the forms of prosperity have no say in defining those forms. They are free to achieve their dreams, but their dreams have already been sketched out by ad agencies and the hollow rhetoric political candidates. In reality, most people are still living in chains. They are the slaves of a system whose methods of organization are invisible and inaccessible to them. They live in subjugation to administrative mechanisms that only free them after Progress has devised more advanced ways of controlling them, of farming their labor, of putting their lives in service to someone else’s ideals and dreams.

1. Flying Lotus – Cosmogramma

theidentitythief — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:42:30 +0000

This album should have been impossible. It’s rare enough for a beatmaker to display this much depth of intuition, and it’s even rarer for one who is so aware of his strengths to stretch this far past both his peers and his entire back catalog. I mean, four years ago, I thought this guy was just another Dilla knockoff. My, how he’s grown! It’s one thing to be ambitious, to develop a lively, animated style of making beats and then to use that method to swallow up galaxies of styles and genres. But ambition isn’t even the most important element of what Flying Lotus is doing. His spirit hovers over this album like an all-seeing eye. Anywhere you look, there he is. The subtle imperfection in the hi hats? It’s him. The way the buzzy bass synth in “Recoiled” jumps out of the mix toward the middle, when the chords change? That’s him too. The lazy groove of the pitch shifted rap sample in “Satelllliiiiiiiteee”? If the shoe fits. This album doesn’t have a lazy genetic strand in its DNA. It oozes spirit and life, despite indulging so deeply in mind-altering studio wizardry. Every element speaks like an answer to a question you haven’t even thought to ask. It’s a musical oracle. Its sense of purpose is like your dad’s hand on your shoulder when he tells you everything’s going to be okay.

Everything’s going to be okay.

I am tired of thinking about the list. I am glad it is over.

2. Sufjan Stevens – The Age of Adz

theidentitythief — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 01:14:03 +0000

“I’m not fucking around.”
-Sufjan Stevens

Another shameless TMT plug. Nobodaddy’s Kanye blurb kicks ass, and somehow it relates directly to The Age of Adz.

I didn’t see this coming. This work was massive, for the same reasons that everyone said Kanye’s album was massive. It draws liberally from all of Sufjan’s past phases, from the spazzy electronica of Enjoy Your Rabbit to the hushed, introspective folk of the aborted 50 states project to the delirious orchestral maximal minimalism of The BQE. And it’s not just a mash of styles, but a suite of epic, well-written songs whose stylistic trappings are as important as their content and their internal drama. For someone who relies so heavily on devices as a means of expression, the two-minute musical statement at the album’s front end, “Futile Devices,” goes surprisingly easy on words, letting its lightly sketched observations float freely amidst a pointillistic backdrop of pianos and plucked guitars. The rest of the songs, which run considerably longer, float on wings of faith as often as Sufjan’s lyrics give ground to his doubts. “Now That I’m Older,” the luxurious, beatless tableaux toward the album’s center, revels in hard-won maturity while its sonics gaze wistfully beyond it. Although The Age of Adz feels like a creative apocalypse, I, for one, hope there’s more of a story on the other side.

LISTEN