Frank Kogan

On one level I suppose all of this is very funny, but if you look past the surface violence and simple abusiveness to the person at the center it's not funny at all. The reason it's not is the aforementioned ambivalence. Jungle war with bike gangs is one thing, but it gets a little more complicated when those of us who love being around that war (at least vicariously) have to stop to consider why and what we're loving. Because one of the things we're loving is self-hate, and another may well be a human being committing suicide. Here's a quote from a review of Iggy's new live show in the British rock weekly Sounds: "Iggy's a dancer and more, a hyper-active packet of muscle and sinew straight out of Michelangelo's wet dreams... who leaps and claws at air, audience and mike stand in an unsurpassable display that spells one thing—MEAT." Ignoring the florid prose, I'd like to ask the guy who wrote that how he would like to be thought of as a piece of meat, how he thinks the meat feels. Or if he thinks it feels at all. Yeah, Iggy's got a fantastic body; it's so fantastic he's crying in every nerve to explode out of it into some unimaginable freedom. It's as if someone writhing in torment has made that writing into a kind of poetry, and we watch in awe of such beautiful writhing, so impressed that we perhaps forget what inspired it in the first place.
--Lester Bangs, "Iggy Pop: Blowtorch In Bondage," Village Voice, 28 March 1977

I remember, not well, someone having written, probably in the early '70s, maybe a letter to the editor, maybe it was to Creem, and someone wrote maybe a brief reply to the letter, maybe unsigned, maybe it was Lester who wrote the reply. The writer was lamenting the absence of Buddy Holly. If Buddy had lived, he'd be doing great things, said the letter, said the writer. And the reply was No! If Buddy had lived he'd being playing Vegas just like any other oldie living off his past, his work no longer mattering except as a walking corpse of a reminder that it once had mattered.

So Lester. He never totally got his shit together, not just chemically but intellectually. But he didn't give up. If he asked a question, the question didn't disappear, didn't get a glib answer from him and then evaporate or hang around like a vague fart, a mist of buzzwords answered by another mist of buzzwords. The questions gnawed at him, repeated, didn't leave him alone.

If he'd lived, I think it would have made a difference. I don't know what his follow-through would have been — he could get lost in an enthusiasm of words and anguish — but I know there would have been one. Maybe it'd just end up as Lester's filibuster. But the questions would ride him, would at least fight to stay addressed. And this is where Lester is different from all my colleagues. I complain from time to time that rock critics, music critics, people in my rockwrite/musicwrite/wrong world, don't know how to sustain an intellectual conversation. My complaints don't help anybody, since whatever the message is in my own writing, the idea that there's a joy in discovery, in unearthing the unknown, that you interact with what's in front of you, with the everyday, and see a new world each time you look, each time you act, but only by thinking, testing, challenging, re-wording and re-phrasing — this message doesn't get across, doesn't get felt, I guess. There's a basic unshakable dysfunction and incompetence in my world, which amounts to dishonesty, a pretense of thought without actual thinking.

Don't know that Lester really knew how either, but given that the conversation, the questions, wouldn't leave him, I imagine he'd have given it a shot.

Piece in the New York Times about smiling ("More to a Smile Than Lips and Teeth" by Carl Zimmer), with this potent passage:

Dr. Niedenthal herself is now testing the predictions of the model with her colleagues. In one study, she and her colleagues are testing the idea that mimicry lets people recognize authentic smiles. They showed pictures of smiling people to a group of students. Some of the smiles were genuine and others were fake. The students could readily tell the difference between them.

Then Dr. Niedenthal and her colleagues asked the students to place a pencil between their lips. This simple action engaged muscles that could otherwise produce a smile. Unable to mimic the faces they saw, the students had a much harder time telling which smiles were real and which were fake.

The scientists then ran a variation on the experiment on another group of students. They showed the same faces to the second group, but had them imagine the smiling faces belonged to salesclerks in a shoe store. In some cases the salesclerks had just sold the students a pair of shoes — in which they might well have a genuine smile of satisfaction. In other trials, they imagined that the salesclerks were trying to sell them a pair of shoes — in which case they might be trying to woo the customer with a fake smile.

In reality, the scientists use a combination of real and fake smiles for both groups of salesclerks. When the students were free to mimic the smiles, their judgments were not affected by what the salesclerk was doing.

But if the students put a pencil in their mouth, they could no longer rely on their mimicry. Instead, they tended to believe that the salesclerks who were trying to sell them shoes were faking their smiles — even when their smiles were genuine. Likewise, they tended to say that the salesclerks who had finished the sale were smiling for real, even when they weren't. In other words, they were forced to rely on the circumstances of the smile, rather than the smile itself.

( I wonder how much of understanding requires the ability to mimic what you're trying to understand )

Paul Krugman ("The New Economic Geography, Now Middle-Aged"), arguing in favor of economists' tendency to simplify and go abstract, to use mathematical modeling and quantitative methods: "The geographers themselves probably won't like this: the economics profession's simultaneous love for rigor and contempt for realism will surely prove infuriating."

( I don't think Krugman is fair to himself when he says contempt for realism )

Until the 1930s and to some extent into the 1940s, institutional economics, with a strong emphasis on "historico-institutional factors," was a major force in American economics. But when the Depression struck, there was a desperate need for answers – and the answers wanted were to the question, "What do we do?" not "How did we get here?" Faced with that question, the institutional economists couldn't deliver; all they could offer was, well, persuasive discourse on the complex historical roots of the problem.

The person who did deliver was John Maynard Keynes. Now, Keynes is a protean figure, whose writings can be read to provide support for many schools of thought. But The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, despite occasional historical asides, essentially presents an abstract, ahistorical model of the economy; at its core is a little two-equation equilibrium model of the level of employment. And here's the thing: Keynesian economics, unlike institutional economics, was able to answer the question about what to do: it told you to boost demand with deficit spending.

( How would things be different if X happened instead of Y? )

Int: In Philosophy And The Mirror of Nature, you attacked Putnam's early philosophy. What do you think of his more recent work?

Rorty: I think our views are practically indistinguishable, but he doesn't. He thinks I'm a relativist and he isn't. And I think: if I'm a relativist, then he's one too.

Int: Why do you think Putnam sees you as a relativist?

Rorty: Beats me. I wrote an article about it, but that was as far as I got.

. . .

Int: Do you disagree with any of Davidson's views?

Rorty: I can't think of anything we really disagree about that doesn't seem to me a verbal issue, but Davidson may have a different view of the matter. Well, one thing is that he keeps saying truth is an absolutely central concept, and I can't see what makes it central or basic. I take Davidson to be saying that truth, belief, meaning, intention, rationality, cognitivity - all these notions are parts of a seamless web, and that seems to me a useful point to make, that you can't have any of these notions without all the others. It's just that he then wants to say, "And truth is in the middle." I can't see why you have to have a middle.

Int: Putnam has also criticized you for deemphasizing truth.

Rorty: Putnam keeps saying that you have to have what he calls "substantive truth." I take Davidson to be saying: there's not much pointing in saying truth is substantive. I don't think Davidson has any better idea than I do what Putnam means by that. Nonetheless, he somehow attaches a weight to the notion that I can't seem to attach to it.
--Interview with Richard Rorty in January 1995 by Joshua Knobe

( It rains when you're here and it rains when you're gone )

Tom asks over on his Blue Lines tumblr:

People make statements all the time about which music they like and why they like it.

Some of these statements will be false.

Is there any advantage to trying to guess which, or in assuming that certain people or groups are lying? Rather than simply assuming good faith?

I said in response that emphasizing motive has more risks than advantages. Not that - if we're aware of the risks - motive should be off the table; motives can matter, but their relevance is greatly exaggerated.** These were my reasons***:

( They put the world off at a distance without realizing they're doing so )

**EDIT: Actually, I think there's something crucially important - in a lot of my thinking, anyway, which is an attempt to tunnel down to insights and impulses that are half-expressed and half-masked by the actual reasons we give and arguments we make - ...something crucially important that I hesitate to call "motive" but that I might end up placing in the category "real reasons" or "more reasons." That's what I'm trying to suggest in that cryptic sentence, "sometimes subterranean 'real' reasons can turn out to be better than the merely good ones." But most people who focus on motive don't care diddly-squat about tunneling down to insights and impulses. I elaborate on this thought down in the comments.

***The reasons I give in my post hardly encompass all my motives for making the post, however.

Tom posted this on his Blue Lines tumblr (the main motive being to make a funny about rolling joints, I think):

( The Trade-Off )

But given that 2009 has the capacity to do better what I and people like me were already doing in 1989 (even though 2009 isn't as different in kind as that list implies), with many more people doing it and with everybody having the capacity to do it more often, so that 2009 might be considered something of the fulfillment of my 1989 dream,* how come the convo in 2009 isn't smarter than it was in 1989, how come my writing isn't far better now than it was then, how come my ideas haven't developed exponentially rather than circling around the same old same old, how come the music isn't better, etc.?

*1986, actually

I'm urging dubdobdee to pitch and write a piece that he's long been contemplating: "why are the left such chumps when it comes to the charts?" So to urge him further I'm pasting in a slightly re-worded version of what I wrote on his thread, and I encourage you to contribute your own thoughts here. (I'm not saying anything that I haven't said better and at greater length before, but I think this summary might be useful.)

( The unstated movement in the left has been towards embracing music, ideas, and actions because they are ours rather than because the music, ideas, and actions are good )