Frank Kogan

Right now, as I write this – March 18, Mountain Daylight Time, 10:00 PM – if you (or I, or anyone) are physically in the United States, you can be seized and taken prisoner without any charges being put against you – much less proven – and be put on a plane and sent to a foreign prison; and the people who do seize you and who spirit you away don't even have to release your name or any information about you. In fact they don't even have to know your name or have any information. Nor do they have to answer to anyone other than the people who ordered them to do it.

Of course, in doing this they are defying the constitution and breaking the law. But they are doing this. Right now. They did it several days ago.

Now, the government people can say that the only people being rounded up are immigrants and gang members. And you can say to yourself that, if you yourself are not an immigrant or gang member, this puts you in the clear. But it doesn't. If charges don't have to be brought and legal procedures don't have to be followed – and information doesn't have to be released! – anyone can be rounded up. You can be picked up:

• for being in the wrong place


• for having the same name as someone else


• for supporting immigrant rights


• for having supported a Democratic political candidate


• because someone owes you money and has a friend in government


• because you're dating someone who someone else fancies

You could say, "Hey, but nothing like that happened last weekend," but that's not true. Something like that did happen. Someone was called a gang member, someone was called an immigrant, with no evidence given of anything (and being a gang member or an immigrant is not in itself a crime) and with no review, and that is being snatched from the street or from an apartment or from your life with no overview, no accountability, for any reason or no reason.

In reality, when I say "anyone" could be snatched and taken prisoner without the rest of us knowing, that wouldn't be true if you were, say, Marco Rubio or Taylor Swift. So, show of hands, how many people reading this are Marco Rubio or Taylor Swift?

The Rolling Stones "We Love You"

The rest of this post is about writing.

I don't spend much time on politics and haven't been much of an activist, so don't know how useful it is to write this post as I have, with specific scenarios ("because someone owes you money and has a friend in government"). I imagine – maybe incorrectly – that if more people were writing like this, rather than relying on abstractions like "rule of law" or "constitutional crisis" – or calling people "fascist" or "Nazi" (those are abstractions too) – but actually give examples of what is at risk, then people who are not yet alarmed would hear us better. --Not that one shouldn't point out that there's a constitutional crisis, and what this means; and not that the rule of law isn't under threat. Saying "Nazi" and "fascism" seems to me to be acting out our feelings of powerlessness, reaching for extreme words to counteract our trouble at achieving anything actually effective – not that they can't represent my own fears of what's potentially coming down the line.

People who write bland newspaper prose have been at this awhile, maybe have some experience of what actually gets across, ways of taking their truth to people who won't listen to mine.

Btw, a lot of my own best writing isn't "clear" and definite, instead is convoluted, full of digressions and deliberate contradictions and uncertainties, hesitations and qualifications, parentheticals and allusions, and if all goes well some of my political writing will be like that too, since a lot of politics isn't clear (for instance, I'm torn and confused about whether Senator Schumer was right in letting the continuing resolution go up for a vote – what the consequences will be, what they would've been if he hadn't let the vote go through – and if you're certain one way or another on that issue and have no sense of what counterarguments there might be, you're not altogether to be trusted, at least not right now by me (btw I'm leaning towards thinking Schumer did the best that one could do, but also to be honest I've not made my way to writers who've genuinely tried to meet his points and counter them (because, honestly, I haven't looked that hard, there are so many other things to think about)) (and btw I'm not certain what a good, sane, functional immigration policy should be, just that we've had 100 years to come up with one and we haven't, my belief (not certainty) being that that's because too many people profit from the issue not being resolved, none of which is any immigrant's fault, it's America's). Anyway, this is how I like to write, but sometimes bullet points are useful.

• Because people pay attention to bullet points


• Because I pondered using "whom" rather than "who" in the Edmond Dantès sentence


• Because Trump prevails unless people who, unlike me, are not liberal-left nonetheless also come to oppose him

CROSSPOST: HTTPS://KOGANBOT.LIVEJOURNAL.COM/394355.HTML

CROSSPOST: https://koganbot.substack.com/p/and-the-trump-people-are-continuing

Later in "Spanish Blood," the story I quoted from in my last post, the detective returns to the house described in the passage I'd embedded. I actually jotted down these sentences for the words "past" and "passed," two words that I often screw up, putting one where I need the other (Chandler uses "past," correctly, but I don't know if I'd get it right if I were trying to write a similar sentence), but in any event, once again there's the immediate experience of time as it's being lived:

He looked at her white shattered face once more, very quickly. Then he swung around, walked away over the lawn, past the pool with the lily pads and the stone bullfrog along the side of the house and out to the car.

Chandler had already described the pool and lily pads and bullfrog on the detective's way to the backyard. Now, as the detective leaves, Chandler mentions them again to suggest the time taken by the return walk, and the pace (if the detective were in a hurry you wouldn't have those details). Also, this gives the reader time for the emotions of the just-ended conversation to hang in the brain and then begin to settle, before the detective gets around to the front of the house and into his partner's car, and the two start talking.

I've been reading Chandler stories chronologically from his start at Black Mask, seeing how he develops; this one is the earliest where he's now full-force Chandler from beginning to end; still more bullets than necessary, and a family of victims is dispatched perfunctorily, but the psychology and mood are there as they will be for the next fifteen years.

Several potential posts I'm working on, which you may see or may never see.

1. A point-counterpoint of the extremes in my attitude towards politics. 10 items in all, plus further musings and slip-slidings. For a taste, here are numbers 1 and 2.

Odd number. (1) Politics is a social space that allows for people to say things that are more stupid and destructive than what they allow themselves to say in almost all other spaces.

Even number. (2) Politics is a means by which the most vulnerable and targeted people in society can organize to defend themselves and gain some social power. (Obviously, it's also the means by which other people can target and rip off the most vulnerable. Those vulnerable people themselves can't actually organize and defend each other unless they gain allies and advocates among the less vulnerable. In fact, it's these latter who do most of the organizing and defending.)

2. Kind of bouncing off this first post, my psychologically creating the conditions under which I might actually engage in politics per se.

(1) Don't assume we have to dumb ourselves down to (a) sway voters, (b) pressure our enemies, (c) get along with our allies.

So, let's say, as a working premise, that we can and should speak and act honestly and thoughtfully, and if colleagues claim that strategy and tactics demand we don't, the burden of proof should be on them. Don't fall for tones of voice that sound "realistic" and "knowing."

This argument is with myself as much as it's with the world.

(2) Joy. There needs to be joy and satisfaction not just in the outcome and the sense of trying to do the right thing (neither of these joys being very available e.g. when we're losing or when we're flailing and confused); there needs to be joy in the doing, joy every day or at least every week. This reverts back to the previous point. The joy of thinking, the joy of discovery: these are always available if we want them and for me they're necessities, not luxuries. But also, for me, they ultimately — thinking, discovering — need a community. This isn't just because ideas get better when discussed and argued over. For me, ideas need to be shared or the whole process rots. Maybe that's because, in my head, the audience I imagine for my words is even worse than the one that's actually out there. Nonetheless, out there there's obviously a malfunction, a train wreck, a breakdown...

3. For a brief period, mid 1977 to mid 1978, I was writing poetry. I'd barely ever read the stuff, barely read anyone's poetry, not counting Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, and not counting song lyrics (the latter being a pretty sizable amount of "not counting") — to the extent of knowing traditions of poetry were there but barely knowing what they were. I approached the enterprise with alienation and adventure: this was someone else's dinner table, but I could somehow leap the process, start in the neighborhood of my own rocks and foothills. I was using as my workbook Kenneth Koch's books on teaching the writing of poetry to kids and old agers (Wishes, Lies, And Dreams and Rose Where Did You Get That Red and I Never Told Anybody). I worked hard at not falling into being "writerly" or "poetic." —Harold Bloom and Mark Sinker to thread, but note that poetry and poets definitely weren't my touchstones: this came at a time when I was running away from my music obsession, and trying to evade my calling as a critic. I emphatically did find my poetic voice, one like no other. And then I stopped. More accurately, music called, and songs, and criticism, "poetry" somehow briefly installed on the path.

4. Bob Dylan really did deserve that Nobel prize, but there's a point-counterpoint here, too. The first point is that if the Nobel people really did want to open the floodgates to American song, allow for songs to come rushing in, Dylan is a gutless choice, the songwriter who's the anomaly with the billboard sign "A Poet, Not Just A Songwriter" rising up to the sky above him. Whereas the true obvious worthy recipient, the living master and genius who nonetheless doesn't safely push the Respectability button or the High Art And Literature button, is Chuck Berry. And once you've got Chuck you've opened those gates to everybody from field hollers and nursery rhymes to Brill Building to Jay-Z, hicks and hacks and streetcorners, truly breaching the cellophane that separates low and high and medium.

But the counterpoint here is that if you take songwriting for granted, and the breach as long done, Chuck is a rather staid choice, obvious indeed as an accepted classic — whereas Dylan is the danger guy still,* the one who explodes everything, simply wipes out the limitations of what you can do with words, draws on everyone and invites you to overthrow them all, no limitations on ambition, yet try it yourself and you're more likely to blow off your own hands than to produce much of value.

And then, this not on the subject of whether or not he's prizeworthy, we need to take account of the content of a lot of those exploding words. Dylan as much as Lou and Iggy (not to mention the more decorous Leonard Cohen and Paul Simon) effectively inserts into popular song the idea of self-destruction as a form of social protest. If you put together my critiques in "The Autobiography Of Bob Dylan"** and my "PBS" essays in the first two issues of Why Music Sucks, what you get is that we — indie-alternative, the supposed underground, the rock critics, our set of Musical Marginal Intellectuals — let self-destruction stand in the place of social analysis. Or let it validate the social analysis, let it make the analysis feel real whether or not the analysis was actually any good. And of course this applies in spades to the Academic Left. (This isn't Dylan's fault, it's in our culture without Dylan anyway, and I wouldn't say that you should think of self-destruction as the main legacy or message of Dylan, what the guy's about in full, and of course he pushes against the self-destruction too — he's an overload of messages, that's a feature — just there's this whole extolled "poet" thing that manages to sidestep huge hunks of what the poetry actually says and does.)



*I mean, I don't think of what he's doing now in the 2000s as danger-guy stuff (though maybe if I knew it better I would). 1965 and 1966 are the key danger-guy years, and they're still there, as it were — still here — haven't been assimilated.

**And here (or here if Google books switches up as it sometimes does and makes the other two go blank).

Why It Is Fine For Me To Scratch The Curtains
A 12-Point Manifesto
By Zaza

1. I appreciate that you have provided me with a scratching post with an equally scratchable base, but, while rough and resilient, neither of these has nearly the responsiveness and sensitivity of the ever-movable curtains.

2. Also, my claws can get stuck in the curtains, which gives me the chance to swing, momentarily, providing me needed exercise.

3. Note that it is another inhabitant of this apartment, not I, who expresses opinions on my need for exercise.

4. And I'm not the one who has so far neglected to take me in to have my claws trimmed.

5. Also note that I'm usually very good about the rule that says when two humans are on the bed at the same time I have to stay off.

6. But about this bed thing: when I'm already on the bed, and there are no humans on the bed, or there is only one human on the bed, and then one or more other humans also get on the bed so that the total number of humans on the bed is now two, I don't see why I, rather than one of them, should have to get off the bed. I didn't willfully create this violation.

7. But I let you shoo me off anyway.

8. And bringing out the spray bottle really wasn't called for.

9. It is a cliché of cat manifestos to refer to the inadequate size of a litter box, so I'm not even going to mention it.

10. When I sit on a pile of papers or envelopes, I am simply acclimating them to the apartment, so I wouldn't call them relevant to this particular conversation.

11. And if Frank hadn't left the t-shirt on the floor I wouldn't have considered sitting on it.

12. Therefore, I am right to scratch the curtains.

As attested by Zaza on July 9, 2014.

The performer speaks easily, giving interviews in English, but careful, too. Not spilling her guts, or spilling the beans, either, should she have any in her big backpocket. She watches a dance rehearsal clip, along with the interviewer, confesses that she hates that it shows her without makeup. She continues speaking, a level tone, describes the effect of YouTube, "Even though music has no language and has the power to break any walls," she says, "YouTube and the Internet have definitely made it easier for people to check our music out and look at our videos." You notice that she's speaking not only in complete sentences, but that she's forming them fully, subordinate clauses and all. "More than I can do, on my feet," you say to yourself. The interview continues, the thoughts steady, though rarely rising above platitudes. She explains that for the fans these days it's not just about listening to and feeling the songs, but about expressing themselves just as the performers do. So the group makes sure that among the dance moves, there are some that are easy enough for the fans to copy.

You yourself track her on YouTube, see her on the reality show, in her own language talking faster but more pensively, posing and answering questions in soliloquy, you watching the subtitles, she wondering if in five years, when the contract is up, would she re-sign. What if the energy isn't there? Her words are fast but the thought comes slow. She doesn't know. Would she have the spirit to start over?

( Then the real thing, onstage )

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.

Like me,* Tom Ewing asked people to list the best thing they wrote all year, and his list has only a couple of overlaps with mine.

http://freakytrigger.co.uk/ft/2010/12/the-best-thing-you-wrote-all-year

*If you missed my request the first time, I encourage you to add your choice in the comments here or back at the original post. I was asking for your one best or favorite from your own writing about music this year and the best or your favorite of someone else's. Add links, if possible.

Just posted this on the ilX Rolling Music Writers' Thread in response to some unthought-through statements from Matos and Weingarten:

I doubt that someone who hasn't "earned" the right to use the first person has earned the right to bore us with adjectives and genre designations either. Someone who falls asleep at my use of the first person isn't interested in my ideas anyway, whether I'm in the first person or not. To go back to my analogy [upthread], the phrase "guitar band" is a red flag for me these days, indicating that I'm likely to dislike what I hear. But the problem isn't with guitars themselves; guitars don't kill music, musicians kill music, and if you had the same guys playing keyboards or xylophones they'd probably be just as dreary. "Electric guitar" meant electric excitement in '66, it means drudgery now. But there's plenty of electric guitar excitement in music today - great stuttering Keith Richards-style guitar chords at the start of Martina McBride's "Wrong Baby Wrong Baby Wrong," for instance - it just doesn't usually come packaged with "guitar band" on the label.

( red flag )

Very bad poem here [EDIT: or here].