FM

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yl7zf_qApoA

It’s Friday the 13th and it seems prudent to be impudent in order to drive off any threat of bad luck.

In related news, it’s also the 72nd anniversary of the launch of the first FM radio station in Bloomfield, Connecticut.

That calls for Steely Dan — a band whose career unfolded during the golden years of FM radio — performing “FM” live.

It’s always said that they don’t write them like this anymore. But this time it’s true. They don’t. And before Steely Dan they didn’t really write them like this at all. This was in its heyday the ultimate geek band: smart, sardonic, exhibitionistically introverted, and really really really seriously good musicians. The kind of highly trained geek musicians where other highly trained but not yet as successful geek musicians would sit and listen for hours to transcribe their instrumental solos. And that would constitute a totally hot Saturday night. Yes, Walter Becker and Donald Fagan are older now — Fagan can’t quite sustain the implied sneer in his vocal delivery with the steady conviction he once could. But this is still Steely Dan. It’s going to be more memorable than just about anything else you’re likely to encounter today.

So with Steely Dan as our talisman, bad luck doesn’t have much of a chance. In fact, as of today, invoking Steely Dan’s singular power, we’re banishing bad luck for a period lasting no fewer than seven years.

I’ll trundle some Frye out later today which will be at least tangentially related to all of this.

And then our victory over bad lack shall be complete.

Video of the Day: The Rap on Rap

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Jon Stewart has a look at the manufactured outrage on the right over the rapper Common reading a poem at the White House. You can see a portion of his slapdown here. As with driving, it is now apparently an offence to Rap While Black.

What the clip doesn’t include, however, is Stewart’s own rap on the issue, which is a nice reminder that it really is a form of “flyting.” You can see the entire segment at Comedy Central (in Canada, at the Comedy Network).

While we’re at it, it should be added that even the most reptilian demagogue understands that Common is well known to be an exceptionally gentle man who has always called for peace and tolerance. This is still more barely coded racism from the RNC/FNC conglomerate, whose agenda (sinecured angry clowns like Rove and Hannity aside) seems increasingly to be advanced by indignant bleached blondes.

Some representative work from this very dangerous black man after the jump.

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Quote of the Day: “The People vs Goldman Sachs”

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Matt Taibbi, who continues a grueling one-man campaign against Goldman Sachs in the popular press, reports in the latest Rolling Stone on the newly released Levin Report, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis: Anatomy of a Financial Collapse, by the Senate Subcommittee on Investigations, chaired by Democrat Carl Levin of Michigan and Republican Tom Coburn of Oklahoma.

A sample:

To fully grasp the case against Goldman, one first needs to understand that the financial crime wave described in the Levin report came on the heels of a decades-long lobbying campaign by Goldman and other titans of Wall Street, who pleaded over and over for the right to regulate themselves.

Before that campaign, banks were closely monitored by a host of federal regulators, including the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, the FDIC and the Office of Thrift Supervision. These agencies had examiners poring over loans and other transactions, probing for behavior that might put depositors or the system at risk. When the examiners found illegal or suspicious behavior, they built cases and referred them to criminal authorities like the Justice Department.

* * * *

But beginning in the mid-Nineties, when former Goldman co-chairman Bob Rubin served as Bill Clinton’s senior economic-policy adviser, the government began moving toward a regulatory system that relied almost exclusively on voluntary compliance by the banks. Old-school criminal referrals disappeared down the chute of history along with floppy disks and scripted television entertainment. In 1995, according to an independent study, banking regulators filed 1,837 referrals. During the height of the financial crisis, between 2007 and 2010, they averaged just 72 a year.

But spiking almost all criminal referrals wasn’t enough for Wall Street. In 2004, in an extraordinary sequence of regulatory rollbacks that helped pave the way for the financial crisis, the top five investment banks — Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley, Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns — persuaded the government to create a new, voluntary approach to regulation called Consolidated Supervised Entities. CSE was the soft touch to end all soft touches. Here is how the SEC’s inspector general described the program’s regulatory army: “The Office of CSE Inspections has only two staff in Washington and five staff in the New York regional office.”

* * * *

Goldman and the other banks argued that they didn’t need government supervision for a very simple reason: Rooting out corruption and fraud was in their own self-interest. In the event of financial wrongdoing, they insisted, they would do their civic duty and protect the markets. But in late 2006, well before many of the other players on Wall Street realized what was going on, the top dogs at Goldman. . .started to fear they were sitting on a time bomb of billions in toxic assets. Yet instead of sounding the alarm, the very first thing Goldman did was tell no one. And the second thing it did was figure out a way to make money on the knowledge by screwing its own clients. So not only did Goldman throw a full-blown “bite me” on its own self-righteous horseshit about “internal risk management,” it more or less instantly sped way beyond inaction straight into craven manipulation.

“This is the dog that didn’t bark,” says Eliot Spitzer, who tangled with Goldman during his years as New York’s attorney general. “Their whole political argument for a decade was ‘Leave us alone, trust us to regulate ourselves.’ They not only abdicated that responsibility, they affirmatively traded against the entire market.”

“They affirmatively traded against the entire market.” That’s the case against Goldman Sachs: fraud on an unimaginable scale, selling their clients what they knew to be toxic assets, and then betting on the failure of those assets, which not only contributed to the collapse of the financial market, but allowed Goldman to enrich itself as a result. It is as revolting as it is frightening. And, if anything, the company has come out of it more powerful than ever: too big to fail and too rich to prosecute.

Edward Lear

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FVU_6GLZ-5Q&feature=related

“The Owl and the Pussycat”: listen right through to the end and you’ll be rewarded with some of the sweetest, most spontaneous and relevant literary criticism you’re ever likely to encounter

Today is Edward Lear‘s birthday (1812-1888).

Frye cites Lear to define the boundaries of satire in “The Nature of Satire”:

Again, we said that the humour of gaiety was the other boundary of satire. But as Juvenal truly said that whatever men do is the subject of satire, and that in consequence it is difficult not to write it, it follows that most humorous situations are at least indirectly satiric. Non-satiric humour tends toward fantasy: one finds it most clearly in the fairy worlds of Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and Walt Disney, in Celtic romance and American tall tales. Yet even here one can never be sure, for the humour of fantasy is continually pulled back into satire by means of that powerful undertow which we call allegory. The White Knight in Alice who felt that one should be provided for everything, and therefore put anklets around his horse’s feet to guard against the bites of sharks, may pass without challenge. But what are we to make of the mob of hired revolutionaries in the same author’s Sylvie and Bruno, who got their instructions mixed and yelled under the palace windows: “More taxes! Less bread!” Here we begin to smell the acrid, pungent smell of satire. (CW 21, 44-5)

 

Panoramic and Participating Apocalypse

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Further to the impending Judgment Day, here’s Frye in The Great Code distinguishing between panoramic and participating apocalypse:

There are, then, two aspects of the apocalyptic vision: One is what we may call panoramic apocalypse, the vision of the staggering marvels placed in a near future and just before the end of time. As a panorama, we look at it passively, which means it is objective to us. This in turn means that it is essentially a projection of the subjective “knowledge of good and evil” acquired at the fall. That knowledge, we now see, was wholly within the framework of law: it is contained by the final “judgment” where the world disappears into its unending constituents, a heaven and a hell, into one of which man automatically goes, depending on the relative strength of the cases for the prosecution and the defence. Even in heaven, the legal vision tells us, he remains eternally a creature, praising his Creator unendingly.

Anyone coming “cold” to the Book of Revelation, without context of any kind, would probably regard it as simply an insane rhapsody. It has been described as a book that either finds a man mad or else leaves him so. And yet, if we were to explore below the repressions in our own minds that keep us “normal,” we might find very similar nightmares of anxiety and triumph. As a parallel example, we may cite the so-called Tibetan Book of the Dead, where the soul is assumed immediately after death to be going through a series of visions, first of peaceful and then of wrathful deities. A priest reads the book into the ear of the corpse, who is assumed to hear the reader’s voice telling him that all these visions are simply his own repressed mental forms now released by death and coming to the surface. If he could realize that, he would immediately be delivered from their power, because it is own power.

If we take a similar approach to the Book of Revelation, we find, I think, that there is a second or participating apocalypse following the panoramic one. The panoramic apocalypse ends with the restoration of the tree and water of life, the two elements of the original creation. But perhaps, like other restorations, this one is a type of something else, a resurrection or upward metamorphosis to a new beginning that is now present. We notice that while the Book of Revelation seems to be emphatically the end of the Bible, it is a remarkably open end. It contains such statements as “Behold, I make all things new” (21:5); it describes God as the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and end of all possibilities of verbal expression; it follows the vision of the restoring of the water of life with an earnest invitation to drink of it. The panoramic apocalypse gives way, at the end, to a second apocalypse that, ideally, begins in the reader’s mind as soon as he has finished reading, a vision that passes through the legalized vision of ordeals and trials and judgments and comes out into a second life. In this second life the creator-creature, divine-human antithetical tension has ceased to exist, and the sense of the transcendent person and the split of subject and object no longer limit our vision. After the “last judgment,” the law loses its last hold on us, which is the hold of the legal vision that ends there.

We suggested earlier that the Bible deliberately blocks off the sense of the referential from itself: it is not a book pointing to a historical presence outside it, but a book that identifies itself with that presence. At the end the reader, also, is invited to identify himself with the book. Milton suggests that the ultimate authority in the Christian religion is what he calls the Word of God in the heart, which is superior even to the Bible itself, because for Milton this “heart” belongs not to the subjective reader but to the Holy Spirit. That is, the reader completes the visionary operation of the Bible by throwing out the subjective fallacy along with the objective one. The apocalypse is the way the world looks after the ego has disappeared. (CW 19, 156-8)

Salvador Dali

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httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rK4Bh_arF-E

The persistence of memory: Dali in a commercial for Lanvin chocolate. “Je suis fou de chocolat Lanvin!”

Today is Salvador Dali‘s birthday (1904-1989).

From “Men Walking as Trees,” a review of a surrealist exhibition at the CNE in the October 1938 issue of Canadian Forum:

Yet surely, in the balanced mind, the critical consciousness is the interpreter of the symbols produced by the creative imagination, and symbolic art in consequence has to strike a medium between the unintelligible chaos of private associative patterns and the dead conventions imposed by a Philistine religion. For this reason, surrealist art is certain to develop in the direction of more explicit and fundamental symbolism, from which consistent commentaries can be more easily inferred; one thinks of the development of the highbrow classical allegories of the Renaissance, now forgotten, into the art of Botticelli and Mantegna. Revolutionary painting today, at any rate in the hands of such a master as Orozco, depends upon this communal symbolism, and in such a picture as Dali’s Autumnal Cannibalism, deeply felt and universally shared feelings about the autumn as a time both of the maturity and of the dying of the world and its connection with the approaching butchery of the human race, perhaps as a necessary prelude to its rebirth, are what appear on canvas. How far the surrealists can go in their apocalyptic attempt to make the human mind create a new heaven and a new earth [Revelation 21:1], no one can say. But it’s worth trying. (CW 11, 95)

Dali’s Autumnal Cannibalism after the jump.

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Judgment Day: Save the Date

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Billboard announcing the end of the world on Main Street East in Hamilton, Ontario (photo: Barry Gray, The Hamilton Spectator)

May 21, at about 6 pm. At that time, the righteous will be Raptured (finally!), while the rest of us will be left behind to burn in eternal hell fire clean up the mess.

I love my hometown, but when end-of-the-world-mania reaches a place like Hamilton, it’s so over.

Story in The Spectator here.

New on the Net: The National Jukebox

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The National Jukebox: more than ten thousand vintage recordings dating back a century available for free online from the Library of Congress.

The Library of Congress presents the National Jukebox, which makes historical sound recordings available to the public free of charge. The Jukebox includes recordings from the extraordinary collections of the Library of Congress Packard Campus for Audio Visual Conservation and other contributing libraries and archives. Recordings in the Jukebox were issued on record labels now owned by Sony Music Entertainment, which has granted the Library of Congress a gratis license to stream acoustical recordings.

At launch, the Jukebox includes more than 10,000 recordings made by the Victor Talking Machine Company between 1901 and 1925. Jukebox content will be increased regularly, with additional Victor recordings and acoustically recorded titles made by other Sony-owned U.S. labels, including Columbia, OKeh, and others.

 

Karl Barth

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Today is Protestant theologian Karl Barth‘s birthday (1886-1968).

The responses to Nicholas Graham’s query posted Sunday mention Karl Barth and include a digression into Frye’s attitude toward fascism, so we’re putting up two anniversary posts today: one relating to Barth and the other (below) to Nazi book burning.

Frye cites Barth on the metaphor of creation in Creation and Recreation:

I want to begin with what is called “creativity” as a feature of human life, and move from there to some of the traditional religious ideas about a divine creation. It seems to me that the whole complex of ideas and images surrounding the word “creation” is inescapably a part of the way that we see things. We may emphasize either the divine or the human aspect of creation to the point of denying the reality of the other. For Karl Barth, God is a creator, and the first moral to be drawn from this is that man is not one: man is for Barth a creature, and his primary duty is to understand what it is to be a creature of God. For others, the notion of a creating God is a projection from the fact that man makes things, and for them a divine creator has only the reality of a shadow thrown by ourselves. But what we believe, or believe that we believe, in such matters is of very little importance compared to the fact that we go on using the conception anyway, whatever name we give it. We are free, up to a point, to shape our beliefs; what we are clearly not free to do is alter what is really a part of our cultural genetic code. We can throw out varieties of the idea of creation at random, and these, in Darwinian fashion, will doubtless descend through whatever has the greatest survival value; but abolish the conception itself we cannot. (CW 4, 36)