Happy May Day!

#McConnelling

The best I found of this wonderful meme, followed by my own more modest contribution.

True Rhapsody

My contribution to True Detective Fan culture.

Preparing For Classes

At the beginning of the semester, I can often convince myself that wandering through YouTube videos in search of new things to show in class is a useful way to spend my time. Below are two videos I unearthed in this quest. The first is short compilation of Sigmund Freud's home movies including clips of Herr Doktor playing with a baby and a dog. The second is a film of André Breton's apartment and art collection. I find them both charming, so I believe I will inflict them on my students this semester.

Paulo Feire Death Metal

This now exists. It was created and performed by one of my students as a final project this semester and features lyrics culled from Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed (aka POO). Listen and Die.

 

Weekend Grading Again

It's Sunday and I'm grading again. Looking back at past posts, I see that I've been here before.

This one and this one stand out for me in particular. I seem to be in much the same place today. Spinning wheels, circle of life, etc.

 

I will survive.

Last Laugh

"The Laughing Song" of George W. Johnson is one of the very earliest hit records. Joshua Gunn discusses it in his intriguing talk below. There's a great deal to be said about the psychoanalytic meaning of recorded laughter, but one oddity mentioned by Gunn in passing is that laughing songs were very popular early on and perhaps constitute one of the first genres of recorded music.

Here is a twisted and perverse repetition of Johnson's laughter by Hasil Adkins, however, I had no idea that this song was part of venerable and historic musical genre. It certainly resonates for me, though, as a return of the repressed. Hasil Adkins as a symptom of the hauntological moment in pop music is all too plausible to me. Adkins certainly haunts me.

The full talk by Gunn is here and is also well worth a listen. Or two.

Best. Show. Ever.

The Lumpen Prof was here! Last Sunday was an amazing night. The Dave Rawlings Machine from left to right in the video above are John Paul Jones on mandolin (yes, that John Paul Jones, from Led Zeppelin), David Rawlings on his vintage Epiphone guitar, Gillian Welch on guitar, in the back on bass is Paul Kowert of the Punch Brothers, and on the right on guitar is Willie Watson formerly of the Old Crow Medicine Show.

The show began with a gorgeous rendition of "Will the Circle Be Unbroken," and included a medley of "I Hear Them All / This Land is Your Land" (with all the best subversive verses included). The high point of the show for me, though, was a truly mesmerizing version of Neil Young's "Cortez the Killer." A close second was their version of Led Zeppelin's "Going to California" performed in what Rawlings described as a "special Dark Lord tuning." Hearing Gillian Welch sing Zeppelin was a strange and wonderful experience.

Setlist.

Remembering Hubert Sumlin

Hubert Sumlin passed away this week. Best known for his guitar work with Howlin' Wolf, I have very fond memories of hearing this man play during my college years in Austin, Texas. He was a frequent guest on stage at Antone's and always a joy to hear. He'll be missed.

New York, New York

Strip Mining the Mind

This is a lovely video of a lovely talk. Here's another equally lovely quote from Robinson:

Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children.

The Money Trick

Somehow, I had never read The Great Money Trick before. A friend uses this as an in-class readers' theater for teaching Marx. I tried it out in my class yesterday as a prelude to reviewing for the midterm, and it worked great! The students enjoyed it, plus I had an excuse to feed them all pumpkin bread. I also learned that my students can't fake a good Cockney accent to save their souls. It was both pitiful and hilarious at the same time.

'As the working classes were in need of the necessaries of life and as they could not eat, drink or wear the useless money, they were compelled to agree to the kind Capitalist’s terms. They each bought back and at once consumed one-third of the produce of their labour. The capitalist class also devoured two of the square blocks…'

Floydian Slip

Puppet Portrait

This looks fascinating. It seems to be an adaptation of Cixous' "Portrait of Dora" with puppets. I wish I could understand it...

Wilde Zizek

From Oscar Wilde's essay, "The soul of man under Socialism:"

The majority of people spoil their lives by an unhealthy and exaggerated altruism - are forced, indeed, so to spoil them. They find themselves surrounded by hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation. It is inevitable that they should be strongly moved by all this. The emotions of man are stirred more quickly than man's intelligence; and, as I pointed out some time ago in an article on the function of criticism, it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought. Accordingly, with admirable though misdirected intentions, they very seriously and very sentimentally set themselves to the task of remedying the evils that they see. But their remedies do not cure the disease: they merely prolong it. Indeed, their remedies are part of the disease.

They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor.

But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised by those who suffered from it, and understood by those who contemplated it, so, in the present state of things in England, the people who do most harm are the people who try to do most good; and at last we have had the spectacle of men who have really studied the problem and know the life - educated men who live in the East End - coming forward and imploring the community to restrain its altruistic impulses of charity, benevolence, and the like. They do so on the ground that such charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.

There is also this to be said. It is immoral to use private property in order to alleviate the horrible evils that result from the institution of private property. It is both immoral and unfair.

I Read Some Marx And I Liked It

This is brilliant! I will be using this on this first day of class in the Fall.

Crisis Cartoon

Animated David Harvey!

A Panel of Experts

Happy May Day!

Waiting for the great leap forward...

David Harvey and the Enigma of Capital

Via. David Harvey's Enigma of Capital Lecture at the London School of Economics.



Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8

"Debt encumbered home owners don't go on strike" (3:50-5:00 in the video). This is the most cogent one line explanation of the roots of the current crisis I've heard.