Soy Bomb @shujaxhaider - Tumblr Blog

I don’t really like tumblr to be honest

Americans tend to associate techno with Europe, but it’s a product of the Rust Belt.

#techno #technomusic #detroit techno #detroit

Dear Students,

I was a kid growing up in a troubled household. We didn’t have books in the house but we did have the daily paper and I remember picking out Family Circus before I could really read.

There was something about the life on the other side of that circle that looked pretty good. For kids like me there was a map and a compass hidden in Family Circus. The parents in that comic strip really loved their children. Their home was stable. It put that image in my head and I kept it. I’d always heard that great art will cause people to burst into tears but the only time it ever happened to me was when I was introduced to Bil Keane’s son, Jeff. As soon as I shook his hand I just started bawling my face off because I realized I had climbed through the circle.

And how I did it was by making pictures and writing stories. To me the Family Circus has always been my wished for family. My soul family in the image world.

That’s why if you say a word against Family Circus to me if I’ve had a few drinks I will slug you so hard.

You have heard me talk about the importance of comics for kids, and the kind of unexpected and sometimes lifesaving difference they can make— for me it was the comic “Family Circus”.

I’ve seen that world through my side of the circle for over 50 years. This weekend at the 71st annual National Cartoonist’s Society Conference, I found out that Jeff Keane inked me into life INSIDE that circle.

SEE ABOVE!!!

COMICS ARE MIRACULOUS!!! They are IMMUNE SYSTEMS! They are TRANSPORT SYSTEMS!!! They are TIME TRAVELING DEVICES!!

Jeff asked a friend of mine why I was so in love with Family Circus.

He said,“It’s not a ‘cool’ comic strip.

Dearest Jeffy K,

Know this: Love is ALWAYS cool.

XOX

Cousin Lynda B.

READ MORE FAMILY CIRCUS HERE!

Siena Cathedral as seen through Google’s neural network.

I made this with a Deep Dream generator for my article on artificial intelligence and neoreaction, in @viewpointmag.

#artificial intelligence #neoreaction

I made this playlist of all the Western Swing tunes George Strait did in the 1980s. Great music.

#music #spotify

Dear Chuck Berry, from Carl Sagan

themaninthegreenshirt

viewpointmag

In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, Muslims don’t need allies. We need comrades.

To fight the xenophobia rising with Trump’s election, we must still claim the legacy of this insurgent universality, which says that we are not passive victims but active agents of a politics that demands freedom for everyone. The view of a Muslim as the passive victim of an injury, who must be protected by the benevolence of a white liberal, is to be rejected as ruthlessly as the hate speech of Trump.

Today, against Trump, we cannot desire Clinton, or somebody of the same figure. We must create a return, if it is possible, to the true contradiction; it’s the lesson of that sort of terrible event. That is, we must propose a political orientation which goes beyond the world as it is, even if it is, at the beginning, in a not completely clear manner. When we begin something, we have not the complete development of that thing. But we must begin. We must begin, which is the point. After Trump, we must begin.

Alain Badiou, Reflections on the Recent Election

viewpointmag

Logging Out

The form a revolutionary strategy will have to take is to be determined and constituted by scientific analysis and popular struggle. Both of these require us to log out – to leave the digital fortress that imprisons left-wing intellectuals in a comfortable petty-bourgeois culture and reduces our politics to idealist wandering. Wander we must, but not on our Twitter feed. We need to leave our bubbles. Those in the cities and suburbs need to investigate them as if they were new to us. Those in the countryside and small towns need to leave our zones and push further into rural America, to knock on doors and talk to people across the country. We have to talk to Trump voters, of course, but also to those millions who didn’t vote this year and the almost 100 million who cannot vote. Read the full article here.

Confidential to my white liberal friends

I've seen a lot of you saying that you're ashamed to be white, or that you're overcome with guilt about your white privilege. I can't speak for all people of color, but personally, I don't see how your guilt and shame have improved anyone else's conditions.

When you feel guilt and shame about being white, you're falling for a trick that the powerful are playing on you: dividing people into groups and pitting those groups against one another. You're saying, it's easier for us, and harder for them. There's an important insight here, that inequality is arbitrary. But in expressing it, you've reproduced the malicious taxonomy of the powerful: that of us and them.

Taking up the core insight, and shedding the terminology that has been imposed onto it, suggests a redefinition and expansion of the sense of "us." Eugene Debs articulated it to the United States Supreme Court, when he was convicted of sedition for protesting the First World War:

Your Honor, years ago I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.

I know that there are all kinds of thinkpieces and memes floating around directed at white people (and mostly written by white people), telling you what you can and can't do and should and shouldn't feel. That's bullshit. Yes, it's important to listen to and learn from those whose experience is different. But don't turn your response inwards, at yourself. Focus it outwards, at the injustice that harms us all.

Freud spoke of what he called a "negative therapeutic reaction" in some of his patients, when insight into their condition resulted in the worsening of their symptoms. He realized that these patients enjoyed their guilt too much to give it up and recover.

"In the end," he wrote in The Ego and the Id, "we come to see that we are dealing with what may be called a 'moral' factor, a sense of guilt, which is finding its satisfaction in the illness and refuses to give up the punishment of suffering."

Like all defense mechanisms, guilt is the patient's expression of an unconscious resistance to change. Why do we resist change? Because it's hard work. But it's the only way to get better. And our society is not well.

White brothers and sisters: stop punishing yourselves. You don't deserve it. We're all in this together.

surfacelevelexpressions

The Goodbye Look

Last night I remembered this Mel Tormé cover of Donald Fagen’s “The Goodbye Look.” Originally from Fagen’s 1982 album The Nightfly, it tells the story of a 3rd world revolution, presumably happening somewhere in the Caribbean:

As you can hear, this isn’t a heroic tale with the revolutionaries as protagonists. Characteristically for Fagen, the story is told obliquely, from the perspective of a narrator who is not unreliable so much as stuck in a self-imposed, ethically dubious position. The song is an imperialist’s lament, basically. It’s unclear what the narrator’s exact position is, but from his aloofness and repeated reference to “the big casino” as a local landmark, it seems likely he’s a businessman of some sort. We get no indication he’s a member of the actual government being overthrown, but he’s clearly very worried - and disapproving of the change in power.

The song begins with him fondly recalling when he first arrived:

The surf was easy on the day I came to stay On this quiet island in the bay I remember a line of women all in white The laughter and the steel bands at night

From his perspective, the island was once a tranquil paradise, where people–he does not distinguish between them–were happy. “Everyone” lived a life of luxury, sipping cocktails on the beach and dancing the night away. But the reference to an exotic island music style (and perhaps the “women all in white”) belies a conflict hidden in plain sight: a class conflict– inflected by race–between the local population and the white (neo)colonists that see the island as a vehicle for the accumulation of capital. Now, it seems, that “tranquility” has been shattered:

Now the Americans are gone except for two The embassy’s been hard to reach There’s been talk and lately a bit of action after dark Behind the big casino on the beach

The rules are changed It’s not the same It’s all new players in a whole new ball game

Our protagonist knows his days are numbered - but he seems shocked by the complete reversal of fortune. The revolution came out of nowhere - he couldn’t see it coming even when the contradictions of the previous arrangement were blatantly obvious. It’s as if he never considered you could even have “all new players in a whole new ball game.” We often speak of bourgeois ideology in terms of its hold on the non-bourgeois, but the song implies that few are more blinded by bourgeois ideology than the bourgeois themselves. He continues, literally sickened from shock:

Last night I dreamed of an old lover dressed in gray I’ve had this fever now since yesterday Wake up darling they’re knocking the Colonel’s standing in the sun With his stupid face the glasses and the gun

Just as nationalization, land reform, and other forms of expropriation were depicted by capital as totalitarian moves, here “the Colonel” arrives to serve as a focal point for imperial self-righteousness about democracy, legality, and non-violence. The possibility that the overthrow of a neocolonial regime might have tangible popular benefits–and might even be organized by the exploited masses–is not even considered. Instead, we hear only the racialized dismissal of a figure the narrator clearly sees as an aspiring dictator - because, after all, only a tyrannical demagogue would infringe upon property rights. It is only with this misrecognition that the narrator begins to see historical parallels to his situation:

I know what happens I read the book I believe I just got the goodbye look

Then, in a tossed-off line rich with subtext, he asks:

Won’t you pour me a Cuban Breeze Gretchen?

The Tormé version changes “Gretchen” to “baby,” but either way we’re reminded that our colonial protagonist is a man, who depends upon women–white and otherwise–to mix his drinks, wash his clothes, and listen to his endless pontificating. Even with his (and presumably her) life in danger, he can’t be bothered to make his own cocktail.

Time is almost up, but there’s one more chance to get out alive:

I know a fellow with a motor launch for hire A skinny man with two-tone shoes Cause tonight they’re arranging a small reception just for me Behind the big casino by the sea

Desperate to flee before the ominous “small reception” that awaits him in the evening, the narrator makes plans to escape by boat. We never learn whether he succeeds, but the final lines remind us that it doesn’t really matter:

I know what happens I read the book I believe I just got the goodbye look

Either way, our protagonist is gone. He has lost. Whether he sees it in the gaze of the Colonel, the steel drum player, or the boatman, the island has given him the goodbye look. There are new players in a whole new ball game - and he won’t be playing.

In perhaps the best example of his unparalleled flair for stating the obvious as though it were hard-won insight, on Monday, Nate Silver told Brian Lehrer the x-factor that would make the difference in the next day’s election. “Both of these candidates need their voters to come out tomorrow,” he explained, “or they’re not going to have enough votes.” It was widely observed that this statement resembled John Madden’s theory of sports: “usually, the team that scores the most points wins the game.”

dailymarx

The less you eat, drink and buy books; the less you go to the theatre, the dance hall, the public house; the less you think, love, theorise, sing, paint, fence, etc., the more you save – the greater becomes your treasure which neither moths nor rust will devour – your capital. The less you are, the less you express your own life, the more you have, i.e., the greater is your alienated life, the greater is the store of your estranged being.

Karl Marx - Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts 1844 (via dailymarx)

Giuffre, Jim Hall, and Red Mitchell seem to do more listening to each other than playing on this rarely discussed record. It's sublime.

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Soy Bomb