10/10/11. God is Dead. Occupy Wall Street. Shit On Police Car. Wipe Ass with New York Times.

The practice of arrangement comes from salon music.  It is the practice of refined entertainment which borrows its pretensions from the niveau of cultural goods, but transforms these into entertainment material of the type of hit songs.  Such entertainment, formerly reserved as an accompaniment to peoples humming, today spreads over the whole of musical life, which is bascially not taken seriously by anyone anymore and in all discussion of culture retreats further and further into the background.  One has the choice of either dutifully going along with the business, if only furtively in front of the loud speaker on Saturday afternoon, or at once stubbornly and impenitently acknowledging the trash served up for the ostensible or real needs of the masses.  The uncompelling and superficial nature of the objects of refined entertainment inevitably leads to the inatentiveness of the listeners.  One preserves a good conscience in the matter since one is offering the listeners first-class goods.  To the objection that these are already a drug on the market, one is read with the reply that this is what they wanted, an argument which can be finally invalidated by a diagnosis of the situation of the listeners but only through insight into the whole process which unites producers and consumers in a diabolical harmony.


But fetishism takes hold of even the ostensibly serious practice of music, which mobilizes the pathos of distance against refined entertainment.  The purity of service to the cause, with which it presents the works, often turns out to be as inimical to them as vulgarization and arrangement.  The official ideal of performance, which covers the earth as a result of Toscanini's extraordinary achievement, helps to sanction a condition which, in phrase of Eduard Steuermann, may be called the barbarism of perfection.  To be sure, the names of famous works are no longer made fetishes, although the lesser ones that break into the programs almost make the limitation to the smaller repertoire seem desirable.  To be sure, passages are not here inflated or climaxes overstressed for the sake of fascination.  There is iron discipline.  But precisely iron.  The new fetish is the flawlessly functioning, metallically brilliant apparatus as such, in which all the cogwheels mesh so perfectly that not the slightest hole remains open for the meaning of the whole.  Perfect, immaculate performance in the latest style preserves the work at the price of its definitive reification.  It presents it as already complete from the very first note.  The performance sounds like its own phonograph record.  They dynamic is so predetermined that there are no longer any tensions at all.

Thedore Adorno, Fetish Character in Music and Regression of Listening

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"The Barbarism of Perfection."  Love that.

"The uncompelling and superficial nature of the objects of refined entertainment inevitably leads to the inatentiveness of the listeners."  Love that too.

What about the uncompelling and superficial nature of the news coverage by refined corporations.  Does that lead to a certain inatentiveness?

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Anyone else digging Occupy Wall Street?  For the first time since I left the City of Piss, I wish I was back in the City of Piss.  For the first time in my life, I wish I was on Wall Street, which apparently is now Take a Shit on a Police Car Street. (Not that taking a shit on a police car is all that unusual in lower Manhattan.)

Sure.  Why not.  Is it really any worst than the shitting-upon all but the richest 1% have taken for the last decade?

Speaking of shit upon, did you read this piece of shit coverage in the New York Times?  Go ahead, click on it.  Read it.  Feel it.  Thanks for sharing Gina!

I get the feeling that because the content of the protest isn't buffed to a Toscanini sheen--that the protest isn't "already complete from first note", that some (like writers for the New York Times) somehow feel they are off the hook from looking deeper into the impetus for those protests, and so can instead write some snotty-ass twaddle for their big important journalism job.

[Right now, as I type this, the main story on the home page of the New York Times is this pitiful piece of shit--a story about a boy who stutters and his history teacher who won't call on him.]

So let me get this straight...the biggest super theft of all time ever happens on Wall Street in the midst of how many US wars?  Three?  And at this very moment, there are protesters protesting that super wickedness and we get a story about stutters and the mean history teachers who won't call on them in class, even when their hand has been raised for a really long time!

Judith Miller aside, what then is the credibility of the New York Times?  We give a shit about what it says why?

More to the point, what then is the credibility of the New York Times when it comes to writing about our beloved Free Jazz--or any gesture that resides outside the parent culture's yoke? 

Yes, yes, Ben Ratliff, very nice...but like, The New York Times you suck.  Hey Downbeat--you suck too!  Hey Wall Street, you really suck, and you deserve every drop of piss and shit the occupiers place upon you. 

You are on the wrong team.  All your content, no matter what the intent, no matter how well meaning, no matter now meticulously worded and proof read, no matter how inspired your journalism teacher made you feel, your content and reputation is smeared with the ass-filth of death kulture boot licking and kow towing to the very forces that have ruined everything.

So write about Wynton.  Or opera at the met.  Or some fluff piece about stuttering.  Or some cynical snotty shitty piece about Occupy Take-a-Shit-On-A-Police-Car Street.

Stay away from This Music--a music that was born, in no small part, out of a contempt, nay, a loathing, for all the things you cherish and the insipid cloying way you cherish them. 

It saddens me to no end that there are musicians and organisations dedicated to the needs and employment of musicians, who do great works for humanity and yet continue to peg their self worth to column inches in any for-profit magazine--not just the known time wasting supporters of all things death.

Though probably not one of their stated objectives, I see Occupy of Take-a-Shit-on-a-Police-Car-Street as, in part, a protest against exchange-value's encroachment into the world of use-value.

For those of you foolish enough to confess out loud an interest in Art, be it our beloved "Free" music, or painting, or what have you, here's a little tip:  Once you're caring about what the New York Times has to say about anything, you have the shit of exchange-value on your shoe.  Stop everything and scrape it off.

For those of you foolish enough to conflate art and commerce, once you view the "success" of your Art-enterprise as parallel to the opinions and attentions of the New York Times, Downbeat, or any for profit publication of/by/for the Death Kulture, immediate action must be taken to save your soul.

Self loathing of the future will be all the more if your time now is spent clinging to the same old wretched iterations of the same old wretched exploitation when new modalities (like the blog, for one) are constantly availing themselves.