In 1989, I was flown to Germantown in Phildelphia to interview Sun Ra (for The Face). Ra is long gone now, and so’s The Face: and while a couple of longish quotes of the interview ended up in the piece about Black Science Fiction I wrote in The Wire just before I became editor, there was a lot of the (quite one-sided!) conversation that ended up on the cutting-room floor. A while back, Conor Gillies of WBUR in Boston, MA, got in touch to tell me about a new series he was helping work on — it sounded my kind of thing but I was super-busy and the only thing I could think might fit one of their projects was to send them the audio for the Sun Ra interview. I’ve been lamentably slow to publicise this — still super-busy is my only excuse — but the series, Stylus, has already started: you can hear Ra towards the end of this ep.
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Quick unedited notes the morning after (on just 4 hrs sleep)
1: the road-testing of the citizens united decision has not developed entirely to the 1%’s advantage
2: TRUMPBOT SMASH *trumpbot falls over on face in puddle of someone else’s vomit*
3: no one ever got rich betting against the continued stupidity of the US pundit class, but — and usually like emerson I am pro creative-transformative intuition and against the soulless bead-counting technocrat where’er he be — but Team Silver has surely helped ding the the current pundit-layer’s crappy jalopy, in a way that a mere unpredicted shock dem win would not have done
4: ratfuck report (relevant internal repug warfare): husted knew — because he could see on his master screen, the one with the knob that technologically flipped the votes — that ohio was gone beyond critical *before* the point where technological vote-flipping could be brought in to save the day; he told the Fox deciders and went home; he pointedly didn’t tell rove bcz FUCK TURDBLOSSOM
First posted at Unfogged, further thoughts at B&T (I had Caro on LBJ in mind here, and the fact that many voting machine companies are Repub-owned): note the Ranter’s response, in particular — my takeaway — the fact that all you need to depress the other guy’s voting (and voters) is for your claim to hold all the cards to be plausible. The loss of this plausibility can be the puncture in the balloon: the hole is small but it doesn’t self-heal. To over-estimate the scope of their control — I think of this as an anarchist failing, but that may just be my age and prejudice showing — is very much to hobble our own options.
]]>Then I started imagining the factories and warehouses full of these pale green and poorly fashioned figurines, and started feeling a bit ill myself: it’s not such a bad habit, when something mass cultural entertains you momentarily, to imagine how it would strike you en masse.
In my day-job I have to read — and deal with — the terms “appropriation” and “subversion”, maybe not exactly en masse, but far too bloody often. The people using these words (not just these words) mostly imagine they are observing stuff from a higher intellectual plane: on the whole they’re really really not.
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