>>Oh no, I just posted an Allen Ginsberg poem! Don't tell me you don't like
>>it. If you dare,
>I dare, I dare.
Hey, check out a special issue of _Race Traitor_, #9 (Summer 1998): "Surrealism: Revolution against Whiteness." It's so "20th-century" that LBO-talkers should love it. There is an essay titled "Murderous Humanitarianism" by the Surrealist Group of France (1932), signed by Andre Breton, Roger Caillois, Rene Char, Rene Crevel, Paul Eluard, J.-M. Monnerot, Benjamin Peret, Yves Tanguy, Andre Thirion, Pierre Unik, and Pierre Yoyotte (translated into English by Samuel Beckett!). A quite topical title! I don't know if the Third Way can coopt this one. There are other intriguing essays, be they historical documents (e.g., Rene Crevel, "The Black Woman in the Brothel," a criticism of white patriarchy) or our contemporary writers' works (e.g., Dave Roediger, "Plotting against Eurocentrism: The 1929 Surrealist Map of the World," Paul Garon, "Psychiatry's White Problem: Racism as Therapy").
As for the Situationist International, I think Curtiss Leung would have much more to say about it than I do.
>But as you well know The Man has since appropriated the term for use in his
>nefarious designs. I'm still wondering about that peculiar phrase Hirschorn
>used today in Slate: "'commodification of dissent' voguishness."
I think that Thomas Frank & _The Baffler_ moved on from criticisms of "commodification of dissent" just in time. It was becoming a bit of cliche (I liked the latest issue of _The Baffler_). The commodification of nearly everything is to be expected under capitalism, so harping on this fact again and again paradoxically ends up reinforcing some people's faith in the very idea you are discounting (e.g., the power of "subversive" music).
I don't think that art, when isolated from a living political movement, can do anything on its own. That said, I have had an abiding interest in left-wing modernism (e.g., Wilde, Brecht, Fassbinder, etc.) in any medium.
BTW, why do you like _Three Kings_? The movie is an argument for a "humanitarian intervention"! Is Carl Remick the only LBO-Talker who didn't like the film?
Yoshie