This is helpful, Chuck.
>
>
>``Mainly you lose me here, Chuck...'' (jks)
>
>That's probably because you are too even tempered and rational. I am
>not. So I'll try a slightly more rational approach.
Yah, that would help. I'm distressingly literal-minded.
>
>I live in a world of at least dual aspect (logos, eros), one of rather
>blah sights and sounds, and the trivial interactions of everydayness:
>people at work, cops writing tickets, paperwork, rules and
>regulations, figuring out mechanical and electrical failures and
>fixing them. The other world, that of eros is completely limitless and
>has very few material referents. It is supercharged with dramatic and
>emotive meanings, signs, symbols, sensations, images. This interior
>world of imagination and its passions have been endlessly commodified
>by mass media where most of my information about the world that I can
>not see and experience directly is presented to me. It thus charges
>every image, every piece of information with some emotive aspect, some
>shading or nuance intended to illicit an emotive response.
Hmm. I think we shift into that world of "eros" only occasionally. But maybe it's just me. Mostly I wrestle with the law all day and my kids in the evening.
. . . .
>In order to maintain the dramatic unity, erotic tension, and
>domination of this imaginary world, it is essential that no part of it
>or its audience resists or betrays the illusion, violates its thematic
>consistency. It is living theater and what is usually referred as
>patriotism is used as the means of identification, to evoke sympathy
>with the unfolding dramatic action. If we are at war with Eurasia, I
>am at war with Eurasia! To be patriotic is both to sustain and to be
>part of the drama.
It is of course a felt identification. But there's an old pop front song that Paul Roveson and, in his early left wing days, Frank Sinatra used to sing, The House I Live In, which lists a bunch of rather banal things (the house I live in, my neighbors, etc.), and the chorus is, That's America to Me. I think it is to most folks.
I was at the Chicago Blues Festival this weekend--everyone should try to make it at least once, we have a great jazz festival too. The evening at the main stage opened the Star Spangled Banner (and I insisted my kids stand for it; I took off my hat; I explained to them that whatever you feel, you respect others' customs). Some biker types whooped it up during the line, "our flag was still here." One of them had a swastika tattoo. The people next to me were snarling about him, "Why hasn't someone killed him yet?" But the evening closed with Shanika Coleman (Johnny Coleman's daughter, and she is fucking awesome) singing about being a ghetto child in this so called land of freedom. The crowd loved that too. So it's complicated, not nearly as totalitarian as you suggest.
>.. . .
>
>You asked, what about Louis' USA?
>
>The practical answer is that world, the one that I have fabricated as
>my mythical America---where all the progressive histories live, where
>the complex themes of the French Revolution were interwoven with
>America, where the abolitionists, and Thoreau, Melville, Crane, the
>WPA painters, the Lincoln Brigade, Abstract Expressionism live---all
>of that is so far off the registers of most people I know, that I can
>not even refer to it as America, because they've never heard of it and
>it makes no sense to them.
Well, that's our job, eh?
About the only universally recognized
>aspect of that world that might exist in the public imagination is
>jazz as you suggest. But for me, it is only very particular styles of
>jazz---actually the least popular ones---the hard, scratchy, badly
>recorded early Bebop
You gotta get into CDs. Almost everything sounds good with modern remastering techniques. However, I mentioned Armstrong because he's accessible and was awesomelly popular, hell, he was Ambassador Satch to the world, and he's as American as they come, claimed to be born on the 4th of July.
and then the later just over the edge Davis and
>Coltrain. In other words, the very stuff, most people dismiss as
>incomprehensible noise.
Early bebop? Early Miles? Quartet Trane? That doesn't sound like noise to us anymore. Now, late Miles and Trane's Ascension, that's another story.
>
>The truth is that I discovered that America and re-traced it,
>re-constructed it,
That's what we all must do.
because it followed a universal theme: an attack on
>the orderliness, propriety, and stayed complacency (the whiteness) of
>the bourgeoisie. It was composed of all the creative and romantic
>American reactions I could find. I could hardly expect it to be
>embraced as patriotism, now, in the mist of this rightwing puritanical
>mortification of mind and spirit, sold as the all american way of
>life, and the only true patriotism. Better to express it as the
>ultimate anti-patriotism.
Why? It's utterly American. What could be more American than your highly individualistic brand of anarchism cum bebop? It sure ain't French!
jks
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