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Jesus of Grunt.

The difference between religion and philosophy is that religion tends to be a closed system of faith that postulates a cosmology it insists is true. While there may be traditions within particular religions of theological debate regarding the interpretation of a religion's tenets, these matters, however subtle and finely reasoned they may be, have limits as to what can be said and done. Religion is a matter of faith, without material evidence, regarding the state of all existence that beyond the limited interpretation of a finite set of core beliefs cannot be questioned.

 For the worth of religion in material terms, I subscribe to the elegant qualifications William James laid out in Varieties of Religious Experience, crudely paraphrased as being that if a set of religious convictions provides a community with values, ethics, and the moral basis for fair laws that allow the members to usefully and creatively cope with life's circumstances, enables them to cooperate and share in enterprises that are beneficial both themselves and to the whole, can empower the members to be generous, kind and responsible so that a community is strengthened with a generally understood purpose greater than the petty desires of the individual, that is justification enough for a person's belief in invisible forces. This sounds sane and, I think, fairly reasonable. The comedian in me, though, also remembers poet John Ashbery's sentence from his introduction to the collection he edited about Avant gard art, "We would all believe in God if we  knew he existed, but would this be much fun?"  

 Organized religion purges those clerics and theologians whose ideas go too far off the reservation and undermine a faith's fundamentals. Philosophy, though related to religion in the sense that it grapples with large concepts and abstract notions, has, at its core, a notion that skepticism is a virtue and has a methodological rigor that questions, tests, and interrogates propositions, ideas, concepts; philosophy preceded science as an intellectual endeavor and it was from philosophy that early scientists got their discipline, the constant testing of their ideas and theories.

 Religion, I'd say, refines itself through theological sophistry to adapt to whatever historical moment the institutions find themselves in; that is, they change according to current fashion. It's not a stretch to say that the basis of the practice is to continue to seem relevant in light of a world that becomes more complex seemingly as research forces the formerly mute, mysterious, and unknowable essence of reality to yield yet more of what is behind the curtain; the matter goes beyond merely being fashionable. It has everything to do with power, as those who have the power to explain the universe to populations have the power, ultimately, to keep them ignorant, afraid, and vindictive or free them from mendacious superstition.  On the other hand, science changes its thinking based on verified facts: If new facts don't fit a theory, you change the theory, not ignore the facts. 

"Chinamen Jump" by Frank O'Hara

As we love at night
birds sing out of sight,
Chinese rhythms beat
through us in our heat,
the apples and the birds
move us like soft words,
we couple in the grace
of that mysterious race.

O'Hara comes as close as anyone I've read to the sound of a speaking voice in his poems  and still create a heightened language. This is the sort musical ear that makes for memorable images and declarations in a memorable poem. O'Hara's  opting for the everyday, the simple utterance, and the plainly and exquisitely rhapsodic is a reversal of sorts; instead of the poet comparing the joys of the senses to the condition of a Heaven one must live righteously to enjoy , if they wish, after an dreary and dry death, the poet says that heaven is more the state of being that  is needed here. There was no need to wait for joy; mouths were made for more than hurling curse words and insults, hands were made for more than forming fists and grabbing weapons.

At night Chinamen jumpon Asia with a thumpwhile in our willful waywe, in secret, play

affectionate games and bruiseour knees like China's shoes.

He is, it's always seemed to be, always in some state of love, all the joy and agony and humdrum inbetweens of being enrapt in another person. Or en-rapt by his passion. Energy and elation are what O'Hara's constant themes seem to be, and what he has over his peers is a zaniness to treat the world as if it were a cartoon.

The birds push apples throughgrass the moon turns blue,
these apples roll beneathour buttocks like a heath
full of Chinese thrushesflushed from China's bushes.

O'Hara, art curator and critic, a City Poet who embodied the idea of the urban center being the place where a population gathered and traded their art as well as their goods and services, writes here as man living in a city full of surprises, intrusions, movie marquees, galleries, relentless hustle and bustle. There is the loud blaring of music, movie soundtracks, news stands with screaming newspaper headlines, unending traffic. New York, the town he wrote about, is all chaos and bustle that nothing implacable unless one goes for the flooding of their senses.  This is the murmur of lovers in doorways after a late dinner at a nice restaurant who at first seek to get out of the rain but then, as they huddle in each  other's arms, find themselves falling into the  depths of their senses , the smell of hair, the scent of after shave, the touch of a unspoken fabric, where heaven on earth is created less as mists, clouds and music from far corners but rather as that safe huddle, the embrace that is a barrier against pleading car horns and angry drivers cursing each intersection that stops them with nothing but colored lights and book of laws they haven't read. Nothing matters in this city poet's metropolis when the authority of the senses are engaged and heeded and the newspapers all suddenly become written in punch lines. This is a life that is meant to transform the brutal material of the sidewalk and the cement and steel of the skyline into punctuation marks for the river of moods shared imaginations unleash. The only way to leave this city was by laughing out loud.

As we love at nightbirds sing out of sight,
Chinese rhythms beatthrough us in our heat,
the apples and the birdsmove us like soft words,
we couple in the graceof that mysterious race.

Here we are treated less with an accurate description of making love than an evocation of the experience itself, a billion China jumping at night to move the earth and Frank O'Hara and his partner rocking their own world with their own kind of rattle and hum, with Chinese jumpers, birds and fruit coming to mind as things that move the irreplaceable O'Hara to new states of desire

DOLPHY WAS GOOSING THE LOW END NOTES

DOLPHY WAS GOOSING THE LOW END NOTES

Dolphy was goosing the low end notes from his bass clarinet , a solemn, fluid tone that swam between the other fragments of drums, bass and teen-dream pianistics, a pulse that made the speaker cones rattle and the juice in the glass Blue poured form himself to shimmy sensually in the water glass that held it. Blue needed to go the store for some birthday candles because his girl friend had the idea that if they burn down the house with a simple incendiary device, a short candle in a roll of toilet paper in the hall closet where the hand towels and cleaning products were stored, they could collect the money from the insurance money she thought Blue had taken out on the four poster disaster where she slept next to him every night in a room with no windows, on a mattress with no springs. The sagging in the center of the mattress meant backaches by the boatload.

 Blue, though, didn't buy any fire insurance for the house, thinking it was silly to do since neither of them smoked. He was in no mood to be yelled at , though.

 He turned up the Dolphy record, scraping guitars and abbreviated saxophone copulated in every molecule the room contained, his head was swimming in terms that amounted to wishful amnesia. He would go to the store and get the birthday candles, they would set up the incendiary device and the house would burn down, a glorious blaze that would light up the night air in this criminally inane neighborhood, and then he would tell her the truth, point blank, blunt and cruel, honey , I never bought insurance for this house and there are no checks coming our way. But on the way to the store he stopped by the Velvet Hammer lounge for a quick snort, maybe two, two that became twelve ; the next thing he knew he woke up behind the wheel of his car, which was going near 80 miles an hour over the Mission Bay bridge.

They found his car in the bay later that night, but they didn't find him. He was never seen again. "All he did was play that atonal shit" his wife told police when they talked to her. She showed no emotion. "I said either this shit comes off the stereo our you hit the road. Dumb fucker."

Nothing in the store was over five dollars

Nothing in the store was over five dollars , so Brake thought nothing of it to get a bag of cell phone cases for a sweet deal of a buck and a quarter. He gave the cashier a five, pocketed his change as he released a satisfied snort , and walked out of the store.

Then he remembered he was still in Clairemont, at an intersection that had chain coffee shop, an adult continuation school and Church full of garble tongued snake handlers on the other three corners. Just beyond a grove of dead crab apple trees he could see the High School Science building roof, a bleak and dreary twp story slab of flyweight construction from which the American flag was seen caught tangled in the chain and pullies of the flag pole.

The flag wrapped around the pole as the wind made sharp corner of the item flap listlessly like an animal caught in a trap who's reflexes spasmodically twitched and pulled against the inescapable of the steel tooth device. Brake thought of Thanksgiving dinner and dropped his bag of cell phone cases, remembering he had no cell phone and no phone number either.

Killing Them Softy: great crime drama

The conventional wisdom regarding Brad Pitt's new film, Killing them Softly, is that it is an abomination because it had a pathetic box office yield in its first weekend . Such are the fortunes, I guess, when how little a film makes over rides the critical concern of how good a film is. Killing is my favorite film of the year , adding more evidence to the notion that Brad Pitt has handily transcended the curse of being a Ken doll to being a versatile film actor; his portrayal here of Jackie Cogan, a cynical, methodical hit man who is called in by Mob higher ups to investigate a robbery of a Mob protected card game and then extinguish the lives of those responsible as a means of warning other street punks from attempting the same gambit, is subtly detailed and nicely mannered depiction of a character who has a grasp of what he is , a contract killer, and the world he lives in, an America where everything is a brutal business transaction. 

Cogan, a lean presence, is the only one in the Game, this particular crime environment, who hasn't addled his senses with drugs, booze or the destructive reaches of delusional rationalization. In a dark,rainy, cold, urban terrain l of decrepit side streets, ratty warehouse districts and freeway overpasses , we witness a noose composed of criminal short sightedness slowly tightening around the necks of petty hooligans and thugs as their sloppy , double-crossing plans to a quick and easy provide the means of their eventual , violent deaths. "Killing them Softly" has the inevitability of a great Tragedy--American crime fiction at it's best , in the guise of Elmore Leonard, Jim Thompson , James Ellroy and Cornell Woolrich, delivers the same bleakly poetic warnings against untoward Pride as does Euripides, Shakespeare or O'Nell-- and Cogan is the only one who understands the situation and certainly the single personality with the focus and method to do what needs to be accomplished. Indeed, this merciless, pragmatic hit man is the only one who understands the terms of this convoluted gaggle of greed and stupidity. Cogan dispatches the elements that have disturbed the city's criminal equilibrium with a perfected mechanical precision. Erratic  punks  creating more ruckus than  riches are not long for this crime world where mob bosses, like any succesful level of management, prefers profit tGo see this film.o employee quirks. Dead problematic thugs cease to be a problem.

 Beyond the oddly  alluring industrial grit of the  crime story itself--a revealing series of conversations where the quirky fuck ups reveal the poetic and vulgar limits of their world view--there are intriguing backdrops that offer themselves up as a critique of the culture at large, particularly the 2008 Obama/McCain race for President where we see, on newscasts observed on televisions in various rat hole brass, the political parties making promises to help the working man while we watch working men, cheap, minor gangsters, struggle , hustle and screw each other for whatever advantage they can get. All this said, Andrew Dimkins, writer and director, has done a superb job with this film, in the overlapping of the three principle story lines that merge at a credible expedient pace, and with the photography, which fashions a dark, noirish feeling in the perennially raining darkness of this film. Superb performances as well by James Gandolfini, Richard Jenkins and Ray Liotta as well. 

Say what you see

The meaning of a representation can be nothing but a representation. In fact, it is nothing but the representation itself conceived as stripped of irrelevant clothing. But this clothing can never be completely stripped off; it is only changed for something more diaphanous. So there is an infinite regression here. --Umberto Eco, The Limites of Interpretation

Umberto Eco some essays, and a book on the matter of over-interpretation, that argue, crudely paraphrased, that observers who've divorced themselves from a need to act upon their judgments on things and events have no recourse but to keep discoursing, interpreting, giving things and events even newer, subtler descriptions until the chatter isn't about what ought to be done in order to effect the way we live but rather about how can we continue to contrive more speech for its own sake.

There was an idea, formerly, that critical theory would describe and diagnose a particular set of problems, and then would prescribe a slate of actions that ought to be done to rid the world of the defined problems: there was a tacit agreement to stop theorizing and to start implementing the radical remedies. Revolutions do not happen by those who hover over the water cooler or  yell at their unblinking tv sets.

Praxis, theory into practice, from Gramsci. Praxis, though, is something the left has forgotten about, gun shy perhaps with advancing any set of ideas that might somehow be construed by the politically sensitive as racist, ageist, sexist, and so on. The ability to name the world in front of us contained the possibility to rename it as well, and then change it. Our theoretical left has taken refuge in poetry and novels and refuses even to discuss what their objects are talking about in the author's terms, exhibiting a convenient nihilism.  

The right isn't afraid to name, nor to advance their cause. There is a living embodiment of political will behind their description of the current situation, and it would be Post Modern Tragedy that we've theorized ourselves into submission.

Sons of the Pioneers

Another in the long series of abbreviated versions of Dylan songs that each contained the by-then formula Byrds/Sonny and Cher arrangement of jingle jangly guitars, over-stated drumming and , just for kicks, a chorus coooing an off key "ahhhhhhhh" in the background. Harrison's talk-singing is impeccably British, charming as a generic trait of Carnaby era artifact, but toothless as an interpreter of one of Dylan's finest, most acidic song-poems. Whatever his technical limits as a singer, Dylan 's nasalisms conveyed attitude, unwavering its combination of exhasustion and disgust. The small talk between Harrison, son of acting stalwart Rex, and  Gary Lewis, son of spastic comedy icon Jerry, is typically lame reparte. It's lameness is the funniest thing about it.