Marxism has been fermenting for long enough in the more well-concealed crooks of windows of the cathedral, generally out of eyeshot for all but the tallest, and of absolutely no merit during the putrefactio stage: like so many hermetically-sealed vessels of cheap solipisitic, Kool-Aid-imitative substance, those who attempted to taste the prison hooch before enough time had elapsed, digging up the orchard promptly found themselves catching brewer’s sickness. Other than those lost their minds, faith, or life if they weren’t lucky enough to come back akathesiac, catatonic-neurotic husks of the men they were to their families, busted road signs to their home towns down so many stretches of politically contested highway, these remnants of the vanguard, finalists in the ceremonial rites of the intoxication olympics, strive to deliver, uninterrupted pieces of time from the outer rim, indivisible in and of themselves and integral only as virtual energy, must like the conservation of the angular velocity of an orbiting electron briefly excited is suddenly apparently replaced (if we’re being crudely mechanical) In reality, there were three things, the beginning, middle, and end of an indivisible moment: excitation, acceleration, sudden-indelible-intensive-return-transformation.
Hip-hop is, ultimately an undertaking on the order of magnitude of permitting and preventing, affirming and denying holocausts
If the invisible hand (the real one, the grabby junky one that’s not so good with money) can be made to loosen its grip on the central form on the potters wheel. But know that, as long as the matter is sufficiently fluid, lassitude of grip can only serve to keep (You/The Author/The Artist) utterly from deciding, where this matter will not go.
Only after relapse is prevented, discipline elapses sufficiently; now the moment of inertia of the incipient res can be roughly fixed in the sense of the artist. Fluid must be fully integrated into the medium for catastrophe to subside. Operations can not be performed in a state of catastrophe. Substance can finally learn how to begin to express its new trust to the author, in his essential motivation as the author to catch her as gravity begins to exert an entirely different effect, as the short term collapses into the present and the concrete future stretches into teleovirtual conformity with the attractor eidos.
As I was standing in line, I heard the jaunty marimba of the Rolling Stones’ 1966 smash hit, “Under My Thumb.” We’ve all heard the song 1,000 times — it’s a very catchy tune, from a talented, superstar band. But it also features lyrics that are not exactly friendly toward women. As I listened, I thought about how the song plays in the wake of Elliot Rodger’s killing spree, fueled, as the killer explained in a lengthy manifesto, by his rage against women and desire to control them.
The author is a senior editor at Alternet — a site most famous for listicles about how the right-wing wants to starve your children — and holds a PhD from NYU in English and cultural studies.
One imagines a moment in this kind of doctoral program, somewhere near the end of your coursework, in which you’re brought into a room and given the OT III (you know, the level in Scientology where you find out about Xenu and the volcano) of cultural studies, the powerful hex-like phrase “in the wake of,” which is used twice in this piece to connect two totally unrelated events; an allegedly misogynistic song, and a spree killer with four male victims and two female ones.
She continues:
What kinds of messages do we think are OK today in 2014? Why should I have to hear about a guy comparing his girlfriend to a dog while I’m buying vegetables?
I decided to ask Trader Joe’s this question. Just so they would know I wasn’t making things up, I printed out the lyrics to “Under My Thumb” and brought them into the store with me. I was directed to a young man named Kyle Morrison at the manager’s station, to whom I explained in friendly terms that I was a frequent shopper and that I had heard a song playing over the sound system which, in the wake of the Elliot Rodger killing spree, made me feel uncomfortable. I told him the name of the song, and offered him the paper with the lyrics.
The story is amusing on so many levels, from the befuddled staff, to Dr. Parramore explaining the feminist conceit that her disliking a song makes it “offensive to women,” to the young employee referring her to the company that actually put together the playlist, because what chain grocer of sound management would trust its workers not to offend cultural studies doctorates?
