GO SEE THIS GO SEE THIS GO SEE THIS

Verses

I am a criminal alarmist, not really in my personal-life so much as in my estimations of society and WHERE WE ARE GOING. There are some unique dangers we face in the 21st century, principally those of crumbling Eco-systems and overoversaturation of bodies and information. But it always tempers me to recall our 20th. I put myself in my parents' shoes, imagine witnessing three assassinations of three great leaders, literal snuffing of hope. I think of the draft too. And then there's my grandparents and great-grandparents—TWO great wars and nuclear armament and new drugs...

Here, Paul Valéry in 1919 (a terrifying year, the whole of Europe knee-deep in its losses), the first letter of his "Crisis of the Mind":

We later civilizations . . . we too know that we are mortal.

We had long heard tell of whole worlds that had vanished, of empires sunk without a trace, gone down with all their men and all their machines into the unexplorable depths of the centuries, with their gods and their laws, their academies and their sciences pure and applied, their grammars and their dictionaries, their Classics, their Romantics, and their Symbolists, their critics and the critics of their critics. . . . We were aware that the visible earth is made of ashes, and that ashes signify something. Through the obscure depths of history we could make out the phantoms of great ships laden with riches and intellect; we could not count them. But the disasters that had sent them down were, after all, none of our affair.

Elam, Ninevah, Babylon were but beautiful vague names, and the total ruin of those worlds had as little significance for us as their very existence. But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

So the Persepolis of the spirit is no less ravaged than the Susa of material fact. Everything has not been lost, but everything has sensed that it might perish.

An extraordinary shudder ran through the marrow of Europe. She felt in every nucleus of her mind that she was no longer the same, that she was no longer herself, that she was about to lose consciousness, a consciousness acquired through centuries of bearable calamities, by thousands of men of the first rank, from innumerable geographical, ethnic, and historical coincidences.

So -- as though in desperate defense of her own physiological being and resources -- all her memory confusedly returned. Her great men and her great books came back pell-mell. Never has so much been read, nor with such passion, as during the war: ask the booksellers. . . . Never have people prayed so much and so deeply: ask the priests. All the saviors, founders, protectors, martyrs, heroes, all the fathers of their country, the sacred heroines, the national poets were invoked. . . .

And in the same disorder of mind, at the summons of the same anguish, all cultivated Europe underwent the rapid revival of her innumerable ways of thought: dogmas, philosophies, heterogeneous ideals; the three hundred ways of explaining the World, the thousand and one versions of Christianity, the two dozen kinds of positivism; the whole spectrum of intellectual light spread out its incompatible colors, illuminating with a strange and contradictory glow the death agony of the European soul. While inventors were feverishly searching their imaginations and the annals of former wars for the means of doing away with barbed wire, of outwitting submarines or paralyzing the flight of airplanes, her soul was intoning at the same time all the incantations it ever knew, and giving serious consideration to the most bizarre prophecies; she sought refuge, guidance, consolation throughout the whole register of her memories, past acts, and ancestral attitudes. Such are the known effects of anxiety, the disordered behavior of mind fleeing from reality to nightmare and from nightmare back to reality, terrified, like a rat caught in a trap. . . .

The military crisis may be over. The economic crisis is still with us in all its force. But the intellectual crisis, being more subtle and, by it nature, assuming the most deceptive appearances (since it takes place in the very realm of dissimulation)...this crisis will hardly allow us to grasp its true extent, its phase.

No one can say what will be dead or alive tomorrow, in literature, philosophy, aesthetics; no one yet knows what ideas and modes of expression will be inscribed on the casualty list, what novelties will be proclaimed.

Hope, of course, remains -- singing in an undertone:

Et cum vorandi vicerit libidinem
Late triumphet imperator spiritus.

But hope is only man's mistrust of the clear foresight of his mind. Hope suggests that any conclusion unfavorable to us must be an error of the mind. And yet the facts are clear and pitiless; thousands of young writers and artists have died; the illusion of a European culture has been lost, and knowledge has been proved impotent to save anything whatsoever; science is mortally wounded in its moral ambitions and, as it were, put to shame by the cruelty of its applications; idealism is barely surviving, deeply stricken, and called to account for its dreams; realism is hopeless, beaten, routed by its own crimes and errors; greed and abstinence are equally flouted; faiths are confused in their aim -- cross against cross, crescent against crescent; and even the skeptics, confounded by the sudden, violent, and moving events that play with our minds as a cat with a mouse . . . even the skeptics lose their doubts, recover, and lose them again, no longer master of the motions of their thought.

The swaying of the ship has been so violent that the best-hung lamps have finally overturned. . . .

What gives this critical condition of the mind its depth and gravity is the patient's condition when she was overcome.

I have neither the time nor the ability to define the intellectual situation in Europe in 1914. And who could pretend to picture that situation? The subject is immense, requiring every order of knowledge and endless information. Besides, when such a complex whole is in question, the difficulty of reconstructing the past, even the recent past, is altogether comparable to that of constructing the future, even the near future; or rather, they are the same difficulty. The prophet is in the same boat as the historian. Let us leave them there.

For all I need is a vague general recollection of what was being thought just before the war, the kinds of intellectual pursuit then in progress, the works being published.

So if I disregard all detail and confine myself to a quick impression, to that natural whole given by a moment's perception, I see . . . nothing! Nothing . . . and yet an infinitely potential nothing.

The physicists tell us that if the eye could survive in an oven fired to the point of incandescence, it would see . . . nothing. There would be no unequal intensities of light left to mark off points in space. That formidable contained energy would produce invisibility, indistinct equality. Now, equality of that kind is nothing else than a perfect state of disorder.

And what made that disorder in the mid of Europe? The free coexistence, in all her cultivated minds, of the most dissimilar ideas, the most contradictory principles of life and learning. That is characteristic of a modern epoch.

I am not averse to generalizing the notion of "modern" to designate certain ways of life, rather than making it purely a synonym of contemporary. There are moments and places in history to which we moderns could return without greatly disturbing the harmony of those times, without seeming objects infinitely curious and conspicuous . . . creatures shocking, dissonant, and unassimilable. Wherever our entrance would create the least possible sensation, that is where we should feel almost at home. It is clear that Rome in the time of Trajan, or Alexandria under the Ptolemies, would take us in more easily than many places less remote in time but more specialized in a single race, a single culture, and a single system of life.

Well then! Europe in 1914 had perhaps reached the limit of modernism in this sense. Every mind of any scope was a crossroads for all shades of opinion; every thinker was an international exposition of thought. There were the works of the mind in which the wealth of contrasts and contradictory tendencies was like the insane displays of light in the capitals of those days: eyes were fatigued, scorched.... How much material wealth, how much labor and planning it took, how many centuries were ransacked, how many heterogeneous lives were combined, to make possible such a carnival, and to set it up as the supreme wisdom and the triumph of humanity?

In a book of that era -- and not one of the most mediocre -- we should have no trouble in finding: the influence of the Russian ballet, a touch of Pascal's gloom, numerous impressions of the Goncourt type, something of Nietzsche, something of Rimbaud, certain effects due to a familiarity with painters, and sometimes the tone of a scientific publication...the whole flavored with an indefinably British quality difficult to assess! Let us notice, by the way, that within each of the components of this mixture other bodies could well be found. It would be useless to point them out: it would be merely to repeat what I have just said about modernism, and to give the whole history of the European mind.

Standing, now, on an immense sort of terrace of Elsinore that stretches from Basel to Cologne, bordered by the sands of Nieuport, the marshes of the Somme, the limestone of Champagne, the granites of Alsace . . . our Hamlet of Europe is watching millions of ghosts.

But he is an intellectual Hamlet, meditating on the life and death of truths; for ghosts, he has all the subjects of our controversies; for remorse, all the titles of our fame. He is bowed under the weight of all the discoveries and varieties of knowledge, incapable of resuming the endless activity; he broods on the tedium of rehearsing the past and the folly of always trying to innovate. He staggers between two abysses -- for two dangers never cease threatening the world: order and disorder.

Every skull he picks up is an illustrious skull. This one was Leonardo. He invented the flying man, but the flying man has not exactly served his inventor's purposes. We know that, mounted on his great swan (il grande uccello sopra del dosso del suo magnio cecero) he has other tasks in our day than fetching snow from the mountain peaks during the hot season to scatter it on the streets of towns. And that other skull was Leibnitz, who dreamed of universal peace. And this one was Kant...and Kant begat Hegel, and Hegel begat Marx, and Marx begat. . . .

Hamlet hardly knows what to make of so many skulls. But suppose he forgets them! Will he still be himself? His terribly lucid mind contemplates the passage from war to peace: darker, more dangerous than the passage from peace to war; all peoples are troubled by it. . . . "What about Me," he says, "what is to become of Me, the European intellect? ...And what is peace? Peace is perhaps that state of things in which the natural hostility between men is manifested in creation, rather than destruction as in war. Peace is a time of creative rivalry and the battle of production; but I am not tired of producing? Have I not exhausted my desire for radical experiment, indulged too much in cunning compounds? ...Should I not perhaps lay aside my hard duties and transcendent ambitions? Perhaps follow the trend and do like Polonius who is now director of a great newspaper; like Laertes, who is something in aviation; like Rosencrantz, who is doing God knows what under a Russian name?

"Farewell, ghosts! The world no longer needs you -- or me. By giving the names of progress to its own tendency to a fatal precision, the world is seeking to add to the benefits of life the advantages of death. A certain confusion still reigns; but in a little while all will be made clear, and we shall witness at last the miracle of an animal society, the perfect and ultimate anthill."

Important

Love in this Club

I've been thinking about the Raj, about gentlemans' imperial postings a lot (hellurrrr). And isn't Charles Dance, as concerned, blueblood academic, Guy Perron, just the best at what he do? Yes. Best always. A strong and silent retrospective reel:

Verses

"Death Sting Me Blues"
Sara Martin

I want all you women
to listen to my tale of woe
I want all you women
to listen to my tale of woe
I've got consumption of the heart
I feel myself sinking so

Oh my heart is aching
and the blues are all around my room
Oh my heart is aching
and the blues are all around my room
Blues is like the devil
they'll have me hell-bound soon

Blues, you make me roll and tumble
you make me weep and sigh
Lordy lordy lordy
blues you make me roll and tumble
you make me weep and sigh
Made me use cocaine and whiskey
but you wouldn't let me die

Blues: blues: blues
why did you bring trouble to me?
Blues: blues: blues
why did you bring trouble to me?
Oh death please sting me,
and take me out of my misery

Verses

"The Model Home" Doug Liman Allan Heinberg & Josh Schwartz 7.9^[15] August 12, 2003 3 3 "The Gamble" Ian Toynton Jane Espenson 8.0^[15] August 19, 2003 4 4 "The Debut" Daniel Attias Allan Heinberg & Josh Schwartz 8.6^[15] August 26, 2003 5 5 "The Outsider" Jesús Salvador Treviño Melissa Rosenberg 9.1^[15] September 2, 2003 6 6 "The Girlfriend" Steve Robman Josh Schwartz & Debra J. Fisher 9.1^[15] September 9, 2003 7 7 "The Escape" Sanford Bookstaver Josh Schwartz 8.8^[15] September 16, 2003 8 8 "The Rescue" Michael Lange Melissa Rosenberg & Allan Heinberg 9.27^[16] October 29, 2003 9 9 "The Heights" Patrick Norris Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer 7.52^[17] November 5, 2003 10 10 "The Perfect Couple" Michael Fresco Allan Heinberg 8.28^[18] November 12, 2003 11 11 "The Homecoming" Keith Samples Josh Schwartz & Brian Oh 9.03^[19] November 19, 2003 12 12 "The Secret" James Marshall Allan Heinberg & Josh Schwartz 6.9^[20] November 26, 2003 13 13 "The Best Chrismukkah Ever" Sanford Bookstaver Stephanie Savage 9.27^[21] December 3, 2003 14 14 "The Countdown" Michael Fresco Josh Schwartz 7.99^[22] December 17, 2003 15 15 "The Third Wheel" Sandy Smolan Melissa Rosenberg 9.4^[23] January 7, 2004 16 16 "The Links" Michael Lange Debra J. Fisher & Erica Messer 8.9^[24] January 14, 2004 17 17 "The Rivals" Ian Toynton Josh Schwartz 12.72^[25] January 21, 2004 18 18 "The Truth" Rodman Flender Allan Heinberg 12.70^[26] February 11, 2004 19 19 "The Heartbreak" Lev L. Spiro Josh Schwartz 10.95^[27] February 18, 2004 20 20 "The Telenovela" Sanford Bookstaver Stephanie Savage 9.56^[28] February 25, 2004 21 21 "The Goodbye Girl" Patrick Norris Josh Schwartz 10.27^[29] March 3, 2004 22 22 "The L.A." David M. Barrett Josh Schwartz 11.09^[30] March 24, 2004 23 23 "The Nana" Michael Lange Allan Heinberg 11.37^[31] March 31, 2004 24 24 "The Proposal" Helen Shaver Liz Friedman & Josh Schwartz 10.49^[32] April 14, 2004 25 25 "The Shower" Sandy Smolan J. J. Philbin 10.13^[33] April 21, 2004 26 26 "The Strip" James Marshall Allan Heinberg 10.52^[34] April 28, 2004 27 27 "The Ties That Bind"

Get Well Soon Marissa Cooper.

Former O.C. starlet/professional girlfriend and London-club-goer/likely heroin-sniffer, Mischa Barton called 911 Wednesday night and was sent down to Cedars. As of yesterday A.M., her publicist reported it was a case of pesky wisdom teeth...we begged to differ. We were correct. She's collapsed in that proverbial Tijuana alleyway, and been placed under a 5150 psychiatric hold by the state of California. We've all been there.

These, as mentioned again and a-gane, are psychically trying times. Something crested. 2009 is a big, fast thud for Millennials and Millennial celebrities and the WORLD. Our prayers (?) are with Marissamischa, the insides of hospitals are jarring, but calling for help--of any sort--is a good move.

Robbed

NO ONE TOLD ME

No one told me about The Master of Moulins! Portrait Presumed to be of Madeleine of Burgundy Presented by St. Madeleine and Portrait of the Dauphin Charles-Orlant are especially brilliant.

Verses

First stanza, Fleetwood Mac's "Gypsy."

So I'm back to the Velvet Underground,
Back to the floor that I love,
To a room with some lace and paper flowers.

Yes

This Makes Sense

1:51

"She's so vicious."

A&P loves Beyoncé (and Destiny's Child). We've made it clear. But further praise is necessary, because MJ's death (what else) has brought forth some new information about her, specifically, a fresh calm about the word fierce. I'm a great fan of the most recent effort, I Am...Sasha Fierce, but have bitten my lip at the title and that old moniker, Sasha Fierce, a self-appointed nickname for B's performative "alter ego," each time I've heard it. For me, fierce is a word rooted in Tyra Banks' America's Next Top Empire, over-overused gay fay-shun slang for...um...fabulous? We also love ANTM/The Tyra Show, but DIFFERENT WORLDS. Fierce struck me as dumb and cartoonish, fine for reality television, but not for our reigning Diva.

However, on Friday June 26th, the day after MJ's passing, while watching the "Thriller" video, I noted phrases in which it was impossible to describe his dance, his expressions, his singing as anything but fierce. In 1982, Michael set aside sweetness (of both the precocious soul-child and disco-sugar variety) and attacked his steps and lyrics, not-so-incidentally playing a hungry zombie and werewolf. By the late eighties, ferocity was MJ's standard, a central theme of the album, Bad.

Now, B's use of fierce seems part of an old, appropriate tradition. She is a brilliantly aggressive performer, with a good bit of Michael's disarming sweetness at her disposal. She has posed this dichotomy of humble Houston Belle and strutting, otherworldly Alpha herself, and, finally, I see that it works. Ann Powers disagrees with me. Oh well.

The only thing that still consternates is B's use of the word it....as in, "Shoulda' put a ring on it," or "Check Up On It," a song that has sounded so good to me lately that I've worked to quiet Mom's voice in my head--"This dehumanizes women!"--and listen to it on repeat...it's not like I don't absorb countless derogatory rap songs with pleasure.

Toro

Rites Aid

For Shame

I'm embarrassed to see people--like twin hens, Lindsey Graham and Jeff Sessions--being racist/sexist and small in/about/over Judge Sotomayor. And honestly, it's not so surprising that the Times is one of the most irritating offenders: "Her speeches, endlessly dissected in the weeks since President Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court, reveal a fiery Latino pride." Oh G-d.

Cobby.

I'm OK. You're OK. Again.

Where Dash Snow died:

Duh.

I'm OK. You're OK.

View of a Room

Paul Cézanne. The Black Clock. c. 1870. Oil on canvas. Private collection.

Of Course

Of course. One of the basest people I've ever been around. Is it sick to say good riddance? Sure, but whatever.

What About Style?--Bastille Day

I've been taking my cues from MJ and late-nite sitcom reruns lately, but this sans-culotte and citoyenne are turning my head--major. They do a thing I've always loved.

Bad Taste Prevails

Important

Folk Art For Bastille Day

For Shame

A year before her death, the urban activist Jane Jacobs, then 88, wrote a remarkably prescient letter urging Mayor Bloomberg to scuttle his plans for the Williamsburg waterfront. “Even the presumed beneficiaries of this misuse of governmental powers, the developers and financiers of luxury towers, may not benefit,” she wrote. “Misused environments are not good long-term economic bets.” Four years later, Jacobs’s prophecy has been realized...

--This excerpt from New York's recent piece on the disastrous development muck-ups in North Williamsburg is the last bit of proof needed in a case against Mike Bloomberg. The man who pays no heed to Jane Jacobs is not the man I want mayoring New York City!

"He's a soulmate for me right now!"

"Obvi" is like a shorter version of "obviously." "Klar" is like German for "obvi."

What Gives?

A Jaguar without a hood ornament?!

Totem

Mild Discomfort (for Monday)

I ASKED JESUS IF HE LOVED ME, AND HE SPREAD OUT HIS ARMS AND DIED.

I found that phrase printed on a standard Avery label in a bathroom stall at Memphis International Airport last summer while I was....the point is this: When did y'all start hearing about Ed Hardy? Maybe Christian Audigier's bolts of fabrique were right there all along, displayed at Flying A beside the Von Dutch bowling bags (hotness), and I didn't take note....?