Whoa! This is funkelicious news for funkaholics. Very promising sample. H/T OffBeat. See also Billboard.
Antisemitic Violence in Europe, 2005-2015
No surprise concerning the perpetrators, the unholy alliance of the green and the red. Full report here.
Do U Want It?
Yes I do. This for funky Friday. As a dyed-in-the-wool funkster I’m hoping to be able catch this funkumentary about the Maple Leaf staple Papa Grows Funk.
With no play lists and no rehearsals every Papa Grows Funk performance is its own masterpiece of funk.
Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind
Walker Percy Wednesday 150
What if then even the erotic becomes devalued? What if it happens, as Paul Ricoeur put it, that, “at the same time that sexuality becomes insignificant, it becomes more imperative as a response to the disappointments experienced in other sectors of human life”?
What then? Does the self simply diminish, subside into apathy like laboratory animals deprived of sensory stimulation? Or does the demoniac spirit of the self, frustrated by the failure of Eros, turn in the end to the cold fury of Saturn?
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Don’t you believe in love?
Yes, but the word has been polluted. Beware of people who go around talking about loving and caring.
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World War II: Betty Grable, Anne Frank, Adolf Eichmann, Stalin; the subsidence of the erotic in favor of a rise in the dispassionate, abstract violence of ideology, Fascism, Nazism, Communism; war increasingly in the hands of technicians; the decency of Truman and Oppenheimer contrasted with the death of 100,000 women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Arendt’s banality of evil = the growing disparity between the monstrous violence of technology and the smallness of the technician-perpetrators; World War II as a transition period between the decline of the Christian era and the rise of the age of technology; 50,000,000 dead.
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Then how do you account for the fact that with the appearance of man there also appeared for the first time in the Cosmos, as far as we know, language, mind, self, and consciousness, and almost immediately thereafter a train of disasters and triumphs which seem to have very little to do with adapting to an environment—such as organized warfare against himself, composing Don Giovanni, Charlie Manson, John Keats, suicide, joy, madness, murder, heroism, modern medicine, child abuse, loving care for the genetically malformed—and in recent years the appearance of the demoniac spirit of the erotic and the violent expressing itself in every conceivable variety of florid sexual behavior which has nothing to do with reproduction or survival of the species, and that with the very rise of science there has occurred the spectacular rise in technological violence, so that more men have been killed in this century than in all others put together—and that finally there should have come to pass the present state of affairs which surpass all belief, not merely that this very “matter” you speak of, which Democritus and Darwin and even Dalton and Boyle saw as peaceable little miniballs of atoms colliding and joining, is in fact possessed of an energy of such an order that one-quarter teaspoon will destroy Greater New York, but that this very secret and this very matter—and here the mind reels—should find itself in the hands of this selfsame demoniac autonomous self, itself a creature of science?
John McWhorter on the Evolution of Language and Words on the Move
Booker T Jones
A lifelong ambition to see Booker T live came to fruition this past weekend. This was no master lazily going through the “greatest hits” motions but a whistle-sharp musical genius taking us on the amazing Stax journey and surrounded with younger extremely talented musicians and vocalists doing justice to foundational songs — Knock on Wood and Dock of the Bay — to name but two. Dispensing with Green Onions about mid-set, was a testament to just how deep and expansive Booker’s work is. Booker’s power and finesse showed off the many glorious tunes that Booker T had a hand in. It’s amazing that Booker’s son Ted has not being playing guitar for that long — he was quite amazing. Can’t wait to see Booker T again this coming winter: one of my funk-soul triumvirate, the others being Curtis Mayfield and Bobby Womack. Booker’s show offset my disappointment in not being able to see Ennio Morricone’s final shows. Praise doesn’t get any higher than this.
Explaining Postmodernism
The very excellent Stephen Hicks whom I had the pleasure of meeting earlier this year has made his book freely available online.
Walker Percy Wednesday 149
Five modes of recreation might be deduced from the semiotic which follows upon the placement of an autonomous unspeakable self in its world. The recreational modes of the autonomous self are understandable in terms of the semiotic options open to it, that is, those transactions with its world, itself, and other selves which are specified by its own placement in its world and its perception of itself as unspeakable.
They are:
Travel, the actual movement of the self in its world.
Sports, the disposing of oneself by contest and in team sports, the creation of a quasi community and territory, and the consequent identification of self with us against them.
Media, those transactions in which the self receives signs from other selves through a medium. Such a category can include sign-transactions as diverse as reading War and Peace, watching Dallas on TV, listening to The Grateful Dead on tape, hearing Dan Rather on the five-thirty news.
Drugs: the alteration of consciousness or the anesthetizing of the unspeakability of self.
Sex: the cheapest, most readily available and pleasurable mode of intercourse with our selves and the only mode of intercourse by which the self can be certain of its relationship with other selves—by touching and being touched, by giving and receiving pleasure, by penetrating or being penetrated.
Polarities of the “authentic” vs. the “inauthentic” are easily discernible in recreational modes. The criteria of authenticity are not necessarily objective but have rather to do with the rules by which the self allows or disallows its own experience.
For example, in travel, the actual movement of the self in the world to escape the expanding nought of the autonomous self at home, different selves will be disappointed or satisfied or delighted according as the trip falls short of, meets, or exceeds the expectation of the self. But the expectation of the self, to be informed in its nothingness—if only I can get out of this old place and into the new right place, I can become a new person—places a heavy burden on travel.
Three people take a bus tour of Mexico.
The bus breaks down and the tourists have to make an unscheduled stop, an old abandoned monastery converted to a questionable hotel by a questionable hotelier, like Ava Gardner in Night of the Iguana.
Traveler A is unhappy. She paid for certain accommodations and expects them. Things have gone awry. She makes everyone miserable with her complaints.
Traveler B is delighted. Having set great store by this trip, he is disappointed by its routineness, by Latinized Holiday Inns, by condo-rimmed beaches, by his boring fellow tourists. Now the unexpected happens. He feels he has left the beaten path. With satisfaction he surveys his new lodgings, a monk’s cell with adobe walls yea thick—he tells his friends later—and a single window overlooking a lush jungle. An adventure. What next?
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One might be looking for adventure, sex, who knows?—or perhaps one has a rotten job and a rotten marriage and so may want nothing more than a mindless hiatus, so that it doesn’t matter whether the bus is lost or found or touring Mexico or Ireland. It’s too bad that A is unhappy, it is nice that B is happy, and a matter of indifference that C is neither. But what more is there to say?
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The expectations of the autonomous self, to be informed in its nothingness—if only I can get out of this old place and into the right new place, I can become a new person—pins a quasi-religious hope on, of all things, travel.
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Scene in one thousand movies: a party, formal stuffed-shirt party, NYC cocktail party, country club party, New Year’s Eve party, hippie party—any kind of party—but with the one common denominator of a failed festival, a collapsed and fragmented community. There is always the painfully perceived gap between what is and what might be. If there were such a device as a social-relationship indicator and one could quantify the relationship what-is/what-might-be, most parties would register less than 5 percent. Hence the booze. Unlike the use of spirits in the past, the purpose of alcohol is not to celebrate the festival but to anesthetize the failure of the festival. The locus of the failure is the self. Richard Pryor: Why free-basing? Because it wipes out the self.
Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy
Someone has uploaded a reissue of Bernard Williams’ classic book.
[m]y conclusion is that the demands of the modern world on ethical thought are unprecedented, and the ideas of rationality embodied in most contemporary moral philosophy cannot meet them; but some extension of ancient thought, greatly modified, might be able to do so.
Wanting philosophy to be at once profound and accessible, they resent technicality but are comforted by obscurity.
manwithoutqualities 