I've been wishing I could get ahold of the papers presented at the pop conference. Oliver Wang has posted the paper on 'Apache' by Matos (who posts the original draft on his blog anyway), as well as a bunch of different recordings of, or sampling, 'Apache'.

'To watch them play is to wonder why everyone in the audience is taking them so seriously. As refugees from the zealously ethical punk counterculture seeking asylum in the hopelessly style-obsessed indie subculture, that's their cross to bear.'

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Does it seem odd that stripping wasn't invented until the twentieth century? Does it seem odd that it was 'invented'? (Or 'discovered' maybe?) I can't decide.

Another way of saying that might be to ask how much sense it makes to talk about the 'form', in Adorno's sense, of a joke. My intuition at the moment is that anything that could be interestingly called the 'form' of a joke will draw in so much about the joke's situation - in language, in the knowledge and affective understanding (a la Ted Cohen) of the joke-teller and the audience - that it would be missing some kind of point to insist on it being the form of the joke, as the brief event of speech or writing between people that we might be inclined to limit it to. And, if so: then wouldn't we really be looking to attribute the 'form', the sedimentation of content, to something larger, shared, and most importantly, not yet objectified, about language? Wouldn't that be nice? A reason for saying: it's not as bad as it seems. (Adorno would probably prefer to say: it could be worse, then.)

I wonder just how surrounded by these promises we might find ourselves if we were able to locate them in creations less formally elaborated than the string quartet, the play, the painting; Ted Cohen, for example, would probably let in jokes and metaphors, having found no great reason not to. These are made of language; it's a small step from there to the possibility of hearing the promise whenever someone opens her mouth.

'Does a philosopher give invitations to a lecture? Isn't it that, just as the sun attracts nutriment to itself, so he attracts those who will be benefited? What physician issues invitations for someone to be cured by him?'

'all of which combine to create a cacophony that sounds like a roomful of drunks arguing with an early Steve Reich record'

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I have some kind of standard for talking about myself, and experiences I have had; often it registers as feeling held back from writing or talking, unless I feel authoritative enough. It helps to have a sense of completeness or wholeness or incisiveness about what I want to say.

This standard is for 'my' experiences but it's what I use when talking about my experiences of things, namely, other people's artworks. But then when I want to say the same sorts of things about other people that I might say about artworks, that authoritative feeling never comes. The words I want to use feel exposed.

My new apartment is in Frogtown, just a short (kind of) walk from downtown Saint Paul. I have determined to spend more time downtown and figure it out. It needs figuring out.

I wrote something long and snide about the particular way in which the downtown area is dead after business hours, but I decided that it was too snide and probably too ignorant, and so I deleted it.

One thing I saw tonight was this memorial to Roy Wilkins, the civil rights leader. As with any piece of public memorial art these days, particularly one that is not plainly a representation of a famous or non-famous person, or a big rock with dead people's names on it, it has a big sign explaining some of its symbolic features. But, for once, I was surprised. The sign explains that the outer walls of the memorial contain quotations from Wilkins' speeches and writings; and they do, but I didn't see the point of inscribing them inside the little metal doors (you can see two in the picture I linked to, inset slightly down from the top of the wall). I tried one and found it was designed to swing closed again on its own, due to its weight. Since I didn't expect this it had closed before I actually read the quotation inside. You have to work to find out what's inside, I thought. When I walked away I thought: oh. You have to work to know what's inside.