I've been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper's, I've digested a few books, which I'll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled "Essays on Art & Democracy," this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don't know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn't really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey's prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper's recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the "retreat into criticism" and the "politics of infinite demands." It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who's an art critic and not a "Critical Theorist," but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I've ever read.

Latest Chris Bowers post has some wonky breakdowns of the upcoming political shenanigans. I'm going to have to vote early/absentee as I'll be on the road Feb 5th. Leaning towards Obama as a Clinton victory here would be decisive for her campaign, and it doesn't look like Edwards will be positioned to pick up many delegates.

I also really agree w/Chris's closing sentiment:

If I could only choose one outcome, I would choose Romney winning the Republican nomination, since it should lead to a big Democratic victory in the general election. For my money, that is a lot more important than the differences between Clinton and Obama, and a lot better than struggling to try and scratch out a narrow, come from behind win against McCain.

On a pure candidate level, Huck! remains the strongest GOP challenger, I think. He's their best perfoming politician. However, he's low on cash and really is loathed by Republican insiders and business elites, and the media has decided -- after years of telling us all how important some generic concept of "faith" is in politics -- that an actual honest-to-jeebus believer is weird and icky.

McCain, on the other hand, has the media in a veritable trance and maintains a lot of crossover mystique. At the same time he's shown GOP insiders that he's willing to play ball and has the anti-choice credibility to rope in evangelicals to his coalition. The fact that he seems eager for war will probably not come up as a campaign issue. He'd be a formidable candidate.

It's been a good weekend, with lots of sleeping in and no drudgework at all. Absent the pressure-cooker mentality I tend to find myself a little listless and bored, especially in the recent aftermath.

When you're a small child, the most boring day in your life is the day after you go to Disneyland. It's a very high high, tons of stimulation, really kind of incredible if you think about all the psychic energy that gets built up by the whole Disney cultural complex. Anyway, the next day you're one strung-out six year old, and you don't even really understand what's happening.

The trajectory of my adult life has grown up around projects. Productions, plays, parties, road trips, websites, campaigns... all variations on the general theme of engaging in an ostensibly focused effort to Get Something Done. At their best, they're like little births; creative miracles born in the spastic passion of inspiration and carried to term with love, craft and care.

At their best or worst though, projects tend to leave me with that same Disneyland hangover. The stress and attention called for to see things through the last mile are (ideally) some of the highest functioning times we experience as human beings. Afterwards, our metaphysitcal children born, grown, gone, and possibly even dead, we wonder what to do with our lives.

Sen. Clinton wins narrowly in Nevada caucuses; Romney takes it in a cakewalk.

Also voting, but not done yet, is South Carolina, a state with an awesome flag:

Down there Obama has been on the upswing among Democrats and McCain and Huck! will fight it out on the GOP side. McCain has the big mo', and it would be sweet vengeance for his 2000 "illegitimate black love child" drubbing at the hands of Rove and Co, but you never know.

On both sides, it's looking like no clear victor until at least Feb 5th, and while media coverage focuses a lot on "winners," the truth is that delegates are won proportionally. Obama and Clinton will get virtually the same number of delegates from Nevada, for instance (UPDATE: bizarrely enough, Obama gets more). It's quite possible that with three or four players splitting the GOP vote, they could go all the way to a brokered convention.

Well, I'm glad I got out of debt, but I'm also glad I didn't do it early enough to sink any money into "the market." While I'm sure many funds will still do well and long-term investors have little to fear, the current economic trajectory is pretty ugly. The dow is headed towards 52-week lows, and there's more bad news to come.

This is what happens when you run things like the Soviets. It's increasingly obvious that our economy, beyond being unsustainably debt-based, is also build on a series of consensual hallucinations that don't map well to reality. Because our made-up-prowess is in "financial products" rather than steel and wheat production, we can get by for longer than they did in the USSR -- and we get hit with mortgage defaults rather than breadlines, which is an improvement -- but the books are no less cooked, and CNBC is a propaganda outlet, not a news channel.

The Big D may indeed be coming, although a new bubble/rally may emerge around alternative energy and infrastructure instead. Here are the fundamentals:

Remembered because Tommy gave me the latest Hold Steady album, and also casting some light on recent events, here's one of my all time favorite Kerouac quotes:

bq. “...boys and girls in America have such a sad time together; sophistication demands that they submit to sex immediately without proper preliminary talk. Not courting talk - real straight talk about souls, for life is holy and every moment is precious.”

It's a good one to remember. Published in 1957 too, meaning it was written and thought even earlier.

And, apropops nothing, my company as if it were run by lolcats.

So, I just added a new feed to my aggremataron. Frank is blogging the process of "Pulling A Wine Bar Out Of A Printing Room" in a historic neighborhood in St. Louis. It's good stuff:

Rented a drill hammer at the Home Depot, like ya do from time to time. Rented it, gave it to someone who in turn busted through some bricks in as subtle a way as possible and then went to return it.

HD Tool Rental Guy: "This is dirty. There's gonna be a $25 dollar fee on this."
Me: "Hold on there, I'll clean it"
HD Tool Rental Guy: "No man, you already returned it"
Me: "I didn't return it, I just put it on that table over there"
HD Tool Rental Guy: "No, I just put it in the system"
Me: "You put it in the system? WHADDAYA, WRITING ME A TICKET OR RENTING ME A TOOL?"

The guy relented. In recognition of both the 60th anniversary of Alekzander Kalashnikov's creation and the work of Ice Cube, "it was a good day, I didn't even have to use my AK."

Should be fun watching Frank pull this off.

It's two steps forward, one step back. I've made it back to the old homestead and have gotten this project out the door (a rather big site) that's been eating my brain and soul for the past couple months. I got locked into a cycle of grinding it out, which can be effective in the short run, but yields diminishing returns over time. I did about ten weeks with no weekends or days off save two for thanksgiving and two for Christmas.

Workaholism is in my DNA (dad and his famous 90 days straight in the oilfields, mom and her neverending string of projects, etc) but this was not the way I like it; too disorganized and haphazard. Too much struggling. The most important thing is to stop struggling. Stress-dreams and exhaustion don't help anyone out.

However, we did get it done, so people are happy and that's a win, and as it was at the same a rather spectacular failure in terms of process, there's a lot to be learned. Blowing it is how you get smart, so I've got that going for me too.

And of course, with this weight lifting, everything else bubbles up like an over-active bottle of orange crush.

Mark reminded me of this quote the other day:

bq. “innocence must die, if we are ever to begin that journey toward that greater innocence called wisdom.”

I feel kind of stuck in the middle there. Innocence is dead, but wisdom has yet to arrive. I've been having a lot of anxiety lately about how life seems to be moving in a direction of dispersion, people all going their separate ways, spreading out over the map and settling down. Even though I'm part of the problem here (maybe because I am), this makes me sad.

It seems like a ridiculous cliché, but I think I've always subconsciously thought my grown-up life would be like living on some kind of commune. Back to my roots!

This is hot:

Politics is like a good martini, or conjugal relations after a period of disagreement and strife. It's hard for it to be too dirty.

For anyone who's tried to email me in the past couple days and gotten a bounce, I apologize. This old server needs to be burned down and restarted. For better accuracy, you can always use my gmail, which is where mail to @outlandishjosh.com goes anyway.

It's outlandish.josh at the gmail.com, yo.