Think About Your Blue Blood

Last night I saw the new documentary Examined Life. What most people don't realize is that the movie, which consists entirely of conversations with some of the luminaries of contemporary philosophy, is actually an extended commentary on the Rolling Stones' album Let It Bleed (1969). I discovered this quite by accident. When the movie let out it was getting close to midnight but I felt like having a cup of tea so I stopped into a cafe where they happened to be in the middle of playing "Midnight Rambler." In the film, the philosopher Avital Ronnell paraphrased Jacques Derrida at length to explain how we must maintain a buffer of mis-understanding and un-knowing with our fellow humans, because as soon as we think we understand another person completely completely, we are making a presumption—and it is always a dangerous presumption, as it gives us the power to discount and discredit them. "As soon as you feel you know the Other, you want to kill the Other," as she put it.

At first that sounded like a lot of philosophical jargon. Then I realized it was really just an extended post-structuralist meditation on the song I was hearing in the cafe:
Did you hear about the Midnight Rambler,
The one you never seen before?...
And if you ever catch the Midnight Rambler,
I'll stick my knife right down your throat.
The Midnight Rambler is a reflection, par excellence, of the Other, because you've never seen him, and everything you presume to know about him is mediated. And as soon as you know him —and he knows you—you're dead.



I noticed that many of the philosophers in the film talked a lot about human interdependency and how important it is, and how we can’t really live independently, despite what we’d like to think sometimes. Yes, I thought as I watched the film. I agree. We need one another. But do I need Avital Ronnell, Peter Singer, Judith Butler, Martha Nussbaum and Kwame Anthony Appiah to tell me this? Aren’t there more complicated philosophical questions they could untangle—nettling topics I haven’t even thought of?

Then again, interdependence also turns out to be a major theme of the Rolling Stones' album, so maybe it was unavoidable. It’s clear as soon as you hear the man-woman harmonies of the first track, “Gimme Shelter.” Then there's "Live with Me." And of course the title track asserts "we all need someone we can bleed on," and offers that "if you want it, you can bleed on me." So you could even say that the importance of human interdependence is in fact the central theme of the album.

One of the film's most powerful moments came during the conversation between Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor, who described living with arthrogryposis, a muscular disease that forces her to use a wheelchair. "Growing up, while I could still walk," she said, "people used to say I walked like a monkey...I guess this really illustrates one of the reasons people feel uncomfortable around the disabled." Here she paused, and you could tell her thoughts had considerable emotional force behind them. "We force people to confront the limits of being human."


Taylor was no doubt thinking—perhaps unconsciously—of Mick Jagger’s most forced vocal line of the album:
I’m a monkeeeeeeeeey. Man.
There you have it—confronting the challenges of human animality, in just four words.




At first, the film’s title perplexed me. What could Socrates’ maxim—“the unexamined life is not worth living”—have to do with the Rolling Stones? But then I realized it was just another reading of the phrase “let it bleed.” After all, you have to let it bleed if you want to examine life. Bleed, and you’re forced to take a hard look at what allows you to live. Let life bleed, examine it.


The most impressive oral performance of the film belonged to Cornel West: “I’m a blues man. Blues is personal catastrophe lyrically expressed. The blues starts with the heap of fragments that is history—the heaps upon heaps—and creates elegance from that. It is not predicated on a fall from a state of unity, as with Romanticism, and so it does not get hung up on that disunity; rather, the blues begins from a moment of dissonance. That’s the stink of life, the decay—what I call the funk.” Wow, I thought, he’s drawing together all these tropes from African-American music, Walter Benjamin, the Christian reading of the Bible—but what exactly is he getting at?


Then it hit me: all of Let it Bleed is based on the blues. In fact, so is all of the Rolling Stones’ music. So West was just leveraging his prodigious philosophical knowledge in order to remind us that we need to understand the blues, so that......so that what? Given that the Rolling Stones are one of the most successful pop groups of the last fifty years, it’s safe to say that people of all ages and nationalities—people with wildly different ideologies—enjoy their music. In other words, people understand (probably unconsciously) the blues’ foundation of dissonance and decay despite the systems of thought and consumption imposed on them. They don’t need philosophy—West’s or someone else’s—to understand it. Indeed, this beginning with fragmentation and dissonance that West is talking about seems to be a basic factor of life in the second half of the 20th century.

So maybe West should have been addressing a different problem: the fact that the Rolling Stones have forgotten their own blues. They are putting their old songs under glass cases even as they deny the decay of their bodies. Ignoring Socrates’ imperative, they are no longer preparing for death in their art.

With Spam Like This, Who Needs Emails?

Tomorrow, Bernard Madoff will plead guilty to running a Ponzi scheme that lasted two decades and raked in nearly $65 million dollars. In his honor, after months of ignoring it, I finally opened the spam folder on my email account, only to find some unforgettable messages.

The first was purportedly from my bank, and informed me that because of numerous failed attempts to sign into my account, the bank (which referred to itself as "we") was enacting additional security measures, so would I please just click this link and enter my username, password, account number, etc. The best thing about this email was that, in addition to the usual grammatical gaffs (missing periods, "their" instead of "they're") the scammers didn't even bother to get the bank's signature colors right.

The next message was from Daisy Rostein, representing Jan's & Company Fine French Antiques, an eBay clearinghouse. In this message, which began "Dear Sir/Ma," I was encouraged to apply for a job as an "Antique Collector /Agent /Cashier / Payment Dispatcher and Payment Coordinator," in which I would work part-time from home mailing payments for purchases made over eBay. And I would make $500 per week. (Corollary scam: when I googled "Daisy Rostein," the first link that came up said "Daisy Rostein is on Facebook." But her profile had no picture, no network, and no friends.)

The third message was the best. From a mister Edward Hassan, an employee of the Labuan branch of Deutsche Bank, this email informed me that some seven million dollars worth of money had been sitting unclaimed since the death of Mr. Sheu Yang-dong, the former Governor of the Taiwan Central Reserve Bank. Mr. Yang-dong and his wife and daughter had been killed in a plane crash on February 16, 1999, and, as ten years had passed without the money being claimed, Edward Hassan was now in a position to name me as the designated next of kin if I decided to enlist his help, give me him my phone number and home address, promise him forty percent of the money, etc. To indicate his good faith, he assured me that he had not, in fact masterminded the death of Yang-dong and his family, and that they had without a doubt died of "natural causes." How a plane crash could be interpreted as a natural cause of death is unclear, but I chalked up this slip to a bad translation from the Malay. Or Arabic or whatever.

Googling "Taiwan Central Reserve Bank" brought up identical emails from Mr. Nicholas Lee (Deutsche Bank London), Mr. Lucas THerbert (Labuan) and Dr. Samailla Nuhu (Ougadougou, Burkina-Faso).

Walt and Walt

Rereading Pater -
...he found it pleasant to think of the resistless element which left one hardly a foot-space amidst the yielding sand; of the old beds of lost rivers, surviving now only as deeper channels of the sea...("Sebastian van Storck" from Imaginary Portraits)

- I was reminded of Benjamin:
...today...the work of art becomes a creation with entirely new functions, among which the one we are conscious of, the artistic function, later may be recognized as incidental. ("The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction")

Of course, the perceived affinity might also have something to do with the covers of the two books:

Street Meet

Covert Street, Brooklyn.

The Moving Image

Last month I went on a road trip through Texas, Louisiana, Florida, Alabama, Tennessee and then back to New York via Baltimore (more on that later, hopefully). As might be expected, I saw a lot of things on cars and other moving objects. Here are some notable examples:

Bathroom cowboys; truckstop on Route 281 north of Austin, Texas, January 17.

The Stockyards, Fort Worth, Texas, January 18.

Dallas, Texas, January 18.

Route 190, near Baton Rouge, Louisiana, January 20.

This guy came out of nowhere at a gas station in southern Alabama, January 23.

Sign of the times; January 28, near Strasburg, Virginia.

It was really funny at the time

I saw what I thought was a book by William Carlos Williams called An American Dad. In fact, it was a book called William Carlos Williams: An American Dad.

This is the cover illustration:

The Moose in the Coffee Shop

Sometime around New Year’s I was sitting in a coffee shop in Chelsea when a man who looked to be in his forties walked in wearing calf-high leather lace-up boots, into which his jeans were tucked, a red flannel jacket, and a wool cap. He was dressed as if he had just gotten back from a hunting trip in 1955. He ordered a coffee, sat down at the table next to me, and proceeded to read the New York Times. There was no moose strapped to the trunk of his car: I learned from a conversation I overheard that he intended to spend most of the day in that fashion. What struck me about his outfit was that just the week before I had noticed an identical pair of boots in a J. Crew catalog on a friend’s kitchen counter. They were prominently displayed as part of the new winter collection. "Red Wing Shoes® went back to the archives to find this one for us," the catalog read, "the Classic Irish Setter [$325.00]. They even brought back the old-style Irish Setter label and Red Wing logo just for us. You won't find this version anywhere else—unless you hit the jackpot in a vintage store. Put them on, and you'll feel like you've stepped back in time—1952 to be exact, when the original version of this style was first introduced." Then just this past week, I was passing a vintage store in the Village when I saw an entire row of similar hunting boots on show in the window. Is “fifties hunter” the trendy retro look of the moment?

The “retro” element has been an important part of fashion since at least the mid-1960s, when pop musicians started rummaging through second-hand clothing shops for particularly flashy items. This kind of vintage fashion always had as its purpose the re-appropriation of out-of-fashion objects. Wearing a nineteenth century military coat or a WWII bomber jacket looked jarring precisely because it would be juxtaposed with contemporary pants and shoes, and/or with items from a totally different era. A hodge-podge look often resulted. The point of re-appropriation was not to look like anything that had been seen before.

Hipsterism has killed re-appropriation. Now the point of retro fashion is not to integrate out-of-fashion items into a new look, but to recreate an entire “out-of-fashion” look from one era or another, whether the look is fifties housewife, seventies housewife, eighties housewife, fifties greaser, eighties greaser, eighties punk, eighties metal fan, eighties hip-hop fan, eighties nerd, etc. (Although of course the range of acceptable eras is limited. No one dresses like a twenties flapper or a belle-epoque society woman, for instance.) American Apparel has created a whole industry out of providing hipsters everything they need to look just like the high school students in eighties sitcoms they’ve seen mostly in re-runs—from t-shirt to backpack to gym socks. A truly enviable hipster will make sure to get an entire look down, coordinating clothes, shoes, hair style, and accessories into an easily identifiable whole. Even when clothes from different eras are worn together, the look will be a sum of identifiable parts. The point here is to look exactly like something that has been seen before.

Which brings us back to the man in the hunting boots in the coffee shop. The condition of his boots, coat and beard (he had a too-perfectly trimmed beard intended to denote a rugged outdoorsman) indicated that his outfit had never seen the woods, and had most likely seen very little besides the box they came in. Why does a grown man dress up like he’s going on a hunting trip in 1955 when in fact he’s going to read the paper in a coffee shop in Chelsea? Today, in New York, this is not ridiculous—it’s trendy. It’s supposed to signify creativeness, individuality. But in fact it reduces individuality to choosing your favorite decade. This is hipsterism. This is what it does to people. And now it is powerful enough that it has reached the middle-aged.