Helpful Hints for Troubled Times

Eight practical uses for all those remaindered/now-never-to-be-read books with titles like "Islamofascism: The Unsurpassable Challenge of Our Time":

1. Kindling for oil-drum fire in your "hobo jungle".
2. Bricks to seal windows in foreclosed houses.
3. Projectiles to throw at bankers on steps of courthouse.
4. Process them into chopsticks, then export to China, thus redressing trade deficit.
5. Use as armor for future military draftees.
6. Shred, then stuff into Salvation-Army windbreaker as insulation.
7. Store in time capsule as evidence of gullibility of "literate" public of '00s for incredulous future generations.
8. Toilet paper.

MIA: A Call to Arms

I read today that the Tamil Tigers Liberation Army are about to be routed by the Sri Lankan military. I believe that there's only one way for these insurgents to turn the military situation around: Their fellow traveler MIA must record a baile funk/bhangra/trip-hop/grime club-rocking jam entreating them to continue the struggle. This recording should include references to old-school DJ equipment, and to contemporary developments in avant-garde design and couture. Then EMI or whatever major label she records for could hire a fleet of helicopters to fly over the Sri Lankan government positions, blasting MIAs new song out of giant speakers, like Robert Duvall in Apocalypse Now. The government troops will flee in terror. I am sure this will work.

Ideas For Doomed Bands

1) the band is really vocal about being influenced by bands from the seminal era of punk, but they're the wrong bands -- the now forgotten retrograde also-rans who were just along for the ride. Like they'll be in an interview talking about, "yeah, we're really into the classic CBGBs sound, you know, like the Tuff Darts, or the Shirts." And when the interviewer asks, "but what about the Talking Heads, or Television?" they'll just look on in stupefied incredulity. Or they'll talk about how much they're getting into' 77 British punk, like 999, or the Motors. Etc.

2) Alternatively, the band could be influenced by infamous rock plagiarists. For instance, they could describe in intimate detail the ways their sound was shaped by A C. Temple, the Inca Babies, or Buffalo Tom. Then, when the interviewer asked them, "Yeah, but what about Sonic Youth, the Birthday Party, and Dinosaur Jr." -- i.e., the respective groups the other three ripped off in the first place -- they'd ask who they were. When the interviewer explained, they'd get real excited. "Whoa, those guys sound really good. We're gonna have to check them out!"

Lafayette, Robespierre --- And Us

I've been reading Albert Mathiez's history of the French Revolution. Most recent histories of the French Revolution aren't very good. The Jacobin years are treated as a mere precursor of Soviet communism (bad); at best, the early years of the revolution are granted the status of a first step toward the kind of world we in the G7 countries now inhabit (very, very good). On the bright side, these lame attempts to domesticate and familiarize the Revolution demonstrate its continuing vitality and relevance (and the increasing inability of our intellectual class to accept that anything other than itself has ever been entirely real). Given the widening ruin into which our placid, "post-historical" world has suddenly and unexpectedly detoured, we may likely expect new interpretations that look more kindly on the salutary ruptures with "business as usual" that Revolutionary France undertook in response to its own crisis of fiscal collapse and elite corruption. But what's missing in all this is a sense of the utter singularity of what happened in France. Writing in the 1920s, long before France was "modernized", Mathiez got this. In 1789, with minimal violence and little warning, the French people found themselves standing on the edge of an open landscape without precedent. Nobody knew what democracy was supposed to be, where it ended, what, if anything, was off-limits. Contrast this with our smugly self circumscribed world, where everything is "known" so well that nothing "unknown" can happen -- because if it was "valid" it would be happening already, right? The revolutionary French literally "stopped at nothing" -- once it became clear that a clean break was being made with the coherent world embodied in the old order,there was no remaining basis to declare this or that specific thing sacrosanct.

I think it's going to become increasingly obvious that some such attitude is the only "practical" response to the actual dimensions of the situation we now find ourselves in.

Wolverine versus Dick Cheney

I had this idea for a new X-Men movie, set during "W."'s first term. Dick Cheney declares mutants part of the axis of evil (which would make it more of a quadrilateral, or perhaps a trapezoid). Anyway, Prof. Xavier decides to send one of the X-Men to Cheney's "secure location", to see what's really going on. They pick Wolverine, because of his tracking ability. Using a shrink ray he's just built, Xavier makes Wolverine microscopic. Cyclops takes the place of one of the waiters at the White House correspondents' dinner and sneaks Wolverine into the vice president's fettuccine Alfredo. The idea is that Cheney will unsuspectingly take Wolverine along in his stomach, eventually crapping him out in his lair. Unfortunately, Xavier screws up, and Wolverine reverts to full-size inside Cheney's stomach, while the vice president is on stage with Darrell Hammond and one of the guys from the McLaughlin group. The contents of Cheney's torso explode all over the horrified media nabobs and Bush administration apparatchicks. Glistening with carnage, Wolverine glares at the crowd. "What are you lookin' at, bub?"

Recently I recalled this cartoon by Raymond Pettibon -- the guy who did the cover art for Sonic Youth's Goo and lots of Black Flag records. It's got this picture of a woman dressed in 1940s clothing crying for her boyfriend or husband, who's just been "bumped off" by the Mob. The caption reads "They didn't have to cut him up. They could've done it nice."

This struck me as an admirably succinct summation of vast tracts of contemporary (Neo) liberal ideology, particularly in such areas as "humanitarian intervention" and "just war theory."

my first blog

My name is Mike O'Flaherty. I used to write for The Baffler -- some of you may have read my article "Rockerdammerung" collected in the Boob Jubilee anthology. I do a radio show called "Radio Zero" on WHPK 88.5 FM in Chicago. (We're web streaming now, but I don't know the URL, I'll get back to you on that.) I named this blog after a song by my favorite band, the Germs. I also reckon it'll give you some idea of what to expect.

Well, that's it for now. Be seeing you...