All the items on my last list of resolutions were dispatched with alacrity. So I thought I’d do it again, serving as an inspiration to the lesser among you in terms of spiritual strength and will power. You’re welcome.

1. Appear three-dimensional
2. Pass as white
3. Hunt the most dangerous prey of all . . .  man!
4. Employ the Power of Mental Thinking
5. Fluoresce
6. Implement a surprise ending
7. Be shocked out of my conservatism by the unprecedented antics of youth
8. Write a haiku on writing a haiku about writing this haiku
9. Develop a faith-based mathematics
10. Pay more attention to celebrities and atheists

***

Also, just for the record, these things are not as funny or as great as you pretend they are and deep down you know it, so knock it off.

• Portlandia
• 3D movies
• Mobile apps
• Scandinavian crime novels

Kissing Jacobson

My head is made of an exploding sun | My body from a singularity | Same old same old, son.

Spoek Mathambo: Mshini Wam. South African electronic musician.

Domus Mixtapes: The Sound of Johannesburg. Mixtape from the Italian outfit, put together by BLK JKS and Athi-Patra Ruga.

DJ Quickie Mart: Ask Ya Ma ‘Nem. NOLA funk and soul translated.

(Not from Ya Ma)

Karen Kilgariff: Behind You. She’s a comedian who tells jokes. Unlike every other comedian who has ever picked up a guitar, her songs are actually funny, but they’re also ouchy.

Fifth Ward Fauntleroy & Shorty Moneypenny: Oops, There’s a Lump in Your Tea and Chapz Everywhere. A gentleman and a lady from Staines take filth to Victorian levels, then disappear.

(No video available)

Yacht Bounce. DJ Tony Scratchere, Quickie Mart and others unite the whitest music (80s soft rock) and the blackest (bounce).

Foster the People: Torches. Weird, compelling combo of church choir, punk rock and guy on the coast road with a guitar case.

Al-Haked is a Moroccan rapper, a working class kid from the city of Casablanca. During the early days of the Arab Spring protests in Morocco, Al-Haked, or Muadh Balghawat as his mother calls him, dropped science on the revolution. Only a few days after the February 20 start of the country’s protests, Al-Haked, which means “the spiteful” in Arabic, posted a rap on YouTube which took on the weight of an anthem.

But, as the Mamfakinch blog reminds us, he has been languishing in Akasha prison in Casablanca since September 9.

Based on the strength of message, he “became the official singer of the February 20 Movement, a constant presence at its meetings and marches, where he performed his songs in the street and at rallies.” He directly addressed the king in one song, in another he riffed on royalist slogans.

Al-Haked was not charged with a political crime. Instead, he was arrested for assault and battery. He got into a scuffle of some sort while passing out fliers in his home neighborhood of Alfa with “a young man affiliated with the Royal Youth organization that supports the regime.”

Part of the effort to free him consists of a campaign encouraging people to take a picture of themselves with a sign reading a variant on “Free Hakem” and email it to freemouad@gmail.com.

I first wrote a version of this as a comment on a Facebook page I follow, but I thought it was worth reposting and expanding here on my blog.

Years ago, I hung out at a squat (a “besetztes Haus”) in the Kreuzberg neighborhood of West Berlin, back when Berlin had a West and an East. I met and talked with the ex-cons, Turks, junkies and radical kids who lived there. A guy we had met hitchhiking (who dressed in women’s cloths) took us up to the roof of the apartment house they occupied. If you had slipped off that roof you would have landed in the no-man’s land, the killing zone, with its mines and razor wire and guard towers. The Wall, in other words, was their wall.

He showed us where he and the others had painted “Mörder!” (“murderers!”), in response to a rash of killings perpetrated by the East German border guards against would-be escapees, in huge black block letters across the entire roof.

The workers in the factory right on the other side of the no-man’s land (or their bosses) had retaliated with a sign painted on the roof of their building, saying, rather confusingly, “Zuerst, muß man arbeiten” (“first you have to work”), which creepily echoed the “Arbeit macht frei” (“work makes you free”) of the concentration camps.

The entryways of these besetzte Häuser all had mesh nets with thousands of pounds of concrete in them, designed to drop with the pull of a cord onto the (West German) cops who frequently tried to roust the occupiers.

The background of the Hausbesetzung movement (en.) was that at that time in Berlin and other cities around Germany, the owners of apartment buildings in the decaying cities had let them fall into disrepair and forced the tenants out. Because of the way the tax code ran in Germany, it cost the owners less to let the buildings lie fallow than to have them tenanted, especially since they would then have to make them livable. Other countries, mostly in Europe, had their versions of the Hausbesetzung movement. (What the specific circumstances of their creation were, I don’t know in any detail. Germany was my place at the time.)

At this time there was a shortage of reasonably-priced housing in Germany and the economy was awful. So, the students and workers and others broke into the places and began living there. These people were not vandals. Most did not, by and large, live in squalor. Instead, they did a tremendous amount of work on the buildings they squatted, fixing the plumbing and electricity, repairing walls and windows and weatherproofing them.

You can make too much of an analogy between between those occupiers and the #occupy movement of today. In some ways, #occupy seems much more abstract, and, I can assure you, the percentage of participants on the margins of society is minuscule in today’s movement compared to those in the besetzte Häuser. But they are not completely unrelated either. I wonder what those who are occupying Wall Street could learn from those who occupied houses.

Twenty years later I visited Berlin, and Kreutzberg, again. I discussed that visit on a radio series called “American Monster,” which I produced for a National Public Radio (NPR) station. The story on Berlin was titled, “The Soundtrack to the Fall of the West.”

The lack of a programmatic political endgame is the strength of #occupywallstreet,  not — as every journalist, and even some protesters, believe — its weakness. The moment #occupywallstreet becomes a “movement,” with a set of rules, the moment it becomes exclusive, it will give birth to a hierarchy, and the moment that hierarchy exists, everything else will end.

#occupywallstreet does not lack or need “demands.” Its existence says certain things: we are invested, we are engaged, we care, we’re upset, we’re worried, we empathize, we want to be involved, we believe, we have faith, we think the world can change for the better and we think we can become agents of some of that change.

The closest thing to a message #occupywallstreet seems to have — message, not demand — is “unfetter the electoral process from big money.” It is my devout hope that the numbers, the volume, increases, the heart increases, the song increases, but that the people as a whole do not give in to the demand of those discomfited by its threatening amorphousness to issues demands that will never be met to people who can never meet them.

We don’t need a proliferation of new interest groups. But a hugely broad-based coalition of Human-Americans might just rock the lawmakers and their financial allies back on their heels, knock them off balance, send them scrambling back with the realization in their minds, “Holy shit, we had better watch our step.”

The power of poteniality, of the threat in shadow, of the mystery, is greater and makes more psychic demands than a monster with a well-documented taxonomy.

Long live the Mona Lisa, O Melissokomos and The Moviegoer!

My uncle painted pictures that were physical devotions of his love and faith. My mother-in-law gave birth to and raised my wife. My friend was a fireman who saved people’s lives. But sure, make maudlin electronic gestures for a man you never knew, swell the river of crocodile tears coursing through Twitter and G+ and Facebook until it’s broad enough for Sobek to slither out of its depths and sun himself on its banks.

Any worth the billionaire had resided in places that not a single one of you have ever seen. His wife saw those places and his kids, his parents and his real friends. But not you. You should go do something that matters. Leave off the shameless worrying of a stranger’s corpse. Let people who meant something to the man mourn him.

I plan to mourn my uncle. And my mother-in-law. And my friend.

Readers and scholars are intimately familiar with Bob Folder’s translation of  Robert Frost’s “Stopping By the Woods on a Snowy Evening,” “Dropping By the Goods on a Low-Brow Heathen.” But they are only now starting to come to terms with a completely unknown alternative translation of that poem called “I Have Felt One Elf Tainted By the Sight,” which is a translation of “Acquainted With the Night.”

I Have Felt One Elf Tainted By the Sight

I have felt one elf tainted by the sight
Of Wookies in chains in shacks of shame.
I’m an outlaw furrier smitten with blight.

I have seen a Wookie’s shadow being blamed
For smoggy skies, a watch, your honor’s teat,
And flopped my pie to crumple up in pain.

Diagalev should smell his dancers’ feet
Then sharpen up his bumptious faille,
Observe a souse and learn to creep.

Touch nuts, but calm them when they start to cry.
The verger spills another on a guy
On whose runny cock was a gangrenous sty.

Rogaine’s fine to use if it is tight.
I have felt one elf tainted by the sight.

Employing the literary archaeological technique of musico-textual analysis, the Center for Folderian Studies has reconstructed a lost poem by the master-poet Bob Folder. Among the poems lost in the infamous Max’s Bob Folder Folder Incident, this poem has been resurrected from a Dream Teens song that used his words for lyrics. (Listen to the song here.)

There was some contention as to whether the song’s lyrics come from a single poem or are the result of merging several together. Dr. Taylor said he believed the lyrics to come from a single poem with the LBaB reference being a list item; this led me to speculate that TtA was also perhaps a list item. Research is ongoing.

Read the poem after the jump.

Strange New Worlds

Athabaskan dithyramb curls into the Dorian mode,
Dark-brown sugar expressions of genetic meaning.
Witness the wrinkle in a waterfall of polished bone.
Puncture an old truth and erase the trademark from off its back
See the mailman, his balls adangle,
The tiny cyclones beneath his skin.
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Giving birth to strange new worlds

Peppermint-dipped waffle-bark arcs in number rainbow
In a Mountbatten freeway through the Nepalese hills
Busting peasants like baseball bats
Through a terracotta vase full of orange Kool-Aid

The last decent page with a fistful of dandelions
Pranced on the girder, slipped in silk booties
Popped on the pavement like a melon full of blood,
Rose up, flower of undefinable texture,
Transformed the German air, wet and cool,
Into a rosary of mnemonic epiphany
That, thrown, glances off the glass coffeetable
In blood-red sparks while he searches the windows for voices.

***

Strange New Worlds (lyrics)

Athabaskan dithyramb curls into the Dorian mode
Dark-brown sugar expressions of genetic meaning
Witness the wrinkle in a waterfall of polished bone
Puncture an old truth
To puncture an old truth
And erase the trademark from off its back
See the mailman, his balls adangle
See the mailman, his balls adangle
The tiny cyclones beneath his skin
The tiny cyclones beneath his
Beneath his skin
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Giving birth to strange new worlds

To puncture an old truth see the mailman
To puncture an old truth just look at the mailman
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Giving birth to strange new worlds
Strange new worlds

Peppermint-dipped waffle-bark
Arcs in number rainbow
In a Mountbatten freeway
Through the Nepalese hills
Busting peasants like baseball bats
Through a terracotta vase full of orange Kool-Aid

The last decent page
With a fistful of dandelions
Pranced on the girder
Slipped in silk booties
Popped on the pavement
He popped on the pavement like a melon full of blood
And I said
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue giving
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Giving birth to strange new worlds

Rose up flower of undefinable texture
Transformed the German air wet and cool
Into a rosary of mnemonic epiphany
That thrown glances off the glass coffeetable
In blood-red sparks while he searches the windows for voices

To puncture an old truth see the mailman
See the mailman see the mailman
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Giving birth to strange new worlds
Giving birth to strange new
Giving birth we’re giving birth
Giving birth to strange new worlds
Strange strange new strange
Strange strange new worlds
Strange ones giving birth to strange new worlds,
Giving birth giving birth see the mailman
Tiny cyclones underneath his skin
Station wagon aperitif Little Bonk-a-Bonk’s
Impossible boogie barn
Tammy the Arthropod glass wiggles in the sprocket moon
Outside they drink the wild chablis
Tammy the Arthropod goes pee
Little Bonk-a-Bonk’s boogie barn
Mention the exquisite fineness in a marmoset’s tongue
Give birth to strange new worlds

I was reading Evgeny Morozov’s essay in Bookforum, “How Much Did Social Media contribute to Revolution in the Middle East.” In it, he says the following as regards an argument Malcolm Gladwell had made.

“To refute ([his argument] that the Internet can be an effective tool for political change when used by grassroots organizations as opposed to atomized individuals), cyber-utopians would need to establish that there was no coordination of these protests by networks of grassroots activists—with leaders and hierarchies—who have forged strong ties (online or offline or both) prior to the protests.”

Now, I think it’s clear that there was some organization by some parties prior to the Jasmine Revolution, in Egypt, at any rate. Wael Ghonim set up the We Are all Khaled Said Facebook account which directed some of the protests and was responsible for a lot of information exchange during the #jan25 uprising in that country.

However, I think that most of the organization was not deeply hierarchical and long-planned. Instead, I think most of the planning was agile (in the general sense of the word). It was more like jazz than classical music. The general melodic and rhythmic options were known to all and those who, in any given situation, extended the most energy tended to move the song. That song having been performed, it became part of the songbook of the uprising as a whole (to labor the metaphor a bit).

At any rate, the thing that Morozov’s argument sparked in me, once I thought out the likely way that leadership was expressed on the fly in Tunisia and Egypt, was a memory of reading the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset‘s book, “The Revolt of the Masses.”

In it, Ortega y Gasset asserts that a modern human’s default setting is as part of the “mass.” He is an undifferentiated blob amid a larger undifferentiated blob – morally, spiritually, intellectually and politically. Only when he challenges himself (or herself) does he become an individual. And once he becomes an invididual, that is what he is until his dying day. Also, he is an individual at the moment he challenges himself, regardless of whether or not he succeeds in whatever challenge he has issued himself.

Even among the leadership in these uprisings that was a result of prior planning and agreement among a sub-group involved in the protests, the leadership that happened there was analogous the the individuality created at the moment of challenge in Ortega y Gassett’s argument. In other words, each time one of the tens of thousands – perhaps hundreds of thousands – of men and women who expressed a moment of leadership, whether it was leading a group of protesters into a square full of cops or passing out brooms to people in a sidestreet, those people went from being members of a passive mass and became the new leaders of their countries.

Take Egypt as an example. Today, instead of one leader and 80 million subjects, the country has tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, of leaders. And all who have not pulled themselves out of the mass to become a leader now knows someone who has. It’s no longer Mubarak who controls the fate of – and has the responsibility for – Egypt’s people. It is not Britain, or the U.S., or Israel, who control the dumb mass of Egyptians with its lines of historical force. Now, every Egyptian has either been a leader – and in that moment took full responsibility for his or her country – or knows that it is possible to be one – and with that understands he has a choice between claiming or ceding leadership. But at least, for the first time, it actually is a choice that an individual can, and must, make.

Photo from Al Jazeera