Matthew T Grant

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Tall Guy. Glasses.

The Bad News

The Finnish eco-fascist Pennti Linkola once said that, “The most central and irrational faith among people is the faith in technology and economical growth.”

Along the same lines, he also opined, “”Any dictatorship would be better than modern democracy. There cannot be so incompetent [a] dictator, that he would show more stupidity than a majority of the people. [The] best dictatorship would be one where lots of heads would roll and government would prevent any economical growth.”

While I’m on the fence about the rolling heads, I share Linkola’s skepticism around growth and have always wondered why anyone would advocate bringing the “American Dream,” for example, to the whole world when, just from a resource allocation perspective, we could not have even half of the Earth’s current population living the way Americans, who represent about 4% of the Earth’s population, do.

Turns out the skepticism is justified and there are mounting problems with the faith harbored by politicians and economists, a faith most visibly at work in the notion that our debt woes will be brought in hand as soon as our economy “starts growing again” or “returns to the growth we saw X years ago.”

The bad news is that the growth the West in particular has enjoyed for the last 200+ years may be an historical anomaly and a chapter in human history gradually, and even precipitously, drawing to a close. If I follow the arguments of the doomsayers, the idea is that said growth, especially in the US, arose out of the confluence of a large, undeveloped (albeit indigenously inhabited) continent ripe for the plucking by the technologically advanced hand of Europe, ongoing technical innovation, and cheap energy (in the form of oil).

The continent having been plucked, technical innovation now tending to increase productivity while decreasing employment, and cheap oil peaked or peaking, the drivers of growth are on the ropes.

And that means things are probably going to get grim (or grimmer, depending on where you are at now).

If you want to read the bad news for yourself, I encourage you to check out: “Forecast 2013: Contraction, Contagion and Contradiction,” by James Howard Kunstler,  “No More Industrial Revolutions, No More Growth?” by Charles Hugh Smith, and “Is US Economic Growth Over? Faltering Innovation Confronts the Six Headwinds,” by Robert J. Gordon.

I guess the good news is that we may, as a species, be on the road back to the feudal days, rather than all the way back to the stone age.

Actually, I’m not sure that’s good news.

Reconstruction of a Talk Given on Walter Benjamin and Twitter (Part 2)

This is the second part of a textual reconstruction of a talk I gave on Benjamin at SUNY Albany.

After setting things up in the first part of my presentation on Benjamin and Twitter, and demonstrating how the cyberflâneur was alive and well on “the street” of Twitter, I went looking for Walter Benjamin there as well.

As it turns out, several people have set up accounts such as this, which intermittently posts Benjamin quotes, but someone also went to the trouble of setting up this short-lived parody account:

Aside from the comedic value of this account’s first tweet—”…the character of the age, distilled into the 140-character aphorism, explodes the character of the here-and-now…—I was struck by Twitter’s characterization, as you will note in the lower left-hand corner, of the Dalai Lama as “similar” to Benjamin.

Read the rest of this entry »

Trouble With Length

A friend pointed out that the most effective posts on this blog are the shortest.

Tree of Smoke

I’ve just finished reading a book.

One line—”Now James felt as if his head had been chopped off and thrown in boiling water.”—made me burst out laughing.

Another two—”Courage is action. Thought is cowardice.”—made me burst into tears.

There is much more in this book than these few lines.

And a hopeful broken-heartedness about the whole thing.

Real Money

I remember listening to a presentation at a business meeting and the speaker talking about the gross revenues of some client or other and our comptroller turning to me and saying, “A billion here, a billion there. Pretty soon you’re talking about real money.”

I was reminded of this joke when I heard an interview Terry Gross conducted with Woody Allen in which he described his life growing up in Flatbush and, noting that most of the parents back then had lived through the Depression, said, “Nobody had any real money and everybody had to work.”

The money we make from working is not “real.” Why? Because, if you stop working, it goes away.

Of course, the realness of money that remains whether you work or not is not a qualitative realness but a quantitative realness. Such accumulated wealth far outstrips the demands placed on it by maintaining a given life style.

It is also the case that if you have enough money to maintain a given life style and, at the same time, invest a portion of the remainder, you can actually increase your wealth at a pace greater than the pace at which your expenses drain said wealth.

Money that generates more money, is real money. Money that merely awaits its inevitable exhaustion, is not.

Turning Towards, Turning Away

In the face of a traumatic event (especially one called “incomprehensible”), we either run to the facts—what happened? why did it happen? what were the causes for this effect?—covering up our feelings, our shock, our horror, our sorrow with the details, or the restless search for them.

Or we run to the future, focusing on how we’ll get through this, how we will prevent this from happening again, and how “we won’t let this define us.”

Or, oddly enough, we run towards the event itself, immersing ourselves in it, agonizing over it. But in so doing, we either ignore or forget or neglect what is actually facing us in our own specific lives. Unless you were directly affected, focusing on this is, in its own way, a kind of self-indulgence. In the name of “facing reality,” a turning away.

Thus does madness become a mirror of madness.

Dinosaur, Jr.

A friend won some tickets so I got to go see Dinosaur, Jr. on Friday night at the Paradise.

They were loud, of course, but not as loud as the last time I saw them.

This time, I appreciated and understood the volume as an essential component of what they were trying to create, rather than as something that got in the way of my enjoyment.

Volume objectifies the music in a transient yet monumental way. It makes it awesome. Megalithic.

Full disclosure: It also hindered my enjoyment. My ears have too long been battered by amplified music and now certain decibel levels and certain tones are unequivocally painful.

I’ve seen a lot of music over the last year and Dinosaur, Jr. reminded me of what I’d been missing from a lot of it: jamming. Dinosaur, Jr. totally jammed. And as their set progressed, J.’s solos started to stretch out. They became more involved. Elaborate. Articulate. As I wrote elsewhere, they literally blew my mind.

Before people jump on me about that “literally,” I want to stress that I mean it literally. If mind is an episodic and fluctuating state produced as our conscious brain processes external sense data, fluid, eidetic and phenomenological states, as well as the constant activity of the central nervous system, then this product (mind) was dispersed and dissipated by the music. Dust in the wind.

J. Mascis looks like a wizard (a sort of pudgy Saruman) and plays like one, his white hair swinging back and forth as he stares into the middle distance. His solos “spaced me out” as much as Garcia’s ever did. In fact, his epic coda on “Forget the Swan” at the end of the set nearly broke my head. Literally.

While undeniably punk at times, Dinosaur, Jr.’s music has its roots in 60s and 70s (Zeppelin, Rush, Neil Young, Robin Trower, etc.) and I felt, seeing them, that that was as close as I could have gotten, here in 2012, to something like Cream at the Fillmore circa 1967.

I was glad I went.

Update 12/3/2012: Just wanted to add one note on the volume issue. Yes, these guys were loud. But you could hear every single note that J. played. For most of the heavy and loud bands that I’ve heard of late, any lead playing gets lost in the sludge. Such bands would be well-served to learn from the masters.

Tinariwen, Paradise, Boston, MA, 10.12.12

A Brief Holiday in Other People’s Misery

Before I went to see Tinariwen the other night, I read up on the political situation in Mali and it is pretty grim. A quarter million people have fled the country since January 2012 and the beginning of the “Tuareg Rebellion,” a conflict fueled in part by the return to Mali of Tuareg fighters who, up to that point, had been in the employ of Muammar Gadddafi.

The Malian government has now long since lost control of the northern part of the country, some of which is controlled by the Tuareg-led National Movement for the Liberation of Azawad, and some of which is controlled by Islamic fundamentalists—the Movement for Oneness and Jihad in Northern Africa and Ansar Dine (under the command of a former Tuareg rebel leader, Iyad Ag Ghaly). The result has been the forced conscription of children, systematic rape, imposition of Sharia law and the disturbing news that fundamentalists are compiling lists of unwed mothers.

Against this backdrop, as I headed out to lose myself in the trancey, guitar-driven desert groove for which Tinariwen has become world-renowned, I was reminded of the opening line from “Holiday in the Sun” by the Sex Pistols, “A brief holiday in other people’s misery.” While that line referred to visiting East Berlin during the Cold War, it seemed to apply just as well to this middle class American seeking entertainment and diversion from guys who every day are wondering and worrying about the fate of their families in a land plunged into unrelenting chaos.

The Absented Messiah

It’s not the case that Tinariwen just happens to be from an African nation that is well on its way to “failed state” status. They have expressed support for Tuareg autonomy in the recent troubles and in fact have been part of Tuareg resistance to the Malian government for decades now. Read the rest of this entry »

Lionel Loueke, Regattabar, Cambridge, MA, 10.11.12

Lionel Loueke is an astonishing guitar player and I would like to call the performance I saw last night at the Regattabar “virtuosic,” but that wouldn’t quite cover it.

It woudn’t cover it because, while Loueke is undeniably a virtuoso, the music I heard last night, really, the act of continuous, protean, phenomenal creation to which I bore witness, seemed less a testament to or the pinnacle of human achievement, as virtuosity often is, and more like the act of a god.

And yet, of course, Loueke and his accompanists—the ecstaticly focused Michael Olatuja and the nerdily spectactular Mark Giuliana—are mortals. For this reason, their performance reminded me instead of the infinite possibilities of music, the unending invention of which the musical mind is capable, and not simply that in music there are, on the one hand, the gods, to which these gentlemen would be unquestionably numbered, and on the other, everybody else.

The scope of the music they played was very broad, encompassing everything from jazz and blues to mathy prog to funk to Juju and other west African traditions. At times, it sounded like a more melodically and harmonically rich version of James “Blood” Ulmer’s early 80s work, with the bass and drums tumbling over each other while Loueke showed just how many sounds a guitar could make and how varied a Klangwelt one could conjure with electricity, wire and wood.

At other times, the music was perplexing in its vorticism, its unbridled chaoticism, a maelstrom which caused the bewildered listener to wonder at the apparently telepathic connection between the players (an overused trope in jazz criticism, I know) and, ultimately, to question all assumptions about what music and, in fact, the world could be.

And, at other times, the music was simply beautiful, joyous and entrancing.

I love seeing music that is amazing, surprising and inspiring and last night I was amazed, surprised and inspired not only by the incredible, overwhelming musicality of what these mortals, if that’s what they were, played, but also by the sheer, visible delight with which they played it.

If you like music, you have to see and hear Lionel Loueke.

Reconstruction of a Talk Given on Walter Benjamin and Twitter (Part 1)

This is the first part of a textual reconstruction of the talk I gave on Benjamin at SUNY Albany.

1.The Death of the Cyberflâneur

In February 2012 Evgeny Morozov’s published an opinion piece in the New York Times entitled, “The Death of the Cyberflâneur.” Evgeny Morozov is a researcher and critic who wrote a book, The Net Delusion, in which he calls into question the cyber-utopian tendency to see an inherently liberating power in the web and social media.

With an eye sensitive to decline (Verfall) and the darker side of things, Morozov lamented in the Times the lost days when one would go on the web to “surf” and explore a sometimes surprising, even shocking world. Those were the days, in his view, of the cyberflâneur, the digital doppelgänger of the Parisian flâneur.

Today, he claimed, the web had found its Haussmann in the figure of Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook, according to Morozov, had brought an end to cyberflänerie. Facebook is essentially an infinitely extensible couch where we sit with our friends, exchanging photographs and found objects, texting, and commenting on the shows we’re watching. Facebook is the bourgeois interior realized in cyberspace and, hence, the grave of the cyberflâneur. After all, you can’t be a flâneur if you never leave the house. Read the rest of this entry »