"You can tell a woman's past by the way she holds her cigarettes." — Sacha Guitry

Friday, cigarette #2
Cup-a-Joe, Raleigh, NC, 10:05am
MUSIC: "Good Morning Britain," Aztec Camera

Music's food till the art biz folds, let them all eat culture!

Mark Antliff has a review up of David Weir's Anarchy and Culture: The Aesthetic Politics of Modernism:

David Weir’s thesis in Anarchy and Culture is that anarchism’s success in the sphere of cultural avant-gardism was a function of its failure as a political movement; he assumes a separation between art and political activism despite his acknowledgment that anarchism claims to overcome such a barrier. In Weir’s reading any fusion of art and politics always favours the former to the detriment of the latter. In his view art and political activism should properly remain mutually exclusive. Weir claims that for the "ideologue" it might be possible to adapt "aesthetics to politics" but that "from the perspective of the poet" a solution might be to "adapt the politics to the aesthetics": this latter strategy is identified with anarchism, "the one ideology that might have allowed [a poet] to reconcile art and action, since anarchism as a form of individualist politics is perfectly suited to . . . individualist poetics." In Weir’s reading anarchism’s success as a poetics is part and parcel of its failure as a political ideology.

Art and politics "should remain mutually exclusive?" Anyone who caught the Yale Political Union debate Resolved: Separate Art and State had the privilege of hearing me mumble for four and a half minutes about how I think "aestheticizing" politics is just another word for "making it awesome."

The idea that politics should be pragmatic has seeped into public consciousness to the point where poetic (and religious and regional and personal) arguments are considered illegitimate. If this trend keeps up, soon there will be nothing standing between America and a national smoking ban except a lot of empty rhetoric about freedom of choice, and I didn't need the treacly final scene of Thank You For Smoking to prove just how flimsy that argument sounds when you say it out loud. Libertarianism is about personal choice, but it's also about the harm principle, and no one can deny that when I light up a Camel I hurt myself and the people around me to a non-negligible extent. "Smoking is a choice and choosing stuff is my right as a citizen!" doesn't work when the choice harms.

To argue against a national tobacco ban, smokers have to prove that a sane person can examine the facts and still find reasons to smoke, and for a lot of people these reasons are aesthetic reasons. If the rules of our democratic discourse say that "Yes, but then what will Marlene Dietrich do with her hands?" and "Like Trey Parker says, this cigarette is about the only vacation I have" and "Watching the smoke dance out of a cigarette is like watching a girl dance out of her dress" are all illegitimate arguments, then we'd better start coming up with cigarette speak-easy passwords now. ("Twenty-three skiddoo, gimme a Malibu!") Weir is wrong that anarchism succeeded culturally because it failed politically, because the whole point of its aesthetics was to be compatible with politics. If it doesn't do that, it doesn't do what it was meant to.

Lastly: Morrissey proves that at least he can mix art and politics.