Daniel Coffeen

Now, don’t get yourself in a tizzy (I’ve never written that word before: tizzy. I like it). Greenpeace might very well be a fine organization doing a world of good. I have no idea. Nor, really, do I care. What interests me is that this encounter was such a familiar encounter: it was consumerist.

So what are we to do? Or, more selfishly, what am I to do? Capitalism — and its police state — have become so smart and so fast, folding all modes of resistance into its spectacle at near infinite speed — John Lennon’s “Instant Karma” is in a Chase ad, for god’s sake.

I love when the words come to me, when they surge through me, when they give me the urge rather than the other way around. All I want is to be spoken — not by the media or some other unsavory force but by the cosmic winds of delight and articulation.

Do I really need to work so much just to make enough money to pay my bills — even a so-called good salary only lets me pay my more expensive bills such as for a nice bottle of tequila and a sushi feast?

Aron (James Franco) is always snapping away. He has a video camera attached to his mountain bike. When he falls hard off his bike, before getting up, he snaps a picture. One could no doubt read this as a watering down of the purity of his event, living in the document rather than the real thing.

So I was lying in the bath just now listening to Velvet Underground’s eponymous second album when “Some Kind of Love” comes on. And I am struck, not for the first time, by the fantastic, playful, hilarious, and generous lyrics.

Teaching is, in many ways, an impossible task. Socrates posed it as an epistemological question, a question of knowing: How is it possible for someone to learn something he doesn’t know? For Socrates, the movement of the mind from Point A to Point B is infinite. He therefore claims that all learning is memory and the duty of the teacher is to make students remember what they already know.

When I was teaching, I generally geared my lectures towards the smartest students and beyond. Indeed, I was often accused of speaking over the heads of my students. This, alas, was thoroughly intentional and stems from my ethics of generosity: contribute the best possible discourse to the world.

Where does this leave our pirates of the Caribbean? They are radically individualistic, roaming the last terrestrial frontier, the ocean. As the massive corporate sponsored state navy takes to the sea, each pirate in his or her place stands little chance of survival. This is the way of the modern state: total coverage.

Irony has hence always attracted me. With irony, I can speak thoroughly of and with this world and at the same time recognize — and articulate — that all this will give way, is already giving way, even as I speak. If Socratic irony points to the infinite — or, according to Nietzsche, to nothing — my irony (I hope) points to the flux.

There is no good and evil, no good guy and bad guy.  There are lives, people who have lived and continue to live, who are complex amalgamations of motive, desire, need, and affect.  We see these people read each other, make sense of each other, make sense of themselves and their place in this world.

What I was doing was creating a horizontal species — not a genus of any one species of booze but a palate, a flavor profile, that runs across the different verticals. Music and film, of course, use this horizontal mood mapping: if you like this music, you’ll like this other music that’s dark, drone, and contemplative.