We Smoked the Last One an Hour Ago #1

“Toss me a cigarette. I think there’s one in my rainoat.”
“We smoked the last one an hour ago”
(from Paul Simon’s “America”)

Hats off to the few of Americans who know what they want. Most often we belong to one herd or another, all being told what to want.

We are wanting machines. We all want, but we have brains and no one can figure out the equations for what we’d best want, so we farm that out to our betters.

Can we compare Paul Simon’s tobacco with Rimbaud’s –

Savoure son onnaing d’où le tabac par brins
Déborde - vous savez, c’est de la contrebande ; -

“Onnaing” – a pipe

After Citizens United are we forced to give up our illusion of classlessness?

“Private incomes in pince-nez point out all false notes”

“Private incomes” translates the concept approximately, but isn’t it interesting how the translation acknowledges that Amercians do not know what a rentier is?

Des rentiers à lorgnons soulignent tous les couacs:

The US is now overrun by rentiers and worse.

Does our time rhyme with Rimbaud’s time?

To Music (À la Musique)

Rimbeau gets into politics and isn’t this what Thomas Mann was complaining about in his *Reflections of an Unpoitical Man*? He wanted shut out the noisy politics of his brother Heinrich. Mann’s target in *Reflections* was also Romaine Rollande.

American art can be unpolitical in just the way Mann preferred? That is part of our illusion of classnessness. Our illusion of classlessness makes unpolitial songs possible?

Is our political art our best art? I heard many objections to John Adams’ *Klinghofer* and *Dr. Atomic*. People commented, “I don’t need him to tell me the bomb is bad.”

On the other hand, I have come to love El Niño.

Joni Mitchell is a sovereign like Djuna Barnes. They stand on their own two feet. Their problem is that they can be so lonely in that sovereignty.

People’s Parties words
People’s Paries song

She wishes she could laugh it all away, but singing it all away is an even better thing to do.

Ladies of the Canyon song
Ladies of the Canyon lyrics

Phoebe Bridgers was born in 1994. I love her (re)wiring of her desire through a conversation with the mother of the one who might be the one, when he gets older. What a bizarre arrangement. And I think immdeiately of how the zellennials are so much in their heads hardly getting aware of their bodies.

Georgia, Georgia, I love your son…(words)