Are yet different in tempo
Steam riding the pavement and all the favors of white
We came to the river so we might ignore it.
The assassination of Colbert was merely cover for the massacre at CBS Radio, which stopped broadcasting on Friday, after ninety-nine years.
To the extent that broadcast media had any claim upon moral authority, much of that was down to the role of CBS Radio–and Edward R. Murrow, specifically–broadcasting from London during the long months of the Blitz.
Of Pat Weaver, inventor of American broadcast television: ‘”He didn’t invent programs, but wrote great memos.”’
What Colbert shared with Letterman, and Conan, and Lorne, was a particular appreciation for the history of the media as a progression of forms–or of the principle of formalization as the stage through which performance could emerge, in all its eccentricities. Under present conditions, form is being misrecognized as another element of fixed capital, which–being depreciated–has no other value than its value as scrap. We are now again dealing in remnants.
Thus, Colbert does his final, final show—the new show—from the public access broadcast facility in Monroe, Michigan, with fellow media savant Jack White in tow, spinning tracks from the Gories and MC5. They did shots of vodka with a former Miss America, they got high on whippets from canisters of helium, they sampled chili dogs and made sandwiches from pita bread and potato chips. They burned down the set, in back in a dumpster.
To state that actually existing Communism was the condition for the functioning of capitalism, as such, is to highlight what is presently lacking in the geopolitical milieu; and thus, the danger which inheres, at present, in the capitalist symbolic. Finding no adversary in the world, it casts about wildly, inventing devils. Its hallucinations are not inconsequential: someone, somewhere, will pay the price. We are all symptoms.
Capital has never been able to abide the slow time of recollection; nor has it been capable of functioning in the absence of ritual.
The branding for America250 is explicitly funereal: “America: 1776-250”
The now common euphemism “celebration of life” seems apt: Something has died, something is lost, but we will pretend otherwise. Not quite denial. Not quite a haunting. And ongoing reckoning with all that remains.
Incidentally, Weekend at Bernie’s was released on July 5, 1989. Make of that what you will.
Pat Weaver’s brother, Doodles Weaver, co-invented broadcast comedy formatting. He died by suicide in 1983. His niece, Sigourney, has a new movie coming out this weekend.
To paraphrase Molly Crabapple: It was almost as if they believed Utopia was a lecture series.
Also: You are not obliged to complete the work nor are you free to abandon it.
The Israeli military attacked a hospital in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday. This begs the question: Is it still a war crime if you insist on pretending that this is a truce?
The war with Iran is ending, again. If it never started, how does it stop?
Empire breaks, fecund, trivial. The District of Columbia as Las Vegas.
Four, twenty-seven