Black market babies. I buy vayne when I can, but it is a privilege. After my mortgage, gas, bills, food, etc, if there's enuff left, i'll go for it, but the danger inherent in black market action forces the cost up into a bourgeois commodity value system. Danger in the gulf, gas prices go up; danger in the weed-market, same thing. I buy krystal because it's cheap and satisfying. I buy organic milk because in a blind taste test it destroyed the competition. I buy vayne because I love it. I'm not worried about whether or not my paychecks go back into the system: that's why you get a paycheck, to allow you to survive in the system. What I am afraid of is having my entire identity interpreted by my marketplace identity.
I had an argument with Will a few years ago, where he claimed that any artistic gesture was inevitably made due to market interests. While I am essentially a neo-marxist and socialistic in my views on just about everything, I believe that capitalistic realities are not what you would call natural laws, even from a antagonistic perspective. It is an oppressive system of translation. Our actions and needs are translated into credit and debt situations, and purchasing becomes power while labor becomes value. Cravings become satisfied, but it's rarely on your own terms... until you associate those satisfactions with yourself.
Unless you are making more money from the black market than you are spending, I'd say you are "voting" for non-representation. The fact that the US economy depends on and accounts for the international black market by printing surplus money they know will vanish into underground dealings proves that the black market is always more gray than black.
Life action becomes very difficult when a system such as capitalism becomes so invasive. Like language, it usurps the medium with which you encounter reality, when even destructive or revolutionary gestures are still spoken in the language of money. When you buy piercings, rap cd's, even guns, anything, no matter how subversive it seems, the money still gets spent, and the only change is that you feel more satisfied and less needy than before.
When you rearrange the pieces of the present system you don't create a new one. You "liquidate" the old one. You may have just proven that the current system is collapsing, but as Yves Klein sold the air in an art gallery for a blank check, he did not produce a new type of art, he "completed the destruction of exchange." Both are better than nothing, but there is a great distinction between rearranging, sampling and cutting, even if it generates subversive perspective, and actually creating new identity. There is my humorless statement puke for the day.
As far as "new" blogs go, if I don't get e-mails reminding me of updates with a link connected, I'll probably never see them. I honestly want to read everything you guys write, and I want to respond. I have never been happier than when we were all blogging and commenting on each other, but now it's totally fragmented. I know some of my pals have left their friendster blogs for blogspot, but I never go there. I've been, but I spend so little time on the computer that if it's not connected to my e-mail, I don't ever have time to surf, or travel far. Is blogspot that much better? Is the font different there? Are there more or different readers? I don't want to broadcast my indulgences much farther than my close friends anyways, so i'll probably stick to this. I may just be lazy and not realizing it, but I don't want to have an enormous presence on the world wide web. I get a little paranoid out there, especially when it comes to speaking my mind about politics and meaning.
A lot of what I've been thinking about lately and a lot of what has fortified my responses in the past two blogs is discussed with severity and great insight in a book I just read by the French socialist economist Jacques Attali. The book is entitled NOISE:The Political Economy of Music. Very tight, very audacious. It has had the effect few things I have read do. It wasn't a mind blower like some, rather it was like reading a far more informed and articulate account of what you are already thinking. Some other examples from my list would be Ernst Cassirer's Language and Myth, and a recent contribution from Pat: Laclau & Mouffe's Hegemony and Socialist Strategy. All of these texts have become both armor and weaponry in my always confusing navigations through our culture and my subjugation in America. Hardy Har! Look them up if you're bored and we'll get into some shit together!
