On my drive home on the southbound 5 through Oceanside, I pass by the Cavalier Mobile Estates. I have often considered this nonsensical juxtaposition of words. Cavalier—as in the dandyish Royalists who fought against the Puritans in the English Civil War? It's hard to imagine such a cavalier laying his belaced head down in a mobile home. Or “cavalier” as in “reckless, pompous, arrogant?” Again, when I think of mobile homes, these aren't necessarily the first qualities that come to mind. Or how about the bizarre idea of a mobile estate? Thinking back to what an “estate” has meant historically, it might well be the hundreds of acres that a nobleman—a cavalier, say—used as his personal hunting reserve and riding range and open space park, et cetera. I guess back in the day an “estate” was a mansion and environs which were expansive enough and subjugated enough such that the common folk working on the estate produced enough wealth to sustain the mansion at the middle. None of that really makes sense when you're talking a paved lot that is about three or four feet bigger on a side than the mobile home at the heart of it. Or how ludicrous is it to be talking about a “mobile estate” in the first place—as though an estate in the classical sense were something so inconsequential that you could pick it up and carry it around?
When I think of a mobile home, I think of depressing poverty. I'm sure there are exceptions to this; I'm sure that not all occupants of mobile homes are depressed or poor. But I very much doubt that very many of them are gallant princes wearing velvet and lace and riding off to show those upstart commoners what's what.
Monday, November 29, 2010
Thursday, November 18, 2010
The Broken Cog in the Unmade Watch
Of late I have been given cause multiple times over to think about deterministic universes, and how I seem to personally experience all the guilt and dread of living in one without seeing any evidence whatsoever of any sort of extrinsic judgment of human actions to reward virtue and punish evil--much less any universal definition of virtue and evil--beyond the feeble machines of human institutions, which are often subverted to support systemic cowardice and arrogance and greed for the material and psychic benefit of their subverters. And yet, acknowledging the material and psychic benefits of evil (e.g., believing my country has a God-given right to invade another country and take its shit), I will not allow myself to be evil, whether out of dread of a deterministic universe or out freely willing to generate what good I can so that what reality we enjoy might be less dreadful and painful, all the while suspecting that my perceptions of minimizing my own contributions to a general suffering and contributing in good faith to a general good have been subverted by my own cowardice and arrogance and greed.
I thus seem to have the worst of both worlds.
I thus seem to have the worst of both worlds.
Monday, November 8, 2010
A Poem Written On The Occasion of a Rain
I fear my friends the funnelwebs shall not feast today, as their webs are full of water: drizzle, mist, and spray. Colorless droplets depend--a frozen moment's unfalling rain; any wary insect should see this and should fly the other way, rather than serve my friends the funnelwebs in some capacity as prey.
Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Being on the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States
Some weeks ago I heard about how Dr. Laura Schlessinger, a prominent radio talk show host (who is not, in point of fact, a psychiatrist or a therapist), felt compelled to leave her radio show after she had repeatedly used the word “nigger” on the air and criticized a black woman for feeling offended about it. This caused a number of Laura's sponsors to retract their sponsorship, and Laura then said she was retiring from radio in order to protect her right to free speech.
And yesterday you, student who alternates between talking when I am addressing the class and sleeping in class, who packs up ten minutes before class is to be dismissed, and who has never failed but to address me in a tone more suited to reprimanding a dog than addressing the instructor of your class, told me about how you felt that your own right to freedom of speech was abridged in the classroom environment because you were being evaluated on your adherence to the opinion of the instructor rather than any other factors. I have told you and the rest of the class that this is not how I evaluate your work; that I evaluate the work in my class based upon the strength of the arguments, their clarity and their use of evidence, not if they happen to be in accordance with my own beliefs, outside of my own belief that the best arguments are those based on reason and evidence, that is, and the employment of such is the best way to persuade others of your position. Pursuant to that expressed belief, here is my carefully reasoned counter-argument to show you that your argument that I am abridging your free speech is bullshit:
The text of the First Amendment is as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Nowhere in those lines does it require all instructors to give As to all students for all work.
The right to free speech doesn't give you the right to choose how other people respond to your speech. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences of speech. The First Amendment does not, can not, and should not protect you from other people disagreeing with you if what you say is bullshit. To say that “congress shall pass no law” about something doesn't proscribe the personal reactions of all people all across the country. The federal government won't put you in jail for spewing bullshit, so long as you're not making violent threats against the government; spewing bullshit may still carry social and economic consequences. The First Amendment doesn't pretend to protect you from that. And thank God it doesn't; I'd be very afraid of any law that criminalized the act of thought or the capacity people to respond non-violently to the thoughts of others. Yes, you have the right to burn a Koran, and I have the right to think you are a total asshat for doing so.
I don't accept that you have a right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, inasmuch as doing so infringes upon the rights of the others. Insofar as my limited lights lead me, I don't believe that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was ever intended or interpreted by a court to guarantee the right of anybody to say anything, whenever, and that nobody be allowed to voice a dissenting opinion. The disruption of a classroom by means of constant talking, for example, doesn't seem to be protected by the First Amendment insofar as I read it; the First Amendment doesn't seem to guarantee that any one voice always be privileged over others.
The First Amendment does not insist that I hold any and all speech to be equally true, or important, or well-informed. The First Amendment does not demand of me that I not ignore my own personal and professional standards for the evaluation of speech, such that I become incapable of evaluating whether or not any given speech act (i.e., an assignment) measures up to the standards that I and other professionals in my field have established for determining how whether the speech act meets the standards of our profession regarding the well-reasoned, evidence-based, persuasive construction of an argument. I do not claim that a professional writer will always necessarily have more access to knowledge about writing than an incoming student, or that the student's assertions about writing should automatically be discarded in favor of those of the professional writer. I do claim that the First Amendment does not indicate that an uninformed opinion, because it has been the most recently expressed, is automatically allowed to trump an informed one by means of some sort of magical thought law.
In short, your freedom of speech does not extend to your having the freedom to force me to like what you say. My attention to your speech, and my estimation of it as something worthy, are a reflection of my own freedom of speech, which extends to my freedom in choosing what speech I want to listen to. And you must employ discretion in your freedom if you want to gain my attention—you must choose to use your speech in such a way that I choose to listen to you. My attention must be earned, my good will swayed; and what have you done to earn my attention, and what have you done to persuade me of the rightness of your position other than badger me for not accepting what you claim as its inherent rightness? Maybe, student, if you spent more time staying awake and paying attention in my rhetoric classroom and less time sleeping or talking, you'd realize the weakness of your position. Maybe, student, you'd realize that I am trying to give you the tools to make other people pay attention to you and hold your opinion in high esteem, and that arguing from a position of outraged entitlement is not one of these tools.
That I continue to allow you to express your opinions in my classroom, calling on you whenever you raise your hand just as I would any other student, is a reflection of my own belief in free speech that goes above and beyond that defined in the Constitution. I am such a believer in the value of the diversity of opinion that I will not, in point of fact, show you this argument, for fear of quelling your voice in my class entirely. I will instead call you in for an individual conference, and ask that we find some way to reconcile your pre-conceived hatred of me and the school experience in general with the necessity of your participating in the class in a constructive way in order to pass it.
But don't think for a minute that, outside of the context of the classroom, I won't think you're in grave error for misrepresenting and abusing the traditions of democracy in this way, and for absorbing this stupid and wrong idea that freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want and people aren't allowed to respond to it.
And yesterday you, student who alternates between talking when I am addressing the class and sleeping in class, who packs up ten minutes before class is to be dismissed, and who has never failed but to address me in a tone more suited to reprimanding a dog than addressing the instructor of your class, told me about how you felt that your own right to freedom of speech was abridged in the classroom environment because you were being evaluated on your adherence to the opinion of the instructor rather than any other factors. I have told you and the rest of the class that this is not how I evaluate your work; that I evaluate the work in my class based upon the strength of the arguments, their clarity and their use of evidence, not if they happen to be in accordance with my own beliefs, outside of my own belief that the best arguments are those based on reason and evidence, that is, and the employment of such is the best way to persuade others of your position. Pursuant to that expressed belief, here is my carefully reasoned counter-argument to show you that your argument that I am abridging your free speech is bullshit:
The text of the First Amendment is as follows:
“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
Nowhere in those lines does it require all instructors to give As to all students for all work.
The right to free speech doesn't give you the right to choose how other people respond to your speech. Free speech doesn't mean freedom from any and all consequences of speech. The First Amendment does not, can not, and should not protect you from other people disagreeing with you if what you say is bullshit. To say that “congress shall pass no law” about something doesn't proscribe the personal reactions of all people all across the country. The federal government won't put you in jail for spewing bullshit, so long as you're not making violent threats against the government; spewing bullshit may still carry social and economic consequences. The First Amendment doesn't pretend to protect you from that. And thank God it doesn't; I'd be very afraid of any law that criminalized the act of thought or the capacity people to respond non-violently to the thoughts of others. Yes, you have the right to burn a Koran, and I have the right to think you are a total asshat for doing so.
I don't accept that you have a right to say whatever you want, whenever you want, inasmuch as doing so infringes upon the rights of the others. Insofar as my limited lights lead me, I don't believe that the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States was ever intended or interpreted by a court to guarantee the right of anybody to say anything, whenever, and that nobody be allowed to voice a dissenting opinion. The disruption of a classroom by means of constant talking, for example, doesn't seem to be protected by the First Amendment insofar as I read it; the First Amendment doesn't seem to guarantee that any one voice always be privileged over others.
The First Amendment does not insist that I hold any and all speech to be equally true, or important, or well-informed. The First Amendment does not demand of me that I not ignore my own personal and professional standards for the evaluation of speech, such that I become incapable of evaluating whether or not any given speech act (i.e., an assignment) measures up to the standards that I and other professionals in my field have established for determining how whether the speech act meets the standards of our profession regarding the well-reasoned, evidence-based, persuasive construction of an argument. I do not claim that a professional writer will always necessarily have more access to knowledge about writing than an incoming student, or that the student's assertions about writing should automatically be discarded in favor of those of the professional writer. I do claim that the First Amendment does not indicate that an uninformed opinion, because it has been the most recently expressed, is automatically allowed to trump an informed one by means of some sort of magical thought law.
In short, your freedom of speech does not extend to your having the freedom to force me to like what you say. My attention to your speech, and my estimation of it as something worthy, are a reflection of my own freedom of speech, which extends to my freedom in choosing what speech I want to listen to. And you must employ discretion in your freedom if you want to gain my attention—you must choose to use your speech in such a way that I choose to listen to you. My attention must be earned, my good will swayed; and what have you done to earn my attention, and what have you done to persuade me of the rightness of your position other than badger me for not accepting what you claim as its inherent rightness? Maybe, student, if you spent more time staying awake and paying attention in my rhetoric classroom and less time sleeping or talking, you'd realize the weakness of your position. Maybe, student, you'd realize that I am trying to give you the tools to make other people pay attention to you and hold your opinion in high esteem, and that arguing from a position of outraged entitlement is not one of these tools.
That I continue to allow you to express your opinions in my classroom, calling on you whenever you raise your hand just as I would any other student, is a reflection of my own belief in free speech that goes above and beyond that defined in the Constitution. I am such a believer in the value of the diversity of opinion that I will not, in point of fact, show you this argument, for fear of quelling your voice in my class entirely. I will instead call you in for an individual conference, and ask that we find some way to reconcile your pre-conceived hatred of me and the school experience in general with the necessity of your participating in the class in a constructive way in order to pass it.
But don't think for a minute that, outside of the context of the classroom, I won't think you're in grave error for misrepresenting and abusing the traditions of democracy in this way, and for absorbing this stupid and wrong idea that freedom of speech means you get to say whatever you want and people aren't allowed to respond to it.
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Aural Analysis: "Bad Romance" by Lady GaGa
Another commute, another aural assault. This time it was the GaGa-thing’s “Bad Romance.” I had this song stuck in my head for something like five or six days, and only managed to finally expunge it by means of a liberal application of Viking metal and medieval Norwegian folk songs. But then, yesterday, as I surfed through the vaster wasteland yet that is SoCal radio, the GaGa-thing came crashing back at me. As will be evident from an examination of the lyrics, the Gaga-thing is fixated on revenge; I believe she is reaching through the radio to make a personal attack on me. Well, it’s time for me to fight back using the only weapon available to me: Swiftian wit.
It’s notable that I heard “Bad Romance” three times on my way to Orange County, rather than the subsequent single, “Alejandro.” Is this owing to the absolutely outrageous acts of homosexual gang rape and blasphemy and Nazi fetishism in the “Alejandro” video that represent GaGa’s crossing of three too many lines? I wonder.
Before I begin, I should say that I actually have some modicum of respect for the GaGa, if only a modicum. In the intellectual desert that is contemporary pop music, I must concede that she exhibits some shred of originality and talent. She is the best of the worst. She can sing, and isn’t all autotuned to Hell and beyond. She has talent. Her songs are undeniably well-crafted; they are all earworms waiting to happen. She and her collaborators have catchiness down to a science.
But oh, how she opts to expend such on weirdness and fetishism when she could probably use it to make much better music. There is a Tori Amos inside of Lady GaGa, trying to get out but constantly getting beaten back by means of bizarre displays of perversion. So my criticism of the GaGa-thing is a criticism of misused ability, rather than a criticism of an absolute lack of ability, which is the criticism I might level at, say, the current incarnation of the Black Eyed Peas.
You want my revenge, GaGa? Oh, I’ll give you my revenge. As before, my responses to your lyrics are in the brackets. As before, I offer the video up to those who, in their innocence, have been spared the seeing of it. It would be another essay entirely to describe the aesthetics of the video which…I actually really like, much as it tries to toe this weird line between sexiness and repulsiveness which…I actually really like. But whatever. The song still be dumb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I
Let’s go, GaGa. Me and you, toe-to-toe, no maybe.
Oh, and spoiler alert: if you have not already seen Vertigo, you suck.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
[These are the lead lyrics from the lead single for The Fame Monster album, intended to describe the negative aspects of celebrity culture. I think the concept is breaking down here; bad romances are hardly exclusive to trashy celebrities. I, being about as unfamous as it is possible for a person to get, will attest to that.]
Ra Ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma Roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[Let me stop you right there, Dame GaGa. Now, I know your name implies that you have only a cursory apprehension of human language (and your video reveals that you have an outsider’s dim and unintuitive appreciation of what human clothing is supposed to be), but that doesn’t mean you have to actually employ strings of baby-talk in your lyrics. You’re an adult, as your video abundantly reveals. You can use adult words. Can’t you?
Okay. Let’s keep going.]
I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
[Wow. Apparently, being ugly and diseased and poor, I am the GaGa-thing’s ideal lover. Nobody tell my fiancée.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[It really takes something for somebody to make an expression of love sound like “blah, blah, blah.” Thank you, GaGa-thing, for cheapening affection and emotion.
Actually, no. I take that back. I’m not going to thank you for that, not even sarcastically.]
I want your drama
[You do? Okay. I’m going to see a performance of King Lear next Friday night in Garden Grove. Would you like me to get you a ticket? It’s only $14.50 on Goldstar, which I know isn’t free (freeness being apparently the threshold for your love, in spite of your otherwise overwhelming materialism), but it’s close enough to it.]
The touch of your hand
[Wow, Lady GaGa. That actually sounds…totally human and relatable. You’re slipping.]
I want your leather studded kiss in the sand
[Oh, good. You’re back to being a freaky weird person again. Don’t ever change, Lady.
On a different note, can you imagine how awful a “leather-studded kiss” would be? It makes me think of studded leather armor. I do not want to kiss boiled leather onto which circular metal plates have been affixed. If my lover’s lips had that texture, I think I would need to get a better lover. Or some serious fucking chapstick.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[When you say that, Lady GaGa, somehow I don’t feel as though you’re being sincere. Something tells me that, in spite of your repeated requests, that if I were to try and give you my love I would very quickly be getting some hate from a bodyguard’s boot.]
You know that I want you
[I do? Well, okay, Lady GaGa. I guess you can have me. But I’m going to wear about seventeen condoms. I don’t know where in the universe you have been, and frankly, I don’t want to know.]
And you know that I need you
[That’s funny. You seem to have been doing pretty well without me up until now. Your vitamin-me deficiency hasn’t much affected your ability to wear spinal-cord extensions and twitch like vat-born abortion that you are.
I want it bad
A bad romance
[Alright, so let’s examine this wanting of the bad romance. What qualities does a bad romance have that you find desirable? Tragic failure? Does that mean you do want to see King Lear with me? Or are you drawn to the emotional or physical abusiveness? If so, I know a certain Katy Perry who, judging by her song lyrics, is desperately looking for a sub to dom over. You girls should hook up.]
I want your love and
I want your revenge
[Well, how convenient for you! ‘Cause that’s exactly what I want to give you!]
You and me could write a bad romance
[You know what? I bet we actually could. The bad romance that you and I would write, GaGa, being drawn together by a volatile mix of queasy lust and utter disdain, would be near-unlimited in its badness. I’ll take the first chapter; you get the second.]
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
[Yes, I still think we could, too.]
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
[Hey, wait. When did you go from wanting a bad romance to being caught in one? In the space of like two lyrics? You move too fast for me, Lady GaGa! Usually it takes at least eight lyrics for me to commit.]
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
[Sis-sis, boom bah-bah. Are we doing some role-playing now, Lady GaGa? Are we supposed to be late 19th century college cheerleaders? Are we supposed to be reciting some sort of prayer to the Ancient Aegyptian sun god? Or are we back to talking in proto-linguistic babble syllables again? So now you’re into submission and paraphilic infantilism. That makes some kind of sense, I guess.
Oh God. If Lady GaGa starts to make sense to you, fear for your sanity.]
Roma roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[Yes, I know. Your wanting of my bad romance is abundantly clear at this point.]
I want your horror
[Really? First you want to go to see King Lear with me, and now you want to go see Piranha 3D? Well, okay. But we’re going Dutch. International superstars in my company can pay for they own damn tickets. And, seriously, have you seen the prices for a 3D movie these days?]
I want your design
[Uh? Well, I’m not much of a designer, but okay. Besides, seeing your outfits, it’s not like I could possibly do any worse than the designers you already wear. An eyeless ape who has had half of his brains scooped out with a spoon could probably design more attractive clothes.]
‘Cuz you’re a criminal
As long as you’re mine
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[You know, Lady GaGa, you’re an adult human female (I think?), and I’m an adult human male, so for you to have my love would have would probably be legal in most areas. Then again, I am confident that if anyone could start at consensual heterosexual sex and end up at the point of criminal sexual perversion, it’s you.]
I want your psycho
[So you want me to dress up like a woman and stab you in the shower as you scream and bleed chocolate syrup? Eh…maybe.]
Your vertigo shtick
[So you want me to fall in love with you, whereupon you will fake your own death, whereupon I will fall into a deep depression until I find you again and fall in love with you again, whereupon we will recreate your fake death and end up actually killing you? That’s a pretty complex fantasy to have, Queen of the GaGas.
It takes a lot to get you off, doesn’t it?]
Want you in my rear window
[Oh, I get it now. All this discussion of classic Hitchcock movies is just a lead-in to you asking for anal sex. Thanks for ruining some of my favorite films for me, Lady GaGa. Never again will I be able to watch Jimmy Stewart and the incomparable Kim Novak climb those fateful stairs without thinking about you taking it in the butt.
You know, Lady GaGa, the other pop stars—they’re just ignorant fuckwits. They know not what they do. But you, you have just enough talent and culture and intelligence to cause actual harm to the things I hold dear. With moderate ability comes moderate responsibility, and it’s unfortunate that you have opted to use your powers for evil.]
Baby you’re sick
[*I’m* sick? Hey, I’m not the one who just turned one of the best movies of all time into a request for butt sex.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[I don’t know. I was having considerable doubts about our love you even before you asked me for all the Hitchock murder roleplay. I don’t know if me repeatedly pretending to kill is a good foundation for a relationship.]
You know that I want you (’Cuz I’m a free bitch baby)
[I doubt that. I’m gonna go with the supposition that you’re actually a ludicrously expensive bitch.]
And you know that I need you
I want it bad romance
Your bad romance
[Yeah, I think we both know at this point that any relationship between us would prove to be pretty fucking terrible. And yet you want it anyway? This song really is a cry for help, isn’t it?]
I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
[More revenge? I haven’t given you enough yet? Okay, well, we have a bridge and a last verse and one more instance of the chorus to go. I hope to have satisfied your revenge quota by the time we’re done.]
You and me could write a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma
[Roma—like the Roma people of Cenral and Eastern Europe? So we can just flat-out use the names of ethnic groups as non-lexical vocables now? Let me try, using my own ethnicity. “Ger-Ger-German American.” Eh. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.]
GaGa, Ooh la-la
Want your bad romance
Walk walk fashion baby
[How is it that we’re discussing fashion now? This is the second time you’ve brought it around to fashion for no apparent reason, O atrocity that goes by the name of GaGa. I feel like you’re just trying to draw attention to your outfits, which probably don’t need any help in that department.]
Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk fashion baby
[In _those_ heels? I don’t think so, girlfriend.]
Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk passion baby
Work it
I’m a free bitch baby
[If that were true, how would you be paying for all those ridiculous clothes? Shit that ugly has got to be super-expensive.]
I want your love
And I want your revenge
I want your love
I don’t wanna be friends
[You don’t? But isn’t being bad friends a good way to lead up to being bad romantic partners?]
Je veux ton amour
Et je veux ta revenge
Je veux ton amour
[Look, you’re just saying the exact same thing in French. You don’t fool me. That’s not really very sophisticated. And yet there’s definitely something about the way your tongue curls around those vowels…ah! No! Must…resist…!]
I don’t wanna be friends
(Want your bad romance
I want your bad romance)
Want your bad romance!
I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
[We’ve been over all this already.]
Caught in a bad romance
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma
GaGa
[You know, just because you took your name from the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga,” which criticized the kind of infantile pop music that was “becom[ing] some background noise / A backdrop for the girls and boys / Who just don't know or just don't care” doesn’t mean that you have to continue you to speak baby talk. If anything, Lady GaGa, you are becoming the very thing that Queen set out to criticize. And, in the end, that’s my real criticism of you—that, in your addressing of the topics of materialistic excess, our culture’s obsession with celebrity, and the pop music that is devoid of artistry and serves only to provide an accompaniment for sex, by means of your hyperbole, you seem to be critiquing all of these things by means of hyperbolic excess, but I really don’t think you’re critiquing these things so much as I think you’re reveling in them with an absolute abandonment of self-discipline. You are not satire so much as you are self-parody. I don’t think you’re pop culture’s greatest critic as you are its worst perpetrator.]
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[You know what? No. Sorry, but no.]
It’s notable that I heard “Bad Romance” three times on my way to Orange County, rather than the subsequent single, “Alejandro.” Is this owing to the absolutely outrageous acts of homosexual gang rape and blasphemy and Nazi fetishism in the “Alejandro” video that represent GaGa’s crossing of three too many lines? I wonder.
Before I begin, I should say that I actually have some modicum of respect for the GaGa, if only a modicum. In the intellectual desert that is contemporary pop music, I must concede that she exhibits some shred of originality and talent. She is the best of the worst. She can sing, and isn’t all autotuned to Hell and beyond. She has talent. Her songs are undeniably well-crafted; they are all earworms waiting to happen. She and her collaborators have catchiness down to a science.
But oh, how she opts to expend such on weirdness and fetishism when she could probably use it to make much better music. There is a Tori Amos inside of Lady GaGa, trying to get out but constantly getting beaten back by means of bizarre displays of perversion. So my criticism of the GaGa-thing is a criticism of misused ability, rather than a criticism of an absolute lack of ability, which is the criticism I might level at, say, the current incarnation of the Black Eyed Peas.
You want my revenge, GaGa? Oh, I’ll give you my revenge. As before, my responses to your lyrics are in the brackets. As before, I offer the video up to those who, in their innocence, have been spared the seeing of it. It would be another essay entirely to describe the aesthetics of the video which…I actually really like, much as it tries to toe this weird line between sexiness and repulsiveness which…I actually really like. But whatever. The song still be dumb.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrO4YZeyl0I
Let’s go, GaGa. Me and you, toe-to-toe, no maybe.
Oh, and spoiler alert: if you have not already seen Vertigo, you suck.
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
[These are the lead lyrics from the lead single for The Fame Monster album, intended to describe the negative aspects of celebrity culture. I think the concept is breaking down here; bad romances are hardly exclusive to trashy celebrities. I, being about as unfamous as it is possible for a person to get, will attest to that.]
Ra Ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma Roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[Let me stop you right there, Dame GaGa. Now, I know your name implies that you have only a cursory apprehension of human language (and your video reveals that you have an outsider’s dim and unintuitive appreciation of what human clothing is supposed to be), but that doesn’t mean you have to actually employ strings of baby-talk in your lyrics. You’re an adult, as your video abundantly reveals. You can use adult words. Can’t you?
Okay. Let’s keep going.]
I want your ugly
I want your disease
I want your everything
As long as it’s free
[Wow. Apparently, being ugly and diseased and poor, I am the GaGa-thing’s ideal lover. Nobody tell my fiancée.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[It really takes something for somebody to make an expression of love sound like “blah, blah, blah.” Thank you, GaGa-thing, for cheapening affection and emotion.
Actually, no. I take that back. I’m not going to thank you for that, not even sarcastically.]
I want your drama
[You do? Okay. I’m going to see a performance of King Lear next Friday night in Garden Grove. Would you like me to get you a ticket? It’s only $14.50 on Goldstar, which I know isn’t free (freeness being apparently the threshold for your love, in spite of your otherwise overwhelming materialism), but it’s close enough to it.]
The touch of your hand
[Wow, Lady GaGa. That actually sounds…totally human and relatable. You’re slipping.]
I want your leather studded kiss in the sand
[Oh, good. You’re back to being a freaky weird person again. Don’t ever change, Lady.
On a different note, can you imagine how awful a “leather-studded kiss” would be? It makes me think of studded leather armor. I do not want to kiss boiled leather onto which circular metal plates have been affixed. If my lover’s lips had that texture, I think I would need to get a better lover. Or some serious fucking chapstick.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[When you say that, Lady GaGa, somehow I don’t feel as though you’re being sincere. Something tells me that, in spite of your repeated requests, that if I were to try and give you my love I would very quickly be getting some hate from a bodyguard’s boot.]
You know that I want you
[I do? Well, okay, Lady GaGa. I guess you can have me. But I’m going to wear about seventeen condoms. I don’t know where in the universe you have been, and frankly, I don’t want to know.]
And you know that I need you
[That’s funny. You seem to have been doing pretty well without me up until now. Your vitamin-me deficiency hasn’t much affected your ability to wear spinal-cord extensions and twitch like vat-born abortion that you are.
I want it bad
A bad romance
[Alright, so let’s examine this wanting of the bad romance. What qualities does a bad romance have that you find desirable? Tragic failure? Does that mean you do want to see King Lear with me? Or are you drawn to the emotional or physical abusiveness? If so, I know a certain Katy Perry who, judging by her song lyrics, is desperately looking for a sub to dom over. You girls should hook up.]
I want your love and
I want your revenge
[Well, how convenient for you! ‘Cause that’s exactly what I want to give you!]
You and me could write a bad romance
[You know what? I bet we actually could. The bad romance that you and I would write, GaGa, being drawn together by a volatile mix of queasy lust and utter disdain, would be near-unlimited in its badness. I’ll take the first chapter; you get the second.]
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
[Yes, I still think we could, too.]
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
[Hey, wait. When did you go from wanting a bad romance to being caught in one? In the space of like two lyrics? You move too fast for me, Lady GaGa! Usually it takes at least eight lyrics for me to commit.]
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
[Sis-sis, boom bah-bah. Are we doing some role-playing now, Lady GaGa? Are we supposed to be late 19th century college cheerleaders? Are we supposed to be reciting some sort of prayer to the Ancient Aegyptian sun god? Or are we back to talking in proto-linguistic babble syllables again? So now you’re into submission and paraphilic infantilism. That makes some kind of sense, I guess.
Oh God. If Lady GaGa starts to make sense to you, fear for your sanity.]
Roma roma-ma
GaGa
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[Yes, I know. Your wanting of my bad romance is abundantly clear at this point.]
I want your horror
[Really? First you want to go to see King Lear with me, and now you want to go see Piranha 3D? Well, okay. But we’re going Dutch. International superstars in my company can pay for they own damn tickets. And, seriously, have you seen the prices for a 3D movie these days?]
I want your design
[Uh? Well, I’m not much of a designer, but okay. Besides, seeing your outfits, it’s not like I could possibly do any worse than the designers you already wear. An eyeless ape who has had half of his brains scooped out with a spoon could probably design more attractive clothes.]
‘Cuz you’re a criminal
As long as you’re mine
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[You know, Lady GaGa, you’re an adult human female (I think?), and I’m an adult human male, so for you to have my love would have would probably be legal in most areas. Then again, I am confident that if anyone could start at consensual heterosexual sex and end up at the point of criminal sexual perversion, it’s you.]
I want your psycho
[So you want me to dress up like a woman and stab you in the shower as you scream and bleed chocolate syrup? Eh…maybe.]
Your vertigo shtick
[So you want me to fall in love with you, whereupon you will fake your own death, whereupon I will fall into a deep depression until I find you again and fall in love with you again, whereupon we will recreate your fake death and end up actually killing you? That’s a pretty complex fantasy to have, Queen of the GaGas.
It takes a lot to get you off, doesn’t it?]
Want you in my rear window
[Oh, I get it now. All this discussion of classic Hitchcock movies is just a lead-in to you asking for anal sex. Thanks for ruining some of my favorite films for me, Lady GaGa. Never again will I be able to watch Jimmy Stewart and the incomparable Kim Novak climb those fateful stairs without thinking about you taking it in the butt.
You know, Lady GaGa, the other pop stars—they’re just ignorant fuckwits. They know not what they do. But you, you have just enough talent and culture and intelligence to cause actual harm to the things I hold dear. With moderate ability comes moderate responsibility, and it’s unfortunate that you have opted to use your powers for evil.]
Baby you’re sick
[*I’m* sick? Hey, I’m not the one who just turned one of the best movies of all time into a request for butt sex.]
I want your love
Love love love
I want your love
[I don’t know. I was having considerable doubts about our love you even before you asked me for all the Hitchock murder roleplay. I don’t know if me repeatedly pretending to kill is a good foundation for a relationship.]
You know that I want you (’Cuz I’m a free bitch baby)
[I doubt that. I’m gonna go with the supposition that you’re actually a ludicrously expensive bitch.]
And you know that I need you
I want it bad romance
Your bad romance
[Yeah, I think we both know at this point that any relationship between us would prove to be pretty fucking terrible. And yet you want it anyway? This song really is a cry for help, isn’t it?]
I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
[More revenge? I haven’t given you enough yet? Okay, well, we have a bridge and a last verse and one more instance of the chorus to go. I hope to have satisfied your revenge quota by the time we’re done.]
You and me could write a bad romance
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
Caught in a bad romance
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma
[Roma—like the Roma people of Cenral and Eastern Europe? So we can just flat-out use the names of ethnic groups as non-lexical vocables now? Let me try, using my own ethnicity. “Ger-Ger-German American.” Eh. Doesn’t have quite the same ring to it.]
GaGa, Ooh la-la
Want your bad romance
Walk walk fashion baby
[How is it that we’re discussing fashion now? This is the second time you’ve brought it around to fashion for no apparent reason, O atrocity that goes by the name of GaGa. I feel like you’re just trying to draw attention to your outfits, which probably don’t need any help in that department.]
Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk fashion baby
[In _those_ heels? I don’t think so, girlfriend.]
Work it, move that bitch c-razy
Walk walk passion baby
Work it
I’m a free bitch baby
[If that were true, how would you be paying for all those ridiculous clothes? Shit that ugly has got to be super-expensive.]
I want your love
And I want your revenge
I want your love
I don’t wanna be friends
[You don’t? But isn’t being bad friends a good way to lead up to being bad romantic partners?]
Je veux ton amour
Et je veux ta revenge
Je veux ton amour
[Look, you’re just saying the exact same thing in French. You don’t fool me. That’s not really very sophisticated. And yet there’s definitely something about the way your tongue curls around those vowels…ah! No! Must…resist…!]
I don’t wanna be friends
(Want your bad romance
I want your bad romance)
Want your bad romance!
I want your love and
I want your revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
I want your love and
All your lover’s revenge
You and me could write a bad romance
[We’ve been over all this already.]
Caught in a bad romance
Ra ra-ah-ah-ah
Roma roma-ma
GaGa
[You know, just because you took your name from the Queen song “Radio Ga Ga,” which criticized the kind of infantile pop music that was “becom[ing] some background noise / A backdrop for the girls and boys / Who just don't know or just don't care” doesn’t mean that you have to continue you to speak baby talk. If anything, Lady GaGa, you are becoming the very thing that Queen set out to criticize. And, in the end, that’s my real criticism of you—that, in your addressing of the topics of materialistic excess, our culture’s obsession with celebrity, and the pop music that is devoid of artistry and serves only to provide an accompaniment for sex, by means of your hyperbole, you seem to be critiquing all of these things by means of hyperbolic excess, but I really don’t think you’re critiquing these things so much as I think you’re reveling in them with an absolute abandonment of self-discipline. You are not satire so much as you are self-parody. I don’t think you’re pop culture’s greatest critic as you are its worst perpetrator.]
Oh la-la
Want your bad romance
[You know what? No. Sorry, but no.]
Friday, August 27, 2010
I Have a Nightmare
Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that President Obama is a “racist” with a “deep-seated hatred of white people or the white culture.” He characterized health care reform as “reparations.”
Tomorrow, on the 47th anniversary of the delivery of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech”—King’s dream having certainly found at least partial fulfillment in the election of a black American President—Fox pundit Glenn Beck will be gathering his people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the “Restoring Honor” rally. Beck characterizes the event as a “non-political” tribute to American soldiers, this in spite of the fact that the majority of attendees are likely to be outspoken members of the Tea Party, and politically charged figures such as Sarah Palin and Beck himself will be speaking about matters of national import.
It is possible that Palin and Beck will refrain from employing the divisive rhetoric that is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the Tea Partiers will observe the solemnity of the occasion by refraining from holding up signs with insulting and abusive epithets on them or booing any mention of President Obama, which is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the event will, indeed, be as “non-political” as any gathering of otherwise highly political people meeting at a highly political location can be.
It is also possible that monkeys will fly out of my dick. Rather profoundly unlikely, but possible.
Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that he did not originally intend to meet at the selfsame place on the selfsame day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his speech. He has called the coincidence “divine providence.” Out of deference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beck will be standing “two flights lower” on the steps of the memorial than where King himself stood. Beck has said “I am not Dr. King.”
And yet, inspired by this “providence,” Beck has gone on to say that “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights movement…We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the Civil Rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”
We were the people that did it in the first place? We meaning the affluent white people who comprise the lion’s share of the Tea Party? Affluent white people were the people who did the Civil Rights movement?
Wow.
I hope that the notion of the kind of affluent, conservative, Caucasian Tea partisans “reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement” turns your stomach as much as it does mine, gentle reader. I have a very hard time seeing Beck and his people as being in the same situation as American Negroes in the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is opening up on Tea Parties with firehoses. Nobody is unleashing attack dogs on Tea Partiers. While Tea Partiers might live in fear of a fantastical socialist takeover of America, they don’t live in actual fear of being lynched by their detractors. Nobody is liable to threaten a Tea Partier with beating or death because that Tea Partier might opt to date outside of the Tea Party, and I believe most states will recognize a marriage between a Tea Partier and a non-Tea Partier. Tea Partiers are not compelled to use inferior facilities or required by law to stay among their own kind or categorically excluded from places of business. Tea Partiers are not, to the best of my knowledge, systematically excluded from institutions of education, denied the right to vote, or the recipients of endemic generational economic discrimination. Glenn Beck ‘s expressions of disobedience are vetted and vouchsafed by the government, and have never landed him in jail.
Tea Partiers are, apparently, compelled to pay more taxes than they would like to pay in exchange for government services that they do not want.
Government services like assistance for the poor, which is a thing that Dr. King expressly did want. I’m willing to bet he would’ve wanted universal health care, too.
In my estimation, Tea Partiers have it pretty fucking good compared to African Americans in the middle part of the 20th Century. Pretty fucking good, indeed. Which doesn’t stop the Tea Partiers from portraying themselves as an oppressed minority victimized by a brutal and unjust state.
I extrapolate out and imagine the Tea Partiers “reclaiming” the Civil Rights movement which they “started” as merely the beginning of a trend. Soon, all oppressive groups will “reclaim” the victimization of their victims, and so gain self-pity and self-righteousness on top of privilege that comes at the expense of others. Meat-eaters will reclaim animal rights from PeTA: “Animals have the right to be carnivores!” Child molestors will reclaim molestation from children: “That six-year-old forced herself upon me with her sex-crazed ways!” Neo-Nazis will reclaim the Shoah from the Jews—“Our ancestors were oppressed because they had to shove your ancestors into the ovens. Do you realize how heavy a body, even a body starved down to bones, can be?”
And, in the coup de grace of inappropriate appropriation, Glenn Beck will reclaim the Civil Rights movement from black people. Because God knows we can’t leave something so important as the struggle against oppression in the hands of actual oppressed people.
Tomorrow, on the 47th anniversary of the delivery of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream Speech”—King’s dream having certainly found at least partial fulfillment in the election of a black American President—Fox pundit Glenn Beck will be gathering his people on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial for the “Restoring Honor” rally. Beck characterizes the event as a “non-political” tribute to American soldiers, this in spite of the fact that the majority of attendees are likely to be outspoken members of the Tea Party, and politically charged figures such as Sarah Palin and Beck himself will be speaking about matters of national import.
It is possible that Palin and Beck will refrain from employing the divisive rhetoric that is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the Tea Partiers will observe the solemnity of the occasion by refraining from holding up signs with insulting and abusive epithets on them or booing any mention of President Obama, which is otherwise their stock in trade. It is possible that the event will, indeed, be as “non-political” as any gathering of otherwise highly political people meeting at a highly political location can be.
It is also possible that monkeys will fly out of my dick. Rather profoundly unlikely, but possible.
Fox pundit Glenn Beck has said that he did not originally intend to meet at the selfsame place on the selfsame day that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., delivered his speech. He has called the coincidence “divine providence.” Out of deference to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Beck will be standing “two flights lower” on the steps of the memorial than where King himself stood. Beck has said “I am not Dr. King.”
And yet, inspired by this “providence,” Beck has gone on to say that “This is a moment, quite honestly, that I think we reclaim the Civil Rights movement…We are on the side of individual freedoms and liberties and, dammit, we will reclaim the Civil Rights moment. We will take that movement because we were the people that did it in the first place.”
We were the people that did it in the first place? We meaning the affluent white people who comprise the lion’s share of the Tea Party? Affluent white people were the people who did the Civil Rights movement?
Wow.
I hope that the notion of the kind of affluent, conservative, Caucasian Tea partisans “reclaiming the Civil Rights Movement” turns your stomach as much as it does mine, gentle reader. I have a very hard time seeing Beck and his people as being in the same situation as American Negroes in the 1960s. To the best of my knowledge, nobody is opening up on Tea Parties with firehoses. Nobody is unleashing attack dogs on Tea Partiers. While Tea Partiers might live in fear of a fantastical socialist takeover of America, they don’t live in actual fear of being lynched by their detractors. Nobody is liable to threaten a Tea Partier with beating or death because that Tea Partier might opt to date outside of the Tea Party, and I believe most states will recognize a marriage between a Tea Partier and a non-Tea Partier. Tea Partiers are not compelled to use inferior facilities or required by law to stay among their own kind or categorically excluded from places of business. Tea Partiers are not, to the best of my knowledge, systematically excluded from institutions of education, denied the right to vote, or the recipients of endemic generational economic discrimination. Glenn Beck ‘s expressions of disobedience are vetted and vouchsafed by the government, and have never landed him in jail.
Tea Partiers are, apparently, compelled to pay more taxes than they would like to pay in exchange for government services that they do not want.
Government services like assistance for the poor, which is a thing that Dr. King expressly did want. I’m willing to bet he would’ve wanted universal health care, too.
In my estimation, Tea Partiers have it pretty fucking good compared to African Americans in the middle part of the 20th Century. Pretty fucking good, indeed. Which doesn’t stop the Tea Partiers from portraying themselves as an oppressed minority victimized by a brutal and unjust state.
I extrapolate out and imagine the Tea Partiers “reclaiming” the Civil Rights movement which they “started” as merely the beginning of a trend. Soon, all oppressive groups will “reclaim” the victimization of their victims, and so gain self-pity and self-righteousness on top of privilege that comes at the expense of others. Meat-eaters will reclaim animal rights from PeTA: “Animals have the right to be carnivores!” Child molestors will reclaim molestation from children: “That six-year-old forced herself upon me with her sex-crazed ways!” Neo-Nazis will reclaim the Shoah from the Jews—“Our ancestors were oppressed because they had to shove your ancestors into the ovens. Do you realize how heavy a body, even a body starved down to bones, can be?”
And, in the coup de grace of inappropriate appropriation, Glenn Beck will reclaim the Civil Rights movement from black people. Because God knows we can’t leave something so important as the struggle against oppression in the hands of actual oppressed people.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Aural Analysis: "California Gurls" by Katy Perry
Katy, my lady. (Yeah?). Now listen here, baby. (Uh-huh!). I had to listen to your stupid song three times today on my way from O.C. down to S.D. After being assaulted in this manner, I felt compelled to mount a counter-attack in the only way I know how: exposing the idiocy of popular culture by means of the ripping, mean-spirited satire that is ever the domain of those who receive an inadequate amount of sex from the bubbly, beautiful people described in your song and your video.
Here's the video. Watch it, if you've not done so already, if for no other reason than to see a woman strapping cans of whipped cream to her impressive breasts and blasting out a moneyshot of whipped cream all over an army of evil gummi bears, and then to try to carry on with a normal human existence after having been exposed to such imagery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwE-SLnLkqY
So greetings, loved ones. Let's take a trip into the stupidity of "California Gurls." My responses to the original lyrics are in brackets.
I know a place
Where the grass is really greener
[Really? Where would that be? Surely not Southern California, where we have water rationing and many of the lawns die during the summer.
Are you in Paradise City? Axl Rose said that the grass is green there, but I still haven't seen it with my own eyes.]
Warm, wet and wild
There must be something in the water
[You mean the water we import from hundreds of miles inland and upstate? Or do you mean the water we plunder from the Colorado river, sloppy seconds water that has flowed through six other states before it gets to California? Either way, this is a poor claim for California Exceptionalism.]
Sippin' gin and juice
Laying underneath the palm trees
[I somehow doubt you or the professional models in your video have ever done anything so ghetto or high-calorie as to drink gin and juice. At 252 calories per serving, you and your girls aren't going to be able to pull off your Daisy Dukes for very long if you were to drink Snoop Juice. More likely, I can see you drinking reduced calorie pomegranatinis and then spending an hour purging afterwards. See also: your silly video.]
The boys
Break their necks
Try'na to creep a little sneak peek
(at us)
[This is weird on multiple levels. First of all, how is it "creep[ing] a little sneak peek" if you are clearly making a sexual display of yourself? But then there's this notion that the boys are "break[ing] their necks" just to look at you. What the fuck, Katy Perry? Are you suggesting that your sex is overpowering that it causes people to VIOLENTLY DIE? I'm sorry, but I'm not really seeing this as a good thing.
Oh no! I feel a mind-rapingly hooky pre-chorus coming on!]
You could travel the world
[Thank you for your permission!]
But nothing comes close
To the golden coast
[In what respect? Sluttiness? I hear Singapore beats us out in that regard.]
Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love
[That's as may be. It's hard to ignore the hormonal demand to fuck you when you're practically begging for it. But it's been my experience spending the whole of my lifetime among California Gurls that it's relatively rare that the kind of women who figure in this sex fantasy will never love you back unless you're a producer, a director, or somebody who otherwise has six figures to throw around. So there's that.]
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
[Congratulations. You know how to fake an orgasm into an autotuner. Your Pentecostal parents must be proud, Katy Perry. Tell me, does that Jesus tattoo on your wrist ever itch or turn weird colors when you're doing stuff like this?]
California girls
We're unforgettable
[Well, that's for fucking sure. I can't go anywhere without stumbling over this song. Its simple major harmonies and insipid beats stick in my brain like barbed fishhooks.]
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
[So, you're saying California is special because its women employ a fashion made famous by a character who was supposed to be from Georgia?]
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle
[Is that...is that supposed to be a metaphor for ejaculation? I think it is, but it has got to take the prize for the weirdest and dumbest double entendre of all time. And again with the weird violence; I don't know about the rest of the Y-chromosome havers in the world, but thinking about my dick melting off doesn't make me feel all that comfortable.
You're into S&M, aren't you, Katy? I feel sorry for Russel Brand. But I guess you met him by chucking a bottle at his head, so he must like it when you hurt him.]
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[Now I'm envisioning you achieving that fake orgasm by strapping on stilettos and stepping on live mice. I like this image; it makes me not want to bang you so bad.]
California girls
We're undeniable
[Do you deny that I have devoted all of this previous blog posting to denying you? Hah! DENIED!]
Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock
[While I actually appreciate the attempt at alliteration here, these lines have a couple of problems. First, that "sun-kissed skin" does not look all that fresh. Once California Gurls get exposed to about 30 years of golden sunshine, they start to sag and wrinkle like mountain hags. Of course, they then get botox injections to compensate, which makes them look like the plastic dolls they really are. Nothing comes close to the Golden Coast when it comes to presentations of surgical sexuality, I do grant you that!
Except Singapore, I guess. I hear they have some pretty wild things going on over there.
Also, to say you "got it on lock" makes sex sound like some sort of Xbox achievement. Don't do that.]
West coast represent
[Which West Coast are we representing here? The illusory one drenched in sex and smiling, or the one that I inhabit, full of bourgeois affectation and soulless pop media layered over racism and grotesque economic discrepancies and disappointment?]
Now put your hands up
[Yay, grotesque economic discrepancies!]
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
Sex on a beach
We get sand in our stilletos
[Oh, come on. Even the alien clone women of L.A. who represent an evolutionary leap forward into artificial life don't wear stilettos to the goddamn beach.]
We freak
In my jeep
[The lyrics site I adapted this from misquoted the lyric as "We freak / And we're cheap." Ho ho ho. As if that would be the lyric for this song.]
Snoop Doggy Dogg on the stereo
[Yeah, I'm sure you listen to "Murder Was the Case" and "Deez Nuuuts" on a daily basis.]
You could travel the world
But nothing comes close
To the golden coast
Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[Just one verse before the chorus now? Yeah, I know. Writing words is hard. Showing boobs and smiling like a naughty girl is much easier. And a much more effective way of selling records.]
California girls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[The more I think about my dick melting off, the less sexy this song becomes. But again, anything that helps me not want to get blasted by whip cream from Katy Perry's tits is a valuable asset in my fight to not have my sexuality hijacked by Hollywood.]
(Snoop Dogg)
[Hey, Snoop Dogg! I haven't really been following your career since _The Chronic_, one of the finest examples of West Coast Hip-Hop of all time! How have you been, Mr. D. O. Double G?]
Toned, Tan
Fit and ready
Turn it up cause its gettin' heavy
Wild wild west coast
These are the girls I love the most
I mean the ones
I mean like shes the one
Kiss her
Touch her
Squeeze her buns
[Oh, I see. That's how you've been.]
The girl's a freak
She drives a jeep
And lives on the beach
[Didn't Katy rhyme "freak" and "jeep" and "beach" a few verses ago? You know, Snoop, I never took you for the sharpest of wordsmiths. Your style was always more contingent upon your smooth delivery and your creative use of the letter "z" more than intricate wordplay. Even so, I would think you would have a little more self-respect, as a veteran rapper, than to take your rhymes from a twenty-six-year-old white girl.]
I'm okay
I wont play
[You'd better not. I saw _Get Him to the Greek_. That Russel Brand is scary when he gets a few (thousand) drugs in him.]
I love the bait
Just like I love LA
Venice beach
And Palm Springs
Summer time is everything
[I hate summer in Southern California. Everything is hot, dry, and slathered in U.V. radiation and inaccessible sex. I guess that's not all Katy Perry's fault. But it is partially.]
Homeboys
Hangin' out
All that ass
Hangin' out
[Lyricism at its finest, folks.]
Bikinis, zucchinis, martinis
No weenies
[Did you just rhyme "zucchinis" with "weenies," Mr. Dogg? I struggle to come up with a coherent response to that.
Except that I might observe that, while according to the most recent data gathered in 1996, California did place second in national summer squash production (being edged out by Florida), and that fresh zucchinis are indeed available here during the summer months, the presence of zucchinis would hardly seem to be a defining feature for California. Zucchini tends not to factor strongly into local cuisine, being far more prominent in the dishes of Mediterranean countries and Mexico. I grant you that, according to Wikipedia, California was the most likely place where zucchini production was introduced into the U.S. (the squash having been taken from the new world, hybridized and selectively bred in Italy, and then brought westward back over the pond). Were you reading up on agricultural history while composing your lyrics, Mr. Dogg?
Or were you just coming up with a ricockulous rhyme for "bikinis"?
And what's with the "No Weenies" injunction? No weenies other than your own, I take it, the better to leave you with your sexual pick of all these fine, fresh, fierce females. But I am thinking that the nature of the "California Gurls" video engenders a response that will involve a lot of weenies, even if those weenies are only being used for masturbatory purposes.
Because it's PORN.]
Just a king
And a queen-ie
[Ugh. No comment.]
Katy my lady
(Yeah)
Now lookie here, baby
(Uh huh)
I'm all up on you
'Cause you representin' California
(Ohhh yeahh)
[Hey, Mr. Dogg, I'm representin' California, too. The underside of California; the after-image of glamor, what's left when the lights fade. Does that mean you'll be gettin' "all up on" me, too? I'd best bust out my Daisy Dukes.
Now bring that chorus back! It's like sugar being directly injected into your brain!]
California gurls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your Popsicle
Oooooh oh oooooh
California gurls
We're undeniable
Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock
Westcoast represent
(Westcoast, Westcoast)
Now put your hands up
Oooooh oh oooooh
Snoop Dogg:
(Californiaaa, Californiaaa)
California girls man
I wish they all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa)
I really wish
You all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa, girls)
Yeah, so that's "California Gurls." No matter how you might criticize it, at least it's not "I Gotta Feeling." It's got that much going for it.
Here are some other links to songs that, in my humble estimation, represent the Southern California experience in a far more musically adroit and psychologically realistic manner.
"Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwlogyj7nFE
"Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk
"Parallel Universe" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPYyoY49Bc
"Down Rodeo" by Rage Against the Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KEKL8fcvzY
"Like a Stone" by Audioslave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QU1nvuxaMA
"L.A. Woman" by The Doors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMVnEGcMsFs
"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPb4s0-QcI
"What I Got" by Sublime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc3ZrmhDN4
"Aenema" by Tool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCEeAn6_QJo
(Every time you listen to "AEnema," with lyrics like "Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA / The only way to fix it is to flush it all away. / Any fucking time. Any fucking day," a pop star goes to Hell! So put it on repeat.)
There are many more I might pick, but these will serve as a primer for quality Southern California music.
Also notable: this pitch-perfect gay tribute to "California Gurls." Gin and Juicy Juice! This is camp at is absolute finest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelUCEcdO8M
Here's the video. Watch it, if you've not done so already, if for no other reason than to see a woman strapping cans of whipped cream to her impressive breasts and blasting out a moneyshot of whipped cream all over an army of evil gummi bears, and then to try to carry on with a normal human existence after having been exposed to such imagery.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CwE-SLnLkqY
So greetings, loved ones. Let's take a trip into the stupidity of "California Gurls." My responses to the original lyrics are in brackets.
I know a place
Where the grass is really greener
[Really? Where would that be? Surely not Southern California, where we have water rationing and many of the lawns die during the summer.
Are you in Paradise City? Axl Rose said that the grass is green there, but I still haven't seen it with my own eyes.]
Warm, wet and wild
There must be something in the water
[You mean the water we import from hundreds of miles inland and upstate? Or do you mean the water we plunder from the Colorado river, sloppy seconds water that has flowed through six other states before it gets to California? Either way, this is a poor claim for California Exceptionalism.]
Sippin' gin and juice
Laying underneath the palm trees
[I somehow doubt you or the professional models in your video have ever done anything so ghetto or high-calorie as to drink gin and juice. At 252 calories per serving, you and your girls aren't going to be able to pull off your Daisy Dukes for very long if you were to drink Snoop Juice. More likely, I can see you drinking reduced calorie pomegranatinis and then spending an hour purging afterwards. See also: your silly video.]
The boys
Break their necks
Try'na to creep a little sneak peek
(at us)
[This is weird on multiple levels. First of all, how is it "creep[ing] a little sneak peek" if you are clearly making a sexual display of yourself? But then there's this notion that the boys are "break[ing] their necks" just to look at you. What the fuck, Katy Perry? Are you suggesting that your sex is overpowering that it causes people to VIOLENTLY DIE? I'm sorry, but I'm not really seeing this as a good thing.
Oh no! I feel a mind-rapingly hooky pre-chorus coming on!]
You could travel the world
[Thank you for your permission!]
But nothing comes close
To the golden coast
[In what respect? Sluttiness? I hear Singapore beats us out in that regard.]
Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love
[That's as may be. It's hard to ignore the hormonal demand to fuck you when you're practically begging for it. But it's been my experience spending the whole of my lifetime among California Gurls that it's relatively rare that the kind of women who figure in this sex fantasy will never love you back unless you're a producer, a director, or somebody who otherwise has six figures to throw around. So there's that.]
Oh-oh-oh-oh-oh, oh, oh-oh-oh-oh-oh
[Congratulations. You know how to fake an orgasm into an autotuner. Your Pentecostal parents must be proud, Katy Perry. Tell me, does that Jesus tattoo on your wrist ever itch or turn weird colors when you're doing stuff like this?]
California girls
We're unforgettable
[Well, that's for fucking sure. I can't go anywhere without stumbling over this song. Its simple major harmonies and insipid beats stick in my brain like barbed fishhooks.]
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
[So, you're saying California is special because its women employ a fashion made famous by a character who was supposed to be from Georgia?]
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle
[Is that...is that supposed to be a metaphor for ejaculation? I think it is, but it has got to take the prize for the weirdest and dumbest double entendre of all time. And again with the weird violence; I don't know about the rest of the Y-chromosome havers in the world, but thinking about my dick melting off doesn't make me feel all that comfortable.
You're into S&M, aren't you, Katy? I feel sorry for Russel Brand. But I guess you met him by chucking a bottle at his head, so he must like it when you hurt him.]
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[Now I'm envisioning you achieving that fake orgasm by strapping on stilettos and stepping on live mice. I like this image; it makes me not want to bang you so bad.]
California girls
We're undeniable
[Do you deny that I have devoted all of this previous blog posting to denying you? Hah! DENIED!]
Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock
[While I actually appreciate the attempt at alliteration here, these lines have a couple of problems. First, that "sun-kissed skin" does not look all that fresh. Once California Gurls get exposed to about 30 years of golden sunshine, they start to sag and wrinkle like mountain hags. Of course, they then get botox injections to compensate, which makes them look like the plastic dolls they really are. Nothing comes close to the Golden Coast when it comes to presentations of surgical sexuality, I do grant you that!
Except Singapore, I guess. I hear they have some pretty wild things going on over there.
Also, to say you "got it on lock" makes sex sound like some sort of Xbox achievement. Don't do that.]
West coast represent
[Which West Coast are we representing here? The illusory one drenched in sex and smiling, or the one that I inhabit, full of bourgeois affectation and soulless pop media layered over racism and grotesque economic discrepancies and disappointment?]
Now put your hands up
[Yay, grotesque economic discrepancies!]
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
Sex on a beach
We get sand in our stilletos
[Oh, come on. Even the alien clone women of L.A. who represent an evolutionary leap forward into artificial life don't wear stilettos to the goddamn beach.]
We freak
In my jeep
[The lyrics site I adapted this from misquoted the lyric as "We freak / And we're cheap." Ho ho ho. As if that would be the lyric for this song.]
Snoop Doggy Dogg on the stereo
[Yeah, I'm sure you listen to "Murder Was the Case" and "Deez Nuuuts" on a daily basis.]
You could travel the world
But nothing comes close
To the golden coast
Once you party with us
You'll be falling in love
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[Just one verse before the chorus now? Yeah, I know. Writing words is hard. Showing boobs and smiling like a naughty girl is much easier. And a much more effective way of selling records.]
California girls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your popsicle
Oooooh Oh Oooooh
[The more I think about my dick melting off, the less sexy this song becomes. But again, anything that helps me not want to get blasted by whip cream from Katy Perry's tits is a valuable asset in my fight to not have my sexuality hijacked by Hollywood.]
(Snoop Dogg)
[Hey, Snoop Dogg! I haven't really been following your career since _The Chronic_, one of the finest examples of West Coast Hip-Hop of all time! How have you been, Mr. D. O. Double G?]
Toned, Tan
Fit and ready
Turn it up cause its gettin' heavy
Wild wild west coast
These are the girls I love the most
I mean the ones
I mean like shes the one
Kiss her
Touch her
Squeeze her buns
[Oh, I see. That's how you've been.]
The girl's a freak
She drives a jeep
And lives on the beach
[Didn't Katy rhyme "freak" and "jeep" and "beach" a few verses ago? You know, Snoop, I never took you for the sharpest of wordsmiths. Your style was always more contingent upon your smooth delivery and your creative use of the letter "z" more than intricate wordplay. Even so, I would think you would have a little more self-respect, as a veteran rapper, than to take your rhymes from a twenty-six-year-old white girl.]
I'm okay
I wont play
[You'd better not. I saw _Get Him to the Greek_. That Russel Brand is scary when he gets a few (thousand) drugs in him.]
I love the bait
Just like I love LA
Venice beach
And Palm Springs
Summer time is everything
[I hate summer in Southern California. Everything is hot, dry, and slathered in U.V. radiation and inaccessible sex. I guess that's not all Katy Perry's fault. But it is partially.]
Homeboys
Hangin' out
All that ass
Hangin' out
[Lyricism at its finest, folks.]
Bikinis, zucchinis, martinis
No weenies
[Did you just rhyme "zucchinis" with "weenies," Mr. Dogg? I struggle to come up with a coherent response to that.
Except that I might observe that, while according to the most recent data gathered in 1996, California did place second in national summer squash production (being edged out by Florida), and that fresh zucchinis are indeed available here during the summer months, the presence of zucchinis would hardly seem to be a defining feature for California. Zucchini tends not to factor strongly into local cuisine, being far more prominent in the dishes of Mediterranean countries and Mexico. I grant you that, according to Wikipedia, California was the most likely place where zucchini production was introduced into the U.S. (the squash having been taken from the new world, hybridized and selectively bred in Italy, and then brought westward back over the pond). Were you reading up on agricultural history while composing your lyrics, Mr. Dogg?
Or were you just coming up with a ricockulous rhyme for "bikinis"?
And what's with the "No Weenies" injunction? No weenies other than your own, I take it, the better to leave you with your sexual pick of all these fine, fresh, fierce females. But I am thinking that the nature of the "California Gurls" video engenders a response that will involve a lot of weenies, even if those weenies are only being used for masturbatory purposes.
Because it's PORN.]
Just a king
And a queen-ie
[Ugh. No comment.]
Katy my lady
(Yeah)
Now lookie here, baby
(Uh huh)
I'm all up on you
'Cause you representin' California
(Ohhh yeahh)
[Hey, Mr. Dogg, I'm representin' California, too. The underside of California; the after-image of glamor, what's left when the lights fade. Does that mean you'll be gettin' "all up on" me, too? I'd best bust out my Daisy Dukes.
Now bring that chorus back! It's like sugar being directly injected into your brain!]
California gurls
We're unforgettable
Daisy Dukes
Bikinis on top
Sun-kissed skin
So hot
We'll melt your Popsicle
Oooooh oh oooooh
California gurls
We're undeniable
Fine, fresh, fierce
We got it on lock
Westcoast represent
(Westcoast, Westcoast)
Now put your hands up
Oooooh oh oooooh
Snoop Dogg:
(Californiaaa, Californiaaa)
California girls man
I wish they all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa)
I really wish
You all could be
California girls
(Californiaaa, girls)
Yeah, so that's "California Gurls." No matter how you might criticize it, at least it's not "I Gotta Feeling." It's got that much going for it.
Here are some other links to songs that, in my humble estimation, represent the Southern California experience in a far more musically adroit and psychologically realistic manner.
"Under the Bridge" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lwlogyj7nFE
"Californication" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlUKcNNmywk
"Parallel Universe" by the Red Hot Chili Peppers
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fPYyoY49Bc
"Down Rodeo" by Rage Against the Machine
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9KEKL8fcvzY
"Like a Stone" by Audioslave
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7QU1nvuxaMA
"L.A. Woman" by The Doors
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMVnEGcMsFs
"Straight Outta Compton" by N.W.A.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkPb4s0-QcI
"What I Got" by Sublime
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Uc3ZrmhDN4
"Aenema" by Tool
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uCEeAn6_QJo
(Every time you listen to "AEnema," with lyrics like "Here in this hopeless fucking hole we call LA / The only way to fix it is to flush it all away. / Any fucking time. Any fucking day," a pop star goes to Hell! So put it on repeat.)
There are many more I might pick, but these will serve as a primer for quality Southern California music.
Also notable: this pitch-perfect gay tribute to "California Gurls." Gin and Juicy Juice! This is camp at is absolute finest.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kelUCEcdO8M
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Fairness
Teaching teaches you a lot about fairness. Like how, basically, it doesn't exist.
Today I suggested to the instructor of the class that a student fail because she had been absent from three tutoring sessions. I had made it abundantly clear to the class that repeat non-attendance would result in failure, giving the students a written syllabus and verbal instructions to the effect that the second unexcused absence would warrant a failing grade in the class. I opted not to fail this student after the second absence, because I prefer to be more lenient in person than I am on paper. But with the third absence, my capacity for permissiveness has been pushed beyond its limit.
No doubt, the student will claim that it is unfair of me to fail her. Last semester, I was exposed to any number of allegations from students as to the "unfairness" of the exercising of my power as an instructor, when I was only operating in accordance with the established standards that they could and should have been aware of all throughout the duration of the semester. But of course, most any punishment is unfair when you're on the receiving end of it, isn't it? And if I don't fail her, the other students in the class will insist that I am being unfair, singling her out for special treatment.
What is fair? Is it fair to try to accommodate the rules to suit the needs of the individual? Or is it fair to try to uphold the rules as impersonally as possible? Neither one seems, objectively, to be more right than the other, and circumstantially either could be interpreted as the right thing to do. One's own experiences and personality will probably prioritize one over the other, but it doesn't seem to me that there's any absolute way of determining the rightness of mercy or justice; when to apply the rules and when not.
When it comes right down to it, there's no right or wrong here. Just a shot in the dark for me, the authority figure, as to what is the best for me and the student in question and all the other students who have not violated the rules but whose compliance might well be contingent upon the equitable enforcement of the rules.
And thus we come to a quandary, where all options are both right and wrong.
I wish the ethical option in any given situation were always obvious, but if it were, we wouldn't need ethics, would we?
Today I suggested to the instructor of the class that a student fail because she had been absent from three tutoring sessions. I had made it abundantly clear to the class that repeat non-attendance would result in failure, giving the students a written syllabus and verbal instructions to the effect that the second unexcused absence would warrant a failing grade in the class. I opted not to fail this student after the second absence, because I prefer to be more lenient in person than I am on paper. But with the third absence, my capacity for permissiveness has been pushed beyond its limit.
No doubt, the student will claim that it is unfair of me to fail her. Last semester, I was exposed to any number of allegations from students as to the "unfairness" of the exercising of my power as an instructor, when I was only operating in accordance with the established standards that they could and should have been aware of all throughout the duration of the semester. But of course, most any punishment is unfair when you're on the receiving end of it, isn't it? And if I don't fail her, the other students in the class will insist that I am being unfair, singling her out for special treatment.
What is fair? Is it fair to try to accommodate the rules to suit the needs of the individual? Or is it fair to try to uphold the rules as impersonally as possible? Neither one seems, objectively, to be more right than the other, and circumstantially either could be interpreted as the right thing to do. One's own experiences and personality will probably prioritize one over the other, but it doesn't seem to me that there's any absolute way of determining the rightness of mercy or justice; when to apply the rules and when not.
When it comes right down to it, there's no right or wrong here. Just a shot in the dark for me, the authority figure, as to what is the best for me and the student in question and all the other students who have not violated the rules but whose compliance might well be contingent upon the equitable enforcement of the rules.
And thus we come to a quandary, where all options are both right and wrong.
I wish the ethical option in any given situation were always obvious, but if it were, we wouldn't need ethics, would we?
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
How To Stop Staring At Girl's Boobs
Today, through the vagaries of the Internet, I happened upon the wikiHow article for "How to Stop Staring at a Girl's Boobs" (http://www.wikihow.com/Stop-Staring-at-a-Girl%27s-Boobs). Oh, wikiHow, where were you when I was going through puberty? Or when I was...twenty-nine, which is my age at the time of this writing? Ahem. The article brought back memories of that time in my life when indeed it seemed that there was absolutely nothing to do other than stare at boobs...which, of course, is before I discovered that there were many other parts of a woman's body worth staring at. So, in the wiki spirit (it is, after all, the manual I can edit!), I here suggest a few additions and editions for the wikiHow page on boob-staring. From here on out, the text in brackets will be mine, to differentiate it from the original text.
Have you ever been in class or perhaps at a party and out of the corner of your eye you notice a beautiful girl with large boobs? [Or a plain girl with large boobs? Or an unattractive girl with large boobs? Or a beautiful girl with medium boobs? Or a plain girl with medium boobs? Or an unattractive girl with medium boobs? Or a beautiful girl with small boobs? Etc.] You gather up your courage to go talk to her, but you can't keep your eyes off her boobs? [Yes! Oh. That is a rhetorical question. I'm not supposed to answer it.] Here are some steps to help you in that and other similar situations.
1. Make eye contact with her when you talk to her. It's polite, and most likely her face will have some attractive feature. [If you don't understand this last assertion, then you clearly haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, and if you haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, then I doubt your credentials as an overly hormonal teenage boy. This article is targeted at teenage boys, right? Protip: I know fuck-all about the sexual development and desires of teenage lesbians, and the less I contemplate this particular subject, the better for you and me and the statutes of the great state of California, so I had best stop now.]
2. You can also talk about her shoes, earrings, and so forth, but not too much or she might think you're interested in something you really aren't. [Pretending to care about things that women are interested in but not really caring about those things is a great way to get near some boobs without drawing attention to the fact that you only care about getting near some boobs. Once you've mastered this skill the the point where you can pretend to care about a girl's thoughts and feelings, you will probably get to touch some boobs.]
3. Talk to her about anything: movies, school, current events, anything that at least partially distracts you from her breasts. [Yes. TALKING ABOUT ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING OTHER THAN HER BREASTS IS GENIUS ADVICE FOR TAKING YOUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM HER BREASTS. Unless the absolutely anything you're talking about is less interesting than her breasts, and if you're a fifteen year old boy there is probably nothing in the world that is more interesting to you than her breasts, and you find your attention straying back to her breasts anyway.]
4. You might get an erection from looking too long at her breasts. So don't stare. Look at her face. Look deep into her eyes. This doesn't mean look at another girl's breasts. [It doesn't? Oh shit, there goes my gameplan! I mean, of course. Stare into her eyes so her boobs don't give you a boner. That should be obvious. It's not like you can feel the gravity of your boobs pulling your little fireman up and your eyes down and your hands in closer, can you? It's not like her boobs have become the center of your attention, of your very universe, have they? Of course not! Of course not. No, stare into her eyes. Deep into her eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul, the gateway to the mind, and one of the most erotic parts of the body. Her beautiful eyes...redirecting all that libidinal energy towards this new body part can't have any possible side effec--ah, shit, now you've developed an eye fetish! You Japanese person, you! You're getting an erection from staring into her eyes, aren't you? Well, maybe there's another wikiHow page that can help you out with that, I don't know.]
5. If you are sure she isn't looking, take a quick glance at her breasts to relieve yourself, but don't forget to look away, as they can be hypnotic. [This gem of wisdom is perfect as it is; I have nothing to add to it.]
6. Don't daydream about girl's breasts, especially if you are in class. The teacher may call you out on it and jar you with a question, if you look spaced-out and have that silly smile on your face. [Because, as we all know, the best way to not think about something is to tell yourself not to think about it! Like if I tell you the last thing in the world you'd ever want to think about is the Candiru fish, which is an inch-long fish with sharp backwards-pointing spines on its back that lives in Amazonian rivers and is attracted to the compounds in urine such that it will swim up into peoples' genitals while they are peeing and so become lodged in their urinal tracts before dying of asphyxia and flexing its spines in reflex, causing unthinkable pain and forcing somebody in a nearby village to perform impromptu genital surgery with a hunting knife, THERE'S NO WAY you would think about a fish swimming up into your penis, dying and rotting and stabbing your penis with bony spines from the inside until you cut it out with a huge knife! And this thinking aversion technique works BEST when it comes to SEX, trust me! Alternately, you can try to think of horrific things to derail your sex drive. Think about your parents or siblings dying screaming in a fire, or think about how those boobs will, in the fullness of time, putrefact to black sacs of rot, shot through with maggots and carrion-eating beetles. There's NO WAY that distracting yourself in this way could be harmful to your your psyche AT ALL. If all else fails and your teacher does call on you while you have a silly smile on your face, you could always pretend as though you were happily contemplating the subject matter of the class. But she probably wouldn't believe you, because as you and I and your teacher all know, learning is for nerds.]
Tips
Make a vow to only stare at them a few minutes a day, and then lower the number of minutes each day until you reach an equilibrium quotient. [I think this tip is suggesting that if you learn what things like "equilibrium quotient" means, your brain will grow at the expense of your balls and you'll somehow sap your sex drive. Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK. Translated into normal human speech, this could also suggest that you ration your boobage staring and decrease the amount each day. Because staring at boobs and timing yourself and taking careful mental notes about the boob staring and trying to be economic with your boob staring such that you reserve your quota for staring at the *best* boobs and not just any old boobs is surely a step in the right direction from willy-nilly boob-staring. And, just like trying to not think about boobs is the best way to not think about boobs, rationing your boob-staring is surely the best way to ensure there's no way you'll ever slip outside of the brittle, artificial, and arbitrary limitations that your higher cognitive processes have imposed upon overwhelming instinct.]
When outdoors, wear sunglasses, so she will not be able to see where your eyes are looking. [Actually, that's some pretty good advice right there. It's half the reason why you'll never see me outdoors without sunglasses. The other half: hangovers.]
The more you treat her respectfully, you increase your chances that she will show you her entire boobs [Sic?] in an appropriate place. This is what dreams are made of. [It is? Well, prepare to be shocked: GIRLS DON'T HAVE PENISES, THEY HAVE VAGINAS INSTEAD! Now you can stop dreaming about boobs.]
Get to know the girl in question, if you would like to become her boyfriend. That way you could see her boobs more often. [Again, we repeat the advice that the only reason for ever having any contact with a woman is for the purpose of seeing boobs, and you should engineer all of your social interactions with such in mind. I know it's totally non-intuitive to think that if you spend more time around a woman such as by becoming her boyfriend, you will have more opportunities to see her boobs, but believe me, it's actually true! You should totally base your boyfriendidness upon whose boobs you like to look at the most! Protip: You don't have to be a boyfriend to stare at boobs? Have you ever heard of this thing called "The Internet?" Fully half of it is dedicated to images of boobs. Really! Try a Google image search for "boobs" right now and see what happens! You'll be surprised. ProProTip: Your ability to see a particular pair of boobs is inversely proportional to your desire to see a particular pair of boobs. The more you see your girlfriend's boobs, the more you'll wish you could see more boobs and different boobs! But you can't! Hah hah. You got monogamied, bitch.]
Warnings
Don't look off into space while talking to her if you are that afraid of looking at her boobs. Try to practice looking them in their eyes while talking to them. Then before you know it you'll be fine. [Protip: Warning: The guy who wrote this piece of advice was an idiot. Don't listen to him. In all honesty, staring off into space is the best alternative to staring at boobs if for whatever reason you feel you can't stare at boobs at the present time. I'm an adult, and I still do this every damn day. No amount of "practice" ever enables you to stop staring at boobs. You might even be able to stop visualizing her boobs in your head while you stare away into space; if so, you will be promoted from padawan to Jedi Master.]
If you find it hard to look at her eyes stare at the space between them.
[Jesus, now you have a bridge-of-the-nose fetish. Luckily for you, there's a 104% chance that there's already hentai that speaks to that need.]
I round out the article with a few select portions of my own sage advice that should have been included in the tips section, but for whatever reason were not.
--Don't be a fifteen year old boy.
--Don't hang around girls like the one featured in the picture at the top of this article, the one wearing a super-low-cut blouse, who is clearly *asking* you to look at her boobs by means of her wardrobe choices. So if you are around such girls and can't stop looking at their boobs, you probably shouldn't feel all that bad about it. Nevertheless, many of these women will all but shove their boobs in your face and then try to make you feel guilty if you stare at them, because a significant percentage of women quite honestly have no fucking clue as to how to be honest, fair, and non-contradictory in their assertions. They are as screwed up and as confused and as ashamed as you! No matter how good the boobs on such women might be, I assure you, the boobs are not worth it.
--Pray (Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK)
--Be Gay. (Then you can stare at pecs!)
--Masturbate already. Get it out of your system.
--Stop masturbating. You're only making it worse.
--Accept that there's really very little you can do to control your sex drive at this point in your life. Be glad if staring at girl's boobs is your WORST problem when it comes to sex. Be thankful, actually, if you don't have the opportunity to fuck up in ways that make getting caught staring at boobs seem absolutely and utterly trivial, which it pretty much is.
--Wait about seven or eight years for your sex drive to cool down from "overwhelming" to "mostly overwhelming."
--Accept that the intense shame you feel now will largely be forgotten in ten years' time.
--Wait twenty years, until you're about thirty-five. Many thirty-five year old women will be happy if you stare at their boobs, especially if you compare their boobs to those of a teenager.
--Learn to appreciate the curve of a shoulder, the graceful architecture of a neck, the gentle swell of a hip from a tapered waist, a slender arm, or all the other thousands of things erotic about a woman. You're so hung up on staring at boobs--have you even thought about staring at asses instead?
And most of all:
--Accept that your desire to stare at boobs is absolutely natural. It doesn't actually get much more natural than that. It's nothing to be ashamed of, though I can understand why you'd want to control it just the same, but you should definitely be accepting of any failures in this regard. And believe me when I say that, sooner or later, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a girl who will want you to pay attention to her boobs. Crazy, I know, but it's true. It might not be the first girl whose boobs you stare at, or the ten-thousandth, but it will very probably come in the fullness time.
Unless, of course, too much boob-staring turns you into a crazy psycho killer in the meantime!
Have you ever been in class or perhaps at a party and out of the corner of your eye you notice a beautiful girl with large boobs? [Or a plain girl with large boobs? Or an unattractive girl with large boobs? Or a beautiful girl with medium boobs? Or a plain girl with medium boobs? Or an unattractive girl with medium boobs? Or a beautiful girl with small boobs? Etc.] You gather up your courage to go talk to her, but you can't keep your eyes off her boobs? [Yes! Oh. That is a rhetorical question. I'm not supposed to answer it.] Here are some steps to help you in that and other similar situations.
1. Make eye contact with her when you talk to her. It's polite, and most likely her face will have some attractive feature. [If you don't understand this last assertion, then you clearly haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, and if you haven't been watching enough hardcore pornography, then I doubt your credentials as an overly hormonal teenage boy. This article is targeted at teenage boys, right? Protip: I know fuck-all about the sexual development and desires of teenage lesbians, and the less I contemplate this particular subject, the better for you and me and the statutes of the great state of California, so I had best stop now.]
2. You can also talk about her shoes, earrings, and so forth, but not too much or she might think you're interested in something you really aren't. [Pretending to care about things that women are interested in but not really caring about those things is a great way to get near some boobs without drawing attention to the fact that you only care about getting near some boobs. Once you've mastered this skill the the point where you can pretend to care about a girl's thoughts and feelings, you will probably get to touch some boobs.]
3. Talk to her about anything: movies, school, current events, anything that at least partially distracts you from her breasts. [Yes. TALKING ABOUT ABSOLUTELY ANYTHING OTHER THAN HER BREASTS IS GENIUS ADVICE FOR TAKING YOUR ATTENTION AWAY FROM HER BREASTS. Unless the absolutely anything you're talking about is less interesting than her breasts, and if you're a fifteen year old boy there is probably nothing in the world that is more interesting to you than her breasts, and you find your attention straying back to her breasts anyway.]
4. You might get an erection from looking too long at her breasts. So don't stare. Look at her face. Look deep into her eyes. This doesn't mean look at another girl's breasts. [It doesn't? Oh shit, there goes my gameplan! I mean, of course. Stare into her eyes so her boobs don't give you a boner. That should be obvious. It's not like you can feel the gravity of your boobs pulling your little fireman up and your eyes down and your hands in closer, can you? It's not like her boobs have become the center of your attention, of your very universe, have they? Of course not! Of course not. No, stare into her eyes. Deep into her eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul, the gateway to the mind, and one of the most erotic parts of the body. Her beautiful eyes...redirecting all that libidinal energy towards this new body part can't have any possible side effec--ah, shit, now you've developed an eye fetish! You Japanese person, you! You're getting an erection from staring into her eyes, aren't you? Well, maybe there's another wikiHow page that can help you out with that, I don't know.]
5. If you are sure she isn't looking, take a quick glance at her breasts to relieve yourself, but don't forget to look away, as they can be hypnotic. [This gem of wisdom is perfect as it is; I have nothing to add to it.]
6. Don't daydream about girl's breasts, especially if you are in class. The teacher may call you out on it and jar you with a question, if you look spaced-out and have that silly smile on your face. [Because, as we all know, the best way to not think about something is to tell yourself not to think about it! Like if I tell you the last thing in the world you'd ever want to think about is the Candiru fish, which is an inch-long fish with sharp backwards-pointing spines on its back that lives in Amazonian rivers and is attracted to the compounds in urine such that it will swim up into peoples' genitals while they are peeing and so become lodged in their urinal tracts before dying of asphyxia and flexing its spines in reflex, causing unthinkable pain and forcing somebody in a nearby village to perform impromptu genital surgery with a hunting knife, THERE'S NO WAY you would think about a fish swimming up into your penis, dying and rotting and stabbing your penis with bony spines from the inside until you cut it out with a huge knife! And this thinking aversion technique works BEST when it comes to SEX, trust me! Alternately, you can try to think of horrific things to derail your sex drive. Think about your parents or siblings dying screaming in a fire, or think about how those boobs will, in the fullness of time, putrefact to black sacs of rot, shot through with maggots and carrion-eating beetles. There's NO WAY that distracting yourself in this way could be harmful to your your psyche AT ALL. If all else fails and your teacher does call on you while you have a silly smile on your face, you could always pretend as though you were happily contemplating the subject matter of the class. But she probably wouldn't believe you, because as you and I and your teacher all know, learning is for nerds.]
Tips
Make a vow to only stare at them a few minutes a day, and then lower the number of minutes each day until you reach an equilibrium quotient. [I think this tip is suggesting that if you learn what things like "equilibrium quotient" means, your brain will grow at the expense of your balls and you'll somehow sap your sex drive. Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK. Translated into normal human speech, this could also suggest that you ration your boobage staring and decrease the amount each day. Because staring at boobs and timing yourself and taking careful mental notes about the boob staring and trying to be economic with your boob staring such that you reserve your quota for staring at the *best* boobs and not just any old boobs is surely a step in the right direction from willy-nilly boob-staring. And, just like trying to not think about boobs is the best way to not think about boobs, rationing your boob-staring is surely the best way to ensure there's no way you'll ever slip outside of the brittle, artificial, and arbitrary limitations that your higher cognitive processes have imposed upon overwhelming instinct.]
When outdoors, wear sunglasses, so she will not be able to see where your eyes are looking. [Actually, that's some pretty good advice right there. It's half the reason why you'll never see me outdoors without sunglasses. The other half: hangovers.]
The more you treat her respectfully, you increase your chances that she will show you her entire boobs [Sic?] in an appropriate place. This is what dreams are made of. [It is? Well, prepare to be shocked: GIRLS DON'T HAVE PENISES, THEY HAVE VAGINAS INSTEAD! Now you can stop dreaming about boobs.]
Get to know the girl in question, if you would like to become her boyfriend. That way you could see her boobs more often. [Again, we repeat the advice that the only reason for ever having any contact with a woman is for the purpose of seeing boobs, and you should engineer all of your social interactions with such in mind. I know it's totally non-intuitive to think that if you spend more time around a woman such as by becoming her boyfriend, you will have more opportunities to see her boobs, but believe me, it's actually true! You should totally base your boyfriendidness upon whose boobs you like to look at the most! Protip: You don't have to be a boyfriend to stare at boobs? Have you ever heard of this thing called "The Internet?" Fully half of it is dedicated to images of boobs. Really! Try a Google image search for "boobs" right now and see what happens! You'll be surprised. ProProTip: Your ability to see a particular pair of boobs is inversely proportional to your desire to see a particular pair of boobs. The more you see your girlfriend's boobs, the more you'll wish you could see more boobs and different boobs! But you can't! Hah hah. You got monogamied, bitch.]
Warnings
Don't look off into space while talking to her if you are that afraid of looking at her boobs. Try to practice looking them in their eyes while talking to them. Then before you know it you'll be fine. [Protip: Warning: The guy who wrote this piece of advice was an idiot. Don't listen to him. In all honesty, staring off into space is the best alternative to staring at boobs if for whatever reason you feel you can't stare at boobs at the present time. I'm an adult, and I still do this every damn day. No amount of "practice" ever enables you to stop staring at boobs. You might even be able to stop visualizing her boobs in your head while you stare away into space; if so, you will be promoted from padawan to Jedi Master.]
If you find it hard to look at her eyes stare at the space between them.
[Jesus, now you have a bridge-of-the-nose fetish. Luckily for you, there's a 104% chance that there's already hentai that speaks to that need.]
I round out the article with a few select portions of my own sage advice that should have been included in the tips section, but for whatever reason were not.
--Don't be a fifteen year old boy.
--Don't hang around girls like the one featured in the picture at the top of this article, the one wearing a super-low-cut blouse, who is clearly *asking* you to look at her boobs by means of her wardrobe choices. So if you are around such girls and can't stop looking at their boobs, you probably shouldn't feel all that bad about it. Nevertheless, many of these women will all but shove their boobs in your face and then try to make you feel guilty if you stare at them, because a significant percentage of women quite honestly have no fucking clue as to how to be honest, fair, and non-contradictory in their assertions. They are as screwed up and as confused and as ashamed as you! No matter how good the boobs on such women might be, I assure you, the boobs are not worth it.
--Pray (Protip: IT WON'T FUCKING WORK)
--Be Gay. (Then you can stare at pecs!)
--Masturbate already. Get it out of your system.
--Stop masturbating. You're only making it worse.
--Accept that there's really very little you can do to control your sex drive at this point in your life. Be glad if staring at girl's boobs is your WORST problem when it comes to sex. Be thankful, actually, if you don't have the opportunity to fuck up in ways that make getting caught staring at boobs seem absolutely and utterly trivial, which it pretty much is.
--Wait about seven or eight years for your sex drive to cool down from "overwhelming" to "mostly overwhelming."
--Accept that the intense shame you feel now will largely be forgotten in ten years' time.
--Wait twenty years, until you're about thirty-five. Many thirty-five year old women will be happy if you stare at their boobs, especially if you compare their boobs to those of a teenager.
--Learn to appreciate the curve of a shoulder, the graceful architecture of a neck, the gentle swell of a hip from a tapered waist, a slender arm, or all the other thousands of things erotic about a woman. You're so hung up on staring at boobs--have you even thought about staring at asses instead?
And most of all:
--Accept that your desire to stare at boobs is absolutely natural. It doesn't actually get much more natural than that. It's nothing to be ashamed of, though I can understand why you'd want to control it just the same, but you should definitely be accepting of any failures in this regard. And believe me when I say that, sooner or later, you're pretty much guaranteed to find a girl who will want you to pay attention to her boobs. Crazy, I know, but it's true. It might not be the first girl whose boobs you stare at, or the ten-thousandth, but it will very probably come in the fullness time.
Unless, of course, too much boob-staring turns you into a crazy psycho killer in the meantime!
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
The Myth of Originality
Originality is a myth. Human beings never have and never will "create" anything; to do so would necessitate a mind that operates independent of sensory and symbolic input, and no such mind could ever exist and communicate with us in any way that would be meaningful. There is no creation, only infinite translation, re...-interpretation, and re-combination. All art, all thought, all action, is iterative, and derivative.
"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."
Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.
The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.
Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.
But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."
"But what about the space shuttle or the SR-71?" says the gentle reader. "There are no natural precedents for those creations."
Such as space shuttles and SR-71s are not found in nature, no. But just as the first human who picked up a rock and cracked at it with second rock until the first rock became a knife wasn't really creating out of nothing so much as he was adapting that which was extant for his or her own purposes, so too is even the most advanced human achievement an adaptation of that which already exists. There are a million or more permutations between that original stone knife and the SR-71, but there are such permutations. The SR-71 does not exist without the A-12, which does not exist without the U-2, which does not exist without the F-104...and so on back to the ME-262, and so on back more to the Wright Brothers Flyer, and so on back to the first human to look at a bird and envy its flight. The titanium in the skin of an SR-71 could only be produced after humans had mastered the metallurgy of iron, which was only possible once humans had mastered the metallurgy of bronze, and so on back to the knife again. Even the most radical breakthrough is no more and no less than an adaptation of that which already exists.
The notion that ideas can come from nowhere, that people can access some sort of headspace for inspiration that is anything more than the sum of their experiences to create something truly "original" or "out of this world" is fallacious, as is any valuation of that which is "original" over that which is "derivative." All human thought is derivative; the best of us can derive more broadly and deeply than others such that the origins of their derivations are not so obvious to him whose derivations are but narrow and shallow, until the origins of the best derivations are mystified in "genius" or made "divine," but even the best of us is merely creating a new permutation of existing elements.
Does a painter paint outside of the colors he can see? Does his mind tell him to go beyond the visual spectrum--that only by painting in colors that the human eye cannot perceive can his work be realized? So he paints a square blue sun--is the square unknown to him? Is blue? Is the sun? It is possible he paints a picture of the sun that the rest of us cannot even recognize as such, but in doing so he still rather reassembles elements of other paintings and of his own perceptions of the sun rather than do something truly original. Show me the man blind from birth who paints masterpieces, and I'll show you a sui generis thinker. Show me the cave artist who leap-frogged over twenty thousand years of technique to paint in exacting proportion and who then went beyond that to a new abstraction made only possible by the implementation of complex concepts that only developed in response to the perfection of established artistic techniques, and I'll show you an original thinker. Show me the poet who works in a language with which she has no other facility to create beautiful poetry, rather than drawing on the millennia of of literature and political history and conceptual development expressed in every syllable of our speech. Show me the poet who has never read any other poetry; show me the engineer who builds robots without understanding the workings of such simpler machines as other men have made and made explicit long before he was ever born. Then I'll show you an original thinker.
But until such time as that, I am going to aver that we are all plagiarists. Smartness is skill and subtlety in plagiarism; smartness is having so many sources recombining within one's head that one cannot attribute one's efforts to anything other than "originality."
Friday, July 23, 2010
Argumentum ad Novitatem
I am a late adopter. Most of my friends are early adopters. This puts me at something of a discord with them on a fairly regular basis.
It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.
But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).
Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.
There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?
Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.
To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.
Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.
Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?
We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.
The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.
So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.
And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.
But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.
Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.
Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.
Let us remember that new is not the same as good.
It is not that I am inherently afraid of technology or progress. Far from it. I understand very well that technologies such as vaccines and intensive agriculture and indoor plumbing have brought a lot of good into a lot of lives.
But just as I see nothing inherently good in man, I see nothing inherently good in his productions. For every beneficial technology, we have such counterexamples in the form of weaponization (theoretical physics to nuclear weapons, computer programs to spyware and viruses) or unintended consequences (pollution, exclusivity, the stress of adaptation, car crashes).
Embracing something *just* because it's new--lusting over Apple's every new release, making an unboxing video and posting it on Youtube, going to Comic Con to geek out over next year's movie releases that you know, on a rational level, are probably all going to be terrible--seems like a dead end to me.
There are a lot of perfectly good things that are old (and, not inconsequentially, cheap or free). Read _The Iliad_ lately, gentle reader? Read _Paradise Lost_? I know you probably haven't, but I assure you that these books are as better than anything that's likely to be released this year. When was the last time you played through _Grim Fandango_ or _Torment: Planescape_, gentle gamer? Oh, the graphics are too primitive? Right. And you, gentle technology buyer, do you really have some need in your life that your current smart phone cannot address, but that can only be addressed by the next generation of smart phones, or do you create within yourself a need for newness that has nothing to do with your other needs?
Of course, being dissatisfied with something just because it's not "bleeding edge" is exactly how corporations want you to think. They need you to continue to shell out for new products as frequently as possible. This is why they design things to break or fail on you after a certain number of uses, frequently compromising on quality for the alleged reason of keeping costs down but actually doing so with the intention of keeping rate of purchase high. This is why there are new fashions every year, new movies, new models of iPhones, new models of cars. Your clothes from last year might be perfectly serviceable, as might your iPhone and your car, and most of the new movies will not be very good. But in all this newness, whether material or cultural, you need to ask yourself "Is this new thing really a *good*? Is it better than what I already have? Or is it just new?" And I don't know, if you measure new things by the metric of utility or significant improvement over the old if many new things are going to stack up.
To my mind, the burden is on anything new--whether a new technology or new artistic product or a new idea or a new restaurant or a new anything--to prove that it is worthwhile. A new instance of art has to prove it's at least as good as the art that has come before it, its digressions from tradition being justified as worthwhile and not just new for the sake of being new. A new restaurant has to have good food, independent of being trendy.
Testing the boundaries of the status quo without a clear justification has exactly as much end value as reactionary paranoia. Neither approach is defensible in terms of logic. I guess the new adopters will act as test subjects for the rest of us--getting sick from the pesticide-laden GMO food, having their iPhones break on them, going to see the new superhero movie on opening night and telling the rest of us how awful it was--and there's a benefit in that, in that their sacrifices will provide the rest of us with the empirical data to say that yes, this innovation is okay or no, this one is stupid and useless. Of course, there may very well be hidden costs of such new technologies that we won't understand for *years* down the line, so it might be decades before the early adopters or anybody else truly understand what those commitments truly cost. Those who are afraid of any change don't provide such useful services as human guinea pigs. But, personally, understanding that undertaking any new endeavor engenders a certain amount of risk, I would prefer to know what my risks are and what my rewards are rather than throw myself all but blindly (or with an excessive outlay of my limited funds) at the new.
Neil Postman says that all technology is a Faustian bargain. He says that in the rush to embrace that which is new we rarely, if ever, realize what we are destroying or discarding in the old. To be sure, we think about technologies like agriculture as unalloyed goods. But look at how many of innovations in industrial agriculture are fraught with complications. The current model for corporate farms is to have huge monoculture crops. Planting great swathes of a single crop does increase yields, yes, I grant you. But it also means that the soil gets exhausted very quickly with all of those plants draining the same nutrients out of it, and the need for fertilizer goes up exponentially. Huge populations of the same plant leave fields open to epidemics of diseases and pests, which in turn necessitates the increased use of pesticides. The end result is that the innovation of factory agriculture involves serious risks to the human population in the pollution of dangerous chemicals, or even in the application and consumption of those chemicals. It poses a serious threat to ecosystems in the form of fertilizer run-off which can devastate aquatic fish and plants or be a real risk to human health if it gets into drinking water. It is a brittle system in that at best we are only ever barely staving off the consequences, and it is dependent on a lot of expensive, non-renewable chemicals in order to function. Does this make for a good?
We believe in a notion of "progress." But it seems to me that so much of human progress is not a movement forward as it is lateral movement. What metrics do we use to gauge whether we are better off now for our new technologies? Increased lifespan? There we succeed. Happiness? There we might well fail. In opening ourselves up to the new possibilities of technology, we do also open ourselves up to new risks and new demands. We are fast approaching our physical limitations with respect to our capabilities to interact with our creations. While the processing power of our computers increases all the time, the processing power of our brains does not, and we are hitting the wall with respect to the human capacity to absorb new information. We have new particular new afflictions--Internet addictions, increasingly widespread needs for constant stimulus and reinforcement and the adulation of faceless thousands, cyber-bullying, the damage to the psyche caused by such actions as spamming and trolling or a Facebook defriending--that would have been unimaginable in 1990 before the advent of the "good" of the Internet. We are reaching our physical limits, too--aided by that agriculture that produces huge surpluses of high-energy foods that we then edit in order to heap on even more energy, the non-physical nature of our new needs, so divorced from what our bodies and minds are adapted to do, will destroy us.
The newness that appeals to me is this: the re-discovery of the extant. That is the space that is available to us, that need not be mediated by any manufacturer or developer. The possibilities of the human body have not been exhausted--or if the limits have been proscribed, that should not mean that it should be any less interesting for an individual to use his own body. More to my taste, the possibilities of the human mind have not been exhausted. Do you think, with all of the need for networking and formatting, that individual initiative and individual experimentation and individual critical faculties are dead? And if such are dead, why the Hell would we want to persist in the world as it is? The possibilities for interaction on a personal scale are not dead. I have yet to see any technology that offers an improvement over the personal conversation. Social networking can distort time and distance to give us depersonalized fragments of a thousand conversations per day, but it cannot provide the intimacy or depth of actual human interaction. And why should we value a thousand snippets of conversation over one real conversation with all of its reciprocity, all of its possibilities for discovery, all of its capacity for the serious exploration of an idea? Because our brains, once tricked out with a love of novelty for the sake of finding new clumps of edible roots on the savanna, now are abused into getting bursts of dopamine from each new tewwt? If so, I say our brains are wrong--or rather, the way that our capabilities are being abused and misused is wrong. It is unhealthful, and it is unuseful. The best technologies are ones that render themselves the most invisible with regards to the "facilitation" of human communication.
So to you who reads this, I offer this challenge. Think about what you want, and think about what you need. Think about whether your technologies address a want or a need. Think about whether your needs are being satisfied by the technology you have, or whether those technologies are creating within you needs that cannot be satisfied. Think about whether your technologies are providing you with better opportunities than could your own mind and your own body. Think about whether you control your technologies, or your technologies control you with their constant demands on your time and attention and finances. Think about whether you are better off with a given technology, or without it.
And if you search yourself and find that your relationship with a given technology is positive, then good. If your judgment is not so compromised by an actual physical addiction to novelty or by a dependence upon something that is helping you in one way while seriously harming you in others and you can make the determination that a technology is a good and that its costs are acceptable, then all is well. Lord knows, I'm not giving up my flush toilet any time soon.
But if you do such searching of your extenuated soul and find that many of these appendages drain you in ways that they do not replete, or that there is nothing in the technology that is better than what you can do for yourself, maybe it's time to throw some of this shit the fuck away.
Let our approach to technology be strictly meritocratic. Let us not engage in the fawning nepotism of brand loyalty, the mad mob rule of trends and fashions, the autocratic impositions of giant corporations, the cheap liberalism that mistakes indulgence for progress or the reactionary conservatism that mistakes fear for genuineness.
Let us be conscious that humans make mistakes, and that these mistakes are frequently fashionable and highly expensive. Let us be conscious that the corporations that offer us newness are no better than the individuals that compose them, and often, due to diffusion of responsibility, quite a bit worse, such that there is nothing inherently good in their products. Let us remember that there is no such thing in all the world as an unequivocal good, that there is no progress without some form of compromise, and that we must be careful and conscious and conscientious in deciding whether the evils we engender are less than the evils we replace. Let us not forsake depth of inquiry and thoroughness of exploration for frequency or novelty of stimulation, no matter how much our pleasure-addled brains might tell us otherwise. Let us cultivate a sound understanding of that which we already possess before we rush to grab on to that which we do not yet have. Let us value intimacy, in all its iterations, over cheap sensation.
Let us remember that new is not the same as good.
Sunday, July 18, 2010
Reflections on _Two Gentlemen of Verona_
I took in a performance of _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ last night. It was the first time I'd ever been exposed to this particular play.
The play sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean that the characters are inconsistent and a-psychological, the action is unfocused, and the language is dull. The lines are nearly bereft of those intricate metaphors, rhythms, and clever inversions that so characterize the Bard's better efforts. I'd say it ain't Shakespeare...but, well, it is. As a contrast to his mature works and as proof how of genius is not so much born as it is arrived at through effort and practice, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ can be interesting. In itself, it's pretty much a piece of shit. The funniest character in the whole thing is the god-damned *dog*.
Here's how the climax of the play goes down (Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about spoilers for a play that is 400 years old, you're a moron).
Guy A: Oh Girl A, stop running through this forest in search of Guy B, who was my best friend and your fiancee until I betrayed him for love of you even though I was already in a relationship with Girl B, who is nothing to me now! Stop everything you're doing and fall in love with me, even though you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so!
Girl A: Piss off!
Guy A: Ah, fuck it! Get ready for rape!
Guy B: I, Guy B, who was beset by bandits in this very forest and who has become their king and who was given all of their treasure on account of my rather trivial ability to speak at least one language other than Italian, will conveniently appear at just this moment to prevent the raping!
Guy A: Oh! Even though I was just about to rape the woman you love, and even though you were exiled on account of my maligning you to the Duke, let's be friends again!
Guy B: Okay!
Guy A: Here, you can have Girl A! I don't care about her anymore!
Guy B: Okay!
Girl A: I have nothing to say about any of this!
Girl B: Oh Guy A, I have been watching you all this time as you tried to rape Girl A! I dressed in drag so you wouldn't recognize me, and you didn't recognize me, even when you sent me to Girl A to give her the ring that I had originally given to you as a symbol of our love! But now look! I reveal my long hair, which means I also have a vagina! You should love me now!
Guy A: You're right! The failure of my raping has made me realize that I actually loved you all along!
Girl B: Hooray!
The Duke: Oh, I am captured by bandits! But I instantly forgive everybody who threatened my life, tried to kidnap or rape my daughter, or manipulated me! Now let's go party!
All: Yay!
This shit is pretty terrible. This Shakespeare guy might have some potential, though. Maybe.
The play sucks. And when I say it sucks, I mean that the characters are inconsistent and a-psychological, the action is unfocused, and the language is dull. The lines are nearly bereft of those intricate metaphors, rhythms, and clever inversions that so characterize the Bard's better efforts. I'd say it ain't Shakespeare...but, well, it is. As a contrast to his mature works and as proof how of genius is not so much born as it is arrived at through effort and practice, _Two Gentlemen of Verona_ can be interesting. In itself, it's pretty much a piece of shit. The funniest character in the whole thing is the god-damned *dog*.
Here's how the climax of the play goes down (Spoiler alert: if you're concerned about spoilers for a play that is 400 years old, you're a moron).
Guy A: Oh Girl A, stop running through this forest in search of Guy B, who was my best friend and your fiancee until I betrayed him for love of you even though I was already in a relationship with Girl B, who is nothing to me now! Stop everything you're doing and fall in love with me, even though you have absolutely no reason whatsoever to do so!
Girl A: Piss off!
Guy A: Ah, fuck it! Get ready for rape!
Guy B: I, Guy B, who was beset by bandits in this very forest and who has become their king and who was given all of their treasure on account of my rather trivial ability to speak at least one language other than Italian, will conveniently appear at just this moment to prevent the raping!
Guy A: Oh! Even though I was just about to rape the woman you love, and even though you were exiled on account of my maligning you to the Duke, let's be friends again!
Guy B: Okay!
Guy A: Here, you can have Girl A! I don't care about her anymore!
Guy B: Okay!
Girl A: I have nothing to say about any of this!
Girl B: Oh Guy A, I have been watching you all this time as you tried to rape Girl A! I dressed in drag so you wouldn't recognize me, and you didn't recognize me, even when you sent me to Girl A to give her the ring that I had originally given to you as a symbol of our love! But now look! I reveal my long hair, which means I also have a vagina! You should love me now!
Guy A: You're right! The failure of my raping has made me realize that I actually loved you all along!
Girl B: Hooray!
The Duke: Oh, I am captured by bandits! But I instantly forgive everybody who threatened my life, tried to kidnap or rape my daughter, or manipulated me! Now let's go party!
All: Yay!
This shit is pretty terrible. This Shakespeare guy might have some potential, though. Maybe.
Friday, July 16, 2010
Zarathustran Musing
Esteem yourself neither by the number of instances nor by the intensity of the esteem of others. Does the decadent culture of the crowd prove nothing if not that those who receive the most praise are often, in truth, the least deserving of accolade? As well esteem yourself by the disapprobation you receive—then you know you are doing something that the stupid man cannot understand. Let his hatred be an honor to you; take your bruises for badges and your scars for garlands. As well esteem yourself in accordance with the apathy your efforts encounter, for in creating such as finds no resonance in cheap souls you might assume that you have done something worthwhile. And if your creations should happen to be received with embraces and your words with welcome, look to it that you speak your own soul. Let any semblance of convergence with the sickly commingled spirits of unthinking men be only semblance.
Thus spoke David Kammerzelt.
Thus spoke David Kammerzelt.
Tuesday, June 29, 2010
Immaterial Song
I built a house for you
I built it room by room
Color by color, line by line
One sensation at a time
The carpet was that rich red you wanted
The second-hand curtains hung just right
To proscribe the way that particles played
In the slanting shaft of light
I offered up the house to you
Describing its details with great care
All you had to do was look away from me
And the house vanished back into the air
The house was ever only
Ever only empty air
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
I made a man for you
Take him as he is
Take him as a rival, a lover
Take him as a hero, a brother
Just please take him
Just please
Take
Him
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
Rarefied until I am become
A living ghost
My hands go right through
You
I made a world for you
I built it word by word
I tried to make it like you wanted
Based on all I'd seen and heard
Based on all I'd experienced and learned
I opened the gates for you and invited you in
You took a look around and moved right on
You moved right on
I built it room by room
Color by color, line by line
One sensation at a time
The carpet was that rich red you wanted
The second-hand curtains hung just right
To proscribe the way that particles played
In the slanting shaft of light
I offered up the house to you
Describing its details with great care
All you had to do was look away from me
And the house vanished back into the air
The house was ever only
Ever only empty air
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
I made a man for you
Take him as he is
Take him as a rival, a lover
Take him as a hero, a brother
Just please take him
Just please
Take
Him
And all I have to offer you
Is sound and light
All I have to give to you
Are words
Come to me with empty hands
You'll go away the same
My own hands are empty
I have nothing to put into yours
Rarefied until I am become
A living ghost
My hands go right through
You
I made a world for you
I built it word by word
I tried to make it like you wanted
Based on all I'd seen and heard
Based on all I'd experienced and learned
I opened the gates for you and invited you in
You took a look around and moved right on
You moved right on
Sunday, June 20, 2010
The City of Gods
It was one of the cities where no one ever died. It was a city defined by yellow and brown, dirty yellow; sunlight and dead grass and bare earth and the uncured, rough-cut human leather hanging in flaps and in skeins of empty fingers from the sun-kilned flesh of those who were whole. Or mostly whole, for the purposes of that particular moment, at least.
A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.
He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.
Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.
Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.
A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.
“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.
The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.
The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.
Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.
She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.
She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.
The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.
A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.
He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.
Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.
Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.
A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.
“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.
The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.
The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.
Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.
She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.
She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.
The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.
Wednesday, June 9, 2010
Embrace
Look at these lines and curves, these letters and words, these black absences of light against a background of white. They suggest sounds, and the sounds suggest a meaning, and the meaning refers to an action: embracing. And when you think of this action, it brings memories to mind; associations with hugs you have received before. If you allow these associations to fill your mind, you will recall the feeling of being hugged. Think about it long enough, and your skin will remember, and your blood will remember, and the very core of you will remember what it is to be enfolded.
I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.
It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.
I cannot now embrace you. I cannot hug you, I cannot hold you. I am too far away. I cannot comfort you, although your sadness is real to me, here. The transmission of your sadness suffers from no noise. All I can send to you is light, mere light,. That light suggests sounds, which suggest an action, that might evoke a memory, that might make you feel loved. Through all this abstraction, all these removes, it is all I can do.
It is all I can do, and it is what I must do.
Tuesday, June 8, 2010
The Body Bourgeois
You know that billboard at the end of the 55? The one that's always rented out by Banana Republic, and always features some ultra-thin model in a pastoral setting? The image changes every month or so, but even so, you can always grass in it, usually sunlight. I commented to Bonny that it seemed to me that Banana Republic was consciously trying to court an upper-class clientele. I was thinking about how the urban poor would feel alienated by images of a carefully cultivated nature that only exists at country clubs and in the expansive yards of those who own fine houses. I was thinking also about how class implies a certain body type, how economic class actually fundamentally affects one's flesh--and that rich folks with their fad diets and personal trainers and yoga classes and plastic surgeons are probably model thin a lot more often than poor folks who are too busy dealing with economic stressors to spend time cultivating the perfect body and who, for lack of education or lack of options, eat shitty fast food and pre-packaged food and basically spend most of their lives awash in high-fructose corn syrup. Funny how the cheapest foods are often the highest in calories, meaning that you pay less for more energy (in an absolute sense), while more expensive foods involve things like garlic and herbs, using flavoring agents other than sugar and fat to be appealing. Health as a luxury item, health as conspicuous consumption; the fat cats are thin now while the workers are fat. It makes me hate my own conceptualization of beauty, seeing it as a contrived imposition from the top-down and reinforced by the heavily-edited images I see every day in advertising, as much as I fail in my struggle to subvert it. It makes me loathe my self-loathing, seeing my hatred of my own body as being a piece with that self-hatred that depressed ethnic groups experience when they measure themselves by the metrics of the ruling class and inevitably find themselves wanting. So yeah, this shot reeked of richness.
She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)
I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"
I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.
Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.
She informed that yes, this was true. Banana Republic is for rich people, while Old Navy and the Gap, which were owned by the same parent company, appealed to the lower and middle classes, respectively. I was a bit stunned. I was not aware that class distinctions in this country were so concrete. I would not have thought that a corporation would be so obvious in its efforts to say "Yes, this is for poor people" and "Yes, this is for the rich." Or rather, I might've assumed that a company like BMW would make a product that is the best it can possibly be and charge as much as possible for that product, but then, after achieving that threshold, I wouldn't think that company would pull back on its efforts and make a product that's just okay for the the rest of us (or a product that's really kind of crappy for those who can't even afford that)
I don't know why I wouldn't have thought that; I guess, being a person who wants options and experiences to transcend boundaries of ethnicity and class, I don't want to think about such boundaries as being rigid and clearly defined. Clearly price is a huge determinant, and as a member of the upper-lower-middle class I recognize that more than most, but it was still strange to me to think of the aesthetics of women's clothing--which I figured were all more or less decadent and an expression of conspicuous consumption--were actually graded along class lines. Is Banana Republic clothing the ideal to which Gap and Old Navy clothing aspires but falls short--and is this falling short a calculated thing intended to make Old Navy and Gap shoppers feel inferior? Or does each clothing store promote a distinct aesthetic, making the most of the styles and materials (and traditions?) within that set price range--"We're here, we're poor, get used to it!"
I don't know. I think it's all ugly, and when I say that I'm not really talking about the clothes themselves. Which is why I will persist in spending as little on my clothes as I possibly can, and in buying clothing that does not compromise comfort for the sake of class vanity, and is otherwise as non-descript as possible.
Not that I think that Banana Republic would have anything that would fit me, anyway.
Sunday, June 6, 2010
Tresasure Seekers
Treasure seekers
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs
I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment
Somebody
Should do
A Study
(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)
With their metal detectors
Sifting the sand
For gum wrappers
Pennies
And pull-tabs
I wonder
If they ever
Make enough
To recoup
Their initial
Investment
Somebody
Should do
A Study
(These city workers in their yellow vests have the right of it; scavenging the sand for the evidence of last night's debaucheries to put into the proper receptacles before someone steps on it and shreds a foot. I think these weekend adventurers would be hard pressed to earn the equivalent of minimum wage with their pathetic treasure seeking. But I'm sure it's more exciting to find a fallen quarter than it is to pick up the ten-thousandth Coors light bottle tossed away by some drunk and selfish fuck, even if it is far more useless.)
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Orange Fail
A few years back I went to the farmer's market across from U.C.I. for the first time. I bought some navel oranges there from a vendor who no longer comes to that market. These redefined my conceptualization of the navel orange. These were the Platonic ideal of the navel orange. Sweet and so full of juice that they soaked your shirt when you peeled them. The vendor has stopped coming to the U.C.I. Farmer's market for whatever reason, and I've been trying to find suitable replacement oranges ever since with mixed success. While my farmer's market produce purchases are usually superior to chemically-ripened waxy desiccated things at the super market that bear only a passing resemblance to fruit, I've yet to find a consistent grower who can deliver fruit that good.
If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.
Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.
If my hands stay dry after peeling your navel orange, you fail at growing navel oranges. I'm so tired of dried-up oranges with flesh that is the taste and consistency of packing material. Juice content, people, juice content.
Navel oranges are sterile hybrids, which means they can only be grown by grafting, which means that all navel oranges are genetically identical. Barring any delicious mutations like the Cara-Cara navel (which is the best kind of navel), all navel orange trees are genetically the same. So the pronounced difference in quality between an orange like a ball of uncooked rice and an orange that is dripping with sweetness must all be in the application of agricultural techniques. Nurture over nature. Something to think about.
Wednesday, May 19, 2010
All You Need Is Love
The song was playing at the stand where I went to buy my tea. It got me thinking. Let us examine Mr. Lennon's claim, shall we?
All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.
Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.
(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)
Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.
Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.
So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.
You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.
To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.
And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.
And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.
In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated
All you need is love. Well, if we assume that a need is that which is necessary to maintain the organism, then I don't know how long one could be sustained on love alone. Nine minutes in an all-love, no-oxygen environment and you're dead. You may be loved, but assuming you need to continue to be alive in order to appreciate the fact, the love is rendered moot.
Okay, so all you need is love. And oxygen. And food, and water, and shelter. Because without these things you will very soon be popping your clogs.
(Yes, I looked that up. You can too.)
Now things are getting messy. In order to fulfill these biological needs, there's a lot of non-love activity involved. In order to get food, you either have to work to raise or gather it yourself or, more likely in this specialized post-industrial society, you work at some other task and somebody pays you for your work and you take your pay to a fourth party who has been commissioned by corporations to warehouse the food created by other other parties and then to exchange your payment--which has to be guaranteed by a government, so now there's *that*--for the food. Water and housing aren't much simpler.
Of course, all you really *need* to live in order to love and be loved are a few handfuls of berries and seeds and insects per day. But I'm thinking that if you're content to subsist at that level of material existence, you're not going to be getting much love from people who are members of a post-industrial society. Assuming that's the kind of love you need, and we'll assume that that's the kind of love Mr. Lennon is talking about, because that's the society he was a member of, drug-filled spiritual quests to India aside.
So now in order to love, you need to eat, and in order to eat, you need to work. In order to work, you need to do all kinds of other things. For a lot of jobs you need to get an education, so now you need to go to college in order to love. For those jobs that don't require a college degree, you might still need to undergo years of training. And in order to maintain most jobs, you need to cultivate a specific kind of appearance, work on one's social skills...so now we get to the fact that if all you need is love, in order to get that love, you have to wear a tie.
You're still with me? Good. I know it's been a bit of a jog to get here, but the logic is sound.
To Mr. Lennon in the year 1967, it might well have seemed that all one needed was love. But getting past that level of ebullient optimism, we see that there are layers and layers of economic necessity (and then layers of luxury that, once entrenched, are perceived as necessities, such that we think we "need" cars and flat-screen televisions and breast implants) in order to maintain the capacity for love. Recall that Mr. Lennon previously quoted Barret Strong to claims that "Your lovin' give me such a thrill / But your lovin' don't pay my bills;" his subsequent reversal of this position doesn't acknowledge the necessity of paying the bills in order to love. And this is to say nothing of the other realities that go into making one loveable and capable of being loved. Can one be content with love alone while dispensing with such other needs as job satisfaction, personal security, actualization through the meeting of self-created goals, variety, et cetera? Certainly love can contribute to the meeting of these other needs, and can even compensate for some deficiencies, but it can't satisfy all other psychic needs, all of the time. It can't really be all you need. Because nobody is liable to love you when you're depressed about how nobody cares about your work, or when you're panicking because you think the terrorists are going to come and get you.
And thus we end up with the causal relationship whereby in order to love, we have to have the war in Iraq. Personally, I'm not willing to make those links--my own needs for security and my own interpretation of the causal relationship between my personal security and the war in Iraq being very different from those of the lion's share of my countrymen--but I can assure you that there are plenty of people who do feel such a need, as stupid as it is.
And thus we end up with the actuality in which the need for love implicated myriad other needs, and the need for love actually generates wars and corporate capitalism and other dumb shit like that. Love equals the purchase of a diamond equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so love equals the endorsement of forced labor in Africa, so John Lennon's original proposition could be retitled as "All You Need is Forced Labor in Africa." Not quite as cheery, but as true, given the assumptions we tend to make in post-industrial societies, some of which are based on actual organic needs but many of which are based on an incredibly luxuriant interpretation of what those needs actually are.
In any case, I am afraid, Mr. Lennon, that your position is an over-simplification of the matter at hand, ignoring the political and economic complexities of a person's "need." Perhaps at some point--like infancy--love includes and provides for these things, but by the point one is an adult, love is far more fraught and complicated
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