that could be a thesis

Update Day: Pets

2009-11-13T00:10:00.000-08:00

UPDATE!!: Wherein I direct you to Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent review of Jonathan Safran Foer's new book Eating Animals. Excellent in large part because it manages to remain levelheaded in that New Yorker sort of way, which as I mentioned previously is not something that people writing or speaking either on the subjects of pets or vegetarianism manage to do very often.

For example, she manages to succinctly sum up the crux of the problem when she writes:

How is it that Americans, so solicitous of the animals they keep as pets, are so indifferent toward the ones they cook for dinner? The answer cannot lie in the beasts themselves. Pigs, after all, are quite companionable, and dogs are said to be delicious. This inconsistency is the subject of Jonathan Safran Foer’s “Eating Animals” Unlike Foer’s two previous books, “Everything Is Illuminated” and “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close,” his latest is nonfiction. The task it sets itself is less to make sense of our behavior than to show how, when our stomachs are involved, it is often senseless. “Food choices are determined by many factors, but reason (even consciousness) is not generally high on the list,” Foer writes.

Like I said in my fairly recent post on the subject, while there are certain ethical issues at stake in my view towards animals, it is more interesting for me to think how 'we' and various other cultures imagine humans relation to (various kinds of) animals or more generally how 'humaness' and 'animality' is variously constructed and understood. The fact that most people I know and meet alternatively fawn over their pets and dismiss or even mock any sympathetic sentiment for any other kind of animal is thus interesting to consider, though only facilitates the most defensive kind of intellectual engagement on the topic of animals, if that. Which is ok, because I get the feeling that most people would rather not be so engaged.

Update Day: the unintelligible crisis update

2009-11-12T23:28:00.000-08:00

UPDATE!!: The economy still sucks. Last week's employment numbers made me more anxious about a right wing populist resurgence than I had been in, well, little over a year. My previous posts on economic topics suggested that the initial decisions to save the economy (in Warren Buffett's analogy, the patient on the table) were not ideologically neutral, but in fact shaped considerably by political and ideological concerns. Turns out the most pragmatic and effective option would have been to pass through a much bigger stimulus, and a policy towards banks (nationalization, for example) that actually increased lending, stopped foreclosures, and discouraged risky activity (perhaps by forcibly modifying executive compensation schemes), and dealt with the 'too big to fail' dynamic that necessitated the bailouts in the first place. Of course none of this happened, evidently because the advice of many leading economists including former IMF chiefs was too left wing and anti-capitalist for a newly elected, supposedly progressive president with a strong democratic majority and a mandate to reimagine this country's economic structures. We'll see if the upcoming financial regulation bills do something close to this.

The one thing that hasn't changed between my initial post and now is that I still don't have a degree in economics. I'm just another libtard that agrees with everything Paul Krugman writes. That being said, I'd rather side with him than the technocratic, Goldman-Sachs "pragmatists" currently in office. For them, I'll direct you to another of my previous posts in saying that all of them must go.

Top 20 Songs of the 2000s

2009-10-24T23:13:00.000-07:00

Inspired by Mikey-Mike (as always) here is my top 20 of the decade. Plus a few more. Per his rules no repeat artists (though I cheat in one case...). I think a top 20 albums list will be much harder, because, were there really 20 great albums released this decade? I don't know.

Radiohead - Morning Bell
Animal Collective - Leaf House
Lightning Bolt - Assassins
Dirty Three - I really should've gone out last night
Bonnie Prince Billy - Bed is for sleeping
Arab Strap - Screaming in the trees
Sonic Youth - Rain on tin
Yo La Tengo - Madeline
Gillian Welch - I dream a highway
Vladislav Delay - Pietola
Clipse - Keys open doors
Songs: Ohia - Didn't it rain
Fugazi - Life and Limb
The Libertines - Horror show
Pulp - Trees
Cat Power - Good Woman
Arcade fire - Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)
Iron and wine - upward over the mountain
Nas - One mic
Tim Hecker - The work of art in the age of cultural overproduction

++
...and you will know us by the trail of dead - Another morning stoner
Sparklehorse - apple bed
Camera Obscura - Knee Deep at the Npl
Kings of Convenience - Homesick
Stars - reunion
MIA - Galang
The streets - has it come to this
Air - Surfing on a Rocket
Kid 606 - Never Underestimate the Value of a Holler
Daedelus - Elegy (at last)
Luomo - Synkro
Broadcast - before we begin
My Morning Jacket - the way that he sings
The books - take time

Pets: Who's Afraid of Michael Vick?

2009-10-19T03:05:00.000-07:00

As my friends know, I have what is considered to be a somewhat idiosyncratic view towards animals. On the one hand, I am fairly uncomfortable around pets. This is especially true of large, jumpy dogs which I find frightening, but also other animals. I don't understand the point of petting, playing with, holding, or talking to cats, for example, or observing the behavior of fish swimming around in a tank. On the other hand, I'm vegetarian, and more sympathetic to militant veganism than most people. For all practical purposes, I'm ok with speaking in moral terms about the animal industry: it's wrong (it's also nearly impossible to live an animal-free lifestyle, even if you think you're being vegan). I even marched with PETA in last year's pride parade in SF, pictured above (I needed to get more near-naked girls in this blog...I don't have many readers right now, ok?!).

If I've found it at times difficult to gently convince people to examine the material and social conditions behind animal consumption, then I would have to say prompting any sort of critical reflection from anyone on the subject of pets is basically impossible. People love their pets, their pets love them, and that's the end of it. So instead of attempting to write an opus on the subject, I'd like to instead get at the subject by presenting incongruities in views towards animals which confuse me but seemingly not many people I meet.

Take the case of Michael Vick, who despite spending two years in jail for dog fighting, is still being vigorously protest ed as he attempts his comeback ("what Vick did was mild compared to child molestation," says one such protester). Even putting aside the fact that Vick's case had probably as much to do with the fact that he was a flashy, African-American athlete in the south, a sport in which animals tear each other apart and then are electrocuted is quite obviously cruel and should be banned.

Even given this, the fury unleashed by the Vick case bewilders me. As Earl Hutchinson writes:

"Countless numbers of pro football players have committed rape, physical assaults, and armed robberies. They have been inveterate spouse and girlfriend abusers and have even been accused of double murder. Yet none of them have ever had an airplane fly over their training camp with a banner that read abuser, killer, robber, assailant, or thug. None have ever been taunted, jeered, and harangued by packs of sign-waving demonstrators screaming for their blood when they showed up at the courthouse. None of them have ever brought the wrath of the entire sports world -- sportswriters, fans, league officials, advertisers, sports talk jocks, and bloggers down on their heads. None have ever had senators, congresspersons, and packs of advocacy groups publicly demand that they be drummed out of their profession."

I don't get this. If it is cruel to mercilessly kill a dog when it can no longer fight (and it is), isn't also cruel to put down a racing horse that has a broken leg? Shouldn't horse racing also be banned? And if we need to euthanize that horse because the life it would live with a likely-infected broken leg - sedentary, full of antibiotics, prone to disease - then shouldn't we also be concerned about the 10 Billion cows, pigs, chickens, and turkeys that spend their lives in worse fashion and die every year in this country? And yet the same sportscasters, so full of bile for Vick, were tripping over themselves a year earlier to mock PETA for advocating for microfiber NBA basketballs over traditional leather ones. And, when some NFL players can commit manslaughter and get 30 days, was Michael Vick such a danger to society that he had to spend two years in prison during the prime of his career? What am I missing here?

Of course I'm skipping over a lot: the insanity of our justice system, the aforementioned issue of race as well as that of celebrity, the inherently condescending nature of sports "journalism." Sports shock-jocks and peta protesters occupy extremes of media sensationalism. Yet given the many fast food commercials one sees during football games, it is inevitable that there are many people who judge Vick harshly for his cruelty to animals while at the same time engaging in such cruelty at an industrial scale. This, much in the same way that their are "animal lovers" and pet owners who would abhor any cruelty toward one type of animal but are extremely comfortable with cruelty towards another kind of animal.

While there may be a moral hypocrisy involved here, in general it is not interesting to look at this cultural phenomenon in moralistic terms. More likely, the terms 'animal' and 'human' need to be qualified instead of naturalized, as they are not categories which consistently and accurately describe the myriad of relationships we have to other living beings. Clearly the first-world dog would seem to us in this country to be more 'human' the the third-world child who makes the dog toy (or at least we act that way). Instead, I might suggest that pets, like other objects of consumption, have a certain use-value; in their case, anthropomorphsized affection and entertainment. So, the disparity in our cultural relationship to dogs, for example, compared to our relationship to pigs means that it is somewhat meaningless to speak them both as 'animals' in the same way.

There is a historical aspect to this provisional thesis, but it's not of the disingenuous, man's-best-friend kind. Rather it's this: that the tendency to construct and broadly conceive of 'nature' in terms of its usefulness for human endeavors, mostly exploitative, is fairly longstanding and not necessarily in opposition to the romantic pretensions of environmentalists and "animal lovers" alike. I realize that this involves a somewhat tricky semi-universalism, wherein dogs and pigs are not both 'animals' in the same way, but both are part of some vaguely biological 'nature'. I'll have to think about this.

But again, avoiding the opus here...

I'll leave you with Jim Rome in an oddly self-aware clip:

interim craziness

2009-08-28T16:55:00.000-07:00

I haven't had the chance to post in a little while, being as I was preoccupied with finding and now moving into a new apartment (in the city!), and also a lingering incomplete for class that I had to finish.

In the meantime, I'll rely, as usual, on the craziness of the American right, now seemingly undergoing either a renaissance (did someone say 'birth'?!) or a last gasp (because their demographic was rationed?) or maybe neither. I might try to devote a future post to the nonsensical contradictions that infuse this movement, but maybe I shouldn't waste anyone's time with what's obvious.

In any case, here's a week's worth of conspiracy theories. Enjoy.

ps. favorite moments
3:23 - to the chalkboard!
4:45 - pointillism!
5:52 - "all it will take is an event, or an emergency." indeed.
7:41 - things getting "scrubbed" from the internet
7:49 - "I've said before I think they're building something. I don't know what it is...I have my thoughts but there are many things that I believe that I shall not say...it's a machine of some sort, it's an exoskeleton."
8:30 - thugocracy
9:15 - "is it unreasonable...to think that this government would ask you to spy on your neighbors." why, that's not unreasonable at all...
11:45 - "I ain't gonna be a victim anymore"

oh, that was fun. btw, those are water guns people are carrying around, right?

"bargaining is the third stage of grief"

2009-08-17T13:55:00.001-07:00

Wherein I direct you to a well-written and seemingly reasonable article about the imminent death of a public option in the health reform bill.

I also wonder about the details about moving a bill through on "reconciliation." That means something that can pass the senate with a simple majority of votes, but as I understand it, under current rules you can't create something new - like a public option - through reconciliation but instead must modify something that already exists. But I've also heard that the vice-president is in charge of making these rules so Biden could theoretically change them to allow for health care to pass the senate in its entirety. So I don't really know. It does raise the question as to whether passing a weak public option that can later be modified and strengthened through reconciliation might be a way to go, or if we should stay strong, whatever that means.

Or maybe we can just abolish the filibuster.

Curry

2009-08-11T20:32:00.000-07:00

This feels like something of a tangent (from what?), but I thought of it today so I thought I would post it. It might be edifying. One of my long standing pet-peeves is the word 'curry'. 'Curry', as will be shown, is a colonial neologism that is as vague as it is inauthentic. Currently it seems to refer to any 'soupy' Indian dish, or more generally any dish that uses a mix of spices, and so, practically, to all of "Indian" cuisine (by which most people mean Punjabi cuisine). And also to Thai food, for some reason.

Let us look into the history of the word, shall we:

Most people in the world today know what a curry is - or at least think they do. In Britain the term ‘curry’ has come to mean almost any Indian dish, whilst most people from the sub-continent would say it is not a word they use, but if they did it would mean a meat, vegetable or fish dish with spicy sauce and rice or bread...

The origin of the word itself is the stuff of legends, but most pundits have settled on the origins being the Tamil word ‘kari’ meaning spiced sauce. In his excellent Oxford Companion to Food, Alan Davidson quotes this as a fact and supports it with reference to the accounts from a Dutch traveler in 1598 referring to a dish called ‘Carriel’. He also refers to a Portuguese cookery book from the seventeenth century called Atre do Cozinha, with chilli-based curry powder called ‘caril’...

The one thing all the experts seem to agree on is that the word originates from India and was adapted and adopted by the British Raj. On closer inspection, however, there is just as much evidence to suggest the word was English all along...

In Richard II’s reign (1377-1399) the first real English cookery book was written. Richard employed 200 cooks and they, plus others including philosophers, produced a work with 196 recipes in 1390 called ‘The Forme of Cury’. ‘Cury’ was the Old English word for cooking derived from the French ‘cuire’ - to cook, boil, grill - hence cuisine...

The development of the curry industry in Britain has been peculiarly Anglo-Asian such that many people brandish ‘authenticity’ as if it were the Holy Grail. According to Camellia Panjabi “Ninety nine per cent of Indians do not have a tandoor and so neither Tandoori Chicken nor Naan are part of India’s middle class cuisine. This is even so in the Punjab, although some villages have communal tandoors where rotis can be baked. Ninety five per cent of Indians don’t know what a vindaloo, jhal farezi or, for that matter, a Madras curry is”.

Another, similar account:

The notion of a curry is what the British during their rule in India referred to when eating spicy food. Indians in India would never have used the word curry to describe all sorts of dishes. They would use individual names reflecting the regional variations of countless curry dishes. The British in India created their own spicy dishes which were diluted versions of original recipes that the cooks were ordered to make to suit European tastes...

Every social event paid special attention to the food and the British Memsahibs ran households that included chefs and cooks. Many of them were highly trained to cater for the western palate...

Also with more and more people from the sub-continent coming to live in the UK, there was a surge in popularity for spicy cuisine. There was an influx of people from the Indian sub-continent coming to live in the UK who were Commonwealth immigrants welcomed into Europe to deal with the labour shortages that were then faced by several industries. Many Asians brought with them the exotic flavours of home. It was during this birth of multiculturalism in Britain that post war curry became a phenomenon. It is now part of the fabric of British tradition and culture and looks like it is here to stay in some form or another, be it formica topped or fine dining...

In sum, at best the word 'curry' derives from a Tamil (ie, south Indian) word referring to a specific or specific set of dishes which was taken up by colonialists and used rather liberally in general reference to any number of specific dishes throughout India, and is now used to refer is such a vague fashion to north Indian hybrid dishes made by immigrants in England. Or, interestingly, it has its origin in Britain or Europe itself.

So, given that I don't consider myself very Indian and am certainly not interested in recuperating (read: reinventing) Indian 'authenticity (read: nationalism) from the diaspora, why does the misuse or at least ignorant use of this word get under my skin so much? Part of it has to do with my annoyance (to say the least) with the failure of people in the west to understand the cultures which they appropriate. In this case it has to do with the inability of people, starting with Dutch and British, to distinguish between the many types of cuisine and the specific dishes in those cuisines. Indeed this was even extended to Thai cuisine, and made even more ridiculous by adding color prefixes ( 'red curry,' 'green curry,' etc.) Maybe I see this 'indifference' analogous to the inability of these same soldiers and traders to distinguish among the people of India (the first state-organized fingerprinting identification systems arose in India for this reason). Maybe this also reminds me, affectivly if not analytically, of the all too frequent confusion of me with almost any other person of Indian descent (I could relate many memorable incidents here, but I'll choose the time when someone in my freshmen dorm to whom I had spoken with many times came up to me one day and for some reason started a conversation about the student government, of which I was not apart. It took about 5 minutes for me to realize he thought he was speaking to a different person).

Even if I have no stake in Indian authenticity, I am still annoyed by the pretension of authenticity. I'm also uncomfortable in assigning this refusal of specificity and pretension of authenticity only to 'westerners,' more frequently known as 'white people,' which would be unfair. On the other hand, there is a colonial history here, and one aspect of these articles I find interesting is the way in which food produced in the colonies and then by colonial immigrants was developed in an imperial history spanning several hundred years. Not an innocent history, mind you, not a simple 'fusion,' but one part of a broader cultural assimilation, and now perhaps a more global assimilation. Food and cuisine is always evolving, but it is also interesting to think of it as stamped with certain power relations (now manifested by the global food industry, Monsanto and the like); this is something I'll have to research more.

ps. and what the hell is "curry-wurst"? sigh...

Our Transnational Mercenaries

2009-08-09T22:07:00.001-07:00

One of the most, if not the most, destructive wars in European history, the thirty years war, was fought primary with mercenary armies. About 1/3 of the population of German states were decimated by free-lancing armies whose raison d'être was in fact raping and pillaging. This led, basically, to our current system of sovereign nation states, each with its own army, which eventually began to take on the structure of secular theology known as 'nationalism.' While I think overall the case that we are entering into a post-national or trans-national period of globalization is somewhat exaggerated, one interesting case is the phenomena of contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan. While these contractors are international corporations without ties or obligations to the nation-state from which they originate (like paying taxes...), they are also companies that are through-and-through creations of what one might prosaically call 'real america.'

When the role of these contractors is so great that their profit becomes plausible explanation for the war itself, accusations such as the ones that surfaced against Blackwater (now Xe) this week seem more business as usual than shocking exception. In case you haven't heard, they allege that Blackwater's founder Erik Prince arranged the murder of individuals who were snitching to the feds about the company, and threatened many others with violence. And that the company was involved in illegal trading of illegal weapons. And that they used child prostitutes. And that they had a vision of "christian supremacy" in which "going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game," Iraqis who were more commonly referred to by Blackwater personnel as "ragheads" or "hajiis. Personnel who used "call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades." What no one has mentioned is that Prince, who "views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe," bears something of a resemblance to Gary Oldman's character from The Fifth Element, the wonderfully titled Jean-Baptiste Emmanuel Zorg.

Anyway, so, ok, maybe that list of transgressions is a little more than business as usual. But, really, if you think that, you should tell one Barack Obama, who continues to pay said company - to the tune of $20 million for August alone - for such vital services as "Air Charter for Things." Things! We must get those things to Afghanistan at once, for how would we wage war without things. Maybe things like banned ammunition that explodes after penetrating the human body. Moreover, it is likely that the 'end' of the war will likely mean a continued US presence, especially in the form of contracted personnel. We might not be there for a million years, but that's only because the US won't be around for a million years. Blackwater, on the other hand, might survive its nation's demise.

If I have a point, it is this: to whom does Blackwater/Xe owe its loyalty? They are a transnational, for-profit, mercenary army fighting a transcendental, religious war. On the other hand they seem to be staffed entirely by Toby Keith's inbred cousins. Are they children of the post-9/11 nationalist hysteria, or transnational profiteers adept at exploiting such hysteria? Would Xe mercenaries switch sides for the right price? That last one is doubtful. I don't think that Blackwater as a transnational company can escape its national roots, but at the same time these roots are in a nation that is silently discordant, a nation whose incongruities and irreducible differences are starting to show. In this context, Blackwater's trancedental war against Iraq and more local operations, say their deployment to New Orleans during Katrina, represent nation-state hegemony gone international, what one might call privatized imperialism.

ps. I'm reasonably sure that tricky is now Erik Prince's assistant as well.

blogging

2009-08-09T21:52:00.000-07:00

To be perfectly honest with you, dear reader, I don't have a clear sense of what this blog is about, or what I'm trying to do with it. The title refers to something my friend Allison and I would say to each other while trekking around San Francisco (ie, 'working from home'). We would be talking about some random idea, one that we would likely never pursue (as is the fate with such ideas), and then say, one to the other, "that could be a thesis." One such idea was to have a blog of this title to keep track of these idle thoughts. Funny now that I must find a topic for an actual thesis. Anyway as you can see the blog has turned into this plus a reposting of other stuff I find on the internets, mostly of a political nature because that's what I do on the internets.

Which is to say the blog isn't cohesive in any sort of way. At this point, I think the 'purpose' of it is to have an escape valve from academia, a place where I can develop my writing, which will inevitably tend towards ('academic') abstraction and cultural commentary while retaining a desire at least to connect to a larger audience. But the key to develop a readership, even if those readers are mostly people I personally know, is to post frequently, and so in between longer pieces I think I will continue to relay links, videos, and stories that find interesting, with my somewhat superfluous commentary. In fact I think I read in Harper's that 94% of blogs have not been updated in the last four months. Anyway, I don't know why I'm telling you this, dear reader, as this particular post falls in neither category. Oh well.

The Othering of Cliche: Twin Peaks

2009-07-30T22:01:00.000-07:00

So what's it like to live in the world we have lost, a mimetic world when things had spirit-copies, and nature could thus look back and speak to one through dreams and omens, nature not being something to be dominated but something yielded to or magically out-performed, and people were born mimics?

-Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity

Recently I've been rewatching David Lynch/Mark Frost's Twin Peaks with someone who has not seen it before (if you haven't seen it but plan to, you should probably stop reading). I remember watching bits and pieces of it when it was first on, but not really comprehending what was going on, and later in college watching the whole thing, one episode a day for a month (a friend had all of it on VHS at the time). I'm about fifteen episodes in, right after Bob leaves his host, and this is where I'd like to stop, given the compromised and incomplete nature of the rest of the show.

There are many quite obvious interpretive entry points to the show. It's immediate appeal I think can be found in its quirky and often very funny characters, it's surrealist elements, and the pervasive sense of atmospheric dread. This last element owes its strength to the eerie soundtrack as well as to the omnipresent symbolism: fire, trees, owls, the color red, and spinning circles (the last being the most subtle and my favorite; how many scenes begin with an ominous, panning camera, moving in a circle).

Maybe because he's working in television, Lynch builds a symbolist Lego set - it's all too easy and fun to make associative connections between, say, Ben Horne's greedy (and conflagrative) destruction of natural resources with the rape and destruction of Laura Palmer by one who likes to 'play with fire' (by the way, one aspect of TP that I'm not sold on is the poetry...). And then there's Laura herself, who neatly plays the structuralist role of referent, that which everything in the show depends on and revolves around but who is dead: she appears only as a beloved if elusive memory whose 'truth' engenders (so to speak) both mourning and a play of signification that far exceeds her. She is the absent, deferred secret that allows for the presence of the drama and comedy of the show.

The part that intrigues me now, though, is perhaps my interpretive crutch for most late 20th century art, which is the issue of cliche. In considering this, I'd like to respond to what I think is a misreading of the show by Jonathan Rosenbaum in his essay Bad Ideas: The Art and Politics of Twin Peaks. Rosenbaum accuses Lynch of a "nostalgic regression...to the worst aspects of the Eisenhower era," namely an obsession with 50s small town America and a puritan view of sexual ethics (why shouldn't already sexualized perfume saleswomen get paid for this very same sexualization, one might ask).

It is certainly true that Twin Peaks plays a Norman Rockwell hand: James (Dean?) and his motorcycle, the diner, the small town conviviality, the prom queen and the football captain (Laura and Bobby), Harry S. Truman as sheriff, the best coffee and cherry pie. Not only that, but there is a heavy dose of conventional Christian ethics and aesthetics: the white and black lodges, red as a scarlet symbol of danger, the goodness of an ideal, pure Laura and the wickedness of her sexual exploiters, Leo et al included.

But what Rosenbaum misses that is that all of this does not imply the reality of small town America, but is rather a (quite overdone) representation of an idea of 50s small town America, one that Lynch uses only to critique via a surrealist apparatus. Here, James the innocent bookhouse boy motorcycle rebel is no more 'real' than the absurd yet prophetic Log Lady; both exist at the mimetic level of caricature, representations of a representation, mimesis of mimesis, or, in other words, kitsch. They are cliches, the same imaginative cliches that Orinn Hatch and co. have used since the 80s to justify a reactionary moral(ist) politics.

Lynch, on the other hand, uses these cliches only to undo them in true surrealist style. Lynch does not attempt to (only) expose the reality 'behind' these reactionary cliches. Rather, he demonstrates their arbitrary and melodramatic character by both showing the hypocrisy of their construction (the same as that shown by Mark Foley, Larry Craig, Mark Sanford, Jon Ensign, Newt Gingrich, and many others) while also convincingly pairing them with a menagerie of surreal characters and situations that expose the psychic and imaginative conditions of possibility for these cliches in the first place.

And yet despite the obvious arbitrary, "constructed" nature of this world, we, like the characters, find ourselves continually drawn to it, wanting to believe in its better parts despite ourselves. If Lynch creates moments of unexpected True Love, cues the saccharine music, and yet still draws us in, it is because we too live in this world, a world of mimetic representations that are not our own and that we yet desire. Like Warhol, Lynch does not attempt a radically alter critique of the sovereign representations of modernity; rather, he makes representations of these representations - kitsch - in order to both undo them and explore our desire for them. In exploring the 'secrets' of Laura Palmer, what Lynch ends up exploring is what Michael Taussig calls the "public secret" that sutures the real to the really made up, the "facticity of social fact."

The unintelligible crisis, part III

2009-04-11T23:20:00.000-07:00

So, part of what I like about this conversation is that it is taking place with friends who are not part of my little corner of academia. Intelligibility is something that occurs or does not occur not only across disciplines but also social spaces and friendships.

In that vein let me try to clarify some of the confusions elicited by part II. The debate was taken to be an ethical one. It might be true that we may have to reward some of the people who got us into and profited from this mess, but it would be ethically worse to punish them while the world collapsed. To use Buffet's metaphor, the patient is on the table, and we must put aside debate, do what is necessary, and save the patient's life (or pearl harbor has just been attacked, and we must put aside debate, and act to secure the nation (by interning Japanese-Americans? By nuking two cities?)). In other words, we are in a time of crisis. Rather than take issue with this ethical situation as it is, I am more interested how we come to understand ourselves to be in this particular ethical situation. That is, in what ways is this crisis made intelligible (or is 'crisis' itself a mode which helps us understand and come to terms with a situation?)? How is a particular ethical situation narrativized and deployed, and in what ways does it direct political energies?

These registers were confused in the previous post. The distinction I drew between a private ethics and a public pragmatics was probably also not helpful, because what I was trying to get at the way in which (multiple and shifting) frames of intelligibility push various discourses and affects to its margins. I think my basic contention was that, while I am in favor of an anti-ideological, ethical pragmatism I am equally suspicious of a discourse of pragmatism that claims to be apolitical and unideological. The irony of our particular situation is that the pragmatic, the thing we must do to save the patient on the table, comes to us not by reason but by faith in a technocratic class and network of institutions that have shown themselves to be anything but pragmatic or apolitical. But maybe this is too top-down. Perhaps we can say something like: from the perspective of someone who beleives that the government is inherently bad at running big insitutions like banks, that history has shown this, emprically, any suggestion to nationalize the banks will appear impractical. In turn, people who suggest such an option, even if credible, mainstream, and numerous, will appear to be emotional ideolouges.

Anyway, all of that was intended to be preamble for what I had thought was my main point, though as I come to this point I find that I have the least to say about it.

--
All that I wrote a few days after 'Part II,' and then some version of life got in the way of me writing more in this blog. What motivated the original post is lost to me now, but I think what I wanted to do is think a more about what it feels like to be in the middle of an economic crisis. A refrain I heard a lot throughout the winter from all sectors was that no one understood the economics of the crisis, not even perhaps the bankers and traders that facilitated the crisis. What is it like, then, for us to have a public debate about something that we don't understand? What sort of qualified faith do we have to have, and in whom? Or could we, with enough patience and study, come to master the inner workings of the system?

I think these concerns came from an article I read linking neo-liberal capitalism (since the 70s or so) with a sort of unintelligibility, a feeling that the system of interconnected markets had grown so complex and so global, that it was impossible to apprehend in its totality. In any case, now that I look at them, I think the posts themselves and the comments are a performance of the types of reasoning one uses to talk about something absent any claim to expertise.

I have now ended this topic in my blog.

Some links on the way out:

About the banks influence. Goldman in particular. On the Wall Street Journal, of all papers, criticizing Summers and Geithner. And one on Joseph Stigliz.

The unintelligible crisis, part II

2009-04-09T22:16:00.001-07:00

So as I mentioned in part I, this particular set of thoughts is a response to this email from a friend. The economic "analysis" there is presented largely in terms of the current debate, a sort of summary of what the average person has access to. But that's not really the most interesting part of my friend's email. Rather, I think the email sets up the debate in ways that are very familiar and common-sensical, and I'd like to interrogate that a bit. I don't mean this sound like a meta-level critique of what was probably a tossed-off letter; rather, I think the assumptions inherent in the email very much speak to our limit to really think this current crisis.

So I will quote the ending (the rest of the email you can find in part I):

I think I'm in a funny position because ultimately I believe capitalism is immoral and support radical changes to our economic system. At the same time I am a pragmatist and recognize that our financial system has created the most successful economic machine in the history of the world, that it serves a function to benefit human welfare (albeit imperfectly) and I'd rather have it continue than collapse altogether, or be changed imprudently for moral reasons without pragmatic consideration. Humanity hasn't been smart enough to figure out an economic system that is both functional and ethical. Eventually we will, but there's no point in breaking the old machine until we've the replacement ready.

Ethics vs. Pragmatism

The core message of the email is something like this: I don't know which economic plan is best, because I don't understand any of the plans or what's going on with the economy. On that issue I will have to defer to the experts. And if they say a given plan will work, then we should do that. We may feel that it's not right, that the wrong people are benefiting, that it's unethical or even immoral, but those are private concerns, to be debated amongst ourselves, and should not impact sound policy.

Again I don't mean to caricature Brett's email in any way. Obama said the same thing in his speech to congress:

I know how unpopular it is to be seen as helping banks right now, especially when everyone is suffering in part from their bad decisions. I promise you -- I get it. But I also know that in a time of crisis, we cannot afford to govern out of anger, or yield to the politics of the moment. (Applause.) My job -- our job -- is to solve the problem. Our job is to govern with a sense of responsibility.

A division has been created here. What Brett calls "ethics" have been made private and personal, an interesting topic of conversation, perhaps, but not a basis for how we must act. We may sense an injustice in this economic plan, may feel that our society is unequal, unfair, but these feelings are configured as just that - feelings, emotions - a populist rage that can be the object of social analysis but will not be taken seriously. These feelings are at best irrational, but more likely those of a child who feels wronged. "Life isn't fair," they tell us at that age, with a condescending smile.

On the other hand, what Brett calls "pragmatic" is what becomes public. Away from the irrationality of ethics, away from the pathos of justice, the pragmatic is simply what will work. It emerges at a time of crisis but asks that we don't change too quickly. It occurs through vigorous rational debate in the public sphere, but insists that debate refrain from a recourse to politics. Rather, in this case, we defer to the economic experts; even Obama is imagined as simply a communicator. So here the economic pragmatic becomes naturalized - there are economic laws that stand apart from the ideologies of politics, and we must listen to those best equiped to understand those laws: the Timothy Geithners and Larry Summers, the smartest guys in the room, the absolutely competent, the ones who have the best interests of the country at heart.

After eight years of an administration that never listened to the experts, on climate change or stem cell research or interrogation or security or war or the economy or anything else, this sounds like a convincing argument. But you can see what has happened here. We have claimed to have evacuated politics from the public sphere - but is this ever possible? Isn't the public inherently political? To be a little more concrete, Brett and I may or may not trust Warren Buffet or Paul Krugman or any number of other people, but there is one group I certainly do not trust. Following Simon Johnson in this interview, if we described the way policy has been formed in this country for the past thirty years, the word to describe our political system would be fairly simple: oligarchy. The corporate super-rich have had an inordinate influence on the public sphere, and it just so happens that these are the exact same people who will benefit the most from this bank bailout. This isn't (just) a matter of personal distaste - the types of policy options that are being presented, and the terms of the debate, are all expressions of power relations, and right now there is a class of people who still have an extraordinary presence in Washington. Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers are the very people who deregulated the banking industry (as well as the energy industry, leading to the Enron fiasco), have profited from that deregulation, and they still have deep ties to the industry.

Economic "laws" are not immutable, nor is the creation or change of an economic system something that occurs against a neutral, apolitical backdrop. Rather, it is always shot through with power relations. Our current system is unethical because it is not functional for everyone, or for most people, and I would argue that this is precisely the point. Currently, a few people benefit, and those people are not citizens among citizens, but are inordinately powerful. I do not want to change an economic system overnight; I am not a revolutionary. But if there are any Friedmanite "distortions" here, it is the super-powerful super rich, and those people must go.

Meanwhile, even if we do away with Bush era ideology, the ideology of privatization, perhaps it would be wise to publicize something else - this private conversation we've been having, about what is ethical and what is just. It may require that we disavow our love affair with functionality and efficiency, but I nevertheless think that it would put our collective and individual actions on firmer ground.

One final note (and yes there will be a Part III - I'm very loqacious about all of this somehow): the idea that many people have to nationalize the banks is not at all radical. Nationalizing here is at most a momentary socialism, but more likely just an organizational tool. The new banks will be resold to private investors, but just different private investors. It is simply a way to reintroduce competition while keeping everything else about late capitalism. That there is such resistance to this option indicates to me the foothold a very small group of people have in our political sphere. It is really 300 rich people defending their position against 300 other rich people - but then oligarchies tend to be parochial in this way.

The unintelligible crisis, Part I

2009-04-09T18:08:00.000-07:00

I've been having the beginnings of a debate about the bank bailout with a friend. I sent him this criticism of Geithner's plan by Joseph Stiglitz and he sent me the below email in response, which I am now publishing in public with little guilt, mostly because I don't have many readers. For context, know that this friend is my oldest friend (since kindegarten) and also one of the smartest people I know, so we've had many discussions and debates like this over the years...

His email (without the end, which is quoted later):

So this guy could be right about all this but also he could be wrong, and i think the truth is that people like you and me just aren't really going to be able to know and judge that for ourselves. I don't know the details of the Geithner plan, and even if I did I wouldn't understand it. There are ethical issues we may have opinions about, but for the details of whether or not a particular plan will work I'd have to defer to those who know better than I. And certainly a ethical judgment may depend on assuming that a particular plan will work or has the best chance of working of any plans we have and can hope to enact in a reasonable time.

So, on an ethical level, you and I might differ on the idea that we should let bankers who got us into this mess profit hugely, with minimal risk to themselves, at the potential downside of taxpayers -- if that's what it takes to get us out of economic crisis. If a plan on those terms will work, and we don't have a better idea that we think will work, I say do it. It stinks rotten that the villains get a paycheck, but it's better than the alternative of our economy falling apart and everyone suffering for it. Now I don't know if this plan will work, or if we have a better plan, but that's where my ethical expertise is outstripped by my economic ignorance and I'm forced to just listen to people I trust.

Maybe I should trust Joseph Stiglitz. But I don't anything about him. He's got a Nobel prize, but so did the guys who ran Long Term Capital Management. I do know something about Warren Buffet though and I do trust him. Here's what he was saying back in October
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9284

And a bit more recently:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/29595047

Ok, first, let me say why I am concerned about the Geithner plan, based on the limited research I have done, largely through the popular media. In addition to the Stiglitz op-ed, I would recommend this episode of This American Life as a good basic primer on how banks work and why they are in trouble (to the degree that it sort of obviates the need for this post...)

I would NOT actually recommend either of the Warren Buffet interviews linked to in my friend's email because he doesn't go into much detail, least of all about the bank bailouts. He seems to want to stay politically neutral and in support of the current administration (which changes from the first to second clip). This also rather comically leads him to incessantly mention pearl harbor in the second clip mostly as a way of saying, "yo, republican CNBC douchbags, STFU."

If in the below argument I misunderstand some fundamental aspect of the sitution or of economics, please know in advance that I don't actually know what I'm talking about here.

The one thing that Buffet does do is come out in favor of marking these "toxic assets" to market. So, following from the example in the TAL episode, let's say a bank owns a house which was originally purchased at $100, but is now worth $50. The banks actually wanted the government to buy that house above market value, like at $90. Then the banks would be fine, taxpayers not such much. Buffet won't say what he does like, but he does say he is in favor of marking to market, that is, setting the price to what it's worth, in this case $50, which the government would just buy en masse. When the banks are literally walking away from these things, it seems that this would at least stop the bleeding, as it were (which also shows how arrogant they are in not wanting to mark them to market). So that's a band-aid, and I guess still better for the banks then the value of the asset slipping even farther, but in this situation the banks have still lost tons of money, and therefore are insolvent, and certainly can't lend. Stiglitz explains:

The main problem is not a lack of liquidity. If it were, then a far simpler program would work: just provide the funds without loan guarantees. The real issue is that the banks made bad loans in a bubble and were highly leveraged. They have lost their capital, and this capital has to be replaced.

So, the question is, how to recapitalize (eg. save) the banks, espcially since both the "ethical" and "pragmatic" imperative seems to be marking these assets to market. I think TARP tried to do this just by giving them money, but it wasn't enough, so they are still not solvent and thus not lending. Well, one option, supported by Johnson in this excellent Bill Moyers interview as well as by many others, is to have the FDIC nationalize the banks for a little while, then sell them to some private group. The so-called 'swedish model.' This article explains what that might mean:

The bank itself is shut down and its assets are transferred to a new entity controlled by the FDIC. The FDIC attempts to maximize the value of these assets, typically by selling them to another bank or banks.

I can understand this - the problem becomes more an organizational one than anything else. As indicated by the TAL episode, the government overpays on the toxic assets to recapitalize the banks, but then owns the bank. They can then break it up, reorganize the good stuff into a new bank, and sell the new bank to other rich people. They can hold onto the bad stuff until the market turns around, however long that takes. Moreover, from a "pragmatic" perspective, it doesn't involve breaking nor even substantially changing the system as it is, even though the banks themselves might be broken up and the current management fired sans bonus.

So having read all this, what do I think of Geithner's plan? Well, I don't know. The way Stiglitz describes it, it's actually not a mark-to-market program. In the example he gives the public-private trust buys the asset at 50% above its market value (this is not in his criticism, just in his description of how the program would work). So in his example a house that's worth $100 would be purchased at $150. This works to recapitalize the banks (hopefully), and if all goes well (say, the asset is really worth $200) the government would get their loan back plus a little extra money on the side ($138 in the loan, and $37 on the side). If it doesn't then the government actually loses more money than the asset was originally worth, and has to then pay out $138 to the private investor.

In fact, now that I think about it, that's crazy. Again, maybe I just don't understand what I'm reading, but wouldn't it be better to just overpay for the asset upfront? That is, if they want to overpay and buy a $100 house for $150, why not just put in all the money right away, instead having an investor come in for a paltry $6 in equity? The only problem with that is that it's a lot of money upfront...but won't they have to pay all these private investors at some point in the future when at least some of these assets go bust?

And aren't these assets already bust? In the proposal the banks sell us the worst of what are already called "toxic" assets. It almost seems like they're thinking that once investors start buying, the market will go up again, thus recreating the housing bubble, except this time it won't be a bubble. It'll be real. What? One thing Buffet does say in the CNBC interview is that there isn't a short term solution to this housing thing. What he means is, we need people. Grown-ups. With jobs. And money. To live in those houses. Why do they figure that the housing market is basically ok? To paraphrase a poet, sometimes a piece of exurban McMansion trash is just a piece of exurban McMansion trash.

Again, I could easily be horribly not understanding something basic about how all this works, but I think I've convinced myself. Geithner's plan seems to take the worst of all the possible options on the table, and somehow makes it crappier. Instead of going with the simple plan that has been known to work, he's inventing some elaborate band-aid that puts in faith in a bubble that has just collapsed and the very people who created that bubble. WTF?

But, as I mentioned, that is the most superficial part of what I wanted to say in response to Brett's email. Because, afterall, all I've done is the most basic of internet research to come to this conclusion. As he says, I am still trusting the opinion of experts. And this is what I want to talk about in part II...

The Genius of Our Times

2009-02-18T17:36:00.000-08:00

As I'm sure you've heard, Obama is doing something about housing. Someone, please, dumb this down for me. Thanks.
Speaking of housing: "Orange County: Subprime lending stupidity capital of the U.S." And it shows.
I think we have a theme here: Pew Research asks, where would YOU want to live in America, based on whatever idea you have of that other place. The result? Denver's #1!!! Yay Denver. As Tamara, a fellow Coloradan said, I love it when pseudo-scientific research shows that my hometown is the best. Well Tamara, you need to meet...
David Brooks! A man who will take selected aspects of that pseudo-scientific research and moralize about it at length:

These are places with loose social structures and relative social equality, without the Ivy League status system of the Northeast or the star structure of L.A...They are not, except for Seattle, especially ideological, blue or red...

The folks at Pew asked one other interesting question: Would you rather live in a community with a McDonald’s or a Starbucks? McDonald’s won, of course, but by a surprisingly small margin: 43 percent to 35 percent. And that, too, captures the incorrigible nature of American culture, a culture slowly refining itself through espresso but still in love with the drive-thru.

The results may not satisfy those who dream of Holland, but there’s one other impressive result from the Pew survey. Americans may be gloomy and afraid, but they still have a clear vision of the good life. That’s one commodity never in short supply.

Oh David, you know us so well - we are so incorrigible. The man's a genius, I swear, and yet, an ordinary person. You can find him at an Applebee's salad bar near you.

Not really related to housing, but certainly related to the sagacious brilliance of our nation's op-edessoriate, is Peggy Noonan's latest attempt to wander the upper east side in search of truth:

And there's something else, not only in Manhattan but throughout the country. A major reason people are blue about the future is not the stores, not the Treasury secretary, not everyone digging in. It is those things, but it's more than that, and deeper.

Deeper, yes...like the core of imperialistic, religiously inflected violence that will one day lead America to squander its potential and devour itself? No - it's because a woman had eight kids (seriously. That's what she says. Read the article).

That's it! I demand a David Brooks/Peggy Noonan morning show. We must be able to gape at the awesome wisdom of these leading intellectual figures every morning, not just twice a week. Also, if I were rich I would sponsor a Peggy Noonan essay writing contest.

Lets get this right

2009-02-14T14:13:00.000-08:00

Glenn Beck: We actually believed in something in 2000. We believed in something in 2004. It's not really easy to be, you know, the pariah in your office, to be the hate-monger, racist, that wants to steal, or, you know, to starve everybody's children, and just hates anyone who's different. We actually took a lot of crap for a long time, and then you guys betrayed us. Why should we even think twice of pulling a lever again? Fool me once, shame on me.

Michael Steele: Right, right...

GB: Fool me twice? Oh my gosh!!

MS: Yeah, you know, Glenn, I'm not gonna, look I'm not gonna soft peddle this with you, I'm not gonna try to blow smoke either. The reality of this is that you are absolutely right: there's is absolutely no reason, none, to trust our word or our actions at this point. So, yeah, it's gonna be an uphill climb.

GB: I have to tell you Michael, that's refreshing

[end scene]

So, Glenn Beck conservatives are racist, hate-monger, thieves who want to starve your children, and who can't trust the words and actions of the GOP. Considering that the latter has betrayed the values of the former, Beck wonders why conservatives should even think twice about pulling a lever again. Though, I believe he means the opposite - that his viewers should think twice about pulling a lever in the future, that is if Glenn Beck's audience ever thinks once, let alone twice, and if the lever in question is the one I'm hoping it is.

One more minor point of linguistic clarification: It's FOOL ME ONCE, SHAME ON YOU, FOOL MY TWICE, SHAME ON ME. And it's a Chinese proverb and has nothing to do with Texas.

No wonder my students don't think rhetoric and communication are important in the working world. Now, please, can the idiots get off my internet machine and not come back until 2012. Thank you.

Facebook is learning

2009-02-10T20:13:00.001-08:00

Incomprehensibility, Understanding, Control

2009-02-04T15:49:00.000-08:00

Some assorted and eclectic pieces from my daily wandering through the internets on the economic bill: Larry summers is trying to kill infrastructure. Some moderate/conservative democratic congressman, Jim Cooper, is saying that Obama is secretly pushing for less spending. Venture capitalist progressives (?) like Leo Hindery are being shut out. And The Nation's daily pessimism seems too much on point. Meanwhile, the emerging narrative is something like, bipartisanship vs war: who's winning?

I haven't cared much for the hermeneutical divinations of Obama's cabinet picks nor for the now-continual analysis of media representations and narratives. Analyzing representations is easy, and is all the media has done for two years during the campaign. The sorts of narratives thrown up by the media, mainstream or otherwise, are attempts to make sense and organize the reality or unreality or sur-reality of politics. This clearly isn't a form/content issue (as if things could be simplified so clearly) but neither is it all form; there is a content here, all the more unstable in its formlessness.

What I mean, more prosaically, is that I do not understand any of the news stories above. I don't understand the economy, or politics, or political economy. And I distressingly feel that reading neither James Galbraith nor Frederick Jameson would help me. If we could spy on the government the way they spy on us, or, more simply, if we could assign an ethnographer to the "field" of the White House, I'm not sure we could fully account for the process by which this bill is being produced, let alone understand a more abstract entity, like "The American Economy."

We would certainly learn something from all these endeavors and more. But like a recession, the content of these proceedings is immanently elusive, something defined in retrospect (perhaps, borrowing from Zizek, we can reframe the Nation article: the US economy will have been destroyed by Geithner and Summers). But by asserting a content, however elusive, we also recognize at some level the consequences: the 'realness' of the economy (that way that its forces produce something recognizable as reality), and also the realness of our political situation (the way that it is susceptible to forces that shift it one way or another).

These thoughts, or lack of thoughts, plus a weird non-encounter from earlier today, plus the perpetual stillness of Orange County, leave me this afternoon vaguely terrified.

Love and Work

2009-02-04T00:05:00.000-08:00

For a long time I've been concerned to the point of obsession with the education, especially and perhaps narcissistically my own. It took three years in college to find, or perhaps realize, an interest in a set of knowledge more specific than 'everything' and there was much soul searching in the meantime (the administrators at my undergraduate university would probably be delighted at this 'journey' of self discovery and would put me in their brochures. I am certain of this.).

This tendency for over-self-reflection has only grown as the stakes of my education have grown. I don't think I am alone here at UCI in thinking that there is something vaguely 'wrong' here, if not with the education itself then with the situation as a whole. Probably most at fault are macro factors, like the disintegration of the university in general and in particular the humanities. There are medium-level factors, like Irvine, which bother some more than others (readers of this blog or knowers of me can guess my stance in this regard...).

Then there are specific things like the structure of our lists, feedback or lack thereof on papers, etc. These are things that generally get grouped within the broader problematic of "professionalization," which, in sounding both terrible and necessary at the same time, tells you everything you need to know about graduate school. I hate the term because it divides the hopefully nuanced work we do into hardened categories: that which is quirky, experimental, and creative vs. that which is rigorous, conventional, job-getting. I also hate the constant stating and restating of our "interests," this meaningless, oppressive practice that neutralizes us in advance.

This became a point of particular concern for me recently, as I slogged through writing my MA paper, which bored me to a painful degree. I've quickly realized that the most important thing for me is to not get bored, because if I'm going to be bored there are lots of other boring things to do out there in this world (well, maybe less so now...). I've also realized that I see academic work very much in terms of that thing that I've always valued above all else: art. Writing, most obviously, but writing in different forms and contexts, and not just writing. I think an academic milieu can be a supportive and productive one for working, but it can also be a destructive one.

My experience goes both ways. The one thing I, and the like-minded professors I've been talking to, need both in my work and life is social contact, community. Intellectually, this is missing, at least in comparative literature, which is why I find anthropology and the various interdisciplinary departments here so interesting and, homey. Why do people in my department not engage with each other, when they are the only people within 10 square miles or more that share the same general interests? Are they just "busy" and "tired"? Do they value their privacy, do they see in books a chance to escape, to hide, to be alone, free from fake smiles and social obligation? Is solitude a cycle that reinforces itself (as it is, now, for me)? Could I be so negative to say that some are so parochial in their interests that they lack a fundamental curiosity that would drive them out of themselves? Are they just not that into me? I don't know, but it's too bad, because it is likely that few if any of us will get jobs. So as far as I can see, the time available to us to be thinkers and writers, to make and exchange ideas (and make them in their exchange) is now. Of course we should prepare ourselves for the future, both its academic and non-academic possibilities, but in fact interaction facilitates rather than distracts from this preparation. This being more important, for me, than correctly citing my sources, than being "well read," than learning how to perform an expertise in a given subject, and certainly more important than this constant hand wringing and worrying.

So much for the potential intellectual community. As far as the social community...well, I'm the kid who threw a party that no one came to.* The sad thing is that I wasn't all that surprised.

*one person did come. still.

Awwww!!!

2009-02-01T11:23:00.000-08:00

But this historic rivalry, one of the best in any sport, is also a friendly rivalry, despite all the power and spin these two well-mannered young men employ against each other when they are on opposite sides of a net. And so it was no surprise that Nadal, the first Spanish player to win the Australian championships, was soon putting his left arm around Federer and helping him pull himself back together long enough to finish the speech that he had begun

"Of course it can happen to all of us," he said of Federer’s breakdown during the ceremony. "It was an emotional moment, and I think this also makes sport grander, to see a great champion like Federer expressing his emotions. It shows his human side. But in these moments, when you see a rival who is also a comrade feeling like this, you enjoy the victory a little bit less."

This of course is reminiscent of that time when Michael Jordan and Magic Johnson tearfully embraced after the 1991 NBA finals. Oh - it wasn't Magic? Well then who...oh...right...

Ok, two more obama things and then I'll stop

2009-01-28T20:56:00.000-08:00

Dear non-existent reader, look at this nice photograph:

Also, you can play him in a game (via Wonkette)

WTF (the good kind)

2009-01-25T20:50:00.000-08:00

Not that I have any readers left, but I just have to say, what is happening right now politically is remarkable. I don't mean all the "historic" stuff (as opposed that which is not historic, or a part of history). Maybe our expectations have just been lowered or maybe, despite paying attention when we were younger, we were not able to understand what Clinton was really doing. Either way, this past week stuff has been getting done, and it's good stuff: ending torture, increasing transparency, closing financial loopholes, increasing emission standards, and thinking about nationalizing the banks. These are things that I've been dreaming and obsessing about for the last few years, and now it seems so effortless.

It also seems that people don't know how to react. It is an undiscussed fact that people on the left are more wary of the government, particularly big government, than the small-government conservatives who have given us not only the biggest, most wasteful government in the history of the planet but also a fairly extensive police-state apparatus, all in the name of freedom. This means that the left is instinctively hyper-reacting to everything Obama does, such as this so-called "jack bauer" exception. They may be right to do so, but I'm increasingly confident that Obama is 'one of us', but more politically skilled. We'll see.

And on the right, well, it's pretty funny. Some are trying to silicon valley their way out of the contemporary situation. There is also the unintentional comedy of David Frum, he of the American We Have No Clue What We're Talking About Institute, trying to reorganize the right via blog. If you start reading these and other similar websites, it's clear that they don't know what hit them and don't understand how to live in a world where their scare-tactic racial politics (eg crime/drugs/terror, the "southern strategy," civilizational wars, "economic responsibility," etc) no longer work. When David Brooks says that Palin "is a fatal cancer to the Republican party," he is just afraid of what they've created since 1964.

Since fear always has a place in politics, Sarah and the Palins (the Republicans) will be back. There can be no myth of the permanent majority (plus, in a working democracy what would that even mean?). Still, the way in which Bush and friends have almost systematically discredited every single Republican idea and moreover managed to link the Republican brand to incompetence and political divisiveness in a generation of diverse voters cannot be underestimated. I also don't want to start sounding like the 22% group in talking about how the President is such a great man that everyone likes. But it's been a while since reading the news was the good part of my day.

didn't it rain

2009-01-24T00:48:00.000-08:00

This is more like it. Today it rained, almost all day, and it was wonderful. There is a dogmatic conformity here to the notion that the blindingly sunny, 85 degree days in the middle of January are what count as "good weather," one of of the many things that make this place so wonderful. I've been resisting my own resistance to this myth, but this is not good weather. One friend described my inclination towards Colorado weather - which can only be described as involving a series of intense climates in rapid succession, as if in a political revolution - as similar to being in an abusive relationship. I reject this, because it still relies on some unthinking 'sun = good' logic.

The sun here feels like it is right on your face, that it is burning its way through your skin, attempting to render you helpless against everything, especially thought. I can't think in this heat (a problem especially for graduate school). Too many days start out foggy, with friendly clouds trying to offer us protection, only to be eviscerated by the Irvine sun that respects nothing. The worst part is seeing people bounce along, seemingly not noticing this or any other kind of violence.

On a related note, the other day I was traveling back from LA in the middle of the night not completely sober and with the air conditioning on when I ran into roadwork that forced me through a detour through La Mirada or some equally faceless part of southern California. I've come to understand Irvine and the more urban parts of LA, at least in the 'contingent' ways that are possible, but the areas in between, as Los Angles fades into Orange county, escape me. It truly feels like nowhere made into a place. One imagines oneself as if a character in a video game, that makes a running motion when controlled to move in a certain direction. Only in this case one has been directed into a dead end, and no pushing on the wall reveals a secret passageway to the next level. So you face a wall, more or less helpless, while still making a running motion.

At least it's raining.

san francisco

2009-01-12T23:05:00.001-08:00

On Lieberman, or: The Inadequacy of Emotion

2008-11-19T14:39:00.000-08:00

There are reasons why Joesph Lieberman should not have kept his chair of homeland security, just as there are reasons why Lawrence Summers should not be Secretary of the Treasury. Unlike what you might have heard from 90% of the media, those reasons are not entirely due to the fact that both have said some really stupid shit. The better reason is that Summers and Lieberman have not been good at their jobs. In fact, they've been terrible. Summers helped write NAFTA, supported the WTO, and aided fellow smartest guy in the room by not regulating the energy industry (seriously, click on the 'not regulating' link - it's the downing memo of the economy). He also helped McCain advisor Phil Gramm deregulate the banking industry - the same Phil Gramm who recently called America a nation of whiners.

Similarly, Lieberman has been an advocate for Bush's foreign "policy" including supporting the war, the spying, the torture and not using his position to investigate rampant corruption on the part of contractors. There are some people who take on corruption in their own party, and then there are people who manage to facilitate corruption in both parties. I know that the 'epic betrayal' angle plays well, but the point is that he has been as bad at his job as George Bush. The media (Maddow excepted) does not mention this, which is upsetting because when someone does bring it up, Lieberman supporters are almost a loss for words.

So this is change we can believe in. The only thing to do is to keep pushing Lieberman and everyone else to do what he/they haven't done in the past two years: investigate the contractors, the spying, the torture, and then stop the war. And then I'm still contributing to whichever liberal candidate challenges him in 2012.

Incidentally, while I promote a politics of policy over one of emotion, I certainly understand/identify with the visceral hate that so many feel for people like Lieberman (and I don't think 'visceral hate' is too strong). In fact, I think Bob Dylan summed it up best:

Against Gay Marriage

2008-11-15T13:10:00.000-08:00

Right now, the headless monster known as the gay rights "movement" is protesting all across California against a proposition which has already passed. I find the sight of people campaigning two weeks after an election sort of comical, but I won't burn through the goodwill of the handful of readers I do have so quickly: I support equality. The main reason I'm not reacting to to prop 8's passing with shock and hysteria is because I see this as a lost battle in larger war. First of all, there is a strong-sounding argument to be made to the California supreme court, so it probably won't even be enacted. Second, if it is, we'll have this same battle again in 2010, and in the long term demographics suggest that the 80s/90s culture war is losing its fizzle and primacy in American politics. Lastly, as far as I understand it, most of the rights and benefits of marriage are federally derived, and so the practical effect of state recognition or state bans is minimal (which suggests that there should by a national movement to press the sympathetic president elect into making good on his promise to recognize gay marriage federally).

But the bigger problem I have with all of this is that I don't actually support gay marriage, in the sense that I don't support any kinds of marriage the way the institution is presently constructed. What strikes me about the laundry list of rights and benefits of contemporary marriage is not how many rights gay people don't have but how many rights married people do have. These are admittedly laws I don't fully understand, but it seems that many of them should not, as a matter of principle, be limited only to people who are married (such as extended hospital visiting hours for spouses). That is, to talk about equal rights for gay people is a little bit of a red herring in the context of marriage, as it takes for granted another inequality: the one between married and single people.

Furthermore, on a broader, historical level, the evangelicals are right: marriage is traditionally defined between a man and a woman, the latter typically not being asked about the matter, and the whole institution existing mainly for the patriarchal transfer and maintenance of wealth and power. This 'substructure' emphasis may be a bit overdramatic, but pretending that marriage is all about the recent invention of "true love" is simply ignorant. The modern gay rights movement has focused on gaining access to two of the most conservative and constitutively homophobic institutions in society: marriage and the military. They do this not even in an attempt to subvert them, as the religious right suggests, but on their own terms, for the sake of monogamy/'true love' in the former and for serving one's country in the latter. Why?

Some proponents of gay marriage like Dan Savage understand the institutional aspect of marriage but claim that it doesn't matter anymore:

The problem for opponents of gay marriage isn't that gay people are trying to redefine marriage but that straight people have redefined marriage to a point that it no longer makes any sense to exclude gay couples. Gay people can love, gay people can commit. Some of us even have children. So why can't we get married?... Ultimately gay people only want what straight people already have: the right for each couple to define marriage for themselves.

Through the lens of Savage's cosmopolitan sex life, even straight marriage doesn't mean anything anymore (I use cosmopolitan as a critical term, not in the sarah-paliny-sense). But marriage is not just an eclectic collection of idiosyncratic arrangements, all individually defined. It's an institution engraved in the legal code, it structures social relations, and many critics would argue it is a fundamental support to capitalism. (And consumerism - as evinced by the $30 billion per year wedding industry which includes everything from dresses and gift registries, to wedding planning, to Savage's getting "married in a tank full of dolphins," to mass weddings and reality tv shows, to, of course, blood diamonds).

So, in my view, the debate over gay marriage is not really between "true love" vs. the "moral sanctity of marriage." Rather, it is between unhinged consumer capitalism vs. bigotry. Similarly, the debate over gays in the military is about patriotic violence vs. bigotry. Do I have to choose sides here? And if, despite my vote and financial contribution to the campaign, I don't have the enthusiasm to stand with the FUCK PROP 8 types nor even read their emails, does that make me a bigot?

The eventual success of gay marriage will be either a Pyrrhic victory - if in the process the potential for a queer movement is lost - or a somewhat meaningless one, as it will achieve equality only by accepting all sorts of other inequalities.

--

This post got too long, which prevents me from getting apoplexy while discussing modernity's most attractive fiction: "true love." For those of you who have a Harper's subscription, I would recommend this book review by Laura Kipnis. A couple good quotes:

The premise that love is a good enough reason for embarking on marriage took grip only in the late eighteenth century, and then only in Western Europe and North America, concomitant with other changes during the era, from the spread of a market economy and rise of individualism to the invention of the novel...

Today, submitting to such regulations seems entirely natural, but let's not forget that licensing our life decisions remains a tool of modern population management. So the next time you file for divorce, amidst the angst and sense of personal failure, take a moment to consider why the state wants to dictate the conditions under which love's dissolution may occur.

UPDATE: This is more like it: when I say bread and butter I mean bread and fucking butter.

UPDATE2: Gay marriage supporters quote Walter Benjamin, reach new levels of stupidity

"Bob Rubin and Larry Summers have got to go"

2008-11-07T18:59:00.000-08:00

electing the first black president was only step 1...

UPDATE: sign the petition

The Day After

2008-11-05T12:42:00.000-08:00

election day

2008-11-03T16:59:00.000-08:00

There is something desperately lonely about Barack Obama's universe. One gets the overwhelming sense of someone yearning for connection, for something that binds human beings together, for community and commonality, for what he repeatedly calls "the common good." Belief in the common good is the sole basis for hope. Without belief, there is nothing to be done. Such is the avowedly improbable basis for Obama's entire push for the presidency...

At the core of The Audacity of Hope is someone who lives at a distance, someone distanced from himself and from others and craving a bond, a commitment to bind him together with other Americans and to bind Americans together. There is a true horror vacui in Obama, a terror of loneliness and nothingness...

Obama wants to believe in the common good as a way of providing a fullness to experience that avoids the slide into nihilism. But sometimes I don't know if he knows what belief is and what it would be to hold such a belief. The persistent presence of the Mother's dilemma - the sense of loneliness, doubt, and abandonment - seems palpable and ineliminable. We must believe, but we can't believe. Perhaps this is the tragedy that some of us see in Obama: a change we can believe in and the crushing realization that nothing will change.

- Simon Critchley

I can't stop posting videos of crazy shit

2008-11-01T18:29:00.001-07:00

via Wonkette

ps. I thought if you didn't get a treat you were supposed to do a trick. Kids need to enforce their candy rights more.

UPDATE: Shirley Nagel
465 Belanger St, Grosse Pointe Farms, MI
(313) 884-2598

Happy Halloween

2008-10-31T19:07:00.000-07:00

I like Halloween.

The EndTimes: Halloween Edition

2008-10-27T13:29:00.000-07:00

Endtimes are near. How else would you explain this picture? As in, WHY THE FUCK IS IT SO FUCKING HOT IN LATE OCTOBER?!?!?! (On a related note, I drove to LA yesterday and it "only" took me 50 min. Who designed this city?). Clearly, the only way to explain why I'm watching the World Series and dying of heat at the same time is that anti-christ is coming soon. Which is a good thing, because from what I hear hell does not have 39B staff meetings.

Seriously though. Actually, I take theocons less seriously than neocons, partially because the former are so easily tricked by the latter. While I would defend religion as such from supposed rationalists like Sam Harris, many of these people, in addition to being gullible, also have a problem with crazyness. And when they blog, special things happen.

I spent much of my fourteenth year of life in a t-shirt that featured a picture of flying saucer and the word "BELIEVE," so I know not only a thing or two about conspiracy theories but also faith. One hardworking blogger has already rounded up many of the Obama theories that conservatives, religious or not, have concocted. And yes, the mainstream media should drop their liberal bias and report on all of them immediately.

If you are not from the mainstream media, but instead from, say, fox news, you can only lament as to what could have been, as James Pinkerton does in a recent post. For Pinkerton, the McCain campaign should have made the objectively verifiable point that Obama was pallin' around not just with Ayers and Wright, but also with another nefarious figure: lucifer. Turns out, Obama is inspired, and possibly funded - we'll never know - by the devil. Alas, if only people knew this, then surely they would not vote for him. According to Pinkerton, McCain should have dug through Obama's personal life and based his campaign on character attacks, because "that’s how you win a presidential campaign, even amidst hard times for your party." Instead, you know, RIP Lee Atwater.

Second up is some heavy investigative journalism from a woman named Flo Ellers. No, she is not on the US women's water polo team. Apparently - and this is something I did NOT know - she visited "tribal Christians" in Kenya and found that " witches, warlocks and those involved in satanism and the occult get up daily at 3 a.m. to release curses against McCain and Palin so B. Hussein Obama is elected." WITCHES!!! WARLOCKS!!! BOO!!! So what worm are these early birds trying to get? Obviously, they are "weaving lazy 8's around McCain's mind to make him look confused and like an idiot." This explains the aimless wandering at the town hall debate. Poor J. McCain. But there is a bigger point here: your friend Ameeth has once again found you a halloween costume. You could be a warlock for Obama. Just put on black face, carry a big stick, and otherwise try to look 'tribal.' But then have an Obama shirt on. It will be ironic, just like that New Yorker cover a few months ago. Wait - actually, don't do that. Just go as regular warlock.

Non-theocons are also getting in on the act. My favorite is this post, wonderfully titled "Obama Sets Up New Gestapo Agency For His Regime." It suggests that Obama will enact Dennis Kucinich's long standing dream of a police state, something of a cross between the Stasi and the SS. Clearly conservatives are concerned about the erosion of civil liberties under an Obama administration (though they do not see the irony of writing about this concern in a blog titled, for example, Stop the ACLU).

So, ladies and gentleman, cue "Love Roller Coaster" for the next Heinrich Himmler:

One wonders if this new police state will have the power to listen in on people's phone calls, read their mail, look into what books they're reading, and infiltrate their political discussion groups. Obama will probably issue a record number of secret presidential orders, and then alter the rules so that classified documents take a generation to become public. Maybe an Obama administration would give its 'unitary executive' sweeping powers to suspend habeas corpus and detain people indefinitely, set up secret prisons in former communist countries, and torture people based on techniques learned from former communist and Nazi interrogators, the whole process concluding, if ever, with show trials. To justify this he would also have to declare a never-ending war, label anyone opposed to this war as a traitor even if that meant outing a CIA agent, depend on a complicit media, and above all politicize the justice department so that what's prosecuted is not the administration's real crimes, but their opponents' fabricated corruption. This would allow him to give millions of dollars of no-bid contracts to his friends - how socialist! The American people would not put up with this, but it wouldn't matter because the Obama camp would simply steal the election with the help of the Supreme Court and/or paperless touch-screen voting machines.

Now THAT, my friends, would be the way to destroy the "fabric of democracy" and replace it with an Orwellian nightmare. But of course, such a crazy scenario would never happen. If the government and it's corporate sponsors gave itself that much power, surely these religious, gun-toting conspiracy theorists would rise up in revolt.

Right?

UPDATE

2008-10-16T23:35:00.001-07:00

I will post the video of bill o'reilly yelling at Barney.

no holds barred god smackdown coming soon

2008-10-13T17:16:00.000-07:00

My money's on Xenu

The Three Rs: Reading any and all (elite) media, Regulating oil and gas, and...ouR kitchen table

2008-10-03T13:58:00.000-07:00

There is a video out there on the interwebs of Willaim O'Reils yelling at Barney Frank, lispy representative of the Washington elite, for causing Freddie and Fannie to fail. I won't post it here because he's too tiresome to watch, but essentially his message to democrat no-nothing-know-it-alls is this: WHAT DOES THAT MEAN, "PLAY US OUT"?!??! FUCKING THING SUCKS!!!

I think O'Reilly was trying to play to his disaffected, conservative (reactionary?) viewers by 'stickin' it to the man' in charge, in this case Barney Frank (GET IT? I'm clever too). Because clearly Barney Frank is in charge of everything and always has been and is the sole reason for people hating politicians.

Speaking of Bill O'Reilly's disaffected, conservative viewers, did you know that around 30 million Americans are functionally illiterate? And according to the Daily Kos' "Hannah," who may or may not be one of Thomas Pynchon's writing students, the people who represent them may be too! It's a good read, one which involves fake war stories, family tragedy, disavowal of friendship, Spanish psychologists, astronauts, cause and effect, and democracy.

Speaking of people who may be functionally illiterate...teaching. As in, my students are not functionally illiterate! Yay! They are much smarter and more engaged than I expected. Teaching is not that hard. The only thing hard about teaching is the special needs website that we have to use to teach our students about "digital literacy." Except that, every time we ask the course administrators why our website lost in the internet special Olympics, they get all Sarah Palin on us and explain that we shouldn't worry about it because the students are already more digitally literate than us and will figure it out the only thing they can't do is think critically and write except you can't fix that by just having them write on sheets of paper you need to use the online tools and oh they don't work hmm well we'll just have to get back to ya on that.

But our course administrators are smart and educated and Sarah Palin seems so, I don't know, not. Therefore, it must be that neither W nor McPalin are functionally illiterate. Rather what we are seeing is a whole new emerging discourse, indeed, an entirely new epistemological frame. This week has marked the turning point in the rise of this frame, culminating in last night's debate (Adennak via Wonkette via Andrew Sullivan):

Back in the OC

2008-09-27T23:37:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last couple of weeks moving into my new apartment. I'm very happy to be living with fellow comp lit grad student vicki, and in the part of graduate student housing where the rent is $200 less than the other part. And I actually have a view of still undeveloped hills.

Anyway, being back in the oc is more or less as awful as I thought it would be. It's like last year but replace nervousness with disillusionment. Also I have to start teaching this year. I had my first class yesterday and it went ok. I think it will more of a chore than anything else. I also find it ridiculous to be teaching anything to anyone.

That's all. This is the first nominee for song of the quarter:

your life of leisure

2008-09-08T16:37:00.000-07:00

My worst fears have been confirmed: you are reading this blog. Or at least you were, until it became too difficult to continue blogging. It was just too much, what with the uploading of pictures and the writing about what I've been doing, and just, you know, the whole thing. But this blog will not die, partially because I will be going back to school and this will be the funnest part of my life.

So my final month in Berlin was awesome times 100. This is what I did, since apparently you care:

- learned that phil was staying in Berlin for August; hung out with phil

- hit up the berlin club scene. This was good because Americans don't like or understand techno even though they try when they are Berlin (sorry American friends). It was really fun, though weird to stay up all night while "sober." Also, real Berliners apparently only go to clubs like Panorama at 6 in the morning, and the famous djs don't come on till at least 8, and if you leave at 7:30 people make fun of you. Some clubs have ice cream and swings, some clubs have ping pong. There are no actual children though, because they all got drunk at the beer garden.

- before, I speak in german past tense. Then, I have in past tense german learned.

- I met Anne, my wonderful language partner from east berlin. We spoke about our weekend activities in german, and about the role of the stasi in everyday east german life in english. She also took me to Marzhan and Lichtenberg but we failed to get beat up by neo-nazis. So that's an experience that will have to wait. But it was cool cause they pained the housing boxes.

- went to artists' squats and galleries, saw more art, saw more ping pong

- hung out with fun people

- went to london, saw clare after a million years, did not walk on grass

And that's that. Now I am in Denver. During my summer long housing saga, I briefly entertained the idea of moving to los angeles. But now I will be moving to palo verde, California, and there will be Starbucks and Del Tacos everywhere, and I will be teaching this year, and Christians will yell at me on my way to class, and my teachers will either tell me to figure my shit out or pretend that I already have, and oh my god. The only bright point of the quarter will be when Sarah Palin starts speaking in tongues during the vice-presidential debate, but if John McCain wins the presidency by 126 imaginary votes in ohio, I swear I will kill myself by choking on my organic-arugula-free-range-brie sandwich while driving my prius off a cliff in san francisco. Otherwise, I'm glad to be back in the USA.

2008-08-01T12:46:00.000-07:00

One of the best things about being here is the plethora of art, especially modern and contemporary art, in both museums and galleries. This is part of Berlin's contemporary reputation, and it does seem that the fall of the wall led to a very exciting and creative atmosphere, though I wonder if this period is coming to an end or becoming more formalized now. In any case, Berlin feels like a city a little less enamored or stuck in its long gone past, like some other places I've been in Europe. There is 'history' everywhere, of course, but of such an ambivalent and complex nature that it (perhaps) provides an impetus to be forward looking rather than the opposite.

When I lived and New York and had practically no friends, one of my favorite activities on Saturday morning was to go to the Chelsea galleries or to the Whitney or some other museum. New York had its fair share of mediocre or (especially) gimmicky art, but I also went to some fantastic shows while I was there.

This was something I really missed while in San Francisco. Anyone who's spoken to me for 30 minutes knows that I love San Francisco, but for a city with so many people who are interested in art, with the finances and cultural motivation to support the arts, SF disappoints too often. Many galleries in SOMA/downtown had boring/derivative work and sometimes even charged (?!), the open studios were a nice way to waste an afternoon, and art openings were miserable multi-media events. (The SF MOMA did have some good shows, though). Like someone here said, the SF arts scene excels at producing things that that are more towards the 'craft' end of the spectrum.

Anyway, that's all just to say that it's nice and every exciting to once again be in a place where I can see both established and new or quasi-new modern and contemporary art (actually, I think I can do this in LA, but not without spending the whole day in a car). Below are some of the works that I have scene in the past month.

Andreas Gursky - Singapore Stock Excahnge

Andreas Gursky - library

Wolfgang Tillmans - freischwimmer

Wolfgang Tillmans - [video of peas boiling with a soundtrack (speech or at a concert)]

Joseph Beuys - meterology

Andy Warhol - Mao

Andy Warhol - Big Electric Chair

Anselm Kiefer - volkszahlung

Anselm Kiefer

Jim Lambie

Frenhofer Y La Laguna (same as above pre-text)

Antonia Low

Barack Obama owes me a swiss army knife

2008-07-28T14:07:00.000-07:00

You may not have heard, but Barack Obama was in town last week. I won’t recap his speech or the visit at length, since so many others have done so. Basically his speech was about how arrogant he is to prefer political to military victory, unless it’s a Prussian military victory, in which case he’s a secret Muslim named Osama Hussein Hitler. The crowd was ‘mixed,’ which apparently is an evocative adjective if you’re an American journalist. Aside from starting chants with America’s expat youth, one of whom does not yet know how to say ‘yellow,’ the highlight of the evening was the girl in American flag pants who might have been in this vide o (is that racist or post-racial?). U-S-A!!! U-S-A!!!

my sad bike

2008-07-27T09:41:00.000-07:00

One of Brett’s primary recommendations for me in Berlin was to get a bike. Bicycle’s are ubiquitous here. Berlin is an extremely flat city, and, though large, is very bike-able. I don’t know if there are any formal share-the-road rules, but on smaller streets especially cars seem to expect and accept the presence of bikers. The sidewalks of the larger streets have bike lanes, and sidewalks in general are large and fine to bike on if you can manage to avoid hitting any kinder.

The first week I was here it was very sunny and I was very jealous seeing everyone on their bike while I walked, even though I like to walk. The GI is a 30 min walk or a very easy 10 min bike ride from my place. So that weekend after brunch the Bode crew and I went to the Mauer Park Flohmarkt (flea market), which is the best of three flea markets that I’ve been to here. As soon as I walked in I saw a good looking road bike, but it was for 80 euro and being the deliberate shopper that I am, decided to look around.

It is clear at this point in my life that I am not very good at buying things. By that I mean, I’m not very good at spontaneously buying things. If I see something I like in a store my first impulse is to note where the store is and come back another day. If I need to make a decision right away, my usual routine is to stare at the object in question for 20-30 minutes while considering all the possible ramifications of my potential purchasing decision. Do I really like this t-shirt? Am I sure that this t-shirt fits me the right way? Is $8 too much to spend on a t-shirt? What else could I buy with $8? etc. On the other hand, I’m a very good shopper if I have 10-20 hours to kill and an internet connection. This is the method I use for anything over $25. (The only time this didn’t work is when I was interested a couple years ago in buying a mattress. Judging from the comments on the many mattress forums, I am convinced that shopping for a mattress makes people go crazy.)

Back to Mauer park, while there were many bicycles at this flohmarkt many of them were not in very good condition, or were single speeds, or girl’s bikes, or some combination thereof. I ended up paying 70 euro for a blue road bike that was functional and kind of nice looking but had clearly seen better days.

I wouldn’t mind riding around a crappy bike so long as it worked ok, but the brakes on this particular vehicle started failing within days of taking it home. Even then, it wasn’t a big issue and was slightly comical, and having a bike was more a convenience than a liability. However, eventually the brake got stuck in one position, a position too close to the wheel so that the brake and wheel were rubbing against each other. It still sort of works, but as the guy at Fahrrad Linke said, if the wheel wears through it will just blow out while I’m riding, which would not be very good. The woman at Fahrrad Linke just laughed at me.

To add further insult, I locked my bike up on the street the other day, and when I got back to the spot, someone had broken my lock! Of all the bikes not just in that one spot, but all over the city, many of which have much crappier and easier-to-break locks than mine, someone decided to cut mine. Why is that an insult? Because fortunately (?), while they broke the lock, they decided to not take the bike! Perhaps they cut the lock out of general spite, or maybe they just wanted to borrow the bicycle for a while, but I’m thinking they rode 10 feet and realized that this bicycle is a piece of crap.

Hopefully I’ll be able to sell it.

'so I sell myself, for the highest price'

2008-07-21T14:35:00.000-07:00

Yesterday evening Arthur, Brien and I went to see Woyzeck, a Werner Herzog film based on the Georg Büchner play. It was playing at the Lightblick Kino on Kastanienallee, which is doing a Klaus Kinski retrospective this month (in addition to a Jim Jarmusch retrospective). It’s difficult to really evaluate the film because it was in German and I, you know, don’t really understand German. Arthur had filled me in on the story before the movie, so I could follow along with the plot generally, but none of the specifics.

The film has some beautiful shots, many of which seem to linger a little bit too long. Maybe this was the most interesting for me given my lack of comprehension, because these scenes or parts of scenes exist almost outside the plot, or at least are not strictly necessary for the action of the film. I suppose many directors do this; the one I can think of now is Antonioni.

After the movie we went over to w-imbiss where I got a pretty good burrito.

and...they're playing 'Blue Monday'

2008-07-19T11:23:00.001-07:00

cause the extended mix is, like, so much better.

the luxury of free water

2008-07-19T11:13:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I headed over to west berlin to hang out with Chris and Danielle and their son Bode. I met up with them plus Tamara and Brien at their quite large and nice apartment. The area is maybe not as hopping as some parts of east berlin but they have a pretty nice space. We went over to the Schloss Charlottenburg and walked around the gardens in the back while talking about birds. Chris is a neuroscientist that works with birds, and Danielle is a science teacher. It’s nice to have scientist friends who break into monologues about birds rather than Agamben.

After that they made us a wonderful dinner, all the more wonderful because I think it was the first real home cooked meal I’ve had since I’ve been here. I don’t know if it’s because Berliners eat out a lot, or if my roommates just aren’t into cooking, but the kitchen in my apartment isn’t really set up well for cooking. I get by ok, but a lot of normal kitchen things I’m used to are absent, like a can opener (though C and D had an extra one and so generously gave it to me).

It’s also nice to sit around a table with people who are more in my age range. I’ve met some good people through the GI, but many of them are college aged, 20 or 21. This past year I’ve begun to notice a separation between myself and people who are that age, that I never really noticed when I was, say, 24. It’s not anything extreme – it’s not that I’m super-mature myself and I still find a minimal amount of energy to keep with things like new music – but I do find that I have less boundless energy and maybe a little more perspective.

That being said, after finishing dinner with the grown-ups I promptly headed back on the u-bahn to the “Bang Bang Club” and joined said 21 year olds to dance to indie-electro until 3am or so. The only difference was that, having been too many times to Blow Up SF/LA, I had considerably lower expectations about the club than they did.

Berlin First Thoughts

2008-07-18T06:18:00.000-07:00

I’ve wanted to start a blog for sometime now, but of course never have time or initiative. So this is intending to be more than just a travel blog, but we’ll see if it keeps up after I get back. Anyway, I’ve been in Berlin for three weeks already now. I’ve been anticipating coming here and learning German for a quite a while now – at least since I graduated from college four years ago (!). So it’s good to be here. It’s also good to be in a real place after spending 9 months in Irvine.

The only time I’ve been here was 9 or 10 years ago with Brett. I remember walking into random connecting courtyards throughout the city, and finding parties in odd semi-abandoned places in east Berlin. As I expected, Berlin has changed quite a bit from then and is more developed. For example I remember sitting in Hackescher Markt with Brett and Les and walking around in that area, and it certainly wasn’t the high fashion center that it is now. I live in Prenzlauer Berg, in the former east. To compare it to something more familiar, it has a very ‘park slope’ feel to it. As my roommate Henning, who moved here in 1993, explained: “at first everything was very cheap and there were a lot of open spaces. Then it seemed that every woman in Western Europe came here to have a baby.” There are babies everywhere, including at the sushi bars and beer gardens. I live above a second-hand, vintage children’s clothing store.

I don’t mind this at all; in fact I really like Prenzlauer Berg. Everyday I walk or bike down Kollwitz Str to go the Goethe Institut (GI), and the sight of cafes and parks and people is great. Helmholtz Platz too is surrounded by a number of cafes, bars, restaurants, many of which have great brunch specials.

Anyway, I am off to meet Chris, whom I met through the GI, his wife Danielle, and their two-year-old Bode for dinner and hanging out, but I will try to catch up on what I’ve been up to in posts over the weekend. This may include: classes, tourist stuff, art, Berlin myths, losing/finding my keys, and other thoughts.