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Thursday, July 24th, 2008 |
| 7:04 pm The Max Factor |
| So Max Mosely has a right to be whipped and shouted-at by sneering, booted women sporting Hitler mustaches and spiked, Road-Warrior-esque strapons in the privacy of the penthouse suite he's rented for the evening's festivities, and we must not speak of it. Just because he's the son of Diana "18B" Mitford and Oswald "Black Shirts" Mosley, and A. Hitler (the A. Hitler) attended his folks' wedding, and he himself is a crazy, stupid combination of that asshole from "Top Gear", Enoch Powell, and a heat-maddened chihuahua wearing Donald Trump's rug....why should we be expect to be able to gossip or chortle or even know about this? Just because it's the funniest goddamn thing that ever happened since the world was made, and everyone's lives would be much poorer had this delicious story never come out? Before you get too sad for the News of the World, remember that it did a hardworking hooker out of half her promised pay. Acting on the persistent rumors - well duh - that Max Mosely had a taste for getting topped by Nazis, or at least by people who look and sound like Nazis (he said he spoke German to his dominatrices "only out of courtesy"), the NotW suborned one of the workers on the European Nazi-orgy circuit who agreed to videotape Mosley's next session under her lash. And so she faithfully did, but, citing the "credit crunch," NotW refused to cough up the agreed 50k! That is fucked up repugnant shit. A whole public corporation - a newspaper, if we can use that term - going the "who's the bitch going to complain to?" route? This is the moral universe of Grand Theft Auto - if you kill the whore, you can keep the money. There's a thin crust of hardened something that underlies the bubbling cesspit of the most terrible tabloid sleaze, and you break through that crust and fall into something lower down and worse when you insist upon that kind of corporate nickel-and-dime cheapness. I mean, that woman had to interact, sexually, with Max Mosley! And then she embarrassed him in front of billions! She deserves a Victoria Cross! |
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| 6:30 pm one thousand confusing recipes |
| We've been flipping through 1000 Great Indian Recipes: The Ultimate Book of Indian Cuisine, which is full of, as it says, Indian recipes. It's also a completely eccentric book. It's coffee-table-sized and has attractive glossy covers. The paper used for the inside text is something like post-consumer recycled Chinese newsprint. I can tear it by looking at it. The recipes themselves are not organized in any way, except into "chapters" like "vegetarian" (about 180 pages), which is in turn separated into curious sections like "dry dishes" and "curries" (these are apparently both exclusive and complete as categories, though the criterion used to sort recipes into one or the other is, ah, obscure; don't try to guess what it was - it's not the obvious). There is an index, but it lists only the strange romanizations of the hindi/bengali/punjabi/gujarati/urdu original recipe names, which aren't themselves descriptive - a particular sort of potato paratha might be named, for example, after the region from which it originates, and not after its ingredients. The index is further subdivided into the Borgesian categories that characterize the body of the work ("Chicken." "Snacks." "Egg, Pork, Liver."). Probably only useful as an index after one has already memorized the book. The translations of the recipes are also, shall we say, not uniformly excellent. There's also a great deal of quaint guesswork, like very old English language cookbooks before the standardization of customary cups and teaspoons - one common measure of quantity used in the book is "big." (In a lot of contexts, too. How coarsely should the root be grated? "Big.") Helpfully, every ingredient is given first in English and then in its Hindi romanization, so "lemon juice", we're always informed, is "nimbu." But hot peppers are often translated as "capsicums," followed by a variety of different Hindi words - I'll have to get someone at the grocery to tell me which pepper they want. (Maybe it doesn't matter - most likely the best working equivalent is "hot as the devil's poker.") Of course, sometimes they're called 'peppers' and 'capsicums' in the same recipe - I wondered if the one is sweet peppers and the other hot, but it doesn't seem so. Then there's the huge variety of terms for beans and lentils - there was some attempt to capture the variation in English, often by using unusual and archaic words like "pulses." Saying you want "pulses" is like asking for "grain." It's not very specific. (What pulse? Gram pulse. How much pulse? Big.) And some of the ingredients are complete surprises. A number of the chutneys call for "a pinch" or "a 'big' pinch" of Potassium Meta Bisulfate. Oh, of course, that stuff. Internet research reveals they must have meant potassium metabusulfite, which Internets know only as a preservative for beer and wine. Apparently also for chutneys to be stored without refrigeration - or could it be for the sour/sulfur-y flavor it's said to impart? I mean, another common ingredient in Indian cooking is asefoetida, which smells like an open grave garlanded in stale garlic. (After exposure to the heat of cooking, asefoetida has a pleasant, if striking, onion-y flavor - but who did the original research and how much were they paid?) Still, I think this is a useful book, if only because, yes, it has a recipe for that, for all instances of 'that' arising in the context of an Indian meal. Of course, there's still a long march of page flipping and puzzled muttering ahead to find where 'that' is and what it means. But it's there. |
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Monday, July 21st, 2008 |
| 10:20 pm Larn the Langage |
| Help me compose a suitably scathing reply to these "people." Image below the cut. ( the cut. ) |
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Sunday, July 20th, 2008 |
| 1:33 am You May Already Be a Winner, or, The Faith Healer of Last Resort |
"Someone's getting a new spinal cord tonight!" Many wonderful things in this article, including: "Critics circulate a YouTube video from Lakeland of him kneeing a supposed terminal stomach cancer patient in the abdomen, saying God told him to."I bet that hurt. In addition to assaulting the dying in the name of the Holy Ghost, he also claims to have raised the dead, which I thought was a kind of event horizon over which tent-revival faith healers didn't venture, because you can't fill a corpse with hysteria and convince it to walk. What I suspect is that he's convinced some living people that they used to be dead (it's a bit too much like the old shrink's joke about the psychotic who thinks he's a corpse). But my favorite part is that the "mainstream pentacostal revivalists" are all mad at this guy. Apparently he stumbles around the stage shrieking and kneecapping cripples in not quite the right way. He's not as well-dressed and decorous as the regular lying sacks of shit who ply this misbegotten, grubby trade. Whatever. |
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| 1:19 am roller |
 click ... photo credit florence-craye Give yourself a Roller Derby name. Or several. My favorite so far is a Naptown Rollergirl in Indianapolis named "Velveeta." I just think that's a funny & cool name. Last night we met a Bea-Otch Arthur, and that was good too. And we saw Peking Truck. And Roxy Cotton. She spent most of the game in the penalty booth. Unfortunately Slugs Bunny wasn't there. So who wants to be Cher Noble? Or maybe Boom Hilda. |
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Saturday, July 19th, 2008 |
| 10:57 am Boring |
| Movies today consist of superhero salad-spinners and teen category romance - or, over at the "art" house, Africans coping with horror and French people having extramarital affairs. For a people whose national slogan is "we're more blasé about extramarital sex than you," the French apparently can't stop dwelling on extramarital sex. They think about it more than anyone, even people who passionately disapprove of it. The subconscious dynamics of that must be interesting - socially-sanctioned, ordinary practices do not obtain to that level of psychic fixation. The first thing any Frenchman will tell an American is that Mitterand's wife and mistress attended his funeral, and they didn't fight. I've heard that story five hundred times. That's not blasé - that's fascinated, even obsessed. I think the French get married just so they can have extramarital affairs, and they travel to america just so they can tell us about them. |
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Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 |
| 3:39 pm unfiltered |
| anon commenting enabled ip capturing disabled open thread |
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Monday, July 14th, 2008 |
| 2:57 pm What Jesse Jackson saying that Obama's Nuts Should be Eaten tells about the Range Rover |
| .... or, Politics in America as Symbolic Hand-Job [If you didn't already know: a tape surfaced of Jesse saying he wanted to 'tear off Obama's nuts and eat them' (or something like that) for a speech Obama gave this Father's Day. That's the context.] So I was listening to NPR just now, and the guy on "On Point" had a dude on to talk about why "he thought Jesse Jackson was right." Well, said the dude, he didn't really think Jackson was right at all, but he'd been hearing discontent with Obama's Father's Day speech from young black activists and "wanted to reflect that." When asked if he thought that Obama was right or wrong about the problems of African American fathers, dude said that the thing to remember about the speech was that Obama had given it before, many times, and that what was important about it was the timing and venue - the first black church Obama'd spoken at after the Jeremiah Wright "incident." It was the wrong way to go in trying to "distance" himself from Wright's "way of thinking." This is all very meta-psychological, I thought. This post isn't about Wright or Obama or even African-American fatherhood specifically, but rather to try and unpack the significations in the above account of what Obama's speech did or was. Note first that the answer to a question about whether the content of the speech was true was simply to bat the question aside - "he'd given the speech many times before." In other words, this isn't something Obama said, it's a Speech he gave, and it's a mistake even initially to take a political speech at face value - that is, to consider the factual statements for their accuracy and weigh the promised actions for their likely effects. No, the point was to note the speech as a symbolic gesture and imagine the complex interactions between the actual audience for the gesture - a black church congregation - and the intended audience - white people who would digest mainstream media coverage of the gesture. But, remember, even the actual people and things and events appearing in the speech/gesture are there only as symbols! The question then becomes, did Obama go too far - was he too insulting to his black audience - when he threw the symbolic figure of the African-American Father out of the troika to placate the ideological biases of the wolf-pack of media opinion-makers charging behind, upon whose mediation the ultimate emotional reception of the gesture in white minds depends? At that point I turned off the radio, because this is subtle territory, and even a good show wasn't going to map it. To show that Obama's "responsibility" speech isn't about actual African-American fathers, consider what The Black Father is. He's a trope. A literary device. A symbolic invention. How do we know this? Because of what the Black Father inevitably does, in all instances in which he is invoked in the media as The Black Father - he abandons his children, just as surely as Br'er Rabbit escapes the Fox. Now, the reality in question - the thing that actually happens - is simply a working-class black father leaving the home. Now, let's re-index that phenomenon to middle-class whites: consider the middle-class white father leaving the home. We have a different trope for that case. We call it "getting a divorce." It somehow does not manage to rise to the level of "cancer on the community" and become Exhibit A in the list of reasons why we get to say white people have a "pathological culture." Yet that is the role of the Black Father in discourse about African-Americans. Let's jump back to Wright. The content of his "inflammatory" rhetoric was simple: Damn You White America. Too simple, and thereby terribly confusing, because he didn't mean it as a gesture! It's an expression of rage at an objective reality: racism and capitalist oppression. Oh, but the handwringing it caused among white liberals! My favorite white liberal excuse (besides the 'reverse racism' gambit, but that's so old and tired) was that one simply "had to understand the rhetorical tradition of the Black Church," as if to say, well, he doesn't really mean it, he's just one of them ol' uncles gets the Spirit and falls out. You've seen black churches in the films of Whoopi Goldberg and Eddie Murphy - you know how emotional they get! As if the one thing Wright could not have meant is precisely what he said. I mean, white liberals never say of the white highway-Baptist mega-church bigot-preachers that, oh, those white fundies are just used to using "high-pitched rhetoric" in church, and you can't take it so seriously. No, when they denounce gays and abortionists and whatever other sexual criminals are getting them hot under their goiters, we - liberals - take it very seriously, because we know that those words mean draconian legislation may get passed, even that people may get murdered. But to make sure Wright didn't really mean the blanket denunciation he uttered, we, the anti-racist whites, would prefer to deny him the privilege of being a human subject who knows his own mind. The Black Father is a kind of counter-symbol to Wright. It's the "no, you suck!" said to Black America - always the best and first playground riposte to the original accusation of sucking. But that's at the level of the talk - the anxiety it covers doesn't reduce to white American liberals' discomfort with accusations of crypto-racism, which is where a lot of progressive thinkers stop - it's deeper than liberal hypocrisy. Much deeper. There's a Real, lurking below these symbols and counter-symbols, and that's the reality of the oppression that we are continually inflicting. That occasions gilt and a terrible knowledge, that there is a justly angry world of people out there. And that knowledge emerges as a fantasy, which derives from our own desires for revenge against those who wrong us - one day, They might come to get us. The kernel of the fear is "that condition which is called war" - race war and class war, which, to the propertied or comfortable, can be nothing else but the return of the State of Nature to civilization. Since I'm a middle-class white, it's probably time for me to quit analyzing African-American reactions to Obama and Wright and Jackson - in any case I'm interested here in the content of white politics, if there is any. The primary key of middle class whiteness is that of anxiety. The white petit bourgeoisie is - if we may put it this way - capital's fingertips. This is the class that does things for Money - at the behest of organized money, on other words - and occupies all the functionary positions that Money requires, like management, interpretation and enforcement of laws, skilled services, and so on. They also compose the vast heat sink for sunk capital - their wages are the engine of consumer capitalism, keeping the commodity cycle in existence, and their small wads of idle funds, collected into huge boluses like "the investment market" and "the housing market", constitute the raw material upon which speculative capitalists work their dark magic. Now, the people who do things and make things, absent the few skilled "professions", are the working class - and there's hardly one of those left in America. Well, of course, that's an exaggeration, but the processes of making and building have been exported to poorer countries to an enormous degree, leaving what we used to call "the working class" doing essentially unproductive, utterly de-skilled "service" jobs for the middle class - serving them food, pushing some of their paperwork, and so on. Either that or they've been rendered utterly marginal, a reserve army of - what? The Reserve Army of the Unemployable is not a category that Marx dealt with, but we've got one now, and it's huge. This is the poor (urban and rural) underclass and those forced to join it by varying degrees of disability or nonconformism. Their function cannot be to depress wages for the working, because they have been so comprehensively failed by educational institutions and society as a whole that they are unable to substitute for the harried bourgeois. We don't know much about these people, frankly, even to the degree of not knowing quite how many of them there are, because the 'end of welfare as we know it' ended their interaction with both the official organs of government and the formal economy - how they get by is rather mysterious to the canonical organs of social understanding. Now, if you belong to this underclass, you're very likely to be either African-American or Hispanic, though, its important to note, the reverse is not true - the existence of robust African-American and Hispanic middle classes, whose interests are now so utterly divorced from those of the underclass that "post-racial politics" is a possible utterance even among some blacks, proves that. This leaves the middle class squeezed in two ways - one from above, in the traditional vice-grip of capital, and one from below, in a somewhat novel way - ideologically. One function of the Reserve Army of the Unemployable is simply to terrify whitey, and thereby to force political speech in certain authoritarian directions and rule out more anarchic alternatives. I think, in the main, middle-class whitey is too useful to capital actually to be cast into violent contact with the underclass - the bourgeoisie needs to be able to drive to and from suburbia in enough safety to do their useful work. But the threat is continually reflected into whitey's gaze. Every newscast, every Hollywood revenge fantasy hammers the message: Black, Brown, and Poor are criminal classes, utterly pathological, like monsters or germs. They are Dangerous. You have to be Heavily Armored to withstand them, and to be Armed and Aggressive probably isn't a bad idea either. Whereas capital, the other half of the squeeze, appears to us, materially, only in the commodity form. And it is hammered into us - ten times as assiduously - that acquisition and possession of the commodity is Comfort and Safety. (A message that has purchase in no little measure because, in capitalism, it's as much true as false - just try to get by without commodities.) All our stories, all our myths, everything we tell each other to define what we are as creatures and who we are as people, is a product-placement. Even our art forms, like music, now serve merely as ads for the economic system that produced them. We chase sprites of the symbolic economy around in a closed circle, symbol, commodity, commodity, symbol, until each stands only for the other and the two become one moment of a perfect superego-stroking, id-jabbing gerbil wheel. This, too, is a condition of continuous anxiety, but the anxiety contains its own continual - partial - resolution. The fact that whitey also sits as the heavy lid on top of the Reserve Army of the Marginal is more problematic, because the real core of the problem - that there are people out there, American people, living in America, not too far away (though not right next door, that's too close) that this country has categorically screwed, and that, in both a specific and diffuse sense, it's your fault - doesn't go away. You're doing it to them right now. Even if you're on your break, or just digging at home in the garden, you look just like, talk just like, and stand right next to the guy who is doing it, and anyway you're throwing off cultural significations of havingness with such assiduous abandon - that there can't be much expectation for...mercy. Back to Obama and the range rover that I never got around to mentioning. I was driving right behind one while I was listening to the radio, and it occurred to me that the range rover and Obama's "raise your kids, black fathers!" speech have identical functions - they're both gestures of distancing, of de-acknowledgment. I'm not sure "de-acknowledgment" is a word, but I can't think of a better one - it's not an outright refusal to see, for a person who refuses to acknowledge danger behaves in a foolhardy way, not in an overly-cautious one. But it's not acknowledgment, either, because the ways in which the anxiety-held-at-a-distance appear are utterly irrational, can't help matters, and make sense, again, only as symbols functioning in a larger myth. Obama, in that speech, is the Righteous Black Man sticking it to The Black Father, which establishes several things in the white mind: first, that Obama is not himself a Black Father, that dangerous, shiftless trickster figure of fable; second, that Obama, in his willingness at least to say - in front of an African-American audience that knew better and would have been insulted to hear it - that he buys into the Black Father Trope and approves of it (in the mode of denouncing it), can be counted upon to abase himself before the requirements of white racism, at least if he can find a rhetoric that lets him appear fierce and upright while actually cowering; and, third, that he has chosen The Right Side in the Symbolic Race War, which is the overall discourse in which all of this is, as we might say, "happening." The Symbolic Race War being, of course, the communal dreamland in which the fantasy of the eventual race and class war plays out, the evidence of the unconscious consciousness of guilt that the white middle class must, somewhere, possess. Otherwise why do they drive range rovers? A vehicle designed to keep a white colonial safe during a safari in Africa! This is what politics in America looks like. A series of gestures that, through symbolic references to the mythic tropes that populate the white middle-class imagination, alternately provoke and relieve anxiety, guiding behavior in the direction most useful to capital. If you look in books, they say things like "politics is the communal process whereby competing interests are mediated," but I think we know now that's a bit naive. Hah! This is too long and I'm not even going to edit it! Teal, dear! |
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Sunday, July 13th, 2008 |
| 4:23 pm maybe |
| I'm going to start a blog called Maybe You Already Knew, about neat things that've been around for a while and proved their worth, and which are broadly known within the most-concerned group or subculture, but that haven't become common coin for most yet. A substantial minority reading any post will be well-acquainted with the subject, but a majority won't be - and the in-the-know minority will be different for each subject. Each post would contain extensive resources for further reading, should the topic strike a chord. File under 'lifestyle blogs.' First post will be about growing heirloom tomato varieties. I can honestly say that growing and eating heirlooms has changed the way I think about tomatoes. And I'm helping maintain tomato-y biodiversity! The second post will be about, oh, I dunno - Greasemonkey and Firefox. The third will be about ... well, who knows. Socialism, maybe. And that'll be the last post! I kid. Perhaps I should actually do this. Perhaps it's a bad idea. Perhaps it's already been done and I am in the not-knowing group. |
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Friday, July 11th, 2008 |
| 6:50 pm A MEME FROM ME TO YOU |
| Here's a list of the top fifty Things of Stuff! Strike the ones you wish to strike, italicize the Italians, bold the ones that don't seem loud enough, and put a bullet character where the Spirit of the Gun moves you! ( clip ) |
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Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 |
| 11:16 am friends only |
 COMMENT TO SEE WHAT IS HIDDEN |
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