ACADEMITASSE: Scribo, Ergo Lacrimo

Oh, THAT Bush Doctrine

2008-09-12T09:31:00.003-05:00

Things Sarah Palin thought the Bush doctrine referred to prior to her interview with Charles Gibson:

--Landscaping
--Bikini waxing
--Moses and the burning bush

Halibut, Harbor Seals, Bears...Oh my!

2008-09-11T12:15:00.003-05:00

"We're not going to spend $3 million of your tax dollars to study the DNA of bears in Montana."--John McCain

According to a summary of requests for federal appropriations posted to her budget office's Web site, Palin requested millions of dollars for, among other things:

--Improving recreational halibut fishing

--Studying the mating habits of crabs

--Examining the DNA of harbor seals

Top Ten Best Animals in Lipstick

2008-09-10T16:00:00.002-05:00

Pit Bull

Moose

Pig

Smelly Fish

Vulture

Sheep

Wolf

Elephant

Ostrich

Lemming

Poodle in Lipstick

2008-09-10T11:24:00.002-05:00

The Vanishing

2008-09-04T13:32:00.004-05:00

The spirit recedes,

nothing left

but the idea of embers

and somewhere else,

embers.

There is no heat:

just warmth

as a feeling

and somewhere else,

a fire;

no smoke:

just grey

as in ash

and somewhere else,

carbon.

The world is not honed down

but whittled away;

not emptied out

but vacated;

not poured forth

but discharged.

Whisper thin

the veil turns vapor

and then disappears.

Allen Ginsberg, Photographer

2008-03-06T21:53:00.007-05:00

From guest blogger Matt:

William Burroughs relaxing on a broken-down foam rubber couch, looking up to the sky: Ginsberg has made a technically superb photo. It’s 1991 and his studies with Robert Frank have paid off. He’s managed to catch Burroughs’ left eye just slightly under his glasses, frozen grey in reflection. Burroughs is thin and wears a jean jacket like a teenager, boyish and baggy. There’s a late 1970s/early 1980s Econo-box in the driveway, and his lawn is well-kept if not meticulous, much like the writer. Burroughs— the Harvard alum, the exterminator of Chicago, the pot farmer of Texas, the gay hustler of 1940s Times Square, the JUNKY, THE junky—is living in Lawrence, Kansas, where he has been a writer-in-residence since 1983.

The springs in the sofa at his back are protruding, and the foam is tattered. It reminds me of Swiss cheese. Resting on a rusty bar, Burroughs’ nearly bald head is close-cropped. He looks too worn out to be a Zen master, too enlightened to be mortal. Ginsberg has captured a picture of all their deaths—Jack’s and Neal’s 25 years ago, Burroughs’ and his own to come.

In his later years Ginsberg became a serious photographer. He was rarely ever seen without his Rollei. In the ’40s and ’50s he used a small 35mm, but then as an infamous poet he met the famous photographer Berenice Abbott, who told him to stop fluttering around like a snapshooter.

“You need detail, young man,” she told him. “You need a large format negative.” He found the view-camera too bulky, too... set up, and he needed detail AND spontaneity. So he went with a medium format. The Middle Way. He was Allen Ginsberg and he was going to take advantage of it. He photographed his friends, many of them cultural icons.

Even in the still photo Burroughs’ restless mind seems to be spinning. We can’t decide whether he’s smiling or pained. Or is he expressionless, blank, momentarily dead? I can’t imagine Burroughs getting up and walking off to make dinner or read a book. He is there forever, in deep thought, aware of everything that’s happened and of everything that will. It is a live photograph—Burroughs alive and well, his legacy taking root and growing limbs.

Party Time

2006-12-11T12:01:00.001-05:00

Here's a little piece I'm calling "Party Time." This one goes out to all muted members of binary oppositions. It rhymes with nothing so much as itself. It is the sublime object of anger management. I rejects its own author function.

Party Time

It is a blank gecko stare,
An afternoon of Necco wafers and too much tea.
Please flash and flesh me out.
I am an outmoded machine
Egregiously decked to serve your meals,
Repair your streets, move your movies
To the basement where more lives than one
Go on like lights about to burn.
I am a flickering bulb.
I am the bass guitar a week behind its beat.
I am a latte. I'm always frayed,
A woolen blanket tossed across a couch at dawn.

Last Chance Glance

2006-12-03T22:10:00.000-05:00

Since my partner in blogging Mike was kind enough to introduce me by quoting various of my reviews, I shall respond with a poem. First, let me clarify that I eschew the current use of cant, buzzwords, and academic jargon. So I shall introduce my poetry with the following few words.

In my poems I strive to inscribe the fragmentation of my identity function in that space where form diverges from function. I seek to inscribe into the position of privilege the hitherto muted halves of irruputed binary oppositions. It is my struggle to force the mouth of my imagination to swallow the tail of my memory. I gnaw at the bars of the prisonhouse of grammar. My meters are a proletarian revolution. My rhymes arrest themselves with the ecstasies of torture.

Last Chance Glance

Stare straight out--
The calendar bequeaths its forgetfulness,
Leaves crease the sidewalks like slugs,
And I am on vacation from nothing.
My breathing takes place of the place
I confounded for my brethren last year,
Before they showed up to hunt me down.
My associate calls out to me, a lost sheep
That should never come out of the rain
Even when the last of the weather is rain
And all the world is losing its shape,
Forgotten laundry left on the line to drown
In the sun now that our dates are in arrears.
I join the planets in their drawn-out chase
In the dark, some light years where the birthing
Of a new system arises, shrugs
Itself into a light-spun artfulness,
And sputters out.

Introducing Jerry

2006-12-01T12:34:00.000-05:00

I would like to introduce another blogger who’ll be joining me on a regular basis. His name is Jerry and he is an accomplished poet.

Here are what the critics are saying about Daft Gnosis, the new anthology of his work.

“Literally brimming with words and punctuation.”

“Daft Gnosis kindles a small fire on your lapels, sets your hair ablaze, and then asks you to consider the color of the flame. Read at your own risk."

“Jerry's poems are gently and consistently upsetting, though less serious than they seem. They describe all the forms of social discomfort that exist, and some others besides.”

“Slick, water-resistant stuff. Poems to paper your parlor with, poems that will survive El Nino.”

“Jerry has reached that point in his writing where the nerves are worn down to their roots, where the voice is essentially no longer audible. Read it silently or out loud, or later.”

“Stands alone among contemporary poets in the way he intervenes in the relentless operations of the ocular regime and the something or other.”

“Mr. Demitasse is funny when he isn’t moving, brainy when he isn’t silly, contemplative when he isn’t shouting. If only he were, say, silly, we should know how to 'place' him. But he is merely—merely!—funny, moving, brainy, silly, contemplative, and shouting. That will have to do.”

“The spectacular, uninterrupted malaise of Mr. Demitasse’s career is presented here for the first time in its entirety.”

“A true American original—here is an urban poet lazing on a porch swing in a gated community, anatomizing the post-9/11 world with a tumbler of Crystal Light, a carton of low-tar cigarettes, and a sitcom sense of closure.”

“Poetry like this is a mirror in which we see ourselves not by reflecting in lazy categories, but as telemarketers or our psychopharmagologists see us.”

“Cock-eyed, bow-legged, and footloose—yet persnickety—this verse bumps up against the world like a drunken sailor with OCD.”

2006-11-29T13:10:00.000-05:00

Oh My God Shoes!

You know the group of teenage girls that are always in front of you at Starbucks? Their leader is usually a girl named Ashley or Francesca, and she talks with a lisp because of the spittle that accumulates in her braces.

“You guysh, I’m sssho getting a caramel macchiato!”

It must say somewhere in the Hello Kitty Guide to Being a Teenage Girl that when you go to Starbucks, you have to order a caramel macchiato.

Anyway, there you are, sitting with your laptop, hand on your brow, doing your best to look profoundly cogitative. You’re sighing at the appropriate moments and giving off a cultivated, angsty vibe. But Francesca and the gang won’t stop giggling and having fun and ruining your little writerly drag show.

Now imagine Francesca has grown up into a pissed-off fashionista, and she's obsessed with shoes. That kind of describes the character that Liam Sullivan has created in “Oh My God. Shoes,” except he calls her Kelly, and when Kelly is angry, she calls people “betch” and “deck,” as in “that girl is such a betch” and “that guy is a total deck.”

If you’re a regular reader of Joe.My.God, this is probably old news to you. But for folks who haven’t seen it, you should check it out. It’s one of the funniest videos on YouTube. (Sullivan actually plays all the characters in the opening scene.)

Troubling Materialism, or What's the Matter With Matter?

2006-11-28T14:26:00.000-05:00

The November issue of Wired contains an article called “The Church of the Nonbelievers” about a group of scientists, the “New Atheists,” who have declared war on religion. They are talking to you, dear reader, reasonable humanist/agnostic that you are:

“The New Atheists will not let us off the hook simply because we are not doctrinaire believers. They condemn not just belief in God but respect for belief in God. Religion is not only wrong; it’s evil. Now that the battle has been joined, there’s no excuse for shirking. Three writers have sounded this call to arms. They are Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett.”

You mean, I can’t sit on the fence?

In a recent issue of Harpers, the writer Marilynne Robinson takes Dawkins to task:

“In his new book, The God Delusion, Dawkins has turned the full force of his intellect against religion, and all his verbal skills as well, and his humane learning, too, which is capacious enough to include some deeply minor poetry. Truly this book is a sword which turneth every way, to judge by the table of contents at least. There is no doubt in Dawkins’s mind that the evils of the world are to be laid at the doorstep of the church, mosque, and synagogue, and that science must be our salvation.

“There is a pervasive exclusion of historical memory in Dawkins’s view of science. Consider this sentence from his preface, which occurs in the context of his vision of a religion-free world: ‘Imagine…no persecution of Jews as Christ-killers.’ In a later chapter he condemns Jews for discouraging ‘marrying out’ and complains that such ‘wanton and carefully nurtured divisiveness is ‘a significant force for evil.’ It is of course no criticism to say that he values the tradition of Judaism not at all, since this is only consistent with his view of religion in general. He seems unaware, however, that there was in fact significant intermarriage between Jews and gentiles in Europe as well as secularism and conversion among the Jews, and that this appears only to have fired the anti-Semitic imagination. While it is true that persecution of the Jews has a very long history in Europe, it is also true that science in the twentieth century revived and absolutized persecution by giving it a fresh rationale—Jewishness was not religious or cultural, but genetic. Therefore no appeal could be made against the brute fact of a Jewish grandparent.

“Dawkins deals with all this in one sentence. Hitler did his evil ‘in the name of…an insane and unscientific eugenics theory.’ But eugenics is science as surely as totemism is religion. That either is in error is beside the point.

“Granting for the purposes of argument that Dawkins is correct in the view that the majority of great scientists are atheists, we may then exclude religion from among the factors that recruit them to this somber work. We are left with nationalism, steady employment, good pay, the chance to do research that is lavishly funded and, by definition, cutting edge—familiar motives of a kind fully capable of disarming moral doubt. In any case, the crankiest imam, the oiliest televangelist, can, at his worst, only urge circumstances a degree or two farther toward the use of those exotic war technologies that are always ready, always waiting. If it is fair to speak globally of religion, it is also fair to speak globally of science.”

I must admit to a certain satisfaction at the way this debate has intensified. And I find Dawkins et al. condescending and parochial. Then again, perhaps their polemical tone is a natural response to the religious right in America.

But God save us all from the facile New Age reconciliations of science and religion that seems to always be occurring in Psychology Today and Yoga Journal. Stephen Jay Gould attempted to call a truce by calling the two world-views “non-overlapping magisteria,” but that won’t do for some people, until they’ve exhausted all possibilities. Or at least until they understand what “non-overlapping magisteria” really means. And good for them.

One such person is ex-Buddhist monk B. Allan Wallace, who was interviewed recently on Salon. Here, Wallace talks about the 2,500-year-old Buddhist tradition of examining mental phenomena systematically as well as subjectively:

“More and more, scientists are able to identify the parts and functions of the brain that are necessary to generate specific mental states. So these are scientific issues. But now let’s tap into what the philosopher David Chalmers has called ‘the hard problem’—the relationship between the physical brain and consciousness. What is it about the brain—this mass of chemicals and electromagnetic fields—that enables it to generate any state of subjective experience? If your sole access to the mind is by way of physical phenomena, then you have no way of testing whether all dimensions of the mind are necessarily contingent upon the brain.

“According to quantum field theory, string theory and quantum cosmology—cutting-edge fields of 21st century physics—matter itself is not reducible to matter. And Richard Feynman, the great Nobel laureate in physics, commented very emphatically, 'We don't know what energy is.' He said it’s not stuff out there that has a specific location. It’s more like a mathematical abstraction. So matter has been reduced to formations of space. Energy is configurations of space. Space itself is rather mysterious. And so when I introduce this theme of a substrate consciousness, it’s not something ethereal that’s opposed to matter. Matter is about as ethereal as anything gets. But could there be this continuum of substrate consciousness that’s not contingent upon molecules? From the Buddhist perspective, yes.”

Energy is configurations of space. Space itself is rather mysterious. Matter is about as ethereal as anything gets.

And now I’d like to introduce you to Greg Fuqua, an artist from Iowa who is exploring some of these ideas visually. He's the new artist-in-residence at the Octagon Center for the Arts in Ames. Greg does these big, swirling charcoal drawings that convey lots of movement but also extraordinary precision. There's great passion as well as great cognitive energy in his work.

This first image is called “Passive/Aggressive,” and I think it could be viewed as a stunning depiction of the idea of “substrate consciousness” (which Wallace also calls "stem consciousness," as in stem cell). According to some Buddhists, this consciousness exists prior to the fetal development of the brain, and survives death.

The second image is called “Conscious Nature.”

You stare into the abyss and the abyss stares back. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the Void isn’t void but is pregnant with possibilities.

Here’s Greg’s statement:
“My work is a melding of my fascination of nature and the forces that shape the form and behavior of matter, and consciousness. In a sense my work represents a reflection between creative nature and creative consciousness. I have invented my own cosmological system, to express notions of inner/outer, notions of permeability, notions of connectedness to nature, energy and to creationary processes. My work has become an abstract expression of this interface between body, consciousness and nature.

“The process was born out of a gestural drawing approach, a sort of an emergent physical felt process that oscillates between clarity and chaos, refinement and obscurity. I am attempting to capture the essence of nature, the primordial drive, the organizational tendencies and forces of the universe.

“The images are inspired from within and are non-objective, but they do connect with reality and provide the link between other natural worlds and us. The specific identification of these forms are not evident, they reference the sense of intrinsic beauty, mystery and power of nature which can be thought of as a representation of inner and outer worlds that are inherently familiar to us all.”

Greg is indeed troubling the line between matter and consciousness, nature and science—and to brilliant effect. I think he’s articulating a kind of sacred immanence, a place where magisteria might overlap or find a common source. He’s got a website in the works (for a science geek, Mr. Fuqua’s knowledge of html leaves something to be desired), but for now, google him to learn more about his work.

Mitch Epstein's "Recreation: American Photographs 1973-1988"

2006-11-27T17:12:00.000-05:00

Let me introduce guest blogger Matt, who will be writing an occasional post on photograpy and the visual arts. Here he is on Mitch Epstein.

“Big” and “color” are probably the two words that best describe the contemporary photography scene (add “expensive” if you’re talking about the gallery and museum worlds), and there are a few great books out there that remind us of why this is so. In the past few years, in what appears to be a golden age of photo books, some eye-popping editions have been released to little fanfare (pretending for a moment that fanfare might actually surround a photo book release). The best of these may be Mitch Epstein’s Recreation: American Photographs 1973–1988, published in 2005 by Steidl.

In the galaxy of color photography—and on the planet of American street color in particular—there has always been a short list of heavyweights: William Eggleston, Stephen Shore, Joel Meyerwitz, Joel Sternfeld, and Richard Misrach. With publication of Recreation, Epstein has guaranteed himself a place on that list. Of course, he was working as early, as seriously, and as brilliantly as anyone else in the medium.

This particular body of work shows a tenacity and street sense as keen as that of his teacher, Garry Winogrand, though unlike the old master, Epstein also has a sharp sense of color. And yet, as rich and sumptuous as these images are, Epstein’s real genius is for distilling 1970’s and ’80’s American culture. While the title speaks of American leisure, the “recreations” he captures on film are full of drama and intensity, forming the backdrop for a poignant, politically charged social document about life in the U.S. Epstein looks for America, and finds it in our backyards, resorts, parks, and campgrounds. Places you might not think to look. As it turns out, so much of who we are as Americans can be revealed when we’re at "leisure."

In just one example, plate 41 (pictured above), we see a scene from 1976—the outside of a rain-soaked motel in Miami. Two impossibly beautiful, skinny teenage girls in bikinis huddle over a pay phone, while a pair of middle-age men, crewcut and tan, looking a few years out of the war, smoke cigarettes and hover close to them. Startlingly close. The men are chuckling, but the girls, clearly aware of the men’s presence, make no acknowledgment. It’s a moment as beautiful as it is disturbing, and one full of mystery. The photograph speaks eloquently about power, gender, youth, corruption, family, sex, boredom, and beauty—and like all of the photos in the collection, it captures something essential about modern America.

In short, Mitch Epstein’s Recreation is a force that American street color photographers should reckon with, and a book that all Americans should check out.

Hauntology Ad Nauseam: Reynolds Schools Me

2006-11-27T16:56:00.000-05:00

You think you know a thing or two about music until you talk to a guy like Simon Reynolds. Here, he responds to my last post:

“I do think that generally speaking the dub thing has both been over-theorised to the point of exhaustion. I don’t think the music has much more to give us at this point, theory-wise! And the idea that dub is the last word in sonic hauntology is off base. It’s not even the first word—there was all that Musique concrète stuff going on, and then psychedelia. I think with the Ghost Box bunch of people and other figures like Ariel Pink who are being talked up as hauntological, it’s far more relevant to talk about Joe Meek or even “Strawberry Fields Forever”—now that’s a phantasmagoric record, on a production level, and not coincidentally, it’s a song about nostalgia and memory. And it’s a good six years before Lee Perry got into ghostified production!

“I also get a bit of a cognitive dissonance sometimes when reading dub theory and it’s all about deconstruction, ghosts, etc, but the actual vibe of so much dub is...kindly. It’s like this forgiving and wise music, as opposed to a wrecking, derailing experience. Either that, or it’s kind of sensual/sensuous, an erotics of sound, all about pure sonic delight, these tantalizing flickers of sound. I’m talking more about your classic Jamaican ’70s dub, when it was wedded to roots reggae culture, and in that sense dub is essentially an adjunct to a religious music—a form of Caribbean gospel. So as much as the art of making the records technically involves a deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, I think the whole point of the music is about a longing for presence: the presence of Jah, the numinous light of the nimbus surrounding him...

“It’s really later on in the hands of white producers (Sherwood above all) and theorists that dub as this assault course of headfuck FX and spatial derangement really takes hold.”

I think Simon’s point about dub being a "longing for presence" is interesting, and probably partly true, though as in the case of the best blues music (I’m thinking Robert Johnson, for example) or the jazz of Coltrane, it becomes difficult to say whether the music is a longing for God or an exploration of His absence. It isn’t clear to me whether the longing is for communion or oblivion. Perhaps the two meet at some point.

And on the flip side, I would argue that what white, poststructuralist philosophers like Derrida demonstrate with their continual deconstructive movement, the endless, self-reflexive regression, is desire for a kind of covert or unacknowledged transcendence. Actually, I think Derrida's late work grapples with this more self-consciously, tries to understand what “presence” might still look or sound like. Peter Goldman at UC Irvine puts it better than I do:

“While Derrida iconoclastically refuses any figuration of the sacred, he still insists on the incommensurability, the absolute difference of God. As a reaction against the fear that we have lost or forgotten the sacred (or Being), and thus the source for all significance, academics have brought back the sacred with a vengeance. But as a result of iconoclasm, the sacred now takes the abstract form of absolute difference or alterity, and any attempt to understand or even discuss rationally the incommensurable is abandoned. Derrida’s incantatory language—the poetical cadences of his prose, the long and rapturous repetitions—reveals an aestheticism which is at heart rooted in a deep nostalgia for the sacred. His hostility towards modern technological civilization reflects the fear that the modern forgetting of the sacred will allow for unrestrained violence. The so-called primitive ambivalence of the sacred continues then, even in modern academia. On the one hand we resent any defined figuration of the sacred for presuming to colonize the space which is essentially spiritual and thus (for modernity) individual. But on the other hand, we still long for a sense of sacred difference, an absolute sacred immune to the corrosive power of resentment.” [Emphasis mine]

(Thanks again to Richard at The Existence Machine for helping to frame this discussion for me and for pointing me in the direction of folks who have been thinking it through.)

Hauntology, Revived

2006-11-22T16:04:00.000-05:00

In 1994, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida wrote a book called Specters of Marx. It was, in part, a response to American philosopher Francis Fukuyama's 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man. "What we may be witnessing," Fukuyama said, "is not just the end of the Cold War...but the end point of mankind's ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government." The Soviety Union had collapsed, the Berlin Wall had come down, and capitalism and Western liberal democracy had finally won.

But wait, said Derrida: all this talk of the end of history is really just an attempt to "exorcise the spirit of Marxism" from our collective memory. And then he went on to look at the some of the "spectral" metaphors in Marx, whose description of capitalism is full of vampires and ghosts and the living dead.

Along the way, Derrida coined the term "hauntology" as a pun on "ontology." Ontology is the study of being, of what exists. Derrida wants to say that our ideas of reality are "haunted" by the stuff we exclude—the things we don't want to remember or acknowledge. The Holocaust, for example, or the slave trade. Our sense of Western history as the progressive march of "freedom" and "civilization" is haunted by genocide and enslavement.

Lately, this concept of hauntology has been kicked around quite a bit by music critics (and by lit/culture bloggers more generally, such as Richard at The Existence Machine). It's being pretty loosely applied at this point to anything that sounds "spooky," which is fine, but there's value in applying the term more rigorously. I recently attended a discussion of David Byrne and Brian Eno's 1981 album, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, which lots of critics consider a seminal album in the history of electronic music. It's pretty good, and it was clearly influential.

But the history of "sonic hauntology" as it's constructed around a record like Bush of Ghosts is haunted itself, by the specter of Black artists like Lee Scratch Perry. Perry produced a good deal of Bob Marley's music, especially the darker songs like "Duppy Conqueror," "Mr. Brown," "Kaya," and "Small Axe." Perry put the dread in natty. In fact, he described Dub as "the ghost in me coming out."

There's so much to say about Lee Scratch Perry—and much has already been said—but it bears repeating, especially now as the history of electronic music is being rewritten. Here's the writer Erik Davis on the history of Dub:

"Dub arose from doubling—the common Jamaican practice of reconfiguring a prerecorded track into any number of new songs. Dub calls the apparent 'authenticity' of roots reggae into question because it destroys the holistic integrity of singer and song. It proclaims a primary postmodern law: there is no original, no homeland."

In other words, no solid ontological ground.

Does anyone remember the creepy "duet" between Natalie Cole and her dead father Nat King Cole? That's a good example of what these music critics are trying to describe. But it isn't only this genre of electronic music that's spooky; these self-consciously eerie electronic songs simply allow us to experience, in exaggerated form, the uncanny nature of representation itself. Re-presentation: the presenting again of something that no longer exists as it once did. Actually, as it never did—things in the world are "always already" infused with history, memory, imagination. They aren't simple and solid, but half-fantasy right from the start, and continually in flux.

"By mutating its repetitions of previously used material," Davis continues, "dub adds something new and distinctly uncanny, vaporizing into a kind a doppelganger music. Despite the crisp attack of its drums and the heaviness of its bass, it swoops through empty space, spectral and disembodied. John Corbett even links the etymology of the word 'dub' with duppie (Jamaican patois for ghost)."

Which brings us back to the history of slavery, of "no homeland." According to the blogger k-punk, "It's no accident that hauntology begins in the Black Atlantic, with dub and hip-hop. Time being out of joint is the defining feature of the black Atlantean experience."

This is what's at stake in the term "hauntology" losing its precision: the memory of specific historical experiences that called for specific aesthetic responses. For example, the concept of hauntology can be usefully applied to Rastafarianism, which constructed its own history from the discarded fragments of the Bible. Rastafarianism is a kind of ghost of Western Biblical history, as least as most of us know it. According to some traditions, Haile Selassie was the 225th king in an unbroken line of Ethiopian monarchs descended from King Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, leading Rastas to conclude that African people are among the true children of Israel. And in fact, Black Jews have lived in Ethiopia for centuries, disconnected from the rest of Judaism.

Like Rastafarianism, Dub is a response to a specific historical situation. Artists like Perry rose to that occasion. If Byrne and Eno were inspired by Perry's work and wanted to appropriate it for their own concerns, that's great. But when critics describe B&E as these "nerdy," "cerebral" musicians experimenting with electronic music, they start to construct just another history of the Western Avant-garde that ignores the intellectual contribution of Black artists. Perry was as much a theoretician as B&E.

Furthermore, if music critics are going to appropriate Derrida's theory, they'll have to reckon with the fact that "hauntology" as a concept is oddly disembodied (Derrida's ideas usually are), and it should be oddly embodied instead. Derrida is talking about writing, not music. I think that the phenomenon of the "phantom limb" might be a useful addition to a theory of hauntology, especially as it relates to music, which is more sensory and immediate than writing.

In the book The Phantom Museum, the writer Gaby Wood says, "In the sixteenth century, the French surgeon Ambroise Paré discovered what he described as a 'strange and grievous fact'; later, in the course of another war, the writer and neurologist Silas Weir Mitchell gave it a name. He said his patients were suffering from 'phantom limbs,' since these 'vivid hallucinations' were in fact a form of haunting. 'Nearly every man who loses a limb,' Mitchell wrote, 'carries about with him a constant or inconstant phantom of the missing member, a sensory ghost of that much of himself.'"

Is a record a kind of phantom limb?

One final thing: On his Bliss Blog, Simon Reynolds asked readers if they could come up with a catchier name than "sonic hauntology." Any ideas?

Alternate Titles for the OJ Book

2006-11-22T10:11:00.000-05:00

From McSweeney's:

Stab This Book
Tuesdays With Stabby
What to Expect When You're Expecting to Stab Someone
Men Are From Mars, She Had It Coming

And a few of my own:

Running With Scissors, a Knife, and Two Bloody Gloves
Left Behind: Even More Evidence
YOU: The Murderer's Manual
Orangey Snicket's a Series of Unfortunate Events
Who Moved My Cheese Next to the Murder Weapon?

Any others?

Neko Case: Fox Confessor

2006-11-21T16:46:00.000-05:00

I'm a big fan of Neko Case, and my review of her latest album, Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, is online at a website called Head Butler. A "cultural concierge" service for "hungry minds," Head Butler recommends books, movies, music--even coffee. It's a great idea in this age of overwhelming choice, and really well executed. Another example of the way someone can turn obsession into user-friendly advice is the website Billy Knows Best. These guys wouldn't keep readers coming back for more if people didn't actually follow their advice and find it helpful. They report honestly, and they do serious legwork. Do you want to sort through 50 detective novels looking for the overlooked gem? Or test-run every single razor out there to find out which one gives you the best shave?

Anyway, if you haven't heard Neko, you're missing out on one of the most captivating voices in pop music today. A true American original. Patsy Cline meets David Lynch. Actually, that doesn't even do the album justice.

Phony Bennett

2006-11-16T14:16:00.000-05:00

Alec Baldwin is one of the funniest guys on TV. When did this happen? Actually, it probably comes as no surprise to those of you who’ve watched him on Saturday Night Live over the past few years. (He’s stolen a few comic scenes on the big screen as well, such as in Along Came Polly.) In this bit, he impersonates Tony Bennett while interviewing the real Tony Bennett, who is playing a character called “Phony Bennett.” Baldwin positions his impersonation right between parody and tribute, much like John Belushi did when he played Joe Cocker with the real Joe Cocker onstage. To walk this line between caricature and homage with the person sitting across from you must be pretty difficult. I imagine most people would either retreat or make the caricature even more broad in order to show they aren’t backing off.

Can any of you wordsmiths reach into your box of curios and pull out a term for a caricature/tribute? Or coin one?

Crazy for Sesame Street

2006-11-14T11:34:00.000-05:00

In retrospect, almost all of the characters on Sesame Street (and quite a few muppets) seem to have had clinical psychological problems.

Oscar the Grouch: Oppositional defiant disorder

Cookie: Compulsive overeating--trying to fill an empty space inside, to the point of occasionally eating inedible objects

The Count: OCD

Big Bird: Gender identity disorder; possibly schizophrenia, if you don't believe Snuffelupagus was real

Snuffelupagus: Disthymia (chronic, low-level depression); possibly comorbid narcolepsy

Elmo: Narcissism--refers to himself in third person, needs to be center of attention

Grover: Histrionic personality disorder--overly suggestible, self-dramatizing, considers relationships to be more intimate than they are

Animal (muppet): Bipolar; possibly comorbid ADHD

Bert & Ernie: No longer considered mentally ill; may become primary caregivers for Ernie's niece Ernestine

Have I missed or misdiagnosed any characters?

Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally

2006-11-10T11:24:00.000-05:00

In the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Stanley Fish
reviews Wendy Brown’s new book, Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire (Princeton University Press).

Liberal tolerance—or, in Wendy Brown’s useful phrase, the “regime of tolerance"—has become an instrument of power. As Fish puts it:

“Live and let live won’t work, we are often told, if the other guy is determined to kill you because he believes that his religion or his ethnic history commands him to. Liberal citizens will be tolerant of any group so long as its members subordinate their cultural commitments to the universal dictates of reason, as defined by liberalism. But once a group has rejected tolerance as a guiding principle…it becomes a candidate for intolerance that will be performed in the name of tolerance.”

Clearly this is one of the moral justifications for going into Iraq. It’s also a problem that citizens of Denmark are struggling with after the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy:

“Western commentators are incapable of understanding (except as misguided, crazy, or evil) the motivations of those who passionately protested the Danish cartoons, and you could nevertheless conclude that their incapacity is all to their credit.”

In other words, Fish sees this as an impasse, and he’s here to dope it out for us. Talk to me, Stan:

“[Brown’s] account of how liberal tolerance works is nuanced and bracing. The fact that her analysis does not (and in my view could not) deliver a program for improving the world (or even a set of reasons for rejecting liberal tolerance) makes it no different from any other effort (always doomed) to derive a politics from the discourses of postmodernism, anti-essentialism, and anti-foundationalism.”

Will there be a tomorrow?

And can't my bleeding liberal heart do anything?

“The same difficulties attend Brown's call for a ‘project of connections across differences.’ On what bridge? Built by whom? It’s a little late to be saying (with E.M. Forster), ‘Only connect.’”

What about the transformation of liberalism itself?

“In short, a softer liberalism, a liberalism alert to difference in a way that does not privatize or naturalize it, wouldn’t be liberalism. It would be something, but what that something is Brown does not tell us.”

Translation: we simply cannot think past this impasse from our current situation. We lack political imagination, or the means to articulate a political alternative. But who is this “we”? Fish tips his hand when he begins the review with this anecdote:

“Some years ago, just after Salman Rushdie was made the object of a fatwa, I found myself at an academic conference listening to a panel address the issues raised by his situation. A member of the audience rose and, without a trace of irony, gave voice to this question/accusation: “What’s the matter with those Iranians? Haven’t they ever heard of the First Amendment?” The empirical answer to the question was maybe yes, maybe no. Some individual Iranians and many members of the Iranian legal community would have heard of (and studied) the First Amendment, but even those who had read it could not have been counted on to affirm the assumptions informing it”—for example, the “assumption that contents (ideas, ideologies, opinions, hypotheses) are equal before the law, and none is to be prohibited unless it is put into (dangerous) action.”

And then it hits you: this is not the problem of a cultural dialogue, but of a cultural monologue. Another white intellectual presuming to speak for everyone. Fish answers the audience member’s question without a trace of irony himself, by saying, “Some individual Iranians would have heard of the First Amendment.” Really? Tell me more about these fascinating "Iranians." Were there any of them in the audience who might have been able to field this question better than Fish? Who the hell knows. The subaltern couldn’t even get a word in edgewise over this mighty torrent.

Fish’s arguments are sound, as they stand. He has ample rhetorical gifts. He floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee. But when you look outside the particulars of the argument—switch your perspective from the content of the argument to the “conditions of its possibility,” as the Marxists say—you wonder why the Chronicle would have chosen Fish to write such a long, solo article on this topic, without even an invitation to dialogue. Maybe, just maybe there are intellectuals who have a foot in both worlds—Western and non-Western—who might have something to say about this dilemma of liberal tolerance. You know, help find a way forward. Imagine that!

Are You Evolved?

2006-11-04T08:38:00.000-05:00

Evolution seems to favor female promiscuity. The latest Human Nature column on Slate reports that:

"In a study of mouse-like marsupials, 'survival of babies with promiscuous mothers was almost three times as high as those in the monogamous group.' Takeaway for women: 'Polyandry improves female lifetime fitness.' Fine print: 'Males usually died after a short and intense single mating season due to exhaustion and aggressive encounters with other males.' (Did we mention that female promiscuity promotes big testicles and small brains in males?)"

This probably explains a personal ad I saw the other day:

Looking for Evolved Man
Fit, promiscuous single mom ISO exhausted and aggressive pinhead with massive testicles for short-term romance.

Mark Foley, Little Miss Sunshine, Anti-Aging Creams, and the Evanescing Commodity

2006-11-03T15:09:00.000-05:00

Celebrity has already passed its heyday as our central preoccupation in America. Youth and aging have replaced it. As Baby Boomers are hitting 60, bookstores are filled with books about healthy aging and anti-aging and staying young. We debate whether we should accept aging “naturally” or fight it with science. We talk about youth and aging constantly because we see them as problems.

Of course, people all over the world have wrestled with the fact of mortality for as long as anyone can remember. But for us, the problem of “mortality” is not the problem of leaving a legacy, or of the soul’s journey and the afterlife, or of the passing of one’s earthly power to a younger generation, or even of failing health. For us, the problem of “mortality” is the passage of “youth” defined as the brief window in which one’s sexual appeal and lust for life is supposedly at its most intense. And for us, this "youth" as desire incarnate—that is, peak desirability and desiring—is a commodity.

In his essay “Children of the Revolution” in the latest issue of Harpers, Mark Greif (editor of n+1) has some interesting things to say about sex, youth, and commerce that are pertinent in light of such disparate cultural ripples as the Mark Foley scandal, the beauty pageants portrayed in Little Miss Sunshine, Calvein Klein ads, and the cosmetics industry:

“[Sexual] liberation went astray because another force turned out to have a use for the idea that sex is the bearer of the richest experiences—commerce.

“But why did liberalization turn back to gorge itself on youth? The surprise is not that youth would be desirable but that it ought to be competitively ineffective, since it is universally distributed at the start of life. Yet youth is naturally evanescent, a commodity vanishing every single day that one lives. Youth can be requalified physically as an aspect of memory, for every single consumer, in minutiae of appearance that you alone know (looking at yourself every day in a mirror) even while other people don’t. Beauty is too much someone else’s good luck; we accept that it is unequally distributed. Youth is more effective precisely because it is something all of us are always losing.

“Thus young people in all forms of representation—advertising, celebrity following, advice literature, day-to-day talk—augment the competitive system of youth whether or not they are the 'target market' of any particular campaign. For society as a whole, gazing at those youths who are sexually mature but restricted from the market, sex children become that most perfect grounds for competition, a fantastic commodity unattainable in its pure form.

“It is as if the culture understands it must be ruthless in preventing adults from tampering with real children, just because it is working so hard to promote the extreme commercial valuation of youth. Thus we produce the obsession we claim to resent; the new pedophile is a product of our system of values.”

For a slightly different and funny take, check out Bill Maher’s piece on Salon:

"Read the labels on your food. It turns out the healthiest thing you can put in your body is Mark Foley's penis. He was probably the first fruit those pages ever came into contact with that wasn't drenched in pesticide.

But that's America for you—a red herring culture, always scared of the wrong things. The fact is, there are a lot of creepy middle-aged men out there lusting for your kids. They work for MTV, the pharmaceutical industry, McDonald's, Marlboro and K Street. And recently, there's been a rash of strangers making their way onto school campuses and targeting our children for death. They're called military recruiters."

Lest the 12 people who read this blog think I’m defending Foley, let me say I think he’s repulsive, regardless of whether the pages he was harassing were of the legal age or not. I’m simply saying that the scandal has become a lightning rod for a number of cultural preoccupations, and that it sheds light on certain strange, troubling aspects of contemporary American life that might otherwise go unnoticed.

So Very Kerry

2006-11-01T11:08:00.000-05:00

There was an old man from Nantucket
or from somewhere in Boston but who probably summered in Nantucket or on “The Cape”
and he didn't live in a shoe
but he did put his well-heeled foot in his mouth
so perfectly,
so thoroughly,
so exquisitely,
so pretentiously,
so patronizingly,
with such noblesse oblivious
and at such an opportune time
that Karl Rove couldn’t have dreamed it
and the old Brahmin probably handed the congressional elections to the Republicans
so thank you thank you thank you thank you thank you
thank you thank you so fucking much
John Kerry.

Wake Up and Smell the Horror

2006-10-31T10:01:00.000-05:00

It’s Halloween, that time of year when we talk about our favorite horror movies. My wife and I have a friend who recommended one recently.

“You have GOT to see this film. It’s not a horror movie per se—more like a psychological thriller—but it’s terrifying, really claustrophobic. It stars Sam Neill, Nicole Kidman, and Billy Zane.”

“Wait, is it the one where they’re trapped on a ship? From the ’80s? What's the name of it again?"

“Dead Clam.”

"Um, I think it's actually Dead CALM."

"No, I'm pretty sure it's Dead Clam."

Interestingly, Roger Ebert notes that Zane’s character in the movie “is a young man who seems to be the only survivor from a tragic incident of food poisoning.”

Fox on Display

2006-10-30T11:27:00.000-05:00

Michael J. Fox recently told ABC News:
“And so if we get sidetracked into a dialogue about whether sick people have a right to display their symptoms in public, you know, that reaction—I think it was more disappointing from the point of view of—the [Republican Senate candidate Michael] Steele campaign. This spokesman said, 'It was in poor taste,' which really, I mean, I’m out here and I accept that, being in the lead. I’ll take some hits. And that’s fine. I’m a big boy.”

I’m a fan of Michael J. Fox, and I think Rush Limbaugh’s comments were despicable (ignorant, too, as the tremors are apparently a symptom of the meds themselves, not of going off them). I also support embryonic stem cell research, though I think this kind of research involves moral questions, not just technical ones.

Nevertheless, the incident raises the issue of what happens when a private citizen inserts himself into public discourse. Do the rules change? What if the citizen doesn’t just enter public discourse, but enters political discourse—and in a partisan way? Perhaps more is at stake here than the right of a sick person to display their symptoms in public.

In an earlier post, I implied that Rush Limbaugh indirectly attacked embryonic stem cell research through an ad hominem attack on Fox: Fox is faking, so say no to stem cell research and candidates who support it. But were the Fox ads an attempt to provide ad hominem support for this research? That is, the symptoms of this disease are awful, as you can see, so say yes to embryonic stem cell research.

Opponents will say that the pain of someone who suffers with Parkinson's, while regrettable, is beside the point, and that the ad is an attempt to distract viewers from the absolute immorality of using embryos. Which can be another way of saying that sick people don’t have a right to display their symptoms in public if doing so forces us to see the costs of our moral decisions. People who are pro-choice don’t like to see images of aborted fetuses. Supporters of the war in Iraq don’t like to see the “collateral damage.” Meat eaters don’t want to see hogs in pens. But what is the good of a morality that can’t face its material, visceral consequences? If you can’t bear to look, maybe something’s wrong.

Bacon, Wrestling, and Ping Pong

2006-10-27T15:30:00.000-05:00

I just found out that my father has to go for heart surgery. It was quite a shock, as he’s relatively young. When he told me, while I wolfed down a sausage hero, he said, “I’m not going to say ‘woe is me.’ I smoked for 40 years, for God’s sake.” He sounded so much like his own father, who was a dairy farmer and a trucker when he wasn’t farming (I’m not sure what you call it, but I’m pretty sure it isn’t “on hiatus” or “in the off season.”)

I never saw my grandfather without a cigarette, cigar, or pipe in his mouth. Usually a cigarette, with an ash that defied the laws of physics. He would be huffing and puffing and climbing on top of heavy machinery, but it seemed like those ashes just wouldn’t drop until he decided it was time. He was sinewy and hard. And like all fathers, he was mythologized by his sons and grandsons, for better and worse.

My father left the farm, went to college, and came to New York with the Coast Guard. His uniform hung in a closet in the basement of my other grandfather’s house in Queens. It actually had a sword. Talk about larger than life: my father, defending boats on the treacherous New York waterways from the pirates of New Jersey. By sword.

He and my mother lived and threw big parties in a tiny apartment on Spring Street in the mid-1960s, and then moved to Long Island to start a family.

For years my mother tried to get him to stop smoking and take better care of himself. When she worked late, my brother, my father, and I would make bacon sandwiches on white bread with mayo--hold the lettuce and tomato--and watch low-rent Atlanta wrestling on TV. Then we’d play hours of ping-pong. Dad would drink coffee and go outside to smoke between games. My brother and I worried about him too. Still, nothing goes better with Atlanta wrestling than bacon sandwiches.

Ten years ago he quit. Mom finally put her foot down. “I love you, and I’m not going to watch you die on a respirator. Let me make clear what I mean: if you continue doing this, and end up on a respirator, I’M NOT GOING TO WATCH YOU DIE.” This probably isn’t the best time to bring it up, and I didn't believe her for a minute, but she probably saved his life. She's certainly extended it and made it sweeter.

He’s made a valiant effort at changing his diet and getting some exercise. He goes to the same Optimo store he used to go to for smokes, but he buys scratch-offs and Lotto tickets instead. I have never seen anyone so exacting about his Lotto tickets. You’d think there was a science to it, and there just might be. He’s spooky when it comes to numbers. He's also a gifted painter, though I don't think he's picked up a brush in more than 30 years, and I wish he'd make time for it.

To look at him, you’d never think my father is a candidate for heart surgery. He’s thin and wiry, just like his own father. Sometimes he can be just as cranky and distant. I’m given to these moods myself, so I'm not pointing fingers. Maybe I’m more comfortable with certain kinds of emotions than the men in my family who came before me. Maybe not. Their lives were different. I do know that it isn’t easy for anyone, and that there’s more than one way to show love. So here's a poem in celebration of fathers.

Those Winter Sundays
by Robert Hayden

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

When he gets out of surgery, I’m going to go golfing with him for the first time, and then we’ll stop for BLTs on toasted whole grain bread with lettuce, tomato, and low-fat mayo. But no turkey bacon. Some things are off the table.

Rooting for Red Sox May Lower Testosterone

2006-10-27T10:36:00.000-05:00

A new study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism shows a drop in average blood levels of testosterone in middle-aged Boston men over the last 20 years.

Blood levels of testosterone in 1,500 Boston men, ages 45 to 79, were first checked in the late 1980s, then in the mid-1990s, and finally in 2002-2004.

The researchers say that the reasons for the decline aren’t clear. But a recent study at Brock University in Ontario may provide a clue. The Brock researchers followed an elite Canadian ice hockey team for a season, measuring the players’ saliva levels of testosterone (a sex hormone) and cortisol (a stress hormone) before and after each game.

They found that testosterone levels were higher before and after winning games. They also found that pregame cortisol levels were higher before home games than before away games, probably due to increased social pressure associated with competing in front of friends and family. And cortisol seems to inhibit testosterone production.

The most likely cause of the decline in Bostonian masculinity, then, is the Curse of the Bambino. The Curse ended in 2004; if testosterone levels have risen since the Sox won the World Series, we’ll know for sure.

The Vapors of Benn Michaels

2006-10-26T09:51:00.000-05:00

There it was, right in front of my face all the time: The Trouble With Diversity. I was so transfixed by all the confessional poetry, slave narratives, and Buddhist meditation primers--not to mention bargain books by Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Anthony Appiah--that I missed Walter Benn Michaels' latest attempt to rark up neoliberal American academe.

But then I saw the cover: three lambs of diverse fur color against a start white background, and underneath it--in bold, black and red typeface--the words "How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Equality." As Alan Wolfe over at Slate observes , "Michaels pictures himself as the tough guy willing to take on the hard issues of class while everyone else opts for warm and fuzzy bromides promising cultural and racial diversity."

Wolfe has already done a good job of laying bare Michaels' rhetorical strategies, but his main points bear repeating.

"Michaels belongs to the 'shock and awe' school of political argument. First, you say something wildly implausible in the hopes that its dramatic counterintuitiveness will make it seem brilliant. Yet in the United States in which I live, race is an obvious fact of life, conversations about it remain uncomfortable, and both supporters and opponents of affirmative action are sincere in their convictions.

Then, you posit false choices. For Michaels, every time we talk about race, we fail the poor. But why should discussions of racial injustice preclude taking on issues of class injustice?

Once you have made absurd claims and posited false choices, you can next assume, as Michaels does, an aura of bemused superiority. Diversity advocates on the one hand and conservative activists on the other spend lots of time and money arguing about affirmative action, but Michaels knows, even if they do not, that it is all much ado about nothing."

This is right out of the O'Reilly playbook. Like Wolfe, I'm sympathetic to the (putative) main point of The Trouble With Diversity, which is that American liberal institutions focus obsessively on symbolic identity politics and ignore class. But let's be honest: the two intersect significantly.

In a recent post on the Valve, Michaels responded to criticism of the book by stating:

"The question of whether what I say is true has nothing to do with the question of whether I myself am rich or poor or a good person."

Followed by: "I do think, however, it matters that people understand whether they are rich or poor, so a large part of the Conclusion is taken up with describing people’s (including my own) difficulty in recognizing what position they occupy in the American class system."

But wait; this isn't, perhaps, so contradictory as it appears: "So if one point of 'About the Author' is that the truth of political arguments has nothing to do with the subject position of the person making them, another point is that people’s interest in hearing those arguments may well depend upon their understanding what their own subject position really is."

Sorry, you can't draw an arbitrary line that way. If my subject position (and my understanding of it) shapes what I'm interested in listening to, then your subject position (and your understanding of it) shapes what you're interested in saying. And if your subject position shapes what your interested in saying, then it affects the truth of what you say--unless you define "truth" so narrowly that it loses almost all meaning in terms of political discussion.

As Terry Eagleton put it, "Ideology, like halitosis, is what the other person has."

Jacob Kugelmass, also on the Valve, says, "Michaels appears to be advocating for an 'absolutely undetermined subject of the democratic state' as an alternative to the person determined by identity categories," a subject "opposed to a 'culturalist' ideology, and a 'victimist conception of man' that imagines human beings to be continual victims of the loss of their culture."

There is a good argument to be made that Western notions of liberty arise from--or at least are deeply informed by--the lived experience of enslavement. Again, the two are a false dichotomy, and setting them up this way is a good opportunity for polemic and book sales. Save your money and buy WBM's The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism instead. Or get some of that Dale's Pale Ale and watch Chappelle's Show.

Crazy Like a Fox

2006-10-25T17:22:00.000-05:00

By now, you've probably heard that Rush Limbaugh has accused Michael J. Fox of exaggerating the symptoms of Parkinson's disease for dramatic effect in a number of political ads that Fox has done for candidates who support stem cell research.

It's about time someone has had the courage to utter publicly what we're all thinking but are afraid to say in polite company. Just today, I saw a guy on the street in a wheelchair who was putting out this uber-paralyzed vibe. Really over the top. I bet he wasn't all that paralyzed, either.

Say no to stem cell research.

Stank Stats

2006-10-25T09:07:00.000-05:00

A new sign in New York subway stations reads:
75% of subway injuries are caused by slips, trips and falls when running for the subway.

To which someone has added the following set of statistics:
1%: Stabbings
24%: Stank

I've crunched the numbers, and I'm coming up with something more like 22% injury by stank, 2% by stabbing, and 1% due to getting your eye poked out by one of those guidos with the lacquered porcupine haircut.

First, can anyone at the MTA confirm these numbers?

Second, can anyone break out the stank figures, into, say, dragon breath vs. old McDonalds?

May a Moody Baby Doom a Yam?

2006-10-20T09:30:00.000-05:00

Bob Dylan doesn't know, nor Greil Marcus. But Al Yankovic does.

Originality is the sincerest form of imitation.

Nighty-Night

2006-10-20T08:25:00.000-05:00

Here is a list of items I found in a gift bag at a recent corporate event I attended:

Stainless steel paper weight
Oven mitt
Soy candle (vanillaroma)
K-Y warming gel
Vanilla-flavored Tylenol PM

There were a few other things in there as well; nevertheless, it's quite sinister.

You Might Need This Drug

2006-10-19T12:02:00.001-05:00

PANEXA is a prescription drug that should only be taken by patients experiencing one of the following disorders: metabolism, circulation, digestion, binocular vision, emotionality, cognitive dissonance, or sharp elbows.

There are a few bothersome side effects, though, including but not limited to: shortness of breath, longness of breath, taste hallucinations (where everything tastes "gamey" or "oakey"), and loss of sexual desire and/or desirability.

For more information, go to: panexa.com

Latin Palindrome

2006-10-19T09:42:00.000-05:00

In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni.

We enter the circle at night and are consumed by fire.

Moderation, Demonstrated

2006-10-18T17:34:00.000-05:00

"What do we want!?"

"Incremental change!"

"When do we want it?!"

"In due course!"

Welcome to Academitasse

2006-10-11T16:56:00.000-05:00

A little taste of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

Scribo, Ergo Lacrimo

2006-08-14T13:32:00.000-05:00

I write, therefore I suffer.