Erleichda, Cassandra

2012 Review #1 The Namesake

2012-01-22T17:30:00.000-08:00

As part of my 2012 write every day initiative, I also plan to write a review for every book I read. Sometimes these will be on the Ploughshares review blog, but otherwise they’ll be here.

Warning: this review has spoilers. Review spoiler: though I can’t imagine anyone being surprised by a single thing that happens in this book, or saddened to not have discovered it in the natural process of reading.

The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri

I’d put off reading The Namesake for a long time. It was one of those books that people recommend to you, unsolicited, without any specific ideas as to why. When I recommend books these days, I at least try to give a one liner in their favor. “It’s about an English professor who threatens to strangle a duck every day until his department’s budget is passed” (Straight Man). “It’s about a Southern Baptist family who moves to the Congo on a church mission and is woefully unprepared for everything” (The Poisonwood Bible). “It’s about a lame-of-leg son of a whore who realizes he is not the main character in the fantasy novel” (Sir Apropos of Nothing) The best The Namesake’s recommenders could do was this: “It’s by Jhumpa Lahiri,” they said, “You know, the one who wrote Interpreter of Maladies.” Name-checking the author has its place; I would submit that that place is not “their first novel after their debut short story collection won an unexpected Pulitzer.” This should have been my first clue.

From the cover copy, The Namesake seemed to have similar thematic content to my novel-in-progress: generational gaps, disaffected youths, a protagonist whose name does not represent him, etc. Gogol Ganguli had promise, I decided, and I would read this one for Ideas. Instead, The Namesake was a much better lesson on what to avoid.

The first chapter went well. We arrive while Ashima is in labor, our protagonist of destiny on the cusp of being born. Excellent backstory on both of his parents, a really good sense of What Lead Us Here. Everything you could want in an introductory chapter. Then we move to chapter two, and we’re still in Ashima’s point of view. Gogol is still a baby. Ok, I thought, that’s more setup than I would have done, but maybe this is all leading to something. It would be like a high jump, where the novel takes a running approach, then leaps into a spectacular narrative arc. It was somewhere around page 150, when we had covered Gogol’s rice ceremony, his first day at kindergarten, his elementary school eating preferences, his high school English class, and his first college girlfriend, that I realized no, this was it. We weren’t watching a high jump, we were on a 400-yard dash through the Life and Times of a First Generation Suburban Bengali-American.

This might not have been so bad, as a structure. The more pressing problem is that the book lacks any narrative tension whatsoever. Sure, the characters sigh sometimes with ennui, and are plagued by nagging doubts about their multi-cultural lives. None of them act on it. Internal conflict is valid, but it’s a very Short Story way to write. Novels need external conflict to sustain the story, even if that external conflict is only an expression of the internal one¹. Even Gogol’s name, the promise from the very title of the book, produces little in the way of conflict. He changes it quietly on his 18th birthday, and experiences only minor discomfort whenever it comes up again later in his life, at dinner parties or from his mother. More than once he stops to ruminate (ever so generally) on how odd it is that he is now Nikhil, instead of Gogol. These reflective moments might have had more weight to them if Gogol or Nikhil more in the way of personality for us to compare and contrast. Gogol, like his rice ceremony foretold, is passive and solitary, without strong motivation in any direction. Nikhil is the same, going to college, getting a job, renting an apartment just like a good American should. He causes no conflict and Lahiri visits none upon him.

So it is with the women in Gogol’s life. He never takes initiative; they all throw themselves in his way. On page 193 we meet Moushumi, the Bengali-American girl Gogol will soon marry (for perhaps the wrong, complicated, post-colonial reasons). We learn that, unlike Gogol with his unremarkable journey from American milestone to American milestone, Moushumi has been under tremendous pressure due to her heritage, and suffered significant loss for it along the way. She has real conflicts with her immigrant parents. She spent her childhood in fear of arranged marriage, poisoning her future relationships. She moved to France as an act of rebellion. And then Graham, her investment banker fiancé, breaks her heart and walks out on her weeks before their wedding because in the end he cannot appreciate (in fact disdains!) all the family and ritual and culture that makes Moushumi Bengali.

Why?! Why would you not write the novel of Moushumi? All of the same background as the milquetoast Gogol, but with an honest to god narrative arc! Conflicts that carry consequences for her life story! A brilliant climax when she throws her ring into the street and Graham strikes her in the face! You could even keep her marriage to Gogol and her subsequent affair² as a sobering reminder that when it comes to postcolonial identity, there are no happy endings.

Is it more representative of the first-generation-American experience to describe airplane food and hat shopping than dramatic fights and broken engagements? I can’t say. But here’s what I’ve learned: multicultural or not, be careful not to write a novel in short story voice. A short story can stand as a slice of life, structured around internal conflict. In a short story, every small action gains importance. In a several-hundred-page novel, this mode is unsustainable, the same way it is over a lifetime. A novel needs that conflict to leave the protagonist’s navel, to burst forth into the external world. We need to see the hurdle and wonder if he’ll make it over.

¹About 6 months ago, my roommate recommended that I read Sag Harbor by Colson Whitehead, and even went as far as to lend me his copy. I was fifty pages in before I thought to ask him “does this book have any conflict?” His answer was no, not really, so I didn’t finish.

²By the time the affair comes around, twenty pages from the end, it seems like just one more checkbox on the American Life to-do list. And of course, Gogol is not the one who initiates it.

Muppets Nostalgia is Not Good Enough

2011-12-21T10:18:00.000-08:00

I think I must be the only person in the world who didn’t like the new Muppets movie.

Ok, make that one of two: Frank Oz, Muppet legend and original voice for Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, and Yoda, declined to appear in the new Muppets. This is what he had to say:

"I wasn't happy with the script. I don't think they respect the characters. But I don't want to go on about it like a sourpuss and hurt the movie."

A class act, Frank Oz. Allow me to go on about it in his stead.

First, let me be clear: this was not a travesty to the Muppet name. Segel et al. were trying their hardest to do credit to the Henson magic of their youth. They were coming from the right place, and that kept the movie from being disrespectful. Unfortunately, they showed that they didn’t have the chops to really analyze, understand, and adopt the artistic principles which made the Muppets great…and ended up producing a light, two-dimensional fan film instead.

Hollywood has a serious originality problem these days. Instead of creative, original movies we have nostalgia mines, sequels, prequels, remakes of remakes, and adaptations from every other media (books, television, comics, cartoons, theme park rides…). Studios are so risk-averse that they only want to work with characters and stories they already know are popular. The Muppets fit that bill perfectly ¹. But you cannot build a movie on nostalgia alone. Over and over, this movie said “You remember that Muppet you like? Well here he is!” As if we are supposed to clap just for them showing up. That works fine for celebrity guest stars, but not for your main characters. The Swedish Chef mumbles in the kitchen. Gonzo wears spandex and jumps from a rooftop. Kermit has commitment issues with Miss Piggy. What else is new²? I could ask the same of the entire movie, actually. The antagonist is deliberately cliché (an oil tycoon). The first half hour is Pleasantville, the second is Blues Brothers (“We’re getting the band back together”), and the rest is a Kermit’s Kids telethon. The telethon itself is an explicit attempt to recreate the Muppet Show, down to the same opening song and dance number and iconic Rainbow Connection swamp scene from the original movie³. This is the stuff of fan fiction, pervading a major studio production. Even the name of the movie—“The Muppets”—refuses to risk treading any new ground whatsoever. Add to this a complete lack of narrative tension (every new problem is introduced then forgotten until it is time for it to be magically solved), poor character development, and inconsistent characterization⁴, and it’s not hard to see why Frank Oz would have problems with the script.

Despite the overwhelming current of nostalgia in Hollywood, some critics are still asking if the Muppets have a place in today’s deeply cynical world. Can we even enjoy straightforward, wholesome entertainment anymore, or can we only relate to our media ironically? Similarly, after Jim Henson’s sudden, untimely death many wondered if the Muppets could go on without such a beloved leader. This movie suffers under the weight of both those questions. It tries so hard to be a feel-good movie that there was no substantial conflict, while at the same time frantically rehashing all the greatest hits of Muppets past. Mr. Segel needn’t have worried. Judging by the new Muppets movie’s reception, yes, audiences want to see the old gang again, and they want a movie to feel good about. Nothing wrong with that. But I say we can do better. We shouldn’t settle for two dimensions: we should be pushing ahead, fast and free. The opposite of irony and cynicism is not cliché and whitewash. Why retread old ground when the trees have grown up around it? Jim Henson was a loving prophet; I’m sure he would not mind letting us (and good friends like Mr. Segel and Mr. Stoller) play with his children. Was that not a major part of Henson’s Muppet philosophy—to engender creativity in us all? We have 36 years of Henson Muppet material to work from, and another 20 since his passing. It’s time to step out of the shadows and move confidently in the direction of his dream.

I’m hopeful though, for the future of the Muppets, because of all the potential that was hidden in this movie, unrealized. It could have been a touching tribute to more innocent times and a call to move forward even through difficult ones. It could have asked how we became so cynical that we prefer to love-to-hate reality stars instead of sincerely love characters like the Muppets. It could have been about how difficult it is to remain true to your artistic vision in the face of external business pressure and internal personality differences. It could have taught us that not everyone needs a stage talent to be a successful and important part of the production. Heck, in that diner scene Amy Adams could have learned how small town life is really naïve and its rituals are unsustainable/unrealistic in the big city (the real world)⁵. Any of these would have taken only moderate rewrites. The songs, especially, were where this potential shined. “Are you a Man or a Muppet?” was a delightful meta duet for Gary and Walter. “Me Party” was a female empowerment anthem for the Miss Piggys of the world. Give it a little less time spent on the humans, a little less time setting up minor conflicts only to resolve them immediately (in the simplest way possible). A little more time developing and sustaining those character arcs (Why did the gang break up in the first place? What does Miss Piggy need from Kermit, and why can’t he provide it? How does Walter deal with suddenly being “in” with his childhood idols, and seeing all their flaws firsthand?). And then you’ll have a movie that moves beyond nostalgia, with a message that today’s audience really needs to hear.

The Muppets aren’t about easy fixes and semi-charmed life. Things don’t go well for them. They’re impulsive and absurd, and often unprofessional. They try, they really do, And when they try, sometimes they fail, sometimes they succeed on purpose, and sometimes they succeed on accident. The Muppets are at their best when everything goes hilariously wrong⁶. Gonzo’s bowling ball would go flying. It would land in Swedish Chef’s stew. The evil oil tycoon would trip on a chorus chicken. He'd land in a face-full of spilled stew. Insanity and entropy everywhere, and somehow it all comes together. They keep believing, they keep pretending. That, Mr. Segel, is a message you can take to heart. The Muppets will go on without Jim Henson. The Muppets will go on without nostalgia mining, and sequels, and prequels, and remakes. The Muppets will go on because even in this bitter, ironic world, we have so many great artists and actors and puppeteers and writers and great audiences of people who want to make them succeed.

¹As perfectly as they can without being an 80s cartoon that is.

²Even the puppetry was lackluster. The one major innovation in this movie was a Muppet who can whistle. This is neat, but it hardly pushed the limits. Think Kermit on his bicycle. The devil in a sack. Gonzo suspended from a bunch of balloons…

³So yes, maybe I cried a little when I heard the banjo, but why watch a poor facsimile when I could just see the original again?

⁴“Who’s been taking care of it for you?” snaps Kermit when Piggy confronts him on the subject of their Hollywood mansion. Kermit is a bad boyfriend to be sure: commitment-phobic and inattentive, but he would never try to score cheap points in a domestic squabble.

⁵ But instead it’s about how she misses her fiancé and has to eat a sandwich alone.

⁶That was a problem in this movie: nothing that was wrong was hilarious.

A Sinking Stone

2011-09-02T08:50:00.000-07:00

After over twenty years of planning, fundraising, infighting, controversy, and delays, the Martin Luther King Jr. memorial opened just south of the national mall this past week.

I’d like to start by acknowledging the elephant in the room: that we have seen fit to honor our most beloved civil rights leader with a piece of statuary which makes an immediate reference to Han Solo frozen in carbonite at the end of The Empire Strikes Back.

Ok, now that that’s out of the way, we can take a step back and discuss the many other ways this memorial fails.

Fails on representation: The centerpiece of this memorial—which sits on the tidal basin and also includes crescent walls with inscribed quotes and a two-stone entryway dubbed the “Mountain of Despair”—is the “Stone of Hope,” a 30-foot high granite relief of Dr. King. One has to wonder what they were thinking when they chose the artist: Lei Yixin, a Chinese national who’s used to carving towering paeans to Great Communist Maos. Far be it from me to deride the skill of Mr. Lei. He carved that very expensive granite into a reasonable likeness of Dr. King, to (I’m sure) the exact specifications of the project managers at the National Memorial Project Foundation. It’s the brand of artistic expression that fails in this situation.

Lei Yixin‘s King is eerily smooth, with almost cartoonish features. It looks unfinished, yet it stands at odds with the very stone it’s carved from. Compare to Winged Victory, which doesn’t even look like it’s made of stone. Hell, compare it to the Lincoln Memorial across the lawn. Same genre—large imposing lifelike statues—and Lincoln’s is magnitudes more complex. King has no soul, no subtlety. Even the way his lips are set and his arms are folded make him look like a disapproving patriarch, rather than a loving minister. Han Solo’s face in carbonite has more emotion behind it¹ .

You could argue that it’s modern. I’d argue that it’s kitsch. It’s made easily digestible, for reproduction and consumption. Can’t you just see the Stone of Hope erasers?²

Then there’s the Twitterfied quote on the base of the Stone of Hope. It reads: “I Was a Drum Major for Justice, Peace, and Righteousness,” when the original (from a speech delivered at 1968 at Ebenezer Baptist Church), is “If you want to say that I was a drum major, say that I was a drum major for justice. Say that I was a drum major for peace. I was a drum major for righteousness. And all of the other shallow things will not matter.” Fittingly, he was speculating on the subject of his future eulogy.

There are 14 other quotes from King on the wall behind the Stone of Hope. The main sculpture itself is 30 feet high. And yet they edited out three-quarters of his words, citing space constraints. As if they had to fit Martin Luther King Jr.’s wisdom into a soundbite. A status update.

A pitiful memorial for a brilliant orator.

Fails on intent: I had a long conversation with my friend John last night about brutalism vs. gothic architecture. Each of us claimed that one of those forms represented the stunning epitome of human achievement, while the other was a hideous “psychotic waste.” Intent is important, John argued (as to why he could not get behind cathedrals built on the exploitation of the underclasses, for the sole purpose of glorifying god over man). An ill-begotten, ill-intentioned building is ugly, or at least cannot be beautiful.

Intent is even more important in a memorial. We don’t just put up a high-impact memorial to any old thing. We put up memorials to people and principles we want to cherish and remember. To those who have bettered us as a people, so that we can keep their spirit present down through the ages. It’s a value system: do we carve Thomas Jefferson into the mountainside, or Nixon? Do we reflect upon a giant Martin Luther King Jr., or a giant Mickey Mouse? How we conduct our monuments shows as much about us as a culture as it does when we destroy the monuments of the past (as the Taliban did to the Buddhas of Bamiyan in Afghanistan).

It’s obvious that the MLK National Memorial was built with all the wrong intentions. First off, this memorial to an African-American civil and labor rights leader was sculpted and masoned by Chinese workers. Who were not paid fair wages for their labor. From China: a country that is carrying out horrific civil rights atrocities against Tibetans, and indeed its own people. A country that has mobile execution vans, for god’s sake.

The Foundation also chose to use these Chinese workers over the protests of many qualified, local, American stonemasons. At a time when unemployment among skilled laborers is high, you’d think we should be helping our fellow man by employing him at public works projects.

The King family squabbled over licensing fees on the fundraising materials³ (licensing fees! For a D.C. memorial!) and the fundraisers accepted blood money from the Chinese government, all while black Americans were left out of the construction process for the first monument to an African-American near the national mall. Intent is important, and the intent here is tainted by layers of hypocrisy. The way they defiled Dr. King’s memory, you’d think the inscription on the Stone of Hope should be “do as I say, not as I do.”

Fails on memorialization: What is the point of honoring a man like Martin Luther King Jr. in ostentatious and hollow gestures, if we’re not going to follow even the most basic of his teachings? What is the point of a monument that evinces no part of his being or his contribution beyond the palest (and often most hypocritical) simulacrum? Is this how we want to remember MLK? As kistchy, monolithic, a condensed platitude? Better to burn the whole thing down and just plant some nice cherry trees.

Every aspect of this project from the design to the construction to the controversies over funding, shows that those who directed it either had no conception of MLK’s enduring legacy, or they deliberately chose to ignore it. I could not imagine a monument failing more completely unless it starts physically crumbling into pieces.

¹NB: George Lucas donated $1 million to the MLK project in 1995
²The Bookstore/Ranger Station stands just beyond the Mountain of Despair. No further comment necessary.
³After Long Struggle, MLK has Home on National Mall

POST SCRIPT

Here’s an example of a good Martin Luther King, Jr. monument, in Mansfield, Ohio:

Mansfield Tourism
More views

It doesn’t dominate the skyline. It’s not gilded or kitschy or hypocritical. Just look at that gorgeous painting on the bottom. It has a quiet beauty, in the way it reminds us of that era. The message of hope for peaceful change is much clearer in that simple stream of men and women marching over the horizon together. It shows a movement. It evokes that unification of spirit that MLK shepherded. It celebrates King in exactly the right way.

When I look at this monument I can feel—just the tiniest bit—what it must have been like to be alive then, to be part of the movement struggling against great injustice. And that is the sacred purpose of any true memorial.

A brief review of Architect of Flowers

2011-07-29T15:54:00.000-07:00

This week I made my debut as a book reviewer for the Ploughshares blog. You can read my review of The Gambler's Nephew here.

However, before I settled on The Gambler's Nephew, I attempted to read another book first.

The following is my review of The Architect of Flowers by William Lychack, as submitted to the Ploughshares editor via email.

Andrew -
I regret to inform you that I will be unable to review Architect of Flowers in a manner consistent with the requirements for the Ploughshares book review blog. I found the stories to be tender, detail-laden tableauxs of standard middle-American grief, and thus everything that is wrong with literary publishing today.

Game of Thrones Memory Game

2011-06-03T14:01:00.000-07:00

I'd been gently nodding for years when people told me that George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones was Like, The Best Fantasy Series Ever, then going on my way. But now Game of Thrones has a TV series, which according to American law means that it is suddenly Significant. So I started reading the first book in an attempt to catch up.

Apparently the few of my friends who hadn't read it yet are doing the same. For example, last night Mallory informed me of an important discovery in her 1st reading of GoT: There is a family tree in the back.

Now, I didn't think I was doing too badly at figuring out who was who. So before I peeked at the family trees, I tried to draw them from memory.

This is what I got:

Which is not terrible, I guess. Except for calling Catelyn Catherine and making Cersei have incestuous love with Tywin (her father's name) instead of Jaime.

I really thought there was another dead sister though.

Sex Manual, Rx Edition: The Importance of Contact of Penis with Clitoris

2011-02-23T15:57:00.000-08:00

The topic of today’s delightful romp is
G. Lombard Kelly’s Sex Manual, Rx Edition. Copyright © 1945, 1953.

The book you needed a prescription to read!

Dr. Kelly, in his practice, found there was an appalling amount of misinformation and downright ignorance when it came to sexual relations. So he wrote this informational volume so that husbands and wives might be able to “ascend the heights of sexual emotion as nearly abreast as possible.” 1

Let’s have a look at the table of contents:

I’ll skip over the boring “Reproductive system—Male” and “Reproductive System—Female” chapters, but suffice to say, they include magnificent illustrations like this:

Overall, Kelly’s Sex Manual (Rx Edition) is surprisingly modern in its attitudes toward, as they say, “gettin’ it on.” It does show its age in some sections though. I’ll let the excerpts speak for themselves.

Quotes from Sex Manual: Rx Edition, carefully compiled for maximum hilarity

1. NEED OF SEX INSTRUCTION

“It is proper that both partners shall understand the import of all their acts, that they shall ascend the heights of sexual emotion as nearly abreast as possible, and that each shall attain the fitting and necessary sexual climax which is essential to the mental and physical well-being.”

“I have talked with a number of earnest and intelligent married men that do not even know whether or not their wives have ever experienced, in sexual intercourse, the climatic release of nervous tension technically known as an orgasm.”

One of the more subtle hilarities of this book is in the ways he constantly avoids more vulgar terms like “sex” or “orgasm” in favor of flowery, “educated” allusions and descriptions thereof.

Clearly, an pressing need for sex education abounds:

Women discuss the matter freely these days and come to their physician with the query “Why is intercourse not the same with me as with my husband?”

… because the man is either ignorant of vital sex facts of indifferent to his partner’s satisfaction.

My personal favorite chapters are the ones on the use of condoms and lube.

4. SEXUAL LUBRICANTS
“Hand lotions, such as Jergen’s or Hinds Honey and Almond Cream, are fair as sexual lubricants but too expensive for routine use.”

(He recommends “surgical lubricating jelly” which can be found in large tubs at any drugstore for 35 cents.)

5. HOW TO USE THE CONDOM
“Hold the open end tightly against the mouth and blow it up to the size of a football” [to test for leaks]

“Men who object to the use of the condom are usually those who tried to use them dry inside.”

“It is true that intromission is not so pleasant with a sheath on as without it but after insertion the difference in the feeling is not sufficient to prevent the most voluptuous sensation of which the individual is capable.”

“Many married couples use the same condom repeatedly. When surgical lubricating jelly is employed as an adjuvant it is necessary only to fill the sheath with tap water (checking for a leak if desired), wash the outside with soapy water, turn inside out, fill and repeat. Next dry the rubber on several sheets of toilet paper, turn inside out and dry again. Put aside until morning of some time the next day.”

Hi dear. I’m feeling frisky tonight. Ready for some serious intromission. Are the condoms dry yet?

Hopefully the page on First Intercourse is large enough to read (click for bigger). If not, the money quotes are below.

6. FIRST INTERCOURSE
“Many pages of ‘don’ts’ for bridegrooms have been written—warning the husband how not to conduct himself when his marriage approaches consummation. As a matter of fact there are only a few important points to be borne in mind.”

“It should be superfluous to say the man bust be most considerate and the personification of tenderness. The woman should be courted and petted to the point of acute passion, everything being done to reassure her.”

“Graduated pessaries can be used to increase the size of the vaginal orifice to the proper dimension. Such treatment, if needed, will pay big dividends in starting off the marriage without feat or discomfort.”

What can we say of
7. FREQUENCY OF INTERCOURSE
?

Why, only this

To be fair, Kelly does follow up and explain that “It is safe to say that sexual intercourse is not too frequent if it does not produce any undesirable after-effects in either partner.”

8. DIFFERENT POSITIONS FOR INTERCOURSE
The instinctive position
“In the first intercourse the virgin will by instinct assume a recumbent posture and the man will lie upon her. Other names for this position are Habitual, Normal, and Man-Above.”

“The connubial bliss of many a small or medium-sized woman has been marred by the thoughtlessness of a heavy partner lying dead weight upon her.”

The other positions covered are Woman-above, Lateral, Rear-Entry, Sedentary and Standing. With attention given to which of these positions may be more comfortable for pregnant women, which is quite progressive if you think about it (sex isn’t just for making babies, and pregnant women are sexual beings as well). Notably, what we would today consider “rear-entry” (doggie style) is the secondary option for Kelly’s rear entry, the first being a modification of a side lateral. (With the feature of “The man can easily reach the clitoris with his fingers”)

For Kelly, the woman’s pleasure is just as important as the man’s. After all, how can married couples ascend to the heights of sexual emotion together if she isn’t getting off too? But how can a good, god-fearing 50s husband achieve such a feat? Sex Manual: Rx Edition devotes an entire chapter to this very subject.

11. THE IMPORTANCE OF CONTACT OF PENIS WITH CLITORIS
"A careful observation of figures 10 and 11 will enable one to understand a frequent cause of failure on the part of the woman to orgasm."

These two diagrams are about to blow your mind.
Are you ready?

Fig. 10 (wrong way)

Fig. 11 (right way)

Beyond his devotion to the clitoris and the proper stimulation thereof, Kelly has quite a bit of good advice that has stood the test of time. These are for the ages:

“It cannot be emphasized too much that coitus interruptus or withdrawal before ejaculation is both an unnatural and an asinine thing.” (p. 45)

“It is so old-fashioned to argue that women should not derive the same pleasure from sexual intercourse as men because of their child-bearing function. … Woman, who suffers the pangs of childbirth and all the preceding discomforts and later responsibilities, should be far more favored by nature than man in this regard.” (p. 42)

“A man with a small organ who has a huge store of knowledge of the art of love will be more welcome to the average woman than a man with a large organ who quickly satisfies himself and immediately makes a motion for adjournment .” (p. 49)

Then he starts in on penis captivus and, well…

"Penis captivus or inability to discontinue coitus because of vaginal spasm has been reported by leading authorities, though it really seems incredible. Rohleder advised against the use of cocaine in treating vaginismus lest the anesthetic die out during the act and the return of the spasm result in caught penis."2

And then there’s

16. ORGASM DELAYED BY LOCAL ANESTHESIA
The idea of anointing the head of the penis with a local anesthetic in order to postpone the sexual climax occurred to the writer independently...

“The results are excellent” …

I hope you’ve had fun today, and learned some important facts about sexual partnership. G. Lombard Kelly would have wanted it that way. Let’s wrap this up with a final quote dump.

The interior of the vagina is corrugated (p. 15)

The Clitoris. “Although much smaller this organ is almost an exact homologue of the penis. “ (p. 19)

“If the woman is unduly slow, the man can rub her clitoris gently with the rhythm of intercourse until she arrives with him.” (p. 36)

“Absurdly high estimates of both [frigidity and anhedonia] have been made by various observers: frigidity in 50 percent of women in general, in 75 percent of married women in New York (excepting Jewish women, in whom it is said to be rare).” (p. 43)

“Good erection may be induced by prolonged massage of the head of the penis by an interested wife.” (p. 51)

“A local anesthetic might have made this marriage a success.” (p. 56)

“A young man, very much in love, without requesting it, opened a letter from his sweetheart and found in it a curl of her public hair. Immediately on recognizing what it was he had an orgasm and emission.” (p. 59)

1 But only married, heterosexual couples of course. Let’s not get too wild here. In the section on differences in sex drives between men and women, he does tell tale of a far away land (Europe) where premarital intercourse is in fact the norm. (Because the female peasantry seek out their desired men and seduce them into sex SO AS to result in a marriage. Sneaky minxes. Let it not be said that women’s sex drives are inferior to men’s.)

2 N.B. The ever-trivial Andrew Ladd informs us that “penis captivus was made up by Canadian doctor and McGill professor Sir William Osler, who, writing under the pseudonym Egerton Yorrick Davis, liked playing practical jokes on medical journals.” G. Lombard Kelly obviously fell for it, as he cites Davis at the end of the penis captivus section for having had to put a woman under general anesthesia in order to liberate just such a stuck member.

Why and K?

2011-02-15T17:16:00.000-08:00

Laughing Squid recently had a post about Wieden+Kennedy (who you may remember from my review of Art & Copy) and their response card for Greenpeace and other annoying canvassers.

I know you’re just doing your job,

but the methods you’ve been asked to use are manipulative and make me less trustful of friendliness in general

and that, not indifference towards your cause,
is why I’m not going to talk to you.

Now, I could talk about how I really feel that these organizations are taking the worst kind of advantage of young people, grinding them down with donation quotas and demeaning/ineffective work in the name of idealism (and I probably will, later). I could make fun of the fact that W+K made these cards because they didn’t like being hassled on their way from their cushy agency jobs to Whole Foods for lunch.

My point here is come on, W+K! Why are you posting this whole self-congratulatory story and not even providing the source material? Oh look, a picture of a hot, smarmy designer looking at the card, but not a link to an image of the card itself. Plus, their comments are locked so I can’t even tell them directly that they’re being total jerks

I was in the middle of writing this post when I realized that this would make me a double jerk if I just complained about it without being part of the solution. So here you are, world: an approximation of the W+K card to passive-aggressively hand out to canvassers who are annoying you outside Whole Foods. (Or wherever)

(better quality PDF or indd available upon request)

I made this in less than 30 minutes on a shitty laptop (it probably took 10 of those minutes just to boot up my copy of CS4) with no mouse, on a grand total of 3 credit hours of design training. And I’m almost positive none of the ~10 subscribers to my blog will seriously want to download and distribute these. But at least I have my principles. Which are, in review, “the internet should be a place for sharing and enabling people to do projects, not just bragging about how cool you are” and “post the damn source material.”

Lameography could have got me a Best-Of

2010-11-13T07:53:00.000-08:00

On my birthday, I received a large package at work. It turned out to be glorious schwag from one of the stock photo agencies that I'd used recently. In it was lots of great design-nerd stuff (font mugs, wall poster), and this weird-looking camera

What is this? I asked Caitlin in the cube next to me. Oh, it's a lomography camera she replied. So I immediately set about giving it away.

One of my film nerd friends decided to take it, but here now for your enjoyment is the craigslist post I wrote.

Lomography Camera for Serious Hipster - $50 (Somerville)
Are you a hipster douchebag? Do you embrace mediocrity and worship nostalgia for its own sake? Would you like a camera that takes small, blurry pictures, on purpose?

I have for you a brand-new Diana F+, the camera that grades itself. It’s a Lomography camera, but, not familiar at all with this concept, when I saw the label on the front I misread it as “Lameography.” From the Wikipedia article, I see that this was originally manufactured as a cheap novelty, but now it is apparently an expensive novelty (~$60 on Amazon), with 50-year-old technology.

Great for:
* Taking small, blurry pictures that look like everything is set on Coney Island in the 1960s. On real film (not included). With light leaks and everything!
* Tricking your friends into thinking that you’re like, totally deep (a sensitive artist!)
* Perpetuating the hipster idea that aggressive mediocrity is a valid artistic principle.

My friend tells me that they’re going to be making a digital lo-mo soon, so better snap this up before maintaining your cred becomes that much more expensive or the cognitive dissonance lifts, whichever comes first. I’ll even throw in this book of hipster photography and poorly-written short stories about how much people love their Diana F+s

If you’re the kind of person who actually wants to buy this camera off me, maybe you’ll be offended at all the offensive things I’ve said about hipsters and lomography in general. That’s cool; we can both still get what we want out of this deal.

$50, and I’m open to creative trade negotiations as well if you’re smart enough to realize that you can’t afford a whole $50 for a vanity camera.

Belts

2010-09-21T18:30:00.000-07:00

I'm going to follow that heavy post about simulacra and politics with a post about belts.

I am very upset about belts. Specifically, the improper use of belts.

Here is what a belt should be used for: to keep your pants up. OR to make your pants look good and pretend to be holding them up. Like so

That latter one (from Michael Kors' spring 2011 collection) would just be yet another sheer titties-out* shirt and skirt, but the belt makes it awesome.

Here then is what a belt is NOT for: a bathing suit.

WHY THE HELL WOULD YOU WEAR A BELT WITH A BATHING SUIT? Can't bathe in it. Can't sunbathe in it. You'd even look like a jackass at a swanky pool party, something which is very difficult to accomplish.

Come on, Michael Kors. Now you're not even trying.

I have gone on record for my hatred of waist belts, but this takes it to a whole new level. I can vaguely, begrudgingly ok a cinch belt for something that is actually designed to hold your clothes closed. That doesn't mean it doesn't look retarded.

To review. Belts = for holding your pants up, or adding decoration around the hips area. Belts =/= for cinching around your waist randomly, or for bathing.

PS. While we're here, putting a belt over a diaper just compounds one terrible idea with another.

*It has been disgustingly anti-feminist how many titties are on display at the latest fashion week. I'm not saying this to be a prude. More like, hey, way to not consider the woman at all, except as a hanger. Or a vehicle for scandalous nudity (except no one was actually scandalized). The point of clothes is that they, to some minor extent, cover you up, right? Not every designer is saying that they make wearable stuff, but a lot of these bitches are, especially Michael Kors. And why not have your model wear a bra? If that's how women are going to be wearing your clothes in real life. Or is it much more important to show itty bitty model titties to the world?

Let's talk about simulacra

2010-09-21T18:24:00.000-07:00

Let’s talk about simulacra.

Glen Beck hosted a Restoring Honor rally at the Lincoln Memorial. The controversy about this (well, the controversy unique to this rally and not just to Glenn Beck’s general existence) is that he held it 47 years to the day after Martin Luther King, Jr. made his “I have a dream” speech on the steps of the very same memorial.

This is a picture from the scene

Let’s talk about simulacra, and why Glenn Beck has a giant backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial on his staging area In Front of The Lincoln Memorial.

Clearly, place is important. Otherwise Beck would hold his rally in a Costco parking lot, or somewhere similarly cheap. Otherwise he wouldn’t be under scrutiny for making any old rally speech on August 28th. There’s something to be said for actually being actually there, in front of the memorial and on the national mall where so many defining protests and gatherings have happened before.

It’s easy to understand why you want to hold your rally with a backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial, but why then project another backdrop of the Lincoln Memorial? Is the original not photogenic enough? Can we viewers at home only understand the majesty of place in terms of postcard images? Or is the Glenn Beck camp not concerned with actual representations of history (only carefully staged ones)?

I remember exactly when I learned the term simulacra. It was at camp, and a fellow counselor had used that word to describe a screen-printed T-shirt. “Like when you go to Hollister and the shirts say ‘Joe’s Famous Crab Shack,'” she said. We recognize the trope of the message and value the shirt as “authentic” even though we know there’s no Joe’s Crab Shack, and it’s not trying to fool anyone.

Radical conservative movements in the United States are all about returning to “the good old days” and “real America” and “Leave it To Beaver” life. But like Joe’s Crab Shack those times never existed (and I feel trite even just saying so). It’s all about having a whitewashed snapshot that they can hold on to as a symbol for what they think they’re being denied. The Lincoln Memorial sure looks impressive as patrician marble, but any discussion of the actual values of Lincoln or MLK and how they differ radically from the Beck crowd’s, or the grave injustices perpetuated by this country that those two leaders were struggling against, is taboo. (There are videos from the Restoring Honor rally of white boys saying, unironically, that they are being racially oppressed because if they say the word “nigger” it makes people think they’re racist.)

Beck re-projects reality into simulacra, and I mean that in the literal sense both ways. His projections are highly symbolic (because they’re easy to latch onto), lack depth (because otherwise they wouldn’t stand up to a critical review, but people are very willing to accept the TV screen as a “real” thing), and change to suit his immediate situation (because the whole point of a façade is it’s easy to erect anywhere, regardless of whether it’s durable or appropriate). So everyone comes to eat at the Crab Shack, and they don’t seem to mind when the only thing they find is a postcard.

Art & Copy Fails Hard

2010-07-15T18:22:00.000-07:00

The opening scenes of Art & Copy are as follows:

1. An extended shot of a piece of assumedly prehistoric stone carving, with a classic “entering the TV picture” fourth wall zoom
2. A series of cliché woodland nature shots, with voiceover about the deep artistic feeling of creative people
3. Dan Kennedy (of Wieden+Kennedy) explaining a totem pole

Then they open after the credits with

4. The blue collar billboard “rotator” Chad Tiedeman talking about how his family has been in the bill-posting business for four generations now, since the 1930s.

These four bits don’t make a lot of goddamn sense, and they make even less sense together, but they are quite representative of the documentary as a whole. Did Doug Pray (the director) make this movie to be a simple paint by numbers tribute to the icons of advertising success, or did he really think that watching leaves fall in a pristine forest and surfers bob on deep blue waves reveals deeper meaning to Madison Avenue?

Art & Copy is ostensibly about Advertising, though it puts forth no particular thesis or point of view, beyond perhaps “Advertising people are like, so creative, man!” Unlike Helvetica, which reveals and explores the often subtle and hidden influence of graphic design through the lens of a single iconic font, Art & Copy doesn’t teach you anything you didn’t already know about advertising, assuming that you’ve had even passing familiarity with the concept of selling a “brand.” (And even the philosophy of branding is only mentioned as an afterthought.) I’m not sure what sort of wisdom we’re supposed to take from Dan Kennedy’s little lecture on the significance of parts of a totem pole—is it social hierarchy? Panopticon? Were the Pac-Northwest Native Americans the first advertisers? Does this have something to do with that ambiguous stone-carved stick figure at the beginning? Why am I watching a rocket take off now? Is this something they teach you to do in film school?

The thin strings of sticky white liquid holding this imagery together are interviews with a handful of heavy hitters from advertising’s upper echelons. We get to see the Creatives in their natural habitats: large, open, architecturally interesting firm offices (some of them in warehouses on the west coast, some of them on the 40th floor overlooking Central Park South). We get to enjoy still life shots of their desks and knickknacks and prestige objets d’art. We get to hear those Creatives waxing about the time they made that one ad that everyone remembers to this day. About how they, the rebels, defected from their stultifying corporate art director positions to each found The Most Creative Advertising Firm Ever. You can almost see the director crossing his legs and flapping his hands in front of his face in giddy excitement at getting to interview his childhood heroes.

Like in Helvetica, the characters are colorful, and they sure as hell didn’t get to the top of that game by being boring speakers. The best parts of this documentary are the little gems of wisdom—which swing between hopeful unbound optimism and soul-crushing irony. For example, Nike’s corporate mission of wanting to get people active and empowered and playing sports lines up so harmoniously with positive human development that you want to buy the whole proverbial world a goddamn Coke. Couch potatoes getting exercise! Battered wives leaving their husbands! Then Wieden and Kennedy tell you that their famous “Just Do It” campaign was inspired by a Utah death row inmate, whose last words to the firing squad were “Let’s do it.” There’s no pantone color for humor that black.

Any number of allusions to said black undercurrent could have made for compelling documentary filmmaking, if the director had bothered to explore them at all.

- An early history of marginalization, where the account broker was the top of the totem pole¹ and the creative art and copy producers were at his service: “How big do you want the logo, sir?”

- The maddening dance to please obstinate/risk-averse/old-fashioned/demanding clients while still pushing the boundaries ever-forward

- The inherent predatory and manipulative stance of advertising, getting people to think and buy a particular way.

- The struggle to negotiate between your conscience, your creative impulses, and your ego to come to terms with your place in said capitalist/manipulative industry, surrounded by Don Drapers.

(It’s no wonder that people from Naomi Klein to Banksy have been devoting significant portions of their lives [and creative work, natch] to warning us of the dangers of advertising and brand proliferation².)

Instead, Art & Copy shows advertising as a sunshine and rainbows factory, where everyone is a black sheep and a brilliant creative mind proving all the naysayers wrong, making a billion dollars for every company, and (if you think about it) saving the world at the same time.

At one point, the Creative of the moment leads the camera crew to a truly amazing piece of pop-art another member of his firm has done on the wall—upwards of 100 thousand clear pushpins outlining the word “Fail Harder” in elegant script. Note that he didn’t just fill in the type, the guide says. He did it the hard way, spending 14 days to fill the negative space. Pray misses the entire point of this episode, though, and never once speaks of any kind of failure on the ad-men and women's parts. Only successes which everyone else thought would be giant failures.

By now we’ve spent so much time wanking on the creatives that you’ve forgotten about Tiedeman and his billboard rotators job from the opening paragraph. So has everyone watching the movie. Art & Copy returns (obligatorily) to Tiedeman every 25 minutes. But Tiedeman’s story never develops beyond his immediate task (though, to be fair, nor do the creatives’ stories evolve much beyond “I made these great ads”). While this working class guy sweats on top of a hot billboard unrolling a huge iPod poster, one of the Creatives gets on the voiceover and basically attributes all of free discourse to the capitalist machine. Back in black.

“If we leave a capitalist society and had a communist or socialist system [with] no need for advertising...It would stop people from wanting to tell stories and convince people of something. And if the something isn’t ‘you should buy this’...It might be ‘you should overthrow this government, we should change things.’”³

Well, as the working class guy pointed out, all of his ancestors have always had steady work at the glorious teat of the ad industry, even during the Great Depression. He didn’t need any fool socialist handout programs to help him. But again, what could have been a jumping off point for a heated debate of how advertising affects or is a reflection of the prevailing social structures gets passed by faster than a Burma Shave sign.

Only in the last 5 minutes or so does the documentary make a grudging concession to acknowledge that most advertising is intrusive, base, and cliché. Anyone can do “a thirty second communication to deliver 5 points about a product,” and well, many do. And it’s alienating. As Pray’s own infographic said, 65% of Americans feel they are “constantly bombarded with too much advertising.”

Last, the ad-men and women reflect upon the meaning of the romantic kind of creativity in advertising, the kind where you go beyond the status quo tripe to the art of the message. “Everything should be so ambitious,” they say, lamenting the “MBA types that never take risks.”

Rarely does a film so accurately express critique of itself, but there you have it. This is what the documentary should have been: something that dared to show the ad industry in both its highest creative achievements AND the lowest scum-sucking sinistrality. That dared to ask ambitious questions about creative function in a capitalist society, at the risk of ugly truths. Or at the very least, that wasn’t just a vanity project, a cookie-cutter interview-your-film-school-idols production.

¹Wait, did I just find a connection?

²“Any advert in a public space that gives you no choice whether you see it or not is yours. It's yours to take, re-arrange and re-use. You can do whatever you like with it. Asking for permission is like asking to keep a rock someone just threw at your head” ~Banksy

³Like the “setting-your-article-in Zapf Dingbats” guy from Helvetica, this was the statement that really pissed me off, as a writer. How dare you have the gall to claim that advertising is the only forum for meaningful debate in this country, nay, the driving force behind all independent thought. Irony Ahoy.

The ballad of M. Night Shamallama

2010-07-05T15:06:00.000-07:00

July 1, 2010.
In his mansion in the snooty, uber-rich part of Pennsylvania, M. Night Shyamalan sits bolt upright in bed:

“OH NO! I forgot to make the Avatar movie!” It’s due to the studio tomorrow, and it’s worth half of his grade.

He tiptoes past his sleeping children to the TV room and frantically tries to shove the first DVD of the series into the player. “Go! You stupid thing! Go!” he hisses, and clicks the play button over and over. Finally it loads and begins the opening

"Water. Earth. Fire. Air. Long ago, the four nations lived together in harmony…"

“Agggghhh, I don’t have time for this!” He fast-forwards. 2x. 4x. 8x… he leaves the episode running at 32x in the background, and rushes over to his computer.

“Ok, ok. Think, Shyamalan. What did you do at film school?” he Google searches “Avatar.” A bunch of blue cat people appear on his screen.

“Damn you, Cameron,” he curses, and adds “the last air blender” to the search box.

“Did you mean: ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender?’ Google suggests.

“Yes yes, whatever! Give me summaries! Where’s the damn Wikipedia?”

20 minutes later, he’s filled a Word Perfect document with cut and pasted chunks of text from ten different websites. On the back of the receipt he found inside the DVD box set, he writes his own notes:

Aa-ng – bald one. Avatar. Everyone he knows is dead
Zu-ko – Fire prince. Dishonored. Doesn’t like women (gay?)
So-ka – Guy with Ponytail. Can’t airbend (mad about this?) Loses gf (becomes fishmoon spirit)

Girl – Also water (name? purpose?)

Watta pads in from her bedroom, in her Airbender PJs.

“Daddy? What are you doing?
“Nothing. Nothing… Go back to bed.”
“Oh! Are you watching Avatar?!” She runs to the TV, delighted.

“Not now sweetie, Daddy’s making a movie.” He shoos her away. The first season is still flying along at 32x, the rest of the discs strewn on the floor from his mad search for volume 1. “Jesus Christ, how many of these episodes are there?” he asks. Only 10 hours until it’s due. Time to focus.

“Script, script. Every movie needs a script,” he mutters to himself. He pulls a stack of printer paper out of the laser jet and writes

INT. SCENE: THE SOUTH POLE - DAY
VOICEOVER (Girl)

“Let’s see…” he skims the summaries for plot points. “Find the avatar, air temple, liberate the village, liberate another village, water temple, Yoshi warriors…” God, there’s no time for all this.” He deletes huge swaths of text from his Word Perfect file. “You’re cut. Cut. Cut. So cut.”

Two hours later, Shyamalan is just hitting the third act. The desk is cluttered with coffee cups, scattered papers, and six empty Five Hour Energy bottles. He’s started writing on the laptop again, so he can get a word count every page. The minimum is 90 minutes. He starts to pad it out.

ESTABLISHING SHOT: THE GATES OF THE NORTHSIDE WATER KINGDOM – EVENING
ESTABLISHING SHOT: THE SHIPS APPROACHING THE NORTHSIDE WATER KINGDOM – EVENING
ESTABLISHING SHOT: EVERYONE STANDING IN FRONT OF THE NORTHSIDE WATER KING – EVENING

VOICEOVER (Girl)
We arrived at the northside water kingdom

M. Night Shyamalan tries to remember what he did with that $280 million the studio guys gave him to make this movie. He searches through his online banking statements: $50 for the complete Airbender box set, $40,000 to put mirrors on every interior wall, several trips to India, weekly lunches with Brad from Paramount… A-ha! $30 million to ILM for “bending rendered”

He calls up San Francisco. “Georgie! Baby! How are you?”
“Night man? Why are you calling me? How did you get this number?”
He asks him if he remembers the Last Airbender assignment.
“Yeah, you were completely in the bag. Kept telling me to put a lot of KARATE CHOP HADUKEN PEW PEW KA-BAM. It’s a kid’s show, Night man.”
“Did you do your section?”
“Yeah, I paid some nerds to do it like a week ago.”

M. Night Shyamalan tells George Lucas he needs him to do him a solid, and make the whole thing 3D. “That other Avatar movie was 3D.”
“So?”
“So think about it! If we don’t make ours 3D then it will totally look like we slacked off!”
George Lucas promises that he’ll wake the computer nerds, and make them work on it all night. He hangs up the phone and puts his arm around his C-3P0 realdoll.
***
The sun is rising over M. Night Shyamalan’s mansion. A black Audi winds down the driveway and approaches the gate. In the TV room, the title menu sequence plays over and over, unheard.

Shyamalan drives up to the mammoth soundstage in Reading. Teamsters are drinking coffee on every horizontal surface. Child actors in full makeup are practicing synchronized roundhouse kicks over and over by the port-a-johns. Two extras are making out in the Air Temple.

A whisper starts up and sweeps across the soundstage. “He’s here? He’s here?” They gather around their fearless leader, waiting for him to speak, after so many months of silence.

Only one dares to ask: “Did you bring it?”
Shyamalan smirks. Poor doubting Aasif. He holds the coffee-stained script aloft. “Ok people. Let’s make a MOVIE!”

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual

2010-06-05T09:57:00.001-07:00

Boston has been delightfully apocalyptic lately. I'm never sure if any given train I'm on will actually reach my destination, break down, or catch on fire. We had no potable water for an entire weekend. And now, Quebeci forest fire ash descending upon the air. I'm disappointed in the lack of riots, but it's only a matter of time now.

Meanwhile, my roommate told me about this little gem

You can download the whole pdf at
http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/06/world_war_ii_sa.html
and I definitely recommend you do, because it’s an interesting read. And surprisingly relevant to Your Life Today, despite the fact that it was written over 50 years ago.

The Simple Sabotage Field Manual (1944) begins with some bureaucratic boilerplate, which is pretty funny if you think about it in a “WWII movie hero crouches in a Vichy barn frantically reading his field manual looking for advice” kind of way

2. POSSIBLE EFFECTS
a. Acts of simple sabotage are occurring throughout Europe. An effort should be made to add to their efficiency, lessen their detectability, and increase their number.

Poor WWII movie hero. Just as he was vowing to increase the efficiency, detectability, and numerousness of his sabotage, the cow let out a warning moo and alerted the entire Nazi countryside to his presence. He didn’t even get as far as

Simple sabotage may also have secondary results of more or less value

But that’s ok, I can summarize.

Sparknotes guide to sabotage: Put Dirt In It.

Seriously, whatever it is--power tools, pneumatic drills, cooling systems, locks, electrical equipment, factory floors, fuel tanks—chances are that a small to moderate amount of dirt will screw it up. Dead insects and wads of hair will do the job as well (as is evidenced by my shower drain).

Ideally, you’ll also want to Light Stuff On Fire (and the Guide devotes a good chunk of time to explaining how), but that’s nothing I’m sure most of you haven’t been doing since you were in elementary school.

Far more interesting than the industrial sabotage are the instructions for social sabotage. They’re so effective that they’ve been widely implemented across the US!

(1.) Make train travel as inconvenient as possible for enemy personnel. Make mistakes in issuing train tickets, leaving portions of the journey uncovered by the ticket book; issue two tickets for the same seat in the train, so that an interesting argument will result; near train time, instead of issuing printed tickets write them out slowly by hand, prolonging the process until the train is nearly ready to leave or has left the station. On station bulletin boards announcing train arrivals and departures, see that false and misleading information is given about trains bound for enemy destinations.
(2) In trains bound for enemy destinations, attendants should make life as uncomfortable as possible for passengers. See that the food is especially bad, take up tickets after midnight, call all station stops very loudly during the night, handle baggage as noisily as possible during the night, and so on.
(3) See that the luggage of enemy personnel is mislaid or unloaded at the wrong stations. Switch address labels on enemy baggage.
(4) Engineers should see that trains run slow or make unscheduled stops for plausible reasons.

How to sabotage the transportation industry: make airline travel as inconvenient as possible!

(2) When the enemy asks for directions, give him wrong information.
(3) Bus-driver[s] can go past the stop where the enemy wants to get off. Taxi drivers can waste the enemy's time and make extra money by driving the longest possible route to his destination.

There are also ways to mess with phone lines (as a switchboard operator, dropping calls, connecting incorrectly, or simply making “wrong number” calls once a day), propaganda movies (the best one involves a paper bag full of moths) and the postal service. Most of these innovations have been streamlined, and nationalized into the very institutions themselves. This past winter, I was the victim of a truly inspiring 3-month phone/computer/mail sabotage propagated by Adobe Tech Support.

This next part I’m not going to make any comments on: I just want you to read and make note of how many of these are de rigueur in your workplace.

(11) General Interference with Organisations and Production

(a) Organizations and Conferences
(1) Insist on doing everything through "channels." Never permit short-cuts to be taken in order to expedite decisions.
(2) Make "speeches." Talk as frequently as possible and at great length. Illustrate your "points" by long anecdotes and accounts of personal experiences. Never hesitate to make a few appropriate "patriotic" comments.
(3) When possible, refer all matters to committees, for "further study and consideration." Attempt to make the committees as large as possible — never less than five.
(4) Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
(5) Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
(6) Refer back to matters decided upon at the last meeting and attempt to re-open the question of the advisability of that decision.
(7) Advocate "caution." Be "reasonable" and urge your fellow-conferees to be "reasonable" and avoid haste which might result in embarrassments or difficulties later on.
(8) Be worried about the propriety of any decision — raise the question of whether such action as is contemplated lies within the jurisdiction of the group or whether it might conflict with the policy of some higher echelon.

(b) Managers and Supervisors
(1) Demand written orders.
(2) "Misunderstand" orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders. Quibble over them when you can.
[…]
(6) In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first. See that the important jobs are assigned to inefficient workers of poor machines.
(7) Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products; send back for refinishing those which have the least flaw. Approve other defective parts whose flaws are not visible to the naked eye.
[…].
(9) When training new workers, give incomplete or misleading instructions.
(10) To lower morale and with it, production, be pleasant to inefficient workers; give them undeserved promotions. Discriminate against efficient workers; complain unjustly about their work.
(11) Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
(12) Multiply paper work in plausible ways. Start duplicate files.
(13) Multiply the procedures and clearances involved in issuing instructions, pay checks, and so on. See that three people have to approve everything where one would do.
(14) Apply all regulations to the last letter.

(c) Office Workers
[…]
(5) Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
(6) Hold up mail until the next collection.
(7) Spread disturbing rumors that sound like inside dope.

And lastly, should any of you feel like perpetrating some social sabotage, here are a set of helpful hints. Just don’t ask me what it means to “Complain against ersatz materials.”

(12) General Devices for Lowering Morale and Creating Confusion
(a) Give lengthy and incomprehensible explanations when questioned.
(b) Report imaginary spies or danger to the Gestapo or police.
(c) Act stupid.
(d) Be as irritable and quarrelsome as possible without getting yourself into trouble.
(e) Misunderstand all sorts of regulations concerning such matters as rationing, transportation, traffic regulations.
(f) Complain against ersatz materials.
(g) In public treat axis nationals or quislings coldly.
(h) Stop all conversation when axis nationals or quislings enter a cafe.
(i) Cry and sob hysterically at every occasion, especially when confronted by government clerks.

Break this

2010-05-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

OKCupid has this useless feature called "icebreakers," where it anonymously matches you with someone who shares a similar interest (based on their profile contents). As a result, I get a lot of inane messages about "hey you liked fight club? I liked fight club!" As if that was any reason for me to talk to you. They're mostly harmless, and easy enough to delete.

But this one...THIS one...

-----------
You have 1 new icebreaker!

Subject: wilde

May 20, 2010 – 8:55pm
Those pedophiles sure know how to write! lol, but which of his works did you find the most entertaining?
-----------

You rat bastard. Don't you dare speak about my idol like that. My devotion to that man borders on religious, and I will lay a holy CRUSADE on those who blaspheme him, don't think I won't.

You, meanwhile, describe yourself as "I am reflectIve, quIxotIc, and InquIsItIve." So I suggest you delete your entire profile and beg forgiveness from every one of those authors on that very long list you claim to like.

(For added irony, I am in the middle of editing an essay I wrote a few years ago about Oscar Wilde and the Art of the University.)

Encounter with a Guardian Douchebag

2010-04-25T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was on the escalator at the Porter Square station, when a man passing on my left looked me in the eye and said “Don’t bite your nails.”

Well this rather pissed me off. It’s the way I’m sure smokers feel, when everyone (even complete strangers) are always telling them to quit, that smoking is bad for them. As if they’d been hiding under a rock for the past 20 years (and in that case, who has been bringing them cigarettes?).

Back to the anti-nail-biter guy. Did he think he was some kind of guardian douchebag, here to change my life forever and deliver me from this miserable existence with one well-timed comment? That’s a heady assumption, Guardian Douchebag, considering the complexity of the world we live in, and the fact that you have zero context for who I am and why I happen to be biting my nails on the Porter station escalator.

Here’s the kicker: Guardian Douchebag was definitely eff ay tee FAT. You tell me not to bite my nails — what, am I going to come up to you and tell you to go for a jog? No I would not, because that would be unhelpful and frankly insulting, wouldn’t it? Also, biting my nails is hardly going to kill me, but you on the other hand are a few Big Macs short of a cardiac episode.

The same kind of thing happened to me on a greyhound bus once. A man in a burnt orange suit asked me “You chew on da finger?” and then insisted that I needed Jesus in my life to help me stop. I wasn’t sure how Jesus would help the situation, or if He’d told that man to wear that orange suit, but goddamn that was an uncomfortable bus ride.

Strangers need to stop trying to get their self-righteous do-gooder points by telling me what I may or may not chew on. Just give money to a bum if you want to feel morally superior.

The Great Ice Cream Dilemma

2010-03-14T15:38:00.000-07:00

The grocery store is already an abattoir of choice paralysis. Thousands of square feet of just products products products, in every shape and color and combination, far more than any of us here in the Western World could ever truly comprehend, much less want or need. While I love eating, and I love having a kitchen full of food, I hate doing the grocery shopping. It's cliché these days to say that modern life makes you anxious. But when I'm in the grocery store I do worry: that I'm making the wrong choices or uninformed choices, or choices that I will otherwise regret later.

Sometimes it's even worse. Because sometimes I want to buy ice cream.

Ice cream presents a perfect storm of consumer anxiety—an example of The Grocery Store Problem so well-balanced that it is nigh unsolvable.

Here's how it goes. I stand there in the freezer aisle, laden with heavy bags (because this is at the end of the trip), wandering back and forth between the different options.

First instinct: I can buy Ben & Jerry's, the hands-down best tasting ice cream in the freezer aisle.
But Ben & Jerry's is expensive, $4.99 a pint.

Alright, so I can buy the Shaw's brand, Stone Ridge, which is acceptably tasty and much cheaper.

But Stone Ridge comes in a half gallon. If I buy Stone Ridge, I will be eating a half gallon of ice cream, as opposed to a quart, which is twice as much unhealthy food!

So I think to myself “I could get some of those fruit cream pops. They're both cheaper (by the serving) and 'healthier' than a tub of ice cream.” But dammit, they don't taste nearly as good as Fossil Fuel, or even the generic standby Cookies and Cream.

So here we have three major attributes factoring into my Ice Cream Dilemma:
Tasty
Cheap
Small (“healthy”)

If we're trying to optimize this whole business, then of course I'd want to make the choice that meets the best of all three. But Plato teaches us that such an ideal does not really exist (for if it did, surely it would be the ice cream of the gods). So I'll have to settle for some combination of two out of three:
Tasty Cheap
Tasty Small
Cheap Small

And here's where it starts to get philosophical. How can I possibly decide between such sweeping abstractions? Which values matter most? Health, wealth or quality of life? Should I even be buying ice cream in the first place? What good does it do, ultimately?

These are questions for the sages to contend with. Let me just step it back a moment, to a more practical, worldly point of view.

Cheap. On the one hand, since all of my money has been going to pay surprise-sex type overdraft fees at my former bank (Rot in hell Citizen's, you greedy bastards), I am fairly poor at the moment. Since I am an unemployed MFA, I am fairly poor as a rule.

Small. On the other hand, even though the women in my family are blessed with an even-keel metabolism, which keeps my weight within a permanent 10-pound swing, I still generally feel guilty about eating junk and want to accrue other tangible benefits from healthy food.

On the third, mutant hand, I'm here standing in the ice cream aisle because I was driven by a very powerful instinct which wants to MAW DOWN ON SOME DUBLIN MUDSLIDE ummphffff mmphnnggfff tasty.

If you're finding this whole thing complicated and ridiculous, just you wait until we get out of the freezer aisle and try to buy some real food. Then we have to add “quickness” to the list of qualifications. Will whatever I'm buying transform into edible format fast enough to satisfy my terminal impatience with cooking? Do I even posses the skills to turn, say, a bunch of turnips into something edible? (and of course, quickness rarely translates into healthfulness, and if it does, you can bet it ain't cheap)

I hope you didn't expect this post to come to any sort of resolution, meaningful or otherwise. Because the Ice Cream Dilemma has no resolution. I'm still caught in its ineluctable vortex (I'm actually posting this from the freezer aisle).

Still looking for that miracle food which is fast, tasty, healthy, and cheap.*

http://www.flickr.com/photos/goosmurf/ / CC BY 2.0

*Actually, I have found one: my roommate's cooking. Too bad he just left for a monthlong trip to the UK. Bastard.

The ennui of hobo-chic

2010-02-16T10:26:00.000-08:00

Ladies and Gentlemen, may I present the Louis Vuitton Raindrop Besace.

I'll give you the punchline first: This bag costs $1,960.

Is there anything intelligent to say about this sort of thing? Most of the blogs and comments thereon stick with a simple "ugh, no" with the occasional "it's distasteful to make fun of homeless people like that" or "who wants a purse that looks like TRASH BAG!?" (easy there, captain obvious). It's, like, so Derelicte.

I don't want to talk about how much rice or clean water or healthcare two thousand dollars could buy. I don't want to talk about whether Marc Jacobs is sincere or laughing at his slavish, super-rich customers. It's all so much tiresome retread.

So what's left? I wish there were a Roger Ebert of fashion, so that I could read his review of it and know what it means. Or at least so that I could read a fashion review that actually has merit as a critical essay rather than a bunch of one-liner comments squealed breathlessly without even bothering to remove the giant cocks they've all been gobbling as a nice mid-morning snack.

Ok that was a little harsh. Commenters have always been lowest-common-denominator morons (see: youtube), and I can't expect commenters on fashion blogs to be otherwise. I've been watching too much Zero Punctuation.

Vivienne Westwood's latest menswear collection, on the other hand,

can fuck right off.

Sure, pat yourself on the back. You're so edgy and like, topical with your orange jumpsuit and your shopping carts and your embarrassing parodies of what you think mentally ill people look like. Go back to making party dresses for people who can't remember how many homes they have, and leave the social commentary to someone who isn't trying to co-opt it for the mass delusion of the insulated class.

Picking No. 3

2010-02-04T19:05:00.000-08:00

A couple of Saturdays ago, I was lounging around watching the last episode of the Tonight Show with Conan O'Brien on Hulu, when my roommate Jimmie asked if I wanted to go to a lock picking workshop at the Sprout hackerspace. I of course said "hell, yes."

So I went, and I learned about pins and uh, machining...tolerance? and whatever it is they call the tools and the housing etc. And within 30 minutes, I had picked my first lock.

Ten minutes later, I also picked handcuffs.
Note: picking handcuffs is SUPER EASY. Observe:

This is the lock I'm doing in that video.

It's a Master lock No. 3, also known as a "Confidence Lock." Meaning, any mechanically inept moron like me can pick it and feel confident.

So now there's a bunch of lock picking equipment hanging out on our coffee table, which got me to looking at that Master lock again.

Check out that sticker. "Tough Under Fire." Yes, shoot at this lock all you like, it ain't budging. Stick a couple pieces of metal in it though, and it will fly open faster than a Happy Meal box at a fat kid's birthday party. Interesting to see where our priorities are. We fear and respect the power of forceful, gun-violence-type entry, but how many people who buy No. 3s think to ask if it is easily pickable?

Three Religion Fails

2009-12-24T22:02:00.000-08:00

I. In 2005 I went to Rome, in search of the biggest, oldest, and most beautiful things I could see. I was not disappointed. The Vatican especially (see photo below) was a stirring monument to the enduring power of the Church: massive-scale architecture, masterpiece art everywhere, and much of it revered relics from centuries long past. Now that's a proper sense of awe, and ain't nobody does it like Rome does it. For the first time, I felt that rare connection to the whole of human history.

II. Every winter, I go to my hometown in upstate New York to spend the holidays with my parents. Every year, my sister, my mother and I attend Christmas Eve mass at St. Mary's, listen to a variation on the "be nice to your neighbor, it's the holidays" homily, and watch the exact same group of girls wearing the exact same robes do the exact same entry-level liturgical movement routine to the exact same song (Shepherd of my Heart).

III. On Christmas Eve afternoon, I posted the following status to facebook:

ok St. Mary's. It's Christmas, and by God, you are the Holy Roman Catholic and Apostolic Church, heir to two thousand years of unprecedented power and worship throughout the entire Western World. Let's see some freakin' PAGEANTRY.
December 24, 2009 at 1:53pm · Comment · Like

IV. The communion wine was grape juice.

I want to believe, religion, really I do. But it's like you're not even trying.

--------------
Also while I was at home, I saw a more-disturbing-than-usual "as seen on tv" type ad, for this lovely product

https://www.prayercross.com/ver58/

It's a cross necklace with the Our Father inscribed in it like the old write-your-name-on-a-piece-of-rice trick. Just hold it up to the light and HOLY SHIT! THE MOST GENERIC PRAYER IN ALL OF CHRISTIANITY!

Made me think back to Taste class with Maria Koundoura, and how something I find so obviously gaudy and kitsch can be an actual viable piece of sentimental jewelry to so many other idiots. (For "only 2 payments of $19.99." Classy.) Another issue: Why would you need a "certificate of authenticity" for this thing? What the hell kind of authenticity would it even have? Yes this is an authentic mass consumer good? Yes that is authentically the Lord's Prayer you got written in there? It's not even made of precious metals--just Austrian crystal.

-------------------------

The Christian Side Hug Video has been making the rounds on leftist blogs. There's very little information about it, or why these guys are spittin' about the unholy dangers of fully-clothed genital-to-genital contact, but everyone seems to be taking it at face value and bemoaning how backwards those darn Christian fundies are. The problem is that's too easy. Blah blah oppressive paranoid anti-sexuality, blah blah co-opting African-American art forms for pussified whiteperson agendas, etc. etc. Instead, I think that the side hug rappers aren't 100 percent genuine, that there is some kind of commentary going on here, though it's hard to say on what level.

The lyrics are here, and pretty damn hilarious...not quite bad enough to be clearly authentic, not quite good enough to be clearly comic. Why would a group fanatical enough to condemn "front-hugging" be referencing "Democratic shift in the Congress," and taking potshots at Angelina Jolie buying babies? One opinion I read in my exhaustive googling of this topic was that the side hug rappers were of a more liberal denomination (think Unitarians) making small fun of their more conservative counterparts. That would explain the crowd reacting the same way to Obama references as they did to Holy Spirit ones.

Chorus is as follows:
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug
I’m a rough rider
Filled up with Christ’s love
Gimme that Christian side hug
That Christian side hug

Blahblah ironic juxtaposition(rough riders | filled up with Christ's love)
Blahblah complete reversal of the actual motivation behind "street" music forms.

And my personal favorite verse:
I’m a married man
You know I can hold hands
Front hug all day long
With no other demands

Oh dayum son. Your marriage be freaky up in this piece!

What's sad then about this situation is not the performance itself, with its thug pretensions and side hugging message. It's the fact that either hypothetical is completely plausible: there may well be fundamentalist groups sad enough to be frightening kids that something as simple and rewarding as human contact (e.g. hugging) is sinful, but on the other hand, everything you see on the internet might well be a parody of something else you saw on the internet. And we can't tell the difference.

PS check out those two black guys just standing upstage. are they there for tacit acknowledgment ("ok honkies, we get it. don't worry, it's all cool"), or to stop fans from potentially rushing the stage and front-hugging the performers?

Tuition Tax: fuck you and the horse you're riding out on

2009-12-23T11:05:00.000-08:00

[It's been a while guys! Post-thesis post coming eventually, and look for a special "religious issues" (I use the term loosely) installment tomorrowish]

This week Pittsburgh narrowly avoided instituting a tax on tuition for the city's college students. After a threat to put the issue to a vote, several universities and nonprofits made an offering to appease the local protection racke--I mean, local politicians, and the budget "crisis" has been averted.

Still, what the hell is wrong with you, Pittsburgh? You can't tax tuition! Education is the one damn thing that needs to remain tax-exempt. Even by your own rules from the 1985 state supreme court ruling:

An institution eligible for tax exemption
* advances a charitable purpose [educating the masses, general advancement of human knowledge, check]
* gives a substantial portion of its services gratuitously [scholarships, student service support systems, open lectures, on and on]
* benefits people who are legitimate subjects of charity [it's higher education not The Boats for Billionaires Fund]
* relieves government of some of its burden [government sure would be burdened if Not to mention the uneducated hooligans roaming the streets believing it's ok to microwave cats]
* operates free of a private profit motive. [a school that operates to make a profit is no damn school at all. Thankfully the ones that do are easy to shun, because there are so few of them]

Town, you really need to get it through your heads that those Gown people up on the hill aren't your enemies. Higher education represents everything that is hopeful and progressive about the future of the country and your precious city as well. It's time to acknowledge that future gains take an enormous investment of money and time, and while that coed might not look like much now, overall, the educated will pay you back en masse. What's more, colleges run your economies. Yes, your economy is in the toilet right now, but so is everyone's. Why the hell are you taking it out on students? The poorest people you know. They're taking on debt to pay for this tuition. Why are you taxing debt? Isn't that a self-fulfilling prophecy?

Taxing tuition is wrong enough by itself, but taxing tuition in order to pay for failing city employee pensions is an unconscionable act of generational warfare (Fuck you, Boomers. Fuck you and the horse you're riding out on. That's my back you're breaking under your fat ass saddle). The "reasoning" here was that college students use government-provided services, like the public transportation and public safety. Yes, college students come and use your public transportation to get to your stores (where they pay sales tax) and their part time jobs (where they pay income tax) and home again (where they pay real estate taxes with their rent money), and they prefer to do it knowing that public safety is there so they don't get mugged on the way and take up valuable resources in the local Emergency Room (because our milquetoast congress can't pass a public option healthcare reform)...but I'll tell you what service NO college student is using: PENSION PLANS. I'm sorry you don't have enough money to keep your elderly in the manner to which they are accustomed. Fix your own messes, and don't take it out on the young. Extorting college students is a knee-jerk reaction: the equivalent of a kid running out back to kick the dog after getting paddled by his dad.

At the risk of bringing this already-loose essay completely off the rails, this guy's post on the same topic makes me wonder about the cyclical nature of generational conflict. What happened to all those boomers who lived through Vietnam and Civil Rights and swore they would do better? They got the corner office and sold credit default swaps like it was going out of style. But who's to say that my generation will do any better? Cynical millenials, asleep in front of a screen, afraid to commit to anything. (Just try to get strong opinions out of college freshmen these days.)
We'll end up either the wafflers or the avoidant. Every generation thinks it can do better, but fails to realize its weakness until it gains power and has the chance to see it in action. Apathy doesn't matter much when you're just going through the motions to get the credentials to live in the boomers' world. It will matter when they finally die and take all the money (and life) they squeezed out of us with them.

Let's talk about graphic design

2009-11-09T10:58:00.000-08:00

My blog is now pretty. Pretty in the "I downloaded a template" way, but at least the pictures all fit in the column.

Meanwhile, someone got paid to design this classy, classy MBTA advertisement:

Which brings up a lot of trenchant social issues. There's the obvious, of course, "When was the last time a creepy guy with bad facial hair checked you out by ogling your ass on the steps of the porter square T-station" (never. I hedge my bets and walk up the escalator), but also "When was the last time you used Comic Sans to deliver an STD-related message?", "When was the last time you went to a free clinic in order to get sexually objectified?" (more than 6 months; usually I just go on the internet--it's much more convenient), and "How can one stock photo go so horribly wrong?"
(my readers have no doubt noticed the blatant plural apostrophe, so informing them of it here would be completely redundant).

Wave hello

2009-10-24T22:30:00.000-07:00

Anyone who knows anything agrees that Google Wave is going to be the Next Most Awesome Thing, that will Totally, OhMiGod, Revolutionize Communication, Man. My usual method of begging friends for invites has proven fruitless, so I decided that I had to sign up myself and do my time in line. Oh Google, how I pine for thee.

The invite page invites you to "Write a Message to the Google Wave team." SCORE! If there's one thing on god's green Earth that I can do, it is write a message. Just call me Cyrano, baby.

Rhetorical Situation: I want Google Wave
Project: Convince the Google Wave Team that I am cool enough for Google Wave

Dear Google Wave Team -
You've probably gotten a lot of flattering, grandiose, or downright sycophantic letters from potential wavers. They'll promise to love you forever, and search your code for Y2K bugs line by line, and use Wave to both fix the economy and bring about world peace.

I can offer you none of these things. I am a lowly graduate student and adjunct writing instructor, without programming or advanced economic theory skills. But what I do have is complete sincerity: I just want Google to run my entire life.

So far Google runs my email, my blog, my phone, my reading material, and my schedule, but that is just not enough. Is this too much to ask? I hope not. Eventually, I know that Wave will wash over the masses, and everyone will be able to enjoy its connective power. Please hasten this day, so that I may complete the transition to total life domination as soon as possible.

Sincerely,
Claire

I'm like, totally waiting by the phone (at least until I get Google Wave and the phone becomes an obsolete method of communication. SUCKAS)

Abomination Thursday

2009-10-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

Let's do a little free-association experiment, my literary peeps. I found this in the computer lab; what do you think?

Here's what I thought:

Oh HELL naw.

There is ONE The Things They Carried. It is probably one of the ten best books ever written, and I'm sure I can get plenty of legit people to back me up on that humble opinion. Here, have the book cover.

Then I went to the website for the movie (still didn't notice that it was The Things We Carry instead of The Things They Carried until an hour later. Hey, there's a vaguely asian girl wearing a vaguely asian hat WHAT AM I SUPPOSED TO THINK? Yes I was also confused because there aren't actually any women in The Things They Carried). As near as I can tell, from the synopsis, it's the Ya-ya sisterhood with meth. (ok that was crass and inaccurate. It's actually like an Oprah book...with meth. But not, you know, THE Oprah book with the meth. Yadda yadda sisters looking for yadda yadda dead mother, learning something about their yadda yadda ok you know what if you're not gonna get blown into a million pieces by a grenade then I'm gonna just keep being really indignant about the fact that you tricked me)

Keep your road trip sister movies out of my monumental metafiction war stories.

Pearson, Stop Posting

2009-09-19T16:47:00.000-07:00

Dear Pearson:
For the love of all that is holy, please stop reposting your listing for the Editorial Assistant - English Higher Ed position. It defies reason.

I applied for this job back in JULY. I wasn't really planning to apply to full-time jobs, because I wanted to do the teaching thing, but this was too good an opportunity to pass up. It's just what I wanted. Hell, me and every other MFA/MA/English major/book nerd in the Boston-metro area.

Which is why there is absolutely no way you should still need to be advertising the position 2 months later. Haven't you gotten a boatload of applications?

I know you had at least one qualified candidate for this job. (Me) Even if there was something inexplicable in my resume or cover letter that turned you off, that's ok. But really? NO ONE met your standards? It's an editorial assistant job, not brain surgery. Hell, I have both editorial experience AND English higher ed experience, not that you couldn't get someone totally competent to do this job who has neither.

This is why when I didn't hear back I thought, "oh well, they must have hired someone else." Until you posted another Editorial Assistant - English ad four weeks later on Bookbuilders of Boston. Even this first repost perplexed me (How can they not have enough applications? Why didn't I get an interview?). Then I worried that maybe your crappy online HR submissions website lost my resume. So I applied again. I tried to get the name of the editor who was hiring so I could send it direct to her email. I couldn't get so much as a name out of your panopticon.

Now today I was checking out the Boston Globe's job database (because I saw a link somewhere) and you've posted the SAME AD there THIS WEEK! September 15th! At this point it is too late for me: I have a teaching contract, and to apply for the same job three times would be considered gauche in any circle. This plea is for my friends and colleagues, and their future sanity.

I understand that you are a large, large corporate publisher-entity. I understand that maybe you do things slower. Three postings in two months, though...

You're teasing us, and I find it rather cruel. Just freaking choose someone already. Hire Mallory. She's good. You won't be disappointed.

(Too many?) Words about the Estee Lauder Quiz

2009-08-23T11:55:00.000-07:00

My Hulu ad choice today was either to watch my Colbert Report with normal commercial interruptions or to take a 3-question quiz and then continue to the video without interruption. Maybe I should have just chosen the normal commercial interruptions, since I only watch the first segment of Colbert anyway, but I do hate commercial breaks (as any red-blooded DVR owning American does). Here’s what went down:

“Is your skin at risk for aging too fast?” Estee Lauder asked me. “To see if your skin is at risk, just answer 3 quick questions” (brought to you by Advanced Night Repair)

You can take the quiz yourself at http://www.esteelauder.com/advancednightrepair/ Just don't fucking buy anything ok?

For the first question

I left the slider all the way left, because as a writer I live a solitary existence in my bat-cave, with the only radiation ever to reach my skin that of the soft glow of my computer screen. But as you can see, it did not accept this. Are you sure? It asks. As if I were a child working on a state test in a school district that desperately needs its funding renewed. Are you sure you have answered this completely subjective and highly personal question to our standard? “HINT: MOVE THE SLIDER TO THE RIGHT.” Ok ok, maybe I don’t go out to the beach but I do live in the city. And I’m sure I get plenty of pollutants on the T.

Here’s the thing. Next time I took the test I did move the slider to the right. Slightly right of center even. Surely this is a reasonable answer and would appease the marketing gods. WRONG.

Again it asks me “are you sure?” Are you sure you receive only a moderately high amount of environment in your day-to-day life? And notice that word “assault.” The last time I thought of the environment “assaulting” me was that ballsy-as-fuck squirrel outside Kensington palace (it actually jumped up on another guy’s shoulder and started snatching bits of his granola bar from his hand! Uninvited! Damn, Di, what did you have in that water?)

If you answer “correctly”, that yes your skin is under constant assault and you are AFRAID, VERY AFRAID, then it just lets you go on to the next question, without nagging about MOVING THE SLIDER TO THE RIGHT.

Next question. Stress.

It says this no matter where you put the slider, from a little less than “constant” down to “no stress” at all. Not that I think a person with no stress at all is well-balanced, but it’s still a nice sentiment. Or is it? Estee Lauder reminds me that no matter how good I feel, my body is still silently plotting against me. Absorbing all those harrowing things that HAVE to stress people out, like traffic! And kids! And work! Three things I don’t have in my life at all! (Ok that’s a lie I do have lots of work, just all self-imposed) In fact, I might feel fine, but you bet, my body is headed for a complete meltdown. Just so you know.

Man, that stresses me out :(

Last question: Signs of aging.

I refused to take a special trip to the mirror for this one. That’s what they (the antifeminist hegemony) want you to do. I’m not some stupid teenager anymore, but dammit I’m not even a “late 20s” yet—I don’t have crows’ feet or liver spots or anything obvious. If the point of this question is to make me scrutinize my complexion, then congratulations, you and every other piece of female-centric media ever.
(Astounding tales of redundancy: I don’t see signs of ages because they haven’t appeared yet? No way…)

Ok, quiz, let’s play your game for a minute. I’ll say I see signs of aging. The warning here is fairly tame: you’re seeing signs of aging and you’ll see more later. Fair enough. But here it commands again MOVE THE SLIDER TO THE RIGHT! Quiz, you asked me how many signs of aging I see when I look in the mirror, not how many signs of aging I’ll see in the next 20 years. Are you saying I’m a liar, or worse, that my face DOES have many signs of aging, regardless of what I see? That I am secretly a nasty old crone?

Enough of this questioning. Let’s get the results!

Well, yep, pretty standard. Quiz results show that I need to buy their latest youth serum, right away.

I know it’s passé to complain about how marketers are trying to—gasp—market us stuff. I posted this at the risk of sounding like my freshman comp students (who all claim they are completely above and onto marketing ploys), because it’s an especially aggressive and yet pathetic attempt.

For all of its guilt-trip hinting, MOVING THE SLIDER TO THE RIGHT has no effect whatsoever on the outcome. Moving the slider anywhere has no effect on the outcome. You always get this same screen. They could have just shown this final panel and had that be the ad. But no, they have to make it all audience participation. Have to show that Bullshit Internet Marketing Quiz Knows Best, while pretending lip service to individualization and customer choice. It’s a weird dichotomy between the authoritarianism of the Quiz and the Me-centrism of the social media consumer. Try to make me feel that this quiz is addressing my needs, my skin or lack thereof, when in fact it’s just another standardized manipulative flim flam.

Also, this quiz is furthering the politics of fear and consumption. By “suggesting” moving the slider to the right, Estee Lauder wants you to acknowledge that your skin is worse than you thought—and fear is good for business. Even if your skin is not so bad, they plant all those hints of horrible portents for the future. That “stress” and those “pollutants” and “signs of aging” will build and build UNTIL IT’S TOO LATE AIEEEEEE! Quick, give me that bottle of expensive goo!

Only $49.50/ fl. oz.

Last thought:
I also have to wonder if The Colbert Report on Hulu was the right venue for this ad. Is it reaching their audience? Do aging women use Hulu? Isn’t the Colbert Report solidly 18-34? Isn’t Comedy Central solidly male? (The first result for “Estee Lauder Quiz” on Google was a dude twittering about how he took this quiz before watching his Hulu show and found it not very tuned to his male needs. “Good idea, crap execution,” he says. I’m not sure if that reflects worse on men [if execution is the only problem he sees in this ad] or on Twitter [if 140 characters limits commentary to such sweeping inanities])

There goes the neighborhood

2009-08-14T14:50:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: SCHADENFREUDE TUESDAY (see bottom)
-----------------------------------------------------
"Kiss me where it smells" she said. So I took her to Allston. ~DFW, Infinite Jest
-----------------------------------------------------

After a long and demoralizing process* I have finally found a room for this fall. I'll be moving to Porter, and living on the red line like a real adult, so here's a little memorial post on Allston and some of the outright apocalyptic signs that have clearly portended my exodus:

1. Comm. Ave Associates don't know the meaning of the word "irony"
Comm. Ave Associates, the real estate place right in Packard's corner, is very proud of their giant corporate Hummer, as you can see:
I would see this thing parked or driving around packard's corner all the time, and it filled me with a rage a few notches beyond the regular bleeding heart liberal kind. Christ, that thing was an aesthetic, economic, and environmental nightmare.

Then they bought a matching red smartcar. Emblazoned it all over with the same gaudy advertising and slogans. I thought "Oh! Good! Perhaps they have finally had their comeuppance for such an ill-advised purchase and are now correcting the errors of their ways."

Until this magical moment happened.
[click for full]

A perfect convergence! High school English teachers, I present to you the definition of the word "juxtaposition." May you never flail at defining it ever again.

(For our more nearsighted audience members, that decal on the bumper reads "My daddy is a Hummer H2")

I could go on about style icons and consumption and how this image is illustrative of every single realtor I've ever dealt with, but I'll just move on to a real tragedy.

2. THEY PAINTED THE PURPLE HOUSE!
When I moved in, my new roommates warned me. Not about the roving bands of underage BU drinkers, or the aspiring band next door. They warned me about the purple house.

And to be sure, it was a nexus of raucous drunken debauchery. I woke up not two weeks into my tenure at Boston to a girl in her pajamas pacing around the front yard of the purple house, talking to herself. (At first I thought she was practicing a Beckett monologue. Then I realized she was on drugs.) I even partied on the roof there once when a few of the roommates were out shining spotlights on anyone walking down the street. When I told people where I lived, sometimes they would go "oh yeah! The purple house! I've been there! Crazy times..." It was famous.

Then a frat moved in and we thought it was all downhill from there. Surprisingly, it was, but not in the way we thought. The frat boys were decidedly more tame, party-wise. Already the legacy of The Purple House was fading.

But this, this was the last straw. I looked out my window on Wednesday (I'm the creepy "rear-window" neighborhood writer [at the front window] wondering why crying porch girl across the street got dumped, I'm here so much) and gasped.

The purple house went from this (yes that is cookie monster in the tree)

To this

How are we supposed to talk about it now? It's not "the purple house", it's "The olive green house". It's "the responsible geriatric house". It's "the three-story house like every other goddamn three-story house in this neighborhood"

Note that they cut down cookie monster's tree too. (cookie monster was long gone. kidnapped and then replaced by a purple inflatable lizard, who then deflated and hung sopping wet for another week or so)

So bye bye Allston. Try to keep it real. Shame on him who thinks ill of it!

*31 craigslist ads replied to. ~25 apartments visited. ~10 offers made.

------------------
SCHADENFREUDE TUESDAY UPDATE:

That's a parking ticket. Haw haw!

Triforce Tech Class Tragedy

2009-07-15T21:08:00.000-07:00

(This one goes out to Liz, because she was THERE, MAAAAN.)

Back in middle school, when by the way I wore stretch pants a full 10 years before and after they were "cool", we were required to take a semester of Technology class. Our technology teacher was a skinny, bald man with out-of-style glasses...and 1 and a half arms. Though there was much speculation that he had lost it in a machine accident, he was always upfront in saying that he had been born that way. His left arm ceased abruptly at the elbow. At the end of that elbow he had a little nub of flesh that was probably trying at one point to be a finger. He used to twiddle it around with his good hand while he talked. His name was Mr. Jump.

We called him Mr. Stump.

But this post is not about this unfortunate man and our un-imaginative childish names for him. It's not even about his catchphrase ("Hot means it can burn you") which we ran into the ground for the next 5 years. It's about the infamous quiz he gave which remains the single greatest travesty of education I have ever experienced. More tragic than our senior English teacher trying to explain deconstruction. More tragic than Craig Stormont, the clinically-depressed English professor who said AND I QUOTE "Blue sky always makes me think of 9/11".

The fact was, Mr. Jump did not actually know anything about technology. Even circa 1997 technology which is when this class took place. Here is the sole thing we learned in tech class:

"Technology is people using tools and machines to satisfy their wants and needs."

I will be 90 years old and have a lifetime of amazing memories--ecstasies, tragedies, all manner of accomplishments and debauchery--and I will never be able to forget THIS STUPID DEFINITION.

And now, without further ado
The Infamous Tech Quiz.

[click the pic for big/not horribly cut off by the column width. sigh]

In a one-page, ten-question quiz:
16 straight up grammar and spelling errors
12 "house style" inconsistencies and clarity issues
9 different fonts, 15 alignment inconsistencies (not including the fact that there is just physically not enough room in which to write the answers to most of these questions)

There you have it. A failure of education, a failure of graphic design, and a failure to communicate. Great use of word processing techology, Mr. Jump.

Utilizing Subject Pool Listservs to Participate in MRI Experimentation

2009-07-05T14:01:00.000-07:00

Introduction
I am not ashamed to say that I loan my brain to science. I figure that my brain does very little to contribute to science when I’m using it, so why not give someone else a chance to make it productive?

Unfortunately, many scientists are not interested in using my brain for things because I am defective. Deviant. LEFT-handed. This has made it a little more difficult to get the juicy fMRI studies, which pay $30/hr as opposed to the “read sentences on a screen and press spacebar” studies which pay only $10. But this time I did it: I was quick off the draw, and responded to the email within 5 minutes of them sending it out. HAH, suckers who have jobs or other things to do besides check the internet all day.

This is my super scientific lab report on Claire’s First MRI at MIT, utilizing genre theory to better bridge the gap between the scientific and blog-reading communities.

Method
Firstly, I had a bit of momentary shock when the consent form said "you have been selected for this study because you have tested in the Austism/Aspergers spectrum....OR you are a control subject." Moral of the story: reading comprehension = the entire sentence. Other preliminary paperwork included a detailed survey about my communication habits as a 4-5 year old. Did I point to things I wanted? Did I use sentences? Did I spin around in uncontrollable circles? Did I have an object I carried around everywhere? (yes to that one) How should I know what I did when I was 5? Maybe I’ll give my mom the quiz and see how she answers. More likely she’ll just claim not to remember herself. Thanks mom.

On one of the many crappy rainy afternoons which comprised June in Boston, I went to one of those giant, glass-paneled buildings in Kendall, where a nice graduate student first administered an IQ test. Before you ask, no, I did not get the results of this test, but it is at least obvious that I counted as the “control” and not the ‘sperg in this situation. IQ is apparently tested with a lot of little pictures asking you to choose what comes next and a few word-puzzle riddles.

TEST YOUR IQ AT HOME!
What belongs to a person, place, or thing, is informal, and is often affectionate?
(If you can answer this question you may officially claim to be smarter than me. Beg me for it when you give up.)

SPECIAL NOTE FOR LIT DORKS – John Steinbeck is on the IQ test. (“Which of these pictures is a scene from a Steinbeck novel?”)

Then I got into some scrub pants and waited around for a half an hour while they fixed the sound system. I ended up having to wear earbuds underneath huge headphones.

For those of you who have somehow never seen an episode of House, an MRI is basically a giant electromagnet. You lie down on a long tray bed and get slid right into the middle of the tube. On House if you see them getting an MRI that usually means something horrible is going to happen to them while they’re in it (the magnet rips out an unnoticed piece of metal in their body, or they have a seizure or otherwise start bleeding all over the place etc), but in real life it’s mostly just a tight space with a loud noise while the magnet thumps around in giant circles—sounds like a malfunctioning computer circa 1994. I’m sure it would have been much louder and more annoying without headphones.

For the experiment itself they projected video feed on a screen behind the machine and then reflected it into a mirror right above my face. My job was to lie still look at things while they watched which way my eyes went. First there was a cute “catch the mouse” videogame where a mouse tail would appear in one of the four corners of the screen (all of which were connected by straight up green Mario Bros. pipes), and then when both me and the experimenter were looking at the right corner the picture of the cartoon mouse would show up whole. The kicker was that only one or the other of us got to see the tail hint so the other one had to have Eye Contact skills for the thing to work.

Then there was live or recorded feed of the same experimenter pulling toys out of a blue bucket on her right or a yellow bucket on her left. Look at the bucket where you want her to pull a toy from. Look at the bucket where the blue fish goes (hint: the blue bucket). I know the toys weren’t really for my amusement so much as for the Autistic kids, but damn they had the coolest wind up crab that skittered sideways across the table…

Results
• Bank account +$75
• CD of MAH BRAIN (see below)
• Awesome topic to blog post about
I checked the internet right afterwards too, and it turns out that people are still spergin’ out all over. So no immediate contributions to SCIENCE, unfortunately.

Discussion
WHAT HAVE WE LEARNED?
• Josh is a jerk for making me think it would be a horrible experience
• My head is a terrible shape and I should never shave it bald
• I don’t have a giant death tumor the size of a golf ball lurking in my skull
• Nor have I been abducted by aliens and had a strange metal object implanted in my body (though strange non-metallic objects are still on the table)
• I can make more per hour lying in an MRI than I can teaching gymnastics to the 4 year olds at the rec center

So without further ado, here it is. What you all came here to see: the inside of my skull
(click the permanent link to see the whole thing. Because I still can't figure out how to get my whole pictures on this thing when they hit the column)

http://i6.photobucket.com/albums/y239/Balthazoid/brain1.jpg
SO COOL

2 sketches when I should be writing my novel

2009-06-21T19:00:00.001-07:00

1. How does FB and LinkedIn know (about these people from my real life that I have no electronic connection with)?
I got two computer-generated friend suggestions recently that gave me much pause: Michael B on Facebook and Eric G on LinkedIn.

Michael B is (I am 90% certain) one of my housemates from my term abroad at Oxford (see below)

Eric G is the exceedingly personable friend of my former roommates in Queens, as detailed in this story. (sorry about the shitty formatting)

I have not spoken to either since I parted their company 2 and 4 years ago, respectively. I am friends with neither on any social networking site, nor am I friends with anyone who is friends with them. (I am FB friends with Jane, the girl who got cut out of that picture to the right, but she has over 1,100 friends, none of which are Michael B). I don't even use LinkedIn: I have a grand total of 5 connections, 4 of which were because they added me in the past week (and I only knew this because I got emails to my junk account telling me so).

So HOW does the computer know I knew these people? Can it read my thoughts? Can it see into my past? If so, I need to know so I can GTFO immediately. As a female writer with no programming skills and a less-than-movie-star-quality face/rack*, I will be first against the wall when the revolution comes. A greasy spot on the mainframe.

In all seriousness, I think I might have an answer for Eric**. My LinkedIn is connected to my spam email account - in which Eric is a contact, because he emailed me details about a party back in the day. LinkedIn also suggested a girl I corresponded with briefly on the same account because she was a prospective roommate for my Boston apartment. If so this is still pretty disconcerting, because it reveals that LinkedIn is accessing Gmail without my knowledge, and that anyone who so much as replies to my craigslist ad is a potential BFF. I once heard someone (Maybe Scott Adams) talk about how getting all our social media to talk to each other would be the great paradise of web 3.0 but I don't know if I buy that. Sure, having all the pertinent info in one place would be great (less clicking, more efficient), but I stubbornly insist upon retaining the ability to decide What Is Important For Me To Know.

Character Sketches, in interest of representing them as real people:
Michael B chawed tobaccy. We would all sit around in the living room reading (me 20th C british novels or theory texts, Chris medievel texts in the original Olde Englishe, and Mike critical texts on Dylan poems). And he would spit foul brown asswater into a clear diet coke bottle. To be fair he was also a semi-professional chef who made me bacon on my birthday despite the fact that bacon didn't really exist in Britain as far as we knew.

Eric G was the reason I ended up getting that room in Queens. He ran beautiful interference for my fat slob roommate's complete lack of charm when I went to visit the place. He is without a doubt among the 10 most interesting and manic people I've ever met (think Chaz, think Scotty Iseri. Not that I've met Scotty Iseri but you know). It was at a party at his house that I first saw somebody snort coke.

2. Is it better to keep lists of expensive things you want or not?
My friend Sterling has a government job which is paying him entirely too much money. He had an unusual and disturbing (for him) problem this weekend when he desired to spend some of said money, but could not think of or find anything that he wanted to spend it on. Now this is a pretty classic consumerist paradox, but because I do not have a government job, I do not have money and am therefore anything but anxious about not spending it. So instead, for me the question became:

Should I keep lists of expensive things I want, with the idea of buying them or getting gifted them in the future?

Should I keep a reminder around that I really really want a Fossil brand watch? Or a "We do things My Way or the Hemmingway" T-shirt? (I don't think I need a reminder about how much I want an iPhone/iTouch; they're everywhere)

My list-keeping instinct says yes, that if you keep such a list then you will know what you want when gift-giving holidays roll around, and it will be more efficient and satisfying for everyone involved. (How many times have you strained to think of something when people ask "What do you want for [Christmas][your birthday]?")

On the other hand, my artist's skepticism says no, because if it were really that important, I would remember, wouldn't I? Why perpetuate such blatant consumerist desires? If I forget I gave a shit about a Fossil watch then I'll be happier and richer for it, right?

*I'm sorry for mentioning my boobs twice in two posts. I don't usually think about them this much but they seem socioculturally significant lately

**This explanation does not apply for Mike though, since he never once emailed me! I mean for god's sake we lived in the same flat for 4 months in 2005. There was no need for that sort of thing.

Just Because it's in French Doesn't Mean It's Not a Cheap Gimmick

2009-06-10T23:56:00.000-07:00

American Apparel (motto: “ooo, look at the pretty colors!”) has cornered several niche markets that had been previously neglected, mainly because other companies found them embarrassing. For example: the $20 plain t-shirt, the impossibly shiny things, the gay as fuck. Plus a full line of Rapist eyewear

About half of what American Apparel sells in any given store is clearly meant as a huge joke. The boundaries of ugly and trendy, of legitimate and ironic, have been blurred into postmodern oblivion. But that’s not the end. Far from it.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you:

Le Sac
It’s new! It’s chic! (it’s a dress!) In the America that said Apparel claims to be from, a sac is a nasty unpleasant bulbous protrusion on a spider from whence spill hundreds more baby spiders when popped. But LE Sac is French, and therefore forget everything you know about spiders, or fashion for that matter—just look at what $38 gets you

Oh ho, but that’s not all. AA is big on multifunctionality. Check this out:

A dress that can be twenty other dresses! It can be an entire runway collection! It can get MacGyver out of a tough situation! And yet not one style that accentuates anything good about a woman’s body. It looks like you’re wearing (dare I say?) …a sack.

If your sack isn’t sexy enough, AA advocates cutting it. DIY (no hem necessary) Surely no amount of money would be too much for such a diverse garment?

Let’s take a minute to discuss American Apparel’s other motto: “Double-A or No Way” (AA or Bust?) or more informally, “Breasts? On Women? Hah!” My twins are nothing to turn heads about, but they still exceed the maximum capacity of many American Apparel designs. Just by virtue of being three-dimensional.

Yet another area where Le Sac fails. Where to keep your ta-tas? Maybe the appeal of Le Sac is that you know she’s not wearing anything underneath it.

So on some level, yes, this is not a serious garment, or even a piece of "fashion." But on the other hand, they spent a lot of effort to design, advertise and put this dress into production (well not the design part) and thus they have to be expecting that some people will buy it right? Do they expect those people will want to wear Le Sac, or that they will find it so ridiculous that they want to wear Le Sac?

Claire's note:
I really don't intend to be a fashion writer. They just make it so easy.

This post is not as TMI as it seems

2009-06-05T21:56:00.001-07:00

I was once out with a friend, and she stopped at a gas station to buy a pack cigarettes while I waited in the car. She was the kind of person who was always talking about quitting smoking but never actually did for more than a month at a time. But I don't actively judge the smoking habits of people I don't have to directly kiss so everything was fine.

She got back in the car and dumped four packs of Camel Lights across the console.
"Damn, girl" I said, "that's a lot of smokes. I thought you were going for just one pack?"
She said that she was, but when she went up to the counter the clerk guy said they were having a buy-three-get-one-free sale. At first she declined, but then he changed her mind. "He said 'you know you're gonna smoke them anyway.'" It was true.

So now, four years later, it occurs to me this is also true of tampons. Not in that you're gonna smoke them--in the principle of "buy them now, because you will go through them."

Now here's an unrelated picture if you're feeling uncomfortable about having to think about tampons

Asher Roth is on Eternal Spring Break

2009-05-20T06:30:00.000-07:00

Well it's pretty clear that the Phoenix has no intention of publishing this, or responding to my follow up emails, so here it is.

(I never write music criticism, but this guy set my skull boiling)

The video: I Love College
----------------
Asher Roth is on Eternal Spring Break
Why are his critics willing to put up with it?

In March, the height of Eternal Spring Break, Asher Roth’s boozer anthem “I Love College” climbed as high as 12th on the Billboard charts. His first full album promises to continue the transparent elbow-nudging–it’s deliberately scheduled to drop on 4/20. Asleep in the Bread Aisle will be music critics’ opportunity to redeem themselves for letting this sub-par rapper slide for the last 10 months.

Roth’s message is “let’s feel nice.” His ambition is to be at the party, not to overthrow the status quo. So when he shows up to spring training lobbing softballs, producers and critics alike have found it easier to look the other way rather than hit him with a fast pitch.

Roth’s lyrics as simple and vacant as the lifestyle they endorse (“Drink my beer and smoke my weed/but my good friends is all I need/Pass out at 3, wake up at 10/go out to eat then do it again”), lazily delivered, and punctuated by “Um”s and girls who seem to have no purpose other than to show up naked. If a college party cliché exists, you can bet it merits a mention.

If the worth of a rap song is measured by a standard of “intensity and duration of arms raised in the air” then I Love College excels. Shouts go out to those who love 1. Drinking 2. College (obviously…) and 3. Women. Roth is even polite about it (“If you have a drink/Would you please put it in the air?”). Not since “Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy” has crowd participation been such a compulsive necessity.

College town tours, MTVu appearances, a record deal with Steve Rifkind…Roth owes it all to another unlikely ATL transplant, promoter Scooter Braun. It’s easy to see why Braun is down with Asher Roth—he can’t ignore the cash registers ringing in his head. And of course the bros love “College” (not that their opinion matters beyond their consumer habits). But why is the rest of the hiphop world throwing down for this keg party? Roth opened for Common at Toad’s before heading down south to become SXSW’s internet media darling. Kanye West’s blog leaked a second track from Roth’s forthcoming album called “Lark on my Go-Kart.” Jazze Pha collaborated on yet another Bread Aisle track (“As I Em”).

The critics are in on it too. It remains to be seen how they’ll react to Roth’s full album, but as far as I Love College and his 2008 mixtape The Greenhouse Effect, reviewers have mostly given him a free pass (the LA Times declared him “average”, and avoided the subject by speculating that a recession might be a bad time to be “celebrating being zonked out of your mind through higher education.”). Even Roth’s critics, such as Idolator.com, admit that we could do a lot worse.

To them, Asher Roth is mostly harmless. A suburban white kid with a nonthreatening public face. The problem is, if critics aren’t taking him seriously enough to take him to task, there will be nothing to counter those who are eager to endorse a white rapper (any white rapper) who won’t make waves. For example, XXL, which put him among its “Top Ten Freshmen: Hip-hop’s Class of 2009.” Or Hiphopmusic.com, which crowns him “the great white hope.” Asher Roth’s regression to the lowest common denominator certainly does not represent anything that’s hopeful about the future of hiphop. Enough patronizing.

If we all recognize that Roth’s shtick is “a little too chillax in its bro-friendly stoopidity”, why does Idolator (among others) insist on calling him “self-aware”? Is it because of comments like this one, from an interview with MTV.com?

“I want to start a revolution. I think you can do it with Us. […] With the kids that are kind of conscious and cognizant of what is going on.” Exactly the kind of vacantly optimistic drivel you could get from Any 20-Year-Old Anywhere. Or any self-professed stoner.

“Self-aware” applies here only so far that the term has become synonymous with “deliberately populist.” Pandering is good business, but nothing notably savvy.

One area where Roth does show a glimmer of self-awareness is when he fields asinine (and likely racially motivated) comparisons to Eminem. In Complex last July: “I think content and everything [Eminem and I] rap about is completely different. We’re different artists.” It’s true: all white people don’t rap alike. Music writers should be able to hear the difference.

The unapologetic drunken mediocrity of it all has some floating questions as to whether this college dropout has actually produced absurdist commentary on bro culture. Bull. Back in my day, we had to work for our irony. Now apparently your critics will use it as a defense mechanism. Enough of this postmodernist, tongue-in-cheek approach to art and art-criticism. You can bet that Asher Roth means what he says, especially when he’s saying, Ferris Bueller style, at the end of the I Love College video: “Do I really have to graduate? Or can I just stay here for the rest of my life?”

No Asher: keep doing what you’re doing, and apparently producers, drunk suburbanites, and music critics alike will go out of their way to make sure that you don’t ever have to graduate from bro-pleasing anthem rap.

Strange Youth

2009-04-23T20:31:00.000-07:00

I had a moment of uncertainty recently. I have been spending an inordinate amount of time becoming familiar with the writing of my 18 year old students, which made me a little nostalgic for the days when just being at college was a glorious, exciting and liberating adventure.

Then I wondered: was I like them? I already know that I was a horrible self-righteous tool all through high school, but what was I like when I was a freshman? What was I writing? Was it any good?

I went back into my "Really old work" folder, and found a 2,700 word script rewriting two scenes from Antigone with Sigmund Freud as a major character. Before you start deleting me from your friends lists, this was a school assignment, I swear, not a personal project. (Honors college classes...)

What's more, I wrote it in what looks like a fair approximation of ¿poetic stanzas? Freud of course is in prose, because as I learned in Shakespeare class, all the vulgar characters don't get to speak in iambic pentameter.

Scene: Antigone's buried her dead brother, blah blah blah, Creon's pissed, Freud's hanging around the court

Creon: Antigone! “Is this true? Are you serious?” (178)
“Do you plead innocent of guilty to these things?” (179)

Antigone: “Guilty. I deny not a thing” (179)

Creon: Then tell me if indeed you knew
That an edict of my own proclamation forbade this?

Antigone: [forcefully] “Of course I knew! Was it not publicly proclaimed?” (179)

Creon: Then what influenced your course?

Antigone: You think me some womanly vegetable,
With no intent to act of my own volition, apart from
Blind devotion to whatever little snatch of gossip graces my ear!
Did I choose to disobey you? “Naturally.
Since Zeus never promulgated such a law” (179)
As that which ignores the heavenly destination of man
After he has the coin of this world spent.
I did as such
That my brother may fly among
His equals of character in a place that
Is his rightfully saved, by no cause of yours.
“Hades makes no distinction in its rites and honors” (182)
But it is not my dear brother who will come to know this
It is he who defies the laws of the gods as though
He was amongst them as yet!

Freud: What a spiked tongue on this one. She seeks to strike at your very authority as the
Ruling man in this scheme. “Submission is a thing she’s [obviously] never learnt.”

What the hell, freshman me!? I know this was exciting good fun to write but did I spare even a moment to think of how damn strange this whole endeavor comes off?

Anyway, Freud stalls Creon for time to psychoanalyze Antigone, finds her pretty damn unstable, and tries to convince her that there are no gods (was Freud an atheist? I don't even know).

Antigone: What good is my life here,
If I do not use it to better my world for my gods?

Freud: These gods of which you speak…how do they manifest themselves?

Antigone: They speak to me from within my head.
I see them in my dreams and in my waking moments,
Whispering their commands in my ear
Where they stay until I awake and bring them into action
I heard the same voices telling me to bury Polyneices
As I did the night the disgraced king, my father, brought himself out of power
For his unwitting crimes against the same gods
They told me to follow Oedipus
And visit upon him devotions that his former Theban people could no longer

Freud: And after years of you being at his, your father’s, side, he met a rather sudden
death at Colonus, did he not? You followed this broken man to the ends of the country, only to have him leave you so unannounced and mysteriously.

Antigone: Your words ring true, if only on the surface
There is much below that you care not to stick your hand in

Freud: And your devotion to these gods is absolute? Creon may or may not be morally
solvent, but he does as king have the right to proclaim the law. His words become real, set upon stone and parchment, whereas these gods resound only in the people’s heads, never more real than an imagined voice when no one is in the house.

As the kicker the sentry rats them out, and Antigone still dies, while Freud gets banished from Thebes for spreading anti-zeus blasphemy. Take that you sick fuck.

My television is full of idiots part 1

2009-04-15T22:02:00.000-07:00

This is going to be a series, because it's absolutely true: every time you turn on the television, you will see an idiot. Money-back guarantee.

TiVo technology has advanced significantly within my recent memory, but I still sometimes accidentally see a commercial. In this case, it was a teaser for the upcoming Fox 25 News. Here is the voice over, verbatim (which by the way, was significantly easier to transcribe thanks to TiVo technology):

"Fox undercover found out one local police department has made it their policy to stop using sirens unless it’s an emergency. And it’s putting the public in serious danger! Tonight on Fox 25 News at 10."

Now, I'm not here to "break the news" that local news is a despicable amateur fearmongering deadweight relic of an institution, that combines all the worst parts of the 50s, 80s and 90s into twenty three minutes of transparent archetype hell.*

but Jesus H. Christ

policy to stop using sirens unless it’s an emergency. And it’s putting the public in serious danger. Tonight on Fox 25 News at 10.

unless it’s an emergency.

have you literally covered every potential danger, no matter how bogus or implausible, to such extent that you are now trying to make a story out of the danger of a situation in which THERE IS NO EMERGENCY?
"Nothing happened, and the police car did not run its siren. OH NO WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!"

What kind of outfit has to market itself by saying "watch our show or you will die." ? What kind of mercenary assholes embrace mortal terror as a consumer strategy? And why, if they've done it for so long, are they so damn bad at it? I don't even know which is worse.

It seems I can't go five minutes without hearing about how the print news industry is dying, how the publishing industry is dying, how we're all going to not be able to get jobs and will die alone, blah blah fuck you. Why can't I be hearing about the timely death of Local News and its bullshit?

In conclusion, IT IS INTERNET POLICY TO POST PICTURES ON YOUR BLOG. BUT WHAT YOU DON'T SEE MIGHT KILL YOU. LOOK AT THIS PICTURE OR YOU WILL DIE.

(There's a reason that ex-journalists make great writers. It's because being a journalist is like being in an abusive relationship. It fucks you up.)

*new goal in life: find a writing job where I can get paid by a ratio of adjectives per sentence.

Your dress has too many vaginas in it

2009-04-05T21:58:00.000-07:00

The maximum should be one, and it should remain an internal organ.

This is only made worse by the fact that A. it's a prom dress and B. the company name is Light in the Box.
I'm going to assume it was designed by a disenchanted, disgruntled young feminist cloth-monkey who has been forced to sit in on one too many meetings where the word "magical" was used as an adjective modifying "prom".

PS. Remember that episode of That 70s Show where Bob discovers Donna is on the pill, and is therefore "Open For Business"? This dress is the sign which tells the customers to patronize away
(Sadie linked me to this one, credit props due)

Christian Siriano, spring 2009 RTW collection.
A lot more subtle, and almost sufficiently insulated in "high fashion" (i.e. shows a much more sophisticated notion of vaginal representation, especially for a gay guy).

(sidenote: this image is a bitch to find)

I might start a regular feature of double entendre clothing (I'd call it Freudian Slips but that shit is too easy)

Short one tonight; I'm behind on absolutely everything, and it's all because I'm a slow fiction writer. Damn revision!

Sy-Why?

2009-03-20T08:12:00.000-07:00

I have been on the record about my anger with the SciFi channel ever since they cancelled Farscape in 2002. (I believe my exact words were “Tom Vitale will be first against the wall when the revolution comes”) Apparently a well-written show about an astronaut going slowly insane was way too expensive to produce (those damn Muppets…), and therefore the budget minders chose to pursue an aggressive lineup of Crossing Over with John Edwards and Scare Tactics (a pre-Kutcher reality show where they scare the crap out of people on candid camera).

Now, they are rebranding themselves. “SciFi” is apparently too geeky, and doesn’t cover their wide range of “imagination-based entertainment”. Instead, they’re going to call themselves “SyFy”. Reaffirming my belief that the SciFi channel is run by a bunch of idiots.

http://www.tvweek.com/news/2009/03/sci_fi_channel_aims_to_shed_ge.php

SciFi Channel: You are the George McFly of cable television. Not the Zack Morris. You’re not [your parent network] NBC. Hell you’re not even Fox, which at least embraces its lowbrow 18-34 demographic (and profits like a bandit for it).

It’s 2009; being a nerd is cool. Webcomics about math are de rigueur conversation fodder. The guy next to you daydreams wistfully of working for Google. Geek Monthly is rising to glossy ascendancy. Why are you paying fancypants consultants for the privilege of rebranding yourself into something that has no vowels and could be easily mispronounced like a venereal disease? SciFi sells! SyFy doesn’t mean anything.

David Howe, President of the channel, even admits that if it ain’t broke, fuck with it:

“[By changing to SyFy] We’ll get the heritage and the track record of success, and we’ll build off of that to build a broader, more open and accessible and relatable and human-friendly brand.”

Human-friendly? Nice, David. Alienate* your entire demographic of nerds by calling them NOT HUMAN. Unless you’re referring to all the Venusians or hyper-intelligent mice who round out the market share. Are you too cool for your viewers now?

[*haha]

Here’s my humble suggestion: how about you try working on your product rather than your name? Let’s have a look at SciFi’s Thursday lineup :

5:00 AM PAID PROGRAMMING

7:00 AM TWILIGHT ZONE, THE PRINTER'S DEVIL

8:00 AM TWILIGHT ZONE, THE THE PARALLEL

9:00 AM SCI FI ORIGINAL MINISERIES TIN MAN: PART ONE

11:00 PM SCI FI ORIGINAL MINISERIES TIN MAN: PART TWO

1:00 PM SCI FI ORIGINAL MINISERIES TIN MAN: PART THREE

3:00 PM LOST FLASHES BEFORE YOUR EYES

4:00 PM STAR TREK ENTERPRISE UNEXPECTED

5:00 PM STARGATE SG-1 (SEASON 9) THE SCOURGE

6:00 PM MOVIE FINAL DESTINATION 2

8:00 PM MOVIE JEEPERS CREEPERS II

10:00 PM MOVIE THE DEATHS OF IAN STONE

12:00 AM BATTLESTAR GALACTICA BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: THE LAST FRAKKIN' SPECIAL

1:00 AM X-FILES, THE THE AMAZING MALEENI

2:00 AM MOVIE MONSTER MAN

4:00 AM DOCTOR WHO - SEASON 4 SILENCE IN THE LIBRARY

There are exactly 0 hours of original, first-aired programming. All of their flagship shows were poached from other networks, with the exception of Battlestar (which is ending this year, or so I hear). Most of Friday is a Battlestar Galactica marathon. With literally a dozen wildly successful sci-fi and comic book movies coming out in the past half-decade, the movies they’re showing are Jeepers Creepers II and Final Destination II. Both of which were terrible the I time around.

In sum: it doesn’t matter how you spell it, the SciFi channel are idiots for wasting time and money figuring out how they can make themselves less of a genre network. Which is their exact niche to begin with.

Obama caves to the Right

2009-03-04T18:51:00.000-08:00

Here’s a picture of Obama signing some legislation—maybe to close Guantanamo, maybe to get NPR to shut up about the damn economy and just let me wake up to a nice Gymnopaedie* suite. Either way

Just LOOK at this people!

Barack, I thought you were a man who stood for his principles. I thought you were one of us…

…When you’re left-handed, your watch goes on your RIGHT WRIST.

Who taught you right from wrong, Obama? Big Righty? Embrace your heritage. Sure, we'll die earlier, probably from a freak accident with a common household item (we all know what happened to James Garfield, the first left-handed president), but in the meantime lefties are more original, creative, and all-around awesome. We're also 1,000 times more likely to make blanket statements about how awesome we are backed by only the most superficial evidence.

*By the way, I didn’t spell this properly the first time, and thus learned that, according to Wikipedia, a Gymnopaedia is something entirely different.

EDIT:

Goddamn it, Clinton! You too?!?

Double edit: Ugh why are my pictures all not fitting in the box? Michelle I really need that html help please

What are the kids referencing these days?

2009-02-22T09:18:00.000-08:00

List of outside media my students cited in their papers on prescriptivism vs descriptivism:

1. Romeo and Juliet
2. Monty Python’s Life of Brian
3. Politics and the English Language (Orwell)
4. Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous (George Berkeley)
5. Hey Arnold!
6. Star Wars IV: A New Hope (in the draft only)
7. Laporte’s History of Shit
8. Desert Solitaire (Edward Abbey)
9. Frindle (Clements and Selznick)
10. Plato
11. Darwin
12. Oscar Wilde
13. Martin Luther King Jr.
14. Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People)

I need this like I need

2009-02-21T13:39:00.000-08:00

I've come to put up with a lot from facebook over the years. (It's been like 5 now, holy jesus) Stalkerfeed, application explosion (fucking zombies, fuck off), Scrabulous getting the boot (everyone come finish your games with me on "Lexulous" winkwink nudgenudge)...

But this will not be up with put.

Who you calling "buddy?"

2009-02-01T11:22:00.000-08:00

I was gearing up my righteous feminine indignation to unleash upon http://pmsbuddy.com

How altruistic the whole thing sounds! Pre-emptive broadcasting of your menstrual state without any "awkward conversation" that might inadvertently leave the men in your life confused as to whether you are responsible for your emotions today, or if they are all to be dismissed as a mass fatal gender flaw!

Welcome to PMSBuddy.com!

PMSBuddy.com is a free service created with a single goal in mind: to keep you aware of when your wife, girlfriend, mother, sister, daughter, or any other women in your life are closing in on "that time of the month" - when things can get intense for what may seem to be no reason at all.

For women, this is a great way to give people in your life a heads-up of when you might be feeling a bit irritable without having an awkward conversation.What's more, we will not only keep you informed, but will give you some free advice on what to do about it. With PMSBuddy.com, there is no reason to ever be blindsided by PMS again.

PMSBuddy.com - Saving relationships, one month at a time!

So yes, I was going to hurl scathing deconstructions of the inherent misogyny and general crassness involved here. I was going to Take Back Our Period. It was going to be epic.

Until I saw the National Alert Level.

This was too fucking hilarious.
Armies of PMStrogen Soldiers set to descend upon mankind. Code Red! National Terror Advisory Orange!* Threat level midnight!

PMSbuddy, you have been spared for sheer hilarity. But please note: As a closet romantic, I am still uncomfortable thinking of emotions in terms of aggregate biochemistry. I reject the widespread belief that being--ahem--en rouge has any bearing upon my general existential condition or behavior. And I definitely don't see how it is anyone's damn business.

*Hey, did you know we're still doing This?

Correspondence

2009-01-22T17:57:00.000-08:00

Today I was at Perseus data-entering my way through Copyright.gov (an abomination of a website which I will certainly expound upon in the future) when I received two emails to my personal account, both regarding the same topic.

I'd like to compare and contrast these emails for you now.

Email the first, from Andrew (whose blog is here by the way, not that I have any traffic capital to bring to this but whatever)

Dear Ms B----,

As per our conversation earlier this week, please consider me for the Graduate Reading Series on March 26th.

Cordially yours,

A. Ladd

Formal, cordial, unpunctuated honorific but initialed given name. Respectful of my position of authority as co-curator of said reading series. Clearly British.

Email the second, from his buddy Heinz

Hey baby,
I'm in Philly for [reason] and won't be back to sign up for the reading. Can you squeeze me into March 26 with Mr. Ladd, Ms. L--- and Ms. B---? I'll love you forever?

<3Heinz

Flirty, slightly L33T, getting my attention with flattering but ultimately unfulfillable promises of affection (caveat question mark?). Go go Brotherly Love.

They were both a welcome change from the bazillion emails I've been getting from freshmen who want to add my writing class. One (the only one I would consider overloading for) did not show up to the first class meeting as instructed, because "my advisor told me there wouldn't be enough chairs even if I did." (Are the academic advisors here really as stupid as I think they are? Which is to say, almost as stupid as the people in the career services center?)

Today I got one from a girl who is legitimately enrolled already with a question about the reading. Addressed

"Dear Professeur"

That's right baby. I'm going French. You'll find me teaching class in the café, from a tattered paperback, consuming no fewer than 3 unhealthy substances simultaneously.

What else have we learned? Having a broken comma key is not only ghetto and ugly, it makes html a bitch too.

Suffer, little children

2009-01-07T19:46:00.000-08:00

Why do we encourage little children by telling them they could grow up to be President someday? As if being President were the absolute pinnacle of individual achievement? In many ways, becoming president is a monumental achievement of Being In the Right Place, At The Right Time, Saying the Right Things. You've achieved getting people to listen to you. You've achieved "convincing people that you are better than the other guy" and "raising lots of money".

Then, once you get there, in many ways, being President sucks. You're always under scrutiny. You have to do unpopular things, and if you really screw up history will never forgive you. You have to answer some real tough questions and deal with some real despicable assholes. You are in danger of being assassinated.

Only a very select few people would actually be happy having the responsibilities of a President (and I suspect a lot of these people are the types of people who become politicians, which should tell you something)

Even while we're telling the little kiddies that becoming president is achievable, what we're actually saying is that it is quite UNachievable. Otherwise, why would it be a big awe-inspiring deal? We don't say "Johnny, you can be anything when you grow up...even a COMMUTER!" ("a LOTTERY WINNER!")("a THRASH METAL GUITARIST!")

In an infinite universe, sure, we could all be President someday. And as W. Bush proved, the vast majority of us have a basic level of competence high enough not to destroy the world in the process. But if I were given the choice to either be President for the next four years, or get the same salary to do a random high-level office job, the smart choice would be the latter. We can debate whether my narcissism or pathological desire for adventure would allow it later. The point is, why are we setting the presidency as a gold standard for our children?

Me and Hu

2009-01-07T01:30:00.000-08:00

I've been reading the message boards at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Some people over there have a highly annoying and highly controversial (among academics, mind you, who will nigh on come to blows over the Oxford Comma* ) habit of using "hu" as a gender-neutral pronoun, either out of a paranoid desire to maintain complete anonymity when posting about the blasé ways their students email them to demand higher grades, or to usher in a brave new world of equality among Man and Woman, I'm not sure which.

Resulting in gems like:
"Someone needs to tell this student that hu should be doing hu's own research!!! If hu can't figure out this sort of thing on hu's own, hu has no business in a PhD program."

I for one am anti-hu, and not just because the objections to it are way funnier:
“‘Hu’ for the English language is like nipples for men.”
“Hu is a literary burqa.”
“Hu do hu think hu are?”

I am anti-hu because it sound awful (I am not an owl, going hu hu hu all night long). Because it makes what should be an innocuous pronoun stick out from the sentence. Like the bridesmaid at a wedding who wants all the attention on her, when her purpose is to stand in line. Because nor does using hu actually serve either of those “purposes” for which it was invented. If by some paranoid coincidence an internet detective happens to take a malicious interest in your petty case, gender is probably the least helpful bit of information you could give. Congratulations, you’ve narrowed the pool down to ~7 million. Knowing if an anonymous student is a he or a she is completely extraneous—except of course, if you’re interested in clarity. Why the hell would professors be interested in having that in their stories?

And as far as gender-neutral pronouns righting 6 millennia of sexual oppression, one internet message board at a time...if you're the kind of person that believes in this kind of thing, then attempting to convince you otherwise would be about as productive as rolling a mythical boulder up the hill. Take your place next to the insufferable Orshee (from Straight Man). In any case, I don’t want to hear from hu.

*I am on the other hand a huge proponent of the Oxford Comma, and not just because I get a pleasant tingly sensation whenever I think of Oxford.

OKC poetry guy: Really?

2008-12-23T14:58:00.000-08:00

I don't remember why, but I signed in to my OKCupid account about a week ago, despite having no real desire to actually use it. The result is, now I am listed as having logged in "in the past month" and thus I have started receiving messages again. The way this is supposed to work is you view someone's profile, find them moderately cute and witty, vet the books section to make sure their listings meet your standards, and then send them a quick intra-site email which says "You're cute, talk to me." (that's the subtext. the best practice for the actual text is an issue of much theorizing and dispute).

Of course I get the ones from desperate balding over-30s who all represent themselves as maverick world travelers and don't give a shit that our "match percentage" is well under sixty. Nothing interesting there. Another I received this week was from a guy in Bloomington Indiana who, near as I can tell, was just going about his regular day when the random mailing of my profile caused him to have an epiphany--it was so much more subtle and elegant than the one of the local girl he'd just been looking at ("she was 'telling' instead of 'showing'").

This one, though...this one really takes the cake. Why spend time writing a sincere and relevant message when you can copy and paste bad poetry?!

i can't believe you are single!
seriously
seeing a beauty like you on this site
makes me think that being on here is worth it
but how can you even be here?
don't good-lookers like you wag your fingers
or snap 'em
and then
poof!
a hottie guy just sort of
shows up at your door?
or slinks up to you on the cold streets of Boston?
crazy. crazy!
but i HAD to email you, of course.
i couldn't let you slide by without saying hi.
it's just this man's style.

Easy, tiger.

5 years late to the blogvolution

2008-12-23T14:51:00.000-08:00

My blog sure is ugly. I know this. Please do not hold its uglitude against me until I figure out how to make nice with HTML. My meager powers of [b] and [a href], have proven inadequate to the task. I also do not understand why, as I'm typing this, the font occasionally jumps back into Times New Roman. These are questions I will have to ask myself.

If any of my more blog-havey friends out there are willing to help me parse that wall of text that is the html editor, I would be most grateful.

Pre-construction: or, I almost have a blog now

2008-12-11T20:33:00.000-08:00

The brainstorm list for what this blog would be called (mostly taken from old quote books)

Hill Valley 2015
What happens once might as well not happen at all
Paralyzed Doctor Octopus
Kosher of Ignorance
[][][][] wackadoo
vibrating cow
cow masturbator
Normal Uncertainty
Fraught with Scandal
Thou Ruinous Butt
Witches' Bris
Strip Pinata
Tap-dancing minister in a wheelchair
Faint in their pants