Tag: ranting and politics

Imax, slasher films, pornography

I feel a meandering mind-map coming on, starting from an essay about slasher movies by Carol Clover (roughly summarized here ) that I read in this anthology about gender in myth.

On the civilized side of the continuum lie the legitimate genres; at the other end, hard on the unconscious, lie the sensation or ‘body’ genres, horror and pornography, in that order. …

It is a rare Hollywood film that does not devote a passage or two— a car chase, a sex scene— to the emotional and physical excitement of the audience. But horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success…

I’ve seen a lot of people try to show that horror and pornography are related, usually based on some inarticulate statement about the similarity of sex and death. This bodily-sensation aspect seems like a more accurate connection. It’s got me editing my ideas about pornography (again), too.

For the last couple of years, my working definition has been that something is pornographic (to me) when it is presented for its own sake with no intention to communicate further meaning. Literal as opposed to symbolic, I guess. Showing literal sex rather than any experience of eroticism, or showing literal blood and gore rather than communicating a meaning of injury or death or fear (a la gore-porn). I don’t mean that as a diss to actual porn, more as an explanation of why I call Cute Overload cute-porn, and why I sometimes object to the ways other people use hyphenated, non-sexual porn labels. (I’m not sure I experience the Ikea catalog as storage-porn just because it shows a lot of shelving.)

This sensation definition is way simpler, and avoids having to argue about what is meaningful or symbolic. Since porn is some of the most intensely deconstructed media around and easily supplied with symbolic meaning, I think this simple sensation definition is a lot more accurate too. So thanks for that, early nineties essay collection.

Thinking about movies that are made for my body got me thinking about imax. All I want from a six-story tall movie is a strong sense of vertigo! I see an imax film about once every two years, but in my limited sampling they seem to be getting less motion-sick overall. Anybody have better evidence on that? (Tosczaks, or other bearers of yearly passes?) At the least, I’ve been disappointed with the imax films I’ve been seeing. I don’t want a plot at the imax, I want a bodily experience. More helicopter shots going over a cliff, please. I want imax to be more pornographic. Imax has not been fulfilling its potential.

So yup. The other idea I want to store here is about “legitimate” genres. I don’t really buy the idea that they’re less focussed on bodily sensations. The most pretentious, high-class films I’ve seen could be called superiority-porn. Feeling superior is a real sensation, although not often acknowledged as a physical/chemical state. I just dug up a clip from the Helvetica movie where Erik Spiekermann explains that he just likes looking at type. “Other people look at bottles of wine, or whatever, or you know, girls’ bottoms. I look at type.” He looks; it feels good. I’ve only seen the trailers, but that documentary is clearly modernist-typography-porn, and totally classy. (Or, ahem, neutral.)

The pretense seems to be that some cinematically-induced sensations are intellectual, rather than bodily, which actually seems very similar to my original working definition about pornography being devoid of meaning. So again, why am I reading anthologies about symbol and myth in these “body” genres if they are so literal and physical? This seems like a very weird manifestation of the usual classist aesthetic distinctions, where “legitimate” good taste just happens to be whatever working class / uneducated / trashy people don’t appreciate. Classy movies are secretly about sensations, and trashy movies are secretly full of cultural symbolism. Oops.

I’m probably specifically bad at this game— personality quiz questions on the theme of “do you pay more attention to rational thoughts or gut feelings” make my head explode, because surely thoughts and feelings exist in the same soup. I mean, you have to feel whether you’re being honest about your logic; I don’t know any other way. From now on I’m paying special attention to how my body feels when I watch fancy art films.

Reading Marjane Satrapi interviews

A hand-animated movie version of Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi’s two-part graphic novel about growing up in Iran during the 1980s Islamic Revolution, will apparently be out on December 25. I’m curious about this movie. I read the first of the two books quite awhile ago, and I remember liking it, but I’ve been doing a lot of thinking and learning since then and I wonder how I’d find it now. I think it has promise.

Out of this curiosity, I’ve been reading a bunch of interviews with Marjane Satrapi. She’s pretty opinionated and direct, so even though the same topics come up over and over, I like to read her responses.

Most press I’ve seen about her is by writers who see her books as “complex,” because she writes about “good” people who do bad things and “bad” people who do good things. In interviews, she talks a lot about dealing with people as individuals rather than making assumptions based on their culture or race (that really doesn’t sound complex). But in this recent promo interview in the NY Times, the journalist seems to want Satrapi to act as an anti-fundamentalism or anti-Islam spokeswoman, rather than taking the usual “complex,” general progressive stance.

All that intro (hmm…) so that I can announce: I love the turn that interview takes, right here.

Your books denounce Islamic fanaticism, particularly as it curtails the rights of women. Is that your main theme? Oh, no, not at all. I don’t consider myself as a feminist but more a humanist.

Still, in your work, you are constantly contrasting your love of food, smoking and sensual pleasures with the acts of self-denial demanded by the mullahs, like wearing a chador. It’s a problem for women no matter the religion or the society. If in Muslim countries they try to cover the woman, in America they try to make them look like a piece of meat.

Are you suggesting that veiling and unveiling women are equally reductive? I disagree. We have to look at ourselves here also. Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?

I never really thought about goose anatomy. I looked when I was on a farm in France.

I am making an effort to barf more on this blog, and to write long-winded, feelings-based rambles like when I first started making the vagina website, ages ago. But I am still self-conscious about it. I have realized that even though I was always in favour of keeping my various websites fairly integrated and putting the vagina website on my resume etc, it’s been a really long time since I wrote anywhere that I actually expected my friends might read, rather than just writing for internet strangers. Not as fearless as I thought. So, working on that. Fewer “this sure is long” disclaimers in the future.

Red and blue, glass and shoes

Smashed glass and stripey shoes, originally uploaded by dreadfuldan.

When I wore mary janes a lot, I used to be into the toes turned in thing. This photo is suddenly making me uncomfortable about it, presented like that with no irony at all regarding women in fancy shoes standing like little girls. I’m hoping my general hairiness was enough to contrast and balance the baby toes.

I had never related the toes to the shoes until last week. I noticed that when I wear my boots I tend to stand like Captain America, feet planted especially wide. Design affordance, I guess. Superhero boots afford superhero stances.

About this new design

I feel like a bit of a wanker talking about My New Website Design since the point for me is to be self-explanatory (I already talked about this stuff by posting the design). But I do like talking about design in regular words too, so here goes.

  • The monster’s name is Pearl. That takes some pressure off.
  • Mouthful of words.
  • Guts out.
  • Memento mori in general, and in specific.
  • These colours make me want to work.
  • The monster is modelled after the radiator that faces our toilet.

Toilet monster

  • There are more hiding throughout the apartment.

Hey you.

Sex, death and consensual education

Christina Aguilera as a schoolgirl in a Skechers ad.

I’ve finished reading Instead of Education, one of John Holt’s influential tomes about unschooling and home schooling. As soon as I started typing my notes into the thesis wiki, I had to make a Vagina deja vu category to keep track of all the concepts I recognized from studying women’s sexuality and reproduction over at All About My Vagina. The root of all the deja vu seems to be one single thing, and it’s one of my favourite things, too! It’s consent.

John Holt spends a lot of Instead of Education making the point that compulsory education is, by nature, oppressive and unethical. (The book is a bona fide manifesto! ‘Students, you have nothing to lose but your chains’… the whole deal. I liked it.) My favourite quotes on this topic are in the wiki:

This seemed vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t put my finger on why until, about a hundred pages in, Holt started writing about teacher-learner relationships. He insists that because these relationships involve one person assuming a position of authority and power (the teacher), teaching relationships need to be temporary, well defined, and free to leave. Maybe I’m the only person who hears that and thinks immediately of BDSM, but I think it’s a really useful parallel!

There is a huge amount of sex writing about boundaries, relationships, temporary roles, domination and, above all, consent. I think what John Holt was after was consensual education. When he talks about the impossibility of consensual education within the framework of compulsory schooling, he sounds exactly like lesbian feminists who believe hetero sex is automatically oppressive within a patriarchal society. It’s about consent, and the circumstances under which it is possible.

My favourite discussion of consensual sex is The Ethical Slut‘s characterization of consent as an active collaboration for the benefit, well-being and pleasure of all persons concerned. An ‘active collaboration’ is exactly the kind of learning John Holt promoted. E.g.,

Like a few children I know in the U.S., [unschooled children from Ny Lilleskole in Denmark] are probably much more able than most of their [conventional] schoolmates (who can only submit or resist it) to make use of [conventional] school, to get from it at least some of the things they want for their own reasons.

It makes perfect sense that a freedom loving gal such as myself would want all relationships to be consensual, but I’d never thought of teaching as a relationship. I started to wonder what other situations I might enjoy more by examining the relationships involved and finding ways to make them consensual.

I think this definitely applies to self-defense (I had trouble making sense of it until I realized that being attacked is a relationship, not a situation). Cooperation and competition in business is another one.

Mainly though, I think this might be a good way to think about dying and death. There are obvious hot topics about death and consent (euthanasia, living wills, etc), but I wonder what could be gained by trying to have a consensual relationship with Death itself. It clearly has terms of engagement; maybe I could come up with my own set of terms and we could collaborate.

Our town

Last night I found more people who have independently created a fantasy about choosing a small town and moving there with all their friends. This makes… five times, I think, in the last few months, that I’ve run into this daydream.

It’s straightforward enough: pick a small town with cheap real estate, move there with all your friends. All of you make some contribution like growing organic vegetables or opening an indie cinema. Get enough people on board to make the town really cool. Optional bonus features include buying a huge statue for the center of town— say, one of the Lenins that periodically gets offloaded by former Eastern block countries— or hiring a promising architecture student to design a whole street or subdivision, like a mini version of Gaudi’s Barcelona.

I’ve heard different opinions on the ethics of taking over a town, and how to be respectful of the existing townsfolk, but the main idea doesn’t seem to surprise anybody.

So now I’m curious. Why is this such a common fantasy right now? What is it about?

I wonder about a couple of things. (Warning: I’m high on coffee and I’m about to dork out.)

Fear of complexity. I might as well put this first; it’s the only thing I seem to talk about these days. Is the desire to move to a small town, where it is easy to be influential, a reaction to overwhelming complexity? Cities are second only to maybe anthills as the most commonly discussed example of systems that are too complex to understand or control without special new theories, and where individual actions have unpredictable impacts on the whole. Could moving to a small town be a way to get away from information overload and find a less confusing, more simplistic cultural life?

The death of indie. I’ve complained before about how the indie/hipster counterculture has become pretty much just a commercial shopping habit. We’ve had what, twenty five years worth of young people moving to the big city to get in the loop with indie culture (meet tastemakers, be creative, go to shows, buy sneakers, etc)? I think of moving to a small town as a hipster fantasy, because that’s who I hear it from and also because having a freelance creative job— the kind of thing you could transplant to a small town— is kind of a hipster ideal. Are hipsters ready to find a new way to be countercultural, now that everything indie is so mainstream and so designer? Seeking cheap rent is, to me, usually a sign that people want more time to work on changing something, or more time to participate in something meaningful. Or, is this like the last gasp of hipster vanity, to get into a pond so small that you can be indie and amateur and still be the biggest fish around?

Displacement. The more obvious factor is just how expensive cities are getting, and this one in particular. This is basic gentrification— a neighbourhood gets expensive and only one kind of people can afford to live there anymore. All the diverse tradespeople, artists, families, students, businesses and various workers who made the neighbourhood awesome go somewhere cheaper. Maybe this desire for everybody to move to the same place is just a survival instinct, trying to preserve the diverse, fun city life by moving it to a sort of cultural nature reserve. Is the idea of moving to a remote, small, undesirable town a protective manoeuver, to get as far away as possible from invasive condo developments, and to avoid ever being displaced again?

OK! No more explainy voice! I keep turning this over in my head to see if it would actually be an awesome thing to do, or whether it would be a weird, defensive, vain thing to do. I can’t decide. (I also can’t imagine getting many people to commit to such a plan… but still I must get to the bottom of it, for some reason.)

Swallowing the toad

I’ve been catching up on some internetto that I neglected while I was on vacation, and while I was really busy before I went on vacation. So I was listening to an October podcast on 43 folders, where Merlin Mann interviews David Allen about procrastination.

It’s a great little interview, although I didn’t get any new ideas out of it (probably because I’ve read practically everything Merlin has every published on the internet… while avoiding work of course). But I did get really fascinated by the phrases and metaphors David used to describe the kind of personal epiphany where you stop being afraid of secret parts of yourself, and just get on with your life. He first describes the topic starting at 2:18.

The thing that is closest to your soul is the thing you’re gonna avoid the most. The thing that will tap into… the part of you that has not yet come to the fore but wants to be expressed but you’re so afraid of it— you will absolutely find every single thing in your life to avoid doing that.

And that one… there is no trick about that one. You just need to be aware of that.

(Aside: business people are so much more into self help than aging single women. I’m waiting for a Bridget Jones type franchise about a bumbling marketing manager with a heart of gold.)

This being-aware-of-your-fear thing is kind of an ongoing theme in our house. I’m really big on solving personal distress by looking for the scariest or most embarrassing course of action, since it is probably the thing I want to do the most. Lately, Galen has been into a similar thing— in his gentler way— of trying not to be afraid by accident. These both sound just like what David mentions.

I don’t have a name for these assorted processes, but I like to collect the metaphors people use to describe them. I say things like “it popped” or “pop the cork” a lot, or things like “cut to the chase”— aggressive shortcuts. Alternately, I talk about hunting and finding and getting to the bottom of things, about being thorough or honest. And then I have my hard-ass forms of encouragement like “grow up,” “suck it up” and “skip to the good part.”

The David uses some familiar words—

  • jump right to the real bottom line
  • show up
  • uncork
  • step up to the plate

It’s funny to me that a mental experience can spark common physical metaphors in different people. I’m a little weirded out by how kinetic— almost violent— most of these are. Pop, jump, cut.

So, simple contrast might be the main reason I like my favourite version so much. I found this description on a random mailing list archive: swallowing the toad. Evocative, yet gentle! It’s more like “take your medicine” than “smash your fear,” and I appreciate a peaceful option.

The post attributed the phrase to Jung, but I haven’t been able to find other references to this anywhere. Maybe it’s a blissful mistranslation? In any case, cheers to finding more toads.

This is the dawning…

This is a bit flaky, but I’d like to propose that we are living in The Age of Complexity. Not the information age, or the age of media, internet, connectivity or whatever, but the age of complexity. I think that’s the primary obstacle in modern problems and stresses: how to stop clinging to simplified half-truths and start understanding complex, interconnected systems. Naming the thing might help us to remember to figure it out.

Complexity— and how counter-intuitive everybody seems to find it— comes up everywhere these days: in media and internet, software design, urban planning, health, environmentalism, psychology, and anything that tries to organize a group of people. I think George Lakoff’s work with the Rockridge Institute, to provide priorities and frames for progressive ideas, is part of dealing with complexity, even though his books are about politics and linguistics, not systems theory.

I’ve been thinking about generalism and distributed knowledge for my independent education project, too, which just struck me as a sort of complex system of learning. Rather than specializing in a particular field, I’m trying to figure out what would count as graduate level work on a general problem (the topic so far is what I want my death to be like). And rather than hook up with a structure or institution, I’m trying to use a lot of small, independent resources. This pleases me more and more, because it suits how I think about information and the web, etc. (Is that called symmetry, when different levels or parts of a system have the same patterns?)

So. This is the link that finally put me over the edge, when I was catching up on Kottke today.

I wanted to ask a more general question: how can people stop needing simple stories, and what can we use instead? I remember, back when I first started making websites in the ’90s, when I first understood hypertext as an alternative to linear narrative, it seemed like the same idea that Kottke is looking at, up there, in the history of science. (How’s that for a hyper sentence, remembering things in the past and present? It seems accurate so I’m going to leave it.) My favourite websites are still the ones that use links as complex context, instead of in sequence.

All of this is just the last chapter of Death and Life of Great American Cities all over again. That’s the chapter where Jane Jacobs describes the kind of problem a city is, and suggests that human knowledge needs new tools to understand organized complexity. The longer I live after reading that book, the more I can’t believe how many people haven’t read it, or how I hadn’t heard of it until I was 25. I come back to that book all the time, and it wasn’t even the first thing I read about complexity or emergent systems.

I think the reason Death and Life had such an impact on me might be because Jane Jacobs is so definite and concrete in that book— she really captures the “aha” of suddenly seeing patterns in chaos, of seeing the bigger, realer simplicity. She sums up the problem of cities in only four principles. Four!

The books I’d read before were much looser. Christopher Alexander’s pattern language for designing houses and cities has over 200 items. Godel, Escher, Bach never intends to sum up intelligence in a set of patterns, although it nearly does anyway. Jane Jacobs got her perspective down to a tight, efficient package, without simplifying anything. It’s inspiring.

There are more general introductions to complexity and emergence (like say, Emergence), but I would still recommend Death and Life as the essential tome on the subject. So far. I’m still learning.

Compassion for freaks who buy the t-shirt

I just finished reading Douglas Rushkoff’s old book, Playing The Future, about how people are adapting to the digital age and how it isn’t the end of the world (I gave it 3/5 on Amazon). He points out the conflict between rebel attitudes in subcultures like skateboarding and snowboarding (the book came out in 1996) and the masses of commercial logos and general expense of those sports. Buying commercial products to display your outsider status.

I have noted this commercialism in a lot of subcultures that for me are about DIY or revolutionary acts— geeks buy gadgets, crafters buy stash, sex activists buy toys, environmentalists buy organic, hipsters buy everything, even vagina-body-image nerds have products they promote.

This sometimes gets me down. What is wrong with people that they can’t rise above shopping? Two little quotes that I’ve been saving up are helping me appreciate rebel shoppers.

If your popular revolution demands that its adherents eschew popular culture it’s not going to be very popular.

– Cory Doctorow in conversation with RU Sirius

The fallacy is to think that social networks are just made up of people. They’re not; social networks consist of people who are connected by a shared object.

Jyri Engeström on ‘object-centred sociality’, after Karin Knorr Cetina

To me, activities and ideas can be excellent objects to share with friends, but it is starting to make sense that people are eager for more and more stuff to share with their outsider pals. Why just knit together when you can fetishize handspun yarn as well? Maybe sometimes that’s just friendly, not so much evidence of weird addiction.

Compassion for teenagers

I get the Baby Fever off and on, and I usually try to remember that babies don’t stay babies, and that if I want to spawn I’ll have to learn to love a teenager. The hormonal creepiness, the narcissism, the volume levels. I’ve actually been practising this, more because I like new skills than because I am laying away emotional supplies for a baby event. I am like a bird-watcher, for teenagers, except I don’t follow them to their nests or anything.

My favourite teenager thing right now is watching little groups of 14 year old girls out on their own. Physically, they are hilarious— even in groups of eight or nine kids, you only get one of each kind. Small and skinny, big and moosey, tall and gangly, eerily voluptuous: nobody has caught up to anybody else by 14, and nobody understands her own hair. I call these groups Variety Packs.

I’ve come to realize that an easy way to love teenagers is to basically laugh about how ridiculous they are. It’s about camp: “Oh, they’re so terrible— I love them!” I’m working on finding a less condescending way to appreciate pupating humans, but for now, the I’m so bershon Flickr pool is feeding my addiction.

A start: normal dying processes

I’ve heard a lot of stories of dying people needing to get a good sleep before they have enough energy to die, or of dying at contrived times like right before an annoying doctor is due to show up, or right after seeing a new baby relative.

I’m sure a lot of those stories are coincidence, but I’m intrigued by the idea that dying is an action the body takes, rather than an event that just happens when the body fails. Zoe pointed out the other day that many people think of death as a failure of medicine, rather than as a normal event in everyone’s life. To me, thinking of death as an active, biological process makes it seem more like a normal function (which I’m interested in, for now).

This morning I’ve been hunting for information about the normal dying process, and how it varies, and whether there are conflicting models for “normal” death responses the way I’m familiar with different, biased models of sexual response from working on my vagina website (and indeed, Kubler-Ross’ stages of grief seem to draw similar controversy to Masters and Johnson’s model of the human sexual response cycle).

Zen Hospice has a great overview of the physical changes a person goes through as they die, from a hospice perspective. I recognize all of those symptoms from the few people I’ve known at the end of their lives. I can see immediately why there are so many comparisons between giving birth, having orgasms, and dying: all involve extreme physical responses that start to seem normal when you know what to expect. Learning about the physical symptoms of dying feels a little like getting to know the birds in your neighbourhood or something: gaining context.

Graceful Exits:How Great Beings Die apparently deals with conscious dying and dying on purpose, such as the idea of elders wandering off alone into the woods to die. It sounds a bit flaky (i.e., possible use of ambiguous generalizations like “aboriginal cultures”), but still really compelling to me. I’m all for special skills, and this intro sort of makes dying sound like a superpower:

Then the person is left alone. He or she sits down, and within a matter of minutes is able to intentionally close down the body and die.

That would be both more and less useful than being able to cry on command.

But, from my scattered reading this morning, I gather that I should do some searching for literature about “deathing” and “timing of death” rather than the process of dying. It’s a bit weird that “dying” gets used more as adjective than as a form of the verb “to die.” When a person “dies” that describes the moment of death fairly precisely, but when a person “is dying” that could refer to almost any stage of life or illness or injury.

This is the kind of jargon I should figure out soon— it’s hard to organize notes when you don’t know the names for things (and stuff).

Research on defanging

I’m a little bit fascinated with the idea of going over to hipsters’ houses when they aren’t around, and rifling through their pop culture possessions.

It seems like if you read all a hipster’s books, watched all her movies, listened to all her music, played with all her toys, and looked at all her web bookmarks, she’d have no way to show off her cultivated taste and connections. I think of this as a defanging. “I’m not much for using media consumption for cool points” is how I characterized this fascination over on MOG.

I haven’t quite gotten to the bottom of this defanging fantasy yet, but this CPU post about creating The Nod has at least given me a solid idea about a website I could make to express my troubles.

Sit in a cafe with a Mac PowerBook, and chances are you’ll get The Nod… Display GNOME on your ThinkPad and you’ll get The Nod. But run Windows on your Dell and you won’t.

Why do some things get The Nod but not others? And isn’t it really the user that gets The Nod, and not the product?…

The Nod is a way for one user to tell another:

“We’re smarter.”

Or

“We’re risk-takers.”

Or

“We’re more indie.”

Or

“We’ve been at this from the beginning (unlike these clueless newbies).”

Or…

Gross! I do love that this article was written for marketers, and I think that’s what unlocked my articulation on this issue. It sounds catty and obvious to declare that it’s shallow and maybe vain to use commercial products to proove your identity, but somehow hearing marketers make up catchphrases about it (“The Nod”?) gives me the necessary boost up onto my high horse.

So this defanging website, to express my troubles. I tried out several previous possibilities on Galen, but they all seemed doomed to hypocrisy.

My latest version is this: it would be fun to interview people about what they like to do and how they spend their time, and simply refuse to print any anecdote containing a brand name, a catchphrase, a club affiliation, or the like. Basically anything you could get A Nod about would be blanked out. Maybe even retroactively, if something you mentioned was easily imitated and sparked a trend. It could be sort of a Last Person Standing competition in inimitability.

It ties a little into this quote I read in the beginning of an Ansel Adams photography textbook. I think it was originally about Mozart, and it said something to the effect that “It’s no great accomplishment to be the first to do something. What we should aim for is to be the last; to do something so extraordinary that it can never be repeated.”

Of course I needed an anarchist’s perspective

Why didn’t I think earlier to look for anarchist and class-struggle critiques of V for Vendetta? I came out of the theatre thinking that the movie, in which the politics are less extreme, made me appreciate the book’s take on anarchy and revolution all the more. The movie was a good foil for the book, in other words, besides being a fun movie.

This anarchist’s take on the movie covers lots of good ground, especially, I think, regarding modern anarchist ideas as something of a fairy tale— fitting for an action movie.

The comic, and to a lesser extent the film, are often viewed as anarchist. I would submit that they are “anarchist “ mostly because at the time of the writing, the anarchists had the most new, vibrant and semi-underground white subculture. … I think it’s mostly seen as anarchist because anarchist theory is so heavily mythological when it comes to revolution.

The general strike has historically been the mythical event that was most often cast to usher in the new world. Leaving the caveman fetishists aside (who, no, I don’t view as “real” anarchists), the critique of vanguardism and political manipulation has left anarchists, in a post-revolutionary union world, without a grounded theory of revolution. Paris ’68 suggested that students spraypainting walls, refusing to attend class, and fucking in the streets might be enough to disrupt the “Spectacle” and push people towards true awareness of their role in society of oppressed and oppressor. …

… Many anarchists and fellow travelers are so starved for positive signs that we mistake repackaged hipness as revolutionary art.

Mostly I like seeing him criticize the theory in the movie, while still obviously appreciating it as an entertaining movie. So balanced, so personable.

Off to read the further commentary linked from that post!

Fair tax and other aphrodisiacs

Grist has a great little article about economic responsibility, the neglected cousin of social and environmental responsibilities.

Much more than most progressive or activist websites, Grist seems to make an effort to come up with a simple vision of priorities, and start pushing the vocabulary to go with it. I appreciate their thoroughness, and skill. In this piece, the writers suggest we need to refocus on gigantic environmental issues like global warming, and we can’t do that without more sustainable economics.

Incidentally, how did economists get to be such rock stars on the internet? It started before Freakonomics, maybe to do with social software engineering and online community theory? It’s Clay Shirky’s fault maybe? I have no basis for this hunch.

In any case, the latest bit of Grist that puts a twinkle in my eye:

Economic issues have long been the poor cousins within the corporate-responsibility debate. For many years, they were considered to be synonymous with financial issues, and widely assumed to be well managed. But as concerns like fair trade, fair pricing, and fair wages have increasingly made headlines, it has become clear that economic issues are surprisingly ill-understood by most corporations, and an underrepresented dimension of the corporate-responsibility agenda.

And getting into the meaty words and definitions:

Let’s just toy with one of these dimensions: economic equity. This addresses the reasonably transparent — and certainly strategic — management of the creation and distribution of wealth. It includes issues like fair trade; fair wages (is it reasonable for 50 cents of the price of a $100 sneaker to go to production workers, and $18 to the retail labor selling them?); fair pricing (is it reasonable for the world’s poorest to pay from two to 20 times as much as the richest for their food, water, energy, and drugs?); and — the new humdinger — fair tax (is it responsible for business to see corporate taxes purely as a cost to be avoided, rather than part of their “social contract” with society?).

‘Fair tax’ would be a hot response to any mention of ‘“tax relief”:http://www.rockridgeinstitute.org/projects/strategic/simple_framing,’ which is a phrase that I notice has started popping up in Canada now that we’ve got a conservative federal government. (“Hot response?” Hot? This is what I’m talking about. Since when do economic buzz words have sex appeal?)

Activist patterns

I posted this in a discussion about The Grim Meathook Future over on Warren Ellis’ new Die Puny Humans site.

I find all this talk of leaders and critical masses and movements fascinating. To my mind, everything keeps getting more fractured and more complicated and we can’t put it back in a nice tidy box. Simple, reductionist, comprehensible viewpoints only lasted until we built machines that could handle thousands of variables at once. Now look how many things actually have thousands of variables at work. Practically every news story boils down to “it had more consequences than we thought.”

I don’t think any kind of movement will gel. These problems are bigger than human minds can handle, at least the way we’re used to thinking. When, before now, have average peasants fancied they might figure out how to alter the course of every society on earth in this level of detail? I think progress will be about learning to deal with complexity, and not just the parts with catchy names like “emergence” or “the long tail.” Parts like “a land war in Asia” or “we’re all getting cancer.”

Lots of fields have formal techniques for dealing with complexity. “Scale later” in software, etc. I’d be really curious to collect similar patterns from activists or politicians.

Then I immediately thought of a bunch of possible patterns and places to find them. I’m going to post them here, before I go see to what degree my comment has been eviscerated by other puny humans. I can’t believe I said “practically every…” on the internet. Bring on the nitpickers!

These are mostly about compassion.

  • The Fog of War documentary about Robert MacNamara by Errol Morris talks a lot about understanding your enemy and understanding that war is very complicated
  • Cory Doctorow says, “If your popular revolution demands that we give up on popular entertainment it won’t be very popular.” I think that’s a big part of the problem facing environmentalism these days.
  • The Ethical Slut gave me a lot of ideas about getting what I want without imposing on other people, and about finding ways to collaborate.
  • Fernando Flores gave me ideas about using trust as a tool for change, and as a good partner for criticism. I wish his books weren’t so ’80s.
  • I’d really like to hear Heather Corrina’s ideas about patterns for activists, because she spends so much time and energy on activism.
  • Lots of people talk about 80/20 rules, but I like Umbra Fisk’s explanation best.
  • Women, Passion and Celibacy is really angry and ranty, but it had a lot of good ideas about doing without things, in this case sexual relationships. The author compared celibacy to vegetarianism, which actually blew my mind. I like to compare both those things to atheism, and reduced consumerism.

How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Orca In The City

Victoria has a history, and I think a proud history, of shitty public art. Until recently, the scope of debate could be summed up as a war between abstract sculptures that annoy old people and hockey fans, and a teeming horde of orcas.

Orca murals, orca mosaics, orca sidewalk chalk, maybe an eagle or a salmon painted somewhere for good measure, but most prominently, a whole army of mass-produced, fiberglass Orcas In The City sculptures, each decorated by a different local artist.

Orcas In The City were bland and oppressive (seriously— the organizers put ‘Arts’ in quotations in their goal statement), but no one was supposed to complain about them because they were only temporary and they were auctioned for charity. Think of the children.

I flipped the bird on one of the more overtly branded Orcas at least once, but I regret never having ruined a tourist’s Orca family portrait by humping an exposed tail flipper or something. I have a lingering vendetta about the Orcas, with apologies to The Children.

Enter Spirit Bears

Spirit Bear featuring a funky neighbourhood scene

Suddenly, this spring, a new menace. Sir Bartholomew is not alone, and he’s even less distinguishable from the other Spirit Bears In The City than was the typical Orca In The City. A spirit bear is a white grizzly bear, if you’re not familiar with Pacific Northwest variations on junior high unicorn-and-kitten fetishes, and the decoration jobs seem to have been rationed out exclusively to the artists who made their Orca contributions look the most like the inside of a Starbucks. It’s wall to wall funky neighbourhood scenes. I know I’m biased towards neon red and blue as the official colours of 2006, but I don’t think I’m alone in believing that yellow and purple should take a well-deserved break. Let yellow and purple recover from their hard work portraying free spirits and Italian snack foods.

Worst of all, the Spirit Bears have broken free of the tourist containment zone and have been popping up as far from the Inner Harbour as Island Blue printers. I yelled out loud when I spotted the specimen at Fort and Quadra.

What’s a concerned citizen to do? How are we going to get all these bears back in?

Toronto got saddled with Moose In The City, so apparently this ride doesn’t hit bottom until it has dipped deep into Canadiana cliché pap. This aggression must not stand! Besides writing to the organizers at the Lions Club and begging them to at least consider funny animals for future mass-blanding fundraisers (goats are a good standby), what is the fitting response?

Three different people have suggested blowing up the bears somehow, but I’m taken with this Knitta Please textile graffiti. I don’t have the time or the tendon health to knit any quantity of bear shrouds, but I think some sewn hoods secured with zip ties would do the trick. As much as the bears stimulate my gag reflex, I’m a non-destructive kind of person and I wouldn’t want to actually destroy someone’s art.

I favour a sign reading “Out of Order” as the finishing touch.

Ugh, hipster parenting is so vain

Pam sent me a link to this article about hipster parents who are convinced they have tapped into eternal youth. They’ve got the same fashion and music as kids who are 18 or 20, so they figure they’ll be permanently in touch with Kids These Days, including their own.

When you read that article, can you see the veil waiting to be lifted? Vanity is tangible. (Shiver— do I know where mine is right now?)

  • I want to take bets on what a hipster midlife-meltdown will look like. What if it’s spectacular?
  • I wonder how much this obsession with having cool kids has to do with being embarrassed about your own uncool youth? That’s a losing proposition— if a whole generation has a hipster childhood, that’s no longer rare or cool. What a drag. Bonus: you still have the same uncool childhood.
  • I’d really like not to project so obviously on my children, when I get down to breeding. Oh, the irony of trying to be cooler than the cooler-than-thou people…
  • Many critics, I think, tend to miss the point of “generations” by focussing on what amounts to essentialism. I crave the analysis that starts, “Do you have the original mindset to back up that haircut, or are you just another white, middle-class, heterosexual, married, consumer parent with a new coat of paint?”
  • Doesn’t the anti-corporate attitude belong to Generation X, by rights? Are hipsters just Gen-X as a fashion industry, or am I missing something?
  • Those grids of white people… those are really scary, yes?

I have a morbid fascination with hipsters that I’m trying to figure out, obviously. I don’t exactly fit the definition, but I can pass (at this moment I’m wearing sassy glasses and listening to The Fiery Furnaces while making websites and living with an indie musician, for example). I suspect my hipster fascination means there’s some part of me I’m not quite comfortable with.

It might be about identifying with a subculture I don’t entirely support, about not being analytical or conscious enough about my lifestyle. I’m on a real radical-awakenings kick this month, which I know has been simmering unnamed for a long time. A big part of my cringing about hipsters might be that I find the consumerism, nostalgia and vanity really disappointing, but I don’t really know what to do about it or how to be Out and Loud about that stuff, which I suspect is an important thing to do.

Oh, settling into my identity! Forgetting to do it for awhile and then catching up! (That’s a song.)

Future parents of lesbians

I didn’t notice anything remarkable about these packages until I was on the way out the door to mail them this afternoon.

Galen, man of the house, addressed this one:

To: Zoe...

And this is the product of my womanly touch:

Mr. #2-5 Londo...

You can watch the progress towards this moment in both our family trees. Grandmothers with business diplomas, fathers who stayed home with babies, and so on. In a couple of generations, the clan will surely have morphed into swashbuckling androgynes of some sort. Hot! (… for my own fictional great-grandchildren! Um, I stand by it!)

I am such a lightweight radical

Yesterday was a steady stream of culture-clash encounters with, I don’t know, The Patriarchy. The Lookist, Erotophobic Mainstream. It embarrasses me to feel like a radical, because I’m not a proper, educated, active radical. I’m not in the habit of thinking about politics or explaining my point of view; I stay home and work on projects of my own devising so much that it is easy to think I am average and mainstream. But apparently life gets a lot more mainstream than me.

  • First email of the day was a band newsletter that referred to a fictional “big dude in a pseudo-latex french maid outfit” as “Ewww.” All the dudes I’ve seen in french maid outfits have been pretty hot.
  • Later email from a friend declared “there is nothing more horrifying than the image of thousands of miniature Lily Tomllins running amok.” I think Lily Tomlin is awesome. I shouldn’t refer to Quinn as The Patriarchy, but I don’t see why else Lily Tomlin could be so horrifying.
  • Vicar’s boss wouldn’t let him play Deerhoof in the retail store. Not even The Runner’s Four, which I consider a mainstream rock album. Except, oh right, Deerhoof.
  • As a perfect bookend, I spent half of Chet’s set at Logan’s sitting on a couch comparing worldviews with JR. This involved lengthy shouted statements about the possibility of excellent pornography, my eagerness to find new and scarier boundaries, and a whole lot of talk about the beauty of polyamory done well and the genius of The Ethical Slut. (And lots of shouts from JR about oppression breeding art, freedom from animal instincts, and his disappearing sex drive. It was fun! We did agree on the freeing power of intentional celibacy, but I don’t know if I made that clear.)

This was a lot of clashes in one day, for me. I wonder if I just had more contact with the world outside my multipurpose room, or if I was primed to dismantle Unjust Privilege after spending Thursday reading radical and activist blogs. It is not possible to know.

power jam

costumes. costumes are a productivity tool.

this morning, on my way between breakfast and the bank, i saw a business man running full tilt down the street. a business man like from a children’s book: in a conservative, navy blue suit and tie, with dress shoes, holding an open umbrella upright above his head. running fast, with long steps making his trousers flap. his tie might have been over his shoulder, but that seems like an embellishment that i would add.

i used to want to organize some kind of annual soccer game where everyone would wear power suits. navy vs. brown (i.e., bankers vs. car salesmen), or white shirts vs. blue shirts. (i also like camping in skirts and mary janes, or just generally taking control of my office wear.)

but the connection that made me realize what an excellent, if obtuse, productivity tool was available to me in costumes was remembering, when i saw the business man running, how much better i like doing housework if i’m wearing a tiara and carrying a wine glass. the glass could be full of water or hot tea for all i care, but carrying it around makes dusting or scrubbing a fun time. an event.

i’m sure you understand right away, what it is like to do housework in a tiara and carrying a wine glass (or a martini glass), because i tried explaining all of this at the sara marreiros show tonight and everybody caught on right away. “you should get some of those slippers with the fluff on the front.” and the thing is, i had some and i ran them into the ground doing housework. we are all on the same page here.

i’ve been thinking about running stairs lately anyway, because it seems like a weird and efficient urban exercise option, and i think if i got a washable power suit i could really get into running. you can wear running shoes with a skirt suit, i think. that’s a classic commuter move. nylons would be best but i have to draw the line somewhere (and they look really weird with my furry legs).

a lot of self-employees and telecommuters make a point of getting properly dressed to work at home, because it gets them into productivity mode. i do that too (my key items are a bra and real pants). i’d like to figure out a home office costume that goes one level further, not just into productivity mode but into like, titan of industry mode. what is the word for one of those pillars of society who wield massive business powers yet are admired for their philanthropy and preferably also some type of artistic skill? genius? character? sarah’s imaginary friend? i want to get into like, gomez addams mode. mon sauvage!

contenders for my new work outfit.

  • a clerical cloak of some type
  • a green bookkeeping visor and crisp shirt
  • power suit
  • my old default: the tiara and the wine glass
  • sassy underwear (possibly combined with the clerical cloak?)
  • dresses with hosiery and jewellery. and footwear.
  • cleanroom spacesuit.
  • specialized garment, like a lab coat or a utility belt
  • monochrome outfit of any kind

i think part of what is holding me back from my ultimate productivity-sauvage costume is that all the glamorous titans of yore were dudes, and the lady workers did not have cool 3-piece suits that suggest timeless power. this is an unforeseen feminist battleground.

Mmm, mysteries.

I’m a little embarrassed to be quoting Einstein here, but I really liked this bit from The World As I See It (via Communication Nation):

“The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of true art and true science…

“I am satisfied with the mystery of life’s eternity and with a knowledge, a sense, of the marvelous structure of existence — as well as the humble attempt to understand even a tiny portion of the Reason that manifests itself in nature.”

Einstein relates the experience of mystery to religiosity, but for me it’s the cornerstone of atheism. Mysteries remain mysteries, and are satisfying without reaching for explanations.

(I realize Einstein is not an embarrassing figure; it’s just that he gets quoted in such flaky ways. The idea of anti-science new agers using Einstein to back up their desire to make science bow down to rainbow vibes is a bit of a cliche for me. There is a chiropractor at the corner where I cross to check my postbox who has several “Imagination is more important than knowledge” posters propped up in the window, and it makes me cringe. I don’t mind rainbow vibes, but I do mind bad science and dumb posters.)

Commies commies commies!


Milton Glaser in The Believer : I think the worst scam that was ever performed on the innocent American people is this idea that retirement is desirable. It’s only desirable for people who really hate what they do.

Oh, that makes me happy. I get so tired of people who don’t do work that they love. I sympathize when my friends are trying to figure out what they want to do, but I have a lot more fun when somebody is actually excited about a plan.

I remember a class debate in about grade 10 social studies, a typical assignment to argue the merits of capitalism versus communism. The argument that, as I remember it, won the debate for the commies was that money is not a failsafe motivator for work, or everyone would want to be a highly paid doctor or lawyer. People do work for love too, in greater or lesser ways. Some work is so well-loved that nobody can get paid to do it (e.g., most art, parenting).

I go through phases of being frustrated by that, that a lot of great work gets done without pay, and some people can’t afford to do the great work they’re capable of. But right now, I’m just glad for the parade of free work that constitutes the bulk of the internet. Just people making stuff out of love. Bunch of commies!

(Sometimes it is really obvious that I have a tendency to take each new idea that I like and make it the symbol of my life philosophy for a week, until it has been processed and integrated throughout my entire brain. I don’t think a grade 10 class debate really resonated with me as the height of political discourse; it just stuck as the identifiable moment when this particular idea took root with me. Mr. Hansen and his rumoured hippie butterfly tattoo awarding the day to the communists.)