This is your main course on drugs

Is it me, or is Rick Bayless chemically altered?

Don't misconstrue the sentiment behind this question. I love his restaurant(s), savor his cuisine, admire and identify with his Midwestern Mexicanophilia. And above all I've been thoroughly entertained by the first several seasons of his PBS cooking show. Chef Bayless's hyper-enthused loopiness was a welcome respite from the inordinate self-importance or forced showmanship of many other TV chefs. (You know who I'm talking about).

Better production values and a hip haircut are not the only things to change in the show's newest season. The pace is oddly lethargic, and it ain't just the editing. Bayless himself is beyond laid back, almost dreamy at times. Add to this how he's constantly on the lookout for snacks...

Do I need to make my insinuations any more explicitly libellous?

'Cause I can. Believe that. I have sources.

Anomie and the cult of expertise: Oprah, Dr. Phil, and self-help infotainment

In various periods of uneven or nonexistent employment, I've had the opportunity to sample some of the overripe fruits of major network daytime TV--enough to get a bellyache, not quite so much as to induce reflux. But damned if during the viewing I couldn't turn off the expensive PhD-level training. (Save some for the job market, duh.) Consider this media criticism after a pretty lazy fashion.

I fancied that I could discern some type of pattern in the endless parade of guests and variations on a limited set of themes. The basic question is: What are Oprah and Dr. Phil and their ilk up to? Bringing all these people into our living rooms to divulge "shocking secrets" or take their lumps from an invited know-it-all?

It's helpful to distinguish between the ends they think they're serving and the subtexts they in fact convey--"manifest" v. "latent" functions, perhaps. Oprah in particular plays up the educative or transformative value of what verges on exploitation. "You're helping millions of women by sharing your story" is a common refrain to tear-streaked guests, even when their appearance is only distinguished in degree from a Jerry Springer freak-a-thon and tongue-lashing.

It's also helpful to realize that the picture we're sketching actually extends to a bigger programming segment, one that contains shows like Supernanny and What Not To Wear, and is also constituted by the huge and ever-growing market for self-help media.

What do all these phenomena have in common?

The assumption (or construction) of a population of people who cry out for guidance because the old rules don't work and the new rules are unclear, nonexistent, or off-putting.

Hmmm, this sounds like a job for social theory! Specifically, Durkheim's concept of anomie: a-nomos, "without laws." (Almost makes the $30K in loans worthwhile.)

Yes, anomie--the individual-level experience of the breakdown of a more coherent social order/worldview into multiple self-sustaining lifeworlds, with no clear or compelling criteria to take one and run with it, but the persistent push to choose or lose. Such freedom could be liberating if it weren't for the incommensurability (yet more theory, this time Kuhn's "Structure of Scientific Revolutions") between the thought styles of those lifeworlds.

Not like I have any easy answers for people who may be seeking grounding and meaning on a TV soundstage. However, before you let Dr. Phil spit therapeutic invective and barbecue sauce fumes at you on the air, consider the following big-picture factors that just might have some impact on you:

We are collectivized/massified by the media, the state, various service industries, etc., while at the same time we're individualized/atomized by the proliferating choices and technology of late modernity. Is there perhaps a bit of - economic and social-psychological - alienation going on, as well? A disconnection from our institutions and our fellow humans? You bet your expanding ass there is. On top of all this, the explosion in knowledge of the last several centuries has necessitated an exploding number of experts--making more and more of us nonexperts.

Enough theory. I simply wish to point out, to potential talk show guests seeking guidance:

1. this is way bigger than you and me and Oprah;
2. there is another way to make some sense out of it;
3. there is no reason to believe expert pronouncements simply because they come from experts by way of your TV.

Frogpocalypse

Tsathoggua.com

Reflection on the arrival of spring semester

"The most merciful thing in the world...is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."
(H.P. Lovecraft. 1927. The Call of Cthulhu.)

What Hath Rod Got?

Calling all stake-holders in Minnesota politics:

Former soldier, pro wrestler, and current vampyre-satanist Jonathon "the Impaler" Sharkey is challenging Tim Pawlenty for unholy dominion over the land of 10,000 lakes. (Thank you, C2C!)

Finally you can feel good about voting for the suckiest candidate. Just don't get caught committing a crime with the Impaler in office--unless you want to learn the wherefore behind the nickname.

Why did I ever relinquish my residency???

When is the land of Lincoln gonna belch up an anti-Blagojevich from the sulphurous pit of outer darkness?

My lair is just blocks from Maison Blagojevich and, I have to say, on seeing him a couple times out jogging with his bike-mounted bodyguard, he looks a lot like an undead Kennedy relative.

Maybe the governor's current hard times can be overcome with an extreme makeover: fangs and a velvet cape.

Would it be too much to ask for "the Impaler vs. the Rod" executive cage match?

Bring me the head of Thomas L. Friedman

A couple weeks back I caught Friedman being his usual affably histrionic self on the Charlie Rose show, spouting pithy profundities on where the US and the world should be headed. It got me thinking...which is dangerous.

Quite independent of my on-going respect for Mr. Rose as the consummate (and supremely unflappable) TV interviewer, I found myself agreeing with the walrus-visaged sage even as I wanted to clock him upside the head with a urine-dampened Qur'an (in translation, of course) or a dead mackerel. His insistence that "'Green' is the new red-white-and-blue" - i.e., that establishing viable alternatives to hydrocarbon-based energy should be this generation's space race - coincides with what I tried to impress upon students in my globalization course.

Nevertheless, I found myself possessed by the urge to strangle Friedman.

Not to shut him up. To take his job.

Or David Brooks'. Or one of the McLaughlin gang's. Or the job done by any of the multiplying media-friendly set who are mainly known for knowing (or being able to spout) something about everything.

How can I get that much pay and adulation just for quasi-learned quote-spouting? 'Cause let me tell you: if it didn't sink in before, the road to recognition doesn't pass through the lower echelons of academe, Juan Cole notwithstanding.

Occasionally I get reporters and production assistants trolling for quotes on some of the esoterica I am marginally known for studying. A double-edged sword, the journalists' pen (or word processor); not the safest tool, even on loan, for carving one's path to punditry. I usually find ways to weasel out (thank you, deadlines). It's a damn shame, since those journalists aren't going to find another expert who takes an equally serious, contextualized approach to this stuff. The one time I threw myself at a media outlet - Coast to Coast AM, but still - they never returned my call. This was after I got my PhD.

Maybe I just need to blog up a storm. Or bombard the Trib with op-ed artillery.

But how to convince people to buy what anthropologists are selling when you have Friedman and Jared Diamond and Malcolm Gladwell dividing the territory Margaret Mead conquered?

Crap. Charlie Rose has David Brooks on.

Off to sharpen my witticisms. Or a whatever else will make a decent shiv.

Heteroglossolalia 3

Two thoughts apposite for the current political-cultural atmosphere:

"Without succumbing to anti-intellectualism, a democratic society must always be suspicious of conceptions of knowledge in which the most valued forms of knowledge are the least accessible, or more sociologically, the most esteemed knowledge producers are the ones whose goods are accessible to an elite set of consumers (e.g., other professional knowledge producers and, indirectly, their patrons)"
(Steve Fuller. 1992. Social Epistemology and the Research Agenda of Science Studies. p.397).

"The myth of the scientific method, then, encourages the laity to have an unrealistic view of scientists and therefore also to have unrealistic expectations of them and of science; and it encourages scientists themselves to be unrealistic about themselves and science, and to neglect the importance of cultivating consciously ethical behavior. It leads the scientific community to assume that its public credibility is permanent and quite automatically guaranteed-which makes it shocking and inexplicable when the credibility of science is brought into question…"
(Henry Bauer. 1992. Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific Method. pp.40-41)

Holy Order of MANZ

I am fascinated by the former factory clock towers of North Center. From the Brown Line you can see them well before the stretch between Damen and Paulina, and I have spent many a train trip admiring how they rise over the brick two-flats and big old houses on either side.

The towers are only the most elegant and visible parts of the now post-industrial landscape of Chicago. Aside from offering a classy way to disguise elevator machinery, these towers also featured clocks for the reference of the many employees who weren't going to cough up a bunch of paychecks for a pocketwatch. (Ah, yes: the days when only gentlemen had timepieces...and women couldn't vote.)

Such towers surmount several of the massive brick buildings that constitute the Ravenswood Industrial Corridor, lining the divided street of the same name on either side of the Metra Union Pacific-North tracks. The vast majority have been converted to office or loft space for some very interesting concerns: e.g., Architectural Artifacts, who salvage and sell a head-spinning array of previously owned decorative stuff, and the relocated Lill Street Art Center, which provides studio and display space (and a cafe selling exotica like glögg cake).

Three towers stand out in this corridor:


The former Speed-O-Print building (manufacturers of hand-cranked mimeographs, for those of us who recall getting a buzz off of fresh mimeos back in our youth...) at Ravenswood and Larchmont is now the Larchmont Lofts Condos, part of the "adaptive reuse conversion" boom of the 1980s and 90s. its clockfaces are all set to different times and appear to be out of commission.


Further north, the Deagan building rises over Ravenswood and Berteau. My wife and I puzzled over the provenance of this name until a recent episode of "Chicago Stories" on WTTW. Turns out to have been the home of the famed J.C. Deagan instrument works, creator of some of the finest marimbas and vibraphones of the mid-20th century. (Think Milt Jackson or Lionel Hampton.) Deagan's former master tuner still does repairs at an office there. However, the building now belongs to Unicut, manufacturer of saw blades.


Midway between these two at Ravenswood and Irving Park is a non-clock tower labeled enigmatically "MANZ." I say enigmatically because a satisfactory referent still eludes me. (The post title makes a punning reference to a '60s Christian-Rosicrucian order in the Bay Area.) Google turned up "J. Manz & Co." printing, founded by Jacob Manz from Switzerland in the late 1800s. Some of their postcards have been selling well on Ebay, if you're interested.

More will be forthcoming...

The Powells Doctrine

No, it's not "You break it, you buy it."

Rather: "Buy it when you see it, 'cause it'll be gone next time."

This is my modus operandi (modus vivendi?) when visiting my favorite Chicagoland bookstore, Powells. I got spoiled during grad school by living mere blocks from the Hyde Park outlet, though I've been impressed by the place on Printer's Row. (Can't even contemplate a pilgrimage to the original Portland store; that would be too much.)

It's tough to be a bibliophile on a tight budget, but that's why they sell the t-shirts: discounts on the first of each month. It's even harder now that we live on the otherwise wonderful North Side. So it was a special treat to browse today.

Biggest find:
Sean McCloud. 2004. Making the American Religious Fringe: Exotics, Subversives, and Journalists, 1955-1993. UNC Press.

Yes, I sign things "unrepentant nerd."

Evacuation at 30,000 feet

In honor of my dearest, who is set to wing her way back to Chicago from the Big Valley tomorrow evening.

To go before the plane or on the plane? This is the perennial, vexing question of air travel.

Usually I choose the former option, only rarely the latter. This invariably turns out to be a chore, as everyone else has the same bright idea (or, perhaps, the same low opinion of their plumbing). Airport lavatories, even in the nicest terminals, are only one step up from their counterparts in bus stations in the matter of inconvenience, if only because of this pee-flight...excuse me, pre-flight pattern.

There are some real advantages to waiting for the airliner loo. Access is usually one customer at a time, and you have the place all to yourself. The big problem is logistics: about the time the plane levels off and the captain OKs moving around, those damn drink carts start jamming up the aisle. And, since you are discouraged from queuing up, you have to watch like a hawk (usually behind you) for the facilities to be visibly vacated.

This doesn't even include the possibility of "turbulence" once you're actually in medias excreto, which usually doesn't arise in the terminal.

So pick your poison, travelers: jockey for a toilet at altitude, or brave the masses in the stalls.

Ring/Bearing

Any other newlyweds extremely careful with their left hands?

Since junior high I've felt naked without a watch, but I never ever wore any jewelry before our wedding last July.

Not that it's the most expensive ring (although it is really shiny, which was all I wanted out of it). But it has forced me to change how I do nearly everything involving two hands. At the least, it makes me over-think otherwise automatic tasks. As a career righty, I often find myself forced into nearly exclusive use of that hand to protect the ring. I have to exercise caution in such formerly carefree operations as lifting, carrying, washing, opening jars and doors.

When it's cold, as it was for a time here in the Windy City, the ring clanks back and forth on my finger, never quite loose enough to slide totally off. (Note: Windex works great for getting rings off and not tarnishing them. This straight from a jeweler.) Those times when I've managed to remove my ring, I am apt to forget it. Explain that to people who know you've just gotten married...including the Mrs.!

Looking at my parents' hands, it's clear that their rings could basically only be cut off--as my mom nearly discovered with some recent carpal-tunnel surgery. Is that what it's gonna take? How do I stop denting it on door handles in the interim?

Meet Your Temporary Mommie: on the profound conservatism of TV wife-swapping

Let me begin with an admission:
I've been relying on regular broadcast TV for several years now.
[shocked gasps]

My wife and I lack the inclination and (to be forthright) the wherewhithal to pay for that kind of entertainment. (We're "renting" movies from the local library, for goodness' sake.) We generally use what we find on the airwaves as a platform for Mystery Science Theater-style improv to amuse ourselves. Being credentialed social scientists from an elite research institution which shall remain nameless, much of our sniping inevitably involves heavy-duty theory.

Consider the deadly combination resulting from anthropology applied to wife-swapping. Was there enough of a market for voyeurism to warrant TWO shows switching spouses?

What continues to disappoint me about these shows, aside from the tired tropes of reality TV (staged situations guaranteed to provoke conflict and then require happy endings) is the decided - and deflating - lack of titillation.

I've watched these damn shows for weeks and there ain't been a real swapping yet.

These shows, whatever they look like, manifest a solidly conservative moral foundation. Allow me to build a pseudo-legal case.

Exhibit 1 - women get traded, not men or kids. No surprise that this mirrors women being "given away" by dads to husbands in weddings. How progressive/transgressive is the entertainment industry if it won't even raise the possibility of a husband-swap?

Exhibit 2 - new mommies' duties don't cover everything. Sure, there's cookin', cleanin', bossin',--all the usual prerogatives. But the elephant in the room: where do the mommies sleep? I will guarantee it's not in the master bedroom.

Until you TV types can put out a Wife Swap that really puts out, piss off. My wife and I need to rip America's Next Top Model a new one.