Anomalibris

The New Front Runner

2007-10-25T23:42:00.000-05:00

Well, I know who has my vote now. If only he would stoop to running for Illinois governor...

Democratic presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has seen a UFO, writes Shirley MacLaine in her new book, "Sage-Ing While Age-Ing."

Kucinich, she writes on page 143-144 of the book, "had a close sighting over my home in Graham, Washington, when I lived there. Dennis found his encounter extremely moving. The smell of roses drew him out to my balcony where, when he looked up, he saw a gigantic triangular craft, silent, and observing him. It hovered, soundless, for ten minutes or so, and sped away with a speed he couldn't comprehend. He said he felt a connection in his heart and heard directions in his mind."

Cleveland Plain Dealer Politics Blog, 22 October

Cicadelia

2007-05-25T22:32:00.000-05:00

Let us welcome our insectoid overlords.

All hail Brood XVII!

(Did you miss me?)

33 is the new 35

2007-03-07T23:29:00.000-06:00

Gouranga

2007-02-17T21:41:00.000-06:00

Call out Gouranga be happy!!!

Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....

That which brings the highest happiness!!


You're welcome.

Make it snow in Miami

2007-01-21T17:23:00.000-06:00

Can I bum a fag?

2007-01-19T13:48:00.000-06:00

Those who speak the Queen's English may want to read on, if only to unconfuse themselves.

We are afflicted with yet another example of stars speaking ill of some subsection of our society and, yet again, I'm gonna go there. I'll restrict the merciless mirthfulness to the title this time. There's a serious matter in this minor incident, though not necessarily what you might imagine.

Our attention, drummed up towards ire, has been directed at a disparaging term among co-workers, an illocution whose employment resulted in an inadvertent outing and reinforced the general stigma on homosexuals. (Did it contribute to a hostile work environment? Considering it was ancillary to a actual physical scuffle involving McDramamine, I'd say it wasn't the only contribution.)

The offender issued his predictably rotund and deluded denial, following up with an equally predictable and legalistic admission/apology. The fulfillment of this now-mandatory ritual of contrition has, predictably, not calmed anything down, though a Gibsonian reading of recent history suggests the furor will die down shortly--if it is not soon redirected by a fresh atrocity.

What has offended and upset me in this incident is how much the righteous are relying for their rhetorical force on how many people are offended and upset by the uttering of the epithet.

Don't get me wrong: I consider disparaging people, individually or by class, because of an aspect of their identity despicable and wrong. Period. Shouldn't that be sufficient moral fortification, if not the primary means by which we confront prejudice: that it's wrong? Why do we need to invoke an aggrieved right-thinking majority?

Bear in mind that I study humans as social creatures for a living. I'm well aware of and quite comfortable pointing out the symbolic, institutional, and interpersonal tools that groups have for bringing their members into line. I have felt them acting on me on numerous occasions. There's no intrinsic harm in being normative or reinforcing "community standards," particularly if we are more self-aware than doctrinaire in so doing.

I simply want to point out the logical and, not inconsequentially, moral problems in using the percentage of a population and their degree of offendedness as your major argument against truth claims. Because there is a tacit truth claim in likening a gay man to a bundle of sticks: not all of us are equally self-evidently human, and the majority decides who they are.

Now, the majority decides de facto what is and is not acceptable. ( I study cults and ufologists; I'm well aware of this.) But I can think of plenty of instances where what the majority of a society at time X reject as the wrong/false/bad beliefs of a minority has by time Y become unquestioned common sense. There's more than enough scholarship on how that happens, concretely and abstractly.

If you accept, as it seems the majority of Americans do, that there are such things as objective, mind-independent facts--and they're not always obvious--do you think taking a poll is any sure way to Truth? If you're really OK with deferring to the majority on epistemological or moral matters, consider what the majority of Americans thought of ethnic, racial, or religious minorities in 1870. Or 1960. Or now.

Not sure I'm cool with that.
Got a light?

Free Association

2007-01-15T20:25:00.000-06:00

F-----------------Ebadd2--Bb-----------Csus4
Who's peekin' out from khaki-clad Crocmen,
F--------------Ebadd2----Bb--------------Csus4
Called by a name that sounds like a dot?
F-------------------Ebadd2-Bb--------Csus4
Who's bending ears a--cross US airwaves?
F-----------Ebadd2----Bb/C-F
Everyone knows it's Bin--di!

F----------------Ebadd2-Bb-----------Csus4
Who's tripping out on your ad--u--la--tion,
F--------------Ebadd2------Bb------------Csus4
Smilin' and spankin' her small, fuzzy friends?
F----------------------Ebadd2-Bb-----------Csus4
Whose mom per--sists in poking alli--gators?
F------------Ebadd2---Bb/C F
Everyone knows it's Bin--di!

------------------Gm7-Gm7/C-Fmaj7
And Bindi's e--nor--mous eyes
-------------------------Gm7 Gm7/D C7sus4
Cause pedophiles' wangs to rise.
------------------Gm7 Gm7/C Fmaj7
And Bindi rips wings off flies.
-----------------Gm7/C
Don't tell the crowds.
-----------------Gm7/C
Don't tell the crowds...

[Apologies to Andrew Rogers and A-Z Chords]

Irresolutions

2007-01-01T16:02:00.000-06:00

Like many of you, I am taking the opportunity of the new year to make some self-improving promises. Unlike the rest of you, I know I'm going to backslide. I'm counting on it. I've programmed it into the promises. Hence my New Year's Irresolutions, the beginning of an annual tradition...perhaps.

#1
Looking ahead to spring semester, I am resolved to motivate my students through more sophisticated and powerful pedagogical methods. I had up to this point mainly relied on the regular wearing of a tie. Laugh if you must; the fact that I'm the only one in class with a tie, when combined with being the only one standing and (for better or worse) the only one talking, is still a pretty good source of symbolic authority. But it's hollow, particularly if I want to encourage students to motivate themselves rather than rely on the Authority Figure to tell them what to think/do.

Resolved: to relax my wardrobe and intensify my teaching efforts.

(Who am I kidding? The ties aren't going anywhere.)

#2
Speaking of the effective management of wayward youth, I'm beginning to see the necessity for disciplining our cats...better...or at all. On several behavioral matters, sweet little Shoggoth and Tsathoggua have lately been leaning toward the feral end of the feline spectrum. They (and when I use the plural I'm mostly referring to Ms. Tsathoggua) have discovered that acting out gets them instant attention. It's not so bad as a distraction from waking responsibilities. But even the most solicitous affection at 03:00 is obnoxious--doubly so when it doesn't persist after a feeding, indicating it was a means to an end.

Resolved: the cats get a good dose of tough love, starting with a digital contraption that will take over early-AM meal doling duties.

(Will I still pet a fuzzy, purring beast crouching on my chest in the wee hours? As long as it's one of the cats, probably.)

#3
Thinking of ways to spruce up the living quarters, one way that I have debated, considered, dreamt about, and yet found reasons to avoid is now at the top of my list. It's cheap, it's versatile, it's readily available, and a near-essential for hosting visitors. All it would take is getting off my butt and rounding it up.

Resolved: I'm going to have more alcohol around the house.

(And yet, if stocking up still involves spending money and making choices--my two arch-nemesiseses--do you think it's likely to happen?)

#4
Finally, making a clean break with the old ways and starting fresh, I resolve: to keep the promises and carry out the plans I make during 2007.

(Any bets on how long this lasts?)

Whitey's on the moon (again)

2006-12-04T22:03:00.000-06:00

A rat done bit my sister Nell
with Whitey on the moon.
Her face an' arm began to swell,
but Whitey's on the moon.
Was all that money I made las' year
for Whitey on the moon?
How come there ain't no money here?
Hmm! Whitey's on the moon.

Gil Scott-Heron

Now, I hate to repeat myself, even when it gives me more opportunity to mouth off. And I hate to be a wet blanket as far as space exploration is concerned. (An earlier edition of me was all set to be the second person on Mars.) But I'm not as gung-ho as I once was about devoting as much attention and resources to manned missions as NASA seems bent on doing in the medium term.

Part of it, as noted, has to do with the incredible rewards of robotic explorers in comparison to the low risks they pose to our pocketbooks and our astronaut corps. Yeah, it's annoying to lose the use of an occasional satellite for whatever reason. I think it beats the national day of mourning that a lost manned mission would entail, though.

An increasing part of my objection to pushing for lunar bases or Mars landings in the medium term is similarly fiscal, but with a strong ethical coloring. Basically, the question is:

Should the spacefaring nations - which, not coincidentally, happen to be the Earth's wealthiest nations - spend the huge sums it will require to safely move a few humans off the planet when equal effort/money, judiciously invested, could clear up problems for so many humans on the planet?

In no way am I against manned space missions absolutely. We need to undertake them. I still want to get to Mars, dammit. Can we at least go after them once we've gotten our Gaian oikos in order and have exhausted what our satellites can do for us?

He Lifted Me

2006-12-01T21:57:00.000-06:00

Because it was there, man...

On this first true wintery day, it lifted my spirits to read something good about the teenagers of this fair nation. One young Alaskan is set to join battle with the forces of irrational conservatism and order, the foe of all restive, imaginative youth--the local school board. All because he chose to exercise his divinely dispensed freedom to make an artistic statement in public.

He draped his school in a billboard reading "Bong Hits 4 Jesus", taking maximum advantage of the free publicity of the passing Olympic Torch.

A lower state appeals court gave him the high sign, treating this as a matter of freedom of speech. Yet now he is being pursued by the board and lawmonger-for-hire Ken Starr in the highest court in the land.

I'd like to think that some high-minded principles lay behind his hoisting of such a hempen Hello. Apparently even the kid himself said it was just for the contact high of 15 seconds of press proximity. Still, why treat this as some high crime against the state?

Had he known his one brief, inspired act would force some very stodgy barristers and functionaries to have to say those four magic words repeatedly in open court, that would only have iced the cake. On those grounds alone, I salute you, young sir.

To the Nth degree

2006-11-22T18:03:00.000-06:00

Congratulations, upright Americans! We got another racist!

Well, he did most of the work outing himself. But one of our number was there, camera-phone rolling, and nailed his sick ass.

If we could just get everyone camera-phones with the Access Hollywood hotline number on speed-dial, we'd be able to wipe this festering sore from the face of our fair nation in no time.

Imagine what we could accomplish with just those tools. Imagine the power we could wield. Kinda makes me giddy (in a righteous way, naturally).

Every commuter who sidles away from a minority on the subway, we'll be there to call them on it. Every conflict where bad words are thrown about, we'll be there to silence them. Every golf course community that too many whites choose to live in, we'll be there to protest. Everywhere there's a suspicious correlation between wealth, power, and skin color...

What?

Oh, yeah. Those do seem kinda tough.

Sure, it might all be coincidences. And those tricky market forces. Not even economists have those things figured out. They could be to blame. And you're right about this ruthless critical examination; we ought to be careful where we poke that thing around. Never know what it'll turn up, especially if we turn it on ourselves.

Yeah, racism is just too hard. Let's stick to racists.

It's only a matter of time before some other minor celebrity opens his fat mouth. And we'll be there.

Requiescat in parfait

2006-11-19T22:21:00.000-06:00

The trouble with trifles

2006-11-13T22:03:00.000-06:00

As with any green-blooded American, my early life was to a great degree shaped by the original Star Trek. I had the classic Trek lunch box that was just a little too vintage to take to school. I've made the hegira to Vasquez Rocks to see the location of essentially every non-soundstage alien world. (That no away team ever ran into Lorne Greene and Michael Landon still annoys me.)

So it's been a blast to discover that a local station known for resurrecting series from syndication's suspended animation is showing Kirk and Co.--just when I should be going to bed, but those are the sacrifices one must make for nostalgia.

Yet something is just a little off. No, not the hammy acting. I'm well aware of - indeed, a big connoisseur of - Shatneriana. (Though nowhere near as deep into it as these guys.) And not the fact that Klingons look like pissed-off Beatniks back then. Too easy.

It's the special effects. They actually look...uh, good.

Take last night's offering, the infamous "Tribble" episode. I don't remember the Enterprise ever being seen from so many angles. Or moving so smoothly. And did the phasers always light up so cool? Am I going senile???

I have the feeling whoever is in charge of the legacy, under the guise of restoring the original, has succumbed to the Lucasian temptation to use 21st-century sfx technology to spruce up 20th-century kitsch. Would Desilu have sprung for CGI if it had been around in 1968? For a TV show?

That would be - say it with me, you pointy-eared freaks - illogical.

Sympathy for the Donald

2006-11-09T23:05:00.000-06:00

I ask you:

How could you be angry at that face?
That sublime way with words?
That human fellow-feeling?

How? I can't.

I'm not worried about him, though.
He's gonna be just fine.
There's a nice, cozy, warm place all ready for him.

Lesser evils or lessen evils?

2006-11-08T23:22:00.000-06:00

Don't mind me. I'm still basking in the afterglow one works up by doing one's civic duty yesterday. Or maybe it's a hangover from a late night's eavesdropping on the machinations of Cook County politics.

Either way, my brain feels numb.

That numbness could've been induced by the unending list of circuit court judges I had to approve on our elephantine ballot. (And me without my hit list.) But no, I think it comes from seeing so many third party candidates in so many state and local races.

Sure, it's nice to discover the notable presence of viable female and minority candidates nationwide. 'Bout time. Yet I'm more intrigued by (and hopeful because of) the strong presence, if not strong showing, of third parties. As far as trends or lessons of the '06 campaign go, this one is way under-reported.

Granted, none of these outsiders came close to the 10% of the IL Green governor-dude or the 15% of my favorite Jewish cowboy in TX. And at least one independent - the incumbent formerly known as Joe Lieberman - was a turncoat who will mostly end up running with the new majority. (All this talk about a center returning to US politics, but look what a prominent independent-minded Democrat had to do to stay in office.)

Nevertheless, anytime the electorate choose a "democratic socialist" and a Minnesota Muslim to join Lieberman and Co. on the Hill, there's hope.

Fancy that: a representative democracy where "None of the Above" is just about a viable option, where we can finally settle for the least of many evils. Can instant run-offs be far behind? Or, Heaven forbid, the death of the electoral college?? Stay tuned.

Scared yet??

2006-10-31T23:10:00.000-06:00

What if I told you the pumpkin carved itself...?

Mightier than the pen...?

2006-10-21T23:36:00.000-05:00

In the interest of raising the visibility of that sliver of higher educators who blog about our common triumphs, trials, and temptations--bringing them to 2.75 additional readers; that'll ingratiate me--here is a short list of professorial blogs.

Drum. Machine.

2006-10-15T22:57:00.000-05:00

I wasn't sold on YouTube before. (Now it's been sold to Google, so my chance has passed.) One can only take so many meatheads wrasslin' in the backyard, Asian guys lip-synching to boy band numbers, pets frolicking in out-of-focus home videos.

But recently I chanced upon a video that thrilled me to my nerdy core:
a CGI Neal Peart--Ayn Rand aficionado and virtuosic timekeeper of progressive power trio Rush--thrashing out a realistically rendered, note-perfect accompaniment to the band's instrumental "YYZ."

N.B.: this is NOT a clip of any of the college rockers, or the band themselves, cranking out the tune, though many versions of each can be had. Nor is it the perplexingly named P.E.A.R.T. mechanical farrago that at one time beat skins by virtue of a laptop USB hook-up. (Engineering students.)

This is, quite simply, too cool in too many was to attempt to capture here. If you don't know why, you better ask somebody...Canadian.

Let it suffice to note the unstinting craftsmanship and dedication and unadulterated monomania that went into such a digital devotional.

Beauty, eh!

Dum dum de dum

2006-10-05T22:17:00.000-05:00

A hearty congratulations to my sister and her newly-minted Mr. on the recent imposition of the holy bonds of macaroni.

Our cats, Shoggoth and Tsathoggua, rejoice that their dog-in-law is no longer a bastard.

One down...

2006-09-24T22:29:00.000-05:00

"It was only out of concern that he might create an army of implacable and powerful enemies...that he did not fearlessly publish [his work]."
Jorge Luis Borges. 1949. The Aleph.

"Come get some."
Ash. 1992. Army of Darkness.

Wow.

Exactly one year ago, the first of now 80-some posts was shot undaunted and unheralded from this weblog into the ether.

I know, I know: the world has been so irreversibly altered by it that you can scarcely conceive of life without it. Neither can I. (What did I do with all the impishness and indignation before?)

It started with such promise. I'm sure I've failed every challenge and broken every stricture I set before myself in that manifesto. The struggles of writing with no deadline and no audience...

Just wait 'til I get fired for blogging. Then it will all have been worth it.

Dumbwaiter to Heaven

2006-09-23T23:35:00.000-05:00

Wait a second.

All we have to do is extrude a carbon nanotube filament and hang it on a geostationary satellite and POOF--space, the banal frontier: anyone who can climb is an astronaut?

Then where is friggin' Richard Branson with his checkbook? You'd think, with the hots he has for space tourism, he'd be all over anything that gets paying customers high.

Why am I suspicious that a technology this safe, cost-effective, and eminently feasible is gonna have to struggle for decades more against big rockets that go boom?

Is it just not sexy enough? 'Cause that's what it sounds like when you start rhapsodizing about the "majesty" or "inspiration" of rocket-fueled space flight. It's the same argument behind diverting money from cheap and productive robotic exploration of the solar system to slinging messy, resource-hogging humans into the void.

Rockets: sexy
Ropes: kinky, but not sexy

What's so sexy about liquid oxygen? Are you willing to keep risking life and limb on 1950s technology because it happens to be around and it still looks kinda cool?

How do we market something like this in a way that neutralizes the "magic beanstalk" factor? What if I told you it's laser-powered?

Yeah, that'll go over like the proverbial lead zeppelin.

Race bait and switch

2006-09-18T12:16:00.000-05:00

Ick. I have the feeling I've been Stosseled (Stossellized? Stossellated?)

You know, that nausea that results from having a know-it-all tell it like it is, because you're too chicken to face it...only to realize, after the orgiastic busting of threadbare myths, burning of straw men, and irate swishing of mustaches, that it was never questioned.

Last Friday's 20/20, in its new incarnation as a single-issue muckracking newsmag, was an overly hyped examination of the taboos preventing honest dialogue about race and sex. The treatment turned out to be rather toothless, yet still pretty offensive.

What offended me was a complex of unchallenged assumptions structuring, and effectively obstructing, the examination:

there are groupings of people called "races," which exist at the same ontological level as genes;
there is basically one factor to which everything can be (and should be--there's always slippage from one to the other) boiled down or bottom-lined; and
there is a direct, unambiguous cause-effect relationship accounting for everything.

The most supposedly explosive topic was accounting for the over-representation of blacks in many sports. Sportswriter John Entine was enrolled to broach the genetic or physiological argument: blacks have an advantageous physique for running/jumping. (Take note that no one went anywhere near hockey, where leg strength is also crucial. Maybe because under-representation in hockey might make a genetic argument untenable.)

Well-intentioned liberal contrarians were then brought on-screen to insist that necessity was the mother of competitive advantage: the black American underclass, and maybe even impoverished East African marathoners, have few viable options but sports, whereas whites have so many they can afford to be embarassed on hardcourt, track, gridiron, etc. (Was the phrase "institutional racism" ever uttered? Certainly not; we can't be too offensive in our finger-pointing.)

Even the nice Iowan teacher who built her career taking elementary schoolers to the brink of racism and back - valiantly nipping prejudice in the bud by making kids experience both sides of it - was enlisted to suggest stereotypes and their deleterious effects on self-image are what guarantees some people finish last. (Get it? "Race"? Running? It's polysemic. Don't get distracted.)

The elephant in the room is not that there might be a significant physiological component to success in certain prestigious/lucrative physical activities. The shock! What no one seems willing to address is how, the closer you look into race, the less certain you can be that anything is really there.

Race is a fact, but a social fact: an ensemble of mental categories, social relations, and cultural practices that varies across cultures and historical eras. That it remains so important for people as a way of bringing order to their world does not make it biologically grounded. Phenotypic traits (how certain genes get expressed while others get suppressed) just don't match up to psycho-cultural traits in any direct or statistically significant way, conventional wisdom and J. Phillippe Rushton be damned. Populations of people are not bounded, no matter how subtle your criteria. Seizing on one or a handful of heritable traits - fast-twitch muscle fiber, for example - will never provide enough grounds for us to group humans into discrete races, nor will any set of behaviors or widespread prejudices.

So fixating on one key variable for explaining complex phenomena, especially a factor as brittle as race, means you'll be constantly fighting a rear-guard action against a horde of pesky qualifications and exceptions summoned up by contact with the real world. A holistic, context-sensitive approach would factor all of the aforementioned variables together, the sum of their interactions generating results quite distinct from them individually and not reducible to them. It's the interplay of the factors, not the simple presence of one or all.

Rather than seek any single point representing The True Cause of "Black" Dominance in Sports, think of a set of overlapping circles, each gradually lighter at its edges. One is a cluster of anatomical traits (which do not even partly co-map to any "African American" population), another America's social hierarchies, a third our systems of values and customs, a fourth the globally interconnected marketplace of goods and ideas, and so on, each considered in its historical contingency. Those individuals who fall in the zone of greatest overlap of factors have the greatest probability (nothing automatic about it) of succeeding in sports. Probabilities of success decrease as the overlaps decrease--that is, fewer beneficial traits are interacting. No single factor is a necessary or even sufficient cause to which we can ascribe any individual's fortunes. (Entine made this same probabilistic point, to his credit, by noting that physical gifts have no bearing if they are not harnessed by hard work.) Unless you think humans act strictly according to some genetic or cultural programming. If you do, I can guarantee they will continue to surprise you.

The bottom line, you ask? How about two:

Putting up with a little complexity can produce a whole lot of insight, especially where an excessive reductionism obscures so much.
As long as it's easier and more profitable to avoid overturning a pernicious social arrangement like racism, ain't a damn thing gonna change.

Therefore be warned:
If you're gonna traffic in truisms and monocausal crypto-theories, be prepared for your reductionist ass to get skewered by uppity academics like me. We won't be confined to diploma factories, catering to your children and our society's out-of-whack priorities. We're retaking explanatory dominion over the real world, swinging the mighty pen, piling high the bloated carcasses of pundit after pundit.

Word to yer mom, Stossel.

Ad majoram hysteriam mundi

2006-09-15T18:47:00.000-05:00

This is what you get when you go and make Robert Blake your pope: he will poke hornets' nests, pull tigers' tails, and put crap into fans because you told him not to.

You don't tell His Holiness what not to do...

For what it's worth

2006-09-11T20:48:00.000-05:00

I had wanted to make a statement regarding today's observance of the 2001 terrorist attacks. Something substantial, maybe even eloquent. Something to cut through the ebbing jumble of sentiment and what has passed for public introspection.

Those words haven't yet come to me. But I can't get rid of the impulse to write. Or the irritating kernel of an idea.

As much as we want to memorialize 9/11/01, we can't lose sight of 4/19/95.

It's not so much the eerie parallels--each the biggest attack to that point, each subsequent investigation characterized by nagging loose ends affording the conspiracy-minded ample material. They're too different in scale and scope to be lumped together.

Rather, it's the suspicion that, as much as we are supposed to have adjusted our lives to the new realities ushered in by 9/11, I think we have yet to really absorb the lessons of the Oklahoma City bombing.

Chief among them is that, if we are to win a war against something as abstract as "terror," we can't assume it is the sole property or activity of some evil Other, lurking out there (or in here) somewhere. We had better be prepared to face terror and terrorism, not simply in our midst, but among our kind, in ourselves.

Race to the Finish

2006-09-09T23:20:00.000-05:00

Survivor: Cook Islands is about to reach the air, but it has already been the object of intense gossiping. (Still no such thing as bad publicity.) In late August word spread like the wildfire that contestants would begin the competition divvied up by race.

I think.

If this article in the Calgary Sun is any indication, the host himself is less than clear on the criteria for team membership:

"[Probst:] 'Ultimately, to win this game, you’re voting people out that are then on the jury that have to come back and vote for you. So, the person who wins is actually going to do the best job of merging with all different ethnicities.'"

He even throws off the staff writer trying to make sense of the whole mess:

"Probst says dividing the tribes by race is not meant to promote segregation, but to encourage the different cultures to mix."

Evidently we media consumers are to assume all those categories are synonymous or linked in some direct and unproblematic way. Or perhaps we should just assume that they are as far as journalists and game show hosts are concerned. Either way it ain't pretty.

Not to set myself up as social-theory cop, but this kind of terminological messiness does a disservice to anyone who wants to figure out what Survivor 13 might mean for the pop cultural world we inhabit. I'm pretty sure this would include many viewers of the show.

For instance, why do European-Americans consistently form the largest and most eager segment of the applicant pool--so much so that producers had to go out of their way to find nonwhites? Do you want to stick with the hack stand-up shibboleths about [insert group here]? Or do you want the chance for some deeper insight?

Well, treating race, culture, and ethnicity as interchangeable doesn't help. Nor does using phenotypic differences (which don't cluster into distinct races) as proxies for culturally-based groupings like ethnicity. Nor does assuming that differences in appearance or self-identification are the most salient factors, especially considering the majority of this season's contestants come from California.

I'd encourage you to look for editorial enlightening from my anthropological colleagues. However, as of this writing, no one has stepped up to that plate. Maybe the October edition of Anthropology News will feature some commentary. I fear that, even if anthropologists articulate a disciplinary position clearly or provide really thoughtful analysis, it's going to follow the way of all anthro-apology and diffuse out into the ether with no discernible impact. Until we can infiltrate soundstages and scriptwriting sessions - there's some applied anthropology! - we're just not going to make any difference, positive or otherwise.

What Survivor's competitors need is native peoples from their filming locations to show up and bust some knowledge upside their heads--like about what it means to be racialized, ethnicized, acculturated, marginalized, and otherwise buffeted by colonial governments and the mass culture industry. In this case the lesson should be delivered at the end of a spear by a cadre of grimacing, menacing Maori warriors. Aaaaaaaarrrrrgggghhhh!!!!

Plutocracy

2006-09-07T21:57:00.000-05:00

I was going to submit this post weeks ago, when things seemed more settled. I was going to crow that it's official: Tombaugh be damned, Pluto is out on its cold, rocky butt, its reign of error in the Kuiper Belt reduced to lordship over the "dwarf planets."

But I'm glad I held off. Things have gotten wierder.

Where to begin? How about a very fine commentary in the Planetary Society website on the insider haggling over how to define a planet. I second the commentator on how the debate provides a great opportunity to see one segment of the scientific community in action. Science, in this salutary view, is less about establishing truth for all time than constantly, self-critically struggling to know more and better, to get closer to the truth.

I would go even further. The Pluto/planet controversy is also a great venue for presenting science studies--a self-reflexive attempt to understand Science as a situated human endeavor--to nonexperts. The controversy is important independent of the quality of the scientific work informing any resulting definition. It provides a view of and a way in to science for nonscientists.

It's far from a bad thing for nonexperts to witness the messiness of actual scientists' practice, which was a fear of some astronomers in re: Pluto. The personal stakes in impersonal data and hypotheses. The rounds of consensus-building, even voting. The personification of the ex(?)-planet and how "he" might feel about losing "his" status. And, now, an uprising of disenfranchised planetologists with a competing definition. (See the text of the definition yourself, though don't be shocked if the experts don't crowd around to hear your assessment of their work.)

The Pluto battle also provides us a valuable lesson on how experts and nonexperts relate so differently to scientific knowledge, always vulnerable to revision or deletion, never free from the inertia of the paradigm or the tug of "external" cultural and economic forces. A self-identified nonexpert "Pluto fan" put it quite reasonably in a NY Times interview:

“It’s just the natural progression of things...The more you learn, the more assumptions are going to get turned upside down. It’s just part of science. And life.”

It's been fascinating to hear, in piecemeal but evocative fashion, how the wider public reaction to the expert debate and its outward-rippling concomittants is reported/shaped by the popular science press. "Honk if Pluto is a planet" bumper stickers and laments that "we have to change the textbooks" (no small practical and financial matter, it should be noted) show how a minor celestial cousin nevertheless connects to a web of symbolic and material significance for many humans that will surely respond if tugged.

I'm with the astrologers on this one...or at least one who deigned to be consulted by a member of the press corps. It doesn't mean dick to the cosmos how we think of it. We didn't know Pluto was there before 1930, we debated it for decades afterwards, and have only ourselves to blame for working it so cozily into our mental maps that it disturbs us to refile it.

Meanwhile, he just keeps loitering out there. Waiting. Plotting.

Wal-Martyrdom

2006-09-04T19:55:00.000-05:00

God bless Charlie Rose. He gets some of the most interesting people, under the admittedly weak spotlight of public TV, to talk about some really vital subjects with no interruptions.

Mr. Rose hosted the CEO of Wal-Mart for a whole hour recently, both at his studio table and wandering around a North Jersey store letting customers grill him. (That's him, if you're wondering. Lee Scott.) Apparently he's making noise about changes in company policy--toward kinder, gentler, "employee health care, blah blah, encouraging our small competitors, blah blah."

Scott came off as a smart, smooth, candid-sounding exec, maybe taking a cue from Jim Sinegal, who runs CostCo from a cubicle, shuns titles, caps his own salary, and seems to be succeeding by treating his workforce admirably.

But he offered too much protestation, methinks. He had to spoil the good feelings by whining about how Wal-Mart's "only 10% of total sales in the US market, but we're still an easy target for critics. Is this not the same company whose lawyers danced around a "big box" law in MD by building two adjacent stores, each just under the square footage limit, that together dwarfed their competitors and flouted local governmental control? The same company for whom Chicago's City Council designed such a blunt legal instrument that it's beating back Wal-Mart and its competitors?

What intrigued me was when the conversation turned to how several business magazines have featured Scott as a potential white knight for green commerce. There is something in this, given the economy of scale involved. I'm enjoying the potentially juicy irony of the world's largest retailer leading a shift to an environmentally responsible business model - energy-efficient stores, leverage over suppliers on better packaging, bringing in Al Gore to lecture his managerial team, maybe even switching the truck fleet to biodiesel on the horizon - simply because it's getting too expensive not to.

Almost makes you forget that Wal-Mart is arguably the single biggest player in bringing more people worldwide into a pattern of mass production and consumerism - founded on artificially cheap labor, cheap goods, and over-extended, energy-draining supply chains - that is neither economically nor ecologically sustainable even in the medium term.

So does making customers and shareholders (and potentially even the planet, however you want to anthropomorphize it) happy make up for the resource-draining behavior you're encouraging?

Mens sana in colegio sano

2006-08-28T20:20:00.000-05:00

To celebrate the first day of the new school year, I offer for your edification and amusement a collection of the very acme of undergraduate scholarship.

If you thought you didn't understand the world before, wait till you read this.

(Allow me this one guilty pleasure. There's no harm if they're anonymous, right? That was my story with the Human Subjects review board...)

Terminolatry 1: Oprahwhelm

2006-08-26T23:12:00.000-05:00

In an effort to make this humble 'blog even more of a catalyst for changing people's lives, I am providing a new service. Think of it as a semi-regular vocabulary builder.

Impress your acquaintances. Get ahead in business. Make sense of your world.

Yeah.

oprah·whelm \ò·pra·hwélm\ verb
to completely demoralize or devastate someone in the most public manner possible

oprahwhelmed \ò·pra·whélmd\ adverb
experiencing the sudden, soul-crushing realization that the world's most powerful woman has just destroyed your career/reputation/life in front of millions of her rabid devotees, who will later scoff at, upbraid, and otherwise crap on you given half a chance

Ken Nordine's Audio Mescaline

2006-08-12T21:54:00.000-05:00

"The changing information which we experience as World is an unfolding narrative. It tells of the death of a woman. This woman, who died long ago, was one of the primordial twins. She was half of the divine syzygy. The purpose of the narrative is the recollection of her and of her death. The Mind does not wish to forget her. Thus the ratiocination of the Brain consists of a permanent record of her existence and, if read, will be understood this way. All the information processed by the Brain--experienced by us as the arranging and rearranging of physical objects--is an attempt at this preservation of her; stones and rocks and sticks and amoebae are traces of her. The record of her existence and passing is ordered onto the meanest level of reality by the suffering Mind which is now alone." (Tractates: Cryptica Scriptura #32)

Now imagine that read in a gravelly basso profundo - the erudition tempered by noir grittiness and existential angst - riding atop a throbbing, squirming soundtrack of ambient grooves.

That's Ken Nordine's Word Jazz.

The man himself (whom you'd know if you heard his ubiquitous voiceovers) has apparently been doing this since he began to free-style over the house trio at a Hawaiian joint on Wilson to keep his Beatnik clientele's jaded attention. Makes sense it's on the radio in the dead of Sunday nights. But how did it ever get on public radio?

If you intend to listen, don't be on any psychedelics or within 20 feet of a sensory deprivation tank.

Potemkin State

2006-08-03T22:33:00.000-05:00

My attention was recently and unexpectedly caught by the barrage of ads for a movie coming out. It seems to be perfect (maybe too close to home?) for youth of a certain age at this point in the late summer.

Plot summary: Kid fails to get into any colleges. Kid and slacker friends create a fictitious school, complete with Lewis Black as dean. Hilarity ensues.

Leaving aside the requisite suspensions of disbelief (for starters, the conceit that a bunch of otherwise unmotivated students could stick with any concerted effort, duplicitous or no, of such magnitude), the kernel idea appeals to me. At that tender age I was dreaming up the ideal interdisciplinary research institute for answering the great questions of human existence--or, more precisely, the cool-ass architecture to house such a beast. It occurred to me later that the ideal location would in fact be the n-dimensional space of the internet, so my dream remains simmering on the far back burner.

Now I've been a student a long time, in varied venues and surrounded by a broad range of people. I've known plenty of students who, faced with conjugating irregular French verbs or following a bill through Congress, acted as though they were wearing leg irons and orange jumpsuits. (That some of them have indeed ended up in such a get-up is a running bad joke between me and my mom.)

Yet some of those same students whose stomachs turned inside-out at the thought of two extra years of pointless post-secondary bullshit just to get a technical certificate manifested insatiable curiosity, self-direction, and limitless enthusiasm about something: mastering an instrument; resurrecting a junker car; reaching peak physical condition, and helping others do the same; designing clothes; reading (even writing) graphic novels. But these were predominantly pursued outside the classroom, beyond the reach of scholastic gatekeeping and shepherding.

This experience is what makes me think "Accepted" will start out promising and quickly become formulaic, divorced from real life--as early reviews seem to hint. Nevertheless there are some sociological verities in this idea that I wouldn't have guessed held true until spending this last school year basically full-time as an instructor in a decent four-year college.

That the rebellion against a cult of collegiate expectations takes the form of the very thing these kids can't attain and perhaps don't want is not fuzzy-headed scriptwriting. I think it's a reflection, on a screen darkly, of just how much we as a society are steering every student toward only certain kinds of post-secondary education.

I will expand this point in a subsequent post, and will try not to come off as overly elitist. If you really want elitism, meditate on just how many people - trivia buffs, college students, even my PhD-possessing peer group - would recognize the czarist allusion in this post title...

A parting thought from the Dean:

"...from behind me, a young woman of 25 uttered the dumbest thing I ever heard in my life. (That was until Dan Quayle was elected the vice president and things took a turn.) She said 'If it weren't for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college.'
I'll repeat that. I'll repeat that because that's the kind of sentence that when your brain hears it, it comes to a screeching halt. And the left-hand side of the brain looks at the right-hand side of the brain and says, 'It's dark in here, and we may die!'
She said, 'If it weren't for my horse,' -- giddyup giddyup, let's go -- 'I wouldn't have spent that year in college' -- which is a degree-granting institution.
Don't, DON'T think about that for more than three minutes or blood will shoot out of your nose."

Mel, the Maya, and a teaching moment to be squandered

2006-07-26T23:08:00.000-05:00

Mel Gibson's new movie is about the collapse of the post-classic Maya.

You should be rubbing your eyes and re-reading this several times.

Now, I could easily pull the "responsible anthropologist" card and quibble propter hoc about the inaccuracies that have already come to light: it was shot in an anachronistic Yucatec; it pushes large-scale human sacrifice rather than self-mutilation; it features the Aztec sun stone as the official website's motif. Or I could be like every other smartass blogger and chortle at our auteur's face-fur.

I would rather get speculative--on very little evidence, admittedly--as to Gibson's artistic intentions. He could tell any variety of tale he chose to at this point. Why a society's collapse? Is there some larger domestic or global purpose than simply putting out a rousing bit of exotica?

For that matter, why stop at nearly complete ethnographic accuracy? Take some of that "Passion" paycheck and get that aging whiz-kid linguist who's cracking the Maya glyphs to do you up something synthetic like the "Stargate" team got from their Egyptologist (even though he was guessing at vowel sounds)?

Speaking of speculation: does this mean there is gonna be a sequel in 2012 when all the calendrical caca is supposed to hit the metaphysical fan? Or is that too New Age-y and heretical? Like Mel is worried about heresy, drawing on that batty nun's visions...

(Even if so, that would only be the end of a 144,000-day baktun, and I think that number is only special to self-satisfied neo-Calvinists anyway.)

When this flick comes out, it's a chance for anthropologists to begin to get back to where Mead and Montague and Krober had us in the public consciousness. Not with tossing cold water on a piece of entertainment just because we can. Not by confining our educative efforts to offhand deprecations in our classrooms.

Rather, we have to find a patch of the media spotlight the movie draws and get noticed. Argue that the story we're developing about the Maya, and about all humans--comprehensive, contextualized, factually grounded--beats the hell out of even good entertainment. Because that story isn't just absorbing (which more nonexperts would discover if we would just gang up and kick goddamn Jared Diamond out of our turf). It has the added benefit of actually helping us understand us. There ain't much bigger than that, and what there is we can also probably speak about.

Sure, the Maya have been so useful and profitable as a "mystery" that it's tempting to play that aspect up. (P.S. They didn't disappear, ya numbnuts; they're still living in the same area, just as prickly as ever. It was that particular manner of organizing themselves that disappeared.) But they are probably more useful and definitely more relevant when considered as fully figured humans making and (tragically) unmaking their world in ways we're still uncovering. That's neither prosaic nor boring, nor is it any less engrossing or relevant for being demystified.

With these kinds of insights, anthropology just might help save us--and not in the way Mel might hope.

Job-blog jitters

2006-07-25T22:43:00.000-05:00

Since this is an outlet for what exercises my brain, and since I am now ineluctably on the other side of the academic looking glass, a natural topic source would be my exploits on the quads. As a prof I'm just getting started, but I've already got quite a potential backlog.

Don't expect to read anything scholastic here any time soon.

It's bad enough to hear about all the poor shmucks in corporate gigs - the forces behind Dooce, Petite Anglais e, and a couple dozen other blogs - who got canned for their content. The stuff ranged from plainly injudicious to completely innocuous; regardless, it was brought to the attention of people with great institutional power and senses of humor atrophied by the strenuous effort to protect their organizations' hindquarters.

However I'm much more spooked by tales of profs who have endured similar circumstances (cf. the Phantom Professor and her lightly fictionalized follies at SMU). They discovered that, even anonymized, it's too easy to identify students, colleagues, administrators, and schools--and thereby open themselves and their employers to legal action.

In one of my first blog entries I mentioned an adjunct gig in the most off-hand yet complimentary way. My wife, ever vigilant, scolded me for opening myself to a Doocing. I still maintain there was no defensible way even a malicious prick could misconstrue the post (or link it to me, for that matter). But the fact that I need to be careful to that degree with what I write - anonymously - dismays me considerably.

So am I to just roll over and accept that anything with potential blowback is off limits? There goes much of our 1st Amendment freedoms as well as entertainment value. As hard as it is to resist passing along these infuriating, titillating, laughter-inducing anecdotes, I can't decide which is a greater loss.

I guess I'll just stick to safer territory: insinuating that minor public television figures are gay.

Home accents

2006-07-22T22:58:00.000-05:00

You know what keeps me up at night?

Among other things, a recurring fantasy of swapping the McLaughlin Group regulars for the personnel of various home improvement shows.

Not that I'd find their politics any more congenial, though you never know. Rather, the trick is to pick panelists who--like Buchanan, Blankley, Clift, and the Big Guy himself--are sporting distinctive regional phonologies and/or lexicons.

Sweet dialectal dissonance!

The Extreme Team are out, because Ty and his goddamn bullhorn constitute an unfair advantage. And most of the crews on TLC and HGTV are just to linguistically bland to put up much of a fight. I might, as a bit of affirmative action, pull in P. Allen Smith; he is a gardener, after all. But I draw the line at Christopher Lowell, dammit.

My dream match-up, however, would be the Min-ne-soh-tan long vowels of "Hooooometime" up against the Beantown blather of "Aaaaahhhsk This Old House" in mortal rhetorical combat.

Just imagine McLaughlin trying to moderate those two teams as they duke it out over North Korea or stems cells or Barack in 2008...

And if they had two-by-fours with protruding 16-penny nails in easy reach...

Mr. T is my life coach

2006-07-17T15:42:00.000-05:00

Apparently I'm nice and that's a problem.
(What? A Minnesotan? Nice??)

I guess as long as there are weasels and chingones and smirking frat bastards willing to screw others simply because they can, helpfulness is a character flaw.

I guess I have to shed my dysfunctionally responsible upbringing like a too-tight pair of bikini briefs.

"Please." "Thank you." "Can I help you?" Kiss my ass.

I need a cognitive makeover. ("Starting Over" is on in the background; it might be coloring my thought process a bit.) But you can take your Iyanlas and Dr. Phils and shove 'em.

I need Mr. T.

No fool receives his pity, no jibber-jabber his toleration. He kicked the ass of poverty, drunks, lymphoma, Rowdy Roddy Piper, and a bunch of pesky allergenic trees. He stands up for moms and calcium and getting an education and (for Conan's benefit) Chicago.

That's a role model.

So, if in the near future you see me wreathed in gold chains with a very narrow hair-do and a determined countenance, you can bet I've been T'd up.

En contra del calor de la chingada

2006-07-16T21:28:00.000-05:00

It is friggin' hot in Chi-town.

This is not a complaint. It is an unbiased, context-independent statement.

(After two years in Southern California, I have no leg to stand on when it comes to whining about hot weather. All I'll say is, where one might compare SoCal heat to what could be expected on the inside of an oven, summer in NE IL must equate to parboiling.)

The new tradition at our place, born from the proximity of Mexican produce stores - and a heat-induced lethargy laced with fear of raising our ambient temperature - is to Cuisinart a vat of gazpacho to last us through the hot spell. Since I likes the knives, I gets to chop.

Thus I pass on to you gazpacho gigantesco a la minnesotana:

cucumber - 1.5 large or 2 medium, peeled/seeded
green pepper - 2 large, seeded
white onion - 2 medium
parsley - 2/3 cup
tomato - 4lb, seeded
garlic - 4-5 cloves
jalapeño chile - 2, seeded
tomato juice (V8) - 2 cups
red wine vinegar - 1/2 cup
olive oil - 6 tablespoons
salt - 4 teaspoons

In the order listed, disassemble and then finely chop the vegetable matter in a Cuisinart or blender, adding the processed result to a large bowl. Stir in the remaining ingredients, sample, and adjust a su gusto. Chill. Serve with chips, guacamole, and either Negra Modelo or Hamms (with lime slice, of course).

Feeds 2...
...for at least 5 days.

Let sleeping moths lie

2006-07-10T15:07:00.000-05:00

My wife, who devours fiction voraciously, can expect a significant chunk of her for-fun reading to be adapted for one or the other screen at some point. The Lord of the Rings was a massive blast from my reading past, and I certainly can't help having discovered the works of Lovecraft and Philip K. Dick long after they began to be butchered by screenwriters and producers (here's hoping A Scanner Darkly is an exception). Yet the out-there but ostensibly nonfictional books I cherish are hardly ever tapped by the entertainment industry.

So when I catch wind of any potential media cross-pollination - or cooptation - a queasy mixture of delight and trepidation curdles in my gut. "Holy crap! How cool is that! But you know it's gonna suck..." Since I don't have to deal with this conflictedness very often, I vacillate wildly between a panting anticipation and the sour-grapes cynicism of the bruised optimist.

Just such curdling and vacillation erupted with a vengeance when the first ads for The Mothman Prophecies ran on TV.

Perhaps to you this was Richard Gere in a love triangle with TV's "Grace" and a fiery-eyed flying humanoid. To the director it was "a meditation on the existential dilemma of humankind seeking stability and certitude in the flux and chaos of the phenomenal world." (I may have put some words in his mouth, but dude basically said that. Basically.) But to me, this was a treasure uncovered in a childhood spent raiding small-town libraries, one of the few books I ever checked out repeatedly, a riotously iconoclastic oddity in a genre characterized by its oddness.

I couldn't bring myself to pay to see it in the theaters, nor have I laid out cash to rent it. Just a half-hour stolen from motel HBO on our cross-country move last summer. It was enough.

Enough to confirm that (a) the movie deviated from the book in frustratingly predictable ways, which confirmed that (b) studio-system hacks have no faith in or respect for their source material. You're making a creepy supernatural thriller; is the story not creepy enough as it is? Flying saucers? Poltergeists? Honest-to-God Men in Black intimidating witnesses? Phone calls filled with mechanical noises, strings of numbers, unplaceably foreign voices? And a seven-foot winged sumbitch with glowing eyes who chases people down back roads in the middle of the night? What?!?!

So the screenwriter may have to prune some of the overabundant detail and frequent digressions with which John Keel seasoned his punchy journalistic prose. And it probably is not necessary to do anything but hint at Keel's acid-tinged synthesis of ufology, paranormalism, and demonology. I'd even be OK with setting the events leading up to Point Pleasant's Silver Bridge collapse in the present day, if only to avoid bloating the production budget.

But how the hell does it improve the story to saddle our heroic investigator with a tragically ended marriage as his connection to the Mothman? What's wrong with a lightly fictionalized Keel simply following his curiousity and getting way in over his head? Why play up characters' personal psychological struggles, especially belief v. doubt, when the public epistemological and cultural issues (like how we can shrug off such a concentration of reported anomalies) are even heavier?

I'm gonna rant more about Hollywood adaptations in subsequent postings, fear not. In the meantime, treat yourself (or spook yourself) and read the book. And don't forget to look up.

"...At the eyeballs' last bleeding."

2006-07-04T22:24:00.000-05:00

As I tap out these words, the sounds of our joyously martial national birthday continue to boom and crack and sporadically drown out my typing.

I love fireworks. I cheered the day Target began selling packages of Chinese goodies in the Midwest. I look forward to when my sister and I can blow shit up in the frigid North Woods at New Years.

So what am I doing blogging when there are bombs still bursting in air? Blame Skokie.

The assault began around 9:10. From our dining room window, we were able to make out a line of decorative destruction stretching along the horizon from northeast to northwest. In turn or all at once, Evanston and Park Ridge and Morton Grove and Niles launched their celebratory barrages.

Some were high and tight (especially the annoying ones that fly up and simply BOOM with hardly any sparkle). Most just peeked over rooflines and trees. Soon the Navy Pier display added its rumbles and reflected flashes. A few of our neighbors provided their own snickering, illicit counterpoint--a bottle rocket here, a roman candle there.

But no source of fireworks approached Skokie for sheer endurance. Every other municipality was packing it in by 10:00. Skokie kept plugging away. They must have put up a solid hour and fifteen minutes of flash-bang-boom. It got to the point that my wife went off to clean the cat litter and I had to move away from the window to rub my cramping legs.

Damn. We feel independent already. Now some of us have to get up in the morning.

Out among the stars

2006-07-01T21:03:00.000-05:00

Stashed surreptitiously in the programming of a PBS affiliate near you is five of the wierdest minutes of science you are likely to see on TV. And I mean that in a good way. I think.

The host, creator, and motive force behind these minutes is one Jack Horkheimer. He is really, really pumped to point out to you all the interesting cosmic phenomena you can see from your backyard. (The fact that it was initially called "The Star Hustler" led many to believe it was breaking new and daring ground for naked eye astronomy. Alas.)

Now, I like a good - or even passable - program on stars and shit. I've been known to say up to watch Astrophysics 101 telecourses. But something about this show is...queer.

Jack has always had, shall we say, a distinctive presence. Yet lately I feel like he's sliding perilously near parody. Not of himself. Rather some ungodly hybrid of Andy Rooney and Rip Taylor.

Maybe it's the voice. Maybe it's the "hair". But I half expect him, legs dangling from the low-res rings of Saturn, to toss shiny confetti at the camera and crow "Woo-hoo! Perseids!", then slip in a cranky aside about how "planetariums are too darn cold," before signing off with a snarling "Keep looking up. Until that arthritis gets you."

LOST: continent?

2006-05-28T15:51:00.000-05:00

Somehow during spring semester my schedule allowed me just enough leisure time on Wednesday evenings to get hooked on season 2 of "LOST." Not so caught up that I'll waste any brain power on chasing Dharma Initiative websites or Hanso Foundation commercials, as much as I appreciate that level of deviousness.

Truth be told, I'll put up with a lot of ambiguity, misdirection, and allusion. That's a lot of value added to the entertainment. But I need one thing cleared up about the finale:

Are the castaways stuck on the last of Lemuria?

It's this big four-toed monumental foot that got me thinking. Can't be Atlantean, since they're in the Pacific. (Though it wouldn't be the first big goof by screenwriters if that was their intention.) Gotta be Mu.

Actually it tickles me to consider that J.J. Abrams and his staff are trying surreptitously to feed their viewers some Churchward or Blavatsky. Such may not be the case. And yet, given that one of the two characters struggling most obviously with weighty existential issues is named "John Locke," and another character who went feral in the jungle is called "Rousseau," I'm really tempted to think so.

Dare I hope for a hatch to lead to Agharta? Or the lair of the Deros?

Satan's Scrotum

2006-05-25T20:42:00.000-05:00

In an era where increasingly anything goes in civil society, swearing imaginatively is - I am sad to say - a lost art. (That "Ron Burgundy" stands out in this respect only proves my point.)

Nerd that I was, I tried to cultivate creative cussing in high school. My favorite was the titular epithet; I wrote it backwards on my notebooks. (This jackass claims he created it for his measly band back in 2001. I was saying it in 1991, at the latest. Bite it.)

I'm not talking some return to "Zounds!" or "Odd's bodkins" or anything, rather alternatives to Carlin's scatological 7...which is down to 2 or 3 by now. Far be it from me to reliquish any good old Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. Just read my posts. Nor would I support any efforts to outlaw them, even if it made them all the more effective.

No, I say add more weapons to the arsenal of oaths and imprecations! Let a thousand foul flowers bloom!

Here are some well-tested contenders; feel free to send others.

"Satan!" (why not take his name in vain?)
"Great googly moogly!" (loved that Snickers ad)
"Ohhhh...floppy disks!" (Neal from "The Young Ones")
"Dagnabbit!" "Dadgummit!" "Galdurnit!" (or anything else you hear on Gunsmoke--curse you MeTV)
"Dirt!" or "Dirty __!" (you provide the noun)
"Cow flop!" (from my farming forebears)
"Bloody poop!" (another of my originals)
"Caca-pants!" (thanks, Helgie, wherever you are)

Heteroglossolalia 6

2006-05-12T23:03:00.000-05:00

In honor of finals week:

"Research" is what I'm doing when I don't know what I'm doing.
Wernher von Braun

Hope you'll bear with my silence but a few days longer. Those 130-odd pieces of "research" aren't gonna grade themselves.

7th Heaven's Gate

2006-04-14T20:26:00.000-05:00

Yes, I admit it:

I have committed myself to watching the last episodes EVER of the WB's gentle juggernaut. And I will further admit that, as I choke down one saccharine scene after another, I will be hoping vainly against hope that the show goes out, not with the uplifting whimper it will, but with a big, juicy bang.

Dammit, they owe us.

Especially since that Rose whore-bag wimped out and got all righteous. ("My parents made me bad." Boo-hoo, bee-atch. Stay bad, at least for a change of pace.)

Maybe the bwonde bwothows will pull a "Redrum" and psychically manipulate each family member into killing their significant other.

Better yet, the rockin' Reverend locks the whole clan in the church, railing against the evil outside world, and goads them into a standoff with police, who finally break down the pews blocking the door only to find every last one of them toes up and leaking spiked communion wine. (Grape juice, rather. Treacly bastards.)

Fade to black...or as close as the sunny Studio City set and the blastedly sunnier show gets to dark.

Too bad it couldn't have been filmed when we lived across the block. I'd have paid to be an extra for that shoot.

Bathos, bribery, and baryatric surgery

2006-03-27T22:40:00.000-06:00

Once again, my reliance on standard broadcast TV for a brief respite from the business of ideas only serves to re-engage my anthropological training.

Damn you, ABC. Paving a virtual interstate to hell with your must-see corporate charity.

What? Charity as entertainment? You know what I'm talking about. All these wishes granted and redemptive renovations of body and home. The newest addition to this cottage industry makes it even more difficult to be cynical, but allow me to try.

In all these shows a few genuinely needy people are showered with more than they need--including stuff they'll soon come to hate. (You think those kids will still dig the monkey-themed bedrooms when they hit 15?)

More objectionably, shows of this kind give many more genuinely needy people the false hope that they can be saved by the loving ministrations of Sears-Roebuck or the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. All they need to do is catch a jaded producer's eye. Send in a tape where they strike just the right balance between proud and pathetic. Show the mother driven to tears by her toddler's emergent realization that they "don't live like other people." That always works.

Worse still, make-over shows give corporations - from the omnipresent Craftsman to a parade of local contractors showing off their skills - free advertising for appearing to perform charitable works, while essentially showing off for potential (full-paying) customers with soft hearts and plump wallets. Would you expect a CEO to pass up advertising s/he could write off on the company's taxes?

But maybe the absolutely most offensive aspect of these shows is how they suck us viewers into an emotionally-correct fantasy. A few big companies do good deeds, a few of our virtuously pathetic fellow citizens are brought up to a standard of living befitting real humans, and yet we feel like crap for having witnessed the whole saccharine thing. Why might that be?

'Cause maybe the ends still don't justify the means? 'Cause that same money invested off-camera, say in Habitat for Humanity, could benefit five or ten times the number of people it does? 'Cause we know we're manipulated, and we know exactly how, and yet we keep watching?

Voting machine...or not

2006-03-21T19:28:00.000-06:00

Today I solidified my citizenship in Chicago by doing my civic duty. Wahoo.

Which is an ass-y way of saying I voted in the primary and I'm not sure how to think about it yet.

Being such a transient for so long (six years in this city clinging to a Minnesota license and address, a year of tourist visas spent on the margins of Mexican society, just long enough in LA to be tricked into establishing residency), I've been pretty lackadaisical in my political participation. This is effectively the first time I've voted in the same state I live since--damn--college.

So I feel a mixture of self-satisfaction and unease with this whole primary deal. Tell me if I'm off.

The city made it stupidly easy to vote this year, with more than a week set aside for early birds. Yet neither the Mrs. nor I got our acts together to take advantage. (How can the city forecast record low turnout when it's this damn easy?) So I swung by my precinct site, tucked away in the bowels of a senior services center (and manned by what could've been clients), to cast a ballot.

Supposedly Chicago's are among the physically largest ballots around. Mine didn't quite fit in the voting booth, so there you go. Not only that, but I missed out on the era of punch-card voting; Chicago switched over to optically scanned sheets, with touch-screens close on their heels. Perhaps out of nostalgia, some candidates' signs still exhorted us to "punch #__" which would only cause havoc now.

Speaking of playing havoc with tradition:
On the matter of the County Board, do I vote for a fire-breathing reformer against whom the entire Chicago Democratic machine is arrayed? Or for the choice of Da Mayor (and everyone on the machine's payroll)--who just had a friggin' stroke? Let me think for a moment.

I could rejoice that this was about the only difficult choice on the ballot. However, when you know next to zip about the candidates except that your alderman really likes some of them (especially the ones who are running unopposed--what the hell is that all about? Six lawyers jostling for one appellate court seat and we can't find anyone willing to challenge most of the incumbents?), and this ignorance has passed through the candidates' websites unscathed by any substantial policy statements (office-holder Rahm Emanuel didn't even bother to take his case to the web, the cocky bastard), they're all challenging decisions.

So I voted for George Mason. Go Patriots!

Should I be worried my precinct captain didn't ask to see my ID?

Que viva el Pinguino!

2006-03-16T21:50:00.000-06:00

A Uds. les recomiendo irse a la gelatería argentina "El Pingüino" en la calle Lawrence. Hay que probar el gelato de sabayón almendrado, del zabaglione italiano.

Helado y vino: riquísimo.

Desafortunadamente no se vende en vidrio así.

A Yank abroad during the "War on Terror"

2006-03-15T17:48:00.000-06:00

Lately I've thought quite frequently about the time I spent living outside the US. Partly this is a function of using myself as a case study in the introductory anthropology courses I've been teaching, demonstrating for my students how at least one anthropologist dealt with culture shock, intercultural communication, and other fun things. But this reconsideration has also been forced on me by recent events that illustrate my country's rocky interaction with the rest of the world.

All cultural anthropologists put in their time living with and studying some social group--the more different the better--meaning we experience the often considerable tension of dependence on a host group whom we nevertheless outrank in influence and even wealth. It was just my luck to undergo this difficult experience in one of the US's most conflicted partners (Mexico) starting immediately after 9/11/01.

Immediately. As in seeing machine-gun-wielding National Guards tromping around O'Hare (though I have to say I was inspected more thoroughly at Juarez Intl as I was returning). As in watching the first bombs fall on Afghanistan as I was lining up contacts.

I returned to Mexico the following summer during the buildup to the attack on Iraq. When I reached the highest-stress period of my research, I passed multiple insomniac nights watching herky-jerky video from "embedded" reporters in Army Humvees blasting across the desert toward Baghdad.

Through that whole year I experienced occasional anti-US flashes--some protests against hemispheric trade, pro-Osama grafitti on the UNAM campus, attacks on KFC and McDonalds--and frequent joking demands from acquaintances to explain my country's actions. (My standard response to anything political was a bashful admission that "When the president speaks, I get a headache."

Only twice was I called out as a gringo, both times by kids in small towns. Rather than cause me any consternation, those reminders of my pasty whiteness only heightened the intriguing surreality of my situation. That surreality is what bubbles to the surface most readily whenever I think about my year in Mexico, though it is the hardest to convey.

Heteroglossolalia 5

2006-03-10T22:52:00.000-06:00

A brief thought apropos of scientism, creationism, and American society:

"...although [scientists] may have measures for enforcing orthodoxy upon the scientific community, for example by effectively ostracizing the 'heretic,' even this conformity may be achieved at the price of exacerbating the problem of heresy in society at large."

Colin Campbell. 1972. "Cults, the Cultic Milieu, and Secularization" p.133

Brokeback Molehill

2006-03-09T22:29:00.000-06:00

You probably took note of some strategic grumblings in the lead-up to the Oscars, grumblings about the suspicious similarities of the nominee films--not least that they were ever-farther from the highest-grossing films of the past year.

Hollywood is so out of touch with its audience, this "culture war" argument went, that it's trying to force all sorts of (queer) crap on us against our principles and preferences, perhaps even (horrors!) against the invisible hand of the market.

George Clooney played on this accusation in his acceptance speech. Proudly aligning himself with the progressive elements in American cinema, he agreed they are out of step but only because they are drumming the rest of us into step to march toward a more just society.

Now, there's a good bit of mystification on each side of this debate. The most egregious and misleading mystification is this unitary idea of "Hollywood." Having lived in proximity to this industry for a couple years, I can tell you one thing: about the only thing all of the players agree on is making a living by attempting to entertain us.

Considering another accusation lobbed at this mythically unified Hollywood - that financial considerations increasingly outweigh artistic ones - what business sense is there in pushing message-movies that the market won't bear? The only person willing to do this is Jeff Skoll, the eBay exec who bankrolled "Syriana" and "Good Night, and Good Luck"--because he can afford the financial hit, and because apparently some people will pay to see them. Yet another shock: there is no unitary audience for the products of a non-unified Hollywood.

The Oscar ceremony is film people rewarding each other for the quality of their craft, not for the amount of their earnings. We might consider box office receipts as the audience rewarding film people for entertaining us, though I'd urge caution with such a logical leap. But until the lists of critical and commercial favorites overlap, no ideologue taking the position of us consumers can honestly claim we are force-fed anything. You are not allowed to make that argument in my presence as long the second Deuce Bigelow movie made any amount of money.

Now, as to the issue of Hollywood collusion in preparing us for alien contact...

In Memoriam: Kirby Puckett

2006-03-08T23:31:00.000-06:00

I'm well aware that some potentially weightier personages have deceased in the same few recent days who may also deserve eulogies. Furthermore I admit that I have no standing as a sports fan to honestly convey what he meant to baseball. But I'm a proud and dutiful Minnesotan, and on those grounds alone I am obliged (and fully qualified) to address Kirby Puckett's passing.

I can still recall vividly the magic of both '87 and '91 World Series, how they swept up even those in the state who normally cared nothing for local teams. And I remember, from the vantage point of grad school well away from home, appraising the unfairness of a career ended by glaucoma, and a legacy tarnished by self-inflicted legal problems.

Nonetheless, as a representative of a state of sports also-rans and never-quites and as a symbol uniting many Minnesotans, I am proud Kirby called my state home, if only for those dozen or so seasons.

Congratulate me

2006-03-07T22:11:00.000-06:00

Today's post, more form than substance, is number 49. Hard to believe I've had that much to say over the past six months.

This is about as much of a milestone as turning 32, which is what else I have going on today. Couldn't quite allow a candle planted in my celebratory pizza, though.

Rhodenticutachusetts

2006-03-05T23:24:00.000-06:00

Evidence is rolling in from all sides that this country is in worsening financial shape. Having just sent in the family taxes (married filing jointly for the first time), I'm all full of brilliant ideas for saving money. If we're seriously looking to protect the national bottom line, I have a suggestion:

Fewer states.

Let's start the belt-tightening by merging a few of those little funny-shaped ones in the upper right-hand corner. The savings on administrative costs alone would make it worthwhile.

And if that's still not enough, we can open the bidding to foreign companies to operate a few states. Maybe one or two of the big square ones well inland. Nothing we'd miss if they went belly-up.

Disquieting the minds of the people

2006-03-04T14:09:00.000-06:00

At the confluence of Damen, Lincoln, and Irving Park in Chicago's North Center community, the Lincoln Restaurant squats in kitschy repose, welcoming seekers of unself-conscious American cuisine and Lincolniana. Yet every Saturday evening it lights up as the host of an unusual and - in my view - badly needed institution: the College of Complexes. (As in "Stop that or you'll give me a complex!")

The College is an unaffiliated forum for free thought and learned showmanship put on by and for talented amateurs (in the best sense of being driven by love rather than money), yours for an incredibly low $3 cover.

CoC is among the last remnants of a vibrant tradition of radical orators and agitators who set up their soapboxes in Washington Square ("Bughouse Square" to the cognoscenti) and set about persuading and/or pissing off fellow citizens. The whole point is to encourage critical examination of the status quo. Recent CoC topics have included hemp politics, humane capitalism, and God-free ethical systems, just to give you an idea.

When last I checked, there were openings for speakers in July. C'mon, autodidacts! It's a free dinner and all the jeering you can tolerate.

Magnolia Caboose Babyfinger

2006-02-28T20:48:00.000-06:00

I have elsewhere alluded to my out-of-step tastes in music--an indigestible smorgasbord of classic rock, classical orchestra, world music, and weird jazz that no one my age would claim with a straight face. That post also announced me as a sort of closeted connoisseur of metal. Let's just say I savor artful noise in many forms.

Lately my curiosity has been drawn to the nexus of classic rock and early metal in the '60s. In fact I take a perverse antiquarian pleasure in ferreting out the earliest examples of "heavy." The Beatles' "Helter Skelter" could fit in the chronology. The genre was definitely in place by the ominously tinted Deep Purple and Black Sabbath, though I shamefacedly admit I'm put off by Ozzy's distinctive vocal stylings. (His late TV antics are another matter.) However, I have more recently turned to exemplars like Iron Butterfly and my current obssession, Blue Cheer.

Those who made fleeting acquaintance with Blue Cheer as some acid-tinged oddity through their ragged cover of "Summertime Blues" (as I was) would be stunned, perhaps pleasantly so, or possibly enraged on first listening to their "OutsideInside" album. This band gives new shades of meaning to "so bad it's good."

Their liberties with the Stones' "Satisfaction" are enough to make Brian Jones rise from his grave and drag Keith Richards in with him. For that matter, I would not want to have been around Albert King if he ever caught wind of the Cheer's take on "The Hunter." (If you think his love gun is something, wait till he whips out his hate gun...)

As for their original material, the songs tend to flow straight from the crotch by way of a Marshall stack topped by a skull-head bong. Yes, they're that good. The album sounds as if Grand Funk Railroad--19, raw, and just hitting the Flint MI bar circuit--had become derailed by the idea of topping "Axis: Bold as Love," failing definitively and heroically and LOUDLY in the attempt.

Sure, "Just a Little Bit" and "Come and Get It" are big and lumbering enough. But where'd they get the idea to lead off with the piano and soft-focus psychedelia of "Feathers from Your Tree"? I guess it's no stranger than the fire-and-ice results of Mountain's West and Pappalardi. Just a lot less polished.

Apparently there's a lot of Spinal Tap-style history to the band, lots of lineup changes and reunion tours. Some form of Blue Cheer soldiers on, continuing to kick the ass of the likes of BTO and Kansas at county fairs across this great land.

And they're huge in Japan.

Candygram for Mongo

2006-02-20T23:18:00.000-06:00

It's heartening to know there is still room on this rock for the likes of Prince Mongo.

Entrepreneur, raconteur, provocateur...possibly even flaneur, for all I know. An all-round colorful character. And modest. Did I mention extraterrestrial?

The greened-over district

2006-02-16T17:39:00.000-06:00

Trading trains in the urban congestion of the Loop, one would never think that vast swaths of grassy desolation lie to the south and west. Yet from the air (or by way of Google Earth) there is a stark line between neighborhoods with houses huddled shoulder-to-shoulder and other neighborhoods full of empty lots and isolated two-flats.

Sheltered small-towner that I was when I first came to Chicago, I thought it all looked like city--too many people too close together. It took an impulsive trip on the Green Line from the Loop to Garfield for me to see the emptiness first-hand. Bronzeville looks ravaged in the way I imagined Sarajevo or Grozny might. Long blocks hold but two or three houses, the remaining lots' rubble increasingly hidden under a patchy blanket of grass.

The perverse thought occurred to me that denizens of wealthier and more crowded parts of the city would kill for such open space--perverse given all the deaths of people and buildings to which those flat green spaces give mute testimony. Hence I'm not holding my breath for any 1950s Hyde Park-style urban renewal or 1990s Logan Square-like gentrification or 2000s South Loop-type "adaptive reuse." Nor do I think we'll see anything like a Bridgeport Village coming to Bronzeville or North Lawndale any time soon.

We talk about neighborhoods being "rough," "blighted." Run down or dangerous as they may be, most have a full complement of residences, stores, cars, evidence of life. It doesn't get much more "blighted" than neighborhoods abandoned to the poor and stigmatized by the slightly less poor and stigmatized, underdeveloped by a unequal society, burned down by some of the very people who live there, and now claimed only by the persistent regrowth of grass.

From the air or from a train, grass is deceptive.
Could be lawn, could be park, could be graveyard.

Bi-Curious?

2006-02-14T00:07:00.000-06:00

Ooh, is it time for the Winter Olympics again?

Thank you, poverty, for ensuring that I will not be afflicted by more than one channel of non sequitur sports and inane human-interest stories about the people behind the packaged competition.

Not that I as an unrepentant Minnesotan am totally averse to some snowy citius-altius-fortius. It's just that my interest in this particular collection of sports tends to be inflamed in direct proportion to their eccentricity, if not downright insanity.

Curling, for instance, is just plain odd as a concept. But I'm too familiar with it by virtue of a northerly upbringing to be overly critical. Now, luge and skeleton (pick your poison, indeed) are well up there in their extremity quotient; you have to wonder about the mental state of the first luger in a way that you wouldn't about the creator of curling. (Abundant winter, beer, and cabin fever explain a lot, believe me.)

But there is no contest on the craziest winter sport: the biathlon.

Take a loaded rifle into the woods. (Wait, it gets better.) Cross-country ski for thousands of yards. Every so often, drop to the ground and try to pick off some tiny metal target paddles. Repeat ad libitum until someone ends up with a medal.

This has got to be, of any winter sport, the one with the greatest real-world utility. If nothing else, knowing there's a population of spandex-clad crack-shot skiers keeps those shifty Canadians honest and on their side of the border.

Don't think we're not watching...

Heteroglossolalia 4

2006-02-09T21:30:00.000-06:00

I've had a bit to say on the current flap over intelligent design in these United States. More will surely follow. For now, I offer a bracing and very widely applicable comment by a scholar who has - for me, at least - helped clarify a great deal about science in society:

"Once it is recognized that knowledge exists only through its reproduction and circulation, the importance of conflict becomes evident: conflict focuses and directs that circulation...The contested circulation of opposing knowledges…is a struggle for truth. Truth matters. Precisely because it matters, truth is often fiercely contested. And if we cannot stand outside that contest to assess it from a neutral standpoint, this does not mean that all claims to truth can be put forward on an equal basis."
Joseph Rouse. 1996. Beyond Epistemic Sovereignty. p.416

Undead vaudevillian cineaste

2006-02-08T23:28:00.000-06:00

How well I remember my rapturous adolescent discovery of MST3K on visits to Twin Cities-area relatives.

Ever since it went out of circulation, a void has yawned in the limited cortical space I reserve for thoughtful yet snotty entertainment with esoteric Minnesota references. (Using Pine City Vo-Tech as a punchline works for a really select crowd.) The Onion, good and Midwestern as it is, only takes me so far.

So once I had returned to Chicago it was a bewildering but pleasant surprise to stumble across a TV show airing - and skewering - shitty old movies with a joyously hokey and decidedly local slant.

All hail Svengoolie, scourge of Berwyn!

If your idea of mirth is a late-night pelting by cheesy jokes, rubber chickens, and overdubbed insults stolen from Looney Tunes and Simpsons episodes, you'll think you've died and been exhumed by the Friars Club's cryptkeeper. All you have to do is move to this side of Lake Michigan...

Where's my damn snow???

2006-02-07T22:34:00.000-06:00

I want my money back.

I put a downpayment on a real upper Midwest winter when I blew in here in August after two years of SoCal surreality. A "dusting" or two ain't gonna do it.

Who do I need to pimp-slap to get more than a couple day's supply of white stuff?

How about actual cold? Like "hurts to breathe, think I'll stay home" cold.

I have a sweet-ass ski jacket. Columbia. I've barely worn it. By this time in Black History Month I should be sick of that jacket. I should be dreaming - rashly, perversely - about a sticky August walk along the lake.

Not actually walking by the lake. In my tennis shoes.

Now watch: We're gonna have a long, cold, damp, retarded spring ahead of us.

God(s) bless you, Guy Spiro

2006-02-06T20:15:00.000-06:00

Do you trust me?

Well, then, be on the lookout for the Monthly Aspectarian. It's Chicagoland's circular clearinghouse for New Age and New Thought.

Need a regression to a past life? Analysis by Ascended Masters? Soul-retrieval? DNA reprogramming?
Find it here.

Searching for your local holistic medicine/crystal/pet store? A Wicca-compliant web designer?
Gotcha covered.

Need the latest Astro-Weather© forecast?
Get one by the divine Mr. Spiro.

At the risk of fawning, let me express my sincere appreciation to TMA and its publisher/editor/astrologer-in-chief for the many hours of L-bound reading I have enjoyed. Here's to many more...in many incarnations to come.

Frink Tank

2006-02-01T22:15:00.000-06:00

Science and technology studies seeks to treat science - that venerable, intimidating institution - like any other human pursuit or product. I begin to think that a better demystifying job might be done by treating science as fodder for gossip.

Enter the renegade science-nerd smack talking of Frink Tank.

The site's approach shines in a recent post pimp-slapping Darwinian partisan Richard Dawkins for unrepentant anti-religiosity while simultaneously managing to insult the pious. In the words of the very quotable Jabba the Hut, "my kind of scum!"

You may find, dear reader, that I cannot consistently muster the Frinksters' total commitment to the smirk, the 'tude, or the gag. For that, they have my grudging admiration. But I make no promises that I will not (what do the young people say?) "bite" their shtick.

Y'all nerds been warned.

This is your main course on drugs

2006-01-25T23:26:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-24T22:19:00.000-06:00

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:

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

Frogpocalypse

2006-01-21T00:28:00.000-06:00

Tsathoggua.com

Reflection on the arrival of spring semester

2006-01-15T20:44:00.000-06:00

"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?

2006-01-13T15:40:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-12T22:23:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-11T22:04:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-10T21:18:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-09T21:31:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-07T17:47:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-04T22:24:00.000-06:00

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

2006-01-02T18:47:00.000-06:00

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.

What's brown and sounds like a bell?

2005-12-31T19:22:00.000-06:00

Dung!!!

May we all ring in the New Year in our own weird ways.

Breathtaking Inanity

2005-12-29T22:05:00.000-06:00

Striking while the iron is still room temperature...

The Dover ID case has been decided for the plaintiffs and (between the lines) against intelligent design. Judge Jones slapped down the defendants with characteristic jollity--see the title of this post for his summation of their position. (It's not the "i" word I'd have used, but a good one nonetheless.)

Thick as it is, the ruling won't stop the court cases, including one mounting in Michigan as you read this. Nor will it blunt the wedge tactics. Districts in 42 states are getting into the sticky subject of science curricula.

I say "Bring it on!" It's great spectator sport, if nothing else. The brouhaha over ID also helps get some important epistemic and civic issues into the spotlight. Yes, something even more important than Tom Cruise's fractured compound or Nick-n-Jessica's compound fracture. Like, oh, I don't know:

where the line needs to be (re)drawn between secular and religious in US institutions;
where and why lines are drawn between science and nonscience (including pseudoscience) and who's doing the drawing;
parents getting involved in their kids' educations, if only for or against one issue (and it's not condoms for a change);
basically the pressures and deficiencies under which schools have to operated.

We just need someone to keep the rhetorical fan going to dispel the heat and smoke all sides keep on generating. Who could that be...?

CHRISTMAS Train!!!

2005-12-22T19:51:00.000-06:00

If you saw a phantasmic locomotive whipping along the L tracks all decked out in tinkling lights and fairly reeking of reindeer musk, you were not hallucinating. Or maybe you were, and this just played right into your little reverie.

It was the CTA's official Holiday Train, spreading the spirit of the season several days a week leading up to "the Holidays."

This train (or more properly, its name) raises the suddenly spiky issue of how to greet people of undetermined religious orientation: i.e., the spreading use of an inclusive "Happy Holidays" being set upon and bludgeoned by Christian conservatives with their "Merry Christmas."

As a goy bridging the gulf between gentiles and Jews one mostly-kosher wife at a time - and as a lapsed Methodist teaching cultural relativism to mostly Catholic collegians - let me take a stab at this whole venom-fest.

» Any L train with red and green lights is a goddamn Christmas train.
» "Happy Holidays" is the most appropriate greeting for a period characterized by the convergence of Christmas, New Year's (in several flavors), Hanukkah, the Hajj (at least this year), and (whatever you think of it) Kwanzaa and for a country whose citizens are apt to celebrate two or more of them.

Ho ho ho.

Heteroglossolalia 2

2005-12-21T23:26:00.000-06:00

This is a reminder for all those (myself included) who would take the role of pundit or scholar or expert, thereby putting others in the nonexpert slot:

The cultural authority of scholars, the complex language used in scholarly discourse, and the esoteric nature of academic channels of communication render academic interpretations of the beliefs of ordinary people generally inaccessible to those being studied...
David Hufford. 1999. "The Scholarly Voice and the Personal Voice."

Cheers, Toasty!

2005-12-20T20:35:00.000-06:00

A special thank you to Toasty Lundqvist for the favorable mention of this collection of digital detritus in his much better crafted (and infinitely more entertaining) blog. I think Vyvyan's mom from "The Young Ones" put it this way:

"Up yours, ugly!"

Why you'd pay any heed to the old, alcoholic bird is beyond me...

Donnelly '08 - the North (Atlantic) will rise again

2005-12-20T19:44:00.000-06:00

It may be a bit early in the political season, but there is too much at stake not to start now. I'm going out on a limb and stumping for a candidate of true presidential timber. That's gotta be a mixed metaphor.

Bear in mind that I'm hardly politically active--or partisan, for that matter. The Libertarian test of political leanings put me at the mushy intersection of liberal, libertarian, and conservative. Nevertheless, after another anaesthetizing session of mass-media news, my eyes - and fancy - were caught by a copy of "Atlantis: the Antediluvian World" on my shelf. That sealed the deal.

In 2008 I will vote for Senator Ignatius Donnelly for president of the U frickin' S of A.

Our country cries out for a leader of the caliber of this great legislator and scholar from my beloved Minnesota. All of those Humphrey boys had their shot. It's time for a leader who actually put the Library of Congress to proper use, producing two learned tomes on protohistory (hmm, a president who reads and writes books...) while still keeping the country together through the dark times of Reconstruction.

OK, the Senator's been dead at least 100 years. Screw the technicalities--his time has come. Again. For the first time.

I ask you: Who better to make sense of our increasingly globalized world than a hyperdiffusionist? Who better to take stock of America's position in the world than the premier chronicler of a doomed, disappeared continent? Who better to unite our fractured body politic than a liberal republican with some real estate he'd love to sell you? Who??

I will strongly suggest that he hook up with the Extraterrestrial Political Action Committee, X-PPAC. Just think of the balance on that ticket!

?Dónde se encuentran las pinches cemitas?

2005-12-16T23:05:00.000-06:00

While it was generally stressful for being all business, my year in Mexico was a treat in at least one respect: the food. I was able to persist in some of my adopted alimentary habits during our time in LA. And it's not like Chicago is devoid of good, cheap Mexican food (e.g. Burrito House).

But there are still unos platillos típicos, in particular ones from Puebla, that I need to track down.

tacos árabes - think crackling gyro meat in near-pita tortillas
cemitas - torta ingredients within toasted sesame seed buns

Apparently both are served at Taquería Puebla on North Ave. - not to be confused with a joint of the same name on Milwaukee - as well as exotica like mixiotes, judging by the photo of its menu posted on a local foodie message board. No pulque or gusanos de maguey, but pretty authentic.

Now if only I could find a correlate to my beloved Taquería Los Ángeles on Avenida 25 Oriente, with its fruit salads and aguas de sandia.

Lost my agatite

2005-12-14T21:09:00.000-06:00

In the Sulzer branch of the Chicago Public Library, my wife recently found a fun (though unevenly researched) book detailing the stories behind Chicago street names. The pesky matter of honorary street names will be left for another time.

Apparently the most mysterious name belongs to Agatite Avenue, a quiet side street running intermittently between Montrose and Sunnyside (itself derived from a popular house of ill repute!) into the near northwest suburbs. Some interesting things can be found on the avenue, including the St. Thomas Syro-Malabar Catholic Diocese of Chicago.

The authors speculate, with admittedly no basis, that it could be a corruption of the mineral "apatite," or a lay hypercorrection of "agate," but their discussion consists mainly of failed attempts to find any positive evidence. Another source raised and then dashed the possibility of linking to a Caribbean tree.

Thus Google to the rescue...or so I hoped.

My most promising lead, a shape-note hymn called "New Agatite," turned out to be circular at best: the author lived on the street when he wrote it. Apparently an Agatite Road runs through Jacksonville FL, but that only deepens the mystery.

So here's what I turned up, in decending order of usefulness:

a series of novels by Clay Reynolds set in the (fictional?) West Texas town of Agatite;
an "Agatite Cement Plaster" manufactured by one Fred Harvey Quincy of Salina KS in the late 1890s;
the Agatite Short Line RR that was absorbed into the Fort Worth & Denver RR at around the same time;
"Red Agatite Stripping Guides" on some handmade fly-fishing rods.

Maybe agatite.com will settle the matter--if it ever gets up and running. But that would be too easy.

Sweet Smell of Stickney

2005-12-09T20:46:00.000-06:00

I teach (extremely) part-time at Morton College in Cicero. It's quite a nice two-year school that's making big strides in the facilities and courses it provides its mostly Latino student body.

It's just not in the best location: essentially surrounded by a bunch of oil refineries and a horse-racing track. There is also a very particular odor in the air whenever I roll into the lot, hard to place--sort of latriney with a hint of petrochemicals.

Recently I caught a rebroadcast of WTTW's excellent homage to the Chicago River. Turns out the campus is barely a Biffy-length from the world's highest-volume water treatment facility, the Stickney Water Reclamation Plant. (For those of you keeping track, that's 1.2 billion gal/day from 2.38 million pooping, swilling, self-moistening Illinoisans.)

As you can imagine, my chest swelled and my nostrils flared with the pride of knowing that this was, in fact, a world-class aroma...and the relief of assuring that it did not emanate from any part of my anatomy.

Heteroglossolalia 1

2005-11-22T22:40:00.000-06:00

Every so often, I will post other people's words without commentary, deep thoughts or jokes or provocations that I've come across in my reading. I leave it up to you, dear reader, to divine which if any reflect my own thinking--and which will infiltrate yours.

I begin with one of my favorites:

"Just because a message comes from heaven doesn't mean it's not stupid."
Jacques Vallée. 1979. Messengers of Deception.

Overheard on campus 1

2005-11-18T16:55:00.000-06:00

Dedicated to M. Colosimo, esq., wherever he may be.

Lewis Black once riffed on a single phrase he overheard in a crowded restaurant, one so bizarre and nonsensical that it nearly gave him an aneurysm:

"If it hadn't been for my horse, I wouldn't have spent that year in college."

Occasionally I stumble into or pass through conversations in midstream, though my reaction is usually more bemused than choleric.

Today, headed home after a long day of quizzing and lecturing, I heard something that sent me chortling all the way to the El. I pass it on to you, more or less as it impacted my eardrum:

"...I'm talkin's f--kin' one-titted Amazon hookers, man..."

Should've told that kid he needs to see the Dean about a horse. But then he'd probably think he fell victim to what a friend of mine aptly called "slurred hearing."

The effectiveness of aluminum foil helmets

2005-11-18T16:43:00.000-06:00

4 MIT engineers
1 $250,000 device
many hours of free time
-----------------------------------
priceless insights.

On being flamed by native speakers

2005-11-04T21:38:00.000-06:00

Several years ago I put together my own website by hand. It was partly to publicize my own research. But mainly I wanted to make it an informative resource for others.

I decided before embarking on field research to translate some of the pages on my Mexican work into Spanish. Admittedly I'm not a native speaker, but neither am I an idiot (or totally unschooled en español a la mexicana).

While in Mexico, I got several e-mails regarding those pages. Most were inquiries on specific aspects of my research. But one was a total rip on my translation skills. "I hate foreign devils like you debasing our beautiful language," he ranted. "If you can't do it perfectly, don't even bother."

Now, no one flipped out at me in Mexico for how poorly I spoke Spanish. Many of my contacts were actually pleased at my improving efforts at smooth and idiomatic conversation.

After the initial shock, I was filled with more than a little righteous anger. That pseudonymous prick picked the wrong person to play language cop on. I actually care enough to try (badly) to reach out; furthermore, I defy readers without a massive cultural chip on their shoulders to interpret my inept translation as disrespect.

So, if you're out there web-surfing, struggling to read or write English, and you stumble across this page, you won't even need to translate this:

!Bese mi culito blanquito, cabrón!

Happy Halloweeeoooow!

2005-10-31T20:15:00.000-06:00

It takes a nation of a-holes to keep us down

2005-10-28T21:25:00.000-05:00

After several years in LA, the land that public transportation forgot, it's nice on many levels to be back in the city of fat pizzas and elevated lines. But for various reasons, it was almost a more pleasant experience to drive in LA. Don't throw your keys at me until you hear me out.

Exhibit A:
Chicago is the only place I have seen a cop drive down a one-way street the wrong way just because he could. No siren, no checking cross-streets, no hurry.

Exhibit B:
It's the only place where people will pull up in front of a house or apartment building before work, lean on their horns, and keep honking until their passengers drag their butts out of bed. There were times I badly wanted a paintball gun to tattoo these a-holes.

Exhibit C:
Of any place I've lived, Chicago tops the charts for double-parking. And I've lived in Mexico, where even the locals admit most of their compatriots are egregious violators in this regard. Four-way flashers are not a force field, a-holes.

Exhibit D:
Chicago has, in my experience, the highest incidence of drivers with absolutely no remorse over blocking four lanes of traffic at rush hour to make a left turn from the far right lane with the red light against them.

Exhibit E:
How many cities with such a gorgeous lakefront can boast so many people who drive to the shore and never even get out to enjoy the view from the other side of the windshield?

And this doesn't even touch on my experiences as a pedestrian and (respectful) rollerblader in this town.

Do you justice

2005-10-27T22:42:00.000-05:00

I have a crush on Jan Crawford Greenberg.

Don't tell my wife (she's automatically notified whenever I post new stuff, so there's really no point).

JCB reports on the Supreme Court for both the Chicago Tribune and the News Hour with Jim Lehrer. I know what you're thinking: black robed elderly judges--what could be more arousing? The way JCB covers the Court, not much.

Perhaps it's the tender yet forceful way she lays bare the most intimate details of that august body. There is absolutely no "prude" in her view of jurisprudence.

Just tune in to PBS during these upcoming confirmation hearings and see if you don't agree.

Fogelson's Law

2005-10-23T22:41:00.000-05:00

(With absolutely no apologies to Haeckel.)

Androgeny Recapitulates Gynandromorphy.

Go White Sox!

2005-10-20T22:04:00.000-05:00

I see by your ass you have excellent taste

2005-10-18T23:09:00.000-05:00

Who started this trend of putting logos and designer names on the back end of pants, skirts, etc.?

I blame school athletic departments. They started slapping team names on legs and rumps back when I was in high school, but you could at least justify it by reference to the "Property of" tag that usually framed that fashion statement. Sort of makes your cross-country runners into human hotel keys--"If found in a snowdrift somewhere, please mail back to..."

Redirecting the question of blame, look at yourself. How much do you have to love your clothier to wear their ad on your butt? I suppose there are more unseemly locales for such designer vainglory. Would you go out in public, for example, with Ralph Lauren hanging off your crotch...so to speak?

There's just no good reason to carry free ad space on your person unless you are paid to do so. Try making that demand the next time you're at a boutique checkout counter: "I want a cut of the ad revenue my ass is generating." They'll probably tell you something catty like "Start hitting the Stairmaster and then we'll talk."

The moral, if that term even applies:
Respect your hindquarters as a mode of communication. If you must, you can indulge in the faux shock of cheeks labeled "Porn Star" or the (possibly more accurate) "Juicy." But at least be creative enough to send your own uniquely degrading message.

(Bear in mind this comes from a kid who, in his custom-made "March Naked" t-shirt, was featured prominently - and gleefully - on a local "Best of the Senior High Class" TV spot.)

Comic Cat-ass-trophism, or: Mars, Venus, Uranus?

2005-10-14T20:52:00.000-05:00

"Right now, animals are crapping in our houses! And we're cleaning it up!! Did we lose a war??" Homer J. Simpson

If you're a "cat person" (and I often wonder if there might be some subtle connection to being a "Mac person"), the following might rub you the wrong way. As a canine-comfortable person who is now a happy and indulgent co-parent of two black kitties - let's call them Shoggoth and Tsathoggua - I share this with nothing but affection.

I'm still weirded out by cat butts.

Not the fact that they have them, per se. (Something about them being like opinions...in that they tend to stink...or something.)

No, more the fact that I have a good chance of being confronted with them at eye level whether I'm lying down, sitting, or even standing. Cats are freaking nimble. If they're as friendly as ours, cats are liable to stroll across the back of the sofa and promenade back and forth by your head to get some attention. Add this to the way they will park themselves anywhere with one leg up and lick their holes after evacuating, and there's just no avoiding it.

Cat ass.

Perhaps, as my dear felinophile wife reminds me, I should be thankful that they're so meticulous cleaning even that end of their anatomy. And that we don't need to take them for a potty run in the middle of a snowstorm. Besides, she insists, "they're soooo cuuute!"

That's as may be.

But that doesn't mean I have to like a purring, fuzzy mini Pit of Sarlac blocking my view when I'm trying to watch "Supernanny."

Meow.

Food, Folks, and WTF?!? What I'll miss most about LA

2005-10-13T23:13:00.000-05:00

This past summer, my wife and I returned to Chicago after a couple of fairly eventful years in the San Fernando Valley, Los Angeles, CA. (Among the events: becoming husband and wife, thank you very much.) We were often too busy to get out and fully indulge in all delights and terrors that LA offers. Perhaps it was for the best. But the fact that my wife's family remains in the area gives us several good reasons for return visits.

As a Midwesterner, LA alternately enchanted, amused, irritated, and terrified me. I readily admit that I'm very glad to be back in Chicago, and in the Midwest generally. But I will also own up to a certain nostalgia for SoCal, for certain favorite things. You will find an annotated and hyperlinked list of them below for your amusement and/or enlightenment.

Lay of the Land

I loved having mountains on all sides for scenery and for recreation, especially the Santa Susanas behind my mother-in-law's house.
Living just over the hill from Hollywood, kitsch was a marked feature of the terrain: from the Brady Bunch House to the site of Spears-Federline wedding to the humming engines of "the Industry," all within blocks of our apartment.
I also enjoyed interacting with the wildlife, especially stalking western fence lizards.
After enduring a couple of blasts of desert summer heat, I came to relish "June gloom," when the damp marine clouds crept over the Santa Monica mountains.
Even now, I am still floored by the incongruous and superabundant flora--pine trees surrounded by bougainvillea on the same block as decorative citrus trees. (How can you let those damn oranges rot on your lawns, people?)

Remembrance of Repasts
Though I'm not a real foodie like my wife and her family, I really enjoyed having every kind of exotic cuisine (made by people from there--and their Mexican cooks) a short drive away. Just a few highlights:

"Sushi Gulch": our strip of Ventura Blvd and a favorite star hangout, where every other building serves Japanese food. Our favorites were Tama, Cio-Cio San, and Daichan.
Zankou Chicken in any of its locations. You could go to Carousel in Glendale for high-class Middle Eastern cuisine, but you won't get Armenian chicken (and bright yellow shirts!) to go.
Wat Thai LA's weekend Thai food bazaar (two words: knom krok).
Asian markets (Galleria for Korean and Mitsuwa for Japanese food), where white people like me can almost be certain of what we're getting--but it's usually tasty.
How could I forget? In-n-Out!

Espectáculos (or Guilty Pleasures)

It particularly tickled me to run into familiar faces in the course of my everyday existence--spotting Clancy in his classic convertible, standing behind Walter at the bank, bumping into Steve in a museum, and watching MJ's dad go through the x-ray at LAX.
Living treasure Huell Howser: did that Simpsons roast make sense to anyone outside of CA?
Hal Fishman, legend, anchorman. Tell me he is not the model for Kent Brockman.
Apocalyptic local news: Fire! Flood! Quake! Car chase! Immigrants!
6 Spanish and 2 Asian channels over the free airwaves. When I was unemployed and cat-sitting, I got my RDA of Korean soaps, Mexican courtroom shows, and Japanese cooking competitions.
The SoCal hothouse for all flavors of eccentricity--the Church of Scientology, the Integratron, the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

We'll still have similar kinds of good things in Illinois. We can, thanks to our automotive accoutrement, persist in the Trader Joes/IKEA lifestyle (with all apologies to Sandra Tsing Loh). For that matter, there are still ethnic goodies to be had. Just not in the same abundance, or with the same atmosphere.

Postscript:
My first day in LA, my now-wife, then-girlfriend and I went to get groceries in the Studio City Trader Joe's. We found ourselves surrounded by obvious entertainment types (and probably wannabes; I still can't tell 'em apart). Noticing my Minnesota license plate t-shirt, the clerk chortled "Welcome to LA...now get out!" We all laughed.

Well, you got it, dude. Never meant to stay.

What? No 7/4? On the lameness of pop-rock functionalism

2005-10-08T17:38:00.000-05:00

Nota bene: this rant comes from someone who discovered rock (in its "classic" and "hard" varieties) out of an early and on-going love for classical orchestral music. So I could be a little perverse.

Let me first say I am a big fan of certain subgenres of rock. As a recreational bass player, I relish playing along with old chestnuts by Cream, Zeppelin, Hendrix, and a host of their contemporaries. I see no contradiction or schizoid separation in being moved by Hendrix's "Red House" (live or studio version) and Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler"--for many of the same aesthetic reasons.

That said, I'm really turned off by the narrow genre conventions of pop and rock generally. In the main they have to do with milking proven ways to sell records, tickets, and memorabilia. This is why I'm all the more impressed when really creative artists (e.g. Beck) get popular. That my respect for certain kinds of creativity is unequaled by the adoration I have for the admitted crudity and loudness of, say, "Mississippi Queen" does not diminish the former, merely my enthusiasm for it. And, if you make a living off your art within a marketplace, I have no basic problem with you tailoring your output to market forces in a way that you can bear.

But why can't there be more little tweaks and tricks to keep pop songs interesting as artistry? Case in point: odd time signatures. What "average" consumer (if there is such a thing) would even notice a lopped-off 7/4 section in the verse, for instance? It adds something interesting and out of the ordinary to what are otherwise saleable songs--perhaps making them more so. And, if you're any kind of musician, it should only slightly tax your brain. (I might be getting my hopes up: you'll find a lot more performers than musicians in pop.)

While it's kind of a stretch, take a listen to Pantera's "Broken" for clues how you might go about integrating oddness and convention successfully. The track still thrashes - even swings - through a 6/4 chorus and a 7/8 verse. It's the main reason why I really dig Pantera, Tool, Clutch, and a handful of other heavier bands (despite qualms about their lyrical content or their fan base) as creatively engaged artists and faithful rockers.

The major factor restricting creativity of form to certain niches is not market or audience expectations. It's genre conventions (and, if I may be so bold, shaky musicianship), combined with the idea that "creativity" ought to be focused on lyrics--although they also remain highly conventional. Bottom line for many pop-rock acts and industry brass: odd time signatures just don't sound right. Why? My guess is that they make the music harder - though not impossible - to dance to. Again, I'd argue that this is not technically true, simply the logic governing these genres.

This suggests a crude classification for music. Within an X/Y grid, with the X-axis labeled "expressivity" and the Y-axis labeled "functionality," we can map any song or artist. All music has each aspect, though the balance differs by genre and work. That is, classification rests on the ratio between aesthetic appreciation and visceral/bodily movement--nod your head versus shake your ass.

Four examples

romantic classical = high expressive, low functional
techno dance = moderate expressive, high functional
West African drumming = low expressive, high functional
pop = moderate expressive, moderate/high functional

I'm not yet sure where to go with this idea. Maybe I can parlay it into a future in music industry niche marketing? Make money off an idea? That might be a little too functional!

Encomium for the Jackalope

2005-10-08T16:21:00.000-05:00

If you ever pass within 100 miles of Wall Drug, SD, you can't miss references to the venerable jackalope--part rabbit, part antelope, all-American.

Well, I'm not writing on that. So bite me.

No, I direct your attention to the Cenotaph of the Jackalope and, more particularly, its estimable proprietor, Dr. Hermester Barrington. I became acquainted with the good doctor through a mutual friend and confidant, and my life has been distinctly enriched because of it.

"Reclusive polymath" is perhaps the best way to summarize the man. He is a trustee and faculty member of that most eminent redoubt of New England higher education, Miskatonic University, where his specialty is protozoa. (Ah, would that I might be appointed lecturer in exosociology or xenoethnography there...)

Dr. Barrington is also an energetic reviewer of works in wildly diverse genres; you will find abundant evidence of his sagacity and acumen if you search him out on Amazon.com. And, as befitting a bibliophile, he oversees the Malibu Lake branch of the Invisible Library, built largely out of his personal collection of great yet oddly untraceable works of fiction and scholarship.

Seek him out on-line, for I can think of no better guide to the exquisite pleasures of obscure scholarship. Trivia, indeed, Dr. Barrington! Realia, I say.

Craunch a marmoset? Anyone?

2005-10-03T22:40:00.000-05:00

One of the most hallucinatory reading experiences I have ever had was a brief entry in the snottily titled "Complete Book of Failure" treating arguably the least successful dictionary on record.

Republished as "English As She Is Spoke", this was the bastard result of passing English conversational phrases through French and ultimately rendering them in a doggedly literal Portuguese. The entry - reproduced in several places without permission - brings me to the point of cackling convulsions each time I lay eyes on it. It is such a concentrated blast of hilarity that I can't even bear to contemplate reading the entire work.

It's $9 new on Amazon, if you dare.

Caveat Lector

2005-09-24T21:46:00.000-05:00

Let the reader be warned:

On this page you will find no overt political commentary or breathless pop-cultural spouting. That said, you will discern a clear point of view if you read between or beyond the lines, as well as sporadic blatant opinionation. Nor will you encounter any self-glorifying drivel or tight-focus navel-gazing for which blogging seems tailor-made. You will, in fact, find little direct personal information, though again it's there if you're paying attention.

What appears herein is simply stuff I find laughable, lamentable, inscrutable, thought-provoking. (When in doubt, you can safely assume the words were tapped in with a definite smirk on my face.) This is basically an outlet for one usually stifled creative urge--slightly less fleeting than my internal monologue, slightly more public than e-mail. Posts can be categorized roughly as "analytical," "personal," and "out there" depending on their subject matter.

Again, the reader is cautioned:
As a trained, and as yet undisgruntled academic, the author is apt to avail himself of verbosity and obscurity to acheive certain effects. As a Midwesterner, he will not hesitate to employ terse and/or foul phrasings to get to a particular point. As a devotee of verbal playfulness, he will mete out plenty of pun-ishment.

If the idea of these three tendencies colliding makes you wince, ya been warned. If it makes you curious, read on. Come back. Bring some friends.