Marie Antoinette

Executive Producer, pitching this movie to studio exec: What I really love about this project is that the first 50 minutes of the movie revolve around someone NOT wanting to have sex with Kirsten Dunst. It's genius.

Studio Exec: That sounds great! Here's 10 million dollars. Don't worry about a plot, either.

So, this movie is boring. There's no payoff to either of the build-ups in the film: waiting around for Kirsten Dunst to get boinked by the King, and waiting around for their heads to get chopped off. Both these things happen offscreen, so...what is this movie about? I don't know. A lot of languid arms draped over really nice furniture...a horrendous (high concept?) montage of shoes and cake while blaring "I Want Candy".

I thought Sofia Coppola was racist for not developing a single Japanese character in Lost in Translation. Now I realize that she just cannot develop character. This movie is like that movie, only without Bill Murray to hold everything up, and this time, not a single French character is developed (Marie Antoinette is Austrian).

I dunno. The whole thing should be stupid and boring, and it is, but the film only tries to be pretty and inconsequential, and at that it succeeds.

The Fugitive (no proust)

So I just wrote a presentation for my Derrida class, which anyone who knows me, knows this class has overtaken my life, has five times as much work as any of my other classes, all the kids are taking it, etc. And so I went over the same information several times: I read it. I re-read it. I wrote down what I had underline. I made an outline from that. Then I wrote a paper from that. And then I went down and wrote a summary of it in my notebook for safe-keeping. And so then I read my presentation to make sure it was under the time limit. It made no sense!!! But I had literally JUST written it.

Have you guys seen the Fugitive? The movie with Harrison Ford. (I should say, Proust's sixth volume of A la recherche... "La Fugitive" was disastroustly translated into English as "The Sweet Cheat Gone," and I really really really really really wish that the Harrison Ford/ Tommy Lee Jones film were called "The Sweet Cheat Gone"). Anyways, when I saw this movie when I was 10, I was obsessed with the TV show, which I had seen every day at 2pm when I was in bed with mono. Now, this is a great action film, probably the equal of that other 1990s juggernaut "Terminator 2: Judgment Day", and definitely better than "Time Cop", a film starring Jean Claude Van Damme which tried to combine the two (cops, time travel) with a sprinking of nudity (this is all I remember, except that someone MELTED when they ran into their time-double.) So, "Terminator 2" and "The Fugitive" were both massively difficult to understand, "Terminator 2" in an existential way, where how can you get rid of the future if you need someone to be sent back to the past to make sure that events turn out the same way, but you have gotten rid of the possibility of being able to send them back? Also: did ROBOTS invent time-travel? I think this is the claim of the film, but why would robots want to time-travel?

"The Fugitive" was impenetrable on a more "who did what and when?" level, because the one-armed man's motive was based on a covering-up of something that somehow necessitated murdering Harrison Ford's wife, but to my 5th grade mind it made sense only for like FIVE SECONDS when I somehow got all the elements in my head, thought "a-ha!" and then instantly collapsed back into a muddle when I tried to reorganize it.

This is what my Derrida paper reads like. I understood it while I was writing it, but reading it ten minutes later, (and let's be fair, it's 2 am and I'm sick), it reads like it was written in Martian. I know that I what I wrote is "true", but I'm not sure it makes any more sense than the impenetrable Derrida piece. Which is to say, next time you bash theory, or if you think my paper is boring, just remember: it's exactly like Terminator 2. That's just how exciting it is.

ny times publishes words of idiot

Yesterday in the Times was this AWFUL piece on how Starbucks is selling CDs, books, and a "lifestyle" to its millions of coffee-drinkers. What astounds me is that this works, because the logic is seemingly self-defeating: coffee shops have been playing jazz for decades, so why is Starbucks going to succeed in moving a new Herbie Hancock CD where others have failed?

Now, there is only one answer, one which this (ridiculous) article does not provide, but which I can easily give you: *not* that Starbucks has pioneered a new logic of selling culture to the educated, $90,000-a-year crowd which they were incapable of finding elsewhere, but rather that Starbucks has turned into a CONVENIENCE STORE. Like a 7-11 on route 9, where you can buy Travis Tritt's greatest hits along with a Big Gulp, Starbucks is making laziness (one might say: the opposite of even middle-brow culture) the rule of the day.

That is to say, there is a perverse irony that the "aesthetic" that Starbucks sells is, to my thinking, already that of mainstream bourgeois pretension. The Ray Charles CD was actually an inspired product, because that is something most people "know" but don't own-- having been Pepsi's image in the 90s-- but the other examples in the article are actually kind of trashy: Mitch Albom is an Oprah author (Oprah representing the pinnacle of mainstream bourgeois pretension), and "Akeelah and the Bee" was a clear take-off on the sleeper documentary hit "Spellbound". Which is to say, what Starbucks is selling people is what they already know they want: but locating it under one roof.

Another shit-move by the article is not to discuss how Starbucks GOT its cultural currency from association with Barnes and Noble bookstores. Barnes and Noble actually includes the coffee house WITHIN the logic of the bookstore-culture, so that Starbucks selling books and CDs along with coffee is already pre-determined by Barnes and Noble selling Stabucks coffee along with its books.

So, I have compared Starbucks to a one-stop, selling people what they already know they want. But what really gets me is that these "educated" customers who make "$90,000 a year on average" are SO BAD at being snooty, espresso-drinking multiculturalists. To wit, when Starbucks recently started selling the Frank Sinatra classic “In the Wee Small Hours,” sales of that CD went up twentyfold. What moron arrives at the age of 50 (say), with a huge disposable income, a suburban home, an Audi, and a lifestyle involving $5 lattes, harbors a secret desire to listen to Frank Sinatra but is unable to fulfill this wish because Frank Sinatra CDs are SO HARD TO FIND? And so, when they pop up at a Starbucks, he/she thinks "at last! I've been looking for this forever!"

Or even stupider: that someone does not even KNOW that they like Frank Sinatra (maybe the most popular pop musician of the last century) until they hear it at Starbucks. This, more sadly, is probably the case.

“If I hear a CD playing [in Starbucks], I generally like it,” Bette Gottfried, back in the Ardsley store, said. “It’s who I am — baby boomer, upper middle class, a little hippyish, rockish.”

Starbucks stores don’t carry “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the Beatles album everyone’s mother could name; they carry “Revolver,” a critical darling without the same overplayed name recognition.

Let's look at that fact that most people would probably be happy just owning a "Greatest Hits" of any particular artist. What is being (unironically) put forward here is that THE BEATLES and FRANK SINATRA are CULT ARTISTS. What is sad is that this obviously WORKS. People clearly buy a Frank Sinatra album or a Beatles album and go home feeling like they are possibly a bit slyer, more cultured than their neighbors. A bit jazzier. A bit more "critically astute".

Starbucks is so much better at selling these things to its customers than I would be, as I would adopt an ironic/meta/condescending attitude towards the buyers. The (evil) genius of Starbucks is not to say, "Oh, hey you should have this Frank Sinatra album, because you are sophisticated and it is essential to that pose." But RATHER, to say to SUV-driving, sweatpants-wearing, Robin-Williams-movie-renting middle-executive SLOBS, with total ingenuousness, "Hey, fellow coffee-drinker...yeah...this music *is* good...what is it?... oh man, Frank Sinatra...yeah, I love the old guy, "old blue eyes"... I have "Duets" and it is really great...oh, you have the CD here in the store...yeah, just throw it on the bill, b/c I'm paying with a credit card anyways...oh, it's his EARLY stuff...oh man, this is so cool."

See, being ironic and spiteful, I would try and capitalize on people's innate pretensiousness from MY perspective of what that means. Starbucks is so successful because it recognizes that, to the clueless idiot, what is really "new" and "culturally sophisticated" is just a variation that has been completely played out elsewhere for everyone but them.

ny times publishes picture of french fries

The caption is: "french fries discovered in a deep-cleaning of a Delta 767"-- which raises the question, do you need a "deep-cleaning" to find an open box of french fries in an overhead compartment?

But you know what? I would eat those french fries. They look pretty good. I bet they are soggy, since (according to the article), they may be up to 18 months old, but they aren't soaking in ketchup, and while they are undoubtedly from a restaurant in the airport, I bet it was like Bennigan's. So yeah. I think the moral is, if "deep cleaning" can unearth such delicious-looking (read: edible) fries in unexpected places, I wonder if some more close investigations of nooks and crannies in my daily routine could unearth maybe some still-edible popcorn, peanut-butter filled pretzels, or baked Lays?

recent jamz

Deadstop- "Done With You" LP
doesn't sound as much like Negative Approach (or...uh...AC/DC) as you might like... kind of has a Youth of Today meets Cro Mags (YEAH) vibe that is not as blatantly dumb as that implies. It's totally hard-as-shit, but never panders.

Dodsdomd- "Seven Deadly Sins" EP
This record came out in English and Swedish versions, I actually got the Swedish version, but I put up the English title, because I don't feel like walking four feet to read the title in whatever goofy "spooky" font they have on the cover. This is a big improvement from their LP: more memorable, no longer sounds like Sweden via USA.

Katatonia- "Dance of December Days" CD
For some reason, they changed the art on this album to look like some horrible I-don't-even-know, but suffice it to say there is a baby looking sadly at a grim reaper, and they changed the band logo. It was so much better when it was just these dudes with moustaches hanging out really close to each other, wrapped in purple smoke. Anyways, this is really over-emphatic "doom metal" before that whole style got co-opted by the Southern Lord crowd and some drone/ambient idea.

Mountain "Nantucket Sleighride" LP
Sounds like Lynyrd Skynyrd. Songs about Moby Dick.

Stan Getz "Sweet Rain" LP
This is one of those examples of someone who is REALLY GOOD at doing a popular version of something showing that their genius in the popular format (bossa nova) is actually based on a real understanding of forms, that can be demonstrated at will. Of course, I also appreciate the converse of this, the abstract understanding being masterfully put to use in a popular form.
examples of the former (rarer): The Beatles "Abbey Road", Beckett "Waiting for Godot"
examples of the latter: Judas Priest "Point of Entry", The Cure "Head on the Door", Velvet Underground "Loaded" (albeit less successfully).

Normally, the Stan Getz move-- "look, I'm sophisticated"--- backfires, and is just pretension. "Sweet Rain" is incredible, but one need only look at the career of Metallica and see their disastrous relation to their avant-garde roots in NWOBHM, a relation they seem incapable of drawing on for inspiration, thus blacking out their entire 80s career from proper context. So when Metallica try to write "sophisticated" music now, it sounds like it comes from Mars (in a bad way).

A flyer I found in the library today

In the library today, I found this flyer about Islam, which I excerpt here:

Islam has of late been accused of being a violent religion. A quick glance at events around the world, however, leaves little doubt that Islamic violence is due largely to US and Israeli policies. The events in the following regions demonstrate this:

Kosovo: Islamic radicals burn down churches and persecute Christians.

Uganda: Muslim rebels in the north, aided by Sudan, have challenged the government.

Algeria: Islamic guerillas continue to attack a government dominated by fellow Muslims.

etc. etc. [there are a bunch of other countries, similar stories].

Do you see how the above states of violent Islamic unrest are due to US and Israeli policies? You don't?! Then you've read this correctly. They have nothing whatever to do with the US or Israel.

Whether you want to call Islam a peaceful religion or not is irrelevant. The fact is that the great majority of unrest around the world involves Muslims--- and has nothing to do with the US or Israel. It has to do with a violent people who have perpetrated some of the most heinous atrocities upon mankind, and convinced a great number of "useful idiots" (mostly on college campuses) that they have a "cause". ....this is not a "cause"-- this is evil in its purest form.
And please stopd the worthless nonsense of calling this note propaganda and racist. You're in college--- you should have the ability to research this easily verifiable truth.

The time to stop Muslim violence is now, the place is wherever you happen to be.
************************************

Obviously I am above debating this note. It begs so many questions, it dismisses in advance any criticism of it as "propaganda" or "racist", etc. There is no debate to be had here.

BUT I am going to investigate (in this extreme case) a lot of bad argumenative practices that are indulged in nearly all public, political discourse.

1) Why shouldn't this note be called "propaganda"? Because propaganda has a pejurative connotation, of course. Because it might imply that this is reductionist and one-sided? Because it considers itself a reasoned, multi-faceted, fair account? Surely this is not the conception the authors had of it, and a leaflet like this is definitively propaganda. Which is not, as the author assumes, to dismiss it. It is to give it a GENRE.

2) Why shouldn't this note be called "racist"? This is another prohibition. My first response is, they are not talking about a race, they are talking about a religion. In this way, warning off charges of racism *raises* the very question it is dismissing-- whether the assumptions about Islam have more to do with people of color (in general) than with the religion (in specific) that it is openly questioning. So, I would say, what is "racist" is perhaps invisible to the authors, and so in the sense *intended*, they are correct-- it is not racist. But in the assumptions (as I'll show) that the logic depends on, there is a definite white, Western prejudice at work.

3) The examples by region. Each of these lacks any citation, although informing me later that because I am "in college," the "truths" they demonstrate are "easily verifiable." Could be. But none of these examples gives a context, either. The violence is presented as part of an endemic violence rooted in Islam. I'll grant that Muslims have engaged in some violence in recent years, and that their outrage is at times unsettling. But in order to prove that this violence is a result of Islam's nature, it would need to be shown:
-- that this violence within Islam is a relative constant throughout history and place
-- that the violence has to do with being Muslim, and has no mitigating history
-- that the violence has to do with being Muslim, in the sense that it is not an internal violence having to do with economic conditions or by subjects who *happen* to be Muslim
-- that the current violence in Afghanistan has "nothing to do with the US". I imagine this is an impossible assertion to prove, and yet the note calls this the "correct reading".

So, this is one long fallacy. If you replace the word "Muslims" with "people over 5'11'' ", you will see how there is no substantive proof LINKING violence to the state of being over 5'11'', although that is precisely what you would be led to assume about being Muslim.

4) That a "great majority" of violence in the world "involves Muslims". As no citation is given, we are not obliged to believe this, and yet even if it were true, the United States and Israel certainly must NOW be dragged into the discussion (which this note is at every effort to prevent), in the context of the great number of examples left out where the United States and Israel have aggressively asserted their policy in the face of a (supposedly unified) "Islam".

5) That there is any relation (having to do with Islam) between Indonesia and Kosovo--- other than the Koran, about which no proof is furnished that there is any incitation to violence.

So. Please consider this an exercise in argument and proving claims, rather than an actual "clash of viewpoints" with this drivel. I think liberalism and bourgeois ideology, and any number of debates, are based upon such disastrous reasonings. As Stuart's blog repeatedly shows, the claims of the Atlantic Yards project backers are contradictory, assert solutions to problems which are never shown to exist, and present numerous false binaries and strawman arguments. This post happens to attack a particularly easy (read: dumb) target, but I think this lazy, bullying style is so widespread that it is basically the Law of the Land.

ipods

So. I don't have an iPod. I want one. But I would use my ipod as an arena in which mp3s I download would battle for my attention, for the honor of being purchased on vinyl as part of complete albums/singles. I buy music. For me, owning music is important, and not because of copyright issues. This is an increasingly outdated viewpoint, it seems, but I hope to show why I think it is the only way for someone who really enjoys music beyond background-noise.

This will seem condescending, I think. No one wants to hear that they do not "truly appreciate" music. So I hope to show the advantages TO listening of NOT downloading, which might seem counterintuitive.

1) It is easy to have "good taste" when you can download anything in the world for free.
...and yet! How rarely is this the case! Normally when I scroll through someone's ipod, it is a collection of inoffensive, friendly, unremarkable music that could be gotten with no research and less than an expansive taste. I remain unconvinced that downloading music broadens one's tastes, although it certainly has that possibility. I would say that it is because there is no risk to downloading something. Because you have not spent any money on it, you can simply send an album to the recycle bin after listening to one song. This makes for a conservative taste.

2) There is no reason to put in any time with an album/artist in mp3 format.
Separated from album art, lyrics, band photos, any sense of a discrete form, the mp3 really makes no demands on the listener to be absorbed, reckoned with, debated, "acquired" (as a taste), etc. So you end up with this completely ephemeral aesthetic, which demands instant attention and instant approval, and I would say that most tastes are acquired tastes-- songs, albums, artists, and styles which require some effort to "get into". I guess that is up for debate.

3) In an infinite space, there is no way to hierarchize one's preferences.
That sounds more boring than I really mean it to. What I mean to say is that our attachments to music are normally located around a "favorite song," or a memory, or something having to do with an experience/emotion we want to play over again and again. No one's *original* favorite song would be an abstract Eno noise-scape. It is probably a Temptations song, or something we can really latch onto-- catchy, good lyrics, easy to relate to.

So, if in point #1, I argue that downloading music makes for conservative tastes, here I am arguing that downloading music onto an infinitely capacious hard drive makes it impossible to ever have again the experience of listening to "Ain't To Proud to Beg" a million times in a row just because you just got the Big Chill soundtrack and are compelled to listen to it over and over. It is not just one spot on an infinite playlist.

4) But, Ben, don't you buy more records than you can possibly listen to very closely?
Fair enough. And I'm sure that some people listen to mp3s in ways that I would completely approve of, too. But there is something about the RECORD that is so much more endearing. It has an identity of its own, you physically interact with it, you have to take care of it, you can show it to other people, you can skip songs but you can't just get rid of them, you can play the same side over and over again, read the lyrics along with it, but mostly: you are responsible to a record. It is not abstract. If you treat it badly, it will sound bad. If you don't listen to it, you will have wasted your money. If you lose the art, it becomes contextless. And I think this is what taking music seriously is about: having some relationship *back* to the music. Knowing that "if I don't preserve this (melody, context, aesthetic), maybe no one else will."

FUCK THIS MOVIE

Oh great. What the world really needs is this constipated character study of an inbred nincompoop, rendered as a deep meditation on progress and tradition. Let's be honest: there is almost no way that Elizabeth II can even read. Her IQ is probably hovering in the low 80s. Her portrayal in the Naked Gun seems far more accurate to me:



But TONY BLAIR is the voice of radicalism in this film? Or his wife? Can someone just drag a rake over my eyes? I feel like I am on crazy pills reading the reviews of this film. Are we supposed to take seriously the ultimate artificial event of our time, the pathetic finale of Princess Diana? I'm sure this film thinks it is like Noh theater or something, and that every small reaction in the throne room is a monumental event in the world, but I almost vomited watching the trailer, and dwelling on the fucking Kings and Queens of Merry Olde England and Their Grand Furrowed Brows seems like a desperate bourgeois attempt to chastise sovereignty while at the same time lavishing affection on its "good" representation (Diana) and imagine that retrograde, drooling idiots like Queen Elizabeth II are capable of the same profound reflection as we have come to expect from President Martin Sheen.

a few more comments

Well, since it's my blog, I figure I don't need to only make comments in the "comments" section of my posts, but please see the last post for some more on that topic.

But here's more:
-- I think I can trace a genealogy of hipster lingo to jazz song titles (unlike pop song titles, don't need to "mean" anything or say anything about the song---mostly arbitrary) and dadaism. This is to draw a line between dadaism and surrealism. Magritte (a surrealist for our purposes), writes "This is not a pipe" (in french of course) underneath a picture of a pipe. Famously, this is true and false at the same time, because literally, it is not a pipe. It is only a PICTURE of a pipe. Duchamp putting a urinal in an art gallery, however, requires no caption. ("Fountain" is metonymic, it's the same thing once removed. It's not necessary.) The reference is to the viewer's expectations- it is a provocation. Magritte is not provoking you: he is telling you the TRUTH. It *is not* a pipe.

-- In a comment in the last post, I discuss the circular defense this lingo puts around itself. To quote TS Eliot, these are "fragments shored against the ruins" of an identity. It is not new; I am not impressed. I am replying to a poster who writes that to reference something outside of oneself is to admit that the self is absent, that saying "Misfits Fan" is substituting for something absent. I dunno. Surely that line has to be drawn somewhere. I would argue, with a certain amount of eye-rolling, that maybe my interests (Proust + the Misfits, to be reductive) DOES add up to something new. But it seems to me that the comment overstates identification. You don't need Freud to tell you that a lot of "becoming" takes place by processes of "identification" and "recognition." And that what is different (in the other) exists only in relation to a difference in you. So, the space between the self and what it identifies with is clearly important. That is why I wonder what has happened in hipsterism, where identitification is either missing or ironized, as if there were a fear that the space left between identification and identity wouldn't be enough.

I realize a lot of things can be reduced to unenlightening truisms or platitudes, or disposable "advice" such as, "mean what you say, and say what you mean." On the other hand, taken to heart, that is probably the most important advice you will get today (and I am giving you this bit of advice).

In class today, someone said the word "equates" when they meant "relates" or "indicates" or "reflects", etc. This is an innocent enough mistake. It is hard to think of the right words, so we rush past the exact right one, to make our larger point. As baffling as Derrida has been, this has been the lesson I (and now you) can learn from it: mean what it is that you are saying. Say what it is that you mean. There, you have one of the most terrifyingly difficult French philosophers, brutally summarized, and in a perfectly useless way. Surely this example ("equates" instead of "indicates") has not hit home with you.

This post is an attack on laziness. On linguistic laziness (now), on laziness in thought, and (finally) laziness in identity. I am not arguing for a humorless "sincerity", nor do I have my mother's professed opposition to people "being fake" (because there is no true self, DUH). But I think it is worth thinking through the difference between "equates" and "relates", if what you mean to say is the second one. Let's be rigorous. For one thing, *I* do not want to be summarized incorrectly (see a few posts back) as having "equated" something, when I only "related" something. This is a terror I have. I am a decent enough writer, I can stop and start over a sentence if it is not going well, if I realize that I am going to have to fudge a verb or a metaphor or a preposition. In a blog, in conversation, often enough I'll just leave it sloppy, so that my meaning is clear, though it comes out as badly written. This is especially true when you are setting up binaries, which is a common rhetorical approach (parallelism and contrast), but halfway through the sentence you realize this isn't a real opposition, or your metaphor is wrong, or you even chose the wrong first word ("although" when you really mean "regardless")--- this is all a sort of rhetorical autopilot.

What this leads to, in large enough quantities, is an imprecision that makes what we are saying nonsense. I think this is a) too obvious, and b) too hysterical a point to dwell on here. What I would like to talk about instead is the laziness, not of ideology or politics, but of people's self-formation. I was lecturing someone about this earlier, in the context of people's internet profiles, which are a really good and a really bad way to form opinions about someone. Good, because how people represent themselves is important. Bad, because people almost always represent themselves poorly.

What I cannot stand is people COMMITTED to ironizing, delaying, obscuring, and creating a nearly-universal language of avoidance, in these forums. I think we are all familiar with a hipster dialect of mystical animal/improbable verb to construct a record title or internet handle. This may also include adjectives like "awesome" or questionable signifiers like "AIDS".
So, "AIDS Wolf" is a band, but also "Awesome Color" and "Japanther". Presumably all of this will sound incredibly dated in a few years, just as the two words "Surrealistic" and "Pillow" now clearly reek of a precisely-dateable pretension. On the other hand, at least you know what you are getting ("surrealistic" might as well say "psychadelic").

Here, as a counter-example, I would cite my two of my own internet "names": "Misfits Fan" (my email) and "S/s", my name on myspace. The Misfits are my favorite band, and S/s (signifier determines subject) is probably the most important concept in philosophy for me, and a key part of my favorite book In Search of Lost Time. Nuff said. I mean these things. "Japanther" means nothing. And also, fair enough--it doesn't have to. We're all postmodern here, right?

My contention would be that, yes, we are all being postmodern here. There is irony in "misfits fan" (it makes me sound like a 15 year old), and in "S/s" (what the fuck does it mean?), but at the same time, these are two VERY important things to me, rendered as if they were just floating signifiers. They aren't. But I am pretending that they are, since I am using them to "name" me. So, for me, I would say, this is my huge critique of the Hipster: get a self. Stay with it. Play with it, by all means. Have fun. Use language and images and signifiers, as freely as you like. But at the end of the day, MEAN something. You don't have to "stand for something"; I am not being political here. Be a person. Consolidate your objects and your desires into something that goes beyond evasion and posturing. I have an idea of what it is like to mature and to get into new things; this doesn't have to be everyone's. I do not ask anyone to be twee and wear their hearts on their sleeves, or to be humorless, or worst of all to be ME, but more's the pity if you turn 30 and you realize you have merely been rotating your self out on a 6-month schedule.

more on the "three point turn"

here is the original post I made

and here is Frederic Jameson explaining it much more clearly (but essentially repeating me):

The old stereotype is that Hegel works according to a cut-and-dried progression from thesis, through antithesis, to synthesis. This, Zizek explains, is completely erroneous: there are no real syntheses in Hegel and the dialectical operation is to be seen in an utterly different way; a variety of examples are adduced. Still, that stupid stereotype was not altogether wrong. There is a tripartite movement in the Hegelian dialectic, and in fact, Zizek goes on, he has just illustrated it: stupid stereotype, or the ‘appearance’; ingenious correction, the underlying reality or ‘essence’; finally, after all, the return to the reality of the appearance, so that it was the appearance that was ‘true’ after all.

here's some more bullshit

There are two articles in the Times today about how religions are not subject to the law in the same way as other corporations/organizations. One is about how churches are not subject to the same regulations about land/supervision of programs that a secular body would be, and the other is about how employees have little recourse against churches if they are fired.

The obvious thing strikes me is that christians want to have their cake and eat it, too, as regards the separation of church and state. So, religious types want to put prayer in public school, keep the word "God" in the pledge of allegiance, pursue their political agenda, demand money for faith-based programs, etc. And then they demand that the government not tell them how to use their land. And as long as an overwhelming majority of congress-people are religious, this is probably just the way it will be. We live in a democracy run by Christians. If you want to let these people vote, you have to follow their rules. Deal with it.

The second thing is that I really don't care if churches fuck over their employees. The reason I think everyone (including me) gets upset about priests abusing kids is, they are KIDS. Their parents put them in this situation, and they have no good way to speak out or defend themselves or escape, and their parents drive them to church week after week to get molested. But I have no such sympathy for, say, a Nun who gets dismissed from her order because she has cancer. If some whack hospital thinks that collective bargaining and unions "defy Christ’s admonitions that behavior must be directed by individual conscience” and “is inherently disruptive” of the church’s healing mission, you know what, that is splendid. KEEP CRAZIES OUT OF THE 21st CENTURY. Churches marrying gay people, women becoming priests, unions for religious institutions, any kind of respect for human decency--- if you belong to some religion that frowns upon these things, it is your own stupid fault that you expect to enter the 21st century and get married/become a nun/have a union. Mainstream religion is not like Scientology. The Catholic Church is not a bait-and-switch. You know what you are getting into. If anything, it is *more* liberal now than it promised to be in the previous century, which is why you have Mel Gibson-style wingnuts.

The same goes for Islam, Hinduism, Judaism, as for Catholics. Bummed out that your two-thousand-year-old beliefs don't gel with your progressive attitude? GET A CLUE. I am not interested in redeeming or reforming or hearing complaints about your religion. Unless some new scroll gets unearthed, if you are Jewish, and you don't like what is in Deuteronomy, TOUGH LUCK. Unless the virgin Mary appears in an english muffin telling you to be a woman-priest, I don't care. The one real virtue of Religion is that it is UNDISGUISEDLY STUPID. Arguing about whether bread turns into bloody-flesh in your mouth, and an intelligent discussion of collective bargaining: these things need to be kept separate.

It is very distressing to me that this great achievement of Western Civilization, representative democracy, which gives the US the moral superiority to battle for freedom against "Islamofascists" worldwide, and in the name of which our civil liberties have been foreclosed, comes down to WHAT EXACTLY?
-- the Democrats now stand a good chance of winning back one of the chambers of legislature, because some Republican sent creepy, sexual-predator emails to boys.

Is anyone happy about this? Sadly, yes. All the Anybody-But-Bush people of 2004, whose candidate pretended not to be able to speak French in order to get elected (which shockingly did not work), now see this as a perfect moment to win political influence by trading on a sexual scandal and alleged cover up.

Now, I thought this was inappropriate in the case of Clinton, and I find it inappropriate now.
1) There is a really unpleasant flavor of homophobia to the whole thing.
2) Undoubtedly this happens with female pages/interns/etc. all the time as well
3) We elect these retards to VOTE IN OUR NAME. On which this has no bearing.
4) Given all that the Republicans have done in the past 14 years in Congress, this is a pretty fucking weak reason to finally overthrow them.

Now, I care about as much about what happens in Washington as I do about which channel of NFL commentators I watch on Sunday mornings (very little, but I have my preferences). That these 400 or so retards, almost uniformly white, Christian, and bourgeois, mostly male, make some claim at running our country, while really just waiting around for lascivious instant-messenger conversations to come across their desk to a) make a scandal or b) cover it up, is so pathetic. This is really even a step down from when Al Gore tried to get elected Leader of the Free World by wearing more earth-tones.

Anyways, if I ever hear anyone talk about our national democracy again, excuse me if I vomit.

Not that you would ever know it, because I don't often have time to post here, but I think written-out opinions, in a set context, are soon the only one I will stick by, and even then I have fear of being misunderstood.

I remember one time I was trying to draw a comparison between Bush and Reagan, and say that Reagan brought a sort of grand old-timey-ness to the office that one is even nostalgic for when faced with this desperate, sketchy, sweaty administration. The example I gave was Reagan's speech on the event of the Challenger exploding: `We will never forget them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.' My point was, 'Can you even imagine Bush saying something like that?!' But all my dad heard was 'Reagan Reagan Reagan' and the conversation didn't go anywhere because he was still too pissed off at Reagan to admit that there was at least an attempt at dignity in that decade.

Another argument I got into with my dad was about "Million Dollar Baby" (no shit), and whether shitty movies won Oscars all the time or not. Or something like that. Anyways, I'm not sure what we were arguing about, because my dad was trying to impart wisdom about the Oscars at the same time as I wanted to point out that he had liked this overblown film. So we were completely at cross purposes until my mom broke us apart.

Things you say in seminar, even longer blog posts (see below), anything relayed to another person, any message board post, virtually every single thing I think-- once you say anything, other people are only going to hear what they want, and then when your message finally gets back to you, it no longer at all resembles what you meant. This is why, if you've ever argued with me, it goes on FOREVER--- my belief is that we aren't really in an argument to begin with, that we've just misunderstood each other, and that if we really separate out our emotions from "what we are really saying," we might turn out to disagree, but at least we'll know, and we'll probably understand each other better. This is why I have a reputation for loving to argue; but to me, I just want to be sure there is even a need to. I think a good deal of the time, we are "just saying the same thing" as the person we are arguing with, and neither of us wanted to think so.

If one thinks of how one gets information, it is either in a chaotic way (conversation, the internet, cultural absorption) or in a uni-directional way (TV, "the news"). Think about politics. The "debate" in politics is conducted by pundits. It is staged for us. There is ZERO attempt made to provide the raw material of decision-making-- firstly, because no one actually wants this, and secondly, when there is a "backstory" given, it is usually some human interest story and not a dialectical/historical process. What this means is that the circularity of political discourse generates its own (detached) conventional wisdom, but then EVERYONE outside of this circuit is invited to join in (on November 2nd) on the basis of having accepted this conventional wisdom as THE discussion about politics. So, doing one's civic duty and voting are coded in specific ways by this discussion, so that not voting is demonized: remaining outside these endlessly-generated arrangements is demonized. As it should be, by the logic of the political circle. It is always *conversational*, and the essence of conversation is the agreed-upon premise, which allows us to talk to one another. Our words mean one thing, this is the definition Newsweek and both the Right and Left agree upon, now we can talk. That is why there is no philosophy of politics which anyone IN politics engages in. Which is why the Judicial, which has this kind of self-philosophizing, is so baffling to Congress. The judicial is NOT conversational.

Anyways, writing. When my book comes out, it will get summarized, people will reference it without having read it, and make assumptions based on the cover and who else has liked it, but in order to SAY anything about it, one will have to have read it. And while that opens up inevitable misreadings, I think this demand of going back to the source is so much less violent in the case of a book, than in, say, an argument. I guess that sounds obvious, but given the fact that the current administration a) functions entirely by miscommunication in news briefings and never "puts it all on the table," and b) the president does not read books; I think it merits a bit further thought.

And no, this doesn't mean that I'll be talking any less.