[Empty 40 oz bottle of Miller Hi Life drops from the dead man's hand and shatters, dramatically]
In Xanadu did Larry the Cable Guy / a stately pleasure dome decree…
NEWS ON THE MARCH
The increasing popularity of redneck parody comedian Larry the Cable Guy has led producers at Fox to give the green light to his longtime pet project, a shot-for-shot remake of Orson Welles’ classic Citizen Kane. Apparently the Cable Guy will play a pathological cable television baron whose entrepreneurial drive and search for acceptance stems from profound loneliness. Details of the pre-production schedule can be found on the comedian’s blog. Responding to questions from the press about his plans to shoot this controversial film, Mr. Guy has been quoted as saying “GIT-R-DONE!!!”
It’s as if Andy Warhol turned his silk screen-ly attentions upon Marvin the Martian instead of Marilyn Monroe, choosing a hooded sweatshirt as his medium instead of a giant canvas. It’s as if someone decided that those skeleton costumes from the Halloween fight scene in The Karate Kid were the next big thing. It’s as if suddenly it became necessary to camouflage yourself outrageously in graffiti. Get a garment and cover it with pinks and greens, browns and yellows, colors and logos of every description utterly shocked to be in each others presence. This and some jeans with embroidery on the butt; you got yourself an outfit!
If you live in Brooklyn, don’t even pretend like you don’t know what I mean.
I am talking, of course, about Brooklyn clothes. Some surreptitiously-snapped examples:
Lively sweatshirts!
Or check out this gentleman’s (blurry) hat:
Brooklyn clothes emulate hip hop style but are not explicitly defined by it: for one, they have a vibrant or eye-catching quality that seems absent in mainstream hip hop fashion. It adds up to something unique. Tell me if I’m wrong but I think that this particular style is home cooked, a Brooklyn phenomenon. I’m trying to gesture here at the bizarre Brooklyn flavor embedded in this fashion; the element that says, “I can do/wear/say whatever I want — I’m in Brooklyn.”
People of different ages, genders, races, and creeds all sport Brooklyn clothes proudly, from what I can tell. On the other hand, it seems like Brooklyn clothes connote a kind of street culture which is intertwined with the daily life of poor or working class folks more than that of us middle class types.
Another fascinating thing about Brooklyn clothes, as opposed to pretty much every other style of clothing in any culture that I’ve ever witnessed, is that the men dress flashier and more colorful than the women! I wish I had photographs to back this one up…but you can test this theory the next time you see a pair of Brooklyn-clad lovebirds at a J stop. It is quite true.
I often think of fashion as a particularly divisive element of consumer culture because it’s the ultimate in conspicuous consumption; it’s status writ with style. Brooklyn clothes are this way as well, I’m sure, but expressed in a cultural lexicon that I can’t read, hence that I don’t disdain as much. As such, Brooklyn clothes grab not only my attention but also my enthusiasm. Brooklyn can be lonely, drab, and gray — Brooklyn clothes seem to make this place a little more lively. And I am all in favor of that!
The BBC news service recently posted an article “Great tits cope well with warming”, which just so happens to be the #1 most clicked-on story for today…
Here’s a theory that seems to be true across a variety of disciplines: Once a system or structure for activity is in place, it’s much more difficult to break out of it or change it than simply to continue on in the same way. This is because systems tend to be self-reinforcing. Is that too obvious/vague to be interesting?
Some examples:
Biology. The production of hormones, enzymes, and other substances in an organism is usually governed by feedback loops; this way the end product of the loop starts it all over again. Once a feedback loop is established to produce whatever chemical or protein, it’s generally easier to keep producing it than it would otherwise be.
Psychology. Habits are hard to break. Because chemical chain reactions in the brain become more stable and cellular pathways more permanent with each repetition, habitual behavior is more deeply ingrained as time goes on.
Social Studies. There are plenty of systematic problems here (overpopulation, the ailing finance system, nationalism, etc.) but I’ll pick one: studies show that the prison system in the United States is screwed up in a variety of ways not least because building and running jail houses has become a major industry. (Check out Eric “Fast Food Nation” Schlosser’s old article on the Prison Industrial Complex.) And yet the effort to persuade public officials to adopt a more rational, cost-effective approach to prison policy hasn’t yielded any concrete results. It takes a huge amount of work to offset a system that’s already running.
International Affairs. The World Bank continues to pump many billions of dollars into big dam projects in India that have proven themselves dangerous, inhumane, and, to be more precise, disastrous. Why do they continue to invest? Because everyone is corrupt and politicians are evil? No…it’s because they have *already* invested billions, along with all their time and energy. They need to see some kind of return. There are people who make their living allocating these funds after all; they have a vested interest in their own success.
Agriculture. I have blogged before about how chemical agriculture is on the verge of collapse. Instead of re-tooling the system on a massive scale, the solution has been to introduce genetically engineered pesticide-resistant crops. It would be much harder to dismantle chemical agriculture and build a new system than it is to just go about business as usual.
Humanities. A genre is a type or category of storytelling, governed by an unspoken set of implicit rules that guide the story. When a genre becomes dominant in the publishing world, everything either fits into the generic rules or reacts to them in some way. For example, the novel developed as a huge genre in English literature beginning in the 18th century, stealing the thunder of its French counterparts, and as a result you’ll be hard pressed to find any British prose that doesn’t enter into some kind of dialogue with that genre system. Even more salient is the example of the genres that sprung out of the heyday of the Hollywood studios; that genre system is still going strong. While art house movies are still challenging and responding to it, it would take an enormous shift in the industry to change it significantly.
I could go on…
I was thinking about this theory yesterday when I saw this NYTimes article about making new habits. According to this article, “brain researchers have discovered that when we consciously develop new habits, we create parallel synaptic paths, and even entirely new brain cells, that can jump our trains of thought onto new, innovative tracks. ” New pathways form in parallel to old ones. So instead of trying to boldly uproot unsatisfactory old habits, perhaps its better to consciously try to make new ones.
The article also proposes that “the more new things we try — the more we step outside our comfort zone — the more inherently creative we become, both in the workplace and in our personal lives.” So trying to develop new habits spurs creativity, which in turn would stimulate you to carry new endeavors even further.
This insight about habits might be usefully applied to other non-brain systems that one might wish to change. Small steps towards a new system could stimulate a cascade of new possibilities, without requiring the huge investment of energy of a large scale change. I think that’s a cool idea.
With regard to social/political issues, I’ve said before that people respond to incentives. So perhaps instead of advocating for environmental utopia, maybe I should advocate for changing the current incentives little by little for new behavioral systems to come into play. Check out New Rules for more along these lines…
It also appears that creativity bears an important relationship to happiness and long term brain function, as well as forming new habits. So maybe Burning Man, the annual festival centered around self-expression, creativity, and self-reliance, is predicated upon a useful idea, rather than just fun?
In the wake of the whole Beijing Olympics protest thing, I wanted to blog about some ideas in hopes of re-framing the issue. Here goes:
States = Organized Crime
States are “quintessential protection rackets, with the advantage of legitimacy,” according to the extraordinary scholar Charles Tilly, who died just a few days ago. Indeed, government works by claiming and maintaining access to all the means of violence within a certain area and concomitantly extorting a protection fee from its subjects. (This idea is from Tilly’s “War Making and State Making as Organized Crime” available here as a PDF.)
Tilly focuses his analysis on the war-like states of Europe circa 1600. He writes, “Power holders’ pursuit of war involved them willy-nilly in the extraction of resources for war making from the populations over which they had control and in the promotion of capital accumulation by those who could help them borrow and buy. War making, extraction, and capital accumulation interacted to shape European state making. Power holders did not undertake those three momentous activities with the intention of creating national states - centralized, differentiated, autonomous, extensive political organizations. Nor did they ordinarily foresee that national states would emerge from war making, extraction, and capital accumulation.
Instead, the people who controlled European states and states in the making warred in order to check or overcome their competitors and thus to enjoy the advantages of power within a secure or expanding territory. To make more effective war, they attempted to locate more capital. In the short run, they might acquire that capital by conquest, by selling off their assets, or by coercing or dispossessing accumulators of capital. In the long run, the quest inevitably involved them in establishing regular access to capitalists who could supply and arrange credit and in imposing one form of regular taxation or another on the people and activities within their spheres of control.”
According to this theory, proto-state leaders competing with one another gradually monopolized violence and secured access to capital as a necessary part of this process. The state arose quite accidentally as more and more territory fell under the state makers’ control. As students of England’s history know, these activities met with resistance from feudal lords, landed gentry, and other nobility– the resistance of the aristocracy shaped the institution of Parliament, among others. Tilly writes, “internal struggles such as the checking of great regional lords and the imposition of taxation on peasant villages produced important organizational features of European states: the relative subordination of military power to civilian control, the extensive bureaucracy of fiscal surveillance, the representation of wronged interests via petition and parliament.”
Now this isn’t the case in today’s post-colonial states, where the means of violence are already centralized and resistance was generally never allowed to take shape.
I’d posit that the pattern of Ancient Chinese state making was fundamentally similar to that of the Modern European variety, even if the circumstances were very different. The long, long history of the undefined “Chinese” state can be thought of productively as gangs continually trying to encroach upon one another’s action. The Empire which resulted, when warring mini-states finally capitulated, featured an extraordinarily efficient bureaucracy and tribute system and very low tolerance for dissent in the ranks.
So it’s not surprising to me that the Chinese government, following its 20th century reincarnation of the Emperor, tortures people.
If you agree with the idea that nation states are fundamentally protection rackets, then you shouldn’t be surprised either.
So yeah. Right now my gf is trying to get her space heater to work because it is freezing in here.
This is May! WTF??
Brooklynites were treated to a few days of summer heat last week, and my inner monologue acknowledged that heat-wise we had gone from winter to summer without very much spring.
Look man, I really don’t want to turn my blog into a soapbox for environmentalism. So get out of my head!
To those of you who haven’t seen the film The Eleventh Hour, narrated sparsely by Leo himself, it is without a doubt the most complete expression of the current social and environmental crisis, the most urgent call for radical change, and the most engaging portrayal of possible solutions that exists in contemporary cinema. I cannot urge you enough to see it as soon as possible.
See it!
That having been said, here’s a list of other movies you could check out if, like me, you enjoy movies and you want to learn more:
Mindwalk — The dad from Home Alone and the lawyer from Law and Order have a long, stimulating philosophical discussion about the flaws of Cartesian thought and the application of ecological systems theory, set against the background of the surreal Mont St. Michel.
An Inconvenient Truth– (Vice) President Al Gore provides probably the best, and certainly the most famous Powerpoint presentation ever.
The Corporation — Canadian filmmakers dissect and diagnose the corporation, the dominant form of power in our world. Since it is legally a person, thanks to a history of deliberately misleading 19th century Supreme Court rulings, the corporation is subjected to standard psychological batteries with unsettling results. (check it out on youtube)
Life and Debt - Globalization and Jamaica — A fascinating look at 21st century Jamaica, caught in impossible post-colonial relations of power, called “globalization”, due to exploitative Western economic policies. (check it out on google video)
Crude Awakening: The Peak Oil Crisis– This is the best movie I’ve seen about the history and future of oil based living. It is pretty grim folks.
Manufacturing Consent – Half Noam Chomsky biopic, half documentary about the mainstream media’s coverage of East Timor, those same Canadian filmmakers outline the famous linguist’s stark views of the way the corporate media operates in the American Empire.
A Convenient Truth: Urban Solutions from Curitiba, Brazil – Local solutions to problems of scale in a mid-size Brazilian city. Shitty production values, cool story. A city governance faced with huge problems and no budget worked out ways to fix multiple environmental and public health problems systematically and simultaneously, and made money in the process.
My Dinner with Andre — Two actors play themselves (kinda) and discuss the art of living.
Fast, Cheap, and Out of Control — Erroll Morris’ bizarre and brilliant profile of several eccentrics; this movie expresses interconnectedness through cinematography. Mind blowing.
Star Trek II is an amazing movie. Perhaps, just perhaps it has unexpected relevance to our lives?
Any nerd worth his or her own salt has seen this film and remembers the Kobiyashi Maru test — the infamous command evaluation given at Starfleet Academy in which the cadet is presented with a no-win scenario. But if you need a refresher, it goes like this:
Imagine you’re the cadet. If you rescue the imperiled ship, you face certain destruction as well as possibly sparking an inter-galactic war. But If you don’t respond to the distress signal, the passengers and crew of the Kobiyashi Maru will definitely die. You lose either way. What do you do?
Now imagine you’re a candidate in the super tight Democratic nomination contest for the 2008 Presidential election.
Do you support suspending gas tax (a very silly policy at best) in order to possibly gain some popular ground against your charismatic opponent? Or do you stick with a somewhat more sensible policy but risk being branded an elitist? You lose either way.
Author and NYT columnist Thomas L. Friedman is getting more and more frustrated with the the fact that no one supports his initiative to increase gas taxes, even though it clearly makes a lot of sense. (He’s probably also still reeling from a recent pie in the face at Brown University) He refuses to accept that it is impossible to make real strides away from the oil economy in a political system whose very existence is based on the abundance of cheap oil. The situation itself is an excellent example of the no-win scenario.
Spock, always the epitome of logic, points out that the point of the Kobiyashi Maru test is to see how the cadet faces death. Kirk, the wise-cracking cowboy Captain, is supposed to have beaten the no-win scenario by cheating– he re-programmed the simulator’s computer banks so that it was possible to win. He even got a medal for his ingenuity!
Here in our fair borough it seems like everyone is aware of the trendy Park Slope Food Co-op: Cheap, high quality food is made available to members if they work for the store for about 3 hours a month. But alas! Far fewer people are aware of We Can Do It! (Sí Se Puede!) Women’s Cooperative cleaning service based in Sunset Park. Founded in August 2006, it’s an organization of immigrant women who work as domestic cleaners on their own terms.
All members of the group are workers; technically they’re all part owners of the enterprise. They do all the publicity, scheduling and, of course, labor themselves (or with the help of volunteers). For each job they work, usually for $100 or thereabouts, $5 of their fee goes towards administrative costs to keep the organization afloat.
So it’s a win-win situation: consumers get lower prices since the infamous middleman has been removed. Workers don’t have to be subject to the exploitative labor practices and wages which are all too commonly associated with immigrant labor (the theory of monopsony describes this situation aptly). And the underfunded welfare / public benefits sector, which doesn’t have the best track record serving immigrants anyway, gets a break. Plus these workers can’t be deported since they’re business owners! And oh my goodness…the workers own the means of production! Well I never.
Now it turns out that the ongoing logistics and the relatively small start-up cost of this project was shouldered partially by the Center for Family Life in Sunset Park, which in turn is a subsidiary of the SCO Family of Services a community-based non-profit organization which (probably) gets grants from a number of private foundations as well as the shrinking pool of money that the Federal and New York State governments earmark for this kind of thing every year.
So it seems like much of the start-up capital and running costs for this venture comes from various forms of government. But said government recoups its minimal investment through taxes and, indeed, a stimulated economy! Plus stable, working families promote nicer neighborhoods, which should raise property value (and tax revenue) and the standard of living for everyone involved. So in addition to being a small-scale, community-based, worker-owned organization, this is also a way for the government to spend its money, or even indirectly to make money, in a way that definitely benefits the community (rather than the corporations).
So instead of abandoning government altogether, perhaps it’s worth recognizing that there is a set of policies out there that could simultaneously relieve the plight of the urban poor while also promoting entrepreneurship, that could reduce welfare spending while also reducing the gap between rich and poor, that could promote community development and encourage people to be more fiscally responsible.
Everybody knows about the famous micro-finance initiatives in Bangladesh which earned a 2006 Nobel Prize, as well as a lot of money, for Grameen Bank. I’d support a similar, hypothetical government program (though perhaps with more of an eye towards community).
The first story. Yesterday I found an alarming lump on my body, which fueled my paranoid fantasies throughout a long, sleepless Sunday night. Would I have to have surgery? What about chemo? How could I ever afford to have cancer? Perhaps the toxic chemicals that I use to spray my apartment for bed bugs have caused a tumor to grow — those little bastards could actually be, albeit indirectly, my cause of death! Or maybe this is my punishment for being so pretentious. When I got to work this morning, my mind was spinning with images of suffering, loss, weeping relatives and dreaded medical bills. Plus I was in the peculiar state, so familiar from college days, of being hopelessly over-tired while also ridiculously caffeine-wired. I was, oh…quite worried.
Now my place of employment is technically an outpatient clinic — I work for a hospital where they actually provide job counseling and basic education services, in addition to medical care. Employment and literacy are components of health, or so they say. So I imagined that being a hospital employee, I could be seen quickly and then return to work.
Laboring under this misapprehension, I trudged through the pouring rain over to the main site to see a doctor. As I waited for hours, well into the dreary afternoon, my Woody Allen angst got more and more intense. Eventually, agitated into sentimentality, I felt grateful for my years of life and love up until now and cataloged all the people I’d contact with the tragic news.
I was ultimately diagnosed with <gasp> folliculitis
An inflamed hair follicle. I think I’m gonna live.
But those moments of genuine fear, inspired though they may be by absurd self-inflating hypochondria, do put things in perspective.
The second story. Went to the post office, still in the rain, to send the cropped orange pony tail of a certain young lady I know who decided to donate her lustrous locks to charity. While there I also sent in my deposit check for Graduate School (capital G, capital S) where I intend to take my China-related nerddom to the level of professional qualification. My goodness, isn’t life exciting?
The only dream worth having...
is to dream that you will live while you're alive
and die only when you're dead.
To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance.
To never get used to the unspeakable violence and vulgar disparity of life around you.
To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair.
To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power.
Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.
~Arundhati Roy
