Archive for culture
Merry morning reading …
… from two favourite bloggers.
I do think one element of conservatism is imagining that they’d win the post-apocalyptic feudal games. …
Let’s suppose you’re minding your business in a lovely suburb of Honolulu. Honolulu gets ALL BLOWED UP. But, hey, you don’t die in the initial fireball. OK let’s say you don’t die of radiation poisoning within the next week or two. You’ve survived! That cancer will be along in a few years, but, hey, no worries for now.
Best case scenario, you live in current day Puerto Rico for a bit. No electricity, no water, but, hey, you’re alive. Also, nobody is going to get near your radiation zone. No rescues, no supplies, no nothing. Enjoy your last couple of weeks on Earth, I guess. I suppose you can forage for fruit, for a bit, and as a good conservative you own guns so you can shoot all the “looters” who are trying to take “your” fruit, but…
No, I do not want to survive the initial blast.
A cultural apparatus always arises to serve the needs of capital. It’s not a conspiracy of any sort, of course. People intuit what would make them more competitive and promote these qualities in themselves, declaring them socially desirable.
What does capital currently need? A rootless labor force that won’t he held back by networks of human relationships from picking up and going whenever capital needs it at this point.
In order to create such a labor force, human relationships need to be devalued and come to be seen as fraught, dangerous, and really not worth the hassle. Remember all these checklists of “How to Support a Bereaved Colleague?” or “How NOT to Talk to a Special Needs Child’s Parent” variety? Obviously, nobody is going to memorize all those laundry lists of prohibitions and exhortations for every occasion. It’s easier to pretend that the bereaved colleague or SNC parent don’t exist.
Another strategy is to displace liquid capital’s qualities, such as unpredictability and endless mutability, onto human relationships. It’s not capital that’s making you feel confused and like you can’t keep up. Oh no, not at all. It’s the changing nature of dating norms and workplace flirtation.
Workplace as a space where people work together for protracted periods of time is positioned as extremely dangerous. Capital prefers self-employed, alienated workers who simply don’t have colleagues they know in person and could, say, form a union with. The next best thing (for capital but clearly not for workers) is a revolving-door office where nobody stays long enough to create any meaningful links.
Enjoy your day, everyone!
[Addendum: My daily feed.]
“We have always lived in the world we built for the poor”
We created a society that has no use for the disabled or the elderly, and therefore are cast aside when we are hurt or grow old. We measure human worth by the ability to earn a wage, then suffer in a world that undervalues care, community, and mutual aid. We base our economy on exploiting the labor of racial and ethnic minorities and watch lasting inequalities snuff out human potential. We see the world as inevitably riven by bloody competition and are left unable to recognize the many ways in which we cooperate and lift one another up.
When a very efficient technology is deployed against a scorned out-group in the absence of strong human rights protections, there is enormous potential for atrocity. Currently, the digital poorhouse concentrates administrative power in the hands of a small elite. Its integrated data systems and digital surveillance infrastructure offer a degree of control unrivaled in history. Automated tools for classifying the poor, left on their own, will produce towering inequalities unless we make an explicit commitment to forge another path. And yet we act as if justice will take care of itself.
From Virginia Eubanks’ book “Automated Equality,” excerpted in the January issue of Harpers magazine.
More:
[Programs] that serve the poor are as unpopular as they have ever been. This is not a coincidence: technologies of poverty management are not neutral. They are shaped by our nation’s fear of economic insecurity and hatred of the poor. [boldface mine]
The new tools of poverty management hide economic inequality from the professional middle-class public and give the nation the ethical distance it needs to make inhuman choices about who gets food and who starves, who has housing and who remains homeless, whose family stays together and whose is broken up by the state. This is part of a long American tradition. We manage the poor so that we do not have to eradicate poverty.
Abuse Ranking
From the wonderful Melissa McEwan:
My go-to strategy as a younger woman was always to turn incidents of sexual harassment and/or assault into “humorous” anecdotes, which allowed me to talk about what happened without really talking about what happened.
This instinct is the result of, in part, policing women’s lived experiences, a central piece of which is inevitably abuse ranking.
It goes like this: Your harassment wasn’t as bad as being hit and your being hit wasn’t as bad as being raped and being raped by a boyfriend isn’t as bad as being raped by a relative and being raped by a relative isn’t as bad as genital cutting…
Until many of us feel as though we aren’t allowed to say anything, unless it’s in the context of saying “I didn’t have it that bad” — to express our “good luck” if our suffering hasn’t passed some arbitrary threshold past which survivors will allegedly be allowed to express that we were affected by abuse.
This idea can be expanded: I’ve seen lots of “pain ranking” and “poverty ranking” in my day.
Two thoughts on 2017
Contempt – even at its most hateful – is a form of *audacity* – and it can animate the creative imagination as truly as any other form.
That person over there doesn’t need to speak in order to beat you in an argument, only spit. You overvalue nuance and number in your vocabulary.
And one from 2015, apropos:
Liberals loathe the political Right’s hypocrisy and unfairness. Conservatives loathe the Left’s immorality and weakness. The groups’ estimations of their own qualities, though, are less precise.
The question of “hypocrisy” is particularly interesting. La Rochefoucauld noted that “hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue.” One can’t be a hypocrite without recognizing that virtue – that morality – exists. This recognition it itself makes hypocrites superior (in their minds) even to decent, noble liberals who discount “morality” as dogmatic and unrealistic. Think of fundamentalist Christians who think that belief in Jesus is the sole criterion to enter heaven; one’s behaviour is beside the point. So, to the Right hypocrisy is a good thing, though they don’t say so.
God bless L7 … the band is back
This should be a splendid documentary.
I saw this band in 1994 in a small Palo Alto club. One of my life’s beautifully overwhelming aesthetic experiences. I pray they come to Vancouver.
Best TV appearance by any band:
Blood in America
“It’s illegal to sell your own blood, but legal to sell somebody else’s! Capitalism!“
Sad respect
“Not for me to understand…Rest in peace CC.” – Mary Lou Lord
“We cannot judge, criticize or blame people who decide to end their own lives. Just be there for those left behind.” – @JudgeDewie
Comments off
Espresso
I did not realize that this was ‘a thing’ until I made a recent trip to Washington. This video is an excellent feature story on the phenomenon:
Nobility
From Clarissa:
For centuries, nothing was more meaningful or more defining than whether one was born to a noble family. One’s entire existence was influenced in every single aspect by the accident of birth into a certain social class.
After WWI, the titles of European nobility started to lose their value. Save for a couple of Windsors or Borbons, the rest of the “nobles” accepted that their titles’ place was on the trash heap of history. I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant for the antiquated aristocrats to see how “nobodies” were stripping them of importance but that’s the march of history for you.
Today the same is happening with citizenship. And people are just as unhappy that the accident of birth that used to give them so much good stuff is becoming meaningless. Like the nobles of 100 years ago, they can’t believe that the lottery win they thought they had gained just by being born in the right place is losing its value.
Of course, their loss is somebody else’s gain. Just like 100 years ago.
All of Clarissa’s posts on Liquid Capital and the end of the nation-state are compelling.
Three Days
“I can’t say as ever I was lost, but I was bewildered once for three days.” – Daniel Boone
“If not …”
It is practically impossible to make it through the day without seeing or hearing someone use “if not” to mean “maybe even,” as in: “Michael Jordan was the best basketball player of his era, *if not* of all time” when what’s clearly meant is this: “Michael Jordan was the best basketball player of his era, *maybe even* of all time.”
We will lose this usage battle, alas, and “if not” will join that list of words or phrases that are their own opposites.
–
The authors of The Hobo Ethical Code (1889) used the phrase “if not” poignantly (and correctly):
When jungling* in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
The Code did not ask its hobo readers to imagine that others might be even worse off than themselves, for to do so might play down the troubles of someone who was at rock bottom, better off than no one.
Now read the quoted sentence again, replacing “if not” with “maybe even” – and experience how different it feels.
–
*About the “hobo jungles.”
Fences and crowds
A comparison worthy of Thomas Szasz (so poignant, so clear – and, that it tells us about ourselves, from two sides of mortality) – from my friend Clarissa:
In Ukraine graves are separated by fences so that people can get some boundaries around them at least in death. Of course, they still have family members crowding them inside the enclosures but at least the strangers stay out.
In North America, graves are not separated. This brings people out of isolation at least in death.
Life
I expect that the person who gave the breakfast cereal that name received a nifty bonus. The one(s) who named Grape-Nuts, too, audacity being the root of beauty.
Transgender Day of Remembrance
A beautiful photogallery published at Vice.com to mark the day, by Jackie Dives and coproduced by my friend Jack Fox.
It’s 2016, and peeing while trans is still generally viewed as a political activity. If it’s happening in a public washroom, legislators want to know it, schools are trying to rebrand it, and at least one Alberta mom attempted to rap about it.
All of this never-ending debate can feel pretty fucking strange, considering trans people are just doing same things as everybody else in there. That there isn’t competing outrage over sounds, smells and soap availability is anybody’s guess.
It’s frankly no wonder trans activist Jack Fox has spent a decade scouting out every non-gendered toilet in his city. Even though Fox says he “reads” as male, the the fear of harassment in the “men’s room” still lingers. “I was so nervous to use a public washroom for fear of being attacked or verbally harassed, I would often wait all day until returning home to go,” he told VICE of his early transition days. “Some days I waited up to 16 hours, being strategic as to what I drank or ate so I did not need to use the toilet.”
Fox recently teamed up with Vancouver photographer Jackie Dives on a photo series that confronts those anxieties and the transphobia that causes them. It pairs photos of non-binary people having a chill time in public stalls with personal stories of dealing with assumptions and hate. To mark Transgender Day of Remembrance, we’ve publish a selection of them here.
The brief quotes beneath the photographs tell a long story.
Photo by Jackie Dives, all rights reserved
The hobo ethical code
This is beautiful. From Open Culture:
1. Decide your own life; don’t let another person run or rule you.
2. When in town, always respect the local law and officials, and try to be a gentleman at all times.
3. Don’t take advantage of someone who is in a vulnerable situation, locals or other hobos.
4. Always try to find work, even if temporary, and always seek out jobs nobody wants. By doing so you not only help a business along, but ensure employment should you return to that town again.
5. When no employment is available, make your own work by using your added talents at crafts.
6. Do not allow yourself to become a stupid drunk and set a bad example for locals’ treatment of other hobos.
7. When jungling in town, respect handouts, do not wear them out, another hobo will be coming along who will need them as badly, if not worse than you.
8. Always respect nature, do not leave garbage where you are jungling.
9. If in a community jungle, always pitch in and help.
10. Try to stay clean, and boil up wherever possible.
11. When traveling, ride your train respectfully, take no personal chances, cause no problems with the operating crew or host railroad, act like an extra crew member.
12. Do not cause problems in a train yard, another hobo will be coming along who will need passage through that yard.
13. Do not allow other hobos to molest children; expose all molesters to authorities…they are the worst garbage to infest any society.
14. Help all runaway children, and try to induce them to return home.
15. Help your fellow hobos whenever and wherever needed, you may need their help someday.
Reposted from nocontest.ca
Sunday morning
I am enjoying a TV-free morning. While I am confident I could bear to watch the Sunday shows, I am just as confident that my blood would near 212 degrees. So, I have been reading the NYTimes obits and doing follow-up reading and listening. Leon Russell, RIP, what a genius! (And truly sweet that Elton John helped Russell get a hit album a few years ago – almost four decades after Russell took the then-whippersnapper on tour with him.)
And John D. Roberts, Professor of Organic Chemistry, who said bringing female post-grad student Dr. Dorothy Semenow with him from MIT to then all-male Caltech in 1953 was “clearly the best thing I have done at Caltech in the 60 years I have been here.”
Here is how the Cal Tech newsletter responded at the time:
This gallant action is not, however, an open invitation to the ladies. It applies only to “women of exceptional ability who give promise of great scientific contributions.” And, before she can enroll, a woman must get the approval of the academic division in which she intends to work, as well as that of the Committee on Graduate Study.’ With such hurdles as these, it is hardly likely that the campus will ever be swarming with female students. Most admissions of women, in fact, will probably involve the use of unique or outstanding research facilities here.
And this from the cinematographer Raoul Coutard obit:
“The Bride Wore Black” (1967) was Truffaut and Coutard’s last film together. “I had the ridiculous idea to quit smoking at the same time we were filming the movie,” Mr. Coutard told The Houston Chronicle. “I was very unbearable and very unpleasant, so we parted ways after that.”
I read that last week and it still cracks me up.
I love life.
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