On Second Thought

Who am I kidding? I give up. I do love the arbitrary juxtaposition of unrelated but independently kinda funny things:

(Starbucks supports Al-Qaeda.)

(Via Ellis.)

Vague Yet Bafflingly Precise Consumption Preferences

1. At Tealuxe, a loud man stepped up to the register. Refusing to submit to the quiescent conformism of "working through the system," he spent not the barest instant looking at the lengthy menu, with its rigid notions of "respectable" beverage selection; no, this fellow would forge his own instrument of oral irrigation, answering solely to what he wanted, not to what Tealuxe wanted him to want. "You have anything hot, with a kind of raspberry flavor, kind of tart? Like a hot bubble tea?" "All of our bubble teas are cold." "Well, can't you just put the bubbles in?" "...I guess. We just don't have any specific recipes for that. I--" "So can I get a hot bubble tea, berry flavor, kind of tart, maybe a little bitter?" Undaunted, this guy. The spirit of 1773 lives on.
2. At the Morse Music & Media Library, two young men prowled the DVD collection. Said one to the other: "I want something intense: violence, death, destruction..." "Violence and death?" "Yeah, but witty violence and death. Maybe something Italian?"

Preserved for Posterity

The copy from the front of the Killa Season DVD:

This is Harlem.

This is Flea's world.

At the end of the day, business is business, money is money.

And from the back:

This Harlem inspired story details Flea's rising empire to take over the streets and an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world. Flea was a basketball player, happy with his subtle hustle, until a Dominican connect introduced him to a new way to spread the work and make all the "cake." Revenge will take place when honor is at stake. No one wants to see you on top.

Cameron Giles, you saw him in Paid In Full, makes his directorial debut with this powerful and detailed story of growing up in Harlem and learning to be #1.

With powerful performances by Cam'ron (Paid In Full), Juelz Santana, and Hell Rell, the film also features cameos by Funk Master Flex and Michael Williams from HBO's The Wire.

A few points:

• "an unstoppable drive to hustle all the money in various places around the world"

  • "The need of a constantly expanding market for its products chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everywhere, establish [Dominican] connexions everywhere" (Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto)
  • "Yo, I could promise this / You dealing with a communist" (Cam'ron, "Leave You Alone," Killa Season)
• "happy with his subtle hustle"
• the quotation marks around "cake"
• "Revenge will take place"
• the repetition, in the space of a couple of sentences, of the Paid in Full citation
• the use of "detailed" as a laudatory term

Sincerely,
The Hood Internet

Marx on Wikipedia

Bourgeois revolutions, like those of the eighteenth century, storm more swiftly from success to success; their dramatic effects outdo each other; men and things seem set in sparkling brilliants; ecstasy is the everyday spirit: but they are short lived; soon they have attained their zenith, and a long depression lays hold of society before it learns soberly to assimilate the results of its storm and stress period. Proletarian revolutions, on the other hand, like those of the nineteenth century, criticise themselves constantly, interrupt themselves continually in their own course, come back to the apparently accomplished in order to begin it afresh, deride with unmerciful thoroughness the inadequacies, weaknesses and paltriness of their first attempts...

—"The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte" in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W.W. Norton & Co., 1978), 597.

"The Eighteenth Brumaire" drops jaws.

Economic Progress Party?

I wouldn't call Will Wilkinson, a political-philosophy wonk (or something like that) at the Cato Institute, one of my intellectual heroes --- his well-justified appreciation for the achievements of "liberal capitalism" is too often marred, I think, by an unjustified identification of the priniciples underlying such a "regime" with the particular institutional forms it has taken in the U.S. --- but he's often an insightful critic (see my post directly below!!); the good thing about all these libertarian bloggers is their outsider status and their disdain for much of mainstream political discourse. I was particularly shaken by a tasty morsel that Wilkinson just threw up on his site, one of those "obvious in retrospect yet totally surprising when laid down in words" storms-and-stresses that I love to run across in my textual wanderings:

[re: the Rawlsian conception of distributive justice and its primary domain of application, the "basic structure" of society] This is, of course, massively confused. The deep objection to this way of thinking is that different basic structures don’t so much determine how stuff is distributed, but determine whether or not there is stuff at all, and how much. ... Because wealth is created and not just moved around, and more wealth is created under certain institutional schemes than others, the question isn’t so much one of distribution as production or creation. The question of whether people live under institutions in which they can realize their capacities and reliably acquire the necessary means to successfully enact their life-plans is mainly a question of what might be called productive justice.

I'm reminded of nothing so much as Marx, in "Critique of the Gotha Program," mercilessly assailing the naive idea of "a fair distribution of the proceeds of labour" as the vision for communist society: before you can get around to handing out checks, he says, you have to deduct from the total social product "cover for replacement of the means of production used up" (including, I assume, depreciation); an "additional portion" set aside "for expansion of production" (note: production is to expand, not stay constant); "reserve for insurance funds to provide against accidents, dislocations caused by natural calamities, etc." (Black Swans!); the costs of administration; the costs of public goods like education and healthcare; and the costs of upkeep for members of society who can't do productive labor. "These deductions ... are an economic necessity and their magnitude is to be determined according to available means and forces, and partly by computation of probabilities, but they are in no way calculable by equity." Marx sees such limits as things to be eventually overcome in later stages of communism, but you can't get there without paying attention to the contemporary "means and forces." Production, production, production.

I think we can detach Wilkinson's notion of the priority of productive over distributive "justice" (btw probably not the best term to use here) from his icky belief that all we need to do to fix up the world is to "install liberal capitalism" (wuzzat, exactly?) in every country, as if the Founders aced it for all time in 1787 and now we need only set their elegant clockpunk contraption in motion to ring in the end of history.

Inspiration one: America Beyond Capitalism by Gar Alperovitz. Breaking up wealth > redistributing income. Cooperatives, worker-owned firms, innovative collaborations between government and business. (I may riff more on this book later (preview: it's good/great but it pushes the "consumerism is bad! let's live simple and stop buying pretty things!" button (it's made of postconsumer recycled drywall and it's lacquered with organic pesticides) way too hard for my taste/comfort level/conception of political usefulness).)

Inspiration two: holycrapshit CHINA TO BUY A STAKE IN BLACKSTONE, a huge private-equity firm that is apparently doing an IPO pretty soon. Really, let that news sink in for a bit: nominally communist (and maybe, despite what the haters say, becoming more communist all the time) China is plowing billions of dollars into an American company that does nothing but take over and reignite other companies; T-bills aren't floating the bureaucrats' boats anymore. A bigger effort, "the State Foreign Exchange Investment Company," is apparently on the horizon; the Times opines that if the co. ends up looking anything like Singapore's state-run development operation, it "would effectively create the world’s largest hedge fund." !

The boys at Long or Short Capital (the blog that pays dividends) and the boys they link to harp on the possible dangers and shortcomings of the deal, for both sides --- China might kinda collapse any day now, given the brittleness of its program to inflict a hardened centralized will upon the whole of an increasingly restless (probably) civil society, and Blackstone could explode too (Black Swan Black Swan Black Swan), leaving China, which is committed to holding onto its shares and to not buying into competing firms for the medium-term future, in the super-shitty lurch --- but goddammit I was excited when I heard this gospel. Remember how China and McKinsey are also building a crazy utopian environmentalist city of the future? These people ain't thinking small, ladies and gentlemen; it must be improbably exhilirating, days like these, to be a Beijing functionary.

When will America wake up? The alarm's going off --- it's a clock radio, and NPR is playing Pharrell's remix of the Internationale --- but we keep hitting snooze.

Genius/Critic

I'm sure everyone's sick of my Unger obsession by now, but: I was stunned, in the course of rereading his neat little piece "A Program for Late Twentieth-Century Psychiatry," to find him pretty much following the Currier House party line in the formulation of a key concept:

To gain freedom of insight and action in a more remote context, often at the price of ineptitude in an immediate one, is a definition of genius.

Emphasis mine. To gain expertise in the immediate context at the price of vision for the future would be the corresponding definition of "critic." Of all the nonsense bandied about in "my" intellectual circle, the genius/critic quasi-distinction stands as one of the most promising and fruitful bits, I (perhaps surprisingly) think. "Factoid," on the other hand, remains controversial.

In café-culture news, the last few times I've gone to the local Starbucks, I've heard men with indeterminate European accents arguing heatedly — to the point of raising their voices, even — about particle physics. Simon's, Peet's: get your cake up. Your concentration of hand-waving humanists isn't going to cut it anymore.

I Can't Say That I Didn't Feel a Bit of a Sting Reading This

By the summer of 1929 the market not only dominated the news. It also dominated the culture. The recherché minority which at other times had acknowledged its interest in Saint Thomas Aquinas, Proust, psychoanalysis and psychosomatic medicine then spoke of United Corporation, United Founders and Steel. Only the most aggressive of the eccentrics maintained their detachment from the market and their interest in autosuggestion or communism.

—John Kenneth Galbraith, The Great Crash: 1929, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), 79.

But surely we can have all of this at once, can't we — more markets, more Proust, more communism? Otherwise, what's the point?

Crises Happen When I'm Not Paying Attention

xxAlekseyxx: i have some weird thing on my tongue.
xxAlekseyxx is away at 1:51:35 PM.

To be continued.

Oh, Religion

For example, when Terry Eagleton, a British critic who has been a professor of English at Oxford, lambasted Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” in the London Review of Books, he wrote that “card-carrying rationalists” like Dawkins “invariably come up with vulgar caricatures of religious faith that would make a first-year theology student wince.” That is unfair, because millions of the faithful around the world believe things that would make a first-year theology student wince. A large survey in 2001 found that more than half of American Catholics, Episcopalians, Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians believed that Jesus sinned—thus rejecting a central dogma of their own churches.

…Critics of the Bible should find consolation in the fact that many people do not have a clue what is in it. Surveys by the Barna Research Group, a Christian organization, have found that most Christians don’t know who preached the Sermon on the Mount.

—Anthony Gottlieb, "Atheists with Attitude," The New Yorker 21 May 2007.

I'm a Hypocrite

Despite everything, I have to say that I think this image, posted recently on BoingBoing, is pretty funny.

At least there are no robots, pirates, or Vikings. Yet.

I Thought This Day Would Never Come

From an email I just received:

Subject: can i interview you about blogs?

Sure, but you might want to get a sandwich and something to drink. This may take a while.

I Feel There Is Still Potential in the "Funny Animal" Genre, Though

There has been a fair amount of talk of "café culture" in my world line lately, due to the influence of certain elements. Mostly "café culture" seems to mean breaking minor laws while sitting in front of Au Bon Pain. Today I was doing the latter half when a strange conjuncture occurred:

1. I started eating a "caprese" sandwich, the most shamefully class-inscribed of all widely available sandwiches (mozzarella, tomato, pesto, baguette).
2. A truck drove past, its trailer emblazoned with the word "BOURGEOIS."
3. A loud-mouthed would-be troubadour said, by way of introduction, "This is a song about my identity."

The troubadour troubled me, which raises etymological questions I don't dare to confront. I encountered him at a different location earlier on, engaging in a weirdly violent performance/terrorism: as people walked by, he sang about them. "You, with that pastry / Is it tasty?" It was something of an "act" and a "joke," but you could tell how uncomfortable people were with the (unacknowledged) shattering of their anonymity. A few steps away, a hired hand dispensed free samples of Eclipse gum, but people weren't taking them because they thought there was a catch, such as homelessness. The troubadour greased the wheels with his dulcet tones: "Hey, why don't you take that gum? / It's actually free!"

Obviously there are lots of things here about space, "the city," quack quack. I kind of liked the guy. But by the time he wound up in front of Au Bon Pain, his gimmick had become weirdly toothless and dispiriting. He sang that Barbie girl song in a funny voice. Also songs by Britney Spears. The small crowd was eating it up, so he transitioned to original works. The song about his identity was actually a riff on being — get this — Jewish, but taking Jesus as a role model. Main joke: the idea of Jesus eating gefilte fish (Jesus was Jewish!). Next song (people are digging this): something about Massachusetts politicians drinking a lot, doing drugs, and "lov[ing] coitus." Main joke: name of Massachusetts politician + lifestyle infraction. Final song, loudly demanded (and therefore apparently previously heard) by a homeless man: begins with the phrase "Starbucks supports Al Qaeda." Main joke: Starbucks supports Al Qaeda.

Now look — and here is where I guess I cross the line separating Gawker-style "here's a thing" from other-blogs–style "here's a thing" — this is just terrible. Everyone was laughing and laughing, thrilled at how controversial this guy was being, at how un-Peoria they were for accepting his jester-like truth-to-power shenanigans in the heart of the town square. But what was his point, exactly? Jesus was a Jew: incredible how this still retains force as a "startling" "revelation." Politicans as "immoral" in boring way: a staple of conservative thought. Are we to be titillated by this? Starbucks + Al Qaeda: a little funny, I'll admit. But how characteristic of the whole currently dominant mode of production of culturally knowing pseudo-humor! Just juxtapose some things that are floating around in the culture. Jesus robots! Robot Jesus zombie terrorist monkeys! I don't even want to go on; it's too sad, and I'm wasting perfectly marketable YouTube screenplay ideas. In the comic store I patronize — the shelves of which are strewn with the works of Robert Kirkman, an avatar of this style of "creativity" who's starting up a wolf-man book to complement, among other things, his (hilariously irreverent!!) Battle Pope book — a white board behind the register lists the week's new releases. A few times in the recent past, books entitled Zombie and Zombies came out during the same week, and I think that a third book, Zombies vs. Robots, also came out one of those weeks. The mischievous store clerks added fictitious entries for Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys and Zombies vs. Robots vs. Monkeys vs. Pirates underneath, but it took me at least a few cycles to figure out what was real and what wasn't.

Surely this isn't all the future has to offer, right?

Blog 1: a comics review: "First, I think we can all agree that 'Zombies vs. Robots' is the best title of anything in the history of the world.…One might wonder how anyone can get a good story out of this concept. After all, what possible threat can zombies pose to robots? And at first, the answer would seem to be, 'Not much.'" (But there's a twist.)

Blog 2: http://robotzombiejesus.blogspot.com/.

Where Can I Get Funding for This?

When I got on the elevator in my building a few minutes ago, I noticed an empty beer bottle on the floor. I thought up an art project, based loosely on something I accidentally did once: upon leaving the elevator, I would position the beer bottle in such a way that it would straddle the threshold, breaking the photoelectric whatever-whatever and preventing the door from closing. It would probably take hours for the problem to be fixed. By then I would be long gone.

The title of this project would be Fuck Everyone.

Ziggy Stardust, CFA

With modern technology available to everyone, we should all be David Bowies in our ability to hedge our risks.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 145.

Could Have Been a Thing

Failed initial experiments may have prejudiced movie-going audiences against movies with subtitles. The silent movie The Chamber Mystery, made in 1920 by Abraham S. Schomer, used words superimposed on the picture. They were placed in comic-strip style balloons coming from the mouths of actors, not along the bottom of the screen. The movie was not a success, and the text in balloons was apparently not used again.

—Robert Shiller, The New Financial Order: Risk in the 21st Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press), 103.

And That's Why I Can't Stand Certain Kinds of Academic Discourse

The vulgar and the hypersubtle possibilities exist in the interpretation of any great social thinker. Typically, the defenders of each theorist adopt the hypersubtle account of their master and the vulgar account of his rivals.

—Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Social Theory lectures (1976), "Classical Social Theory I," 128.

A bit obvi when stated in such an upfront fashion, but can anyone deny this?

In a similar vein:

Everyone believes that their favorite philosophers are misunderstood. The problem will be especially acute insofar as one's favorite philosopher is oneself, but most of us extend the claim beyond this special case.

—Peter Godfrey-Smith, "Dewey on Naturalis, Realism and Science," Philosophy of Science 69 (2002), S1.

Quotations Are All I Can Handle at This Point

In my day, we only had the one universe. Now it's like satellite telly. There's billions of 'em. And they're all shite.

—Captain Midlands in Wisdom no. 4 (Marvel, May 2007).

What Unger Would Call Institutional Indeterminacy

Hebrews 10:1-4 (NIV):

The law is only a shadow of the good things that are coming—not the realities themselves. For this reason it can never, by the same sacrifices repeated endlessly year after year, make perfect those who draw near to worship. If it could, would they not have stopped being offered? For the worshipers would have been cleansed once for all, and would no longer have felt guilty for their sins. But those sacrifices are an annual reminder of sins, because it is impossible for the blood of bulls and goats to take away sins.

Bulls and goats, elephants and donkeys. Someone tell this to the Constitution fetishists.

Isaiah 1:22-23

Your silver has turned to dross;
Your wine is cut with water.
Your rulers are rogues
And cronies of thieves,
Every one avid for presents
And greedy for gifts;
They do not judge the case of the orphan,
And the widow's cause never reaches them.

For the Record

Tyler Cowen, the economist behind Marginal Revolution, quotes Seth Roberts, a psychologist (and blogger), quoting Tyler Cowen:

Blogging, of course, is one of the ultimate forms of self-experimentation.…Your blood pressure, how your brain is working, what new ideas you have, how your attention span has changed, how you now read other people’s work differently, who you find yourself liking more (and less), etc. I believe those effects [of blogging] are often quite striking.

Cowen fills in the details:

Blogging makes us more oriented toward an intellectual bottom line, more interested in the directly empirical, more tolerant of human differences, more analytical in the course of daily life, more interested in people who are interesting, and less patient with Continental philosophy.

Wink! Whattaya think, bloggers?