Dicksonland

Change of address

2011-03-14T13:23:00.001-06:00

I'm moving this blog over to tumblr. Update your bookmarks you imaginary readers, you.

Bret Easton Ellis: How Charlie Sheen is Giving Us What We Want

2011-03-13T10:39:00.002-06:00

Bret Easton Ellis decodes Charlie Sheen's post-empire moment, and the problem is our fixed attitudes:

You’re completely missing the point if you think the Charlie Sheen moment is really a story about drugs. Yeah, they play a part, but they aren’t at the core of what’s happening—or why this particular Sheen moment is so fascinating. I know functioning addicts. They’re not that rare or that interesting. What this moment is about is Sheen solo. It’s about a well-earned midlife crisis played out on CNN instead of in a life coach’s office somewhere in Burbank. The midlife crisis is the moment in a man’s life when he realizes he can’t (or won’t) any longer maintain the pose that he thought was required of him. Tom Cruise had a similar meltdown at the same age in the summer of 2005, but his was more politely handled (and, of course, he was never known as an addict). Cruise had his breakdown while smiling. He’s always essentially been the good boy who can’t say “Fuck you” the way Sheen (or even someone as benign as Cee Lo) can. Cruise is still that altar boy from Syracuse who believes in the glamour of Empire earnestness, and this is ultimately his limitation as a movie star and as an actor.

n+1: Notes on a News Cycle

2011-03-13T10:14:00.000-06:00

Kristin Dembock on the Giffords shooting:

René Girard wrote in Violence and the Sacred that people never look more similar than they do when they’re fighting. Violence is mimetic. And mimesis, Girard argued there and elsewhere, is where violence comes from in the first place. Not from difference, which is what we usually think, but from sameness. We only become who we are by imitating others, which means we imitate even their desires (we want their things, their careers, the girl, the political power, even the power to tell the story, to find the answer), and then in that moment when we reach for the same thing, we catch a glimpse of ourselves in the mirror of the other and want to smash it.

[via George Lazenby]

Nick Drake - Wikipedia

2011-03-13T10:02:00.001-06:00

On Nick Drake:

Drake suffered from depression and insomnia throughout his life, and these topics were often reflected in his lyrics. Upon completion of his third album, 1972's Pink Moon, he withdrew from both live performance and recording, retreating to his parents' home in rural Warwickshire. On 25 November 1974, Drake died from an overdose of amitriptyline, a prescribed antidepressant; he was 26 years old.

Drake's music remained available through the mid-1970s but the 1979 release of the retrospective album Fruit Tree caused his back catalogue to be reassessed. By the mid-1980s Drake was being credited as an influence by such artists as Robert Smith and Peter Buck. In 1985, The Dream Academy reached the UK and US charts with "Life in a Northern Town", a song written for and dedicated to Drake.[6] By the early 1990s, he had come to represent a certain type of 'doomed romantic' musician in the UK music press, and was frequently cited by artists including Kate Bush, Paul Weller and The Black Crowes.[7] The first biography in English of Drake appeared in 1997, and was followed in 1998 by the documentary film A Stranger Among Us. In 2000, Volkswagen featured the title track from Pink Moon in a television advertisement, and within a month Drake had sold more records than he had in the previous 30 years.

Shock Doctrine in Wisconsin

2011-03-09T13:31:00.002-07:00

I am no longer skeptical.

Built to Spill - Temporarily Blind

2011-03-08T14:37:00.000-07:00

Love the throwaway moment at 1:29 when they play a "Big Country" style riff, just cuz.

Carol Dweck's Attitude - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-03-08T14:27:00.000-07:00

Carol Dweck argues that people who believe that you achieve success through hard work (incremental) rather than through raw talent (fixed) perform better and achieve more. This works especially well for children, but in the real world things tend to be much more complicated:

The answer turned out to be: It depends. The Michigan studies divided the incremental theorists (that is, the students who implicitly believed that intelligence is malleable) into two groups: Those whose sense of self-worth was tied to academic performance and those who didn't care so much about school. The latter group—those whose egos were not deeply invested in schoolwork—behaved as Dweck would have predicted. But among students whose self-worth was tied to academic performance, incremental theorists behaved similarly to students with "fixed" beliefs about intelligence. They avoided practicing, and they "self-handicapped."

Perhaps because academic performance is a fixed category itself. To be truly incremental you have to ignore goal-orientation and focus on the task at hand for its own sake. You have to be zen, be a yogi.

Big Ten 2011 Tournament Bracket And Schedule - SB Nation Pittsburgh

2011-03-07T09:44:00.001-07:00

Ohio State is all but guaranteed a spot in the Big Ten finals with Northwestern, Minnesota, Michigan and Illinois all on their side of the bracket. The possible Friday morning match-up against Northwestern is the most intriguing. Otherwise it's straight to Sunday and a meaningless rematch against Purdue or Wisconsin. The most desperate team will be Michigan State who might need some wins to get into the tournament.

Go Into The Story: Best commercial ever?

2011-02-04T12:48:00.000-07:00

The kid as Darth Vader commercial is already the best thing about this year's Super Bowl.

Destroyer: Kaputt | Music | Music Review | The A.V. Club

2011-02-04T12:28:00.001-07:00

This is why I absolutely adore the new Destroyer album:

Something strange happened to rock music in 2010: Soft-focus sax solos stopped being funny. Well, they’re still sort of funny, but indie groups like Gayngs and Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti have reclaimed the smooth-as-Aja sonic textures that characterized the lite-FM songs they first encountered in the back seats of minivans 30 years ago. While attempts at reviving the gently swinging spotlessness of records like Roxy Music’s Avalon typically toe the line between winking irony and gushingly emotive sincerity, leave it to a sherry-sipping, lovesick fool like Dan Bejar of Destroyer to go full-on gauche on Kaputt. An album that’s as stunning for its straight-faced chutzpah as for its unrepentant, obsessively well-coiffed lushness, Kaputt elevates Bejar’s affected aloofness to intoxicating levels of bearskin-rug romanticism.

No, really.

Charlie Brooker - How TV Ruined Your Life

2011-02-01T07:37:00.001-07:00

Charlie Brooker is back with a new series that continues his scathing critique of all things small, fearful, and stupid:

S01E01P01

S01E01P02

Chopin was plagued by epilepsy, researchers claim - Telegraph

2011-01-26T16:52:00.000-07:00

Hints of the bicameral mind:

Frederic Chopin regularly suffered through hallucinations, and his frailty and bouts of melancholy had been put down to bipolar disorder or clinical depression.

Chopin may have suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy
He often appeared wild eyed or with his hair on end, spoke of a "cohort of phantoms" tormenting him and once described a monastery where he had stayed as 'full of terrors and ghosts'.

Purdue Boilermakers vs. Ohio State Buckeyes - Recap - January 25, 2011 - ESPN

2011-01-26T15:42:00.000-07:00

Buckeyes win 87-64, outplaying Purdue in every aspect of the game. Even players that I worried about in the previous game against Illinois, looked terrific:

The Ohio State Buckeyes knew there were doubters about their claim to No. 1.

There might not be any more.

William Buford had 19 points, Jared Sullinger added 17 and the top-ranked Buckeyes played almost flawlessly in rolling past No. 12 Purdue 87-64 on Tuesday night.

"It was a loud answer to those questions," Sullinger said.

Jon Diebler had 13 points and a career-high eight rebounds, Deshaun Thomas added 13 points, David Lighty scored 10 points and Aaron Craft had 11 points and six assists for Ohio State (21-0, 8-0 Big Ten), which ran its record to 62-4 all-time when atop the polls.

David Milch Luck Interview - David Milch on Deadwood Movie, True Grit and Luck - Esquire

2011-01-26T14:47:00.000-07:00

Looking forward to Luck, sometime later this year:

The organizing illusion in Luck is the notion that a horse crossing the finish line before another can truly change a man's life. As with Deadwood, the show's characters include all the men and women even peripherally invested in that illusion: jockeys, owners, trainers, low-lifes, misfits, criminals both petty and grand — notably Chester "Ace" Bernstein, played by a triumphant Dustin Hoffman. Milch's world of horse racing is different from his cops-and-robbers past, and not because the jockey genre is currently limited to, like, Seabiscuit. Because Deadwood is much the same, too — every man for himself, as long as every man agrees it's a prize worth winning.

Watching the Michael Mann-directed pilot, it's hard not see Hoffman as the equivalent of Deadwood's Al Swearengen: a deeply flawed, admittedly destructive man happy not to play by the rules, but ultimately more decent than he’d liked to admit. But Milch isn’t out to repeat himself, or please the fans of his previous shows.

"To think in terms of what the effect of a story is going to be as opposed to trying to discover its inner logic, is one of the fundamental dangers in the process," he says. "I'm just going to try and hit the ball straight and we'll see what field it turns out to be on."

n+1: Revolt of the Elites

2011-01-26T14:00:00.000-07:00

If you went to college, you're a member of the cultural elite. If you think there's more to life than making a buck, God help you:

The noxious thing about the cultural elite is supposed to be its bad faith. Everyone else in America more or less forthrightly confesses that they’re trying to grab as much money as they can, and if somebody has meanwhile forced a liberal education on them, that doesn’t mean they’ve had to like it. Upon making their money, real Americans are furthermore honest enough to spend it on those things that evolution or God have programmed humans to sincerely enjoy. In winter recreation, this might be snowmobiling — genuine petroleum-burning fun! — as opposed to cross-country skiing, a tedious trial of aerobic virtue.

Tragic Anti-Heroes

2011-01-25T16:25:00.001-07:00

Doomed outsiders, obsessives gone bad:

There Will Be Blood
The Great Gatsby
Moby Dick
Citizen Kane
The Talented Mr. Ripley

Rasputin in popular culture - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

2011-01-25T16:20:00.001-07:00

Ideas not to work on:

In Team Fortress 2, there is an achievement for the Heavy class named after Rasputin, given for being shot, burned, bludgeoned and exploded in a single life.
Grigori Rasputin plays a major role in the game Shadow Hearts: Covenant. In the game, he is a genuine mystic with dark powers, and he is head of a secret group which is plotting the overthrow of the Czar.
In White Wolf Game Studio's World of Darkness role-playing game metaverse, many factions of supernaturals claim Rasputin as one of their own, including one faction of mages (the Cult of Ecstasy), at least five factions of vampires (the Brujah, Malkavians, Nosferatu, Ventrue, and Followers of Set), and one faction of werewolves (the Shadow Lords). The second edition of Wraith: The Oblivion has a description of the 'Stamina' attribute referring to the stories of Rasputin's assassination. The in-game "truth" is still disputed, though Ethan Skemp (developer of Werewolf) has since mentioned that the multiple conflicting stories were meant as little more than an in-joke running through many of White Wolf's early books.
Rasputin is a playable character in Alpha Denshi's 1992 coin operated 2-D fighter arcade game World Heroes as well as its sequels. The character bears his likeness and uses a combination of bizarre and magical attacks against opponents, while preaching for a worldwide peace. The arcade games had high distribution in terms of available machines, but were poorly received by gaming critics. [7]
The main character in the PS2/Xbox game Psychonauts is called Razputin (better known as 'Raz'). Due to his psychic abilities, he is presumably named after Rasputin. The backstory of the character Raz includes a fear of drowning (like Rasputin's siblings) and a life in the circus (like his daughter Maria).
In the game Half-Life 2, a crazed Russian priest named Grigori aids the player through a zombie-infested town.
In Command & Conquer: Red Alert 2, the character Yuri was most likely inspired by Rasputin; he is a mysterious man with special powers who has a hold on the Russian leader.
Rasputin appears as a primary antagonist in Shin Megami Tensei: Devil Summoner.
In the game Resident Evil 4, the village chief bears a striking resemblance to Rasputin. Also, as Rasputin cared for the peasantry, Chief Mendez is the only possessor of a queen Plagas that shows any care for the ganados as revealed by a note encountered shortly before the boss battle with him.
In the Call of Duty: World at War Nazi Zombies mode, on the Downloaded map Shi No numa, Nikolai Belinski can be heard saying after killing a zombie "Who are you, fucking Rasputin? Stay dead this time!"
In Assassin's Creed II, a series of glyphs and codices describe Rasputin as a Templar agent who infiltrates the Czar's palace so he can steal a powerful artifact in the Czar's possession.

Rapunzel or Goldilocks

2011-01-25T15:43:00.003-07:00

Robert Plant had hair like that of the prettiest girl you'd ever seen.

And now...

The original Battlestar Galactica series bible is Ron Moore's rebuke to Star Trek

2011-01-25T15:39:00.001-07:00

Moore's first mistake was thinking that Star Trek was something that needed to be rebuked. His second mistake -- in retrospect -- was not delivering what he promised:

The jabs at Star Trek from Moore — who had only recently ended a long stint on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and (briefly) Voyager — are the first thing that jump out at you when you read the bible. Moore is out for "nothing less than the reinvention of the science fiction television series." And that means avoiding "the usual stories about parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil twins, God-like powers and all the other cliches." And the roster of characters should not include "'the cocky guy,' 'the fast-talker,' 'the brain,' 'the wacky alien sidekick' or any of the other usual characters.

By the end it was all parallel universes, time-travel, mind-control, evil, twins, God-like powers and characters motivated by little more than alcoholism and lousy childhoods.

Liberals and Economic Growth | Mother Jones

2011-01-24T09:59:00.000-07:00

This is a pretty good assessment which seeks to differentiate the economy as a whole from its many components and interest groups:

I agree that liberals ought to do a better job of persuading the electorate that liberal policies are friendly toward economic growth, but it's worth a pause to say that even if we do this successfully it won't affect the business community's view of us at all. Despite what they say, business executives don't care much about economic growth. They should, but they don't. What they care about is low taxes, light regulations, firm anti-union policies, robust corporate profits, and a sense that the bureaucracy of the government is sympathetic to their needs. Liberals are just never going to give them that other than narrowly and briefly (as with financial deregulation, for example, which was great for the Democratic Party but turned out to be not so great for the economy).

Jay Parini on Herman Melville - Telegraph

2011-01-23T14:57:00.000-07:00

The improbable friendship and subsequent falling out of Melville and Hawthorne:

Melville was working on Moby-Dick, his masterpiece, at this time, and Hawthorne pushed him to go beyond anything he had done before. As ever, Melville needed money, and desperately hoped that his rip-roaring story of the pursuit of a massive and dangerous white whale would attract readers.

Hawthorne, the allegorist par excellence, saw that Melville had before him more than a sea story. Here was a metaphysical quest, with man pitted against nature. Without Hawthorne’s conversations through the winter and spring of 1851, Melville may not have realised fully what he had on the desk before him.

People like to suggest that Melville had romantic feelings that Hawthorne did not return. But honestly people go their separate ways for far pettier reasons than that. Maybe Melville was just annoying.

Experimental Theology: The Theology of Calvin and Hobbes: Table of Contents

2011-01-23T14:35:00.004-07:00

Not really theology so much as an existential meditation on C&H. Calvin's authentic self is constantly hemmed in by objective reality, rules, logic, and normative standards, while he is liberated through creativity, imagination, and the willingness to jump on his sled just to see what happens. Calvin teaches us to abandon our goal-orientation and just let things go.

Calvinball as a state of grace

Ohio State Buckeyes vs. Illinois Fighting Illini - Box Score - January 22, 2011 - ESPN

2011-01-22T12:19:00.005-07:00

Bucks win a very exciting -- and important -- road game over Illinois, 73-68.

Sullinger and Diebler played great, but there was a lot of iffy play from Lighty, and I spent an inordinate amount of time yelling at Aaron Craft for his many miscues. Still both he and Deshaun Thomas redeemed their poor first half play during the 11-0 run that turned the game.

Would like to see the Bucks develop more of their inside-outside game, but Sullinger is so good in the paint that kicking out to the three point shooters is actually the less desirable option. Lighty on the other hand can't seem to hit shots after contact and always looks like he's expecting a foul to be called -- like a desperate receiver looking for pass interference on every play. Craft also had a bad habit of leaving balls on the front of rim when he tried to drive the lane. Finally, big man Dallas Lauderdale didn't see much playing time, probably because the OSU D did a good job of keeping Sullinger out of foul trouble.

Ohio State advance to 20-0 and defend their #1 ranking.

Keith Olbermann is Leaving MSNBC -- Daily Intel

2011-01-22T08:31:00.002-07:00

This can't bode well:

However sudden the departure was, however, it was not unexpected. Over much of the past year, Olbermann's future had been a topic of discussion in the cable news industry. He had long been MSNBC's biggest star, but the network had built a stable of pundits around him that came close to matching his success — especially protege Rachel Maddow, whose 10pm show followed Olbermann's. Executives were further encouraged they could survive a post-Olbermann era after both Maddow and Lawrence O'Donnell nearly held his audience numbers while guest hosting Countdown.

Of course we know that Keith has never behaved impulsively before. He'll feel bad about this later. Still props to him for speaking out against the Bush administration when few others had the guts to do so.

UPDATE

So it's starting to look like Comcast fired him. Cabletown is messed up.

Afternoon

2011-01-21T17:07:00.003-07:00

If you'd wanted to hang around wasting time at work this afternoon you should have had a lot of funny things to say about the Sky Mall catalog. Sadly, I did not.

Lunch

2011-01-21T17:06:00.000-07:00

If you'd wanted to go to lunch today you should have been prepared to talk about your hiking tours of Peru, scuba trips to Belize, crazy Mexican cab rides, or the history of Tequila manufacture. Sadly, I was not.

Listening to the National

2011-01-21T15:41:00.002-07:00

I must be in some kind of Inception style dream within a dream because this album has been playing for like seven hours and I just looked and it's only track 3.

"The spectacle of politics as a palliative cure for boredom" | blissblog

2011-01-21T14:25:00.001-07:00

Politics as "another option in the array of passivities:"

you can consume "politics" (all the endless, impossibly intricate analysis, the parsing and discussion of the "optics") in this addictive, stim-buzz-snacking, distracted-drifting, more-more-gimme-more way that is nothing like actual politics as activity (which involves quite a lot of boredom, tedious graft, endless meetings, or, if it's activist, involves the physical endurance of protest)... and that conversely is extremely like the way one engages with music/popculture on the web (flitting and skimming, tldr, dl-ing-but-never-getting-round-to-listening, half a YouTube here, half a streamed track there). so "politics" does become just another option in the array of passivities, all the time-kills available to you in this wonderful webbed infosphere... only difference is that "keeping up" and "staying informed" seems vaguely more worthwhile and virtuous than obsessively downloading the latest djmix

at any rate, whether or not he meant spectacle as in "spectacular commodity society" and "the society of the ____", this fellow's thoughts made me think that:

a/ the Situationist critique of our civilisation in terms of boredom / isolation / "the poverty of everyday life" has never been more pertinent ... what with the internet, social networking, and other surrogates-for-true-fulfilment/community... digimodernism has created a whole new array of pseudo-activities, pseudo-participations.... digimodernism is Spectacle 2.0

b/ the Situationist critique is one of the best explanations for rock/pop/etc available ... as an explanation of why it came into existence in the first place, and of why it ultimately fails (ie. its rebellion against boredom/isolation/disenchantment is alway recuperated, turned into something that just reinforces boredom/isolation/disenchantment)

Esquivel | HiLobrow

2011-01-20T14:56:00.001-07:00

It's Esquivel's birthday:

Drop a needle onto any one of JUAN GARCÍA ESQUIVEL’s (1918-2002) legendary mid-twentieth-century recordings and listen in awe as the sound ping-pongs from speaker to speaker: pianos plink and glide, strings zigzag into space, and an unseen chorus croons soothing syllables, then bursts into an emphatic “pow!” Esquivel was a piano prodigy who had his own radio show in his native Mexico at the age of 12; he later honed his idiosyncratic chops backing up a comedian who might ask him to provide “music for a Frenchman walking in Russia.” That he succeeded wildly was underscored when his arrangement of “Sentimental Journey” was performed by an office suite in a delightfully surreal segment of an Ernie Kovacs special in 1961 [video below]. Though known today as the king of “space-age bachelor pad music,” Variety once noted that “Esquivel is to pop music what Aaron Copland is to serious music, or what John Coltrane is to jazz.”

Gorillaz ft. Little Dragon - Empire Ants (Live on Letterman)

2011-01-19T21:27:00.003-07:00

Iowa Hawkeyes vs. Ohio State Buckeyes - Recap - January 19, 2011 - ESPN

2011-01-19T19:58:00.001-07:00

Buckeyes roll to 19-0:

David Lighty scored 18 points and Ohio State wasn't tested in its first game as No. 1, rolling over Iowa 70-48 on Wednesday night.

Design*Sponge » Blog Archive » she & him video premiere: don’t look back

2011-01-19T17:13:00.002-07:00

How cool is it that She & Him's retro-futuristic video gets an online premiere on Design*Sponge? Pretty dang cool:

“Don’t Look Back” (off of their new album, Volume Two) is not only a wonderful song, but also a visual trip down mid-century memory lane with furniture, decor and references that I think so many of you will love and appreciate. Whether you’re in it for the classic furniture designs, the sounds or both, I hope you’ll enjoy this video debut. It’s so fantastic to get to celebrate the worlds of design and music colliding. Thanks to Lindsey, Zooey and M. Ward for sharing this video with us today. You can check out She & Him right here online. xo, grace

Coachella 2011 Lineup - Stereogum

2011-01-19T10:28:00.002-07:00

Day 2 > Day 3 > Day 1

Read Bill Murray’s Hilarious Speech to Sofia Coppola at the NBR Awards -- Vulture

2011-01-18T15:43:00.000-07:00

A toast of sorts:

So why do you encourage these people? Because now she's had this success, she's had this work, she has this life, she has this family, she has this thing going, and now is when people like you have chosen well to say, 'Let's give this person another boost, let's give this person another boost to say keep going, because now life will come to you hard, like it's come to everyone that's lived long enough. It comes hard and it gets in the way of your career; it stops your career, it stunts your life — not necessarily your life, but it definitely will make your career go left. You show me an actor doing a shit movie, I'll show you a guy with a bad divorce. [Audience laughs.] Right? Right? [Looking around the room.] You know who I'm talking about.

Did Golden Globes Host Ricky Gervais Blow It Last Night? -- Vulture

2011-01-17T10:28:00.001-07:00

The short answer is no, he did not. Ricky Gervais was the only reason you might want to watch this nonsense. The movies and shows themselves were largely undeserving. The big stars themselves played it way too cool for school. More bored than glamorous. Their speeches and asides ran the gamut from sanctimonious to vapid. Frankly, Gervais could have used more screen time.

The Anti-Regulators Are the “Job Killers” | The Big Picture

2011-01-17T08:07:00.000-07:00

A good reminder of the importance of regulation as an antidote to fraud:

The Great Recession was triggered by the collapse of the real estate bubble epidemic of mortgage fraud by lenders that hyper-inflated that bubble. That epidemic could not have happened without the appointment of anti-regulators to key leadership positions. The epidemic of mortgage fraud was centered on loans that the lending industry (behind closed doors) referred to as “liar’s” loans — so any regulatory leader who was not an anti-regulatory ideologue would (as we did in the early 1990s during the first wave of liar’s loans in California) have ordered banks not to make these pervasively fraudulent loans.

One of the problems was the existence of a “regulatory black hole” — most of the nonprime loans were made by lenders not regulated by the federal government. That black hole, however, conceals two broader federal anti-regulatory problems. The federal regulators actively made the black hole more severe by preempting state efforts to protect the public from predatory and fraudulent loans. Greenspan and Bernanke are particularly culpable. In addition to joining the jihad state regulation, the Fed had unique federal regulatory authority under HOEPA (enacted in 1994) to fill the black hole and regulate any housing lender (authority that Bernanke finally used, after liar’s loans had ended, in response to Congressional criticism). The Fed also had direct evidence of the frauds and abuses in nonprime lending because Congress mandated that the Fed hold hearings on predatory lending.

The S&L debacle, the Enron era frauds, and the current crisis were all driven by accounting control fraud. The three “des” are critical factors in creating the criminogenic environments that drive these epidemics of accounting control fraud. The regulators are the “cops on the beat” when it comes to stopping accounting control fraud. If they are made ineffective by the three “des” then cheaters gain a competitive advantage over honest firms. This makes markets perverse and causes recurrent crises.

NFL Playoffs

2011-01-16T22:50:00.000-07:00

It's no wonder that this was such a bad year for Fantasy Football. All four finalists in the playoffs have better defenses than offenses, and not a one has an offensive superstar. Based on that I'll take the Steelers and the Packers next week.

Quitting The Philosophy Of Religion - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2011-01-16T12:37:00.001-07:00

A philosopher abandons the teaching of the philosophy of religion and simultaneously points out the purposelessness of rehashing unconvincing arguments. Sometimes there aren't two sides to a story. He comments further:

I got tired of constantly being in the debunking mode, especially when you find yourself debunking the same thing repeatedly. That starts to feel like swatting flies. I used to be a subscriber and regular reader of The Skeptical Inquirer, but then I let my subscription expire. How many debunkings of ghosts, UFO's, and Bigfoot do you need? Likewise with "the case for theism." I think I really have heard it all by now, and my hearing has been patient and fair. Also, as I said before, I am also aware of works by Oppy, Sobel, Gale, Everitt, Le Poidevin, Martin, Drange, Schellenberg, and many others that have done the debunking so well that I really have nothing further to add.

As for the use of the term "fraud," I tried to make clear that I am talking about the arguments, not the arguers. Actually, "fraud" was probably a bad choice of words since it inevitably connotes deceit and dishonesty. My view of the "case for theism" is not that it is a dishonest fabrication but that it is completely vacuous.

What the science of human nature can teach us : The New Yorker

2011-01-14T15:35:00.001-07:00

David Brooks is at it again. I should have known it wasn't going to go well when I read this:

You can see a paragon of the Composure Class having an al-fresco lunch at some bistro in Aspen or Jackson Hole. He’s just back from China and stopping by for a corporate board meeting on his way to a five-hundred-mile bike-a-thon to support the fight against lactose intolerance. He is asexually handsome, with a little less body fat than Michelangelo’s David. As he crosses his legs, you observe that they are immeasurably long and slender. He doesn’t really have thighs. Each leg is just one elegant calf on top of another. His voice is so calm and measured that he makes Barack Obama sound like Sam Kinison. He met his wife at the Clinton Global Initiative, where they happened to be wearing the same Doctors Without Borders support bracelets. They are a wonderfully matched pair; the only tension between them involves their workout routines. For some reason, today’s high-status men do a lot of running and biking and so only really work on the muscles in the lower half of their bodies. High-status women, on the other hand, pay ferocious attention to their torsos, biceps, and forearms so they can wear sleeveless dresses all summer and crush rocks with their bare hands.

But I kept reading, hoping we'd eventually get to the bit about the "science of human nature." Instead it's an extended fantasy of cobbled together studies and just-so stories related to courtship and "happiness."

Let's face it "Composure Class" isn't as catchy as "Bobo", but it's probably a smart move to flatter the wannabe new plutocrats at the stage. Who would identify so closely with an article in the New Yorker or fuss about how happy they are. These are first world problems, version 2.0.

The Prioress' Prologue and Tale -- An Interlinear Translation

2011-01-13T13:21:00.002-07:00

Regarding the phrase, "Blood Libel":

565 Fro thennes forth the Jues han conspired
From thenceforth the Jews have conspired
566 This innocent out of this world to chace.
To drive this innocent out of this world.
567 An homycide therto han they hyred,
For this they have hired a murderer,
568 That in an aleye hadde a privee place;
Who in an alley had a secret place;
569 And as the child gan forby for to pace,
And as the child began to pass by,
570 This cursed Jew hym hente, and heeld hym faste,
This cursed Jew seized him, and held him tightly,
571 And kitte his throte, and in a pit hym caste.
And cut his throat, and cast him in a pit.

The Rise of the New Global Elite - Magazine - The Atlantic

2011-01-13T13:16:00.001-07:00

A nice summary of everything that's wrong with the global economy - income inequality, plutocrats, hubris, etc. You see, the rich really do think they're smarter than you. Why else would they be so stinking rich, and you so stinking mediocre:

Though typically more guarded in their choice of words, many American plutocrats suggest, as Khodorkovsky did, that the trials faced by the working and middle classes are generally their own fault. When I asked one of Wall Street’s most successful investment-bank CEOs if he felt guilty for his firm’s role in creating the financial crisis, he told me with evident sincerity that he did not. The real culprit, he explained, was his feckless cousin, who owned three cars and a home he could not afford. One of America’s top hedge-fund managers made a near-identical case to me—though this time the offenders were his in-laws and their subprime mortgage. And a private-equity baron who divides his time between New York and Palm Beach pinned blame for the collapse on a favorite golf caddy in Arizona, who had bought three condos as investment properties at the height of the bubble.

and..

You might say that the American plutocracy is experiencing its John Galt moment. Libertarians (and run-of-the-mill high-school nerds) will recall that Galt is the plutocratic hero of Ayn Rand’s 1957 novel, Atlas Shrugged. Tired of being dragged down by the parasitic, envious, and less talented lower classes, Galt and his fellow capitalists revolted, retreating to “Galt’s Gulch,” a refuge in the Rocky Mountains. There, they passed their days in secluded natural splendor, while the rest of the world, bereft of their genius and hard work, collapsed. (G. K. Chesterton suggested a similar idea, though more gently, in his novel The Man Who Was Thursday: “The poor man really has a stake in the country. The rich man hasn’t; he can go away to New Guinea in a yacht.”)

This plutocratic fantasy is, of course, just that: no matter how smart and innovative and industrious the super-elite may be, they can’t exist without the wider community. Even setting aside the financial bailouts recently supplied by the governments of the world, the rich need the rest of us as workers, clients, and consumers. Yet, as a metaphor, Galt’s Gulch has an ominous ring at a time when the business elite view themselves increasingly as a global community, distinguished by their unique talents and above such parochial concerns as national identity, or devoting “their” taxes to paying down “our” budget deficit. They may not be isolating themselves geographically, as Rand fantasized. But they appear to be isolating themselves ideologically, which in the end may be of greater consequence.

The Afterlife of David Foster Wallace - The Chronicle Review - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2011-01-09T21:58:00.000-07:00

On the rise and rise of Wallace scholarship:

Boswell said that, as early as Wallace's debut novel, The Broom of the System, it was apparent that the writer had a new, ambitious, ethically charged agenda. "The first novel announced very clearly that Wallace wanted to revive the tradition of postmodern maximalism, generally associated with writers like John Barth, William Gaddis, and Thomas Pynchon, but also that he was going to do it in a way that made sense to members of his own generation, who grew up in the desolate aftermath of the 1960s and no longer needed to be shown the hollow hypocrisy of the bourgeois social order or whatever," he said.

Interesting Times: It Doesn’t Matter Why He Did It : The New Yorker

2011-01-09T15:31:00.001-07:00

Another reasonable take:

But even so, the tragedy wouldn't change this basic fact: for the past two years, many conservative leaders, activists, and media figures have made a habit of trying to delegitimize their political opponents. Not just arguing against their opponents, but doing everything possible to turn them into enemies of the country and cast them out beyond the pale. Instead of “soft on defense,” one routinely hears the words “treason” and “traitor.” The President isn't a big-government liberal—he's a socialist who wants to impose tyranny. He's also, according to a minority of Republicans, including elected officials, an impostor. Even the reading of the Constitution on the first day of the 112th Congress was conceived as an assault on the legitimacy of the Democratic Administration and Congress.

This relentlessly hostile rhetoric has become standard issue on the right. (On the left it appears in anonymous comment threads, not congressional speeches and national T.V. programs.) And it has gone almost entirely uncriticized by Republican leaders. Partisan media encourages it, while the mainstream media finds it titillating and airs it, often without comment, so that the gradual effect is to desensitize even people to whom the rhetoric is repellent. We’ve all grown so used to it over the past couple of years that it took the shock of an assassination attempt to show us the ugliness to which our politics has sunk.

'Vitriol' Cited As Possible Factor In Arizona Tragedy : NPR

2011-01-08T22:41:00.000-07:00

A second person of interest:

At a news conference Saturday night, a clearly emotional Dupnik, who has been close to both Giffords and Roll, repeatedly cited what he characterized as the "vitriol" that has infected political discourse. He said that his own state has become "the mecca for prejudice and bigotry."

There is reason to believe, he said, that the shooting suspect "may have a mental issue," adding that people like that "are especially susceptible to vitriol."

"That may be free speech, but it's not without consequences," he said.

The suspected gunman was tackled and held by people at the event until police arrived and took him into custody. Law enforcement sources told NPR the suspect was 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner.

Dupnik declined to name the suspect, but said he "has kind of a troubled past — I can tell you that — and we are not convinced he acted alone."

Officials have a photograph of a second "person of interest," a 50-year-old white male, Dupnik said. "We have an individual we are actively in pursuit of, but I cannot tell you who he is at this point," the sheriff said.

Alleged shooter left social media hints - Ben Smith - POLITICO.com

2011-01-08T22:34:00.001-07:00

Twisted logic:

Among his long list of favorite books in his YouTube profile are Mein Kampf, The Communist Manifesto, Siddhartha.

Loughner also "favorited" just one video on YouTube, which shows the burning of an American flag and is accompanied by an anti-government screed. A sample from that screed:

If there's no flag in the constitution then the flag in the film is unknown.
There's no flag in the constitution.
Therefore, the flag in the film is unknown.
Burn every new and old flag that you see.
Burn your flag!
I bet you can imagine this in your mind with a faster speed.
Watch this protest in reverse!
Ask the local police; "What's your illegal activity on duty?".
If you protest the government then there's a new government from protesting.
There's not a new government from protesting.
Thus, you aren't protesting the government.

The insane, in their isolation, are relentlessly logical. Their thoughts constantly turning to the malformed syllogisms that give formal structure to their inner turmoil. If this, then this. They seek to convince themselves that what they are doing is simultaneously unreal and inevitable. If only to relieve them of the burden of taking responsibility for their actions.

Gabrielle Giffords Shooting: Don't Blame Sarah Palin - The Daily Beast

2011-01-08T22:15:00.001-07:00

The rush for political cover:

This isn't about a nearly year-old Sarah Palin map; it's about a lone nutjob who doesn't value human life. It would be nice if we briefly put aside partisan differences and came together with sympathy and support for Gabby Giffords and the other victims, rather than opening rhetorical fire ourselves.

Rising above unseemly politics and asserting that the gunman acted alone does nothing but cynically ignore the undeclared civil war that the right has been waging for the last two years.

Little Green Footballs - What Violent Right Wing Rhetoric?

2011-01-08T21:55:00.000-07:00

Violent imagery doesn't mean much, until it means everything.

Young Americans: Left out in the rain | The Economist

2011-01-07T18:37:00.000-07:00

When I was finishing college, they called us slackers. Now it's just reality:

Though they burst into the workforce with expectations of fun and fulfilment (leading employers to grouse about their sense of entitlement), they have been delivered a slap by the recession. Nearly 16% of 18-24-year-olds are unemployed, almost double the national average.* Most are simply struggling to keep their heads above water, according to the MacArthur Research Network.

Ted Nugent isn’t on board with a Palin presidency yet - Yahoo! News

2011-01-07T10:03:00.000-07:00

What is this world coming to? Apparently cat scratch fever is not what it used to be.

Marc Maron’s Must-Hear Podcast for Comedians - NYTimes.com

2011-01-06T16:13:00.005-07:00

I was going to mention at some point that Marc Maron's WTF podcast has quickly become my favorite. But the Times beat me to it. He is indeed raw and angry, and he understands the self-destructive impulse in human psychology that leads to comedy. It's interesting that so much art comes from this dark place and that the artistic journey is one where the wounded self seeks out imaginative engagement with the source of all inner turmoil. To what? To heal, to break with the past, to reengage, to go forth once more.

The brilliant thing about Maron's show is that comedians share all the same demons of artists and poets and they're good talkers. They turn all that anger outward, they express it with full voice, and inject humor as a way to say, look, I survived. I persist. Whereas most writers turn inward and are in danger of being eaten alive.

As he says of his ill-fated tenure at Air America:

“I really began to believe that the struggles of most people are existential, not political,” he said, “and my biggest struggles were existential.”

Which is to say, politics is fine if all you want is dialectic and the rigors of partisan logic. But if you really want to know what's going on, you need to engage with all the messy, unresolved, patently absurd aspects of life. You have to face up to the fact that you're here, alive today, and decide what you're going to do about it before you die.

Born To Run | Human Evolution | DISCOVER Magazine

2011-01-06T12:07:00.001-07:00

More research into the evolution of running:

Unlike many mammals, not to mention primates, people are astonishingly successful endurance runners, "and I don't think it's just a fluke," Lieberman says. He and Bramble argue that not only can humans outlast horses, but over long distances and under the right conditions, they can also outrun just about any other animal on the planet—including dogs, wolves, hyenas, and antelope, the other great endurance runners. From our abundant sweat glands to our Achilles tendons, from our big knee joints to our muscular glutei maximi, human bodies are beautifully tuned running machines. "We're loaded top to bottom with all these features, many of which don't have any role in walking," Lieberman says. Our anatomy suggests that running down prey was once a way of life that ensured hominid survival millions of years ago on the African savanna.

Sugar Bowl: Ohio State vs. Arkansas

2011-01-04T16:38:00.014-07:00

I'm dreading this game.

Everything is stacked against us. SEC opponent. Southern location. Myriad distractions. My fear is that we'll play Virginia Tech to Arkansas's Stanford. Hang around for a quarter or two and then go home on the wrong side of 42-10.

So is tonight the night that Buckeye fans everywhere decide that OSU is a basketball school? Bucks are 12 1/2 point favorites against Iowa.

UPDATE

Buckeyes played a brilliant first half, taking a 28-10 lead, but nothing has gone right since. The phantom safety may have been the last straw as the lead is cut to 31-23. I think I've seen this movie before.

Meanwhile the basketball team eked out a 73-68 win over Iowa in a game where they trailed for the bulk of the action.

UPDATE

Another bizarre play as Herron fumbles on what should have been a back-breaking, clock-burning, 4th down conversion.

Bucks lead 31-26 with less than 6 minutes, but right now we're waiting for the inevitable Arkansas go-ahead score.

UPDATE

Buckeyes get a remarkable three and out with 4 1/2 minutes to go. Field position continues to be their greatest enemy as Arkansas punts them down inside the 5 yardline.

UPDATE

With 2 minutes left, OSU has done a good job of running the ball and running down the clock.

Still, the game has been way more exciting than it needed to be.

UPDATE

And there you go. A special teams disaster. Would have been better if they'd gone for it.

UPDATE

HOLY COW! The Bucks get an interception with a minute left!

UPDATE

Bucks win 31-26. Unbelievable game. I've got nothing left to say.

FINAL UPDATE

Hope someone off the defense gets the MVP. They made the difference 100%.

Leaders and Legends?

2011-01-01T14:49:00.003-07:00

The Big Ten is 0-4 so far in the New Year's bowls. Maybe it's the match-ups. Maybe it's a combination of the Big 10 being overrated and their opponents underrated. Or maybe it's that all of these southern teams are winning games played in the south?

Either way, it's hard to say that these exhibition games are all that inspiring, or that they add much to our understanding of league competitiveness.

UPDATE

Wisconsin is trailing in the third quarter of the Rose Bowl. A huge disappointment. They look very average against TCU, and are playing a lot more like the team that lost to Michigan State than the team that rolled over Ohio State.

UPDATE

Wisconsin goes down, forgetting that they got to where they are by running the freaking football. Why you would throw on the potential game-tieing 2pt conversion is beyond me.

Big Ten 0-5. Initiate ritual self-flogging protocol.

What Pride and Prejudice Can Teach Us About Inequality - Branko Milanovic - Business - The Atlantic

2011-01-01T10:19:00.000-07:00

Most people think Jane Austen novels are romantic, which is why I've never been a fan. On the other hand, it's pretty clear, even to me, that her books have a lot to tell us about economics and society:

It will not be giving away the plot to point out that Elizabeth does have some doubts about the suitability of Mr. Darcy, who, in no uncertain terms, expresses his "adoration"--a period euphemism that would be stated quite differently in a modern book. But rebuffing him forever has an additional unpleasant implication. Due to English inheritance laws, if Mr. Bennet dies without a direct male heir, the house and well-functioning estate revert to his obnoxious cousin, the Reverend William Collins. In that case, Elizabeth has to live on her own income, which is basically her share of the £5,000 that her mother brought ("settled") into the marriage. Elizabeth's independent wealth is thus somewhat indelicately estimated by Reverend Collins, who also doubles as her ill-starred suitor, at £1,000. Mr. Collins assumes that she would make a return of 4 percent on it, and hence earn £40 per year. This is a rather measly amount, approximately equal to twice the mean income in England at the time. It is an income that a family of a surveyor or merchant marine seaman could expect.

This is where the love-wealth trade-off makes its appearance. Consider the situation from the point of view of Elizabeth's mother, worried about the happiness of her daughter. On the one hand, Elizabeth can marry Mr. Darcy and enjoy an annual income of £5,000 (we assume that she contributes nothing in monetary terms to Mr. Darcy and that Mr. Darcy shares his income evenly with Elizabeth). On the other, she can fall into what certainly seems to Mrs. Bennet a world of unremitting poverty, living on less than £50 annually. The income ratio between these two outcomes is simply staggering: more than one hundred to one. At that cost, the alternative of not marrying, or perhaps waiting until an ideal lover appears on the horizon, is out of the question. One would really have to hate Mr. Darcy to reject the deal he is tacitly offering!

For Elizabeth Bennet, it's not really a question of love. It's about how much she's willing to negotiate.

Ohio State Buckeyes vs. Indiana Hoosiers - Recap - December 31, 2010 - ESPN

2010-12-31T19:08:00.004-07:00

Buckeyes are off to a great start this year going 14-0 and picking up their first win in conference play.

So far this is a better team than the Greg Oden led 2006-2007 team that lost the NCAA champion game to Florida, but they still have a long way to go to match the achievements of the Jerry Lucas teams of the early 60s. Those teams not only went to the finals three years in a row, but the 1960-61 team followed up its National Championship by going 27-0. Their only defeat was in the championship to Cincinnati (70-65, in overtime!) The next year they came back and did it again going 26-1 before losing the rematch with Cincinnati 71-59.

YouTube - 20 Car Pile up on South Carefree and Powers Colorado Springs Part 1

2010-12-31T09:44:00.001-07:00

The genius of winter drivers is unbelievable. This was yesterday.

Twilight Zone | Syfy

2010-12-31T09:26:00.001-07:00

Twilight Zone New Year's marathon on SyFy. Also known as the handbook of American Literature.

How Did God Get Started? » Arion » Boston University

2010-12-28T13:16:00.010-07:00

A great article on how religious faith appeared in Western culture as a direct result of the invention of rationality in Greek Philosophy.

With rationality, the Greeks gods are no longer necessary to make the wind blow, the earth shake, and the rivers flow, natural phenomenon began to have naturalistic explanations. And as a result religion splits away from reason, taking on a new purpose and a new set of characteristics.

It becomes:

Monotheistic which simplifies and streamlines the pantheon by positing a single god who is seen in various forms, just as natural phenomenon can be reduced to elemental forms.
Exclusive which strengthens monotheism by arguing that one god is the true god, and all others are false.
Supernatural which in turn privileges the power of unseen forces over the seen. Faith becomes the foundation of religious thought precisely because it places authority beyond the natural and beyond scientific reasoning.
Apocalyptic which finally allows religious believers take solace in the promise that their faith will be vindicated when the unseen world unveils itself and the secular world is ruins. A revenge fantasy and payback for those who are marginalized both by their religious belief as well as their relationship to the natural world.

As Colin Wells explains:

Whatever its precise origins, the idea of an exclusive God was crucial for Christianity’s spread among the Gentiles, because it answered so many needs at once. It appropriated the pagans’ own unitary god and trumped it, addressing paganism by offering a compelling rationale for rejecting the old gods; at the same time, it provided a resounding slap in the face to the naturalism that was always implicit in Greek philosophy, even if that naturalism was now being culturally swamped. Indeed, it was being swamped precisely because, then as now, it was so threatening to religious sentiment. Exclusivity fed into that reaction. Nature’s regularity had melded the nature gods into One that enfolded many, but (as Thales saw) it also unavoidably implied doubt about divine agency. Rising supernaturalism allied itself with the blocked impulse to restore divine agency, but couldn’t offer a new outlet for it. Exclusivity at once focused supernaturalism and cleared the way for divine agency, by demonizing the weakened gods and putting the one true God above them and their material realm.

In Darwinian terms, what I’m suggesting is that rational inquiry changed the religious environment, and that exclusive monotheism was the new class of religion that evolved as a result. Since religion’s environment is in fact psychological, to explain how religious “mutations” become successful “adaptations” it’s necessary to explain their psychological appeal. I’ve shown how exclusivity worked by appealing to and ultimately co-opting the rising tide of supernaturalism that reason left in its wake. Apocalypticism, exclusivity’s seeming corollary, has long posed a fundamental psychological problem, but we can explain it in a similar way. It’s easy to see how apocalypticism arose among a marginalized minority, and how it would appeal to Christianity’s earliest pagan converts—women, slaves, the poor. But what was it about the apocalyptic outlook that gave it such broad and lasting appeal as exclusive monotheism was taken up by entire cultures and societies? Why would a sense of marginalization resonate with the mainstream, which by definition isn’t marginal at all? Once more, we can look to reason and its psychological consequences for an answer. Apocalypticism’s message of ultimate vindication for the marginalized resonated with the mainstream because the inherent authority of naturalistic explanation threatened to marginalize all religious accounts of reality, in a way analogous to that in which Jewish authorities had marginalized outcast preachers like Jesus and Paul. The Greek word apocalypsis is usually translated as “revelation.” The original meaning of both words is “unveiling,” or a bringing forth of the hidden—for true believers, this became the time when the unseen will literally come out of hiding to annihilate the seen in a final act of glorious revenge for being so brusquely pushed to the side. From an epistemological standpoint, all believers are marginalized in this world. In pinning its hopes on the next world, what faith reveals is the ancestral mark of religion’s marginalization at the hands of reason.

This is a terrific idea, and the elegance of the explanation makes me want to take it a step too far. What if, for example, the specifics of American religious history can explain the increasingly paranoid mindset in American politics. What if it can explain the way that the dividing line is no longer drawn along party affiliation but also competing ideologies, one explicitly secular and mistrusting of authoritarian nationalism and religious fundamentalism and the other explicitly religious and skeptical of scientific authority and secular institutions.

In almost any debate it is not uncommon to see the two sides split between believers and non-believers. As a result, you repeatedly find this idea that "unseen" forces are in control and that only a few marginalized truth-tellers understand what's really going on. The masses are sheep, the individual speaker possessed of rare insight and special knowledge. We see that the government serves the elite or is ruled by hostile foreign forces, corporations secretly control our waking lives through marketing and misinformation, religious people are irrational for believing, atheists are egomaniacally deluded for their lack of faith, true believers are mocked for their credulity, scientists and skeptics are criticized for selling out the truth to the status quo.

If you think something is true, it's because they want you to think it's true. If you believe something is true it is because you're not one of those weak-minded fools that believes everything they're told.

And of course, the attraction of this style of thought is simple: it reduces the world to a single, simple explanation, separates the sheep from the true-believers, offers the excitement of fantastical events, and promises that the truth is out there waiting to be unveiled.

Faith, therefore, is not just belief in something that may or may not be true, but the potential to rationalize away our own sense of alienation in the name of open-mindedness, individual growth, or psychological healing.

Media Focus: Irrational Fears, the Sensational | The Big Picture

2010-12-27T16:34:00.001-07:00

I'm less interested in the media bias slant then I am in the cold hard facts of what can kill us:

But it turns out that relative to the coverage, the reality is quite different.The media covers issues that are exciting, sensationalistic or have good visuals. This leads them to present a very different view of the world, one that does not conform very closely to reality.

For example: Automobiles are a far larger cause of death than homicides. The way deaths are portrayed on the news is hardly proportionate.

Dramatic television is even worse. CSI: Miami is far more exciting than CSI: Someone ran a red light and the ensuing accident left 2 injured, one dead. Yet auto deaths far outnumber homicides.

Even within accidental deaths, there are approximately twice as many Suicides as there are Homicides. Not that an American watcher of TV would ever know that. Murder, She Wrote has far more intrigue and drama, and is probably a whole lot more watchable, than “A painful incurable disease of an elderly person led to a suicide, She Wrote.”

Only Connect - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2010-12-25T13:14:00.002-07:00

I think this is my goal for 2011.Stop censoring myself, stop avoiding things, stop trying to control every outcome. Allow myself to confront problems, allow myself to not get bottled up in my head, allow myself some sort of pressure valve without being self-destructive or blindingly angry.

One of the things I've notice whenever people give these self-help talks is that they never warn you about the difficulty of the transition. Because anytime you start to change your behavior the first thing you notice is that no one else seems to notice or care. And because you feel vulnerable to begin with, you feel even more vulnerable. You feel like you're opening yourself up to a world that's just going to exploit you and tear you down more. That people are going to laugh and see you for what you are. Weak. Unworthy. Unimportant. Unwanted.

So how to get past that?

I don't know, but I've got a lot of work to do to start figuring it out.

Werner Herzog Reads Twas The Night Before Christmas

2010-12-24T09:36:00.001-07:00

Existential thirst is the engine that drives the holiday machine...

A Holiday Message from Ricky Gervais: Why I'm An Atheist - Speakeasy - WSJ

2010-12-23T16:46:00.002-07:00

More than worthwhile to read the whole thing.

So what does the question “Why don’t you believe in God?” really mean. I think when someone asks that they are really questioning their own belief. In a way they are asking “what makes you so special? “How come you weren’t brainwashed with the rest of us?” “How dare you say I’m a fool and I’m not going to heaven, f— you!” Let’s be honest, if one person believed in God he would be considered pretty strange. But because it’s a very popular view it’s accepted. And why is it such a popular view? That’s obvious. It’s an attractive proposition. Believe in me and live forever. Again if it was just a case of spirituality this would be fine.

“Do unto others…” is a good rule of thumb. I live by that. Forgiveness is probably the greatest virtue there is. But that’s exactly what it is -‐ a virtue. Not just a Christian virtue. No one owns being good. I’m good. I just don’t believe I’ll be rewarded for it in heaven. My reward is here and now. It’s knowing that I try to do the right thing. That I lived a good life. And that’s where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. “Do this or you’ll burn in hell.”

You won’t burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

Lame Ducks Triumphant - NYTimes.com

2010-12-23T16:30:00.001-07:00

Did Obama fake out the Republicans with the tax compromise and clear a path for the raging duck congress?

But let’s admit it. Nothing would have gotten done if Obama hadn’t swallowed that loathsome compromise on tax cuts for the wealthy.

If he’d taken the high road, Congress would be in a holiday war. The long-term unemployed would be staggering into the new year without benefits. The rest of the world would look upon the United States as a country so dysfunctional that it can’t even ratify a treaty to help keep nuclear weapons out of the hands of terrorists. The people who worked at ground zero would still be uncertain about their future, and our gay and lesbian soldiers would still be living in fear.

It’s depressing to think that there was no way to win that would not have involved giving away billions of dollars to people who don’t need it. But it’s kind of cheery to think we have a president who actually does know what he’s doing.

Meep meep, indeed.

Five Ohio State Buckeyes, including Terrelle Pryor, must sit out five games in '11 - ESPN

2010-12-23T16:20:00.001-07:00

This is ridiculous.

The hypocrisy of the NCAA and the universities needs to stop. Either limit suspensions to criminal behavior, or fix the economics of college sports. When guys are essentially pawning their valuables for pocket money there is something wrong.

I'm just mad cause this will probably screw up the Sugar Bowl.

Best Coast - When I'm With You

2010-12-22T14:16:00.001-07:00

The philosophical underpinnings of David Foster Wallace's fiction. - By James Ryerson - Slate Magazine

2010-12-22T11:32:00.001-07:00

David Foster Wallace reads David Markson's Wittgenstein's Mistress

"I am my world" is what Wallace had in mind when he spoke of "the loss of the whole external world" in the Tractatus. There is no difference, ultimately, for Wittgenstein between solipsism and realism (solipsism "coincides with pure realism," he writes). For Wallace, this was a harrowing equation, the dark emotional takeaway of the Tractatus's severe anti-metaphysics. This was also, for Wallace, what Markson had rendered imaginatively in his novel. Without ever raising these ideas explicitly, Markson had conveyed them with a special kind of clarity. Wittgenstein's Mistress, by echoing the Tractatus's brusque, dreamlike sentences and placing Kate in a cold, lonely, self-as-world cosmos, had managed, as Wallace put it, to "capture the flavor both of solipsism and of Wittgenstein." What's more, Wallace felt Markson had done something that even Wittgenstein hadn't been able to do: he humanized the intellectual problem, communicating "the consequences, for persons, of the practice of theory; the difference, say, between espousing 'solipsism' as a metaphysical 'position' & waking up one fine morning after a personal loss to find your grief apocalyptic, literally millennial, leaving you the last and only living thing on earth." That was something only fiction, not philosophy, could do.

Here Wallace not only finds the essence of storytelling but discovers the limits of logic. If you can explore your premise through example you rescue logic from inertness and humanize the narrative. The novel of ideas requires an energizing force - an emotional wallop - to make itself live in the imagination.

Left Out - Francis Fukuyama - The American Interest Magazine

2010-12-21T18:42:00.001-07:00

Francis Fukuyama???

Scandalous as it may sound to the ears of Republicans schooled in Reaganomics, one critical measure of the health of a modern democracy is its ability to legitimately extract taxes from its own elites. The most dysfunctional societies in the developing world are those whose elites succeed either in legally exempting themselves from taxation, or in taking advantage of lax enforcement to evade them, thereby shifting the burden of public expenditure onto the rest of society.

Doctoral degrees: The disposable academic | The Economist

2010-12-20T10:36:00.002-07:00

On finishing a PhD:

In America only 57% of doctoral students will have a PhD ten years after their first date of enrolment. In the humanities, where most students pay for their own PhDs, the figure is 49%. Worse still, whereas in other subject areas students tend to jump ship in the early years, in the humanities they cling like limpets before eventually falling off. And these students started out as the academic cream of the nation. Research at one American university found that those who finish are no cleverer than those who do not. Poor supervision, bad job prospects or lack of money cause them to run out of steam.

The Dream Of The '90s Is Alive In Portland: Pics, Videos, Links, News

2010-12-18T20:17:00.003-07:00

"Portland is a city where young people go to retire."

Jerry Saltz’s Open Letter to the Republicans of the 111th Congress -- Vulture

2010-12-18T14:17:00.002-07:00

Speaking up for the arts!

Dear Messrs. Kantor and Boehner:

Given your censoring of David Wojnarowicz’s video of ants crawling on a plastic crucifix with a wooden human figure meant to represent Jesus Christ, a literary character penned by numerous authors over several hundred years and now worshiped as God, and your threatening the Smithsonian’s funding if it did not comply with your wishes, I would like you to know about a similar threat to decency.

Crustypunks - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2010-12-16T09:47:00.007-07:00

Harrowing portraits of homeless kids and travelers in New York City.

I can't stop reading these tales of drugs and violence, ex-cons, drop outs, and the unwanted; people who are just socio-pathic enough to fall off the edge. Philosophically, they fall somewhere between Dharma Bums and Milch's romanticized notion of the artist as psychologically damaged outsider.

It's amazing how people can so thoroughly mess up their lives, rationalize those mistakes as virtues, and yet still be asking some of the right questions. Which is to say: what is the life that's worth living? What is freedom? What is society? What does it mean to be true to oneself?

Wow.

Jon Savage on song: The Smiths' The Queen Is Dead is an anthem for our times | Music | guardian.co.uk

2010-12-15T12:38:00.002-07:00

Yep,

The Queen Is Dead is the Smiths' mature masterpiece. The playing is faultless: the rhythm section is both supple and relentless, while Johnny Marr's wah-wah guitar is constantly in motion, in total sympathy with the song's mood changes: rhythmic and viciously propulsive one minute, ambient the next. Morrissey's lyrics are pointed, witty and tricksy, with their implied rhymes: "castration" instead of "strings" to take just one example.

Best of all, they give a thorough portrait of how it feels to be an outsider, rooted in a precise physical and psychological place – "hemmed in like a boar between arches". When you hear the line "but the rain that flattens my hair" you can think of no other place than Manchester, and in many ways The Queen Is Dead represents the highpoint of Morrissey's lyric writing – when he was still informed by his city and its past.

This sense of rootedness is important. You intuitively sense that the musicians have experienced, indeed have deeply felt, what they are communicating. They know of what they speak. This sense transmits itself to the listener, who in turn finds a reflection of their own experience, and so the bond is forged. And that sense of connection remains: two and a half decades after I first heard it, The Queen Is Dead still rings proud and strong.

[via somedizzywhore]

Yglesias » Production, Consumption, and Prosperity

2010-12-13T10:45:00.004-07:00

A slightly muddled response to the resurgence of supply-side, producer-oriented economic blather.

If the wealthy were the source of all economic growth, we could produce our way to prosperity simply by making iPhones by the billions, have the Dallas Cowboys build eight more stadiums in Texas for eight new teams, have James Cameron film Avatars 2 through 9 simultaneously and have them in theaters by next summer.

But who would buy all those iPhones? Who would go to all of those football games? Who would watch all of those movies, buy all of those BlueRays? Precisely. The fact is no one would ever do that because there's no market for that much stuff, no audience, no customers. Which proves the point: demand for goods and services - not supply - is what drives the economy. When wealth is increasingly moved into the hands of fewer and fewer wealthy people, you destroy demand and push the economy into a golden-goose-killing death-spiral.

Businesses succeed when they build things that people want, and businesses prosper when they reinvest for the future rather than waiting for some bigger fish to buy them up and offer them the equivalent of lottery winnings.

What's needed are incentives to put more money in the hands of people who actually need things and fewer incentives for those at the high end of the income spectrum to take the money and run.

Orwellian Centrism - NYTimes.com

2010-12-12T12:55:00.001-07:00

Krugman catches the Washington Post rewriting history on the healthcare debate. Somehow we've gone from obstructionist Republicans to left-wing dirty hippies being the source of all our ills:

Um, that’s not what happened — and I followed the health care process closely. The debate over the public option wasn’t what slowed the legislation. What did it was the many months Obama waited while Max Baucus tried to get bipartisan support, only to see the Republicans keep moving the goalposts; only when the White House finally concluded that Republican “moderates” weren’t negotiating in good faith did the thing finally get moving.

Beyond Billboards - The Daily Dish | By Andrew Sullivan

2010-12-12T09:44:00.001-07:00

Andrew doesn't seem to know what a myth is:

The Christmas stories in the Bible - and they are multiple and contradictory - are obviously myths. They are obviously not to be taken literally. They are meant as signs to the deeper, profounder truth that Christians hold to: that the force behind all that exists actually intervened in the consciousness of humankind in the form of a man so saturated in godliness that merely being near him healed people of the weight of the world's sins.

If stories are not meant to be taken literally, then why take them so literally?

The real point is that a myth is not a falsehood taken for truth. It is an imaginative leap into the inner world of human experience.

Myths are the first human attempts at understanding human psychology: our haunted, wounded, despairing, doubting selves made better through storytelling. Myths are neither true nor false, reasonable or unreasonable, they are what make facts meaningful and understanding possible.

Paul Scheer | Film | Interview | The A.V. Club

2010-12-10T12:21:00.001-07:00

Paul Scheer comes off as such a smart, like-able guy in his interviews. It makes it that much more painful to watch him as Andre in "The League".

Also this: WTF interview with Marc Maron

And this: Wonderful Terrific on JJGO!

The Abductive Method | HiLobrow

2010-12-10T11:17:00.002-07:00

Sherlock Holmes as intuitive rather than logical thinker:

Deduction, according to Peirce, proceeds from rule/guess (e.g., “All the beans from this bag are white”) to case (“These beans are from this bag”) to result/observation (“These beans are white”), whereas induction proceeds rather more tediously — from case to result to rule. I say “tediously” because a guess based upon both case and result/observation is a safe, habitual guess; detectives, who form hypotheses and then test them against the case (evidence), are more romantic figures. ...Though Doyle’s stories do a terrific job explaining how deduction ought to work, Holmes’ skill at solving crimes is due, they claim, to a brilliant abductive ability — i.e., the ability to proceed, swiftly and with unerring accuracy, from rule/guess to result/observation to case.

...

Like the deductive reasoner, the abductive reasoner begins with a rule/guess: e.g., “All the beans from this bag are white.” By comparing a result/observation (“These beans are white”) against the rule, though, the abductive reasoner doesn’t seek to test the validity of her hypothesis, but instead to detect any deviations from it. Which shouldn’t exist!

In summary:

Deductive reasoning: Rule/Guess --> Case/Evidence --> Result/Observation
Inductive reasoning: Result/Observation --> Case/Evidence --> Rule/Guess
"Abductive" reasoning: Rule/Guess --> Result/Observation // Case/Evidence

I get email : Pharyngula

2010-12-10T10:05:00.001-07:00

PZ Myers responds to and annotates a nasty email message. Classic.:

There is a lot of evidence of paranormal activity[No, actually, there isn't] , how is that explained? [Wishful thinking, selective memory, gullibility. Easy.] The vast majority of people believe in a God [So? You don't get to vote on what reality exists], and many believe Jesus has died for their passage into heaven [And many believe that Mohammed was God's prophet, and that praying to Ganesh will remove obstacles from their lives. Do you?]. Are all of these people (myself included, and I am a very well educated individual and deep thinker if I do say so myself[I don't believe you.]) delusional or weak minded or worse because the have faith? [Yes. Or lazy, or guilt-ridden and brain-washed, or fearful] If you look at the world and see how everything fits so perfectly together I don't understand [Those three words are actually the whole of your argument] how anyone can NOT see that there is "intelligent design" behind the creation of everything[Hey, it's easy…because there is no evidence for creation, but plenty for evolution]. My background is also in biology and the life sciences. I went to Kent State University[Kent State grads everywhere are groaning at the association], then graduated at The Ohio State University [Ditto Ohio State] with a degree in Allied Medicine. [That's nice. Are we playing Trump That Degree?] For a few years while I was "becoming smart"[I think you were deceived] I too began to question the existence of a God. I was deceived[like I said] into thinking[I'm pretty sure you weren't doing that] there really was no need for any supernatural force for everything to be [I peeked ahead. You never bother to tell us anything that requires a supernatural force]. But then I looked how everything just worked. Take the krebs cycle. One of hundres of thousands of different processes that occur in the body. Every step has to happen perfectly.[No it doesn't. Cellular processes are stochastic, driven by thermodynamics. Did you learn nothing about biochemistry?] Every substrate has to perfectly fit it's particular enzyme [Wow. So there must be only One True phosphoglycerate mutase out there then. Have you noticed that there is sequence variation in these enzymes in different species?]. That 1 process, you're trying to tell me, just came about because of chance? [No. That's a very tired creationist canard. Evolution is about chance modulated by selection, a non-chance process] I really don't think so. I can go on and on with different examples but that would be pointless because you know exactly what I'm talking about. [Actually, I know exactly that you don't know what you are talking about.]

Generation Why? by Zadie Smith | The New York Review of Books

2010-12-09T17:05:00.004-07:00

I feel the the internet is withering and dying. I don't want to tweet. I barely want to blog. I ignore my wall. I've lost my desire to move from blogger to tumblr.

And so it is thrilling to read Zadie Smith's take on Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook:

Shouldn’t we struggle against Facebook? Everything in it is reduced to the size of its founder. Blue, because it turns out Zuckerberg is red-green color-blind. “Blue is the richest color for me—I can see all of blue.” Poking, because that’s what shy boys do to girls they are scared to talk to. Preoccupied with personal trivia, because Mark Zuckerberg thinks the exchange of personal trivia is what “friendship” is. A Mark Zuckerberg Production indeed! We were going to live online. It was going to be extraordinary. Yet what kind of living is this? Step back from your Facebook Wall for a moment: Doesn’t it, suddenly, look a little ridiculous? Your life in this format?

All human (humane, humanist, humanizing, human sized) thought is existential in nature. What is this life I live, and what is good and just about it? Facebook evades these question by insisting on the importance of the most trivial and least meaningful interactions. Death by a hundred fanciful associations.

The Goggles Do Nothing — Crooked Timber

2010-12-09T13:53:00.001-07:00

On Steampunk:

Hence, the initial impetus of ‘steampunk’ was in large part an effort to recapture this sense of social inquiry, bridging the gap between nineteenth century inquiries and our own. Here, I am not referring to K.W. Jeter and others who were using Victorian tropes, but to the two books which really brought steampunk to a wider audience – William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine and Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. Both of these are unabashed exercises in sociological speculation, which use nineteenth century forms to explore modern anxieties. Gibson and Sterling’s book is indeed arguably a Singularity novel as well as steampunk – but the singularity is the emergence of an unusually baroque form of the ‘vast, inhuman distributed systems of information-processing, communication and control, “the coldest of all cold monsters,”’ that Cosma is talking about.

...

The difference between what say, Sterling and Gibson wanted to do (and what Stross wants), and what Priest is doing, is perfectly clear. Sterling and Gibson wanted to use Victorian technologies as a set of metaphorical tools to explore social change. Priest wants to use class struggle, exploitation, war and all that blah-blah-blah as a means of justifying cool-sounding Victorian technologies. A long war allows her to justify the inclusion of fun-sounding “tanks and crawling machines and elaborate guns” in her novel. A Dickensian factory allows her to have a heroine who wears goggles (she needs them to do her work). But the point of interest for Priest isn’t the war, or the class struggle, or the Dickensian factory conditions. It’s the zeppelins and digging machines, and the funky-looking goggles. The former provide a patina of sociological plausibility for the latter.

What was the Hipster? | HiLobrow

2010-12-07T13:32:00.003-07:00

Hipsters haunt the Revivalist generation (born 1974-1983):

Noting that the term “hipster” was first applied to certain black subcultural figures in the 1940s and to 1950s-era “white negroes,” Greif notes that although the look of “Hipster, in its revival” [emphasis added] may have “overlapped enough with a short-lived moment of neo-Beat and fifties nostalgia (goatees, fedoras, Swingers-style duds) to help call up the term,” the 1999-era crop of hipsters were white, and uninterested in fetishizing blackness. Instead, with their trucker hats, “wifebeaters,” Pabst Blue Ribbon, mustaches, Americana T-shirts, tube socks, and tattoos, the hipsters “fetishized the violence, instinctiveness, and rebelliousness of lower-middle-class ‘white trash.’”

Yep, this is what I’ve been saying for a few years now about the Revivalist generation. Whereas their immediate elders mix and match fragments of received cultural forms, which sometimes results in works of great originality, and sometimes simply means freshening up reheated entertainments with air quotes, Revivalists don’t have an ironic take on bygone cultural forms; instead, they reboot them, like old videogames. The hipster takes to a risible extreme what all Revivalists — including n+1′s editors — do, in one form or another. It’s hard-wired into their generational DNA.

If Revivalists despise the hipster with white-hot intensity, it’s for that reason.

So if revivalists are always-already rebooting dead cultural modes, do they hate hipsters for giving away the game - thereby turning the whole ethos into a sham parody - or because they are incapable of the ironic distance required to, y'know, get the joke - and thereby laugh at themselves?

Comedian Mike Birbiglia on His New Book, 'Sleepwalk With Me,' and One-Man Show, ‘My Girlfriend’s Boyfriend’ -- New York Magazine

2010-12-04T12:48:00.001-07:00

Stand-up as storytelling as art:

Birbiglia road-tests his material with a trio of trusted advisers: older brother Joe, who serves as his manager and co-writer; Seth Barrish, director of Sleepwalk With Me; and Ira Glass, host of “This American Life.” “If a minute goes by without laughs, Mike’s learning to quiet the part of him that says, ‘This is sucking’—those minutes in a story that are there just for the feeling you’re not going to get a laugh,” says Glass, who discovered Birbiglia through the “Moth” storytelling series. The two are working on a film adaptation of Sleepwalk With Me. “He’s learning the more specific and personal a story is, the more universal it is,” adds Barrish, who speaks to Birbiglia several times a day, “so he can say, ‘Here’s what I’m thinking.’ Mike thinks and dreams big, but not in a way that’s remotely obnoxious.”

In 2008, Birbiglia wrote a script for a CBS sitcom loosely based on his blog, Mike Birbiglia’s Secret Public Journal. It had a Seinfeld conceit, only this time the comedian lived in Brooklyn with his girlfriend. It got as far as the pilot stage. “I can’t even begin to describe the degree to which I had no control; it’s the reason I haven’t attempted to do a TV show since,” he says. “They didn’t want all of me, they wanted this part they perceived to be likable, which ended up being wrong. I tested unlikable. Can you imagine a worse scenario? I tested poorly in something that few people on Earth can quantify, yet was quantified for me, and I failed.

“In a way,” he adds, “my whole career is an accident. I tried to sell out, then when they didn’t buy it, I decided to be artistic.” Birbiglia credits failure with the comedy renaissance going on now. “Few people are above selling out, but the difference between the highest and lowest bidders isn’t much anymore. People are like, ‘Fuck it, if I’m not going to make a lot of money, I might as well do something I’m proud of.’ ”

David Foster Wallace's Personal Files - Newsweek

2010-12-04T12:44:00.001-07:00

The well-read DFW:

The archive also corrects Wallace’s reputation as one of the most abstruse of writers. Wallace’s notes to himself in Tolstoy’s essay “What Is Art?” strip back layers of received critical opinion and show a writer who is eager, above all, to connect. When Tolstoy throws down his decisive thunderbolt against art for aesthetics’ sake—“it is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based”—Wallace underlines it emphatically, adding “Art as Empathy” in the margin (while the 9-year-old nods, somewhere, inside).

Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Orange Juice: Coals to Newcastle

2010-11-19T06:53:00.013-07:00

I don't know, maybe some legendary but unheard bands should stay that way. I'm no expert on Orange Juice, but I'm sympathetic to their influence. Unfortunately, there's no getting around the fact early tracks like this are sort-of, kind-of, lame:

First off, Edwyn Collins is Rick Astley-esque with the hair, the attitude, the shirt. There's no getting around that. It also doesn't help that this particular video comes from the school of aspirational silliness, which is to say, hey, we're playing music in the TARDIS, life ain't that bad. Things aren't so hard. We're young, you're old, and the world will be ours. Here goofy disregard for convention trumps angry attack.

So post-punk is or was anti-punk, and about as confrontational and non-comformist as retro-preppy Vampire Weekend singing songs for faux-preppy Tommy Hilfiger. In this case the band goofs around city streets, wears white trousers and Hawaiian shirts in the cold Scottish rain, and somehow manages to embody the very essence of preppy funsterism. Forced fun is usually no fun at all, and in this case the target of their fun, the "documentary" footage of drab UK life, looks amazing, and outshines all of the 80s-isms. Just look at those gray streets and those dark, serious citizens of collapsing empire. It oddly fascinates.

On the positive side, there's a nifty little guitar bit that underpins the whole track and which will eventually find its apotheosis in INXS's "Need You Tonight". If you don't like that, then there's no hope. And if nothing else the catchiness of the guitar bit hints at as-yet unrealized talent. There's more going on here than meets the eye.

As for Edwyn Collins, we'll always have 1994:

Chekhov's genius will always elude us | Dan Rebellato | Culture | guardian.co.uk

2010-11-18T11:53:00.001-07:00

Chekhov as contemporary hero/obsession:

But also, I think, Chekhov is a mystery. There are some playwrights who are so busily present in their work that it's like you have the author beside you murmuring comments on the action. Chekhov is different; what does he think of his characters? Does he admire them or pity them? Ask us to examine or ridicule? It's never obvious. Chekhov's characters tend to let their mouths run away with them (Gayev in The Cherry Orchard fills a silence with an idiotic hymn of praise to a bookcase that, even as he's saying it, he must regret). It's almost as if Chekhov lets silences form in his play, which his characters nervously fill and thus reveal themselves.

I have not read him as deeply as I should have done by now. But the idea of silences interests me.

Antonioni's Blowup featuring the Yardbirds

2010-11-15T20:51:00.001-07:00

Our hero is on the hunt for Vanessa Redgrave. Jimmy Page plays the riff. Michael Palin is in the sullen crowd. Jeff Beck smashes his guitar at the director's request. When the guitar neck is hurled into the crowd, the kids turn from unimpressed spectators to mad consumers. Out on the street, the guitar fragment loses its context and its worth.

I am not a Communist — Crooked Timber

2010-11-11T11:27:00.003-07:00

An interesting discussion on the meaning of innovation in the era of social networking. Namely that the most interesting work being done today is communal and shared, and implicitly anti-capitalist but noone wants to admit it for fear of being branded a Marxist. Except, as Henry points out:

The degree to which Marx and Engels might or might not have approved e.g of the methods employed by Russian Communists to come into power is still the topic of vigorous controversy. The degree to which Marx and Engels invented, or ‘helped invent’ the command economy is not. Neither had any role whatsoever in inventing it, except as conveniently dead sources of rhetorical justification to those who came after them. They were themselves extremely vague as to exactly how the economy would work after socialism.

So the future could look increasingly communistic without necessarily moving toward a scary command economy and leading us down the path to Hayekian serfdom.

"My Dark Star" - Suede

2010-11-11T10:25:00.001-07:00

Pitchfork: Album Reviews: Suede: The Best of Suede

2010-11-11T09:28:00.001-07:00

A good review of the under-appreciated Suede:

When Britpop first began to cohere as a concept and a potential mission statement, no band defined its vague, abstract ideas better than Suede. By the time Britpop became an actual going concern, Suede were simply grandfathered in; and when the whole thing spittered to its post-Oasis peak, Suede were considered washed up. But in 1993, they were the creators of the fastest-selling debut LP in UK history and had been anointed as saviors of British indie before their debut single, 'The Drowners', even hit the shops. This made them a natural for the British press to create ideas around, and so when Select argued for a return to wit, artifice, glamor, and British art school traditions, Suede were easy avatars for those hopes.

Matthew Norman: How did this wastrel ever find his way to the White House? - Matthew Norman, Commentators - The Independent

2010-11-10T15:07:00.001-07:00

George W., dumber than you thought:

It takes a certain minimal intelligence for the truly dim to have a notion of their own dimness, but this is denied him. Unlike Mr Tony Blair, who emerges from his well-calibrated if often chilling memoir as a man of colossal cleverness (though not intellect), W has the self-awareness of a bison. There seems even less to him than met the eye, and there was precious little of that. Astounding as it appears, we misoverestimated him.

Republicans Love 'Breeder' Shows, Democrats Love Mad Men, Says New TV Study | Movieline

2010-11-10T12:24:00.002-07:00

Politics and TV habits:

As it turns out, popular shows are watched by Republicans! The Amazing Race, Modern Family, American Idol, Dancing with the Stars and The Big Bang Theory, among other Nielsen thoroughbreds, have a larger number of Republican fans than Democrat ones. The reason for this? Basically that Republicans like rooting for a winner. (No wonder so many Yankees fans are also Republicans.)

On the flipside, “critically acclaimed” series like Mad Men, Dexter, 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights and Parks & Recreation are watched by Democrats. So, the losers. Of course the fact that Democrats might consider themselves “too cool for school” is only half the issue, according to John Fetto, senior marketing manager for Experian Simmons.

“The big shows with mass appeal tend to have above-average scores from Democrats and Republicans but with higher concentrations of Republicans. Looking at the Democrats side, I don’t mean to make light of it, but they seem to like shows about damaged people. Those are the kind of shows Republicans just stay away from.”

I would have been happier with the shorter version: Republicans watch shows that are stupid; Democrats watch shows that are smart.

Hats and Jackets

2010-11-08T22:12:00.007-07:00

John Kongos - "He's Gonna Step On You Again"

2010-11-08T21:32:00.001-07:00

Oh hey, you learn something new every day.

Happy Mondays - "Step On"

2010-11-08T20:59:00.002-07:00

You're twisting my melon man...

Belle & Sebastian's If You’re Feeling Sinister | Music | Better Late Than Never? | The A.V. Club

2010-11-08T16:30:00.008-07:00

I disagree with almost everything in this assessment beginning with the opening premise:

It seems impossible to describe Scottish band Belle & Sebastian without using words like “precious” and “whimsical,” which are the two adjectives least likely to describe any of my favorite bands. That precious whimsy (or whimsical preciousness) is the cardigan-sweater-wearing heart of twee pop, the fey subgenre that typically grates on my nerves—and the one Belle & Sebastian came to epitomize beginning with 1996’s If You’re Feeling Sinister.
When the album came out, I was in my junior year of college and spending a lot of time at my school’s radio station, KCOU, which opened my musical horizons beyond the steady diet of punk on which I subsisted for years. I was a budding indie-rock snob—Yo La Tengo had blown my mind at a show in late ’95—so I was primed to greet Belle & Sebastian’s delicate songs with open arms. Yet I have little memory of If You’re Feeling Sinister’s release. It’s like remembering someone from a party years ago, but not recalling much about him other than you weren’t very impressed.

The idea that B&S are less punk than Yo La Tengo, or somehow more fey and delicate than late 90s indie rock betrays a fatal chauvinism and a complete lack of imagination. And for a music culture that rejects "labels" and "genres", people seem awfully at ease with pigeon-holing Belle and Sebastian.

Because beneath the fey surface there's an awful lot of pain, violence, and disappointment in the songs of If You're Feeling Sinister. And what the band offers is not answers but ambivalence - a comfort with contradiction, and ultimately the notion that most of life falls somewhere between "fail" and "kick ass."

Belle and Sebastian write songs about youth for adults, and for people who understand or have lived through that gap between youthful expectation and adult reality. The characters in their songs are constantly shifting from identity to identity, from innocence to experience and back again, and do so without falling into the cliched binaries of masculine/feminine, young/old, rebelliousness/conformity, sin/faith, strong/weak, gay/straight. Everyone, they say, is all of these things all of the time. As a band, they are communal and democratic, privileging no one member, and allowing the warts and occasionally weak singers to shine through. This, they seem to suggest, is an organizing principle for life.

Perhaps what's most subversive about their music (and this is true of Morrissey as well) is that the very idea of twee-ness is so threatening to your average unreformed and reactionary beta-male. And fearing that B and S will turn you into a pussy is the Calvin pissing on a Chevy sticker of music fandom. Whimsy is anarchy stripped of its fascist impulses. Preciousness is just emotional poverty made plentiful in song. If you can't rock to that, maybe you need to grow up.

Orson Welles On Art And Work | The New Republic

2010-11-08T14:07:00.001-07:00

Orson Welles in 1960 on his political convictions, and forgotten battles between liberals like himself and rightists.

The National - "Terrible Love"

2010-11-08T13:42:00.001-07:00

New Statesman - Claude Levi-Strauss: the Poet in the Laboratory

2010-11-08T13:31:00.001-07:00

Practical deconstruction:

Lévi-Strauss claimed to have discovered the fundamental differences on which all kinship and myth were based, and produced a simple combination of differential oppositions that, he thought, underpin even the most complex and apparently dissimilar myths. Myths were privileged insights into thought, and here his second thesis came into play: "primitive" societies or, as Lévi-Strauss termed them, "societies without writing" are more authentic than societies that have succumbed to writing. Ever since Montaigne, and receiving its fullest expression in Rousseau's noble savage, there had been a current in western thought which saw in "primitive" societies a richer, less alienated relationship between men and their world than that which obtained in "civilisation".

Lévi-Strauss thus promised two things: first, a combinatory schema that would reveal the basic operations of the human mind - all kinship systems would be conceived as variations on a single theme, and all myths would operate around a set of basic differences - and second, a demonstration of the superiority of forms of thought that came before writing, before the fundamental alienation that occurred when writing intruded into an authentic idyll.

However, Lévi-Strauss's dominance of western thought evaporated after Derrida devoted a 40-page analysis to the anthropologist's foray into the world of the Nambikwara Amazonians. Derrida showed that Lévi-Strauss's position, far from breaking with a Eurocentric model, reproduced it. He demonstrated how the notion that the Nambikwara inhabited a different and better world, one before writing, reflected a long-held western prejudice that ignored the way in which any system of language had all the features of a writing system that Lévi-Strauss considered distinctively modern. The Amazonian enjoyed no more direct and unmediated a relationship with his surroundings than the western anthropologist trying to persuade little girls to break tribal taboos.

Derrida not only demolished Lévi-Strauss's sentimental valorisation of the Amazonians, but took an axe to his "scientific" project. Linguistics was based on the discovery of the phoneme, the basic element of sound difference from which all meaning in a language flowed. Yet the anthropologist's mythemes were always the result of interpretation.

kung fu grippe | Just a man in a cowboy suit

2010-11-07T09:00:00.002-07:00

John Vanderslice performs "Promising Actress":

Lance Mannion: All the mad men and all the mad women are about to go Galt

2010-10-20T17:13:00.001-06:00

An analysis of Mad Men by way of Ayn Rand. Pretty great when you can read stuff like this:

Work, as far as they’re concerned, is not its own reward. They don’t take pride in a job well done because they can never be sure that they will continue to hold that job no matter how well they do it. Someone who can do it better will always come along to impress the bosses and where will that leave them? People who just work don’t have worth no matter how well or hard they work. People who just work are just useful to the people who produce.

Now, The Hobo Code is not an endorsement of their Randian world view. In fact the episode and the entire series is a refutation of the idea that the world of work and business is a world of solitary and independent heroes carrying the parasites along on their broad shoulders.