Anyone who knows me well knows how obsessed I am with years and people's ages and the relationship between these and historical events. I don't know what it is, but years have a magical quality to me. Each historical year is like a different holy name freighted with so much history and countless associations.
Year are so casually invoked. How many times have you heard someone say, “Well, let's see, I think 'at was back in '79 or 80” or “Yeah, uh, I graduated '94, and um got my B.A. at Rutgers in '98...” Mostly we think nothing of it. To me, however, to reference a year is to mutter an incantation, to cast a spell, to casually lift your shirt to reveal the gun tucked in your waistband. To mention a year, especially an old one, is to say, “I was there, motherfucker...where were you?”
This year fetish of mine is endlessly diverting when you mix it with a little history. By and by you begin to weave a large knotty tapestry, and all you need to know is a person's age and you can weave them right in too.
The Rolling Stones tune “Memo from Turner”, featured prominently in Donald Cammel's 1970 film Performance contains the lyric “I remember you in Hemlock Grove, 1956”, funny, that, seeing as how Mick Jagger was only thirteen at the time. Alan Ginsberg, on the other hand, turned thirty in June of that year. In January, he wrote the poem "America", one month before a young woman named Norma Jean Mortenson, just two days older than Ginsberg, would change her name to Marilyn Monroe. Six months later and a few weeks after her (and Ginsberg's) thirtieth birthday she would marry playwright Arthur Miller while an adolescent Mick Jagger was loafing about on Summer holiday and the death penalty was being abolished in his native England.
Mick was born in 1943, along with Robert DeNiro, R.L. Stein, Penny Rimbaud (the drummer for seminal anarcho-punk band Crass) Tony Basil (“Oh Mickey, you're so fine!”) and my Aunt Leela. These people, it seems to me, were the perfect age to appreciate the sixties, and did in varying degrees. Rimbaud was a vegetarian pacifist who made the leap to punk and made socially relevant avante- garde music during the repressive Thatcher regime. Jagger faded into obscurity after a few mildly-succesful gigs at working class taverns in Dartford (LOL). My Aunt Leela moved to the United States and married a white hippie psychiatrist-in-training named Bruce.
She arrived here in 1967, the year Liz Phair, Kurt Cobain, Judd Apatow and Guy Pierce were born and the year a twelve year old Jamaican boy named Clive Campbell moved to the South Bronx with his family. She was thirty-one years old when she gave birth to her first child in 1975, and thirty two when a female drug dealer from Jamaica Queens gave birth to Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson in 1976. 50 cent would achieve success by following in the footsteps of young Clive Campbell, who as DJ Kool Herc, began spinning two copies of the same record, at parties he threw in his building's rec room, so as to isolate the “break” and loop it to create beats, paving the way for what would become hip hop.
Herc was born in April of 1955, one year before Ginsberg wrote America and Monroe wrote herself into another doomed marriage. She and Miller were able to obtain a divorce in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico in January of 1961.
Six months earlier, and a thousand-or-so miles to the south in Cuernavaca, a young Harvard psychologist named Timothy Leary was having his first trip on psilocybin mushrooms. Meanwhile, in various parts of the world, Vincent Gallo, Killing Joke frontman Jaz Coleman, and Steve Poltz were all being born.
Killing Joke released their most controversial album, Outside the Gate, in 1988, while Steve Poltz's friend Jewell Kilcher, at twelve, was busking with her father in Alaskan taverns to make ends meet and Vincent Gallo's friend and erstwhile bandmate Jean-Michel Basquiat: Warhol-protege, legendary old-school grafitti artist and darling of the New York art scene died of an overdose of heroin and cocaine. This was also the year I was born.
If you find this kinda shit fascinating, just think of what I left out. Where do you and yours fit in?
Friday, October 9, 2009
Ten Little Indians
So I know I said I'd stop talking about India. I don't generally like talking about my racial background mainly because (and I'm sure most ethnic or racially nonwhite people will agree) I want to be about more than my ethnicity, especially in my writing. I also avoid the subject because Indians in this country tend to be conservative, clannish, and possessed of that corny, slightly creepy esprit de corps that small, relatively unsettled minorities tend to have in spades.
Nonetheless, I guess I can't escape my preoccupations, and it's safe to say my race is one of them. I tend to keep my eyes peeled for Indians on the street and in the news, and I'm always curious about the interactions between the two countries (America and India) which inform my cultural identity.
Which brings me to an unpleasant realization I had today: famous Indian-Americans tend to suck really hard. Seriously! There are only a very few Indian-American celebrities but of those few, the vast majority are huge assholes! Indeed, so totally lame are the majority of famous Indians in this country that, with them as principle examples, it's a wonder we're known in this country for engineering, vari-colored gods and tikka masala instead of as a race of thoroughly reprehensible shitheads.
Let's start with one of the most prominent of these Desi disgraces: professional Punya-pimp and mystical hustler Deepak Chopra. Fuck this guy. Now I know white people love the shit out of him, and everyone seems to think he's super-spiritual and all, but come on! In the eighties, Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh(aka Osho) managed to swindle his nutcase acolytes out of enough frogskins to build a five star ashram in Pune, with enough left over to buy a Saddam Hussein-style fleet of Rolls Royces. But at least that guy had the decency to grow a beard, wear robes and make with the mystical shit. Chopra looks like a professor at MIT, and with his MD, one wonders why he's not, i dunno, practicing medicine somewhere and leaving our immortal souls in the hands of more skilled (as well as beaded and dreadlocked) professionals.
But one would be missing the point. It's precisely because Chopra looks like a buttoned-down white-collar type that he's able to woo so many spiritually bankrupt American professionals desperate for an easy enlightenment-fix and with plenty of money to burn. Chopra looks like your kindly Indian doctor, and his lifestyle suggests that you don't have to renounce your plasma screen TV and six car garage to find spiritual satisfaction. After all if you can't find God in the marketplace...
Lastly, but not least annoying, his mystical shit mixed in with middlebrow Chicken Soup for the Soul style “wisdom” and white collar audience makes for the most nauseating sort of language as business cliches stroll arm-in-arm with New Agey truisms. Now I'll admit that I've never read one of his books, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they say stuff like “You don't have to give up that luxury car and live in a shack” (perish the thought) “you can see god in the face of a child, experience Brahman at a board meeting, or mukti with your morning mocha!”. Barf.
So we've got Chopra, as well as dudes like Farid Zakaria, establishment desis. Professional, neat, polite conservative and serene, they remind me of my uncles. Except no one's ever given my oldass uncles fucking book deals, TV interviews and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. My uncles don't kick it with Anderson Cooper!
But these guys are nothing compared to the raging neocon Indians. I'd call them race-traitors but I don't want to buy into the same nationalist rhetoric that gets these folks all fired up. Bobby Jindal is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you guys ever heard of Dinesh D'Souza?
D'Souza's politics swing past conservatism into reaction and hate. While a student at Dartmouth, D'Souza outed closeted members of the Gay Student Alliance and edited a conservative paper called The Prospect which criticized the schools “minority admissions policies” and was described as “outwardly destructive and irresponsible” by the schools Vice President of public Affairs. D'Souza appears to believe that African American culture at large is inherently poisonous, since it has it's roots in a tradition of rebellion against slavery, making modern day blacks rebellious and anti-authoritarian. He stops short of describing their murky, foul-smelling blood and insatiable hunger for non-consensual sex with white women. Asshole. D'Souza also dated Ann Coulter and has a wife named Dixie (no bullshit).
Then we have Sanjaya. Now, Sanjaya is an obvious target, but I don't hate him because he's egotistical or shrill, or flamboyant or untalented. In fact, I admire his courage and uniqueness. Too many Indians in these country are mousy little people made invisible by their shyness. Sanjaya is loud and bright, distinct and bold. Unafraid to take risks and be himself in front of a hostile crowd.
But he's also shallow and vapid and a part of the sick American Idol machine with it's Hollywood glitz, commercialism, hallmark card aesthetic and Simon Cowell- Schadenfreude. So no thanks.
Moving along we come to the most irredeemable villain on our list: Anand Jon, fashion designer and convicted serial rapist! Sweet!
During his trial his victims tearfully upbraided him before he was convicted of sixteen of twenty three counts of sexual abuse. Among the charges was the forcible rape of seven women, some as young as fourteen.
Shit, I mean say what you will about the other guys on this list, but at least they don't fucking rape children (although I think D'Souza fucks dogs). And what did he do before he was a rapist? He was a fashion designer, a part of that culture which makes young women insecure enough to be taken in by sleazebags like Anand Jon in the first place.
Recently, I was thinking about how much I love Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I mean, I am seriously in awe of the guy, he's just so...So what? Polite? Sane? Not-a-rapist?
This is where we've gotten to with our famous Indian Americans. For me personally, guys like Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn aren't likable because they're particularly great at what they do, or because they make art which moves me to tears, or because they have such well informed enlightening opinions. It's because they're regular people, famous Indian-Americans that I don't have to be ashamed of.
The picture is a bit rosier in other countries, especially the UK, where Indians form proto-punk groups and man green-anarchist info shops. Where lumpenproletariat desis live alongside poor Africans and whites in council estates and make Marxist electronica.
But until Indian Americans expand into these progressive, fringe-niches, until we have Indian gangster rappers and pacifist indie-cartoonists and squatters and tranny bash-back cell members and anti-capitalist grafitti artists bringing a DiY ethic and rock and roll aesthetic to the Indian American cultural landscape, we'll have to settle for the honest, shy smile, the kindly bedside manor and honest demeanor of Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn, who's oatmeal-normality makes us feel like decent people. True American Heroes.
Nonetheless, I guess I can't escape my preoccupations, and it's safe to say my race is one of them. I tend to keep my eyes peeled for Indians on the street and in the news, and I'm always curious about the interactions between the two countries (America and India) which inform my cultural identity.
Which brings me to an unpleasant realization I had today: famous Indian-Americans tend to suck really hard. Seriously! There are only a very few Indian-American celebrities but of those few, the vast majority are huge assholes! Indeed, so totally lame are the majority of famous Indians in this country that, with them as principle examples, it's a wonder we're known in this country for engineering, vari-colored gods and tikka masala instead of as a race of thoroughly reprehensible shitheads.
Let's start with one of the most prominent of these Desi disgraces: professional Punya-pimp and mystical hustler Deepak Chopra. Fuck this guy. Now I know white people love the shit out of him, and everyone seems to think he's super-spiritual and all, but come on! In the eighties, Bhagavan Sri Rajneesh(aka Osho) managed to swindle his nutcase acolytes out of enough frogskins to build a five star ashram in Pune, with enough left over to buy a Saddam Hussein-style fleet of Rolls Royces. But at least that guy had the decency to grow a beard, wear robes and make with the mystical shit. Chopra looks like a professor at MIT, and with his MD, one wonders why he's not, i dunno, practicing medicine somewhere and leaving our immortal souls in the hands of more skilled (as well as beaded and dreadlocked) professionals.
But one would be missing the point. It's precisely because Chopra looks like a buttoned-down white-collar type that he's able to woo so many spiritually bankrupt American professionals desperate for an easy enlightenment-fix and with plenty of money to burn. Chopra looks like your kindly Indian doctor, and his lifestyle suggests that you don't have to renounce your plasma screen TV and six car garage to find spiritual satisfaction. After all if you can't find God in the marketplace...
Lastly, but not least annoying, his mystical shit mixed in with middlebrow Chicken Soup for the Soul style “wisdom” and white collar audience makes for the most nauseating sort of language as business cliches stroll arm-in-arm with New Agey truisms. Now I'll admit that I've never read one of his books, but I'd bet dollars to donuts that they say stuff like “You don't have to give up that luxury car and live in a shack” (perish the thought) “you can see god in the face of a child, experience Brahman at a board meeting, or mukti with your morning mocha!”. Barf.
So we've got Chopra, as well as dudes like Farid Zakaria, establishment desis. Professional, neat, polite conservative and serene, they remind me of my uncles. Except no one's ever given my oldass uncles fucking book deals, TV interviews and membership in the Council on Foreign Relations. My uncles don't kick it with Anderson Cooper!
But these guys are nothing compared to the raging neocon Indians. I'd call them race-traitors but I don't want to buy into the same nationalist rhetoric that gets these folks all fired up. Bobby Jindal is just the tip of the iceberg. Have you guys ever heard of Dinesh D'Souza?
D'Souza's politics swing past conservatism into reaction and hate. While a student at Dartmouth, D'Souza outed closeted members of the Gay Student Alliance and edited a conservative paper called The Prospect which criticized the schools “minority admissions policies” and was described as “outwardly destructive and irresponsible” by the schools Vice President of public Affairs. D'Souza appears to believe that African American culture at large is inherently poisonous, since it has it's roots in a tradition of rebellion against slavery, making modern day blacks rebellious and anti-authoritarian. He stops short of describing their murky, foul-smelling blood and insatiable hunger for non-consensual sex with white women. Asshole. D'Souza also dated Ann Coulter and has a wife named Dixie (no bullshit).
Then we have Sanjaya. Now, Sanjaya is an obvious target, but I don't hate him because he's egotistical or shrill, or flamboyant or untalented. In fact, I admire his courage and uniqueness. Too many Indians in these country are mousy little people made invisible by their shyness. Sanjaya is loud and bright, distinct and bold. Unafraid to take risks and be himself in front of a hostile crowd.
But he's also shallow and vapid and a part of the sick American Idol machine with it's Hollywood glitz, commercialism, hallmark card aesthetic and Simon Cowell- Schadenfreude. So no thanks.
Moving along we come to the most irredeemable villain on our list: Anand Jon, fashion designer and convicted serial rapist! Sweet!
During his trial his victims tearfully upbraided him before he was convicted of sixteen of twenty three counts of sexual abuse. Among the charges was the forcible rape of seven women, some as young as fourteen.
Shit, I mean say what you will about the other guys on this list, but at least they don't fucking rape children (although I think D'Souza fucks dogs). And what did he do before he was a rapist? He was a fashion designer, a part of that culture which makes young women insecure enough to be taken in by sleazebags like Anand Jon in the first place.
Recently, I was thinking about how much I love Dr. Sanjay Gupta. I mean, I am seriously in awe of the guy, he's just so...So what? Polite? Sane? Not-a-rapist?
This is where we've gotten to with our famous Indian Americans. For me personally, guys like Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn aren't likable because they're particularly great at what they do, or because they make art which moves me to tears, or because they have such well informed enlightening opinions. It's because they're regular people, famous Indian-Americans that I don't have to be ashamed of.
The picture is a bit rosier in other countries, especially the UK, where Indians form proto-punk groups and man green-anarchist info shops. Where lumpenproletariat desis live alongside poor Africans and whites in council estates and make Marxist electronica.
But until Indian Americans expand into these progressive, fringe-niches, until we have Indian gangster rappers and pacifist indie-cartoonists and squatters and tranny bash-back cell members and anti-capitalist grafitti artists bringing a DiY ethic and rock and roll aesthetic to the Indian American cultural landscape, we'll have to settle for the honest, shy smile, the kindly bedside manor and honest demeanor of Sanjay Gupta and Kal Penn, who's oatmeal-normality makes us feel like decent people. True American Heroes.
Friday, June 5, 2009
Cutup
Today, I decided to experiment with the cutup technique of Brion Gysin and William S. Burroughs. To those unfamiliar with this technique, it's basically a "word-salad" made from chopping up and re-arranging bits of text, producing humorous/creepily relevant/consciousness-expanding/paradigm-shifting/semantic-barrier-eroding/potentially boring and headache-inducing results.
For mine, I cut up two pieces I had written as well as an account of the protest at the 2008 Republican National Convention, a letter containing hurtful criticism of one of my short stories, an article about some Canadian band, some blurbs about kid-friendly tourist attractions in San Diego, an article about the movie "The Hangover", and an article from a parenting magazine about How Not to Worry Excessively for the Safety of Your Children When they Go to Sleep Away Camp.
I only added about ten words, and only when it was absolutely necessary. Here goes:
I like it when it's a story about a guy who happens to be a sexual impossible. To live in this world and not dramatically alter your surroundings for perhaps better, perhaps worse. End up an academic, a number of other things (projectionist for example).
Better or for worse, no matter what you do.
But by these crazy standards, I think it's safe to say that dumpy debauchery becomes less interesting when it loses its context. Fiercer, more pretentious scenes are fun, because it's entertaining to imagine I'm as close as possible to a passive spectator. I'm becoming resigned to this, if not proud. Not quite hip to the obscure social norms and inscrutable hole-in the pocket thing. Imagine you're watching these deviant acts, while Sea Life Aquarium is a two-story in a few joyless flings with a few harried women. Maybe get usually quiet when I attend the sole focus of the narrative, while the water aquarium designed for children is located right next door to mediocrity.
Maybe not even finish college and find some easy boring job in an easy circle, not interesting enough to like, but too harmless. It lacks the context that gives deviance. Legoland, and hate. San Diego and my parents will die worried about me.
But those two middle-aged Liberal women we met on the sharks, octopus and lung cancer got in the middle of a crowd of people and my wife accuses me to remind you of our conversation.
“So what brings you bandannas and medical respiratory masks that burdened everything?” she yells at me.
“I just took a few days off from school to come, people! And the usually not-so helpful eyes of the media never fuck.”
Meals are served, I remember herds of African animals hopefully achieve unique results. Beautiful childhood injuries. We're all in top shape, granted, ridiculously I feel like a pig and I remember I see lions, tigers and gorgeous gardens on the reel of tape. Still, Borcherdt adds, Holy Fuck has floors and is slowly filling in the fences of the freedom cage. A friend, though, because it was just as awkward for her, drops the fact that we at Nairobi Village, explore where we're up there with all this silly stuff. More deeply, there has become something of a national obsession with natural butterfly jungle, the little battery operated logic of children. Our protective instincts keep us doing exercises of the Lorikeet Landing (open ones, that have headphone jacks that you reconnect with this edge) and it's difficult to acknowledge.
I feel I finally broke the year, including holiday guitar pedals and we know now that there will be at least one teddy bear from kids, and trust our kids to look out between subject and narrative: Fuck it up the right way, primarily based around themselves.
Fully allowing masturbatory adventures when you list off another with the down-to earth Midwestern wife of another professor. She is curvaceous, a lot I don't need to know, home to more than 4,000. Rare, and to carry me back to that, you appreciate about them from a female perspective, (freckled, with long red curls and an earthy pleasant face). She hates the people around her as in a couple of months Seth will start endangered animals: the San Diego Zoo loveliness that causes your sex-cravedness, as I do, and gets snarky and vicious when she's had a few too many. She's also a smoker, college, enthusiastic to take on his next.
She comes alive at night! See your favorite space of cartoons, hardwood description of the act itself, which I did appreciate. She is charmed by my aloofness at one of these lame parties. She mistakes this for a lack of adventure while I wait in the background, animals and exhibit in a whole new light. Honeypot on a summer's collection of sensual pretension, a thoughtful weariness with the pedantic people around us. One day, at a going away gig, at some point it becomes clear that around the zoo it's a sweeping billow. You hinted at some sort of sensuality for some sanctified fucker planning to retire, which I'm forced to attend because even I know the sexual fantasies, favorite pornos, performances and live animal poetry in the sex-narrative, and therefore it's an actual insult not to. She shows up wearing a salwar kameez. Her husband brought it back for juvenile character as opposed to the parts from India. It looks good on her. She uses it as a conversation piece, tailor made, it would seem, with so much potential, and then explore cool habitats like the monkey house there. For me, less captivating, and the Sun bear forest, children's zoo, and the Panda Research station lost to adults, still balding, but with a ponytail.
Some found your decision making process to engage in the act of vandalism, and your less captivating themes, open every day of the year. My Librarian-looking wife, talked down to by Reason for hating “corporate” to the people who matter, the open minded ones who, as Andy Bernard in the office hangover rescued my childhood academics. Chided for being a romantic, incredibly irritating, your choices of graffiti slogans also are such stereotypes that I wonder if you're being facetious by using them. Overall, I love music, the Tories can shove it where he's a dentist. Table taboos among this group of people? I think you're too smart and critically-thinking to believe in any of these things. The F-Bomb hasn't stopped Holy Fuck from making a trio of groomsmen land get-togethers. I exist at the fringe of wholeheartedly, so I'm left to assume there's an element of self-mockery, buzz worthy appearances at marquee festivals like their buddy Doug who's off to his bachelor party to shun, often snickered at or ignored.
Implicit in this part, and really in all of the story, the Juno awards didn't seem to mind when the band's second morning suite was trashed, a baby in the apathetic, defeated man who has a big personal library, some pretty diverse interests, stacks and stacks of little one length LP's nominated for Album of the Mini-Bar and a tiger in the bathroom. Doug is M.I.A. Bring her down, I chain-smoke, she hates abandoned novels, aborted screenplays, criticisms, raunchy poems, songs. Journal in 2008? Neither did M.I.A. when she took the band. None of them can remember what happened in terse silence.
I have two affairs, even evidence of a few hobbies, maybe. Of course, Holy fuck had no idea what they were in for, drum beats fill the air, red white and blue lights shine down from atop a 320-foot tower, as passively under me, the anti-war march files out and we decide to move in clusters back to the capitol lawn to try and fill up water that employs all the weird effects. Laughter can be heard as a silly patriarch for doing so. It's actually okay, and we slowly go back and send out people to dominate the genre with sea lions and mischievous otters. I falter when I see her empty water run. They come back, some medics check on us, and a squad of bike cops slowly surround us. They weren't trying to shun technology.
Killer whales start taunting “what's wrong, you were running from us earlier”.
Maybe it was an intuitive way to do their own rock'n'roll concert featuring hot sensational Infomancers hovering around the house and at pawn shops, part of an annual tradition called Summer Future where, intended for use as toys, nights at sea world spent to see what we could do with lo-fi and battery operated smoked out ruins of earth.
For mine, I cut up two pieces I had written as well as an account of the protest at the 2008 Republican National Convention, a letter containing hurtful criticism of one of my short stories, an article about some Canadian band, some blurbs about kid-friendly tourist attractions in San Diego, an article about the movie "The Hangover", and an article from a parenting magazine about How Not to Worry Excessively for the Safety of Your Children When they Go to Sleep Away Camp.
I only added about ten words, and only when it was absolutely necessary. Here goes:
I like it when it's a story about a guy who happens to be a sexual impossible. To live in this world and not dramatically alter your surroundings for perhaps better, perhaps worse. End up an academic, a number of other things (projectionist for example).
Better or for worse, no matter what you do.
But by these crazy standards, I think it's safe to say that dumpy debauchery becomes less interesting when it loses its context. Fiercer, more pretentious scenes are fun, because it's entertaining to imagine I'm as close as possible to a passive spectator. I'm becoming resigned to this, if not proud. Not quite hip to the obscure social norms and inscrutable hole-in the pocket thing. Imagine you're watching these deviant acts, while Sea Life Aquarium is a two-story in a few joyless flings with a few harried women. Maybe get usually quiet when I attend the sole focus of the narrative, while the water aquarium designed for children is located right next door to mediocrity.
Maybe not even finish college and find some easy boring job in an easy circle, not interesting enough to like, but too harmless. It lacks the context that gives deviance. Legoland, and hate. San Diego and my parents will die worried about me.
But those two middle-aged Liberal women we met on the sharks, octopus and lung cancer got in the middle of a crowd of people and my wife accuses me to remind you of our conversation.
“So what brings you bandannas and medical respiratory masks that burdened everything?” she yells at me.
“I just took a few days off from school to come, people! And the usually not-so helpful eyes of the media never fuck.”
Meals are served, I remember herds of African animals hopefully achieve unique results. Beautiful childhood injuries. We're all in top shape, granted, ridiculously I feel like a pig and I remember I see lions, tigers and gorgeous gardens on the reel of tape. Still, Borcherdt adds, Holy Fuck has floors and is slowly filling in the fences of the freedom cage. A friend, though, because it was just as awkward for her, drops the fact that we at Nairobi Village, explore where we're up there with all this silly stuff. More deeply, there has become something of a national obsession with natural butterfly jungle, the little battery operated logic of children. Our protective instincts keep us doing exercises of the Lorikeet Landing (open ones, that have headphone jacks that you reconnect with this edge) and it's difficult to acknowledge.
I feel I finally broke the year, including holiday guitar pedals and we know now that there will be at least one teddy bear from kids, and trust our kids to look out between subject and narrative: Fuck it up the right way, primarily based around themselves.
Fully allowing masturbatory adventures when you list off another with the down-to earth Midwestern wife of another professor. She is curvaceous, a lot I don't need to know, home to more than 4,000. Rare, and to carry me back to that, you appreciate about them from a female perspective, (freckled, with long red curls and an earthy pleasant face). She hates the people around her as in a couple of months Seth will start endangered animals: the San Diego Zoo loveliness that causes your sex-cravedness, as I do, and gets snarky and vicious when she's had a few too many. She's also a smoker, college, enthusiastic to take on his next.
She comes alive at night! See your favorite space of cartoons, hardwood description of the act itself, which I did appreciate. She is charmed by my aloofness at one of these lame parties. She mistakes this for a lack of adventure while I wait in the background, animals and exhibit in a whole new light. Honeypot on a summer's collection of sensual pretension, a thoughtful weariness with the pedantic people around us. One day, at a going away gig, at some point it becomes clear that around the zoo it's a sweeping billow. You hinted at some sort of sensuality for some sanctified fucker planning to retire, which I'm forced to attend because even I know the sexual fantasies, favorite pornos, performances and live animal poetry in the sex-narrative, and therefore it's an actual insult not to. She shows up wearing a salwar kameez. Her husband brought it back for juvenile character as opposed to the parts from India. It looks good on her. She uses it as a conversation piece, tailor made, it would seem, with so much potential, and then explore cool habitats like the monkey house there. For me, less captivating, and the Sun bear forest, children's zoo, and the Panda Research station lost to adults, still balding, but with a ponytail.
Some found your decision making process to engage in the act of vandalism, and your less captivating themes, open every day of the year. My Librarian-looking wife, talked down to by Reason for hating “corporate” to the people who matter, the open minded ones who, as Andy Bernard in the office hangover rescued my childhood academics. Chided for being a romantic, incredibly irritating, your choices of graffiti slogans also are such stereotypes that I wonder if you're being facetious by using them. Overall, I love music, the Tories can shove it where he's a dentist. Table taboos among this group of people? I think you're too smart and critically-thinking to believe in any of these things. The F-Bomb hasn't stopped Holy Fuck from making a trio of groomsmen land get-togethers. I exist at the fringe of wholeheartedly, so I'm left to assume there's an element of self-mockery, buzz worthy appearances at marquee festivals like their buddy Doug who's off to his bachelor party to shun, often snickered at or ignored.
Implicit in this part, and really in all of the story, the Juno awards didn't seem to mind when the band's second morning suite was trashed, a baby in the apathetic, defeated man who has a big personal library, some pretty diverse interests, stacks and stacks of little one length LP's nominated for Album of the Mini-Bar and a tiger in the bathroom. Doug is M.I.A. Bring her down, I chain-smoke, she hates abandoned novels, aborted screenplays, criticisms, raunchy poems, songs. Journal in 2008? Neither did M.I.A. when she took the band. None of them can remember what happened in terse silence.
I have two affairs, even evidence of a few hobbies, maybe. Of course, Holy fuck had no idea what they were in for, drum beats fill the air, red white and blue lights shine down from atop a 320-foot tower, as passively under me, the anti-war march files out and we decide to move in clusters back to the capitol lawn to try and fill up water that employs all the weird effects. Laughter can be heard as a silly patriarch for doing so. It's actually okay, and we slowly go back and send out people to dominate the genre with sea lions and mischievous otters. I falter when I see her empty water run. They come back, some medics check on us, and a squad of bike cops slowly surround us. They weren't trying to shun technology.
Killer whales start taunting “what's wrong, you were running from us earlier”.
Maybe it was an intuitive way to do their own rock'n'roll concert featuring hot sensational Infomancers hovering around the house and at pawn shops, part of an annual tradition called Summer Future where, intended for use as toys, nights at sea world spent to see what we could do with lo-fi and battery operated smoked out ruins of earth.
Wednesday, April 1, 2009
Oh Boy...
If you scroll down to my last post and check the comments section, you'll notice that someone named "Urdu" representing a website called "Urdu Rasala" digs my blog. I can tell from the scripted tone of this entity's message that it doesn't give a fuck about the content of this blog, but probably scans blogs for Indian key words or something and offers to add them to its blogroll. Needless to say, this is pretty crappy. This is not an Indian blog about India, goddammit! I am not some Air-Jordan wearing, bhangra-listening Desi kid from Jersey involved in Marthomite youth groups who wants an MBA from Rutgers! Motherfuck that!
I'm pretty sure that the only people who'd get the above references would be offended, so maybe I should change that, but fuck it! I don't censor myself by god! This is one ABCD who isn't going to mince words and shuck and jive for the man! I may have an exaggerated sense of my own importance, my blog might be some bore-you-to-tears rag about suburban blandness, signifying nothing, but christ-dammit I have integrity! At least some! And so, in short, I'm gonna try to Not Talk About India Much from now on, and you UrduRasala maderchods can jao chodo yourselves! So there!
Heh! In other news, as we speak shit is popping off in London with the G20 protests, and woe betide any dude who shows up in a trench coat and bowler hat. If this was thirty years ago, maybe some "mods" would get caught in the crossfire. I hear the Watchmen movie was okay, but I still wish that Snyder prick would dive into a wheat-thresher.
My buddy showed me this youtube blogger called Ladyw87 and I think I'm in love. She speaks candidly about her sex life and the sex lives of her near and dear. She's funny and gorgeous and has, like, 12,000 subscribers. I am now one of them. I encourage everyone to watch, subscribe, and make this chick famous. Not that my opinion carries a lot of weight.
I invented a fun game today, invent movie titles using a simple formula: (Funny Name) semicolon (funny job) like "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" So far I've got "Rascal Davies: Freelance Executioner" "Boris Pepperman: Devious Tooth-Mechanic" and "Wallace Tusker: Anthropomorphic Elephant Small Claims Adjuster". This last obviously needs work.
So, I dunno if you've figured it out, but I have nothing to talk about.
I'm pretty sure that the only people who'd get the above references would be offended, so maybe I should change that, but fuck it! I don't censor myself by god! This is one ABCD who isn't going to mince words and shuck and jive for the man! I may have an exaggerated sense of my own importance, my blog might be some bore-you-to-tears rag about suburban blandness, signifying nothing, but christ-dammit I have integrity! At least some! And so, in short, I'm gonna try to Not Talk About India Much from now on, and you UrduRasala maderchods can jao chodo yourselves! So there!
Heh! In other news, as we speak shit is popping off in London with the G20 protests, and woe betide any dude who shows up in a trench coat and bowler hat. If this was thirty years ago, maybe some "mods" would get caught in the crossfire. I hear the Watchmen movie was okay, but I still wish that Snyder prick would dive into a wheat-thresher.
My buddy showed me this youtube blogger called Ladyw87 and I think I'm in love. She speaks candidly about her sex life and the sex lives of her near and dear. She's funny and gorgeous and has, like, 12,000 subscribers. I am now one of them. I encourage everyone to watch, subscribe, and make this chick famous. Not that my opinion carries a lot of weight.
I invented a fun game today, invent movie titles using a simple formula: (Funny Name) semicolon (funny job) like "Deuce Bigalow: Male Gigolo" So far I've got "Rascal Davies: Freelance Executioner" "Boris Pepperman: Devious Tooth-Mechanic" and "Wallace Tusker: Anthropomorphic Elephant Small Claims Adjuster". This last obviously needs work.
So, I dunno if you've figured it out, but I have nothing to talk about.
Monday, February 2, 2009
A Self-Indulgent Work of Staggering Banality
I've been meaning to update this thing for awhile, and I haven't had the heart to do so for lack of anything to say. Lately, though, I've realized that I never really had anything to say, and that most of these entries have been self-indulgent disjointed rants which have nonetheless amused some of my friends. Perhaps it is precisely the pointlessness of my posts which has made them appealing to the few who like them, and thus, it would be folly to bide my time waiting for inspiration when I should just write.
Today, I've been feeling the urge to write again, and this time, however weird and tangential, I think I have something to say. Thus, this article could be the most intricate and entertaining entry I've posted so far-or the most disappointing, ill-thought out, meandering tissue-of-horseshit I've ever foisted on you people. I suppose we'll let history decide, lol.
Lately I've been "meditating" on the idea that "everything is connected", that fluffy sounding New Age truism which, according to some, has found some confirmation in quantum theory. This idea though is a fascinating one. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I am now being affected, in ways I could never conceive, by international and historical forces outside my control, by people I'll never meet, by books I'll never read, by events I'll never hear about in countries I'll never visit. It's when these interesting patterns suddenly reveal themselves, in even the most trivial form, that I feel I catch a faint glimpse of the sheer scale and intricacy of the world and it's history, and that is truly something special.
I'm enrolled in Anthropology 101 right now, and we've spent the last few weeks discussing Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In ten days, it will be Darwin's two hundredth birthday, and so I've been frequently finding him in the news. Several times I've found myself listening to a story about Darwin's upcoming birthday on NPR while driving to my Anthropology class to talk about him for two hours.
Much has been made of the fact that Darwin and our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, are the exact same age having both been born on the same day (February 12th) in 1809. Several articles in the February issue of the Smithsonian's magazine have made much of this fact, and it's symbolic and poetic implications. For my part, I took Poli Sci last semester in the same classroom in which I'm now taking Anthropology, but I guess that's not much.
But driving back from Anthropology today, I heard on NPR that Wedgwood China was in serious trouble. The English China company had apparently merged with Ireland's Waterford Crystal, and now both were in trouble, planning to go their separate ways, and possibly on the verge of bankruptcy. I found this interesting since Wedgwood's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin, and the Wedgwood fortune was part of the reason Darwin could afford to neglect his studies and take that now famous pleasure cruise aboard the HMS Beagle in 1829. Indeed, it was Wedgwood who persuaded Darwin's father to allow him to go.
When I got home, I made myself some lunch and then set out to run my big errand for the day: mailing two books back to my cousin in India. One was a copy of Q and A the 2005 novel by Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup and the loose basis for this year's Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire.The second was a 2009 planner put out by an Indian Newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. I guess that each year's planner has an Indian historical figure- theme, because this was a Tippu Sultan-themed planner with his biography on the first page and countless portraits of the South Indian monarch displayed throughout. The planner was tempting to keep since it smelled like India and would be a wonderful talisman and reminder of home to have throughout this challenging semester. Nonetheless, I had to return it. My cousin sent both of these books to me as a gift, and as I am no longer speaking to her, I can't accept them.
I don't know what it is about my cousin, Y. but for as long as I can remember I've found her simultaneously compelling and horrible. She is almost fourteen years older than me and seems like my antithesis in every way. She is a neat, precise and determined professional, the editor-in-chief of the Chennai Deccan Chronicle, who is charming and yet secretive, protective of her privacy and (as far as I can tell) adept at Machiavellian social-combat if her bubble is threatened. I'll admit, right off the bat, that my issues with her are pretty trivial, but I simply feel that I've been ignored and condescended-to by her for the past twelve years, and this has all come to a head very recently. After feeling evaded and talked-down-to in a series of emails we exchanged, I sent her a vitriolic missive, intending to force her to talk to me or end our relationship for good. She never replied, and a few weeks later I discovered that she'd blocked me on facebook.
My mother returned from India a few weeks ago, and she brought me these books from Y. It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though she was writing off my anger as some childish temper tantrum. It was her way of being better than the whole problem. And plus it seemed, blatantly, like a tactic. She's known for her hospitality, for lavishing gifts on people and for adamantly accepting nothing in return. But she's much stingier with people she knows well, and seems to give gifts and do favors only to win people over. Feeling like I couldn't keep both these gifts and my integrity I decided to mail them back. This package is the silver bullet and the horse's head in her bed. It is an act of vengeance, a weapon, a tactic and a message.
Q and A is a story of Love, Tippu Sultan's life, a story of War. Tippu, the “Tiger of Mysore”, was a brutal Muslim ruler who forcibly converted Hindus on pain of death. In Karnataka, there is a spot called Tipu's Drop, where the Sultan's men would hurl recalcitrant Hindus to their death. Still he made gifts of jewelry and land grants to Hindu temples in order to curry favor with Hindu rulers. (These highly political “gifts” seem similar in intent to the books given me by my cousin, how fitting, then, his likeness on the cover of that planner.) He also waged a series of long wars against the British, the Anglo-Mysore wars. A drawn out clash between East and west which would claim his life in 1799. “Mohammed Faisal-Iftekar” (the pen name of an anonymous Pakistani writer) referenced Tippu in the title of his 2006 novel, The only King to Die on the Battlefield.
Like the war between Tippu and the British, the feud between Y. and myself is a clash between east and west, but the act of mailing back her books feels to me more like an act of vengeance than an act of warfare. Perhaps the best known revenge tale in modern times is Alexandre Dumas' The count of Monte Cristo. First Published between the years 1844 and 1846 (or from the year Charles Darwin began, tentatively, to outline in writing his theory of natural selection to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The count of Monte Cristo also seems to me a classic David and Goliath story, Edmond Dantes is persecuted by well-connected noblemen who conspire to have him imprisoned for life. On making public his theory of natural selection, Darwin made an enemy of the Church of England, and risked association with revolutionary France (then under the rule of the “citizen king” Louis-Phillipe, former employer and ally of Alexandre Dumas). John Wilkes Booth probably thought of himself in similar terms when he assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, I've often viewed the conflict between Y. and myself this way as well.
Jules Verne, also French, created his own enduring revenge-obsessed character, Nemo captain of the Nautilus. Nemo was an Indian nobleman whose family was killed during the Sepoy Mutiny. Nemo's name is Latin for “No One” and Greek for “I give what is due”, some believe Verne took his name from the Scottish motto “Nemo me impune lacessit” or “No one impunes me unpunished”. Like Yagna and myself, Nemo is Indian, and like the other characters in this story he is David, in this case fighting the Goliath of Imperialism and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a literal giant monster.
The character Nemo is also allegedly the nephew of Tippu Sultan.
Whew! Thank god for wikipedia. Moving right along., Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. While taking in a popular play by playwright Tom Taylor entitled Our American Cousin, about “the introduction of an awkward boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives” (I think that one is self-explanatory). Taylor also served as Editor-in-Chief of Punch magazine, which inspired an Urdu-language Indian spinoff, Awadh Punch which, like Nemo, was a thorn in the side of India's British rulers.
Y. is also the editor-in-chief of an Indian newspaper.
Awadh Punch had a series of ambitious and intelligent young writers associated with it, which helps explain it's success. The Deccan Chronicle, likewise owes it's success to its charismatic owner Venkattram Reddy. His story looks more like William Randolph Hearst's than Awadh Punch's, however. Alexandre Dumas appears to have had a similar savvy when it came to dealing with newspapers and this allowed him to maintain his extravagant lifestyle.
William Randolph Hearst's life became the basis for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, (and the story of the battle between Welles and Hearst which ensued is another David v.s. Goliath story). In the movie, Charles Foster Kane erects a pleasure palace/hideaway in which to essentially imprison his wife. That Palace is called Xanadu, named for the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “...In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately palace build...". Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather was a great patron of Coleridge, giving him enough money to live on without working so he could focus on his art.
Coleridge was a freethinking follower of William Godwin, and thus likely opposed to the racist outlook of his era's Imperial powers. Imperialism shaped the lives of many people in this story, from the bitter Indian submarine captain Nemo, to Dumas (the son of an Afro-Carribean former slave, his race caused problems for him all his life) to Darwin (whose theories would be misinterpreted and misrepresented by the Eugenics Movement and the Social Darwinists, in fact, his own son would become a follower of eugenics) to Lincoln who, of course, was the great emancipator.
Lincoln presidency was characterized by the American Civil War, and, despite a cynical outlook toward politicians in general I have a bit of a soft spot for him. He would ultimately pay a high price for his role in that war, and so “Faisal-Iftekar” to the contrary, I think Lincoln could be considered another king who died on the battlefield.
Vietnam was another war which colored the terms of many U.S. presidents. To me, (as well as thousands of assassination buffs) however, the one who payed the highest price for his role in that war was JFK who also suffered a high profile assassination in 1963, the year Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A. was born. Swarup is a Indian diplomat, and Kennedy placed an emphasis on diplomacy, wanting to create an atmosphere of detente.
And what are diplomats if not communicators. Communication is the bridge between people and is antithetical to war. (“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, another David and Goliath tale.) Though Kennedy tried, it is Reagan who is remembered as the great communicator. Reagan, second in popularity only to our doomed President Lincoln.
In the story of Y. and myself, there is no communication. In fact it was a lack of communication from her end that caused the whole house of cards to fall in the first place, but then I'm sure in this I am equally culpable.
In any event, this package is a message, a form of communication. Hermes, the messenger god, god of communication, gave Perseus the weapons by which he slew Medusa. So too, will I, using this message, confront my own Medusa, my own Goliath, and as it travels straight and true across the Pacific, with what lives will it intersect? And what will be the ramifications of its arrival?
Today, I've been feeling the urge to write again, and this time, however weird and tangential, I think I have something to say. Thus, this article could be the most intricate and entertaining entry I've posted so far-or the most disappointing, ill-thought out, meandering tissue-of-horseshit I've ever foisted on you people. I suppose we'll let history decide, lol.
Lately I've been "meditating" on the idea that "everything is connected", that fluffy sounding New Age truism which, according to some, has found some confirmation in quantum theory. This idea though is a fascinating one. Nothing happens in a vacuum, and I am now being affected, in ways I could never conceive, by international and historical forces outside my control, by people I'll never meet, by books I'll never read, by events I'll never hear about in countries I'll never visit. It's when these interesting patterns suddenly reveal themselves, in even the most trivial form, that I feel I catch a faint glimpse of the sheer scale and intricacy of the world and it's history, and that is truly something special.
I'm enrolled in Anthropology 101 right now, and we've spent the last few weeks discussing Charles Darwin and the theory of evolution. In ten days, it will be Darwin's two hundredth birthday, and so I've been frequently finding him in the news. Several times I've found myself listening to a story about Darwin's upcoming birthday on NPR while driving to my Anthropology class to talk about him for two hours.
Much has been made of the fact that Darwin and our sixteenth president, Abraham Lincoln, are the exact same age having both been born on the same day (February 12th) in 1809. Several articles in the February issue of the Smithsonian's magazine have made much of this fact, and it's symbolic and poetic implications. For my part, I took Poli Sci last semester in the same classroom in which I'm now taking Anthropology, but I guess that's not much.
But driving back from Anthropology today, I heard on NPR that Wedgwood China was in serious trouble. The English China company had apparently merged with Ireland's Waterford Crystal, and now both were in trouble, planning to go their separate ways, and possibly on the verge of bankruptcy. I found this interesting since Wedgwood's founder, Josiah Wedgwood, was the maternal grandfather of Charles Darwin, and the Wedgwood fortune was part of the reason Darwin could afford to neglect his studies and take that now famous pleasure cruise aboard the HMS Beagle in 1829. Indeed, it was Wedgwood who persuaded Darwin's father to allow him to go.
When I got home, I made myself some lunch and then set out to run my big errand for the day: mailing two books back to my cousin in India. One was a copy of Q and A the 2005 novel by Indian Diplomat Vikas Swarup and the loose basis for this year's Oscar favorite Slumdog Millionaire.The second was a 2009 planner put out by an Indian Newspaper, the Deccan Chronicle. I guess that each year's planner has an Indian historical figure- theme, because this was a Tippu Sultan-themed planner with his biography on the first page and countless portraits of the South Indian monarch displayed throughout. The planner was tempting to keep since it smelled like India and would be a wonderful talisman and reminder of home to have throughout this challenging semester. Nonetheless, I had to return it. My cousin sent both of these books to me as a gift, and as I am no longer speaking to her, I can't accept them.
I don't know what it is about my cousin, Y. but for as long as I can remember I've found her simultaneously compelling and horrible. She is almost fourteen years older than me and seems like my antithesis in every way. She is a neat, precise and determined professional, the editor-in-chief of the Chennai Deccan Chronicle, who is charming and yet secretive, protective of her privacy and (as far as I can tell) adept at Machiavellian social-combat if her bubble is threatened. I'll admit, right off the bat, that my issues with her are pretty trivial, but I simply feel that I've been ignored and condescended-to by her for the past twelve years, and this has all come to a head very recently. After feeling evaded and talked-down-to in a series of emails we exchanged, I sent her a vitriolic missive, intending to force her to talk to me or end our relationship for good. She never replied, and a few weeks later I discovered that she'd blocked me on facebook.
My mother returned from India a few weeks ago, and she brought me these books from Y. It felt like a slap in the face. It was as though she was writing off my anger as some childish temper tantrum. It was her way of being better than the whole problem. And plus it seemed, blatantly, like a tactic. She's known for her hospitality, for lavishing gifts on people and for adamantly accepting nothing in return. But she's much stingier with people she knows well, and seems to give gifts and do favors only to win people over. Feeling like I couldn't keep both these gifts and my integrity I decided to mail them back. This package is the silver bullet and the horse's head in her bed. It is an act of vengeance, a weapon, a tactic and a message.
Q and A is a story of Love, Tippu Sultan's life, a story of War. Tippu, the “Tiger of Mysore”, was a brutal Muslim ruler who forcibly converted Hindus on pain of death. In Karnataka, there is a spot called Tipu's Drop, where the Sultan's men would hurl recalcitrant Hindus to their death. Still he made gifts of jewelry and land grants to Hindu temples in order to curry favor with Hindu rulers. (These highly political “gifts” seem similar in intent to the books given me by my cousin, how fitting, then, his likeness on the cover of that planner.) He also waged a series of long wars against the British, the Anglo-Mysore wars. A drawn out clash between East and west which would claim his life in 1799. “Mohammed Faisal-Iftekar” (the pen name of an anonymous Pakistani writer) referenced Tippu in the title of his 2006 novel, The only King to Die on the Battlefield.
Like the war between Tippu and the British, the feud between Y. and myself is a clash between east and west, but the act of mailing back her books feels to me more like an act of vengeance than an act of warfare. Perhaps the best known revenge tale in modern times is Alexandre Dumas' The count of Monte Cristo. First Published between the years 1844 and 1846 (or from the year Charles Darwin began, tentatively, to outline in writing his theory of natural selection to the year Abraham Lincoln was elected to his first term in the U.S. House of Representatives.) The count of Monte Cristo also seems to me a classic David and Goliath story, Edmond Dantes is persecuted by well-connected noblemen who conspire to have him imprisoned for life. On making public his theory of natural selection, Darwin made an enemy of the Church of England, and risked association with revolutionary France (then under the rule of the “citizen king” Louis-Phillipe, former employer and ally of Alexandre Dumas). John Wilkes Booth probably thought of himself in similar terms when he assassinated Lincoln on April 14, 1865, I've often viewed the conflict between Y. and myself this way as well.
Jules Verne, also French, created his own enduring revenge-obsessed character, Nemo captain of the Nautilus. Nemo was an Indian nobleman whose family was killed during the Sepoy Mutiny. Nemo's name is Latin for “No One” and Greek for “I give what is due”, some believe Verne took his name from the Scottish motto “Nemo me impune lacessit” or “No one impunes me unpunished”. Like Yagna and myself, Nemo is Indian, and like the other characters in this story he is David, in this case fighting the Goliath of Imperialism and in 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a literal giant monster.
The character Nemo is also allegedly the nephew of Tippu Sultan.
Whew! Thank god for wikipedia. Moving right along., Lincoln was assassinated at Ford's Theatre in Washington D.C. While taking in a popular play by playwright Tom Taylor entitled Our American Cousin, about “the introduction of an awkward boorish American to his aristocratic English relatives” (I think that one is self-explanatory). Taylor also served as Editor-in-Chief of Punch magazine, which inspired an Urdu-language Indian spinoff, Awadh Punch which, like Nemo, was a thorn in the side of India's British rulers.
Y. is also the editor-in-chief of an Indian newspaper.
Awadh Punch had a series of ambitious and intelligent young writers associated with it, which helps explain it's success. The Deccan Chronicle, likewise owes it's success to its charismatic owner Venkattram Reddy. His story looks more like William Randolph Hearst's than Awadh Punch's, however. Alexandre Dumas appears to have had a similar savvy when it came to dealing with newspapers and this allowed him to maintain his extravagant lifestyle.
William Randolph Hearst's life became the basis for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane, (and the story of the battle between Welles and Hearst which ensued is another David v.s. Goliath story). In the movie, Charles Foster Kane erects a pleasure palace/hideaway in which to essentially imprison his wife. That Palace is called Xanadu, named for the poem by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “...In Xanadu did Kubla Khan, a stately palace build...". Josiah Wedgwood, Darwin's grandfather was a great patron of Coleridge, giving him enough money to live on without working so he could focus on his art.
Coleridge was a freethinking follower of William Godwin, and thus likely opposed to the racist outlook of his era's Imperial powers. Imperialism shaped the lives of many people in this story, from the bitter Indian submarine captain Nemo, to Dumas (the son of an Afro-Carribean former slave, his race caused problems for him all his life) to Darwin (whose theories would be misinterpreted and misrepresented by the Eugenics Movement and the Social Darwinists, in fact, his own son would become a follower of eugenics) to Lincoln who, of course, was the great emancipator.
Lincoln presidency was characterized by the American Civil War, and, despite a cynical outlook toward politicians in general I have a bit of a soft spot for him. He would ultimately pay a high price for his role in that war, and so “Faisal-Iftekar” to the contrary, I think Lincoln could be considered another king who died on the battlefield.
Vietnam was another war which colored the terms of many U.S. presidents. To me, (as well as thousands of assassination buffs) however, the one who payed the highest price for his role in that war was JFK who also suffered a high profile assassination in 1963, the year Vikas Swarup, author of Q and A. was born. Swarup is a Indian diplomat, and Kennedy placed an emphasis on diplomacy, wanting to create an atmosphere of detente.
And what are diplomats if not communicators. Communication is the bridge between people and is antithetical to war. (“What we have here is a failure to communicate” says Strother Martin in Cool Hand Luke, another David and Goliath tale.) Though Kennedy tried, it is Reagan who is remembered as the great communicator. Reagan, second in popularity only to our doomed President Lincoln.
In the story of Y. and myself, there is no communication. In fact it was a lack of communication from her end that caused the whole house of cards to fall in the first place, but then I'm sure in this I am equally culpable.
In any event, this package is a message, a form of communication. Hermes, the messenger god, god of communication, gave Perseus the weapons by which he slew Medusa. So too, will I, using this message, confront my own Medusa, my own Goliath, and as it travels straight and true across the Pacific, with what lives will it intersect? And what will be the ramifications of its arrival?
Friday, November 14, 2008
Last Tardy Thoughts on Sarah Palin
Sarah Palin is continuing to hang around in the headlines and on the news long past her sell-by date. At least as far as I'm concerned.
I admit that it's troubling to see her still plotting. I figured she'd fade peacefully into obscurity like she should, and so since she hasn't I suppose it's best for someone to keep tabs on her.
Nevertheless, we're still just beyond the point where Sarah bashing is relevant and amusing, and so I hesitate to bring her up. I hesitate also because, as I mentioned in my last post, it's almost unforgivably pretentious to assume that anyone gives a shit how I feel politically. Disregarding that, here goes:
I read reccently on Wikipedia about an interesting phenomenon called "anal-winking". According to them, a certain Dr. Stuart Horn discovered that "a noxious or tactile stimulus will cause a 'wink' contraction of the anal sphincter muscles and also flexion". A controversy emerged from this, when another doctor, a Bruce Woodling "developed the anal wink test, which he alleged was an indisputable diagnostic indicator that a child had been sodomized."
Wikipedia goes on to say that these ideas have now been "utterly discredited", and calls them pseudoscientific. Specifically, they say "Woodling's pseudoscientific testimony during the trial of Ray Buckey contributed to Buckey spending five years in prison without bail. Buckey was later released without conviction".
This is, of course, very sad. And it's unfortunate that Woodling's negligence may have cause innocent people to suffer this sort of persecution.
Nevertheless, I think in the case of Sarah Palin, Woodling's assertion may still hold true:
"When an asshole winks at you, you know there's gonna be some ass-fucking involved".
I admit that it's troubling to see her still plotting. I figured she'd fade peacefully into obscurity like she should, and so since she hasn't I suppose it's best for someone to keep tabs on her.
Nevertheless, we're still just beyond the point where Sarah bashing is relevant and amusing, and so I hesitate to bring her up. I hesitate also because, as I mentioned in my last post, it's almost unforgivably pretentious to assume that anyone gives a shit how I feel politically. Disregarding that, here goes:
I read reccently on Wikipedia about an interesting phenomenon called "anal-winking". According to them, a certain Dr. Stuart Horn discovered that "a noxious or tactile stimulus will cause a 'wink' contraction of the anal sphincter muscles and also flexion". A controversy emerged from this, when another doctor, a Bruce Woodling "developed the anal wink test, which he alleged was an indisputable diagnostic indicator that a child had been sodomized."
Wikipedia goes on to say that these ideas have now been "utterly discredited", and calls them pseudoscientific. Specifically, they say "Woodling's pseudoscientific testimony during the trial of Ray Buckey contributed to Buckey spending five years in prison without bail. Buckey was later released without conviction".
This is, of course, very sad. And it's unfortunate that Woodling's negligence may have cause innocent people to suffer this sort of persecution.
Nevertheless, I think in the case of Sarah Palin, Woodling's assertion may still hold true:
"When an asshole winks at you, you know there's gonna be some ass-fucking involved".
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
Man, Fuck Bipartisanship!
So, I'll have to admit, when I found out Obama had won the election I was pretty happy. I was convinced that he'd lose, for one reason or another, and that we'd end up, once again, ignorantly marching into our past. In fact, I was so relieved when I found out he'd won, that I forgot for a moment that Obama is a fucking "moderate".
Especially in the context of the last eight years, I think that the word "moderate"should be considered a pejorative term which translates, roughly, to "dipshit". I've said it once, and I'll say it again: fuck bipartisanship! Haven't conservatives done enough damage to permanently exclude themselves from the political process? But I guess that's just hopelessly naive in a country where Karl Rove is sitting pretty on Fox news, and actually presuming to give Obama advice, like some kind of concerned grandfatherly senior politician. Or where a conservative caricature like Sarah Palin was actually given a shot at the Whitehouse instead of desperately hidden by the RNC, lest her very existence drive the final nail in the coffin of their credibility. Or where the son of an east-coast millionaire CIA spook can masquerade as a small government Texas populist, disgrace himself terribly, and yet be around long enough to endorse another drunken loutish son of priviledge attempting to pass himself off as a straight talkin' "maverick" war hero from Arizona.
Anyway, that's enough ranting. I don't want to make the pretentious mistake of assuming that other people give a shit about how I feel politically. But one more thing: I've noticed that no matter what gains democrats make, they never seem to be able to shake off this image of them as weak humanist fairies who piss and moan about civil rights and compassion until they need the big strong conservatives to come in, guns blazing, and bail them out. If a democrat wants to succeed, he has to move right, and if he does so, he earns the honor of...comparison to a badass animal?
Come on! "Blue dog" Democrats? What the goddamn fuck, you guys? How come, if some democrat hates abortion or thinks we're being "too soft on the blacks" he becomes a Badass Blue Asskickin'Dirty Dawg Dem! I mean, shit, if I didn't know better, I would think that political discourse in this country is inherently slanted right. But what the fuck do I know?
Anyway, prop 8 passed in California, proving once again that even us latte-sippin' left-coasters can be total monstrous reactionaries just like everyone else. I had a thought today at work. Wouldn't it be funny if snack foods had really unappetizing names? Like if, instead of "goldfish" they were "Sweetass Cheez Flavored Fish Krackerz", and Cheetos were, like, "Cornilicious Artificially Flava'd Cheddar Nukes", or something? Just a thought.
*sigh*
Especially in the context of the last eight years, I think that the word "moderate"should be considered a pejorative term which translates, roughly, to "dipshit". I've said it once, and I'll say it again: fuck bipartisanship! Haven't conservatives done enough damage to permanently exclude themselves from the political process? But I guess that's just hopelessly naive in a country where Karl Rove is sitting pretty on Fox news, and actually presuming to give Obama advice, like some kind of concerned grandfatherly senior politician. Or where a conservative caricature like Sarah Palin was actually given a shot at the Whitehouse instead of desperately hidden by the RNC, lest her very existence drive the final nail in the coffin of their credibility. Or where the son of an east-coast millionaire CIA spook can masquerade as a small government Texas populist, disgrace himself terribly, and yet be around long enough to endorse another drunken loutish son of priviledge attempting to pass himself off as a straight talkin' "maverick" war hero from Arizona.
Anyway, that's enough ranting. I don't want to make the pretentious mistake of assuming that other people give a shit about how I feel politically. But one more thing: I've noticed that no matter what gains democrats make, they never seem to be able to shake off this image of them as weak humanist fairies who piss and moan about civil rights and compassion until they need the big strong conservatives to come in, guns blazing, and bail them out. If a democrat wants to succeed, he has to move right, and if he does so, he earns the honor of...comparison to a badass animal?
Come on! "Blue dog" Democrats? What the goddamn fuck, you guys? How come, if some democrat hates abortion or thinks we're being "too soft on the blacks" he becomes a Badass Blue Asskickin'Dirty Dawg Dem! I mean, shit, if I didn't know better, I would think that political discourse in this country is inherently slanted right. But what the fuck do I know?
Anyway, prop 8 passed in California, proving once again that even us latte-sippin' left-coasters can be total monstrous reactionaries just like everyone else. I had a thought today at work. Wouldn't it be funny if snack foods had really unappetizing names? Like if, instead of "goldfish" they were "Sweetass Cheez Flavored Fish Krackerz", and Cheetos were, like, "Cornilicious Artificially Flava'd Cheddar Nukes", or something? Just a thought.
*sigh*
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