MaMa and I are having an ongoing discussion about the state of America. I am increasingly disillusioned. I’m willing to struggle and fight, but increasingly I am reminded how awful we are. There is a stark difference between us and other westerners. Something about our culture is unique and not in a positive way. It’s a real shame because I do think our political system is exceptional and we could have been also.
But I am increasingly of the opinion that we are not worth saving. We trash it all and maybe the best solution is to let us dig our own graves. The latest scene is the hoopla surrounding All-American Muslim, a TV show about a Muslim family in Dearborn, MI. It was a boring show, but that was the idea. A Muslim family that is indistinguishable from their neighbors except for some of the women wearing hijabs. Lowes, in response to a call from the Florida Family Association (of course it’s situated in Florida), removed its advertising from the show with some nonsense about communities needing to talk.
That’s distressing. The FFA’s call was distressing, but not too surprising. What is surprising is some of the vitriol on Lowe’s FaceBook page about the controversy. Even if some of these comments are not sincere, as if I care about sincerity, it’s shocking that someone can even think of these things.
One of the things I first noticed when moving to Minnesota was the lotteries in the bars. Bars here really like their lotteries. These are not the state run lottery of number picking or even the scratch off cards. What the bars like are meat raffles and pull tabs. They are lotteries because it costs money to play and it is possible to win more than the entry fee, or in the case of the meat raffle something of more value than the entry fee. The third criteria is that there is nothing the entrant can do to increase his odds of winning.
Lately, I’ve been noticing a new type of lottery: The Lobster Zone. Think of the claw machine in Toy Story. You guide a claw along two axes and after a set amount of time the claw drops. In this case it drops into water and ideally grabs one of the lobsters, lifts it up and deposits it in a corner where you then have access to it.
It costs two dollars per try and the reward is a lobster dinner prepared by the bar’s kitchen at no additional cost. Let me defend why it is a lottery. The easy argument is that it is gambling, because there is skill involved in maneuvering the claw into a more advantageous position to snag one of the lobsters. But that’s a trap. Not only is there no skill involved but it gives the impression of skill, which makes it a particularly insidious lottery. At least with pull tabs someone wins occasionally and the meat raffle does produce winners.
The first problem with the skill argument is the water. The water distorts your view. This is a lesson learned by kindergartners the first time they’re at the pool. You drop a quarter in the water and you cannot grab it easily because of the distortion. The Lobster Zone is a big machine. It is impossible to look down on the lobster and see the claw in the same view. You must edit the images together and this stitching magnifies the already present difficulty.
Those two criticisms are not enough to make it a lottery, because a gifted enough human might be able to compensate. There is one more feature which washes out the skill factor in toto. The grip of the claw on the lobster is never tight. These are wiggly wet creatures who panic when grabbed. I have seen several successful claw grabs, but the bug always falls out of the grasp. And that’s why it’s an insidious lottery. It looks like gambling, like a game of some skill, and yet it isn’t. In nearly three hours of observation I have seen $20 flushed down the tank. And people are usually smiling upon failure.
It’s also really gross. Of course the lobster is nearly bug and any attempt to empathize with it smacks of anthropomorphism, and yet I still empathize with a creature panicking and struggling to survive. Not to mention they look so bored. Maybe they aren’t, but it seems the safe play is on the side of empathy.
It is also gross seeing what types of bars have the lotteries. The bluer the collar of the average patron the more lottery systems the bar will have. These are people that do not have the money to lose and yet precisely the most to gain, hence why they play. This is another reason The Lobster Zone is insidious. When the gain is money people are probably more rational, and more cynical, more in touch with the risks and rewards of the game. This is not, however, the same model of consent that is offered up by libertarians and capitalists as an excuse of all kinds of tyrannical devices. Because the lobster reward is not monetary it fails to open up the cynical channels of the player. That’s why it’s brilliant and distressing.
Geek Porn. The phrase is in the tradition of disaster porn or food porn. It’s about something other than sex, but it exists within the realm of desire. It is by definition libidinal. Geek Porn is also not necessarily nerdy. It’s about watching people geek out on a subject. Sometimes those subjects are mobile phones (Azrienoch) or palindromes (Barry Duncan) or food (The Sporkful guys) and so on. Sometimes there are subsets too, for example, Michael Pollan as an organic food geek, but not necessarily a food geek.
One of the few magazines I read regularly is The Believer. I love it because it encourages writers, the magazine doesn’t employ them, to geek out on something. Every article is a fascinating romp into a new geekdom. The Barry Duncan article in the newest issue is the perfect example.
Barry Duncan is a master palindromist. Some might discount this achievement because he’s the one making the rules for palindromists. Someone has to the be the first. That is not to say that Duncan is modest about his self-appointed role.
When I say that I am a master palindromist, there are two answers for what that means…. One is that it means, when it comes to palindrome-writing, I know what I am doing. The other, slightly longer, slightly more combative answer is that it means you shouldn’t confuse me with any garden variety, ‘Madam I’m Adam’ hack who couldn’t paint my shadow. (quoted in Kornbluh 2011, 4)
Duncan does acknowledge the problem of being a self-appointed master palindromist. It’s that recognition which probably gives rise to his taxonomy of palindromes. He wants to better study them and then by definition create a science, or at least a club, that has rules and orders. And that, is geeking out. The world will go on if Duncan fails his project. And yet geeking out offers a promise. It’s a vague promise, which is its joy: if it fails to rise above the level of mundane, then there was nothing really at risk.
The kid who hacks cell phones will probably make some improvements, but that’s not to say they are significant. Duncan theorizes that learning about palindromes may help resolve or ease the symptoms of Alzheimer’s or maybe palindromes are key to unravelling DNA and its palindrome-like double helix. Then again, maybe not. Duncan finds pleasure in writing and studying palindromes. It holds a libidinal attachment and that’s why reading about him is Geek Porn.
It’s also porn because some of his passion bleeds onto the reader. I was not even sure I knew what a palindrome was before I read the essay. Now, however, I want to collect books about them. I want to write them. I want to breathe them.
Part of what makes the desire transfer across the magazine medium was the detail of Duncan’s study. He has some categories for palindromes. A long one has at least 100 characters. An epic palindrome is at least 100 words long. A mega palindrome is at least 1000 words. 1000 words! Right now this essay is at 528 words. The entire essay will be around 1000 words. But the palindrome must to be precisely measured. And it would all double back in on itself. Perfectly.
Geeking out isn’t just a serious investment either. It’s about rigor and rigidity in study. “The most emotionally and mentally satisfying” type of palindrome is the Three-Layer Vertical Stack, known as the 3LVS for short. He’s developed a language for a field of study that might just be 1 person large. The 3LVS has rules, obviously: 1. The third line is the exact opposite of the first; 2. The second line is self-contained; 3. The second line mediates the first and third. (5) His most prideful example:
Miss apt A-w on oud?
No! Set a date, son:
Duo now at Passim
Obviously the longer palindromes are more like poetry than prose. They require a significant amount of work to read and are very context dependent. The above example does make sense when all of Kornbluh is read. I will spare you the effort, but trust me. It makes me sense. I did have to look up ‘oud’.
Why then do we geek out? To answer this it is important to establish that geeking out requires much out of the person. This is not the territory of the genius, where things just seem difficult to normal folk. Geeking out often requires the horsepower of the genius, but even for them it represents an investment. This is a sustained amount of work that probably required many sleepless nights, gallons of Adderall, many pots of a caffeine delivery vehicle, and probably a relationship or two. Given the investment of energy and time and the difficulty of doing this, why does one do it? The easy answer is to rise above mediocrity. Maybe that motivates some, but I doubt it. It requires more than a Schadenfreude-like impulse. It requires a dedication and a devotion that cannot be found by merely rising in rank in a pursuit deemed trivial and freakish by others (the status, if gained, is only gained after completion and hence serves as a by-product and not a motivation).
Duncan offers us a glimpse of an answer when he says that he enters a zone. The palindromist is naturally limited by the alphabet, but Duncan, when in the zone, feels a sense of control over the alphabet. He bends letters to his will. He takes the system that exists not only within each of us but also beyond each of us — a person cannot escape language, after all — and gains more control of it than few if any humans ever have. The geek is in pursuit of domination. Complete and utter domination is, of course, impossible and that’s why the Geek remains human. The isolating effects of his domination have left Duncan feeling almost non-human at times. Relationships, even with friends, when he displays the full scope of his Geek-dom.
These are just some initial thoughts about Geeking out. It is also a recommendation of the Kornbluh article. Some other recommendations and material that will inform a larger piece about Geeking Out are below.
Kornbluh, Gregory. (2011, September). Doubling in the middle. The Believer, 83, 3-9.
All of his clips are proof of geeking out. But in this clip he is shockingly open and revealing the true depth and costs of geeking out. And yet he continues to do so.
I include this clip because the Sporkful episode with Rachel Maddow was the best example of geeking out. The way she destroys the pina colada and then reconstructs it is amazing and yet so trivial.
Norway’s national anthem is “Yes, We Love This Country.” What an interesting title. Beginning with “yes” makes it sound as though it is answering a question. As if there can even be soem skepticism about Norway’s love-ability.
Nobody ever asks, “do you love Satan?” Satan is unlove-able, absolutely.
Nobody ever asks, “do you think sugar babies are cute?” They are cute, absolutely.
Why then would you write a national anthem — better yet, why select a national anthem — that posits the nation as not love-able or great?
I don’t know many Norweigians, but the ones I do are this way. They are introspective and self-doubting creatures. That’s not necessarily a bad thing.
Taking a break from the serious reading. It’s raining out, so no quick bike around the lake. I am all out of new episodes (Game of Thrones, The Killing, Justified) to watch and I just know that if I start up on Deadwood again, then that’s two days of my life I’ll never again get back. So, I read a David Sedaris column. He’s funny.
I found this paragraph that I think is wonderfully written, and while too sentimental it is sentimental in all the right ways.
When you’re young, it’s easy to believe that such an opportunity will come again, maybe even a better one. Instead of a Lebanese guy in Italy, it might be a Nigerian one in Belgium, or maybe a Pole in Turkey. You tell yourself that if you travelled alone to Europe this summer you could surely do the same thing again next year and the year after that. Of course, you don’t though, and the next thing you know you’re ana aging, unemployed elf [this is a funny comment if the entirety of the piece is read], so desperate for love that you spend your evening mooning over a straight alcoholic. (52)
I had a dream the other night that The Swede and I were on Oprah shilling our book about escaping to the Caribbean. Of course, we had nothing new to offer. Yes, it was scary. Yes, the timing wasn’t right (it never is) and we did it anyways. Then I realized that the jackass who writes that book and then peddles it is as gross as the jackass who only dreams of escaping. The person that makes the jump and writes about it still harbored an intense anxiety about making that jump, or else there wouldn’t be a story to tell. I don’t want to be that person. If others see it as a jumping then so be it, but I want to just walk.
Sedaris, David. (2009, April 20). Guy walks into a bar car. The New Yorker, 48-52. link
A bit of rambling, but I worry if I hesitate on this, then you will be directionless and might…panic.
On last week’s Slate’s Political Gabfest John Dickerson makes an interesting observation. He notices that in the 1950s and earlier officials did not make tornado predictions because the science was so bad at predictions. The risk to making a faulty prediction is the potential for causing a public panic. These days, however, that’s not a concern of public pronouncements. In fact, just the opposite: politicians and the media encourage panic inducing pronouncements. It used to be that we accepted risk in our lives.
Now we do not accept risk. The War on Terrorism is a great example. Now, this is not a bin Laden is gone ergo we ought to ramp down the WoT post. I believed the WoT needed to be ramped down beforehand. It definitely should be now that their leader — yes, he was important even if al Qaeda is cell-ed up — is gone. One note about the bin Laden event. It saddens me that we live in a culture so horrific and horrified that we celebrate the death of a person. This is not to say there are not enemies, but to actively celebrate their deaths seems barbaric to me. It’s that line of thinking that causes actions we see as good (we are, after all, motivated to stop evil) and others as evil.
‘Evil’ is an unproductive concept. I would even argue it is counterproductive. ‘Evil’ stops creative efforts at conflict-resolution. ‘Evil’ stops cooperation and necessitates cyclical violence. I do not believe violence is always bad, but in the service of manichean ethics it is merely cycle inducing and not conflict resolving. It is ‘evil’ which allows us to believe panics are beneficial.
I was thinking about what to write. My adoring fans are pining away waiting for the next post. I found the above and it seems to reflect my solipsism. Or to hear The Persian describe me, I’m a meltdown like Charlie Sheen but not interesting. I’m a little proud of that one. After all, she did contact me to insult me, which tracked similarly to my response to her, “and yet here you are.”
All of this is my way of cueing you into a growing disconnect I am feeling. I’m a nice guy and have always had a fine time getting along with people. Lately, though, I can feel that changing. I am increasingly involved in events and escalations that are completely dumb.
Yesterday at the gym I approached the leg lift sleds. One had weights on it and the other was empty. I took off some of the weights and this large black man approached me, “yo, little man. That’s me. I’m there.”
Okay, no problem. I then put the weights back on. As I was doing this he began to lecture me that the sled right next to me, the empty one, was the same machine and blah blah blah. I lifted my palm to him. I was intending this to be an apology, a way of saying I understand and that he didn’t need to waste his breath explaining something that didn’t need explaining.
“Did you just flip your hand at me? You interrupt my workout and now you flip my hand at me?”
“Relax, I didn’t know -”
“- Relax?! Now you tell me to relax?”
“Yes. I didn’t know you were here.”
“Well, I was. I was over there doing chin ups.” I gave him my best non-escalatory and yet still you’re-an-idiot look at then turned my back to him. Later The Swede asked if I was afraid there would be a fight. And I realized that I wasn’t. I would have had my ass kicked, but I knew that in the gym he would not be violent. I also, and this is what concerns me the most, didn’t really care. I do care, but i suspect I was too confident in the deterrent effect of being in the gym.
In any case, events like this happen more and mroe frequently. Maybe I am not as apologetic as the typical Minnesotan and so my behavior comes off as aggressive. Maybe it’s not Minnesota and therefore my differnce. Maybe there is something I am doing to invite more and more conflicts. Deep down my worst fear is that I am losing my boyish charmn as I age. I also note an increased hostility in how I approach the world. I have recently defriended some FaceBook friends because their conservative rants were too affecting to my mood.
This is an image sent in an email by a member of the Tea Party. Underneath the image Davenport, an elected member of the Orange Country Republican Central Committee, wrote, “now you know why — no birth certificate!” Even if her command of the English language had been at a middle school level this would have been shocking. What is really shocking is her apology. She says race had nothing to do with it. Interesting.
1. If there is not conscious thinking about Obama as an African American — normally I say “black” but here is an instance where it is useful to say “African-American” — then what does this image possibly mean? He was born to chimpanzee parents in Africa. A thought project: replace Obama’s face with Boehner’s or McCain’s or Cheney’s. Does the joke make any sense then? Of course not.
2. The lack of thinking about Obama’s race might just prove it is a race issue. Clearly I doubt the sincerity of her comment. But if she was sincere, then it means race works exactly as many people claim it does: in the background and underneath our codes.
3. Who gives a fuck about intention? Regardless of her intention, a message was communicated. She can think whatever she likes, but as an elected official she should be held accountable for her statements, especially political ones. Davenport is a biggot and this is one time I think a 74 year old ought to be sent into mandatory retirement. Hopefully, come election time, Orange County will do precisely that. Sadly, there are probably many in her area that wil employ her for her willingness to make a brave and courageous stand. Even though she couldn’t back away from the email quickly enough.
Here’s the gem of her apology though: “I am an imperfect Christian lady who tries her best to live a Christ-like honouring life. I would never do anything to intentionally harm or berate others regardless of ethnicity.” Nevermind the Christ-like honouring lives I know are rarely lived by nice people. But I will give that a pass for now. In Davenport’s case it’s a load of shit. A big steaming pile of elephant shit. And the Tea Baggers will claim this as just another anomaly in their rolls, that there is no proof they are racists or bigots. Their argument is one of significance. There is no significant proof of racism. I say anecdote after anecdote is enough for me.
There is, however, another racist meme percolating around the interwebs. My father sent me a link to a Fox News clip about a mosque near Houston and a hog farmer. The mosque bought land next to the farmer’s and then asked the farmer to remove the hogs. A silly request to make. In retaliation for this request the hog farmer now holds Friday night pig races, which is precisely when the mosque will be conducting services. It’s important to note that the mosque’s members only asked for the hogs to be relocated. They did not sue. They did not do anything to cause undue stress. They merely asked. Why then would Baker, the hog farmer, respond this way? Why is this news? Why does Fox News say that there are already 60 mosques in the Houston area, as though this new mosque is unnecessary? Because the underlying belief is that Muslims are evil, or, at the least anti-American. Would this be a story if instead of a mosque it was a church and the same ask was made because a hog farm is smelly and loud? Doubtful. Baker would still probably not move, but the story would get zero play on Fox News or on YouTube or via the email circuit.
48HRMagazine just created is first issue (Issue 0) and its theme was Hustle. Below is my submission (too lazy to fix formatting translation errors), and here is another piece that was not accepted which helps define ‘hustle’ (focusing mainly on an activist oriented approach, as opposed to a labor based approach) even though we all know what it is. Below my submission is a link to a YouTube clip that must be seen (thanks again to Blinkered Bunny for this tip).
The best hustle in New Orleans is Test Tubes. We were just in from New York City, DC, Miami, Minneapolis, Dallas and Los Angeles for a bachelor party. The name of the bar was lost in the haze, but it had an upstairs patio overlooking Bourbon Street where we immediately went.
I was first. She was cute and the shot was a reasonable three dollars. She put the test tubes in her mouth, the bottoms clinched in her teeth. Gripping my ears, she pulled my mouth onto hers and she grabbed my belt and she pulled me down and our heads tilted and the tubes dumped into my mouth.
“Nice.”
“Six dollars.”
“Three dollars?”
“Two tubes, honey.”
“Nice. Keep the change.” She winked at me. Knowingly.
The next girl came a few minutes later. She had a crooked mouth and thick arms and she began on the other side of the group. She also had a chest and would alternate the tubes between there and her mouth.
“Nice rack.” Some spectators were amused.
“Get to ya’ll next.” She was not amused.
She made her way through the six of us with no delay. I was last and JP was before me. He shot off her chest and handed her a twenty, which she dropped into her bra. JP squished his eyebrows and she turned to me.
“Sorry, I just gave all my cash to your friend. She got here first.” Come on, honey. Her eyes twinkled. “No, seriously.” I showed her my wallet, seeking her approval. She turned to the group and asked if anyone would cover me.
“Take it out of my change. Fourteen dollars.” I took the shots from her mouth.
“Six dollars.”
“Told ya, don’t have it. Take it out of his change.”
“Six dollars.” She addressed the group.
“Take it out of my change.” Each time JP mentioned his $14 change ($8 after my shots) she slapped him on the back of the head, “that’s in the past.”
It was amusing. A cat playing with a mouse. We thought she was the mouse. We formed a circle and JP mentioned his $14. She grabbed his crotch and twisted. JP shifted. Instead of moving with the twist he turned against it and crumpled.
We all cringed in unison. Hand to the groin. Step back. She juked out of the middle and we paid the six dollars.
At the risk of becoming too comfortable in my seat on the Sam Harris bandwagon, I must admit agreement over this piece in the NYT. The argument is that pediatricians ought to be allowed to do a ‘nick’ (an attempt to make the cut seem innocuous) on girls newly born into families that would practice Female Genital Mutilation. The concern is that if not allowed to perform the procedure in the US then the family will merely send the daughter somewhere it can be done. Regardless the daughter will be cut and here it would only be a nick instead of full removal.
However, the uniqueness portion (the daughter will be sent off anyways) of this argument is not a solid argument. Most of the immigrants where this would matter hail from eastern Africa. This also tends to be one of the most economically depressed demographics of American immigrants. The financial means to do so are not always present. Even if they are present, there are ought to be a significant cost to that practice. While the nick may be less harmful than full removal, it is still a practice that deserves condemnation. The avoidance of a worse act does not make it a worthy act.
And here is where we come to the Sam Harris portion. Even though I am probably in line with most cultural relativists and am probably, accurately, in many cases considered a nihilist, this is not one of those cases. This is a horrific act. It makes the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end. And that is before I even turn to the testimonies of its victims. There is also a significant body of evidence about measurable and quantifiable harms for engaging in the act. Even if the nick avoids these measures, it is still a horrific act.
The benefit? ”Cultural gains”. Screw that: cultures change. I’m comfortable with a wholesale dismissal of this cultural benefit. I had thought the nihilistic relativist was a caricature, the boogey man of Tea Party luncheons and Limbaugh shows. Apparently not. Here’s Harris with his take on it, from this essay:
I don’t think one has fully enjoyed the life of the mind until one has seen a celebrated scholar defend the “contextual” legitimacy of the burqa, or a practice like female genital excision, a mere thirty seconds after announcing that his moral relativism does nothing to diminish his commitment to making the world a better place. Given my experience as a critic of religion, I must say that it has been disconcerting to see the caricature of the over-educated, atheistic moral nihilist regularly appearing in my inbox and on the blogs. I sincerely hope that people like Rick Warren have not been paying attention.
Maybe there are these people really out there. The great enemy of the Left are those that sit idly by in their homes thinking they and all others are islands. Islands with their own jagged reefs of beliefs, but islands nonetheless so they do not need lighthouses. Apathy. If you want to defend the nick, then by all means do so, but don’t cave just because you’ve interpreted apathy as acceptance of the act.
"All the more reason to frequent your local brewpubs for their latest specialty beers." http://t.co/DIQjo3vH#, 8 hours ago
Walking down the street in Atlanta a few months ago I saw a dead bird and told @chinable. He looked to the sky and asked, "where? where?" #, 8 hours ago
RT @IsaacFitzgerald: OH: "The worst hick towns are the ones that don't have strip clubs." #, 2012/05/19
Don't believe them when they say it's hard to dance to Neutral Milk Hotel's "Holland, 1945". #, 2012/05/19
Taking a break from the serious reading. It’s raining out, so no quick bike around the lake. I am all out of new episodes (Game of Thrones, The Killing, Justified) to watch and I just know that if I start up on Deadwood again, then that’s two days of my life I’ll never again get back. So, I read a David Sedaris column. He’s funny.
