year-end stats

without going into tedious detail, I note at the year-end that traffic for this very blog has increased to an average 3571 hits per day - a total of over 107,000 hits this month! over the past year, higher yearning got over seven hundred thousand hits, 430,000 page-servings to sixty thousand unique visitors. rants about global warming and about OS X were among the most popular entries, along with the rise of the idiots (about the TV show Nathan Barley) and the observation that the OS X critique was extremely popular with Microsoft employees. abuse was noted from 'reversedns.resolve.ru' and from various spammers. 60% of visitors use windows, 21% apple, the rest are unknown/linux/solaris/free bsd. a disappointing 35% still use explorer, 18% use netscape, 17% are on firefox and 11% on safari. mozilla users account for 4% and netnewswire readers for almost 3%. opera and other browsers fall below 1%. ten spiders visited this month, including three unidentified ones. michael berube deserves thanks for directing readers this way, more so than any other site except search engines. apart from the US of A, readers in australia and thailand, brazil and canada, japan and china, south korea and europe made a good showing among the 52 countries represented.

semper aliquid haeret

The idiots are still winning. According to a recent poll, the WSJ reports:
"About 22% of U.S. adults believe Mr. Hussein helped plan 9/11, the poll shows, and 26% believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction when the U.S. invaded. Another 24% believe several of the 9/11 hijackers were Iraqis." And 41% believe "Saddam Hussein had strong links with Al Qaeda."

Syriana... and a Covert CIA Program Uncovered

Covert CIA Program Withstands New Furor: the Washington Post reports that, "Duane R. 'Dewey' Clarridge, who directed the CIA's covert efforts to support the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, said the nature of CIA work overseas is, and should be, risky and sometimes ugly. 'You have a spy agency because the spy agency is going to break laws overseas. If you don't want it to do those dastardly things, don't have it. You can have the State Department.'"

That is the kind of hard headed analysis that gives neocons a woody. You know we're safe if these guys are in charge, because they're willing to get down and dirty, and do even ugly things. I think that is what conservatives imply about themselves that they are more honest and have the stomach for the pure use of force as opposed to liberal hypocrites who want their security but shy away at the cost of it.

I just saw Syriana and I was blown away, largely because of the way in which its interwoven narratives deftly demonstrated that covert usually means corrupt and that even the prosecutions of corruption are corrupt. This film doesn't make me feel despair, I feel the bracing chill of reality -- and it may just be entertainment in disguise, but the film's flirtation with and then abandonment of conspiracy narrative made it a deft analysis of complexity and the its visualization.

The easy seductions of oil money are connected to the charisma of the madrassa teachers. The potential recruits are less religious fanatics than dead end kids with a dream of momentary absolute power as compelling as the one that motivates Washington lobbyists and Texas oilmen.

Fifty Top Robots

Wired is listing what they consider the 50 Best Robots Ever - and while their definition of "robot" is a bit too loose, the pictures alone warrant a visit to this article... Here, the van Kempelen chess automaton rubs shoulders with the Roomba, classics like Vaucanson's duck and the false Maria are juxtaposed with Lego Mindstorm, and the Japanese comic phenomenon Astroboy (Tetsuwan Atom) almost bumps the Stanford VW-based autonomous vehicle from the top slot.

white shaman stay away!

Breaking Open the Head is the title of a book by Daniel Pinchbeck, who like me reads a lot of Walter Benjamin. This is a book about taking the trip to exotic and extremely impoverished lands and using psychedelic drugs as a replacement for psychoanalysis.

I'm afraid Pinchbeck is just going to write me off, if he ever reads this rant, as a psychedelic-hating, over-intellectualized freak, like Norman Mailer who "like most literati, hate psychedelics." But Pinchbeck had to travel to Gabon to partake of igoba and spend $7000 to enhance his impoverished dream-life and inner monologue, and I hate to boast, but my dreams are quite psychedelic as it is, in fact they are the more so, when my head is on my own pillow.

I'm not against psychedelics, I just don't like the idea of the "trip." I have to take a stand against travel. Travel, I have realized, prevents us from really thinking. Now, I can't say I'll never travel again, but I will travel reluctantly -- and yes, I travel for psychoanalysis, to France, because that's where they have this really pure, like really pure strain of it, and it really produces the BEST most psychedelic high, unlike the meager rewards of ego stroking or social working that one gets here after filling another prescription for whatever the latest mood reliever/orgasm suppressor they've got you on.

My life is RICH, my dreams ARE really amazing. I thought I was going to die on the flight back from Taiwan and I didn't see my life flash before my eyes, I realized I thought I deserved to die because I was so guilty about being neither the child of grandmother OR my mother. I'm comfortable sharing that much with you all, and I'll keep the rest to myself.

I am not fleeing from psychedelics because I want to have a safe and comfortable middle class intellectual life that Pinchbeck so despises, but because the couch has yielded more real hallucination for me than anything I've ever smoked or inhaled, or chewed down on. And I know my shrink is more powerful than his shaman.

But most of all, I hate Jung and Gurdjieff -- I really dislike neo-occultism. I think it offers us the most compromised forms of spiritual life around and Pinchbeck likes them and quotes them a lot. Jung was a re-mythologizer, seduced by Nazoid imagery because "it was, like, pagan too." The irony is that you have a much better chance of getting mainstream attention if you are a Jung lover and trash psychoanalysis than if you criticize the first and take seriously the latter.

buying the win

The US military now not only enlists bloggers to sway public opinion about its efforts, it pays Iraqi TV stations to reflect a US-friendly coverage. Nice. Bloggers, Money Now Weapons in Information War (Washington Post)

xmas thoughts

I'm realizing that it's really great to be home on Christmas. Not having to go to the Modern Languages Association meeting in Washington DC this year makes us feel as if we've made it! Unfortunately, it's also an uncomfortable time of year for atheists like me who find most Xmas posts in the blogosphere much too sanctimonious and crypto-Christian. Let's just say that the Christmas season is no time to relent on the critique of liberal "tolerance" (aka conversion of the other). But I admit that I like the songs and the lights! I even like the exchange of presents!

In this reflective mood, I've decided to post a shot of the alley where my grandmother lives in Taipei. I lived there myself from the ages of 1-4. Note the creative addition on concrete house. My grandmother's house is around the bend. Out of some kind of prudishness, I never got a shot of it.

Old Franglais

... speaking of class matters and the pretentious use of macaronic branding in the USA: it slays me how one kind of Franglais could become a pretentious accent in Paris: "les people sont si fair-play," "leur style est tres destroy," "c'est tellement design chez eux"... while on the other hand, language purists frown upon a more proletarian Franglais that has become permanently a part of everyday French -- "le week-end," "top" or even "hyper-top!" - Thus one might even consider modern English an Old Franglais!

Frank says to critics: class dismissed!

Crooked Timber links to Larry Bartels's critique of Thomas Frank and Frank's retort: class dismissed!


I'm reposting my own contribution on what is working class - is it income, is it self-definition? Can we rely on statistics and polling or the methods of social science to perform this phase of class analysis? A resounding no! Can we rely on Deleuzian/Hardtian celebrations of the creativity of the multitude? No again! Here it is -- straight from the hip -- this IS part of the book I'm working on:

I'll take a stab at the definition of working class from the point of view of cultural capital and its emergence in the 19th century as the "possession" of a newly dominant class of the bourgeoisie who defined themselves as superior to both the proletariat and the petit bourgeois because they had an organic that is familial relation with "high" culture. Of course this was a European innovation.

But then the socially progressive elites of the US decided as well to adopt division of culture into high and low (see Lawrence Levine on this): from Jane Addams (who thought that teaching handicrafts to workers would make them prouder of their station in life) to Frederick Law Olmsted (who wanted to teach the rabble of New York City to enjoy Central Park without spitting and gambling and hiring prostitutes -- so he actually created a new police space in the center of the city), progressives took up high culture as an instrument to educate the poor and immigrant classes, or those most explicitly exploited by massive industrialization.

This is at the root of American working class suspicion of cultural elites -- and the working class relationship to culture is not one of puritanical uplift -- either through symphony or museum attendance, or New Ageism, but rather one that is more unabashedly indulgent in the remnants of folk spectacle, even if industrialized (which is often identified as kitsch) -- so NASCAR, excessive Xmas lights, the Crystal Cathedral, professional sports are "working class" even if their participants make a lot more money that your average University professor who has more cultural capital, but less income on her W-2 form at the end of the year.

Thus, Frank's definition of working class as a mode of consumption would obtain here -- this is the stage of late capitalism that we have reached in these United States --class status is not self-defined as it defined by modes of consumption. Any strategist on the Left will be left helpless if she doesn't deal with this.

Now the ruling elite in the US has become more and more explicitly philistine in order to reach out to the discontentment of the culturally marginal -- this is perhaps the ultimate achievement of of post-modernism's overturning of high/low divisions.

police state NY

Police Infiltrate Protests, Videotapes Show (New York Times): "the dangers of terrorism were perils sufficient to outweigh any First Amendment cost"

Salon on Sarah Schulman & the high price of RENT

Salon Books on Sarah Schulman's Stagestruck: Theater, AIDS and the Marketing of Gay America and ends the lame assertion that even though the play and movie Rent very obviously ripped off her 1990 novel People in Trouble , Rent's more straight-friendly, planned community compatible narrative has reached more people and made much more money than -- say Angels in America . So there you have it -- this critic's final line is the bottom line and the inescapability of this logic in mainstream theater and criticism will choke the life out of any living human being. The spectacularization of bohemianism seems to be the final indignity suffered by the denizens of the world in which Schulman and I spent our youth.

For an interview with Schulman, look here .

OJ in the OC

This is a photograph courtesy of Leo, who just turned five. He sometimes simply photographs things he likes. As my to do list grows longer and longer, I am looking for ways of finding some way of apprehending things I like as well. Yesterday, on winter solstice, for example, our family went swimming and hot tubbing in the late afternoon and then fell into bed at 7:30, which is I think a very Californian way of spending the longest night of the year.

Don't drink the tap water in Guangzhou either

Reuters reports on a chemical leak (of cadmium) into a river that supplies drinking water to the over 9 million people who live in Guangzhou. The state owned zinc smelter up river is the source of the spill.

In the meantime, the benzene in the Songhua River in Heilongjiang province in China's northeast is slowly but surely flowing toward Russia...

Billionaire Mayor divides, hoping to conquer

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said that Transit Workers Union leaders had "thuggishly turned their backs on New York City," and accuses the union of hurting working New Yorkers.

I like it when billionaires express such deep sympathy for every single worker in his city, except for the ones who are striking.

And yes, we've seen this again and again. The privileged white guy makes the union members out to be coddled fat cats who are asking for more and more fat o'the land in order to sit around blowing bubbles out of their fifth story walk ups in the South Bronx, Red Hook, Jamaica, etc.

Thuggish and lazy at the same time -- this is the war of words that makes it into the media and appeals to the resentment of all those who do not have pensions or health insurance -- a dive for the bottom, leaving Bloomberg on top.

again boing boing has links to pix but no content

Boing Boing on NYC Transit strike hits, traffic slower than a 1993 modem - Bloomberg calls the Transit Workers Union "thugs" and the head of the Union appeals to a justice higher than the law. You decide who is trying to keep the working class in its place.

Is the Irvine Company French?

It's a hideous professorial PEEVE of mine, but I can't stand the addition of the -e to 'Point': I don't want to hear PWAHNT in my mind when the English word, which is just as good as the French word -- is E-less, and will always be E-less.

Let me repeat myself: point is not spelled with an "e" in English, it's spelled with an "E" in French, and since this is a red county, Irvine Company can you please respect our language and try not to spell words in a French way????

Adding an effing E to point does not make this luxury apartment complex on the Newport Back Bay anymore luxurious or French. In fact, French does not signify luxurious, you may not want to hear this, but most French people live very modestly and could never afford to pay for that extra "E." OK? Spell correctly and maintain the dignity of our language.

Actually I googled Bay Pointe -- as two words and this spelling abounds in the US. So it's not just Orange County and the Irvine Company, but still, take back the "E"! Spell correctly! It supports our troops who don't want to fight for the French spellings of any words!

My Left Wing : Slouching Toward Kristallnacht

My Left Wing excerpts Milton Mayers' They Thought They Were Free.

An commentator at Daily Kos wrote in response to the post above, "Conservatism taken to its logical conclusion leads to fuedalism in an agricultural society and to fascism in an industrial society." He or she offers aggressive liberalism as the solution.

But the problem as Adorno and Horkheimer saw it was that liberalism was all too eager to promise happiness and equality for all while retaining a class system that would always demolish the working class's dreams for anything like either. Their revolt would easily become the grounds of a Fascist revolt against what they see as liberalism's broken promises and betrayals.

Therefore, the working class white man identifies with the cause of war as an attack on liberalism's betrayals as embodied by the lame, lame Democrats as much as on the external enemy, be he Osama or what's that other guy's name?

Drawing us into a vortex of satanic impotence

"If it is said that divine power attracts creation, satanic power likewise draws everything into its own impotence.” (Adorno and Horkeimer, "Elements of Anti-Semitism" published in the Dialectic of Enlightenment)

It is because we are essentially impotent that we must join him in violating the civil liberties of American citizens, the sovereignty of other nations, kowtow to Dick Cheney, Prince of Fear and wage a perpetual war against terror, privatize security operations to the profit of Halliburton, wallow in corruption and absolute certainties. From this world nothing creative or positive (except for certain bank accounts) can emanate.

Eminem used as torture device

Rap torture is a new technique pioneered by American interrogators in Afghanistan. - I found 8 Mile barely watchable despite its star attraction's real charisma. The rags to riches story and the anticlimatic performance scenes made me decidedly uninterested in rap's great white hope, but the idea of using his music as a torture technique -- that shows an understanding of the relationship between background music and the breakdown of resistance worthy of Adorno.

Dongzhou massacre

Chinese whispers of discontent. Peking Duck has covered this as well, and their comments are funnier and better informed on the China issue. Crooked Timber has always had the snarkiest commenters in the blogosphere. I've been swamped by family obligations and have not had time to keep track of this incident, which is yet another story of local corruption, rebellion and state violence. But there has been a cryptic denunciation from within China, on the Internets and it may have long term effects.

So even if Taiwan is convinced that there is no way other than reunification, China may fall apart from within. This is of course, the fantasy that the house of cards will fall apart, but there if there is enough extreme nationalism among the newly enriched bourgeoisie ready to protect its new privileges, then you will see the continuation of the hard-line against dissidents, rampant corruption and labor abuses -- and it will turn out that authoritarianism will be China's biggest export. For if indeed, this is China's century, as long as the government kills its citizens with impunity and still manages to enrich its privileged classes, we will see the Chinese amplification of capitalist models of exploitation.

Perhaps Latin America will make the last stand against globalized profiteering: of course, Halliburton and China Steel may still be our masters for a generation, but not of the entire world...

Sex and The Nutcracker

This ballet is all about a young girl's sexual awakening in the arms of a rather stiff, but brave... nutcracker. The Kiev Ballet and South Coast Performing Art Center's version was ravishing, so much so that the sixty-something balletomane (now there's a word one doesn't often use these days) sitting behind us in the last row gasped every time the brave doll turned prince swept up Maria and just so gently put her back down. Ravishing takes a literal meaning. The port de bras of the Ukrainians was as light as butter, as supple as velveteen. Dance companies make their money at this time of year, and I am happy to help them.

Tchaikovsky's music brought tears to me eyes, even the Chinese pas de deux, a ridiculous 19th-century Orientalist fantasy - mixing up Japan with China to bring into being some of the most awkward dance moves ever seen on stage or screen. But the Arabian pas de deux, gorgeously danced, was even more more absurd, an Egyptian fantasy with Ali Baba costumes and billowing pants. They're toys, 19th century toys come to life - giving us a glimpse of how the world could be contained by a decorated tree one hundred years ago - and are meant to entertain a young girl who has fallen asleep with her wounded doll, awoke to see it defeating a mouse and embraced a human being where there once was only wood - and all on Xmas eve! Matters of 19th century kitsch aside, it must be said that even five year olds like Leo are enchanted by this tale danced with swords, replete with a magician battle, a beauty and a beast defeated. No Christ in this Christmas story either.

home improvement ain't self improvement

As the New York Times reports: 2nd Army Officer Charged In Iraq Rebuilding Scandal: "cash, intended for projects like a library in the holy city of Karbala and an Iraqi police academy south of Baghdad, paid for a new hot tub and a deck for Colonel Harrison's home in Trenton"...

World Values Survey

World Values Survey gives us this image of the world's spiritual values across a visual graph with Confucianism winning out as the most secular/rational worldview -- scary, if that is indeed true.

This image is indeed fascinating, with Protestant Northern Europe and the US as front runners on the self-expression scale.

Check it OUT!

Why is 'University Hills' News to the LA Times?

Less-costly housing is a professorial perk This photo is NOT a University Hills house, but is for sale in Irvine, CA: you can own a giant two car garage attached to a house for a mere $850,000!

Disclosure: we are buying in these here University Hills of Irvine, at far, far below market value. Even so, we are deeper in our ears in debt than Emma Bovary on a bad day. But why is "real estate" news? Since housing is so unaffordable around here, perhaps the LA Times is trying to promote careers in academia as a way of financing OC real estate. If you're tempted to do a Ph.D. in order to buy in the Uni Hills, don't do it.

I know all about real estate porn, which I no longer indulge in since OC prices and the planned community lack of curb appeal have made me prudish. What would I say to these beige palaces? My what big GARAGE DOORS you have! I would have to scan ads for homes in Oklahoma to be able to 1) have any realistic chances of satisfying my cravings 2) find houses with basements and garages in the back.

But real estate infotainment?

That is sad, sad, sad...

Blue versus Green

After a week in Taiwan, I can say that the difference in feeling after the recent KMT election victory is palpable. When I left Taiwan last summer, people still insisted that democracy was worth defending, if only with one's life. Now, however, there is a sense that corruption and greed are so out of control in the Green Party that only authoritarianism can clean house. This can be blamed on two parties -- the Greens for their incompetence and the media who have an endless line up of right wing, Bill O'Reilly like talk shows that are highly KMT flavored. ALL the KMT men part their hair almost at their ears: they delight in shaking their heads and making sanctimonious statements about DPP or greens.

The KMT is finding that they have more in common with the Chinese Communist Party than they could every imagine. Both sides agree that power emanates from the barrel of a gun: and we should kow-tow to power, or those with the biggest and most guns. The CCP is powerful and growing more so everyday so everyone should just get in line. This just makes the idea that the Chinese Civil war was won in 1949 in order to overturn one form of corrupt authoritarianism in order to pave the way for another. Oh the humanity!

Former supporters of Chen Shui bian or the Green Party President on the other hand are in the streets exercising their democratic and hard fought right to protest his recent divisive statements attacking civil servants and teachers retirement plans.

Chen has really painted himself into a corner. The irony however is that while the KMT celebrates the division in the Green Party, they look forward and back to a time when peaceful protests were violently put down.

the real meaning of turbulence

Over the Northern Pacific two or maybe three nights ago, my flight encountered HOURS of turbulence and I thought I was going to die: my brain was jostled like jelly and I could hear stuff banging around in overhead compartments and storage bins throughout the plane. And I was in the last row of the jumbo jet -- numbered 69. I thought this was a bad sign. When I opened my eyes, I thought I was in a 3 D Hollywood movie about airplane disasters.

I had had portents of ill fortune before boarding, but as I tried to breathe through my nose to calm my nerves, I began to realized that all dreaded violence and catastrophe come from the intrapsychic world. I had wanted to declare myself "against travel" before my trip even began, but some one told me that Deleuze had already beat me to a manifesto against globe-trotting.

it's "Dean Grey Tuesday," idiot

Today is Dean Grey Tuesday, a net-wide day of protest over the attempt by Warner Brothers to censor the noncommercial mashup album "American Edit" that remixes Green Day's album "American Idiot" - well, I am not sure if it's worth comparing to the Grey Album (I did not catch this new mash-up before the vultures squashed it, although I did get the Grey Album in time).

reception bot

May I Help You?

Rather than dealing with young female receptionists who have to maintain an even keeled, sweet natured, helpful if rather robotic demeanor, you can deal instead with a REAL LIVE ROBOT!

(I've just returned from six days in Asia -- don't do it, unless you can fly first class. A one week trip to Asia from the continental US just means two weeks of jet lag). Thanks Dr. K.! for keeping the blog fires burning! (and to Shane King from Monsters, Robots, Cyborgs for leading me to reception bot).

over and out

done guest blogging for the international traveler...

cyborg couture: 80s retro

This Wired piece looks back on the time when "graduate students began strolling around the MIT campus looking like cyborgs," but neglects to mention the cyborg couture on display at this year's Siggraph in Los Angeles (Cyber Fashion Show 2005, Wednesday, 3 August) which featured wearables from the Banff New Media Institute, MIT Media Lab, the Wearable Fashion Group at Keio University, the Innovation Centre @ Central St. Martin's College of Art and Design, and a number of design companies. Cyborg style is not just about head-mounted displays, it also encompasses smart clothes, futuristic club wear, and CAD/CAM jewelry. I don't have pix because I was a bit underwhelmed with how 80s retro it all looked... (admittedly not inappropriate for a convention center in downtown LA). So let me state the obvious here - those texts by Donna Haraway and William Gibson, those clothes by Thierry Mugler and Madonna: they're just not up to speed for current cyberarts.

shoe dropping at Tulane

The reorganization plan announced today at Tulane in the wake of Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath "is unprecedented in the modern history of academe," as the Chronicle reports. Layoffs, restructuring on graduate and undergraduate levels, closing departments, eliminating 14 doctoral programs, cutting down on NCAA level sports - the administrators are cutting a broad swath. The layoffs (180 in the medical school and 53 other academics) amount to 10 per cent of faculty, and affect 65 tenured professors. Earlier, Tulane had laid off 243 full-time staff members and 150 part-time employees.

targets of opportunity

"Target of opportunity" was an expression used by the Bush Administration (as quoted in the Washington Post, March 20, 2003, p. A1) to describe the American attempt to kill Saddam Hussein at the start of the second Gulf War. Targets of opportunity are transient phenomena; their exact timing and/or location are uncertain - they're targeted before they come into range.

How many more people have to be killed as a direct consequence of the current US administration? In the words of the Defense Special Weapons Agency, the international scene "has now evolved from a weapon-rich environment to a target-rich environment." Are we trying to make ourselves feel alive by asserting that we can kill - even as killing turns you into a pathetic corpse-in-waiting? Death as a way to overcome death...

Samuel Weber took the phrase for the title of a new book, Targets of Opportunity: On the Militarization of Thinking. From Odysseus to Carl Schmitt, and from Freud and Benjamin to the concept of "netwar," Weber reads "the notion of targeting (skopos) as the name of an intentional structure in which the subject tries to confirm its invulnerability by aiming to destroy a target." I highly recommend it.



I found this target practice area in rural Taiwan, in a water park (visiting the owner of this blog). The attendant would rent you a bow and a basket of arrows. It wasn't too popular, except with kids. But it was definitely what they call "a photo opp" - so I shot arrows, and this photo.

Unnovations

Tomorrow's outmoded artefacts today. From the makers of "TV Go Home" comes a comic spoof of the consumer-product catalogues that arrive like an unwanted rash from newpapers and magazines.

TV go home

"It's just stupid."
"Stupid people think it's cool. Smart people think it's a joke; also cool"
... to quote another signature exchange between alternative press writer Dan Ashcroft (from the series Nathan Barley) and his supercool editor.
Well, Simon Wistow @ the gestalt.org offers a rather extensive compendium to the parameters of potential Nathan Barley plots... can you blame anyone for suspecting this ubergeek, dorkbot guest, perl pro, gamer, media maven, and social commentator - either of being the inspiration for, or jealous of, Nathan Barley?
But no, the show's fons et origo is actually the (now defunct) TV Go Home, a satirical TV guide website (link takes you to the wayback machine on archive.org, where you can browse the remains - it's also now archived in book form). Taking aim at style journals and celebrity magazines, this site also ridicules hypertrendy music channels and their vapid VJ culture; it was inevitable that a TV show would be made of this - that's how quickly criticism of popular culture is assimilated by popular culture...

Need a Lift? Try a Godcast

From BusinessWeek: Need a Lift? Try a Godcast: "Star Wars robots C-3PO and R2-D2 visit Baby Jesus" - you just could not make this stuff up ('cept this guy did... a man of the cloth...)

new age update - it's still stupid

Hot on the tail of the denouncement of those who would so quickly denounce the rise of idiocy - and as version 2.0 of a complete idiot's guide to the Complete Idiot's Guide crowd - I second, somewhat belatedly, what this very blog's host says about the newest new age pundits (and, for instance, their regrettable presence in otherwise quite readable rags such as Arthur magazine) - the new age is still stupid: precisely in the way it proposes less intelligent and more intelligent appropriations of new age spirituality... The shameless eclecticism of such cafeteria-style self-helpings of belief systems invariably sells itself not as hodge podge (or hot pot) but as the cool "new new thing," when actually it's nothing more than self-improvement on the cheap, giving a horrid name to time-honored and often very respectable traditions. Buy silly orientalist baubles online - fine, but don't make them "spiritual" appendages of your commodity fetishism. You like Buddhism - then maybe you ought to study a language or two, along with some serious history... Meditate with your friends and neighbors - good, but don't make it the latest in-crowd dating scene. Profess kabbalah - ok, then don't just talk about it (or use it as a selling ploy) but read scripture for a good number of years. Give your brain a workout, don't let your wallet do the walking for you. If you want some lighter fare, don't watch teevee for Seven Years, instead get Chaim Potok's book The Chosen. But if, on the other hand, instant satisfaction is exactly as you prefer it - wisdom in a pocket, just add water: weekend getaway, enlightenment guaranteed - then just have it that way and stick to it. Fuck tradition, it's your day. But please: Don't blabber about it, just let your wallet do all the talking.

Is Sarah Silverman America's ID?

Sarah Silverman channels every Jewish American Princess on the level of gesture and then animates her with the voice of America's upper middle class ID -- and what does Id chatter on about -- race AIDS anal sex and fine jewelry that costs the lives of African children. Ha

rise of the idiots

A Complete Idiot's Guide to Nathan Barley: after I was tipped off to the brilliant comedy series Nathan Barley on Channel 4 (UK), I winced through every episode, thinking: this is so true it's almost not funny any more...

Nathan Barley is 26. He is a webmaster, guerrilla filmmaker, screenwriter, DJ and in his own words, a "self-facilitating media node". He is convinced he is the epitome of urban cool and therefore secretly terrified he might not be, which is why he reads Sugar Ape Magazine - his bible of cool.

Dan Ashcroft writes searing columns for Sugar Ape. He's considered astonishingly cool, but only by those he despises. He is surrounded by idiots and practically worshipped by Nathan (whom he considers to be their king). He is 34. Why has he failed to move on?

Claire Ashcroft, 27, is Dan's sister. Like Dan she despises "cool". She hasn't met Nathan yet, but like him she is a film-maker. Unlike him she despises novelty, trash, irony and gadgets. She is furious that no one will fund her hard-hitting documentary about a choir of reformed junkies.

I suppose one thing to take away from the painful hilarity is that even as it is tempting to denounce the rise of the idiots - the masses who willingly buy lots of Complete Idiot's Guides to everything, the purported "artists" who are nothing more than real estate developers in bad faith, the brainless design junkies, the dangerous drivers who floor the pedal in their SUV like they're flushing gas down the toilet, the rampant anti-intellectualism that condones and encourages nothing but commodity fetishism and countin' the green, the clueless people who buy guide books to organize their own weddings, the pseudo-academics who get ahead by claiming things that aren't, ahem, historically verifiable - it is good to keep in mind that this mode of condescension is all too easily ossified in the pose of the loser. And a final warning, from a user comment on IMDb (of all places!): "the people who don't appreciate Nathan Barley clearly are the people who find Friends funny." Now that would be funny, if it wasn't so true.

blogging: a family affair

Sublunar Harem is our friend's nephew's blog. A student, the very best kind who loves learning. --- And here is my cousin's blog. She grew up in Taiwan, where she is a documentary filmmaker. She just returned from a three month working trip to India. You can practice your Chinese on the Wheel of Time.