Entrepreneurial City

a postcard of campus

2009-10-05T12:19:00.000-07:00

In April 1906, too eager to await arrival at Stanford University, L.M.H posts to an acquaintance an image of the traveler’s future: “I am a little ahead of myself as I will not see this for several weeks yet but never mind,” writes L.M.H. in Boston across the bottom of this postcard.

L.M.H., however, never arrived at the scene. Days after this card made post, the 1906 earthquake demolished the major monuments featured at the center of the image, the chapel and memorial arch. The caption is fitting at both personal and political scales: not only does the image portray a place the sender expected, but failed to find, the setting itself is one of a deeply occluded future. It is worth, then, a closer look at these two early nineteenth century mediums, the postcard and the campus, as they both offer an (emotional) practice that has become all but obsolete today.

The campus, as if in struggle against the increasing dispersion of everything, unites architecture and planning as a means of asserting a place defined, in ideals and materials, as a self-contained autonomy. The postcard, on the other hand, captures everything by making the most of its mass-produced redundancy, temporality, cheapness, and patchwork aesthetic; it dislodges everything from context, and alone offers its sender the small space in which a minor personal note or adventure may illuminate a whole scenery’s meaning. Nevertheless, these opposing styles of completion (autonomous singularity, or compulsive reproducibility) align in their committed expression of the not-yet: the postcard drops into the mailbox filled with the same anticipatory hope as the campus’s imagined future. “I am a little ahead of myself as I will not see this for several weeks but never mind,” scribbles L.M.H. beneath the oval green field preceding Leland’s Stanford university city which famously began with a clairvoyance of is own: “the children of California shall be my children” announced Leland shortly after the death of his only son. The campus and the postcard avow a glimpse into the distance, like an augur.

Photo Tag

2008-09-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

A local(?) experiment in photogenicism. Take out your cell phone and snap a picture, your best picture of something that catches your eye. Anything at all. Send the image to phototag {at} hotmail.com. Then see everyone else's pictures. Vote on your favorite image. The top three images will win a cash prize and have their image enlarged, framed, and displayed on campus: location TBA.

Take a photo, send it, vote, leave comments, make something collectively, come along, be a part, rise anew, stand and sing, take a form, come and see, resonate, be not afraid.

Deadline to SEND: Nov 1, 2008
Deadline to VOTE: Nov 4, 2008

Personalized faith

2008-09-07T23:57:00.000-07:00

People are harder to read than usual and you might accidentally rile someone up if you're not extra-careful. It's not like they're ready to pounce, but misunderstandings are just far too easy.

Im a Taurus and thats my day's horoscope. There is a grad student in the anthropology department that rumor has it based her decision of who to chair her dissertation solely on faculty members' astrological sign. Is the increasing significance of celestial life forces strictly an academic character trait? Or more generally speaking, is it the increasing resolve to finally accept a socially meaningless life that now functions to endow our "present" with either a religious fundamentalism or an absolute personalized contingency? Anything can happen today, its best to read my horoscope and find out what it will be.

Vicky Christina Barcelona (2008)

2008-09-02T14:33:00.000-07:00

Complacency Insanity Loneliness more accurately pinpoints the trifecta Woody Allen offers us in his hat toss into the post 9/11 genre of the dysfunctional family/relationship. I have to admit that this is by far my favorite American genre to have surfaced since my beloved slasher film kicked the bucket in 1984 with the (still worthy) Silent Night, Deadly Night. Axe wielding Santa was, I guess, as far as we were all willing to go, unfortunately. For some reason or another, without a holiday to base a string of murders around, killing just wasn't entertaining anymore (but do see recent posts below for a more suggestive reason for this out-moded genre).

But back to the matter at hand. The dysfunctional relationship genre has perhaps its first appearance with Kramer vs. Kramer (1979). But the post 9/11 version of this theme is much more cynical than its post-Vietnam counterpart (Thanks to Kiersten for connecting war itself to the meditation that this anti-love genre wants us to undergo). For definitional purposes lets outline a few of this genre's most recent examples: The Squid and the Whale, Little Children, Margot at the Wedding, Broken Flowers, The Station Agent, House of Sand and Fog, Punch-Drunk Love, Lost in Translation, and last and definitely least, Wes Anderson's entire oeuvre (can all hipsters here face the fact that this guy has nothing more to say until he hits age 60, and this, only if, god help him, he somehow turns "political?")

The unhappy ending is a new trope in this genre and I kind of like it for that fact. But I guess I'm beginning to wonder if its a symptom of the fact that these filmmakers, despite how acutely personal their character studies have become, maintain a frustrating lack of imagination in their adherence to the humdrum definition of middle-class romance. Which is to say that these relationships are "dysfunctional" only to the extent that they are measured up to the 'true romance' of an earlier generation's definition of 'till death do us part.' If we were to abandon that as the goal, these stories wouldn't be seen as dysfunction, they would simply be stories of the grand escape from that definition of love, they would be understood as jail-break films. But the Shawshank Redemption is there to remind us that the process of such a difficult escape is just as intriguing as that day when, hopefully, all of us will get to eventually massage that sun-kissed sailboat with long restorative thrusts of gritty sandpaper. And maybe its just not watchable, but who among us will write or even imagine, nevermind risk searching for the actual thing itself in real life, the story of the relationship that isn't betrothed in complacency, insanity, or loneliness?

Vicky Christina Barcelona offers us something midway through the film: a threesome becomes the most functional glimpse of a relationship Hollywood or even an indie film has shown us in years. Is this simply that good ole wishful thinking from a misogynist culture? Or am I too ambitious here to suggest that the film has momentarily begun to actually imagine love differently as something altogether unrecognized and unregistered by the state, that is to say, love as a collectivity?

Participating from a distance; or, Untraceable (2008)

2008-08-29T10:37:00.000-07:00

Marketed as 'The Silence of the Lambs for the Internet Age,' Untraceable tells the story of a young adult angered over the way in which his father's suicide became a national laughing-stock on Youtube, decides to build a website that is intricately connected to people he has captured and now places into precarious positions: wired to a lethal dose of blood thinner, surrounded by heat lamps, in a glass box piped to sulphuric acid. They aren't necessarily dead yet. But I say precarious because our antagonist has rigged it so that the more people that log onto the website to witness the scenario, the sooner the victim meets his death. Spectatorship is no longer neutral observation, its active participation, a kind of weapon. The online public becomes an accomplice to a murder that otherwise never would have happened. Needless to say, the number of watchers surge into the millions faster and faster with each new exhibition.

Untraceable flopped at the box office and most critics hated it for either being too conventional or else not following those conventions of the thriller genre. Adam Tobias of the Watertown Daily Times points out,

Part of the problem with “Untraceable” is the identity of the killer behind the Web site is revealed way too early, thus taking most of the mystery out of the movie.

and

But what is confusing is that while Jennifer, Griffin and Eric are trying to stop people from being murdered one by one, the workers in the FBI office are glued to their computer screens watching the terror unfold. Which begs the question: If these are the people who are paid to protect us, then why are they helping out the killer by speeding up executions?

The film does back-off from the cynical position of bluntly accusing the watching public of being evil as at one point someone in the film suggests, 'its only human to be curious.' But it is clear the audience is meant to feel complicitous and ultimately guilty for the way the internet so easily allows us to make light of the most gruesome situations, the most degrading humiliations. And there is somewhat of a conservative edge to any such pronouncements which, in the next breath, often want to move towards censorship and restraint. Much like any city will want to incarcerate or 'relocate' its homeless population whenever the Olympics of even a democratic convention rolls into town. What remains untraceable is still all those millions around the world without an internet connection. Yet our movie has no trouble substituting its middle-class online spectators with that larger group known as 'humanity.' Once more the language of ethics (who is responsible?) stands in for that of economic inequality and considerations of personal freedom stand in for doubts about capitalist social organization itself.

We have, at least, finally gotten our answer to why the slasher genre--so lucrative in the 80s and 90s--is all but old-fashioned and exhaustive to today's audiences. The serial killer has become obsolete and luke-warm in a culture where "everyone" is equally, politically, legally responsible.

La Commare Secca (1962)

2008-08-28T12:46:00.000-07:00

Bertolucci's first film, La Commare Secca, gives us the Italian take on Kurosawa's Rashoman. Here, a prostitute has been murdered on the bank of the Tiber and we listen to police interrogate five men: a thief, a middle-aged pimp, a soldier on furlough, an unemployed vagrant, a young lover of gnocchi--all of whom were seen at the park where she solicits on the day of her murder. The film is five mini films on how time was passed for five lives in the rainy afternoon before which a woman was murdered for her purse.

The title of the film gets translated into English as "The Grim Reaper" but something has been lost here. Commare secca is a term you will only hear in Rome and is indeed the unique name this region gives to death, but it is important to note the literal translation of commare secca is 'dry housewife.' Quiet opposite of a prostitute, and this play on words is significant for everything the movie seemed to signal to its own unique historical moment.

In 1962, its quite clear the film wanted to say something--in as poetic a way as possible--about how a murder could occur in the same afternoon trajectory as say, a soldier fell asleep on a park bench, a boy was beaten for stealing, a man curses his outsmarting ex-girlfriend. Life is flimsy and short for most of those outside the camera's eye.

We know this story all too well by now and the film no longer holds its punch in terms of its intended political commentary. But what does stand out is not so much the point that life is a slow or quick death for those outside the middle class, but rather the fact that a filmmaker once set out to present this grim truth in such a lyrical manner. The dancing curtains of rain, the perpetually moving camera, the comb through the hair, the timing of that acoustic guitar, brings all these small stories forth into an enormous and fundamental surplus of life's ubiquitous dimming resonance.

Minger and I talk of branching EC out into a radio documentary podcast in which we interview various people in the bay area. What would the Silicon Valley version of a 'dry housewife' be? How does daily life here relate to daily death and, if it does, what role, if any, would 'style' serve to represent this relationship?

Because 'style' or 'innovation' is deeply active in Silicon Valley, not so much by its filmmakers and writers, but rather through the convictions of its managers. The defense of craft and freedom of creativity is voiced loudest by SV's corporations and new humanistic management theories which encourages high levels of autonomy and self-development as a crucial component of any lucrative firm. Then: we have to face the fact that humanism, as it has been invented and smuggled into American society largely by English and philosophy departments of the late nineteenth century, is most actively brandished today by the corporate world. The entrepreneur in Silicon Valley carries the torch the English department once did for the university. Humanism is alive and well, it has simply been channeled toward market innovation. Managers, it seems, have all remembered that one day they (their product) too will die, and therefore fun needs to be part of the production process so that they may live again. In which case it is not the Grim Reaper and our relation to death that measure the absurdity of these days, but our relationship to a now vanished, even among the subcultures, way of living. Most bluntly, how does one dare today to even begin to explicate the practical public value of labor that lacks a marketable product? 'La Commare Secca' of Silicon Valley is the rather hilarious, if it wasnt so pathetic, position of any professor of humanities.

Because we were made that way

2008-08-20T18:36:00.000-07:00

Almost like the universe itself compelled me to respond to mordenti's post, I was listening today to a podcast (Speaking of Faith again) about the meaning of play. Here is Dr. Stuart Brown on the topic:

[P]lay is trivial. It's what you do when your responsibilities are taken care of, particularly as an adult. But if you were to follow, as I have at least scholastically and, if not, clinically, if you're to follow the trail of play in both animals and humans, the beginning point of play in the mother-infant or parent-infant bonding process is kind of the spontaneous eruption of joy and pleasure upon the process of being safely fed and, in the case of the human, when there is eye contact. And the social smile emerges and the infant and the mother begins to coo. That cooing, that's worldwide. And there is mutual joy. And the brain imaging that's associated with that shows an attunement between the mother's right cortex, a nondominant hemisphere of the brain, and the baby's.

And then if you build on that and say, 'OK, the child has experienced that and now they're growing up a little bit,' they get some of the same joyful experience from grabbing something, putting it in their mouths when they're infants, and then a little later, playing with toys, and then ultimately, parallel play with other children and on and on. I could go right on up through the whole life cycle, each of which has more and more intricate, more complex play if the individual is sort of allowed, through the environment, to take advantage of it.

There is no why

2008-08-20T12:28:00.000-07:00

He was in the dentist office when he saw an article about the twin towers in NYC. He drew a line to connect their roofs. His dream was to walk across this line. He had felt they were now unknowingly building these structures solely for him. But these twin towers instead became the symbol of an entire generation precisely because of the bodies that did ultimately fall from their towering heights.

Phillipe Petit was not one of them. He walked back and forth eight times over the course of 40 minutes across the wire he fastened between the WTC towers. He trained at Notre Dame, a bridge in Sydney, a park outside Paris. Where did the money come to do all this? Why did all of his relationships--both intimate and platonic--end immediately after this feat? Unfortunately for me, the film does not go into these details. We are told Phillipe is particularly upset by the media's immediate response, they want to know 'why did you do this?' He tells us this is an uniquely American question, only Americans would watch this act of beauty and immediately ask why. There is no why, he tells them.

But perhaps the question can be changed around. That is to say, who else in the entire world could see the value of 'art for art's sake' in 1974 other than a well-to-do Frenchman? Children have been napalmed in Vietnam, a civil rights movement had brought entire continents together, a national recession had brought homelessness into figures widely beyond those known in any other of the world's metropols. All of this was in ear shot when Phillipe Petit shifted his weight from the left foot firmly on the roof to the right foot now slightly touching the suspended wire half a mile in the air. In total concentration, he balanced above it all in the name of 'poetry,' 'the sublime,' 'the utopian boundlessness of human potential.' This was one last outcry of nineteenth century humanism.

What can we make of this today? Do we call this unfettered narcissism of a sadly disconnected madman, or rather a statement about how much more would actually be possible within all of us if we we were not hourly burdened with the numbing obligation to earn a living?

Where there's smoke (or Sometimes A Cigar?)

2008-08-18T20:26:00.001-07:00

Allow me to present an emotional revelation in four (and a half) parts/four days.

Thursday: Groundwork

Last Thursday, I listened to Eckhart Tolle being interviewed on Speaking of Faith. Here's Tolle talking about his notion of the "pain body" (I got the text from the transcript of the program):

[H]ow can there be so much emotional pain when the situation that [a person is] in cannot actually justify that much emotional pain? ... there's something in everybody that is a remnant of past painful emotion. And these remnants of past painful emotion from pain that you suffered as a child, perhaps even pain that was passed on from previous generations.

Friday early evening: An Abstract

On Friday, I told B. that I found it very difficult to be present, to pay attention to the particular thing happening in the moment. Instead, I said, my mind would immediately jump from the present to an abstracted universal, of which the present was only an example, and an insignificant one, at that. Even that statement, I noticed right away, was an abstraction. I couldn't even tell him about a particular time when I went from the concrete to the abstract, since such a time would itself have been a concrete example.

Discerning principles in the particular is an important skill for attorneys and judges engaged in legal argumentation, but when you can't turn it off, it becomes an impediment to mindful living.

Friday late evening: All The Wrong Places

At the end of the evening, when B told me he did not want to date, I had an emotional response that was quite out of proportion to the event. I had fears, anxieties and judgments come up, such as the fear that this was just another example of a "failed" date that confirmed my essentially unlovable or undate-able nature.

Tolle suggests that we "become the space for the emotion", and cultivate an awareness of the pain body, which is the thing that causes these apparently disproportionate hurts.

Late that night, speaking with my brother, I was indeed able to talk about my pain body, its manifestations and possible sources. This included relating to him a rather unfortunate incident in my childhood when my father, out of a misguided attempt to shame me into losing weight (I shall assume it wasn't out of pure spite or intentional hurtfulness), told me that I was so fat that, if I were a girl, nobody would want to marry me, certainly he wouldn't. I think I was about 13 or 14, at just the age when sexual and social anxieties were foremost in my mind. This was one of the first times that I became aware that there could be things about me that were sexually and socially undesirable, and also that certain traits were inherently bad, and made me essentially unlovable.

That night I tried to sit and go through the Metta meditation, but was not even able to summon up lovingkindness for a child, as I was feeling so vulnerable and uncared-for myself. I tried to feel some lovingkindness for myself as well, but with similarly lack of success. I decided that I would practice self-care by going to bed rather that sitting.

Saturday: Mixers and Maturity

On Saturday evening, I went to a wedding where I felt a mix of emotions. Some were positive: happiness for my friends who were getting married, relief at having gotten there on time, joy at seeing an old friend I hadn't seen in a while, delight in the little funny things that happen at grand/solemn ceremonies. Some were what I would call negative: melancholy at the passage of time, sadness that I was not at this time anticipating my own marriage or celebrating with my love partner, some physical discomfort at the cold and my own hunger and, of course, guilt for not feeling an unadulterated joy.

Of all these emotions, I now see that only two were "present-oriented": the delight and the physical discomfort. I think also that these two emotions are strongly associated with children's reactions to such ceremonies.

At the dinner, I drank enough to be very pleasantly tipsy throughout.

Sunday: A man of substance

On Sunday, I had a sudden urge to buy and smoke a cigar. In retrospect I have some possible explanations (none or all of which may be true) for this urge:
1) My masculinity needed some bolstering after the somewhat tiring and dispiriting emotions of the previous two days.
2) Mordenti had mentioned smoking cigars the last time I saw him, and I was missing his company on Sunday.
3) I was sleep-deprived and seeking a stimulant to self-medicate.
4) I was horny from not having had sex for a while, and wanted to interact with something phallic.
5) I was craving novelty to once again tap into that feeling of delight which I knew I was capable of because of Saturday's ceremony.
6) I wanted to spend money on a "luxury" in order to revel in my ability to provide myself with things I wanted.

As I smoked, I thought about all the things the cigar represented, but I also thought about the physical details of smoking the cigar. It had been very difficult to light the cigar, a lot more so than a cigarette. Also, smoking a cigar required a very different action from smoking a cigarette. Instead of inhaling the smoke into my lungs, I tried to hold it in my mouth in order to taste the qualities of the tobacco. I was careful also to exhale, when I remembered, through my nose, the better to smell the smoke. A breathing exercise of sorts.

So what does it mean to smoke a cigar? It means all the things in that numbered list. But it also means all the things in the paragraph that follows. Smoking implies fire as well as loneliness; breathing as well as stimulation; tasting and taste.

Hawaii palace takeover

2008-08-16T18:17:00.000-07:00

An "occupation public information bulletin" distributed by a member of the group began: "Majesty Akahi Nui, the King of Hawaii, has now reoccupied the throne of Hawaii. The Kingdom of Hawaii is now re-enacted."

Akahi Nui claims to have been coronated in 1998.

Hawaiian activists have long used Iolani Palace, the site of Queen Liliuokalani's imprisonment following the 1893 U.S. overthrow, as a prime location for protests against the United States' occupation of the islands.

About 6:30 p.m., the group let reporters onto the palace grounds for about an hour. A spokesman, Alfred Love, said he was a federal marshal. He said he "placed the kingdom under federal protective custody" and has asked the U.S. Congress to determine that the 1893 overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii was illegal.

"Our plan is to take the palace for the crown," Love said. "Our flag is now over the guard house, the flag has not flown since before 1892. We plan to be here forever."

more.

Of the approximately 30,000 residents, eight percent of the population in East Palo Alto identified themselves as Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander in 2000.

Since we're on the subject of statistics, race, and politics, take a look at these comparisons of the crime statistics comparing Palo Alto, East Palo Alto, and the Nation in 2006. The 2007 stats come out in two months.

By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples

2008-08-14T15:58:00.000-07:00

Orson Scott Card has a blog entry* on Mormontimes.com that opens with this proclamation:

The first and greatest threat from court decisions in California and Massachusetts, giving legal recognition to "gay marriage," is that it marks the end of democracy in America.

A little hyperbolic, sure, but that's to be expected of a right-wing rant against The Gay Agenda. But Card saves the Big Guns for last. Here are the last two paragraphs, which start with a stirring call to action (in the form of a rhetorical question):

How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.

Biological imperatives trump laws. American government cannot fight against marriage and hope to endure. If the Constitution is defined in such a way as to destroy the privileged position of marriage, it is that insane Constitution, not marriage, that will die.

It's worth remembering the history of the Mormon church. Hell, the history of Christianity, too, why not. The very same page that had Card's blog had a banner on top featuring a quote from the book of John, chapter 13, verse 35, "By this shall all men know that ye are my disciples, if ye have love one to another." The verse immediately preceding it in the bible is the famous one about "A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another." All this is attributed to Christ even as he contemplates his own death.

Mormons, too, were persecuted for loving too much (among other things). Though instead of staying (as a body of believers), or even walking to their death/redemption, as Christ did, they fled, first from New York to Ohio, then to Missouri, then Illinois, and finally Utah. In this, then, there are echoes of the Exodus story, featuring a group favored by God, but persecuted by the government.

What then, does it mean, that an heir of this religious history finds himself advocating for the destruction of a government that essentially has become too permissive? If indeed he feels persecuted (and I suppose we can grant him that, though it's a stretch to say that Mormons are "persecuted" by a government that recognizes same-sex marriage), should he not surrender to it in humility, secure in his redemption (like Christ), or humbly working to change it through love (like Christ's admonition to his followers), or fleeing to more accommodating vistas (like early Mormons) or even fleeing and waiting for God to show his favor by inflicting plagues and disasters upon the oppressor (like Moses & Co.)?

What precedent calls for the imposition of the will of the people onto unfortunate minorities? Democracy, that legacy from the same-sex-loving Greeks.

Irony also has Greek roots. It comes from eiron, to dissemble. And there is something rather false about this particular Mormon's rabid and violent opposition to same-sex marriage.

*Hat-tip to Joe.My.God. where I found out about this blog post

Love during wartime

2008-08-08T13:02:00.000-07:00

How close is revenge to reverence? Apparently the new spirituality in America is something not too far removed from weaponry.

The USS New York was built with 24 tons of scrap steel from the World Trade Center

It is the fifth in a new class of warship - designed for missions that include special operations against terrorists. It will carry a crew of 360 sailors and 700 combat-ready Marines to be delivered ashore by helicopters and assault craft.

Steel from the World Trade Center was melted down in a foundry in Amite, LA to cast the ship's bow section. When it was poured into the molds on Sept 9, 2003, 'those big rough steelworkers treated it with total reverence,' recalled Navy Capt. Kevin Wensing, who was there. 'It was a spiritual moment for everybody there.'

Junior Chavers, foundry operations manager, said that when the trade center steel first arrived, he touched it with his hand and the 'hair on my neck stood up.' 'It had a big meaning to it for all of us,' he said. 'They knocked us down. They can't keep us down. We're going to be back.'

The ship's motto? 'Never Forget'

The Conformist (1970)

2008-08-07T15:58:00.000-07:00

At a young age a boy is molested by his chauffeur. He shoots him and flees. It is in Italy in the 1930s and Mussolini has been elected dictator. This boy has grown up and, because of his childhood experience, feels radically different from everyone else. He chooses a life of over-compensation. Feeling like an outsider he searches heavily for a life of normalcy: a petty bourgeois wife, a house, a honeymoon in paris. He is so committed to normalcy that he over-commits. Not only is he a fascist, his secret is that he is their assassin and earns a living killing anti-fascists.

The film is beautiful of course and lauded by all accounts. Today, for me what resonates is the way in which normality functions as a decoy of self-hatred. Its simultaneously what is accepted by all and that which is the most impersonal. What experience is necessary or required to let go of that which tells us again and again, we are the problem, the bad person, the guilty? What will absolve us from the pain that we are alone with out hearts broken from the lies we've been told and that we even tell ourselves? What prevents us from giving in, to just playing by the rules, and being happy, if that is how happiness is today offered to us here? Happiness as conformity, as silence. Happiness as similarity. Happiness as unrecognizability. Everything else will be unforgiven and violently despised. Why not capitulate?

In the film, the assassin encounters the chauffeur and realizes that he did not kill him. That what he thought his whole life till now was untrue. Perhaps he began to no longer feel guilty for who he was. But the film ends, and we don't know what happens next. It seems, rather, a good place to start a film. What will you do when you realize you've built an entire life based upon a misunderstanding of who you are? What will you next do? What will you see in the mirror that morning? Today, the 'not-normal' has become a kind of conformity. And tradition, although it has its nostalgic appeal, is not to be celebrated without devastating sacrifice. And so we have no protocol for what to do when we realize that who we were in the past is not necessarily the person we are, or even want to be.

Of course, these questions suppose an identity of oneself is possible, and I imagine that will make some people cringe. It just seems to me that any question of change requires some identifiable position to set out from without which everything, everything, is for naught.

We had taken a bench

2008-07-31T17:13:00.001-07:00

We had finished the semester, stepped out of the last class. The walk on campus after a tough semester finishes must share something emotionally diminished, yet affiliated, to release from prison. Despite however many nights you've been awake, filled with anxiety and determination, despite the total emptiness of barreled exhaustion, everything, all senses are piqued and its common to be in a state of absolute absorption. I had been walking slower than usual in this pocket of dense time. Its the binge and purge ratio of life that has always been the only way i've managed to get anything of value ever done. These dazed, fecund walks were the closest i'd ever get to victory marches.

I'd been walking through the Plaza of the Americas and I had my eye on this bench in the corner. It was perhaps the busiest intersection on campus. Everyone was carrying forth, heading or returning from a class, filled with intention. There were still several days of exams left to go. Everyone was rushing and flustered. I had finished; so i only noticed, tranced in this slow motion gait, all the way from the middle of the plaza, I only noticed this bench on the corner. It was empty. It was as empty as me.

I reached it as if it had been planned, built, and presented solely for me to sit on. I'd never noticed this bench before. Today it was all there was. I had been walking with my girlfriend at the time. She said, "Here?" This made me laugh for no reason. It was a bench that probably never held anyone seeing as it was located at such a wild crossroad. We sat there for hours, holding hands, making out. The whole world passed by in visible disbelief. People we knew stopped and talked and felt bazaar about any sincere interaction among all the strongly intentioned movement that surrounded us. The bench being there, its presence, caddy-corner to the whole intersection, seemed to validate the whole thing.

You're boring me

2008-07-29T12:14:00.000-07:00

You die as a hero or live long enough to see yourself as the villain.

So states the motto of this summer's record breaking blockbuster, The Dark Knight. These are anti-heroic times and we all stand prepared to accept the conundrum of this film that the Joker seems so (politically?) motivated to make crystal clear: he is the freak that represents the greatest product of what the Batman has created or inspired in Gotham. Batman can't kill the Joker without becoming him. The Joker cant kill Batman because he's rather bored by the threats and interests of the run-of-the-mill crime bosses. So the two need each other; love is a battlefield, etc., etc. Relations among the outsiders are even more toxic than relations among the residents. In the process a woman dies and the district attorney becomes Two-Face, further emphasizing the Joker's thesis that the two (good and evil, republican and democrat, entrepreneur and outcast) are one side of the same coin.

That this all comes down to the emblematic feature (the coin) of capitalism is probably not a far fetched idea. Those going-steady readers of entre city will recall previous posts on the subject. Anyway, I liked it. And it would be good to hear what others thought, whereas apparently the whole USA is watching it these past two weeks. Or, if you haven't, perhaps you'd like to comment on whether or not you ever get the gripping sense that your emotions are nothing but politics (as the joker and this film seem to suggest.)

A Fine Romance

2008-07-28T13:50:00.000-07:00

If heterosexuals were bailing out of matrimony in droves, at least there was another group standing by to repopulate the ranks, like a new wave of civic-minded immigrants eager to move in and spruce up abandoned neighborhoods with fresh coats of paint and small business loans: soon it becomes the hip place to be and the middle classes all want to move back in.
- Laura Kipnis in Against Love

I find Kipnis' gentrification metaphor to be intriguing but problematic. If same-sex couples are the eager new arrivals, the implication is that the religious conservatives unhappy with these "newcomers" to marriage are the "holdouts".

This plays into the fallacious idea that there's only so much room in the Marriage neighborhood, and that letting homos in will leave less room for heteros. Kipnis herself disavows this assumption later, calling for a more "imaginative" response to the LGBT community's demands for marriage equality. However, Kipnis does not grapple directly with the gentrification metaphor she invokes, instead half-heartedly mocking the outcome of the controversy using the idiom of space (conservatives wanting to "Keep gays out. Keep heterosexuals in, with electrified fences if necessary"), but ultimately leaving unquestioned the relationship between neighborhoods' residents' responses to gentrification and "conservative" responses to demands for recognition of same-sex marriage.

A more apt metaphor might have been one of "white flight," which is a sort of inverse gentrification, where (at least to liberal eyes) the moral opprobrium attaches not to the phenomenon of the financially and socially more powerful groups entering a socially marginalized neighborhood, but rather to those with social power who would flee the neighborhood when they notice its character changing.

Rather than constructing religious conservatives as victims and holdouts (which is the rhetoric they use), then, they can be compared to those property owners who couch their racism in the language of "devaluation" of their property by the "wrong kind of people" moving into their neighborhood. Indeed, it is clear from conservative rhetoric that they see marriage as their property, something to be granted or withheld from same-sex couples as they see fit. The metaphor of property values is the one where talk of same-sex marriage "undermining" heterosexual marriage makes sense (after all, who your neighbors are matters, in a racist and homophobic world). Rather than feigning ignorance ("I don't see how same-sex marriage will devalue heterosexual marriage"), let us acknowledge that we know why this "devaluation" is happening, but also call it out as homophobia that drives it.

To pretend that there is no risk that property values will drop when "the wrong people" start acquiring homes in a neighborhood is rather foolish. To acknowledge that the reason that they might drop is racism (or xenophobia, or homophobia), and that the mere fact that property values might drop is insufficient justification to place barriers in the way of would be entrants to the neighborhood, now that is political integrity.

Photo: The "G" Word by IntangibleArts

Paintings edge

2008-07-26T11:31:00.001-07:00

Those near or in LA today may want to check out the Riverside Art Museum's exhibition of the 2008 "Paintings Edge" workshop:

“The Paintings Edge workshop,” cautions the course catalogue, “is not for beginners.” Every year, as part of the Idyllwild Summer Arts Institute, several dozen professional artists and advanced art students convene in this intensive colloquium in painting – painting techniques, painting subjects, painting ideas.

The painting above was done by my inspiring friend Kathy who is one of the participants in the workshop. In 2004, Kathy quit her well-paying job as a web designer for Universal Studios in order to devote herself completely to painting all day long. She free-lances her computer skills on the side now, but is mostly altogether found in her studio these days.

Legacy of the Tinman; or Borderline Personality Disorder and Finance Capital

2008-07-25T11:26:00.000-07:00

The founding grant of Stanford University dictates that this institution's expansive acreage can never be sold. The university approached bankruptcy in the 1930s until an engineering professor turned provost found a way to make money off the Stanford's generous land endowment after all. Unable to sell it because of the founder's wishes, he decided to rent it and in the 40s the Stanford industrial Park was born just south of the main quadrangle. Books have been written explaining this decision as the origin of Silicon Valley and Frederick Terman, our innovative provost, is often referred to as its grandfather.

When capital shifts from investing in spaces of extraction and production (factories) to spaces interested in the new kinds of profits available in financial transactions themselves a new kind of abstraction is at hand that is far from an academic matter. This fictitious capital or finance capital is absolutely disinterested in content, which becomes a mere marketing pretext, and is now solely concerned with the transformation of land into that which by definition has no use-value.

Today this process is synonymous with Silicon Valley, if not globalization itself: faced with the saturation of foreign markets, every region abandons that older industrial kind of production, along with its factories and trained workforce, and takes flight to the more profitable ventures of land speculation. The latter is oriented strictly to the expectation of future value. The goal of production no longer lies in any one specific market, or any specific set of social or individual needs, but rather the free-floating state of strictly performing (abstract, mindless, generic, contentless, bodyless) money relationships. The structural features of this new 'futures' market includes, on the one hand, a frenzied search for more profitable investments, and on the other, a planned obsolescence, disposability, and disinterestedness. Perhaps we have here a historical context for what is anthropomorphized as borderline personality disorder and has its earliest characterization in Frank Oz's "Tinman" (1939). Was all this already available to us to read into last month's blockbuster, Ironman? You let me know.

Of course, on entre city hope springs eternal. And leave it to the ever-positive Emily to cheer up my day once again by sending me this video. For let us never forget that there was not only the tinman in the Wizard of Oz, there was also the lion. Please go here and watch.

"We're moving too fast"

2008-07-24T14:06:00.000-07:00

Talking about this with mordenti, I was gearing up for a skeptical post about the meaning of this phrase, as used in dating. If you've ever been on the receiving end of this or its related phrases (The more direct "let's take things slowly" or the less direct "do you think we're moving too fast?"), you know the feeling.

The first response often is to take offense. Which is to say, one immediately starts to wonder how a relationship can move too fast, if it's going in a good direction. Really, one wants to counter, what you're trying to say to me is that you want to go somewhere else, is that it? Because, after all, if the relationship is going right, why not go as fast as you possibly can (just so you can stay still, as the Red Queen might say)?

As I was looking for a photograph to accompany this post, however, I found the one above, that amused me and made me think more carefully about the metaphor of movement, and the emotional/interpersonal meanings of speed, direction, and destination, as well as the attendant dangers of going too fast, in the wrong way, or towards the wrong thing.

Speed, or "Hold on tight!"
We know time through observing change. When a lot of change happens in one sphere of our lives while few changes happen in other spheres (for example, riding in a car, I may notice that the scenery undergoes a lot of changes between one breath and the next), we either perceive the first sphere as fast or the second sphere as slow, depending on our perspective. As we who live in the world have noticed, speed is relative.

In a relationship, then, if you notice a lot of change (to your routine, perhaps, if you're dating frequently, or to the way you feel every day, if you're constantly thinking about the person or calling them) while other things don't change (your job, your friends, the way you wear your hat), you might feel that the relationship is going too fast.

On the other hand, you might say that the rest of your life is going too slowly. I think this accounts for that feeling of being "awake" or "alive" when in a relationship. It's the exhilaration of living at the right "pace".

The danger of going too fast, even if you're headed the right way, or to the right destination, is exactly the tension between the different rates of change in the relationship and the rest of your life. Everything else needs to catch up, is the problem. You're in love and setting up a nest, and your family doesn't even know his name (let alone credit history). Or maybe you're now saving your money for a big getaway together, and your friends still think you're going to law school in the fall. Disappointments and tensions proliferate. Things start to fall apart. The rest of your life needs time to get used to this new person, to this new commitment, to the new you.

And as we know, it's easier to stretch slowly into place than to tear something and try to mend it.

Then there's the uncertainty about directionality.

Directionality, or "Hey, quit shifting your weight!"

Sometimes, in fact, "We're moving too fast!" is an indirect expression of doubt. "I'm not sure I like the direction we're going," is the implied complaint.

It doesn't necessarily mean you both don't have the same goal. The problem with moving, is that even when you know where you're going, there's the question of what route to take to get there.

Sometimes you just have to pick one. Any one. Consider the direct path from A to B. Now imagine a tree right smack in the middle. It's as good to swerve left as it is to swerve right, but if each person on the bike picks a different way to lean, you end up bruised and broken.

So too, in relationships, perhaps. The metaphor strains, but one can imagine a situation where doing anything is better than doing nothing, but where hasty decisions by each party leads to a cancelling out of action. The Gift of the Magi is an extreme example.

Taking things slowly gives more time to check in. "I'm about to pawn my watch to buy some combs for you. Please don't sell your hair or buy me any watch-related gifts." This does mean checking in, however. There's no point going slowly if you're still going to make decisions without consultation.

Uncertainty is at the heart of another reason why one might beg for a change of pace.

Destination, or "I thought we were just having fun!"

This is the big one, folks. It hardly needs a lot of explaining (or it needs so much explanation that this blog won't be nearly enough). If you think you may want to get off the ride before you end up somewhere you don't want to be, you're going to ask to slow down, so that when you fling yourself off, you only have to duck and roll for a short while. Also, the walk back is shorter.

Photo: Speed Limit What??? by Joe Shlabotnik

Learning from Las Vegas

2008-07-24T10:13:00.000-07:00

We skipped seeing Batman last night and instead rented "21." Its based on the true story of a team of MIT mathematicians who develop a system to count cards and signal hot decks at blackjack tables. Our protagonist joins the group reluctantly, saying, its only until he earns the $300k its gonna take to fund his way through Harvard medical school. He gets greedy, loses everything, but in the end, ends up using the story of his experience to win the prestigious Robinson Scholarship that ultimately grants him the free ride to Harvard.

The subplot finds Cole Williams (Lawrence Fishburn) as the casino pitboss whose job is to rid the Riviera casino of its card counters. His career is on the verge of obsolescence as more and more casinos are opting for that camera that uses face recognition imagery to identify known card cheaters. The pitboss, looking to secure a pension that his job does not offer, makes a deal with our hip protagonist in which he receives $200,000 and more importantly, Mickey (Kevin Spacey), whom, many moons ago, made a killing counting cards on the day Cole took off and therefore costing our pitboss his job at the MGM. Cole has held the grudge nearly a lifetime and our finale involves the day of reckoning for Mickey.

Mickey: the MIT professor who organized his most gifted students into a squad capable of bringing down any house in Vegas; the terse genius who used his talents for personal gain; the academic turned entrepreneur.

"21" tells an interesting story of how the working class teams up with a subcultural group of young urban professionals in order to beat the system. But the system isnt blackjack, its academia and the seemingly inescapable fact that it functions today without apology as a corporation aimed strictly at knowledge that steamrolls quick and exorbitant amounts of money. Its not Vegas that lacks a soul, its your campus. And it becomes fun to ask why one would set out to 'beat a system' they ultimately wish to join. We'll see our rebel protagonist in class on monday.

Despite this cynical social commentary on the Ivy League, 21 taps deep into neoliberal daydreams as the institution happily grants our storyteller his scholarship and the brilliant young mathematician grants, in turn, our worker his pension. There's always someone somewhere making the handout, this film would like us to believe. But is that a hand one should be betting on?

Virtuously Normal

2008-07-23T17:15:00.000-07:00

One virtue is more of a virtue than two, because it is more of a knot for one's destiny to cling to.- Zarathustra, as portrayed by Nietzsche.

If you picked one virtue to live your life by, which would it be? Often it seems that the single virtue adored by many Americans is to be average, to be "normal", to be just like you. I'm Okay, You're Okay.

I think my virtue would be Hospitality.

Photo: Giotto : Saint François prêche aux oiseaux , XIIIè s. by ginieland.

Drive, gamble, and die

2008-07-23T12:13:00.000-07:00

Jason wanted to go to a casino so we found one online: Lucky Chances. Its in Colma, just outside South San Francisco. I have to say I was impressed by the nonchalance of the urban planning of this city: entire blocks of car dealerships lined one after the other, then an enormous cemetery called Cypress Gardens, and then across the street, Lucky Chances casino. "Drive, gamble, or die," suggested Colma.

Inside a hundred card tables are assymetrically dispersed around a huge warehouse the size of Costco. Twelve people to a table with their money stacked into colored chips. A dry-erase board shows the long list of names waiting to join a table. We were there 20 minutes before being seated. Mind you, this was a Tuesday night around 7:30.

Most were still in their work uniforms: a nurse, a plumber, a maintenance man, an auto-mechanic. They held their cards like a grudge against the world. Kings and queens facing knaves and dreams. In Colma things are unabashedly clear. By 8:30, Jason lost $50 to the Texas hold'em table; we walked out just in time to catch the pink sunset on Cypress Gardens.

Garlic is as good as 10 mothers

2008-07-22T16:25:00.000-07:00

The 30th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival is this weekend and im not missing it for anything. Although it will always be second in my eyes to the Castroville Artichoke festival.

Whether you are a first-time visitor or a “seasoned” veteran, the Gilroy Garlic Festival is always a fun and fragrant experience. Over 3 million honored guests have made the pilgrimage. Please join us in celebrating this palate-pleasing herb at the 30th annual Gilroy Garlic Festival, July 25-27. Always the last full weekend in July!

Love Abides

2008-07-21T11:12:00.000-07:00

A week has passed in silence on entre but lets flip the record over now. The ends where it begins. An enormous thank you to all of those who kept me afloat this week when drowning seemed almost certain: Monica, Ming, Mike, Mom, my brother. I feel strangely capable today and its got everything to do with you all. A book was handed to me early last week, Hanif Kureishi's Intimacy. I devoured it whole and I've over 10 million words to say about it to anyone whose read it, or not. But let's be brief and ease into it. All of us, everyone close to me, we are much better at promiscuity than we are at "families," but lets celebrate and raise glasses to this, rather than play their smug game of assuming thats the only way to live. And Kureishi writes this:

Desire is the original anarchist and undercover agent--no wonder people want it arrested and kept in a safe place. And just when we think we've got desire under control it lets us down or fills us with hope. Desire makes me laugh because it makes fools of us all. Still, rather a fool than a fascist.

Support the UCSF Strike

2008-07-15T13:30:00.000-07:00

Here is a post from Craigslist made by the striking workers outside UCSF that will be there until Friday and would like your support:

AFSCME employees of the University Of California state wide (ucsf in San Francicco) has gone on strike. We trying to get a contract. We have been without a contract for over 7 months. IF YOU ARE ONE OF THE SCABS THAT CROSSED OUR LINE TODAY, then stay home Tuesday. Don't cross our line please. The job you save might be your own. We are not over paid goverment workers. Over 90% of the service works statewide at uc get some kind of goverment help. While they build and build big new big buildings and the managment gives themselves more and more money. We get the shaft. HELP US DON'T CROSS THE LINE. CALL UC TELL THEM TO SETTLE WITH US.
Thank you a worker.

If I haven't read it in a while, it's new to me

2008-07-15T02:16:00.000-07:00

An interview I wrote a few years ago:

Here's an interview with me that I pulled from QRS-TUV, a pub. that features queer musicians.

Are You Talented?: An Interview with SVU guitarist Ming Wong
Colette Kohl

As a young itinerant amateur music journalist (so much more appealing a title than "groupie") I often woke up on Sunday mornings face down in a puddle of vomit. As I picked the remains of my dinner (or someone else's, if I had gotten un/lucky) out of my hair, I thought to myself - some day, some day I shall be paid to do this. I shall be paid to hang out with small independent bands with a lot of hope and little talent, to stay up until 4 am drinking increasingly mysterious blends of beer and liquor/cleaning products. So when I got a call from Jeremy asking me if I'd like to interview Ming Wong of SVU I immediately said: Who? But then when he told me they'd pay 5 cents a word, I did a quick google search, packed up my notebook and Caltrained over to Palo Alto, where Wong resides.

Colette: (ringing doorbell and waiting. ten minutes pass. I decide Wong is not home and start to leave, but just then the door bursts open, and in the doorway, wearing only a bathrobe and cradling a mesh bag filled with dirty sheets, is what would be a dreamy hunk of a man, if that man worked out more and shaved)
Ming: (yelps in surprise)
C: Hi. I'm Colette.
M: Who?
C: From QRSTUV.
M: What?
C: The music magazine.
M: Oh yeah, right. Come in. Sit down.
C: Nice place.
M: Thanks, we built those window covers ourselves during our lesbian home-depot phase.

C: So... let's just get started.
M: Okay.

C: What's the story behind Special Victims Unit?
M: Well, Rich and I met in Northampton, randomly, in this poster store. I actually went in with the intention to hit on him. Anyway, we started talking and it turned out he lived in Palo Alto, which is where I lived too. So I set up what I thought was a date, but then turned out to not be one, since he has a girlfriend. Anyway, we hung out some more, he had drums, I had a guitar, one thing led to another, and we formed SVU. It's like Chekov, but with a slightly happier ending.

C: How did you come up with the band's name?
M: I'd always loved watching SVU [Law and Order: Special Victims Unit is a series on NBC], mainly for Chris Meloni. Rich also likes SVU, partly because of Marissa Hargitay. By our projection of sexual desire onto television characters combined, we formed SVU. Also I can play the opening song on my guitar. Do you want to hear it?
C: That's ok.

C: What would you say is your favorite song?
M: You mean like ever, or from our album?

C: Both.
M: Well, my favorite song ever is probably a Beach Boys song - I can't pick one right now, they're all so good. I wish it were something more pretentious, even in a foreign language - Chinese would be ideal. Or something by a band with more violence. But the truth is, I fucking love the Beach Boys. "Surfer Girl" is awesome - with its sort of wistful melody that washes back and forth like the waves, the cathartic rhymes - it's comfort food for the post-feminist consciousness. Like eating a bowl of fried rice in an age of Atkins.

C: What about from your latest album?
M: I'd have to say the bonus hidden track - "Chang Chang Changity Chang". The story behind it is that Rich [Simpson, SVU's drummer] and I came up with a private language, and the whole song is in that language. It's actually The Internationale translated into SVU-ese, set to a different melody, of course. See, "she-bop" means humanity, and "Chang Chang Changity Chang" means The Internationale, so that the line "Chang Chang Changity Chang She Bop/ We'll always be as one" is, translated into English, "The Internationale unites the human race." Not that we're communists or anything, or in SVU-speak: "Doowah diddy diddy dum bang boom"

C: Sounds a bit like gibberish.
M: That's what every fading culture says about emergent culture.

C: What exactly are the politics behind SVU?
M: We aren't about politics - we're about anti-politics. While I personally am somewhat of an existentialist, I think music is an arena in which I subscribe to a theory in which individuals lose a lot of conceptual agency and become just a locus for the confluence of musical history. In other words, SVU is as inevitable as bad weather - we had nothing to do with it, and hence, our politics had nothing to do with it. I'm not saying we are mere mouthpieces for some kind of zeitgeist or movement - that's too simplistic. Rather, we're like the reverb on a noisy amp - nobody wanted us here, but we're here anyway, and you know what - people are going to have to deal with it.

C: Do you think being queer has influenced your music?
M: Well duh. Next question.

C: How do you think being queer has influenced your music?
M: Well aren't you just BBC-documentary persistent? I think being queer allowed me to develop the girlish shrieking that I utilize in at least two of the songs on [It's Never Too Late to Read] Hegel. Also sucking dick expands your vocal range.

C: Does the release of this album signal a new direction for SVU away from free live performances?
M: I doubt it. Frankly, to steal a phrase from that Marx brother - we wouldn't want to play for anyone who would pay us to play for them.

C: In a recent review, SVU's sound was described as "at once genuinely awful... and sublimely clever." Would you agree with that appraisal?
M: Holy crap. You read up on our reviews? Who are you, Terry Gross? Yeah, I'd agree with that appraisal. I agree with it so much I could have written it myself.

C: What do you think about the recent developments in the legalization of same-sex marriage?
M: You must mean in the U.S., since developments have been happening for a long time in other parts of the world. Frankly, the only important thing about legal marriage to me is the benefits - but of course the debate is hardly ever framed that way - it's all about love love love.
You know that couple [Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin] that has been together 50 years? They were the first ones to get married in San Francisco? Well, there's something weird about focussing on them as the reason why gay marriage should be legal. Now I don't have anything against them, I think it's fantastic they've stayed together that long, and that they got together in the 50s, and it's all very fabulous and heartwarming but you know what? What does legal recognition do for them? They stayed together this long without it - hello? unnecessary much? We need to be showing the people who would be, no, who are torn apart without legal marriage, to drive the point home that this isn't some fuzzy romantic icing on the gay love cake. Some people are in crisis mode here, and a lot of us are less photogenic than two harmless-looking old white american women. Some of us are bearded foreigners.

C: Are you in a relationship right now?
M: Oh, I am in many relationships right now. None of which is recognized by the U.S. government as granting me any rights whatsoever.

C: I meant a romantic relationship.
M: I'm not big on categorizing my relationships with people. My least favorite phrase is "He's just a friend." Just a friend? Well fuck you very much too.

C: If you could be an animal, what would you be?
M: First of all, I am an animal. Second of all - actually, there is no second of all. I was going to say we can skip the precious questions, but then I realised that would in itself be precious. Precious precious precious. The word "precious" is precious. So, in answer to your question, if I could be an animal, I would be Bjork.

C: Who are your biggest musical influences?
M: I was afraid you were going to ask that. And you know what, even after all this time, I still don't have a well thought out answer. I'm going to say... Gershwin, Radiohead and Beethoven. Of course, that's totally wrong.

C: What's next for SVU?
M: We'll probably practice this Friday and then possibly go out for some Indian food. That's as far as we've planned.

Friend, have you heard the good news?

2008-07-14T19:59:00.000-07:00

What do these men know?

Who was it who discussed the synchronicity aspect of newspapers? The sense that all these events happening at the same time, all these "meanwhiles" are due to some larger "because" that surely must exist in order for them to be united in this newspaper (even if the "because" is just that the Editor - did you know that "edit" is a backformation from "editor"? In the beginning God. Only afterwards, his acts of creation). Or what if god is the backformation, and the concept of synchronicity came first? What if, in other words, religion was the first great inductive leap?

We lost god when the "meanwhiles" became too much to handle, and no amount of "because"-ing could make us believe that there was one great Objective because.

So why do we still think that newspapers tell the truth about what's happening, when god himself can't explain the whole world? How can the New York Times claim to have "all the news that's fit to print"? Why do so many ask news.google.com what's going on in the world today? Why do we read our local newspapers instead of just asking the first few people we meet on the street what's happening?

Do you have faith in the invisible hand of Editor? How much faith? Or are you a realist who reads blogs? How realistic are those blogs?

Photo: Ambassador From 12 Galaxies, Meet The Ambassador from the Jolly Roger by Thomas Hawk

Cholesterol and fiberglass

2008-07-14T16:32:00.000-07:00

Heads up for the Silicon Valley Mom's blog. They have recently registered outrage at the American Academy of Pediatrics for advocated statin drugs to children (pay attention, but please forgive me for not resisting to point towards the analogy of body fat to plastic insulation that serves here as quite persuasive rhetorical evidence for the AAP critique):

Cholesterol is critical for brain function. Does the AAP really think that kids' brains will develop normally by reducing cholesterol in their body? Remember, they haven't even studied it! Our nerves are surrounded by fatty insulation which serves the same function as plastic insulation around electric wire.

_

I do

2008-07-13T02:20:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I have my doubts, I must admit. What is it all for? Why do I care about marriage?

As I'm sure divorcing parents have their doubts about why they're still fighting for custody of the kids. Mixed in with the love there must be some ambivalence. The question must arise: Aren't we just doing this to hurt each other? Aren't we just doing this to avoid being hurt?

Aren't they just doing this because they're homophobes? Aren't we just doing this because we can't let them get away with injustice?

Is there a way to step back and say Maybe this isn't worth the fighting. Maybe there's another way to work this out without tugging back and forth and back and forth? What would it look like to peacefully go our separate ways? Is it even possible when there's children and romantic love in the mix for there to be peace?

These are not rhetorical questions.

Photo: DSC00024 by JasonJT

Notes for a short story

2008-07-12T13:27:00.000-07:00

It's difficult to tell if it had to do with 9/11, but one of the noticeable trends after that September amongst almost everyone i knew was that their relationships immediately took a grave turn. Every couple i know either engaged or broke up. I was in the latter. A new seriousness seemed to be piped into the American psyche of those between age 20 and 30. Maybe others too, i don't know. But I can't tell if this was just bad timing for a generation that has entered their own and now faced the inevitable 'now or never' years of early adulthood. Marriage, career, lifestyle, we could only play chicken with these for so long. Was what I noticed then anything other than what millions of lives experience, whole generations simply continuing to discover and rediscover that process which deforms human growth through its deep internal directing of what adult consciousness must necessarily be in America: a rigid, separated, detached external perception, a mode of using and consuming rather than that which we always find and admire in the accepting, enjoying, sharing views of all children. How will we measure the historical catastrophe of the deformation involved in 'growing up?'

In December 2001, I went on a date with an ex who said, if i wanted, she'd give me a baby in a few years time, after i was settled, and after her present newborn had grown up a bit. It seemed suddenly important that everyone feel the values (family, national, romantic) that most of my friends had sworn off for various reasons throughout the 1990s. Don't get me wrong, scholarship remains the enemy of romance, but even the heavily educated put down the books, left the library. Everyone wanted "to live." How to do it, though? Was love possible without exploitation? No protocol had been arrived at yet, and now no one seems to even bother with such questions anymore.

Regardless, though, and on a much more positive note, congratulations to all those newly married in San Francisco last month.

The iPhone and America

2008-07-10T22:23:00.000-07:00

Traditional marxist thought codes production as masculine and consumption as feminine. But we've come a long was from mid-20th century in this regard and gender somehow doesn't seem to be the defining force that divides this dichotomy today. Today production and consumption is more familiarly coded along national lines. The USA consumes; Taiwan produces. This seems further fed by the general acceptance that there is a powerful connection between how people become consumers and how people become citizens. Our administration knows this all too well: the best way to help america is to distribute a stimulus check to revitalize the economy. We'll buy our way back into the world economy. We'll spend our money on technology to help us multi-task our way out of a recession. Our cutting edge will aim at micromanaging our social networks onto pocket-size black touch screens rather than developing ways to end hunger. But let's not think about that right now.

What's needed is a politics of consumption that neither blindly celebrates technological invention nor stringently valorizes our own inevitable obsolescence. Repair, compromise, rearrangement--in love as much as in politics--are maneuvers that require in order to properly function neither a winner nor a loser, but rather a vital understanding that itself is necessarily a radical invention. This is what i want. Fuck the iphone.

Hat tip to emily carruthers for dearly reminding me of this last point.

Another post on color

2008-07-10T11:26:00.000-07:00

Found out about multicolr, a cool web-based unusual search engine from this Lifehacker post.

It searches for flickr photos based on the colors that you pick out. I wonder what photos would turn up if you entered in Palo Alto's color?

The photo here is the first creative commons licensed one that I found searching for photos with red, white and blue in them. Apparently the colors most associated with the United States translate well into a photo featuring Canadians.

Do colors have inherent meanings?

Photo: Canadian Little League Championship Game by uncleweed. It's under an attribution and share-alike license, just like this post! :)

Keeping one's distance

2008-07-09T19:30:00.000-07:00

Dave just joined Facebook and he's making much of the tool that lets you find everyone from the same graduating class you attended in high school. Yesterday he messaged 20 people off the list and was now electronically receiving all these life stories from former friends after losing touch over the past 16 years all in the course of a Tuesday afternoon. Brian Gumby was married with three kids. Joanne Deventis, an ex, had made an unimaginable family life with Joe Ballua. Most still live within 50 miles of the neighborhood we grew up in. Recently, out of the blue, I got a message from Leanne, my prom date.

A certain segment of the population, it seems, never again has to worry about losing touch with a friend, a lover, an acquaintance. The entire life of so many of those people we ate lunch with, walked to the bus stop with, fought, loved, or hated in what seems a lifetime ago and, perhaps now, barely remember, are today not at all difficult to find. I don't know the adjective, but hearing the tone and style of a person you once knew so closely, so suddenly one afternoon, after years and years, its a jarring barrage. People change so little: this may be the initial strongest revelation to come out of facebook. Is it not bound to have some altering impact upon a generational mindset that is presently hardwired to relish the temporary, the transient, and the whim?

We swore we would never grow up. Facebook now makes that sound less like a conviction to our ideals and much more like a simple excuse not to manage, organize, and care about anything.

How Does It Feel?

2008-07-08T14:45:00.000-07:00

Taking off from mordenti's post yesterday, here is a link to a great bit of conversation about what it feels like to be a white woman moving into a majority non-white neighborhood and being pressured by her white friends not to live there.

http://stuffwhitepeopledo.blogspot.com/2008/07/go-along-with-racism-instead-of-calling.html

Here's an excerpt:

“Well, it’s obvious now, and it really bothers me how we didn’t come out and just SAY it to each other. I mean, we’re all good, well-meaning people, or we think we are, but we’re really white people who are afraid of black neighborhoods. And Mexican people. We don’t want to be around those people if we don’t know them. And we sure don’t want to LIVE around too many of them. So their reactions to my neighborhood were racist. And instead of calling them on that, instead of pointing it out to them, I went along with this kind of unspoken racism. I played right along with it. Without even realizing I was doing that.”

My friend C’s voice had begun to shake, and then she started crying.

I should note that absent from the entire conversation in this post is any discussion of gentrification. Most of C's distress stems not from her own role in gentrification (which she could perhaps control), but rather from her racist feelings and thoughts and the racist feelings and thoughts of her family and friends.

I also find it a bit odd that, given that the author has already abbreviated C's name to a letter (if in fact it is an abbreviation and not a mere substitution), that they have to further anonymize the situation by describing C's move as "from a rather bohemian, largely white part of her Midwestern American city to a largely non-white area". Are there so few white people whose names begin with "C" in this neighborhood that the author is afraid that providing this additional detail will identify her?

I suppose the fear is that her neighbors might recognize her from this description and will take offense at the fact that she has racist thoughts. But fear of having one's racist thoughts made plain seems like exactly the kind of closeted-ness the author and C have come to realize is contributing to racism rather than undoing it, no?

Photo: Color Your life by Capture Queen

Which is my face, which is a building, which is palo alto?

2008-07-07T23:03:00.000-07:00

It's general consensus that propriety interests are maximized in suburban life, but perhaps no where is this more ostentatiously stated than San Yates' public-private art venture entitled "The Color of Palo Alto." Yates photographed every house in Palo Alto and is now in the process of synoptically generating a composite color which will be made available as a formula for paint pigment in local palo alto hardware stores. Soon a projector will display a constant loop scrolling though each of the 17,729 photographs every hour onto a screen in Yates' downtown plaza studio. The city paid Yates $35,000; Hewlett Packard, $40,000.

In a city in which real estate functions as the primary economic generator, it makes sense that one would privilege the shade chosen, among all things, by homeowners as the most significant way to determine the color of palo alto. In fact, one cannot think of a better way to exclude into the picture of this community all those upon whom it daily relies to clean its houses, manicure its lawns, cook its food, babysit its children. 'The Color of Palo Alto' may be understood as the desire to conceive of Palo Alto without color.

Addendum: I think it fitting to recall one of the Palo Alto homes that will not be included in this can of paint. VTA bus #22 runs up and down El Camino Real all night long. In the winter, when the local shelters close and its too cold, as many as 40 or 50 people a night can be found on what is locally referred to as 'hotel 22.'

Did you hear the one about the blog?

2008-07-06T01:19:00.000-07:00

Mordenti and I had a discussion on the N line and decided that weekend blog updates will be optional and limited to jokes and other light content.

In that spirit, here is one of my favorite jokes told to me by a dear friend, also an immigrant:

Two Palestinians migrate to the U.S.. When they touch down in New York, they make a deal. The person who becomes the most Americanized, they agree, will get a car, for which the other person will pay. This, they believe, will be a great motivation for them to assimilate and adjust to their new lives.

Ten years pass, and they meet in a pre-arranged spot.

The first man is so eager to show how assimilated he is, he begins rattling off his accomplishments in a flawless American accent.

"Well, in ten years, I've managed to get a job working in a Wells Fargo bank. I married a nice girl from Wisconsin, and we're raising two beautiful kids in the suburbs. One of them has started elementary school and says he wants to be a boy scout. I just got a big promotion at work, and the boss has said he'll sponsor me and the wife if we'd like to join his country club."

The second guy is taken aback by this recitation. He takes a moment to collect himself, then gets a triumphant look on his face as he decides how to best present himself as more American than the first man. Taking a deep breath, and putting on his best red-faced grimace, he shouts at him:

"Go home, you fucking towelhead!"

Photo: Comedian Zach Toczynski by DCMatt

What we don't see

2008-07-04T22:02:00.000-07:00

Because of her experiences growing up around military conflict, a friend of mine becomes very agitated by loud and sudden noises. A low-flying plane can be terrifying. Fireworks inspire anxiety. Many veterans experience similar reactions, whether or not they've been diagnosed with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Sitting in my room, hearing but not seeing the fireworks outside, I understand a little bit more now the anxiety these sounds can cause. There's something about sound alone that is evocative in a way that sound and light together sometimes are not. Sound feels intimate. Loud noise, therefore, is especially intrusive. It's extremely hard to get away from a loud noise. Covering your ears is almost never as easy or effective as closing your eyes. Getting inside or behind a building doesn't shield you from a loud noise. Even one that's far away. A disturbing image can be blocked by something as thin as a piece of cloth (or your eyelids). A disturbing sound can seem impossible to hide. It's why babies cry. It's why wolves howl. It's why terrified people scream.

Oregon Public Radio asks if fireworks should be cancelled to help those with PTSD on the fourth of July. For some commenters, apparently, this is inconceivable. In fact, the first commenter has some advice:

But we can't change everything in the world to accommodate a few. There will always be loud noises and they need to get desensitized to them.

Everything in the world? Apparently some confuse the spectacle of fireworks with what they are ostensibly meant to celebrate - self-determination, resistance to monarchy, and government responsive to the demands and needs of its people.

Photo: Loud Noises by nukeit1

Baby-eating Satanists From Outer Space!

2008-07-04T09:45:00.000-07:00

In the great tradition of Hearst-owned newspapers' turn of the century reporting on the "Yellow Peril", it's been a week of inflammatory headlines from the San Francisco Chronicle.

It all started with a recent Federal probe into San Francisco's policy of not using local resources to actively cooperate with immigration officials to identify and deport undocumented immigrants. Apparently an ICE official stopped a San Francisco official who was escorting two Honduran youths back to their families in Honduras (as an alternative to locking them up in local facilities, or turning them over to ICE where they would be locked up in federal detention centers).

Consistently, the Chronicle has demonized youths in this particular case as "crack-dealers" and "illegals".

The worst of the headlines:
"8 crack dealers shielded by S.F. walk away"
"ILLEGALS CALLED COURT'S PROBLEM"
"S.F. mayor shifts policy on illegal offenders"
"Crack dealer caught in S.F. after escape"

Unaddressed or minimized is the city's concern for human rights, community relations and how to rehabilitate youths caught up in the drug trade, as opposed to merely engaging in punitive measures. Unsurprisingly, of course, national studies have shown that a focus on rehabilitation is more effective than a focus on punishment/deterrence.

Also a mere moment's reflection is needed to realize that children usually don't freely choose to leave their home country in order to engage in an illegal and dangerous profession, and have probably been abused or coerced. Apparently Chronicle writers are a little too pressed by deadlines to take the time to, what is it called, think?

Also galling is the bait-and-switch in the article with perhaps the most sensationalist headline. While the bold text appropriately boldly proclaims them "crack-dealers shielded by S.F.", the article is more circumspect, saying that they had been "convicted of dealing drugs". What drugs, and how the convictions were obtained (plea bargains? did they have adequate representation?) are left unspecified and unexplored. Truly, this is tabloid journalism at its most craven.

And, of course, the Chronicle (and ICE, really) don't seem to have any suggestions about how local officials are supposed to determine and report immigration status for those arrested. Selectively asking/investigating arrestees based on police suspicion about their immigration status would degenerate quickly into racial and linguistic profiling (though perhaps the Chronicle could find a xenophobic journalist or editor willing to defend racism in the name of immigration enforcement). Asking/investigating everybody arrested would destroy whatever trust the police have managed to build with immigrant communities and make it difficult if not impossible to persuade victims and witnesses to report crime or cooperate in investigations. Not to mention the additional time it would take to confirm every arrestee's immigration status.

Tim Redmond criticizes the coverage at the SF Guardian's blog.

I may analyze each of the terrible articles in more detail in upcoming posts. Each of them invites a scathing response.

(oh, and happy Fourth of July weekend, all)

Image: "The Yellow Terror In All His Glory", 1899 editorial cartoon

Dear entrepreneur,

2008-07-03T16:29:00.000-07:00

After 1980 the development of research parks gained enormous momentum from the passing of the University Small Business Patent Procedures Act, later known as the Bayh-Dole Act. The intention of this legislation was to invigorate US economic growth after the 1973-1975 recession. The leveling-off of defense-driven federal support for basic science coincided with an enigmatic growth in rapidly developing fields of biotechnology, computers, optics, and semi-conductors. The Bayh-Dole Act then efficiently merged business and education through a federal patent policy that granted small businesses, universities, and nonprofits automatic ownership rights to taxpayer-funded research. It resulted in an overhaul of federal patent policy that until then maintained a distinction between property rights and public domain. Under Bayh-Dole, state and federal research funds could now be turned into marketable products by giving exclusive rights to small firms, education institutions, and other noncommercial entities. In 1983, President Reagan issued a Memorandum instructing all executive agencies to extend the Bayh-Dole Act’s title-in-contractor provisions to large corporations as well.

What university administrators saw as a way to make up for declines in federal funding has now become an unchallengable organizational procedure and has subsequently opened the way to full-scale privatization of public research and a transformation of academic culture through additional laws aligning higher education and the private sector: corporate tax breaks for investing in academic research; rewritten antitrust laws allowing universities, industry, and the federal government to combine their research capabilities; and several new federal grant programs aimed to quicken and encourage university-industry research collaboration. To say nothing of the historical transformation of 'knowledge production' on campus, the research park and mixed-use real estate projects that blossomed after Bayh-Dole redefined the character of communities beyond the campus and created whole new genres of property development that mixed institutional and commercial uses. In the meantime, desires changed, too, amidst this archipelago of research parks that are increasingly pursued the world-over as the key urban form for economic development. Would it be a stretch to say emotions, desires have here become heavily abandoned outside only its safest and self-effacing forms: sarcasm, irony, apathy, and beligerence? Speaking one's desire remains challenging amidst our social arrangement if not all together deadly and suspect. A small possibility remains that this is a good thing. Entrepreneurial City rises anew because whom one loves is at least as important as whom one reads. Read us. Write back. Let's go for pizza. Dearest entrepreneur, we love you.

Reality Shows

2008-07-02T23:27:00.000-07:00

Today I spoke with a friend who is getting legally married to her partner of many years. They had a wedding several years ago, before California recognized same-sex couples' marriages. I asked if they were going to have another wedding ceremony. No, she said, probably not. The one they had performed before was the real marriage. This was, I suppose, by implication, the fake wedding, imposed by the state.

It made me think about citizenship and being an American. Sometimes I think I should just start calling myself an American, legal "reality" be damned. I feel as American as anybody, I think, whatever that means. I also feel like an immigrant (it's clearer to me what that means). I propose a new term: "Undocumented Americans". It would refer to people who are American in all the real senses of the word, but whom the U.S. government refuses to recognize as citizens.

Photo: Bride by spaceodissey

Human Geographers' delight/nightmare

2008-07-01T22:57:00.000-07:00

"Can You Find Me Now?"
http://blog.aclu.org/2008/07/01/can-you-find-me-now/

Today the ACLU sued the Justice Department to force it to reveal its policies for tracking the location of cell phones. As anyone who watches Law & Order: SVU knows, all cell phones double as tracking devices.They send cell phone networks information that provides a pretty accurate idea of where they are physically located. This means that if you go for a walk around town with a cell phone in your pocket, it is possible for your cell phone provider to trace your route.

At least today, your cell phone provider does not have a business reason to keep such close track of you. But the government has plenty of reasons to want to do so. The question is under what circumstances the government is going to be able to access such information.

One of the more ominous phrases in there is "At least today".

Photo: "tell me, whats in your cellphone?" by frischmilch

Knowing me

2008-07-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

In conversation today with a colleague.

J: I could bring the care bears in and set them up in your office.
Me: That would be so wonderful except that I'd already be sad thinking they'd have to leave when you go.
J: That's messed up.
Me: I know.

Photo: Sunset 8 Juni by Powi

(Re) Opening Post

2008-07-01T02:24:00.000-07:00

Just over the crest of summer, and the days are getting shorter. A good time for EC to start again, for writing to be one of the things that sees me into the Fall.

I had a conversation on Sunday with a friend about gay relationships and sex, after which I wondered, why had he been so committed to having an open mind about open relationships even though he was sure that he did not want to be in one himself? I reassured him that he could in fact have an open mind even if he wasn't in an open relationship (or participating in one by being the person to whom the relationship was opened).

The whole thing opened my heart a little bit, because here was someone so generous and so soft (he even had a sweet fuzz that day on his face, like a salt and pepper peach) that he felt that in some way his decision to live differently was an injury or offense. Which is true, as much as we like to think that it isn't, in this individualistic and hard society. What is interesting is how to negotiate that hurt and the reality that people will perceive difference.

Do readers feel like their life choices sometimes hurt others by their mere being and open proclamation (as opposed to the kind of "direct" hurt that choosing to, say, punch someone in the face, inflicts)? I know it's a profoundly anti-liberal thing to say (though they'll defend to the death my right to say it, I should hope), but I sometimes feel that way.

Photo: "Open" by Monica's_Dad

Beginning Again

2008-06-19T16:38:00.001-07:00

Greetings Entre City devotees. We return with a vengeance on July 1, 2008. See you then. The above mural is by Thomas Hart Benton, a relatively unknown painter in 1930s Indiana, who declared himself an "enemy of modernism" and began the naturalistic and representational work today known as 'regionalism.' The "People of Chilmark" was painted in 1920. The people sail a ship against a leviathan. Do they succeed? Chilmark, where are you today?

A stanford education

2007-09-14T16:47:00.000-07:00

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has joined the Hoover Institution at Stanford University as a visiting fellow and will serve on a task force focused on issues pertaining to ideology and terror, the California think tank said on Friday. see more.

and then:

Rumsfeld could be joined by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who has said she will return to Stanford to teach in 2008. Rice served as provost at Stanford for six years. more.

and yet:

Last Thursday and Friday, hoods similar to those photographed on the Iraqi prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison were discovered on several Rodin sculptures at the Cantor Arts Center. Administrators at the Arts Center said they do not know who is responsible and will not further investigate the matter because none of the sculptures was damaged. On Thursday morning, “Rumsfeld was here” was also found written in front of the Burghers of Calais at the Quad, and one of the sculptures also had a hood placed on it.

More to come!

He ain't dirty. He's my brother.

2007-09-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Drawing of Saint Francis embracing a leper from "St. Francis and the Leper - A Meditation"

Does anyone dare to express sympathy for Larry Craig?

Perhaps the gay and lesbian community will embrace him, and give him shelter in his time of need. But our memories are just long enough to remember his hypocrisy, and our vision just long enough to see the tempting fruit of holy (legal) matrimony.

But what about all those other men whose lives are disrupted by these sting operations? What about these sting operations in general? Could we get some community outrage about that?

Here's what GLAAD has to say about cruising:

GLAAD urges media developing such stories – whether separately or as part of their coverage of Sen. Craig – to place them in context by consulting credible experts who can discuss whether such behavior is reflective of any healthy orientation, gay or straight. Gershen Kaufman, a professor emeritus of psychology at Michigan State University, yesterday told ABC News, "[C]ruising is practiced mainly by deeply closeted men...There is a lot of self-hatred and shame, and they can't allow themselves to come to terms with their sexuality."

Additionally noteworthy is the fact that such behavior is being condemned by gay and straight people alike. Intimations that gay Americans broadly object to the enforcement of laws against this kind of activity simply are not supported by the facts and should be avoided.

Finally, GLAAD stresses the importance for reporters to note that these kinds of furtive activities stand in stark contrast to the loving commitments that gay couples everywhere are making to care for each other and for their families.

"GLAAD Provides Recommendations For Media Covering Revelations About Senator Larry Craig", August 30, 2007

Why the cold shoulder?

Samuel Delany pretty much described the psychology of both our oppressors and those of us who feel guilty about being oppressed and envious of the privileges of those to the (hetero) manor born:

We are guilty that we are not them - are not those boys destined to run the systems and cities of the world: that puts a rift between us. They, on the other hand, are terrified, lest through some inexplicable accident, some magic happenstance of sympathy or contagion, they might become us. In most of them, we know, that terror can be repressed before adolescent curiosity. But we also know that that terror, given the license of adult exercise in the darkness of unquestioned moral right, can assume murderous proportions: our deviance, our abnormalities, our perversions are needed to define, to create, to constitute them and make them visible to each other and to themselves.

- The Mad Man, 155-156

Sanctuary! Sanctuary!

Some historians and other activists have criticized the GLAAD-style response:

Where the Craig "spectacle" departs from earlier ones is that some in the gay and lesbian community are participating in humiliating Craig or saying nothing as he has been attacked. Most of the leading gay groups have been silent, making no comment on Craig or the suspect police tactics used in the sting.

William K. Dobbs, a gay civil libertarian, described the performance of the gay groups as "Abysmal, absolutely abysmal. It seems the only sexual behavior they care about these days is within the context of marriage."

- "Troubling Questions in Craig's Fall", Duncan Osborne in Gay City News, 9/6/2007.

There's also a surprisingly compassionate mention in a conservative column in Newsweek:

Craig's unravelling involved a sadness almost unfathomable to anyone who has not felt it necessary to live, as he seems to have done for years, disguising one's nature. The fact that Craig deepened his misery with an absurd "explanation" that was, in its way, lewd increased the duty to feel compassion for him. But the presidential candidate he supported quickly pounced, issuing a statement devoid of human sympathy. Craig, said Mitt Romney, seizing yet another opportunity to stroke social conservatives, "reminds us of Mark Foley and Bill Clinton" and, "frankly, it's disgusting."

- "Now, Defining Decency Down", George F. Will in Newsweek, 9/10/2007.

It isn't all good news(week)

Of course, in that same issue of Newsweek, you have an article basically canonizing the police officer who arrested Craig. He gets described as "sincere and soft-spoken", "laid-back, smooth", a "humble, hard worker". The sting operation, in turn, was "not glamorous work".

There's also a bit where Newsweek describes a previous arrest that the officer made in the same bathroom, in which "rather than humiliate the man with a showy arrest next to the stalls, [the officer] quietly led him away."

Could this possibly be because a big public arrest would basically put everybody in that bathroom on notice, driving the arrest rate down, and requiring these "hard working" police officers actually go somewhere else and tackle real social problems? Or maybe because a big public arrest would be so obviously excessive and distasteful that the whole practice of sting operations would be called into question?

No. Newsweek would rather have us believe that it's because the officer was "being respectful".

With Friends Like These

To return to the GLAAD advice for a bit, let me be tactfully understated: there are some problems.

What exactly is GLAAD's point of view? Despite the (understandably) mealy-mouthed nature of their recommendations, I think we can glean the following:

1) Cruising reflects an unhealthy "orientation".
2) Gay Americans are probably okay with the enforcement of "decency" laws. Possibly even when it involves the state merrily dancing right up to the line of entrapment.
3) Cruising is the "polar opposite" of committed gay relationships.

It's hard to decide which of these statements is the most appalling and why.

Is it the joylessness and sex-negativity of (1) and (3)?

Or perhaps it's the nonchalant acceptance of marginal sexualities as criminal/pathological in (1) and (2).

Or maybe it's the willingness to engage in divisiveness in the service of political acceptability evidenced by (2) and (3).

What GLAAD's message here boils down to, not to put too fine a point on it, is: "Please don't confuse the good, upright, reasonably chaste gay citizen couples with those sick, lawless men who have sex in bathrooms. Unlike them, we deserve the rights and privileges you're still denying us."

Shocked. Shocked!

2007-09-06T21:36:00.000-07:00

Somehow newspaper editors, television presenters, and the "public" have to muster up all the surprise and outrage we can when some Republican conservative senator like Larry Craig turns out to have been arrested for indecency in a public bathroom.

What exactly is this shock over?

Are we perhaps shocked that he didn't just hire a male prostitute and have sex in the relative privacy of a hotel?

No wait, Ted Haggard did that, and we were "shocked" then too.

Are we perhaps shocked that he didn't just use his position of power to sexually approach attractive men in his employ who were unlikely to report this abuse?

No wait, Mark Foley did that, and we were "shocked" then too.

Or that he didn't have an extramarital affair with a male employee who only got the position because of the affair?

No wait, Jim McGreevey did that. Shock. Shock. Shock.

The feigned innocence of the American public when it comes to sexual matters apparently knows no bounds.

For me, it's hardly a shock at all that a closeted, conservative, powerful man whose power is contingent on projecting the image of heterosexuality might engage in sex in restrooms with other men who are unlikely to recognize him or go public with their sexual encounter.

The real shock to me is that he got caught and couldn't pull strings to hush it up more thoroughly.

What is the role played by this surprise? It's to distance ourselves from the system that is obviously failing.

Everybody has to act surprised when a marriage fails, because otherwise, maybe marriage isn't all that great.

Everybody has to act surprised when an ostensibly heterosexual man enjoys same-sex sexual activity, because otherwise, maybe the whole idea of heterosexuality starts to look suspicious.

Everybody has to act surprised when a politician has a private life that does not conform to the straight-white-married-monogamous mold, because otherwise, the whole idea of that being the proper source of this country's laws becomes suspect.

It's the same reason I always act a little surprised when somebody wants sex on a first date, and the same reason I always feel a little disappointed when people let me down.

Maybe that fake innocence is the only kind of innocence we've got left.

The sugar you stir

2007-09-05T11:53:00.000-07:00

Made in LA tells the powerful story of three female garment workers who organize and fight three years to receive living wages and workers' rights from their factory in Los Angeles. The three women epitomize courage and dignity in an industrial setting that strips these qualities away at every turn: constant adverse treatment from bosses, husbands, as well as, at times, other co-workers. The film takes us through their work day, their personal lives, the rise of the boycott, its seeming decline, and finally its ultimate success. The film is an inspiration to anyone concerned with immigration, workers' rights, political activism, feminism, and old-fashioned perseverance. We are not told the details of the new working contract, but we trust from their celebration at the end of the film that it was a remarkable success.

Nothing should distract from the enormous personal perspective and honor that this film provides for its three protagonists. Yet, during the film's happy ending one cannot help feeling a bit betrayed. The filmmakers have followed Lupe to NY where she will speak the voice of the boycott and garner more support for the movement. While there she visits Ellis Island and finds photos of Jews, Poles,and Italians that worked in the garment district in Manhattan and also protested for better working conditions. Nothing has changed, she says. A relationship has been rightfully sought with workers who lived and died a century ago. But what of those at work today under similar conditions as Lupe? The child in Indonesia sewing Nike or Old Navy? Or the countless dry cleaners in every city, the migrant farm worker, the auto mechanic all working under toxic chemical conditions for 12 hours a day for countless shoe-stringed years? Is it a stretch of the imagination to draw a connection from garment workers' lives to these workers' lives today? Or are we truly stretching the imagination when a film about workers' rights issues itself a happy ending? But I know, I know, "one day at a time." Right jefe?

The grapes aren't sour. Prove it!

2007-09-02T08:53:00.000-07:00

You'd think that taste might be an area in which the personal escapes public criticism, but you would be wrong.

Here is Hume on the bad critic:

He must conclude, upon the whole, that the fault lies in himself, and that he wants the delicacy, which is requisite to make him sensible of every beauty and every blemish, in any composition or discourse.

In other words, as shadow might say, such a critic has unreliable taste buds. But how, Hume asks, can we (who?) educate this person? How are we to convince him (and of course, it's always a man, being the 18th century and all) that he needs to revise his opinion of a certain dish?

Success will come:

. . . when we show him an avowed principle of art; when we illustrate this principle by examples, whose operation, from his own particular taste, he acknowledges to be conformable to the principle; when we prove, that the same principle may be applied to the present case, where he did not perceive or feel its influence[.]

Let's go over that again. To succeed at convincing the bad critic of his badness you may take the following steps:
1) Show a principle of taste.
2) Demonstrate that principle by agreed upon examples.
3) Demonstrate that the principle applies to the current object.

So a Hume-an food conversation might go something like this. You have to look pretty carefully to see the operation of the three steps, though, since they often occur all at the same time:

A: I don't like tofu.
B: But smooth-textured and creamy foods are tasty. For example, you like ice-cream and soft cheeses.
A: But it's bland.
B: First of all, tofu has its own bean taste. Secondly, tofu is often eaten with other things. It's only "bland" because it is not a pre-salted product. There are plenty of other unsalted products that are "bland" until seasoned. Stock, for example, or rice.

This is a pretty logical, and verbal, way to go about silencing the bad critic. But in reality, bad critics are often very resilient to persuasion of this type. Far more effective, I have found, is the following method.

A: I don't like broccoli.
*Chef prepares a broccoli dish in which it is cooked right and beautifully presented*
A: *Eating* Oh, this is good.

So then we have two models of silencing the bad critic. The first model is Hume-an persuasion. The second model is a sort of proof by counterexample. Silencing the critic, as it were, by putting food in his mouth.

The chief limitation of the first method is that it rarely works.

The chief limitation of the second method is that it does not do so well for persuading people that they do not or should not like a certain food.

Another limit on the second method is that it's not so great for persuading people that they should like a specific dish, at least, not directly, unless the first time they tasted the dish, it was poorly prepared. However, one can always combine the two methods to overcome this second limit.

Imagine that a person claims not to like the Penne Puttanesca at restaurant X. First one might try to find out what exactly the person does not like about it. Whether, for example, he dislikes that puttanesca, or all puttanescas, or perhaps all pennes. Then, depending on what you found out, you might try to present the person with dishes that prove the critic wrong. In an especially intractable case, you might need to introduce a whole series of sauces and starches, working your way into the neighborhood of Penne Puttanesca.

The second method is inherently kind. To show the bad critic his error, you must feed him.

But of course, the second method is inherently violative. To show the bad critic his error, you must feed him food that there is a risk he will dislike, possibly violently so.

This kind violation is exactly the kind of intimacy elided by Hume's persuasion.

So why talk about food at all?

It is a happy occurrence that the purpose and motivation for conversation about food may coincide.

What is the motivation? As Scarry says, "beauty brings copies of itself into being". We are motivated by the food itself to talk about the food, "as when the seen face incites an ache of longing in the hand, and the hand then presses pencil to paper".

Which means when we talk about food, we are driven to replicate its beauty in words. As I have noted above, the mere logic of an argument proves inadequate to persuade a bad critic of a dish's deliciousness, or beauty. An argument, then, can only succeed if it relies on its own beauty, the same way another dish "demonstrates" a principle of taste.

Witness the outrage at (others) being "deceived" by a critic such as Mr. Gold, whose writing is so carefully crafted. A food review is a form of argument. When an argument has a beauty of its own, it can feel as intimate, as kind or as violative, as a meal.

Bridge

2007-09-01T23:33:00.000-07:00

On the tip of the bay at the top of the morning Alyson and Sheheryar build a bridge of their own. Congratulations you two. What is it that keeps two together for 10, 20, 30 years? I don't know. But some things are clear. Alyson's father, a mechanic in LA, told a story about holding his young daughter's small hand when they went to pick strawberries on a farm together. Alyson wasn't picking any though. When her father asked her why she said because if she wants strawberries she could just go the store to get some. It's Alyson's gentle nature and enormous care to never disrupt that comes out strong in this story. But his slow and careful recount spoke even more vividly an immaculate love of a father who knew the precise way in which his daughter was the whole world.

Hume-ility and Kant-empt

2007-08-30T11:06:00.000-07:00

In a previous post, I asked whether Jonathan Gold and certain yelp reviewers were wrong when they celebrated Mission 261, a Chinese restaurant in L.A.

The underlying question, however, is the only one I can answer, and it is this: Can a reviewer who is sincere ever be "wrong", and if so, what does it mean?

For one person to be wrong, and another to be right, they have to share some common ground. Being "wrong" or "right" is meaningless without some agreement on what "wrong" and "right" entail. Otherwise, two people are merely at cross-purposes, not in fact in disagreement.

It's not surprising then, that the more committed one is to certain standards, the more vehement the disagreement with another who also is committed to those standards.

Hume elegantly outlines this tension in "Of the Standard of Taste":

There are certain terms in every language, which import blame, and others praise; and all men, who use the same tongue, must agree in their application of them. . . . But when critics come to particulars, this seeming unanimity vanishes; and it is found, that they had affixed a very different meaning to their expressions.

The whole point of tension is that it demands to be released or undone. Thus:

It is natural for us to seek a Standard of Taste; a rule, by which the various sentiments of men may be reconciled; at least, a decision, afforded, confirming one sentiment, and condemning another.

What might this standard look like when it comes to restaurants and food?

Familiarity breed Kantians

I am the very model of a modern mantou.
image: Fried Buns from moriza.

There may be specific qualities that one looks for in certain dishes or cuisines. To the extent those qualities are present, the dish, and hence the restaurant is "good". Take, for example, this comment on chowhound:

I think the dumplings are too sweet there. I'm expecting a savory taste and would be hit with granules of sugar. On siu mai? Very unacceptable.

But Gold seems to be on a different track. He acknowledges the value of the paradigmatic and ultra-familiar, but ends up celebrating the unusual and abnormal:

I like gooey steamed har gao and flash-boiled Chinese broccoli as much as the next dim sum freak, but the dishes at Mission 261 seem almost from a different planet.

Mission 261 has some dumplings with combinations of fillings and shapes that I've never heard of. Gold does acknowledge the precariousness of a restaurant that breaks from tradition in the presentation of their dishes, noting that:

If the dumplings were dried out or flavorless, the fanciful shapes might be meaningless, even annoying, but they are so fresh, so bursting with juice, that the follies are as charming as fairy stories.

To borrow a Kantian dualism, then, it seems that with food, there are two forms of tastiness (beauty):

The first presupposes no concept of what the object should be; the second does presuppose such a concept and, with it an answering perfection of the object.

- Critique of Aesthetic Judgment

Kant calls these kinds of beauty "free beauty" and "beauty which is merely dependent". However, for our purposes, we could call them "deliciousness" and "authenticity".

Thus, all arguments for a restaurant like this one (from yelp) fall into the "authenticity" or "merely dependent" category:

Almost everybody in the restaurant was Chinese which is always a good sign (there was 1 other non-Chinese person out of about 50 during dim sum last Saturday).

While phrases like "subtly crunchy baked buns" (Gold) and "fillings are clean, lean and fresh tasting" (Burum) seem to lean more towards "deliciousness".

In arguments about food, people often switch between the two competing attitudes about taste. In my experience, it is not uncommon to be involved in conversations like this:

A: I really did not like the curry at that restaurant, there was an unpleasant bitterness.
B: The eggplant curry? That's supposed to be slightly bitter.
A: But it was way too bitter to be palatable. Also it was slimy.
B: It's an acquired taste. I used to dislike it, but now I love it.

It's supposed to be green and goopy!

It seems that for the familiar, we want adherence to established standards, but for the new, we want "free" deliciousness. Over time, however, we can "acquire" tastes for things that previously were not delicious to us. The wider the range of things we have eaten, the more models of authentic food we have, and the more able we are to form analogies and make distinctions between new dishes and recognized ones. This is the "educated" palate that many foodies prize.

Pride and Prejudice

Hume has a slightly different explanation for this phenomenon. Rather than positing a dualism between "free" and "dependent" beauty, he acknowledges the presence of "prejudice" in all critics, whether arising from our "humour and disposition" or from "the manners of [our] own age and country". This prejudice arises to a greater or larger degree and colors our appreciation of "the true standard".

Thus, for Hume, there is only one kind of beauty (or deliciousness), and we are hindered from appreciating it by notions of authenticity or familiarity.

Those who value authenticity could contest this Hume-an position. What Hume sees as "prejudice", an impediment to true aesthetic assessment, a diner sees as cuisine, memory, inextricable from the object of criticism. As M.F.K. Fisher said, in her introduction to Gastronomical Me:

It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others. So it happens that when I write of hunger, I am really writing about love and the hunger for it, and warmth and the love of it and the hunger for it . . . and then the warmth and richness and fine reality of hunger satisfied . . . and it is all one.

Given food's connection to the personal, can we ever achieve the Hume-an ideal for aesthetic judgment when it comes to food?

in the sound state of the organ [i.e.: free of prejudice], there be an entire or considerable uniformity of sentiment among men, [from which] we may thence derive an idea of the perfect beauty.

If we could, it would mean that every joy is intensely personal and yet shared by all. That every hunger is unique and all the same. That every morsel of food that passes your lips is yours alone to eat, but everybody else can share in that experience. It's the kind of paradox that keeps philosophers up at night.

Perhaps this is what prompted Kant to insist on a disinterested standard for beauty. Just as with ethics, when we must be guided by duty above mere moral sentiment, so too with aesthetics, when we must be guided by principles and not that fickle feeling of "Oh! This tastes good!"

Yet, a Kantian position appears completely untenable when it comes to food (which is probably why Kant did not talk much about food). It seems ludicrous to say something like "this food tastes disgusting to me. However, applying the principles of taste, I discern that it is delicious!"

In fact, food reviewers seem to pretty soundly reject a "principled" assessment of food every time they note the surprising deliciousness of certain dishes which, in principle, sound bad. Linda Burum's review has two examples:

Oddly named dishes that seem unappetizing can turn out to be wonderful. "Shrimp colloid balls stuffed with cheese," for instance, are delicious deep-fried shrimp balls with a bit of mild cheese filling, encased in a crust of minuscule croutons.

and

The word "pith" may not whet your appetite. But this dish of steamed chicken paillards rolled around slender asparagus-like bamboo pith, served in a broth flecked with a fine dice of "pumpkin" (actually winter squash), could take bamboo pith mainstream.

On the plate and in the mouth, phenomenology triumphs over idealism.

Silencing the Bad Critic

Related to the issue of the Standard of Taste for a restaurant is the issue of how to persuade others either to adopt that standard or to properly apply it. To fully answer the question of How Was Jonathan Gold Wrong, we will need to get into rhetoric as well as aesthetics.

More on this next time.

Alyssa

2007-08-28T22:34:00.001-07:00

My two year old niece is fond of carrying around a mini pink laundry basket full of toys wherever she goes. When we went bowling she dropped an eight pound ball and smashed her finger pretty badly. But she did bowl a 77 with the rails so I think it might have been worth it. Here she is being strolled around the University of Virginia where we spent the afternoon. She liked riding down the steep parts of the hills. At all of these places Alyssa could never properly pronounce "Uncle Rich." Whenever she tried she said, "Make a Wish." As in: Good morning Make a Wish, making pasta Make a Wish?, and plea tie my shoe, Make a Wish. She's pure strength and imagination.

Paul

2007-08-27T21:08:00.001-07:00

Just outside the San Francisco Bay, in an abyss too rich for tricks of light and sounds, perched beneath an ocean of darkness, the high pressure, on a rock in a crack sits an unknown crustacean. A whole entire environment has shaped the form of his shell, and all his quiet patience as he waits unobserved in his deep black crevice.

A campus, no different at all, creates its own means of survival. My friend Paul, in the summer of his fifth year of his Philosophy PhD program at Stanford, has decided to take a Leave of Absence. He will go to a retreat center, a place entirely in the wilderness, away from everything, in either southern Texas or upstate New York. He will spend an unknown amount of time. He doesn't know or care right now if he will complete his dissertation or not afterwards. He has already completed a draft of it and needs only to revise it. But its not important to him. He has worked only two or three hours a day for the past two years on it. The rest of his day he volunteers at homeless outreach centers in Palo Alto and San Francisco or does volunteer work on campus. More than anyone I know, Paul has proven it possible that being a grad student at Stanford can also mean being directly involved with the community.

We ate lunch together on Friday afternoon at his favorite spot on campus, which you see in the photo. It's easy to forget you're at stanford when you're sitting beneath this tree. During our lunch, I was wondering why someone so involved, someone who struck the balance between working on the dissertation and having a fulfilling socially responsible lifestyle at the same time, would give it all up and decide to live on his own in near complete isolation. I associate this desire to go into the wild with workaholics, businessmen, and millionaires who realize around age 40 they no longer feel anything at all. Paul's nothing like that. When I asked him this question he said he wanted to go because he wanted to learn how to give more of himself. He said the avenues in which he volunteers and does work for the community actually limits what he could give to others. The only way he could truly reach such a way of being, of absolute giving, was to go away for awhile. To retreat altogether from the world itself. He mentioned people in history who had done this: Buddha, Jesus, St. Francis of Assisi, Gandhi. All of the good they did required in the beginning a spiritual fulfillment through a period of complete isolation.

I was amazed to hear this coming from someone and they were words backed up with all the actions of his getting packed and ready to leave come Monday morning (today). It's one of the boldest decisions I've known anyone to make and Paul has always been a key source of inspiration for me; his actions come as no surprise to me.

But I still don't know what to make of them. This desire to help the world by separating oneself entirely from it: is it something that is still possible as it was centuries ago? Or has society become so complex that some new practice of total immersion in it, and all of its emotions, is rather a more successful and accurate means of helping the world? To be more specific, the exact place that most often makes me think of isolation and complete, utter separation is the campus itself: historically, geographically, literally, aesthetically. The Western university was born out of the monastery. Paul teaches me that the isolation and separation one feels as a grad student today is exactly because Stanford is an entirely social and community-involved university. But I wonder: is that other kind of isolation and separation that the more authentic retreat offers any different, is it not also necessarily social and born of this culture as well? Has deeper truth, then, been abandoned; yet still waits out there to be found? Or is that deeper truth, right here, perched in the soft melee, found just beyond San Francisco Bay, in an abyss rich of darkness, high pressure, quietly curled in a trunk of a car on the asphalt of a community college's afternoon parking lot?

Mouth-witness accounts conflict

2007-08-27T14:46:00.001-07:00

Today I consider food reviews of the same restaurant, Mission 261, from:
1) Linda Burum in The LA Times, a commercial daily newspaper
2) Jonathan Gold in The LA Weekly, a free weekly newspaper
3) Various users of Yelp.com, a community of critics who cover anything from restaurants to sunglasses
4) Various posters on Chowhound, a community dedicated to discussing food only, though not limited to reviews of restaurants

This is merely a review of reviews, as, unfortunately (or fortunately, depending on which reviewers you believe) I did not go to the restaurant itself and have no personal experience of the place.

Without pretending to too much of a system, I shall start with endings, cutting, as chowhound says, to the chow:

"Was it worth it for you?"

In line with my perverse order of attention, I shall look at #4 first.

Mr. cookie, the poster who began the Mission 261 thread, ends his review/rant with:

Next time I'll try Sea Harbour because they specialize in seafood.

An overtly personal complaint/conclusion. Mission 261 has failed to satisfy this poster's desire for seafood. But what about the "meat" dishes? What about the starches? The vegetables? How was the place priced? So far, Mr. Cookie is coming across as somewhat quirky, and not concerned with addressing himself to a broad swathe of the eating public.

One commenter responds in kind.

ml22, the last commenter, ends with:

The manager was very rude, you'd think a big place like that will have friendlier, bilingual employees.

First, please insert here a bitchy aside about making a grammatical error in a sentence complaining about other people's language skills.

Second, earlier in her review, ml22 stated that:

based on the chinese people filtering in and out of the restaurant, I was eagerly (and probably expected too much) waiting to be served

So she'll rely on our patronage as an indicator of quality, but then when it comes time to learn a little Cantonese or Mandarin, all bets are off.

But enough snark about ml22's thinly veiled racism. Let's look at what I consider to be the most interesting comment, that of the first commenter, slacker. Since it's a brief comment, I reproduce it here in its entirety:

It's just not that good. Sometimes I feel like people rave about places just because Jonathan Gold told them it's good. To me, his taste buds are very hit and miss.

Are his ears burning?

Oh. Shit. A reference to another reviewer! This just got inter-textual, folks. In this brief comment we get:

1) I don't like this restaurant.
2) Other people have raved (told yet people) about this restaurant (in a good way, presumably).
3) Those people are wrong.
4) Jonathan Gold misled them by telling them the restaurant was good.
5) If Jonathan Gold had not told them the restaurant was good, they would not think it was good, or at least, would not be "raving" about it.
6) Jonathan Gold's taste buds are unreliable.
7) In this case, his taste buds failed him.
8) He then honestly passed along that misinformation.

There's moral opprobium here, but it is unclear on whose shoulders the blame lies, and for what?

Jonathan Gold may be at fault for having those unreliable taste buds, and then spreading his unreliable opinions on to others. But of course, we all have unreliable taste buds. Jonathan Gold, however, owes a certain duty of care to his readers, being a prominent food critic and all. His unreliable taste buds need to be disciplined, kept in check somehow. This is the moral blame that attaches to those who recklessly wield power. From those to whom much is given, much is required.

The readers who raved might be at fault for relying too heavily on Gold's reviews, and (apparently) ignoring their own experiences. These sheep-like diners willingly re-bleat Gold's falsehoods. They are the unwashed and uninformed, incapable of independent thought. This is the moral blame that attaches to those who fall under the sway of an ideological despot, and, by echoing him, only reinforce his power. For the marketplace of ideas to work, we must all be resolutely independent.

Underlying slacker's comment is the assumption that his opinion matters more than Gold's or the misled masses, not just to himself, but to any and all who might chance upon this comment, because his taste buds are more accurate. We've all had this feeling, of course. It's the opposite sentiment to "to each his own" and, I believe, the cornerstone of all critical writing.

The Defense May Call Its First Witness

I'll go further into slacker's position later. But first, let's take a look at the two excoriated parties' own thoughts on the subject of Mission 261.

[T]he dim sum is already extraordinary, easily the best in California at the moment — less a teeming mass feed with oceans of congee and fleets of Sterno-spewing carts than a sort of aestheticized dim sum meal, where you sit with a pot of really great chrysanthemum tea or puer or zhu cha or whatever and a few small plates of attractive, exquisitely prepared food, the clatter of plates replaced by the contemplative sounds of a live virtuoso of the ch’in, the quiet, zitherlike instrument of the great Chinese philosophers.

That, of course, was Jonathan Gold. Who could fail to be seduced by this paragraph? Already, my finger itches to book another flight to LA. Note, first, that a lot more faculties have come into play in Gold's assessment than merely those of his taste buds. He expresses his disdain for the more common experience of a dim sum "mass feed". He is grateful for the calming strains of the ch'in, and the absence of plates clattering. The food is "attractive", meaning, I assume, visually attractive, and "exquisitely prepared", a contrast to the usual dim sum experience of carts bearing dumplings that have been making their way around the room for who knows how long.

All this before a single morsel of dim sum has made its way past Gold's (narrative) lips.

The folks on Yelp must be among those who "rave" about the restaurant. Alice C. says the dim sum was:

[v]ery fresh. The best dim sum I've ever tried in my life (and I am Chinese so I grew up eating lots of it). The tickin' checklist guarantees the freshness of the food because you have to wait for it to come as they are cooking it ("we make it when you order it" - Jack in the Box).

theo n. proclaims it the "[b]est dim sum in the US of A!" Wynne H., more reserved, says it is "[o]ne of the best dim sum restaurant and banquet hall in LA, and notably for their delicious food cooked without MSG." She also compliments them on their checklist ordering system (look ma, no carts!) and short wait for a table. "We've not had a bad dish here yet!" exclaims Calvin L..

Jerrold S. provides corroboration for slacker's accusation of "raving," saying "I would recommend Mission261 to all my friends".

Not all of the yelpers were so enthusiastic, of course, but I've chosen to focus on those who were, since they are likely suspects for slacker's accusation.

There's Accounting For Taste

So were Gold and the yelp reviewers wrong, and why? I'll go into all that, and Hume too, in the next post.

Courage to sleep

2007-08-24T22:49:00.000-07:00

A detective may piece together the facts in a suicide case but even as facts they cannot be true if they stop there. If a detective says, "May Zhou had 6 milligrams of Unisom in every liter of her bloodstream and wrote an email giving 'life evidence' to her sister before driving to Santa Rosa Community College, laying in her car trunk, and going to sleep," his detached, disinterested pronouncement made from a telephone desk, may be confirmed by scientific findings, but its inconsideration of the surrounding social life in which the calamity occurred renders his diagnosis ridiculous. Perhaps Zhou is simply a pathological case among many (how many?), but certainly not for her.

And certainly not for her father to whom, along with his family, we extend our condolences for this tragic loss. He has created a website (mayzhou.com) that refers to a second autopsy, unacknowledged by the police, that finds multiple wounds to her head and body. He detects unseen forces, but now they have taken on the form, not of a pathology but an individual. Any explanation other than suicide is sought: a random stranger, an envious friend, a vision from the future, a forgotten ghost, a betrayed lover, a thief, a foul situation, an environment...a place where health itself is pathic and infantilism has been risen to the norm, a state of detachment, an issue of self-honor or respect, an unloved labor, an onlooker. It could be all of these things and that thing they all add up to. We used to call that sum a 'society.' Such an old-fashioned word, it makes one blush when it comes up in relation to violence.

If the competitive lifestyle and isolation of graduate work at the research one university are unrelated to this event, if the campus itself is such a repressed and inconceivable factor in this brilliant woman's death by sleeping pill, than we have surely entered that twilight zone in which "to serve mankind"--the familiar motto of higher learning--ends up being in the last hour the title of the alien's cookbook. One is reminded of the ease with which the university system functioned unchanged during the Nazi rule in Germany. And remember: Dr. Robert Oppenheimer's optimism failed at the very first hurdle. Classes begin anew at Virginia Tech. Is it a stretch to concede that whatever else they do, universities also require and produce an as yet unnamed inhumanity.

It gets harder and harder to let neither the power of others, nor our own powerlessness, stupefy us.

On Beauty and Being Fed

2007-08-24T10:14:00.000-07:00

The beautiful, almost without any effort of our own, acquaints us with the mental event of conviction, and so pleasurable a mental state is this that ever afterwards one is willing to labor, struggle, wrestle with the world to locate enduring sources of conviction.

- Elaine Scarry, On Beauty And Being Just

Can a critic ever escape the nagging feeling that he or she is attempting to do the impossible - that is, to fix a source of beauty "in the world" upon the page? Or is criticism just to begin (or continue) the process of what Scarry calls the "infinite begetting" that beauty prompts - a fruit begets a painting begets a poem begets an essay begets another painting and so on?

In the realm of food criticism, the objects of beauty are particularly fleeting. To fully experience a dish's beauty, you have to destroy it by eating it. Perhaps it is this fleeting quality that has many philosophers and theorists reluctant to class food as "art."

Could food criticism change their minds? What aspects of food make it more or less likely to come to be regarded as an art, and how can food criticism affect our perceptions of those aspects of food?

Can food be useless enough to be art?

Both foods and recognized art forms qualify as symbol systems within which common aesthetic features may be found. I do not argue that food ought to be classified as art - or at least, certainly not as a fine art standardly understood. That would be a pointless advocacy in any case, since arts do not arise out of philosophical insistence.

- Carolyn Korsmeyer, Making Sense of Taste

Perhaps a comparison to another medium would be instructive. There is a medium whose artistic potential was once in doubt but now seems firmly established, photography. Sontag writes in "On Photography":

Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Yet food is different from photography in several key ways.

First, food is not new - it has been with us for far longer than photography. If its artistic potential has not yet been recognized yet, what hope does it have going into the future of making an easy transition?

Second, food has a clear social use, and is almost never a purely "gratuitous" activity. Where photography started off as a completely "useless" medium, food has started off as the opposite - not merely useful but in fact vital. However, certain aspects or functions of food do blur the line between "useful" and "gratuitous."

Most food straddles the useful/gratuitous line

Take, for example, the practice of the garnish, or of visual presentation generally. One might claim that insofar as the food preparer gives attention to visual presentation, he or she is engaging not in "cooking" but in a form of painting-with-food or perhaps collage. Yet, the other visual arts do not (at least, no longer commonly) suffer the indignity of this sort of comparison. Photography has been called "painting with light," but the comparison is not derogatory (though perhaps a backhanded sort of compliment, refusing, as it were, to acknowledge the distinct features of photography).

Visual arrangement serves a variety of purposes in food preparation. Not all of it is done merely to make the food look "good" or "appetizing" (with the "useful" aim of stimulating appetite). Sometimes food is arranged so as to look like something else, with varying levels of resemblance: fruits and vegetables carved to look like animals, animals deboned and then reassembled to look like a whole animal. Other times, food is made to follow a visual formal code, such as the "five color" requirement of bento boxes, or the preference for whiteness in bread. The presentation of food can be used to send a message - the self-consciously "simple" presentations of Chez Panisse makes sense as a contrast to the highly regular and "refined" presentations in classical French cooking.

Another example of useful/gratuitous blurring in food is the addition of seasoning or spices. It may be that in the past, spices and seasonings prevented spoilage, or masked its effects so that otherwise unappealing food could be consumed for economical reasons. However, with the advent of refrigeration and food abundance in wealthy countries, the use of spices seems to be sliding more and more into the gratuitous, serving not to mask off flavors but to create "good" ones, and often to affirm cultural identity or create a feeling of the "exotic" (depending on one's relation to the cuisine associated with a particular spicing).

Is molecular gastronomy a purely "gratuitous" food?

Since photography's artistic potential was recognized only when two distinct groups of photographers emerged - useful and gratuitous, so too with food, but in reverse. Some chefs must start making purely gratuitous food. Arguably something like this is happening in the world of molecular gastronomy.

Some of the key features of molecular gastronomy, as I understand it:
1) It occurs almost always in professional kitchens and its techniques are almost alwasys unavailable to the home cook. Thus, it paradoxically is playful and professional at the same time. There are no dilettante molecular gastronomy practitioners, any more than there are home particle physicists.
2) It moves further from recognized cuisine than even the "fusion" style of food, occasionally making witty references to well known dishes, but always appearing alien, shedding a very strange light on the familiar.
3) It often goes right up to the edge of what we would recognize as "food" or even "edible" - for example serving edible papers, globes of sugar, making use of hot water to release scents into the air from elements that are then not actually eaten, aerosol sprays, and, famously ethereal foams. In this, it has that self-reflexive medium-referring-to-itself quality that one associates with art and literature.
4) Its methods show concern for the "scientific" and reproducible. In applying "scientific" principles to food, using many mechanized processes, and the presentation of highly-manipulated and "refined" raw ingredients, molecular gastronomy wants to create dishes that can be precisely reproduced, and not dependent on the skill of any particular chef (the famous "cold hands" of pastry chefs, or that mysterious technique of poking at a piece of food to tell if it is done), region or even time of year. Which brings us back to Scarry's description of the effects of beauty on the perceiver:

Beauty brings copies of itself into being. It makes us draw it, take photographs of it, or describe it to other people. Sometimes it gives rise to exact replication and still other times to resemblances and still other times to things whose connection to the original site of inspiration is unrecognizable.

Molecular gastronomy attempts to create a lasting copy, a response to the beauty of food, that is itself food

With its playfulness, its concern with perfect replication, and its distancing from the practical and everyday food of the home, Molecular Gastronomy seems to be as much a reaction to food as food itself. Here then is a "text" that is sufficiently distanced from its subject matter to be considered on its own, and is sufficiently reproducible to be faithfully "read" by many, and thus "public" in a way that food generally cannot be (many restaurants have "bad nights," on which certain dishes, typically prepared well, are noticeably poorly prepared, which to me implies that dishes are inconsistent, even if most of those inconsistencies fall within the acceptable range of a "good" night).

The famous molecular gastronomy chefs are not "talented" in the same way that other chefs are. They are "ideas" men, and their new style has its share of critics, the way that much contemporary art, in moving away from "technique" has drawn criticism.

Even as molecular gastronomy moves towards being classified as "art," its existence as "food" comes to be questioned.

Food about food - are you a chef or a critic?

Molecular gastronomy is clearly "about food." It self-consciously plays at the edges of the edible, and engages with the many cognitive elements of cuisine, if not its more visceral ones. Thus, its practitioners could fairly be called food critics of a kind.

Yet at the same time, their work product results in things that you put in your mouth (usually), chew (sometimes) and swallow (sometimes).

Here then, molecular gastronomy straddles another line - creation and criticism. But this kind of straddling is familiar to those who have encountered art in any medium. A good film is also "about film," a good photograph is "about photography."

Which then prompts me to expand this analysis to all food. All food, not just molecular gastronomy, is a response to other food. All food is a re-creation of the beautiful - a previously encountered instance of food. The origins of many foodstuffs are notoriously hard to find, meaning that for the most part, we have been eating copies of copies for all of recorded history.

Molecular gastronomy's remarkableness lies not in the fact that it responds to food, but that it responds to it in a new, more permanent medium. This means that it can be experienced fully without being destroyed, since the important thing is not the instance of the dish, but its concept, with the instances being brought ever closer to the concept through science and technology.

Art has to be permanent?

Perhaps the unstated reason for the reluctance to recognize food as "art" is its transience. Yet, as I have argued, food displays many other qualities that "art" has - it has instances of usefulness and gratuitousness, it is self-regarding, and it is (or can be) beautiful.

By refusing to grant food the status of art, we reveal our own fears and concerns about mortality. How could something so immediate, so temporary, be worth elevating? How could this thing, encountered so intensely, pressed against the most intimate parts of the body, full of moisture and smells and memory, then suddenly gone, possibly be as civilized as a painting, contemplated day after day, from a distance?

How could something so alive possibly be as important as art?

The Meaning of Food

2007-08-22T21:56:00.000-07:00

How do food critics eat? Jonathan Gold eats with an awareness that the food in front of him is a text (or at least, has elements of symbolic value), and bears relations in form and history to a series of other food-texts. Consider this passage from his review of Noodle House:

If it is before noon, you will probably get soy milk, a bowl of warm, ghostly liquid dosed with probably more sugar than is good for it. Thin as supermarket 2 percent, with a chalky, beany flavor that half of Chinese cuisine may be devoted to masking, soy milk anchors a rich northern-Chinese breakfast as milky tea does an English fry-up

With this pair of sentences on something as ostensibly simple as a bowl of soy milk (although, of course, if anybody has made soy milk from scratch they will know that it is far from simple), Gold relies on the reader's familiarity with a range of cultural products, and situates the bowl of soymilk in relation to them. They are quite revealing in his (and thus our presumed) attitudes and relations to food and the culture around food.

Here then, is what I got from these sentences:

Food exists in tension with our desires

First, "more sugar than is good for it," grants the bowl of soy milk a will of its own. It is an implicit acknowledgment that food creates its own value systems, and, like text, bends only so much to our will, molecular gastronomy notwithstanding. There is only so much sugar you can add to soy milk before it becomes no longer "good for it." Note, not good for us, but good for the soy milk. Of course, one could argue that such language serves only as a metaphorical stand-in for "not good for us to eat," but it bears noting that the attribution of a value-for-itself is quite common not only in food criticism, but also in cookbooks and other guides to food. Milk will "spoil," and dough "needs" to rest. It is the delicacy of a fruit that may be "overwhelmed" by too much vanilla, and not our own robust senses (which, in many contexts, can deal with quite a large amount of vanilla indeed).

Food analogies are culturally dependent and may be invisible

Then, the metonymic "supermarket 2 percent," a phrase that would be essentially meaningless to many around the world. Supermarket what? 2 percent of what? The nouns missing, of course, are "milk," and "fat." Even as it is highly culturally and temporally situated, the comparison, if you should live in a country and era where it works, seems completely natural. Yet, to many others, even if explained, it might not seem appropriate at all. I know that growing up in Singapore, I considered soy milk to be a completely different drink from milk, and not at all interchangeable, either in application or in my imagination. Might as well compare soup to apple juice.

Indeed, the further comparison of the soy milk to a cup of milky English tea (an ingredient which, historically, of course, traces its roots to China) seems natural to one audience while being quite wrong to another. The categories of "food" and "drink" are distinct and comprehensible in both contemporary American and Chinese cuisines, but what falls into each category can be quite different. By comparing the soymilk to a cup of tea, Gold implicitly places soymilk in the "drink" category.

Yet, even in his own description of the soy milk, there are factors that weigh against this assessment. For example, it is served in a bowl, something that rarely, if ever, happens for drinks in American culture. Second, it has a "chalky, beany flavor" quality, again, not attributes that drinks usually have.

In my experience, soy milk is constructed as a "food" in Chinese diaspora breakfasts, and not a "drink," and thus does not "anchor" the meal in the way a distinctive drink can, but is rather an element of breakfast, more akin to the bowl of granola or the fruit salad in an American breakfast than the cup of tea in an English fry-up. Admittedly, the inclusion of a bowl of soy milk in a meal does mark it as "breakfast"-like (or, in fact, supper-like) in a way similar to the inclusion of a cup of milky tea. But of course, a similar role could be served by any number of foods, including the fried cruller, certain rice porridges, and soft boiled eggs.

Food is fully appreciated within a "cuisine," but the scope of that cuisine, and the relationship of the particular item of food to that cuisine, depends on the point of view of the diner

Then, "half of Chinese cuisine may be devoted to masking" a "chalky, beany flavor," is somewhat mysterious as well. It requires a working knowledge of Chinese food to understand what Gold is referring to. Tofu, I believe is the answer to this riddle. Gold refers to the many Chinese dishes that include tofu as a major element, and the various sauces that may serve to "mask" soybean products' characteristic taste.

And yet, there are a number of regional Chinese cookings each of which is quite distinctive and has claim to being a "cuisine" apart from the others. I don't mean to suggest that diversity within a group invalidates the coherence of that group - of course there can be "nesting" cuisines. Thus, there may be aspects that these regional cookings have in common that make a "Chinese" cuisine discernible. Gold's choice to speak of "Chinese" cuisine here, while earlier speaking of a "northern Chinese" breakfast may be especially apt when it comes to soybeans, whose products occur in all the regional cookings that I'm aware of.

The choice of "mask," however, suggests a certain attitude about soybeans that may be more in line with American cuisine than any Chinese cuisine. It is true that Chinese cuisine values the soybean and its products for their texture first and flavor second. Yet, it is strange to assert that half a cuisine is devoted to "masking" a certain attribute of a food. After all, it seems that if that attribute is worth "masking" (which implies a certain unpleasantness) it would be worth masking all the time, not just half the time. Indeed, in the various Chinese saucings of tofu, the sauce never so truly dominates the dish that the chalky flavor of the bean does not come through. In fact, the coherence of those dishes depends on the flavor of the bean curd - it would be a completely different (and probably unheard of) dish if the thing being "masked" was chicken, say, or bitter melon.

The belief that a "chalky, beany" flavor is one to be "masked" relies for its coherence on a culture where beans are seen as less desirable, a substitute or filler material for meat, eaten when one cannot afford meat (or cannot afford as much as one would like). I think there may be something too of a lingering Jewish fear of "mixing." The bean, after all, tastes a little like a starch (chalky), a little like a protein (beany), and so has a strange and frightening interloper-flavor. Indeed, legumes (including beans) make possible a diet that is complete in protein without the consumption of animal products - probably a secretly terrifying possibility for a culture whose underlying economy relies so much on animal-rearing.

You eat what you are

I suppose my next question is: are food critics more aware of how they eat than those who do not write about food? We all inherit a complex system of concepts, aversions, ethics, when it comes to food. Many of us undergo a change in that system as we go through life, whether consciously chosen (becoming Vegan or vegetarian, for example), or less consciously (learning another cuisine's tastes, adapting your own cuisine to new ingredients). Does this make us more aware of the contingent nature of the meaning of food?

And what of our perception of food's resistance to infinite malleability? Is this resistance real or merely something that we attribute to food in order to justify and render invisible our contingent assessments?

A Preview of Review of Reviews

2007-08-22T01:59:00.000-07:00

To my friend mordenti, who had a pre-preview already, I beg patience (or perhaps a response to this new preview in light of the pre-preview).

I got back yesterday from a trip to LA. One of the goals of the trip was to visit a number of restaurants reviewed in Counter Intelligence, the weekly food column in the LA Weekly by Jonathan Gold.

Gold won this year's Pulitzer Prize for criticism. He is the first food reviewer to win this prize. A quick survey of the previous 10 years has 2 winners each in Literature, Music and Film; with the other 4 years' winners writing on Architecture, Fashion, Photography and Automobiles (!). Of those, by the way, Fashion (2006) and Automobiles (2004) were similarly unprecedented subjects for Pulitzer recognition. As you might imagine, writing on Music, Film, Literature and Architecture had won before.

I believe that Gold also is the second person writing for a free weekly paper to win the prize for criticism (the first was Lloyd Schwartz in 1994 writing for the Boston Phoenix).

Anyway, enough recitation of numbers and dates.

After eating at the restaurants that Gold reviewed, my aim was then to write a piece reviewing his reviews of those restaurants.

Now, having eaten at those restaurants, I find myself with a basket of ideas waiting to be turned into some kind of palatable essay.

An upcoming post might address the following topics:
1) What is the value of a food review? Is it in reliability? Is it something to do with the quality of the language?
2) What is the distinction between a food writer and a food reviewer?
3) What is the point of Jonathan Gold's column?
4) Why do some people on the internet feel that they should heap scorn on those who like certain restaurants "just because" a critic said it was good?
5) What is the difference between food reviewers writing in a free weekly, a paid daily, and one of the many peer-review sites (like Yelp or Zagat)? What motivates each of them? How does their tone differ?
6) Is there an evolutionary advantage to having strong aesthetic opinions? Does it have something to do with age? A friend of mine told me about a study in which older monkeys preferred not to eat new foods.
7) If you like eating out, do you have to like reading food reviews? How is the relationship of the diner to food reviews different from (or the same as) the relationship a person who appreciates art has to art criticism?
8) Do reviews serve to ease the anxiety we have at trying new things? If so, to what end?
9) Given the economically marginal existence of most eateries, restaurant criticism is especially fraught with political and moral implications, in addition to the aesthetic considerations in any kind of review.
10) A food reviewer's common practice of visiting the same restaurant multiple times may give a more reliable indicator of the worth of the restaurant, even by one's own subjective tastes, than one's initial visit to a restaurant.

L.M.H.

2007-08-13T01:54:00.000-07:00

In Boston, April 1905, the age of mechanical reproduction has just broken dawn. Meanwhile, L.M.H. is impatient to write to an unaddressed friend on the paper of a picture postcard of a place she or he has neither seen nor been. The handwriting on the card above states only: "I am a little ahead of myself as i will not see this for several weeks yet but never mind."

L.M.H. sat at a desk in Boston before going to the post office. Was he or she so certain to make it all the way to Palo Alto in 1905? Roads arent paved yet and there is no highway system with snack machines and mechanics at every exit. Furthermore he or she was one of the few people who gave up the chance to write in the small space alloted for messages, "wish you were here" or "having a great time." Instead its, "...but never mind." As if here was a man or woman who just wanted to get the tedious task of writing and sending a postcard out of the way so that he or she might quickly move on to enjoying one of the other new practices of modern life like a rare assam tea or an imported cigar. Perhaps L.M.H began, later in life, to get so fed up with the whole obligation of having to write postcards that on rainy days he happily mailed out four maybe five postcards from places he or she hadnt been but planned to go in the next five to ten years: "I am a little ahead of myself as i will not see this place for four score and seven years yet but never mind."

And little did our L.M.H know that the place he was going would one day be known as Silicon Valley and would invent the machinery necessary that would allow everyone to see anywhere they wanted without ever being there and, as it happens, not ever having to mind anything at all.

Weight

2007-08-12T11:49:00.001-07:00

My brother is collecting pebbles for his dresser. They will be there to keep a wooden carving of Buddha company. I've decided to help him.

And so it was that I collected thirteen pebbles at the beach on Saturday, as I walked the sand with my friend M. M had had a crush on me in undergrad, about which I was somewhat unaware, since I'd known him only as a freshman, and did not quite understand that guys might actually be interested in me.

I discovered his prior interest in me when he visited SF again for an alumni reunion weekend. We went for dinner.

He came to town this weekend on a business trip, and we had lunch.

After the beach, we drove to the stadium to pick up a pin that said "758," a commemorative item for Bond's 758th home run.

As we walked from the car to the stadium, M said to me that he preferred to spend his money on experiences and not things. The one thing, he said, that weighed in favor of things, was that experiences were transient. Things are transient too, I said, and ultimately less fulfilling because they pretend to be permanent.

As I spoke, I felt the weight of the pebbles in my pockets. It's different somehow, when you're carrying things for someone else.

Why Do You Like This Guy?

2007-08-11T22:49:00.000-07:00

In a recent discussion, mordenti and I came to a conclusion that I should face one of my fears and start interviewing friends of mine about why they are in relationships that they are in.

I'm afraid of what I might find out.

Earlier this week I practiced on my brother, interviewing him about his relationship with his best friend in the city.

At one point, the interview was blocked, because there were some things he did not feel comfortable discussing with me, specifically the nature of intimacy.

Which was a relief, because I was getting scared. But now I wish I'd pushed the point a little more. Then again, when you have a personal relationship with the interview subject, you can't really push too hard. That's a good way to lose friends.

Phoenix Order

2007-08-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Yesterday i asked if Harry Potter's association with Oxford signals that school's irrelevance to the social world. Especially as compared to our modern scholastic model, Stanford, which has made "practical" research and development for any number of commercial and state enterprises its reason for being. But after watching "Harry Potter: the Order of the Phoenix" last night i've changed my mind completely.

In the film, Hogarts receives a thorough shakedown from the Ministry of Education for its poor teachers and outrageous lack of discipline. The new professor appointed by the government is Ms. Umbridge and her first order of business is to see to it that the students learn "theories" of magic spells rather than actually "practice" magic spells. Harry smells a fish and realizes this is a sure-fire way to get slaughtered in the coming battle against the evil Vortimer. The students start their own school with Harry as the teacher and all ends somewhat well from there.

The commentary on Tony Blair's 'learn and earn' education reform of the British school system is there to be untangled and any of our British readers are welcome to help us out here. But what struck me last night was that Harry's group of friends are the meek wierdos, the social outcasts of the school. They are the marginalized group in a fantasy world in which race, class, and gender are identities that no longer too heavily exist. And when the government comes to change their beloved school they collectively mobilize and can acquire an institutional space of their own. Its the best part of the movie: a door suddenly appears that opens up into an enormous hallway that has never been there before and only appears, someone says, when its absolutely needed. "Its like Hogwarts wants us to win," says Harry. The building itself has an active role to play in what can and cannot be taught within its walls.

The name of this process in which a room opens itself up where it previously did not exist, in our contemporary moment, is called "interdisciplinarity." And once upon a time it was thought of as a radical, transgressive practice. In fact it was brought about, not by buildings magically conceding a new space for alternative learning, but by protests, marches, and sit-ins. So what was transgressive yesterday is magically on top of today's menu. The building itself becomes the technology that coagulates this historical process. Yes, i like it.

Meanwhile, Harry has chosen this moment to have a personality crisis and can't really decide if he is good or evil as Vortimer has stepped into his mind. Its a subplot on par with our own Spiderman 3. Could it be that in a historical moment when the means of transgression itself have been appropriated by even the poshest, stuffiest of university settings, that subjectivity must now suffer through the realization that it too is interdisciplinary, a new kind of technology, and by that i mean your very own marginal identity can today magically solidify, reify an entire history of struggling people and in the process become firm ground upon which to reap a lifetime of commercial success.

Why all this happens at Oxford and not Stanford im puzzled by. But, no, the Order of the Phoenix is really all about the University of Phoenix. Technology: is it in you?

Oxford

2007-08-09T12:06:00.000-07:00

In the gift stores at the colleges in Oxford you'll find Harry Potter memorabilia. I saw a dish set of Harry and his two friends in a showcase for 300 pounds. I dont know if Harry Potter was filmed there, but I think I remember reading that the Oxford campus was the inspiration for the author's depiction of Hogwart's schools. Gothic, grey, and cloistered away from the rest of the world. At Oxford there is a bellman at every entrance and when the 5:30 bell tolls all visitors are rapidly shuffled out of these ornate, black iron gates.

Does the fact that this old, austere, mold-setting university has become associated with, indeed the exact setting for, all of the magic and fantasy of the world of Harry Potter only reiterate its obsolescence as a scholastic setting, as a place appropriate only for children and day-dreamers? Oxford's cloistered quadrangles of fine green grass (which "you, sir, are not permitted to walk on.") is a stark contrast to Stanford and its total embrace of its surroundings, its recreation of its vicinity into Silicon Valley. Oxford makes Stanford feel like a dramatically social kind of university. Can you believe I wrote that sentence?

When the university closed we walked the town a bit. It was filled with high school kids flirting and cruising and junkies asking for money or knocking things over. Perhaps the high schoolers, equipped with the rhetoric of loving Harry Potter, begged their parents to attend summer school at Oxford so that they might stay out late unchaperoned and find girls to look at. The junkies, meanwhile, were up to their own wizardry and witchcraft.

junk in a trunk

2007-08-09T09:51:00.001-07:00

junk in a trunk
Originally uploaded by mingerspice

A box full of badges at the Alameda antiques fair, where I went last Sunday.

The fair is very long, but not too wide, so the best way to navigate it is to walk all the way to the far end and wind your way back to the entrance.

The vendors weren't set up in any discernible order.

No comment

2007-08-03T10:31:00.000-07:00

Him: You deserve to be with someone who loves you.
Me: But I'm having fun dating you.

The Blue Rigi

2007-08-02T19:35:00.001-07:00

Greetings from Palo Alto faithful Entre readers! I made it back safely! Though, in my last day in Washington DC I did catch a fever and its cold is still with me. Sore throat, coughing, congestion. All good stuff to have after a month of traveling. Its keeping me at home writing and catching up with myself.

And likewise my rechargeable batteries in my camera have lost all desire to recharge right on cue of returning home. So I can't look at my photos, nor share any just yet. But look at this. Its a watercolor painting done by JMW Turner in 1841. I saw this at the Tate Britain on a whim one afternoon while in London and just now tried to find a reproduction of it on the internet. It is the greatest watercolor i have ever seen and it was an unexpected find that day. They had an entire exhibit on his watercolors, but this one you cant too easily walk away from. I knew nothing of its subject or its artist before I walked into the room but there I stood for some time suddenly deeply in awe of both.

Three weeks later I had met up with Christian in Basel and we had planned a trip into the alps during my stay. I had no idea exactly where we were going or how we would get there. It turned out that the mountain we climbed was Rigi Kulm. We took a steamer boat across that same lake, we climbed to the corner tip of that same mountain in Turner's watercolor. By then I had forgotten the name of the picture, Blue Rigi, because at the time the name didnt mean anything to me, only the image did. Now this afternoon, finding that the image I was looking for of Turner's watercolor was now a place I had just been, a place of stunning, ineffable beauty, I am laughing at all the small amazing stories that lie in the spaces and chance acts that brought me to see this painting, its mountain, and the reproduction of them you see above. What's this laugh?

You can('t) always feel what you want

2007-07-30T11:57:00.000-07:00

There is pleasure sure in being mad that none but madmen know.

Living in the bay area, in this technocracy, in the second most educated city in America, hanging out with smart law students and attorneys, I've come to buy into the illusion of control extending into our own emotions.

But it ain't so.

Today on the radio, my brother and I heard a DJ talk about his ongoing sexual relationship with a man who was in a long-term open relationship. He received assurances from his fellow DJ and callers that the open relationship was going to be fine and was not his to worry about. While he acknowledged that the open relationship seemed ok, he persisted in feeling worried and guilty for being "the other woman". He got somewhat upset at being told not to feel guilty.

From which I gleaned:
1) We are often attached to the feelings we have

But also

2) We often are unable to be talked out of feeling what we feel, even if we want to be.

photo: Self-Reflection by kton25

Room with a view

2007-07-23T17:22:00.001-07:00

There's something about seeing a wet street from so far above that I really, really miss. Maybe I'll work at a big firm with a 20th storey office, just so I can look down on rainy days.

image: hdb2 by psychofish

2007-07-23T04:41:00.001-07:00

A dove in her nest in the joint of a rusted pipe

2007-07-18T21:59:00.001-07:00

We watched a pair of doves build a nest in the joint of a rusted pipe outside our window. They were not more than 15 feet away as I cooked, ate, and studied for the bar exam.

This morning I saw that the female dove had laid an egg and was sitting on it, the egg kept in the nest more or less by friction and little else. I took this photo. You can see the little white egg.

Later today the doves were gone, and the remains of the egg were on the pavement below.

Elephant and castle

2007-07-17T06:10:00.000-07:00

Here is the one who has been cooking my falafal dinner's for the past week. He is from Turkey and has been living in london 15 years and not a citizen of this country. The shop, he says, has made the time go bye so quickly.

Off to Berlin this evening.

Timing

2007-07-12T17:41:00.000-07:00

I woke up at 3pm on Monday afternoon. It was a 15 hour nap. Annalisa was just getting home from work by the time i took a shower and stretched out the 20 hours of traveling I had just done. We flipped through the Time Out together and found that my friend's band was playing. Its a nice thing when you fly across the world to find an unexpected coincidence like that just waiting for you to notice.

LA friends will know them well: The Ettes are in London recording their new album and all their new songs are swingy smooth and a ton of fun to dance to. Although the kids at 'the social' were quite tame. A. and I missed the opening act so werent sure if they were just in awe at Poni's no-brakes drumming or if recalcitrant posturing was what the neighborhood kids here do. yeah, kind of like LA.

We got there early and decided to go for pizza and come back. Just stepping out of the club onto the sidewalk the kid in front of me backed up into my arms. He had just peeked his face into the tinted window of a parked van only to have whoever was inside kick the window. It was apparently meant to be a joke but ended up being perfect timing to knock out the kids two front teeth. He clenched his mouth and uncovered it briefly only to spit out his two bloody front teeth which had been stuck onto the back of his throat. He crouched down and the kicker came out to profusely apologize. Everyone gathered around him to see the bloody mess, but now he was tucked hard into his crouching position on the sidewalk, completely silent, and now no one could see what had happened. We kept going.

Crunch time

2007-07-10T22:24:00.000-07:00

The bar exam is in two weeks. Will I be ready? We'll just have to see. I'm already feeling out of breath.

Passing it doesn't make me a success. Failing it doesn't make me a fuck-up.

Photo: exam-43 by archiprezmosis.com

First cups

2007-07-05T21:21:00.000-07:00

Steve, a former barrista at Blue Bottle coffee in Hayes Valley has a flickr account. In that flickr is a photo series. Each picture in that series is of the first cup of coffee he drinks each day before he drinks it. Often it is a cup he made or that a friend made for him.

This is a photo of my first cup of coffee. After I drank it. I bought it from blue bottle.

It's a whole different value system.

So it's come to this

2007-07-04T09:29:00.000-07:00

My friend, J., puts sunscreen on his head to prevent his scalp from getting sunburned. We proceed to sit on the beach for 3 hours. J. reads Harry Potter. I read Brillat-Savarin. In a while, I drink water and eat the snap pea crisps that J. and D. brought.

New masthead

2007-07-03T10:32:00.000-07:00

What a difference a font makes. From something that resembled the Paris Metro font to the old standard Serifa. Our masthead has changed. I also decided that the text of "entrepreneurial" should be brown rather than black. "city" remains black, however.

The birds patiently and silently accomodate all changes.

Morgantown window

2007-07-03T08:44:00.000-07:00

I have left my camera in the archives so unfortunately no picture with this post. I do apologize. But let me make up for it by giving a brief account of my very first hour of this one month long trip.

I had just finished with the paperwork for the rental car at the airport in Charlotte (the best airport in the US!) and had been driving for about 45 minutes when i decided to stop for breakfast. It was about 8:30am and I had reached a town called Morgantown. I exited I-40 and a highway patrolman was there stopping people on the exit ramp. A line of cars waited to be spoken to by two stiff-hatted men. It wasn't clear why. I had my license ready and reached it out to him when it was my turn. He looked it over carefully. Then asked if I still live in Florida. (I still have a Florida driver's license.) I said "yes, sir." Although we all know this is not the truth. I guess I was trying to avoid any complications with this man, and was just hoping the quickest and easiest answers would mean I was not to be paid attention to. It was. He said okay after a three second pause. And I went up to the stop sign and pulled away. There was never any explanation about any of it. And I didnt ask. I always just feel guilty around cops and use the method of quick release whenever I can. Lying to cops is also kind of fun to do.

So I was in Morgantown, NC now looking for a nice vegetarian breakfast restaurant, still a bit jumpy from having been looked over by the cops for no clear reason. I saw a place called "Coffeeshop". I pulled in the parking lot and a grey-haired woman in the window smoking a cigarette watched me suspiciously. Above her head and in each of the windows were huge photos of dishes of scrambled eggs, pancakes and bacon. Smoking coffee cups and muffins. On these photos were written funny quotations that had nothing to do with the food. My favorite one was on the Breakfast Specials photo of a ham and cheese muffin with hash browns. Across the photo it read, "If you want something done, ask a busy person to do it." I about fell out of the car laughing. I guess I pictured that lady with the cigarette saying it to me. Anyway, we watched each other for awhile: her giving me the evil eye with her cigarette clutched easily between fingers in a hand never too far off from her face, me sitting in a yellow rented Chevy Cobalt laughing at how witty I imagined her to be. When I stopped laughing I started to think about what this must look like from her Morgantown window. Because of this early morning exchange, I never ate at "Coffeeshop." I drove back to the highway and stopped at the next exit...

Road work

2007-07-03T01:16:00.000-07:00

There's always road work going on on my street. And when it's over we have these brutal surgical scars of metal and tar.

Sweaty scenery

2007-07-02T12:14:00.000-07:00

I've been running regularly this past week with my brother. Each time we pick a new place in the city to run to. We've explored the area up on the hill above Dolores Park, which felt very Montmartre. Today we ran to Duboce Park, where I saw some DILFs and a sunbather.

These parts of the city are best experienced at around 6 miles an hour. A bike is a bit too fast. Walking can be slow. A car is certainly too fast.

Golden Gate Park, on the other hand, is more a bike experience, and not a run experience. Manhattan was a walking experience.

Photo: "Curse those joggers" by ben hanbury.

Farmers Markets on the Peninsula

2007-07-01T01:03:00.000-07:00

(photo from Redwood City Farmers Market website)

I've been to three farmers markets on the peninsula and thoroughly enjoyed each one. In general, they are not as crowded and overpriced as the Ferry Building, but with slightly better quality produce than the Heart of the City market (although, admittedly, I tend to go to Heart of the City a bit late in the day, since it stays open later than any other farmers market I've been to).

Palo Alto
Saturdays on Gilman St. behind the post office
http://pafarmersmarket.homestead.com/index.html

This was my first farmers market, and I still have fond memories of its intimate setting (a parking lot barely bigger than a tennis court) and reasonably priced seasonal produce. Whoever manages this market does a great job, since each stall seems to offer produce that is not duplicated at other stalls, taking the stress out of decisionmaking. If you want a peach, you go to one farmer. An avocado? The next guy. Sometimes comparing prices and quality of the 6 different farmers offering peaches at the Ferry Building is overwhelming.

It's also a great place to run into your professors and TAs with their adorable kids. Conveniently, Whole Foods is just a few blocks away for your staples (which you won't be able to get at the market).

Mountain View
Sundays at 600 W. Evelyn (in the parking lot there) http://www.cafarmersmkts.com/mtnview.html

This was the second of the peninsula farmers markets I've been to. It's a lot larger than Palo Alto's and significantly more crowded. Acme bakery has a stall there, as do most of the big name farmers who are at the Ferry Building. I would say that this is the Ferry Building market but with less crowding, more asians, and much less attitude. The prices are generally lower too, in my memory (although I have not shopped there in a while, and this is a very expensive year for food).

Great for pre- or post- dim sum farmers marketing.

Redwood City
Saturdays at 850 Winslow St.
http://www.rwckfm.org/

I went here once or twice with my friend L. who used to live in RWC. It was in between Palo Alto and Mountain View in size. I found it to have the most casual of atmospheres, with very good produce. However, I haven't been here in a very long time. Great for stopping by the Indian provisions store for some fried snacks afterwards.

Adrift

2007-06-30T01:11:00.000-07:00

I don't know what I want, sometimes.

EPISODE I

The Boy: I discussed this with K. at work, and we decided that you saying that you're going to a job fair in Colorado was passive aggressive.
Me: Really?
Boy: Yes.
Me: I guess. I could see that.
Boy: You're mister passive aggressive.
Me: Maybe I am. I didn't even realize.
Boy: I'll talk to you soon, PA.
Me: What? What's PA? Oh.
Boy: Uh huh.
Me: I don't want that to be my nickname.
Boy: Just for now.

EPISODE II

Boy: Do you want to come over?
Me: Well, I don't want to if you're tired. Do you want me to come over?
Boy: It's up to you.
Me: Well, how do you feel? I want to see you, but if you need your rest . . .
Boy: I'm just a little crabby.
Me: Maybe I could come over for breakfast.
Boy: I leave it for you to decide.
Me: Hmm. If I come over?
Boy: We'd just go to bed.
Me: You should rest. I'll see you at breakfast.

EPISODE III

Me: I haven't seen you in like a week!
Boy: When you say "I miss you," do you really miss me or is it something you're just saying because you feel you should say it?
Me: Oh. Maybe. I don't know.
Boy: Oh no!
Me: I mean, but I always think that. I never know whether what I'm feeling is real or not.
Boy: What?
Me: You know, I'm always second-guessing myself.

Hooked, by Matt Richtel

2007-06-28T03:21:00.000-07:00

I thought EC readers might be interested to know that there is a new fiction title out set in the SV (and environs), Hooked. It's a thriller. Matt Richtel, the author, is a journalist at the New York Times. It's still in hardcover and so a little pricey. I shall browse it at a local bookstore and perhaps purchase and review it if it seems promising. Amazon reviews so far are unhelpful/uncomplimentary/suspiciously enthusiastic. One reviewer annoyingly, and predictably, uses the book's title to describe how he felt about the book. There's always one. It's like the guy who points out the not-so-funny-and-painfully-obvious pun, and expects you to clap/laugh/give him a fucking medal.

Apartment Dwelling

2007-06-28T00:24:00.000-07:00

A friend of mine blogged about the gym in his apartment complex. I have to bike to go to the gym. At least it saves me the warm up cardio.

Some days I miss apartment life. The height, the view, the elevators, the amenities downstairs. When many people live in a small amount of land, a certain quality attaches. The apartment complex makes a city feel like a city.

The bulk food aisle

2007-06-27T00:38:00.000-07:00

The bulk food aisle is a fine way to try new things in a world where you can't ask your grocer what's good.

Almost got them

2007-06-26T23:51:00.000-07:00

A faulty generator in the dish was said to be the cause of the brushfire in the foothills behind stanford yesterday. The "making hay" statues, unfortunately, were not caught on fire.

Foreign correspondent

2007-06-26T01:39:00.000-07:00

A picture I took in Niles, Fremont next to the oldest Silent Film theater in California. Charlie Chaplin made films in this town. Go there if you can. Film history is rich across the Dumbarton bridge and the mannequin heads in the windows are ripe for thinking about horror films: a favorite past time of the writers of entre city.

On wednesday evening I depart for Columbia, South Carolina for 10 days. From there I head to London, Berlin, and Basel. Posts will be sporadic, but very precious indeed. A big kiss to all I will miss back home!

Radio

2007-06-25T16:24:00.000-07:00

I don't like listening to music on the radio, because there are too many interruptions from self-satisfied DJs and commercials. NPR, on the other hand, is a joy, because the hosts aren't annoying, and the breaks are shorter. Even if there's a program I'm not particularly interested in, I'd rather listen to that than the overstimulant that is commercial radio.

Is it so wrong to want a subsidized music radio station as well? Why should paid satellite radio be the only way to get music? Is this so utopian, considering the miraculous nature of radio itself?

Tesla coil photo from francescopozzi

Hey there, buckaroo

2007-05-29T23:23:00.000-07:00

Despite my disclaimer that Vegetarians, and especially vegans, do not ride mechanical bulls, I ended up holding on until the dial hit 7 out of 10. Which, according to the woman controlling the bull, is the highest rating she's seen in quite awhile. I could of held on longer but decided to go for style and swung my hat around in circles Broncho Billy style. Then I heard applause and cheering and shortly after that she cranked up the dial and I landed on my face. I have to admit, falling off was the best part.

Performing campus

2007-05-24T20:52:00.001-07:00

This entire school year Azia Kim, an 18 year old from Orange County, has been living in Kimball and Okada undergraduate dormitories on campus. But Kim was never accepted as a student. She's been squatting. Allegedly she climbed in and out of the first floor window as she was never issued a key. In the meantime, she's been doing all the basics like attending classes, studying for exams, meeting friends, and pissing off her roommate. Her roommate at Okada had this to say:

"Personally, I don't feel safe now that Stanford allowed this to happen and that they're not doing anything to ensure the safety of their students. I think something is definitely wrong with the system if this could happen."

Unfortunately Kim hasnt spoken-out about what made her decide to act like being a freshman at Stanford. But its the perfect response to last week's realization at MIT that Marilee Jones, their Dean of Admissions, never graduated from college as was listed on her resume when she applied for a position at the university 28 years ago. When this tiny piece of information became public, despite her terrific work as MIT's Dean, she resigned.

Overheard at the planning office

2007-05-21T09:43:00.000-07:00

On campus, one bridge connects the electrical engineering and computer science buildings to the earth science, physics, and aerospace buildings. This warning sign has recently been posted at its entrance. Meanwhile, a discussion down at the campus planning office was overheard:

Bob (Facilities Manager) just placing the phone back on its hook: "Another broken heel down out the science bridge: that's our third complaint this week. This poor woman broke her Gianni Melianis. Someone's gonna git hurt if we dont do something about this. Why'd you have to go and put up a steel grate bridge in the first place?"

Jim (head architect for campus structures): "Deconstruction is all the rage these days Bob, you know that. The more it looks like it ain't finished, the more street credibility it gets. That's just the way it is, my friend. Didnt you see my design for the new hospital building. Its a giant steel cage."

Bob: Yeah, well your bridge is sexist!

Jim: What?

Bob: That's right. You've built a bridge that's hazardous to women. You walk across that bridge in high heals you're a gonner. It's a death trap.

Jim: Maybe if Stanford had more women nerolled in the hard sciences I would have thought of that, but as it stands I was under the impression this university went back to being an all-boys school. Furthermore, Bob, who are you to say women's gotta wear high heals? This is the 90s, i mean the zeros, man, women wear sneakers just like everyone else. I seen a woman with a skirt on and wearing sneakers just the other day. And I got no problem telling you I thought it looked very professional.

Bob: I know women wear sneakers Jim. The point is the women that wear heels are forced to walk around the entire building rather than cross your bridge.

Jim: Well lets put up a sign that says "Watch your step."

Bob: No, that would compromise the sense of security about the structure itself. When in fact its the person--a specific kind of person--crossing the bridge that should not feel safe on it.

Jim: Okay, how about, "dress appropriately for this bridge."

Bob: No, no, no. That's way to authoritarian. I know, how about a picture of a high heel with a line drawn threw it? It worked for the No Drugs campaign. No reason why it can't be jsut as effective with clothing. Hey where you off to, we gotta sketch this out.

Jim: I gotta deadline. Im' designing a new door knob that can't be opened by anyone with long finger nails.

Bob: Alright then, head on back when yur done.

Fin

Talk to Chuck

2007-05-16T23:11:00.000-07:00

This evening, in celebration of International Week at Stanford, there were a series of tables lined up offering food and alcohol from various countries. This took place on the patio of the Schwab (as in, Charles Schwab) Business School dormitories which meant that after the first hour there were two drunk dudes wrestling on the sidewalk pulling tight on each other's polo shirts and shouting about how 'you can't do that, you can't do that.' Surrounded by representatitves of the entire world offering free samples of their cultures' wares, it was hard not to see the scuffle as an honest emblem of the competitive and self-centered spirit of their lifework as future american capitalists. Swept-up by this moment of clarity, i shouted "Go Wolfowitz Go!" which registered as a complete and utter silence, especially as it was evident from my hoodie, vans, and black jeans that i and my three friends were so crashing this "party". After that the attention turned to us which meant I hoisted one last Sapporo and mochi and moseyed on out.

Photo by Cartier-Bresson (1938) picnic on the marne. (no real reason intended.)

Soldier's Lament

2007-05-15T20:55:00.000-07:00

A private in a Japanese World War II regiment has shot at Emperor Hirohito with a slingshot for atrocities commited during the war. He drives a van whose every inch is painted with messages of the emperor's betrayal and the need of consolation for those men reportedly killed after August 14th, 1945, the day the war officially ended. They are his friends, but some of them he did not know at all. He has been jailed over 13 years for acts committed that for him hold the burden of consoling the dead. When he is pulled over in his van by angry drivers and police, he speaks to them through a bullhorn apparatus mounted on the top of his vehicle. He is prepared for all of it.

In this documentary (Yuki Yukite Shingun/The Emperor's Naked Army Marches On) we watch Kenzo Okuzaki confront the men who committed these murders and the men who gave the orders to kill them. He beats them in their homes when they will not speak to him, and the ones laying bed-ridden in the hospital after some operation, he slanders and tells them they have gotten what they deserve.

During his time with these men we learn that the privates were "executed" not so much because they had betrayed their regiment as was reported, but because they were to be eaten by the rest of the regiment stationed in the foodless jungle of New Guinea. They were chosen because they were the lowest ranking men. Ozuzaki has brought with him the brother and sister of one of these cannabalized men as a means of provoking these sergeants into a confession of the truth of what happened. When the relatives cannot continue, or are unwilling to go along, Ozuzaki has his wife, or an old friend of his, to go along with him to play the role of the grieved relative.

The film is often used to draw out a discussion of the ethics and responsibilities of the documentary filmmaker. Why did he not come to the aid of the man being beaten? Why did he allow Ozuzaki to lie to these men as a means to wheedle the truth from them? At the end of the film Ozuzaki tells us he will contnue to use violence if necessary as a means to console the souls of the dead. We learn that, years later, Ozuzaki, in an attempt to kill one sergeant, has shot his son instead. He is back in jail. Perhaps the filmmaker, like Ozuzaki, believes the atrocites committed warrant the methods used or needed to uncover the truth.

But to watch this film and ask these formal questions seems to me a way to avoid talking about its content. (Although, the dilemma of whether or not it is acceptable to use violence and deception to have war criminals confess implicates, if not incriminates, the viewer through every minute of the film. Is their an argument to be made for Ozuzaki's moral fury?--is an important and untimely question given our general all-around agreed upon post-ideological and ethics-avoiding 'daily-life.') This film is not a general warning that needs to be understood on a global scale in order to prevent an imminent disaster. Although, it is certainly that too, this film makes that point crystal clear by offering the viewer the unique, fundamental nausea at the sight of the malice with which humans attempt to culturize their own internecine slaughter. Its when that truth has an embodiment in persons with families, houses, and dinner-times that it suddenly becomes something much more horrifying than any inconvenient truth.

Love Will Keep Us Together

2007-05-11T12:39:00.000-07:00

But the Uniting American Families Act won't hurt.

It's a bill that was re-introduced on Tuesday. It has been introduced several times (previously also under the name Permanent Partners Immigration Act). Each time, the list of Congressional supporters grows. Seems like only a matter of time.

UAFA would extend to same-sex couples the same immigration rights currently afforded only to opposite-sex couples.

Historically. the U.S. government has committed to the position that family unity is a worthwhile policy objective for immigration law and that forced separation of family members may be a hardship. Congress has eliminated numerical restrictions upon immediate family members of U.S. citizens to immigrate to the United States. The disparity between same-sex and opposite-sex couples then is an undue hardship imposed not only on foreign national partners, but on American citizens and permanent residents.

UAFA holds Congress and the U.S. government to its commitment that immigration law should keep families together.

Although a growing number of countries are recognizing the importance of allowing same-sex partners equal immigration benefits, many couples are unable to live together because neither of them lives in a country that provides such recognition. The U.S. needs to get off that latter list, and on to the former.

mordenti says:

2007-05-11T10:21:00.000-07:00

Ming, stop thinking about your "career" and post something on this blog!

Community Service on campus . . . oh, I once heard of this group that served ice cream to the elderly

2007-05-08T23:16:00.000-07:00

Im a "community associate" in the graduate dormitories on campus which means I plan the non-academic events for grad students in my neighborhood. In addition to this, all of the CAs are separated into four groups to lead campus-wide events for grads in these categories: sports and recreation, culture and education, social events, and community service. Im in the latter and this year, for example, I organized a book drive for local prisoners.

Tonight we had a meeting and it was proposed by the CA in charge that rather than have a separate group for community service we are going to split it up and integrate it into the other three categories and make them each required to do one community service event throughout the year. This is a response to the low graduate student attendance at community service events. By making it a "requirement" the idea is to thereby emphasize the importance of community service on campus and increase the numbers of people attending.

When I oppose this suggestion, am i being conservative? Surely, more people be involved by making it a requirement. This was the "reality" of the issue I was repetitively asked to consider. I wondered instead if this would further stigmatize public service as something students "should" do but don't really want to. I don't want people "required" to attend to attend cooking for the homeless, collecting books for prisoners, or even eating ice cream cones with the elderly. There's this widespread tendency on campus to turn something that falls behind or lacks popularity into a success by making it mandatory. People obey rules, is the local fail-safe pedagogy. I proposed several ways of making the group fun and more creative with its events and therefore courting people to get invloved. But they said our group isn't allotted money to budget such things as parties like the three other groups are. So they hadn't even thought to offer the same amount of money to community service as, say, going to the ballet might necessitate. In the meantime, our numbers are down and now its curtains for community service on campus. Its hard not to see this as somebody's long term plan.

Painting by Raymond Pettibon (1987). For the fuck of it.

Tough choices

2007-05-07T21:24:00.000-07:00

Lately I've been reading at the engineering library on campus. Last week I arrived there just in time to see Carly Fiorina sitting at a table in the courtyard next to a stack of her new book, "Tough Choices." Apparently she had just given a talk in the auditorium and was now signing copies for a long, admiring queue of Stanford electrical engineering grad students. I found a friend standing off to the side and asked if she'd been acquitted for the accusations of surveilling her employees at Hewlett-Packard. He didn't know. He asked what I was doing here. This was a dig at my being a humanities, rather than hard science kind of guy. I said I was writing poetry up on the third floor. He ignored this and apologized for the remark. He added that, in fact, he would be studying literature and philosophy like me if only the world was such that he could live forever.

Carly, at the table, had sacrificed the individual freedoms of her employees for the good of her corporation. Likewise, my friend, in grad school, had sacrificed his own individual desires for the good of his own life.

And on and on.

The Nature of the Blog

2007-04-28T10:16:00.001-07:00

What's this blog going to be about? A genre of writing? An audience that becomes a community? Questions that can't be easily answered?

We know it'll have a sense of humor. We know that the photos will often be good (and not original content).

Perhaps we'll have weekly features, I don't know. A book review, a blog review, some kind of vegan recipe.

Life in the Valley is worth talking about, and not just at fancy parties, or in your car.

New Digs

2007-04-28T00:46:00.001-07:00

Looking cute, and feeling cute.