Seditious Rants

The ravings of a sold out eco-terrorist with a poor kid's fascination for high culture. Also... sports stuff.

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Let ‘em know! These are some of Crommunist’s tweets in reference to an article on Reason stating that America was founded by the “opposite” of victims, to which he asserts, wouldn’t that be victimizers? And if in that case, correct. 

This “personal responsibility” and “bootstraps” and “American exceptionalism” narrative pushed is so offensive since those who state it want zero responsibility for imperialist White supremacist capitalist cisheteropatriarchy and the related oppression while ignoring privilege. Yeah okay, whatever. It’s built on victim blaming and exploitation and genocide with a system of capitalism that could not exist as is today without slavery.

And for people of colour who buy into this narrative, the politics of respectability cannot save us. Neither can believing we are responsible for racism. 

See the collection of James Baldwin’s writing in The Cross of the Redemption for exquisite writing on the lies used to maintain White supremacy through everything from semantic warfare to re-writing history. It…explains a lot.

They are unable to conceive that their version of reality, which they want me to accept, is an insult to my history and a parody of theirs and an intolerable violation of myself.

James knew…

(And do not derail this post by mentioning the Irish. Thank you.) 

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two things:  

I am assuming the Crom part of this dude's name is from this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vf6mxdri-gQ.  Which makes Crommunist my new favorite thing, and I think I too will now refer to myself as such (despite the obvious ideological problems caused by a god who so explicitly favors the mighty few and a philosophy of economy that so obviously advocates for the groveling many).

For my potentially more controversial second thing, if Irish-Americans get the "just another white guy" treatment now (which I'm all for, don't get me wrong), how far are the Jews from this?  One generation, two tops?

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Book Review: The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.

A literary riff on the same beat that Portlandia hits, Waldman celebrates/condemns her own intended audience of liberal leaning, creature of privilege hipsters. And though it is certainly critical of that demographic, it carries an awareness of doing and being so, not with an ironic detachment, but an embrace of all the good (introspective) and the obnoxious (overly-introspective) of the artistically inclined Brooklynites pedaling around Williamsburg. However, the true achievement of the novel is not the further documentation of the exhaustively documented post-adolescent New Yorker, but in how real the protagonist (the eponymous Nathan) feels. This is a trip into the male psyche by an outsider to the pervasive (and often perverse) power of the penis, and it is utterly believable. Nathan is a lived-in character, grappling with a familiar issue (“what the hell am I doing with my love life?”) that resolves in an organic, if not particularly redeeming, denouement.

  Ideal Reading Setting:

Location - A coffeeshop in a neighborhood en media gentrifica, tables and chairs fashioned from scrap material from Hurricane Sandy; baristas bespectacled and betatted and conversant in coffee, tea, and Dostoevsky.

Music - Tori Amos’ “Strange Little Girls” album, a feminist conversion of songs with essential male perspectives [highlight tracks - Joe Jackson’s “Real Men” a reflection on the damage wrought by boys trying to become men. Slayer’s “Raining Blood” becomes a paean to Eve, Judith, and the blame foisted on women by the Patriarchs (or something. I may have incepted a little too deep there. And also, I’ve decided that “incepted” is a viable adverb)].

Food - Anything local, sustainable, and delicious in proportion to its pretension.

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Book Review: Perfume

One of the more profound arguments against freewill I've ever read, and it's in a historical fiction novel whose protagonist is a fractured mind with a tremendous will, zero conscience, and a superlative sense of smell. And through the twisted little tyrant of perfect olfactory powers, Suskind describes three things in wonderful, lyrical detail: his view of human nature (mechanistic and instinctual), the Ancien Regime (contempt, but not the usual Les Miserables variety. More of a Candide approach to the idiocy of Pre-Revolution France), and the unceasing and undeniable appeal of a virgin on the cusp of pubescence (which is, somehow, even creepier than that description makes it seem). Unsurprisingly, the first one is interesting, the second amusing, and the third disturbing. But you have fair warning: the opening pages compare Jean Baptiste to the Marquis De Sade and Napoleon, a sort of depraved murderer extraordinaire.  All in all, a great book that is best enjoyed in a few long and uninterrupted reading sessions, so as to better immerse one's self in the lushly dark descriptions of the 18th century. Ideal Reading Setting: Location - A long flight, wedged in the middle seat. On the aisle, a gargantuan man whose girth intrudes over, below, and around the armrest into your meager seat space. He is, however, incredibly polite and is wearing a high end cologne of indeterminate origin. The window seat is a young woman, slight and raven haired, wearing a slip of a dress that reveals the slightest hint of cleavage. She is undeniably beautiful. Unfortunately, she also smells of a fetid bog, like lint pulled from beneath the insert of an athletic shoe. And she spends most of the flight berating and/or complaining about the flight attendants.  Music - Berlioz's Symphonie Fantastique is the obvious choice, but that does not make it wrong. If you can handle the guttural vocals, Summoning's Stronghold album would also represent the right dichotomy (beautiful harmonies as a soundtrack to a nightmare).  Food - A glass of Malbec and a thick hunk of Stilton, raggedly torn from the wheel and eaten with bare hands, then licked from the fingers, bits of blue cheese floating in the deep red of the wine as you sip from your glass. 

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George Zimmerman, Friday, and a Fundamental Truth About Being A Man

 So George Zimmerman has been determined, by the laws on the books in the state of Florida, to have not murdered Trayvon Martin.  It was found that the larger, older, and armed man had just cause for fatally shooting the smaller, younger, unarmed teenager he had been following for several blocks.  The larger man followed the smaller, the older man initiated the confrontation, and the armed man was the one acting in self-defense.

Huh.

Some friends of mine with law enforcement and military backgrounds, and some that are just gun toting hicks with no formal training, rejoiced!  Finally, the corrupt, criminal-coddling courts got one right!  There was, if viewed from just the right angle and light, a hint of the belief in some cosmic re-balancing; almost like now, with this verdict, things had been made right for all the horrors of the O.J. trial.

Other friends of mine, with activist or criminal connections, and others that are just plain thugs, were angry, but not enraged.  Like they were disappointed more than surprised.  The more radical among them have begun researching the legal and logistical hurdles for starting a preemptive defense fund for the eventual defendant charged with murdering George Zimmerman.  One just wants the gangs in Florida to obtain an address, a weapon, and a sense of purpose.

I think they’re all missing the point.  

The complete failure of comprehensive gun control in the aftermath of the Newton Connecticut Massacre has proven that in this political climate, and with the two parties as currently composed, gun rights are more sacred than the safety of the populace.  When coupled with today’s bill stripping out food stamps from the farm bill (a dichotomy, designed 50 years ago, aimed at aiding both the urban and rural poor.  In the year 2013, it could be cynically described as a way to subsidize large scale corporate farming while injecting cheap carbs and fats into our city centers.  But, hey, I’d take Tampico and Hamburger Helper over nothing.), the priorities of our political elites are laid bare: more guns, less groceries.  

So for me this is not an issue in need of politicizing.  If Newton wasn't going to change things, Trayvon certainly won’t.  Ice Cube told us as much 25 years ago, and goddammit, it looks like in some fundamental ways that hasn't improved, regardless of the president’s pigment.  Instead, this needs to be a watershed moment in personal responsibility for all men, regardless of race, creed, or property: embrace the ass kicking.

A friend of mine told me a long time ago that “every man needs to get his ass kicked, at least once.”  And in the years since, the essential truth of that mantra has only increased.  Because we've all known that guy, that guy that never really got his ass beat.  And we hate that guy.  You probably work with one, you've likely worked for one, and you might even be one (and in your heart of hearts, you know if you need an ass kicking better than anyone).

Every man goes through a phase where he thinks he’s invincible, and the requisite ass kicking serves to remind him that he is not the main character in a summer blockbuster action movie.  He is merely a small part of a world in which everyone has kicked some ass, and everyone has had their ass kicked.  It is the great circle of ass kicking, and all men have a role to play, though that role may change with time, place, or age.

Zimmerman never got that ass kicking.  No man that had received his recommended dose of ass kicking would creep on another man for a few blocks, because that would be asking for another ass kicking.  And if Zimmerman had gotten his ass kicked and still chose to follow Trayvon around, and Trayvon proceeded to whup his ass, Zimmerman would have known two things: he deserved the ass kicking, and a broken nose and some stitches aren't life threatening.

Trayvon was doing Zimmerman a favor, giving George a lesson he should have learned a long time ago.  And Zimmerman, seething with a toxic combination of assumed privilege, perceived impotence, and the profound boredom of the willfully unimaginative, made for an exceedingly poor student.  George had the mind blanking audacity to be surprised, and even worse, to feel that his life was in mortal danger after Trayvon, taking offense at being followed and then called out in his father's neighborhood, proceeded to stand up for himself.  So now, because Zimmerman wasn't man enough to take an ass kicking, a young man is dead.  Adding insult to injury, the law rewarded him for it.   

  Incidentally, referencing Straight Outta Compton and Friday in the same essay has somehow made those Coors Light commercials even more depressing.  Cube better of spent that money on something really fucking important.

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Rage Against the Propogan-Dad

Regardless of one’s opinion on the subject, the two-gender, two parent household is a diminishing norm.  The increasing number of people choosing to have children outside of marriage, the inevitability of legalized gay marriage, and the expansion of adoption and artificial insemination options (and eventually even gestational ones) have, and will continue to, reduce our reliance on the traditional model of parenting.  In other words, it is no longer 1957 [see footnote 1].  

But our myths have not kept pace with our culture.  There are endless instances of people clinging to the old ways, like they were fighting to preserve the remnants of a once great and honored people.  Be it the things I read (articles feteshizing the father/son relationship in particular), the things I hear (“I have to stay with my husband/wife, because I don’t want my baby to grow up without a dad/mom”), or the things I see (the number of television shows and movies that revolve around finding closure with a delinquent parent would be comical, if it wasn’t so tragic), many of our narratives (anecdotes and stories, both fiction and non) of self-discovery or affirmation revolve around a confrontation with, or confirmation of, the protagonist’s parent(s).  And stories matter.  They are how we understand our connection to the past, the potential of our present, and our responsibilities to the future.  

The PSAs, self-help books, and Nickelodeon plot lines centered on tweens coming to terms with their parents divorce, or their gay dads, or finding out they’re adopted do not address the issues children in non-nuclear families face, they create them.  The goal of these moralizing fables of the modern age is to show children they’re not alone in their confusion and pain, which is admirable, but destructive.  These stories implicitly tell the children of increasingly varied genesis that their past is inextricably tied to parents they did not choose, that their present hardships are the fault of a single parent household, or that their future is imperiled by parents they never met.  These narratives inevitably resolve in a happy ending, but only for the protagonist, not the intended audience.  

If a child without a father is told that its missing something, the child will feel like its missing something.  Inducing a sense of want in a child is the simplest thing in the world, as anyone attending a spoiled kid’s birthday party can attest.  There is never enough of anything for the young; the discipline and foresight to do without is a learned skill, not an instinctive trait.  I have yet to hear a child, regardless of familial or socio-economic status, say “sorry, but no more playing or toys.  I’ve had my fill of attention and stimulation, thank you.”  And most adults are susceptible to this as well!  Humans rarely feel content with their lot [footnote 2].

Instead of the universal vilification for bad or absent parents, and the ambivalent media attention for non-traditional parents, our culture should redirect that energy to ideals anyone and everyone can achieve, regardless of gender or family composition: love and responsibility for those dependent upon us.  A child doesn’t need a father, anymore than a child needs an uncle or a grandfather [footnote 3].  What a child needs are people that unconditionally and unquestionably care for them.  In our culture, we have idealized the mother and father as the only people capable of filling such roles, but (again) it is no longer 1957.  Anyone that takes a sincere and lasting interest in a child’s well being can fulfill a child’s need for love and support, be they aunt, neighbor, teacher, or friend’s older brother.  That is not to say that parents are inconsequential, and this is certainly not meant as an attack on the concept of parenting as a whole.  Rather, it is a hope that every adult recognizes their responsibility to foster loving connections and positive examples for the children in their lives, regardless of DNA.  Daughters, nephews, godchildren, and the kid that just happens to live a couple doors down all deserve and need to be shown that they matter, and that you care.

  Footnotes:

1) a reminder: the Victorian upper middle class ideal of a nuclear family has been a minority occurrence for the vast swath of human history.  Economic, medical, and political trends converged to make it a norm for baby boomers, and their population bulge enforced domination of our political economy and culture drags upon us with all the weight of their well meant, but ultimately misplaced, nostalgia.

2)  This is ultimately a good thing.  Discontent is why people build bridges and circumnavigate the globe.  But it’s also why people drink too much.

3) In the metaphorical sense.  I am aware that, biologically, every child needs ancestors.

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Girls: Believe the Hype, It's the Haters That Got It Wrong

Over the weekend, the Lakers effectively ended their season, the Clippers definitively did so, and even the Kings looked mortal for the first time in the playoffs.  So I looked for scripted relief from the messy sturm und drang of competitive athletics.  And since I had heard so much about it, I decided to mainline five episodes of HBO’s Girls on Sunday night.  It was a brilliant choice.

Instead of the Lakers “live despite nightmarish outside shooting/die due to nightmarish outside shooting” (which has been mostly die against a Thunder team willing to do whatever it takes to keep the ball away from Bynum when it counts), I was treated to dialogue with a precision that even Kobe could admire.  Rather than averting my eyes at a Clippers roster that has only two players that can play both offense and defense, I was able to enjoy a genuine triple-threat (writer/director/star Lena Dunham).  And like the Kings absolutely dominant playoff run, Girls is at its best when it goes for the throat with each and every line.

Yet, so many people hate it.  Most of the hand-wringing over Girls revolves around the “first world problems” of the main characters.  Judy Berman, on Flavorwire, wrote a fantastic piece responding to the criticisms that Girls is merely a parade of rich white girls bitching about being rich white girls, so go read that if you want to read a thoughtful article that bothers to respond to shallow criticism.  Those that would reduce everything to “x piece of art is merely about y, therefore it is not worthy of my time” absolutely infuriate me.  First of all, having such an expansive breadth of entertainment options that you can pick and choose based on some farcical concept of inclusivity/diversity is a “first world problem.”  More importantly, you will miss out on fantastic works of art if you exclude anything and everything that is primarily concerned with the upper class.  Pride and Prejudice is exclusively about the “first world problems” of rich white girls, and if you never got past the book jacket as a result, you would miss out on one of the greatest novels ever written.

Now don’t get me wrong, Dunham is not Jane Austen, but that is precisely part of her charm.  Her on screen alter-ego, Hannah, is as verbose as Elizabeth Bennet, but with the cringe-inducing tendencies of Mr. Collins.  Nearly every line from Hannah’s mouth will provoke a smile, though the majority of those smiles come at her expense as she attempts to navigate the world.  And that is the key to this show: the four main characters that grant Girls its title (and the boys those girls associate with) are desperately trying to understand the world on their own terms, and the tension and humor of the show is a direct result of the total failure that is the inevitable result.

Girls is entertaining and valuable because it demonstrates the folly of youth attempting to make its way on desire alone.  Determinedly turning away from their parents (though not their parent’s money), they desire fulfillment and actualization at any cost.  They are creatures of instinct, but an instinct only the well fed can have- they seek not food and shelter, but freedom.  They want to do or say or be whatever they want.  In that sense, Girls is the antithesis of Pride and Prejudice; where Austen wanted to show the folly of impulse, Dunham has made impulse the very center of her character’s quests for authentic selves. 

And it is that drive for authenticity that shows how tragic and comical youth can be when it is unmoored entirely from tradition and the past.  In the cultural landscape of the 21st century American upper-class, there are no milestones.  Graduating from high school is meaningless, and finishing college is no guarantee of a job.  Marriage is optional, and children are an accessory choice.  In short, we no longer know if someone is an adult, or even have a deadline for when someone is unequivocally on their own.  There is no sanctioned road map to follow, so everyone has to cut their own way through the wilds.

With Girls,Dunham has fully realized the frustration of people who feel like they should be independent and mature, yet know they are far from grown-up.  She wonderfully portrays the anxious meandering of early-twentysomethings that have no idea what they want, but a highly detailed and nuanced understanding of exactly what they don’t.  And Dunham has captured this knowingly hypocritical striving desperation for authenticity in a show that is, above all else, hilarious.  So shove aside the liberal backlash at the lack of a token ethnic presence.  Swallow whatever classist rage you may feel watching these characters live in the most expensive city in America on someone else’s dime.  Just sit back and enjoy the rare marvel that is a television show that dares to tell a story without being filtered through a thick layer of test audience pandering.    

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Reflections on Pregnancy and Misogyny

Some of my more... misogynistically inclined friends have a grim perspective on women who want, above all else, to be mothers.  Fueled by the pseudo-intellectual cabal of P.U.A., Tom Leykis, and Men’s Rights groups, aspiring pro-creators are seen as, at best, drones of the Disney myth makers.  At worst they are drawn up as gold digging succubae ensnaring impressionable young men and draining their productivity and creativity in the guise of being a “stay-at-home mom.”  That second, darker view sees children as the nuclear option in the battle between the sexes: once deployed, the world is never the same, always for the worse.

         But these soft-doctrine chauvinist friends of mine (nerds to the man, as we nearly all met through D and D and bonded over marathon sessions of FPS combat) yearn deeply for the world of Aragorn and Sauron, of righteous causes against absolute evil.  What they seek, really, is the sense of purpose only possible in the grand narratives of epic tales.  And so I am compelled to ask, is there a grander purpose than the creation of a living, breathing human life?

        A vignette: two women, bellies swollen with child, are sharing smiles and lunch on a café patio on a gorgeous Thursday afternoon.  A pure materialist observer might credit the beaming faces to the endorphins that can flood a woman’s body during pregnancy.  A person that uses the term “feminazi” on a regular basis could point out that the fathers of those fetuses are probably at work so these two can afford their endive and goat cheese salads, the smiles evidence of a stress-free existence enabled by the sweat of their enslaved husband’s brows. 

        I see the fulfilled contentment of two people who know precisely what is they’re meant to be doing, the true joy of people living their vocation.

        And it only lasts nine months! 

So in the interest of the continued propagation of Homo Sapien Sapien, I implore my fellow men to give pregnant women not quite a year of unmitigated respect, deference, and support.  You can go back to mocking the plight of the modern woman when they leave the maternity wing.  A gentleman, however, would wait until she’s done breastfeeding. 

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Well, at least they got a black guy.

But seriously, after reading this, I was compelled to caption the pic as seen above.  'Cause... dude, come on.

*knock knock* "uhhhhhh, honey? It's the republican party... they're.... they're here for your uterus. Apparently we've been doing it wrong."

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Thanks Dr. Dre!

The title is sincere.  I have to get that out of the way, in case you were expecting a snarky diatribe against the D-R-E for his role in attacking peer-to-peer networks, or maybe his part in birthing upon the world 50 cent.  But as real as those sins were, he has redeemed himself!  

Was it a supreme act of charity (a la Bill Gates)?  Perhaps he created a magnum opus which all his personal failings can be rationalized against (vis a vis Wagner)?  Or did he take the fastrack to redemption: a quasi-tragic early death (cf. Amy Winehouse)?

Nope.  He made it socially acceptable for me to walk around in public with these on my head:

I can already hear the hipsters groaning, “the douchebag headphones?  Pssssh, those things are just overpriced cans for NBA fans!  Totally not worth it, real audiophiles know that if you really want to hear all the subtleties of Tom Yorke’s voice you need the BLAH BLAH.”  The groaning naysayers are missing the point.  Dre is not vindicated for making the best headphones, he is absolved for making the best category of headphones a reasonable option for a man about town.

Just a few short years ago, you had one option for headphones:

If you walked around with studio quality cans, you may as well have been carrying around an old boom box.  But now, through a partnership with Monster audio and a horde of top tier athletes and pop stars, Dre made it not only reasonable to wear goofy chunks of plastic and wire on your dome while waiting for the bus, he made it hip!  I can’t tell you how many compliments I've gotten wearing Beats around town.  

And they’re ridiculous looking!  It’s like Dr. Dre’s re-written the “Emperor’s New Clothes” fairy tale as a 21st century performance piece, and he’s totally getting away with it.  It is awesome.  And for that, he is forgiven his many, many sins (who let him make this commericial?  Or does he just really fucking love Dr. Pepper?).

Now, if only he could somehow make socks with sandals hip, thus alleviating my most egregious teenaged fashion foible ex post facto, I would actually start a religion for him.  

This would probably be our Lord’s Prayer.

This our Apostle’s Creed.

Maybe we could do the stations of the cross somewhere in Compton?

God damn that old school raiders hat makes me nostalgic.  Okay, full disclosure: that hat alone, and the positive memory mind trip it just took me on, is enough to make up for his Napster stance.  It took the headphones to come back from that soda thing though. 

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The Average New Yorker: Clearly Smarter Than Diego Rivera

MOMA has brought out their Diego Rivera murals for the first time in 80 years, and the exhibit is exquisite.  Though it’s timing is prescient (an exhibit that takes capitalism and colonialism to task, painted by a legit old school commie, opening while Zucotti park was teeming with leftist-populist rage?  Apropos!), the pieces are wonderful regardless of context.  Indian Warrior in particular, with its simple color palette and brutally straightforward theme, is amazing; it’s a punk rock mural with a high culture pedigree, and therefore palatable to the 1% despite its “take the power back” message.

However, Indian Warrior was not why I enjoyed the exhibit as thoroughly as I did.  When I first began to appreciate museums (and art in general), I always assumed the primary reason to see a piece in person was because no high-res photo or HD Discovery channel special could replicate the complexity of color, the texture of brushstrokes, the way a piece could change depending on your angle of view.  And while all that is true, the best reason to go to a museum, especially to a popular limited run exhibit, is for the people. 

A non-comprehensive sample of the people you will see at an art exhibit: college student looking for extra credit, retired housewife (sometimes accompanied by retired company man, and/or grandkids that run the spectrum from “bored and on facebook app” to “enraptured with a passion for studying art to the dismay of even the adult that brought them to the museum in the first place”), disinterested security guard that hates his job except for that two seconds he gets to say “no pictures”, talkative security guard that loves his job and chats you up about the pieces you’re looking at, impressive art authority (hopefully with guests so you can eavesdrop on his lectures), pompous art authority (who is hopefully there by himself so you don’t have to listen to his lectures but is still recognizable by the way he scrutinizes the description placards and shakes his head at every sentence), tourist couple there to check the box on their to-do list, local couple on a date trying to impress each other with their high-brow interests, and earnest/desperate/hopeless self-educators.

Those are all key archetypes for museum people watching, but my favorite has to be the “Hopelessly Incorrect But Emphatic and Loud” (Hibel, pronounced to sound like “libel”).  And Rivera’s retrospective had the most epic Hibel moment I’ve had the pleasure/anguish of experiencing.  The legendary level Hibel moment was inspired by Frozen Assets.  

I was admiring the work’s narrative on social injustice, wondering if the skyscrapers of Manhattan would one day be seen as the American equivalent to the Pyramids at Giza: mythic feats of engineering meant to benefit the elite, built by the sweat of an underclass whose greatest hope would be that their children might one day make use of them.  Then the thought occurred to me that the Aztecs, whom I had admired so much a few minutes ago in Indian Warrior, could be accused of the same sort of injustice for the building of their pyramids at Chichen Itza (short answer: yes).  But before I could explore this theory in-depth, my internal monologue crashed against the jarring idiocy of the couple looking at Frozen Assets next to me.  

I had previously misidentified them as “local couple on date,” but quickly realized they were in fact professional level Hibels.  A pair of them!  In the wild!  I switched my focus from the introspective to the extrospective (?), and began to listen in…

Female: “See here, look!  That’s the Chrysler building there.  And the Empire State building to the right, so…”

Male: “It’s like he’s looking at the city from the Bronx, but then he has Rockefeller Center and the Daily News building next to each other in the front.”

Female: “Exactly, he drew the buildings pretty accurately, but the geography is all wrong.  All wrong.”

Now, where to start?  

The first thing you learn in any art history or art appreciation class, the FIRST, is that you have to assume the intentionality of the artist.  That what you’re looking at is what the artist intended you to see.  If the sky in a painting is green, you don’t conclude the artist just ran out of blue and said “to hell with it.”  You presume the artist made the sky green because that is how he wanted the sky in the painting to look, as part of the message or theme he was presenting in his art.  So thinking that Diego just screwed up his building placement is a strange place to start when analyzing a piece.  Perhaps, just maybe, those buildings were placed as they were for a purpose?  

But what made this such a profound moment in Hibel history, beyond even the extreme hubris required to think that only a true New Yorker could understand the geography of a city built on a grid and exhaustively well documented (like Diego couldn’t be bothered to ask someone, or check a map, or just look out his fucking window!), was the plaque to the right of the painting.  A plaque that clearly stated that the three buildings Rivera placed at the forefront of his mural were all designed by Raymond Hood, and Rivera likely made those buildings so prominent because he was trying to hustle some commission work from Hood (I’m paraphrasing here.  Museum curators would avoid using the word hustle in their info plaques, even if [especially if] the piece the plaque was describing had “hustle” in the title).  

This couple were ramming their heads against Diego’s mural with remarkable tenacity, coming to conclusions that carried a kind of internally consistent logic, and creating narratives to support those conclusions.  All of it fantastically wrong; their entire conception, backwards to forwards and beginning to the end, was incorrect at the most basic level.  Worse, I don’t think they ever read the plaque!  Their entire time in the exhibit, the Hibels bounced from piece to piece, spewing a stream of inane chatter, even reading the plaques for a few of the other pieces, but never, ever returning to the site of their most atrocious crime against art.  And you can be damn sure I followed them around, waiting and hoping that I would be able to judge the look on their faces when they realized their mistake.  But alas, it never happened.  They went on with their lives, blissfully unaware of their horrible misconceptions.        

So, in order to sleep that night, I created a narrative of my own.  Instead of a story that would support a stubborn inability to trust the talents of one of the 20th century’s most respected artists, my narrative was designed to restore my faith in human beings as essentially redeemable creatures.  Here is what I came up with to salve my broken faith in man’s goodness…

Carter and Alex Hibel left the exhibit on Diego Rivera.  They enjoyed it, but primarily out of a sense of duty.  They were cognitively aware that the art was respected, and so they respected it.  They would be hard pressed to explain what it was they respected, or why, but they would insist they did indeed respect it.  And for their friends, that would be enough.  To fortify their assertions of respect, they purchased the book that accompanied the exhibit from the MOMA gift shop- a trophy, not for their mantle, but for their coffee table.  

The next day, Alex nibbled on a pastry with a reverence for the sweet carbs that only a permanent dieter could achieve.  Carter was on his morning bike ride.  Alex set down her freshly made espresso on her coffee table, and as her hand slid along the table looking for the remote to the DVR, she noticed “the Diego book” (as it had inevitably been christened upon crossing their threshold).  Alex lazily thumbed through it, not sure what she was looking for, until she stumbled upon it… there.  That painting with the buildings in it, and all those bodies.  She started to read.  She had a slight frown at first, as she scanned down the page, but then suddenly burst into a smile and a staccato giggle.  The high-pitched noise was appealing or appalling in the exact proportion to what ones feelings would be when seeing her unclothed.

As the psychological echo of Alex’s outburst dissipated, Carter unlocked the door to the apartment and walked in.

“Oh Carter, perfect timing, you know that Diego Rivera painting we were looking at yesterday, where the buildings didn’t make sense?”

  “Ye-”

  “Well it says here that Rivera was hoping that the architect of those buildings in front of the painting, Rockefeller Center and the other two, would hire him for some work!  That’s why all the buildings were in the wrong places!”

  “Oh, that makes sense.  I’m glad we got that book so we could correct our silly misconceptions about Diego Rivera.”

  “Me too.”

Okay, I might of lost hold of the characters at the end there, but by then I had accomplished what I had set out to do: conceive of an Einsteinian alternate universe where that horrible couple stands fully corrected.  Soooo… victory?  Either way, it was good enough to fall in to a deep and satisfied slumber, the kind of restful sleep available to the areligious only on nights when they win their daily battle to maintain their fragile optimism for mankind.    

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I'm watching the Timberwolves-Clippers game, and I can't help but notice Kevin Love's bona-fide Oregon facial hair (The Hierarchy of Beards marks its official style designation as "grizzled").  

Non-beard highlight of this game: watching the Clippers all-around stellar guard play, along with Rubio's instant impact on the fluid dynamics of the Timberwolves offense, is almost enough to make me forget the fetid, stagnant, Kobe-chucking wretchedness of the current Lakers line-up.     

K-Love Buzzer Beater Three Update:  holy christ!  The Beard works!

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Urine or Death?

My piece was going to start with “Hilary Clinton and Leon Panetta can go fuck themselves,” but this Gawker article got to my main point first (anyone else hate themselves for watching sports instead of writing this week?  Anyone?  Come on, Saints vs 49ers and Heat vs Clippers, I had to watch those games instead of doing something productive, right?).  I even thought up a fake multiple choice test question for my hook…

There is a team of highly trained and well equipped men towering over you, and you hear them ask each other “What do you think we should do with the Hajji?”  Well, you can’t control their actions (they’ve got the guns, after all), but what is it that you HOPE they do to you?   

A.  Just shoot me in the head and be done with it.

B.   Offer me the chance to successfully beg and plead for my life in a way that forgoes any concept of dignity or self-respect.  In between gasping breaths and desperate sobs, I’ll be sure to tell them about my large family, my long standing friendship with a Christian neighbor, and how I always wanted to visit San Francisco and ride on the street car to the wharf.

C.  Knock me in the back of my skull with the butt of a rifle, rendering me unconscious until I awake strapped to a chair in some god-forsaken island prison whose name is unpronounceable in my native tongue.  

D.  Take turns urinating all over me, but spare my life.  Pray that no pee actually gets inside my mouth.

As wretched as options B, C, and D are, they are still far better choices than A.  Keep in mind that when people stand up and declare, with flawless elocution and a well tailored coat, “Give me X, or give me death,” their death is rarely the one being wagered (Patrick Henry confirmed kills = 0.  Medals for bravery = 0.  Number of slaves owned = at least 6, received as a gift from his father-in-law.  Talking about the number of slaves owned by a historical figure can be a leftist cliche, but I bring it up now to point out that Henry was all to willing to let someone else do his dirty work, literally).  So where does all this ridiculous outrage about a faux-war crime come from? 

For some, it is to preserve the notion that we have the moral high ground in this war (Guantanamo makes that a hard argument to sustain).  Others see it as a betrayal of the grand history of honorable American warriors (the fact that drones and bombs have accounted for some ungodly percentage of the Arab casualties in Afghanistan and Pakistan makes that a silly statement).  The pragmatists are primarily concerned with how this will negatively effect relations with Arab nations (that is… probably pretty spot-on, actually).            

[WARNING: My main point has already been made.  Hell, Gawker already made it last week, I’m just jumping on their bandwagon.  What follows is a serious rant.  So you can move on now, knowing you read the topical bit already, as what follows is a disaster of an attempt at stream of consciousness style analysis.  I would blame no one for just moving on, maybe to check out this amusing update on Aesop’s fables?]   

I blame St. Augustine.  Seriously.  

St. Augustine was the foremost Christian thinker just as the early Church was wrestling with its new status as the official religion of the Roman empire.  A religion built on pacifism and communism was now the philosophical spine of a vast Empire carved out of conquest.  So how does a Christian Emperor send armies to war?  What troop formations did Jesus refer to when he said “turn the other cheek” and “what you do to the least of my brothers, you do to me” (the “least” in this example being an illiterate and hungry Celt on the edge of Rome’s borders)?  St. Augustine, the greatest mind of his generation, turned all of his great faculties to the task, and arrived at an answer:  the biblical injunction to “love thy neighbor.”  The way St. Augustine saw it, Jesus was explicit in his non-violence, with his self-sacrifice being the ultimate argument against meeting violence with violence.  But Jesus also said to do to your neighbor what you would want him to do to you.  So you may not be able to go to war to defend your self or your own lands, but you could go to war to defend your neighbor’s self and lands.  Therefore, if you were defending your neighbor (as you would want him to do to you), and your neighbor is defending you, and you get enough neighbor’s together marching in step, well, now you have an army of neighbor’s righteously defending each other.  And as any sports fan could tell you, the best defense is a good offense, so the newly baptized Centurions could go about defending their neighbor’s far outside of Rome’s borders, while the Bishop of Rome could pray for their safe return home with a clear conscience.  It was the greatest highjacking of the “Golden Rule” in history, and it’s held that record for about 16 centuries now.        

Anyway, now we have a Western concept of just war that Christians can back on.  But what does that look like in the deserts and mountains of the Middle-East?  The same as any other war: fear, want, anxiety, hate, and blood.  The most efficient method of enabling a man to kill a group of people on command is to somehow dehumanize the targeted group.  And once you dehumanize a group of people to more effectively rationalize ending their lives, then Abu Ghraib (and trailing back before that, My Lai, No Gun Ri, Dresden, and the Sand Creek massacre) becomes inevitable.  The enemy is less than you, and they are trying to kill you… extermination quickly becomes the most logical of choices (I’m leaning heavily upon Grossman’s “On Killing” for my perspective on this topic).  So we may have a dubious notion of justifiable war to soothe our highly civilized brains, but the actual dealing of death still requires the same dirty hands and unclean deeds that stained the hands and souls of the Spartans.  And, as Lady Macbeth would tell you, those spots are hard to wash off.     

Personal anecdote interlude: two kids I grew up with are now elite military men with confirmed kills and chests covered with ribbons.  One of the two had a profound conversion experience and sees himself as a Crusader with a capital “C,” the other has simply embraced the combat adrenaline rush.  Oddly enough, neither of those things are mentioned during those military recruiting commercials that run during the Super Bowl.  My point here is that there are other methods beyond dehumanization that can inspire someone to pull the trigger, but I’d argue those are not inherently better than the dehumanizing route... in fact, they're demonstrably worse.

I’ll end this rant on a positive note.  The outrage over Urinegate (or whatever the media is going to call this thing) may be hollow from an absolute perspective (so bombing a neighborhood with the certain knowledge of collateral damage is less morally outrageous than pissing on the decaying organic matter of the deceased?), but it does signify how far the military has come in a short period of time.  The baby-boomer version of war crimes was an actual freaking massacre performed and carried out by an entire company of soldiers.  The Millenial version is probably more accurately described as a civil-rights violation.  So maybe the next generation will progress even further… maybe just talking trash on Twitter?  We can only hope.         

Oh man, I just realized I didn’t even go into the preposterousness of the “honorable warrior” thing!  Okay okay, I’ll save that for later, this is already 1,000 words longer than it should be.

And in case anyone missed it, the title is a tasteless allusion to this classic Eddie Izzard bit, now with Legos!  Now that I think about it, the use of the word tasteless there may be a subconscious pun.  I am shamed.  

Jan 23 update: saw this cartoon on Slate.com, and thought it a good match...

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The image I'm using for my tumblr and twitter avatars at the moment is a cartoon by Mana Neyestani, an Iranian political cartoonist (link goes to his facebook).  Can you imagine what the Ayatollah thinks of this guy?  Hmmm... let's see... after consulting my Theocratic Tyrant Scale of Hatred, I'm gonna go ahead and guess Mana's firmly in the "train his own pets to maul him and feast upon his flesh" range.  Let's hope Mr. Neyestani prefers goldfish.  More of his work, and about Persian cartoonists in general, here.

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Two Suits, Four Quarters - King James and D. Wade on the Bench

LeBron James and Dwayne Wade watched last night’s Miami Heat vs. Atlanta Hawks game from the bench, resplendent in their NBA nerd couture.  And every time the camera cut to them, they were very clearly in the midst of an engaging conversation; an engaging conversation that was, at best, obliquely related to the game underway three feet in front of them.  By way of a lip-reading class I sat in at a community college in Crystal River, Florida, I was able to string together a few bits of that conversation.  Follow me, if you dare, into the parlor room exchanges of the new order athlete blackeratti…

3:48 into the First Quarter:

LeBron James:  …so needless to say, we will not be going back to that gallery.

Dwayne Wade:  That’s precisely the problem!  You and Savannah expected to be treated like “King James and his fiance,” but no artist of note knows who we are!  Michael Jordan could stroll in to Art Basel and be mistaken for a Parisian-Algerian performance artist, there to see his boyfriend’s installation.  

LJ:   Oh-ho-ho!  Now who has the improper expectations?  Are you implying that artists are incapable of enjoying the game of basketball?  Are you as small-minded as those that say we are merely mindless vessels for our physical talents?

DW:  Hahaha, well played sir, well played.

7:14 into the Second Quarter:

DW:  …so as much as I respect Ron Paul’s fiscal discipline, I simply cannot get beyond his utter disregard for public education.  

LJ:  But what is our alternative?  An incumbent that refuses to shut down the wasteland of human rights that is Guantanamo?  Or two other Republicans completely subservient to their religious doctrines?   

DW:  I fear you overstate the permeation of Mormon precepts into Romney’s political leanings-  Oh!  Timeout….

(D. Wade and LeBron walk towards their teammates on the court, hands up in the air for a high five)

LJ:  Yeahhhhhh boy!  What did I tell you about that screen?  Fight through it, get the block, and open up the fastbreak!  

DW:  Cole, you have to reward the big man for running the floor!  I don’t want to see you going up for a dunk when Joelle’s looking up at you hanging from the rim like you just tracked mud in his mamma’s house.  

10:15 into the Third Quarter:

LJ:  That Ivan Johnson is performing like an absolut wunderkind!  How did he toil in the obscurity of the Developmental League for so many years?    

DW:  You know, I hate to say this… but doesn’t he remind you of a Saracen warrior?  With that finely groomed thicket of facial hair?

LJ:  Ha-ha, indeed he does!  

DW:  We should send him a scimitar and a turban!  That would simply be twitter gold. 

LJ:  Hahahahaha!

DW:  Haha, his handle could be @IvanTheSaracen.

LJ:  Or perhaps… @IvanTheMagnificent?  Or maybe @IvanSonOfSaladin?    

11:59 into the Fourth Quarter:

DW:  By all the stars in heaven!  

LJ:  Ol’ Boshy nailed that three!  Most impressive!

DW:  Smashing!  Simply smashing!

LJ:  Though, on a more somber note, that means we certainly won’t make our reservations at Quinones.

DW:  Let’s not be so hasty, my friend!  I think that youngster Cole has just the thing for these estwhile Hawk starters, there’s no way this goes beyond the first extra period.  

LJ:  A wager than?  The usual?

DW:  No no, I don’t want to take yet another of your automobiles… do you still have that vineyard in le Midi?

at the end of the first OT:

DW:  (sigh)  That is the end of our reservations.  And alas, that Chalmers fellow will need a stern talking too, forsooth!

LJ:  I thought we agreed to never use that word again!

DW:  Pardon, Pardon.  Mario needs a terse talking too.  Terse. 

at the end of the second OT:

DW and LJ make eye contact, and in unison:  (sigh)

at the end of the third OT:

DW and LJ make eye contact, and in unison:  at last!  

DW:  Victory!

LJ:  Let us congratulate our compatriots, and be well upon our way!

DW:  Well said, well said.