It's paranoia if they're really after you.

I was reading some kooky conspiracy web sites today as I am an academic and thus without real work to do. One explained the secret satanic message to be found in the Matrix--that was a good one because it got to the satanic roots of Hollywood itself, which was named after the druidic magic wand that Merlin (spawn of devil-raped mother that he was) used to subvert the teachings of Christ--all of which belies the true evil that lay at the heart of Hollywood's purpose. Which is interesting and informative since I was under the impression that it was named after the ranch of Harvey Henderson Wilcox, the city's founder which stood on the site in the 1880s. The ranch being named for an agricultural settlement in Ohio that his wife, Daeida had visited, itself named after a Dutch town. But that is just not as plausible as the Merlin-based theory. Indeed, I often find that Merlin-based etymologies are the explaination to many of lifes most wonderous conundrums.
A second site I perused explained the history of Lemuria, a country which sank beneath the Pacific 10,000 years ago. You might know it as Mu--yeah, me neither. It seemed like some harmless new agey stuff until, with feats of logical legerdemain that evaded my every attempt to tackle the words, we got to all this has to do with the Jews and how they planned 9/11. So that stopped being fun.

Conspiracies are fun to read (except when they get all anti-Semetic, which happens with depressing frequency) because they make these satisfyingly mysterious connections and are written out by impossibly earnest advocates for the sublimely silly. It's like seeing a commedian really commited to the material do a prat fall. Like when Chevy Chase was still funny. Only these people live in their basements looking for the code within the DaVinci Code (admit it, I just blew your mind).

But there are those conspiracies that I believe in. Like that the CIA is responsible for the crack epidmic of the 1980s, that the FBI had something to do with the assassination of MLK Jr., and that Enron with the knowledge of some in the govenrment created the California energy crisis for profit and political gain at the expense of a Democratic stronghold.
In this weird, satisfyingly gnostic way it helps to believe that you have a grapple-hold on a few bits of secret knowledge that keep you from being drowned in the stream. Knowledge is power and all that. Many people would laugh at my conspiracies, and I might change my mind if I knew more on the subject. That's the thing about secret knowledge, it's almost always the result not of deep information narrowly grasped, but widely available information shallowly sampled...like the DaVinci Code, it helps to know just enough to get it wrong, or to simply be willing to go along for the good and entertaining feeling it gives you.

But dude, the CIA really is responsible for rock-smoking.

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That's right Nike, back up off of Minor Threat! Now who wants a piece of Black Flag?

Nike backs down on using Minor Threat as a marketing ploy without actually asking Dischord Records if that was cool. The apology is a good one--by which I mean the PR person who drafted it did a good job, I'm impressed--but it rings slightly hollow. I mean, am I expected to believe that the sports marketing people at Nike didn't know that they should get permission? Did Nike of all companies not know that appropriating anti-authoritarian music from one of the seminal bands of a movement would bring about derission from fans and outrage from the artists themselves? I call bullshit.
Seriously, they've pulled this crap before with the Beatles' Revolution:

Twenty years later the song was subject to even more controversy, when the surviving Beatles sued shoe-manufacturers Nike for using it in a television ad.

This time they just figured that it was small-time enough to creep under the radar. But Nike didn't count on the awsome power (and obsessiveness with authenticity) of internet-based music nerds.

Don't worry though, the sweatshops are still there, so Nike's doing just fine.

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Nike is not hardcore

This kind of crap is why I don't buy Nikes. Oh, and the sweatshops, they are also a big reason. And not so much the sweatshops themselves (though that's a big thing) or the dishonest ad campaign, but the blatent fuck-you-ness of it all. There was all this sweatshop stuff a while back and Nike just kind of shrugged it off, they didn't do anything, they just said that worker condidtions weren't all that bad and moved on. And in this case, they didn't call up Ian McKaye and ask to use Minor Threat album art because they knew the answer would be no, so instead they will steal it and in the end Nike has more lawyers than Dischord, so they will either drag it out and make the suit too expensive and/or they will settle for less than they should have paid. And that's if Dischord even sues, sometime you wonder why even to bother.

Nike sucks. Yeah Air Jordans were awsome, but that's it. And thinking back, Jordans weren't that awsome.

It's not enough to suck, now you have to pull things that don't suck into your sucking hole of suck? Damn you Nike, Minor Threat rocked, and you have no right to their rocking as you have done none of your own.

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The Circle

If you will recall, the summer of 2001, the one that ended in unspeakable horror that made us change everything, was host to a tremendous amount of media coverage about shark attacks at beaches. The coverage was sensationalistic and silly--as these things usually are--going so far as to produce covers of Time and Newsweek featuring toothy sharks. You are more likely to die of bee sting than shark attack...but we used up all the bee stories in the '90s whent the killer bees (ominously called: "Africanized" with all the baggage that carries, unintentional or not) finally made it to the US and then didn't do anything so they needed to be sensationalized. Well I was just watching the CNN and after a helpful piece on how to avoid having your own pretty white women go missing we got: a shark attack story. So there we are, full circle on the shark thing. Whatch out, they're coming for you! And your white women in Aruba!

Oh, and in 2004 there were 61 shark attacks world wide with only 7 fatal according to the International Shark Attack File at the Florida Museum of Natural History. Seven dead. World wide. Yeah, lets definately freak out over this. Hell there's a possum that lives behind my apartment and I bet the little fucker's got rabies, when should I expect the news 'copter?

It's partly not the medias fault. We like worrying about stuff like this because it makes mortality remote and not-our-fault. If the image in your mind of a horribble death is a shark attack, then it is just nature red in tooth and claw that is the source of misery in the world. But if your image of horrible death is something more like starvation in the Third World, then it's kind of humanity's fault for our own misery isn't it? And nobody wants to think that at all...so bring on the shark attacks: did you know that they kill more people in a year than die in America from gun violence in an hour!

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Yeah, and if wishes were horses we would all [something vulgar].

I would really like to write a epistolary novel set during the Spanish-American War. But that's just me...a dreamer.

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Free Katie!

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So...how's that, ah...whatcha callit...um, "discourse" going?

As a careful examination of the page you are looking at right now will tell you, I'm a big nerd about the ancient greco-roman world. Now, so were our founding fathers--bless their be-wigged souls and they were particularly fond of of the Stoics. Orators, philosophers, ethicists: Cicero and Seneca are the two big boys. "An unpopular rule is never long maintained," Seneca said. Yeah, those dudes were all about republican government.

"He who comes to a conclusion when the other side is unheard, may have been just in his conclusion, but yet has not been just in his conduct," was also one of Seneca's. Cicero composed his Philippics against Mark Antony and they stand today as the gold standard of political invective and the rhetorical art. These were serious men in a moment of transition for their civilization and ultimately the entire western world. Their rationality held together a fractured Rome and inspired legions of great minds in the following centuries. They were both ultimately killed for their troubles, but they never advocated violence and always addressed their enemies through the Senate and the People of Rome. Their reputation for moral and intellectual seriousness runs through the ages.
********
So 2000 years later pig-fucker Karl Rove says a bunch of crazy shit, literally claiming that liberals want the terrorists to win...I don't mean that if you look at it a certain way that's what it could mean--I mean he said it. Cicero he ain't.

Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 in the attacks and prepared for war; liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers.
...
Mr. Rove also said American armed forces overseas were in more jeopardy as a result of remarks last week by Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who compared American mistreatment of detainees to the acts of "Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime - Pol Pot or others."

"Has there ever been a more revealing moment this year?" Mr. Rove asked. "Let me just put this in fairly simple terms: Al Jazeera now broadcasts the words of Senator Durbin to the Mideast, certainly putting our troops in greater danger. No more needs to be said about the motives of liberals."

(Oh, and when I say "pig-fucker" I should clarify that I don't mean to use childish name calling...I mean that Karl Rove actually lubes up and fucks pigs for sexual enjoyment--he's a pork packer.)

Of course, we all know that this is partisan rancor in Washington...the White House and Republicans will distance themsleves while firing up the base with some meaty rhetoric and the cycle continues...like when Dean goes out and says some shit so those actually running for things don't have to. Actually no, the White House and the RNC completely agree with Rove.

Republican Party Chairman Ken Mehlman, speaking in Puerto Rico, said there was no need to apologize because "what Karl Rove said is true."

White House spokesman Dan Bartlett this morning on MSNBC: "Karl was giving a speech in which he was pointing out obvious public record."

Not that this is new...Swift Boat Vets anyone? It's a bunch of bullshit...and the reason it will work for the most part is because their are three kinds of people in this country when it comes to politics: those that think Rove has no soul himself but is made of the souls of unbaptized babies and was worshiped by the Phoenicians as Moloch, those that think that he is a political savior annointed by the White American Jesus to rid America of poor people, Muslims, and The Gays, and the third group who thinks "Karl who?...oooh Britany's preggers!" The third group outnumbers the first two combined, by a mile. And that third group, when they do register something on the teevee they like it when that something to be either violent or sexy. And Karl Rove says violent, inflamatory stuff. Even though that stuff is demonstrably false the public heard that liberals are pussies and they love terror and the guy that said it is some kind of government guy, so, y'know, it's probably true.

Mark Antony would be proud.

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Ah...the First Day of Summer

Summer has come in Ann Arbor and the homeless are out. The punishing weather up here in the north means that a tragic number of the homeless face real danger of dying. Along with the myriad of reasons that homeless are in a bad way...the homeless population in the Industrial Northeast faces both high unemployment and nasty environment. Normally I'm snarky on this blog, but homelessness in America is a serious problem. That the richest nation on earth cannot keep all its citizens under a roof, employed, or at least give them the medical/psychiatric treatment they need is one of the greatest sources of shame for the U.S.

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D-town Adventure, Or: Culture up in the 313

I recently made a trip to the Detroit Institute of Art, and let me tell you something...it's the tits. It's being renovated so the entire collection wasn't up, just the "greatest hits" and they were amazing. The DIA has the fourth largest collection in the country, and the thrid largest collection of American artists in the world...or so I'm told. William Randolph Hearst donated a ton of old armor and sabres and the like back in the day, which is all cheesy and in poor taste, much as one should expect from WRH. Other than that the collection of Flemish masters and Romantic landscapes--they must have more Hudson Valley painters than the actual Hudson Valley--is unrivaled by anything I've ever seen. No wonder the Rembrandt exhibition I saw in Boston a year-and-a-half ago had a sizeble chunk of pieces on loan from the DIA. And giant Renaissance canvasses from Titian, Bellini, Gentileschi? Oh, you bet your ass--they got 'em in spades. The center piece of the entire place (literally) is the Rivera Court, an entire enclosed courtyard completely covered in murals painted there by the only muralist anyone has ever heard of (and among the most interesting people ever), Diego Rivera. It's breath taking, and it perfectly captures the tone and story of the city--which makes sense since it is entitled Detroit Industry.



Man, those commies can mural.

On the way home I got lost around Woodward and 8 Mile Road, just like in the movies (only without a maudlin yet affecting performance by Kim Basinger).

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A trip down Memory Lane, and being hit-and-run by a drunk driver at the corner

When I was but a lad of 16 years, there was a plucky young television network called The WB. And it had a singular, noble vision: to provide overwrought, teen-driven, primetime melodrama to the great oxy-scrubbed masses of middle-class suburbia. Now me and my friends...we were pretty "hard" as they say. (A friend of mine once killed a hobo for heroin money--true story--in between student council and school newspaper meetings--we were rebels). But we fell in love with a particular show on the WB Tuesday nights back in those turbulent '90s: Dawson's Creek. "The Creek," as we called it, was not about that simpering fool Dawson, but about the adventures in growing-up of one Miss Joey Potter, played superbly without affectation and yet with a certain je ne sais quoi by Katie Holmes.

She was my muse.

But now, Katie! oh Katie! my soul cries for you! Because she has been recently engaged to psycho cult-member, midget, and shitty actor Tom Cruise. I don't like Tom Cruise, never really have. I mean name one good movie he's starred in? (And Top Gun doesn't count because we all know that movie was Goose and Iceman all the way). Yeah, can't think of one can you? Seriously, Interview With a Vampire? How do you go too far as a gay vampire? Well Tom Cruise found a way. And the Scientology stuff, I don't know if you've ever read about any of that, but the less said the better...there's just no way to get around the craziness there. And everybody totally knows that he went trolling for the image boost ("I am not a cult-obsessed closetcase who can't carry a picture!") all over town approching Scarlett Johansen, Jessica Alba, and others who turned him down.

Ah well: time, she flies. You can't stay at "The Creek" forever, that was one of the important lessons Joey Potter taught us when she went off to the Ivy League to make her own life. I have learned much the same thing again today...never forget that you can always leave to make a better life Katie, remember that when you are sleeping in seperate beds and appearing in public together only around release dates per contractual obligation.

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I am not a "shopper"

I went an' bought some shirts today. Why? Because, damn it all, I needed a couple of casual shirts. So I went to the anemic Briarwood mall in sunny Ann Arbor ("A Squared" we call it here 'round the U of M). So I don't want anything too fancy, that's my problem, all I got is nice shirts, and I walked into this store called "Hollister." You may be familiar, I was not. The store and the brand itself are imitations of some strange parallel universe California. You know the one...where Orange County contains only Newport Beach and Disneyland (and no minorities) and everybody has natural highlights and deep sense of personal fulfilment and a surfboard. Anyway, I would take odds that I was the only person in the store that had ever actually been to California, and yet here were the young and affluent of Washtenaw County ready to shop and to serve those who would shop. The service was horrible...I mean really, really bad, I could find neither fitting room, nor employee to direct me to a fitting room. When I found a shirt I liked (I found a mirror and just tried it on right there) and went up to purchase it, well there was one dude at the check out and we was clearly out of his weight class. A young woman in front of me had $250 worth of clothes (and let's remember that we are not talking about a good pair of pants, a belt, and a jacket, this is $250 worth of $25 items) and that took a while (because, and I didn't know this, you have to carefully fold the pre-wrinkled tank tops and pre-ripped jeans lest said purchases become mussed in the shopping bag). Two other people were hanging out behind the counter, but were not interested in helping, I don't know what they were doing...mostly talking about a young woman whose boyfriend--named Randy--was not at all a good boyfriend for her. Randy's ears burned this day, that I promise you.

But there was a bright side. They were training the summer hirelings when I was there. And because of their commitment to customer service, they were doing it in the middle of the store directly in front of the cash register and we were forced to line up awkwardly to the side. At any rate, I was privy to the training session and had ample time to look at the posters on the walls, both of which were instructive and just an itsy bit fun.

First off: the posters. Posters appeared on the walls bearing the slogan, "Do You Belong?" which is creepy and judgemental, and fit perfectly with the atmosphere of the store. I found out, after asking, that it was directed at getting a Hollister charge card. But you can see the thinking. It's antagonistic and preys upon the natural insecurities of the teen agers that clearly make up the majority of the clintele (though the models on the posters are clearly my age or older [mid-twenties]). You have to ask to find out that it's about a charge card, the slogan goads kids into doing so, and once asked, odds are the kids are going to sign up, at least those that are most valuable will. The relative benefits of store cards beside (full disclosure, I have a Nordstrom's card) the real gold mine here is for the store who will sell the info on a group that has self-selected as both impressionable and affluent enough to shop there. Think of that what you will.

Next: the training. What struck me about the training (other then having an informational session in the middle of the god-damned store during business hours) was that they made each prospective employee stand on a chair in the middle of the other prospective employees and list their name, where they are from, where they go to school (so far pretty standard--but wait there's more), and then the reason why they want to work there, their favorite CD, and (my hand to god) their favorite celebrity. Each answer was being evaluated by a young man with a clipboard who was a few years older than the group average. When Clipboard was challenged by a prospective who said that he couldn't come up with a celebrity because he really didn't have a favorite and he thought celebrities were silly, Clipboard responded that the prospective needed to answer the question and that--far from being silly--he was "deadly serious" about it. Needless to say that I disapproved of nearly every answer I overheard. But I'm a snob, so don't listen to me. The important thing was that "favorite celebrity" had become a personal signifier; these kids weren't merely expected, but required to identify with a famous person as a means of personal evaluation (a troubling twosome mentioned Paris Hilton and laughed, and the others laughed, and Clipboard laughed, and I died a little inside). Individual worth was pegged to pop status. It's important to remember that Clipboard was scoring these responses on a form sheet. It's as though the young prospectives (pledges to the fraternity of Hollister employees?) were not meaningful except as analogies to those whose merit is unquestionable since it arises organically (ha!) out of our collective will. The individual 19-year-old is but a pale reflection of the ideal Platonic (via Jung and Neitzsche) form of Mischa Barton. Ah, Hollister, we see you but through a mirror darkly!

Both the posters and the questions can be explained under the misguided pseudo-California the store aspired to. California, especially the one that exists in the national mind, is all about aspiration and sundrenched beauty and celebrity and the renewal of personal identity. But none of these kids has read a Joan Didion essay, and that's not how the kids in the store meant it. The status here was to be found in the judgement of Clipboard and their peers. Are they good enough to work in the store, are they Hollister material--with all the belonging that entails. The sociology paper will be entitled: Wither Seth Cohen? Identity in the New California of the Mind.

Then a girl opened a new register and rang up my $16 white cotton button down with green stripes and I left--wondering what (not who) my favorite celebrity might be.

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This makes me a sad panda.

via Pandagon


This is a flag designed by one Marcia Thompson Eldreth, it has recently begun drawing attention as high profile as Pat Robertson's "The 700 Club" television show.

While the creation of a Christian American flag seems really, really silly (and it is, on many levels) it is also deadly serious. The implications are manifold and instructive. This is a flashlight into the great dark, dank caverns of the American right-wing-Christian/Dominionist (for short I call them "crazies") psyche, and we should take the opportunity of it's light to see what there is to see.

The first set of questions that immediately pop into mind are the contradictions--they may make us complacent and dismissive. For example: you sorts always claim as a justification for the legislation of your religious choice into compulsory civil laws that this is a christian nation, yet you claim victimhood and even went so far as to create your own flag to set you apart...so which is it? Either this is a Christian nation or you are a persecuted minority, can't have it both ways. (The truth of the matter lies somewhere between neither position, both are demonstrably false: this is a secular nation that is remarkably tolerant toward all religions, at least it is supposed to be). One also wonders what's so wrong with regular Old Glory that it isn't good enough for the crazies. I mean seriously, do we actually have to put a cross and a poorly misunderstood out-of-context biblical quote on fucking EVERYTHING before the crazies' thirst for Jesus will be sated (in a manly, hetero way)? Well, sadly the answer there is a "Yes" so great and wide wide-rushing as to make Noah's deluge seem but a trickle.

But the moor sinister aspects of this spontaneous flag genesis serious matters. Flags as we understand them to represent nation states, even sports team pennants (and not just banners anouncing a memorial day sale) come down to us through a centuries old military tradition. The tradition of the "standard." Most famously the Roman legions marched out with their Eagle standards as symbols of the might of Rome. Captured standards were marks of everlasting disgrace. The martial implications of national flags are hard to miss. These are the banners under which the nation states assemble to talk peace or wage war. By making their own flag the crazies are beginning to see themselves as outsiders making war on the US. This isn't merely a symbol like a professional group, union, NGO, or corporation might use as a trademark at the top of their stationary for press releases. This is a banner under heaven and above the heads of the righteous. In hoc signo vinces and all of that. Also, it's not as though the christian religion has no symbols, like the greek fish or the cross itself. But in the flag the cross is carried by an eagle. The American-ness seems to support the Christianity here. It's a creepy nationalism that isn't alway apparent in previous examples of national/religious fusion. The Cross of St. George became the symbol for England, it wasn't propped up by...I don't know...pigs and tin or whatever England was known for at the time. The same is true in Turkey. Even the Vatican flag with the keys of St. Peter on them are a symbol of Christ granting authority to the Church on earth, not the Church holding up Christ. This flag is not the flag of Christians, but of nationalists. And nationalists are nearly always bad when they get their hands on Jesus.

Well, I've rambled on long enough--and I could go on--but I think you get the point. The flag, and more importantly its acceptance in the crazy community, is a pretty good sized leap toward the inevitable schism in American life over "tradational" values, and the relatively new radical and overtly political interpretation of Christianity that is Paul-centric instead of Jesus-centric (and incorporates all sorts of theological heresies like pre-millenial dispensationalism) that lays claim to that traditional status (aka "The Crazies").

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This is some good ass news

CALEXICO LATEST NEWS

I eagerly anticipate this release, as I have with few others recently.

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Don't call it a comeback

I post once more!

You ever just get in your car and drive 'cause it's that kind of day? Well I just did, and a lovely Sunday drive it was...uh...guv'ner.

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