March 30, 2004
Lawyers in loooove
There's a fascinating, and sad, anthropology of lawyers looking for love in the WP today. The article profiles Friendswap, a dating event that caters to people for whom everything is an exchange value -- so much so that the "dates" arranged at the meetings are called "swaps". Naturally, everything is analyzed with state-of-the-art two-dimensional grids of informational abundance:
Dan Prieto ... has designed an Excel spreadsheet to keep track of the 15 women who've been selected for him as possible love matches. The spreadsheet lists the women's jobs, hobbies and physical characteristics, and ranks them on a scale he devised of 1 to 3. Prieto, 35, uses it as a crib sheet for his conversations tonight with the women, whom he has scheduled at regular intervals.
The system is designed to be of the elite, by the elite, and for the elite:
Even when a single doesn't know her swap, she probably knows someone similar to that swap, which is to say similar to herself. The insularity of FriendSwap comes from the fact that it's invite-only.
God forbid any cross-class matchups should happen. Worst of all is being alone at such an event:
Worst of all are the guys who stand alone, looking into the middle distance, spots of conspicuous motionlessness in the moving crowd.
But if you ask the organizer of Friendswap why she's doing it, of course she has an economist's tautological justification for it:
The marginal cost to us ... is much less than the marginal benefit to everyone else.
Posted by Chris at 09:20 AM | Comments (0)
March 29, 2004
Christian vomitcore
I was perusing my site referer log -- because I'm always curious to see how people find my blog -- and found someone had arrived via a search on google for Jesus's flogging.
That's disturbing enough, but a few sites down in the results for that search is this site of lyrics by a band called Vomitorial Corpulence, which has some really great song titles:
Just when you think it's simply the output of a deranged spammer's random-word generator program, or song lyrics as a medical journal's abandoned slush pile, you get to these titles:
and
...and you realize that they actually mean it. The band has a site, which pops up a window that takes over the whole screen, so I don't recommend it. But I did learn, while on that site, that "you're either for GOD or against GOD". I suppose the stomach-churning lyrics -- or should I say "Grotesque Mucopurulent Disgorgements" -- are meant as a shock to the system that opens your mind to the message in the "spiritual" numbers. Kind of the Christian vomitcore version of the eyeball-slicing scene in Un Chien Andalou.
Posted by Chris at 07:24 PM | Comments (0)
March 26, 2004
Priceless Americana on a scanner
I'm interested to meet the guy who would dare put a $75,000 comic book on a flatbed scanner -- and I wonder whose copy he used -- but I'm kind of glad he did, because now I can read Action Comics #1 instead of just lusting after it.
Actually, 75 grand gets you a "VG", or somewhat worn, copy of the book. A minty copy -- only four are known to exist -- would be essentially priceless.
(Via Memepool)
Posted by Chris at 04:53 PM | Comments (0)
March 23, 2004
Strange days
I've noticed a number of stories recently on people who have counterintuitive combinations of political attitudes and consumer habits, or politics and religion, or whatever. First was the "conservative punk" thing I wrote about this weekend; then I noticed Wonkette giving a nod to the same article. In that post, she pointed out recent articles about conservative college students and conservative hipsters.
Now the American Prospect has gotten into the "black is white, up is down" game with a piece on freestyle evangelicals. They're political versions of Jonny Moseley, doing the seemingly impossible with daring and unconventional ways of deriving politics from religion:
As one believer told the Prospect, "I am a political moderate, not despite my theological conservatism but because of it."
I have two ways of reading this: First, that your consumption of politics doesn't have to be internally consistent, because it's just a vast buffet of different consumer choices. Late capitalism allows you to have your Tony Bennett and your Clash, your Sleater-Kinney and your Supremes, your Pixies and Lawrence Welk. So, without any fear of contradiction, it also permits "odd" combinations of politics and faith: moderate evangelicalism; punk-rock Republicanism; statist anarchism.
My second way to understand this -- not necessarily inconsistent with the first -- is that the focus on the oddity of evangelical moderates is a way of reinforcing the conventional wisdoms about liberalism. The dominant story is that liberal politics is necessarily secular politics. Thus you have scribes like David Brooks acting surprised that a left-wing cause -- in this case the civil rights movement -- can have religious underpinnings.
The idea that Christian fundamentalism invariably leads to an anti-welfare state, pro-business, intolerant worldview, is just a result of incredibly strong Republican propaganda to the effect that their politics is the church's politics. And to slip in the idea that a theologically conservative person might conclude that Jesus's teachings require a strong welfare state, the Prospect has to invent a new term: "freestyle" evangelicals. "Freestyle" suggests that they are loose, unpredictable, dangerous: it thus cedes the rhetorical ground to the Republican/Christian right before the battle has even begun. By emphasizing how strange and deviant the moderate evangelicals are, the term just bolsters the idea that the "normal" Christian is conservative.
The Prospect article ends on a hopeful note:
But the extremist ideology of this administration -- clearly antithetical to virtually everything Jesus Christ stood for -- has created an opening among religious voters ... The Democrats can win some votes, redefine the role that religion plays in American public life, and neutralize one of the right wing's great wedge issues -- if they choose to pursue it.
But the terminology, and thus the concept, is all wrong. These aren't "freestyle" evangelicals -- they're just gentler interpreters of church teaching. Democrats could make a better case if they can show how mainstream this is, not how deviant.
Posted by Chris at 11:45 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2004
Ewwww! Ewww ewww ewwwwww!
I'm not sure which is scarier: That someone arrived at my blog yesterday by searching Google for "Martha Stewart prison rectal", or that my blog is currently the #1 hit for said search.
Posted by Chris at 09:51 AM | Comments (0)
March 08, 2004
Can't pass it up
The Bovine Rectal Palpation Simulator lets veterinary students get a feel for the, uh, terrain inside a cow's rectum, without messy reality getting in the way. It uses haptic force-feedback technology to simulate the business end of a cow.
There's also an equine version that teaches what it's like inside a horse's ass. But people have been going here to learn that for quite a while now.
Posted by Chris at 02:50 PM | Comments (0)
March 02, 2004
After the orgy, a Eucharist
Two churches in Connecticut had special Post-Passion Services for those who had just been to see Mel Gibson's orgy of religious violence. One pastor had a fairly unfortunate choice of words in describing the event:
"After the film there will be a time of reflection," said Ian Cron, Trinity's senior pastor. "It will be a chance for us just to sit in the afterglow of the film, if you will."
Cron added that there will also be designated smoking areas for those who still like their fags after really hot sex seeing a movie.
Posted by Chris at 01:19 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2004
Fascism in Jesus's name
I had been trying to ignore The Passion of the Christ. Just ignore it, and it will go away. But I've read very disturbing critiques of it from all across the ideological spectrum, and I think the film is much more dangerous than a piece of "mere" anti-Semitic agitprop. I think it's a transmitter of fascist values, and an incitement to Christians to adopt the violence toward their enemies which the Romans showed to theirs.
My favorite review comes from Leon Wieseltier in The New Republic, who writes:
I do not see how a belief in Jesus strengthens the case for such a film. Quite the contrary. Belief, a theory of meaning, a philosophical convenience, is rarely far away from cruelty. Torture has always been attended by explanations that vindicate it, and justify it, and even hallow it. These explanations, which are really extenuations, have been articulated in religious and in secular terms. Their purpose is to redescribe an act of inhumanity so that it no longer offends, so that it comes to seem necessary, so that it edifies. My victim of torture is your martyr.
David Neiwert's long piece is also very informative, and is full of Neiwert's trademark heavily researched antifascist readings:
The anti-Semitism seems incidental to the larger worldview at play here. And what becomes clear is that Gibson's Catholicism is not merely conservative -- it is positively medieval. In that context, the anti-Semitism is a noxious and fairly constant presence, but it is only a product of its larger thrust, which is a religious politic of domination, the rule by guilt and fear. ... It is clearly intended to shock, and shock, and shock viewers again. In this regard, it has more than a passing resemblance to the programs of humiliation and dislocation that are the hallmark of religious cults.
And Christopher "Snitch" Hitchens, not someone I agree with much of late, has this to say:
The culture of blackshirt and brownshirt pseudomasculinity, as has often been pointed out, depended on some keen shared interests. Among them were massively repressed homoerotic fantasies, a camp interest in military uniforms, an obsession with flogging and a hatred of silky and effeminate Jews.
Even Bill "The Law of Causality is Immaterial" Safire is deeply troubled, but he doesn't say "blackshirt".
As an aside, I have to quibble with Wieseltier's assertion that "This is the greatest story ever told as Dario Argento might have told it." That's an untenable slur on Argento, whose use of violence is always strictly stylized, artificial, and never occupies much screen time. Besides, Argento uses violence to question and parody the conventions of horror films, and to play around with his own subconscious icky dreams -- never to promote violence, or glory in it.
It's very troubling that this movie can be released in America with a plain old 'R' rating, when something like Bertolucci's The Dreamers, saddled with an NC-17, can't even get distribution outside of art houses in big cities. What does that say about our culture?
Wieseltier again:
The Passion of The Christ is an unwitting incitement to secularism, because it leaves you desperate to escape its standpoint, to find another way of regarding the horror that you have just observed.
I couldn't agree more.
Posted by Chris at 01:17 PM | Comments (3)
Oscar grouch
I could go on at some length about why I don't care about the Oscars this year. They dissed the extremely worthy American Splendor for Best Adapted Screenplay, in favor of Return of the King which, while a worthy flick, is inarguably a very mediocre piece of writing. But I'll save my words and instead point to this pic of Charlize Theron. Have you ever seen anyone more plasticine in your life? A picture speaks a thousand words, and to me, this one shot is the essence of Oscar fakery. And we're supposed to think she's attractive.
Stupid. Fake. Bullshit.
Posted by Chris at 11:54 AM | Comments (4)
February 20, 2004
Christian tolerance
This is breathtakingly, mind-bogglingly, stupefyingly insane. In Australia a couple of years ago, they passed something called the "Racial and Religious Tolerance Act". Now, a Christian group is suing, under this act, to have Islam declared illegal:
Islam was an illegal religion because the Koran preached violence against Christians and Jews, a Christian group told a judge yesterday. ... The group's barrister, David Perkins,... told the Victorian and Civil Administrative Tribunal that if the state's new religious hatred law intended to fetter the teaching of Christian doctrine it was invalid.Victoria's Racial and Religious Tolerance Act 2001 referred to lawful religion, and it was in that sense, he said, that by preaching violence Islam was disqualified. "The Koran contradicts Christian doctrine in a number of places and, under the blasphemy law, is therefore illegal," he said.
File under "War is Peace", I suppose.
(Via Pandagon)
Posted by Chris at 04:12 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2004
Adventures of the S.S. Harvey Milk
Went to the SF Indie Fest this Sunday and saw a most amazing piece of mockumentary filmmaking, In Smog and Thunder. It's a parody of Ken Burns-style doco pieces, with artwork, narration, and testimonies by history professors. The subject: the "Great War" between San Francisco and Los Angeles. The art, by Sandow Birk, is simply amazing -- he made around 125 paintings and drawings for the movie, in all different styles, all faithful to the tropes of historical art. The film's site has a bunch of information, including this great still shot of the "Battle of San Francisco". Note the "Ask me about free checking" sign being held by a combatant.
Brilliant. Don't miss it if it comes near you, or go buy the DVD online.
Posted by Chris at 11:09 AM | Comments (0)
February 12, 2004
Only a dog person...
Only a dog person would come up with this event:
Dan Cohen went to a local "dog happy hour" and was "floored by the way people were connecting through their pets.""They probably would not otherwise be talking were it not for this warm and caring intermediary - which is the dog," he says.
...for the simple reason that cats would scratch out the eyes of everyone at the happy hour. Especially some cats I know. Cats just aren't interested in being "warm and caring intermediaries".
(Via Wonkette)
Posted by Chris at 03:56 PM | Comments (0)