Click on image to enlarge.

You Are Not

Watching Fight Club again. I loved both book and movie, for very different reasons. I’m too sensitive. I will have the feeling of the movie for a good week to come. I can’t read books or watch movies and be left alone. I will think in that narrative for a while. Maybe it’s a sign of a weak mind. I probably need more sleep. More food. More sex. At this point in my life, these types of movies are too dangerous for me to watch. It makes me want to undo myself. Past week I wanted to just wither away. Now I just want to explode. I’d do something with my life, if I knew what to do.

I thought it was absurdly hilarious when they are in the car arguing about their relationship and it sounds like Tyler is breaking up with the narrator, and then Tyler yells “just let go,” of the wheel. What I found funny was the fact that they all buckle up. With all their death talk, and nihilism and space monkey quotable lines…they don’t actually want to die. What they want to do is come the closest to death, in order to feel more alive. Toy with it. Fuck with it. But really they don’t want to die. They don’t want to let go and give it all up. I’m sure this is a realization I’ve had before, and you’ve had before as well. Still. I found it a riot tonight.  That they want to cling to life so hard.

So long, good friend

VHS is finally dead.

“The last major Hollywood movie to be released on VHS was “A History of Violence” in 2006. By that point major retailers such as Best Buy and Wal-Mart were already well on their way to evicting all the VHS tapes from their shelves so the valuable real estate could go to the sleeker and smaller DVDs.”

I know, not my usual shocker article, but I’d like to pay homage to the VHS.  After it was made mainstream by porn, VHS has entertained us for something like three decades, really taking off in the 90’s.

So I’d like to write about some memories that I have with VHS. A eulogy, of sorts. Feel free to add your own memories in the comments section.

I remember still being in Russia, so I was under the age of 6, and how I thought my Grandpa was something close to god (secular Soviet home) because he could make TV stop, rewind, and play at will. I watched endless reruns of the same episodes of Gummi Bears (in Russian of course). I thought the TV power solely belonged to my Grandpa. Sure, I didn’t know it was a trusty VHS that held my joy on it, but there it was, a token of  my early childhood.

In case you’re curious as to what Gummi Bears sounds like in Russian..

You can only imagine my sheer happiness when I discovered that this strange new land, America, also had Gummi Bears, albeit in it’s own language. America also had those adorable little cheese wrapped in wax (Babybel), which I first met on the plane coming to the USA, where I promptly ate the cheese, wax and all, until some nice lady took pity on me and explained to me that I can take the wax off.

Oh VHS, I remember the sheer control. I could put it in, record anything I want on TV, play it back, record over it again. I remember recording mistakes. I remember footage being lost. I remember the joy of finding it again, accidentally, that as you’re watching some old cartoon, for nostalgia value as now you’re too told for the cartoon, that you recorded at a very tender age that would get interrupted midway through by the porn that you recorded from the TV at that same tender age.

I remember feeling so powerful. I could capture moments. I could rewind and play at will. I could erase. Maybe this sounds so geeky, but the idea that one could take memories from the TV without permission. We don’t have that anymore. We pay for it. We are also watched. Someone else knows what we record. What we prefer. The privacy is gone. That was really the glory of VHS, video home system, the privacy in your own home. Obviously this was primarily for porn purposes in the beginning, as it’s nicer to watch it at home instead of some peep show theater. With VHS we had our own personal cinema. It was so revolutionary. It was so intimate. I loved hitting pause, and then play and watching everything move very very slowly. I loved the noise of the machine when it would fast forward or rewind. You could feel the little guy working.

I remember the anticipation of tracking. When the tape was too old and it would be fuzzy and not so perfect, and you would hold your breath hoping that tracking would fix it. I remember actually the days before auto-tracking and how that was a bitch and a half to set the levels just right. It was a sense of pride and accomplishment every time I made a video look good.

I loved the working technology as a kid, but I also loved it when my parents gave me the important task of destroying videos as well. I’d pull the black tape out and out and dance with it in the house. Sometimes I would rewind it manually with my fingers. See if I could put it back together. See if I could undo it more. I would braid it into my hair, then take it out because I wasn’t allowed to look like that outside the house. I loved how tangible VHS was.

My college house still has a ton of VHS tapes. Old Disney movies, not digitally remastered, that we gather around and watch. We bask in the feeling of being young again. Of the tape sometimes being soft around the edges. How everything wasn’t so perfect, and that is, and was, part of the appeal. Nothing more exciting than taking that clunky VHS tape and watching the VCR eat it. No menu screen with options. Just ff and then play. No DVD that sits and keeps replaying the menu screen over and over.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the new digital world. Yet sometimes I miss the fuzzy memories of my youth.

So goodbye and so long, VHS. You done good. I know others will make a far more creative and artistic omage to you. You might get some gallery installations. Some modern art pieces. Maybe a movie and documentary. Maybe a porno.

But you will never again teach young immigrant girls how to capture memories on their own. Don’t worry, VHS, your memory is already captured. It keeps playing inside. My generation watches your graceful death. You embody the death of our childhood.

I didn’t know Colbert read Lacan!

America used to live by the motto “Father Knows Best.” Now we’re lucky if “Father Knows He Has Children.” We’ve become a nation of sperm donors and baby daddies. But there’s more to being a father than taking kids to Chuck E. Cheese and supplying the occasional Y-chromosome. A father has to be a provider, a teacher, a role model, but most importantly, a distant authority figure who can never be pleased. Otherwise, how will children ever understand the concept of God?
- I am America (And So Can You!) – Stephen Colbert

Here is some theory for you: Zizek on how to read Lacan:

The true formula of atheism is not God is dead – even by basing the origin of the function of the father upon his murder, Freud protects the father – the true formula of atheism is God is unconscious

In order to properly understand this passage, one has to read it together with another thesis of Lacan. These two dispersed statements should be treated as the pieces of a puzzle to be combined into one coherent proposition. It is only their interconnection (plus the reference to the Freudian dream of the father who doesn’t know that he is dead) that enables us to deploy Lacan’s basic thesis in its entirety:

As you know, the father Karamazov’s son Ivan leads the latter into those audacious avenues taken by the thought of the cultivated man, and in particular, he says, if God doesn’t exist… – If God doesn’t exist, the father says, then everything is permitted. Quite evidently, a naïve notion, for we analysts know full well that if God doesn’t exist, then nothing at all is permitted any longer. Neurotics prove that to us every day.

The modern atheist thinks he knows that God is dead; what he doesn’t know is that, unconsciously, he continues to believe in God. What characterizes modernity is no longer the standard figure of the believer who secretly harbors intimate doubts about his belief and engages in transgressive fantasies; today, we have, on the contrary, a subject who presents himself as a tolerant hedonist dedicated to the pursuit of happiness, and whose unconscious is the site of prohibitions: what is repressed are not illicit desires or pleasures, but prohibitions themselves. “If God doesn’t exist, then everything is prohibited” means that the more you perceive yourself as an atheist, the more your unconscious is dominated by prohibitions which sabotage your enjoyment. (One should not forget to supplement this thesis with its opposite: if God exists, then everything is permitted – is this not the most succinct definition of the religious fundamentalist’s predicament? For him, God fully exists, he perceives himself as His instrument, which is why he can do whatever he wants, his acts are in advance redeemed, since they express the divine will…)

Instead of bringing freedom, the fall of the oppressive authority thus gives rise to new and more severe prohibitions. How are we to account for this paradox? Think of the situation known to most of us from our youth: the unfortunate child who, on Sunday afternoon, has to visit his grandmother instead of being allowed to play with friends. The old-fashioned authoritarian father’s message to the reluctant boy would have been: “I don’t care how you feel. Just do your duty, go to grandmother and behave there properly!” In this case, the child’s predicament is not bad at all: although forced to do something he clearly doesn’t want to, he will retain his inner freedom and the ability to (later) rebel against the paternal authority. Much more tricky would have been the message of a “postmodern” non-authoritarian father: “You know how much your grandmother loves you! But, nonetheless, I do not want to force you to visit her – go there only if you really want to!” Every child who is not stupid (and as a rule they are definitely not stupid) will immediately recognize the trap of this permissive attitude: beneath the appearance of a free choice there is an even more oppressive demand than the one formulated by the traditional authoritarian father, namely an implicit injunction not only to visit the grandmother, but to do it voluntarily, out of the child’s own free will. Such a false free choice is the obscene superego injunction: it deprives the child even of his inner freedom, ordering him not only what to do, but what to want to do.

“Millons of homecrafters face bankruptcy after Jan 20 from new law”

The January 20 2009 deadline for millions of American homecrafters to object to a new law requiring expensive testing of their products, is approaching fast. Child-products without certificates proving they have no lead content, will have to be scrapped.

The new Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act – passed hastily to bar poisonous foreign products – also will require millions of American homecrafters to have each of their products tested at huge cost, ranging from $500 to $4000 per product – including their old stock which was manufactured before this law had even been thought up.

No more selling old things on eBay or Craigslist…
And all the products sold on eBay or Craigslist will also require such certificates of compliance or they will be breaking the law. Also affected: millions of charities, which will no longer be able to accept donations without a certificate of compliance. And this certificate can only be obtained through expensive testing by an SCPC-accredited laboratory.” Without such certificates, billions of dollars worth of uncertified children’s products will have to be destroyed because they can’t be legally sold without an CPSI-certificate of compliance, and this will cause major environmental problems,” said Massachusetts campaigner Kiki Fluhr.

“Larger corporations that can afford testing will incur thousands, maybe millions of dollars in fees, and this expense will be handed down to the consumer, probably making the prices for children’s products go through the roof.” Fluhr: “This law will put thousands of manufacturers of children’s products out of business -hurting our economy and causing even more loan defaults. Though this legislation was well-intentioned, it cannot be allowed to stand.”

“This law affects every stay at home mom trying to help put food on the table and every grandmother knitting blankets for the local craft fair. It makes the thousands of us who have found a niche in the burgeoning handmade market have to make a tough decision – continue to produce items illegally and possible incur a $100,000 fine, or close up shop and maybe not be able to pay the mortgage this month….”

That really sucks. What will wonderful websites like Etsy do? Why are we trying to kill off small-time artisans..especially with this economy? Is our land really the land of the corporate?

Gosh. I used to buy diy items on Ebay all the time. Special little items that someone else used and can now sell to me rather than throwing it away.This will only encourage people to buy new products rather than invest less money in more durable items. No more hand-me-downs. No more individual craftsartists.

This really makes everything seem so bleak. If it’s not factory-mass-produced, you can’t have it. What a crazy monopoly that we are presenting to large businesses. I’m rather distraught about this. If you click on the above link to the article there is a petition you can sign. As useful as that is.

Golly gee, can you imagine a black market for used products? People trying to sell their hand-made soap and jewelry? We could write dystopias on this.

But again, it’s not just the trouble of having a harder time consuming cheaply…charities are affected. I remember before I left England we randomly found a soup kitchen workshop and we asked them where we could donate our clothes and blankets since I can’t take them with me. She told us to bring them over tomorrow, they’d wash them for us. It was nice just to pack bookbags of clothes, blankets and other trinkets and give them to an organization directly.

The law isn’t evil, it’s trying to protect. Yet within this protection there is an excess. Sure we’re trying to keep people safe, but within the zealotry people get hurt, small businesses suffer, small people who can’t even count as a small business suffer.

Blergh

So there’s often a rather vociferous, angry, and generally grossed out response to furries…

Why is that not okay…but this is?

For some reason people who go on Second Life, bloggers, and WOW gamers are demonized…but that shit is allowed on the tele for mainstream viewing and purchasing?

I guess we’re starting our kids early on furrydom.

Mashups

A mashup  is a song or composition created from the combination of the music from one song with the a cappella from another…In full swing at the end of the 20th century, mash ups have been described positively as “ultimate post-modern pop song[s]” or “‘culture jamming in its purest form’” and “display an analytical impulse…we actually hear how these songs resonate with one another, comment upon and affect one another…in a way, the music speaks for itself”.

I know Kanye’s “Stronger” became popular. He spliced his song with Daft Punk’s “Technologic”–also an awesome song on it’s own that was used for an Ipod commercial.

Eminem also did a mashup with one of Enya’s songs:

Girl Talk is a great example of mashups. He’s actually really famous. Although he is in a good heap of lawsuits. Listen to the song and let me know how many songs/rifts/etc you can identity.

“Ultimate post-modern pop songs,” was a line from the above paragraph from Wikipedia. I think that is a beautiful description for this. Girl Talk grabs snippets of songs, lyrics, rifts, beats from other songs in order to create a “new” song. Mashups are the music for the tl;dr generation. There is overarching melody or theme. Only punctuated moments of enjoyment. That after we have them, we don’t remember them, because suddenly we blend into another snippet of enjoyment. We don’t seem to savor the enjoyment, but consume it and quickly move onto another one. Well, in a way then, we don’t actually enjoy. We don’t like things that are too long. We like our headlines. We like our quick sentences. We enjoy our information to be fast and concise. We want to consume it quickly and move onto something else. It seems to be the same style with our contemporary music.

You cannot tell when one song blends into the other. The entire album could have been one track. I’m not saying the music or the process of creating it isn’t complex. The way we experience music, at least mashups, has changed. This is nothing like the long, drawn-out (albeit beautiful) Baroque music, where different parts of the piece will refer back to the larger theme..nor anything like the predictable pop songs where we have the chorus 2 or 3 times, a zenith, and then a fade out, where we know the structure and the length of the song, and we come to expect all of these parts to occur. The Girl Talk songs just do. No theme, just snippets. Sweet, enjoyable snippets. In a way, we can hear many, many songs all at once. We do not have to choose which song to listen to first. “Do I want to hear this…or this…how will I ever decide?” No need to! I think this feeds into our society of enjoyment rather well. Our satisfaction is instant, but not permanent. We don’t really enjoy it, because we keep craving.

I believe we get a delight from (not only the snippets) but also the fact that we have the knowledge of all of these various snippets. That we can identity all the songs that are being spliced and used inside this one song. A type of cultural elite, per say. In order to really appreciate the mashup we need to know what the musician is making references to. So we must amass a large body of knowledge, musical and general pop culture. Sucks for those who don’t.

Lost on the Market

Thinking back to my post on the lack of a defining overall movement or characteristic of my generation, except disappointment at our political system and economy, I wonder if this lack of a concrete label, except something as amorphous as the “Dot Com Generation,” is the reason we are so obsessed with labels?

In other words, are we so label-orientated because we don’t have one? I suppose this is a basic summary of a postmodern identity, and maybe all my years of theory finally hit home, because unlike anyone older than me, I feel that being born in the late 80’s made me lost. I didn’t even have a time of identity illusion.

This isn’t just another lost puppy “who am I?” question, but more of a, “i?”

I wonder if the lowercase i means anything. It is that “i” that defines my generation. The one where the self isn’t prime. Maybe that’s a good thing, the “I” begins to take less precedence. Yet I don’t see us becoming any less selfish. Narcissism seems to be frolicking with all of our “i”-pliances, our technological prosthesis. It makes me think of Allucquère Rosanne Stone’s book The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age, where she discusses how Stephen Hawking and his machine that allows him to communicate are not separate from one another. I can walk away from my computer and still be “me,” but for him, without it he is silent.

I wonder if it is becoming so hard to market ourselves. There are no easy categories to cling to. Yet we haven’t escaped the need of them. Do we need labels of every other product out there because we don’t have labels ourselves?

So are we lost or have we transcended? Have we become meat? Have we escaped our meat status with our communicative technologies?

What grade meat would you be?

I think since I’m free range, I get lots of exercise and good, clean, organic vegetarian food (so no worries about diseases), perfect vision, no allergies, no high fructose corn syrup..Advanced education, multicultural background, bilingual, great at cooking Asian and Southeast Asian food, no hormones, marketable skills, high resistance to heat, Expert in Microsoft Office Programs on Macs and PC’s, graphic design skills, research capabilities, debate skills..strong teeth, good back, lots of energy, good sense of humor… Yeah I’d be pretty good on the market.

What are we? “We” meaning my generation.

Last class we were all silent. It’s not that I haven’t done the reading, I didn’t know how to respond. Defintions have become so difficult because we grow up aware of so many circumstances that we cannot make choices anymore because we are constantly walking on eggshells. I suppose I can highlight aspects of my identity, my personality, but which ones? I have a really hard time answering questions as to my generation. I feel we are all so fractered. We have no cause to rally around. We have all this wonderful technology to bring us together but it’s hard to make a community. We create online communities around random things like lolcats…yet, what actually happens is that the lolcats creates the community and defines us. We are defined by our interests, our facebook profiles, our black and white artistic myspace photos. They are not are reflection of us, but are our prosthesis. Without our Blackberries we are very silent Hawkings. Without our easily defined boxes of name/age/location/favorite movies (because none of can ever name one)/artists, quotes, mottos…nice clear boxes…We’re not a ‘we’. Perhaps because without all of that we cannot connect to others. It’s like saying “Oh, hi! I am a real person. Here is my business card. You decide if you want to associate with me.”

What’s real anymore?

How much is $700bn?

The arguments for a bailout to avoid systemic collapse are of course genuine and persuasive, but so are the arguments for aid and against standing by and allowing a child to die every 3 seconds, or a woman to die in childbirth every minute. To put the proposed Wall Street bailout into perspective. $700bn:

· Would clear the accumulated debt of the 49 poorest countries in the world ($375bn) twice over
· Is almost 5 times the annual amount of extra aid needed to achieve all the Millennium Development Goals on poverty, health, education etc ($150bn a year)
· Is about 7 years of current global aid levels ($104bn in 2007)
· Is enough to eradicate all world poverty for over two years (UNDP  calculates it would take $300bn to get the entire world population over the $1 a day poverty line).

On the other hand it’s
· only a quarter of the cost of the Iraq war ($3 trillion on Joseph Stiglitz’ calculation )
· a half of annual global military spending ($1339 bn)

Priorities, priorities

One Man’s Attempt To Throw Nothing Away For An Entire Year

Here is the description behind 365 Days of Trash. It’s a blog that I stumbled upon. I think this experiment is amazing. This guy is trying to basically recycle/compost everything. He keeps a track record everyday. He also provides a lot of easy tips on how to produce less waste. Considering the average American produces almost 5 pounds of trash per day, it might be good to think a little differently.

When I was in England I watched this show for a while called Dumped, which basically is a type of Survivor reality TV show, except a number of people are put on a garbage dump and are expected to live completely off it. They would have to forage for shelter supplies, and general life. I didn’t get to see too much of it because I was leaving back to the states.