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[a] Truth and Faith ... or Something Like That <^><^> [a] Life Sucks <^><^> [a] The Movies <^><^> [a] Drawings of My Living Room <^><^> [a] Can Anthropology Describe a People? <^><^> [a] Current Events Pass, Conditions Stay the Same <^><^> [a] Celebrity Worship <^><^> [a] The Unlikely Dynamic of Food Not Bombs <^><^> [a] The Joy of Idleness <^><^> [a] More Income vs. More Leisure <^><^> [a] The Pedicab as a Symbol of Feudal Society <^><^>
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August 27, 2004 Truth and Faith ... or Something Like That[asfo_del]
The comments to my last post, in particular APerson's remarks about faith and spirituality and Velma's affirmation of humans' fundamental goodness, have given me a lot to think about, but I'm unsure exactly how to respond because those notions take me, a grumpy cynic, into uncharted waters. [Although, given the always-useful reminder by another commenter that I am an arrogant ass, I should really have no compunction about spouting opinions over matters that I know nothing about.]
I had written: "Some people seem to have a natural aptitude for optimism and perseverance." APerson wrote: "These people have FAITH. Yes, I said it. Faith. One can have faith without clinging to a God concept. It is an acceptance that the future will take care of itself. Faith in oneself is confidence. Faith in others is trust. While I often criticize organized hierarchical religion, I feel it's important to find one's spirituality. I personally like Taoism although I don't label myself TaoIST. It's an interesting take on life."
I think that I don't have any faith. I'm not sure how I would go about getting it. Most of the time, I trudge along, doing semi-okay while waiting for the other shoe to drop. I don't think I'm particularly pessimistic, nor am I a worrier. I'm mostly just fatalistic. I think that everything just is: no rhyme or reason, no overarching meaning, no patterns or preordained constructs. To me, humans are no different nor more important than nematodes, those little tiny crawlie things that exist by the hundreds in every teaspoon of dirt; we just have a greater ability to screw up ourselves and our world, and then to think and talk and write about it all. Not that this particular viewpoint has held me in very good stead. It doesn't give you much to hold onto.
Spirituality is a concept that has always escaped me. I've never given it the thought that it deserves, so I really am not qualified to say anything about it without putting my foot in my mouth. I think I may have always kept the notion at arm's length because it seemed to have a vague scent of religion about it, and I find religion pretty distasteful. [No disrespect intended. I would never try to persuade someone what their most personal beliefs should be, especially since my own have pretty much left me disgusted and grouchy.]
This is an interesting definition that I came across [slightly edited]: "Spirituality is a term which refers to any set of ideas, methodologies, or experiences whose sincere aim is to increase self-knowledge. Not only does this term include religion, it also includes so-called secular traditions such as psychology, philosophy and artistic expression. An authentic and courageous desire to know one's self is the only "required" basis for any true spiritual pursuit."
A secular quest for insight is something that I can grasp. I have a little trouble, though, with the notion of an inward desire to know myself. I understand it's meant as a way of looking outward by starting from an internal point of peace and acceptance, but it still feels kind of uncomfortably self-absorbed. I just can't bring myself to believe there's really anything about me that is particularly worth knowing or questing after. [Obviously, I'm plenty self-absorbed already, but that's another story.]
Of the secular traditions, psychology has never been my friend [I was in therapy once for eighteen months and it was a maddening, hair-pulling exercise in frustration that left me worse off than when I started. I later saw another, much more expensive shrink who gave me the kind of insight I was paying for, dammit: he said that I was too smart to be in therapy, because I couldn't be tricked], philosophy I just am not very familiar with [before you ever get to any of the good stuff, it gets all bogged down in defining terms and providing convoluted logical proofs of abstract arguments, so I never got very far before my eyes would glaze over], but art has been a major influence in establishing a kind of framework for understanding my life.
I think one of the most important things I learned when I went to art school is that art, because it is a tangible, physical object, simply is what it is. You cannot make excuses for a project that didn't turn out by explaining how it was supposed to be: the object speaks for itself. If it's a piece of crap, then that's what it says, loud and clear. And if the work of art is meant to convey some kind of meaning, it has to be present and apparent in the work, not in some appended explanation. Physical objects all convey the truth about themselves, whether art pieces or everyday things. To me that's a very comforting and inescapable truth. Plastic laminate that is meant to look like wood doesn't fool anyone. Anything that is used shows its wear. Broken things can be glued back together but the cracks will still remain. Ships are repainted year after year with thousands of gallons of paint, but rust stains keep on streaming down their huge hulls. Physical reality is incapable of lying.
Acknowledging the truth on this very basic, tangible level is liberating, but it leaves you kind of raw. It's a stark outlook that may not help you feel less disgusted or alienated, since it offers no particular hope or reassurance, but I don't think I would want to give it up. It's what rings true to me, rightly or wrongly.
The headmistress of a school where I was applying for a teaching job, years ago, asked me something about my intellectual pursuit of the meaning of life. I don't remember her question exactly. When I told her that I thought meaning was found in the everyday, in the objects and experiences that surround us, she scoffed and said, "Well, not everybody is satisfied by that!"
Despite the wonderful premise of truth and beauty that art is based on, the actual practice of art, in the context of the professional art world -- of which I was, vicariously, a part for many years -- is an awful nest of pretensions and ego.
But then there's punk rock, which has probably been an even more fundamental, visceral influence on me than visual art. Punk rock not only tells the truth, it beats you over the head with it, hard, while somehow making you feel all giddy and happy. Punk is something I can't explain. [Billie Joe said, "It's almost like trying to describe a smell. It smells like dirt and Pine Sol."] I'm not even going to try. I'll just quote somebody else.
This is from Scott Puckett of Punk Rock Academy: "The function of punk is to shape an approach to life which includes a built-in bullshit detector, an approach which helps people understand when and how they're being lied to and how the truth is being manipulated and massaged to turn their opinion in one way or another.
"The function is, simply put, to encourage critical thinking.... And remember that any time someone watches the news and questions the report or calls bullshit on something that someone says that seems like a lie, punk is alive, well and working."
And, lastly, APerson wrote: "I understand the push and pull one sometimes has towards people. It is a continual oscillation we often go through, asserting our individuality through isolation and seeking companionship (sociability) are often conflicting, but best to see them as cyclical. Expectations unfulfilled, whether ours or others, often sour the spirit and makes us more cynical. No use denying these inclinations, but they are not set in stone."
And Velma wrote: "Yeah, people bug me, but my own epiphany came when I read Ann Frank's diary for the fifth or sixth time and these words finally caught me, "In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." Just the fact that she was able to write those words, at least in my mind, makes them true."
I can accept the paradox that people are pretty wonderful and pretty shitty all at the same time, or at different times within the same person. Looking at the need for aloneness and companionship as cyclical and throwing away useless and unfounded expectations both seem very wise and necessary. I'm not sure if I am capable of either.
Anne Frank had an enormous generosity of spirit, and I agree that what she says, given who she was and her circumstances, has such authority that it simply can't be dismissed or denied. I am a much smaller, meaner person, however.
This has been difficult to write. All I say is meant only as an explanation of my personal experience and how it has led me to the [often destructive and defeatist, but in some respects uplifting] way I think and is no way meant as any kind of universal truth. I actually feel kind of sheepish expounding on any of this at all. Someone just posted a comment asking how I feel about Jesus. That will have to wait for another time....
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[Continue to July Archive]
[asfo_del]
It takes so long -- decades! -- just to figure out the smallest, most necessary things. It's taken me forty years to still not understand how to get along. Not just with people, but much more generally. People are just so awful that I've given up. [Okay, there's my boyfriend, Mike, who has the biggest heart of anyone in the world. And who truly loves people. So it isn't like I'm not around anyone, but they're all his friends, and a lot of the time I'm just so tired that I can't deal with having them around. Then there's my ex boyfriend, Bill, who is still my best friend, but he lives very far away. And my sister and parents also have huge hearts but they're extremely reticent and reclusive, like I am.]
You spend nearly a lifetime going to school, but what do you learn? How to think about literary ideas and write papers on them. That's not bad, I guess. It's pretty interesting. It's good to learn to think. But it just leaves out so much that you're somehow supposed to pick up on your own, from the ether. Like how do you tolerate intolerable situations. How do you put up with a life of constant disappointment and befuddlement and still carry on, survive, have fun, love, hate, ignore, deny, accomplish. Some people seem to have a natural aptitude for optimism and perseverance. Is that something you can learn? It seems that the most useful survival skill is the ability to tolerate crap. If you can do that, you can live with your terrible job, you can deflect difficult people -- in short, you can carry on. But if you don't have that skill, can you get it? Does it just spring forth out of necessity?
The inspiration that we are offered as students and kids is to not tolerate or bow down, but to speak up and be heard. Everyone who has accomplished something amazing has done just that. But most of us are destined just to survive; it's a mathematical certainty. And if we don't have it in us to lead a revolution or create a great masterpiece, all that being openly defiant will get us is in a lot of trouble -- very often stupid, pointless trouble.
I'm usually pretty quiet and unassuming, but petty injustice wielded just to willfully abuse a position of power makes my blood boil. And my blood boils pretty easily, hence my aforementioned inability to get along. Once [okay, one time of many] I yelled at a professor who was trying to give me some high-handed bullshit about needing his approval for a course waiver that I clearly qualified for. A few days later, I was on that same hall, and a secretary called me into her workspace. I thought she was going to rebuke me for having made a scene; instead, she thanked me! Everybody hated that guy, most of all the people who had to work under him every day. And he had no choice but sign my course waiver, since he couldn't go against department policy. So that was one small victory; it usually doesn't turn out that way.
The world is in a terrible way. It would be so good to be able to do one small thing to make it better. But what? I used to be even more incapable than I am now to look at political and social issues without becoming so upset that it was paralyzing. I couldn't understand how people in power could do such terrible, dastardly things. And if you listen to mainstream rhetoric, it offers no explanations. It's full of platitudes, incorrect assumptions, and enormous gaps in facts and logic. Radical critiques of society make so much more sense, cut through the bullshit, but you have to go find them, dig them out, and study them. And initially, when I first came across radical ideas, they seemed to be out of touch with the assumptions that I had, in spite of myself, absorbed from mainstream culture, so they seemed a little suspect, as they do to so many. I somewhat believed the notion, as absurd as that seems to me now, that politicians, though self serving, were more or less trying to do the right thing: so why did they always, invariably, fail so badly? Of course, the only sensible explanation is that they are in fact not trying to do the right thing, and that they are not failing but perfectly succeeding in accomplishing their aims: enriching themselves and their wealthy cronies, and consolidating their own power.
But what can I do about it? Actually, nothing that I can think of. I know that sounds ridiculously defeatist, especially to any activist. Arundhati Roy was recently quoted as saying, "The philosophy that I believe in is, I'm not doing something in order to win. I know people who go out to do their stuff every day knowing that the chances of anything happening are not very high. But if you're involved in something on a real basis, as opposed to just conceptually -- if you look at the anti-dam movement, sure the dams are getting built, but there's a whole different attitude of people involved in the struggle.... Those are huge victories."
Although I don't believe in placing anyone on a pedestal, and I know she has been accused by some of grandstanding, Arundhati Roy is nevertheless an amazing person: active, intelligent, articulate, unstoppable. I am none of those things, except maybe articulate, which is fine for me and the five of you who are reading this. I don't have the ability to write a book that could change people's perceptions, nor do I have the knowledge. I could conceivably acquire the necessary knowledge, except that I don't have the physical strength to take on such a task, neither the researching nor the writing of a lengthy volume. I have even less ability to get involved in an actual struggle, which requires a level of energy that I just don't have and the aplomb to deal with difficult people and situations, a skill that completely escapes me. [And, obviously, I'm very good at coming up with excuses.]
Most of the time, I'm just quivering, fretting, wondering what to do next with my day, facing a mountain of dishes and piles of hair and lint collecting in every corner of every room and not even doing anything about that. And I'm just so tired. I have no way of knowing what would be different with my life if I wasn't sick and exhausted all the time. But unless I want to make excuses I have to assume that everything would be exactly the same, that I would still be cowardly, inept, lost in a general funk, and would never do anything.
A few years ago, I actually was involved in an activist center, though I steered clear of doing anything that could get me into any kind of trouble. Mostly, I took on working for Food Not Bombs, which was one of the center's activities, and volunteering to do general shitwork around the place. There was a certain wonderfulness about the people who gravitated toward the space, a warm, kind of gritty camaraderie, especially with the youngest volunteers, many of them kids in their teens or very early twenties, but mostly people drifted in and then away again, and the core group that always remained was the nasty tyrant who ran the place and a couple of his henchmen. Dealing with them was okay as long as I kept my mouth shut, worked, and didn't complain. But when I thought of making a suggestion which at the time seemed very mild [it had to do with how phone calls into the center were routed] I was hit with such terrifying venom and cruelty that I had no choice but to leave and never come back. Entrenched power, even on such a petty scale, is so difficult to challenge -- and this particular individual was actually scary -- that everyone sided against me, and blamed me for having been attacked.
That happened three years ago, but it left such a bitter taste in my mouth that I will never become involved in an activist group again. Period.
[asfo_del]
I almost never go to the movies. The last time I went out to see a movie was, no kidding, over two and a half years ago. [And I don't own a VCR or DVD player, either.] Movies are so expensive, and they're so often a frustrating disappointment. As a general rule -- though often broken -- I just don't spend money on anything unless I really have to. I don't have to go to the movies and help support an industry that is arguably distorting society and our very view of ourselves. And I don't mean through excessive violence, but by creating a vision of a world that is hyper-real, that is so compelling it can trump reality. [Okay, that requires a more thorough explanation, if it's even an accurate observation, but I'm just not up to it right now.]
Never mind those awful action flicks, where your excitement level is meted out on such a controlled, predictable schedule that you might as well be on an intravenous drip of a stimulant drug, even so-called art films are usually crafted to manipulate every nuance of your emotions. Thank you, but I'd rather have some room to figure out for myself if I feel heartbroken, angry, or uplifted. I remember walking out of Il Postino years ago, highly acclaimed though it has been, because I couldn't stand how pushy it was in its sentimentality.
I am reading an autobiography [Adventures of a Suburban Boy] by John Boorman, the director of, among many other films, Deliverance, Hell in the Pacific, and Hope and Glory, all of which I've seen and admired. And it's making me think that movies can be pretty great -- which I already knew, of course. [But, seeing as movie tickets are so expensive and I'm usually to tired to go out anyway, I might as well not feel like I'm missing out on anything and just decide that I don't like movies. You know: classic sour grapes.]
He made a film called Leo the Last, with Marcello Mastroianni, which I had never heard of and which was apparently a flop, but the description of the work that went into it really brought home the idea that making films, at least some of the time, is a true work of artistic vision. [It's hard for me to imagine the degree of ego that would be required in order to invest the time and effort of hundreds of people over several months, plus large sums of money, into the making of one's personal artistic vision.]
"A European aristocratic ornithologist inherits a mansion in the midst of a slum and watches his neighbours through a telescope.... Leo eventually discovers that his leisured life has been supported by rents from the slum that surrounds him. He is mortified and attempts to give his house and money to the people of the street, with predictably disastrous results. We wanted to imply that we are all Leos, living off the poor of the world." [That was in 1969. How long has this fact, which has done nothing but get worse and worse, been painfully obvious to anyone who bothered to think about it? Whether movies are able to motivate social and political change is another worthy topic.]
John Boorman offers an explanation for the fast paced action movies that are so prevalent today, and that I so dislike. "Everything had changed in Hollywood since Star Wars. The studios woke up to the realisation that the mass audience is made up mostly of young boys who want action-adventure movies with a style and pace as close as possible to the cartoons they grew up watching on television.... If all arts aspire to the condition of music, then all movies aspire to the condition of Tex Avery, the great animator."
When I was a kid, we pretty much only went to Disney movies, which didn't seem quite as heinous back then. Mostly they were just schmaltzy and ridiculous. Mary Poppins was my sister's favorite. I think we still have the soundtrack record at my parents' house, in Italian.
Children's movies very often build to a climax where there's a lot of hooting and hollering, amid a great urgency to avert some calamity, complete with close-ups of windblown, sunny faces shouting lines like, "Come on, we're almost there!" I remember always leaving movies with such a sense of elation that I was embarrassed to be seen, dazed and breathless, by the people in the lobby, in the sharp lights. But how any of what I had seen and felt could be translated into actions I could take in my own life completely escaped me. I went to school. I went home. I watched TV. I ate dinner. There was never occasion to run, frantically and with a band of cohorts, to rescue a nest of goslings moments before it was bulldozed by a snarling developer and his henchmen.
But even when I was somewhat older, in high school and college, watching movies had this kind of emotional power that made me feel like I should do something important or exciting, but it never gave me any actual idea what that might be. The medium is so visual that it leaves you with the impression that you would have an interesting life if only your life looked interesting: with just the right set design and clothes, plus a ravishing landscape in the background. Movies are so much bigger and bolder than real life that you start to experience your own real moments as if you were taking part in a movie.
[asfo_del]
[asfo_del]
About seventeen years ago, one of my favorite books was an anthropology text on an indigenous people who live in the rainforest of northern Brazil and neighboring Venezuela: Yanomamo: The Fierce People by Napoleon Chagnon, published in 1968, now with over 800,000 copies in print. My then boyfriend and I used to read passages of it to each other. It wasn't so much the book, though fascinatingly told, as the Yanomami themselves who were amazing. I haven't really brought it to mind over the years, but I thought I'd look it up on the web because I've been thinking about issues surrounding indigenous people. It turns out that both the book and its author are highly controversial. I don't really know what to make of it.
Chagnon is seen by some as a right-wing nut [and an article I found in the National Review [!] heaping praise on him might tend to corroborate that opinion...] who has damaged the world's perception of the Yanomami, the largest indigenous nation in the Amazon, numbering over 20,000, by painting them as violent. According to Chagnon, Yanomami men are engaged in constant battles with their neighbors over women, or "reproductive resources." Thirty percent die violently and half the men over 25 have taken part in a killing. He has been quoted as saying, "One thing you can never get enough of is sex," as an explanation for the constant fighting he describes. According to some, he believes that sex and violence are interrelated and that Yanomami culture simply acts out what other societies have suppressed.
On the other hand, when he is accused, with his negative portrayal, of making it easier for miners to justify displacing and killing Yanomami, he replies, correctly, "People have been killing Indians for 500 years without knowing the word anthropology."
When I read the book, I remember admiring the Yanomami. They were fierce and proud of it, but also smart, funny, wily, unflappable, and warm. [And they loved to get really high.] I don't condone killings and misogyny, of course, but these seemed to me to be no worse in Yanomami culture than in our own. Their murderous impulses certainly don't have the scope or scale of those perpetrated by modern governments. This article explains it thus: "He makes his way through dangerous terrain to live with natives he depicts as remarkably violent, yet his portrait of them is as affectionate as can be, perhaps because it's so intimate and concrete."
Some anthropologists argue that Chagnon's portrayal of violence is sensationalized, and that native people are fundamentally harmonious unless disrupted by outsiders. But that, too, is a condescending and inappropriate position, it seems to me. How does someone who wanders into the forest with a notebook, tape recorder, and Ph.D. believe that he or she has the right to pass broad judgment on the entire cultural construct of a sovereign people? Whether they are described as "fierce," "savage," "noble," "spiritual," or "harmonious," the Indians' response to patronizing outsiders is often a resounding "Fuck you!" When Chagnon first arrived in the Yanomami village, he was greeted with drawn arrows. As well he should be! For centuries, rainforest nations were able to exist undisturbed partly through the fear that they were able to strike in outsiders. [The joke is often on the "expert" for having underestimated his or her research subjects. Witness the now infamous hoaxing of Margaret Mead, who is believed to have been duped by young Samoans into describing a fantasy society of unfettered sexual freedom.]
Chagnon was accused of terrible crimes, including causing genocide by intentionally infecting Indians with measles, in a book by a fellow anthropologist that was later roundly discredited. But his controversial position remains. He's kind of a macho explorer type, apparently, with more regard for his own ego than the integrity of his research subjects. In an article called Is Anthropology Evil? Judith Shulevitz reports that Chagnon may have inadvertently caused the belligerent behavior he documented by bringing highly coveted steel goods into the village as gifts, and that the tribesmen may in fact have been fighting over access to steel goods and the people who brought them into the forest, including missionaries and scientists, and not over women, for the preceding 100 years. She also argues that Chagnon was highly unethical in his collection of genealogical data, which he extracted by playing old enemies against one another in order to persuade them to break the Yanomami taboo against speaking the names of the dead.
Prior to coming up with this nefarious ruse, the anthropologist had been roundly ridiculed by the Yanomami, who would simply make up names of dead relatives, using words like "hairy ass." Chagnon, who had not yet mastered the language well enough to understand the terms, would go up to another Indian and ask, "So, are you related to 'hairy ass'?" And of course they would bust out laughing.
So, are anthropologists evil? Hm, don't know. Yeah, kind of, I guess. Some of them. Are some stupid and arrogant? Apparently, yeah, pretty much. [No offense to any actual anthropologists, a profession that I still greatly admire and find fascinating. Actually, I can't help continuing to admire Napoleon Chagnon, even after digging up all this dirt on him. And his book is highly recommended.]
-----------------------
Postscript: The Yanomami lands, a region the size of Washington state, were found in the late eighties to be rich in gold, diamonds, and tin, and were descended upon by tens of thousands of miners, who were briefly expelled by police, then allowed to return. Out of despair, some Yanomami killed themselves, committing the first known suicides in Yanomami history. Many others died from diseases like tuberculosis and from malnutrition caused by the pollution of rivers and streams, which killed off fish. The Brazilian government has promised the demarcation of large parcels of land as Indian territory, as much as one tenth of Brazil's land area, but progress has been painfully slow and marred by deadly violence, as resistance from commercial mining and agricultural interests is intense. In 2003 alone, 23 indigenous leaders were murdered in Brazil.
[asfo_del]
It seems kind of obtuse, with all the truly terrible things that are going on in our world right now, to obstinately refuse to mention current events in the blog: a pointless and bloody war, waged only for greed and empire, which has already claimed at least 12,000 lives; the loss of civil liberties in America; the rise of an increasingly totalitarian police state; a media machine that has become nothing more than a propaganda apparatus for the state and the ruling class. It's enough to make you feel sick, nauseated, defeated. But, from the beginning, I've wanted to deal more with the underlying conditions that remain, regardless of who's in power and who they're killing and brutalizing at the moment: poverty, inequality, the struggle for even the most decent rights and needs. Conditions that are created by the same greed for money and power that starts wars and muzzles citizens.
Not that I've consistently done that. I'm always going off on tangents that only have any relevance to myself -- and to others, maybe, if they happen to have had a similar experience. If I had a significant mouthpiece then I would feel a responsibility to say things that could lead to real actions and political change. But since not many people read what I say, I feel pretty free to muse about whatever crap is knocking around in my addled head, while still trying to maintain respect for those who do come by -- and thank you to all of you -- by at least offering some thoughts and trying to keep them somewhat concise and organized.
One of the things I loved about zines, which I used to read but haven't in a long time, is their willingness to tell the truth, even if it made the writer look like a total loser. Which is, of course, the punk rock ethic. While in mainstream publications authors usually put their best foot forward, their self aggrandizement only serves to make me, the reader, feel like shit: why do they have such interesting lives and are so smart and articulate while I'm such a pathetic dork? Well, actually, we're all pathetic dorks: some people are just better at hiding it. I haven't really told that kind of truth here, partly because the internet has always felt kind of hostile. A lot of people are incredibly warm and supportive, but there's always the feeling that there's a lurking eel waiting to dart out of its hole to take a bite out of you, when you're least expecting it.
I've been collecting articles about indigenous issues, mostly on South America and Africa. It seems to me that indigenous people have the right idea, living in a way that is environmentally and economically sustainable, and in relative harmony with one another through some form of collectivism. And their struggles for land and sovereignty go directly to the heart of what is wrong with the oppressive and money-driven rule of law that governs modern societies. I also read a couple of interesting articles about reproductive rights for women in Africa. Only three African countries offer legal abortions [South Africa, Tunisia, and Cape Verde]. But it's not only the laws, access to health clinics, and the ability to pay for medical care that determine reproductive rights. Nor is it just, as appalling as that is, the Bush administration's ban on aid to those who perform or advocate abortion. It's the cultural status of women in all the world's societies -- male dominated, all. I hope to write something about these issues soon, but my head is not really in it right now.
Now, for the truth-telling portion of the evening. These are the most recent site statistics for this web page. I don't know how to make them public except by giving away the password, which I won't do because someone could change the account or go in and delete stuff [plus, I don't want to]. About a third of these, as far as I can determine, are random searches, many of them looking for terms that I am sure I have never used on the blog. [Five most recent: rural dentist; pakistani tea; living for less; common wheel; email guestbook of rice exporters in america.] Unique Hits: August 1 -- 23; August 2 -- 33; August 3 -- 39; August 4 -- 36; August 5 -- 32; August 6 -- 28; August 7 -- 30; August 8 -- 25; August 9 -- 39; August 10 -- 40; August 11 -- 39; August 12 -- 47; August 13 -- 30; August 14 -- 36. The site statistics are tracked by a free service available at das.reinvigorate.net.
And the aforementioned, heretofore nameless musician who puts the cream in my coffee [actually, I don't drink coffee...] is, of course, Billie Joe of Green Day.
[asfo_del]
I abhor celebrity worship. I find it sad, pathetic, delusional. A hollow shell that creates a fake alternative fantasy world that can never be equaled or bested by real life. But I am guilty of it in spite of myself. Why else would I be so disgusted with it, if not to turn that disgust on myself?
Okay, so maybe feeling terrible affection and love for a musician is not the same as adoring an actor, who has nothing to offer, really, but his or her looks, and maybe the personality you perceive them to have based on talk show appearances. Music is meant to elicit strong emotions, to touch your heart, so why should it be so strange when it actually does that?
I think the problem with it, what makes it all so weird and unnatural, is that fame creates a one way street. You know the famous person, sometimes very intimately because he has bared his soul to you, but he doesn't know you, at all. And, to make matters worse, there are thousands, sometimes millions, of others who also know the object of your affection and feel just as strongly about him as you do. So that when you venture out to see him at some public venue, you are assaulted by screaming hordes. The possibility that you could so much as say hello simply doesn't exist. And even if you've tried to convince yourself that nobody understands him like you do, you know that that's pretty much not true.
To make matters worse, there are people making large sums of money based on the fact that Mr. ILoveHimSoMuch is able to elicit such devotion, and they will try to sell you whatever piece of him they think you will be willing to shell out money for. So that if you take an interest in what he has to say, and want to maybe read interviews that actually include some of his own words, you find yourself confronted in mainstream magazines with the most grotesque and distasteful media machinery: shameless contests for the privilege of being briefly in the same room with him, under close supervision and carefully managed time constraints, or offers that dangle at you crass merchandise and other demeaning representations of something that you consider so pure and meaningful.
Then there's the matter that even real life events, like live musical performances, have an unreal, plastic-packaged quality to them when they are mediated by the media. Our culture is so steeped in fabricated images that actual gigs are engineered as if they are to be judged by how closely they resemble the media fantasy. The stage is ten feet high and surrounded by steel barriers, the performers are skillfully lit by flickering multicolored lights so that they actually look like they're inside a huge TV, and the audience seems oblivious to the fact that the band they so admire and shelled out big bucks to see is made up of actual human beings who are standing right there in front of them, pouring their hearts out. I used to work at a concert venue, so perhaps I am particularly cynical. Throngs of people would spend the entire show jostling for drinks at the bar, where my job was to make change because the bartenders were so swamped they couldn't take the time to count their own change. Many more fans would actually, hungrily, watch the performances, but it was with a kind of greedy lust in their eyes, which looked to me for all intents like the unmistakable consumption of a particularly juicy and delectable product. A product they paid for, goddamit, and were going to get their money's worth from.
[One of the worst things I've ever seen is Kid Rock flanked by two thirty foot high towers, on top of which buxom blond women gyrated in skimpy stars and stripes bikinis.]
I have only rarely attended mainstream concerts, except for the time when I had to work at them on a regular basis. When I used to go to live shows, it was usually to see completely unassuming and friendly punk rock bands, at dingy little clubs or even at squats. The contrast is like night and day. Everybody is happy to be there and having a good time, and even people you don't know treat you like a kindred soul [although to an outside observer it might look more like there was a soccer riot going on]. And nobody thinks that the bands are larger than life. They're just some kids that play music. Duh.
Going to see a band that I love at a mammoth venue spangled with the logos of corporate sponsors and filled with breathless suburban kids having a paroxysm over the presence of their idols [okay, so I'm doing that too, but at least I'm doing it quietly; I'm not shoving, yelling and butting people to jostle for a better position], and who seem to have not mastered the concept of reality versus media hype, is just so depressing it makes me feel queasy and saddened. It's almost not even worth it.
And by the way, you know what you can do with your contest to win backstage access. I already met the band, thank you. I found a backstage pass on the floor. I shook his hand, and it was so small and damp. I walked around Boston the next day, by myself and in a goofy daze, nursing a half-suppressed, giddy little smile. That was almost ten years ago.
I'm not going to say who it is, in spite of my recent lofty pronouncements about always telling the truth. Sorry. You can probably figure it out, anyway.
[asfo_del]
The Autonomist has been writing about his current work volunteering for Food Not Bombs, which was a big part of my own life for a few years not long ago. And although he's at the opposite end of the country, his experience with FNB seems like an echo of my own. For those who may not know, Food Not Bombs is an all-volunteer, egalitarian, nonviolent, vegan collective that collects food that is either donated or would otherwise go to waste and cooks it up and serves it, free, to anyone who chooses to partake, usually in a city park. The fundamental belief is that food is a right, not a privilege, and that poverty is a form of violence that is willfully perpetrated. FNB is essentially moneyless, since there is no money paid for food, labor, or kitchen facilities. It's a wonderful concept and a wonderful system, almost utopian.
But then there is a phenomenon that seems to be common to many FNB groups, whereby the people involved simply take leave of their senses. I don't know if it's because it is strictly non-hierarchical, so that nobody can give or take orders from anyone else, and therefore people who, except in that moment, have been forced to take on shit tasks throughout their daily lives feel suddenly liberated of that burden, but it all becomes maddeningly lackadaisical. One or two people are working while everyone else is lounging around. Food is left out to rot. The kitchen floor becomes caked with mud. The rice is burnt black or glued together into a single mass. The soup is either utterly tasteless or so pungently hot that only the strong-hearted can consume it. The plastic cups someone thought to procure melt when hot soup is poured into them, and are impossible to hold without burning one's hand.
The attitudes that some FNB volunteers seem take on go something like this: for things to get done, nobody actually has to do them; because we are doing something that is philosophically radical, beautiful, and selfless, the food we cook doesn't actually have to be edible, the plates or cups we serve it in don't have to not fall apart or be clean, and the space we cook in doesn't have to be cleaned up nor the food properly stored or refrigerated.
I'm actually not slagging on Food Not Bombs, which I truly love. It's just bizarre and frustrating how it sometimes seems to play out. But in spite of the strange magic-thinking that takes over the volunteers, it always seems to work out somehow. We served free, hot, healthy food to about 40 people, usually three times a week, and usually on time. And although there were other soup kitchens that were much more efficient, reliable, and whose food was more abundant and probably more palatable, the people that made the park their home had a friendly, if somewhat incredulous, appreciation for us. We were completely non-judgmental. We were not religious [which mystified a lot of people: Why are you doing this? For school credit?]. We sat around on the park's benches and slurped down cups of soup along with everyone we served [which also functioned as a kind of guarantee of consumability]. We were just a bunch of scruffy kids who hung around, chatted, told jokes, sometimes even broke up fights. We genuinely felt that there was no distinction between the volunteers and the people who stopped by for a cup of soup. The nearby church, in contrast, required people coming by for the food to sit through a sermon, and when a FNB volunteer who was homeless had the temerity to tell them that he did not believe in God, he was roundly reprimanded.
[asfo_del]
[Found via Infoshop News]
This is just too great. An article [a book excerpt, actually] that is a paean to the joy of idleness. Smart, irreverent, and written by a fan of punk rock, no less -- and probably an anarchist. [I don't know of this author, so I don't know what he may have written or what his beliefs are, other than what is contained in the article.] I'm giddy.
Idleness is, of course, my bag. Since I am frequently too tired to do anything, because I have chronic fatigue, I spend many hours doing absolutely nothing. Lately, I have been through a period of especial tiredness, for several months, and I have found that I have been living mostly in my head, which, frankly, is a pretty interesting place to be. I may not be able to accomplish very much, at times, but I can always think about anything I want. That's obvious enough, but the impression I have, which may not be representative in any meaningful way, is that many of us use up our idle, thinking time, whatever of it we may have, either while riding the subway, driving, or lying in bed before falling asleep, to fret and worry about our outside lives -- the ones outside our heads -- and neglect to pay enough attention to nurturing what goes on inside by contemplating and meandering through our own thoughts.
I often make up elaborate stories, which I find completely engrossing. It's like reading a book or watching a movie, except that you can have happen whatever you damn well please, the characters and situations are entirely of your choosing, and it doesn't have to make any logical sense or satisfy any conventions of quality or believability because no one will ever see or know any of it but yourself. [Perhaps I've said too much....]
Of course, the more serious side of the issue is that demonizing idleness and the idle is a very effective tool for the capitalist exploitation of human beings, who, having internalized the message that hard work is a measure of their moral mettle, are reduced to striving, obedient worker bees.
Anyway. The author of this article has a far more interesting and expansive take on idleness than anything I could say, so I'll just quote some of my favorite bits:
-It is a sad fact that from early childhood we are tyrannised by the moral myth that it is right, proper and good to leap out of bed the moment we wake in order to set about some useful work as quickly and cheerfully as possible. Parents begin the brainwashing process and then school works yet harder to indoctrinate its charges with the necessity of early rising.
-The propaganda against oversleeping goes back to the Bible. Here is Proverbs, chapter 6, on the subject:
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
(I would question the sanity of a religion that holds up the ant as an example of how to live. The ant system is an exploitative aristocracy based on the unthinking toil of millions of workers and the complete inactivity of a single queen and a handful of drones.) ... This passage from the Bible is used as a bludgeon by moralists, capitalists and bureaucrats in order to impose upon the people the notion that God hates it when you get up late.
-EP Thompson ... argues that the creation of the job is a relatively recent phenomenon, born out of the Industrial Revolution. Before ..., work was a much more haphazard affair. People worked, yes, they did "jobs", but the idea of being yoked to one particular employer to the exclusion of all other money-making activity was unknown." ... "The pattern persists among some self-employed ... today, and provokes the question of whether it is not a 'natural' human work-rhythm."
-The Industrial Revolution, above all, was a battle between hard work and laziness, and hard work won.
-Thomas Carlyle ... wrote, ... "Every idle moment is treason." It is your patriotic duty to work hard - another myth, particularly convenient to the rich who, as Bertrand Russell said, "preach the dignity of labour, while taking care themselves to remain undignified in this respect". Or as the late, great British writer Jeffrey Bernard put it: "As if there was something romantic and glamorous about hard work ... if there was something romantic about it, the Duke of Westminster would be digging his own fucking garden, wouldn't he?"
-Idleness as a waste of time is a damaging notion put about by its spiritually vacant enemies. Introspection could lead to that terrible thing: a vision of the truth, a clear image of the horror of our fractured, dissonant world.
-This prejudice is well established in the western world. Governments do not like the idle. The idle worry them. They do not manufacture useless objects nor consume the useless products of labour. They cannot be monitored. They are out of control.
-But sex, like so many other pleasures, has been caught up in the striving ethic. It has become hard work; something we have to "perform" at; a competitive sport.... Sex for idlers should be messy, drunken, bawdy, lazy. It should be wicked, wanton and lewd, dirty to the point where it is embarrassing to look at one another in the morning.
-Dreams make the world go round. Our dreams at night fill our subconscious with strange reflections of the day. In our dreams, our spirit roams free; we can fly, we can sing, we are good at things (I have dreams where I am brilliant at skateboarding, for example), we have erotic encounters with celebrities.
-The art of living is the art of bringing dreams and reality together. I have a dream. It is called love, anarchy, freedom. It is called being idle.
[asfo_del]
"Over time, Europeans have used some of the increase in their productivity to expand their leisure rather than their incomes. Americans, by comparison, continue to toil long hours for more income. Who is really better off?"
"By one estimate, the average American worker clocks up to 40% more hours during his lifetime than the average person in Germany, France, or Italy."
"Americans seem more obsessed with keeping up with the Joneses in terms of their consumption of material goods.... Their GDP figures look good, but perhaps at a cost to their overall economic welfare."
These quotes are from an article in The Economist [June 19, 2004]. In spite of being giddily pro-capitalist, and often wildly far-fetched or downright fanciful in its assumptions, The Economist can be a treasure trove of information. [You just have to pay no attention to the conclusions it comes to based on that information.] The point of the article I quoted from was primarily to say that economic growth in Europe is no worse than in the U.S. as long as the same standards of measurement are applied.
[Interestingly, another article only a few weeks later bemoaned the "failure" of having adopted of the 35 hour workweek in France. Apparently, although productivity and profits did not decline in any significant way, there was nevertheless a small blip in "the economy" [which usually means the stock market], therefore, the conclusion went, the 35 hour workweek hurt everybody. Never mind that only large investors are hurt by small declines in stock prices: the mantra is that a strong "economy" is good for all. Excuse me, but the purpose of shortening the workweek is so that people will have to work less: how could it have failed in that respect?]
I think a more interesting conclusion is to consider whether not only individual economic priorities but the ability to achieve basic survival are different in the U.S. than they are in Europe. Many services that are free in Europe have to be paid out of Americans' own pockets, most notably health care, especially for the uninsured but increasingly for everyone else as well. And the fear of losing health care coverage is so urgent that many labor negotiations have to be about employee benefits, setting aside even the issue of higher wages, let alone the possibility of agitating for more free time.
Then there's the fact, according to this article, that European companies are still making money in spite of fewer working hours and strong unions. The American model of supposed prosperity is held up by conservative economists as a standard to aspire to, but it turns out not to even be true for the almighty bottom line. What the American model does successfully, however, is to keep workers in line. The article makes no mention of the fact that American companies have been able to extract such high productivity from their workers through fear and dependence: basic needs are privatized so that people have to make more money in order to provide those needs for themselves and their families, while unions and workers' rights are demonized, and job security is disappearing. That way people are kept busy at work, swimming like mad just to stay afloat.
And of course there's also been a very successful campaign of cultural propaganda: Americans have been persuaded to believe that costly consumer goods and entertainment are necessities. But I'm not sure that's so different in Europe. Prices in Europe are often higher, and credit cards are less prevalent, so it may just not be possible for people to buy as much. According to The Economist article, the average "euro area" European [which does not include Britain] is 30% poorer than the average American "in terms of GDP per person measured at purchasing-power parity."
The very leisure time that is so talked about is itself terribly expensive. I've been watching the Italian news this past week, while I was at my parents' house, and nearly every news story was about the mind-boggling congestion on highways and at airports as seemingly all Italians make their way to vacation destinations for the month of August. If you visit an Italian city in August [that is not a tourist attraction], it is eerily deserted. You walk alone along empty streets, storefronts locked down with metal roll gates, windows on apartment buildings shuttered. All that's missing is the tumbleweed. Wouldn't it make sense to save the money you would spend going on vacation and just stay home, and revel in having the city to yourself? But there are other social pressures at work. Forgoing your holiday time at the beach, countryside, or mountains would make you into a pathetic loser in the eyes of your family and acquaintances, and even your own. One of my issues with Italian culture, at least as I experienced it among my circle of extended relatives, is its rigidity. There's an obsession with propriety: wearing the right clothes, frequenting the proper establishments, following fashion and trends. One of the great things that can be said about life in America, though I'm sure many won't agree with this assessment, is that it is exceedingly easygoing. Nobody really cares if you're an eccentric. They probably don't even notice. People here will go to the grocery store in their fuzzy bedroom slippers and pajama bottoms. If only they would also use some of that unacknowledged freedom of expression to fight for what's important.
[asfo_del]
[Sorry for the gap. I've been out of town for a week.]
There was a short article in a recent New Yorker [July 26, 2004] about New York's pedicabs, or bicycle taxis, which are great for the environment, great as a means of reducing consumption of oil, and better for traffic congestion than gasoline-powered taxis, but which are disturbingly servile: another person is physically employing his or her own sweat and muscle to propel the lounging rider through the city's streets. The author, Adam Gopnik, makes an interesting commentary on the pedicab as a visible symbol of a society that is increasingly unequal: "Pedicab drivers ... will tell you flatly that it is the best job they can find. The pedicab may merely suggest rather than entirely embody the new America of puller and pulled, but it is a sharp symbol of a new reality."
He goes on to make an even broader assertion about American society: the absence of outrage and demand for redress in the face of constant abuse. "The puzzling thing for anyone outside America is the conservatism and docility of the American working people. In France, their confreres are off on their five-week paid vacations; in Canada, they have brought a straight-out Socialist party back into a position of influence, because they cling stubbornly to their right to free national health care. In America, though, we are all remarkably inclined to take it on the chin and keep pedalling. The old explanation for this was, essentially, the bicycle messenger compact: in exchange for hard work and long hours, you got to pedal your own bicycle to a better life. But over the past twenty-five years that compact has been dissolving. Maybe we are having more feudal moments because American life is becoming more feudal. An open, mercantile society is a society run on the bargain of future prospects: in exchange for your subservient labor we will provide hope. A feudal society is, simply, run on the bargain of fear: in exchange for your labor and subservience, we will provide security. Is it possible that some Republican delegate might hop in a pedicab this summer and pause to ruminate on an economy in which some are always pulled and more and more are always pulling?"
Interestingly, as either a mercantile or a feudal society, ours provides neither hope nor security, and it never has, unless you count the false hope promised by rhetoric and flag-waving propaganda.
