The New Girl sports her newness

This New York Magazine profile says a Zooey Deschanel is not an Apple product like we all thought. A Zooey Deschanel is actually a constant, expansive, and versatile market force carried out through a persona. And a Zooey Deschanel persona is a composite of associations--associations with sexuality, quirkiness (sometimes mistaken for "originality"), innocence, fun, and indie credibility with all its emphasis on authenticity and sincerity. People, especially those who fancy themselves hip and/or original, explore these conceptual areas for opportunities to escape consumer culture. But every attempt to step outside that culture just expands the Market's reach there (and beyond). A Zooey Deschanel is that reach manifest; her persona is singular in that it does not change whether on or off camera, thereby invoking a claim to authenticity and sincerity that empowers it to follow the hip and the original to new areas into which the market can flourish.


Notes:

The NYMagazine profile writer is aware and even seems vaguely complicit with the permanent marketing campaign of a Zooey Deschanel--until sticking this jab at the end using a Zooey Deschanel's own words:

Hearing the CD reminded me of how she had gotten very impassioned when I asked her if she and Gibbard bonded over music the first time they met. “I’m wary about this thing about being in the generation of social networking where people are like, ‘I am my musical taste,’” she said. “I am not just a collection of music. Or a collection of movies. I think that’s a thing that people romanticize: ‘Oh my God, she likes this band so she is a dream.’ I’ve definitely learned that you can easily get stars in your eyes. I’ll meet directors and they’ll be like, ‘I love Godard!’ And they love screwball comedies and they love all these things I love, and then it’s, like, ‘Wait a minute, that doesn’t mean they can make movies.’“ 

Just because somebody likes something doesn’t mean ... anything, really.”

Right there a Zooey Deschanel shoots down the sole reason she is appealing, and apes the very reaction that people have to her: A Zooey Deschanel is so cute because she likes Hello Kitty! A Zooey Deschanel is a composite of associations and likes that constantly advertises those likes, thereby associating a Zooey Deschanel with whatever associations the audience has with the objects being liked.

In a sense, none of this is unique to a Zooey Deschanel, but it is perhaps taken to a new level and with a new audience.

I first saw a Zooey Deschanel in an Apple product commercial, and I noticed the face design that says, "You are looking at me" (or, "I am a thing that is looked at").

The Higgs, part 2

Back in July when the apparent Higgs Boson discovery was news, I posted here

The physics almost-news about the Higgs boson is simultaneously the most interesting and most boring thing going right now. Maybe this narrative conflict will resolve itself in a nice anti-climax.

This GQ article, "The Higgs Boson: Steaming Particle of Bull$#!%", seems to offer me exacting validation. Is it true that this is the thing that explains the existence of all things? No, "It just isn't true."

Angry Chair

Having watched both the (American) Democratic and Republican conventions a little each night, I found Clint Eastwood's improvised moment with the empty chair during the Republican convention to be the most compelling and meaningful part of the whole charade. But the pundits and critics, who claim to be ready for something authentic and substantive, finally got something that was just that, and they immediately rejected it.

Eastwood said he had cried when Obama was elected (presumably because it was such a powerful moment for a nation with a long history of racism). I take him at his word, and believe he was moved like so many others that night. So what was this moment with the chair all about?

Here's what: The chair was empty, signifying an absence, and speaking silence. This prompts the audience to wonder, Where is the Barack Obama I voted for? Because I don't see him anywhere.

Eastwood begins a sort of pitiful dialog with the missing Obama. He is attempting to recreate a ghost, the faded remains of the projection of his own hopes and dreams from four years ago: "So, Mr. President, how do you handle promises that you have made when you were running for election, and how do you handle them? I mean, what do you say to people? Do you just, you know--I know people were wondering. You don't handle that. OK."

Soon the projection lashes out, judging by Eastwood's reactions: "But, I thought maybe as an excuse--what do you mean shut up?" Here, the projection has taken on a life of its own, and is no longer merely a canvas. The candidate Obama from 2008 is no longer a willing, cooperative partner in this game of imagination. The exercise dissolves, leading Eastwood to his moment of resignation: "And I think it's that time. And I think if you just step aside and Mr. Romney can kind of take over."

Eastwood is hardly a champion for Romney, though: "A stellar businessman. Quote, unquote, a stellar businessman." His talking points covered, sarcastically. Finally, in a turn away from the chair to the listening audience, Eastwood delivers his real message, one of disappointment and disillusion with the whole process: "And, so, they (the candidates) are just going to come around and beg for votes every few years. It is the same old deal." And then, "We don't have to be--what I'm saying, we do not have to be metal masochists and vote for somebody that we don't really even want in office just because they seem to be nice guys or maybe not so nice guys ... "

It's a shame the whole exchange was written off as crazy talk by a misguided old man. Eastwood attempted to inject a moment of truth and sincerity into an obscene display of delusion and dishonesty, but instead he was rejected and held up as proof that the rest of the display is coherent and the system works.

Notes:

• Eastwood badly misread or misunderstood his audience, who they were, and where they were coming from. He may have been misguided in several other ways, too, arguably, but his main point stands.
• His means of communicating was a little unorthodox, so for this reason, too, he was rejected.

Humanities

In a recent interview, Noam Chomsky was given the prompt, "In your new book, you suggest that many components of human nature are just too complicated to be really researchable." He replied,

That's a pretty normal phenomenon. Take, say, physics, which restricts itself to extremely simple questions. If a molecule becomes too complex, they hand it over to the chemists. If it becomes too complex for them, they hand it to biologists. And if the system is too complex for them, they hand it to psychologists ... and so on until it ends up in the hands of historians or novelists. As you deal with more and more complex systems, it becomes harder and harder to find deep and interesting properties.

about Slash by Slash

A few months ago I read Duff McKagen's It's So Easy (And Other Lies), but if I could read only one Guns N' Roses-centric autobiography, I'd read Slash because the latter offers more thrills (courtesy sex, drugs, and rock n' roll). That said, I'm glad I read both because they are different kinds of autobiographies and don't compare.

Slash is an American rock music institution and his autobiography works as such; it's a tell-all that only reinforces the myth because it can never tell enough. Every juicy detail leads you to ask, And then what? And then what? And what was that like?

Duff's autobiography is more traditional; it traces a personal and spiritual journey, one man's rise, fall, and redemption, sharing wisdom gained along the way; Duff has undergone a transformation and, though rock remains important, life is a wholly different venture for him now. Slash on the other hand is just Slash but older and with a relatively cleaned up act.

One thing, though: These two books have reinforced a suspicion I had about Nikki Sixx's autobiography, The Heroin Diaries: A Year in the Life of a Shattered Rock Star--that some creative marketing contributed to its making.

Notes (and highlights)

• Mostly, Slash's version of Axl and the demise of real G N' R is that Axl just got too controlling and was either oblivious to, or totally unconcerned with, the needs and concerns of others.

But, more generally, " ... we didn't have a good line of communication among us about any of these issues, so the end result was serious misunderstanding. Since these points of interest were never discussed, since there was never a conversation about how to adjust our game plan to take everyone's needs into account, we kept doing things the way we had in the past, which considering that we'd changed caused us serious internal tension." Later, "None of us stood back and took a moment to ask one another or ourselves, 'How do we do this? How can we get everyone together and working and satisfied?' We needed to be clear-headed about it; if one thing didn't work, we'd need to keep trying. But we didn't do that."

• On hanging out around LA in the 80's: "I saw a lot, I liked very little, and I was fucking bored the entire time."

• On the past: "So I did everything possible to put distance between yesterday and the present. I've always been that way and I still am. It is why I don't have any memorabilia to speak of: I don't have gold and platinum records, only the guitars that mean something to me."

• About this girl Megan he had been living with for months, spent Thanksgiving with her family: "Before I knew it Christmas was around the corner and Megan started planning a lavish party: she was way into decorations, she bought a fondue maker, and she invited all of our friends to her winter wonderland. It was one of  the most bizarre things I had been involved with for a long time, and the fact that I was straight made that feeling pretty hard to ignore. The day before the party, she came home with about $400 worth of useless garbage that she'd bought at the market to decorate the house. That was my breaking point. I watched her decorate our place, thinking all the while, I don't even know who you are. We had the Christmas party, we had our friends over; and as soon as they'd gone, I set about telling Megan that she had to go as well."

• On hanging out with James Hetfield: " ... I remember that there was a girl that James wanted to fuck and I let him take her into my bedroom. They were in there for a while and I had to get in there to get something, so I crept in quietly and saw James head-fucking her. He was standing on the bed, ramming her head against the wall, moaning in that thunderous voice of his, just slamming away, and bellowing, 'That'll be fine! That'll be fine! Yes! That'll be fine!'"

• Slash was co-written by Anthony Bozza.

James Holmes, madman

The New York Times article "Before Gunfire, Hints of ‘Bad News’" unfolds for us the life of James Holmes leading up the massacre. It pins him down, makes him a subject of analysis, takes us down a path that runs parallel to his even while he diverges from his own. We learn how witnesses remember him, forming a cohesive picture of the subject we can use as a collective memory from which we draw out the identity of James Holmes, an identity through which we can say, "That was something James would do" or "That was not like James," until we know when the madman appeared. So it goes: James was normal when he was quiet and shy, attending school, and, at times, acting goofy and awkward; but then he became a loner and, more troubling, unconcerned with school, which is abnormal. Normal James worked, was willing to work, assumed a career, a productive life. And so his divergence was here--not in the movie theater.

On July 20, 2012, James is said to have killed 12 people and wounded 58 at a midnight screening of "Batman: The Dark Knight Rises". The movie depicts the saga of a crime fighter, Batman, and James allegedly referred to himself as The Joker, Batman's nemesis, a powerful and enigmatic villain, a clever perpetrator of crimes. But James likely will not be judged to have committed a crime, and therefore not be labeled a criminal. He will exist outside the binary of law. The judicial system shines a light on the accused, and they are judged innocent or guilty. James performed his violence in the dark, and his mind just may remain beyond the light. His peers and the experts may decide that James was a madman before he entered the theater. A sane man doesn't just shirk off his ambitions, lose all interest and sympathy for civil society, and abandon his social pretensions. Lock him up. Society must be defended.

My man

He always cuts briskly through the office, efficient and determined. Like a man who just learned his plane started boarding at a different gate some 150 feet away. He looks together, but he dresses nicely, which only feeds my suspicion that he's a wreck. Today, dark gray wool pants and maroon shirt. Long sleeves, naturally. Like all the men in his family, he prefers stalls to urinals. Now, picture a cell buried in the flesh around his armpit; this is where cancer slumbers through the day. Some 3000 days from now, just after sipping the last of the coffee, seated in his kitchenette, it will wake and begin its spill through the lymphatic vessels. He will regret nothing.

The ones who say what is

Scientists recently gave the octopus consciousness. What a nice thing to do. Also, they mistook perceived patterns of central nervous system matter for a thing called consciousness, and themselves for the only ones qualified to say what they see.

The greater suffering is the better suffering

Maybe twice a year for most of his adult life, Samuel Clemens met a mysterious but familiar girlfriend in his dreams, according to some notes of his published in Harper's. Of the first time he lost her in a dream, he wrote, "I turned around, and the log house was gone. I ran here and there and yonder down the lanes between the rows of tombs, calling Alice; and presently the night closed down, and I could not find my way. Then I woke, in deep distress over my loss, and was in my bed in Philadelphia". The published notes close with a final comment on her death in a later dream:

That was a terrible thing to me at the time. It was preternaturally vivid; and the pain and the grief and the misery of it to me transcended many sufferings that I have known in waking life. For everything in a dream is more deep and strong and sharp and real than is ever its pale imitation in the unreal life which is ours when we go about awake and clothed with our artificial selves in this vague and dull-tinted artificial world. When we die we shall slough off this cheap intellect, perhaps, and go abroad into Dreamland clothed in our real selves, and aggrandized and enriched by the command over the mysterious mental magician who is here not our slave, but only our guest.

I like this. The dream life is real because the sense of loss and misery felt there, and felt upon waking, is complete; none of our expressions, including feelings and imagination, are compromised by reason and its accounting for competing obligations and practical concerns; such so-called harsh realities make life "unreal" because they make us "artificial"; and they make us artificial because they make us check our impulses, make us plan and act in strategic interests that are foreign to our nature, so to speak, and that feed into life's complex network of power relationships, the ultimate game of pretend. In dreams, imagination and feeling reign, and they are felt and exercised honestly and fully. The very vividness of their creation is the character of the real.

Notes:

• How amazing to me that he felt such a sense of loss over a dreamed of girl. Grief dreams about real persons, understandable.
• People wake and interpret dreams, introducing the artificial into the real, dressing themselves in reason.

only in dreams

Sneaking into a series of small, connected utility rooms built between the high school and the track, you seemed to know the way, and led me into what seemed like a large maintenance closet, oddly furnished with only a bed. After awhile, we heard people moving somewhere in the complex, coming our way. We started dressing and I was mad at you, thinking, "How careless, to not prepare!" But in a hurry it was forgiven and we started plotting our getaway, having fun, and you looked more beautiful than ever.

something by Tagore

In the Dusky Path of a Dream

   -by Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941)

In the dusky path of a dream I went to seek the love who was mine in a former life.

Her house stood at the end of a desolate street.

In the evening breeze her pet peacock sat drowsing on its perch, and the pigeons were silent in their corner.

She set her lamp down by the portal and stood before me.

She raised her large eyes to my face and mutely asked, "Are you well, my friend?"

I tried to answer, but our language had been lost and forgotten.

I thought and thought; our names would not come to my mind.

Tears shone in her eyes. She held up her right hand to me. I took it and stood silent.

Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze and died.

About a Dostoevsky short story

In Fyodor Dostoevsky's short story, "A Disgraceful Affair", we're introduced to a hoity-toity General having drinks with his buddies and running his mouth about how Russia will thrive in an age of what he calls "idealism". That, he imagines, is everyone respecting and caring for one another regardless of class. After one too many, he starts for home. Finding that his coachman isn't there waiting for him, he cusses a storm and forgoes a cab, content to hoof it all the way, mostly to spite his missing servant.

While straying through the ghetto he passes one of his lowly, wretched clerk's wedding receptions. The stewed General daydreams about classing up the party with his presence, in the process blowing everyone's mind with what a kindly superior human being he is. Sounds like a plan, so he stumbles in and, after the initial awkwardness, he settles himself, and even sees a few other underlings in attendance. But soon he is swilling vodka and champagne until he finally gets too drunk and passes out. But not until after making an ass of himself, rambling about idealism and spitting all the time.

At this point we learn the groom--the lowly clerk--shoulders all kinds of misery in his quest to make his way.

Anyway, the party breaks up, and the General thrashes and pukes a little until finally an old boarder woman assumes the job of cleaning him up. In the process, the General promptly sobers up enough to hightail it home where he stays in bed for eight days, laid out with a bad case of humiliation.

On the ninth day, no longer able to bear not knowing how much he's damaged his reputation, the General returns to the office where he finds, to his amazement, that nothing appears to have changed!

At the story's end, we find the General sitting pretty in his office, reflecting on the fact that, not only will he come through with reputation intact, but he's had a pretty awesome productive day to boot. Just then another clerk enters with the day's final paperwork and a transfer request from the new groom. Rather than grant the transfer immediately, the General actually says he'll forgive the young man. At this news, the clerk blushes and excuses himself. This inspires in the General the greatest wound, as

He felt more shame, more heaviness at heart, than he had experienced even during the most unbearable moments of his eight days of illness.

"I have failed to live up to my own ideals!" he said to himself, and sank into his chair--helpless.

I see this conclusion at least two ways: (1) I think there's a triple move there, a series of realizations: first, the General realizes his reputation is shot; second, he realizes that, by party crashing, he only added to the groom-clerk's misery, of which, until then, he had been completely unaware; and third, he realizes that, just now, at the moment when he could have spared the injured groom-clerk the insult of having to work for such a cruel boss, he instead chose to humor the prideful delusions of his own reputation. Or, (2) the General remains oblivious to the sufferings of the inferior folk, and is concerned with his own problems.


Notes:

• I told this guy at work about Dostoevsky's life and themes and he said it sounds like "Tales from the Hood" but earlier. An awesome comparison. But "Tales from the Hood" somehow seems like an older reference point than Dostoevsky does.

A poem

Toes in Wet Grass

  -by me

Wince

or sigh,

a pity.

Ozymandias

     -by Percy Blysshe Shelley

I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
`My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:
Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away".

about Jonah Lehrer, making meaning, not making sense

Recently, audiences were disappointed to learn that author-journalist Jonah Lehrer fabricated and misrepresented quotes and self-plagiarized. His crime spurred a couple soul-searching response pieces, most of which are summed in Salon's "Jonah Lehrer throws it all away". Here, Roxanne Gay hits a few angles and floats the hypothesis that a guy like Lehrer "fits the narrative we want about a boy genius" because he can "make us feel smarter for finally being able to understand the complexities of the human mind"; he is the product of, and answer to, "a cultural obsession with genius, a need to find beacons of greatness in an ordinary world".

Because there must be some deeper reason he did what he did. Symptomatic of some disease rooted in our culture and in our souls that caused this thing. This fucking thing.

Doesn't this kind of ponderous speculation, this pathologizing, just create, replicate, and self-serve our need for meaning and significance in this "ordinary world"? Or our need for a need for meaning? Couldn't it just be that Lehrer is dishonest? Or that maybe he got lazy? Or that he tried to produce too much too soon? Or maybe we don't know. And it doesn't matter.

Finding the work of guys like Jonah Lehrer and Malcolm Gladwell interesting is one thing, but to mistake these pop-sci/pop-soc writers for preeminent thinkers of relevance and genius undermines the fearlessness, moral courage, and intellectual vigor of the better writers (and artists) who act as critics, stewards, and producers of culture.

Note:

• I'm not convinced self-plagiarism is a thing or that, if it is, it should be so damnable an offense. But in Lehrer's case, if nothing else, it's sort of ironic considering his big theme was creativity.

Gore Vidal, 1925–2012

A few months ago I wrote of a trend in which people write critically of the newly dead. With Gore Vidal now gone, one such item appears in Salon with the clever title "Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal". But this writer gets it all wrong. He accuses Gore of aristocratic WASP-ish snobbery. Well, yeah, but that's not a damnable offense. The writer's main charge is antisemitism. Gore clearly took a political stance against Zionists; that is not antisemitism. Moreover, in the early eighties Gore urged American Jews to team up with gays and work together to get mainstream acceptance.

Anyway, knocking Gore for condemning a people is like accusing water of hydrating Nazis during World War II. Condemning is what he did. Criticism was one of Gore's biggest talents and he practiced it most of the time. Hell, he looked down on anyone he didn't hate.

This was not a good anti-eulogy.

Notes:

• "Stop Eulogizing Gore Vidal" wins the gold for most crusty, crotchety title.

About "Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone" by Eric Klinenberg

Klinenberg wants us to know this is a big deal--"the most significant demographic shift since the Baby Boom—the sharp increase in the number of people who live alone". And the volume and proliferation of these people, annoyingly called "singletons" here, has never happened before. The book attributes the shift to four eco/techno/socio-cultural developments: (1) women's lib, (2) conveniences of technology, (3) longer lifespans, and, the biggest factor, (4) increased urbanization.

Klinenberg's revelation is that, rather than worry about this increased atomization making a nation of shut-in brats, we should see this as a neutral or even ultimately positive thing because these singletons are healthy, happy, and engaged. Indeed one of the book's big goals is to dispel myths and assumptions about people who choose to be alone. In support the book rallies scores of miniature profiles of singletons, quoting and amassing their differing and converging impressions and reasons. These mini bios also try and humanize the subject, to make flesh and blood out of a growing mass of loners.

The book's message is inherently anti-climactic: Hey, this is happening but it's OK (as long as we govern accordingly). I guess this is why I found the book so dull.

Good technical documents

The American Institute of Certified Professional Accountants' summary of their study on corporate ethics (May 2012) is very pleasing to peruse.

an email: Going Away Forever

From: Kumar
To: All
Subject: Jeremy - Going Away Forever Lunch
When: Thursday

Where: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Our beloved Jeremy is fortunately leaving us. As one of the Leads, he has been a great source of inspiration and guided most of us in all our difficulties.

We all have learned a lot of skills from him. The two most important things that anyone would have learnt is his sense of humor and using Lambda expressions in your code.  Though they seem to be highly efficient, yet they are so much annoying, for you have to rebuild the whole solution for any small changes to the code snippet containing those lambda expressions.

He has helped us immensely, inspite of the busy board he hangs on his chair. To put it in right words he had been a very good mentor like other Leads.

His leaving is a big loss for all of us as we would miss his knowledge, humor and expertise. It’s a big loss to the girls. Hopefully he will not take them with him like the Pied Piper of Hamelin.

Let us group together and give him a great unforgettable favorite lunch, to extend our best wishes for his new career.

This would be the best time to bring sacks of Oranges.

Date : 07/26 ( Thursday) 11:30am to 12:30pm

Venue: Thai and Japanese Restaurant

Racing around to come up behind you again

The race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

    ―Ecclesiastes 9:11