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As Lacan writes, we are in effect going dumb before we come out of the womb. I urge you all to peep this:
It looks like our little friend on the right here will be well prepared for a life of supermanning that "ohhh!" - perhaps he will begin with that nice little ballerina in the middle, who seems to be game?
My daughter is a Barney freak. We're always on the lookout for Barney DVD's she doesn't have. That's why we bought The Dino-Riffic collection. Unfortunately, there was no information on the website listing to tell me that this collection was 3 common DVD's she already had. She was very dissappointed.
Recently, I was in da club (or rather outda club, waiting to gain entranceda club). As I shivered (those jeans may be expensive, but that doesn't mean they're warm!) and tried to look cool, I saw this dude roll up in an H2. He parked it in the middle of the street, got out, and start walking towards da club. He was about to bypass me (clearly he was headed for the VIP), but I stopped him and asked: "Hey man - how come you didn't get the H1?" He shrugged and moved along, feigning aristocratic indifference, but I knew that my comment must have ruined his evening. After all, what kind of pussy buys an H2? Is he not wealthy enough - was his line of credit not generous enough - for him to have afforded the H1? Surely he wasn't concerned about gas mileage, ostentatiousness, convenience, or the welfare of other drivers, so what prevented him from going all the way?
The same thing applies to Porsche Cayenne S drivers. These pathetic, blue-collar individuals could not afford the quad-exhaust, 520hp, contrast leather interior, and overall classiness of the Cayenne Turbo, let alone the Cayenne Turbo S. They are effectively unable to actualize on their own dreams; they are like those would-be Olympic athletes who, having trained their whole lives, make it to the tryouts but simply fail to man up and make the team.
In my last post I talked about how I learned that global warming is a hoax. This made me realize that it was okay to drink water. But then I remembered something. I've heard that a lot of Hollywood stars and other accomplished people are going carbon neutral. This may sound like bologna, but it's actually pretty cool. Here's the deal: you can buy"carbon credits." If you buy enough of them, you can become carbon neutral. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are both carbon neutral. Also, most products can now be bought in carbon neutral forms: jeans, cereal, dishwashers, and even houses. Most stars buy only carbon neutral products.
The coolest thing, though, is that this isn't just a mainstream trend. It's really urban and hip. Urban subcultures, such as squatters, are often really carbon neutral. Fixies are very carbon neutral. Lofts, organic restaurants, trannies, Girl Talk, and other things that happen in Williamsburg are all, to varying degrees, carbon neutral.
Maybe it's not worth it to forgo that glass of water; I, for one, was glad I had it. But it's probably worth it to buy a carbon offset for it.
If you're interested in going carbon neutral, check this out.
Whew! Well, I have to say that we all went pretty dumb last night! When I woke up at 1PM today with a throbbing headache, stumbling towards the fridge to get some nice, cold water I was struck with a scary thought. What is going to happen when all of the polar ice caps melt and there is no more fresh, cold water? I had heard a lot about global warming recently and it sounds pretty scary. One of the things that is supposed to happen is that the polar ice caps are going to melt. These are the sources for all of our water. While this may not matter much to people in developing countries like India or Africa, where their supply of water is already low, those of us in America like our water nice and cold and plentiful!
My head pounding, I wondered if perhaps I should not drink the water. I decided to do a little research, and I found out that global warming is actually a hoax. According to Richard Lindzen, who is a scientist, the Scientific Community is unsure of whether global warming is even happening at all. Thus, I decided to drink the water.
Due to a not-insignificant level of interest from my readership of the female persuasion, I thought it would befit my generous and aristocratic spirit if I were to provide some guidelines for those seeking to make my acquaintance. Namely, I have provided below a reading list that constitutes the minimum level of education that I expect from female suitors. If you have not read the following, or are not willing to do so before a F2F meeting, I would be willing to consider chatting online or perhaps even a webcam 'encounter,' as long as you agree to play the Youtube recordings of Zizek lectures at the European Graduate School at the highest possible volume, and within sight of the webcam, during our 'encounter'.
Deleuze & Guattari, Mille Plateaux
Marx, Das Kapital (All four volumes, preferably in the original German or in French translation)
Ellis, American Psycho
Butler, Bodies That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of Sex
Stine, Goosebumps (All installments. Note that French or German translations are acceptable. Alternatively, familiarity with the entire Fear Street series will be accepted on the condition that all volumes were read in German translation - French translation NOT acceptable)
Hegel Phenomonology of Spirit (must be in original German)
Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics (translation OK)
Joyce, Ulysses
Nietzsche's œuvre complète (must be in original German, and must have been read while on long walks in the Schwarzwald, while wintering in St. Moritz, or while under the influence of peyote)
[Note: thanks to kushakov for alerting me to my lack of an "eeks" at the end of Mille Platea[x]. Quelle horreur que ca soit si je l'ai laissé comme avant!]
P.Diddy is always on the verge of balling: he's got the yacht(s), he runs marathons, wears Tom Wolfe suits, etc, yet he's always a little bit on the wrong side of laughable. I don't think he ever gotten over his role as pathetic sidekick to Biggie Smalls (e.g. his lines in Hypnotize). Here is an example of an almost successful attempt at balling: the ad verges on aesthetic coherence and a nice post-9/11 soft-porno feel, yet by the time he's pulling off her underwear and staring into the camera while biting her stomach we can't help but laugh.
It's all the more embarassing when someone as ostensibly non-baller as David Lynch can pull it off with such aristocratic ease:
This piece in the Onion, about ironizing one's life to the point where one has actually assumed the traits which one is ironizing, is quite amusing:
"But what good is all this hilarity if there's no one else hip enough to appreciate it? On the 8:12 a.m. commuter train, everybody just assumes I'm one of them. So does my secretary, my assistant, and every single one of my colleagues at the law firm, where I'm now a partner. I even married this clueless girl from Connecticut—loves shopping and everything—and we have two ironic kids. I swear, they look like something out of a creepy 1950s Dick And Jane reader—I even have these hilarious silver-framed pictures of them in my cheesy corner office. But still, the humor is lost on everybody but me. I'm probably the most fashionable guy on the planet at this point, but no one understands. God! Do you have any idea how difficult it is being so far ahead of your time? Some days, it's enough to make me want to embrace conformity like all the other sheep."
The serious question which I believe this article implies is: to what extent does ironic performance depend on 'an audience'? The article hinges on the "writer's" assumption that the effectiveness of irony lies in other people "getting it"; that is, it implies that the subversive effect is to be gained through making others realize that, e.g., corporate existence is hollow and worthy of parody.
Yet - and I say this in all honesty - if we were to be a bit less ridiculous than the ostensible writer of this column, I think that this type of "lifestyle irony" could be a legitimate form of subversion. The key is not conceiving of it as a sort of external performance, a question of instructing others or revealing to them their own conformity - in the end obviously a self-aggrandizing hipness, which is obviously where this article gains its humorous effect - but rather as a practice. If we look at Foucault's notion of ascesis (in Vol. 3 of the History of Sexuality), the"work of the self on the self," I think we can come to conceptualize lifestyle irony as a legitimate way of navigating one's social existence. If one feels - how could one not? - that this social existence is in some fundamental sense patently absurd, and that the options for a self-sufficient, self-realizing subjectivity are extremely circumscribed, I think a limited self-ironizing which is directed at assuming one's position in the social order while attempting to preserve a critical perspective on it at the same time, and artfully "enhancing" that existence with a sense of the existential hilarity of the whole situation, is a potentially ethical position to take. Though it is easy to criticize such a practice as pure aestheticism and ultimately conservative - and this is a critique often leveled at Foucault, e.g., by Habermas - I think it provides a potential foundation for a critical existence that, while it may not presume the progressivist ability for constant, real, and practically unemcumbered social change - is a more solid foundation for anything that could come to be useful as social praxis. I subscribe wholeheardtedly to the Marxist notion that some sort of critical subjectivity is necessary for praxis; thus I think we need to start by examining the positions of possibility for such a position. I don't believe that these positions are easy or well-defined; the unpredictable and "irrational" commitment to "lifestyle irony" mirrors these difficulties, and is I believe a site, perhaps, for their realization.
As a result of the massive volume of traffic on this blog in the past few days, I have received a number of comments via email, most of them positive. Yet some disgruntled readers have chided me for what they see as my blatant sexism. Phrases such as "sexed-out $lutz," "hotties," and "bangin' 80s aerobics-instructor bitchez" seemed to have struck a nerve with some of these sensitive souls. Rather than simply laughing at these pussies, or feeling sorry for them (since they clearly aren't getting any), I would like to point out that the discipline of economics teaches us that women are in fact destined to play a different role in society than men.
The key concept here is that of comparative advantage. A person has a comparative advantage in an activity if that person can perform the activity at a lower opportunity cost than anyone else. Differences in opportunity costs arise from differences in individual abilities and from differences in the characteristics of other resources. Thus one should specialize in one's comparative advantage; in this way the maximum amount of goods gets produced in a society (a goal which, as we all know, is the inherent telos of human existence). Since women have vaginas and wombs, their comparative advantage is coitus and childbearing. Since men have penises, their comparative advantage (to borrow from Lacan) is signification.
It is important to remember here that there does not have to be an absolute comparative advantage, but only a dynamic comparative advantage. This means that individuals, economies, or genders don't necessarily have to be inherently more productive, but, through learning-by-doing, can come to specialize in a certain area and gain a comparative advantage. Thus other aspects of gender differences - intelligence, bravery, etc. - may not be the direct result of biological difference but a result of historical specialization based on social organization. For example, women now have a dynamic comparative advantage in crying, hand-holding, sewing, and reading, while men have a dynamic comparative advantage in making money, lifting, playing Halo 3, and other forms of bro-ing out.
Thus, in most cases it would be a Pareto improvement for women to give it up more frequently, and for men to concentrate on bro-ing out when the marginal benefit of getting play exceeds the associated marginal costs (hand-holding, talking, brushing teeth).
I hope this answers the various objections that have so far been made; however, as this blog serves to engage the public sphere, where a perfect meta-language reigns and discourse is always conducted on a fully inter-subjective and rational level, the discussion will continue, and I welcome further comments or suggestions.
Baudelaire wrote that director Michael Mann (Heat, Collateral, The Insider) is "looking for that quality which you must allow me to call 'modernity'...he makes it his business to extract from fashion whatever elemental it may contain of poetry within history, to distill the eternal from the transitory." Modernity, as Baudelaire defines it, is "the ephemeral, the fleeting, the contingent."
For those of us looking for the modern-day Ulysses, such as Pitchfork Music, postmodern (i.e., for our purposes, sufficiently contemporary and socially critical) art has to have some sort of sad irony about it, some supposedly fractured Wasteland-esque evocation of the poverty and inanity of mass culture. Even films such as Tarantino's, I think, essentially imply this type of critique: by trying to create "real"-seeming, vibrant characters whose behavior is an agglomeration of cliches from other films, he suggests that reality is now simply mimed, a simulacrum, andthat we cannot have even moving films but only ironic inanity.
Michael Mann - Baudelaire's "Painter of Modern Life" - is someone that these ostensibly cultured and critical hipsters might look down upon. The plot in Miami Vice is not only cliche, it doesn't know it's cliche; it's not only violent, it expects the violence to be frightening and moving. Yet who's to say that Tarantino actually knows how cliche he's being? The presumption of a position from which one can perform the ironic critique with pure remove is the same bird-lipped modernist elitism that people like Tarantino are trying to get away from.
Does anyone really not find modern life - let's call it "late capitalism" for fun - to be almost sublime? If you're not a Luddite - actually, even if you are - can you deny that there is something intoxicating about mass culture, about huge, technologized cities populated with complacent receptacles of ideology, about millions of people on treadmills across the world, listening to techno on their iPods and dreaming their little dreams?
In Miami Vice, we get an evocation of all that is terrifying and beautiful about late capitalism: shiny white cars lost in the crowd on the freeway; slick, mindless dudes talking on their cell phones; sexed out $lutz in glittery bodysuits writhing at "velvet-rope" clubs, "go-fast" boats zipping along an overdeveloped coastline. Globalization (international drug trade, Chinese-Cuban businesswoman as the post-feminist embodiment of the 'Protestant Work Ethic', the faux-internationalism of Miami) figures large; mass culture is treated simply as it is and evoked straightforwardly. The film lets it speak for itself, and it is unbearably moving. The tendency to dismiss films like these as cheesy is, I think, an indication of the fact that people are uncomfortable with the position it puts them in. Take a look at this trailer:
or this admirable home-made thing:.
I don't want to hear that the Linkin Park/Jay-Z mash-up is "bad." When Jay-Z drops the line "Boeing jets" while the teaser cuts to a drug-running plane, then cuts back to the club scene, then to Colin Ferril pulling a 360 in the Ferrari, then to Colin Ferril and Gong Li making out in a limo - which looks like a sort of sublime, frenetic business transaction - this is the beauty of late capitalism. The suffocating literalness of the trailer - matching Jay-Z's raps with 'related' scenes ("blow you to smithereens" gets played over a car getting blown up) and the beat to intercut shots of Colin Ferril and Jamie Foxx cocking various guns - brings us even closer to the text. As in Wagner's use of leitmotifs in derRing des Nibelungen, the film aestheticizes itself through a synthesis of the aural and visual (creating a "kinetic" feel) and thus the viewer is forced to experience it more intimately and fully. It's not just a song playing over images from the movie, which happens to enhance the mood of the film, but rather the two fuse and come to work "directly on the emotions" - and yet, of course, it's anything but direct; it's wholly mediated through the trappings of late capitalist-gemeinschaft/gesellschaft. This "mediated authenticity" is the exactly the sublime element of late capitalism; what's so fun about hitting the club with your bros is that when you're dancing to Soulja boy with some hottie, it feels real, yet it also feels rediculous and false (like those fake titties! HIGH FIVE BRO!!!!!!!). This is the pleasure of Krakauer's "mass ornament," the aesthetics of the mechanization of human life, here taken to its logical late-capitalist conclusion with the mechanization of culture as such. Miami Vice "works on us"; it leaves little space for the comfortably ironic transcendental liberal subject. Therein lies its beauty and, indeed, its political possibility
Thus, I think it is reasonable to say that Miami Vice exists in the space of the contemporary gesamkunstwerk.
We all love Simian Mobile Disco, or at least we did last year before they got all recuperated and stuff, and of course we still welcome any new pearls of culture they might have for us post-electroclashBrown students who still like to sweat out those $15 drinks at Bungalow 8 courtesy of our trust funds.
This new video for "Hustler," which, as even the most aged, Wheetabix-and-prune-eating gramps knows is the dopest track on their album, thus initially seems like good old hipster fun: some bitchez dancing around in American Apparel bikinis, and before we get uncomfortable and start feeling like bros at a strip club, they luckily start 'ironically' smearing food on their chests, spraying Redi-whip in their mouths, and puking up neon colors. Just like Vice: we get to see some hot anorexo-bunnies in various sexually compromising situations, but the gross-out factor makes it a. hip (i.e. different from, say, Maxim) and b. politically correct, for those in the know, since it's not actually debasing women or satisfying voyeuristic male desire - it's teasing us for our desire to see them debased, dancing around for our pleasure, and then allowing us the convenient self-critical perspective within the text itself. While we get grossed out by the spectacle of these hotties throwing up peanut-butter and smearing it all over their face, it becomes funny because we're slightly embarassed that we were just plain old aroused - no irony (gasp!) - before it got gross. Their fetishistic pleasure - satisfied with hot dogs, Twix, and Redi-Whip - becomes our passive affirmation of a feminist "fuck you."
Yet is it really a "fuck you"? As our favorite over-the-hill theory dork Stanley Fish says, "Think Again!" Like Godard's ironic cinema, in which we, the spectators, are "given" what we "want" from capitalism - fine honey$, dudes with dope suits smoking unfiltered Gaulloises - and then castigated for it with a formal, Brechtian distantiation - Simian Mobile Disco, or whatever RISD grad directed this video, are offering us a too-easy way out. We still want these things from our films and our music videos. Bridgette Bardot in Contempt is maddiningly beautiful and unsatisfactory. We always want MORE of her, the same way we want MORE of Britney Spears (well, no longer). This is precisely what is unfulfilling about these so-called false desires that are supposedly being critiqued by, e.g., Godard and our RISD grad. To critique them as such does nothing; it makes us feel guilty for what is essentially not our fault, and it denies us the modicum of satisfaction offered by the staging of these false desires.
Rather, what they should do is "go all the way"; give us what we want. This, in fact, is what capitalism, or whatever ideology we're trying to transcend here, is afraid of and always denies, because it reveals precisely the failure of capitalism to contain within itself "all that we want." Instead of this safe distance of already-given self-critique and ironic awareness, a truly progressive hipster (we all want to be progressive, right? Even when we're being un-PC "asshole" hipsters it's as an ironic 'performance' of the failure of progressive politics.) would make a video like that for Eric Prydz's "Call on Me".
I'm not joking. This yuppie-wet dream, with an appropriately 'happy ending', is a perfect evocation of the sexual fantasies of upper-middle-class quasi-urban, quasi-'metro' bro or sorority girl. What it offers is not only a modicum of satisfaction - and I'm sure many a pimply teeny-hipsters has wasted a few tissues over this one - but also a sense of the dissatisfaction of this type of completely eviscerated culture. We don't get this "easily," through the text, as we do with Godard, but rather through a confrontation with our own reaction to it. Why is it satisfying? Why is it unsatisfying? Why is it funny when it really should be depressing? Why don't bangin' 80s aerobics-instructor hoez be all up on my dilz? There are no easy answers to these questions, as there are to those posed by Godard's cinema and Simian Mobile Disco, and it is this difficulty that art can and should be staging.
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