From: GONEPOMO To: Tim Ingalls Sent: Sunday, December 16, 2007 2:31 AM Subject: Re: dream come true
i literally just spent 2 hours shopping online after i talked to you because i was so depressed about being home and not knowing what the fuck to do with my life ----- Original Message ----- From: Tim Ingalls To: GONEPOMO Sent: Saturday, December 15, 2007 11:59 PM Subject: Re: dream come true
yo, don't steal my style, DAWG BTW should I get the new rescue or the other ones? TIm On Dec 15, 2007 5:40 PM, GONEPOMO < ****> wrote: if you want to buy those APC's - "Tobi" is running 25% off everything. PERFECTGIFT is the coupon code. im thinking of getting a pair for myself.
Well, "it's been a while, since I" posted on this blog. The other day, as I competed with the anorexo-bunnies at the gym, pwning all of them by staying on the elliptical for 50 minutes and burning over 600 calories, listening to Justice remixes and watching "True Life: I'm having an arranged marriage" on MTV, I thought: wouldn't it be delicious if I could somehow capture this moment, somehow evoke it on my blog, make it pop? A woman (whose parents had emigrated from Pakistan), quite upper-middle class, with big Chanel sunglasses, was speaking about how according to her religion, she could not hold hands with her fiancee, whom her parents and picked out for her, until they were married. She spoke of her excitement, the fact that though she had "always thought," like any American girl, that she would meet the man of her dreams and fall in love all on her own, that had somehow never quite happened, and now she wanted to follow the dictates of tradition, to be a part of that ancient cultural tradition with which she had perhaps lost touch.
Can't hold hands, yet her, and her parents, and her fiancee, were more than willing to have camera crews follow her, watch her spray perfume at the last moment in her Chevy Tahoe before she meets her fiancee for the first time. I'm watching this, with the deadening, misspelled and unpuntuated subtitles blurting endlessly along the bottom of the screen, big fat electro'd beats "ironically" blaring in my ears, I'm feeling good, I'm syncing my movements with the beat, I'm burning those calories, getting real toned, she's real nervous about meeting this guy but excited, he seems nice, she wants to hold hands, her ass looks great in those Seven jeans, she's so happy to be part of this ancient tradition which despite her family's immigration, despite all the changes wrought by their life in the big new world, despite their fabulous financial success, is still alive in her and her fiancee's union - through them the tradition lives on, and the best part is that MTV is capturing it and spreading the information to all these white people, indeed all these Americans whether they're white or not, so that they can have an appreciation of her tradition and realize that Islam is not some "Other" but is really just another cultural tradition, which America, the melting pot (or perhaps we should dispense with that metaphor, let's just call it a global village), can accommodate and celebrate.
Jameson suggests that postmodernity is characterized by the "waning of affect". Perhaps our MTV lovebirds are affectless; more substantially, one can imagine bored, cynical teenagers sitting on their woven-polyester couch in some suburban, aesthetically dead bungalow, flipping aimlessly through channels, pausing on "True Life," chuckling a little, or perhaps showing some "genuine" (however qualified we want that term to be) interest in it, "believing," half cynically and without any actual intellectual committment in the story being told, but certainly moving on to MTV2 within a few minutes.
What about this, though?
"Against cynicism, a thin but fabulous hope - of ourselves becoming realer than real in a monstrous contagion of our own making." (Massumi)
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