Time to bitch about Facebook on the pseudonymous LJ blog.

This new, apparently totally random way of showing updates on FB sucks sweaty hairy bollocks! By chance I went to a guy's FB page today and saw that he'd posted a note saying he had a friend who was hiring for a full-time position for which I am well and goddamned qualified, as well as being well and goddamned interested in. But this post had gone up FIVE DAYS AGO! I'm lucky I even saw it now, but I sure would have liked to get a crack at it as soon as it was posted, rather than striking when the iron has already gone ice-cold.

Previously, the system of FB post-listings seemed to be a simple, straightforward chronological listing of what your FB friends had posted. Easy. Chronological, linear, eminently comprehensible. Now it's this stupid, seemingly random algorithm that posts things according to no scrutable criterion. Maybe because they got more comments or views, or they somehow resemble posts you've liked in the past, I don't know.

And I might have missed out on a good job opportunity because of it! Fuck you FB programmers! I hate your mommies!

From Bloomberg.com's opinion columns, by way of HarvardBusiness.org:
Why Great Innovators Spend Less Than Good Ones.

One anecdote, innumerable platitudes, and no data to back up any of the argument. Aaaah, business writing. The only academic discipline more soft-headed than theology.

Back in the 1950s the McCarthyists came up with a great euphemism for the Reds of the 1930s who attacked the rise of the radical right in Europe long before mainstream America came to see the threat: they were labeled with the unintentionally complimentary moniker of "premature antifascists."

The Cassandra Left always seems to find itself in this position: they make the right call on the major of issues of the day -- segregation, war, economics -- but usually 5 to 15 to 25 years before it will be acceptable on a mass scale. Take the example of this article in the Washington Post: "U.S. official resigns over Afghan war." Ex-marine and Foreign Service official Matthew Hoh has turned into a war protestor, resigning because he has lost confidence in "why and to what end" this war is being waged.

Funny, a bunch of people had that worry eight years ago. Hoh waves around his testicular bona fides when he asserts, "I'm not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love....There are plenty of dudes who need to be killed."

And why would you have listened to those unmanly peaceniks eight years ago, when they warned that extreme violence and technological superiority in Afghanistan had consistently, repeatedly failed every major power from Alexander the Great, to the British Raj, to the Soviet juggernaut? Only men in camo are allowed to come to that conclusion in U.S. press, and only long after it would make a significant difference. Long after it would have saved the nation's blood and treasure.

Another revealing quote: "Hoh said he decided to speak out publicly because 'I want people in Iowa, people in Arkansas, people in Arizona, to call their congressman and say, 'Listen, I don't think this is right.''" I love that the millions of people in New York, California, Massachusetts, Wisconsin, or Illinois who had reasonable objections don't matter. The urban majority that overwhelmingly opposes needless war is not part of The Washington Post's acceptable conversation, only the suburban or rural minority that is vocal and overempowered in the U.S. Senate. It's the ignorant minority in the less populated, less educated states that matter, thanks to our non-representative system of "representative democracy."

Last month I was in an office in Conroe, Texas, birthplace of the Lone Star Flag. A woman who swore loudly that the only news she consumed came from FOX and forwarded e-mails had just "joked" that she couldn't wait until Obama would be shot and killed. She waited many long seconds before claiming she was joking. I engaged her for a while, mentioning that Texas rightists had already successfully murdered one slightly liberal president.

She eventually took the conversation to George W. Bush, who she compared negatively to his father and blamed for a lot of our current troubles. She also said the Iraq war was an unnecessary, harmful extravagance. And I believe that might be what a lot of FOX viewers are thinking these days, if I understand the polls I've seen. To which I want to scream, "There were ten million of us in the streets screaming, marching, being clubbed and shot with pepper balls, trying to tell you that when it mattered. Where was your common sense then?"

We remain eternally premature.

I don't want to be one of these Internet shitbags who anonymously, pompously, and self-righteously gloats over the misery and loss of others in a news incident in which they have no personal stake (beware of any Internet statement that begins with "I don't want to be X, but..."; the utterer is almost invariably being X).

But...this "Spiritual Warrior" sweat lodge death incident in Sedona, Arizona almost seems to have an element of karmic justice to it. The American southwest and, to a lesser extent, the Great Plains are absolutely rotten with fake Indians and those who profit from the fake Indian industry. For a place with such a relatively sparse population, there seems to be no shortage of people doing fake Sundance rituals, building kivas in places where there never was a pueblo and there are no Puebloan people for miles around, or salesmen and hucksters vending overpriced weekends for other salespeople only slightly more gullible than themselves.

This chazzer James Arthur Ray, for example, was charging real estate agents and dentists ten grand a week to go put on feathers and find their inner warrior spirit being, so they could cover up the vast hollow left in their souls left from being callow, self-interested money grubbers the other 358 days of the year. This makes the Internet shitbag in me want to say, "Good! I'm glad a few of them cooked to death in their bullshit sweat lodge and now I hope the cops lock his ass up forever, where he can sweat away the rest of his days in fear of his cellmate, a 300-pound warrior. Not a spiritual warrior, mind you, but an actual street warrior who murdered fourteen people."

But I don't want to say that, that's not who I want to be. I don't want to be the grumbling old man watching Fox News or Nancy Grace, dispensing armchair justice with a can of Bud Light as my gavel.

But then you look at the photos of the retreat compound:


Source

A teepee. In Arizona. Not on the plains, but Sedona, Arizona. With a Yin Yang Taijitu on it. I can't begin to count the number of things wrong with that.

And then you look at the nice, new hogans in the back, probably better appointed than 98% of all the structures in the entire Navajo Nation. And you think: fuck these guys. Let 'em strangle on their own self-delusion. And then prosecute the survivors, expropriate their estates, and distribute them among the tribes in the area.

I don't think I oppose radical syncretism, and I shouldn't, since I'm someone who just spent the previous night being again deeply moved as Saul Williams recited Coded Language, where he calls out praises to every hero earthly or spiritual: Kali and Siddartha, Yemaya and Ogun, Lilith, Isis, and Medusa. I believe a heretical blending of the best of spiritual traditions can be inspiring and deeply fulfilling. But when it gets blended into the cultic, Oprah-approved, American sales culture that seems so inescapable, my skin crawls. And people actually get killed.

And it seems like everybody gets to commodify Native culture except Natives. They get pilloried everywhere from The Simpsons to the Texas Attorney General's office on down the line for finding one way to participate in the American economy: the casino. No one ever seemed to present the Sunbelt real estate casino of the migrant White suburbanite masses as controversial, but they goddamn well should have. It's had far more of an adverse effect on the region than any overgrown bingo palace ever did.

I suppose I'm offended because I remember growing up in a public school district that included several pueblos, going to math contests and spelling bees at schools where the kids grew up in crappy, geographically isolated housing in economically untenable communities. Their families kept their dignity and didn't exploit their culture, but there was no way to devise substantial community development in those beautiful but financially unproductive places.

Meanwhile, the James Arthur Rays of the world were making themselves millionaires literally playing shaman-god to pathetic upper-middle class schnooks and selling them Peruvian ponchos at $250 a pop. In order to earn their fortunes, the Rays of the world stole and warped the ceremonial rituals that a post-Holocaust people use to try to hold their decimated cultures together.

For that reason it is a little gratifying to see him choking on his own hot air.

From page 77 of Time Out Chicago's Eating & Drinking guide for 2008:

"Zia: A New Mexican Cafe: If New Mexicans eat like this every day, they either possess superhuman tolerance for spice or they don't have any taste buds left. The carne adovada--shredded pork topped with red chile sauce--has a, (sic) juicy texture and a flavor dominated by by the chile's tongue-searing heat..." ...yadda yadda yadda, stuffed sopaipillas, location and hours, and that's about it.

One, this is an incredibly flattering description of the New Mexican palate, and it makes me and all my fellow homies from the Heart of Aztlan grin with a deep, self-satisfied glow.

Two, the Midwesterner's absolute phobia of anything with flavor means that this cafe has already shut down. These motherfuckers around here have got to learn how to eat something other than sausage and cheese curds for once in their casserole-centric lives.

Seriously, a couple weeks ago I was in the break room at a government office on the Southwest Side waiting for some documents to be copied. A middle aged guy was going around trying to give away a Ziploc bag of hot Cheetos his wife had added to his lunch. Not actual chile or curry or anything like that, mind you, just hot Cheetos. And all of his colleagues, every government worker in that room, put up their hands in rejection as if he was trying to force-feed them weapons-grade plutonium. "Oh no, I can't eat spicy foods," they all protested. He ended up throwing them in the trash.

Blankets by Craig Thompson


My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of those graphic novels that's slightly guilt-inducing because it's clear that the author spent years breaking his back over a drawing table to laboriously produce his beautiful, 600-page epic, while you get done reading it in an hour and a half or less.

Meticulous, pretty, personal. A cute coming-of-age and love story, even if it isn't earth-shattering in scope. It's an engrossing, intimate story. It's a little bizarre that such a "small" story can go so long without feeling disproportionate.

Simple, iconic drawing that feels extremely real and natural. It took me many pages before I realized the first-person character had a 3-D triangle for a nose. Depictions of nature and winter landscapes had a nice, sloping feeling, sort of like a bunch of simple charcoal drawings. Really interesting drawings of high school kids from the 90s, both the rednecks in the country school and the grunge kids in the city school. They all had a lot of character, which seems to me like a hard thing to accomplish. The leering and menace of the thuggish kids was really palpable. And the girl is drawn really, really cute (as are the brothers when they get to college age, but I'm not particularly interested).

I feel a little more in tune with these Midwestern comics makers -- Thompson, Chris Ware, Kevin Huizenga -- than before I lived in Chicago. It's not necessarily my favorite aesthetic, it's usually cold, quiet, kind of introverted and bleak. It's not unlike a lot of the climate, regional architecture, and social culture, in my limited experience. I'm much more an avid fan of the lush, passionate, and baroque aesthetics of Latin American-influenced art. But I'm happy to have a little more feeling for Midwestern art than I used to.

Also, I think I spotted the clock-faced tower of the Wrigley Building when he went to an unnamed "Big City" for art school. Chi-City man!

The one thing I'm jealous about with the Christian fundamentalist kids is the amount of time and intellectual effort they've poured into a single obscure, ancient text. I think it's a real achievement, especially after looking at the scene where Thompson so intelligently picks apart Ecclesiastes or after listening to a couple books by Bart Ehrman. All the other neuroses -- including a phobic aversion to every glorious earthly pleasure from science to masturbation -- those I can live without.

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When I read today that one of the Beastie Boys was going to be getting treatment for cancer, it was yet another weird reminder that time is moving forward whether I like it or not. It's so striking to see that someone who was an icon of youth when you were young is now middle-aged, silver-haired, and vulnerable to the advance scouts of mortality. Hmph.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier by Alan Moore


My rating: 4 of 5 stars

It takes a little effort to change out of "comic book-reading mind" into "document-reading mind", since these books are comics interleaved with dossiers and memos, loaded with all sorts of documentation from an imaginary world. But once I can get my lazy self to make that effort, it's completely worth it, especially since they obviously went to such strenuous, imaginative efforts to make the documents. Alternative Shakespeare folios, Orlando's diary of war and love through the ages, Gulliverian travels, it really rewards the reader once s/he gets into it. Plus a lot of the Romantic-era/Age of Adventure erotica stuff was both hawt and fanciful. The 3-D section at the end seemed more like a gimmick and didn't really do anything to move the already-ended story along. But so what?



I don't remember taking home much of an impression from the first book of these that I read. But this one really showcased the series concept's charms: where Moore imagined a world where superheroes were real in Watchmen, a world where a superman is real in Marvelman, or a world where magic is real in Promethea, the Extraordinary Gentlemen books imagine a world where every fictional character actually existed. Pretty cool by me.


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One of the best feelings is when my bike is fully tuned and the tires pumped to maximum pressure. It's responsive, aggressive, and fast (or at least fast for something with fat mountain tires).

As I race to finish errands before the big rainstorm hits, it screams across the pavement like I'm skating on cold glass. I can whip between unloading semi trucks and oncoming traffic, burn through lights so yellow they're already red, and bounce off potholes and fissures in the pavement like a tightly filled basketball. I feel like a king on asphalt.

Everyone on the Intartoobz is busily wondering why Sarah Palin quit, as if it's some big mystery.

It's patently obvious: she's a no-talent, no-experience, no-intelligence hack who couldn't cut the mustard. She required a tour of five low-grade schools to complete one of the weakest majors in higher education:


She's translucently venal, corrupt and greedy to a degree that would make Chicago's Mayor Richard Daley blush. She's an incompetent politician and useless public servant, and her vaunted strength as a campaigner is pure myth.

She was beloved of the peasant wing of the American right, those poor schlubs who worship their economic masters, and she was a creation of the moron wing of the rightist punditsphere -- those columnists whose ability to get things wrong has always led them to better and better paid gigs (meritocracy is only for others, not conservative shills or corporate CEOs).

She's only good as a spokesmodel for a radical ideology. Xenophobic suburbanites left behind by a growing, changing world love her, but they can't attract more than a few kooky numbers to their cause.

The only thing that is scary about Sarah Palin for the American left and those who care about small-d democracy is what her class of public figure represents: the hypersexualized anti-sex icon. They're the Carrie Prejean, Heidi Montag, and Jessica Simpson figures who call for abstinence outside of church-sanctioned hetero marriage and even then probably think it's icky, all the while commodifying their sexual attributes.

Their profitable rise embodies the doublethink of a repressed minority of Christians, a phenomenon which might as well have leapt off the pages of a Wilhelm Reich analysis. People who can violently embrace mutually contradictory beliefs can also be led to commit mass repression of others, or mass murder if things get bad enough.

For now it's comforting to see that their national leaders are too incompetent to cause any large-scale damage, but they're worth keeping an eye on. Movement politics, progressive or reactionary, have a way of seeping back into electoral politics. And Palin is now just a movement politics leader, but only for now.

From a science article in The Guardian about intense hummingbird dive-bombing mating rituals: "Just as female preferences can generate exaggerated male ornaments [such as the male peacock's tail], female preferences for dynamic behaviours may cause males to perform courtship displays near intrinsic performance limits."

I'll try to keep that in mind the next time a helmetless biker shoots through my blind spot between lanes on the expressway.

What makes dead comics so engrossing? John Belushi, Chris Farley, Lenny Bruce, Mitch Hedberg, Bill Hicks, Artie Lange (I know he ain't dead yet, but he might as well start holding prayer sessions with Sister Helen Prejean)...they're almost impossible to ignore once you get a taste of them.

I don't mean comics who merely died of old age or natural illness, but funnymen* who died at the hands of their craft, who wrangled with the demons of the tragic clown and ultimately lost. Whose self-loathing allowed them to be the most hilarious kids on the national playground, the same self-loathing that drove them into fatal intoxication.

I can't stop watching videos of Artie these days. It's more than morbid, rubbernecking curiosity (at least I think it is). There must be something deeply satisfying to the heart and eye to observe someone self-destructing. I've never been good at understanding psychology, but I'm guessing it reflects something powerful inside many of us, the desire to laugh at another and sympathize with his humiliation, like they're enacting some sort of inner war that we want to see personified. Or we fantasize about having the passion and unblinking honesty to be that cruel to ourselves, the tightrope act is one we wish we could perform.

*Any funnywomen I'm leaving out here? Nancy Spungen? Marilyn Monroe if she'd told more jokes?

All right, god damn it: for more than two weeks I've been coming into the office to revise one little project, a revision that will take just a few hours. But instead nothing ever gets done. YouTube, news articles, Wikipedia tangents, crosswords, I invariably allow any number of things to take over. And now you can add "posting on LJ" to that list.

This is a big question facing me here at this life-crossroads, and not just pertaining to this one project revision. I want to take a new direction in life, or at least refine my current direction so it becomes much more productive, more stable, more reliable. I'm not yet sure how to do it, whether getting an advanced university degree is the way to go, or getting a gainful holdover job that allows me to save to fund future international travel, or pursuing an internship at the right organization, or doing self-promotion on an entrepreneurial website, or if there's a another path.

But not one of those things is going to work if I don't figure out and fix this work aversion problem.

It's a near-universal problem for me: if something needs to be done, I do something else. It isn't dread of what I have to do, I will avoid doing things I really want to do. I remember being in a lit class in college and being assigned Burrough's Naked Lunch, a book I had really wanted to read for a few years. But as soon as it was an assignment, I did something else. I don't think I've read more than a few pages of it to this day. I'll check out books from the library out of genuine interest and then leave them, same with books I've bought. I'll leave off work until well past the last minute. If there's no hard deadline, it might sit forever like this current project.

This habit contributed significantly to the disastrous end of my last job. It would surely prevent any success in my effort to get a masters (I probably would not go for a PhD). It would make a regular job difficult and would make a self-driven "entrepreneurial" effort completely fruitless.

I don't think it's a case of simple laziness, it certainly feels more complex than that. But it could be. I have to come to understand it and figure out "exercises" or some other way of strengthening my metaphorical self-discipline muscles. Just "manning up" seems too simplistic, I feel like there's more necessary than just playing drill sergeant within my own head.

Went to go see the new Star Trek movie this weekend. In all, I think the Onion's brilliant rendition of events was pretty much accurate: "Long time fans say JJ Abrams' enjoyable, engaging prequel betrays what Star Trek is all about."


Indeed, "there isn't even one scene set at a long table in which interstellar diplomacy is debated in endless detail." "Yes it was exciting, but where was the heavy-handed message about tolerance? It just didn't seem like a Star Trek movie to me."

I definitely fall into the category of boring, undersexed nerds who worshipped at Trek's altar for many years and was primed to see heresy in this new movie. It could have been a lot worse, I don't feel like it destroyed the saga. But there was a quite a bit of lackluster writing that kept it from coming alive in any other way than visual action. In the end, I found it to be made up of equal parts dumb fun and plain dumb.

( Endless bla bla bla, including lots of spoilers, about Star Trek after the cut )

When listening to Obama talk about health care reform just now, I found a surprisingly lot of comfort in the idea that he had fought with the health care system when his mom died of ovarian cancer. It was really encouraging to know that he had some first-hand experience of what is really wrong, rather than a patrician background.

The patrician politician can appreciate regular people's problems in one of two ways: 1) with Kennedyesque sympathy and slight condescension as they do poverty tours around the Mississippi Delta, or 2) Bushite indifference, as with George H.W. going to a grocery store and not even knowing what an optical scanner is, much less what it is to be in any kind of need. It's great to know that there is an essentially middle-class executive with firsthand experience of what a lot of the country experiences.

COUNTERPOINT: On the other hand, you think of the greatest president of the 20th Century, FDR, who was a class traitor of the highest order (at least in the eyes of his angry peers). He had the ability to do a sort of "Nixon goes to China" effort, i.e., the militarist Nixon is able to begin diplomacy, the extremely wealthy Roosevelt is able to begin serious redistributionist economic policy. And I wonder if this middle-class president won't continue to yield to the wealth fellatists of Wall Street -- Geithner, Summers, Bernanke -- since he doesn't have adequate confidence in his own wisdom and experience.

Of course, sensible people don't want health care "reform," they want a national health care system. But the screaming psychopaths who rule cable news and their quiet, strategic, and sociopathic masters would never countenance such an idea.

Also, the cynic in me can't help but scoff at the idea of a subsidy making COBRA (temporary health care insurance for the recently unemployed) affordable. That shit ain't never gonna be affordable. If you lose your job, you can't pay triple-price premiums, that's all there is to it -- unless you have a new job lined up right then and there.

It's this sort of recognition that Obama's preference for half-measures is what is going to ultimately doom this, just as it has the bank bailouts and TARP programs. Whether he grew up middle class or not is less relevant, what is relevant is he's unwilling to break up the monopolist/oligopolistic banks that have destroyed the financial system, or that he's unwilling to break up the health insurance industry that has destroyed the national health system.

I live right next to the stop for the commuter train that runs right into downtown. It's quick, rarely overcrowded, and even cheaper than the bus or subway if you buy a 10-ride pass...buuuuut it only runs once an hour when it's not rush hour.

And the timing is amazing. It arrives here at quarter-til every hour. Around half-past the hour, not yet fully dressed or packed, I always realize I'm too late to catch the next train. Then I slack off like a stoner moron until it's too late to catch the one after that. So first I'm lulled into complacency, "I've got more than an hour until the next one, no hurry," and then it's suddenly too late, "Shit! Only ten minutes and I don't even know where my pants are! Too late to catch this one, I guess I've got more than hour to go."

Someone please contact Amnesty International, it's a travesty of the worst proportions.

Last Friday I put on a suit jacket, a white shirt, and black slacks, printed out a couple hundred business cards, and went to the city's big journalism awards dinner. I was there to do the vile, the unspeakable, the horrid: I was there to network. [May anyone who utters that word as a verb have their tongue turn to stone. Oh wait, that means I'm going to utthhtuuthtth uuttth tutthtuthh!]

( Adventures in a Declining Industry )

The following statement is based on absolutely no evidence and is complete speculation on my part.

When I heard a few weeks ago that New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson would be signing legislation to repeal the death penalty, the first thought that crossed my mind was, "Oooo, those prosecutors must have something really bad on him. He's going down."

"Going down" as in getting jail time, or at least as the end of a political career. Richardson's facing a corruption inquiry that already scuttled his bid to get into the Obama cabinet.

There are two reasons I think this: one, the example of Illinois' Gov. George Ryan. His noble gesture of placing a moratorium on capital punishment in his state directly preceded his descent into the federal hoosegow.

The second reason I believe Richardson thinks his political future is over is that the Bejoweled Wonder is an inveterate wind-sniffer, a compulsive weathervaner who gives the crowd ONLY what it wants. He most hilariously exposed this character flaw/career-making quality when he claimed to be both a Yankees fan and a Red Sox fan, although the list of serious issues where he does the same thing is plentiful as well.

The anti-death penalty stance is never a winner for someone looking to scare up votes, especially because the death penalty side is a lot scarier. Pro-lethal injection folks run on one of the best vote-getters: fear. Hardcore compassion for even the worst among us is spectacularly unpopular at the ballot box. Even the Christian church had to magic up their number one boy with mystical healings and zombie revivification to keep folks interested in the boring, prissy Sermon on the Mount crap.

Supposedly the pro-death penalty poll numbers are declining, but not enough to make it something you can bank on come the first Tuesday in November. The political upside of banning the punishment does not seem that great to me. Maybe Big Bill's just a better visionary than I am and he sees a future trend that I do not. When someone makes magnanimous acts that potentially alienate independent voters who gravitate toward "law-and-order" issues, it makes you say, "Homeboy's not going back on the national stage ever again."

Every time former NM Gov. Gary Johnson made a speech in favor of decriminalizing narcotics, he made a special point to say that his political career was finished. And it sounded redundant every time he did.

It's been snowing horizontally since early this afternoon. It's almost ten at night now.

[Horizontal snow is what happens when the wind blasts the precipitation with such force that any visible downward trajectory disappears. It's particularly grim looking when you're at least a few floors off the ground.]



Great, now tomorrow's prediction is for "ice pellets" in the morning and afternoon.

I want it to be spring already.