Black Breast Continues to Plague American Values

This more or less well shaped, famous black breast has certainly cost a lot of people a lot of money.

Breast Fines Mounting

Forgiving Michael Moore: It's Ass Kicking Time in America

I think maybe now I can forgive Michael Moore for his support of Ralph "Jackass" Nader in the 2000 election: his latest movie, Fahrenheit 9/11, is a wonderful piece of film making and is LONG overdue. True it's slanted, but I've got news for you all: everything is slanted. 100% full objectivity is a myth. So what if his film is slanted, and definitely goes over the top - not in his much needed and very welcome battering of Bush the pretender but in his insistence on indulgent displays of maudlin emotion (the poor woman who lost her son in Iraq).

Nevertheless, in this day and age we NEED someone like Moore who has the balls to take on the radical, lying, obnoxious, religious Right wing of this country. It's high time people with a conscience and respect for realilty and the constitution left their goddamn therapy groups and new age politics of love and inclusion and rational discourse and started fighting back. And this is what Moore does with his new film. Right wing media (radio fucks like Limbaugh and Hannity, TV a-holes like O'Reilly) has long used lies and ridicule and bullying and ad hominem attacks as their tactic - so too should the left and middle of the road liberals take their fucking gloves off and start taking shots. This ain't no time for tea and cakes and ices, naw, it's time to force the moment to its crisis.

All I've been seeing in reviews of Moore's film is how unobjective it is, how slanted, how biased, how juvenile he is in taking pot shots at Bush's character. You're damn straight it's slanted. It's beautifully slanted! I love this slanted piece of film making! It's time to get slanted, baby! These are just the tactics that have worked so well for the Republican party. It's time we smartened up and got slanted. When you are up against fanatics and liars, you have to stoop down to their level, just low enough to get a good smack in.

All these calls for objectitivity by Right wingers is a little late. When Clinton was being impeached, the republicans cried immoral, he's a bad man, he's evil and should be fired, waahhhh, when only later it was found some of the strongest opponents of Clinton themselves had had affairs. This ain't no time for the Right to cry foul. This is a level and method of discourse you chose, you used, and now it's time for a taste of your own medicine. We're going to get slanted on your asses!

So, I forgive Michael Moore and now can fully get behind him. Keep up the good work, big guy. This film kicks some much needed ass and is a wake up call to every fluffy, calm, and reasonable Liberal to start hitting below the belt. It's time to fight fire with fire.

Perhaps one of the great things about this film, in addition to it's skilled use of satire, humor, and montage, is that is reaches and connects with its audience on an emotional level. The reason the Right wing of this country does not want people to see this film is because it is hitting a wide ranging audience, an audience that may not read the latest books or news stories, and his film affects people. Effective affectual affectation - hitting us on the level of emotions, like religion or myth does. When we hear a well reasoned, rational argument, we nod and agree and admire the logical rhetoric, but we are not moved like we are from music or image. Image hits us on a different level. And Michael Moore's use of the image, along with music and humor, hits our hearts and wakes up deep rage and feeling and concern. It's very important that we do this if we want Bush and his clan to leave our country alone.

Corporate Exhibitionism: ‘Free Spirits’ in the Workplace and the Breakdown of Artificial Barriers

I believe my workplace is filled with exhibitionists. Self conscious, sloppy, self regarding, juvenile exhibitionists.

For example:

People at work who take their shoes off and walk around the office without shoes. What does this say? It says, 'I like to be comfortable. I am a casual person. I am free spirited and not bound by the stiff social conventions of society.'

I get a glimpse of their knobby, gnarled, calloused, sometimes hairy toes, and GLORY! Barriers have been lifted, I accept them for who they are, we are enlightened, advanced, progressive. We don't need such social conventions/constructions as shoes to make us uptight. Free your toes, we are all adults here.

People at work who brush their teeth after lunch. This wouldn't be so bad if they did it in the bathroom and most of them who brush do (along with the archetypal engineer nerd flosser, who spends precious hours staring into the bathroom mirror dutifully plucking all the gunk out between his teeth, like his mommy taught him, but that's another story). But the problem for me, and what exemplifies this kind of corporate exhibitionism, is that many of them walk around brushing their teeth, as if that was OK, as if we were all just a bunch of happy camp kids, or all together for some sort of sleepover.

People at work who bring their cereal in and eat it for breakfast, as if they just rolled out of bed (and believe me, some of these frumpy dumpy folks look like they just came out of the bedroom) and treat their cube desk as a breakfast table. I don’t know what it is, but there's something about seeing someone pour their milk and start slurping their wheaties in the workplace. Then, when they finish, the cereal bowl sits on their cube (perhaps washed) with a spoon in it, as if this is also their kitchen.

Also: People sat my work say the word Fuck all day long. Sometimes long ago before I started someone broke that barrier and said Fuck and now everyone's been saying it ever since. People say Fuck all day long, curse wildly, profusely, loudly, well aware that the word is still taboo, and their faces betray a tinge of giddy self consciousness, like when a kid first discovers that there are "dirty" words in the dictionary like vagina and anus and penis and breast.

Some external examples are
+ Women in cars on the way to work plucking eyebrows, putting on lipstick, crimping eyelashes, applying foundation. It's as if they are trying to improve their appearance before they get to work, but it's ok to look not to hot in the car. The car is still private, apparently, even though everyone can see you.
+ Men in cars on the way to work using an electric razor.
+ The worst example is perhaps the cell phone. I am not sure why people on cell phones tak so loud, and always look at you to make sure you are looking at them, as if be default you had no choice to listen to their dull conversation. When a coworker takes a cell phone call and hushes her voice, somehow I respect her because she is expressing a belief in the private, that there is a barrier between us and it is that barrier that allows us to respect each other. But most people not only take their calls but do so loudly, flaunting their very important conversations about what bar they plan to go to later or who they will hang out with.

Visions and Revisions Which a Minute Can Reverse - The Value of Self Editing

Since we have gotten an editor here at work, it has been enlightening, to say the least. To have one's writing edited, even technical writing, is an experience in the unknowability of the self. What I mean is, with writing specifically you write and write all day long (as a tech writer, or a journal keeper, a poet, a fiction writer) and no one sees your work. Perhaps people may look at it and review it, but generally you write and become used to what your words sound like and imagine that they mean something and might communicate some information to whoever reads them. My words are OK, I know how to write, I enjoy it, I can do it fairly well.

But until you get an editor, you don't know how much your writing is the product of habit, the result of writing the same way over and over for many years. You don't know how much your *style* simply consists of your habits, good and bad, that you've developed over the years. It's like walking, or sitting, or anything you do regularly and consistently: you tend to develop ways of doing these things and you repeat yourself. Often, these habits are not good, or, they simply become stale and old and boring. Bad posture. A slight lean to one side when you sit. Using the same verbs over and over.

When the editor here looks at my sentences - these little strings of symbols that identify ME and are a unique expression of my SOUL, goddammit! - and shreds and slices them with her bloody red ink pen, it's a shock. I realize how all these little linguistic habits and stylizations I had thought were pretty clear and decent, are actually stiff, unclear, wordy, redunant, bland, ineffectual, pedestrian, uninspiring.

Looking at your own writing is much like looking in the mirror - you see this person you know is you, but, the more you stare and examine this strange living being in the glass, quite foreign and downright creepy. Who IS that person, anyway? When an editor (or a psychologist) takes an honest and objective look at you, you get the opportunity of seeing yourself through the critical lense of of another. You are shown just how much of who you really are and what you do is a a jumbled collection of habits and repeated behaviors, mostly unconscious.

Much like being able to really understand and imagine what another person might be feeling, to elevate your consciousness to the level of Empathy, the editor (or psycholgist, who have now become "Life Coaches") enables you just enough glimpse into who you are to realize things you weren't even aware of:

"I did not KNOW I often made errors in subject-verb agreement."
"I did not know that when I eat at a restauant that I blow my nose on the linen napkin and leave it on the table and this may digust people."
"I did not know that I used a semicolon so often."
I did know KNOW that when people at work talk to me I hold my hands together and twist them nervously."

If you're lucky, after you recoil at this new picture of who you are, get over the realization that on a slight level you weren't who you though you were, then you might develop to a degree of empathy for yourself, and begin the process of making the changes you must if you want to grow and transcend the sometimes inextricable flow of entropy that engulfs us all as we go through life. Breaking down the unconscious Ritual de lo Habitual. I've quoted this chap (Mr Rilke) a thousand times before, but I must one more time: "You must change your life."

The Secret of All Matter

Terry Eagleton discusses the subject of death as viewed by Postmodernism and capitalism, from his newest book "After Theory" (quoted in the New York Review of Books):

"The body, that inconvenient reminder of mortality, is plucked, pierced, etched, pummelled, pumped up, shrunk and remoulded. Flesh is converted into sign, staving off the moment when it will subside into the sheer pornographic meaninglessness of a corpse. Dead bodies are indecent: they proclaim with embarrassing candor the secret of all matter, that it has no obvious relation to meaning. The momenet of death is the moment when meaning heamorrhages from us.... Capitalism too, for all its crass materialism, is secretly allergic to matter.... For all its love affair with matter, in the shape of Tuscan villas and double brandies, capitalist society harbours a secret hatred of the stuff. It is a culture shot through with fantasy, idealist to its core, powered by a disembodied will which dreams of pounding Nature into pieces."

Let There Be YO!

Genesis 1 - King James Version – Revised for today's Rap audience

In the beginning Yo created the heaven and Yo.
And the Yo was without Yo, and void; and darkness was upon the face of Yo. And the Spirit of Yo moved upon the face of Yo.
And Yo said, Let there be Yo: and there was Yo.
And Yo saw the Yo, that it was good: and Yo divided the light Yo from the dark Yo.
And Yo called the light Yo Day, and the dark Yo he called Night. And the evening Yo and the morning Yo were the first day.
And Yo said, Let there be a Yo in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And Yo made the Yo, and divided the waters which were under the Yo from the waters which were above the Yo: and it was Yo.


Gospel According to YO - Cambridge Yo Version

In the beginning was Yo, and the Yo was with Yo, and the Yo was Yo.
The same was in the beginning with Yo.
All things were made Yo; and without Yo was not any thing made that was made.
In him was Yo; and the life was the light of Yo.
And the light Yo shineth in dark Yo; and the dark Yo comprehended it not.
There was a man sent from Yo, whose name [was] Yo.
The same came for a witness, to bear witness of the Light Yo, that all [men] through him might believe in Yo.
He was not that Yo, but [was sent] to bear witness of that Yo.

Needles, Blood, Bullets: Life on "Unfriendly Lane"

Still adjusting to the newly discovered danger of my neighborhood. Death in the streets. The head shop half a block from my house where the young Latino man was shot dead on the sidewalk is now open, mourning period more or less over. Sidewalk cleaned, doors opened, glass pipes and water bongs now available at a discount rate. Nature doesn't mourn, has no courts of law or justice. $5000 dollar reward for information leading to the arrest of...

Then, just the other night, walking out of a liquor store with a fat can of Foster's lager, I look to the ground and see a needle on the ground, the grubby, scratched up tool of a junky. Little tube used for injecting heroin or meth or coke into the bloodstream. Hopefully no blood is lost in the transaction.

When I used to live on 5th street in downtown San Jose, I saw many things, highlights and sights of inner city depravity and squalor: a man and a woman on the side of my house, she on her knees, him leaned back, until I, in a fit of rage, opened my window and said, "Not here!"; an undercover drug bust, guns drawn by cops sticking into the necks of drug dealers, whose unfortunate faces pressed into the asphalt of the dirty city street; my first night in the neighborhood, a man running at a small pickup truck that was speeding away from the scene, holding baseball bat which he tried in vain to swing into the windshield of the truck, missing, hitting the hood and falling as the car almost runs him over.

Just last week on my street, during a very mellow Sunday afternoon, I hear the loud WOOOoooo of a police siren, and look out the window to see a cop car pull over a red Jeep Cherokee. Didn't think much of it. They were roughly a half a block away from my house. I turn around and continue my business of cleaning my house when I hear a screeching noise. I look out the window and see the guy in the Jeep flooring it, speeding away as fast as he can in front of my house. Then, the cop in a state of shocked delay, or perhaps radioing his colleagues, finally hitting his gas pedal and speed after the car.

I used to hate gated communities, but now they seem like not so bad an idea - keep out raw, savage, unmediated human nature.

"as if his whole vocation were endless imitation"

They say you turn out just like your parents. I've just realized that not only did I turn out just like them (half my Dad, half my Mom), I am at best a poor cariacature of them. A cheap facsimile, some outsourced version of all their bests and worst traits - mostly worst. Alas, originality is a myth.