repetition compulsion (nine-eleven nine-eleven nine-eleven . . . )

Music: CNN Headline News In compliance with a the Court of Appeals ruling, yesterday New York authorities released a portion of the city government's Nine-eleven audio archive to the "general public": nine hours of emergency personnel recordings and oral histories—23 CDRs in sum—detail the confusion and heroism of the victims of the attacks. I've written about the cultural function of recorded voices in panic and close to death already (click here for a pdf file), so I won't go into the melancholic/haunting dynamics of this continual need to return to the captured voices of the dead.

What I haven't touched on before is the institutional motives behind the clammoring for dead voices: the introduction of new vocalic ghosts is the consequence of a legal battle initiated in 2002 by The New York Times under the banner of the "Freedom of Information Act." The paper claims that its efforts are to serve the "families of the victims," who were demanding to hear the tapes of emergency personal, which would presumably lead to a stronger sense of closure. Dead voices, however, always function ambivalently: the sound of a deceased loved one—especially if in pain or on the verge of death—may give one an intellectual sense of standing (viz., a sense of what happened), but the sound of the cry also stirs a sense of emergency (if not outright dread). Reporting always strives for a sense of the un-grey and singular motives, but the write-up in the paper is certainly interesting for what reporters and the editorial staff chose to highlight about the new batch of recordings:

They [emergency personnel] spoke of being unable to find anyone in authority to tell them where to go or what to do. Nearly from the moment the first plane struck the World Trade Center, they had little radio communication. As their leaders struggled to set up ordinary procedures for a "mass casualty incident," the crisis gathered speed by the minute.

With the lines of command sundered, many of those interviewed said, they became their own bosses. They found themselves shepherding crowds away from the towers, serving as trauma counselors, bandaging people inside a bank lobby, and packing their ambulances with the dazed, the bleeding, the burned.

It should come as no surprise reporting the loss of authority (of a sense of the sovereign) is the first revelation of the tapes: Don't you remember what it was like to feel helpless? Haven't you seen War of the Worlds yet? That feeling is all the more reason for supporting phallic governance and the imperialistic leadership! I'm so very tired of watching/reading the news media prop up this administration with in trauma—by continually and constantly reminding us we live in a permanent state of exception.

Fortunately, my sweetie comes for a visit tomorrow and so I am going to forget the world for a week [edit from 8/19: talk about a "state of exception!"]

in loco parentis

Music: The Greencards: Movin' On Today Pamela Rogers, the hottest "rapist" in the recent female teacher boy student sex scandals, has been sentenced to nine months in prison for four known acts of a sexual nature with a 13 year old "star athlete." Watching the "news" this morning I couldn't help noticing that Rogers is, indeed, hot and that the televisual portrayal of the woman/boy affair is most certainly scripted by the "Hot for Teacher" Van Halen fantasy.

Speaking of "hot for teacher," I met with my amazingly cool and hot teaching assistants on Tuesday, Amber and Roger. After we discussed the fall course ("Rhetoric and Popular Music") and how to negotiate 250 students, and after our second pitcher of beer, we discussed teaching ethics. Since this was their first time in the assisting in the classroom, and because they are both hot, I had to underscore the ethical gist: please don't sleep with the students; and if you must, the better thing to do if you cannot help yourself is to wait until they graduate and disassociate from the university. I explained my own experience as a teaching assistant and newbie teacher (I dated a student, but waited until she graduated). We discussed the phenomenon of "the transference" and teaching and its relationship to male strippers in police uniforms and cowboys (well, every one of the Village People), and how, in general, sexualizing the students is both inevitable and also a bad thing to do. Someone said that antoher professor said that she just "turns it off" when sexualization starts to happen, but I countered that is complete bullshit and that the best you can do is shift that to a different section of the psyche. I mentioned how prohibitions sometimes backfire and how I should not have said anything at all: take the case of Pamela Rogers, for example, who slept not once, not twice, not three times, but four times with the up and coming young athlete. Surely someone said something—there was a suspicious comment, a tease from a co-worker, something to push the "do it" buttom, and the script then played itself out. You know, it's kinda like being at the top of a tall building and saying, "what if I jumped and ended it all right now?" Eveyone has those "what if" moments--its just that most of us don't jump. Having trouble in her marriage, and this young hottie leering at your breasts, and then that Van Halen filed away in the unconscious, she was overcome with a culturally overdetermined hydraulics.

Why is the taboo so overdetermined? they inquired. Insofar as part of the interplay of the transference/counter-transference involves—at least in the Freudian scheme—the projection of (unconscious) feelings about a parent, we're up against one of the biggest taboos of humankind: the incest taboo. For media audiences in the United States, teacher/student sex is the flipside of incest; we are titillated because screwing your teacher is like doing mommy or daddy. Of course, this facile reading of the force of taboo (thank you Mary Douglas) flies in the face of the critique of the "repressive hypothesis," Foucault's term for the belief that cultural "no's" lead to irresistible sexual urges to violate taboos (the net effect of this discourse is the restriction of sexuality to heterosexist norms, as well as its universalization as a explanatory mechanism).

I think Foucault is (essentially) right about this, which would come as a shock to some people. Indeed, I'm also persuaded by Guattari and Deleuze's critique of the Oedipal as a misleading magic of three (their beef is not simply a critique of the family model, but of the notion of symmetry, of trinitude). Desire may very well be a flow among and through machines. I think the point is, however, that we are interpellated to think in terms of repression, that we are reared in the Oedipal and that a condition of citizenship is currently an enfoldment of the guilt apparatus (initially in terms of the incest taboo). In other words, psychoanalysis as a discourse is a mechanism that perpetuates these fantasies of prohibitive subjectivity. Guattari—himself originally a Lacanian psychoanalyst—was interested in developing a theory of the psyche that did not perpetuate the Oedipal mechanism of cultural subjectification. Against the hydraulics of metaphysics and the restrictive (that is, repressive) logics of the Victorian episteme we have schizoanalysis. Even so, Pamela's "Hot for Teacher" script still has explanatory power for her transgression; she is victim of the fiction of "lack."

As a brief aside: one of the most annoying aspects of being an academic in the humanities (and I suspect in the human and natural sciences as well, though I don't speak from experience) is the prohibition against theoretical promiscuity. Because I'm interested in psychoanalysis, my finding theorists critical of the enterprise is not allowed. This is, especially, the irony of scholarly allegiances in my field (Communication Studies), where theoretical consistency is policed with a rigor that bespeaks the kind of sadism only possible with a deep-seated feeling of inferiority (thank you Dr. Adler): Freud and Foucault are two "Fs" not to be fucked with on the same page. The only compelling argument for theoretical consistency is the political/ethical argument offered by Marxists and feminists (and I guess the more I think about it, continental philosophers like Derrida, Heidegger . . . well, shit, I guess most of our scholarly superstars, like Richard Weaver): ideas have consequences that get people killed.

I guess I just answered myself. Even so, I think a little promiscuity is not a bad thing if we defend roving in terms of academic freedom and free-thought (and that means I don't have to have a tidy essay for every blog too!). Well, I digress, but I guess the overall point this morning is that there is no way to read the "Hot for Teacher" fantasy (or alternately from the view of the countertransference, the "Phaedrus Phantasy") outside of the coordinates of the Oedipal and the taboo of incest. You may not buy psychoanalysis, but this discourse is as much a part of the popular imaginary as microwave popcorn and neo-liberalism. You can critique the mediated portrayal of the fantasy from the angle of schizoanalysis, but motive—now that's fantasy, and fantasies are the scripts we live by. Indeed, I've consistently argued that fantasies are all we've got.

on erototransferephilia

Music: The Greencards: Weather and Water Although Beth Geisel's recent firing from her post as a teacher at a private, Christian high school in Albany New York was for sexual impropriety, her sleeping with at least four 17 year old teens was not a crime--at least until investigators discover that she had relations with someone younger (in New York the age of consent is 17). For me this much publicized and deliciously teenage story raises a couple of issues: (1) why have we seen a notable increase in teacher/student sex scandals in the past decade?; and (2) why does Geisel's (or that of Debbie Lefave) case make the news when there are hundreds cases that only get covered in their local papers? The answers to these questions are many, but I think a large number are related under the aegis of "the transference," a psychoanalytic concept that refers to the unconscious projection of wishes, desires, and feelings onto a socially inappropriate individual (almost always someone in a position of authority).

The transference was initially discovered by Freud and his colleague Breuer during their clinical researches on the phenomenon of hysteria. When they discovered patients reacting to them as parental figures—and sometimes lovers—they decided transference was a bad thing. Later, when Breuer left psychoanalysis because of a particularly lusty patient (after her advances he picked up shop, took his wife on a second honeymoon, and became a critic of Freud's understanding of an erotic unconscious), Freud eventually determined that the transference was an unavoidable dynamic in treatment, and that working with or through it was necessary and even helpful. The classic understanding of the phenomenon rooted in Freud is the projection of feelings of love, or hatred, or admiration or what have you onto the analyst. Depending on the school of thought, this projection can be of an idealized, inner-type (Jungian) or the reproduction of a past relationship with a parent (e.g., the father or mother in the British School), or the projection of present-day wishes and desires. Today, the transference is understood as fundamental to all relationships, most especially erotic/love relationships.

Consider, for example falling in love with someone in that "big way" most of us have experienced at least in our teenage years: s/he seems perfect, like s/he completes you, the proverbial "soul mate!" The theory of transference would suggest that you are projecting an idealized persona onto your lover which will eventually melt away to reveal an actual person, farts, warts, and all, which inevitably leads to conflict. Half of unions end in separation because couples are not able to let go of their projections; they are unwilling, in other words, to work through the initial stages of the transference into more "mature" and pragmatic understandings. Nevertheless, in the therapeutic setting the initial transferential feelings must be "worked through" so that the therapist literally fades into the background as a tool for the analysand to use for herself. It should not also go without saying that the therapist feels the transference too, only it is typically understood as "the countertransference," which refers to the therapists unconscious acceptance of the patient's projections—perhaps even encouraging them.

When we turn, then, to the student/teacher sex scandals of recent years, it is not difficult to explain why it happens and, in fact, why in our culture it is even overdetermined. Student/teacher sexual encounter is overdetermined for a number of reasons, but the most significant is the projection of unconscious phantasy onto the other which is at the center of teaching. Indeed, the practice of teaching is fundamentally transferential: although the challenge of new material can stimulate learning on a model of competition, most models of pedagogy function by getting the student to care about how the teacher feels about them. Students learn when they believe the teacher cares about them; teachers often deliberately chide or compliment students to foster these feelings. Larry Rickles calls this "stylin' the transference" in the college classroom.

In earlier years, the teacher's countertransferential power centers on the figure of the parent; as students mature—and especially as they reach puberty—the teacher transforms from parent to potential lover (of course, in Freudian terms these are always two sides of the same coin). I can remember fantasizing about teachers when I was in grade school (so can David Lee Roth, who's lyrics for "Hot For Teacher" was a number one hit right before I graduated from junior high). Indeed, we can even postulate that having sex with one's teacher is one of the oldest fantasies of Western civilization: in Plato's Phaedrus Socrates explains to a young teen hottie how learning from him is fundamentally a process of sublimated erotic desire. Teaching has always been stylin' the transference; same as it ever was. Peruse any porn shop and you'll see "school" is one of the most popular themes; just about any scenario you can imagine has eroticized the transference.

Of course, that the fantasy forms the sexual core of our collective being has something to do with the fact that most of the readers of this blog, and a mighty percentage of the U.S. populace, have felt the transference in the classroom with at least one teacher. So when we turn to the question, "why the increase of teacher student scandals in recent years?" one must answer that, well, there hasn’t' really been an increase at all. ). According to the Department of Education, at least ten percent of students have experienced what they term "sexual abuse" (which includes everything from consensual sex to leering), and any cursory perusal of the World Wide Web reveals countless local stories of teacher-student naughtiness (check out this growing list). There is no "profile" for these teachers or students either—although the ones we hear about in national media tend to focus on young men and skinny blonde women, especially if these blonde women like motorcycles, like Pamela Rogers (who was arrested last February for sleeping with a 13 year old). What we have been seeing, however, is a recent increase of publicity.

According to the controversial book, Harmful to Minors by Judith Levine, prosecuting student/teacher sexual indiscretions may be much more traumatic than simply letting it be. Those who prosecute "statutory rape" argue that the event is traumatic and causes psychological problems later in life, while Levine argues that study after study does not support such claims, most especially for young men. What both sides seem to leave out of this debate is the role of the transference, and how the intimacy of pedagogy and the erotics of authority provide the foundation of indiscretions (I'm not talking about abuse here; I'm talking about consensual indiscretions which I cannot put an age to since every person matures—physically and psychologically--differently).

Indeed, what both sides of the debate on "informed consent" seem to leave out is the centrality of erotic projection to the classroom. This omission is, in part, a legacy of patriarchical control (as bell hooks has written about often). It is also part of a centuries-old ideology of childhood desexualization, which underwrote the Victorian conceit that codemned Freud as a pervert for suggesting infants had sexual desires. Folks simply don't want to admit that when there are people sharing space, erotics is involved. This intensifies when one or more of the people are authorities in some way, of course.

What these debates also seem to ignore is the increasing prominence of media stories about student-teacher transferential love, which should indicate a cultural trend in media coverage (and by extension, the popular imaginary) that intensifies the transgressive appeal of fantasy. Perhaps we can trace it back in recent memory to the Mary Kay Letourneau case, who recently married the man (then decidely a "boy") she slept with over a decade ago. Since that widely publicized case to the present, almost every story featured a very attractive white woman, which, of course, is not coincidental. In answer to the second question, why do the Geisel or Debra Lefave cases break nationally instead of Elisa Kawasaki's (or perhaps more commonly, male teachers and female students)? I think the answer is gleamed by analyzing the common features of the recent increase in teacher/student sex publicity in general: the most common ideal of "American" beauty--the busty blonde bombshell--seems to be central to most of the scenarios we hear about and read about (Marilyn Monroe/Pam Anderson is in the classroom, people! It's straigt out of Van Halen's "Hot for Teacher" music video; this shit was scripted in the 70s, at least!). The resurgence of this fantasy in the new "epidemic" frame surly reflects, in a homeostatic manner, the turn to cultural conservatism on the one hand, and the arrival of low-cost, "reality television and web cam" aesthetics on the other. Regarding the former, we need only think about the fantasies of yesteryear: recall in the late 1980s it was the patriarcal fantasy of Satanists sacrificing toddlers and taking their nude photos. This newer, "Hot for Teacher" epidemic rhetoric is merely the flipside (still a male fantasy, only the roles are flipped; no longer are women damsels in distress, but Mrs. Robinson-style dominatrixes ready to "teach" them teens what a clitoris really is).

But the content of the fantasy is different given our particular historical context of surveillnce. As Jodi Dean argues in her somewhat persuasive book, Publicity's Secret: How Technoculture Capitalizes on Democracy, ours is a postmodern age in which the dominant ideology, PUBLICITY, generates a profound interest in secrecy (everyone wants to know everything about every public person, but is rabidly obsessed with his or her own privacy, a staple of conservatism). In a sense, the contemporary explosion of teacher/student sex scandals reads like a delightfully perverse Lynch film: what the "news media" package for us are only the scandals which involve pretty women bedding more than willing teens in the neatly manicured suburban neighborhoods of A Town Like Yours. We watch the stories unfold like a film, just like those who participate in them experience their lives just like a film (and on the latter tip, note Debbie Lefave is pleading "insanity!"). Teacher student sex scandals comprise our contemporary transferential pornography, and unlike the priestly pedophilia of yesteryear, this time the fantasies will last a little bit longer. What bisexual or straight men (and more than a few women of any identification) among us, identifying with our teenage selves, would not like to have sex Debbie Lefave? Whom among us did not secretly fantasize the hot teacher molesting us after school during detention? (Jeeze, I can remember seeing a care-giver's bare breasts as she was wiping down tables in pre-school and wanting to un-wean myself!) All we are seeing today is a longstanding fantasy finally coming to the screen again—the return of the repressed. The sheer volume and force of its recent re-arrival, however, bespeak a stifling conservatism, the kind of system of beliefs that says sublimated desire is better witnessed as violence abroad than letting your kids watch two adults making out on TV.

withholding the shit

Music: Judge Judy Because my debut as a shit(ty) scholar is in this fall's issue of Text and Performance Quarterly, I've decided I need to start digesting material for my new career in scholarly scatology. I need to start working on a paper titled "Supercolon (:) Sigmund's Sigmoid," which I am slated to deliver at the National Communication Association meeting in November.

Freud suggests that, among many other things, novelty is associated with shit in the collective unconscious. In this respect I remain fascinated by Pampers' new Kandoo product line, basically a brand of moist buttwipes and foaming hand soap. In the Sunday paper there was a circular advertising Kandoo and—I kid you not—heralding "National Toddler Empowerment Month."

Seeking more information on this product line, as well as the concept of National Toddler Empowerment Month (unsure if its August or July), I contacted media relations at Pampers and was eventually led to Zach Perles, a PR man at one of Proctor and Gamble's many hired firms. Zach works on the Kandoo line and helped launch it in the United States. In a phone interview, Zach explained that Kandoo was originally a European line and they wanted something uniquely "American" for its debut here last January. The result: The Kandoo™ Potty Bowl, a staged, participatory spectacle which coincided with the Superbowl. The news release reads: "Today, in a grand celebration of bathroom hygiene -- Arizona State University in Tempe, home to the famous Fiesta Bowl -- will play host to yet another bowl game, the Kandoo Potty Bowl for kids! In good, clean fun, teams of 11 children, ages 4-5, will don helmets, pads and team shirts and take to the specially designed "Kandoo Football Field" to conquer oversized obstacles representing the every day challenges children face in the bathroom."

And what did participating toddlers find in the Potty Bowl? A giant toilet bowl filled with "colorful foam balls" to play in; a wiping relay game in which kids will "wipe the Kandoo Frog" before moving on to the next wiping station, ultimately ending in a flushing station and a sink area for clean up.

Apparently everything came out Old Kinderhook at the Kandoo™ Potty Bowl. This was a raging success for Perles, who was careful to explain that this product, which is for "slightly older, "post potty-trained children," centers around "empowerment." He said that the product is a result of product research: "Pampers listens to what parents need," he said. "The design of the [Potty Bowl] program was to bring kids out and [to] master the bathroom basics." He continued that "the idea is to empower children to use the bathroom on their own." I asked Zach if he came up with the rhetoric of the promotion, and he said that he did not. He does events planning; the advertising firm handles the language of the promotion. Zach said he would put me in touch with the right people via email.

So, I waited a few hours and, not hearing from Zach, I emailed him this message:

To: zperles@painepr.com From: Joshua Gunn Subject: thanks Cc: Bcc: X-Attachments:

Zach,

Thanks for the information you provided today; thought I would email to follow-up in case you were having trouble sending info to me (new system here for me). Any info you could provide on the ad agency would be appreciated.

Thanks again,

Josh

A couple of hours later, Zach emailed back. Apparently he was getting suspicious:

Subject: RE: thanks Date: Wed, 3 Aug 2005 11:29:41 -0700 Thread-Topic: thanks Thread-Index: AcWYR7fl2t48VBtFQ9aeGeeeHEMJzwAEXUbg From: "Zach Perles" To: "Joshua Gunn"

Thank you Josh.

Tell me a again what course you teach and what this case study will be used for specifically. I will be sure to put you in touch with the right person/s.

Thanks again.

Zach

Here's a photo of Zach. It's not actually Zach, of course, just what I think he looks like (perhaps he looks like this?. Anyway, so I am thinking: how do you explain to a non-academic that you really don't know what you are going to say, that you are in the stages of invention, and you've not quite figured it all out? Besides, it's not likely that talking about Kandoo at an academic conference will malign this buttwipe product. So here's what I pulled out of my ass:

To: "Zach Perles" From: Joshua Gunn Subject: RE: thanks

Hi Zach,

This is not for a course. It is for a research paper I'm writing on the psychoanalytic theory of aggressivity among toddlers and the rhetoric of "empowerment." I'd like to speak with someone involved in the advertising campaign about "National Toddler Empowerment Month" and the Kandoo product line.

Thanks!

Josh

Mr. Perles decides to clench the information sphincter in his reply:

Subject: RE: thanks Date: Thu, 4 Aug 2005 06:30:09 -0700 Thread-Topic: thanks From: "Zach Perles" To: "Joshua Gunn"

Thanks Josh.

Can you tell me a little bit more about the psychoanalytic theory of aggressivity among toddlers"? Just trying to get a sense of where you are heading with this paper - also if you can provide your timing on this, that would be most helpful.

Thank you.

Zach _______________________

Could Zach's emails be anything but an excellent exemplar of anal agressivity? Talk about withholding the shit! Ah, well, I've hit a dead end in my researches. I'll continue to root around until I find the shit that I need. There's something fascistic going on here, something violent. The anal imaginary may harbor the true War on Terror (or Global Extremism or whatever we're calling it now).

bluegrass: on coming out

Music: The Greencards: Weather and Water Today has been decidedly lazy. The Sunday ritual commenced with a read of the Austin newspaper to the backdrop of This Week and Meet the Press. Rick Santorum was on This Week, and I cannot believe how fucking idiotic this man is. His new book, It Takes a Family, is essentially that conservative talk-show style of "rhetoric," you know, empty and baseless. He blamed "radical feminists"—and later, "academe" in general--for devaluing stay at home moms, and when George Stephanopoulos pressed him to name a radical feminist, he couldn't. It was really fun to watch. At this point, us Leftists can claim George Will as one of our own since he's clearly retreated from the neo-cons—at least on television. And can you blame him after Santorum's book?

But today has mostly been about . . . bluegrass. I headed to Cheapo Records off of South Lamar to scout for some cheap vinyl, found some good stuff (some bluegrass, as well as the one-hit-wonders Kajagoogoo). Close friends know of my fondness for the Louvin Brothers, the Grateful Dead, and southern gospel. Well, I'm coming out: I love bluegrass music, and I'm proud to admit it. I honestly think I can blame this passion on Camper Van Beethoven, whose classic, golden era albums (such as my favorite, Our Beloved Revolutionary Sweetheart ) got me hooked on the fiddle. I also grew up as a kid at my grandmother's house watching lots of Hee-Haw, and therefore, hearing lots of banjo. So imagine my delight when I discovered the Greencards, a local band who creates divine bluegrass/Americana music. Their latest record, Weather and Water, is a contemplative masterpiece, mostly slow and depressing, with a lot of acoustic guitar and sad lyrics. My favorite track, "Long Way Down," is worth the price of the disk alone. It begins with a sorrowful but medium paced fiddle, and then a gentle male voice sings: "Flying so high/ain't gonna last/touchin' the sky, but you're fallin' fast/findin' a love, somethin' brand new/is more than enough for me and for you/ and it's a long way down . . . " and when the chorus comes, it is a lovely harmony with a female voice. It's perfect Sunday music, gentle, sad, but hopeful.

I've been lusting after the Louvin Brother's box set for many years. Now that I'm in Texas—and further from Kentucky and Tennessee—I may just have to give in. I spent over a decade fighting my genetic heritage, but something soul-deep responds to bluegrass. How I can get goose bumps from synthpop and bluegrass at the same time is inexplicable, except for the fact that I like good music regardless of genre . . . and apparently drawl.

midday at the Fiesta

Music: Mansun: Attack of the Grey Lantern; David Bowie: Hunky Dory After almost a week of mundane struggle, I've managed to establish myself in Austin. Aside from the toolbox that was stolen by the movers in Baton Rouge, it seems everything has arrived safely and intact, including Tara, my beloved mechanical fortuneteller. The cats are finished howling now that the furniture (and requisite, familiar smell) has arrived, and I've met a few neighbors. Marsha and Graham, a late 50-something couple across the street, seem pretty damn cool (they made jokes about prostitutes and gave me a key to their home). Graham works at the faculty club across the street from my office at UT, and Marsha at the hospital close by. "Miss Kay," the 86-year-old matriarch next door, brought me some bean soup and muffins in exchange for my phone number. I promised to make her Jambalaya and she grinned from ear to ear. Seems like a nice neighborhood.

Some issues: first, everyone will come to my back door instead of my front door because there is a locked gate at the front area. This was installed, apparently, because kids from the neighboring apartments and condos were cutting through the property to go to school (I'm two blocks from a high school in a Hispanic neighborhood). In other words, "brown colored" youth were cutting through the neatly manicured lawns and the white, HOA leadership didn't like it. What this means is that the HOA leadership is racist. I cannot wait until my first HOA meeting. I really would like to welcome my guests through the front door.

Second, my walls are fucking pink and the carpet is almost a powder blue. That will take some getting used to, and hopefully with all my tacky crap hung on the walls it will go away (or work in some delightful, unexpected way). The wallpaper in the foyer and front dining area is right out of a "tasteful" hotel, circa 1986, so I've decided to make that the media area with floor to ceiling shelving for my CDs and DVDs. My artsy side is coming out and I'm worried about the time-suck decorating this place "my style" will create; I really should be focusing on prepping for my first 250-student class. Nevertheless, the largest issue I'm facing with my "nest" is the previous owner's aesthetics, which reflects the kind of "tasteful" that says, "I want to appear that I have wealth and taste." Let's call this JC Penny Aesthetic. I am battling with overcoming the JC Penny Aesthetic with the Ikea or Target Aesthetic, with a smidgen of low-class tacky.

One thing that I really loved about the middle class aesthetic in Louisiana was the "yeah, I'm middle class and I don't pretend to be anything else" way of decorating. I mean, I lived in a neighborhood where people hung chicken feet above their front doors (voodoo good luck charm) and put pink flamingos in their front lawns. That so rocked! I miss that and have hope that one day I'll live in a place like that again (e.g., the Hyde Park or South Congress area of Austin).

Anyhoot! I've been living for a week without refrigeration; I purchased a el-cheapo fridge (not so cheap with Texas sales tax!) at Sears and it was delivered this morning. Afterwards, I ventured out to get groceries, as I've been craving salad and green peppers, two staples in my daily diet. I decided to hit the "Fiesta Mart," because it's local and I was told had lots of Hispanic, Indian, and Asian foodstuffs. This store was so culture shock! I walked in the door and there was a one man mariachi band (dude behind a series of synths), who had guests dancing in the produce area! I'm serious. Folks were jamming out to Mexican folk tunes next to the melons. The store was mobbed full of folks, so much so that navigating a buggy seemed pointless. I decided instead to wander around and check out all the stuff in there, much of which was for Mexican households. I found fascinating cans of things I've never heard of (tubers of all sorts, beans, etc.). I need to get a Tex-Mex cookbook to try out this new cultural cuisine . . . .

After 30 minutes of exploration in the Fiesta Mart, I was overwhelmed with "crowd," so I left (I was tempted to buy a t-shirt of the Virgin of Guadalupe that had flames coming out of her, though). I headed across I-35 to the "H-E-B," basically, the "white" grocery store, where I was able to navigate a buggy and pick up a few needed refrigerables. I was amused by the other shoppers—most of whom looked like me, 30 something white people struggling to remain "cool" and not become something like the people whom my condo complex was created for. I'm cautiously optimistic.

final FPA

Music: Archer Prewitt: Way of the Sun At the behest of Shappy, Friday night the usual front porch suspects (sadly, minus David Terry) gathered at The Chimes for a few pints, food, and warm, Bush-style gazes at each other. We discussed Rove-gate, the relative merits of Romero's Land of the Dead, and, of course my imminent departure to Austin early tomorrow morning. Shappy conspired for a candle bearing cake to be brought to the table, whereupon FPA agents sang New Order's "Bizarre Love Triangle" to my abject embarrassment, which ended up producing applause from the entire south side of the restaurant. Later we retired to the front porch for my final action as a resident of Baton Rouge, where I gave away a bunch of stuff and had some drunken "I love you guys" moments.

Ben donated a bottle of Booker's "True Barrel Bourbon Whiskey" , which, after I gulped it down as if it were regular bourbon, I discovered it was 130 proof or something like that. Needless to say, I got a bit silly (as did most imbibing that stuff) for the rest of the evening. At one point there was apparently a kissing fest as a result of this invention, "venom lip gloss", which is a tingly concoction that Wendy swears makes the wearer's lips bigger (I didn't think so, but it does taste good).

Here's a photo-gallery of the end of a three year corral of love. I look forward to coming back for more front porch action in the future, and the fond memories of Friday night should sustain me until I can find a surrogate porch in Austin.

The Rosewater Chronicles will be down for a few days or perhaps even a week until I get the new household running. Stay tuned for an account of moving adventures, my thoughts about Lance Armstrong running for the governor of Texas, and the return of the The Smurfs to the big screen!

el corazon

Music: Melotron: Cliché

Here I am on the day of closing on my new town home, in the final days of moving, the house filled with boxes and millions of corners to stub a toe on (I think I've banged all ten at this point), and the Entertain-o-sphere EXPLODES with the kind of social drama I live for (that is, when I'm not moving, entertaining lovers or guests, under a writing deadline, scrambling for money to pay the bills, recovering from a hurricane, and so on): Pamela Anderson and Tommy and are getting married for a third time; while filming the remake of All the King's Men Jude Law slept with his nanny, got caught by his kid, and issued a public apology to his families and fiancé yesterday; a sex tape of Colin Farrell has surfaced, which, if the sex partner and former Playboy Playmate succeeds in releasing it, the bad boy says will ruin his reputation (seriously! leads you to wonder what they're doing on that sex tape; it must involve rodents); and Cameron Diaz has topless photos (careful clicking this link; it's not work safe) circulating the Internet. Diaz was recently quoted defending her boobs, saying that they "look good" (I agree). So here's this juicy movie/rock star buffet of bad, stupid, and hawt behavior and then comes along something just as scandalous: Bush nominates quasi closeted ultra-conservative, John Roberts.

Of course, we Leftist types hoped for a female judge, and not because of her biological sex, but because, as a woman, she would have been subjected to the same kinds of structural discrimination most women experience, and therefore would more likely have a sensibility that defended civil rights and liberties. Here is a man with no real paper trail, but who predictably went on record as saying in a state sponsored brief that Roe should be overturned. He also ruled in favor of military tribunals at the Guantanamo gulag. Nevertheless, reporters and pundits are saying his positions are hard to call, and, it would seem, the few defenders of the Left in congress are somewhat mystified as to how this dude is going to turn out.

Given the president's remarks last night at the formal statement of nomination, we shouldn't have much difficulty discerning the president's hunch about this man, which can be reduced to a single turn of phrase:

In my meetings with Judge Roberts, I have been deeply impressed. He's a man of extraordinary accomplishment and ability. He has a good heart. He has the qualities Americans expect in a judge: experience, wisdom, fairness, and civility. He has profound respect for the rule of law and for the liberties guaranteed to every citizen. He will strictly apply the Constitution and laws, not legislate from the bench.

This choice paragraph from an otherwise defensive speech is designed to answer the question, "why should this guy be the next supreme court justice?" The answer is: (1) the president is personally, deeply impressed; (2) his accomplishments at 50 are extra-ordinary; (3) "He has a good heart"; (4) he has qualities and qualifications of a supreme court justice, including respect for the law; (5) he will not participate in judicial activism. Which one of these reasons is not like the others?

"He has a good heart"

Since the beginning of his presidency, a number of popular magazines have devoted space to decoding the carefully crafted rhetoric of Michael Gerson and other Bush speechwriters, revealing its double voice. As a kid brought up in Christian evangelicalism, I recognize this language fairly easily. "Heart" is a word that is code for the condition of one's soul, not merely one's conscience. When one is "born again," she is to "let Jesus into your heart," meaning that one is to surrender to the saving, phallic power of the Almighty (yes, it's all quite sexual). And the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary are figures for saving grace among Catholics too. In other words, when Bush/the speechwriters added the sentence, "he has a good heart," they were speaking in code to evangelical Christians and certain Catholics: this man is down with Jesus and is assuredly "pro-life." Why the pundits, reporters, and politicians are blind to the not-so-secret meaning of this reference to the heart, after six years of theological warmongering, is a mystery. Then again, speaking of the heart, Pamela and Tommy are getting married FOR THE THIRD TIME! I suppose that when it comes to matters of the heart, almost everyone is blinded by big dicks.

on the new heights of anal empowerment

Music: iris: awakening The recent product line by the Pampers division of Procter & Gamble is called "Kandoo," which is centered around moist butt-wipes and foaming hand soap. Kandoo is a term for asserting of one's anal acumen as well as the name of an enterprising frog character. I am amused by Kandoo because of the tidy ways in which P&G's marketing campaign is so demonstrative of Freud and Abraham's theory of the anal erotism. As we all know, it feels good to poop and, so the story goes, once kiddies get control of their sphincters (between the ages of two and three, approximately) they discover a new source of pleasure. It feels good to both hold it in and to let it out, and eventually the child associates this pleasure with a sense of mastery.

So no wonder, then, that the childhood version of mastery is described in terms of royalty. The ad campaign for Kadoo wipes (which you can view here) features the following narrative, which accompanies shots of a child taking a shit:

You are master of the toilet! Lord of the Loo! [child pulls off too much toilet paper and it gets heaped into a pile in his lap] . . . well, almost. [Mother's voice] "Do you need me sweetie?" [Child looks defeated and sad.] Don't worry! Now there's Pamper's Kandoo moist toilet wipes, designed especially for children. Simply wipe, and flush away! [little cartoon frog offers box of wipes to junior]. And for royally clean hands, there's Kandoo foaming hand soap! By the time you're done, you'll be king of the throne! [child throw up hands in victorious glee]

One might wonder why the toilet is always associated with royalty, and the answer is money. It is no mere coincidence that the local port-a-potty company in Baton Rouge is "Pot-o-gold": shit is associated with money, and royalty literally sit on their riches.

Why the association of shit with money? Well, it all has to do with love, says Freud. See, when you are a child you observe your parents exchanging gifts (money, flowers, the baby sister, and other objects of barter). The child soon learns to associate affection with the giving of gifts. Then, the child learns that mom and dad are simply thrilled when they shit or pee in the potty. Praising your kid for making doodie is almost universally recommended. The last step in Dr. Phil's "one day method" of potty training recommends a Potty Party:

Step 6: Let the Celebration Begin! When your child successfully goes potty, throw him a potty party. Most importantly, your child can now call his favorite superhero and tell the hero about what he just did! Enlist the help of a friend or relative to play the hero and take the phone call.

If mommy and daddy are throwing you parties for making poo, you'll pretty soon figure out that it's just about the only thing you got to give for love. Hence, shit and pee-pee are associated with money.

Freud later says that the biphasic functioning of the anal sphincter becomes associated with the pleasures of not only giving (passivity) but withholding (aggressivity or "anal aggression"). Anally retentive children can come to associate his or her independence by withholding her turds. Further, some children can translate the pleasures of independence and "mastery" with the shit weapon, and can have fantasies of destruction (e.g., bombing things with their turds).

Horror of horrors, these television ads mask the roots of consumerist fascism. Kandoo is playing with filthy lucre here, and all this praise about mastery can back fire (pun intended, heh heh heh). Be careful with this cheerful frog moms and dads! You may find your toddler defiantly proclaiming "it's mine to mind!" and have a three-foot kingly control freak on your hands. Marketing mastery is dangerous business! Just look what the President has done with the same party line about pooping on "terrorists."

Speaking of control freaks, in related news Slavoj Zizek, certainly a frog of sorts, got hitched. Wow! He really Kandoo! And he looks like, oh, shall we say the anal object par excellence? The bride is beautiful to begin with, but standing next to him I think one is tempted to declare her among the most beautiful women alive. Perhaps proof positive that the "matching hypothesis" can be falsified in fantasy.

sing blue silver

Music: Mephisto Walz: Insidious Well, this morning I don't feel too bad, which is good considering my deliberate attempt to be a glutton last evening on my last evening in New Orleans as a resident. The Duran Duran show was fun, but the crowd was strange: I've never seen such a concentrated group of boring looking people with fanny packs and "god, guns, and no-gays" kinds of t-shirts except at Walt Disney World. I sez to my date: Gee, we're not the oldest people here, and we still actually remember how to dress eighties style.

Speaking of my date, Jen is a friggin' hoot and I will miss her very much. She's like my only buddy in Nola these days. And despite the fact she was MY date, she was getting' her girl on and picked up not one, not two, but three phone numbers from ladies she met at the concession stand. I sez, "Jeez Jen, how do you do it?" And she's like, "I just go up and hit on 'em." She's a pro, I'll give her that. I didn't see her for half the concert . . . .

Anyway, aside from Jen's gyno-conquests, there was a little drama here and again. Arriving an hour early, will call didn't seem to have us on the VIP list. Bummer. So after waiting for what seemed like forever, two tickets were produced for us: 10th row, floor, very close. Alas, the floor was not packed and the arena was not sold out (poor guys, they thought they were bigger than they are, I guess). So we got even closer, so close that I could smell Simon's sweaty bleating. This was certainly exciting, for there was no way I would have ever got seats this close (or that mom and dad would have ever chaperoned) when I was a sixth grader. We jammed out hard from about the third row for a good long bit, but then the security was all up in our grill and shit making us go back to our seats (I mean, us Duran Duran fans are dangerous).

The group was very polished, and the sound was very very good. I wondered at times if they were syncing, but nope, I was up so close I could see the spittle and I even heard a boo-boo chord once, so, these guys were live and were very professional. They were so good, in fact, it was all too slick for the first set. But once they stopped going through the motions, they got much better and the vibe was so 80s! It was happy times. And imagine my unbridled glee when Simon's fourth wardrobe change was a Fascist-style suit and cap! And he sang "Sing Blue Silver!" I thought for a moment a heil hand gesture was coming, but no, it didn't go as far as Marilyn Manson likes to take it.

Nick Rhodes, of course, is the genius behind the whole outfit, and he looked suave and smashing in his dark suit and serious red shirt and tie; he looked so serious the whole evening, like he always does. He was usually considered the "ugly weird one" but now he's kinda hot and still delightfully fashionably strange; the guitarist Andy Taylor should get the "got-older-and-uglier" award, and he looking like such a dweeb jamming out to basic synth-pop (he left the band in the late 80s and made a hard rock album, and he and the band got in some sue-fest-ness over the album Notorious. Which reminds me, Simon was sooooooo gaaaaaayyyyy when "Notorious" was played (it was like he was on the catwalk or something; laugh-out-loud funny he's so not hot anymore). And then there was this part in "Hungry Like a Wolf" or whatever when Simon crawled seductively to the edge of the stage. Oh my god that was so ridiculous: dude, if I'm not 24 any more, you certainly ain't! Jen and I debated about who it would be cooler to sleep with: John Taylor (whose the only one left that really looks hot) or Nick Rhodes. I said Nick, obviously, because he makes good music and is the brains of the whole artifice and would be a better pillow talker. Besides, he never had any qualms about guy-make-up. Jen disagreed, saying that women really do respond to bass (association station says: Renegade Soundwave single from the early 90s; key scene in Private Parts with Howard Stern and a speaker-sitting caller).

They played all the good stuff. I only have three complaints. First, my favorite song, "Save a Prayer," was one huge karaoke display, when Simon simply said "you sing it for me" and held the mic to the audience. NO! I'm sorry, but I didn't pay to hear my favorite song sung by a bunch of drunken New Orleans natives with conservative clothes on. Second, they didn't play the two best songs on the new album, "Astronaut" and "Bedroom Toys." Boo. Third: Simon, yes, you can sing, and much better than any of the groups I've seen on Hit Me Baby One More Time, but, YOU ARE NOT A 24 YEAR OLD HOTTIE.

Here's a photo album of last night. The little doggie is Jen's miniature Doberman, Isis.

Overall, though, it was a fun show. I've not been to an arena show in some time. I don't like them, in general, unless I'm doing lots of drugs, but I haven't done drugs in about a decade (yes, it's really true). But I'd do it for the Cure again, and perhaps Depeche Mode and the Rolling Stone . . . that is, I'd do an arena show.

Must . . . pack . . . boxes (repeat)

jukin on the synth low

music: Psychedelic Furs: talk talk talk The new Dresden Dolls album is quite remarkable for a major label, and surely their opening for Nine Inch Nails on the recent tour dedicated to the theme of fellatio has given them an added boost. Equal parts cabaret music, Nellie McKay, and the tortured femi-goth anger of Switchblade Symphony, the debut album is a delightful moody masterpiece. While certainly cliché (the toy piano riffs are sometimes tiresome) and at times predictable, the album also has bursts of uniqueness that are inspired. I would recommend finding and sampling the track "Half Jack," which is the best song on the album; like all good songs upon the first listen, it gave me goose bumps.

I've also been really getting my synthpop groove on recently (helps while away the time while packing), and I lament the fact that only Europeans seem to like it these days; why bands like De/Vision have never charted in the United States is a mystery, especially since we're being bombarded by "new 80s" sound of bands like The Killers and Bloc Party. There is, in fact, an amazing U.S. synth band that puts out some pretty great records: Iris. They're slated to release a much anticipated follow-up to their 2003 album, Wrath, in late August. Here's the best part, though: they're based in Austin, Texas! How cool is that? A great synthpop band in my hometown . . . .

I say that the relatively popular disinterest in synthpop stateside is a mystery, but the more one thinks about it less in terms of the sound of the music (which is groovy) and more about what it "represents," it becomes less mysterious: it's about norms of American middle class masculinity. Even if you're a hair-in-the-face new mod, you're not allowed to like synthpop unless it has a guitar in it or something guitar like, and only if the vocalist has "punk" (read, masculine) leanings (e.g., The Faint). Best friends hold hands in many European cities, regardless of sex; you'd be hard-pressed to find that in the U.S., of course. Synthpop, in other words, is a victim of homophobia. "Real men don't listen to Erasure", you know. And boys don't cry, neither.

And in the key of crying, Terry McMillan was on The Today Show dissin' her soon-to-be 30 year old ex-husband for coming out of the closet. This was preceded by a special "episode" of Oprah about "living on the down low," a phrase that once circulated among the African American community (but now everywhere) that refers to self-identified straight black men who sleep with other black men (some dude has written an an entire book about this, as if its news or something). McMillan is claiming her once 23 year old suitor was "gay all along" and manipulated her for money. He says he was confused about his sexuality and that McMillan is a homophobe. I say they both right and both mistaken: sure, he was confused and yeah, he used her for money. But the underlying premise here is that somehow sexuality and the expression of desire is static. Identity is static and oppressive and confining, and perhaps he secretly knew he loved the cock all along, but to say when these two where groovin' on the floor there wasn't some chemistry is stupid. Didn't Kinsey clear this up decades ago? Didn't Kurt Cobain summarize it best?

Well, in the midst of this battle over the back door I've developed a new phrase for straight and bisexual men who secretly love synthpop: "jukin' on the synth low." This phrase refers to all the men out there, many of whom I have met, who will dance to Duran Duran or even Erasure if they've had a few beers. Perhaps I'll see y'all who are jukin' on the synth low TONIGHT AT THE DURAN DURAN CONCERT IN NEW ORLEANS!?!?!?! I'm so excited I have to pee . . . .

middlesex: of navels and the black hole

Music: Fever: Red Bedroom

The current controversy raging on blogs and discussion boards across the world orbits a navel: on the recent Macy's fireworks spectacular on July 4th, Mariah appeared to lipsync to one of her finely crafted ditties with the requisite exposed midsection. Although it is possible for women to achieve chiseled abs of monstrosity, it requires a tireless dedication to every variation of the crunch imaginable more than once a day for many, many months, and so it has been speculated by netizens that Carey's newly, well defined belly was an airbrushed canvas.

Although I admittedly do not know if Carey's abs were painted on, I believe it is likely, and because its Mariah Carey, we should now begin to consider whether we would like to lick them. What would it be like to run a tongue up and down that washboard, darting among the crevices and ultimately into the navel itself?

Of course, I'm only articulating the ab-ticular fantasy that resides in the popular imaginary (it's beginning marked by the arrival of the widely successful Abs of Steel video in 1991, succeeded by many sequels). More seriously, although the gesture of painting on abdominal muscles is amusing, it also tracks, on the one hand, the way in which the abdomen has become that obscure object of desire in the past decade. The belly has taken over the pride of place previously claimed by more prodigious bulges on the chest or below the waist; now, breasts and penis bulges merely "frame" the abdomen, like those frilly flower-wallpaper runners on suburban walls across the country. Despite recent attempts to domesticate and normalize the abdomen by Novartis, the makers of Zelnorm, in a series of television commercials depicting a parade of "normal, everyday" folks proudly lifting their shirts to reveal the words written on their bellies (e.g., "yes, there is help for your IBS" or whatever the hell), the fact remains that defined abdominal muscles are coded as the signature of good health and, ultimately, the ability to have good sexual intercourse (after all, its not the size that matters, but the motion of the ocean). The only thing Ms. Carey had going for her--as a superficial icon--was her public pride she demonstrated about her more typical womanly figure and smug in-your-face buxomness; in the current word-war with Madonna, she could play the trump card that she's naturally beautiful without all those crunches. But now, of course, she has succumbed to the fantasy of abdominal promise. How do we reckon with Carey's succumbing to the ab-ticular? How to reconcile her fall from abdominal normalcy into the clutches of the popular fashionista-abticularity?

One obvious way is, of course, to read Carey as an automaton and her belly as a barometer, tracking the ideological formations of the new century; we might thus locate the public abdomen as the new "public screen," a miniature television set, if you will, providing us images of popular consciousness. In this respect, for example, it makes sense so many people find the navel a rim for adornment. The "belly button ring," once symbolic of a defiant urban primitivism (a legacy of "punk"), is now the exotica of newfound nubility—a token of "youth."

The defined abdomen is similarly signiferous beyond the promise of sexual prowess, as it also represents the mobility of a code for masculine self-control to the female body: The original Abs of Steel video for women features a flat and strong tummy, but it remains coded "feminine"; the most recent version of that series depicts a more knobby female abdomen, but it does not resemble a "six pack" and, again, is coded feminine. Carey's airbrushed abdomen, however, is unquestionably masculine in appearance (the only, similarly defined abs were owned by Janet Jackson, who was bombarded with the centuries-old myth of having a rib removed to achieve them!). Carey's airbrushed abs are hyperbole for a desire to appear "in control" and, in this sense, represent an overdetermined, obsessive gesture that defies the association of the feminine with the hysterical. This is why the original advertisement of Zelnorm was targeted to women, who proudly displayed their more normal bellies as a sign that they are in control of their GI tracts, no longer a slave to the renegade turd that refused to exit on command. Hence, when sharing her feelings about being called a "diva" to a British reporter, Carey said: "“Well, my mother was an opera singer, so I’m comfortable with the old-fashioned meaning of the word diva. And if somebody said you were the cupcake diva of Manhattan, that would be OK too. But I’m not, like, this hysterical woman — I promise you!" Airbrushing is, hence, the token of a promise. The pierced belly is the promise of youth; the defined abdomen, the promise of self-control—and we should add, the beer belly a commitment to sloth and, the pregnant belly, the promise of life. Insofar as the navel is a reminder of origins, moreso than breasts, penises, vaginas, mouths, eyes, and assholes, the abdomen reflects our fears of social and literal death.

clamoring for atrocity

Music: My Life with the Thrill Kill Kult: Diamonds and Daggers Like many of us, I awoke this morning to the horrific news that London had been bombed, and this hour, it seems there are approximately 40 confirmed deaths. What is almost as equally disturbing is the way the news media are choosing to cover the "event." News has decidedly entered the zone of "real time" coverage as the immediacy of terror is willfully elongated into an exciting, Speilberg-esque state of continual emergency. Now it's time for Blair to assert the state of exception, no?

Watching television news coverage of the London bombings—the inane chatter that mindlessly repeats the same, scanty details over and over and over to fill the time and keep the sense of immediate presence alive—one cannot help but think of Baudrillard's many compelling arguments about terrorism, especially the following:

It is almost they who did it, but we who wanted it. If one does not take that into account, the event lost all symbolic dimension to become a pure accident, an act purely arbitrary, the murderous fantasy of a few fanatics, who would need only to be suppressed. But we know very well that this is not so. Thus all those delirious, counter-phobic exorcisms: because evil is there, everywhere as an obscure object of desire. Without this deep complicity, the event would not have had such repercussions, and without doubt, terrorists know that in their symbolic strategy they can count on this unavowable complicity.

The news media, as we all know, is almost synonymous with Western government—at least here in the United States—and so the gaped-mouthed reporting and clamoring for bloody images and photos of blown up buses are used to create a sense of deep anticipation to ready us for the phallic assertion of community. Just like Speilberg's War of the Worlds, atrocity generates the desire for the assertion of the sovereign, the mystical rites of the force of law.

So not once, but twice the G8 "leaders" met behind Tony Blair as the inevitable dirty work is done (notably, with Bush on his right): the bombings are rightly condemned as barbaric, but then, quickly packaged into a binary that characterizes whatever the resolution of the G8 talks will be, it is perfectly righteous in comparison. More disturbing yet predictable, of course, are Bush's inane remarks urging "vigilance" and home and stressing, repeatedly, the "resolve" of world leaders. "The War on Terror goes on," he said to reporters this morning asserting his righteous rigidity. They, I mean we, secretly want atrocity to remind us of how good we are.

fireworks barge catches fire, or, welcome to louisiana

Music: Junior Kimbrough: "Go To Hell" Last night was a spirited evening of grilling, music, conversation . . . and fireworks! The best exploding balls of fire were seen on the sidewalk in front of our house; Shappy made some dynamite burgers, and it was good to see so many merry folk meting measured patriotism (patriotism is a good thing; last night we celebrated the strict separation of church and state, something definitely to be patriotic about).

After days of televised talk about how this year's display of explosions in the sky would be bigger and better than ever, we were only treated to about ten minutes of rather lackluster boom-boom; all of us were disappointed and much more amused by the "snakes" and "Blue Thunder" roman candles that Jim acquired. Photo's of last night can be found in this gallery.

It turns out the Baton Rouge fireworks extravaganza was plagued by typical, Louisiana-style incompetence: the fireworks barge caught fire (Wendy Armington arrived later to report she saw the whole fiasco from the banks of the levee). The write up in theThe Advocate, Baton Rouge's premiere newspaper, is hilarious and demonstrative of the kind of smart thinking typical of the in-charge crowd here:

"July 4 Celebration Sparkles, Shimmers; America Reflects on Iraq War, Issues at Home"

By Nikki G. Bannister and David Jacobs, Advocate Staff Writers

Thousands of Baton Rougeans and others decencded upon downtown for the annual Star Spangled Celebration thoughout the day on Monday, jamming streets, parking lots and the levee.

The celebration included a tour of the USS Kidd Veterans Memorial and Museum [basically, an abandoned WWII warship docked next to a casino], vendor booths, face-painting, music, a World War II re-enactment, hot air balloons, flyovers by the F-15 Eagles and "Fireworks on the Mississippi," sponsored by The Advocate and WBRZ Channel 2.

The fireworks display was shorter than expected.

David Spear, a friend of the sponsors, said a fireworks shell blew up on the deck barge instead of up in the air.

The blowup caused a malfunction in the electrical control-firing system, he said, and a significant amount of the display was lost.

As millions of Americans celebrated the Fourth of July from beaches to backyard barbecues, at concert venues and elsewhere, they also reflected on the most pressing issues facing the country.

"I'm trying to save the ones who can't make it in public schools," said David Matlosz, an adult education teacher and St. Amant resident.

"We need to go back to the basics: reading and basic math."

"We try to be too technical. They can work a computer, but they can't read and write. They'd rather play with a computer than read a book," he said.

Janie Bernal of Baker has a son in the U.S. Air Force and she believes the war is the most serious problem facing the country . . . .

"And Josh Gunn, a three-year resident of the Red Stick, believes that there really must be something in the water supply . . . . " I'd type more of this front page story if I could bear it, adding some cynically smug commentary had I the patience, but I think the gist is clear enough: the newspaper story is homologous to the display, which bespeaks some horrifying and hilarious underlying commonality.

cruising the state of exception

Music: Gilian Welch: Soul Journey Perhaps one can file today's entry under "invention," meaning that I wanted to jot down a few unfocused notes in the hope that they may eventually coalesce into an article. I have to be either excited or bothered by an idea to pursue it, and I'm both about this latest film of Speilberg's, which I saw yesterday afternoon after dropping Michael and Ruth off for their playtime adventures in Europe. In light of Benjamin's theses in "On the Concept of History," War of the Worlds is truly a masterpiece if only because it helps to explain the uneasy relation between the rule of law and the state of exception detailed in the eighth: "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring about a real state of exception, and this will improve our position in the struggle against Fascism." To Speilberg's credit, the function of the state/sovereign is somewhat ambiguous (if not helpless) in the film, and more than one soldier is made to appear insensitive (if not moronic). Yet no other film that I have seen in recent memory creates the desire for the State and the oxymoronic "ecstasy of belonging" than this film. Many viewers, I suspect, yearn for a strong military force to come into town to save the day. Instead, they get Tom Cruise learning how to be a father, and the drama shifts us from a global perspective to the psychological drama or micro-makings of a sovereign-as-father (the lawgiver). Perhaps no other film in recent memory lays bare the onto-theological underpinnings of the U.S. foreign policy forged by our resident Sith Lord, Richard Perle (detailed in his roadmap to Endless Evil).

What is the "real state of exception" that Benjamin talks about, and how does this conception relate to War of the Worlds? Perhaps the answer is best explained by Giorgio Agambin, an Italian philosopher that Michael Bowman has got me hooked on. Of course, most would isolate the concept to Carl Schmitt's work, principally Political Theology, in which Schmitt argues that that the sovereign is the one who gets to herald a state of exception, a moment when the law is suspended for the sake of the state or its citizenry. The so-called "Bush doctrine" of preemptive war is essentially a proclamation of exception (drafted, of course, by Perle and his ilk) brought about by real or fictional (about to arrive) atrocity. Although the argument is complex and I cannot do it justice in this space, as I understand it Schmitt argues that the sovereign is therefore paradoxically a legal entity propped by the un-legal, what used to be called the "state of nature" but now, perhaps, best described at the "state of anomy," exogenous, uncontainable violence. Its assertion is a fiction while nevertheless very real. Agamben suggests that Schmitt's theory attempts to "contain" the exogenous Real, as it were, within the legal, such that we have an essentially onto-theological conception of the sovereign. The state of exception is therefore "a space devoid of law" that appears "so essential to the legal order itself" that the normative order "makes every possible attempt to assure a relation to the former, as if the law in order to guarantee its functioning would necessarily have to entertain a relation to an anomy." Agamben argues, however, that Benjamin's observation that the state of exception "is the rule" throws Schmitt's theory out the window. What we have, instead, is a situation in which one can no longer distinguish the exception and the rule within a space of undifferentiated, desirous violence (or naked force—not necessarily deathly force). This is what War of the Worlds illustrates so well, an inability to distinguish, understand, and act upon the rule of law submersed in an exceptional state. War of the Worlds is a good film because it is complex and reflective, despite its best efforts to dumb itself down (e.g., the choice of Tom Cruise as the lead).

The "turns" in the otherwise straight corridor of the film's plot are especially telling. The story unfolds simply as a man trying to keep his children alive as they flee aliens. The moral is paternity, alternately that sometimes you must sacrifice for your children, and that you must also "let them go." The moral is that love will see them through, and that love is the ultimate protectorate. The moral is that even bad parents can become good ones, especially if aliens attack your hometown. Yet as Cruise's character gradually begins to understand the role of the sovereign and how to mete "the law of the father," as he begins to realize that the solider and the policeman are just mere others, the entire social edifice that made reality meaningful crumbles in "pure" violence. There are two key scenes: the first is when the father realizes that he must let his teenage son go, as he is powerless to resist his son's efforts to become a soldier. The second is when, having holed up with a man who has gone insane in a farmhouse cellar, the father realizes that he must kill the man to protect his daughter. In both scenes, "exceptional" deeds are done, for this is an exceptional time in which the ecstasy of belonging yields to ecstasy pure and simple. By the end of the film, of course, order is restored (the son presumed dead returns), and the father has earned his status as a sovereign. But this status, Cruise's newly realized fatherhood, is only established in relation to the state of anomy.

I recognize this is a facile reading, but what is astonishing to me is how well the current political climate is packed into War of the Worlds, and far beyond the obvious analogies to September 11, 2001. Of course, on numerous occasions characters compare the aliens to "terrorists." The superficial pedagogy of the film, that we want a strong, militaristic state to protect us from pure evil, is troublesome. And while the film ultimately collapses the answer in the saving love of the nuclear family (a hegemony to which most are prone), it also seems to underscore the force of law as the "mystical foundation of authority," an argument that Derrida proposed some years ago (and that Agamben mentions in this article). This is the true reason for the reviews of the film that describe it as Speilburg's "darkest." Perhaps in some sense we can say that War of the Worlds helps to illustrate one of Agamben's chilling conclusions:

The Western political system thus seems to be a double apparatus, founded in a dialectic between two heterogeneous and, as it were, antithetical elements; nomos and anomy, legal right and pure violence, the law and the forms of life whose articulation is to be guaranteed by the state of exception. As long as these elements remain separated, their dialectic works, but when they tend toward a reciprocal indetermination and to a fusion into a unique power with two sides, when the state of exception becomes the rule, the political system transforms into an apparatus of death.

War of the Worlds is the United States as a death machine, a mirror image of what we tell ourselves (protect our children) and what we have done to the Other now that the state of exception became the rule. Insofar as the horrible delight of watching the film is reducible to the aestheticization of the political (Joshua Tyler of cinemablend.comdescribes it as "a piece of perfectly realized, pure entertainment," which is the stupidest thing I've read about the film yet), War of the Worlds is an excellent exercise in the uncanny. I'm not saying I liked the movie, of course; it's pretty bad and, well, what I expected. But it is a useful film worth writing about; whether or not audiences realize it, it can teach us that aliens are us.

ain soph: embracing the fool, or, more on sadism and academic publishing

Music: VNV Nation: Matter + Form Although some Jungians praise the Tarot sun card as a token of the dialectical counterpart to the "dark shadow," it can also represent arrogance and self-righteousness (hence Lucifer, the "light-bearer"). Sometimes wrestling our (dark) shadow (Jung did not proffer a "bright" shadow) is simply the better way to go, if only because it is the route of the humble and less likely to result in hurting others. My latest call, of course, is that academics should embrace the figure of the fool. In tarot symbology, the fool is not an idiot or stupid, but simply blind to things in plain view. In Wagner's opera Parsifal, the fool eventually gets and protects the grail. The fool, in other words, is not a bad figure to make into a patron saint.

Yesterday I received another rejection for a manuscript I've been working on for about three years now. Having submitted more articles for review than I can count, I must admit sometimes rejection is relatively easy, especially when the reviewer is curt and rejects my ideas out of hand. The rejections that continue to hurt are those that take the time to explain why my essay should be rejected in detail, but not to "help" me or teach me something. Rather, the rejections that hurt are those that say, in essence, you're an idiot, and here are four single-spaced pages why this is true. The editor, also a friend of mine, was very kind and humane: one reviewer recommended that the journal pursue the article, while the other, reject. Divided reviews are my lot, so this is nothing new. But I think the editor was concerned about the tone of the rejection, so she apparently she contacted a third scholar, who also urged rejection. The editor, bless her, offered a revise and resubmit with significant revisions, but I decided to send it elsewhere because I think the damn thing is good enough already, and I don't want to take advantage our friendship (I suspect she would have rejected someone she did not know with the same set of reviews).

Nevertheless, the "you're an idiot and here's why" kind of rejections are the true source of "writing block" for young scholars; no one likes to feel stupid, or being told that they are stupid. This judgment is also why being an academic is a tough row for the lot of us: there are a handful of really brilliant scholars who publish brilliant things, often at a rather brilliant pace. The rest of us consist of the smart kids in high school who really don't fit in any other place. I mean, the army certainly has no place for us, and we'd drive factory workers crazy with our latest idea about Tom Cruise and Scientology. We work hard, we make pretty decent contributions to our field, but we're not the sort to generate the next Grand Unified Theory or find the cure for cancer. Us smart hard worker types sometimes wish we were "brilliant," but a good number of us (like me) are content to work hard, produce interesting or creative work, and hope an undergraduate here and again changes her mind about "reality" as a result of something we wrote or taught here and again.

And we're really good lovers.

Anyhoo, I thought I'd share the rejection letter that "hurts," offering translations along the way. It's not terribly far off from what I'm used to receiving, actually. The manuscript in question is here in a pdf format.

Review of Manuscript #05-007 “Hystericizing Huey”

Although I think this piece is very well-written and engages with some interesting literature, I find the execution lacking and the specifics of the project to be misguided in a way that wouldn't benefit from even substantive revision.

Translation: This essay is so bad that the author can do absolutely nothing to make it better; it's so bad its doomed forever.

I want to divide up my comments into two camps, one in which I lack sympathy to the psychoanalytic tradition, and one in which I am [in sympathy with the tradition]. I don't know the readership of [journal name] just yet, but I suspect that more of its readers will fall into the first camp, so I'll start there. I suspect the author believes the same, since he/she spends a large amount of time in theoretical exposition.

Translation: This essay is so incompetent as a piece of scholarship that I can critique it from multiple perspectives. Even though I am sympathetic to the author's project, I think it would be fun to pretend I'm not and blow holes through the essay from a perspective that is not my own, so that the author can see it's really shitty work no matter who you consult. Then, because I'm smarter than the author, I'll demonstrate how stupid the author is by addressing him and the essay on their own terms

As far as this camp goes, here are four objections/questions: First, I do not think that the piece offers a significant or substantive justification for using psychoanalysis as a critical tool. In the lengthy explanation given regarding the dynamic between obsession and hysteresis, there is nothing that offers much insight into the particulars of the situation or context at hand. In effect, the claims are far too universal, something somewhat required of psychoanalytic concepts.

Translation: Psychoanalysis is bad because its claims are universalist. It can never address the specificity of a given rhetorical situation or encounter in its proper, historical context

Given that everyone shares obsessive and hysterical tendencies, and given that all discourse is marked by a certain sense of fort-da, why isn't everyone a de facto demagogue? To argue, like the author does, that current efforts to understand charisma or even eloquence “lack a theory of desire” may be true, but it does not follow that a theory of desire is a valuable contribution.

Translation: As you present it, your theory suggests we have a little bit of demagoguery in all of us. So what? While it may be true accounts of charisma do not take "desire" into account, this does not mean an account of desire is desirable, either. Note, dear reader, this is a non-sequitor. Whenever there is a non-sequitor in support of a rejection, we know that something "brilliant" is on the horizon. Hence:

Given the universal or potentially universal nature of this theory of desire, and given the obvious fact that not everyone has demagogue status or that certain “it” factor of charisma, the critic must eventually move from the universal theory of desire expounded within this essay to the specific discourses of the demagogue, where the status of demagogue is determined by historical assignation rather than by psychic structure. The problem is though, once you've moved from the general to the particular, it seems obvious that the particular is a necessary and necessarily rhetorical component, and that the psychical concern is largely superfluous.

Translation: Because the essay draws on a theory that advances in universalist claims, it cannot address particulars in that theory. Insofar as demagogues are special in some way, you must analyze particularities (historical especially) to explain the demagogue. But if you do that, then there's no need for universal claims, really. Hence, psychoanalysis is incapable of providing an account of demagoguery, and the project is doomed. The asserted premise here is that rhetoric implicates historical particularity, and vice-versa. I don't agree with that premise, of course.

To follow the logic of the piece, by contrast, means understanding charisma and eloquence as non-rhetorical concepts and practices, a practice that hardly seems compelling for an audience of communication scholars. In other words, here is a theory of charisma that removes entirely the importance of rhetoric. As much as I might appreciate the author's investment in the philosophical precepts of psychoanalysis, I don't believe that it warrants publication in an NCA journal. [Look at 36, for example, wherein the symbolic is conflated with rhetoric, a revealing lack of differentiation.]

Translation: The National Communication Association, as an entity, only supports scholarship that is rhetorical in scope, and since psychoanalysis is plainly not rhetorical, this essay should be rejected. . Of course, at this point the reviewer is having way too much fun playing the devil's advocate . . . and at my expense. Why is it necessary to reject an article on premises even you do not believe in? Apparently because it feels good to do this to someone who does not know your name. The sadism continues:

Second, the substantial but not obviously relevant take on desire and gender, adds little to the piece other than problems for those not already inclined to believe Lacan. One fairly obvious problem that isn't addressed in the piece, for example, comes once more with the issue of context. The author seems content, a la Lacan, to say that cultural assignations of gender are supposed to be psychical, yet the neuroses that define those assignations clearly presuppose culturally assigned values for women – the idea that woman are more naturally hysteric, for example. It makes just as much sense, given the lack of empirical data in this section, to believe that hysteresis is a socialized phenomenon, in that girls are often “taught” to be self-effacing.

Translation: The article tempts essentialism. This is patently unfair, as many lines are devoted to the cultural construction of not only gender, but sex. I never say anything whatsoever about "women being naturally hysteric." Read closer (righteously neurotic asshole). The spanking continues:

Third, and I know this claim might irk critics invested in Lacan, but it seems to me as if the piece ignores certain specificities of the media environment in which demagoguery emerges. Most notably, with the way it's written, it seems as if the proper process of manipulating the sense of presence, of generating charisma, can only come about through oral encounters and oral broadcasts, which is a ridiculous claim, given the lengthy world history of demagoguery, or the role of the written in some of the more famous propaganda campaigns. I suspect this must just be a slip in characterization, given the fact that most of the evidence comes from the monuments themselves, rather than actual oral exchanges.

Translation: The author claims that demagoguery is limited to orality, which is "ridiculous". I never claim that, by the way. Notice how we the reviewer moves from "seems as if" to "he claims, which is ridiculous." In argumentation theory, we call this a straw person argument.

Fourth and finally for this set of objections, the fixation on the monuments provide at best post hoc explanations for Long's hold on Louisiana state politics – they do nothing to provide empirical data for the functional analysis of the dialectic of demagoguery. Indeed, for the first twenty-or-so pages of the piece it seemed as if Long and the monuments were more important as excuses to discuss psychoanalysis, rather than a study of demagoguery made better or more valuable through the inclusion of a psychoanalytic theory of desire. The idea that the theory is in this case necessarily linked to the case study seems more than suspect, and if I begin with a suspicion of the jargon and tropes and reversals required in psychoanalysis, this piece will do little to overcome that initial bias.

Translation: I suspect the author's intent with this article is to convince those who are hostile to psychoanalysis that psychoanalysis is not all that bad, and can actually yield interesting insights. However, there is not time enough spent on the case study, and it seems little more than a ruse; it will fail to convince the hostile . I agree with this, for the most part, except this reviewer is excluding entirely the audience I am most directly interested in: students.

Now, let's say that I wasn't going to worry about that bias, and I think there are reasons that might be a valuable starting point, even if I don't find those reasons ultimately convincing. The problem is, that even if I did follow a general sympathy towards psychoanalysis, I believe that assessing the paper on its own terms also comes with problems.

Translation: I don't find any of the reasons I just outlined convincing myself, although they "might be a valuable starting point" and so I rehearsed them. Thanks asshole. As if I haven't heard those kinds of "biased" reviews before. I know for a fact the editor asked you to review because you were "down" with psychoanalysis, and you chose to spend the majority of your review rehearsing the arguments against your own position. Why is that? Trying to "toughen me up?" I smell "turf" policing. More sadism ensues:

The major problem here is that, at best, the study of the monuments shows only that after Huey, the public had such an hysterical impulse that they immortalized their own hysteresis in the robo huey and the monument at the capitol; it tells us nothing about the actual functioning of charisma. And this could just as easily be explained by the effects of the assassination, with little to do with the actual functioning or performance of anything we might label charisma. As with Christ, so with Long (a comparison that smacks a bit more of Zizek than Lacan, perhaps). This postmortem sense pf hysteresis, or guilt, tells us nothing about how Long is able to generate or manifest his charisma, much less his ability to manipulate obsessive and hysterical impulses. For that, one would need to tie it to his discourse, but this would be an entirely different project.

Translation: Your analysis of monuments dedicated to Huey Long do nothing to analyze Long's charisma. Exactly. This is because Long's charisma does not belong to Long; it is a product and dynamic of the Symbolic order, which belongs to no one (e.g., Huey's charisma is scripted by popular fantasy, like a movie). Nevertheless . . .

The readings of the monuments themselves, independent of any question of charisma and demagoguery, are valuable but also plagued with problems. The monuments are phallic yes, in an obvious sense, but that fact in and of itself indicates nothing other than their status as generic monuments, all of which are phallic in construction. Indeed, even with the discussion of the phallus in this piece, it makes no sense to qualify the monument's phallic status as strange or anything less than phallic, since all monuments face a threat to their sense of presence precisely because of what the purport to represent – the absent figure of a great man or woman. But to say that the buildings or statue are phallic, while correct and even comedic and interesting to note, does not provide the sort of evidence or interest needed to sustain reader interest. No attempt is made to discuss the architectural features; instead, readers are left to what amounts to an analogical argument (visualized on p. 20), which is I think, a very weak form of psychoanalytic critique.

Translation: So you claim the monuments are phallic: so what? All monuments are phallic. Reading this stuff I got bored.

The most interesting monument is the Robo-Huey, but it's clear from its placement in the essay that even Robo-Huey in and of him/itself is an insufficient object of analysis, insufficient even as an objet a. There's really no attempt to explain how Robo-Huey can be seen as any more interesting, and more indicative of the discourses of Huey long than might the animatronic greek gods in Caesar's palace indicate the supplications of Nevadans, or the various other animatronic statues of presidents and other historical figures that litter the countryside. To take the concern further, what about the animatronics is so important in the first place? What makes an animatronic so much more monumental than some other monument? These are questions that are, I think obvious, but that remain unanswered in the essay.

Translation: Your read of the automaton is a bore, and you fail to explain why the automaton is a special kind of monument. This is not true, as I detail in excess the relation of the automaton to death, which is intimately related to demagoguery . . . .

More annoyingly, in an otherwise well-written essay, the line in which readers are told that the animatronic statue reminds us of the “danger of demagoguery, that fascism is ultimately underwritten by death” is, I'm sorry, absurd. Fascism is underwritten by death, yes, but so is every other political system. Fascism is underwritten by death, something history recognizes as truth, and does so largely without the assistance of Robo-Huey. Indeed, I have difficulty even discerning a relationship between Robo-Huey, or the subject of the essay in general, and the sudden insertion of the word fascism. This sort of line, devoid of warrant and unrefined, isn't worthy of the rest of the essay, much less an NCA journal.

Translation: The comment about fascism and death is cliché in the extreme, and the article should be rejected on this line alone. I laughed aloud and read this line to my spouse over dinner, and we made fun, gleefully, of the author's stupidity. Why fascism suddenly appears is inexplicable. The "I'm sorry this is absurd" like is a sort of coy apology for being mean. And, of course, demagoguery has often been characterized as American fascism.

That being said, I think there are other roads that could have been taken with this material, but they are road perhaps traveled best by critical methods not grounded in psychoanalysis. The concept of the gift, introduced early in the piece but never significantly developed, is a very real possibility, though it would be a path defined by names other than Lacan, Evans, and Fink. I applaud the author for his/her writing and her/his willingness to tackle complex issues and relationships, but in this instance, I do not think that the tackle is particularly well executed.

Translation: Psychoanalysis has a bad name because of idiots like you. Leave it to more careful scholars. You're a moron.

Aight, so this si wound-licking. But it feels good, and this is my blog, so THERE! One can only imagine what the reviewer's remarks were to the editor alone. It does bite a bit to be called stupid (albeit in a way that does not seem like an ad hominem). I much prefer the nasty reviews because they're easier to dismiss.

I sometimes get comments from friends and colleagues to the effect that publishing is "easier" for me because they see my name in print. They are surprised when I tell them my rejection rate is fairly high, that a given manuscript often sees two to three different sets of reviewers (at different journals) before it gets to print, and that divided reviews are the norm. None of this stuff comes easy for me (or most people, I underscore), and those whispers in smoky bars about how "bad" my work is—from my incompetent use of psychoanalytic theory to how horribly wrong my reading of Walter Benjamin is—do get back to me. Does it hurt? You bet. Do I care? Yup. Am I going to admit I'm stupid, throw up my hands and proclaim, "I give up?" Nope. Never claimed to be brilliant, and I try to avoid making any gestures to that effect. But you say my ass hanging out? Very well then, my ass is hanging out. But it’s a creative, hairy, and lovable ass, even if it smells wrong to some people. It's time for us younger scholars to be foolish, to stop worrying about "being brilliant," and to embrace a new coprophilic style! Oh, and yeah, while it DOES hurt, we DO have each other, right?

culture wars on cruise control

Music: melotron: fortschritt The "culture wars," usually associated with "political correctness" and other forms of squabbling among layperson, politicians, journalists and academics on the television and in top U.S. magazines and newspapers, are being waged everywhere these days. No longer are the battles limited to "gay rights" or where life begins or the obfuscating prose of an arrogant professoriate. Today it seems that any issue somehow related, however remotely, to the question of Spirit will be yoked to a facile, Left vs. Right binary. Interestingly, the series of decisions handed down by the Supreme Court yesterday seemed to navigate this terrain fairly carefully and in an unexpected way: it is and is not legal to display the ten commandments, depending on whether religion or heritage is emphasized. Although dissenting opinions intoned the proper, Right-ist conclusions, in general the decision seemed to avoid the predictable in favor of balance.

Speaking of balance, then, I have been thinking more on Tom Cruise's recent unbalanced behavior and righteous statements regarding the mind, which are clearly within the terrain of a culture war that does not rest neatly along the Right/Left divide (that Cruise's assault on psychotherapy coincides with the promotion of Spielberg's family-bonding remake of The War of the Worlds is, of course, no mere coincidence either). Consider his remarks in a recent interview in Entertainment Weekly (courtesy of Karen McCullough at The Blogora):

EW: You are aware that your views about psychiatry come across as pretty radical to a lot of people.

CRUISE: In the 1980s, you were supposed to say no to drugs. But when I say no to drugs, I'm a radical? 'He's against drugs — he's a radical! He's against electroshock treatments — he's a radical!' [Laughing] It's absurd!

EW: Yeah, but Scientology textbooks sometimes refer to psychiatry as a ''Nazi science''. . .

CRUISE: Well, look at the history. Jung was an editor for the Nazi papers during World War II. [According to Aryeh Maidenbaum, the director of the New York Center for Jungian Studies, this is not true.] Look at the experimentation the Nazis did with electric shock and drugging. Look at the drug methadone. That was originally called Adolophine. It was named after Adolf Hitler. . . [According to the Dictionary of Drugs and Medications, among other sources, this is an urban legend.]

EW: Well, Freud wasn't a Nazi, but the point I'm getting at here is that expressing these views isn't necessarily a public relations bonanza for you.

CRUISE: What choice do I have? People are being electric-shocked. Kids are being drugged. People are dying.

It is curious how psychotherapy is lumped in here with psychiatry, that both are termed a "Nazi science," and especially that Jung would be associated with Nazism! It's also clearly fallacious to assume all things "psy-" share the same premises, except, perhaps, that there is this thing called the dynamic unconscious. Incidentally, Hubbard's Dianetics is about as close to a bastardized form of "the talking cure" as you can get, with it's own, dangerous depth-psychology techniques and bizarro-world abuses of the transference (including skin-conductivity tests) . . . the major difference between psychoanalysis in its many varieties and Scientology as it is practiced concerns the role of Spirit. As Cruise noted in his interview with Lauer: "Scientology is something you don't understand. It is a religion. Because it's dealing with the spirit --you as a spiritual being." The distinction drawn here is not between the Left and Right (remember, Billy Graham is a democrat), but "secular humanism" versus a faith in soul, or a belief in what Scientologists refer to as the "thetan."

So, Tom appears on Oprah, and the two are aligned along the same, pro-Spirit axis. Indeed, Oprah's philosophy of self-help therapeutics is in perfect keeping with Scientology's stress on self-soul repair: there is no chemical "imbalance" that leads to suicide. It's simply a matter of cleaning up your thetan, shedding the unsoulful, through individual effort. After all, Oprah's success is proof enough that there are no structural or systemic disadvantages for black women; Cruise's success--like that of George W. Bush--is proof enough that dyslexics can overcome tremendous "biological" obstacles.

If we reflect on the major, media events of the past year—-on Shiavo, on television series like Revelations and the Left Behind phenomenon, the recent Star Wars film and, of course, on the role of fundamentalist religious rhetoric in the current U.S. presidency—-the culture wars are clearly misread by those of us (often wrongly) assumed to be on the liberal side. The culture wars consist, increasingly, of battles over the existence of the Spirit and soul. It's time for secularists to wake the fuck up and get a clue. Laughable events like Cruise's misguided couch-jumping boot-strapism, here parodied as an Evil Cruise Emperor zapping Oprah, really point up the no-so-secret wagers too readily dismissed as pop culture trash. Cruise is really not so much concerned with the overprescription of Ritalin or electro-shock therapy as much as he, following Scientological dogma, is scripted to believe that the collective human soul is being deadened by the pharmaceutical industry and an ideology of secular healing. Now, my friend and student Roger Pippin has done a good job pointing out how the prescription of Ritalin is, in fact, a serious problem. My point here is that this really is NOT about drugging our kids: it's about the "State of the Union's Soul."

I predict that The War of the Worlds, unquestionably a rehash of the trauma of Nine-eleven, will be in-sync with this message. It will communicate the story of a people under attack from an unseen, evil force from beyond (e.g., demons, but with space ships) that find strength in family and, ultimately, faith. I will be interested to see how Spielberg reworks the church scenes from the classic original (faith in God is a major theme in the original)—I suspect, given his Jewish background, he will downplay the overtly religious aspects of the original screenplay, but amplify the role of spirit in some ingenious way that is in perfect keeping with the cultural march toward evangelism.

For many people, the culture wars are really the battles of a spiritual warfare. That's what's happening today in our courtrooms, in Washington, on our screens and in our papers. People are clamoring to define the proper form of the soul, and making arguments for rescuing it from the clutches of this or that evil secularism . . . . Whenever wars are waged over abstractions we should be alarmed. Just think about how our "war against evil" has changed our lives so far; the Left needs a rhetoric of religion and spirit, badly and now.

the passions of the Cruise, the ding dong of doubt

Music: Gene Loves Jezebel: Immigrant As I was completing my Sunday ritual this morning (coffee, Meet the Press with Tim Russert and This Week with George Will, and the Sunday paper), I ran across a short story about Katie Holmes in my favorite section, Newsmakers: the 26 year old Catholic has said "she was taking lessons in the Church of Scientology." Apparently the faux-Faustian bargain struck here is that holstering a top-gun is contingent on agreeing to "the Introspection Rundown" (viz., "regression") in lieu of any form of psychiatric treatment. Scientologists hate psychiatry and most other forms of psychotherapy, preferring instead cathartic methods of treatment (e.g., "breakthroughs" and similar sorts of one-shot, ego-therapeutic behaviorisms).

The short of it is that Tom Cruise already has Katie Holmes, the love of his life, undergoing mind-control techniques. Perhaps this is proof enough that Nicole Kidman's post-Tom flop, the re-make of The Stepford Wives, was much more than coincidence.

It is a curious public romance, to say the least, and it's laughable how closely the media coverage of the events leading up to the marriage proposal so closely parallel the plots of Cruise's action films. Consider Mission Impossible II, which Cruise had a heavy hand in: a strong female character, a high-class thief played by Thandie Newton (hot!), is giving Tom lots of trouble and challenge at the opening of the film. As the plot unfolds Thandie becomes increasingly child-like, her dialogue dwindles. By the end of the film, Tom rescues Thandie and they live happily ever after. If I recall correctly, one of the most beautiful closing shots Woo captured was of Newton standing in a childlike pose in childlike clothes, as an innocent and lost "little girl." The image is beautiful, but it's also terribly infantilizing. The once strong and independent woman is rendered a child. Jump-cut to Holmes, basking in the media spot-light, all smiles but voiceless, taking classes in Scientology and undergoing Introspection Rundowns to make her top-cock even more resolutely phallic (proof that Kidman actually has a brain). Tom Cruise is an idiot playing the happy and guileless all-American alpha-male.

The trouble with Tom is that, well, he's so amusingly and transparently neurotic and scripted. Indeed, he seems so scripted that we may be tempted to describe him as "hysterical." Consider his strange behavior in an interview with Matt Lauer last week on The Today Show.

The typically publicity shy Tom Cruise has been taking the microphone lately in a barrage of Scientology-inspired media events, presumably to promote his new film, the Spielberg remake of The War of the Worlds. Very little, however, is said about the film. Instead, Cruise picks fights by asserting that he knows the truth, that the rest of us are fools:

MATT LAUER: I'm only asking, isn't there a possibility that-- do-- do you examine the possibility that these things [psychoactive drugs] do work for some people? That yes, there are abuses. And yes, maybe they've gone too far in certain areas. Maybe there are too many kids on Ritalin. Maybe electric shock--

TOM CRUISE: Too many kids on Ritalin? Matt.

MATT LAUER: I'm just saying. But-- but aren't there--

TOM CRUISE: Matt.

MATT LAUER: --examples where it works?

TOM CRUISE: Matt. Matt, Matt, you don't even-- you're glib. You don't even know what Ritalin is.// //if you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay. That's what I've done. Then you go and you say where's-- where's the medical test? Where's the blood test that says how much Ritalin you're supposed to get?

MATT LAUER: You're-- you're-- it's very impressive to listen to you. Because clearly, you've done the homework. And-- and you know the subject.

This is the point of the interview when I decided to stop disliking Matt Lauer and to see him as the genius that he is. "Gee, Tom, you seem so smart, so well read on this subject; I'm learning so much! Tell me more!" My God this was a brilliant move: if you stroke the penis with just a hint of teeth, the obsessive will try to fuck you.

TOM CRUISE: And you should.

MATT LAUER: And-- and--

TOM CRUISE: And you should do that also.

MATT LAUER: And--

TOM CRUISE: Because just knowing people who are on Ritalin isn't enough. //you should be a little bit more responsible in knowing really--

MATT LAUER: I'm not prescribing Ritalin, Tom. And I'm not asking--

TOM CRUISE: Well--

MATT LAUER: --anyone else to do it. I'm simply saying--

(OVERTALK)

TOM CRUISE: Well, you are. You're saying--

MATT LAUER: I know some people who seem to have been helped by it.

TOM CRUISE: I-- but you're saying-- but you-- like-- this is a very important issue.

MATT LAUER: I couldn't agree more.

TOM CRUISE: It's very-- and you know what? You're here on the Today Show.

MATT LAUER: Right.

TOM CRUISE: And to talk about it in a way of saying, "Well, isn't it okay," and being reasonable about it when you don't know and I do, I think that you should be a little bit more responsible in knowing what it is.

MATT LAUER: But--

TOM CRUISE: Because you-- you communicate to people.

MATT LAUER: But you're now telling me that your experiences with the people I know, which are zero, are more important than my experiences.

TOM CRUISE: What do you mean by that?

MATT LAUER: You're telling me what's worked for people I know or hasn't worked for people I know. // I'm telling you I've lived with these people and they're better.

TOM CRUISE: So, you're-- you're advocating it.

MATT LAUER: I am not. I'm telling you in their case-- (LAUGHTER)

(OVERTALK)

Apparently Tom Cruise, the dyslexic high school drop-out who made his name by wearing sun-glasses and dancing in his underwear as a call boy for an older woman in the risqué art cinema masterpiece, Risky Business, is in the position to educate the world about the proper route to sound mental health.

Tom Cruise is Michael Jackson in reverse. The man who is "in control" is the hysteric wearing an obsessive's mask; the man who is out of control, desperately yearning for the love he never received as a boy, is the more authentic fascist.

Although I’m very far from an expert on Scientology, my past research on this "new religion" leads me to conclude Cruise believes (or has been told to believe, though he will take credit for the telling, as if he told it to himself) he has reached a new level of spiritual awareness. This characteristic display of guileless good-natured-ness has exploded into a kind of confident arrogance that typical of the values embraced by Scientology. More than evangelical religious belief systems, Scientology is the quintessential "American" religious system, built almost exclusively on individualism: all mental problems, indeed, all problems in life, are not the consequence of structural or biological disadvantage, but spiritual misalignment. The road to healing is, predictably, all about soul-repair, basic ego-psychology with a lot of science-fiction and goofy terms thrown in for good measure. Except for the part when you are told the human race was seeded by aliens, Scientology is, as Althusser might say, the Religion of Interpellation On a Stick. Well, that's actually Christianity. So, maybe it's better said that Scientology is the Religion of the Self-Possessed Alpha-Male. Indeed, I think the story goes that Hubbard made up Scientology as a bet with a buddy on who could invent the better religion (probably on a boat with a six pack in the cooler).

Which reminds me: Ah, yes, Louisiana is Sportman's Paradise. A rifle, day-glo camoflage, and shooting shit until the sun comes down. Now THAT IS BLISS.

Can anyone make this shit up? Maybe it is all programmed by our Alien Slave Masters! It's simply fascinating (and, yes, saving me from packing!). Based on Hollywood fantasy-logic, here's my prediction for the Katie, currently undergoing the same kind of patriarchical psychical make-over that Jennifer Wilbanks is enduring: a year from now, at the significant age of 27, Holmes will realize that, however smart the career-move, she has just married one giant cock: it thinks it does what it wants on its own terms (it's actually on cultural autopilot); it's job is simply and merely to look pretty and fuck things (up) from time to time in the service of the "Same as it Ever Was." Like Wilbanks when she ran, and Kidman when she divorced, Holmes will have a flash of feeling and a hear the ding-dong of doubt; no one can live with hysteric that long. And then, in the words of the new pop giants, the Kaiser Chiefs, "I predict a riot."

the gendered construction of public toilets

Music: The Cure: Carnage Visors SAYING GOODBYE

Last night Michael and Ruth Bowman hosted a going-away party for the exodus party (Wesley Burkle to eastern Tennessee, yours truly to Austin, David Terry to Chapel Hill, and Justin and Jess Trudeau to Dallas). When folks are sad to see you leaving, but also visibly happy for you as well, its easy to get verklempt. Rog gave me a toast with love and "payback" in equal measure that made me get all weepy. The other toasts were similarly moving and love was thick in the room. One thing that the LSU community has that I know is unique is a strong sense of community and an active cultivation of caring. I left "early" and got home around midnight. If I stayed with everyone I would have cried and become overly emotional and, as we all know, "boys don't cry." I am going to miss these people so very much. As for the place . . . yeah, I'm going to miss that too. I hate the ritual of leaving love, and trying to sleep with the loss.

EXPENSIVE FOOLISHNESS

Thursday afternoon I received an unexpected package of ten copies of my book. It is a weird feeling, at once both anticlimactic and exciting. I need to take it to a bar and just gloat . . . but I worry I'm going to find more mistakes (I already found one big one just thumbing through it . . . not my fault, neither!). I think the design is nice, with a groovy booger-green cover. It's a little scary now that this thing is ready to go and to be judged by others. It's just a retrofitted dissertation, and so I shouldn't expect too many oohs and ahhs . . . it's simply nice to have it over with. I'm not saying it's shit (well, it is shit, but it’s my shit!), just that its pretty much what I was thinking over three years ago, and I've changed my mind about a lot of stuff since then. I think the anxiety most scholars experience when their tome is published is that it will be read as their present "state of mind," that one will be held to which-whatever silly ass mistaken thought she had over four years ago. Well, anyway, I hope someone enjoys it, or finds it fun or useful. It lists for a whopping $50, which pretty much kills the chances of it ever going to paperback (though I can get copies for $35, so, if you wanna save some dough and would like a copy, just email me). Well, perhaps it will bring anger or delight for at least two years before it is remaindered at Labyrinth Books.

ASTRONAUT, SCISSOR-SISTER STYLE

All-powerful Mindy Fenske hooked my shit up with some primo seating for the upcoming Duran Duran show in New Orleans on July 13, as well as a fully autographed glossy and compact disk. Master-Piercer Jen P. and me will be jamming to the hot new sounds of 1984 up close and personal in a few! w00t! The new(er) album is "ok," if only because they stopped trying to sound "un-gay." I'm particularly amused by the title track, which precedes a song titled, "Bedroom Toys":

Makes my hair stand up on end, Something alien happening, Sychronize but don't comprehend, 'Cause where I stop that's where you begin!

Another moment I commit, A pleasure as I'm gonna' take the hit, And I'm addicted to the state you're in, 'Cause you're getting me out of it!

So, clearly this is the 2004 version of "Cocaine Sex," right? Where one stops is indeed where another begins, hand in glove. But then the song gets stupider:

Wasted, there's nothing gonna ace this, And were gonna go to space it, 'Cause I'm leaving with an astronaut!

Groovin' out to X-ray specs, Something tells me your the alien sex, I can't imagine now what comes next, When this astronaut connects!

Coming on when I touch your skin, A kinda' strange light you emit, I hear you're gravity pull me in, Now your getting me out of it!

Wasted, there's nothing gonna ace this, And were gonna go to space it, 'Cause I'm leaving with an astronaut!

There, feat for quantum leap, Because space is hot and deep, And we follow giant footprints, As we fall in, falling like the twins, Through Saturn's holy rings, And if they can't hold us, where it's gonna end up, Anybody knows

Saturn's holy rings? Twins? This is all so hotly and deliciously ambiguously homo-erotic. You gotta listen to the track, because of the way LeBon sings "Astronaut": "Ass" is emphasized in a high falsetto. This is no mere paean to drunken anal-sex! It's an all out attempt to get a song featured on Queer Eye!

Boxes and Bangs

I've noticed I have much more time to blog than usual. Why? I should be packing. I hate packing. Ok, so. I'm going to pack now.

Oh, and I forgot to mention: Miss Panda has bangs! Very hot. I got hated for not noticing IMMEDIATELY. But it's true: I like banging.

the gruntometer and the voice abject

Music: The Cure: Seventeen Seconds Last year I came up with the "voice abject" as a concept that gets at the Real betokened by the grain of the voice. It's a notion that cobbles together the Lacanian understanding of the "love object" (usually the objet a, that which is desired but cannot be captured and for which other objects are usually mistaken substitutes) and Kristeva's notion of "the abject," material traces, tokens, or (bodily) objects of death. The voice abject is perhaps best captured by the notion of "the cry": an infant speaks of its abjection, its proximity to death, in the shrieks of hunger. But there are elements of the voice abject in the grief-stricken who groan uncontrollably, and the lovers gasping and moaning in that momentary loss of self, la petite morte. Perhaps it's the strange conjunction of the unconscious memory of our own infantile cries and the older recognition of the primal scene--particularly, the sounds of one's parents dying, that lends abjection over to sex.

Today the news broke stateside that a British tabloid's "gruntometer" had recorded tennis star Maria Sharapova grunting on court at 101.2 decibels (about as loud as a police siren). Apparently tennis grunting is quite controversial in the UK, inviting censure and offending proper Brit tennis fans (especially women). It's not a big deal in the states; as I recall the Williams sisters grunt quite a bit, and nothing is made of it. Nevertheless, some have theorized that the grunting is part of a deliberate strategy to startle opponents, which is starting to draw counter-grunts. Sharapova has denied any grunting strategery, insisting it is the natural consequence of energy exploding as the ball is whacked with a lot of force.

Of course, I find the controversy and the "gruntometer" amusing, to say the least. But it is also very interesting because the "grunt" has been given a kind of agency, and the issue orbits control: Are these players in control of their grunting, as cynics suggest, or are they involuntary? I would seem to be the case that people are much more comfortable with the idea that the grunts are strategic, or perhaps, that they for some reason assist the player in hitting the ball harder. What disturbs the Brits is the possibility that Sharapova is right, that the grunt has an agency of its own, and perhaps, the game of tennis itself is governed not so much by skill but . . . well, death. "Release," whether on the dance floor, or in the bedroom, or at the end of life, is surrender—"giving it up" (the theme, of course, of the famous Postal Service album which is so catchy).

The voice abject is a curious thing, funny and disturbing (indeed, it's the topic of the next book). I think I need to let myself grunt more:uuuugggggghhhhhheherrrrrraaaaahhhhh.