Archive for the ‘politics’ tag
There’s probably a peanut in there somewhere…
I’m trying to work up interest for my current book It Didn’t Happen Here, an analysis of the failures of American Socialism. It’s got all the hallmarks of “doctoral thesis turned to book”, and you may have guessed that that doesn’t translate to “gripping prose style”. Thing is, I have a very hard time just scanning: usually once I crack the cover on a book I tend to go all the way through.
But I think I know the answer to this already: Marxism, while providing a compelling analysis of societies where capital is aligned with fixed class structures, it has not proved to be a useful predictive tool in any meaningful sense. It combines the rationalism of the enlightenment with the mechanistic world view of the nineteenth, and as such has a hard time imagining situations where groups of people act in irrational ways. For example: the church in Europe has been for the most part an agent of class conservatism, even after the reformation. In the US, religious vitality has more often than not been the result of class resentment and anti-authoritarianism. Thus it was much easier to organize a proletariat in Europe by attacking organized religion.
So perhaps the question shouldn’t be why didn’t Socialism succeed in America, but rather why should we expect it to? In any event, unless something unexpected interrupts the assertion-proof-citation-conclusion cycle, I may have to make an exception and just move along to another volume.
Tags: books, daily photo, politicsRelated posts
Two trucks in two days….
This big odd thing was in front of my door today, pumping or flushing something underneath the street. ConEd sent it out, but I have no ideas for what purpose.
I’m back in the office, on what is usually a day off, trying to finish up some stuff before a teaching trip to Tennessee. Communication seems to be the watchword of the day, and we’re all struggling to come up with the right words to give shape to our plans.
Last night’s opening was quite nice, what with Lolita showing up, a quick dinner with her and my friend Lynne and then a surprise run in with another friend on the way to the subway. It all felt very civilized, and at the event I got to make the acquaintance of Napoleon, a kissy and excitable french bulldog. I’m hoping to get some more work done this weekend, along with getting my fridge cleaned out tonight and hopefully some laundry and other mundanities.
Lyn asked me about my feelings about the president last night. I couldn’t say much then, beyond not being over surprised. I do think that he needs to give up on the idea of winning over his opposition. They are too high on their bile at this point for him to even make a case. With the advent of Fox news, we now have a case where frothing yahooism has become a profit making business, where candidates can spend years amasing money and speaking past the government in a way that negates traditional notions of bipartisan governance. They make more money by yelling and sniping, without ever having to govern, to fix problems and deliver services. It is in the proposal for those fixes that all of the risk of politics resides. So Obama is hamstrung in some ways, because people don’t have to work with him if they don’t want and get more mileage out of their refusal.
Tags: daily photo, friends, my block, politicsRelated posts
Introducing the rantlet…
Listening to Grace singing “Bullshit”, if singing is really the right word for it. Doesn’t matter: I still love her. There’s a whole degree of “I’m bat-shit crazy, now and for eternity” in her whole career that I just have to admire.
I’m suffering from the inverse of the usual web rhetoric inflation impulse; every time I think to comment on something I pull back from really letting rip, stopped by {1}the prospect of having to reason out an entire argument in the slender minutes I’ve given over to writing and {2}an unwillingness to to contribute to the cartoon violence of online utterance, where every emotion must be at the highest pitch in order to be heard, resulting in much heat but little light.
But I can’t tamp down always, so here are a few sanity preserving rantlets: utterly unreasonable, barely considered argument flavored bits.
1.I’m sick of transparency, shading and gradients as the dominant style in user interface design. I want my computer screen to be plain and flat and beautiful like a Paul Rand page. Stop making everything look like cough drops you geeks.
2. It was turning to Satan that doomed Haiti, Pat Robertson? Really??? I’m mocking god right now, when do I get my earthquake? Art Clokey just died. Was god mad at him too? Geology is not Theology.
3.Obama has been proceeding with the Dem party playbook vis-a-vis queer people: make nice sounds during the campaign, once in office, hire people with little fanfare, and publicly distance yourself from any legislative or executive action. Treat em like crap a bit to show you’re a centerist. Explain that the time isn’t right for plainspoken advocacy. Delay until the second term and then forget about it. It’s not surprising to me, but it is tiring in it’s banality. I believe he’s a smart guy, but he’s pulled some dick moves.
4.Big time NYC art dealer Jeffrey Deitch has been appointed director of LAMoCA. Is this a good or bad thing? Should art dealers be Museum Directors? People point to his “good taste”. He’s a nice guy, I’ve always gotten along with him, and he owns an early piece of mine. But this is a lazy hire: his “taste” is irrelevant, since Directors don’t directly decide what hangs in Museums, curators and accessions committees do. Directors basically manage the Board of Trustees and beg other rich folks for money. Not so very different from what art dealers do. So it’s not such a big stretch, but I call it lazy because it’s one more surrender of cultural life and infrastructure to market success. It’s like electing Bloomberg mayor. It reinforcement of the idea that museums should be trophy halls for big game collectors. Sure they can be that, but why not try to think of them as something else? People worry about his conflict of interest issues, which is laughable in the context of overwhelming market reverence through out most of the museum world. Here’s one of MoCA’s biggest problems: they can’t figure out why any one should go there. And Deitch won’t be able to fix that with business savvy. It’s a class issue.
OK, that last was a bit long for a rantlet. BUT AT LEAST IT’S OFF MY CHEST. (whoops, must remember to turn on my caps lock earlier next time)
Tags: anger, art world, computer, daily photo, design, obama, politics, rantletRelated posts
Watching the Parade go by
I’m not surprised at the outcome of today’s New York State Senate vote. The state legislature had a history of defeating any Gay rights bill brought before it for decades, and in the current state climate, the fact that Governor Paterson had made a stand for the bill almost guaranteed its failure. Still I’m disappointed that momentum has stalled on this issue, primarily because I want it to be resolved so that it will cease to be the monomania of the progressive sexuality movement. I’ve said it before , but here is my view on the whole thing: People should be free to formalise their relationships through any sort of ceremony they wish, with the corollary that the state has no business favoring one sort of arrangement over another, especially when those ceremonies take place with in the boundaries of religion. Nation-states are good for building highways and delivering mail, not for determining the structures of families. Until such a time as the state does indeed truly separate itself from the church, it should afford all of its citizens equal access to all of the benefits it offers, including those of marriage.
So I guess you can count me as one of those queers who really is out to undermine the sacred institution of marriage. But those dicks in Albany still should have passed the fucking bill.
Tags: daily photo, Gay Marriage, politics, queer agendaRelated posts
Where’d you get that idea?
I got the idea not to vote for Bloomberg today from his cavalier disregard for the laws of the city he governs, by which I mean that he is of the new breed of plutocrats who change the rules when it suits them. I’m still pissed at the city council for caving in to his decision to upend the city’s term limits law. I also got the idea from the smug nannyism that has come to characterize his tenure, which will probably extend to more than a decade of my life once the votes are counted. If the term limits laws had not been in place he most certainly would not have been elected in the first place. No doubt Giuliani would have taken a third term as mayor.
At first, I didn’t quite know where I got the idea for last night’s drawing, knowing only that time was wasting and that it had been too long since I’d done one. Sometimes there’s something very specific I want to make one about, other times like last night, I let my mind drift until it comes on an idea. What’s interesting is that although the idea just seemed to pop into my head last night, in the middle of this morning I figured out what it must have been based on:
This poster fascinated me when the movie came out in 1975 and I think that it remained lodged somewhere in my brain for all the intervening years ultimately getting mashed up with something like this Philip Guston:
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New York to Kinksters: Don’t Be It, Damn It…
At last night’s TES meeting someone who has been around New York’s leather life for a long time talked about the “scene getting bland” in the midst of reminiscing about the Hellfire Club. Their observation was not dissimilar to those made many times in my circles, and for the most part everyone seems content to let it pass as a truism and move on. I was in a crabby mood however, and lobbed the observation that the the blanding of the scene is no accident, and that from where I stood, there has been a systematic attempt regulate non-conformist sexuality into invisibility in New York over the last twenty years. And then this afternoon a friend drew my attention to this article.
In terms of this specific case I should be honest: I haven’t been the hugest admirer of the way the previous Leather Weekend Street Festivals have been managed, but this story neatly encapsulates the issues at stake in New York right now. We are faced with a city administration that will do anything to make sure that the preening self regard of international consumption continues without disruption. Having “improved” the meat packing district and Chelsea by making it a safe haven for the overpriced inanities of Stella McCartney, hoteliers can dictate the terms under which their guests can be protected from the horrid prospect of encountering the people who populated the area for decades previous. Shopping must continue smoothly. Elegance and ease above all. Their response to the possibility of public sexuality? “Get a room. Hopefully one of our over priced ones.”
Why is this a big deal? After all, people can fire up their laptops and pickup a willing play partner on Recon or Fetlife. In some ways more people know about Kink than ever before. We have Folsom Street East every year. Private parties still happen around New York, and let’s face it, it’s more fun if it’s a little dirty and underground, right?
It’s a big deal because of the utter quietism that greeted this rollback of opportunity. New York currently has one and a half leather bars in a city of some eight million. One SM club that periodically issues cries for help. And no one is talking about it in a larger sense. Gay and Lesbian political groups have abandoned any attempts to talk about sexual behavior, in a bid to argue for gay people’s rights to replicate the nuclear family with the blessing of the state. NCSF, which we all should be a member and supporter of, has too few resources to do much more than put out fires, like last years rash of raids and closings of pro-dom houses and the attendant media frenzy.
Sex and urban life are places where we put our bodies on the line. There is a power to be gained from going outside away from the computer and seeing people do something you hadn’t thought of before, watching people in the exultation of endorphins and endurance, or witnessing the formal elegance of certain D/s couples, or being part of the antic fun of doing fucked up shit, that feels far different from having the “permission” to “do what we want behind closed doors”. When I am confronted by other people’s difference, when it’s inconvenient for me, when it disrupts my somnambulism, I am grateful. That’s what being a city dweller means. It does not mean being a mall shopping gated community denizen with better views and an account at “Design Within Reach”.
Shortly after moving back to New York in 1996, I was involved in the early days of something called Sex Panic!. As an organization it didn’t sustain itself, in part because (in my view) much of its activist stance was pitched at fighting a battle in academic queer studies circles, and it lacked a sense of how to really negotiate the ins and outs of community board politics, which would be the only way to address the development issues in New York. At least it had the will to argue for the sorts of things that few kinky people ever speak out for these days: the right to inhabit our own skin in public without shame or apology. It also was willing to draw the connections between the erosion of sexual freedoms with the erosion of public space. Guiliani presented the thuggish bullying face of that trend. Bloomberg presents the nannyish. Both of them agree that what is paramount good for the city is business, that development and displacement are somehow natural processes that only the irrational would think to question, and that making it all the same is making it all better. In every pot a CVS and every man a hedge fund manager and all that.
Commerce is one thing that makes cities great. Confusion is another. So the next time you’re thinking that you aren’t having as much fun as you used to, don’t blame it on the young folks who don’t know how to do things right or the Stand and Model crowd. Look instead at the shills in city hall who have been working so hard to make us all so much safer and saner. Did they do it with your consent? And if not when will you work up the nerve to tell them?
Tags: activism, anger, dissapointment, kink, new york life, politics, sexRelated posts
Angry? Blame Hiram Johnson…
It seems clear that Johnson believed that direct democracy could counter the machinations of entrenched special interests (in his day, mostly industrial trusts). What he could not have foreseen was the rise of a professional ballot initiative industry, one that succeeds fiscally whether or not it succeeds at the polls and thus has a vested interest in introducing ballot measures every election cycle. Thus, the California constitution is now hostage to the whims of single issue fundraisers and out of state interests, a group that now functions as an unelected shadow legislature.
I don’t blame the “fundies” for making valid use of a system to further their interests, however much I disagree with those interests. It also seems that the California State Supreme Court shares my dislike of the initiative process as a vehicle for deciding matters of basic human rights, but as was stated in their opinion: “our task in the present proceeding is not to determine whether the provision at issue is wise or sound as a matter of policy or whether we, as individuals, believe it should be a part of the California Constitution. Our role is limited to interpreting and applying the principles and rules embodied in the California Constitution, setting aside our own personal beliefs and values.” The constitution as it currently exists allows for such actions, and it is at the constitutional level that the problem needs to be tackled.
I’ve written about my own feelings regarding the question of gay marriage before. I still don’t believe in it personally, but of course believe that if a right is extended to some citizens of a nation it should be extended to all. The lesson of Hiram Johnson is that even the acts of self termed progressives can produce results far beyond their intention.
The real task in front of Californians is to find some way to balance Johnson’s ideals of direct democracy with some mechanism to prevent the continuing cynical abuse of of the initiative system.
Tags: california, Gay Marriage, History, politics, proposition 8Related posts
Watching the speech at work…
I felt sorry for Elizabeth Alexander, the poet selected to follow the President. Talk about a tough act to follow. And how intense has Dianne Feinstein’s life been? Seeing her make the introductions, looking remarkably similar to when she announced the Moscone/Milk shootings (I mean hairdo and all, not in bearing or emotional state) made me think that you truly cannot predict the arc of a life or the consequences of an act.
I’m back on the job after three days away (back to everything really – I’ve been without lj, wordpress, email and cellphone), most of them spent being sick, just at the point that I was congratulating myself on not getting sick like everyone around me. The hubris stick, it hurts.
Tags: daily photo, illness, obama, politicsRelated posts
Threshold part one, outer…
Snow coming on. The year winding down for all us Julian calendar types. People are posting their year end wrap-ups. Most of the time I don’t read them and we know this lil journal is self absorbed enough that I probabaly shouldn’t write one; I’m always chewing over the meaning, for me, of what just happened, to me. But here goes anyway:
When I think about where things are at just now for the country, here’s the image that comes up: we have been sick, sick in body and sick at heart for years now. Those who have believed in the current crop of leaders, have seen the economy turn to quicksand, the moral compromise of many of those leaders, and the elusiveness of the supposed security those leaders promised. For those of us who chafed under the Bush administration, we have endured the unease of seeing Cheney’s termites at work on the constitution, and watched helplessly while the rest of the world came to regard us as either rapacious porn peddlers or half crazed bullies. On either side, impotence and frustration. You can’t walk around with that kind of knowledge year after year and not feel its effect. So this year’s election asked us in effect: you’re sick, what are you prepared to do about it?
Amazingly, America somehow summoned the courage to go with the unknown, experimental treatment. We don’t know if it’s going to work. We haven’t even begun to feel the real effects of the pill we took this November. But one of the immediate benefits was the reaffirmation of the American willingness to strike out in a new direction, something that in itself is powerful in its implications. At a time when so many nations, frozen in their suffering, have been unable to make change or worse have chosen to retreat into more oppressive and centralized states (Russia, Cuba, Zimbabwe, Israel, Iran), America’s choice highlights the underlying strength of our governing principles.
Anyone who has done any sort of recovery work will recognize this feeling: you start going to meetings and you start experiencing the “Pink Cloud”: hey I decided to stop drinking and now all my problems are solved! I can pay my rent! I feel great about everyone, and so on. After a short time comes the inevitable crash: the problems that one was turning away from with addiction are separate from the the addiction itself. And so you have to begin the painful work of facing each of those problems sober. It can feel scary and tempt one to despair to see the full extent of the mess the binge has caused. It’s this queasiness that I feel the country is in now. The full extent of our challenges remain unknown, and as they come into focus it’s tempting to question our choice to face them. And many are bone weary. But the choice was the right one
Tags: daily photo, emotion, end of year, politicsRelated posts
Color me…
…crabby.
First thing:
This morning I heard Barney Frank on NPR explaining his support for the proposed auto industry bailout, which seemed to boil down to the argument that if the auto makers declare bankrupcy, it will allow them to stick it to their union employees. When asked what amount he would cap the federal cash infusion at, he blustered and changed the topic. All in all it was a performance that smelt of flim-flam. My feeling is this: US auto companies have ignored the implications of their business practices for decades, in essence betting on a market model that it turns out was the wrong one. Supposedly, when you do that in a market economy, you lose your stake and too bad. You shouldn’t be able to go to the federal government, reaching through them into the pockets of your customers for an advance on your allowance so that you can spin the wheel again. Frank’s bullshitting didn’t answer why these businesses should get another chance, especially when there are other players in the field who are not in the same position.
Second thing:
My HP desktop has continued to prove itself to be craptacular – not in a huge, bursting into flames way, but in a a dozen little stupid habits that it has that make it hard to work with. Contrary to what Microsoft asserts, my familiarity with Vista has not bred in me any joyous appreciation of its innate goodness. If anything, I loathe it even more now than when I first started working with it.
Third thing:
I have too damn much going on, such that I’m becoming forgetful about what my commitments are. For some reason Google calendar isn’t helping me. I think I need to devote a few hours to simple paper shuffling to get a better sense of the lay of the land. I’m drifting into that state where I’m becoming afraid to pick up the phone because every call might be a reminder of something I didn’t do. Perhaps some of this is related to the upcoming show.
Utterly unrelated non-crabby observation:
I was talking with a friend who works in reality television and they said “God, the deadlines; it’s just like when I used to work in porn” and a lightbulb went off for me: that’s what all these Bravo shos are. They stand in the same relationship to careers as pron does to sexual relationships. All the boring parts are gone and you cut right to the achievement. Unlike in an actual career, where it takes a lifetime and you can never be sure if you’ve succeeded or not, these shows package “being a chef” into a series of carefully times obstacles and mile markers, culminating in the big money shot where the winner is revealed, and indeed gets money. We watch for the expression on the winner’s face the same way we wait for the orgasm in a porn film.
Tags: anger, politics, project runway