the battle rages on

I'm glad Carly Simon's son finally stepped up and addressed the question "Who's better: Snoop Dogg or Carly Simon's son?" head on. Check his sick new version of the radio edit of The Doggfather's latest single on his myspace:

http://www.myspace.com/bentaylorofficial

oh, here's Carly Simon's son:


Isn't it cool when white people respect black people things? JK. Snoop Dogg isn't really a black person's thing. Isn't it cool when white people make jokes based on the assumption that they are clearly lamer than black people, and in doing so reveal how desperately they want to believe that some better, realer, cooler, not boring and lame way of life really does exist, even though we all secretly know it totally doesn't? Anyway, keep the dream alive and give a listen to Carly Simon's son! I'd here like to point out a similar structure in my argument about why you should never actually fuck a butthole.

Hey! how about let's forget that.

This reminds me that I've been slipping on the MC's "Holler of the Week" feature. This week's top holler went a little something like this:
me: Ooo girl, you're looking like like a young Carly Simon tonight
girl: ....
The girl turned out to be a horse fetus.
::::a-ZINGAGE!!!!!::::::
(cause Carly Simon looks like a horse fetus.)

Shop Talk

I just came across this while reading up on “dialogue” for a paper (that’s coming along fantastically, I'm glad you asked). It’s from Postmodern Culture 2.1 , and it’s actually by Jerome McGann, not “Sheri Meghan,” but he is using that pseudonym to make a point about dialogue, context, and performativity [ed. note: gay].
That thing you smell is the musk of early-90s-academic angst. But if you find that appealing, then read on (and if not, then skip ahead to my glorious unpacking):

AN ABC OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY: A DIALOGUE by SHERI MEGHAN

a. A: As Moses Hadas always used to say: "The only interesting talk is shop talk."
b. B: All shops are closed shops, more or less. Suffocating. If you're not a professor and you find yourself, by circumstance, dropped among a bunch of professors at lunch, how interesting do you imagine you will find their conversation?
c. C: Well, suppose you came there as an ethnographer. Then the shop talk might seem very interesting indeed.
d. A: But it wouldn't be shop talk anymore it would be ethnographic information. And if the professors were conscious of themselves as ethnographic subjects, even they would not be producing shop talk any longer.
e. B: A blessed event, the coming of the ethnographer to the ingrown conversations of the closed shop. And more blessed still should she come to the smug halls of late- 20th century academe. Enlightened halls, open--or so their citizens like to think--to every kind of talk.
f. A: And so they are.
g. B: Only if the talk is framed in a certain way. The academy is the scene where knowledge has been made an object of devotion. Its two gods, or two-personed god, are science (positive knowledge) and philology (the knowledge of what is known). It is a cognitive scene, a scene of calculations and reflections. It is the country for old men. Children, whether of woman or of Jesus born, do not come there--unless it be to leave behind their childlikeness.
h. C: They do not come because the knowledge of the childlike person is experiential rather than reflective.
i. B: Socrates in his trance, Alcibiades in his cups?
j. C: They will do nicely as signs of what both justifies and threatens every symposium, every state--the Outsiders that are within. Admired and hated, sought and feared; finally--because every state, every closed shop, is what it is--expelled.
k. B: And what then of your ethnographer, that darling of the modern academy? Is it not the ultimate dream of Wissenschaft that all things should submit to reflection, that experience itself should become--field work? In the ancient world of Plato that sick dream appeared as the Socratic philosopher; more recently it came as the nightmare of the positive scientist, mystified forever in the figure of Wordsworth's Newton, "voyaging through strange seas of thought, alone." Mary Shelley lifted his mask and we glimpsed the haunted face as Victor Frankenstein, whose monstrous creature is the index of Frankenstein's soul as it has been observed through the lens of an outsider's--in this case, a woman's--sense of the pitiful.
l. C: So you don't care for ethnographers either.
m. B: Well, they are our latest Faustian types. Benevolent colonialists. Today their shop talk--it is called Cultural Studies--has given the modern academy some of its most effective means of self-mystification. As if the academy could harbor within itself its own outsider, its own critical observer.
n. A: That "critical observer" you are imagining is the real illusion. All observers are inside the shop. If they weren't they wouldn't even know about the shop, couldn't see it, and hence couldn't talk at all. Shop talk is "interesting" because people share their differences.
o. C: So for you it is not merely that "The only interesting talk is shop talk"; more than that, "Shop talk is all there is!"
p. A: Exactly. But some shop talk is more interesting than other shop talk.
q. C: And what makes it more interesting?
r. A: Every shop has many conversations going on inside of it all the time. The most interesting conversations are those that get everybody else talking--talking about them, or talking in their terms.
s. B: But where do those new and interesting conversations come from? Inside the shop?
t. A: Evidently.
u. C: Why "evidently"? Is the rapt Socrates inside or outside? And what about Alcibiades--drunk or sober? We all remember how, and where, he died.
v. B: Inside or outside, it doesn't matter. The point is that every shop must be something other than what anyone, inside or outside, could think or imagine it to be. The shop must be, in some sense, beside itself. Irrational. Other than itself. Otherwise it cannot accommodate--either conceptually or experientially-- anything "new."
w. A: Put it that way if you like. Shop talk is often irrational. Just so you don't bore us with ideas about absolute critical differentials.
x. B: Have it so if you like. Just so you don't insult us with ideas about knowing or accommodating otherness. No shop--no academy--can do so. Otherness comes like a wolf to a sheepfold. Later, when the damage is done, the priests--let us say, the professors--will indulge their shop talk of explanations.

The idea of discourses as shops got me thinking. In analogies!

1. Shop of academia = the Bibelot Shop (sorry people who didn’t grow up in Minnesota.)
2. Shop of the MC = Creative Kidstuff (sorry again Eastcoasters: my analogical frame of reference is Midwestern. Deal with it. It will shovel your walk or yield up its parking space if you ask nicely.)
3. Shop of law = Jamba Juice
4. Shop of evolutionary psychology = Old Navy. In that it falls apart at the seams as soon as you touch it, and that it’s basically just Banana Republic (=the shop of anthropology) but nominally less racist.
5. Shop of the blogosphere = IKEA. Admit it, we're all happy it's around.

Lies our mothers told us

Remember alienation? It used to be how we talked about the manner in which the contemporary condition was destroying our human essence. It turned about to be a lie. You forgot about it. There was no reason not to. Well, it's back -- IN THREE NEW FORMS

1.
The first is Facebook alientation, earlier outlined in an architecture review published in this very blog. It goes like this:



And then you have to think:
1) Who am I to even judge? Good for them. Having a good time. I bet pictures of me and my friends look like that to them.
2) Secretly I know that pictures of me and my friends look cooler
3) They don't, do they? That wouldn't make any sense. I'm just a facebook person like these friends. I guess I'm fine with that. Equality. Democracy. America in the Digital Age. I'm fine with that.
4) Who am I?


2.
The second is called "understanding the noble effort of I Am Charlotte Simmons alientation." It's when you see tweens hip hopping around on roller shoes, listening to music they call "emo," which is short for "emotional," and engaging in a fad called "cutting" or "cut" where they use store bought razor blades and actually cut the soft flesh of their young bodies...because they like the scars. "You ever feel real pain?" Jordan hissed. "eYe KNO PA1N 4 REL," C.W. "instant messaged" in return, bemusedly.
Anyway, it's when you look at young people and can't figure out what they're doing.

what are they doing?


3.

The third is when you learn a new way not to trust your friends because you see Nora Dunn on Saturday Night Live reruns and realize that you could just hang out with a group of people for, like, 6 years and nobody would ever think to care enough about you to let you know that no one really liked you or anything you did besides stand around.

There, I said it.

I wrote a snap

Hey guys. Good to see you all. You know what, let's just get into it. Here goes:

The irony of the of the titular "That's So Raven" character is that if Raven Symone were really psychic she never would have allowed herself to grow up.

OH SNAP

SNAP

SNAP





If anyone wants to start a snaps blog HIT ME UP.