Here’s something that has been puzzling me. I mentioned a few posts ago that my infant daughter’s first word was “cracker.” Now, nearly every white person I have told this to has immediately made some joke on the order of, “is she talking about her daddy?” (I am white; my wife and daughter are black). No black people to whom I have told this have had any such reaction. Indeed, my wife, and other black people, have expressed complete puzzlement as to why so many white people would spontaneously make this “joke.” So, my own question is this: why do so many white people seem obsessed with black people supposedly calling white people “crackas” (which they freely interchange with “cracker”)? What kind of strange racial imaginary is behind all this?
Here’s something that has been puzzling me. I mentioned a few posts ago that my infant daughter’s first word was “cracker.” Now, nearly every white person I have told this to has immediately made some joke on the order of, “is she talking about her daddy?” (I am white; my wife and daughter are black). No black people to whom I have told this have had any such reaction. Indeed, my wife, and other black people, have expressed complete puzzlement as to why so many white people would spontaneously make this “joke.” So, my own question is this: why do so many white people seem obsessed with black people supposedly calling white people “crackas” (which they freely interchange with “cracker”)? What kind of strange racial imaginary is behind all this?
I kind of think the Harry Potter books are merely OK reading, not particularly great. And I do think they are ultimately right wing and crypto-Christian, as has been recently argued. The great contemporary children’s author is not J.K. Rowling, but the anti-religious humanist, Philip Pullman. But, that said, I have no sympathy for the current high-minded backlash of anti-Potterism…
I kind of think the Harry Potter books are merely OK reading, not particularly great. And I do think they are ultimately right wing and crypto-Christian, as has been recently argued. The great contemporary children’s author is not J.K. Rowling, but the anti-religious humanist, Philip Pullman. But, that said, I have no sympathy for the current high-minded backlash of anti-Potterism…
Continue reading “Anti-Harry Potter-ism”
I’ve been listening a lot lately to Miles Davis’ On the Corner, originally released in 1972. I am in general partial to Miles’ early-70s electronic period, but On the Corner is unique. More than thirty years later, this album still sounds absolutely radical, fresh, and contemporary. It’s swirling, propulsive funk, probably the most abrasive, explosive music Miles ever made. Pure rhythmic bliss, riffs weaving in and out, dense but never murky, atonal but never grating, “world music” (listen to those Indian tablas) but never sounding like mere touristic sampling. On the Corner can be heard behind nearly every interesting musical innovation of the last decade or so, from Aphex Twin to Timbaland to D’Angelo to UK drum ‘n’ bass and garage to microglitch, but in a real sense none of these artists or trends have yet matched its full intensity.
I’ve been listening a lot lately to Miles Davis’ On the Corner, originally released in 1972. I am in general partial to Miles’ early-70s electronic period, but On the Corner is unique. More than thirty years later, this album still sounds absolutely radical, fresh, and contemporary. It’s swirling, propulsive funk, probably the most abrasive, explosive music Miles ever made. Pure rhythmic bliss, riffs weaving in and out, dense but never murky, atonal but never grating, “world music” (listen to those Indian tablas) but never sounding like mere touristic sampling. On the Corner can be heard behind nearly every interesting musical innovation of the last decade or so, from Aphex Twin to Timbaland to D’Angelo to UK drum ‘n’ bass and garage to microglitch, but in a real sense none of these artists or trends have yet matched its full intensity.
I’ve redesigned the blog by using the templates kindly provided by empty pages.
I was alerted by Boing Boing to Warren Ellis’s new issue of Planetary, which is also a Batman (!) comic: Planetary/Batman: NIght on Earth (illustrated by John Cassaday). This is the most hilarious pisstake on the Caped Crusader since Grant Morrison presented him as a schizophrenic unable to resist the logic of a deliriously postmodern Joker in Arkham Asylum. In Ellis’ vision, a passage through a series of alternate Earths, with alternate Gotham Cities, gives us glimpses of a variety of Batman incarnations (Batmen? Batmans?), from raging psychopathic vigilante to empathetic New Ager (well, almost). It’s ridiculous to the point of nearly being sublime. Another direct hit for the incredibly prolific Mr. Ellis. (Did I mention that I am an obsessive reader of his blog, Die Puny Humans, as well?)
I was alerted by Boing Boing to Warren Ellis’s new issue of Planetary, which is also a Batman (!) comic: Planetary/Batman: NIght on Earth (illustrated by John Cassaday). This is the most hilarious pisstake on the Caped Crusader since Grant Morrison presented him as a schizophrenic unable to resist the logic of a deliriously postmodern Joker in Arkham Asylum. In Ellis’ vision, a passage through a series of alternate Earths, with alternate Gotham Cities, gives us glimpses of a variety of Batman incarnations (Batmen? Batmans?), from raging psychopathic vigilante to empathetic New Ager (well, almost). It’s ridiculous to the point of nearly being sublime. Another direct hit for the incredibly prolific Mr. Ellis. (Did I mention that I am an obsessive reader of his blog, Die Puny Humans, as well?)
My ten-month-old daughter’s first word is “cracker”; she likes to eat various sorts of biscuits, cookies, crackers, teething biscuits, etc., and this is her term for all of them. Sometimes she speaks the word, as if asking for a cracker. But she always repeats the word a number of times, whenever we give her one. What’s striking is the happiness with which she repeats the word; her pleasure at being able to say “cracker,” her delight at having expressed a meaning, far exceeds the pleasure she gets from eating the cracker itself. A pretty good exemplification, I think, of what it means to be human.
Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is an effectively creepy film about work, business, and emptiness. The protagonist is a management/consultant/financial type, who can’t bear to tell his wife and family (or even emotionally admit to himself) that he has lost his job; so he drives around all day, fantasizing details of his busy work schedule in calls home to his wife on his mobile phone, then finally shows up late in the evening, exhausted, to play his role as husband and father & fall into bed. As this film goes on, all this escalates, as he fabulates about new jobs for which he even seems to be writing business reports and proposals, pitches fake investments to his friends, and digs himself further and further into a hole of debts and fabrications. The film is almost terrifying in its evocation of an uncanny emotional blankness that could just as well be the actuality of work in the business world, as it is the protagonist’s self-deceiving simulation of such work. Cantet convincingly imagines the affect of privileged bourgeois life in late capitalism, and it isn’t a pretty sight.
Laurent Cantet’s Time Out is an effectively creepy film about work, business, and emptiness. The protagonist is a management/consultant/financial type, who can’t bear to tell his wife and family (or even emotionally admit to himself) that he has lost his job; so he drives around all day, fantasizing details of his busy work schedule in calls home to his wife on his mobile phone, then finally shows up late in the evening, exhausted, to play his role as husband and father & fall into bed. As this film goes on, all this escalates, as he fabulates about new jobs for which he even seems to be writing business reports and proposals, pitches fake investments to his friends, and digs himself further and further into a hole of debts and fabrications. The film is almost terrifying in its evocation of an uncanny emotional blankness that could just as well be the actuality of work in the business world, as it is the protagonist’s self-deceiving simulation of such work. Cantet convincingly imagines the affect of privileged bourgeois life in late capitalism, and it isn’t a pretty sight.
28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, is a vivid horror film in the mode of George Romero (the Living Dead trilogy, of course, but also his excellent, although lesser-known The Crazies), but updated for the new century, in terms of its cinematography (lots of shock cuts in the violent sequences) and overall attidutes (a bit more sentimental than Romero, but also more, how do I say this, pragmatic). A plague turns nearly all of England into zombie-like enraged maniacs, bent on spreading their disease by biting others. A small group of uninfected people try, against all odds, to stay alive. Horror is both the most visceral and the most intellectual of film genres, and 28 Days Later succeeds on both counts. The film works largely because of its pacing: Boyle understands the rhythms of dread, anticipation, and surprise, and he captures those scary moments when nothing is happening, but for that very reason it is impossible to feel safe, because something horrible might happen at any moment, and especially at those moments when you finally do relax, and don’t expect trouble. There’s also the visual poetry of London, and the British countryside, strangely devoid of people, though filled with their garbage and other detritus; it’s more disturbing in its way than scenes of outright ruin (destroyed buildings, etc) would have been. Though the film does have one eerie, almost apocalyptic moment, when our fleeing protagonists see Manchester burning in the distance. In terms of intellectual content, the film rethinks our post-AIDS ideas/dreads/paranoia about contagion, and also uses the aftermath of catastrophe scenario to reflect on our contemporary remakings of gender. (It’s hard to be more specific without giving things away, but let’s just say the film both gives a positive account of a new sensitive heterosexual masculinity, and reflects quite gruesomely on the laddie backlash that has been strong in both the UK and the US in recent years). All in all, I cannot say that this is a ground-breaking horror film, but it is a memorable and affecting one.
28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, is a vivid horror film in the mode of George Romero (the Living Dead trilogy, of course, but also his excellent, although lesser-known The Crazies), but updated for the new century, in terms of its cinematography (lots of shock cuts in the violent sequences) and overall attidutes (a bit more sentimental than Romero, but also more, how do I say this, pragmatic). A plague turns nearly all of England into zombie-like enraged maniacs, bent on spreading their disease by biting others. A small group of uninfected people try, against all odds, to stay alive. Horror is both the most visceral and the most intellectual of film genres, and 28 Days Later succeeds on both counts. The film works largely because of its pacing: Boyle understands the rhythms of dread, anticipation, and surprise, and he captures those scary moments when nothing is happening, but for that very reason it is impossible to feel safe, because something horrible might happen at any moment, and especially at those moments when you finally do relax, and don’t expect trouble. There’s also the visual poetry of London, and the British countryside, strangely devoid of people, though filled with their garbage and other detritus; it’s more disturbing in its way than scenes of outright ruin (destroyed buildings, etc) would have been. Though the film does have one eerie, almost apocalyptic moment, when our fleeing protagonists see Manchester burning in the distance. In terms of intellectual content, the film rethinks our post-AIDS ideas/dreads/paranoia about contagion, and also uses the aftermath of catastrophe scenario to reflect on our contemporary remakings of gender. (It’s hard to be more specific without giving things away, but let’s just say the film both gives a positive account of a new sensitive heterosexual masculinity, and reflects quite gruesomely on the laddie backlash that has been strong in both the UK and the US in recent years). All in all, I cannot say that this is a ground-breaking horror film, but it is a memorable and affecting one.
Well, the other shoe has dropped. The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will sue individuals who are engaging in unauthorized file sharing. We can expect hundreds of lawsuits by the end of the summer. Of course, everyone is commenting on this, usually either with outrage or grudging, fatalistic acceptance. I might as well put in my two cents too. Especially since there are certain aspects of this case that have not been sufficiently discussed…
Well, the other shoe has dropped. The Recording Industry Association of America has announced that it will sue individuals who are engaging in unauthorized file sharing. We can expect hundreds of lawsuits by the end of the summer. Of course, everyone is commenting on this, usually either with outrage or grudging, fatalistic acceptance. I might as well put in my two cents too. Especially since there are certain aspects of this case that have not been sufficiently discussed…
Continue reading “RIAA Lawsuits”
Scientists have recently discovered a mechanism for genetic repair used by the Y chromosome in human males. The Y chromosome does not have a partner chromosome to pair with, and recombine with during meiosis. Recombination is one of the ways that chromosomes compensate for mutations, transcription errors, and other potentially lethal alterations; so, without the opportunity to recombine, the Y chromosome would seem extremely vulnerable, and indeed this has often been used to explain why it is so much smaller than the X chromosome, or any of the other paired chromosomes in human cells. But it turns out the Y chromosome has a way of compensating for this difficulty. Large areas of the chromosome are palindromic, that is to say, they read the same in either direction. This means that the chromosome is able to, and in fact does, fold over and recombine with itself. This explains why, although the Y chromosome has far less genes than the X or any of the other, it does in fact have something like 78 active genes, which is more than anyone expected. This discovery is interesting, although scarcely earth-shattering. But the scientists who made it cannot resist the temptation to blow it up into something far more significant than it really is: “Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee…We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it, Dr. Page said. But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” Can Dr. Page be serious? Even if his calculations of the numbers of genes involved is correct (which I doubt), all this shows is that not all genes are equally important, or equally active. While interspecies gene comparisons can give us a sense of how closely related two species are, they do not give us any indication of how “similar” or “dissimilar” those two species are, in any meaningful sense of those words. To say that human males are as similar to chimpanzee males as they are to human females is nonsense, if only because human beings and chimpanzees cannot interbreed and produce fertile (or any) offspring. The second half of Dr. Page’s comment–with its cliched invocation of opposing “political correctness”–suggests that he is overinterpreting his results in accordance with an agenda that has nothing to do with science. All in all, I’m reminded of a witticism my brother once uttered: “Isn’t it strange that I have 98.5% of my genes in common with a chimpanzee, but only 50% of my genes in common with my own son?”
Scientists have recently discovered a mechanism for genetic repair used by the Y chromosome in human males. The Y chromosome does not have a partner chromosome to pair with, and recombine with during meiosis. Recombination is one of the ways that chromosomes compensate for mutations, transcription errors, and other potentially lethal alterations; so, without the opportunity to recombine, the Y chromosome would seem extremely vulnerable, and indeed this has often been used to explain why it is so much smaller than the X chromosome, or any of the other paired chromosomes in human cells. But it turns out the Y chromosome has a way of compensating for this difficulty. Large areas of the chromosome are palindromic, that is to say, they read the same in either direction. This means that the chromosome is able to, and in fact does, fold over and recombine with itself. This explains why, although the Y chromosome has far less genes than the X or any of the other, it does in fact have something like 78 active genes, which is more than anyone expected. This discovery is interesting, although scarcely earth-shattering. But the scientists who made it cannot resist the temptation to blow it up into something far more significant than it really is: “Men and women differ by 1 to 2 percent of their genomes, Dr. Page said, which is the same as the difference between a man and a male chimpanzee or between a woman and a female chimpanzee…We all recite the mantra that we are 99 percent identical and take political comfort in it, Dr. Page said. But the reality is that the genetic difference between males and females absolutely dwarfs all other differences in the human genome.” Can Dr. Page be serious? Even if his calculations of the numbers of genes involved is correct (which I doubt), all this shows is that not all genes are equally important, or equally active. While interspecies gene comparisons can give us a sense of how closely related two species are, they do not give us any indication of how “similar” or “dissimilar” those two species are, in any meaningful sense of those words. To say that human males are as similar to chimpanzee males as they are to human females is nonsense, if only because human beings and chimpanzees cannot interbreed and produce fertile (or any) offspring. The second half of Dr. Page’s comment–with its cliched invocation of opposing “political correctness”–suggests that he is overinterpreting his results in accordance with an agenda that has nothing to do with science. All in all, I’m reminded of a witticism my brother once uttered: “Isn’t it strange that I have 98.5% of my genes in common with a chimpanzee, but only 50% of my genes in common with my own son?”