I’m just going to shamelessly rip off Tommy (Sticks of Fire), who posted a local story, and I just couldn’t top (har har) the headline if I tried:

the ho’s on the bus go up and down

categories: tampa, sport, incredible, icon, smooth criminals by tommy @ 8:09 am

I have a quick follow-up to the nationwide story about the strip club love bus. It seems the bus had a brass pole installed, and two of the dancers were arrested for performing in an oratorical manner. Oh, and a customer was busted smoking pot. All of this just outside the Bucs game. You’d think the Minnesota Vikings were in town. Hey! I just came up with a brilliant idea that may save HARTline. I’ll have to flesh out the details, though.

Flesh Tommy? heh. heh.

I’m sure that’s amusing to a lot of cons who are convinced the socialists run the MSM and the campuses. Wot. Evah.

And, PS, hope you’re reading. I have got a bunch of client one on ones today so I’ll get to comments eventually. Then I’m going to write my 10 point action plan for world domination via Bitch | Lab.

Where Have All the Commies Gone? Weak campus political activism is bad for all
Published On 11/29/2005 12:09:11 AM

By JOHN HASTRUP
Crimson Staff Writer

I applied for this column to challenge what I though was the dominant leftist ideology that pervaded campus and hampered Harvard¹s academic purpose. Naively, I hoped to set down a beacon of rationality as a guiding light in a dark forest of liberal orthodoxy. Unfortunately, I have discovered few liberal excesses to denounce. I am no beacon, and we are covered not in darkness, but in a thick gray haze of purposelessness.

Harvard¹s student body is not just lacking the progressive vigor that led to the takeover of University Hall in 1969 to protest the Vietnam War, or the Mass. Hall occupation in 2001 to rally students against low worker wages. It is bereft of any vigor at all.

When political activism does occur on campus it is wishy-washy and bland. Even the most radical elements of the student body, such as the Student Labor Action Movement (SLAM), are surprisingly tame by historical standards. Instead of appealing to socialist notions of equality in their quest for higher wages, they couched their stance in terms of cost of living and prevailing wage rates. And in lieu of occupying Mass. Hall, they sent workers¹ children to Larry Summers¹ house on Halloween to ask for money for their families‹only to realize that he was not there because someone had leaked their plan beforehand.

The Undergraduate Council (UC) recently learned an important lesson about school politics when it tried to pass a simple nonbinding resolution in support of workers and reasonable wages. The outcry was not only from the Harvard College Republicans‹a group that incidentally has become so marginalized that is has been reduced to sending out whinny emails when it is offended by something. But voices all over campus stood up to denounce what they saw as a breach of the UC¹s fundamental purpose, which apparently is wasting money on concerts that never happen and failing to extend dining hall hours.

I am not saying that I truly want to go back to the days of boycotts and occupations, as they waste resources and class time. But I do admire the energy and optimism of the not-so-distant past that has recently escaped us.

Read the rest of “Where Have All the Commies Gone?” by John Hastrup

I found this political quiz voyeur-touring sitemeter stats on other people’s blogs, which I found fascinating, in so far as you can learn a little bit about the blogosphere’s incestuousness. I landed at Bad Bad Ivy’s blog. Ivy is a Maple Tree and she thinks she broke the quiz. :)

I also found the results interesting and I’m wondering if the these particular Libertarians are a little biased toward Liberals?

Now you can get your name spelled with Flickr photos. Purty nifty the things these people come up with to get traffic to their site, to brand the name, etc. etc. Give it away, build traffic, then. The ADS! And we all participate and have fun! Then, we bitch about the ads!

Just subtexting the spamdex for fun.

Chips will Gnome
conditionally
Hedge Boy you
should be ever red

Greeen bright Girl
memorizing me
Red right Boy
industriously

Player will
Greedy Circle Round
Hope Forecast
comparatively

Double or not
universally
Universal Lazy nothing
plenetarily

Soldier bad corner
when Pair Kill Boy Do
Con Hope Bet
tantalizingly

– that is all that

The blogosphere is like standing in a bar room getting drunk with your buds.

All of a sudden, a brawl breaks out. Silly ass drunks like me giggle or snarl or both, pouring a little beer from a plastic cup on their heads. There, take that fuckers. Thanks for ruining a perfectly lovely evening! Neither of them notice because they’re too busy tearing each other apart.

As you cleverly pour your beer on the brawlers, you feel the crowd start to move away from the brawling. You move with it, sometimes pushing and struggling against the overwhelming movement of the crowd, a crowd moving away from a center, often without really knowing why, except a vague notion that there’s some brawling going on, or someone needs to get through. Who knows?

The crowd’s moving.

So you move.

Back. Back. Back. It moves. Away from the brawling center. As it moves, minor brawls break out in the crowd, brawls sprinkled throughout a mass of humanity that is irrevocably moving — moving for reasons the crowd doesn’t understand. It is a crowd.

Out. Out. Out. It moves. Until next thing you know, you’re standing outside, in an alley, taking in the stench of stale beer and piss wondering how you and that mass of humanity got through the side door.

And there you are, alone, standing with a bunch of scattered strangers, looking for whoever you’d been hanging out with.

Standing under a dark blue midnight sky, cool brisk air dampening your nostiles and the pungent odor from the dumpster stinging your eyes, you look down.

The beer cup is empty.

So is the brawling center.

That by way of an answer to Happy Tutor. Tutor asks me some interesting questions. I replied, but thought I’d post here, too. I’d been thinking about this issue on and off for awhile now, especially after the exceedingly long and arduous work of doing both Max’s blog and the big ass Web site. And Michael Berube got me to thinking about it once again when he said that Max (of MaxSpeak) had given him hope about the blogosphere. I’ve been meaning to get back to him and ask if he would elaborate. But, I’m a lazy ass Bitch.

I don’t have any answers to Tutor’s questions. I’m about as dumbfounded about the notion that I’m some sort of leader or that I’m needed to help keep the revo going as I was when Mike Ballard said I was the US’s version of Alice Munro. Which is to say, the notion of taking a leadership role in a social movement or even of some blogcult is about as foreign to me as the idea that I’m some sort of fiction writer.

I’ll tell you a secret. Back when we first fired up the Pulp list? Back in 1999 was it? After all that work, building the site and slowly getting discussions going, and then spamming a bunch of lists with annoucements, I was exhausted. I felt like I’d given birth and I just wanted to kick back with a nice cup of coffee (with real cream and sugar!) and watch the show. I didn’t want to participate. I’d built something and I wanted to just watch it grow, invisible. It’s not that I don’t have something to say (HA!) or that I don’t like people, I just got a tremendous satisfaction out of building something, an infrastructure, that others were clearly enjoying. That made me happy.

As for the question of the blogosphere, community, and social movements…. Seriously- and I think I’ve said this before here — I don’t see how blogs are conducive to community. It’s one reason why I never started one.

Back when MaxSpeak first started out and told me about what he was doing, I thought the name and tagline said it all: MaxSpeak, You Listen! Max was being a little tongue-in-cheek, no doubt. Still, I didn’t like it much. It put me off because, having experienced the worlds of Bad Subjects and Pulp lists I saw community. LBO will never achieve that sort of community. The three post a day limit means that people are less likely to share the dorky, goofy, raunchy, chit chatty bullshit that, counterintuitively (or not?), is usually required to sustain communities in cyberspace. Even the highly contentious Politics list can cultivate a sense of community at times — precisely becaue we take time out to engage in discussions about our cat, pun fests, film reviews, and posting the latest photo of a blue-bellied flufferhub on the porch.

Blogs cultivate tourism — which is why I call visiting blogs voyeur-touring. It’s not that I’m dissing this blog, blogs in general, anyone who visits and participates here and/or elsewhere. I love it that people are commenting and I always think, Oh, I’d love to just type something up to get them all thinking their beautiful, nasty, crazy, ugly thoughts. Get me a cup of coffee — with real cream and sugar, sugah!

It’s just that I don’t see them as particularly or especially conducive to building communities — if what you’re talking about is the group of people who read and comment at a blog. As what they call a “resource” — as in the “resource mobilization” theory of social movements, then yeah, blogs can help sustain movement communities.

I want to say it’s (just) a medium. But then I think of McLuhan.

The medium is the message. The medium is the massage.

Blogs can help circulate information and the symbols, emblems, and icons that unite communities. They can remind us that we can do things, perhaps small things, but working together, we CAN googlebomb Shrubya. That might seem like small potatoes — and it is. But part of what any movement needs is short, sweet reminders that every once in a while they can make a difference, they can accomplish something. Working for social change is one, long, hard struggle. It can be horribly demoralizing. What sustains you is, occasionally, feeling you made a difference somewhere.

This desire to see blogs as a special new medium which will usher forth a new social movement is part of a search for what Amy Gutman calls a politics of conscious social reproduction. People want a politics where we ask one another if what we do every day reproduces the worlds we imagine when we think about justice, progress, and the good society.

Accordingly, there is no ‘outside’ to politics. The is no choice to political participation. Everything we do is always already political. Political participation is a fact of life because we live in and through political institutions and practices.

On such a view, participation in the social world, when justified by ‘private’ reasons such as “just earning a living” or “just having a fun,” is not good enough. And, any form of conventional political participation that is disciplined by ideological social control or constrained by a technocratic ethos is found wanting.

Our democratic dignity, it is said, can only be served by a politics of “responsible world construction’ or “conscious social reproduction.”

Blogs have been heraled as a mechanism that can enhance the politics of conscious social reproduction. They are seen as an alternative to the formalism of a rights-based democratic politics. Blogs are seen as a way for us to collectively define substantively good reasons for life’s concrete and situated practices.

From this standpoint, blogs are a way to save democratic politics from technicism. They are thought to be able to redeem interest judgments from the manipulation of images, to redeem representation from delegation to putative experts, to redeem collective zeal from bureaucratization, and to redeem empathy from the demagogues of sentimentality.

Yet, as a blog grows to have any measurable influence, they must become rationalized and commodified. The blog becomes an enterprise. Blogs are built around personalities, at first. As they become bigger, they must ratioanlize in order to produce their product. Gradually, the blog is about more than, say, Daily Kos, the person, and his particular take on politics. Now it’s become iconographic in the same way that the Freepers did. You could call someone a Freeper or say you read about it over at at Freeperville and everyone would nod knowingly. Now, you have KosKids, emblems of a certain kind of supposedly not party-line Democrat point of view(s).

But, as Max Weber astutely pointed out, rationaization is a disenchanting force.

Where most bloggers are concerned with the second ideal of the politics of conscious social reproduction, creating free spaces where political participation is not as constrained by technicism and is relatively free of the discipline of ideological social control, Tutor’s questions get at the first ideal of a politics of conscious social reproduction: asking not just that we create free, public, explicitly and overtly political spaces. Rather, that we also examine our motivations for our participation in life itself. For, afterall, on the view of an advocate of a politics of conscious social reproduction, everything is political.

Thus, on this view, justifying one’s participation as “just making a living” or “just having fun” is an uninterrogated claim. One must consciously, purposefully interrogate what one is actually doing. How is one’s behavior helping to create a world, the world one imagines when one thinks of things such as justice, progress, and the good society?

It is both exhilarating and agonizing to consider how, in the name of democracy, a social order might seek to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness. But perhaps such a politics of conscious social reproduction, when taken to an extreme, is just another name for the presumptuous intellectualism which the Scottish Moralists criticized in those who thought social life could be consciously planned. Perhaps the human spirit needs a space for play, a space free from the ambiguities of perpetually informed consent and perpetually interrogated socio-political praxis.

Perhaps social life is held together by a ’sort of center of opacity’ -a non-rational, non-contractural solidarity, the very solidarity that grows out of the chit chatty bullshit that most serious political people abhor. Perhaps good outcomes as well as bad are possible precisely because so much of social life is left unspoken, left unsaid. It is what we take for granted, what enables us to enjoy the chit chatty bullshit. Perhaps the linearity of spoken accountability favored by such a politics subverts the poetic simultaneities of practice. Perhaps the good that is served by practical judgment is subverted by having to defend it, always, on principle.

The beer cup is empty.

Oh, and that’s your Bitch How Tuesday. Have a little fun and cut loose once in a while, fuckers!

Chunk of Marble Falls Off of Supreme Court Building

WASHINGTON - A large chunk of marble has fallen from the facade of the Supreme Court building. Eyewitnesses on the scene say no one was injured when the large piece fell onto the steps where tourists normally enter the Supreme Court.

The large piece of marble fell from the building’s facade above the words, “Equal Justice Under Law,” just before 10 a.m.

The basketball-sized piece of marble landed on the steps near visitors waiting to enter the building. The marble was part of the dentil moulding that serves as a frame for the frieze of statues atop the court’s main entrance.

The justices are meeting to issue orders and hear arguments.

Just in case this is your bag. Or your badge?

G, a professor of rhetoric, makes some good points about the Victorian era. As for his first question? Probably not. I have, having lived among the so-called dregs of womanhood back in the old ‘hood. But as for g’s first question? I am not sure it matters. Sometimes, these things simply won’t be checked by a “reality-based community.” They circulate no matter how much reality is shoved in our face. No time to explain more at the moment.

G’s comments are thought-provoking, so I thought I’d elevate them out of the comments section.

Some comments amidst the fray. Re, “dress like a hooker”. I am wondering if the respondents have actually seen “real” hookers working. What they wear ain’t much like the clothes being described here.

Re Victorian “modesty,” propriety, or whatever. Turn the “properly dressed” Victorian woman sideways and what have you got? Tits and ass. Bustles and tightlaced corsets. And under the petticoats? Buttonhook high heeled boots. Crotchless bloomers. No “panties,” no brassieres. Those large families? They didn’t fall out of trees.

And how did Victorian hookers dress? On the street, like “ladies.” In the house, in dishabille, like ladies without the outergarments-stockings, garters, corsets, high heeled boots, braless decolettage.

Victorian society was obsessed with sex, and also highly “classed.” The economy apparently supported more rent boys and hookers than at any time in history, before or since. But it was very much two worlds. Respectability was exactly a middle class phenom. The real aristocracy didn’t have much truck with it, and the lower classes lived off of it as best they could.

We are certainly not a classless society but we are closer than the Victorians, and, I venture, regardless of appearances we are less obsessed with sex, we are more comfortable with it. We can watch, with a kind of amusement, the paroxysms of the proper over a pierced and bemedalled nipple at the super bowl on accounta chirrens are watchin. We can watch a jury have the equanimity to release Michael Jackson, not because they thought he was innocent, but in observation of the law defining “guilty” as established by the evidence presented “proving” that guilt as being “beyond a reasonable doubt.”

Cheers,
g

Porn ‘does not make sex objects’. You read that right. I’d have to see the research to make coherent comments, but one thing I wonder, are the women in these videos initiating sex and asking to be put into pretzel shapes that don’t ever seem especially enjoyable to me and, in fact, aren’t? I’ve never had a chance to ask another women if they think the same thing when watching these videos. But my thoughts were confirmed when I saw the half-hour doco on HBO, Katie Morgan: A porn star revealed.

In the doco, Katie talks about having bruises from doing it on uncarpeted stairs, twisted and contorted on stools, etc. etc. She also tells you all this while sitting on a stool, completely nekkid and all perky. Wait. She was wearing the 6 inch spike heels. She talks about growing up in a strictly religious family, homeschooled, and being very bright. She scores as a genius on the online IQ tests (whatever that means), but plays the ditzy blonde — and knows it.

Anyway, according to this Australian study, women in porn are not represented solely as sex objects. Now, personally, I’d have to see how they defined sexual subjectivity. If she’s saying, “I want to be contorted into a pretzel shape, with my head smashed against the corner of a hot tub, and I have to strain hard so my skull isn’t cracked open by a tub fixture,” then I’m thinking, uh, not really much sexual agency goin’ on there. (Not saying that some people don’t like this and want this, but I’ll bet they’re in the minority.)

Anyway, Bitch has work to do. And Happy Tutor, I haven’t forgotten you. I’ll be back when I can and will know more about my schedule on Thursday. (Perhaps even Wednesday)

Porn ‘does not make sex objects’
By Vera Devai
24-11-2005

AN Australian study has cast doubt on the commonly held view that pornography shows women as nothing more than sex objects.

The study, to be published in the noted international Journal of Sex Research, analysed 50 of the bestselling pornographic videos in Australia to find out whether people were represented as sex objects.

Queensland University Professor Alan McKee, who led the study, said researchers compared the way women and men were represented in each video.

They noted such things as who initiated the sex, whose pleasure was paid attention to, whether people in the videos got to speak about what they wanted during sex and whose perspective the videos were presented from.

“We were surprised at just how active and in control the women were in these videos,” Prof McKee said today.

“This study suggests that mainstream pornography in Australia doesn’t represent women as sex objects, it shows them as active sexual agents.”

The findings are part of a three-year government-funded study - the most comprehensive of its kind - on pornography in Australia.

Interim results released in 2003 on the content of pornographic movies found super-size breasts scare some men, conservative voters love dirty magazines and adult videos have realistic plots.

Dr Alan McKee said those initial results had shattered the “dirty old man in a trenchcoat” stereotype of pornographic consumers.

Of the 320 respondents who said they used mainstream porn, 20 per cent were younger women, 33 per cent were married, 93 per cent believed in gender equality and 63 per cent considered themselves to be religious.

Read the rest here.

Is there just a perverse sociologist out there, social engineering the staff at fastfood joints? I jest. I jest. Seriously though, one of the quotes in the Rotating Bitch is from Louis Althusser: “The bad subjects…on occassion provoke the intervention of the repressive state apparatus. But the vast majority of good subjects work alright all by themselves.”

I wrote quite a bit about this when the Abu Ghraib scandal broke out, referencing the Stanford Prison Experiments and some of us talked about Stanley Milgram’s experiments on obedience to authority. Summing up his research in “The Perils of Obedience” he wrote:

“The legal and philosophic aspects of obedience are of enormous import, but they say very little about how most people behave in concrete situations. I set up a simple experiment at Yale University to test how much pain an ordinary citizen would inflict on another person simply because he was ordered to by an experimental scientist. Stark authority was pitted against the subjects’ [participants’] strongest moral imperatives against hurting others, and, with the subjects’ [participants’] ears ringing with the screams of the victims, authority won more often than not. The extreme willingness of adults to go to almost any lengths on the command of an authority constitutes the chief finding of the study and the fact most urgently demanding explanation.”

At any rate, if they’re right and this is one person, this sounds exactly like the kind of thing hard core rapists do. They get off on the rituals involved in ‘the scene.’ They will get by, for a time, simply on recreating the scene in their mind, possibly with the help of an object taken from ‘the scene.’ But, after awhile, it’s not enough, so they must do it again.

It’s interesting to note that so many people simply refused to believe anyone would end up following through, doing what the caller instructed them to do. Everyone likes to think they wouldn’t do the same. And yet….

I’ve also appended some recycling and archiving material on Milgram, below. It’s part of a discussion with someone else about the misuses of Milgram’s research.

A hoax most cruel

By Andrew Wolfson, The Courier-Journal

She was a high school senior who had just turned 18 — a churchgoing former Girl Scout who hadn’t received a single admonition in her four months working at the McDonald’s in Mount Washington. But when a man who called himself “Officer Scott” called the store on April 9, 2004, and said an employee had been accused of stealing a purse, Louise Ogborn became the suspect.

“He gave me a description of the girl, and Louise was the one who fit it to the T,” assistant manager Donna Jean Summers said.

Identifying himself as a police officer, the caller issued an ultimatum: Ogborn could be searched at the store or be arrested, taken to jail and searched there.

“I was bawling my eyes out and literally begging them to take me to the police station because I didn’t do anything wrong,” Ogborn said later in a deposition. She had taken the $6.35-an-hour position after her mother lost her job. “I couldn’t steal — I’m too honest. I stole a pencil one time from a teacher and I gave it back.”

Summers, 51, conceded later that she had never known Ogborn to do a thing dishonest. But she nonetheless led Ogborn to the restaurant’s small office, locked the door, and — following the caller’s instructions — ordered her to remove one item of clothing at a time, until she was naked.

“She was crying,” recalled Kim Dockery, 40, another assistant manager, who stood by watching. “A little young girl standing there naked wasn’t a pretty sight.”

Summers said later that “Officer Scott,” who stayed on the telephone, giving his orders, sounded authentic. He said he had “McDonald’s corporate” on the line, as well as the store manager, whom he mentioned by name. And she thought she could hear police radios in the background.

Summers shook each garment, placed it in a bag and took the bag away. “I did exactly what he said to do,” Summers said of her caller.

It was just after 5 p.m., and for Ogborn, hours of degradation and abuse were just beginning.

Read the rest, A hoax most cruel.

From Debates over the Milgram Studies

i’m with ya all the way on this critique of positivism and the fetishization of the hypothetical-deductive model.

As for the Milgram Studies: granted that you read the milgram research years ago, so what follows is academic though i think important enough because the research is often misused.

firstly, milgram didn’t need to prove that people are generally obedient to authority. what would the point be in doing that? this is plainly obvious. aside from that, it’s a basic sociological insight that obedience to authority, acceptance of taken-for-granted rules, not questioning much of social life is absolutely imperative if society is to function at all. if folks went about questioning authority every minute, asking everyone to define and given justifications for the taken-for-granted assumptions that regulate the majority of our activities then we’d be in one helluva mess.

and yet, *that* is also the source of our dismay-at least for those of us who believe that those assumptions are systematically produced in such a way as to benefit the few while harming the majority. and contra something you seemed to allude to in another post, there really is no way to eliminate authority. it is a form of social control that we just can’t escape unless we achieve utopia and, quite frankly, i dont want that!

so, milgram wasn’t setting out to prove that people are obedient to authority. he wanted, as margaret noted, to follow up on, to elaborate on the hypothesis that the German’s were a special case and this is what could account for the Halocaust. (the Shirere Thesis to be precise) he initially agreed with this thesis. i also seem to recall that he was interested the frankfurt school’s authoritarian personality studies, but the details escape me at the moment.

initially he was going to test USers, then Germans. he never went to German because his experiment failed miserably: he found far more obedience to authority in an ostensibly democratic society than he could ever have imagined.

he then decided to rewrite the exp. in order to find out what made people disobey, to vary the conditions which would encourage disobedience. for example, verbal protests and cries of pain from the confederate ‘learner’ in the exp generated disobedience. other changes generated more: locating the experiment in bridgeport in a delipadiated, shifty looking office bldg; he stopped strapping the confederate ‘learner’s’ hand down; they brought in a second confederate ‘learner’ who refused to go along with the teaching session; and milgram actually had the S hold the ‘learner’s’ hand down to receive the shocks. btw, even when the Ss had to physically struggle to hold the ‘learner’s’ hand down, more than a 1/4 of them zapped the guy with 450 volts even when face-to-face with a person screaming and struggling to be set free. I understand that this research was done for 10 yrs and that it’s been replicated often, though differently now because of concern about harm to human subjects.

Milgram’s explanation: normally we are in a state of autonomy. but in certain circumstances, we operate under what Milgram calls a state of agency (an agent for, in the place of, an other) which is bascially a frame of mind in which you see yourself as an instrument for executing someone else’s wishes/demands. conditions required for agency? recgognize authority (power wielded legitimately) that is meaningful to the S. in this case, as you know, the authority was Yale, academia more generally, science (and all the emblems signifying scientific authority -eg., white lab coats), and indeed simply living in the US 1960-1963.

the point was that ppl are basically obedient to authority, that their ability to do really horrendous things depends on their definition of the situtation (is there some authority one is acting on behalf of?) so that causing harm is seen as something legitimate, that it has a purpose, some higher end that makes it worthwhile. their ability to disobey depends on the degree to which they see the other as human being who suffers. and, of course, disobedience is easier with others.

again, not a big fan of a lot of research based on the h-d model. however, the criticisms that Milgram didn’t attend to how the Ss understood the situation and what they were doing are just waaaaay out of the ball park. yeah, we don’t know exactly what folks will do in “real life” but we do know that the ways in which people interpret the situation, the ways in which they interpret symbols of authority that suggest they *ought* to act on behalf of that authority are what will encourage or discourage obedience. for all intents and purposes, those folks were acting in “real life” in any event since they were duped into believing everything was real.

I’ve gone from being worthless to being worth enough money to make it through a year of this freelancing stuff and not feel like I’ve got a horrendous knot in my gut every single minute of the day.

Where are the buyers? Damn it!

Years ago, my dissertation advisor did an impromptu analysis of Batman. He said it was a great fascist flick. We looked to the superman to save us from peril. The “Which hero are you most like?”l poll reminded me of a question a member of the Politics list posed to members today.

How would you answer S’s question? I pretty much agreed with him. I have lust (which is just admiration) for someone. They do something beautiful — write, rant, photography, volunteer, create, whatever — that I think is admirable. They remind me how wonderful this world is, how remarkably rich and complex people are. How people are fighting their small struggles everyday and keep on keeping on. When I read Dennis Perrin when he’s on a rant, I admire the way he puts words together. Or Grace. Or the precision with which Duncan forumulates his reponses, so rich in that Cultural Studies tradtion of thoughtful, balanced analysis. I see my friend Renny’s photography and think, Wow, here’s this woman with a full busy life, also making these photos. George with his nuggets of wisdom bound up in finely tuned prose, scattered with colloquialisms for just the right touch. R, who can be such an asshole sometimes, but who will pretty quickly admit when he’s made a mistake. He’s one of the few people I’ve ever known who says, in a heated email list debate, “Ooops, I’m an ass. I goofed.” (Lots of times he doesn’t do that, but…. :) Plus, he used to read to me on our long-distance dates.

Here are all these talented people plugging away, doing their thing. Anyway, another long-winded twisty turn intro to S’s question. I agree with him and really couldn’t think of anyone I truly admired unequivocally. Lustfests here and there. It’s kind of like music. I’ll listen to the same thing over and over for awhile. Lucinda Williams fest I had going once… It was pretty pathetic.

Question:

Last night, in a long telephone conversation, a friend
who is having a hard time (lost his job more than a
year ago, marriage breaking up, etc.), asked me whom I
admire. He thought it was remarkable that I couldn’t
answer right away.

His ‘heroes’ are John F. Kennedy and Johannes Brahms.
He told me various stories about each of them and how
their lives have influenced who he is.

He didn’t believe me when I said that I couldn’t think
of anyone that I admire — I mean, I can think of lots
of people, great writers, philosophers, scientists,
etc. that have done remarkable things — but I
couldn’t think of anyone that I admire as much as he
reveres JFK and Brahms. I told him that I needed to
think about it and we could talk about it next time we
talked.

So, I was wondering: is it remarkable to not have a
person that you admire? I know that there are lots of
people that make study of a particular figure — Jane
Austen, Abraham Lincoln, Pablo Picasso, JS Bach — and
who read everything available and strive to know
everything about their subjects. But, is it common to
hold someone as a role model in this way?

< ...>

S

I’ve been meaning to do this for days, too. The clear winner in the feed reader badge poll was, by 2-to-1, the Fuck You Bitch icon. (Poll results, here.) Thanks to everyone who voted. If you use a reader and you really hate it and think it’s a good idea to drop it, write me. I use these things as therapy. Creating things relieves stress for me, especially if it’s not _for_ something or someone. Yanno?

I liked the concept, just not the actual way it ended up looking. I was tired and didn’t feel like toying around with it to get perfection — let alone surfing around for women flipping the bird. I’d forgotten the Bitch PhD uses the same concept. The one on BPhD undermines the flipped bird though, I think. First, they’re little girls. So, the gesture is infantilized. Second, the girl in the background, who’s shocked, registers, in my mind, the madonna/whore dualism in this culture. Taking enjoyment in the low-class behavior of the bad girl, while registering her insistence that’s she’s only smirking and laughing, not doing it — smirking and laughing because it’s so * gasp * shocking. It kind of reinforces the dualism. I think.

But, another nugget, you kind of have to be careful (another answer to Happy Tutor/Wealth Bondage here) with any attempts to navigate this terrain, binding and unbinding, weaving and weaving, raveling and unraveling. (Does anyone ravel, actually? Dunno. Sounded good, though). What I mean is a really good exploration of the issue, Kim Niccolini’s Essay, Staging the Slut: Hyper-sexuality in performance. (Kim of Kim Dot Damnit Live).

1. Fuck you bitch
46.3% (56 votes)

2. Mouthy Bitch
21.5% (26 votes)

Hot pink fuckmepumps bitch
11.6% (14 votes)

Patriotic bitch
8.3% (10 votes)

None. I do not like all the eyecandy crap. I use a feed reader so I do not have to look at all the crap.
5% (6 votes)

I like lots of pictures. I just do not like the raunch. Can you use clipart of fluffy bunnies and cute little hoppity toads?
5% (6 votes)

Are you serious? You stink at graphic design. Hire a professional. Have mercy on us.
2.5 (3 votes)

total votes: 121