Monday Miscellany November 2, 2009

I’m already mourning the passing of the Season of Wearing Cute Dresses in a pretty hardcore way. Yuck. Forgive that I already posted a picture of this outfit (which I have christened “You’d Never Guess She’s a Man-Hating Anarcho-Feminist,”), but I did a lot of tailoring to it to make it fit (there was a LOT more lace) and I’m pretty much in love with it. Those tights have little twee hearts on them!

Lots happening out there in the world, plus I am over my horrid mood of last week! Let us celebrate with links:

My BFFF (extra F for how Fucking much I love him) Than Luu is doing some ridiculous food blogging on his travels around the world with his band Black Gold (Oh look! Another opportunity to mention the music video I was in, how handy!). Check it out!

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Speaking of bands, while I was engaged in a horrible Halloween depression spiral, my sweetheart was in Louisville mixing THIS. Wow.
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Profanity-laced hilarity courtesy of McSweeney’s.

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The new Bloodroot calendar is out! In the two years since Bloodroot published the gorgeous cookbook set that I was honored to have had a hand in creating, they have been publishing a calendar with new recipes. The calendar is super gorgeous and filled with 99% vegan recipes straight out of my mentor Selma’s head–snap it up!

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I’m happy one of the Brooklyn Jonathans (Safran Foer, Ames, and Letham) wrote a book about why you should be vegan or whatevs, and I’m happy that famous blonde actresses are writing vegan cookbooks, all of that is well and good. But these books are written for non-vegans—why people have to keep pointing them out to me I have no idea.

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Speaking of another of the Bklyn Jonathans, Ames wrote that new show Bored to Death and though I haven’t seen it I completely loved & agreed with Nancy Franklin’s recent New Yorker review (I basically agree with everything Nancy Franklin has ever said though.). Particularly this part:

Chick lit—the range of fiction by women about contemporary city life, friendships, sex, jobs, climbing out of the wreckage of youthful dreams—gets a lot less respect than the male equivalent, which people tend to approach as if it were automatically more artful, more written. Women write “thinly veiled accounts”; men write “romans à clef.” Women writers may have a room of their own, but men who thrash around in front of the mirror and record their every failure, humiliation, moue, and excretion for an audience’s consumption still own the house, even if all they do in it is lie on the couch—and then write about it.
The work of Jonathan Ames, who created the new HBO series “Bored to Death,” lies in this vein of self-fascination and self-conscious inertia.

My god, YES. I suffered through a Jonathan Ames audiobook (which I refuse to Google to figure out the title, as I am unwilling to spend one more second of my life on Jonathan Ames) once, and every second was pure torture.

On the other hand, everyone says this new series is good. Oh, the pain.

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And a few work-related miscellanies:

Heya Baltimorites (?)! Check out Brunie’s Bakery, a cute small-batch vegan bakery in your fair city. Recently their head baker emailed me to say that she was making the wedding cake for the woman who ordered the aforementioned wedding truffles from last week and she just sampled and adored a few truffles. How nice is that? I love it when things like that happen. Vegans can be a crazy bunch, but overall we are such decent, sweet, friendly people, no?

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(All that follows is NSFW!)

So, this erotic chocolate shop in Belgium wants to sell ye olde vulvaz, and I hope we can make it happen. How hilarious does it look? My favorite product so far is the “Candy Gay String.” And while I find these deeply, deeply horrifying….I must say they are pretty well done! And they remind me all over again to be annoyed that no one (Beloved TCHO! Are you listening?) makes high-quality vegan (coco milk!!!) milk chocolate and white chocolate. Oh, and I have this mold! I once made it for my sweetheart filled with peppermint patty filling and presented it to him right before he left on a tour. It was too much sugar (a solid inch or so of peppermint patty filling, I’m not sure quite what I was thinking) and he couldn’t eat it in front of anyone and I fear a lot of it went to waste. But it was adorable!

perfectability impossibility: on the virtues of nuance and compromise (and also radical anarchistic revolution, yo) September 20, 2009

Here’s what I like:

Holding two completely diametrically opposed ideas in your hands and your heart at one time and rushing out into the world, thrusting both in front of you, living as hard as you can through both of them.

I’ve come to like, in truth, being a big giant hypocrite: I talk such talk about not compromising, drawing lines in the sand, and purity, but every second of my life, pretty much by definition, is a compromise on shifting sands of impurity.

I live in the world, therefore I fail just a little. Most of the time this doesn’t bother me. I’ve come to understand that a nuanced worldview and commitment to focusing my energies where they will be best utilized is more important than slavish attention to purity. The purity game is a fun one, most of my 20s was spent in its clutches, but in the end it’s a sad, small way to spend a life.

Striving for perfection—while simultaneously recognizing its impossibility: that’s my game these days.

These rather abstract ideas have been floating around in my head more so than usual the past few days because of this great article in The New Yorker by Elizabeth Kolbert . The always-brilliant Kolbert writes about how silly and absurd those gimmicky blogs (and the books that inevitably follow) are where someone painstakingly catalogues their vainglorious attempts at eco-friendly perfection.

Specifically, she’s talking about that No Impact Man blog (which at least the dude, Colin Beavan, admits was a stunt all along), as well as two extreme-sports 100-mile dieters (who wrote a blog, then book, chronicling their year eating food grown within 100 miles of their apartment) and that woman whose blog I actually pretty much like who resolved to do one “green life-style change every day for a year,” ranging from selling her car to not using toothpicks.

Let me say this first: there is a place for them in the world. Useless extremism can teach us something, for sure. But as a genre I’ve been irked by all this for a while now. Not only because, as Kolbert so adeptly points out, they are all 100% stunts manufactured for publicity and book deals—I believe the authors all genuinely believe in their missions despite their complicity in the capitalist system, and though this might out me as a ridiculous Pollyanna, that’s OK—but mostly because they are actually doing the environmental movement, in the long run, a disservice on two fronts.

The first problem is the problem of nuance: lack thereof. The second is that the ingrained inequities and malfunctions of our beloved late-stage capitalism really don’t allow for your giant eco-leaps to mean much to the society as a whole. Yes, admitting that kinda sorta invalidates my entire lifestyle, but it’s a good reminder to me that all my organic jeans and local produce and composting don’t give me a free pass to stay home when I should be out smashing the state like a good anarchist.

First the first: Maybe they are fun books and blogs to read for those of us who consider ourselves grassroots environmentalists, but for the culture at large, to whom they are almost exclusively aimed, I think their projects backfire. If you teach someone that eating locally involves growing and grinding your own wheat when you can’t source it near your home, no one is going to want to eat locally.

What, exactly, are these capers meant to show? Why do they irk me so? I guess it’s a certain self-righteousness (and I of course, Ms. bicycle-powered-washing-machine and whatnot, don’t like competition in that department) and…what? It’s just media-savvy lefty thoughtful people trying to draw attention to a giant problem, right?

I think it boils down to this: nuance as a methodology for long-term sustainability.

Pop culture, by definition, cannot accept nuance, so we get these wild extremes. But if we truly want long-term solutions, we need nuance. We need, for example, salt. No one wants to live without salt, and it shouldn’t be seen as a virtue when you decide you’re going to go for a year without salt. Or, for that matter, cumin and coriander and cardamom and cloves (did you ever notice how many spices start with “C”?)—in short, the richnesses of the world. Having spices literally broadens our horizons and enriches our lives. There are smart ways to harvest and transport that which cannot immediately be grown in your neighborhood, just as there are smart ways to reduce your environmental footprint without reducing your life to such a tiny circle that one day you find yourself, as No Impact Man and his family did, to climbing fifty-four flights of stairs a day and eating endless amounts of, as Elizabeth Kolbert puts it, “cabbage slaw in the dark.”

Perhaps no one looks at these books and thinks, as I fear they do, “It’s too hard, I won’t even start.” Maybe your standard American housewife will buy Sleeping Naked is Green: How an Eco-Cynic Unplugged Her Fridge, Sold Her Car, and Found Love in 366 Days and will be inspired to walk to work more or turn down her thermostat, or something. Perhaps these quirky personal stories, a bit of medicine with a good deal of sugar thrown in, are what we need to turn our brain-dead populace into something closer to thinking, consciously consuming upright citizens. I sort of doubt it, but who knows.

On to my second point.

As Kolbert brilliantly points out (she can’t do anything non-brilliantly, have you noticed?) in the sort of commentary I’d expect to find in The Nation, not The New Yorker*, the primary problems are structural, not personal, and therefore personal solutions aren’t always (or, let’s be honest, ever) the best solutions (Ms. the-personal-is-political, are you listening?).

She puts it so much better than I ever could that I’ll just do a little copy and paste action:

So committed is Beavan to his claim of zero impact that he can’t—or won’t—see the deforestation for the trees. He worries a great deal about the environmental consequences of Michelle’s tampon use and the shrink-wrap around a block of cheese. But when it comes to his building’s heating system, which is apparently so wasteful that people are opening windows in the middle of winter, he just throws up his hands.

A more honest title for Beavan’s book would have been “Low Impact Man,” and a truly honest title would have been “Not Quite So High Impact Man.” Even during the year that Beavan spent drinking out of a Mason jar, more than two billion people were, quite inadvertently, living lives of lower impact than his. Most of them were struggling to get by in the slums of Delhi or Rio or scratching out a living in rural Africa or South America. A few were sleeping in cardboard boxes on the street not far from Beavan’s Fifth Avenue apartment.
What makes Beavan’s experiment noteworthy is that it is just that—a voluntary exercise conducted for a limited time only by a middle-class family. Beavan justifies writing about it on the ground that it will inspire others to examine their wasteful ways. On the last page, he observes:

Throughout this book I’ve tried to show how saving the world is up to me. I’ve tried hard not to lecture. Yes, it’s up to me. But after living for a year without toilet paper, I’ve earned the right to say one thing: It’s also up to you.
So, what are you going to do?

If wiping were the issue, this would be a reasonable place to end. But, sadly—or perhaps happily—it isn’t. The real work of “saving the world” goes way beyond the sorts of action that “No Impact Man” is all about.
What’s required is perhaps a sequel. In one chapter, Beavan could take the elevator to visit other families in his apartment building. He could talk to them about how they all need to work together to install a more efficient heating system. In another, he could ride the subway to Penn Station and then get on a train to Albany. Once there, he could lobby state lawmakers for better mass transit. In a third chapter, Beavan could devote his blog to pushing for a carbon tax. Here’s a possible title for the book: “Impact Man.”

Totally, totally, totally.

But! This is not to say, I don’t think, that personal solutions are no solutions at all. I think the trick is a mix of personal responsibility (cutting consumption, buying mindfully, etc) and massive societal structural overhaul. Sadly, I don’t think any of these books and blogs contributes all that much to either.

*The blow job to Bloomberg in the issue before reminded me what I was reading though, don’t worry.

a not-annoying story by the not-annoying Jonathan June 24, 2009

How nifty was the story “Good Neighbors” in the June 8 & 15, 2009 New Yorker? I so enjoy Jonathan Franzen, and I so enjoy that he is not Jonathan Safran Foer, who I dislike for no particular reason except it just seems to be the right thing to do. Anyway, this line has been reverberating in my head for a week, so much did it make me laugh:

Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the S.D.S. in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.

Oh, too, too much. It made my week!

Monday Miscellany: pretties to eat, wear, and grow, + mixing business with [p]leather June 1, 2009

[Oh god people. Planes are disappearing, heroes are getting shot, my mother's best friend is in the hospital---and NPR is having a fund drive. And I wore the wrong hoodie to work and now it smells all oniony. In short: everything sucks. But I wrote this post days ago when life was much more rosy.]

No no no, not business + leather. Or Christmas with Heather. Or pleather! I just can’t stop myself from quoting Beck songs, OK? I mean, freaks flock together, what else is there to say?

yummyfun.com – YES. And how.

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Peach Berserk!!!!1!1!! Through the magic of the internet, I was just reunited with this sweet small company, and I’ve had shivers of happiness all day because of it. Many years ago my loverboy (I just came up with that one!) and I were in Toronto to see….um….. um…well….to see Ani DiFranco, OK? Like, back when she was awesome. And she might have been opening for Dylan…or maybe that was another show. I was sort of obsessed for a while, but you had probably already pegged me for an Ani-lover, right?

So, we wandered into this shop, and I fell in love, hardcore. Sweet handmade bathing suits and dresses, everything wild and overdone and exuberant —and totally affordable, even for a college kid. The owner, Kingi, was sweet as the sweetest pea, and I took home a little booklet or flier thing about the store whose craziness deeply thrilled me. I wore the bathing suit I bought until the bottom got so stretched out that it fell down every time a wave came at me. I practically lost it in the ocean a hundred times, and now it lives happily in my “Old Clothes to Keep–Sentimental!!!” box. Peach Berserk–reunited and it feels so good.

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I’m not sure you were in danger of this, but just in case: under no circumstances should you begin reading Martha Stewart’s dogs’ blog. Mostly because the comments are written by clearly insane people who write as if they are dogs. They are worse than I Can Has Cheezeburger comments, I swear. (I can’t put a link there to ICHC because if I go there to snag the link I will get lost in it for hours, so if you don’t know of what I speak…well, I’m just not sure what I can say to you. Happily for me, on my bedside table right now is the ICHC book waiting patiently to be devoured, courtesy of the above mentioned loverboy who got it at some music festival or another. I [heart] swag!)

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Speaking of Martha, my sweet pals Ken + Doug from the Hudson Valley Seed Library are mentioned in the June Martha Stewart Living! And Sarah Snow, the talented and adorable designer of my new bonbon boxes, designed the seed packet pictured in the article!

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I was totally touched that a fancypants newsletter I get about furniture (because I once ordered literally the cheapest thing in the catalog) sent out such a beautiful sentiment about Prop 8! And I thought I was unprofessional for mixing business and politics in my silly business emails! I wonder how many bigots there are in the modern furniture world who will angrily never order from them again? Well, I know where I’m going for my fancypants furniture from now on.

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I really liked this idea from Sasha Frere-Jones (in last month’s New Yorker) It justifies all my Facebooking (and let’s ignore for now that I am not a digital native):

One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers.

Awesome.

monday miscellany: wednesday “While the 2- to 3-year-olds recognized 8 out of 12 brand logos, most 8-year-olds were able to recognize 100% of the logos” edition. March 18, 2009

• Look at these beauties: buttons and other wearables made from melted plastic bottles. They have a lovely otherworldly beauty, but I am a little worried about the fumes the artist inhaled when making them…. (Via Mighty Goods)

• This American Life has an AMAZING segment this week that perfectly articulates my feelings about the going-to-college dilemma. At first I was preparing to write an angry expletive-filled retort, thinking it was going to go down the typical you-must-go-to-college-to-be-a-productive-member-of-society route, but I underestimated my beloved TAL—it ended up in quite a different place. Awesome.
• My junk might be on some pee-cam porno website, as I use this bathroom once in a while (of course, I’ve never bought anything at Starbucks—perish the thought! Ick.) Ick ick ick ick ick. (Via Brittany’s Facebook)
• Hiding friends on Facebook: best idea EVER. Why am I friends with so many sketchy dudes? Must. Be. More. Selective.
• Oh, David Foster Wallace. When his books were coming out, I was in a phase of not reading books by men, a sort of affirmative action program I enjoyed very much. But I just read the long article about him (and the fiction by him) in The New Yorker, and it was heartbreaking, and it made me put Infinite Jest on my reading list, and oh, how sad, how sad.
• I’d already read one piece of his, though: a few years ago my love for Gourmet magazine under the helm of Ruth Reichl was cemented when they published an utterly mind-blowing long, long, long piece about, pretty much, why you shouldn’t eat lobsters, by DFW. They had sent him to cover some horrid lobster festival and the manifesto he came back with, “Consider the Lobster,” was so beautiful that it actually made me cry. Ruth Reichl’s gutsy decision to publish an explicitly anti-lobster-eating article in a food magazine was equally beautiful. She got lots of angry letters, but she found a fan for life in me.
• I need to take some great photos (of you-know-what), and I have a great camera (Jacob’s). Whenever I use it I set it to “auto-focus” and it works OK, but I want super-focused, beautiful, professional photos, which I think entails setting things like “f-stops” and maybe “apertures” or something (those are the only photo words I know). Do any of you know any sites where I could read, very quickly and in super dumbed-down wording, how to set, um, f-stops or whatever they are called to take truly great pictures? I am hoping I don’t have to become a giant photo geek who knows everything about everything to take a decent non-auto-focus picture. This camera scares me, can you tell? It is very heavy. It has lenses. I’m terrified of it.
• My feeling about the dreaded wraps, pretty much exactly (thanks to Aaron for the link). And I’m sure you’ve seen this, but it kills me every time, so here it is again.
• My sweetheart is currently in the wilds of Austin at SXSW (here’s how he describes it when people are all “I heard SXSW is so awesome! It’s amazing that you go every year!!”: “Yeah. South By. Um. Here are my two least favorite things: Brooklyn hipsters, and Texas. At SXSW they combine. It’s amazing.”) working no less than twenty shows in five days with three bands (how is this possible? I am still not sure), but before he left (which I could also have written as “right after he came home”), we had this hilarious exchange: “Ahh! You just scratched me! Do you have man nails? You went away for three weeks and now you come back with the dreaded man nails?” “You mean—males?”
• And finally: I got the Adbusters corporate US flag in the mail today as a gift for my subscription, and since the rainbowy “pace” flag I’ve had up for five years literally disintegrated recently, I am thinking of hanging it (um, I am not sure why, but my house came with a flagpole. Yes, it is weird.). My mom thinks I should hang a flag with a picture of two kittens frolicking on it that she bought for me (oh mom. Kitteh house!), but somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. But I’m not sure about the Adbusters flag. My problems with it: 1) I don’t want people thinking it’s a fucking American flag. 2) I don’t want to look at those damn corporate logos all the time waving above my pretty roses. 3) What if people don’t get the irony?
• And finally for real: I am tempted to completely stop my life, move into my friend Than’s currently unused apartment on West 93rd street (right down the street from both Zabars and Lush!) and work full time on the Reverend Billy for NYC mayor campaign. Damn capitalism, keeping me chocolatizing all day long instead of in the streets!

postmodernist primer March 12, 2009

Let’s talk about postmodernism. It’s a fun thing to learn about in college if you have that kind of money to burn. But if you’ve committed yourself to a real, handmade life and might not be going to college, as I so emphatically recommend you do not, it’s up to you to educate yourself about cool concepts like postmodernism, deconstructionism, and other bizarro -isms to ponder as your mind wanders.

What, really, is the nature of language, and how far can the concept be stretched? Is language meaningless because words can never actually be what they signify (the word “book” will never be an actual book), and if so what are the implications for literature? And, for that matter, social movements? What were/are the effects of the postmodern project on modern literary fiction? Did postmodernism create, kill, or have no effect on the concept of irony? Fun ideas to mull over while driving or soaking in the tub, for serious.

Knocking around concepts like this is primarily what I use my very expensive education (which I will be paying off until 2023—sadly, I am not exaggerating) for most days. I conjugate French verbs to myself while driving home from work, I have the awesome advantage of being able to say to the many religious zealots I get in fights with that yes, as a matter of fact, I have read the Bible, I’ve read the whole fuckin’ thing: I took a whole class on it in college and got an A—it’s a fascinating work of fiction, utterly terrifying. When I can’t sleep I read untranslated Rimbaud poésies out loud to the cats, and take some pleasure in my quite passable accent (je est une autre, mofos!). And I think about postmodernism. That’s about it.

In the spirit of anarchistic skill sharing and celebration of the life of the mind without the need of uptight universities, I’d like to chat a bit about postmodernism.

Happily, Louis Menand has provided a supremely compact disquisition on the topic in the February 23 issue of The New Yorker, in the form of a review of a new biography of the pomo surrealist writer Donald Barthelme. Pieces like these are why I so so so heart TNYer—mad skills on display in full flower without snottiness, an intellectual workout without obfuscation. Here’s all you need to know about the pomo world, in five easy pages. Actually, here’s really all you need to know in one paragraph, suitable for clipping and keeping in a back pocket in case a last-minute cocktail party chatter topic is needed:

Boom. Roasted.

Louie Louie doesn’t tell you which one he thinks is “right,” he’s just giving you the facts. He tells you that the bio of Barthleme thinks he was “emphatically a postmodernist in the first sense,” that is, he believed that he learned from and worked within a tradition established by modernists like Joyce. “Modernism was formally difficult and intellectually challenging,” Menand writes. It was high art at its most high. In contrast, postmodernists in the second sense, as epitomized by Warhol, didn’t seek to be high art or lowbrow art—they sought to erase the distinction between the two:

Boom. Roasted. Really, that’s the only talking point you need to know about Warhol’s soup cans—they sought to point out that art is a capitalist product just like anything else. Warhol didn’t particularly care about this, in fact I think he rather liked it, which is one reason that I am not particularly concerned and am, actually, rather heartened by the fact that Valerie Solanas shot him.

There are loads of other goodies in here, even for someone like me who’s never read much Barthelme (I think I’ve only ever read one short story, but I liked it a lot.). Barthelme’s whole thing is adding in weird nonsensical passages to his fiction. It sounds like it would be maddening to read a short story that suddenly includes a few sentences ripped from a manual on how to repair a carburetor or something, but I like Menand’s justification for them (enough with the screen shots, I’ll just copy it out):

He tried to create a certain amount of noise in them [his short stories], on the theory that the distraction helped the reader. “The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude,” he explained. “As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done.”

Yes yes yes! Also:

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we’re trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That’s the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

Fascinating, no?

It seems to me that blogging and so much of Internet culture in general is a terribly pomo practice. Most people I know use internet-speak like “omg!” ironically, in order to call attention to the hilariousness and weirdness of the Internet universe. Blogs (which, hilariously, is not in WordPress’s spellchecker) like mine that aren’t focused around just one topic and are written for fun (as opposed to profit) are postmodern in that they are little collages, grabbing bits of news, poetry, photos, commentary, and presenting them in a format that can’t help but call attention to the author of the blog and the meta process of blogging itself. The ability for anyone to comment on a post destabilizes the authority of the authorial voice even further, thus creating a more democratic exchange of information. This deconstruction and fragmentation of the process of information dissemination is a sign, maybe, that the lefty postmodernists, who fought so hard to erase all hierarchies by claiming that they were meaningless, are having the last laugh.

It is also, almost certainly, why newspapers everywhere are failing. It means that we need to work harder to find “experts” (to the extent that we believe in that word) to listen to, and that the people (largly white and male) who previously had an easy and possibly unearned ride as “experts” are feeling their positions of power being snatched from them.

Sigh. I miss writing term papers.

Lest anyone call me a hypocrite because I have previously railed against pomo feminism and the “pole dancing is political” viewpoint (I sense a Brittany comment is coming…) that it hath wrought in the name of feminism (what Twisty calls “funfeminists“)….um, well, I don’t think postmodernism would be happy if those who liked some aspects of it didn’t have problems with other aspects!

Its middle name is “problematizing,” after all.

(This post is dedicated to Veronica, my favorite non-college kid!)

patriarchal puzzlement February 28, 2009

How is it that I have a degree in feminism, yet I can never remember if “patriarchal” or “patriarchical” is correct, or if there is a difference, and if so what the difference is? I am pretty positive “patriarchal” is always correct, but Ariel Levy is throwing “patriarchical” and “hierarchical” all over the place in this podcast, and just like she don’t know no nothin’ ’bout vegans, I don’t think she’s right. The article she discusses though (the lesbian separatist movement in the 1970s, out of which my favorite place on earth, Bloodroot Restaurant, pictured here, evolved), was so fucking rad that I will forgive her.

(HA ha! My dudey—albeit pretty rad—landlord just walked into the kitchen as the speakers were blasting “there was a moment in the 1970s when lesbian sadomachosism became a big thing….” and he had the most deer-in-the-headlights look you have ever seen.)

AWW! I think this is already on the blog somewhere, but I love this picture of Selma and me so much I have to put it up again.

Ariel Levy fucks over vegans whilst discussing fucking generally January 28, 2009

I’ve always had a lot of affection for Ariel Levy. She’s a good feminist doing good work, and I loved her wife’s wedding tuxedo getup.

Unfortunately she’s done for me, and this is tragic.

I can’t let this go by. In her (interesting) review of the new vs. old Joy of Sex in the January 5, 2009 New Yorker, she drops this little bomb:

If “The Joy of Sex” was like “Joy of Cooking”….“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was like the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Everything in it was healthful, enlightened, nourishing.
Here’s a trick you might try at home sometime: pick almost any recipe in the “Moosewood.” Now add bacon. You will find that the addition of this decidedly unwholesome ingredient makes the food taste much better. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” likewise, lacked a certain trayf allure. The revised edition of the book—even the original—is a fantastic resource for educating young women (and very sophisticated girls) about their physicality. But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little vegan.

Oh, fuck you!

OK, I see your point, but the reason vegans are seen in popular culture as pale pleasure-deniers is because popular culture is reductionist and idiotic, not because it’s a true stereotype. And while I find the Moosewood Cookbook adorable, no sane vegan (or, person) cooks from it.

The point is: this just has to stop. Well-meaning liberal people making jokes out of being vegan WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. I just hate this shit. To make fun of someone’s choice to decrease violence and unnecessary death in the world, Ms. Levy, is not funny. Not fucking funny at all. I’m taking Female Chauvinist Pigs off my “to read” Powells wishlist—which it seriously was on!

Let’s play a little substitution game that will point out how idiotic this faux-snarky little crap zinger is. If you wouldn’t say these things, you shouldn’t talk shit about being vegan.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little anti-rape.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little pro-human rights.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little against child pornography.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little pro-gay marriage.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little feminist.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little Democratic.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little anti-racist.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little multi-cultural.

You see? You’re trying to be funny, but you’re being REALLY OFFENSIVE.

STOP IT.

beloved barney: the radical congressman who wasn’t January 28, 2009

Peeps! BE EXCITED! I’ve got a super nice post and a super mean post lined up for you tonight, both about The New Yorker. Here we go! Guess which is which?

I’ve always had a lot of affection for Barney Frank. Remember when Bush took his cell phone out of his hands and talked to his boyfriend? Oy!

The New Yorker just had a nice Jeffrey Toobin profile on him which I read intently. I have this horrible trait of looking for reasons not to love the people I love, so I went through the article circling potential reasons not to love Barney. I do this not (only) because I am the most negative person you’ve ever met, but also because I want to be armed to instantly refute if someone points out flaws in someone I admire—people are assholes like that, have you noticed? The minute you say someone is interesting or smart or worthy of slavish hero worship they feel the need to tell you that their cousin once fucked them in a bathroom and they were “small in the game” (a phrase I just learned, courtesy of Lily Allen). I mean, I am always looking for more information on peeps, but man, people can be idiotic with that shit.

So here’s what I’ve got for Barney Frank:

Joe Corcoran, a giant developer dude, says,

Barney is a real capitalist. He understands that we have to make a profit.

Oh, sad face. (he also says: “Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.” Of course!)

Michael Oxley, former chairman of the Financial Services Committee says:

Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process.

Of course, neither of these came straight from Frank, but this did:

And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.

Really? I am not so sure at all. But I believe in you, Barney! Convince me! (& oh, I adore that TNYer does the accent over the o in cooperation!)

So…should I not love Barney Frank if he is a capitalist and an institutionalist, being as I am an anarchist antipreneur*?

When I was deciding who to honor for my upcoming line of feminist chocolates, I made a giant list of women and literally assigned point values: were they white? Minus 1 point—I had too many white women in the lineup already (bye bye Rachel Carson!). Were they born rich (I loved you once, Natalie Barney!)? Minus 2 points, I fucking hate richies. I dropped Dolores Huerta because she endorsed Hillary, and on and on.

And although I think that was the right approach for the chocolate line, as I wanted my ladies to be beyond reproach, I’m OK with looking up to people whose values and, most likely, actions I don’t always agree with. It’s like Naomi Klein says in that little text box on the right up there—politicians need rabble-rousers on the left to help move them along and to show that there is support for leftist policy.

I can work for anarchist utopia, which is never going to happen in my lifetime, while Barney Frank works to keep the system we have from being completely taken over by idiots on the right. We are on parallel but not identical trajectories, and while much of our work is the same, the end results are very different. I’m OK with all that. I’m OK with pretty much anyone doing anything to stop the madness, I guess that’s what I’m saying. And anyway, with the kumbaya president we’re going going on now, we need Barney Franks to make sure Obama listens to the left wing of the Democratic party.

Also, how could you not love someone who says stuff like this?

Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”

*I stole the “antipreneur” title from Adbusters, do you love it?

from the ground up December 24, 2008

found on the beach today!

I’m writing up a series of candidate’s questionnaires for the New Paltz Greens to help us decide whether to endorse non-Green candidates. It’s pretty fascinating, and it’s stretching my brain in all kinds of ways. Based on a suggestion from a fellow Green, I just added this question:

“If elected, would you work to stop the common practice of municipal vehicle idling?”

And my heart just sang for a moment. Talk about building a new and better world, brick by brick—we are doing it! We’re thinking about everything—condoms in schools, Town and Village unification, expanded paper recycling, healthy school lunches, beavers, everything.

It feels good.

Then today on the beach I read the Naomi Klein New Yorker profile and, true to my chosen socioeconopolitico demographic, I adored it and adore her more than ever.

And! How perfectly does this passage fit in with what I was just saying a few days ago? It’s pretty much everything I believe about Obama and the left and life in one tidy paragraph:

Both Klein and Lewis [her kickass husband] are skeptical about Barack Obama. “I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.” (emphasis mine)

FUCKING A!