Abstract Dynamics || nomadic, intense, not quite daily/ Abstract Dynamics covers pop culture and politics and pop politics and political culture with an especially deft ear. Topics range from Hip-Hop to Big Media to Old School political agitation. Even if the writing weren’t good and on target and kinda fun, even, you’d still like him (the name behind the email address is William Blaze, so I’m thinking “him” is appropriate) because of the great book plugs on the sidebar: Deleuze and Guattari, Luc Sante, Paul Auster, Neal Stephenson, Italo Calvino, Gabriel Garcia Marquez — ain’t no fluffy “summer reading” crap! Plus, he Does the Right Thing by hosting other blogs he thinks are peachy-keen. Lissen:
Ultimately though I suspect that corporate personhood is an effect of the corporate drive for power, not a cause. Is shifting the balance of power back towards another organization with repressive tendencies, the State, an answer to the problems posed by big business? In order for the answer to be “yes” the State must be ready to recode the corporate laws in a constructive manner. A dubious but not impossible prospect, and one that can be furthered greatly if the ideas on how to recode these entities are in existence. And this my friends is our job.
Good writing, good taste, good NYC style — I’m thinking he’s gotta be from Brooklyn. [Continue reading]
Via Joi Ito I’ve found this neat little chat applet. Like Joi, I’ll try it out here for a bit and see if I like it. This little button is supposed to let you know if I’m online or not.
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Very interesting story on the near-cult-like inner workings of Ikea — an empire apparently even bigger than Microsoft!
The Mållen clip doesn’t look like much, and yet it represents, in microcosm, a vital Ikea strategy: the way the company decides what you need before you’ve even realised you might need it. The clip, Vinka explains, is for hanging up magazines in your bathroom: you attach a magazine to the metal clip, then hang the rubber ring over a towel hook. “This is one of the articles that is selling most in the Mållen range today,” she says. “You don’t want your magazines on the floor, do you? They’d get dirty and wet.”
It had never occurred to you, presumably, that you might want to hang up magazines in your bathroom. But Ikea had already decided that you would. And the brilliant but scary part is this: once you’ve seen a row of magazines hanging up in one of Ikea’s showroom bathrooms, each neatly suspended at 45 degrees from a Mållen clip, it takes a will of steel not to find the magazines in your own bathroom, now you come to think of it, almost offensively disorganised. And so you think about purchasing the Mållen clip.
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I read the article below and got the willies. The main criticism seems to be that Bush is in bed with Big Pharma in this initiative, but that’s hardly news — his daddy is tightly linked with Eli Lilly, the biggest beneficiary of this plan, after all. But what remains un-criticised is the thought of a nationwide mental health screening that would, presumably, produce nationwide records on the mental health status of all Americans, and that can’t possibly be good.
Bush plans to screen whole US population for mental illness [Continue reading]
This is just sick: “Kerryopoly” lays out a game board of Kerry properties and invites you to try to enjoy Kerry’s lifestyle on $40,000/year, the national household average. The only conclusion I can draw from it is that Kerry doesn’t deserve our vote becuase he’s rich — unlike George W. Bush, who was born the son of poor black sharecroppers in rural Mississippi and worked his way up through a series of backbreaking, menial jobs until some Republican bigwig, inspired by the young Dubya’s spunk and verve decided that here, finally, was a man fit to governm this mighty country of ours. [Continue reading]
Michael Taussig is what you might call a “gonzo anthropologist” — he writes heavily “novelized” (not necessarily to say “fictionalized”) ethnographies that deal primarily with the intersection between capitalism and terror. His latest book, My Cocaine Museum, posits a Colombian museum that would explore the role of cocaine in Colombian history the way that the already-existing Gold Museum does for mining. An excerpt of the book is available at the University of Chicago’s website.
Speaking of Indians, here’s a familiar figure to greet you, that huge photo you see in the airport as you walk to immigration of a stoic Indian lady seated on the ground in the marketplace with limestone and coca leaves for sale and in front of her, of all things, William Burroughs’s refrigerator from Lawrence, Kansas, with a sign on its door, Just Say No, as an Indian teenager saunters past with a Nike sign on his chest saying Just Do It and a smiling Nancy Reagan floats overhead like the Cheshire cat gazing thoughtfully at an automobile with the trunk open and two corpses stuffed inside it with their hands tied behind their backs and neat bullet holes, one each through the right temple and one each through the crown of the head.
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Interesting article on homosexuality in the Navajo community. Indian societies have long posed a challenge to Western notions of fixed sex and gender identities. Many have a long history of tolerating, and often holding in high regard, people who choose at some point in their life (usually puberty) to take on the role and identity of the opposite sex. As the article notes, these people frequently married members of the once-same, now-opposite sex, and their marriages were considered as normal and natural as any other marriage. Once referred to generically as “berdaches”, the preferred term these days, from Will Roscoe‘s work on Zuni and other socities, the accepted term nowadays is “two-spirits“. The particular term for two-spirits in Navajo is nadleeh
Western conceptions of gender don’t apply very readily to two-spirits, and it is difficult to apply the term “homosexual” to them without reservations. But, of course, Navajos don’t live in pre-contact Navajo society, they live in a modern Navajo society which has developed for centuries in relation to a conquering Western society. Homosexuality in Western society is a mark of difference, a transgression of the categories we rely on to make sense of human relations. It is also closely related to the modern, Western sense of the self as an individual, driven by private pleasures and passions. Sexuality in Western society is more than a social role, it’s a function of identity, and so the Navajo have experienced the emergence of “gay” identities that don’t quite fit the mold of the nadleeh, yet aren’t quite the same as Western homosexuality, either.
Now gay Navajos are organizing, under pressure from both HIV/AIDS and a social scene, Navajo and Western, that doesn’t quite know where to place this new breed of nadleeh. It would be interesting to know the particular experiences Navajos have in dealing with these pressures, and their responses to those experiences. [Continue reading]
I wasn’t going to write about the new Matrix film here. I’ve been posting comments to some of the discussions of the film around the blogosphere, but didn’t feel I had enough to say to make it worth a post of my own. But it’s a funny thing–certain ideas kept reprocessing, some of my earlier sureties about the movie have come under question, and I find myself admiring the movie a lot more today than I did when I saw it 10 days ago. And then I read William Blaze’s take on the political implications of Matrix: Reloaded (via Doc Searls), and it all clicked together. So, for better or worse, here are my thoughts (or a selection of them, anyway) on the Matrix. [Continue reading]
Eyeteeth has a great interview with Siva Vaidhyanathan, author of The Anarchist in the Library (which is now at the top of my “to-read” list). Vaidhyanathan discusses the ways that sharing networks–be they local communities like church groups or jam sessions or transnational structures like the Internet of global corporations–work as the medium for cultural growth and development. [Continue reading]
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