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Hi, I'm responding on your talk page rather than GR's talk page because my response has little to do with the book itself.
Rather than working with a text file, you might want to try using a sandbox. You can name it whatever you want—here, I've violated your private space and created one for you here. Any page you create under your own user name (after the slash) is yours to do with as you please. With a sandbox, you can see how all the markup will turn out right away as you're writing. You also don't have to worry about losing the text file (I recently dropped my netbook, breaking my hard drive and losing all my work files). When you're satisfied with what you've done, you can merge it back into the main article.
There's a video on starting a user sandbox here.
Also, wikipedia policies are there for a reason, obviously, but if you wait until you've read all the policies until you start editing—well, honestly you'll probably get bored or burn yourself out before you actually start editing. It's better to just jump in, and if you break any rules grievously enough, someone will come along and fix it (and possibly berate you, but what do you expect from a bunch of internet kids?), and you'll learn something from it. I'd like to see you get some editing done while your motivation's high. CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 03:57, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, CT (can I call you CT?). I appreciate the coaching. (Is this what the help links mean by "finding a mentor?") You intuited me correctly; I frickin' can't stand help files and tutorials. Especially videos -- some bright, chirpy person half my age staring into the camera and speaking v-e-r-y c-l-e-a-r-l-y, like they know me, but I'm their quasi-retarded cousin. (I'm not entirely politically correct in emailish dialogues, so stop me if my humor offends you). I haven't even figured out what "inline citation" means precisely. (I'd grab that info when I need to make a cite.) Thanks for setting up the Sandbox. I would have done it The Old Fashioned Way I've been editing textfiles since the early 90s and never would have eöũven thought to try something different without you "violating my personal space." Thanks again. I'm sure the Sandbox is much easier, and that way I can begin to play with some of your HTML markup coding. Learning by doing without embarrassment. I like it.
I love Wikipedia. I learn so much from it -- even if it's bracketed as coming from Wikipedia and only conditionally true, it's a better set of truth-conditions than what blogs offer. Since you strike me as some level of admin, maybe you've seen my IP on here for literally days on end. I've just started to sniff around; I read the bios of the Philosophy group and gotten a tiny whiff of some of the politics and heated arguing that goes on. Sad to say, we all live in Po-Mo World now, where everything is true and false simultaneously and nobody wants to take directions. I'd love a nickel for every time you've heard the argument that since it's all just text commenting on text -- why do I have to provide citations? I noted the patient ritualism of your boilerplate on interpretation. Some people must really balk at that. "But wait ... I was taught my whole life to think for myself!"
As you doubtless also intuited -- I'm one of those people. Hell, I went to an alternative highschool where I didn't have to take math or a foreign language. Like the P-man, I was pomo before pomo was cool. So I have a much better synoptic intelligence than I have a command of facts. What that means is that I'm only going to remotely think of editing something here if I can confirm it's inaccurate, like a bad plot summary. Otherwise, I'm just not all that interested in what some published person thinks about something to confirm whether or not I should think it -- and I like to write about stuff I'm passionate about, like musical opinions that have no place in Wikipedia unless somebody published thought it first.
As I said, I'm an internet bloviator and not in any way a natural encyclopedian. Which doesn't mean I can't completely respect and support your mission to provide verifiable information and help when I can at the margins. The Pynchon plot summary ought to be an interesting challenge.
Cheers,
Bob McKeown
Snardbafulator ( talk) 05:57, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
- Ha ha! I'm not an admin. I've been on Wikipedia since the end of 2005, but it's only the last few months I've done much more than fix typos. GR happened to be on my watchlist because I happen to like the book. I only started editing after I got sick of Chester Brown- and Jim Woodring-related pages being totally neglected for years (a couple of big projects I've taken on that I haven't completed yet).
- "Inline citation" basically means those numbered footnotes. The inline citation says "THIS information being given to you HERE is being cited by THIS source". A citation that's not inline would be, say, a book being claimed to be referenced at the bottom of the page, but not telling you what's being cited where. You know, as if I told you I read Have a Banana: A Skeleton Key to Gravity's Rainbow by I. M. A. Goodwriter, but didn't tell you what I had cited where. "Just, like, take my word for it, man. 'It' (whatever 'it' is) is in there somewhere.' So, yeah, just another word for a footnote.
- Your humour doesn't offend me half as much as your American spelling ;P—and I don't care if you call me CT, but in a Japanese accent (I live in Japan) it does sound suspiciously like "Shitty". CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 07:21, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
South Park -- "Shitty Wok!" LOL! Okay, CT, I've taken the plunge. I'm going after "Episodes in Gravity's Rainbow" with a chainsaw (well, maybe a petite, ladylike chainsaw of the type that drag-wearing Zoyd Wheeler almost used to wreck that logger's bar in Vineland), as a sort of dress rehearsal for rewriting the one on the main page. I was wrong upon more careful review; it's not "excellent," it's actually horrendous. I'll stop when the page starts dribbling one-liners, but by that time I would've given myself a good taste of editing.
Question (since I'm too damn lazy to just look it up): I've gotten the double-bracket thang for links to pages, but how do you highlight a phrase and have it link to a different term? There's a "citation needed" for shell shock, but I want to highlight those words and link to abreaction. What's the coding?
Thanks in advance,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:09, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
- When you see someone doing something on a page and want to figure out what they've done, the easiest way to figure it out is to click "Edit" and take a look. I'll give you this one since you asked so politely, though.
- You put a "pipe" (|) character in between, thus:
[[Abreaction|shell shock]]
. Whatever is on the left is what gets linked to, and whatever is on the right is what gets displayed.
- You don't always have to do that, though. If you just want to append something to the end of a word, just do it outside the brackets without a space:
[[banana]]s
- Also, you'll find it easier to get italics without the html markup. On Wiki, usually you surround the word with two single quotes:
''Vineland''
(that's two apostrophe marks on each side, not quotation marks). It'll save you some typing, and you won't have to worry about forgetting the slash in your closing tag.
- Did you actually like Vineland? That was the first Pynchon book I actually found disappointing—and his crappy Japanese had me wondering how accurate is German was in GR ("motto henna" isn't even a grammatical sentence—obviously lifted straight out of a dictionary). CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 21:49, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Explain the slash in my closing tag, and I'll be sure to remember it once I know what it is. (I notice you use a high-ASCII/Unicode long slash not on the keyboard.)
Vineland? Coming 15 years after a book many of us felt (and still feel) should've won the Nobel Prize, of course it was a colossal disappointment. I just think the image of a petite, ladylike CHAINSAW is pretty hysterical. (As I'm also a Frank Zappa freak, I have a soft spot for mega-stupid humor :)) Bear in mind though, that many people felt that The Crying of Lot 49 was also a major letdown after V. Pynchon's lighter works can be deeper than they seem, though; while everybody seems to have "gotten" Inherent Vice as this groovy page-turning neo-noir (and there's a Hollywood movie supposedly in the works), linked on the IV page is this wonderful essay, arguing that just as GR was meta-concerned with plastics, rocketry and cybernetic control, IV's deep theme (completely removed from the plot) is inhuman, automobile-centric Southern Californian/suburban American land use patterns. I've read William Howard Kunstler and I agree.
As wince-inducingly not-in-a-good-way silly as some of Vineland is, I personally feel (Warning: Original Research) that it also contains some of Pynchon's most poignant writing and most well-drawn characters up until that point (both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day exceed that mark). Prairie Wheeler is just a pip of a kid, absolutely believable -- a worthy dress rehearsal for ATD's amazing Dally Rideout. The backgrounds of DL and Frenesi are also quite well-drawn (including DL's abusive military dad), and the central characterological question Pynchon tackles in the book: How can a woman which such impeccable Leftist credentials as Frenesi Gates (bear in mind she hails from the Traverse/Becker clan, whose pro-anarchist history is a major part of ATD) wind up playing footsie with a fascist scumbag like Brock Vond? -- is a difficult, worthy, relevant question, however successfully you might feel Pynchon ultimately answered it. You'll note Pynchon took up this concern again in ATD with Lake Traverse -- who winds up not only marrying her father's cold-blooded murderer, but having gnarly threesomes with he and his pardner in the crime.
I have no Japanese, but an early essay on GR noted a couple venial mistakes in German (along with some bad movie chronology which evidently embarrassed Pynchon enough that he dated all his movie references in Vineland). The consensus in Mindful Pleasures, though, is amazement that he got so much of his foreign language use right (and I've seen nothing knocking his heavy use of Spanish and Italian in ATD). As for his portraits of Japan and Japanese characters in Vineland -- that's a whole other kettle of ramen. A Japanese person, or a Westerner who's spent much time in the country, must've just wanted to throw up at such shallow caracatures. That whole part with the Yakuza white-slaving DL for Ralph Wayvonne was particularly icky and doubtless un-verisimilar. What I think Pynchon is doing here (Warning: rogue unpublished American Studies major in the building) is indulging in a particularly Californian cult-of-the-Far-East filtration of all things Asian through the prism of American pop/movie culture. Reminiscent, you might note, of Quentin Tarantino in the Kill Bill movies -- and I find those Japanese references quite icky as well.
I hope you've read Pynchon's bang-on NYTimes Book Review essay "Is It Okay To Be a Luddite?" because he gives a little of his game away. Pynchon is fascinated by (and often roots for) the literary trope of what he calls the Badass: not only Frankenstein, King Kong or Godzilla, but all charismatic, larger-than-life ostensible villains who can't be contained within the System (note how important John Dillinger is to Pig Bodine in GR). Vineland is riddled with Badasses and the accoutrements of Badassery: martial-arts asskickers, an unidentified, possibly space-alien (or collectively hallucinated) industrial plant-stomping monster, lovingly-described automatic weapons, dialed-up sports cars and off-the-road vehicles.
This struck me when I first read the book (and natch, I've never seen it addressed, let alone confirmed) as being material that might occupy the fantasy life of an extremely disempowered, bottomlessly angry, alienated California kid -- an offstage kid much more seriously-visualized than Billy Barf or Isaiah Two-Four. Maybe into punk rock and drugs, maybe on the way to juvie -- or worse, to an in-patient stay at a mental facility. But that's what gives Vineland so much of its poignance for me, and redeems a lot of the silliness.
Anyway, you can tell that I have too much time on my hands, sheesh. Hey -- if I can't put this stuff in Wikipedia, at least I can share it with other Pynchon fans, right.
Finally, CT -- how the heck did you survive the earthquake/tsunami?
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 08:01, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
- I survived the earthquake & tsunami by living about 400km from the epicentre. Japan's a "small" country, but it's long, and most people didn't live anywhere near enough to the earthquake for it to be a real concern (although it did some small damage in Tokyo). We're expecting our own big one any year now, though, which is expected to cause massively more destruction just by being in a far more heavily populated area (right smack between Tokyo and Nagoya, the third largest city in Japan).
- I have read Luddite (I think it's online somewhere, or was), but I haven't read any of his post-Vineland work yet. Too many good books in the world, too little time, and I've been reading mostly non-fiction and comic books for the last year or so. I go through these phases where I'll spend a year or two reading nothing but fiction, and then swing to all non-fiction. Maybe it's time for me to swing again.
- You've obviously spent an awful lot more time with Pynchon's work than I have. With Vineland, I liked how it started, but it progressively just got boring for me. I wasn't expecting a Pynchon book to tie up its loose ends at the end or anything, but the ending seriously just felt to me like he'd gotten bored with the book and just gave up (unlikely that he would have published it if that were the case—he's not one who gives you the impression he's pressured by deadlines). The whole second half of the book just gave me the impression that he stopped caring about his own book. It's been years, though, and maybe I should give it another try. The thing is, with GR, no matter how hard, strange or dense it got, it managed to keep my attention. Even when it was obviously going right over my head.
- Playing with reader expectations and fucking with racial/cultural stereotypes or whatever doean't bother me in the least. I'm a big fan of Robert Crumb who's definitely known for his over-the-top blackface nigger characters that get him labeled a racist by those who aren't familiar with his work (in fact, his "When the Niggers Take Over America" was illegally reprinted by an Aryan supremacist organization who took it and presented it as literal. His satire sometimes doesn't come off as satire unless you're deeply familiar with his work. HIs poking at Jews takes on a whole other world of meaning when you find out that both his wives, his mentor Harvey Kurtzman, and his most famous collaborator, Harvey Pekar, are/were all Jews). Pynchon's Japanese caricature's totally lacked anything for me to grab on to, though. They weren't really funny, and they didn't really seem to successfully play off of racist American stereotypes in any way that I found interesting. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the right stereotypes. I certainly didn't find it offensive, just surprisingly poorly done for Pynchon (which applies to the whole second half of the book for me, not just the Japanese stuff).
- The bad Japanese dialogue was bad in a way that so easily fixable, which is what got me. The guy spends seven years on a book and can't get a few trivial lines of dialogue proofread? Why did he even bother including the dialogue? It didn't seem to add to the book in any way.
- I'm not sure what you mean by the "slash in [your] closing tag", but the long dash I get by typing {{ emdash}}. Also, if you look down below the edit box, and below the "Save page" button, you'll see a selector that's probably set on "Insert". You can select something else there to get other kinds of symbols. For example, if you select "Latin" you'll get a whole pile of Latin letters with diacritics on them. Click on one of those with the cursor still in the edit box and you'll get one of those symbols. That way you can spell things like "Pökler" with the umlaut over the "o". You can get the long dash by selecting "Insert", but if you touch type, you'll probably find it faster just to type {{ emdash}} like I do ("emdash" is the term they use in typography for that symbol. It's the width of a capital "M" in whatever font you happen to be using; similarly there's "–" ({{ endash}}) used for number ranges (e.g. "pages 27–42") and regular "-" dashes).
- I used to be a huge Zappa fan, too (I had 27 of his records on vinyl alone), but Captain Beefheart gradually weened me off of him. Like Jimmy Carl Black said, "Zappa's good, but Don is the real thing." CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 10:05, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
"Apes-ma? Apes-ma, you're eating too much.
And going to the bathroom too much, Apes-ma.
And Apes-ma? Your cage isn't getting any bigger, Apes-ma."
Uh, yeah. The Beef rules. I don't currently possess any Zappa (my vinyls are in Purgatory), but I made sure to have the five essential Beefs (Trout Mask, Decals, Shiny Beast, Doc and Ice Cream) on hand for ready blastage. There's some Zappa that I think is bottomlessly amazing ("The Black Page" [all versions], Läther, most of the stuff from the Ruth Underwood / George Duke / Fowler Bros. period, "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch," The Yellow Shark, e.g.); other stuff — all vocal-centered — that is ... unnecessary. (NEWS FLASH: Jimmy Swaggart is a hypocrite. Film at 11.)
Since you're an R. Crumb fan and your U.K. spellings and effortless prose lead me to believe you're some flavor of Brit / Commonwealth person (you've identified yourself as "living in Japan"), mayhap this might jingle something:
"You can imagine my delight
Was like some R. Crumb magazine come to life
Thank you ladies, you had us all
I hope you both enjoyed it ... "
These deliciously facetious, heavily English-accented lines come from what still might be, all things considered, my all-time favo(u)rite rock album, The Rotters Club by Hatfield and the North. There. I've been outted. I'm a shameless lifelong progrock fanatic (I compose the stuff, too).
You can see I'm getting better with the coding, but how do you insert what word processing programs call hard returns at the end of truncated lines so you can quote poetry/lyrics without adding a blank line and taking up so much space?
It's funny that you should mention R. Crumb in the context of literal-minded misinterpretation. Another of my favorite prog artists is drummer extraordinaire Christian Vander, he of the legendary French band Magma. I can't believe you wouldn't know of them; they sing in their own constructed language, Kobaïan, and have spun an enormous sci-fi double trilogy over a 40-year career (the last installment came out in '09) about a handful of people's exodus from a doomed Earth to planet Kobaïa, and return to try to save Earth. If ever there was bait from a rock band for an epic graphic novel series, this is it.
Now Vander is a very weird guy, full of bottomless rage at the death of John Coltrane and the lameness of late-60s Anglo-Americophilic French audiences. Kobaïan has no grammar and precious little syntax, essentially consisting of gutteral Slavo-Germanic consonants (without glottal stops), the word-meanings mostly nouns. In the early days, Vander liked to spontaneously rant in this language (check out the intro to "Stoah" from their first album) in a blood-curdling falsetto shriek (or "ungodly coloratura," as Miklos Thanatz described Captain Blicero's rantings in the final days before the firing of Rocket 00000 -- could Pynchon have known of Magma?), which made a lot of people think of Hitler speeches on crystal meth. Didn't help that at a time of leftist/anarchist cultural frenzy in France ('68), Vander's band wore all black, took their primary musical inspiration from Carl Orff and Richard Wagner instead of The Beatles and The Byrds, were lock-step disciplined in concert (the music's very rhythmically aggressive and metrically complex) and Very, Very S-E-R-I-O-U-S.
So of course some geniuses in the French press and a local Communist Party chapter concluded that Magma were literally capital-"F" Fascists and tried to stop their concerts. Fortunately for music, that never gelled into a consensus.
Jump-cut 30 years to the critically successful Magma revival, as they're headlining European and American RIO ( Rock in Opposition) fests. Vander, as you'd imagine, is the sine qua non of the "inward-directed" person, not giving a fig about musical trends, continuing to compose music in his own entirely idiolalic style (although it spawned an enormous international movement in RIO circles, called Zeuhl music. Japanese drummer Tatsuya Yoshida is a major disciple in his bands Ruins and Koenji Hyakkei). So naturally he's something of a megalomaniac, and being a quarter Roma, has some identity issues he hasn't quite gotten to the bottom of. It was discreetly notorious among musicians and club owners that Vander would drink too much after gigs and often go lacing into these horrible anti-black and anti-semitic rants. Hard to believe coming from a self-identified Coltrane worshipper with a gooey attatchment to funk and soul in the "crossover" Magma album Merci, not to mention with an ex-wife and lifelong musical partner (vocals and production) whose family got the Hitler Double Whammy for being both from Poland and Jewish. Or maybe, with psychology, not so hard to believe.
About two years ago, some of this in the form of rumors, putative "facts" and accusations by a monetarily estranged ex-band member began filtering through the Magma fan community. For a month or so, this was highly dismaying to me; I had just rediscovered Magma and found their output from 2000 on to be astounding — nothing at all like another lame Yes-like "classic rock" cash-in reunion act. The band had top-notch young musicians, Stella Vander was in great voice, their concerts (captured in the Mythes et Légendes Epok 1-4 DVD series) utterly mindblowing (some on YouTube and definitely worth a scope) and their new material (especially K.A.) every bit as good — maybe better — than the Magma of old.
An English blogger I knew who just twigged to Magma and thought she could grow to love them deletes the albums she had just paid to download, screeching "I had no idea Christian Vander was a NAZI !!!" and blogs about it for weeks. I told myself I could square the racist rants. Nobody should expect great artists to be particularly nice people. Hell, if anyone wants genuine NAZI, there's always demented cult leader Don Vliet running the Trout Mask Replica rehearsals like a wannabe Charles Manson. (Both John French and Bill Harkleroad in the end forgave him.) Much more distressing was to lurk on the Köhntarkösz fan blog and listen to lifelong Magmaniacs who've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars/pounds/Euros following the band and keeping up their Magma collections attempting to dissect the Kobaïa story, looking for encrypted "Heil Hitlers" and wondering if a story of a handful of elitists who flee a hopelessly corrupted Earth and return to force it to follow the Only Way to Survival might indeed encode an odiously authoritarian subtext.
And all this angst over a band that never had a single skinhead follower. Sheesh.
Anyway ...
The earthquake/tsunami: I suspected you probably weren't near the epicenter, but I was more concerned about the ongoing Level 7 (Chernobyl-grade) nuclear incidents. Considering Japan's history with radiation horrors, I worry there'd be a lot of grimness about it all over. Radiation in the food and water and the like.
I'm not going to spend a lot more time attempting to disabuse you of your view of Vineland because I get it. The bad stuff in that book, save for some of the early short stories, is Pynchon's worst, period. For me, it centers around Takeshi — originally just a plot device to link Prairie up with DL so she could begin to exhume and explore the history of her estranged mother Frenesi, which is the heart of the book. But for some ungodly but doubtless still Pynchonian reason he took on a life of his own, and went on to wreck prit-near every scene he's in. And you're right: it has nothing to do with being a stereotype per se; he's just a cipher. The caracatures of Major Marvy and "Bloody" Chiclitz, of Dr. Hilarius in Lot 49, are in ways inhuman and offensively drawn, but they're also eye-popping and fun. Takeshi's just clunky and the episodes his presence provoke: the Karmology Clinic attending to the retributive needs of the Thanatoids, the yearlong contract with DL so she can atone for her mistakenly-applied Ninja Death Touch, the Chipco Lab Mystery Stomping, are just strained and silly.
Though the whole plot doesn't resolve very well (and this is Pynchon's only non-apocalyptic novel, with a bona-fide Happy Ending to boot, so it should), I will say that I think there's some really great writing in the second half. In a stunningly ironic twist for Pynchon (and which harbored a good lesson for his later fiction), the stuff that works best in Vineland is the least surreal and most humanly verisimilar. As you say, the beginning is teriffic; I wish there was more of Zoyd's home life with his daughter. The romantic feelings between DL and Frenesi, the girl-crush Prairie has on her glamorously delinquent friend Che, Frenesi's red-diaper parents Hubbell and Sasha — are all exquisitely drawn. The labor history about union-busting in Hollywood is very well-done and historically accurate (and comes near the end of the book). And as bizarre as it might seem to someone not intimately familiar with campus unrest in late-60s America (not to mention the Weather Underground), the PR3 rebellion at The College of the Surf, though dramatized, is an uncannily ringing portrayal of an unprecedented time of freedom, chaos, unsupportability and backlash that swept through campuses only a few years before the Patty Hearst kidnapping demonstrated the degeneration of those ideals to the broader public.
Okay, enough for now (sheesh!). Plenty to chew on here, and opening up a new tab in Wikipedia shows me that I have a new message. I hope that won't zap this whole thang here. Lemme save it in a textfile just in case ...
TTYL,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 06:27, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
- I remember liking all that "labor history" stuff. For some reason I thought it came earlier in the book.
It came as a result of bringing Frenesi back together with Sasha and Hubbell due to Zoyd nemesis and TV-detox escapee Hector Zũinga attempting to blackmail the family into helping to make a Hollywood movie, which would turn the revolutionary filmmaker Frenesi Gates's life into a cheesy made-for-TV anti-drug, anti-hippie parable (an idea kind of like Gerhardt von Göll making The Return of Martin Fierro on steroids). So Pynchon at that point had an excuse to flesh out Sasha and Hubbell's family history and their careers behind the scenes in Hollywood. One of the best parts of the book. (The climax itself is kind of ridiculously terrible, though).
- You've just gone and name-dropped a lot of my favourite bands. I knew about Magma's reunion (around 2000 or so?) but haven't gotten around to listening to their new stuff yet (or much of my own kind of music at all since we popped out a couple of kids).
Mazel tov! You owe it to yourself to YouTube up K.A. and at least give Part One a listen (hell the whole thing, but K.A. I is particularly amazing). The recording is fantastic, the vocals (solo and chorus) are lyrical and passionate, Vander's drumming is superb, the (excellent) composition less trance-y and Minimalist and more Stravinskyan-neoclassical.
- It's the first I've heard about Vander's racism.
I've extensively researched it from archived periodicals and I don't think the idea can be supported that Christian Vander is a racist per se. He was mentored as a young drum progidy by none other than Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones (his dad was a notable French jazz pianist) and he loves Trane doubtless with every drop of his Gallic blood (the young Vander became bottomlessly furious at the cultural forces he naively felt were implicated in Coltrane's death). He's a man with lifelong anger problems (his homelife as a kid was reportedly terrible) and a bad history with alcohol. I think he's conflicted about his own backround; on one hand, he's appeared quite proud of the musical gifts of his Gypsy violinist grandfather, on the other, considering the reputation of the Roma people in Western Europe, he probably harbors a degree of shame about that heritage, too. He's said incredibly contradictory things about Africans over the years, one time to provoke the New Left sensibilities of his interviewers by excoriating the political failures of France's former colonies in racial terms, a little later viewing African blacks as inherently spiritually advanced and more loving than Europeans.
I think he has a weird and naive set of racialist beliefs, which find expression in the Kobaïa myth's clashing civilizations. More troublingly, he may at some time have bought into some aspects of Holocaust denial (a comment about "rewriting history" that nobody managed to clarify). Still, all those decades of history with the Polish-Jewish Stella Linon as his former wife and lifelong collaborator make it hard to credit hardcore anti-semitism or serious Hitler nostalgia.
I've concluded that Vander is a guy who has had to continuously fight off feelings of weakness and disempowerment, constructing an edifice of the hyper-rhythmical, Wagnerian Magma — Mars to the French band Gong's Venus — as a reaction formation. And this contempt of internal weakness sometimes flings itself outward in raging drunken outbursts.
The most seriously troubling thing I've heard was a recollection on the Köhntarkösz blog that Vander admonished his audience to "consider" voting for Le Pen. Since this was one person's memory coming at a time when fans were overturning every rock looking for this stuff and nobody corroborated it, I choose to call it mistaken memory. He couldn't have gotten away with doing that in France without becoming notorious. If true, I dunno what I'd ultimately conclude. As annoyingly capital-L Libertarian as Zappa eventually became, he never once asked his audience to vote Republican.
- Honestly, that wouldn't keep me away from his music, though. It would just induce me to torrent it so he couldn't get paid for it.
Why torrent? Torrenting might be fine if you're looking for the latest Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, but appears to be a time-consuming pain in the butt for anything qualifying as obscure. Mediafire, megaupload or rapidshare will get you the whole file in one shot (sometimes in a less lossy FLAC format). Filetram's a good conduit to those sites. I have no idea how they can remain legal after the demise of Napster, but they're all chock-full of banner ads and legal disclaimers, so I'll be damned if I'm going to feel guilty for using them. 90% of the time I'm downloading stuff I used to own, anyway. If I wasn't so broke atm, I'd mail all my favorite artists checks just for all the pleasure they've brought me. Then again, I'm a persuasive advocate for my favorite music, so maybe they'd consider that free promotion :)
- I'm pretty thick-skinned—my favourite cartoonist is a representative of the Libertarian party of Canada. Disgusts me, but I have no problem enjoying his work (even when it's explicitly Libertarian).
When the US Libertarian Party solicited Frank Zappa to run on their presidential ticket, I'll credit Zappa for demurring and calling their platform "insane." Anybody generally on the Left side of things has an often ardent degree of sympathy for civil libertarianism, but a political party that amalgamates it with economic libertarianism is a creature only borne of dorm-room bull sessions by white guys in elite universities — demonstrating the adage that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. At least garden-variety Republicanism isn't so bone-crushingly naive about the weilding of power.
A number of years ago on our public-affairs TV network C-SPAN, I caught a five-candidate debate for Canadian PM. I noticed two things: first, how salubriously red-shifted to the public-sector side of things your whole politics are compared to ours, and secondly, how the candidate from Alberta seemed to be clone of George W. Bush from Central Casting.
It's nice when literary or musical artists happen to share my politics (I also love Henry Cow, Fred Frith, Art Bears and their many RIO offshoots, though I tend to prefer their song/structured composition side to their free-improvising side), but goodness I couldn't make it strictly necessary. Art is supposed to mine the subconscious first, not articulate some normative agenda. Peter Gabriel may have the greatest male voice in rock, but he and Bono are bland and boring to me as artists, no matter how much they do for Africa. When I'm out of this post, btw, I'm going to seriously check out your Chester Brown.
- I've wanted to go see a Yoshida Tatsuya show (last I heard he was doing them solo), but I can't convince anyone to go with me (why do I feel like such a loser going alone? I missed the Ventures' last tour of Japan before whatsisname died because I didn't want to go alone).
I don't think I understand Japanese name conventions. Everything I've seen in the press calls him "Tatsuya Yoshida," but I notice the musicians familiarly call themselves by their "surnames," so I'm sure you're following a convention by "inverting" his names. You're talking about Ruins Alone, and that would be something for the stout of heart. Ruins is extremely hardcore and a bit close to Japanese brutal avant-garde (there are some Japanese bands that make Ruins sound positively well-behaved). I respect and admire Ruins because I'm an odd and changing time signature monomaniac, but even I think a Ruins concert would be a bit much to take in at one sitting — though of course I could be totally surprised.
But by all means if you get the chance, drag the spouse and the li'l chillins to a Koenji Hyakkei concert. Koenji's Yoshida's direct Magma homage, and while the last thing from "easy listening" (everything about Koenji is on steroids), their bouyant exuberance and audience rapport are just off the charts — totally unlike the Dark, Dead Seriousness of most RIO/Zeuhl outfits. Imagine an audience call-and-response with a word in an invented language: Dunt ... Dunt ... Dunt ... "TOBELOI!!!" Dunt ... Dunt ... Dunt ... "TOBELOI!!!" Koenji's greatest assets (aside from the impeccable jazz/classical chops of drums, keyboards and five-string bass) are their two female frontpeople: the drop-dead gorgeous vocalist AH (stage name) and adorable sprite soprano saxophonist Keiko Komori. They cannot stay still, putting all kinds of body English into dementedly difficult parts, effortlessly bopping around in 13/4 or 17/8 like denizens of some intergalactic disco. The sheer joy at music-making this communicates is alone worth the ticket; I've seen them described (and I heartily concur) as the single best rock outfit touring today. Some of their concerts are on YouTube. Plug the notebook into the stereo and check them out!
- If you haven't come across it, you should hunt around for Beefheart's original Bat Chain Puller. I put it number two after Trout Mask (although Gary Lucas puts Decals at number 1, and I find myself ranking it higher every time I listen to it). There's a boot of BCP floating around online called the "JWB Transfer" that's probably the best quality you'll find.
I had read about the session being someting else, but didn't realize there was a listenable copy floating around. Thanks for the tip! You'd figure something that good would be officially released, especially considering the enormous outtake-riddled compliation Grow Fins. I heard Decals after I had fully assimilated Trout Mask and was utterly astounded then and remain so now. You can't bestow too many superlatives on a tune like "I Love You, You Big Dummy." I'd rank it (like Lucas and a number of critics) slightly above Trout Mask. Of the later releases, I'd put Ice Cream For Crow slightly above both Doc at the Radar Station and Shiny Beast, though none come near Decals or Trout Mask, for the as-yet unshredded voice alone.
- Aside from avoiding eating domestic fish, the earthquake's had very little impact where I live ( Shizuoka). Well, they've agreed to shut down the nuclear plant that's in the area, which people have been calling for for years. A lot of people (like my brother-in-law) have been going solar in recent years. The trend's totally unrelated to earthquakes, but I imagine it'll pick up a lot now. No food shortages or anything. The western media's really blown things ridiculously out of proportion. They actually had an hour-long special on the TV here about all the ridiculous claims being made around the world. It turns out that not a single foreign reporter had bothered to try to get any primary sources. One reporter actually did all his research in Osaka, which is just so ridiculously far away from where it hit...and then reported back home that Japan was a-ok because the people of Osaka were safe. Some papers were reporting thousands of deaths from the nuclear fallout (there has yet to be even one). The most tragic thing that happened to me was that my mother went and canceled her visit.
Everything I know about the earthquake/tsunami came from reading Wikipedia. I've been under a self-imposed news blackout since the November election. I worked my heart and soul out for our state's Democratic senator (who lost, natch), and there is nothing more demoralizing for a lifelong Democratic activist and political news junkie than a Republican midterm blowout. I don't wanna know from Sarah Palin, I don't wanna know how "weak" Obama's become or how he has to cave to Republicans now. All my posting since then has been on the unofficial Cardiacs forum The Mare's Nest (another musical fetish of mine). As the heavens turn seasonally in the sky, this will inevitably change in the 2012 election season.
I read that your wind farms took a direct hit from the tsunami and came out unscathed, which is a teriffic promotional for wind power. I was just thinking Chernobyl-grade incident and partial core meltdowns (as stated in Wikipedia) and extrapolating from there in my imagination. Whether or not anybody's been directly hurt by it yet (though of course radiation effects might take years to percolate through epidemiological studies), that just seems pretty extraordinary and — prima facie — pretty scary. I'm very glad that the "fallout" (so to speak) from the disaster is apparently much less than imagined.
- Oh, and I'm Canadian, by the way, not British. CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 07:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Hey, I did include the option that you might be a Commonwealth person :)
Cheers,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 00:35, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
I haven't followed the news the last couple of weeks, so I just heard about the meltdowns at lunch today from a friend who's returning to the States. Apparently TEPCO was covering it up so that the news wouldn't get out of hand (I don't blame them. Much as I resent the information not being released, the foreign media has, at times, crossed straight into the fictional). I haven't heard anything about the wind farms. We've got one wind turbine here in the city, but it's used for research purposes, not actual power generation. I'm surprised they haven't set up more. That thing's been there forever. Maybe now that they're shutting down the local nuclear plant they'll get around to setting up some more. Apparently Germany and Italy are going to start phasing out nuclear power now, too.
- The wind farm I read about was apparently a large one off the coast of the epicenter and took full-force waves. But being essentially simple devices anchored firmly into the shelf, built to withstand high winds and the like, there was little if any damage — which I still think is amazing. Chernobyl was a considerably gnarly event; I'd suspect that you guys are going to be hearing about the "Level 7 incidents" for while to come now that the cover's blown. I don't much like the thought of panic or overreaction either, but the Three Mile Island accident was only a Level 5 incident (an accident with consequences) and it pretty much derailed the construction of new nuke plants in the US.
I can't believe I've never come across Kōenji Hyakkei. It looks like they've been releasing records almost as long as Ruins. I'll have to check them out. Although I must say I can definitely imagine sitting through a Ruins concert. I've got a boot at home from around the turn of the century ('98? 2000?) that I totally loved (although haven't listened to in years). There was one long track that was a collection of classic rock'n'roll guitar riffs, all Ruinsized—and with no guitar!
- Yoshida has this thing for medleys. There's a Ruins Alone YouTube clip that's a 3-minute progrock homage. It's got almost everything: Rush, ELP, Yes, Gentle Giant, Genesis, King Crimson, Zappa, etc. etc. etc. with the just the tiniest snippets so you really need the list of riffs in the post to read along while you're listening. Ruins has a Magma homage in the same vein. And it fits the Ruins jump-cut aesthetic (which may be why I'm a little less enamored of them than I am of the more thoroughly-composed Kōenji Hyakkei). If you dig his venture into classic guitar rock, you could also check out his power trio, Korekyojin, especially the cut (once again, on YouTube) "Swan Dive." It's a blistering take on the sound of old-school hard rock. Classic Strat and P-Bass, Marshall stacks, amp overdrive (not fuzz).
As for Yoshida Tatsuya's name, "Yoshida" is his family ("last") name and "Tatsuya" is his given name. In most far-East countries, the family name comes first. After 13 years here, it's hard for me to switch them around the other way. There's an international standard (for, like, scientific papers and stuff) in which you're supposed to capitalize the family name, so that no matter whether it's YOSHIDA Tatsuya or Tatsuya YOSHIDA, you know which is which. Of course, the US isn't known for following international standards (metric, anyone? It's only been two hundred years now!).
- I'll never forget the humiliated sinking feeling I got when we launched the Hubble Space Telescope and it turned out that some of the infamous initial optics nightmare had to do with a contractor fucking up a metric-English conversion. I don't support the human space program (among much else, unless you wrap a vehicle so thickly in lead it'll never get off the ground, any long-term mission [say to Mars] will load the astronauts with radiation poisoning from the solar wind) but I do strongly support unmanned exploration. Challenger blew up, now this. We're idiots.
The original Bat Chain Puller's been boot quite a number of times, and has been released semi-offically ("grey-market", legal status unknown) at least once (under a title which escapes me, but I actually saw it in Virgin records in town years ago). Apparently the semi-official release sounds like shit, but the JWB transfer sounds awesome, like it came off the master reels or something. The Zappa estates sitting on the actual masters, and it was rumoured they were going to release it when the semi-official version came out and they canceled the plans. After all these years, and with Don dead, I find it unforgivable that Gail would still sit on this shit. I mean, what for? Spite? Spite over what? And for 35 years? I can'ōt believe how much money I've spent on Zappa shit...at least I should've bought it all used!
- I dunno, CT, on this we may have a different perspective. I know a few Zappa fans who like to snarl at Gail for control-freaking the legacy, but I can see a positive side to that. For instance, I know the guy who founded Project/Object, a Zappa tribute band. Gail denied them authorization to play Frank's music. And you know what? Go Gail. Even if they did play with Ike Willis. Because the guy I know's a total wanker; I've seen him perform many times at a local venue and a Steve Vai he decidedly ain't. If you can't transcribe a tune as cretinous as "Steve's Spanking" accurately, you have no business glomming onto the legacy. My 2¢.
- I've seen Don along with Mothers alumni drop way more brickbats on Frank over the years than the reverse. I agree with Frank that composers have a different status than musicians, and I tend to wonder if most of the talk about Frank "stealing ideas" from his sidemen is more likely envy or sour grapes provoked when Zappa disbanded the first Mothers and "threw them out of work." I'd credit it a lot more seriously from Don Preston than I would from Jimmy Carl Black, let's put it that way. Zappa gave Don Vliet an income when he was contracturally prohibited from recording by taking him on the Bongo Fury tour and guesting him on the album, and Don acted with increasing (irrational) resentment. Zappa's always been a detatched rationalist with an eye for business, and I think this just creates resentment from emotional intuitive art-comes-from-within types. But Zappa never at any time acted like the mean-spirited control freak dictator that Don did when he threw Drumbo down a flight of stairs and tossed him off the Trout Mask credits even though French irreplaceably transcribed most of the music. So I can't take at face value a presumption that Gail is acting in some way to undermine Beefheart's legacy by not releasing those tapes. I'd like to at least hear her side.
The album itself sounds like what the last three records would have sounded like if they'd been recorded with the Decals band. John French is on drums. There're only two tracks that were never re-recorded, but I think all the tracks (except maybe "Brickbats") sound better on the 1976 recordings. Basically, the track listing is like a best-of of the songs from the last three albums.
- Gotcha. "Brickbats" is one of my faves from Shiny Beast. I hope some of the filler isn't on there, like "Harry Irene," "You Know You're A Man" or "Love Lies." Does Bruce Fowler play? It's hard to imagine "Run Paint Run Run," "When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy," "Owed T'Alex" or "Suction Prints" without his "air bass" trombone.
Without giving me a year, I can't tell which Nazi Albertan party leader you're talking about. Preston Manning? Stockwell Day? Current Führer Stephen Harper? Alberta fucking breeds those people. Funny, I lived there for two years, and the people I knew never seemed like such xenophobic fundamentalist fascists. Only twenty years ago, Canadians wouldn't have given these fuckers the time of day, but it seems the Left has been split between too many parties, letting the Conservatives sweep into power with only 23% of the vote.
- Stockwell Day. He was so creepy. Another hail-fellow Man of Action Ken-doll type like Bush. (Even he, though, was talking up preserving your national healthcare.) You know, we Merkuns get slapped around for our Tweedlededumbed-down two-party system by you Parliamentary types, but one advantage over a proportional multiparty system is that we have to work out our differences within the major parties, before a general election. I'd hate like hell to imagine a coalition government where Pat Robertson's God Party decides to walk out and call a vote of no confidence because he didn't get to make abortion punishable by death. Not such an exaggeration when you consider how Israeli governments left and right have to suck tiny ultra-religious party balls gently yet passionately even though the vast majority of that country is secular. Abysmal turnout + alienating discourse = stability.
I don't personally align myself with any party. I tend to vote against candidates, rather than for them.
- I have a friend who's got a better democracy aphorism than Churchill's: Democracy is the form of government where everyone gets what the majority deserves. I hear ya; that's a totally respectable position, provided, of course, that you vote (when you're not, you know, being illegally disenfranchised). I admit it; for all my self-proclaimed inward-directedness I'm a Party man. I don't challenge Democratic incumbents in a presidential race and I do get very active and idealistic-lefty when we have an open primary. In '04 I was a Deaniac because he was right on Iraq (supporting John Kerry in the general was brutal) and in '08 I don't regret (nay, am proud of) my vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary. At the end of the day I'm a committed realist — always busting my hump for the Evil of Two Lessers because nobody running gets near my true ideal of a progressive. In an American context I can't say I have much respect for so-called Independents (who are generally people who put candidate personality and "character" ahead of positions on issues) and that most despicable of creatures, the Undecided Voter. Hey ... there are only two viable choices here. If you don't know what Marx would call your objective interests by now, you're a friggin' waste of life.
However, as of 2006, I've been illegally stripped of my Charter right to vote, by not being a resident. So, basically, if Canada ever were to institute a draft (an idea that would have seemed laughably ridiculous until last month), I could be forced to kill or die for my country, but I couldn't participate in choosing the people who would make that decision on my behalf. I found a forum somewhere where some people were complaining about it, and some posters responded that if you weren't paying taxes in Canada, why should you expect the right to vote? I love that idea! A great way to prevent housewives, the disabled, the retired and unemployed from participating in the system that makes decisions for them!
- Yeah, in America they used to call that the poll tax. Good grief. I just read the Q&A from your link and I'm utterly appalled. It seems so ... un-Canadian. I can't believe this would stand up to a court challenge, and I'm clueless as to what motivated the change in interpretation to begin with. Five years? And you're dead right; if you're subject to serving in the military, you damn well should be able to vote; that's how we got our last Constitutional amendment passed, which gives 18-year-olds the franchise. You're still subject to frickin' Canadian law as a citizen! And taxes if they want to pass a law! Like that site explained; we campaign vigorously overseas in America for expat votes. Canadian serial killers can vote, but a genius kid at Harvard looking for a cure for cancer can't. This is such a boneheaded, reactionary, xenophobic restriction I can't believe Americans haven't thought of it first!
I've never come across Filetram before—I don't know how not! Looks like I'll be having a busy night. Merci beaucoup to you! CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 06:49, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Mercy buckets back atcha,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:55, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
- Oh, I can't guarantee that you'd like Chester Brown's Paying for It. It's a bit off the mark to say it's not a typical Brown work, as he's sort of famous for changing his approach with every new work he starts, but the book just came out and so far is only available in hardcover—I'd hate to see you blow $20 on an hour-long read by a guy who's trying to promote a Libertarian utopia where romantic relations are a thing of the past and people buy and sell their bodies like any other piece of property, with no emotions attached; pretty much everything he does is an "acquired taste", and it's a bit hard to say what would be the best work to start with. If you can find something in a library or online it might be best, but it's also not likely (there's something about talking penises and graphic images of minors masturbating on the carpet that puts people off). If you lived in the neighbourhood I'd just lend you everything, as I think his work's best appreciated that way. You could probably plow through it all in a week or less (they're comic books, after all, and Brown's comics tend to emphasize the visual. He's also not terribly prolific. After almost thirty years, I doubt his unabridged works would come to a thousand pages).
- Look at me trying to warn someone off my favourite artist! I'd be a terrible salesman! CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 12:17, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
That's weird, because the only other work I know that tries to radically excise romance from sex is a centralized, Statist dystopia — Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I wouldn't be "offended" by any of this; after all, my favorite novel has that scene of a dominatrix (with a tortured conscience) who shits down the throat of a doddering General (who enjoys it) so her employer can be rewarded with more of the money the General is in control of in order to capture and ultimately try to castrate the hero the dominatrix had much great but rather emotionless sex with because said employer feels his entire worldview might collapse if he can't learn why this man gets hardons at the particular times he does.
Sounds like a healthy good time, doesn't it.
I'll read about him in Wikipedia and see if I can't google a few things up ...
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:55, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Well, I read the Chester Brown Wiki pieces. "There's nothing wrong with paying for sex as long as you're paying the right woman for sex."
Hehe. Sounds like marriage :)
Question: Does he give / is he depicted as giving these women orgasms?
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
- There's no scene in which the woman have orgasms, no. There are a few scenes where he prematurely ejaculates, and some scenes where the women are clearly not enjoying it. It's really weird—he's clearly advocating all this stuff, and yet making it look like it's no fun at all.
Nobody writes an autobiographical work about healthy, fulfilling sexual relationships ("This morning we made love. It was awesome. This evening we had a marvelous dinner, saw a movie and made love. It was great.") unless they're writing straight porn. And nobody writes an autobiographical work about prostitution like Fanny Hill or The Happy Hooker that attempts to uplift the profession, honor the female sex drive and laud the status quo — which would make the tiniest pretense of attempting to appeal to women. Or not being porn. This is clearly an argument, I think aimed at himself.
- There's a problem, though, with him depicting everything as flat and emotionless. He's done that as an artistic choice, though in real life he's known to smile and laugh a lot—his friend Joe Mattdepicted him as having a horse laugh way back in the 80s, and you can hear that in one of the videos link on the external links section of the Paying for It page. He comes off as robotic and sombre in the book, but a number of people have pointed out that he's not like that in real life, and that in fact he's become less uptight and more happy in real life since he started whoring. And yet this is the work that he's decided to drain all the emotion out of! (well, Louis Riel was pretty emotionally flat, too, but not to half the degree of PfI.
I've read all the stuff on Chester up on Wiki and I'm pretty good at doing the dinosaur bone bit and fleshing him out in my mind. I think the guy's a serious candidate for therapy and an exemplar of the Peter Pan Syndrome. Sure, he's capable of good relations with his male buddies (like in the secret clubhouse when he was 12) but the idea of an adult relationship with a woman, which requires risk in order to achieve intimacy, absolutely terrifies him. He's happier now that he's whoring because, according to The Playboy, he's had a lifelong fixation on masturbation guilt, while sexually cathecting on images of ideal superlovers who bear no relationship to the women around him. He doesn't have to spank it anymore. Whew! Everthing else, including the political arguments, is a doubt-inducing rationalization on which his friends get the last word.
- I already thought that prostitution should be decriminalized/legalized, for the same reason as with drugs (although I participate in neither): making them illegal has created far too much opportunity for crime (pimping, human trafficking, etc in the case of prostitution; all the hustling and gang warfare that goes with the drugs). Brown hasn't made me swing the other way, but if I hadn't already been convinced, this book wouldn't have convinced me.
Sure, I'm a civ-libber, too. It's funny, though, how this guy doesn't at all resemble an American Libertarian Party member. Those guys pay lip-service to all the dorm-room bull session issues including free-speech absolutism, unrestricted private abortion, the right to die (assisted or otherwise), defendants's rights before solving crimes (which all become a lot more complex and double-sided when you apply any serious thought) but spend all their time on abolishing the income tax or at least making it flat, ending reserve currency and going back to the gold standard, dismantling government, ending foreign aid, viewing all social issues as personal disputes to be resolved in civil court (may the best-argued lawsuit win) and getting out of business's way. An American LP dude would legalize prostitution but wouldn't shed a tear for or shudder at the inadequate healthcare these women have as Chester apparently does at one point. He'd say charge what the market will bear, pay the doctor or buy the appropriate type of medical insurance; don't expect the State to do any of that for you.
- So why do I like the book? I love fine cartooning, and Brown has an amazing amount of control over his line, pacing, panel compositions, etc. Plus, the conversations are pretty funny. He often gives the last word to his friends who disagree with him. Strange approach to take for advocacy. When he advocated that schizophrenia doesn't exist in " My Mom was a Schizophrenic" he didn't allow these cracks in the argument. It was a lot more convincing, and it was still enjoyable to read.
I totally dig it. My favorite cartoonist remains Bill Watterson, who did the last great American comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes (I named my cat after both the political philosopher and the eponymous stuffed tiger). I completely admired his art (while having zero ambivalence about his message). I don't think Chester Brown's arguments are very real, though. I think they amount to epiphenomenons of his mental state and wish-fulfillment about his personal experience. Back in those wild American Early 70s when you could entertain just about any idea (the perfect moment in the Zeitgeist to release Gravity's Rainbow), I read a bunch of Thomas Szasz in Psychology Today magazine, the psychiatrist who put those schizophenia-is-socially-constructed arguments on the map. Hey. My own mom died of alcoholism when I was 13 and my first girlfriend was a clinically-diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic (in remission at the time I met her). She flipped out again at college, came back home and I spent my late teen years attemping to "take care" of her. Mental illness is real. End of story.
Thomas Szasz also put the Libertarian argument for complete autonomy in sexual relations on the map as well; considering the confluence of these issues with Chester (and considering that Chester is less than a year younger than yours truly), I wouldn't be surprised at all if Chester had read his work and considers Szasz a primary influence on his thinking.
Let me also not fail to express what I think is clearly admirable about this work. Brown is trying as hard as he can to be totally honest. He's not idealizing or fantasizing. He's accurately portraying the creepiness that makes him unsexy to women. And he's giving his own arguments the skepticism they're due by realistically relating the debates with his friends and letting them have the last word. I absolutely see why this book won awards and why you like his work so much. The flat affect is not so much a rhetorical strategy as it is a necessity due his terror of intimacy, on which he bases his larger political argument. If you really wanted to do the dinosaur bone bit and psychoanalyze the guy for a minute (which I realize full well I'm not equipped to do; but hey, it's just the internet :), I'd say this came from the traumatic withdrawl he felt from his mother while ill (full-blown schizophrenics obviously have no capability for intimate exchange) prior to her tragic death.
- I think he's trying to arguing for too many things at once in the book. (1) He's arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution—fine.
Not so fine — unless you're a Libertarian who doesn't give a flying fungus about the social effects of prostitution (because to Libertarians there are no "social effects," only personal interactions. As Maggie the Thatch always sez, "Society doesn't exist"). I support decrim only as a stopgap measure, because I'd rather see the cops spend their time (and our money) on other things. But I don't support it at all as a matter of policy. I support legalization, along with what our state Nevada does in the several counties where it's legal, full regulation. Mandatory checkups, background checks, healthcare and social service access, etc. All things that would make any self-respecting American Libertarian run screaming the other way.
- (2) He's arguing that the emotional stress of romantic relations is a negative, destructive thing—if you buy that, fine, but it's a separate argument.
It's not only a separate argument, it's totally invalid on its face. People in stable, relatively happy relationships (hetero or homo) live longer and suffer less health problems — a fact long empirically established by sociology (Along with American studies, I was a Soc minor.) If he were arguing only for himself (completely valid; not everybody fits in the middle of the bell curve), he'd have no need to push this. It's the ol' m'lady protesteth too much thing. In other words, pure defensiveness motivated out of a painful emptiness that all his hail-fellow whore stories only mask to his friends but doesn't alleviate.
- (3) Then he's arguing (from his Libertarian standpoint) that our bodies are our property (and, as a Libertarian, that property rights are the only rights the government should be protecting),
I'm going to take this contradiction apart without any need to reference Chester. You know, Libs are funny people (and I've debated self-described capital-L Libertarians for decades, on BBSs before the internet). Sometimes you can catch them when their defenses are down, maybe after a couple glasses of wine and they're feeling a little sentimental and miffed at constantly being mistaken for moral nihilists. They'll declaim to you that their political persuasion is in fact deeply moral, and it involves minimizing the potential for force and fraud. (Of course, Libertarians generalize this into a Rousseau-like historical principle and implicitly if not explicitly assert that if people didn't practice force and fraud on each other, why there would never have been a need for government at all. Which makes them, of course, single-theory-to-explain-everything maniacs and therefore a bit intellectually hopeless in the best of cases.) It's what makes them different from anarchists, because they believe in a role for government and the military, however minimal, precisely to protect people (in practical terms property, because as you stated people own themselves as property) from acts of force and fraud. It's also what makes them a little different from Constitutionalists and other flavors of small-f fundamentalist conservatives, because they're not so ready to abandon the civil courts to "tort reform." Sometimes you need a vigorous court defense to protect your property (and your person) from force and fraud. And the more property you own, the more you require protection.
And that's where ethically it all falls apart ...
There are some women, in the vast majority of cases high-priced call girls of middle class background, who got into it as a free choice without being exploited. That girl who famously caught out our former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer a few years ago is an example, as are Xaviera Hollander and Heidi Fleiss. Sometimes women got into hooking as a way to pay for a college semester and found they liked it more than going to school. (I have a couple friends who don't share my sexual ethics and regularly visit freelance middle-class prostitutes. I can't speak for the girls, but sadly enough, I'd characterize these guys's motivations as all-too-often consisting of a fair mixture of grandiosity, obsessive-compulsion and misogyny.) It generally seems to require a higher than average sex drive, a materialist outlook and sometimes just a strong desire to "get over" on powerful men by turning the tables for a minute. These are the women who validate the Libertarian paradigm by simply "taking ownership" of their bodies and, as they make a good penny, don't cost the state a thing.
But good gravy, this is only a tiny sliver of prostitutes. It's not the girls Chester visits nor for the vast part the ones my friends visit. Mostly they have drug problems, serious emotional issues, they got into it out of some degree of economic desperation (even if no one sold them into white slavery with a literal gun to their heads or a pimp's fists in their backs). They react to their environments; they are not in any way self-actualized people who take charge of their destinies. To speak of "self-ownership" regarding these women is to babble incoherently. And this reveals the fundamental immorality of defending one's actions with a set of principles that reduce human value to the currency of what we choose to buy and sell.
A human life has an incommensurable value. It is ours alone, but infinitely more precious than "property."
- and that romance-free paid sex should be the way that everyone approaches sex. Well, that one should really, really be a book all its own, and only muddies the argument when you're trying to get prostitution decriminalized.
I think what Chester needs to do is to go find a 75-year-old who's just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and tell them that contrary to all outward appearances, how foolish, deluded and miserable they've been their entire adult life.
- You know, if the whole point of #1 is to get to #3, and you don't agree with #3, then why would you support #1 in the first place? He just shoots himself in the foot with the way he presents his arguments. And then he leaves the strongest argument for any of this that he has right out of the book—what his friends (like Seth and Jeet Heer) have attested to: that he's so much happier a person since he took up whoring. He sure doesn't come off as happy in the book! He comes off as a robotic, emotionally repressed cripple (which he sure doesn't seem to be in his video interviews). Definitely a failure on the polemic side, but I can't decide if this last one is an artistic failure or not—the book's enjoyable, even if it's not accurate. How accurate does art have to be, anyways?
I think the work succeeds as art in direct proportion to how much it fails as a polemic. Chester's not fooling anybody; he still feels way-guilty for having orgasms no matter where they come from, so he's chasing what Erica Jong memorably called the zipless fuck. Jong called it "the purest thing there is" and something that explicitly cannot be bought. Of course he needs to try to salvage what this means for the sake of his dignity. His rationalizations go to extremes (the thought of a guy this obviously miserable shilling for a sexual utopia is pretty tragically funny) and his buddies roll their eyes, and are right.
You said this isn't accurate, but I'd disagree. I think it's extremely accurate. This is who Chester genuinely is, so it meets all critera for autobiography. And it's reflective of my own experience with my two whoring friends. They'll try to tell me how great it was last night, I'll look at them and go "dude ... you paid for it" and then they'll rag on me for not getting any pussy. It's the same basic dynamic; they invest money in something they know inside is empty and unfulfilling and rationalize and/or deflect like hell when challenged on it. If it was really that good, they'd have no need to convince me it was.
I don't think Chester is either seriously advocating to legalize/decriminalize prostitution or genuinely attempting to sell a world liberated from the ickiness of romantic entanglement. I think Chester is just being Chester — an impulsive sexual neurotic — and writing a comic book about it. And I applaud him for all the unflattering honesty this demonstrates. If he wanted to write a polemic for either of those outcomes, he could've easily have done it — but it would have had to have become heavily fictionalized. The girls would become major characters who'd tell us that they would enjoy their fulfilling and self-actualized choice of profession even more if only they didn't have to worry about those durn cops.
And hey — how many Chick's Tracts or political pamphlets win comic book awards?
Finally, I think it's a scream that Hugh Hefner felt the need to share some dismayed "fatherly advice" with Chester about the book. Hef cracks me up; he remains the poster boy (and I do mean boy) for American Freudianism (which is what you get when you don't remember to read Civilization and its Discontents). Sexual repression is ... bad! If we only get rid of it by understanding its true nature, a veritable utopia of liberation awaits us. Hef was just gobsmacked that a guy this neurotic and repressed could still exist in our present age of enlightenment. But Dr. Hilarius from The Crying of Lot 49 was right. Hold the nasty little creature tightly by its tentacle, bring it out of the dark subconscious and into the Light of Reason — and you're still holding on to the tentacle of a nasty little creature.
Eww.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:11, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
- I'd assumed you read this when you brought up Szasz, but it looks like you didn't. Brown wrote an eight-page Chick tract-style comics "essay" called "My Mom Was a Schizophrenic" that he photocopied and left around Toronto. It's become one of his better-known works, and the bulk of it was inspired by Szasz and R. D. Laing. Despite the title, he never mentions his mom once in the whole strip, and her schizophrenia is only lightly touched on in his other works (mainly I Never Liked You, although her condition is never explicitly called schizophrenia in that book).
No, I guess I didn't. And I take your point that a tract or pamphlet-style work of comic art advocacy is also, as Cardiacs say, worthy of laudation. Believe me, I have personal experiences (my dad made a good living in medical advertising, starting back when Valium was considered a wonder drug) I could share regarding the scientism of psychiatry and the pharmico-industrial complex that would curl your toes and should make me by all rights a Szasz/Laing ideologue on the subject. But I also have the experience of driving my schizophrenic girlfriend Cathy home when out of the clear blue sky, she starts beating the living shit out of me in traffic, nearly killing the both of us. At the end of the day, I'm forced to conclude that opprobrium at behavior like that is motivated by something more than a social construction.
- You find out about Brown's mother mostly from his interviews—very little is given in his works. It may seem like he's repressing something, but in the interviews I've read he says that it's because he wasn't aware of what was going on with her when it was happening. Most of the time she seemed normal enough, but occasionally would get hysterical (which he doesn't show in his books, aside from one brief scene where she flips out at him for saying "Shit"—it comes off as her being religiously prudish, though, rather than unstable). I Never Liked You has a number of scenes with Brown's mother emotionally reaching out to him. It was Brown who was emotionally withdrawn, not his mother.
Obviously I don't know the situation and I don't wish to be glib about it, but at face value this raises some red flags. A mother "emotionally reaching out" is not necesarily a good sign for the emotional growth of her child (again, I have some difficult personal anecdotes I could share to show that, at least in my own case). What you and I have agreed on is that Chester comes across as emotionally stilted in PFI, and I would further argue that Chester has a fear of intimacy so pronounced that it cannot serve as a basis for social prescription. In general, a mother who shifts from hot to cold, or who has "hysterical" episodes and then reaches out to her son, can be extremely confusing to a child. The extreme level of masturbation guilt Chester suffers in TP (something which obviously cannot parse in a Libertarian worldview) seems connected to a "religiously prudish" mom who loses it at the word "shit," and maybe all those Playmates of the Month offered the promise of unconditional love that parents are normally supposed to assure their children of.
- He says he was given little information at the time about what was going on with his mother, and was not asked to go to the funeral. It wasn't until adulthood that he started to try to find out what schizophrenia was, which is when he ran across Szasz and Laing. He doesn't put in much effort to tie in what he believes about schizophrenia to his experiences with his mother. He doesn't advocate that the doctors did anything wrong in her case—in fact, he doesn't even seem to know what her treatment was. She ends up dying from falling down the stairs. If Brown believes the doctors were to blame for that, he hasn't said or implied so in any interview I've ever read with him. His anti-psychiatry stance, to me, falls in line with his generally well-known contrarianism, and I think the only relation to his mother there is that, the fact that she was diagnosed as schizophrenic gave him a subject to look up at the library (Toronto's got an awesome library system, by the way).
It would be very helpful if I knew the content of that tract, because there are many aspects of the anti-psychiatry argument that I think are quite valid. R.D. Laing's existential psychology (I love Gentle Giant's song " Knots") was a needed counterweight to the institutional Freudianism of the 60s and 70s (although Laing also indulged in his own share of Crackpot Ideas like re-experiencing uterine memories). When Szasz wrote his book in 1960, American psychiatric institutions were a snake pit, no question, and the side-effects of the early blunderbuss anti-psychotic medications (notoriously Thorazine) horrific. Residents were, a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, robbed of nearly all their dignity.
But the pendulum of history moves with its own momentum. By the mid-60s in the US, Szasz's ideas helped found a movement, supported not only by humanitarians and civil libertarians but also by President Kennedy, to de-institutionalize nonviolent mental patients. A terriffically humane and progressive idea, and one that would take courage to implement and get the public to accept, but the law was passed and it gradually came to be. For developmentally-disabled ("retarded") people this was an almost complete success, and on the whole, I don't think anyone would seriously argue for a return to what it was. But it also means that there's a hard core of homeless on American streets who are dead-bonkers (I've had my share of conversations with them), shuffle in and out of local jail for petty offenses, and only a Libertarian ideologue would argue that they're "happier" living this way rather than being sheltered and made to take their meds every day.
- I'm not sure how I misworded things in the Paying for It article that got you thinking that Brown was shedding tears over prostitutes' lack of health care.
My bad; that was an interpretation. It came from a description in the Wiki article about Chester's dismay in an argument regarding healthcare for prostitutes, represented by lightning bolts in a panel. It was noted that this was one of the very few places in PFI where Chester shows any emotion at all, so I took it for sentimental concern.
- There's a scene in the book where he's arguing the decriminalization vs legalization thing with his friend Seth. Seth is arguing that the prostitutes should be regularly tested. Brown argues that they live in Canada where health care is free and are free to get tested any time and however often they want. Seth argues they should be forced to be tested—and this is where Brown gets Libertarian. It's funny that he doesn't actually argue against our health care system (although it's been brought up time and again how he has received multiple grants from the government to complete his works, despite explicitly having the abolition of such grants on his platform. He gives his only half-coherent argument for why he did that in an interview floating around called something like "The Difference Between Giving and Receiving").
It's simultaneously both easier and more difficult to argue for capital-L Libertarianism in a place like Canada. Easier, because Canadian society has assimilated egalitarian welfare into its social contract and it's always easy to criticize the inevitable excesses and unintended consequences of an established system — e.g. bureaucratic inconveniences that would no doubt raise hackles in a typical American. More difficult because Chester is obviously trying to have it both ways. Leave aside the obvious (and oft-noted) hypocrisy of depending on State arts grants to survive in an unremuniterave profession like cartooning, but also that he "gets Libertarian" on Seth knowing full well that healthcare is a guaranteed right for these women. Heh — try making the Libertarian argument for caveat-emptor, unregulated prostitution in America, with women getting tested whenever they damn well want to, where healthcare (shamefully) is not a right. See how well he sticks to his guns there. This is so internally inconsistent within the tenets of Libertarianism that once again, it leads me to believe Chester's book is up to something different than an all-too-easily demolished Libertarian polemic for prostitution.
- I'm not deluded (and I don't think Brown is, either) into thinking that legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution would somehow give these women self-actualization/-fulfillment or whatever. What it would give them, however, is police protection against violence, etc. As it stands, if a prostitute (even a strong, independent, "self-actualized" one) is the victim of violence (or anything else) from her john, she doesn't have the recourse of taking it to the police, as she could have herself arrested for prostitution.
Any supporter of legalization (like yours truly) would certainly accept decriminalization as a first step. I'm ambivalent about legalizing all recreational drugs, but I fully support the idea to treat all drug use as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue. The very first thing that needs to happen is for prostitutes to have recourse to common legal protection.
- As for Nevada, Brown of course brings it up in his book, but so do others: the prostitutes who work in the Nevada brothels are confined there, and are not allowed to leave without escort. You don't need to be a Libertarian to find something intensely horrifying about that.
As an American and a strong, if not entirely doctrinnaire, civil libertarian, I don't exactly find that "intensely horrifying." Before learning more about Nevada's brothels, my first reaction is to think culturally, and recall that Nevada is part of the American West, that cradle of don't-fence-me-in Libertarianism (sort of like our country's answer to Alberta :). I wouldn't suspect that there's something nefariously Statist going on there, or something that reeks of noblesse-oblige Eastern Seaboard "social engineering." It might very well be (thinking off the top of my head before I go wiki Nevada brothels) that being a known prostitute alone is extremely dangerous given the cultural realities of low-income Nevada, and this is for their physical protection. If it's part of the contract before these women sign up for the work, then it fairly conforms to Libertarian respect for contracts. It would be "intensely horrifying" if it came out of the blue after they took the job.
- On the other end, if a john found out (or suspected) that the prostitute he was seeing was, say, being forced into the work, he could report it if the whole business wasn't illegal in the first place.
Agreed. I do think cops look down on pimps and traffickers even more than they do on prostitutes.
- Compare it to the alcohol situation. With alcohol legal and strictly regulated, there are still all kinds of social problems (alcoholism, broken glass littered on playgrounds, drunk driving), but the crime waves brought on by prohibition were so much worse (ditto the drug laws). You can be a tea-totaller and still see that prohibition is a problem, not a solution. Prostitution's not going away, and criminalizing it only magnifies the problems.
Oh my goodness, no argument here. But I will note something appropos of prohibiting other drugs (you know that subject would come up sooner or later) which speaks to my whole approach regarding prostitution. There are enormous cultural factors involved. Alcohol is a substance which the settlers of our country (if not the indigenous population) had centuries of experience with and deeply ingrained social rituals to informally regulate the consumption of. This is not true even with a substance as manifestly benign as marijuana, as Western Europe is not a "toking culture." As a teen, you can have a glass of wine with your family at dinner, attend social functions and learn by example what the limits are and the consequences from not following them. It's not a perfect system, obviously, but it does provide guidance that's effective most of the time. There's no tradition in our culture where it's appropriate to "smoke a joint with your dad" as a coming-of-age ritual, so it's much much harder to give the green light to pot while making sure that teenagers aren't just off to the races with it.
Let me be dead-explicit: I fully support the medical paradigm for dealing with all recreational drug use, which implies that I support total decrim for "soft drugs" and vastly reducing the penalties of "hard drugs" and substituting treatment programs for jail time in all non-violent cases. I am also an ardent supporter of legalizing marijuana, along with mushrooms, peyote and any other naturally occuring substance, even smoked opium balls and chewed cocoa leaf. I draw the line at processed hard drugs and synthetics because I see drug addiction as a serious problem and I loathe the profiteering middlemen and lab jockeys who process the shit (crystal meth is a worse social nightmare than either heroin or cocaine). I'd rather all drug use become more ritualized and spiritualized and less "recreational," though I realize that's asking way too much of cuture to evolve that way. What I don't support, though, is a Dutch solution which is both Libertarian and odiously Statist: not only subsidizing registered heroin addicts but also subsidizing their food and housing. This creates a class of people that have zero incentive to live any but the most diminished lives, let alone contribute to society. We shouldn't pay for that.
Explicit, though, isn't necessarily definitive. I realize that the lines I've drawn are inevitably arbitrary and can be disputed any number of ways. The only thing I'm 100% on is rejecting the criminal paradigm and generally agreeing that prohibition is more often than not counterproductive (even there I sound tentative, I know). Which gets me to my concerns about prostitution. Let's say we took the Libertarian, no-government approach and simply erased the laws against prostitution. Cultural attitudes about prostitution are going to remain the same. Prostitutes still won't get the benefit of the doubt from cops, they'll still have a tough time expediting rape cases, they'll still be seen as easy targets for violence (doubtless why culturally libertarian Nevada gets all Big Brother on their brothel employees). The only way this changes is not through law, but through a cultural evolution that allows the acceptance of prostitution as a dignified way for women to earn a living.
I'm not using this (as some people would) as an argument against decriminalizing prostitution. I indeed agree with Chester Brown and yourself that it would be an improvement, but I think it would be a much more marginal improvement than Brown gives it credit for — even for something as basic as being able to go to the cops. That's why my preferred route is not only legalization but support (public and/or private): Don't necessarily make them required-residency brothels but at least have safe houses, access to counseling, mandatory healthcare. As long as prostitutes are seen as social outcasts (not many of them can command the big bucks as call girls servicing the elite), I think it's the only humane way to go.
This sort of thinking blips completely off the radar screen of a Libertarian, though. Libertarians don't wanna know from culture. They don't wanna know from society. All they consider are individuals faced with choices, under the working assumption that every individual is an equal piece on the chessboard of life, and may the best moves win.
- You don't need to bring Brown to a 75-year-old couple—he acknowledges in one of his talks with his friends that such happy couples exist. His argument is that they are the exception rather than the rule, and that if that's what makes those particular people happy, then they should be free to have their happy monogamy, but that the social construct that puts pressure on all of society to seek the same thing is wrong.
A Golden wedding anniversary is obviously very rare and I was being facetious. But it's still hard to argue with the statistics. The people who muddle through long-term relationships are generally happier than those who aren't (given an equivalent age), and I think this is more reflective of a hardwired need for stable human companionship (there are no cultural differences to speak of here) rather than a construction indicative of a particular time and place — even if the institution of marriage as we know it (marrying with free choice for love rather than for social and/or economic reasons) is a product of the 19th-century industrial bourgeoisie (and that was a vast blow for liberty and happiness over arranged marriages).
Consider something else. There was a huge backlash against the Sexual Revolution for a very good reason. All else being equal, it's a rotten deal for women. Women get stuck with the kids. Men can walk away. So when you're attacking the social pressures for long-term relationships, you've got to consider both sexes here. There are a heck of a lot less cougars in the world than there are men who like to cat around. And again, I'm not speaking normatively, I'm speaking statistically (if informally). If you want to bring social pressures into it, my bogeyman is diametrically opposed to Chester Brown's. I think the problem is, rather, the social acceptance of the commercial commodification of sex. IMHO, Chester screwed up his adult love life by drooling over all those Playmates of the Month as a teen. So of course he can't find a woman in real life who can measure up to his impossible fantasies. The same thing with the ubiquity of porn. Young adult men of the internet age who've spent their adolescences wrecking computer keyboards with jizz often go through a crushing disillusionment with sex once they start having it. Couple counselling literature is filled with this. How would women feel about it?
So while I realize that The World's Oldest Profession is not going away any time soon, and while I fully support realistic, humane ways to integrate it into society, I think that Chester's prescription is not going to improve social attitudes about sex. The girls may gain a measure of long-denied respect, but the boys growing into Chesters would be much worse off.
And women in general would just have that much more reason to give up on men.
What Chester really needs to do is to invest in a RealDoll with an animatronic vagina.
- As for his "unsexiness" to women—well, I won't comment directly on that, but I do want to point out that his last girlfriend was Sook-Yin Lee (the page on her is horrible), who was a MuchMsuic VJ back when I was in high school—and she was hot (actually, she's aged pretty well, too). I remember being totally in love with her back before I had ever read a Chester Brown comic (I have yet to come across any of his comics in my hometown—not that it would have necessarily made a difference, as it was illegal to sell that stuff to minors). And the fact that she would promote comic books (like Brown's) on-air just made her unspeakably more desirable to this little comic book nerd. Just keep in mind that she wasn't just hot, but one of the most famous media personalities in Canada, and pretty much could have had her pick of men (or women—she's bi). She was the one who broke off the relationship, though (although they continued to live together for four more years). Not that this is proof of anything whatsoever, but I think it's his shyness rather than "ickiness" that makes it difficult for him to find women.
Oh absolutely. I meant the portrayal of his inner state, not whatever degree of objective attractiveness to women he may or may not possess. If you feel unattractive and icky, you're going to come across that way no matter what you look like, and Chester obviously has some pretty gnarly sexual self-esteem issues. The usual answer to Chester's common dilemma that romance is more trouble than it's worth (every person has felt that way at one time or another — usually after a painful breakup) — is, once emotionally recovered, to play the field. Get on the internet. Go speed-dating. Go to a park and strike up conversations. My bud Jonathan (one of the whoremasters) has an expression: "Women are a thing best enjoyed in vast quantities." The idea being either to eventually meet a woman you're sufficiently compatible with for a relationship or to get enough pussy while trying to tide you over. (Jon is not a guy who needs to pay for sex; he's just obsessive/compulsive).
Chester didn't feel like he could do that, despite having the status of a nationally admired cartoonist and despite coming off a relationship with a high-status woman like Sook-Yin Lee. That's an internal problem; it's got nothing to do with society. (How many adoring young female fans of his work do you think he could've trawled for at comic conventions?) The greatest irony in all of this is that Chester settled into a "monogamous" relationship (on his part, anyway) for a number of years with a steady girl. And there's nothing that an anti-Libertarian polemicist like yours truly could say that more effectively torpedoes his whole argument than that: At the end of the day, Chester's exactly like most people. He craves stability, familiarity, some semblance of connection (no matter how tenuous) with the person he's being intimate with.
That he happened to pay for it is not, at core, germane.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:09, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
- I won't disagree with many of your points (I've been married ten years with 2 1/2 kids and I think I'm much more monogamous by nature than most people you'd meet. I also can't imagine what motivates people to make use of prostitutes—if there's going to be no intimacy with the sex, I'd rather jerk off).
- It crossed my mind that, given Brown had been passing out the "My Mom Was a Schizophrenic" tracts for free, that it'd be available online (not from himself, though—he doesn't own a computer). Apparently some site had it up, but it's down now. Other than that, I can only find two pages of it on a Google image search.
- Legalizing hard drugs isn't really one of my pet subjects, so I don't want to dwell on it, but if, say, heroin were available by prescription from your doctor at cost or something close to it, it seems to me that it would pretty much eliminate the opportunities for traffickers and pushers. Who could compete with zero margins? Why would you want to? This would also give doctors the opportunity to keep an eye on the addicts (not necessarily in a Big Brother sort of way), and offer them ways out when they see the opportunity open. Of course, make it illegal to provide prescriptions to those who aren't already hooked. Of course, there'll always be new junkies out there—shit gets out and around even with the best safeguards. But without pushers looking for new clients (or with fewer of them, anyways; let's be pessimistic) I think in the long run the problem would become much more marginalized than it is now, with more opportunities for dealing with the cases that do exist. I don't know a lot about crystal meth, but if none of this applies, well, I think we should deal with special cases as special cases.
- When it comes to softer drugs, well, if there's no culture that's built up around it to signal to people the appropriate social limits, it sure isn't going to happen while the stuff is illegal. I'm not going to go into it deeper than that, though. My issue is not so much that I want drugs to be legalized, as that I want to do away with laws that cause more problems than they solve (or cause problems without solving anything).
- "Agreed. I do think cops look down on pimps and traffickers even more than they do on prostitutes."
- Well, to be honest, so do I. I think there should be no more pressure on either the prostitutes or johns than in any other client relationship (*), and pimps and traffickers provide a lot of pressure. If there were agencies that provided contact between hookers and johns I'd be for (or at least not against) that. As it stands in Canada since last fall, prostitution is actually legal, but pimps, brothels and street solicitation are not. (I'm assuming you mean "trafficker" to mean those who procure prostitutes, usually from abroad. Maybe you meant it as the client; some people seem to use the word that way.) Whether the cops would actually give prostitutes the benefit of the doubt—well, okay, you can't always trust a cop, but that's not directly related to the issue. At least the prostitutes would have the opportunity to try to get the cops' help.
- (*) Please don't interpret this statement through Brown's lenses. I'm not into his "utopia". In normal relations with clients, as long as a contract hasn't been signed, there's a lot of leeway for both sides to back out before money has changed hands. Pimps take away a lot of that leeway.
- I want to end this on something other than politics, but I've been battling mosquitoes all night and I'm sleepy. I think I'll go back to bed—glad there's no work today. I'll just say that I think I Never Liked You is my favourite of all of Brown's work, but relatively it's pretty tame—no jerking off, no fucking dead bodies, no nosepicking and biting neighbours. It's a near-perfect example of a comic that tells a story entirely in comic-book terms, one without literary pretensions (meaning he's not one of thes cartoonists of his generation who was so insecure with his chosen profession that he tried to "elevate" it by quoting poetry he didn't understand or by filling up panels with verbose narration). The whole story is told through images and dialogue and extremely well paced and laid out. Even though it's 176 pages you could probably get through it in an hour—which doesn't sound like you're getting what you've paid for, but I've re-read it enough times to more than make up for it (I like it so much I've bought it three times—in its original Yummy Fur appearances and in both collected editions, although my copy of the first edition has been stolen). CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 23:28, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
Makes it easier to edit when you break it up. Yeah, I hear ya, bro. I overslept way-extremely last night (actually the late afternoon until about 12 noon today. Toronto's in what -- Chicago's time zone? [CDT]) and can't for the life of me wake completely up. I'm trying to quit smoking (been gasping on 'em for 36 years) and all the pleasant memories of writing tightly-edited, insanely long posts to you while puffing madly away isn't helping — not that, you know, you're in any way to blame for that :) So I don't think I have the energy or focus to do a point-by-point today, which I'd guess you're fine with.
Boy was I ever wrong about Nevada's brothels. Turns out they're an insult to the notion of decent employment practices and if it were up to me I'd scrap the whole system. Nevada's back-asswards cultural attitudes can't remotely assimilate prostitution. Culturally libertarian? Not exactly. Libertarianism, after all, implies a certain degree of sophistication (however naïve) which Amsterdam might qualify for (they have a statue of a prostitute in the red-light district erected by an international sex workers's association) but hardly the relig-uh-mus, un-ed-u-muh-fuh-cated White Trash™ culture that settled Nevada. It's simply part of their heritage as a territory and then a state with a shitload of ranching and mining, which brought to it an enormous influx of Excess Unmarried Men. The vast majority of Nevadans live in the two populous counties where prostitution is illegal and it is restricted exclusively by the entirely arbitrary measure of county population size.
Las Vegas illustrates the whole state's doubleminded idiocy on the issue. The city polls dead split on the issue and the intense lobbying against it comes from the resorts and casinos, who, knowing the demographic trends, have worked to clean up the "Sin City" image and make it more family-friendly for all the aging baby boomers who make up the biggest share of their tourist revenue. But prostitution is inextricably linked to Vegas ("what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"), prostitutes fill the casinos late at night and there are "escort" and "personal entertainment" services stuffing the duly legal Yellow Pages (telephone directory) which even the most severe acephalitic knows are prostitution services in all but name.
The brothel owners are scum. The movement restrictions they place on the girls aren't so much for their safety as to guarantee their employees are making their shifts. The girls are contract employees, responsible for paying Federal income tax and Social Security (rather than having the money withheld up front and the overpayment returned at tax season, as with most wage employees) and they have no benefits (no employer healthcare, no paid time off) — while enjoying none of the psychic benefits of your-own-boss freedom associated with being an independent (IRS form 1099) contractor. While it's explicitly illegal to live off the wages of a prostitute, many brothels tacitly encourage outside pimps to keep the girls in line and working. The insanely Big Brotheroid restrictions on where prostitutes can live, where their children can live, where they can congregate (no bars where they could meet local men) are all about the cultural view that prostitutes are blights on a community. That's why advocates talk more about decrim than legalization. This model is horrendous.
One of the Wiki prostitution articles said that there were three basic paradigms in which to view prostitution: the prohibition model (where the girls are criminals), the abolition model (where the girls are victims) and the regulation model (where the girls are workers). Despite being "legal" in name, it's clear that Nevada's brothels operate in Paradigm #1. The girls are considered moral imbeciles who thus require being treated like misbehaving children. Dignity? Heh, what's that.
Lemme spend a minute on Paradigm #2 because I think it's interesting. That's where Canada's coming from, and it was pioneered by Sweden, Norway and Iceland which is why it's called the Nordic model. The idea is to criminalize all procuring and soliciting behavior (including the unmediated behavior of a john, say, signalling out a car window) while leaving the girls alone. You have to admit there's something very progressive about this; it recognizes that prostitution, like drugs, is a demand-driven activity. It also recognizes that if a woman is in desperate straits, prostitution is not any more a freely chosen activity than scoring drugs is for an addict. It recognizes that as long as male demand exists, criminalizing women for answering it is blaming the victim. And it puts the onus where the power and free choice reside, on the men who suffer nothing of what the prostitute does by living the sort of life required of them to be available to service men's needs.
So far, so good. But it goes further than that. It's based on the idea that a contractural relationship between a man and a woman (or any two people) for sex is strictly speaking impossible (practically speaking deeply dishonest) because of the power differential between buyer and seller (in the case of men soliciting women, furthered by patriarchal culture). Or that even if the relation was dead-equal, like say a guy at college offering to buy a blowjob from a girl on his dorm floor, sex is something so bound up with self-esteem, identity and need-for-intimacy issues that it can't be bought and sold, only freely given. And that concomitanty, women who support themselves by selling sex cannot help but warp their personalities and stunt their emotional growth. This is an idea advanced not merely by radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon who believe that we live in a rape culture (Dworkin is notorious for postulating that even marital sex is tantamount to rape), but by some of the most enlightened, humane countries in the world — including France, where the Fille et Joie is a national icon. So you get a bizarre alliance of progressive feminist humanists with moral reactionaries pushing this position, like Nicholas Sarkozy using post-9/11 security concerns to clamp down on soliciting.
What sex workers themselves want is only the freedom to practice what they have defined as a freely-chosen profession. They want the right to organize and to be provided health and counselling services, and are one of the few groups of any sort of workers who are actually fighting to be taxed by the state, so (among other things) they can draw pensions. There are sex worker organizations in every Western country, and over the past 20-30 years there's been a movement to fully legalize prostitution in a few European countries. In my travels on Wiki, it seems that Germany is the only Western European country where there hasn't been a huge backlash against legal prostitution. The Netherlands — in many ways the birthplace of political power for sex workers — has reconsidered and the reason is simple free-market economics — the race to the bottom that globalization facilitates so well. It seems that legal prostititution inevitably creates an irresistable trafficking black market to exploit cheaper labor, so Germany is rife with undocumented East European prostitutes.
So that's the dilemma. It makes abolition a much more complicated issue than it appears to any sort of ideologue, pro or against. In fact, I'll take just a mo to speak of what usually appears a no-brainer to most sensible people: the repeal of the "Noble Experiment" to prohibit alcohol in the US. While no sane person would argue for a return to the good ol' Roaring Twenties, it wasn't simply a matter of rampaging moral absolutists like Carrie Nation axe-ing up barrooms. Social history is important; the Gilded Age brought enormous waves of immigrants to our industrial cities with no social services or employer regulations to speak of. Slum tenements were miserable, 12-hour 6-day factory shifts the norm, and drink was one of the few escapes and reminders of their home countries these workingmen had. The social problems of alcohol were horrifically concentrated and the burdens of managing them fell squarely on immigrant mothers and wives. Prohibition was a blunderbuss solution — completely incomprehensible to (and unnecessary for) the middle class — but it came out of the same movement that brought the abolition of slavery, settlement houses, women's sufferage and humane worker reforms that only reached their culmination (thanks in large part to the American Communist Party) in the New Deal with the 8-hour workday and 40-hour work week, the banning of child labor, unemployment and disability insurance, the right to organize.
So what is a person to conclude? " Harm reduction" is the only paradigm that makes sense. There are no magic bullets; any solution brings its own set of problems and unforseen consequences. We can't abolish prostitution, nor can we adequately prohibit it. We can honor sex workers in their freely-chosen right to prostitute themselves by making their work legal, but we'll inevitably increase trafficking (exploitative, unfreely-chosen prostitution) because there will always be a demand for more product at cheaper rates, along with further legitimating the idea of sex as a commodity. Legalization and ultimate social acceptance might well be the lesser evil here, but it's no panacea and will lead to worse problems in the short term. Brothels and red-light districts are not an answer and only allow society the untenable luxury of denial.
I've really gone to town on this topic, so I'll just conclude to say that harm reduction is always a calculus. Even though there is no socially-established set of limits for pot use that young people can learn by example, keeping it illegal is still a worse choice. If we legalize pot, there's going to be an enormous spike in usage (along with a spike in the inevitable emergency-room visits from people whose physiologies just can't handle pot) which is then going to taper off. Take the glamour of illicitness away from pot, and in the long run I've seen it argued that there will be less, not more, teenage pot use.
Anyway, 'nuff for now. The Great American Wiknik is happening this Saturday, so I may just take a stroll down to Fairmount Park in Philly and have a look-see at all these anonymous local toilers in the digital cottonfields I admire so much, just to express that to them and maybe, I dunno, eat some barbecued chicken or something.
Ciao,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 00:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
- I'm not so sure that legalization/decrim would lead to more trafficking. Think of it this way: people talk about pot as being a gateway drug. I certainly know a lot of people who've experimented (if only briefly) with heroin, which they got from their pot buddies. But what is there about pot that leads to heroin use? They're completely different kinds of drugs. And why is it that people who smoke and/or drink but don't smoke pot are not so quick to play around with whatever drug is floating around the party? If pot (and only pot) were legalized, I think you'd see a lot fewer users willing to try heroin, for the simple fact that that would be crossing the line from legal substances to illegal. With the situation as it is right now, you may be crossing a social or "common-sense" line, but by being a pot-smoker you've already crossed the legal line.
It is abundantly clear that the single most significant gateway drug is BREATHING. Careful statistical analysis and ample anecdotal evidence suggest — nay, conclude —that every single person who has used any sort of illicit substance at any time in their lives whatsoever and for whatever alleged "reason" has breathed first, QE—fucking—D! Which only goes to demonstrate my level of supercillious contempt for the "gateway drug" argument, natch:) I haven't quite mustered the effort yet to determine the specific Aristotelian nomenclature, but I'm dead-convinced it's some flavor of rhetorical fallacy.
Which isn't to say that the so-called "gateway drug" argument is entirely meaningless — just that its reality as reflected in statistics doesn't quite add up to the argument than the anti-decrim crowd intends. For instance, underage cigarette smoking is probably the biggest single correlation, mabe even a little ahead of underage alcohol use — and nobody uses the argument to attempt to criminalize those substances for adults. But the "gateway drug" argument vis a vis marijuana is truer in a way that's even more destructive to the overall project of anti-decriminalization. Follow me for a minute ...
You've probably noticed in your life as a Canadian that your cousins across the 49th Parallel are a little batshit-insane about certain things. Almost alone among the Western countries, American culture is rife with a moral puritanism we never did manage to shake off from our founding as a haven for the religiously persecuted. So we can't just prohibit something for rational reasons having to do with health or bad consequences. We have to accompany it with a whopping egregious load of moral self-righteousness. We just don't feel American without it, thus our story of how a common weed became illegal.
All throughout the Roaring Twenties and a half-decade into the repeal of Prohibition, cannabis was legal throughout most of the US (in fact, farmers were encouraged to grow hemp to help the Great War effort, as hemp is an incredibly useful fiber). It was off the radar screen as Great Social Scourge because only "Negroes and Mexicans" made a habit of smoking it, and I mean what self-respecting Yankee Doodle Dandy gives a flying flamenco about them, right? But then arose several confluences: First, thousands of these recently trained and hired Internal Revenue agents (the "revenooers" who set upon hillbilly distilleries during Prohibition) were out of work after Repeal. Secondly, DuPont had just developed Nylon — the first synthetic fabric that could replace hemp in tire cord and other vastly profitable industrial applications.
Enter Harry J. Anslinger and the Marihuana Menace. I'll let you read his Wiki page and judge for yourself, but it appears that there's ample evidence he helped to fan the flames of public hysteria over the thought of marijuana corrupting innocent white, middle-class youth to burnish his career as the first head of the newly-formed Drug Enforcement Agency and provide gainful employment for a vast arm of law enforcement idled after the scourge of Demon Rum. Out of this era we get the unintended cult classic movie Reefer Madness and most of the crazed prejudices that pot is just ... well ... horrible.
So here's how the "gateway drug" argument actually worked for my generation. None of the Authorities were stone-stupid enough anymore to tell fourth graders that pot will turn you into a "serial-killing Zombie" like they used to or anything, but they still won't answer the question of why exactly smoking pot is so bad for you — they just link it with heroin, LSD and speed and spin the more readily believable horror stories associated with those drugs. And if you use pot, why next thing you'll be dancing with your shadow to unheard music on some dangerous city street corner like those "acid heads."
So what happens? Kids are naturally curious. They cop some pot (probably from an older sibling), smoke it and ... they're fine. No hallucinations (frightening or otherwise), no hangover, no physical addiction — and they can even sober right up from the burst of adrenaline if Pop knocks on the door. If it wasn't for the stanky smell and the telltale red, sagging eyes, nobody would ever know. Shit, you can even do your homework stoned! (Woah man ... I never knew algebra was so awesome.) So then, what happens to Adult Authority when it turns out that all their warnings amounted to total bullshit?
And in my generation, you had the synergistic effect of Adult Authority crashing around everyone's feet with the failed Vietnam War, Richard Nixon literally going insane in the White House, the popular acceptance of divorce — a general pall cast on all established institutions. So it's not a short hop from that largely healthy disillusionment to disbelieving everything the Adult World says about illicit drugs. If pot's nothing like what they said, what about cocaine? Speed? Heroin? Quaaludes? And thus it goes, the "gateway effect" being directly caused by adults not being capable of having a straight, honest talk with their kids as to what the actual negative effects of pot are if the kids decide to smoke it as much as they currently believe they can get away with. Nothing about the very real " amotivational syndrome" that habitual pot use can cause or the more general idea of living one's life in a fantasyland, which is a morally and philosophically difficult subject.
- Similarly, if prostitution were legal but trafficking not, I would imagine there would be a drop in trafficking. Assuming measures were actually and enforced taken to separate the two.
Well, except that's just not empirically confirmed. You have the mayor of Amsterdam — a person not saddled with the puritannical cultural baggage of a Nevada politician — strenuously arguing that legalization was a failed experiment, citing stats that Amsterdam is a worldwide trafficking hotspot. It's an empirical fact that Germany is loaded with undocumented women from the former East Bloc prostituting themselves under the very liberal radar of a society that otherwise makes it extremely easy to do so legally. The answer why this is so is once again, simple economics — the very same reason that factories outsource to avoid labor costs. A European sex worker who is a citizen is going to demand, rightfully, that she or he is paid a living wage for their work. Trafficked women have no such luxury and this apparently makes little difference to their clients. Again, I'm not using this as an argument against legalization per se, nor am I trying to equate the two. Only noting that legal prostitution has not been a "safety valve" that reduces trafficking but rather, perversely, makes it easier. From all evidence it seems that any society that legalizes prostitution has to become doubly vigilant against trafficking.
- Whether pot usage would spike if legalized—well, I imagine initially that would inevitably be the case, the way that the number of divorces exploded after divorce was legalized and made easy—peaking in 1984 int he states at around 50% of all marriages, then dropping slowly off to, I think, somewhere around 30 percent. Who can tell where the number of pot smokers would settle? Interestingly, I read somewhere once upon a time that the Prohibition actually resulted in something like double the number of regular drinkers after it was lifted, and the numbers have never gotten back even close to the pre-Prohibition numbers.
First, I'd wonder a little bit where that came from because I find it hard to imagine a particularly accurate census count of working-class slum tenements pre-Prohibition, let alone a decent estimate of per-capita alcohol consumed. But just generally reflecting it does make a degree of sense (I'd question a literal doubling per capita) because during that time (1910 to 1940) there were enormous changes in American society; the fruits of industrialism finally began to filter a little bit into the larger population — even considering the gargantuan blip of the Great Depression. The middle class had expanded and workers led much better lives by that time, had much better housing. Clearly after WW2 and the start of the suburban boom there was more money to spend on all the accoutrements of a social life (including drink) in general.
As for pot use ultimately levelling off at a higher level, I'd tend to agree with you. Compared to the two thoroughly noxious substances of abuse Americans are legally entitled to destroy their lives with (cigs and alcohol), marijuana is so much more manifestly benign than either that one would have to think there would be thousands, if not millions, of people who would take up the weed (and concotions would arise that would allow you to consume it without smoking) who don't now simply because it's illegal. I've for years held the opinion that if Americans "abused" pot instead of abusing alcohol, our society would be worlds better off. Domestic violence rates, for instance, would plummet (of course we'd never see that world come to be with legalization because alcohol would still remain legal). We might even see the "mellowing" of the American character — a thought that no doubt mortifies 'n' puts the Fear o' Gawwd into conservative American Exceptionalists.
I'd also agree that while I knew zillions of merry potheads in my frolicksome youth and young adulthood, I was only closely acquainted with one (a co-worker and housemate) who shot smack. And he had a full set of dentures at age 30 he got in the joint. He'd take his aluminum foil into the bathroom and I'd just cringe and try strenously not to judge him too harshly.
- Kinda funny...I've never used any drugs (and rarely drink) and can't imagine using a prostitute, yet look at all the bits spilled here over these issues!
Hehe, see that ... corresponding with Yours Truly is a ... gateway drug! For my turn in the self-revelation department, let it be know that I've been a lifelong pot smoker (currently I'm unemployed and so have no money nor availability for such luxuries — which of course I'm fine with until my situation changes) with no regrets — well, none tied directly to pot, anyway. I'm a very moderate, social drinker (my family drinks like fishes like the good Irish-Americans we are), more-or-less indifferent to alcohol. That wonderful buzz in the first 20 minutes of embibing can never be recaptured or sustained; you'll only become more drunk, never more euphoric or touchy-feely — and I find being drunk sort of annoying. Alcohol is basically a screwdriver that just loosens you up; it doesn't make you more eloquent or thoughtful or (like sometimes with pot) give you more access to creative intuition. And it's not a mood changer, it's a mood amplifier. God forbid you start drinking and have something piss you off; you tend to go ballistic instead of shrugging it off or viewing it in proper perspective. That's why I think a little wine with friends is about the best experience anyone can hope to have with alcohol.
- Something I remember from when I first came to Japan, though. There are a lot of Hostesses here (the phrase "h*o*s*t*e*s*s b*a*r" is blocked by the proxy here at work, otherwise I'd link to it)—basically rent-a-girlfriends you'd pay to talk to and pour your drinks for you. A lot of them don't actually put out, but, of course, a lot of them do. I remember meeting such a girl (off-hours) while out with a couple of female friends when I first came to Japan. Being the Lefty I am, my heart immediately bled for her, assuming she was somehow compelled to do this stuff, whether through threats or poverty or whatever. Turns out this wasn't the case. She was thoroughly middle-class and lived with her parents, but her parents were meanies who wouldn't buy her Louis Vuitton bags, so she took up selling her body to get the money to keep up with her friends (some of whom did exactly the same thing).
Ahh, yes, the ol' Geisha tradition, no? (Since I've been corresponding with you I've been wiki'ing various post-bubble Japanese social problems like parasite singles and hikikomori.) This is very interesting in the discussion because it focuses our attention on an individual rather than a conceptually-framed social issue. I'm sure when you were talking to her you found her to be a charming and articulate young woman, but afterwards you prolly thought to yourself something like "damn girl, is your booty really worth just a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags?" You lost the bleeding-heart reflex to take pity on an imagined victimization — but was it replaced with a feeling of respect, as if she were merely a brave entrepreneuse doing what she needed to do to survive and thrive in a rotten economy? Hell, I'd get a rotten old Madonna song stuck in my head.
So that's really kinda what Uncle Frank calls the crux of the biscuit, innit. The people most prone to be personally sympathetic to a woman like that — you and I among them — at the end of the day can't respect the choice she made. And that's cultural; for all the relentless sexual commercialization, for all the Madonnas loudly proclaiming to young women for 30 years that it's okay to be an empowered slut, we still can't get past the idea that giving oneself physically to another is something that should remain above commerce. I mean, why should we care why she does it? Clerks in stores scrimp and save honestly for the singleminded purpose of occasionally buying a high-fashion accessory — and who are we to judge that, or that this woman is living out that particular dream to the fullest? Why is it somehow immeasurably worse for the image of this young woman in our eyes that she happens to be anything but a victim? What's up with that?
And that's the problem right there. I'm guessing you wouldn't be so prone to fascination for this subject if your favorite cartoonist didn't produce a work that you simultaneously appreciate as great art while having to relentlessly defend it to people. But legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution is at least as thankless a task as defending PFI is to your friends, loved ones and co-workers. Until such time as we can reflexively admire the life choice of Geisha wannabes like your brief "parasite single" acquaintance instead of growing queasy at the thought of what they do for a living, it's a straight uphill road. All the Madonnas and Lady Gagas of the world haven't helped things. Would they ever? Could they? Should they?
Finally, I'm going to toss this out. My psychology curriculum at Wikipedia University spit this out the other day: Schizoid Personality Disorder. I'm suggesting you have a look at this with an eye toward Chester Brown. Unless you're well-versed in psychology or the arcana of the DSM-IV, it's not what you might think. Schizoids aren't schizophrenic; they're people who by all appearances have made a rational choice to avoid all intimacy. I have no genuine clue, of course, whether or not Brown qualifies, but I'd be interested in your impressions. Schizoids can also be high-functioning, creative people.
- Total tangent—I have no idea what that anecdote says about any subject, but while I'm probably far more Left now than I was then, I'm not much of a bleeding heart anymore.
Oh my goodness, I still so am. My politics have moderated to center-left over the years (no goddamn conspiracy theories, thanks!) but I'm just as insipidly bleeding-heart as I ever was, maybe worse since I now own two cats. It's hard for me to read wiki articles on pharmecuticals when I get to the animal studies. I cringe at the "forced swim test" for induced depression in mice and go "awww ... leave the poor li'l guys alone, woudjapleez!" A pathetic excuse for a man, that's me.
- Enjoy your chicken! Have another piece for me!
Oh goodness. Maybe I need to become a vegetarian.
Heh :) What I'm really dreading, though, is going there without any friggin' cigarettes.
Wish me luck on that front.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 09:18, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
- First try http://airs1.septa.org/bin/query.exe/en?
- Also the site http://www.philamuseum.org/visit/12-270.html?page=4 suggests SEPTA bus routes 7, 32, 38, 43, and 48 or the Philly Phlash.
- Smallbones ( talk) 13:56, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. Leaving momentarily; I'll take the 38 from City Hall and JFK Boulevard.
See you there,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 16:07, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
IRC cloak request
Hello Snardbafulator. You recently applied for a Wikimedia IRC cloak. However, it looks like you don't meet the requirements. You need to have at least 250 edits and to have been around for 3 months. I also noticed that you have not registered your IRC account. Make sure that you do that before apply again. (/msg NickServ register <email> <password>) I'm sorry for the confusion, and feel free to re-aply later. Cbrown1023 talk 18:34, 25 July 2011 (UTC)
It may take a few minutes from the time the email is sent for it to show up in your inbox. You can at any time by removing the {{ You've got mail}} or {{ ygm}} template.
OohBunnies! Not just any bunnies... 21:36, 19 August 2011 (UTC)
|
Hi, I'm responding on your talk page rather than GR's talk page because my response has little to do with the book itself.
Rather than working with a text file, you might want to try using a sandbox. You can name it whatever you want—here, I've violated your private space and created one for you here. Any page you create under your own user name (after the slash) is yours to do with as you please. With a sandbox, you can see how all the markup will turn out right away as you're writing. You also don't have to worry about losing the text file (I recently dropped my netbook, breaking my hard drive and losing all my work files). When you're satisfied with what you've done, you can merge it back into the main article.
There's a video on starting a user sandbox here.
Also, wikipedia policies are there for a reason, obviously, but if you wait until you've read all the policies until you start editing—well, honestly you'll probably get bored or burn yourself out before you actually start editing. It's better to just jump in, and if you break any rules grievously enough, someone will come along and fix it (and possibly berate you, but what do you expect from a bunch of internet kids?), and you'll learn something from it. I'd like to see you get some editing done while your motivation's high. CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 03:57, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks, CT (can I call you CT?). I appreciate the coaching. (Is this what the help links mean by "finding a mentor?") You intuited me correctly; I frickin' can't stand help files and tutorials. Especially videos -- some bright, chirpy person half my age staring into the camera and speaking v-e-r-y c-l-e-a-r-l-y, like they know me, but I'm their quasi-retarded cousin. (I'm not entirely politically correct in emailish dialogues, so stop me if my humor offends you). I haven't even figured out what "inline citation" means precisely. (I'd grab that info when I need to make a cite.) Thanks for setting up the Sandbox. I would have done it The Old Fashioned Way I've been editing textfiles since the early 90s and never would have eöũven thought to try something different without you "violating my personal space." Thanks again. I'm sure the Sandbox is much easier, and that way I can begin to play with some of your HTML markup coding. Learning by doing without embarrassment. I like it.
I love Wikipedia. I learn so much from it -- even if it's bracketed as coming from Wikipedia and only conditionally true, it's a better set of truth-conditions than what blogs offer. Since you strike me as some level of admin, maybe you've seen my IP on here for literally days on end. I've just started to sniff around; I read the bios of the Philosophy group and gotten a tiny whiff of some of the politics and heated arguing that goes on. Sad to say, we all live in Po-Mo World now, where everything is true and false simultaneously and nobody wants to take directions. I'd love a nickel for every time you've heard the argument that since it's all just text commenting on text -- why do I have to provide citations? I noted the patient ritualism of your boilerplate on interpretation. Some people must really balk at that. "But wait ... I was taught my whole life to think for myself!"
As you doubtless also intuited -- I'm one of those people. Hell, I went to an alternative highschool where I didn't have to take math or a foreign language. Like the P-man, I was pomo before pomo was cool. So I have a much better synoptic intelligence than I have a command of facts. What that means is that I'm only going to remotely think of editing something here if I can confirm it's inaccurate, like a bad plot summary. Otherwise, I'm just not all that interested in what some published person thinks about something to confirm whether or not I should think it -- and I like to write about stuff I'm passionate about, like musical opinions that have no place in Wikipedia unless somebody published thought it first.
As I said, I'm an internet bloviator and not in any way a natural encyclopedian. Which doesn't mean I can't completely respect and support your mission to provide verifiable information and help when I can at the margins. The Pynchon plot summary ought to be an interesting challenge.
Cheers,
Bob McKeown
Snardbafulator ( talk) 05:57, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
- Ha ha! I'm not an admin. I've been on Wikipedia since the end of 2005, but it's only the last few months I've done much more than fix typos. GR happened to be on my watchlist because I happen to like the book. I only started editing after I got sick of Chester Brown- and Jim Woodring-related pages being totally neglected for years (a couple of big projects I've taken on that I haven't completed yet).
- "Inline citation" basically means those numbered footnotes. The inline citation says "THIS information being given to you HERE is being cited by THIS source". A citation that's not inline would be, say, a book being claimed to be referenced at the bottom of the page, but not telling you what's being cited where. You know, as if I told you I read Have a Banana: A Skeleton Key to Gravity's Rainbow by I. M. A. Goodwriter, but didn't tell you what I had cited where. "Just, like, take my word for it, man. 'It' (whatever 'it' is) is in there somewhere.' So, yeah, just another word for a footnote.
- Your humour doesn't offend me half as much as your American spelling ;P—and I don't care if you call me CT, but in a Japanese accent (I live in Japan) it does sound suspiciously like "Shitty". CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 07:21, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
South Park -- "Shitty Wok!" LOL! Okay, CT, I've taken the plunge. I'm going after "Episodes in Gravity's Rainbow" with a chainsaw (well, maybe a petite, ladylike chainsaw of the type that drag-wearing Zoyd Wheeler almost used to wreck that logger's bar in Vineland), as a sort of dress rehearsal for rewriting the one on the main page. I was wrong upon more careful review; it's not "excellent," it's actually horrendous. I'll stop when the page starts dribbling one-liners, but by that time I would've given myself a good taste of editing.
Question (since I'm too damn lazy to just look it up): I've gotten the double-bracket thang for links to pages, but how do you highlight a phrase and have it link to a different term? There's a "citation needed" for shell shock, but I want to highlight those words and link to abreaction. What's the coding?
Thanks in advance,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:09, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
- When you see someone doing something on a page and want to figure out what they've done, the easiest way to figure it out is to click "Edit" and take a look. I'll give you this one since you asked so politely, though.
- You put a "pipe" (|) character in between, thus:
[[Abreaction|shell shock]]
. Whatever is on the left is what gets linked to, and whatever is on the right is what gets displayed.
- You don't always have to do that, though. If you just want to append something to the end of a word, just do it outside the brackets without a space:
[[banana]]s
- Also, you'll find it easier to get italics without the html markup. On Wiki, usually you surround the word with two single quotes:
''Vineland''
(that's two apostrophe marks on each side, not quotation marks). It'll save you some typing, and you won't have to worry about forgetting the slash in your closing tag.
- Did you actually like Vineland? That was the first Pynchon book I actually found disappointing—and his crappy Japanese had me wondering how accurate is German was in GR ("motto henna" isn't even a grammatical sentence—obviously lifted straight out of a dictionary). CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 21:49, 12 June 2011 (UTC)
Explain the slash in my closing tag, and I'll be sure to remember it once I know what it is. (I notice you use a high-ASCII/Unicode long slash not on the keyboard.)
Vineland? Coming 15 years after a book many of us felt (and still feel) should've won the Nobel Prize, of course it was a colossal disappointment. I just think the image of a petite, ladylike CHAINSAW is pretty hysterical. (As I'm also a Frank Zappa freak, I have a soft spot for mega-stupid humor :)) Bear in mind though, that many people felt that The Crying of Lot 49 was also a major letdown after V. Pynchon's lighter works can be deeper than they seem, though; while everybody seems to have "gotten" Inherent Vice as this groovy page-turning neo-noir (and there's a Hollywood movie supposedly in the works), linked on the IV page is this wonderful essay, arguing that just as GR was meta-concerned with plastics, rocketry and cybernetic control, IV's deep theme (completely removed from the plot) is inhuman, automobile-centric Southern Californian/suburban American land use patterns. I've read William Howard Kunstler and I agree.
As wince-inducingly not-in-a-good-way silly as some of Vineland is, I personally feel (Warning: Original Research) that it also contains some of Pynchon's most poignant writing and most well-drawn characters up until that point (both Mason & Dixon and Against The Day exceed that mark). Prairie Wheeler is just a pip of a kid, absolutely believable -- a worthy dress rehearsal for ATD's amazing Dally Rideout. The backgrounds of DL and Frenesi are also quite well-drawn (including DL's abusive military dad), and the central characterological question Pynchon tackles in the book: How can a woman which such impeccable Leftist credentials as Frenesi Gates (bear in mind she hails from the Traverse/Becker clan, whose pro-anarchist history is a major part of ATD) wind up playing footsie with a fascist scumbag like Brock Vond? -- is a difficult, worthy, relevant question, however successfully you might feel Pynchon ultimately answered it. You'll note Pynchon took up this concern again in ATD with Lake Traverse -- who winds up not only marrying her father's cold-blooded murderer, but having gnarly threesomes with he and his pardner in the crime.
I have no Japanese, but an early essay on GR noted a couple venial mistakes in German (along with some bad movie chronology which evidently embarrassed Pynchon enough that he dated all his movie references in Vineland). The consensus in Mindful Pleasures, though, is amazement that he got so much of his foreign language use right (and I've seen nothing knocking his heavy use of Spanish and Italian in ATD). As for his portraits of Japan and Japanese characters in Vineland -- that's a whole other kettle of ramen. A Japanese person, or a Westerner who's spent much time in the country, must've just wanted to throw up at such shallow caracatures. That whole part with the Yakuza white-slaving DL for Ralph Wayvonne was particularly icky and doubtless un-verisimilar. What I think Pynchon is doing here (Warning: rogue unpublished American Studies major in the building) is indulging in a particularly Californian cult-of-the-Far-East filtration of all things Asian through the prism of American pop/movie culture. Reminiscent, you might note, of Quentin Tarantino in the Kill Bill movies -- and I find those Japanese references quite icky as well.
I hope you've read Pynchon's bang-on NYTimes Book Review essay "Is It Okay To Be a Luddite?" because he gives a little of his game away. Pynchon is fascinated by (and often roots for) the literary trope of what he calls the Badass: not only Frankenstein, King Kong or Godzilla, but all charismatic, larger-than-life ostensible villains who can't be contained within the System (note how important John Dillinger is to Pig Bodine in GR). Vineland is riddled with Badasses and the accoutrements of Badassery: martial-arts asskickers, an unidentified, possibly space-alien (or collectively hallucinated) industrial plant-stomping monster, lovingly-described automatic weapons, dialed-up sports cars and off-the-road vehicles.
This struck me when I first read the book (and natch, I've never seen it addressed, let alone confirmed) as being material that might occupy the fantasy life of an extremely disempowered, bottomlessly angry, alienated California kid -- an offstage kid much more seriously-visualized than Billy Barf or Isaiah Two-Four. Maybe into punk rock and drugs, maybe on the way to juvie -- or worse, to an in-patient stay at a mental facility. But that's what gives Vineland so much of its poignance for me, and redeems a lot of the silliness.
Anyway, you can tell that I have too much time on my hands, sheesh. Hey -- if I can't put this stuff in Wikipedia, at least I can share it with other Pynchon fans, right.
Finally, CT -- how the heck did you survive the earthquake/tsunami?
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 08:01, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
- I survived the earthquake & tsunami by living about 400km from the epicentre. Japan's a "small" country, but it's long, and most people didn't live anywhere near enough to the earthquake for it to be a real concern (although it did some small damage in Tokyo). We're expecting our own big one any year now, though, which is expected to cause massively more destruction just by being in a far more heavily populated area (right smack between Tokyo and Nagoya, the third largest city in Japan).
- I have read Luddite (I think it's online somewhere, or was), but I haven't read any of his post-Vineland work yet. Too many good books in the world, too little time, and I've been reading mostly non-fiction and comic books for the last year or so. I go through these phases where I'll spend a year or two reading nothing but fiction, and then swing to all non-fiction. Maybe it's time for me to swing again.
- You've obviously spent an awful lot more time with Pynchon's work than I have. With Vineland, I liked how it started, but it progressively just got boring for me. I wasn't expecting a Pynchon book to tie up its loose ends at the end or anything, but the ending seriously just felt to me like he'd gotten bored with the book and just gave up (unlikely that he would have published it if that were the case—he's not one who gives you the impression he's pressured by deadlines). The whole second half of the book just gave me the impression that he stopped caring about his own book. It's been years, though, and maybe I should give it another try. The thing is, with GR, no matter how hard, strange or dense it got, it managed to keep my attention. Even when it was obviously going right over my head.
- Playing with reader expectations and fucking with racial/cultural stereotypes or whatever doean't bother me in the least. I'm a big fan of Robert Crumb who's definitely known for his over-the-top blackface nigger characters that get him labeled a racist by those who aren't familiar with his work (in fact, his "When the Niggers Take Over America" was illegally reprinted by an Aryan supremacist organization who took it and presented it as literal. His satire sometimes doesn't come off as satire unless you're deeply familiar with his work. HIs poking at Jews takes on a whole other world of meaning when you find out that both his wives, his mentor Harvey Kurtzman, and his most famous collaborator, Harvey Pekar, are/were all Jews). Pynchon's Japanese caricature's totally lacked anything for me to grab on to, though. They weren't really funny, and they didn't really seem to successfully play off of racist American stereotypes in any way that I found interesting. Maybe I'm just not familiar enough with the right stereotypes. I certainly didn't find it offensive, just surprisingly poorly done for Pynchon (which applies to the whole second half of the book for me, not just the Japanese stuff).
- The bad Japanese dialogue was bad in a way that so easily fixable, which is what got me. The guy spends seven years on a book and can't get a few trivial lines of dialogue proofread? Why did he even bother including the dialogue? It didn't seem to add to the book in any way.
- I'm not sure what you mean by the "slash in [your] closing tag", but the long dash I get by typing {{ emdash}}. Also, if you look down below the edit box, and below the "Save page" button, you'll see a selector that's probably set on "Insert". You can select something else there to get other kinds of symbols. For example, if you select "Latin" you'll get a whole pile of Latin letters with diacritics on them. Click on one of those with the cursor still in the edit box and you'll get one of those symbols. That way you can spell things like "Pökler" with the umlaut over the "o". You can get the long dash by selecting "Insert", but if you touch type, you'll probably find it faster just to type {{ emdash}} like I do ("emdash" is the term they use in typography for that symbol. It's the width of a capital "M" in whatever font you happen to be using; similarly there's "–" ({{ endash}}) used for number ranges (e.g. "pages 27–42") and regular "-" dashes).
- I used to be a huge Zappa fan, too (I had 27 of his records on vinyl alone), but Captain Beefheart gradually weened me off of him. Like Jimmy Carl Black said, "Zappa's good, but Don is the real thing." CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 10:05, 13 June 2011 (UTC)
"Apes-ma? Apes-ma, you're eating too much.
And going to the bathroom too much, Apes-ma.
And Apes-ma? Your cage isn't getting any bigger, Apes-ma."
Uh, yeah. The Beef rules. I don't currently possess any Zappa (my vinyls are in Purgatory), but I made sure to have the five essential Beefs (Trout Mask, Decals, Shiny Beast, Doc and Ice Cream) on hand for ready blastage. There's some Zappa that I think is bottomlessly amazing ("The Black Page" [all versions], Läther, most of the stuff from the Ruth Underwood / George Duke / Fowler Bros. period, "Ship Arriving Too Late to Save a Drowning Witch," The Yellow Shark, e.g.); other stuff — all vocal-centered — that is ... unnecessary. (NEWS FLASH: Jimmy Swaggart is a hypocrite. Film at 11.)
Since you're an R. Crumb fan and your U.K. spellings and effortless prose lead me to believe you're some flavor of Brit / Commonwealth person (you've identified yourself as "living in Japan"), mayhap this might jingle something:
"You can imagine my delight
Was like some R. Crumb magazine come to life
Thank you ladies, you had us all
I hope you both enjoyed it ... "
These deliciously facetious, heavily English-accented lines come from what still might be, all things considered, my all-time favo(u)rite rock album, The Rotters Club by Hatfield and the North. There. I've been outted. I'm a shameless lifelong progrock fanatic (I compose the stuff, too).
You can see I'm getting better with the coding, but how do you insert what word processing programs call hard returns at the end of truncated lines so you can quote poetry/lyrics without adding a blank line and taking up so much space?
It's funny that you should mention R. Crumb in the context of literal-minded misinterpretation. Another of my favorite prog artists is drummer extraordinaire Christian Vander, he of the legendary French band Magma. I can't believe you wouldn't know of them; they sing in their own constructed language, Kobaïan, and have spun an enormous sci-fi double trilogy over a 40-year career (the last installment came out in '09) about a handful of people's exodus from a doomed Earth to planet Kobaïa, and return to try to save Earth. If ever there was bait from a rock band for an epic graphic novel series, this is it.
Now Vander is a very weird guy, full of bottomless rage at the death of John Coltrane and the lameness of late-60s Anglo-Americophilic French audiences. Kobaïan has no grammar and precious little syntax, essentially consisting of gutteral Slavo-Germanic consonants (without glottal stops), the word-meanings mostly nouns. In the early days, Vander liked to spontaneously rant in this language (check out the intro to "Stoah" from their first album) in a blood-curdling falsetto shriek (or "ungodly coloratura," as Miklos Thanatz described Captain Blicero's rantings in the final days before the firing of Rocket 00000 -- could Pynchon have known of Magma?), which made a lot of people think of Hitler speeches on crystal meth. Didn't help that at a time of leftist/anarchist cultural frenzy in France ('68), Vander's band wore all black, took their primary musical inspiration from Carl Orff and Richard Wagner instead of The Beatles and The Byrds, were lock-step disciplined in concert (the music's very rhythmically aggressive and metrically complex) and Very, Very S-E-R-I-O-U-S.
So of course some geniuses in the French press and a local Communist Party chapter concluded that Magma were literally capital-"F" Fascists and tried to stop their concerts. Fortunately for music, that never gelled into a consensus.
Jump-cut 30 years to the critically successful Magma revival, as they're headlining European and American RIO ( Rock in Opposition) fests. Vander, as you'd imagine, is the sine qua non of the "inward-directed" person, not giving a fig about musical trends, continuing to compose music in his own entirely idiolalic style (although it spawned an enormous international movement in RIO circles, called Zeuhl music. Japanese drummer Tatsuya Yoshida is a major disciple in his bands Ruins and Koenji Hyakkei). So naturally he's something of a megalomaniac, and being a quarter Roma, has some identity issues he hasn't quite gotten to the bottom of. It was discreetly notorious among musicians and club owners that Vander would drink too much after gigs and often go lacing into these horrible anti-black and anti-semitic rants. Hard to believe coming from a self-identified Coltrane worshipper with a gooey attatchment to funk and soul in the "crossover" Magma album Merci, not to mention with an ex-wife and lifelong musical partner (vocals and production) whose family got the Hitler Double Whammy for being both from Poland and Jewish. Or maybe, with psychology, not so hard to believe.
About two years ago, some of this in the form of rumors, putative "facts" and accusations by a monetarily estranged ex-band member began filtering through the Magma fan community. For a month or so, this was highly dismaying to me; I had just rediscovered Magma and found their output from 2000 on to be astounding — nothing at all like another lame Yes-like "classic rock" cash-in reunion act. The band had top-notch young musicians, Stella Vander was in great voice, their concerts (captured in the Mythes et Légendes Epok 1-4 DVD series) utterly mindblowing (some on YouTube and definitely worth a scope) and their new material (especially K.A.) every bit as good — maybe better — than the Magma of old.
An English blogger I knew who just twigged to Magma and thought she could grow to love them deletes the albums she had just paid to download, screeching "I had no idea Christian Vander was a NAZI !!!" and blogs about it for weeks. I told myself I could square the racist rants. Nobody should expect great artists to be particularly nice people. Hell, if anyone wants genuine NAZI, there's always demented cult leader Don Vliet running the Trout Mask Replica rehearsals like a wannabe Charles Manson. (Both John French and Bill Harkleroad in the end forgave him.) Much more distressing was to lurk on the Köhntarkösz fan blog and listen to lifelong Magmaniacs who've spent hundreds if not thousands of dollars/pounds/Euros following the band and keeping up their Magma collections attempting to dissect the Kobaïa story, looking for encrypted "Heil Hitlers" and wondering if a story of a handful of elitists who flee a hopelessly corrupted Earth and return to force it to follow the Only Way to Survival might indeed encode an odiously authoritarian subtext.
And all this angst over a band that never had a single skinhead follower. Sheesh.
Anyway ...
The earthquake/tsunami: I suspected you probably weren't near the epicenter, but I was more concerned about the ongoing Level 7 (Chernobyl-grade) nuclear incidents. Considering Japan's history with radiation horrors, I worry there'd be a lot of grimness about it all over. Radiation in the food and water and the like.
I'm not going to spend a lot more time attempting to disabuse you of your view of Vineland because I get it. The bad stuff in that book, save for some of the early short stories, is Pynchon's worst, period. For me, it centers around Takeshi — originally just a plot device to link Prairie up with DL so she could begin to exhume and explore the history of her estranged mother Frenesi, which is the heart of the book. But for some ungodly but doubtless still Pynchonian reason he took on a life of his own, and went on to wreck prit-near every scene he's in. And you're right: it has nothing to do with being a stereotype per se; he's just a cipher. The caracatures of Major Marvy and "Bloody" Chiclitz, of Dr. Hilarius in Lot 49, are in ways inhuman and offensively drawn, but they're also eye-popping and fun. Takeshi's just clunky and the episodes his presence provoke: the Karmology Clinic attending to the retributive needs of the Thanatoids, the yearlong contract with DL so she can atone for her mistakenly-applied Ninja Death Touch, the Chipco Lab Mystery Stomping, are just strained and silly.
Though the whole plot doesn't resolve very well (and this is Pynchon's only non-apocalyptic novel, with a bona-fide Happy Ending to boot, so it should), I will say that I think there's some really great writing in the second half. In a stunningly ironic twist for Pynchon (and which harbored a good lesson for his later fiction), the stuff that works best in Vineland is the least surreal and most humanly verisimilar. As you say, the beginning is teriffic; I wish there was more of Zoyd's home life with his daughter. The romantic feelings between DL and Frenesi, the girl-crush Prairie has on her glamorously delinquent friend Che, Frenesi's red-diaper parents Hubbell and Sasha — are all exquisitely drawn. The labor history about union-busting in Hollywood is very well-done and historically accurate (and comes near the end of the book). And as bizarre as it might seem to someone not intimately familiar with campus unrest in late-60s America (not to mention the Weather Underground), the PR3 rebellion at The College of the Surf, though dramatized, is an uncannily ringing portrayal of an unprecedented time of freedom, chaos, unsupportability and backlash that swept through campuses only a few years before the Patty Hearst kidnapping demonstrated the degeneration of those ideals to the broader public.
Okay, enough for now (sheesh!). Plenty to chew on here, and opening up a new tab in Wikipedia shows me that I have a new message. I hope that won't zap this whole thang here. Lemme save it in a textfile just in case ...
TTYL,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 06:27, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
- I remember liking all that "labor history" stuff. For some reason I thought it came earlier in the book.
It came as a result of bringing Frenesi back together with Sasha and Hubbell due to Zoyd nemesis and TV-detox escapee Hector Zũinga attempting to blackmail the family into helping to make a Hollywood movie, which would turn the revolutionary filmmaker Frenesi Gates's life into a cheesy made-for-TV anti-drug, anti-hippie parable (an idea kind of like Gerhardt von Göll making The Return of Martin Fierro on steroids). So Pynchon at that point had an excuse to flesh out Sasha and Hubbell's family history and their careers behind the scenes in Hollywood. One of the best parts of the book. (The climax itself is kind of ridiculously terrible, though).
- You've just gone and name-dropped a lot of my favourite bands. I knew about Magma's reunion (around 2000 or so?) but haven't gotten around to listening to their new stuff yet (or much of my own kind of music at all since we popped out a couple of kids).
Mazel tov! You owe it to yourself to YouTube up K.A. and at least give Part One a listen (hell the whole thing, but K.A. I is particularly amazing). The recording is fantastic, the vocals (solo and chorus) are lyrical and passionate, Vander's drumming is superb, the (excellent) composition less trance-y and Minimalist and more Stravinskyan-neoclassical.
- It's the first I've heard about Vander's racism.
I've extensively researched it from archived periodicals and I don't think the idea can be supported that Christian Vander is a racist per se. He was mentored as a young drum progidy by none other than Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones (his dad was a notable French jazz pianist) and he loves Trane doubtless with every drop of his Gallic blood (the young Vander became bottomlessly furious at the cultural forces he naively felt were implicated in Coltrane's death). He's a man with lifelong anger problems (his homelife as a kid was reportedly terrible) and a bad history with alcohol. I think he's conflicted about his own backround; on one hand, he's appeared quite proud of the musical gifts of his Gypsy violinist grandfather, on the other, considering the reputation of the Roma people in Western Europe, he probably harbors a degree of shame about that heritage, too. He's said incredibly contradictory things about Africans over the years, one time to provoke the New Left sensibilities of his interviewers by excoriating the political failures of France's former colonies in racial terms, a little later viewing African blacks as inherently spiritually advanced and more loving than Europeans.
I think he has a weird and naive set of racialist beliefs, which find expression in the Kobaïa myth's clashing civilizations. More troublingly, he may at some time have bought into some aspects of Holocaust denial (a comment about "rewriting history" that nobody managed to clarify). Still, all those decades of history with the Polish-Jewish Stella Linon as his former wife and lifelong collaborator make it hard to credit hardcore anti-semitism or serious Hitler nostalgia.
I've concluded that Vander is a guy who has had to continuously fight off feelings of weakness and disempowerment, constructing an edifice of the hyper-rhythmical, Wagnerian Magma — Mars to the French band Gong's Venus — as a reaction formation. And this contempt of internal weakness sometimes flings itself outward in raging drunken outbursts.
The most seriously troubling thing I've heard was a recollection on the Köhntarkösz blog that Vander admonished his audience to "consider" voting for Le Pen. Since this was one person's memory coming at a time when fans were overturning every rock looking for this stuff and nobody corroborated it, I choose to call it mistaken memory. He couldn't have gotten away with doing that in France without becoming notorious. If true, I dunno what I'd ultimately conclude. As annoyingly capital-L Libertarian as Zappa eventually became, he never once asked his audience to vote Republican.
- Honestly, that wouldn't keep me away from his music, though. It would just induce me to torrent it so he couldn't get paid for it.
Why torrent? Torrenting might be fine if you're looking for the latest Justin Bieber or Lady Gaga, but appears to be a time-consuming pain in the butt for anything qualifying as obscure. Mediafire, megaupload or rapidshare will get you the whole file in one shot (sometimes in a less lossy FLAC format). Filetram's a good conduit to those sites. I have no idea how they can remain legal after the demise of Napster, but they're all chock-full of banner ads and legal disclaimers, so I'll be damned if I'm going to feel guilty for using them. 90% of the time I'm downloading stuff I used to own, anyway. If I wasn't so broke atm, I'd mail all my favorite artists checks just for all the pleasure they've brought me. Then again, I'm a persuasive advocate for my favorite music, so maybe they'd consider that free promotion :)
- I'm pretty thick-skinned—my favourite cartoonist is a representative of the Libertarian party of Canada. Disgusts me, but I have no problem enjoying his work (even when it's explicitly Libertarian).
When the US Libertarian Party solicited Frank Zappa to run on their presidential ticket, I'll credit Zappa for demurring and calling their platform "insane." Anybody generally on the Left side of things has an often ardent degree of sympathy for civil libertarianism, but a political party that amalgamates it with economic libertarianism is a creature only borne of dorm-room bull sessions by white guys in elite universities — demonstrating the adage that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. At least garden-variety Republicanism isn't so bone-crushingly naive about the weilding of power.
A number of years ago on our public-affairs TV network C-SPAN, I caught a five-candidate debate for Canadian PM. I noticed two things: first, how salubriously red-shifted to the public-sector side of things your whole politics are compared to ours, and secondly, how the candidate from Alberta seemed to be clone of George W. Bush from Central Casting.
It's nice when literary or musical artists happen to share my politics (I also love Henry Cow, Fred Frith, Art Bears and their many RIO offshoots, though I tend to prefer their song/structured composition side to their free-improvising side), but goodness I couldn't make it strictly necessary. Art is supposed to mine the subconscious first, not articulate some normative agenda. Peter Gabriel may have the greatest male voice in rock, but he and Bono are bland and boring to me as artists, no matter how much they do for Africa. When I'm out of this post, btw, I'm going to seriously check out your Chester Brown.
- I've wanted to go see a Yoshida Tatsuya show (last I heard he was doing them solo), but I can't convince anyone to go with me (why do I feel like such a loser going alone? I missed the Ventures' last tour of Japan before whatsisname died because I didn't want to go alone).
I don't think I understand Japanese name conventions. Everything I've seen in the press calls him "Tatsuya Yoshida," but I notice the musicians familiarly call themselves by their "surnames," so I'm sure you're following a convention by "inverting" his names. You're talking about Ruins Alone, and that would be something for the stout of heart. Ruins is extremely hardcore and a bit close to Japanese brutal avant-garde (there are some Japanese bands that make Ruins sound positively well-behaved). I respect and admire Ruins because I'm an odd and changing time signature monomaniac, but even I think a Ruins concert would be a bit much to take in at one sitting — though of course I could be totally surprised.
But by all means if you get the chance, drag the spouse and the li'l chillins to a Koenji Hyakkei concert. Koenji's Yoshida's direct Magma homage, and while the last thing from "easy listening" (everything about Koenji is on steroids), their bouyant exuberance and audience rapport are just off the charts — totally unlike the Dark, Dead Seriousness of most RIO/Zeuhl outfits. Imagine an audience call-and-response with a word in an invented language: Dunt ... Dunt ... Dunt ... "TOBELOI!!!" Dunt ... Dunt ... Dunt ... "TOBELOI!!!" Koenji's greatest assets (aside from the impeccable jazz/classical chops of drums, keyboards and five-string bass) are their two female frontpeople: the drop-dead gorgeous vocalist AH (stage name) and adorable sprite soprano saxophonist Keiko Komori. They cannot stay still, putting all kinds of body English into dementedly difficult parts, effortlessly bopping around in 13/4 or 17/8 like denizens of some intergalactic disco. The sheer joy at music-making this communicates is alone worth the ticket; I've seen them described (and I heartily concur) as the single best rock outfit touring today. Some of their concerts are on YouTube. Plug the notebook into the stereo and check them out!
- If you haven't come across it, you should hunt around for Beefheart's original Bat Chain Puller. I put it number two after Trout Mask (although Gary Lucas puts Decals at number 1, and I find myself ranking it higher every time I listen to it). There's a boot of BCP floating around online called the "JWB Transfer" that's probably the best quality you'll find.
I had read about the session being someting else, but didn't realize there was a listenable copy floating around. Thanks for the tip! You'd figure something that good would be officially released, especially considering the enormous outtake-riddled compliation Grow Fins. I heard Decals after I had fully assimilated Trout Mask and was utterly astounded then and remain so now. You can't bestow too many superlatives on a tune like "I Love You, You Big Dummy." I'd rank it (like Lucas and a number of critics) slightly above Trout Mask. Of the later releases, I'd put Ice Cream For Crow slightly above both Doc at the Radar Station and Shiny Beast, though none come near Decals or Trout Mask, for the as-yet unshredded voice alone.
- Aside from avoiding eating domestic fish, the earthquake's had very little impact where I live ( Shizuoka). Well, they've agreed to shut down the nuclear plant that's in the area, which people have been calling for for years. A lot of people (like my brother-in-law) have been going solar in recent years. The trend's totally unrelated to earthquakes, but I imagine it'll pick up a lot now. No food shortages or anything. The western media's really blown things ridiculously out of proportion. They actually had an hour-long special on the TV here about all the ridiculous claims being made around the world. It turns out that not a single foreign reporter had bothered to try to get any primary sources. One reporter actually did all his research in Osaka, which is just so ridiculously far away from where it hit...and then reported back home that Japan was a-ok because the people of Osaka were safe. Some papers were reporting thousands of deaths from the nuclear fallout (there has yet to be even one). The most tragic thing that happened to me was that my mother went and canceled her visit.
Everything I know about the earthquake/tsunami came from reading Wikipedia. I've been under a self-imposed news blackout since the November election. I worked my heart and soul out for our state's Democratic senator (who lost, natch), and there is nothing more demoralizing for a lifelong Democratic activist and political news junkie than a Republican midterm blowout. I don't wanna know from Sarah Palin, I don't wanna know how "weak" Obama's become or how he has to cave to Republicans now. All my posting since then has been on the unofficial Cardiacs forum The Mare's Nest (another musical fetish of mine). As the heavens turn seasonally in the sky, this will inevitably change in the 2012 election season.
I read that your wind farms took a direct hit from the tsunami and came out unscathed, which is a teriffic promotional for wind power. I was just thinking Chernobyl-grade incident and partial core meltdowns (as stated in Wikipedia) and extrapolating from there in my imagination. Whether or not anybody's been directly hurt by it yet (though of course radiation effects might take years to percolate through epidemiological studies), that just seems pretty extraordinary and — prima facie — pretty scary. I'm very glad that the "fallout" (so to speak) from the disaster is apparently much less than imagined.
- Oh, and I'm Canadian, by the way, not British. CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 07:39, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
Hey, I did include the option that you might be a Commonwealth person :)
Cheers,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 00:35, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
I haven't followed the news the last couple of weeks, so I just heard about the meltdowns at lunch today from a friend who's returning to the States. Apparently TEPCO was covering it up so that the news wouldn't get out of hand (I don't blame them. Much as I resent the information not being released, the foreign media has, at times, crossed straight into the fictional). I haven't heard anything about the wind farms. We've got one wind turbine here in the city, but it's used for research purposes, not actual power generation. I'm surprised they haven't set up more. That thing's been there forever. Maybe now that they're shutting down the local nuclear plant they'll get around to setting up some more. Apparently Germany and Italy are going to start phasing out nuclear power now, too.
- The wind farm I read about was apparently a large one off the coast of the epicenter and took full-force waves. But being essentially simple devices anchored firmly into the shelf, built to withstand high winds and the like, there was little if any damage — which I still think is amazing. Chernobyl was a considerably gnarly event; I'd suspect that you guys are going to be hearing about the "Level 7 incidents" for while to come now that the cover's blown. I don't much like the thought of panic or overreaction either, but the Three Mile Island accident was only a Level 5 incident (an accident with consequences) and it pretty much derailed the construction of new nuke plants in the US.
I can't believe I've never come across Kōenji Hyakkei. It looks like they've been releasing records almost as long as Ruins. I'll have to check them out. Although I must say I can definitely imagine sitting through a Ruins concert. I've got a boot at home from around the turn of the century ('98? 2000?) that I totally loved (although haven't listened to in years). There was one long track that was a collection of classic rock'n'roll guitar riffs, all Ruinsized—and with no guitar!
- Yoshida has this thing for medleys. There's a Ruins Alone YouTube clip that's a 3-minute progrock homage. It's got almost everything: Rush, ELP, Yes, Gentle Giant, Genesis, King Crimson, Zappa, etc. etc. etc. with the just the tiniest snippets so you really need the list of riffs in the post to read along while you're listening. Ruins has a Magma homage in the same vein. And it fits the Ruins jump-cut aesthetic (which may be why I'm a little less enamored of them than I am of the more thoroughly-composed Kōenji Hyakkei). If you dig his venture into classic guitar rock, you could also check out his power trio, Korekyojin, especially the cut (once again, on YouTube) "Swan Dive." It's a blistering take on the sound of old-school hard rock. Classic Strat and P-Bass, Marshall stacks, amp overdrive (not fuzz).
As for Yoshida Tatsuya's name, "Yoshida" is his family ("last") name and "Tatsuya" is his given name. In most far-East countries, the family name comes first. After 13 years here, it's hard for me to switch them around the other way. There's an international standard (for, like, scientific papers and stuff) in which you're supposed to capitalize the family name, so that no matter whether it's YOSHIDA Tatsuya or Tatsuya YOSHIDA, you know which is which. Of course, the US isn't known for following international standards (metric, anyone? It's only been two hundred years now!).
- I'll never forget the humiliated sinking feeling I got when we launched the Hubble Space Telescope and it turned out that some of the infamous initial optics nightmare had to do with a contractor fucking up a metric-English conversion. I don't support the human space program (among much else, unless you wrap a vehicle so thickly in lead it'll never get off the ground, any long-term mission [say to Mars] will load the astronauts with radiation poisoning from the solar wind) but I do strongly support unmanned exploration. Challenger blew up, now this. We're idiots.
The original Bat Chain Puller's been boot quite a number of times, and has been released semi-offically ("grey-market", legal status unknown) at least once (under a title which escapes me, but I actually saw it in Virgin records in town years ago). Apparently the semi-official release sounds like shit, but the JWB transfer sounds awesome, like it came off the master reels or something. The Zappa estates sitting on the actual masters, and it was rumoured they were going to release it when the semi-official version came out and they canceled the plans. After all these years, and with Don dead, I find it unforgivable that Gail would still sit on this shit. I mean, what for? Spite? Spite over what? And for 35 years? I can'ōt believe how much money I've spent on Zappa shit...at least I should've bought it all used!
- I dunno, CT, on this we may have a different perspective. I know a few Zappa fans who like to snarl at Gail for control-freaking the legacy, but I can see a positive side to that. For instance, I know the guy who founded Project/Object, a Zappa tribute band. Gail denied them authorization to play Frank's music. And you know what? Go Gail. Even if they did play with Ike Willis. Because the guy I know's a total wanker; I've seen him perform many times at a local venue and a Steve Vai he decidedly ain't. If you can't transcribe a tune as cretinous as "Steve's Spanking" accurately, you have no business glomming onto the legacy. My 2¢.
- I've seen Don along with Mothers alumni drop way more brickbats on Frank over the years than the reverse. I agree with Frank that composers have a different status than musicians, and I tend to wonder if most of the talk about Frank "stealing ideas" from his sidemen is more likely envy or sour grapes provoked when Zappa disbanded the first Mothers and "threw them out of work." I'd credit it a lot more seriously from Don Preston than I would from Jimmy Carl Black, let's put it that way. Zappa gave Don Vliet an income when he was contracturally prohibited from recording by taking him on the Bongo Fury tour and guesting him on the album, and Don acted with increasing (irrational) resentment. Zappa's always been a detatched rationalist with an eye for business, and I think this just creates resentment from emotional intuitive art-comes-from-within types. But Zappa never at any time acted like the mean-spirited control freak dictator that Don did when he threw Drumbo down a flight of stairs and tossed him off the Trout Mask credits even though French irreplaceably transcribed most of the music. So I can't take at face value a presumption that Gail is acting in some way to undermine Beefheart's legacy by not releasing those tapes. I'd like to at least hear her side.
The album itself sounds like what the last three records would have sounded like if they'd been recorded with the Decals band. John French is on drums. There're only two tracks that were never re-recorded, but I think all the tracks (except maybe "Brickbats") sound better on the 1976 recordings. Basically, the track listing is like a best-of of the songs from the last three albums.
- Gotcha. "Brickbats" is one of my faves from Shiny Beast. I hope some of the filler isn't on there, like "Harry Irene," "You Know You're A Man" or "Love Lies." Does Bruce Fowler play? It's hard to imagine "Run Paint Run Run," "When I See Mommy I Feel Like a Mummy," "Owed T'Alex" or "Suction Prints" without his "air bass" trombone.
Without giving me a year, I can't tell which Nazi Albertan party leader you're talking about. Preston Manning? Stockwell Day? Current Führer Stephen Harper? Alberta fucking breeds those people. Funny, I lived there for two years, and the people I knew never seemed like such xenophobic fundamentalist fascists. Only twenty years ago, Canadians wouldn't have given these fuckers the time of day, but it seems the Left has been split between too many parties, letting the Conservatives sweep into power with only 23% of the vote.
- Stockwell Day. He was so creepy. Another hail-fellow Man of Action Ken-doll type like Bush. (Even he, though, was talking up preserving your national healthcare.) You know, we Merkuns get slapped around for our Tweedlededumbed-down two-party system by you Parliamentary types, but one advantage over a proportional multiparty system is that we have to work out our differences within the major parties, before a general election. I'd hate like hell to imagine a coalition government where Pat Robertson's God Party decides to walk out and call a vote of no confidence because he didn't get to make abortion punishable by death. Not such an exaggeration when you consider how Israeli governments left and right have to suck tiny ultra-religious party balls gently yet passionately even though the vast majority of that country is secular. Abysmal turnout + alienating discourse = stability.
I don't personally align myself with any party. I tend to vote against candidates, rather than for them.
- I have a friend who's got a better democracy aphorism than Churchill's: Democracy is the form of government where everyone gets what the majority deserves. I hear ya; that's a totally respectable position, provided, of course, that you vote (when you're not, you know, being illegally disenfranchised). I admit it; for all my self-proclaimed inward-directedness I'm a Party man. I don't challenge Democratic incumbents in a presidential race and I do get very active and idealistic-lefty when we have an open primary. In '04 I was a Deaniac because he was right on Iraq (supporting John Kerry in the general was brutal) and in '08 I don't regret (nay, am proud of) my vote for Hillary Clinton in the primary. At the end of the day I'm a committed realist — always busting my hump for the Evil of Two Lessers because nobody running gets near my true ideal of a progressive. In an American context I can't say I have much respect for so-called Independents (who are generally people who put candidate personality and "character" ahead of positions on issues) and that most despicable of creatures, the Undecided Voter. Hey ... there are only two viable choices here. If you don't know what Marx would call your objective interests by now, you're a friggin' waste of life.
However, as of 2006, I've been illegally stripped of my Charter right to vote, by not being a resident. So, basically, if Canada ever were to institute a draft (an idea that would have seemed laughably ridiculous until last month), I could be forced to kill or die for my country, but I couldn't participate in choosing the people who would make that decision on my behalf. I found a forum somewhere where some people were complaining about it, and some posters responded that if you weren't paying taxes in Canada, why should you expect the right to vote? I love that idea! A great way to prevent housewives, the disabled, the retired and unemployed from participating in the system that makes decisions for them!
- Yeah, in America they used to call that the poll tax. Good grief. I just read the Q&A from your link and I'm utterly appalled. It seems so ... un-Canadian. I can't believe this would stand up to a court challenge, and I'm clueless as to what motivated the change in interpretation to begin with. Five years? And you're dead right; if you're subject to serving in the military, you damn well should be able to vote; that's how we got our last Constitutional amendment passed, which gives 18-year-olds the franchise. You're still subject to frickin' Canadian law as a citizen! And taxes if they want to pass a law! Like that site explained; we campaign vigorously overseas in America for expat votes. Canadian serial killers can vote, but a genius kid at Harvard looking for a cure for cancer can't. This is such a boneheaded, reactionary, xenophobic restriction I can't believe Americans haven't thought of it first!
I've never come across Filetram before—I don't know how not! Looks like I'll be having a busy night. Merci beaucoup to you! CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 06:49, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Mercy buckets back atcha,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:55, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
- Oh, I can't guarantee that you'd like Chester Brown's Paying for It. It's a bit off the mark to say it's not a typical Brown work, as he's sort of famous for changing his approach with every new work he starts, but the book just came out and so far is only available in hardcover—I'd hate to see you blow $20 on an hour-long read by a guy who's trying to promote a Libertarian utopia where romantic relations are a thing of the past and people buy and sell their bodies like any other piece of property, with no emotions attached; pretty much everything he does is an "acquired taste", and it's a bit hard to say what would be the best work to start with. If you can find something in a library or online it might be best, but it's also not likely (there's something about talking penises and graphic images of minors masturbating on the carpet that puts people off). If you lived in the neighbourhood I'd just lend you everything, as I think his work's best appreciated that way. You could probably plow through it all in a week or less (they're comic books, after all, and Brown's comics tend to emphasize the visual. He's also not terribly prolific. After almost thirty years, I doubt his unabridged works would come to a thousand pages).
- Look at me trying to warn someone off my favourite artist! I'd be a terrible salesman! CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 12:17, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
That's weird, because the only other work I know that tries to radically excise romance from sex is a centralized, Statist dystopia — Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. I wouldn't be "offended" by any of this; after all, my favorite novel has that scene of a dominatrix (with a tortured conscience) who shits down the throat of a doddering General (who enjoys it) so her employer can be rewarded with more of the money the General is in control of in order to capture and ultimately try to castrate the hero the dominatrix had much great but rather emotionless sex with because said employer feels his entire worldview might collapse if he can't learn why this man gets hardons at the particular times he does.
Sounds like a healthy good time, doesn't it.
I'll read about him in Wikipedia and see if I can't google a few things up ...
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:55, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
Well, I read the Chester Brown Wiki pieces. "There's nothing wrong with paying for sex as long as you're paying the right woman for sex."
Hehe. Sounds like marriage :)
Question: Does he give / is he depicted as giving these women orgasms?
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:06, 16 June 2011 (UTC)
- There's no scene in which the woman have orgasms, no. There are a few scenes where he prematurely ejaculates, and some scenes where the women are clearly not enjoying it. It's really weird—he's clearly advocating all this stuff, and yet making it look like it's no fun at all.
Nobody writes an autobiographical work about healthy, fulfilling sexual relationships ("This morning we made love. It was awesome. This evening we had a marvelous dinner, saw a movie and made love. It was great.") unless they're writing straight porn. And nobody writes an autobiographical work about prostitution like Fanny Hill or The Happy Hooker that attempts to uplift the profession, honor the female sex drive and laud the status quo — which would make the tiniest pretense of attempting to appeal to women. Or not being porn. This is clearly an argument, I think aimed at himself.
- There's a problem, though, with him depicting everything as flat and emotionless. He's done that as an artistic choice, though in real life he's known to smile and laugh a lot—his friend Joe Mattdepicted him as having a horse laugh way back in the 80s, and you can hear that in one of the videos link on the external links section of the Paying for It page. He comes off as robotic and sombre in the book, but a number of people have pointed out that he's not like that in real life, and that in fact he's become less uptight and more happy in real life since he started whoring. And yet this is the work that he's decided to drain all the emotion out of! (well, Louis Riel was pretty emotionally flat, too, but not to half the degree of PfI.
I've read all the stuff on Chester up on Wiki and I'm pretty good at doing the dinosaur bone bit and fleshing him out in my mind. I think the guy's a serious candidate for therapy and an exemplar of the Peter Pan Syndrome. Sure, he's capable of good relations with his male buddies (like in the secret clubhouse when he was 12) but the idea of an adult relationship with a woman, which requires risk in order to achieve intimacy, absolutely terrifies him. He's happier now that he's whoring because, according to The Playboy, he's had a lifelong fixation on masturbation guilt, while sexually cathecting on images of ideal superlovers who bear no relationship to the women around him. He doesn't have to spank it anymore. Whew! Everthing else, including the political arguments, is a doubt-inducing rationalization on which his friends get the last word.
- I already thought that prostitution should be decriminalized/legalized, for the same reason as with drugs (although I participate in neither): making them illegal has created far too much opportunity for crime (pimping, human trafficking, etc in the case of prostitution; all the hustling and gang warfare that goes with the drugs). Brown hasn't made me swing the other way, but if I hadn't already been convinced, this book wouldn't have convinced me.
Sure, I'm a civ-libber, too. It's funny, though, how this guy doesn't at all resemble an American Libertarian Party member. Those guys pay lip-service to all the dorm-room bull session issues including free-speech absolutism, unrestricted private abortion, the right to die (assisted or otherwise), defendants's rights before solving crimes (which all become a lot more complex and double-sided when you apply any serious thought) but spend all their time on abolishing the income tax or at least making it flat, ending reserve currency and going back to the gold standard, dismantling government, ending foreign aid, viewing all social issues as personal disputes to be resolved in civil court (may the best-argued lawsuit win) and getting out of business's way. An American LP dude would legalize prostitution but wouldn't shed a tear for or shudder at the inadequate healthcare these women have as Chester apparently does at one point. He'd say charge what the market will bear, pay the doctor or buy the appropriate type of medical insurance; don't expect the State to do any of that for you.
- So why do I like the book? I love fine cartooning, and Brown has an amazing amount of control over his line, pacing, panel compositions, etc. Plus, the conversations are pretty funny. He often gives the last word to his friends who disagree with him. Strange approach to take for advocacy. When he advocated that schizophrenia doesn't exist in " My Mom was a Schizophrenic" he didn't allow these cracks in the argument. It was a lot more convincing, and it was still enjoyable to read.
I totally dig it. My favorite cartoonist remains Bill Watterson, who did the last great American comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes (I named my cat after both the political philosopher and the eponymous stuffed tiger). I completely admired his art (while having zero ambivalence about his message). I don't think Chester Brown's arguments are very real, though. I think they amount to epiphenomenons of his mental state and wish-fulfillment about his personal experience. Back in those wild American Early 70s when you could entertain just about any idea (the perfect moment in the Zeitgeist to release Gravity's Rainbow), I read a bunch of Thomas Szasz in Psychology Today magazine, the psychiatrist who put those schizophenia-is-socially-constructed arguments on the map. Hey. My own mom died of alcoholism when I was 13 and my first girlfriend was a clinically-diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic (in remission at the time I met her). She flipped out again at college, came back home and I spent my late teen years attemping to "take care" of her. Mental illness is real. End of story.
Thomas Szasz also put the Libertarian argument for complete autonomy in sexual relations on the map as well; considering the confluence of these issues with Chester (and considering that Chester is less than a year younger than yours truly), I wouldn't be surprised at all if Chester had read his work and considers Szasz a primary influence on his thinking.
Let me also not fail to express what I think is clearly admirable about this work. Brown is trying as hard as he can to be totally honest. He's not idealizing or fantasizing. He's accurately portraying the creepiness that makes him unsexy to women. And he's giving his own arguments the skepticism they're due by realistically relating the debates with his friends and letting them have the last word. I absolutely see why this book won awards and why you like his work so much. The flat affect is not so much a rhetorical strategy as it is a necessity due his terror of intimacy, on which he bases his larger political argument. If you really wanted to do the dinosaur bone bit and psychoanalyze the guy for a minute (which I realize full well I'm not equipped to do; but hey, it's just the internet :), I'd say this came from the traumatic withdrawl he felt from his mother while ill (full-blown schizophrenics obviously have no capability for intimate exchange) prior to her tragic death.
- I think he's trying to arguing for too many things at once in the book. (1) He's arguing for the decriminalization of prostitution—fine.
Not so fine — unless you're a Libertarian who doesn't give a flying fungus about the social effects of prostitution (because to Libertarians there are no "social effects," only personal interactions. As Maggie the Thatch always sez, "Society doesn't exist"). I support decrim only as a stopgap measure, because I'd rather see the cops spend their time (and our money) on other things. But I don't support it at all as a matter of policy. I support legalization, along with what our state Nevada does in the several counties where it's legal, full regulation. Mandatory checkups, background checks, healthcare and social service access, etc. All things that would make any self-respecting American Libertarian run screaming the other way.
- (2) He's arguing that the emotional stress of romantic relations is a negative, destructive thing—if you buy that, fine, but it's a separate argument.
It's not only a separate argument, it's totally invalid on its face. People in stable, relatively happy relationships (hetero or homo) live longer and suffer less health problems — a fact long empirically established by sociology (Along with American studies, I was a Soc minor.) If he were arguing only for himself (completely valid; not everybody fits in the middle of the bell curve), he'd have no need to push this. It's the ol' m'lady protesteth too much thing. In other words, pure defensiveness motivated out of a painful emptiness that all his hail-fellow whore stories only mask to his friends but doesn't alleviate.
- (3) Then he's arguing (from his Libertarian standpoint) that our bodies are our property (and, as a Libertarian, that property rights are the only rights the government should be protecting),
I'm going to take this contradiction apart without any need to reference Chester. You know, Libs are funny people (and I've debated self-described capital-L Libertarians for decades, on BBSs before the internet). Sometimes you can catch them when their defenses are down, maybe after a couple glasses of wine and they're feeling a little sentimental and miffed at constantly being mistaken for moral nihilists. They'll declaim to you that their political persuasion is in fact deeply moral, and it involves minimizing the potential for force and fraud. (Of course, Libertarians generalize this into a Rousseau-like historical principle and implicitly if not explicitly assert that if people didn't practice force and fraud on each other, why there would never have been a need for government at all. Which makes them, of course, single-theory-to-explain-everything maniacs and therefore a bit intellectually hopeless in the best of cases.) It's what makes them different from anarchists, because they believe in a role for government and the military, however minimal, precisely to protect people (in practical terms property, because as you stated people own themselves as property) from acts of force and fraud. It's also what makes them a little different from Constitutionalists and other flavors of small-f fundamentalist conservatives, because they're not so ready to abandon the civil courts to "tort reform." Sometimes you need a vigorous court defense to protect your property (and your person) from force and fraud. And the more property you own, the more you require protection.
And that's where ethically it all falls apart ...
There are some women, in the vast majority of cases high-priced call girls of middle class background, who got into it as a free choice without being exploited. That girl who famously caught out our former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer a few years ago is an example, as are Xaviera Hollander and Heidi Fleiss. Sometimes women got into hooking as a way to pay for a college semester and found they liked it more than going to school. (I have a couple friends who don't share my sexual ethics and regularly visit freelance middle-class prostitutes. I can't speak for the girls, but sadly enough, I'd characterize these guys's motivations as all-too-often consisting of a fair mixture of grandiosity, obsessive-compulsion and misogyny.) It generally seems to require a higher than average sex drive, a materialist outlook and sometimes just a strong desire to "get over" on powerful men by turning the tables for a minute. These are the women who validate the Libertarian paradigm by simply "taking ownership" of their bodies and, as they make a good penny, don't cost the state a thing.
But good gravy, this is only a tiny sliver of prostitutes. It's not the girls Chester visits nor for the vast part the ones my friends visit. Mostly they have drug problems, serious emotional issues, they got into it out of some degree of economic desperation (even if no one sold them into white slavery with a literal gun to their heads or a pimp's fists in their backs). They react to their environments; they are not in any way self-actualized people who take charge of their destinies. To speak of "self-ownership" regarding these women is to babble incoherently. And this reveals the fundamental immorality of defending one's actions with a set of principles that reduce human value to the currency of what we choose to buy and sell.
A human life has an incommensurable value. It is ours alone, but infinitely more precious than "property."
- and that romance-free paid sex should be the way that everyone approaches sex. Well, that one should really, really be a book all its own, and only muddies the argument when you're trying to get prostitution decriminalized.
I think what Chester needs to do is to go find a 75-year-old who's just celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary and tell them that contrary to all outward appearances, how foolish, deluded and miserable they've been their entire adult life.
- You know, if the whole point of #1 is to get to #3, and you don't agree with #3, then why would you support #1 in the first place? He just shoots himself in the foot with the way he presents his arguments. And then he leaves the strongest argument for any of this that he has right out of the book—what his friends (like Seth and Jeet Heer) have attested to: that he's so much happier a person since he took up whoring. He sure doesn't come off as happy in the book! He comes off as a robotic, emotionally repressed cripple (which he sure doesn't seem to be in his video interviews). Definitely a failure on the polemic side, but I can't decide if this last one is an artistic failure or not—the book's enjoyable, even if it's not accurate. How accurate does art have to be, anyways?
I think the work succeeds as art in direct proportion to how much it fails as a polemic. Chester's not fooling anybody; he still feels way-guilty for having orgasms no matter where they come from, so he's chasing what Erica Jong memorably called the zipless fuck. Jong called it "the purest thing there is" and something that explicitly cannot be bought. Of course he needs to try to salvage what this means for the sake of his dignity. His rationalizations go to extremes (the thought of a guy this obviously miserable shilling for a sexual utopia is pretty tragically funny) and his buddies roll their eyes, and are right.
You said this isn't accurate, but I'd disagree. I think it's extremely accurate. This is who Chester genuinely is, so it meets all critera for autobiography. And it's reflective of my own experience with my two whoring friends. They'll try to tell me how great it was last night, I'll look at them and go "dude ... you paid for it" and then they'll rag on me for not getting any pussy. It's the same basic dynamic; they invest money in something they know inside is empty and unfulfilling and rationalize and/or deflect like hell when challenged on it. If it was really that good, they'd have no need to convince me it was.
I don't think Chester is either seriously advocating to legalize/decriminalize prostitution or genuinely attempting to sell a world liberated from the ickiness of romantic entanglement. I think Chester is just being Chester — an impulsive sexual neurotic — and writing a comic book about it. And I applaud him for all the unflattering honesty this demonstrates. If he wanted to write a polemic for either of those outcomes, he could've easily have done it — but it would have had to have become heavily fictionalized. The girls would become major characters who'd tell us that they would enjoy their fulfilling and self-actualized choice of profession even more if only they didn't have to worry about those durn cops.
And hey — how many Chick's Tracts or political pamphlets win comic book awards?
Finally, I think it's a scream that Hugh Hefner felt the need to share some dismayed "fatherly advice" with Chester about the book. Hef cracks me up; he remains the poster boy (and I do mean boy) for American Freudianism (which is what you get when you don't remember to read Civilization and its Discontents). Sexual repression is ... bad! If we only get rid of it by understanding its true nature, a veritable utopia of liberation awaits us. Hef was just gobsmacked that a guy this neurotic and repressed could still exist in our present age of enlightenment. But Dr. Hilarius from The Crying of Lot 49 was right. Hold the nasty little creature tightly by its tentacle, bring it out of the dark subconscious and into the Light of Reason — and you're still holding on to the tentacle of a nasty little creature.
Eww.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 13:11, 17 June 2011 (UTC)
- I'd assumed you read this when you brought up Szasz, but it looks like you didn't. Brown wrote an eight-page Chick tract-style comics "essay" called "My Mom Was a Schizophrenic" that he photocopied and left around Toronto. It's become one of his better-known works, and the bulk of it was inspired by Szasz and R. D. Laing. Despite the title, he never mentions his mom once in the whole strip, and her schizophrenia is only lightly touched on in his other works (mainly I Never Liked You, although her condition is never explicitly called schizophrenia in that book).
No, I guess I didn't. And I take your point that a tract or pamphlet-style work of comic art advocacy is also, as Cardiacs say, worthy of laudation. Believe me, I have personal experiences (my dad made a good living in medical advertising, starting back when Valium was considered a wonder drug) I could share regarding the scientism of psychiatry and the pharmico-industrial complex that would curl your toes and should make me by all rights a Szasz/Laing ideologue on the subject. But I also have the experience of driving my schizophrenic girlfriend Cathy home when out of the clear blue sky, she starts beating the living shit out of me in traffic, nearly killing the both of us. At the end of the day, I'm forced to conclude that opprobrium at behavior like that is motivated by something more than a social construction.
- You find out about Brown's mother mostly from his interviews—very little is given in his works. It may seem like he's repressing something, but in the interviews I've read he says that it's because he wasn't aware of what was going on with her when it was happening. Most of the time she seemed normal enough, but occasionally would get hysterical (which he doesn't show in his books, aside from one brief scene where she flips out at him for saying "Shit"—it comes off as her being religiously prudish, though, rather than unstable). I Never Liked You has a number of scenes with Brown's mother emotionally reaching out to him. It was Brown who was emotionally withdrawn, not his mother.
Obviously I don't know the situation and I don't wish to be glib about it, but at face value this raises some red flags. A mother "emotionally reaching out" is not necesarily a good sign for the emotional growth of her child (again, I have some difficult personal anecdotes I could share to show that, at least in my own case). What you and I have agreed on is that Chester comes across as emotionally stilted in PFI, and I would further argue that Chester has a fear of intimacy so pronounced that it cannot serve as a basis for social prescription. In general, a mother who shifts from hot to cold, or who has "hysterical" episodes and then reaches out to her son, can be extremely confusing to a child. The extreme level of masturbation guilt Chester suffers in TP (something which obviously cannot parse in a Libertarian worldview) seems connected to a "religiously prudish" mom who loses it at the word "shit," and maybe all those Playmates of the Month offered the promise of unconditional love that parents are normally supposed to assure their children of.
- He says he was given little information at the time about what was going on with his mother, and was not asked to go to the funeral. It wasn't until adulthood that he started to try to find out what schizophrenia was, which is when he ran across Szasz and Laing. He doesn't put in much effort to tie in what he believes about schizophrenia to his experiences with his mother. He doesn't advocate that the doctors did anything wrong in her case—in fact, he doesn't even seem to know what her treatment was. She ends up dying from falling down the stairs. If Brown believes the doctors were to blame for that, he hasn't said or implied so in any interview I've ever read with him. His anti-psychiatry stance, to me, falls in line with his generally well-known contrarianism, and I think the only relation to his mother there is that, the fact that she was diagnosed as schizophrenic gave him a subject to look up at the library (Toronto's got an awesome library system, by the way).
It would be very helpful if I knew the content of that tract, because there are many aspects of the anti-psychiatry argument that I think are quite valid. R.D. Laing's existential psychology (I love Gentle Giant's song " Knots") was a needed counterweight to the institutional Freudianism of the 60s and 70s (although Laing also indulged in his own share of Crackpot Ideas like re-experiencing uterine memories). When Szasz wrote his book in 1960, American psychiatric institutions were a snake pit, no question, and the side-effects of the early blunderbuss anti-psychotic medications (notoriously Thorazine) horrific. Residents were, a la One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, robbed of nearly all their dignity.
But the pendulum of history moves with its own momentum. By the mid-60s in the US, Szasz's ideas helped found a movement, supported not only by humanitarians and civil libertarians but also by President Kennedy, to de-institutionalize nonviolent mental patients. A terriffically humane and progressive idea, and one that would take courage to implement and get the public to accept, but the law was passed and it gradually came to be. For developmentally-disabled ("retarded") people this was an almost complete success, and on the whole, I don't think anyone would seriously argue for a return to what it was. But it also means that there's a hard core of homeless on American streets who are dead-bonkers (I've had my share of conversations with them), shuffle in and out of local jail for petty offenses, and only a Libertarian ideologue would argue that they're "happier" living this way rather than being sheltered and made to take their meds every day.
- I'm not sure how I misworded things in the Paying for It article that got you thinking that Brown was shedding tears over prostitutes' lack of health care.
My bad; that was an interpretation. It came from a description in the Wiki article about Chester's dismay in an argument regarding healthcare for prostitutes, represented by lightning bolts in a panel. It was noted that this was one of the very few places in PFI where Chester shows any emotion at all, so I took it for sentimental concern.
- There's a scene in the book where he's arguing the decriminalization vs legalization thing with his friend Seth. Seth is arguing that the prostitutes should be regularly tested. Brown argues that they live in Canada where health care is free and are free to get tested any time and however often they want. Seth argues they should be forced to be tested—and this is where Brown gets Libertarian. It's funny that he doesn't actually argue against our health care system (although it's been brought up time and again how he has received multiple grants from the government to complete his works, despite explicitly having the abolition of such grants on his platform. He gives his only half-coherent argument for why he did that in an interview floating around called something like "The Difference Between Giving and Receiving").
It's simultaneously both easier and more difficult to argue for capital-L Libertarianism in a place like Canada. Easier, because Canadian society has assimilated egalitarian welfare into its social contract and it's always easy to criticize the inevitable excesses and unintended consequences of an established system — e.g. bureaucratic inconveniences that would no doubt raise hackles in a typical American. More difficult because Chester is obviously trying to have it both ways. Leave aside the obvious (and oft-noted) hypocrisy of depending on State arts grants to survive in an unremuniterave profession like cartooning, but also that he "gets Libertarian" on Seth knowing full well that healthcare is a guaranteed right for these women. Heh — try making the Libertarian argument for caveat-emptor, unregulated prostitution in America, with women getting tested whenever they damn well want to, where healthcare (shamefully) is not a right. See how well he sticks to his guns there. This is so internally inconsistent within the tenets of Libertarianism that once again, it leads me to believe Chester's book is up to something different than an all-too-easily demolished Libertarian polemic for prostitution.
- I'm not deluded (and I don't think Brown is, either) into thinking that legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution would somehow give these women self-actualization/-fulfillment or whatever. What it would give them, however, is police protection against violence, etc. As it stands, if a prostitute (even a strong, independent, "self-actualized" one) is the victim of violence (or anything else) from her john, she doesn't have the recourse of taking it to the police, as she could have herself arrested for prostitution.
Any supporter of legalization (like yours truly) would certainly accept decriminalization as a first step. I'm ambivalent about legalizing all recreational drugs, but I fully support the idea to treat all drug use as a medical issue rather than a criminal issue. The very first thing that needs to happen is for prostitutes to have recourse to common legal protection.
- As for Nevada, Brown of course brings it up in his book, but so do others: the prostitutes who work in the Nevada brothels are confined there, and are not allowed to leave without escort. You don't need to be a Libertarian to find something intensely horrifying about that.
As an American and a strong, if not entirely doctrinnaire, civil libertarian, I don't exactly find that "intensely horrifying." Before learning more about Nevada's brothels, my first reaction is to think culturally, and recall that Nevada is part of the American West, that cradle of don't-fence-me-in Libertarianism (sort of like our country's answer to Alberta :). I wouldn't suspect that there's something nefariously Statist going on there, or something that reeks of noblesse-oblige Eastern Seaboard "social engineering." It might very well be (thinking off the top of my head before I go wiki Nevada brothels) that being a known prostitute alone is extremely dangerous given the cultural realities of low-income Nevada, and this is for their physical protection. If it's part of the contract before these women sign up for the work, then it fairly conforms to Libertarian respect for contracts. It would be "intensely horrifying" if it came out of the blue after they took the job.
- On the other end, if a john found out (or suspected) that the prostitute he was seeing was, say, being forced into the work, he could report it if the whole business wasn't illegal in the first place.
Agreed. I do think cops look down on pimps and traffickers even more than they do on prostitutes.
- Compare it to the alcohol situation. With alcohol legal and strictly regulated, there are still all kinds of social problems (alcoholism, broken glass littered on playgrounds, drunk driving), but the crime waves brought on by prohibition were so much worse (ditto the drug laws). You can be a tea-totaller and still see that prohibition is a problem, not a solution. Prostitution's not going away, and criminalizing it only magnifies the problems.
Oh my goodness, no argument here. But I will note something appropos of prohibiting other drugs (you know that subject would come up sooner or later) which speaks to my whole approach regarding prostitution. There are enormous cultural factors involved. Alcohol is a substance which the settlers of our country (if not the indigenous population) had centuries of experience with and deeply ingrained social rituals to informally regulate the consumption of. This is not true even with a substance as manifestly benign as marijuana, as Western Europe is not a "toking culture." As a teen, you can have a glass of wine with your family at dinner, attend social functions and learn by example what the limits are and the consequences from not following them. It's not a perfect system, obviously, but it does provide guidance that's effective most of the time. There's no tradition in our culture where it's appropriate to "smoke a joint with your dad" as a coming-of-age ritual, so it's much much harder to give the green light to pot while making sure that teenagers aren't just off to the races with it.
Let me be dead-explicit: I fully support the medical paradigm for dealing with all recreational drug use, which implies that I support total decrim for "soft drugs" and vastly reducing the penalties of "hard drugs" and substituting treatment programs for jail time in all non-violent cases. I am also an ardent supporter of legalizing marijuana, along with mushrooms, peyote and any other naturally occuring substance, even smoked opium balls and chewed cocoa leaf. I draw the line at processed hard drugs and synthetics because I see drug addiction as a serious problem and I loathe the profiteering middlemen and lab jockeys who process the shit (crystal meth is a worse social nightmare than either heroin or cocaine). I'd rather all drug use become more ritualized and spiritualized and less "recreational," though I realize that's asking way too much of cuture to evolve that way. What I don't support, though, is a Dutch solution which is both Libertarian and odiously Statist: not only subsidizing registered heroin addicts but also subsidizing their food and housing. This creates a class of people that have zero incentive to live any but the most diminished lives, let alone contribute to society. We shouldn't pay for that.
Explicit, though, isn't necessarily definitive. I realize that the lines I've drawn are inevitably arbitrary and can be disputed any number of ways. The only thing I'm 100% on is rejecting the criminal paradigm and generally agreeing that prohibition is more often than not counterproductive (even there I sound tentative, I know). Which gets me to my concerns about prostitution. Let's say we took the Libertarian, no-government approach and simply erased the laws against prostitution. Cultural attitudes about prostitution are going to remain the same. Prostitutes still won't get the benefit of the doubt from cops, they'll still have a tough time expediting rape cases, they'll still be seen as easy targets for violence (doubtless why culturally libertarian Nevada gets all Big Brother on their brothel employees). The only way this changes is not through law, but through a cultural evolution that allows the acceptance of prostitution as a dignified way for women to earn a living.
I'm not using this (as some people would) as an argument against decriminalizing prostitution. I indeed agree with Chester Brown and yourself that it would be an improvement, but I think it would be a much more marginal improvement than Brown gives it credit for — even for something as basic as being able to go to the cops. That's why my preferred route is not only legalization but support (public and/or private): Don't necessarily make them required-residency brothels but at least have safe houses, access to counseling, mandatory healthcare. As long as prostitutes are seen as social outcasts (not many of them can command the big bucks as call girls servicing the elite), I think it's the only humane way to go.
This sort of thinking blips completely off the radar screen of a Libertarian, though. Libertarians don't wanna know from culture. They don't wanna know from society. All they consider are individuals faced with choices, under the working assumption that every individual is an equal piece on the chessboard of life, and may the best moves win.
- You don't need to bring Brown to a 75-year-old couple—he acknowledges in one of his talks with his friends that such happy couples exist. His argument is that they are the exception rather than the rule, and that if that's what makes those particular people happy, then they should be free to have their happy monogamy, but that the social construct that puts pressure on all of society to seek the same thing is wrong.
A Golden wedding anniversary is obviously very rare and I was being facetious. But it's still hard to argue with the statistics. The people who muddle through long-term relationships are generally happier than those who aren't (given an equivalent age), and I think this is more reflective of a hardwired need for stable human companionship (there are no cultural differences to speak of here) rather than a construction indicative of a particular time and place — even if the institution of marriage as we know it (marrying with free choice for love rather than for social and/or economic reasons) is a product of the 19th-century industrial bourgeoisie (and that was a vast blow for liberty and happiness over arranged marriages).
Consider something else. There was a huge backlash against the Sexual Revolution for a very good reason. All else being equal, it's a rotten deal for women. Women get stuck with the kids. Men can walk away. So when you're attacking the social pressures for long-term relationships, you've got to consider both sexes here. There are a heck of a lot less cougars in the world than there are men who like to cat around. And again, I'm not speaking normatively, I'm speaking statistically (if informally). If you want to bring social pressures into it, my bogeyman is diametrically opposed to Chester Brown's. I think the problem is, rather, the social acceptance of the commercial commodification of sex. IMHO, Chester screwed up his adult love life by drooling over all those Playmates of the Month as a teen. So of course he can't find a woman in real life who can measure up to his impossible fantasies. The same thing with the ubiquity of porn. Young adult men of the internet age who've spent their adolescences wrecking computer keyboards with jizz often go through a crushing disillusionment with sex once they start having it. Couple counselling literature is filled with this. How would women feel about it?
So while I realize that The World's Oldest Profession is not going away any time soon, and while I fully support realistic, humane ways to integrate it into society, I think that Chester's prescription is not going to improve social attitudes about sex. The girls may gain a measure of long-denied respect, but the boys growing into Chesters would be much worse off.
And women in general would just have that much more reason to give up on men.
What Chester really needs to do is to invest in a RealDoll with an animatronic vagina.
- As for his "unsexiness" to women—well, I won't comment directly on that, but I do want to point out that his last girlfriend was Sook-Yin Lee (the page on her is horrible), who was a MuchMsuic VJ back when I was in high school—and she was hot (actually, she's aged pretty well, too). I remember being totally in love with her back before I had ever read a Chester Brown comic (I have yet to come across any of his comics in my hometown—not that it would have necessarily made a difference, as it was illegal to sell that stuff to minors). And the fact that she would promote comic books (like Brown's) on-air just made her unspeakably more desirable to this little comic book nerd. Just keep in mind that she wasn't just hot, but one of the most famous media personalities in Canada, and pretty much could have had her pick of men (or women—she's bi). She was the one who broke off the relationship, though (although they continued to live together for four more years). Not that this is proof of anything whatsoever, but I think it's his shyness rather than "ickiness" that makes it difficult for him to find women.
Oh absolutely. I meant the portrayal of his inner state, not whatever degree of objective attractiveness to women he may or may not possess. If you feel unattractive and icky, you're going to come across that way no matter what you look like, and Chester obviously has some pretty gnarly sexual self-esteem issues. The usual answer to Chester's common dilemma that romance is more trouble than it's worth (every person has felt that way at one time or another — usually after a painful breakup) — is, once emotionally recovered, to play the field. Get on the internet. Go speed-dating. Go to a park and strike up conversations. My bud Jonathan (one of the whoremasters) has an expression: "Women are a thing best enjoyed in vast quantities." The idea being either to eventually meet a woman you're sufficiently compatible with for a relationship or to get enough pussy while trying to tide you over. (Jon is not a guy who needs to pay for sex; he's just obsessive/compulsive).
Chester didn't feel like he could do that, despite having the status of a nationally admired cartoonist and despite coming off a relationship with a high-status woman like Sook-Yin Lee. That's an internal problem; it's got nothing to do with society. (How many adoring young female fans of his work do you think he could've trawled for at comic conventions?) The greatest irony in all of this is that Chester settled into a "monogamous" relationship (on his part, anyway) for a number of years with a steady girl. And there's nothing that an anti-Libertarian polemicist like yours truly could say that more effectively torpedoes his whole argument than that: At the end of the day, Chester's exactly like most people. He craves stability, familiarity, some semblance of connection (no matter how tenuous) with the person he's being intimate with.
That he happened to pay for it is not, at core, germane.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 20:09, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
- I won't disagree with many of your points (I've been married ten years with 2 1/2 kids and I think I'm much more monogamous by nature than most people you'd meet. I also can't imagine what motivates people to make use of prostitutes—if there's going to be no intimacy with the sex, I'd rather jerk off).
- It crossed my mind that, given Brown had been passing out the "My Mom Was a Schizophrenic" tracts for free, that it'd be available online (not from himself, though—he doesn't own a computer). Apparently some site had it up, but it's down now. Other than that, I can only find two pages of it on a Google image search.
- Legalizing hard drugs isn't really one of my pet subjects, so I don't want to dwell on it, but if, say, heroin were available by prescription from your doctor at cost or something close to it, it seems to me that it would pretty much eliminate the opportunities for traffickers and pushers. Who could compete with zero margins? Why would you want to? This would also give doctors the opportunity to keep an eye on the addicts (not necessarily in a Big Brother sort of way), and offer them ways out when they see the opportunity open. Of course, make it illegal to provide prescriptions to those who aren't already hooked. Of course, there'll always be new junkies out there—shit gets out and around even with the best safeguards. But without pushers looking for new clients (or with fewer of them, anyways; let's be pessimistic) I think in the long run the problem would become much more marginalized than it is now, with more opportunities for dealing with the cases that do exist. I don't know a lot about crystal meth, but if none of this applies, well, I think we should deal with special cases as special cases.
- When it comes to softer drugs, well, if there's no culture that's built up around it to signal to people the appropriate social limits, it sure isn't going to happen while the stuff is illegal. I'm not going to go into it deeper than that, though. My issue is not so much that I want drugs to be legalized, as that I want to do away with laws that cause more problems than they solve (or cause problems without solving anything).
- "Agreed. I do think cops look down on pimps and traffickers even more than they do on prostitutes."
- Well, to be honest, so do I. I think there should be no more pressure on either the prostitutes or johns than in any other client relationship (*), and pimps and traffickers provide a lot of pressure. If there were agencies that provided contact between hookers and johns I'd be for (or at least not against) that. As it stands in Canada since last fall, prostitution is actually legal, but pimps, brothels and street solicitation are not. (I'm assuming you mean "trafficker" to mean those who procure prostitutes, usually from abroad. Maybe you meant it as the client; some people seem to use the word that way.) Whether the cops would actually give prostitutes the benefit of the doubt—well, okay, you can't always trust a cop, but that's not directly related to the issue. At least the prostitutes would have the opportunity to try to get the cops' help.
- (*) Please don't interpret this statement through Brown's lenses. I'm not into his "utopia". In normal relations with clients, as long as a contract hasn't been signed, there's a lot of leeway for both sides to back out before money has changed hands. Pimps take away a lot of that leeway.
- I want to end this on something other than politics, but I've been battling mosquitoes all night and I'm sleepy. I think I'll go back to bed—glad there's no work today. I'll just say that I think I Never Liked You is my favourite of all of Brown's work, but relatively it's pretty tame—no jerking off, no fucking dead bodies, no nosepicking and biting neighbours. It's a near-perfect example of a comic that tells a story entirely in comic-book terms, one without literary pretensions (meaning he's not one of thes cartoonists of his generation who was so insecure with his chosen profession that he tried to "elevate" it by quoting poetry he didn't understand or by filling up panels with verbose narration). The whole story is told through images and dialogue and extremely well paced and laid out. Even though it's 176 pages you could probably get through it in an hour—which doesn't sound like you're getting what you've paid for, but I've re-read it enough times to more than make up for it (I like it so much I've bought it three times—in its original Yummy Fur appearances and in both collected editions, although my copy of the first edition has been stolen). CüRlyTüRkey Talk Contribs 23:28, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
Makes it easier to edit when you break it up. Yeah, I hear ya, bro. I overslept way-extremely last night (actually the late afternoon until about 12 noon today. Toronto's in what -- Chicago's time zone? [CDT]) and can't for the life of me wake completely up. I'm trying to quit smoking (been gasping on 'em for 36 years) and all the pleasant memories of writing tightly-edited, insanely long posts to you while puffing madly away isn't helping — not that, you know, you're in any way to blame for that :) So I don't think I have the energy or focus to do a point-by-point today, which I'd guess you're fine with.
Boy was I ever wrong about Nevada's brothels. Turns out they're an insult to the notion of decent employment practices and if it were up to me I'd scrap the whole system. Nevada's back-asswards cultural attitudes can't remotely assimilate prostitution. Culturally libertarian? Not exactly. Libertarianism, after all, implies a certain degree of sophistication (however naïve) which Amsterdam might qualify for (they have a statue of a prostitute in the red-light district erected by an international sex workers's association) but hardly the relig-uh-mus, un-ed-u-muh-fuh-cated White Trash™ culture that settled Nevada. It's simply part of their heritage as a territory and then a state with a shitload of ranching and mining, which brought to it an enormous influx of Excess Unmarried Men. The vast majority of Nevadans live in the two populous counties where prostitution is illegal and it is restricted exclusively by the entirely arbitrary measure of county population size.
Las Vegas illustrates the whole state's doubleminded idiocy on the issue. The city polls dead split on the issue and the intense lobbying against it comes from the resorts and casinos, who, knowing the demographic trends, have worked to clean up the "Sin City" image and make it more family-friendly for all the aging baby boomers who make up the biggest share of their tourist revenue. But prostitution is inextricably linked to Vegas ("what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas"), prostitutes fill the casinos late at night and there are "escort" and "personal entertainment" services stuffing the duly legal Yellow Pages (telephone directory) which even the most severe acephalitic knows are prostitution services in all but name.
The brothel owners are scum. The movement restrictions they place on the girls aren't so much for their safety as to guarantee their employees are making their shifts. The girls are contract employees, responsible for paying Federal income tax and Social Security (rather than having the money withheld up front and the overpayment returned at tax season, as with most wage employees) and they have no benefits (no employer healthcare, no paid time off) — while enjoying none of the psychic benefits of your-own-boss freedom associated with being an independent (IRS form 1099) contractor. While it's explicitly illegal to live off the wages of a prostitute, many brothels tacitly encourage outside pimps to keep the girls in line and working. The insanely Big Brotheroid restrictions on where prostitutes can live, where their children can live, where they can congregate (no bars where they could meet local men) are all about the cultural view that prostitutes are blights on a community. That's why advocates talk more about decrim than legalization. This model is horrendous.
One of the Wiki prostitution articles said that there were three basic paradigms in which to view prostitution: the prohibition model (where the girls are criminals), the abolition model (where the girls are victims) and the regulation model (where the girls are workers). Despite being "legal" in name, it's clear that Nevada's brothels operate in Paradigm #1. The girls are considered moral imbeciles who thus require being treated like misbehaving children. Dignity? Heh, what's that.
Lemme spend a minute on Paradigm #2 because I think it's interesting. That's where Canada's coming from, and it was pioneered by Sweden, Norway and Iceland which is why it's called the Nordic model. The idea is to criminalize all procuring and soliciting behavior (including the unmediated behavior of a john, say, signalling out a car window) while leaving the girls alone. You have to admit there's something very progressive about this; it recognizes that prostitution, like drugs, is a demand-driven activity. It also recognizes that if a woman is in desperate straits, prostitution is not any more a freely chosen activity than scoring drugs is for an addict. It recognizes that as long as male demand exists, criminalizing women for answering it is blaming the victim. And it puts the onus where the power and free choice reside, on the men who suffer nothing of what the prostitute does by living the sort of life required of them to be available to service men's needs.
So far, so good. But it goes further than that. It's based on the idea that a contractural relationship between a man and a woman (or any two people) for sex is strictly speaking impossible (practically speaking deeply dishonest) because of the power differential between buyer and seller (in the case of men soliciting women, furthered by patriarchal culture). Or that even if the relation was dead-equal, like say a guy at college offering to buy a blowjob from a girl on his dorm floor, sex is something so bound up with self-esteem, identity and need-for-intimacy issues that it can't be bought and sold, only freely given. And that concomitanty, women who support themselves by selling sex cannot help but warp their personalities and stunt their emotional growth. This is an idea advanced not merely by radical feminists like Andrea Dworkin and Catherine McKinnon who believe that we live in a rape culture (Dworkin is notorious for postulating that even marital sex is tantamount to rape), but by some of the most enlightened, humane countries in the world — including France, where the Fille et Joie is a national icon. So you get a bizarre alliance of progressive feminist humanists with moral reactionaries pushing this position, like Nicholas Sarkozy using post-9/11 security concerns to clamp down on soliciting.
What sex workers themselves want is only the freedom to practice what they have defined as a freely-chosen profession. They want the right to organize and to be provided health and counselling services, and are one of the few groups of any sort of workers who are actually fighting to be taxed by the state, so (among other things) they can draw pensions. There are sex worker organizations in every Western country, and over the past 20-30 years there's been a movement to fully legalize prostitution in a few European countries. In my travels on Wiki, it seems that Germany is the only Western European country where there hasn't been a huge backlash against legal prostitution. The Netherlands — in many ways the birthplace of political power for sex workers — has reconsidered and the reason is simple free-market economics — the race to the bottom that globalization facilitates so well. It seems that legal prostititution inevitably creates an irresistable trafficking black market to exploit cheaper labor, so Germany is rife with undocumented East European prostitutes.
So that's the dilemma. It makes abolition a much more complicated issue than it appears to any sort of ideologue, pro or against. In fact, I'll take just a mo to speak of what usually appears a no-brainer to most sensible people: the repeal of the "Noble Experiment" to prohibit alcohol in the US. While no sane person would argue for a return to the good ol' Roaring Twenties, it wasn't simply a matter of rampaging moral absolutists like Carrie Nation axe-ing up barrooms. Social history is important; the Gilded Age brought enormous waves of immigrants to our industrial cities with no social services or employer regulations to speak of. Slum tenements were miserable, 12-hour 6-day factory shifts the norm, and drink was one of the few escapes and reminders of their home countries these workingmen had. The social problems of alcohol were horrifically concentrated and the burdens of managing them fell squarely on immigrant mothers and wives. Prohibition was a blunderbuss solution — completely incomprehensible to (and unnecessary for) the middle class — but it came out of the same movement that brought the abolition of slavery, settlement houses, women's sufferage and humane worker reforms that only reached their culmination (thanks in large part to the American Communist Party) in the New Deal with the 8-hour workday and 40-hour work week, the banning of child labor, unemployment and disability insurance, the right to organize.
So what is a person to conclude? " Harm reduction" is the only paradigm that makes sense. There are no magic bullets; any solution brings its own set of problems and unforseen consequences. We can't abolish prostitution, nor can we adequately prohibit it. We can honor sex workers in their freely-chosen right to prostitute themselves by making their work legal, but we'll inevitably increase trafficking (exploitative, unfreely-chosen prostitution) because there will always be a demand for more product at cheaper rates, along with further legitimating the idea of sex as a commodity. Legalization and ultimate social acceptance might well be the lesser evil here, but it's no panacea and will lead to worse problems in the short term. Brothels and red-light districts are not an answer and only allow society the untenable luxury of denial.
I've really gone to town on this topic, so I'll just conclude to say that harm reduction is always a calculus. Even though there is no socially-established set of limits for pot use that young people can learn by example, keeping it illegal is still a worse choice. If we legalize pot, there's going to be an enormous spike in usage (along with a spike in the inevitable emergency-room visits from people whose physiologies just can't handle pot) which is then going to taper off. Take the glamour of illicitness away from pot, and in the long run I've seen it argued that there will be less, not more, teenage pot use.
Anyway, 'nuff for now. The Great American Wiknik is happening this Saturday, so I may just take a stroll down to Fairmount Park in Philly and have a look-see at all these anonymous local toilers in the digital cottonfields I admire so much, just to express that to them and maybe, I dunno, eat some barbecued chicken or something.
Ciao,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 00:59, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
- I'm not so sure that legalization/decrim would lead to more trafficking. Think of it this way: people talk about pot as being a gateway drug. I certainly know a lot of people who've experimented (if only briefly) with heroin, which they got from their pot buddies. But what is there about pot that leads to heroin use? They're completely different kinds of drugs. And why is it that people who smoke and/or drink but don't smoke pot are not so quick to play around with whatever drug is floating around the party? If pot (and only pot) were legalized, I think you'd see a lot fewer users willing to try heroin, for the simple fact that that would be crossing the line from legal substances to illegal. With the situation as it is right now, you may be crossing a social or "common-sense" line, but by being a pot-smoker you've already crossed the legal line.
It is abundantly clear that the single most significant gateway drug is BREATHING. Careful statistical analysis and ample anecdotal evidence suggest — nay, conclude —that every single person who has used any sort of illicit substance at any time in their lives whatsoever and for whatever alleged "reason" has breathed first, QE—fucking—D! Which only goes to demonstrate my level of supercillious contempt for the "gateway drug" argument, natch:) I haven't quite mustered the effort yet to determine the specific Aristotelian nomenclature, but I'm dead-convinced it's some flavor of rhetorical fallacy.
Which isn't to say that the so-called "gateway drug" argument is entirely meaningless — just that its reality as reflected in statistics doesn't quite add up to the argument than the anti-decrim crowd intends. For instance, underage cigarette smoking is probably the biggest single correlation, mabe even a little ahead of underage alcohol use — and nobody uses the argument to attempt to criminalize those substances for adults. But the "gateway drug" argument vis a vis marijuana is truer in a way that's even more destructive to the overall project of anti-decriminalization. Follow me for a minute ...
You've probably noticed in your life as a Canadian that your cousins across the 49th Parallel are a little batshit-insane about certain things. Almost alone among the Western countries, American culture is rife with a moral puritanism we never did manage to shake off from our founding as a haven for the religiously persecuted. So we can't just prohibit something for rational reasons having to do with health or bad consequences. We have to accompany it with a whopping egregious load of moral self-righteousness. We just don't feel American without it, thus our story of how a common weed became illegal.
All throughout the Roaring Twenties and a half-decade into the repeal of Prohibition, cannabis was legal throughout most of the US (in fact, farmers were encouraged to grow hemp to help the Great War effort, as hemp is an incredibly useful fiber). It was off the radar screen as Great Social Scourge because only "Negroes and Mexicans" made a habit of smoking it, and I mean what self-respecting Yankee Doodle Dandy gives a flying flamenco about them, right? But then arose several confluences: First, thousands of these recently trained and hired Internal Revenue agents (the "revenooers" who set upon hillbilly distilleries during Prohibition) were out of work after Repeal. Secondly, DuPont had just developed Nylon — the first synthetic fabric that could replace hemp in tire cord and other vastly profitable industrial applications.
Enter Harry J. Anslinger and the Marihuana Menace. I'll let you read his Wiki page and judge for yourself, but it appears that there's ample evidence he helped to fan the flames of public hysteria over the thought of marijuana corrupting innocent white, middle-class youth to burnish his career as the first head of the newly-formed Drug Enforcement Agency and provide gainful employment for a vast arm of law enforcement idled after the scourge of Demon Rum. Out of this era we get the unintended cult classic movie Reefer Madness and most of the crazed prejudices that pot is just ... well ... horrible.
So here's how the "gateway drug" argument actually worked for my generation. None of the Authorities were stone-stupid enough anymore to tell fourth graders that pot will turn you into a "serial-killing Zombie" like they used to or anything, but they still won't answer the question of why exactly smoking pot is so bad for you — they just link it with heroin, LSD and speed and spin the more readily believable horror stories associated with those drugs. And if you use pot, why next thing you'll be dancing with your shadow to unheard music on some dangerous city street corner like those "acid heads."
So what happens? Kids are naturally curious. They cop some pot (probably from an older sibling), smoke it and ... they're fine. No hallucinations (frightening or otherwise), no hangover, no physical addiction — and they can even sober right up from the burst of adrenaline if Pop knocks on the door. If it wasn't for the stanky smell and the telltale red, sagging eyes, nobody would ever know. Shit, you can even do your homework stoned! (Woah man ... I never knew algebra was so awesome.) So then, what happens to Adult Authority when it turns out that all their warnings amounted to total bullshit?
And in my generation, you had the synergistic effect of Adult Authority crashing around everyone's feet with the failed Vietnam War, Richard Nixon literally going insane in the White House, the popular acceptance of divorce — a general pall cast on all established institutions. So it's not a short hop from that largely healthy disillusionment to disbelieving everything the Adult World says about illicit drugs. If pot's nothing like what they said, what about cocaine? Speed? Heroin? Quaaludes? And thus it goes, the "gateway effect" being directly caused by adults not being capable of having a straight, honest talk with their kids as to what the actual negative effects of pot are if the kids decide to smoke it as much as they currently believe they can get away with. Nothing about the very real " amotivational syndrome" that habitual pot use can cause or the more general idea of living one's life in a fantasyland, which is a morally and philosophically difficult subject.
- Similarly, if prostitution were legal but trafficking not, I would imagine there would be a drop in trafficking. Assuming measures were actually and enforced taken to separate the two.
Well, except that's just not empirically confirmed. You have the mayor of Amsterdam — a person not saddled with the puritannical cultural baggage of a Nevada politician — strenuously arguing that legalization was a failed experiment, citing stats that Amsterdam is a worldwide trafficking hotspot. It's an empirical fact that Germany is loaded with undocumented women from the former East Bloc prostituting themselves under the very liberal radar of a society that otherwise makes it extremely easy to do so legally. The answer why this is so is once again, simple economics — the very same reason that factories outsource to avoid labor costs. A European sex worker who is a citizen is going to demand, rightfully, that she or he is paid a living wage for their work. Trafficked women have no such luxury and this apparently makes little difference to their clients. Again, I'm not using this as an argument against legalization per se, nor am I trying to equate the two. Only noting that legal prostitution has not been a "safety valve" that reduces trafficking but rather, perversely, makes it easier. From all evidence it seems that any society that legalizes prostitution has to become doubly vigilant against trafficking.
- Whether pot usage would spike if legalized—well, I imagine initially that would inevitably be the case, the way that the number of divorces exploded after divorce was legalized and made easy—peaking in 1984 int he states at around 50% of all marriages, then dropping slowly off to, I think, somewhere around 30 percent. Who can tell where the number of pot smokers would settle? Interestingly, I read somewhere once upon a time that the Prohibition actually resulted in something like double the number of regular drinkers after it was lifted, and the numbers have never gotten back even close to the pre-Prohibition numbers.
First, I'd wonder a little bit where that came from because I find it hard to imagine a particularly accurate census count of working-class slum tenements pre-Prohibition, let alone a decent estimate of per-capita alcohol consumed. But just generally reflecting it does make a degree of sense (I'd question a literal doubling per capita) because during that time (1910 to 1940) there were enormous changes in American society; the fruits of industrialism finally began to filter a little bit into the larger population — even considering the gargantuan blip of the Great Depression. The middle class had expanded and workers led much better lives by that time, had much better housing. Clearly after WW2 and the start of the suburban boom there was more money to spend on all the accoutrements of a social life (including drink) in general.
As for pot use ultimately levelling off at a higher level, I'd tend to agree with you. Compared to the two thoroughly noxious substances of abuse Americans are legally entitled to destroy their lives with (cigs and alcohol), marijuana is so much more manifestly benign than either that one would have to think there would be thousands, if not millions, of people who would take up the weed (and concotions would arise that would allow you to consume it without smoking) who don't now simply because it's illegal. I've for years held the opinion that if Americans "abused" pot instead of abusing alcohol, our society would be worlds better off. Domestic violence rates, for instance, would plummet (of course we'd never see that world come to be with legalization because alcohol would still remain legal). We might even see the "mellowing" of the American character — a thought that no doubt mortifies 'n' puts the Fear o' Gawwd into conservative American Exceptionalists.
I'd also agree that while I knew zillions of merry potheads in my frolicksome youth and young adulthood, I was only closely acquainted with one (a co-worker and housemate) who shot smack. And he had a full set of dentures at age 30 he got in the joint. He'd take his aluminum foil into the bathroom and I'd just cringe and try strenously not to judge him too harshly.
- Kinda funny...I've never used any drugs (and rarely drink) and can't imagine using a prostitute, yet look at all the bits spilled here over these issues!
Hehe, see that ... corresponding with Yours Truly is a ... gateway drug! For my turn in the self-revelation department, let it be know that I've been a lifelong pot smoker (currently I'm unemployed and so have no money nor availability for such luxuries — which of course I'm fine with until my situation changes) with no regrets — well, none tied directly to pot, anyway. I'm a very moderate, social drinker (my family drinks like fishes like the good Irish-Americans we are), more-or-less indifferent to alcohol. That wonderful buzz in the first 20 minutes of embibing can never be recaptured or sustained; you'll only become more drunk, never more euphoric or touchy-feely — and I find being drunk sort of annoying. Alcohol is basically a screwdriver that just loosens you up; it doesn't make you more eloquent or thoughtful or (like sometimes with pot) give you more access to creative intuition. And it's not a mood changer, it's a mood amplifier. God forbid you start drinking and have something piss you off; you tend to go ballistic instead of shrugging it off or viewing it in proper perspective. That's why I think a little wine with friends is about the best experience anyone can hope to have with alcohol.
- Something I remember from when I first came to Japan, though. There are a lot of Hostesses here (the phrase "h*o*s*t*e*s*s b*a*r" is blocked by the proxy here at work, otherwise I'd link to it)—basically rent-a-girlfriends you'd pay to talk to and pour your drinks for you. A lot of them don't actually put out, but, of course, a lot of them do. I remember meeting such a girl (off-hours) while out with a couple of female friends when I first came to Japan. Being the Lefty I am, my heart immediately bled for her, assuming she was somehow compelled to do this stuff, whether through threats or poverty or whatever. Turns out this wasn't the case. She was thoroughly middle-class and lived with her parents, but her parents were meanies who wouldn't buy her Louis Vuitton bags, so she took up selling her body to get the money to keep up with her friends (some of whom did exactly the same thing).
Ahh, yes, the ol' Geisha tradition, no? (Since I've been corresponding with you I've been wiki'ing various post-bubble Japanese social problems like parasite singles and hikikomori.) This is very interesting in the discussion because it focuses our attention on an individual rather than a conceptually-framed social issue. I'm sure when you were talking to her you found her to be a charming and articulate young woman, but afterwards you prolly thought to yourself something like "damn girl, is your booty really worth just a bunch of Louis Vuitton bags?" You lost the bleeding-heart reflex to take pity on an imagined victimization — but was it replaced with a feeling of respect, as if she were merely a brave entrepreneuse doing what she needed to do to survive and thrive in a rotten economy? Hell, I'd get a rotten old Madonna song stuck in my head.
So that's really kinda what Uncle Frank calls the crux of the biscuit, innit. The people most prone to be personally sympathetic to a woman like that — you and I among them — at the end of the day can't respect the choice she made. And that's cultural; for all the relentless sexual commercialization, for all the Madonnas loudly proclaiming to young women for 30 years that it's okay to be an empowered slut, we still can't get past the idea that giving oneself physically to another is something that should remain above commerce. I mean, why should we care why she does it? Clerks in stores scrimp and save honestly for the singleminded purpose of occasionally buying a high-fashion accessory — and who are we to judge that, or that this woman is living out that particular dream to the fullest? Why is it somehow immeasurably worse for the image of this young woman in our eyes that she happens to be anything but a victim? What's up with that?
And that's the problem right there. I'm guessing you wouldn't be so prone to fascination for this subject if your favorite cartoonist didn't produce a work that you simultaneously appreciate as great art while having to relentlessly defend it to people. But legalizing/decriminalizing prostitution is at least as thankless a task as defending PFI is to your friends, loved ones and co-workers. Until such time as we can reflexively admire the life choice of Geisha wannabes like your brief "parasite single" acquaintance instead of growing queasy at the thought of what they do for a living, it's a straight uphill road. All the Madonnas and Lady Gagas of the world haven't helped things. Would they ever? Could they? Should they?
Finally, I'm going to toss this out. My psychology curriculum at Wikipedia University spit this out the other day: Schizoid Personality Disorder. I'm suggesting you have a look at this with an eye toward Chester Brown. Unless you're well-versed in psychology or the arcana of the DSM-IV, it's not what you might think. Schizoids aren't schizophrenic; they're people who by all appearances have made a rational choice to avoid all intimacy. I have no genuine clue, of course, whether or not Brown qualifies, but I'd be interested in your impressions. Schizoids can also be high-functioning, creative people.
- Total tangent—I have no idea what that anecdote says about any subject, but while I'm probably far more Left now than I was then, I'm not much of a bleeding heart anymore.
Oh my goodness, I still so am. My politics have moderated to center-left over the years (no goddamn conspiracy theories, thanks!) but I'm just as insipidly bleeding-heart as I ever was, maybe worse since I now own two cats. It's hard for me to read wiki articles on pharmecuticals when I get to the animal studies. I cringe at the "forced swim test" for induced depression in mice and go "awww ... leave the poor li'l guys alone, woudjapleez!" A pathetic excuse for a man, that's me.
- Enjoy your chicken! Have another piece for me!
Oh goodness. Maybe I need to become a vegetarian.
Heh :) What I'm really dreading, though, is going there without any friggin' cigarettes.
Wish me luck on that front.
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 09:18, 23 June 2011 (UTC)
- First try http://airs1.septa.org/bin/query.exe/en?
- Also the site http://www.philamuseum.org/visit/12-270.html?page=4 suggests SEPTA bus routes 7, 32, 38, 43, and 48 or the Philly Phlash.
- Smallbones ( talk) 13:56, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
Thanks. Leaving momentarily; I'll take the 38 from City Hall and JFK Boulevard.
See you there,
Bob
Snardbafulator ( talk) 16:07, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
IRC cloak request
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OohBunnies! Not just any bunnies... 21:36, 19 August 2011 (UTC)