Messianic Schmoodaism: The Arcade Project, 2nd Ed.

The most startling accusation leveled against a literary theorist since the discovery of Paul de Man's Nazi sympathizing journalism! Walter Benjamin: Crypto-Schmoo?!?!

That's a pretty shitty arcade, Wally. Time for a second edition!

While we're on the subject (what fucking subject?), I think I'm going to be Foucault for Halloween.

Does anybody have a really amazing turtleneck I can borrow? (If you're wondering exactly how awesome the turtleneck has to be -- see above. Yeah, you know what, just don't even bother.)

Babysnatching. Suspiciously self-satisfied toilet-cleaning. Pervasive pornlessness.

Taking a class on Utopias is depressing.

They, Utopias, ought to be these Candyland wonderbars where you pay for Almond Joys with the gold you scrape off the road and then have consensual sex with lots of models, since everybody in Utopia looks like a model, but, incredibly, everybody is still as attractive to everybody else as models are to ugly people in our non-Utopian world. And then you ought to go home and tell your long-term Utopian domestic partner about the Utopian sex you had with a lot of bookish, Wilde-witty, generous but also commanding utopomodels you just met at the milk bar and it ought to get you both riled up and you ought to have sex that's so good that it actually sublates the sex you just had with the utopomodels into a new kind of utoposex. And that utoposex ought not be followed by any kind of existential hangover -- no! No burning hatred, no staring the void in the face. Everything will be just as good tomorrow as it was today, and today was fucking great! For everybody! The afterglow lasts forever, and it's not even after anything. It's just a glow, an all-consuming heavenly halo draped around your neck like a dayglo noose that just squeezes tighter and tighter and makes you happier and happier until your head's just about to blow. Utopia is a total vacuum of phenomenality that puffs you up like an enormous blood-bloated tick -- one those ticks so full of blood that their legs wiggle in space and they can't even walk -- and then pops you with the business-end of a lawndart of ecstasy, and your jouissance, uncontainable in such a humble, limited vessel of happiness as yourself, splatters all onlookers sticky. "Dude! You got your joy on me! Awesome!"

That's what a Utopia is, don't you know. In theory.

But that's not the way Utopias read. Because that kind of description always hinges on one thing: being in a good mood. And when everybody's in a good mood, as everyone in a Utopia must be, it's not a good thing. It's just fucking creepy. Church group creepy. People get along, go along, in tremendous moods, cutting hay because it feels good, and caring about art but not that much because attendance to art is tantamount to an acknowledgment of suffering. Not ever having any desires unfulfilled or any crises or bafflements. They're never stifled. They're never unhappy -- just occasionally less than giddy. And when they are giddy, it's even creepier. Like those church people who actually go into mildly orgasmic enthusiasms when the Word of God is being read out loud, but you can totally tell they're faking their scripturegasms. But, as with all fakers, you'd never be able to get them to fess up, because once a fake is out, you can't get it back in the bottle.

Partly, Utopias are terrible because -- and I'm speaking for myself -- it's in my nature to begrudge the fuck out of people who seem content, satisfied, stationary. Partly they're terrible because of an instinctual suspicion to the tenets of groupthink, no matter how right that groupthink may be. (It never ends up being all that right.)

Utopias have a responsibility to deal with every person individually. Every person has to be just as happy as every other person. But it's impossible to deal with every person in a Utopian fiction. Utopian fictions don't even deal with one person. They inject a stranger into Utopias and just kind of let them run around finding out how looney and different this world is than their own world -- generally, in this case, the world of fin de siecle Britain, which is one of the most stodgy environments in history.

So we never get portraits of a unilaterally satisfied toilet-cleaner, going from toilet to toilet, repeating the mantra, "There's no thing as undignified work, only undignified wages, gee-hyuck!" No, we never get that.

We never get the wife who had the misfortune of marrying the guy who has the vast collection of German porn hidden under the floorboards, and one day when he's out of town she calls in a repairman to fix the leaky pipes and he says, "We're going to have to rip up some of this groundwork." And then, after they're done having a passionate love-affair against the antique table that's been passed down from generation to generation (on the husband's side), the repairman actually gets around to putting circular saw to hardwood and...

We don't get people saying, "That fucking guy, there's no way that guy is smarter than me, why did he get an A on his paper and I got a B." (Not nearly enough rhyming in Utopian inner monologues.) Instead, we get third-hand reports from officials who toss off whole conceptual rubrics that don't even make any sense, like, "We only want those best suited to motherhood to be mothers, so if a woman can't hack it, we take her babies! She had her chance! She can't complain!"

This is the machinery of Utopia. Babysnatching. Suspiciously self-satisfied toilet-cleaning. Pervasive pornlessness. In fact, general Freudlessness. A total lack of sensitivity parading as perfect sympathy.

Staying up late at night to read these tracts and manifestos of bloodless, mild, ultimately bankrupt happiness is like being locked in a gym with your high school valedictorian. The one who opted out of any and all offered honors courses because they would bring down her GPA and keep her from getting into the private school that's named after the state you're from, except it has a directional epithet attached to the front -- East Montana, or Southwest West Virginia State, or North South Carolina of Ohio... Tech. And she just got engaged. She used to do sodomy because she thought if she just went "all the way" with her beau she would go to hell.

But she's not going to tell you that. Not in this gym.

She's going to tell you about how they've picked out a perfect set of doilies for their kitchen table -- it's an eat-in kitchen, you know, with a perfect little booth that replicates the feel of a 50s nostalgia diner! They were able to get just the perfect little suite from student housing because, you know, student housing saves the best suites for the people who are happily married and oh, it's fabulous, you really should try it some time.

You swear to god she says under her breath, I installed a virus on Kim's hard drive so it would crash the day the paper was due so she wouldn't get a better grade than me because the class was on a curve and she's smarter than me but she didn't deserve it because I worked so hard.

You say, What?

Nothing!

Put me in the gym, and lock the door. I'm off, once again, to try to tame the screeching Victorian demon that is Utopian fiction.

Note: I must be getting bored again. I'm turning back into an ironic pervert. What kind of a way to combat boredom is that, anyway? Ironography.

I can strut my boody, make my sweet pigmeat, and other mild amusements

Anachronistic sexual innuendo of the day: "She shall have no other food; and that will make her my slave. And the man that slays me shall have her for his booty."
~GB Shaw

To wit: OED entry for "booty, n. 3." I'll bet you some jive-ass whitey academic stifled some chuckles putting this together. (And I totally, self-consciously censored Carl Van Vechten, because I'm a bowdlerizer on this blog.)

I. Simple uses.

1. Sexual intercourse; a person (esp. a woman) regarded as an object of sexual ambition or desire. Also (occas.): the female genitals. Cf. ASS n.2 1b.
1926 C. VAN VECHTEN N****r Heaven II. iii. 215 Now..that you've gone white, do you really want..pinks for boody? 1935 Z. N. HURSTON Mules & Men 192 If you want good boody Oh, go to Ella Wall. 1978 W. BROWN Tragic Magic 104 I'm giving up neither money or bootie! 1992 F. M. DAVIS Livin' Blues 36 A woman had a ‘pussy’..or ‘booty’. 1997 Touch May 20/2 Grab a glass of wine..in the upstairs bar and watch all that fine booty just flow on by.

2. The buttocks.
Prob. the earlier sense, esp. given the similar sense development of ASS n.2, PUSSY n. 6, etc.
1959 F. L. BROWN Trumbull Park 363 Getting kicked in the booty would be mighty discouraging too. 1960 N. FLORENCE in P. Oliver Blues fell this Morning vii. 189, I can strut my boody, make my sweet pigmeat. 1980 Washington Post (Nexis) 4 July C8 ‘You're cute up there,’ she told singer Esther Williams. ‘You should shake your booty a little. You have a nice booty. Shake it a little.’ 1999 N.Y. Times 12 Dec. IX. 4/3 This is a woman's best part... A skirt has to scoop under the booty.

II. Compounds.

3. booty bandit chiefly Prison slang, a homosexual man; (also) a man who commits male rape. booty call, a visit made to a person for the (sole) purpose of having sexual intercourse; an invitation to have sexual intercourse.
1962 P. CRUMP Burn, Killer, Burn 293, I lost 'em fightin' a *booty bandit in a black cell. 1993 K. SCOTT Monster 293 Fat Rat had a reputation for being a ‘booty bandit’ and thrived on weak men with tight asses. 1998 G. CANADA Reaching up for Manhood 143 All of the guys who been serving time in prison know the score... When the booty bandit stops someone else from taking the guy's dessert, it's a declaration that this is my new bitch. 1993 ‘DUICE’ (title of song) *Booty call. 1994 YSB (Nexis) 30 Apr. 54 Guys don't have to make the ‘booty’ calls these days. 2001 Cosmopolitan (Electronic ed.) June, A guy I'd been seeing made a booty call. Afterward, he said, ‘High five!’ and reached out his hand to slap mine.

*

I mean, if somebody asked me, would you be willing to pay 2 dollars per day for electricity, I would say yes, but every month, I find myself wondering, "which were the electricities that ran through this house for a cumulative cost of $60?!"

*

"Five minutes after smoking the drug, none of the doses had any effect on the pain felt.

"But 45 minutes later, those who had smoked the moderate dose said their pain was much better, while those who consumed high doses said it had got worse.

"They did, however, feel 'higher' than counterparts who had taken moderate doses."

~BBC

*

Getting into the dictionary is one thing. Getting into the dictionary with a sentence this good -- "Augustinian monk and botanist whose experiments in breeding garden peas led to his eventual recognition as founder of the science of genetics" -- is something only Gregor Mendel could do.

Ask the Sphinx

So I've nearly finished polishing my Coleridge presentation paper. It took some doing to fight through the gleaming-bright hot hatred I've had for him ever since I realized I'd have to read him against a deadline, the old lunatic metaphysician. But, it's nearly over. All that's left is to go and read the paper in front of a jury of my peers who have glanced at the paper, underlined some sentences in much the same spirit that you blindfoldedly thwack a pinata, and have but one question: "Could you say more about...?"

It would scare me. But I've finally figured out this question's kryptonite. You can say anything -- it doesn't matter -- as long as you have this key in hand. You can talk about nothing. In fact, you're encouraged to talk about nothing. You can talk, if you want, in quasi-Marxist polysyllabics like "reified hegemony" and "superstructurally codified marginalization," even if those things really don't bear on the subject at all. Because if there's one thing quasi-Marxism has proven over the years, it's that it can be decal-slapped onto any conversation, so long as you preface your pseudo-opinion -- and this is all-important -- with the phrase, "There is a sense in which..."

"There is a sense in which..."

Because, no matter what you say, if you're vague enough, you're absolutely right. There is a sense in which pretty much everything that means nothing is, if not true, at least not false. You say "epistemological" if you're talking about what people know, and "metaphysical" if you're talking about what they believe, and you're halfway home. It doesn't matter if you're wrong. You simply beg out of your wrongness by claiming that "I would need to revisit the language, certainly," or that "I'm not thinking about this as rigorously as I would like to be."

(A useful corollary to "There is a sense in which," if you feel like you're using it too much -- a very real risk -- is, "Well, let me go ahead and problematize that by saying," or, if you're really an asshole, "...go head and re-problematize that...")

If you're feeling brave, you can slot new elements into the syntax. "There is an important sense in which..." if you think like you might be using some words that aren't totally alien to the conversation. Or even, if you want to seem like you're being more specific without providing any more information, "There is an important philosophical sense in which..." If you get crazy with it, you can start hybridizing and foreshortening terms into a kind of Cultural Studies stew. "There is an important -- and I don't know how else to put this -- theo-historico-ecclesiastical, you could say... or more specifically, a teleological, almost teleo-eschatological, in the truest sense of that word, way in which..."

So let's see how this works in practice.

Student: Yeah, I have a question about your paper. I notice that on page two you say, "Coleridge clarifies that this is not the divine distinction of election engendered by the separation of 'the Christian from the this-worldian,' but only 'the civilized man in contra-distinction from the barbarian, the savage, and the animal.'" Can you say more about that?
Me: Certainly. I'm actually glad you brought that up. See, there is an important philosophical sense in which Coleridge is superstructurally codifying a sort of marginalization that bleeds through social substrates.
Student: Can you say more about that?
Me: [flustered] Sure, I mean... I'm perfectly happy to grant you that there is a way in which what I said is not true. But there's also an important material-historical, and I mean Adorno, not so much Benjamin, though he would be useful methodologically, too... dialectic sense in which Coleridge is actually presenting a reified hegemony that it itself already encoded in the false consciousness engendered by the Anglican...

Etc.

The important thing here is to seem like you know what you're talking about, without seeming like you're not surprised by the fact that you know what you're talking about.

Let's build something together.

So there's this new askwiki search engine. You ask it a question, and it answers it. It's "like an AskJeeves that actually works," says bOING bOING.

So, I'm like, ok, let's see what this thing's got. So I want to ask it a question that really has no answer, to see what it's got for me.

So I ask it, "who stole the cheese?"

A split second later, it responds, "There is a legend as to where cheese came from that says an un-named Arab nomad discovered that milk could be taken from animals, and began filling his water pouch with this milk. According to legend, one day he was out traveling when he became incredibly thirsty." It says, "From Article: Cheese."

So I go to the article, Cheese, and this story isn't even in it. Now I'm like, what's the fucking end of this story?!?

This is the most tantalizing search engine ever.

To the more straightforward question, "Was Frank Dux a liar?" the search engine returned the far more poetical and evocative, but ultimately more final answer: "As with virtually all sausages, hot dogs must be in a casing in order to be cooked." I see...

It's like having a really insufferable zen koan expert around to relay all your questions to.

"Thumbscrews" Coleridge

This might sound silly, but I'm furious at Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

I'm going to write in a clear and simple style for the next three days to make up for all the times he tortured defenseless Grammar's poor denuded body. The rack and the screw, the wheel, the maiden, fire and knives, all implemented with fiendish precision and a total lack of conscience while poor Syntax, bound at the wrists and ankles, is not even allowed to scream in agony for the soiled cravat shoved in her mouth as she is bent in ways a body was not built to withstand. Diction is cut a thousand tiny times until she bleeds a thousand tiny drops, and the last proves too much. Not only English, but Greek, Latin, and German bones poke broken through holes in the flesh of Language. Clarity's limbs are torn and piled until she is no longer recognizable for the blood smeared on her face. Lucidity weeps and Logic shivers in shock as he steps next to them with his mandible sheers, dripping the entrails of Cogency, who is still dying, though not for long, already gutted completely. All those Angels, the daughters of Philosophy, expired and expiring while the mother looks on aghast, knowing only, finally, that she will be the next to fall to the encroaching madman with the gleaming teeth, the opioid eyes, and the screwdriver... my god, not the screwdriver...

Egads! It's already too late! I too have fallen victim to this this evil creature, this Coleridge! Demons out!

A short wardrobe update, and "the best thing ever" he said semironically

I'm wearing one of the shirt I accidentally stole from my sister's ex-gangster ex-boyfriend, and when I wear it I sometimes wonder, was this this shirt that witnessed all those murders?

While I was walking home from the bar the other night, the Pumas that I've placed all of my faith and most of my hopes in over the last couple of years finally gave out and cut the shit out of the back of my heel before I even noticed it. It's complicating my pedestrian lifestyle. How much anxiety are you allowed to couch in your first shoe-shopping excursion in a new city?

So what made my day? This made my motherfucking day.

Jean Claude Van Damme starring in a film about the making of a biopic about Jean Claude Van Damme starring Jean Claude Van Damme. UHNNNNNNNN! I just popped an embarrassing Jean Claude Van Damme chubby.


It should be noted that I've probably spent more time in a room with Jean Claude Van Damme's digital simulacrum than with any human being, or facsimile of a human being in my entire life. So, this is as naturally exciting for me as it would be for you if, say, your father or your girlfriend landed a starring role in the next Spielberg / Bay CGI vehicle. You might not have my baggage, but, as a wise man once said, "Everybody's got a price. Everybody's gonna pay."

Finally: my Red Sox won. That's important. But what's more important is, the Indians lost. They dropped 3 straight games. That's hard to do. I'm convinced it has less to do with the fact that the Red Sox were good than it has to do with the tacit but overwhelming shame that has to come with making millions and millions and millions of dollars playing a kid's game when this

is yr logo. I wouldn't feel too good about it, either.

A drunken monk's tongue (Plus: for other uses, see Facial (disambiguation).)

So I tongue-kissed an ex-monk the other day. It was your basic double-dare situation. We were standing in front of a bar we'd just been kicked out of with this fantastic couple from Queens whom we met by accident. They were in town visiting a brother, and they were off the next morning to attend the annual Maryland oyster-shucking championship. We, the monk and I, had been suckered to the bar for interdepartmental hobnobbing, unbeknownst to us when the invitation was extended, and having decided that the stakes of hobnobbing were too high, we decided to talk about sex and breakfast and shotgun Yuengling and PBR (bottles!) with this couple from Queens. Eventually, after last call and every other patron had come and gone, we were asked to leave the bar. So we were standing out front, awash in the glow of having met people you actually like by accident, and there was some talk of inhibitions, and then of not having inhibitions, and this somehow naturally precipitated a drunken monk's tongue wiggling around mine for upwards of a second. It was weird. It was also just like that movie, Tremors.

That movie's fucking awesome.

The couple from Queens finally left, and it was sad to see them go. Then, we peed in an alley, and because we yelled back and forth across the alley about how we were peeing in an alley, we got yelled at by a woman in a house for peeing in the alley. I yelled something about how I was peeing in somebody's private residential something-0r-other, and this woman yelled, pissed but amused, "how's it going guys?" I stifled my urge to say "morally inferior!" and simply shouted "great!" up at her bedroom window.

And that's the story of why I had the savage hangover that kept me from reading 150 pages of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theo-politics yesterday. Now, I have to read 150 pages of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's theo-politics, and write 6-7 pages about them in all their inscrutable neo-Kantian glory, by Tuesday morning. And I'm not very happy about it.

So I figured I'd at least get a blog post out of it, you know.

*ALSO*

Edit: I can't believe I wrote this any more than you can.

It's a familiar hypothetical: If aliens came to earth, and I was charged with introducing them to the highest achievements of the species, I'd...

Well, the first thing I would do is dial up wikipedia and show them how there are independent entries for "facial," "pearl necklace," and "cum shot" ("redirected from 'money shot'"), all of which link to each other. More importantly, in the "pearl necklace" page, there's a picture of, well... a girl with a pearl necklace. There's no room anymore to kvetch and moan and claim the encyclopedia didn't really teach you what a pearl necklace is because you can't visualize it from the description. Oh no -- it's all there. Too, there is no longer any cause to wonder whether the world was better off when the minds of its citizens were informed by the professional thinkers and good old boys who board-chaired the Brittanicas and Collier'ses. The wisdom of the mass of men, the mob mentality's instinct as an editor and redactor, is no longer subject to reproach or second-guessing. Amazing, in retrospect, that we were willing to put up with the many bricklike volumes of you fickle, instantly outdated editions, given what essential chunks of human knowledge you elided. Veritable worlds of universal wisdom simply stricken from your record, which paraded around with unearned, undeserved, intentionally misleading epithets like "unabridged" and "compendium" attached to their shirtfronts as credentials. Swindlers, the lot, I defy you!

"An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge." The 2007 Brittanica macropaedia consists of 699 articles on subjects as diverse as physics, quantum physics, and special relativity. But it can't muster a 700th to chronicle the noble, neglected facial? ALL branches of knowledge. Except the facial. Until now!

You know how I know how many articles the Encyclopaedia Brittanica has? I looked it up on wikipedia.

The "facial" entry even has a sort of quasi-philosophical discourse on the visceral appeal thereof: "Often viewers will be particularly aroused when copious amounts of semen are ejaculated onto the female's face. Sometimes this is met with wincing, flinching, and disgust from the female. Other times she is excited or surprised, which can add to the viewer's arousal... Other viewers claim the appeal is a snowflake or uniqueness argument. Namely, that the appeal and the excitement of facials is linked to the fact that no two facials are identical. Each facial has unique elements of: splash pattern, amount of semen, number of semen shots, location of semen deposits on the face, speed at which semen is ejaculated, etc."

Index. Chaos theory: see, mathematics; physics; facial (random splash pattern of).

A considerate editor has taken it upon him or herself to note that this very same "facials" entry cites not so much as a single source (which is odd, since the "pearl necklace" entry cites no less than three). What I hope this means is that somebody sat down and invented a dialogue to rigorously investigate the latent psychosexual underpinnings that give rise to the meritorious aesthetic supernova that is that most valuable few frames of B-roll. But it was probably just a guy who spent way too much time on message boards.

It's the unique splash pattern. But oh, it's so much more!

Hence the etcetera.

Equally gifted

"MTV had been on the air for nearly two years before it got up the courage to play the video for Jackson’s 'Billie Jean,' in 1983. (Jackson was the first black artist to appear on the channel, though it had played videos by the equally gifted white soul act Hall & Oates.)"
~Sasha Frere-Jones

The Blow Up 2: Electric Boogaloo

What, was I gonna not take a picture of this guy?

Let's see that again.

Have you ever even considered the possibility of talking on the phone in the middle of a public commons in this struck pose? This pose? Notice, if you will, that it's his left arm holding the phone to his right ear to free up his right elbow to support his weight against the turf, enabling him to kick up both knees at such angles to perfectly replicate a dirty, periwigged Frenchman in a chaise longue. This pose, this pose that suggests you are lounging in a Greek bath house, listening to Socrates and Timaeus talk of tyranny and divine mathematica, and you had to excuse yourself because you just got a call from your weed dealer that you really had to take? He talked like this, in this pose, for some time. I merely admired, and then Antonionified that shit for the world to see.

At least now we know that history hasn't changed people. Its greatest artists -- including Michaelangelo, Caravaggio, and me -- have cruised for people in exactly this pose to be subjects of some of their greatest art.

Of course, Caravaggio's John the Baptist wins, because he managed to stumble on some dude frolicking -- I don't know how else to put it but frolicking -- with a ram, which is, in some ways, nature's cellphone.

With that kind of flaccidity, though, you can't accuse John the Baptist of being one of history's first sheepfuckers. Unless this was post-coital. These dudes must have painted hella fast, because if somebody catches me like that, with a ram, I'm going to scramble for some pants on the double.

Deleted scene: I was at Subway, standing next to this dude and this chick. Action!

Dude: I'll have a foot long tuna on honey oat.
Chick: Eww, gross.
Dude: What?
Chick: I have to sit in a room studying with you for 16 hours and you're going to stink.
Dude: Tuna doesn't make your breath smell.
Chick: Tuna smells like vajay!
Dude: *indistinguishable*
Chick: My jay is mad clean.

Aaaaaand I'm proud to be an American, where at least I know I'm free. And I won't forget the men who died who gave that right to me. And I gladly stand up next to you and defend her still today, 'cause there ain't no doubt I love this laaaaaaand. God Bless the U.S.A!

Then I made the Hindu woman working the counter put bacon on my sandwich.

I live life like Salinger gave it to Esmé. With love & squalor.

Just now, I saw the first scary bug I've seen in my apartment. I've seen a couple of little larval creepy crawly things, but this one, it was standing on a piece of paper, like an evil ink blot that owned the joint. I had every intention of killing it, you know. But it shot away into the dark depths underneath the futon. They're fast as hell, these things.

Adjusted for scale, a cockroach is the fastest land-animal on the planet. I learned that in Cub Scouts. From my mom. She was the troupe leader, and, as far as I know, might have been lying. But ever since, I've had this kind of fantastical daymare that basically involves a cheetah running after a gazelle, but being overtaken unexpectedly from behind by a giant cockroach and devoured.

I think this might be the only thing in the world too scary to make a horror movie about.

Although, Mansquito has already been done.