On “ist” Jokes (H)

From loos-talk:

I think we can all recognize that the “it’s a joke excuse” is the most dismissive, self-righteous loophole, created by those who refuse to examine their power, and assume they have not only the right to say whatever they want to people, but the right to control how other people react to what they have said.

And don’t let me get in my zone:

Some points:

+ Pointing out small-scale problems does not diminish one’s capacity for tackling large-scale problems. In fact, small-scale problems are born out of the larger ones, they feed into the larger ones, they keep those larger ones intact and acceptable to mainstream society. Every rape joke makes a rapist feel more comfortable amongst zir peers, and a victim less comfortable speaking up. Every racial stereotype on a TV show or in a macro on tumblr helps make every 3D person of color feel that much more 2D and invisible, makes that kid not want to speak up in class, makes that girl feel ugly, makes that bigot feel more welcome. Every “no-homo” in a music lyric or a standup act makes a queer person that much more afraid to be who they really are. Every “durr, that’s retarded” in general conversation reinforces a society where people with disabilities are dehumanized and reduced to an illness. Every time some hipster wears a headdress or talks about their spirit animals, that contributes to a climate that makes it harder for colonized cultures to hold onto the few shreds of identity, of dignity, that haven’t already been stripped from them, assimilated and commodified, because it’s not like there is no history of this literally, tangibly happening to civilization after civilization after civilization. It’s not like it isn’t still happening.

If you don’t understand how these “small, insignificant, nitpicky” things can build on each other, can chip away at a person and a community, congratulations. You are goddamn lucky. But you should, you know, try to understand. Because you live in a world with other people in it.

+ Klansmen and Westboro Baptists and other blatant, vocal bigots are easy to recognize, to fight, and to distance oneself from, but it’s not the only form of bigotry that exists. Would that it were. Modern day bigotry in this ~post-racial, ~post-feminist, ~post-everything society is much more insidious and much more harmful. It’s easy to say we’ve got no internalized prejudices just because we’re not like them. But at the end of the day that helps no one.

+ It’s not just TV. It’s not just comedy. It’s not just music or books. All media is made by real people in the real world, with all the baggage that goes along with that. That doesn’t mean everyone is required to analyze it critically, or that no one can have fun with it (or that people can’t do both at once! WEIRD, RIGHT?), but analysis is as valid a part of consuming media as squee. Telling people they should think less is about as non-constructive as it gets. No one’s trying to force people to read or engage in discussions against their will. No one’s trying to make anyone else feel bad for enjoying things. No one except the strawpeople, anyway.

+ We aren’t perfect, no one is. Since when is that a reason not to try to be conscious of how our words affect people? It’s not about who’s offended and who isn’t because that’s an individual thing that changes from day to day. It’s about trying, wherever possible, to avoid contributing to real systems of oppression that harm our entire society in tangible ways. Weirdly enough, it’s possible to do that and still manage to have fun on the internet.

addendum: On Changes (I)

Habits are moneymakers for the people who make things we find comforting: iPhones, Blackberries, laptops that stay connected to the internet on remote islands, McDonalds in every city and so many countries, Europeans knowing enough English that your trip to Spain won’t mean speaking any Spanish. You can get rich making a portable life for people so that they can take their lives with them.

Beckett said, “habit is a great deadener.” Not to be outdone by Samuel Beckett, Ze Frank weighs in on the value of breaking habits, or “busting your cycle”:

Busting your cycle is where you take one aspect of your life that’s more or less constant and you purposely bust it. By temporarily breaking a routine you can often experience the world in a very different way. If you bust the right cycle, this shift in perspective can often lead to elation and a sense of possibility.

By going to the dentist, I was trying to bust the cycle of not having people fuck with my mouth. That turned out to be the wrong cycle to bust, and it just plain sucked. Busting some other cycles has worked out for me though. I find that the best routines to bust are the ones that you spend the most energy trying to maintain. For example, sometimes I get anxious about sleeping. I get all worked up about falling asleep and not getting back to sleep if I wake up in the middle of the night. So I bust that cycle by purposely setting my alarm and starting my day at an ungodly hour. When you walk around the streets at five in the morning you realize that some people do it every day. And as you go through your day you realize that you can still function even though you’re really tired. And instead of being stressful that tired giddiness can make the world a little bit fun.

So, yeah: change doesn’t always have to be dramatic or scary. Jad and Robert (and another Robert) talk, in the Radiolab on Stress, about stress in lab rats related to whether or not they will receive electric shocks:

Robert Sapolsky: If the rat thinks it has control, it’s not going to get a stress-related disease. Let it press a lever; it’s been trained to press this lever to decrease the chances of a shock. The lever is doing squat today, it’s a placebo, it’s disconnected, but the rat’s pounding away on the lever thinking, “This is great! Imagine how many shocks I’d be getting otherwise!” It has a sense of control.

Control makes stressors less stressful.

Maybe the most stressful thing in my life is when I feel out of control. And maybe the reason I get stressed about change is because the world is always changing, and while I can find some freshness from it, while I can maybe find some wonder in looking at the world in a new light because something in me is different, it’s still scary as shit to feel it’s going on without my input.

Exercising a modicum of control can make change that much less scary. Sometimes just remembering what little control you have: how you react to things.

And as long a we’re mentioning the iPhone, check out Ze’s free app:

Passion & Pessimism (H)

I want to kiss everyone.

The skinny man across the table from me at this crowded coffee shop who bashfully handed me his charger to plug in. His long dark hair, his golden arms thinner even then my woman arms. His long, clean hair. He’s got a shadow above his  mouth, lips thin, pink, exquisite, and he’s nodding and bobbing with his head  phones and I want to kiss him. I want to kiss him, to share life. I want to take the whole world into my mouth, into my body, and I want to give myself to it, too. It’s not about the zipless fuck (which doesn’t seem at all elusive), and it’s not raw animal lust; it’s lust for life, love, connection, union, encounter, the erotic in Audre’s sense of the word: that which is most deeply felt. It’s not about sex; sex is just the most obvious expression, the most obvious way to futilely attempt to answer the frustration Jack writes about in The Four Loves:

If we had not experienced this, if we were mere logicians, we might boggle at the conception of desiring a human being, as distinct from desiring any pleasure, comfort, or service that human being can give. And it is certainly hard to explain. Lovers themselves are trying to express part of it (not much) when they say they would like to “eat” one another. Milton has expressed more when he fancies angelic creatures with bodies made of light who can achieve total interpenetration instead of our mere embraces. Charles Williams has said something of it in the words, “Love you? I am you.”(p. 95)

The way I want to kiss everyone when I travel. Seeing people in the street in India, coming out of crowded trains, walking quickly in the narrow, crowded streets, and without desiring them, I wanted to taste their mouths, to try to taste India in them. Like I could know their country through knowing their flesh.

***

An argument I got in recently: he kept making jokes about women driving badly and didn’t back off when I asked. And I’ll joke about all manner of terrible, tasteless things with the right company, but I didn’t know or sense him well enough to know how much he was joking. I didn’t know his intention, and I didn’t want to use humor in the service of making light, diminishing, dismissing. The ethics of humor re: Kundera, Heinlien. And I try to explain this, that sexism is real, and I need to get a sense of him before I’m comfortable joking about it.

“Maybe it’s bad back east,” he says, “But you have to relax here. People aren’t like that here. You need to figure that out.”

We keep talking–I do not like being told to just relax–and we get to the crux of it.

“You see so much suffering that I just don’t see,” he tells me.

“Yes.”

And I am livid because it seems, again, that honesty and standing up for myself do, as I had feared, subject me to a life as too serious, needing to lighten up, humorless, out of touch, too sensitive. Insight and caution are ignored as making mountains out of molehills, honesty about feelings is mistaken as exaggeration or manipulation because people “don’t talk that way”, he told me, confused that I meant, “You scared me,” when that was what I said that. What awareness I have of suffering and injustice, the desire and need to help, are mistaken for an inability to enjoy or relax, or pessimism!

No.

It is because I desperately love dirt and sand and bugs and stray cats and even dead beetles and the silky feel of the bottom of a lake and the sound of shouting and crickets and helicoptors and Matt’s voice saying, “Baaaaaby,” stretching out the a when he’s pleased about something and the way O’s laughter makes me hum and vibrate with joy and the bitter smell of coffee and the feel of the word “Memphis” in my mouth and the need to dance and the taste of salt on his neck and…

And that is why I intend to work more towards awakening than pleasure, to invest more in seeing what’s there than what’s pretty. And of course I have myriad flaws and failures, make no claims about great achievement, only about great aims: vision, clarity, charity, ability. Pessimism is not in seeing that which is difficult, disastrous, painful, tragic, but in abdicating from the struggle. Pessimism is in the way he kicks back in front of The Daily Show each night and gets drunk or stoned with his friends. He had told me about the rage he lived with when he started to see how much cruelty there was in the world, and he responded to the anger by averting his eyes. He failed his eyes. That is nihilism–and fuck that.

I remember Patrick standing in the red Arizona dirt, turning around to face me as he says, “I think optimism is about how much desire you can stand.” Yes: how much you can bear to hope for or let yourself dream of.  And we can have more than mere pleasure if we have the endurance to survive that kind of desire, and the courage, audacity, tenacity to work for it.

Re: Deepest Darkest Secrets (I)

To re-posit a quote Hope shared a while ago:

“If we each told each other our deepest, darkest secrets, we would laugh uproarously at our lack of originality.” – Stephen Levine

The tubes are already buzzing about it, but Letterman just put this idea to the test.

What’s fascinating and, yes, funny, is that the big revelation is the climax, but it’s not the revelation itself that is climactic. In fact, he can’t help but make it funny, and after a good 8 1/2 minutes of buildup it’s so simple, such poor theatre. What’s makes it a big emotional release is the fact that he’s telling it at all.

Telling the truth can be very deep. I’ve been revisiting this feeling of having one’s ego destroyed. Sometimes I feel my pride annihilated, after playing an open mic or after a crit in college. It’s terrifying but it feels very cleansing once the adrenaline releases, and I get really friendly with other people. I got the same feeling the first time I showed a group of people my last film; I wonder if the openness is just a rush of endorphines or if pride and fear are what keep me sheltering myself. Facing a fear and wrecking the pride makes everyone my buddy.

I discovered that telling the truth can do the same thing when it’s a big truth. When I called my best friend one day just to say “look, I want you to know all the reasons why I love you,” suddenly I loved everyone in the world. It was easy to get drunk on it, and I started telling everyone how I really felt about them. Seems most often my deepest darkest secrets are affections I have for people, that I’m usually afraid they don’t want to hear. Strange how sometimes paying someone a large and sincere compliment can be the most selfish thing you can do.

But it’s okay; it’s nonzero.

Dominion (I)

The curious thing about religion is the way it grants you dominion over an entire planetful of living things, and also leaves you dominated by one or many people up on Mount Olympus. It strikes me as odd that cultures the world over would construct this kind of spiritual feudal system only to cast themselves as dukes. But it makes a kind of sense: given the drive to be both master and slave, better to be master of all you see and slave to someone invisible. To impose your will on all that you might see and pass all responsibility for your actions to your creator, who is, conveniently, not here to answer for himself.

I once had a conversation with a guitarist where he asked me “but if animals aren’t supposed to be eaten… why are they here?” The conversation ended there. Douglas and Richard have better answers:

As a side-note: in The God Delusion, Richard Dawkins quotes from an interview with Douglas Adams. The quote appears on page 42. I’m positive this is intentional.

The Talk (I)

Love, Blood And Rhetoric (I)

We’re more of the love, blood and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can’t give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They’re all blood, you see.

-The Player, Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead

It’s funny the way your mind works when you aren’t looking. When I was very young, for some reason I knew that people died, but I thought it was only us. I didn’t know that all that lives will die (…except turtles…). When my dad told me that, no, one day my dog would die too, that’s what shattered me.

Rewatched Rosencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead yesterday. Inexorable, terrifying, unbearable… sometimes someone needs to take the piss out of death.

For those who don’t want to watch til the end:

Whatever became of the moment when one first knew about death? There must have been one. A moment. In childhood. When it first occurred to you that you don’t go on forever. Must have been shattering, stamped into one’s memory. And yet, I can’t remember it. It never occurred to me at all. We must be born with an intuition of mortality. Before we know the word for it. Before we know that there are words. Out we come, bloodied and squalling, with the knowledge that for all the points of the compass, there’s only one direction, and time is its only measure.

Love, blood and rhetoric. I guess that’s what they say, there is only sex and death. And talking about it.

Glory Of Pain (I)

Context: he hasn’t seen his best friend since falling in love with her, until now; she just played a recital.

I started to walk up towards the park. The street lamps were big blobs of light with rainbow haloes, and the wind was cold on the tears on my face. My head was hot and light and ringing with the singer’s voice. I didn’t feel the pavement under my feet, and if I passed anyone I didn’t see them. And didn’t care if they saw me walking on the street crying.

There was glory in it. It was too much for me to take, everything coming together at once, but there was glory in it. And that was partly love. I mean real love. In the song I had seen Natalie whole, the way she really was, and I loved her. It was not an emotion or a desire, it was a confirmation, it was a glory, like seeing the stars. To know that she could do that, that she could make a song that made people be still and listen, and made me cry, to know that it was Natalie, it really was, it was her, herself, the truth.

But there was so much pain in it, and I couldn’t handle it.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Very Far Away from Anywhere Else, p. 71-72

Sometimes there is something beautiful about extreme pain. So much of the time there isn’t. Why is it sometimes? Sometimes a pain will leave me sitting on the sidewalk watching a sunset with tears streaming down my face, sobbing because I’ve been blown open to every beautiful thing in the world; other times the same pain means I can’t see beauty in any damn thing. Do the wires just cross because your mind is overloaded? Why is it sometimes wonderful to be conquered by love, and sometimes horrible, and why is it sometimes wonderfully horrible? Why can’t the pain be always beautiful?

And what do we do with ourselves?

Later:

“Gorillas build new nests every night,” I said. “They sleep in nests, up in trees. They build really lousy ones, very sloppy. They have to build new ones every night because they keep moving on, and besides they foul up the old ones with banana peels and other effluvia. The rule for primates, maybe, is to keep moving on and building nests, one at a time, until they learn to do it right. Or to throw out the banana peels at least.”

Natalie was still sitting at the piano, and she played about six seconds of a thing by Chopin that she had been studying back in December, the Revolutionary Étude. She said, “I wish I understood…”

I got up off the floor and sat down by her on the piano bench and played some nothing with both hands. “See, I don’t understand how to play the piano. But when you play it, I hear the music.”

She looked at me and I looked at her, and we kissed each other on the mouth. But modestly: six seconds at the maximum. (p. 83-84)

So… just keep swimming?

Taking A Lap (I)

I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who’s now in her 90s, but she’s been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, “run like hell.” And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn’t be fast enough, so she’d be running and running and running, and she wouldn’t get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it “for another poet.” And then there were these times — this is the piece I never forgot — she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she’s running to the house and she’s looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it’s going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first.

-Elizabeth Gilbert, from her TED Talk.

I sometimes feel that “happily ever after” is like that. Sometimes, at Point A, you see this beautiful Point B with someone, and have no idea how to get there. And that’s fine, Point A is where you are now, it’s the only place to be. And you just hope to hell that, when Point B comes barreling over the landscape, you and your love are running at the same speed in the same direction and on the right trajectory.

(Maybe that’s why polies run in packs.)

re: Flight of the Conchords (H)

Out last night, my date says, “This makes me think of that Flight of the Conchords song, ‘You’re the most beautiful girl in the room.’” Which sounds like a terrible half compliment, but was kind of apt.