Only 0.1% on coffee?

A friend of mine sent me this link (http://consumerist.com/5008065/consumer-price-index-shows-that-consumers-like-eating-out-gasoline) to consumerist, referring to a NYT graph on American consumer spending.

Categories in which I Whup The Average American's Ass include coffee, health insurance, and men's shoes.

A sprited defense of fast food to follow.

I wanna live in Los Angeles, not the one in Los Angeles

Off to a couple job interviews in LA next week.


I promise that I will never become a Lakers fan.

I was always a hater, in the sense that I hated people who were successful, people who were happy, people who have it easy and have it made. Of course there are as many, well, probably more, unhappy etc people in the Los Angeles area, but it was that very hater in me that always assumed I'd hate LA. Sunny weather, presumably attractive people, simultaneous proximity to ocean/desert/mountains/forest, and generally just being American shorthand for the opposite of the Serious, Moody, Dark midwesterner I'd always seen myself as, perpetually digging myself out from snowbanks , dodging tornadoes, doling sage advice and directions to clueless strangers. LA was the d-bag at the party in the sunglasses even though it's dark who wants to do coke with your girlfriend. I saw myself as the guy who had to clean up the next morning.


That was stupid. At some point in my life, I learned that I could stop beating my head against the wall and enjoy myself every once in awhile. (Coke and hitting on people's girlfriends are still lame. Coke Zero, tangentially, is the best.) I know I'm not heading off to golden age hollywood or Ventura Highway by America, that my life there will be like my life here, just with more sunshine, traffic, and possibly cheaper produce. But I like it that I'm off to live somewhere I never would have as the know-it-all hater I used to be.

decollecting

As money is tight, had to sell a lot of records today. Some pretty good stuff (a lot of semi- to fairly-obscure European and Japanese hardcore, some dance music [Liaisons Dangereuses, Giorgio Moroder]), some of which had some sentimental value. Did not sell the above record.

I'm definitely of the opinion that for young-ish Americans, consumption is one of the major means through which we develop or enact our identity. (Romance, work, and education are also pretty major.) I'm not thinking of that as a good or bad thing, though it certainly has both positive and negative effects. (or Negative FX, if you're drawn to that record in the above collage.) I also think that by selling these records, I'm making some comment about where I'm at in life, and what sort of objects I choose to keep around me. I felt an odd sense of comfort that everything I brought in would be sold, that I got a pretty decent amount of money for it, and that a couple of the clerks at the store had already earmarked some of the records. Kind of like I found a nice farm family for them.

I want to explore the notion of resale and identity further at some point, but if anyone has any thoughts about consumerism or resale and identity (particularly consumerism of countercultural objects), please feel free to share.

R.I.P. Eight Belles

It's a little disengenuous of me, as someone who enjoys thoroughbred racing, to express sadness at the death of one of these [noble creatures/pieces of livestock], when I know perfectly well the physical strain that the sport puts these [beautiful/deply inbred] animals under. But of course I felt sad. It was interesting to hear how gendered she was (as the only filly in the race, and damn near the first filly to win the Kentucky Derby in decades) by commentators, both leading up to the race and while being eulogized, talking about what a brave girl she was, bravely giving it her all against all those colts, holding out to place 2nd.

(Oh yeah, wasn't able to get a ticket for the sold-out DBT show and doubted my ability to talk or sneak my way in.)

Springtime

"There's a little bit of springtime in the back of my mind

remembers things perhaps as they should have been...

Although it's nice to know there's a place to go

where there's still so many things

left to see"

(Photo taken from http://jamiesrunoutgroove.blogspot.com/ ; review of a Frankie NW Stubbs acoustic solo 10" that I really, really like. Dunno the guy or gal who does the blog, but from a cursory glance s/he has great taste in music.)

(Plenty more Leatherface/Frankie Stubbs posts to follow.)

(Off to listen to "Not Industructible" by Jesse, a 90's/Leatherface hiatus [I think] Stubbs band, and to get back to the task at hand: watching Houston at Utah with the windows wide open on a beautiful spring evening.)

(Update: Utah is back to making Houston look silly. OK, not silly, just incapable of stopping Deron Williams. If nothing else, let this be the series that teaches America the correct pronunciation of Deron Williams' name ["Derrin," not "De Ron."].)

The Limits of Neuro-talk (from New Atlantis)

An article by Matthew B. Crawford concerning the misapplication of neuroscience in psychology and popular culture. I was glad to read this article (and its use of "scientism"), particularly after damage done to my brain while watching sports commentator Skip Bayless hypothesise on Sportscenter that LeBron James lacks a "clutchness gene." Sigh.

Anyway, this was a particularly interesting paragraph to me:

[Arizona State University psychologist William] Uttal suggests that the
perennial need to divide psychology textbooks into topic chapters—“pattern
recognition,” “focal attention,” “visual memory,” “speech perception,” and
the like—has repeatedly induced an unwitting reification of such terms,
whereby they come to be understood as separable, independent modules of
mental function. The ad hoc origin of such mental modules subsides from the
collective memory of investigators, who then set out to search for their
specific loci in the brain.

There are many more great things said in this article concerning what the author refers to as "scientism," many of which can be applied to evolutionary psychology and its popularization, and the author specifically addresses the attempt to locate "emotion" squarely in the brain, disconnecting it from the conceptual, ethical (as he says) and social (as I'd say) networks of meaning that give it life.

I'm also quite fond of this move made by the author:

I would like to make the case for giving due deference to ordinary human
experience as the proper guide for understanding human beings. Such deference
may be contrasted with the field of “neurophilosophy” (most famously, the work
of Paul and Patricia Churchland), which is intent on replacing “folk terms”—such
as “reflection” and “deliberation”—with terms that describe brain states.
Needless to say, brain states are objective facts, whereas our introspective
experience of our own mental life is inherently subjective. But this divide
between the objective and subjective, between the brain and the mind, does not
map neatly onto cause and effect, nor onto any clear distinction between a layer
of reality that is somehow more fundamental and one that is merely
epiphenomenal.

whoa, I'm glad I heard about this

DRIVE-BY TRUCKERS , 8 pm, 5/3. The Metro.

I've loved Drive-By Truckers since I heard "Carl Perkins' Cadillac," appropriately, while driving, on WHPK. I pretty much immediately went out and bought The Dirty South, which had just come out, and not long afterward picked up Southern Rock Opera and the rest of their pre-existing catalogue. They sound like a bunch of former punk rockers, who can play really really good, drawing on the southern rock, country and power pop/bar rock canons. What really puts them up a notch for me are the lyrics. Not really for cynics, though they often tell stories about cynics, Patterson Hood, Mike Cooley, Jason Isbell (when he was with the band), and now Shonna Tucker (bassist on the last few albums who has a few songs on the new one) write with such an affection for (for lack of a better word) the common (and now that I think about it, uncommon) man and woman, while keeping one eye on the dangerous, bad things in the world.
I've never seen them before (did see Patterson Hood play solo in December at the bottle) and Can. Not. Wait.
I can't describe this band without getting really cheesy (like that's a bad thing), so I'll just go full on dairy here and describe their new "Brighter Than Creation's Dark" as a series of beautiful, often painful pictures of America in 2008. A+ RECOMMEND

poem draft

The fragility of historiography

Watching TV, thinking about a dream I’d just had about Jerry Orbach
when the dog, telling a joke, used his name.
I turned to you, somehow proud of, then frozen by, this coincidence
and unlike the dog couldn't speak. I knew you wouldn’t believe me,
that if it ever came up after that very night

I would have thought you were right
when you’d say that first we watched cartoons,
and only later could I have dreamed about Jerry Orbach

We might even decide I'd gone to sleep watching Law and Order.

Phrases We Like: Baseball edition

I have a baseball game on, and the announcer just used the phrase "dead red," and I really like this phrase. Not just because it rhymes and is vaguely metal, I just like how it evokes a certain baseball situation effectively, crisply, and, yes, does so in a rhyming and metal fashion. I encourage you to post baseball phrases you like. Some others of mine include:
-Southpaw (I like dogs);
-Showing bunt;
-Can of corn (involves [Midwestern] food);
-Rope, as in to "rope a line drive" (really like that Hitchcock movie);
-chin music (I like music);
-wheelhouse (sounds like a shoegaze band; is it?).

I'm not counting Jose Canseco and Mark Grace phrases like "road beef" and "slump buster."

To those of you interested and near the U of Chicago

"Please join the Money and Markets Workshop for a specialsession, Friday, May 2, as we welcome Viviana Zelizer,professor from Princeton University, delivering a paper on'circuits of capital.' Please note that we will meet in Cobb107 for this unusually scheduled session."

Awesome.

Zelizer wrote an influential (to me and to various fields in the social science) book on the historical emergence of Modern American Childhood called Pricing the Priceless Child, and another book called the Purchase of Intimacy which, among other arguments, productively challenges our idea that money invariably poisons intimate relationships.

A big question.

Do we take seriously the notion that modern life (in any sense) has left us relatively (to some idealized past) isolated? This has always seemed to imply that this isolation is a bad thing, and emerges in defiance of some evolutionary imperitive to be less isolated-- more specifically, to live lives that are intimately connected with others.

There are several useful theories of human development that rest on some notion that evolution has left us predisposed, even physiologically dependent on, recognizable connections to social others. (A lot of these theories are under the umbrella of what many American psychologists [see Steven Mitchell] refer to as Relational psychoanalysis, emerging from British object-relations schools of psychoanalysis [see Donald Winnicott]. Relatedly, see Bowlby and all and Attachment Theory) There's another basic argument that relates to how we presumably survived through collaboration and connections with others, and the ability to "think" as a group (what I would consider Culture, in the broadest sense).

Despite its dependence on some imagined, undertheorized and de facto unempirical notion of our past (I am particularly disturbed by the influence these imagined pasts hold in arguments emerging from evolutionary psychology), I really like this notion, in contrast to what unfairly gets called a "Darwinian" perspective on human biology (some might call this Machiavellian, or individualistic, etc. Basically, the assumption that we are in some pure, deep way just Looking Out For Number One). Even at my most misanthropic and self-isolating, I take pleasure in the work and emotional, symbolic expressions of others: sad movies, sad songs, food and drink technologies, etc. I tell myself I'm ALONE when I'm sitting at home drinking a beer, watching Miller's Crossing, and ignoring my phone, but we know that Tom Reagan and Myrna Birnbaum and the Coen brothers and millenia of farmers and brewers are there with me.

This isn't really intended as a refutation as the proposition mentioned at the top of this post, though maybe I should think of it that way. Upcoming I will post a few notes suggesting that Romance, in most of its senses, and perhaps the arts (?; not really my forte, but..) have perhaps emerged as evolutionary adaptations to this putative crisis of isolation.