No, though I might look it here, I’m not actually homeless.
The Internet says I’m homeless
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Looking fabulous to stay afloat professionally
So, after four – or more like five and a half – years of meandering studies in the humanities, you’ve finally checked out of the University with a BA (AKA Bugger All). As the ensuing hunt job hunt starts looking more like a wild goose chase, you find wisdom in your parents’ warnings about the piddling employment prospects of a humanities grad.
I’d like to offer an outline of a University course I think oughta get introduced across humanities programs, in way of redressing these challenges facing BA grads. In the last decade or so a host of studies have come out highlighting just how much someone’s chances of professional success rests on how attractive they are. In general, these studies find that hiring practices are like super biased in favor of the good-looking, who tend to move with disproportionate ease into higher status and better-paid positions. This should come as pretty good news for humanities students, having as they generally do a pretty keen sense of style.
I’d like to argue that humanities programs introduce a course to develop this sort of acumen, so that human. students might enter the labor market with at the very least one competitive advantage. Students would be taught to adorn themselves to the most flattering effect through hairstyling, outfitting, accessorizing, and the like. Curriculum could be divided between study of fashion design and business/workplace dress codes so that students learn to appear sophisticated and sexy within the confines of professionalism.
For grads of the humanities, a gainful career in the arts, where too many end up, is only getting harder to manage; more and more the dominant ‘creative’ players in this world are the MBAs and entertainment lawyers. But if there’s one thing that humanities students have going for them professionally speaking, it’s their sharp sartorial sense. Introducing a course designed to foster this know-how would actually complement the most fashionable ‘theory’ of the humanities today, namely postmodernism. This doctrine teaches that power is the invariant prime mover and essential goal of human activity; making obsolete the humanities’ immemorial question, What is the Good Life? This being the case, the humanities may now turn – finally – towards developing their students’ employable skills, and thus prospective share of power in the world – an effort which, for starters, could benefit from introducing a course like the one I’ve outlined.
- Occupy WS’s memed-out Hipster Cop
Quotes:
“These beings have no other status but that of cultivating the idea of beauty in their own persons, of satisfying their passions, of feeling and thinking… Lions or dandies, hipsters or scenesters: whichever label these girls and boys claim for themselves, one and all stem from the same origin.” -Charles Baudelaire
Les UX: Paris’s conservative conservators?
Spokesperson Lazar Kunstmann has observed that his organization les UX may be the only people in legal history to face prosecution for repairing a clock. The clock in question was the celebrated 1850 Wagner that overlooked the Latin Quarter from the Panthéon’s dome, out of order from neglect since the 60s. The Centre des monuments nationaux (the government department that manages many of France’s historic sites) accused les UX of having broken into the mausoleum, set up a work and living space inside its dome, and for a year gone about secretly abetting the clock into working again. Srsly.
About all this, the plaintiffs were right, and les UX acquiescent. The CMN also charged the pirate clockmakers of damaging the lock on the monument’s gate, and sought 48,300
euros in reparations. A quick demonstration of the lock’s mechanics easily dispelled this claim, and after twenty minutes deliberations the judge ruled in favour of les UX.
The clock rescue mission crowns les UX‘s illustrious record of clandestine heritage interventions, which includes restoring a medieval crypt, breaking into monuments after dark to stage plays and readings, and building a cinema, bar, and restaurant beneath the Trocéador. If these seem like the stunts of just a gang of unusually rarefied pranksters, the group insists that there’s a serious political, indeed revolutionary, thrust to their work.
“The Latin Quarter is where the concept of human rights came from, it’s the centre of everything. The Panthéon clock is in the middle of it. So it’s a bit like the clock at the centre of the world,” said Kunstmann. “In any other country, a monument such as the Panthéon would be maintained in a perfect state. But not in France… We would like to be able to replace the state in the areas it is incompetent.”
And as rare avant-gardes who have ascended armchair revolutionizing to genuine praxis, les UX are organized in a manner befitting of genuine terrorists: with ten specialized branches that include an (all-female) infiltration team, a division running an internal messaging system and a coded radio network, and the Untergunter, the cadre and restoration cell of les UX.
The revolution of which les UX are the vanguard is the privatization of France’s heritage monuments. As Kunstmann surely knows, few governments channel as much resources into monument conservation as do the French. The CMN’s incompetence is that not of an underfunded or understaffed administration, but of a thoughtless one that would allow the prolonged decay of one of the world’s preeminent mausoleums, and then stoop to persecuting those who voluntarily repaired its damaged parts. Kunstmann proclaims les UX‘s aspiration of replacing this absurdist and callous state bureaucracy; this should not be taken literally, but rather as an expression of longing for change in control and ownership of heritage monuments from the public to the private sector, under which would flourish the creativity and efficiency that les UX represents. (JK.) ♣
Quotes:
“Après le déclin de l’ancien régime, les esprits aristocratiques souffrent la persécution pour leur goût supérieur, et ont été contraints à la clandestinité.”
-Beau Sueurhomme, AKA B. Sweatman
“In Canada and the EU they subsidize art/but believe me they ruin it for hustlers who got their shit planned out/that’s why I never took a government hand-out/see, if you get a grant that’s free money/that’s food in your tummy, so why bother having ambition?/You already got paid, thanks to the politician.” -Chilly Gonzales, AKA Jason Beck
Josh Harris, “the greatest internet pioneer you’ve never heard of”
By the time Josh Harris reached his mid 40s, he had led short-lived, but groundbreaking careers as both internet mogul and conceptual artist, earning in the process over $80 million, and was all but bankrupt.
For a time, he seemed poised to succeed as the digital age’s Andy Warhol. A shy computer programer, he achieved explosive overnight success with Pseudo.com, an Internet television network company he founded, which was the first of its kind. Harris had an impresario’s knack for magnetizing bright and talented people, throwing lavish New York parties that drew brilliant computer techies and creatives; a dynamic recruiting ground for his commercial and artistic ventures.
Within a few years, he had sold Pseudo for somewhere in the neighbourhood of $80 million, devoting himself entirely to making conceptual art. Harris envisioned, with curious exaltation, a future in which people’s lives were permeated by an all-encompassing system of surveillance relying on advanced media and internet technologies; moreover, he predicted, people would eagerly submit to this condition. This dystopian vision became the central theme of his art, and culminated in two projects: Quiet and We Live in Public. The first was a funky totalitarian experiment that confined 100 artists for 30 days in a bunker under NYC, with myriad surveillance cameras capturing their every moment. They shared dining, bathing, and recreational facilities, and lived in cubicles outfitted with monitors connected to the cameras, allowing them total surveillance over Quiet’s other citizens. They were subjected to humiliating interrogations, had 24-hour use of a firing range and automatic weapons, and attended church services in devotion to Quiet’s mock futurist cult. In We Live in Public, Harris equipped webcams to every corner of his New York loft, where he lived with his girlfriend. Their online voyeurs followed as the relationship collapsed, as his fortune was leveled by the 90s dot.com crash, and as Harris, predictably, himself then fell to pieces.
Over the next few years, Harris underwent a romantic reversal of his former outlook, disparaging the infiltration of our lives by surveillance technologies and social media that minimize direct human interaction, rendering relationships artificial, corrupt. He retreated to a solitary life farming on a lush apple orchard he purchased with his little remaining cash, leaving even his closest friends and family in the dark about his whereabouts. A few years later, now bankrupt and fleeing from creditors, he moved to Ethiopia, which he described as “pure humanity… the richest culture in the world.” There he taught basketball to orphans, relished in his environment’s comparative insularity from internet, smart phones, and the like – and eventually established himself as CEO of the fledgling African Entertainment Network, where he currently presides; his instinct for driving the march of mediazation apparently getting the better of him. ♣
Demande du jour :
While Josh Harris was arguably the New York art world’s least acknowledged visionary of the 90s, the same might be said of genius guido boy-band B-4 4 among Canadian artists. Who’s vision (the internet panopticon or the guido pantheon), so far has proved more prescient and far-reaching?
Quotes:
“Bentham’s Panopticon is… a design for a prison, built so that each inmate is separated from and invisible to all the others (in separate “cells”) and each inmate is always visible to a monitor situated in a central tower. And, in fact, although Bentham himself was never able to build it, its principle has come to pervade every aspect of modern society.” -Gary Gutting, summarizing “Discipline and Punish” by Michel Foucault
“So while we’ve got each other here/Let’s treat our bodies right/ Communicate, and I’ll go undercover/Gonna make you cum tonight/Over to my house/If you get down on me, I’ll get down on you.” -B 4 4, from “Get Down”
Desert despot takes up Graffiti in a big way
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President of the United Arab Emirates and billionaire Hamad Bin Hamdan Al Nahyan has undertaken the world’s most gigantic act of graffiti, tagging his name on an island he owns with letters so big they can be seen from space. Hamad had workmen carve the inscription, measuring 1000m high and over 3km, along the coast of his island so as to absorb the tide of the encroaching ocean and better illuminate the letters from an aerial perspective. ♣
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Check out the Google Earth view for yourself:
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http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Futaisi+Island+-+United+Arab+Emirates&hl=en&ll=24.344438%2C54.320955&spn=0.062716%2C0.077162&sl
l=24.527135%2C54.140625&sspn=0.015656%2C0.01929&t=h&z=14
The Illuminati goes to Summer Camp
Every year, the Bohemian Club hosts a two-week all-male summer camp, known as the Bohemian Grove, with spirited camp songs and rituals, nudie swimming, and peeing outdoors – for hundreds of the world’s richest and most powerful men. Annual camp events include fun like the Cremation of Care, a mock-pagan exorcism that ends with the burning of an effigy by hooded figures, and the Grove Play, a large-scale musical-theatre production written and composed by club members each year, involving some 300 participants. Srsly.
You’d think this wacky group might consist of just a few rich oddballs, and be left alone by prominent Establishment figures, but nuh-uh: the roster reads like a who’s who of the American elite, with a concentration of Fortune 500 executives, top public officials and media people, and has supposedly included every Republican president since 1923. No surprise that the camp’s air of elite cultishness has exacerbated the paranoia of conspiracy theorists, like my favourite American shock jock Alex Jones, who sees the camp as a site for the New World Order to practice, in earnest, “ancient Canaanite, Luciferian, Babylon mystery religion ceremonies.” Jones infiltrated the Grove with a film crew a few years back, and captured footage of the Cremation Ceremony, funny stuff linked below.
Growing up a member of the Royal Lake of the Woods Yacht Club, I cannot divulge by reason of sworn secrecy the fact that similar occult rituals went down at that playground of the Canadian prairie’s jet set. ♣
Demande du jour :
FIll me in on what you know about outlandish and secretive activities/rituals performed by other Manitoba clubs…
Quotes:
“The Bohemian Grove, that I attend from time to time — the Easterners and the others come there — but it is the most faggy goddamn thing you could ever imagine, that San Francisco crowd that goes in there; it’s just terrible! I mean I won’t shake hands with anybody from San Francisco.”—President Richard M. Nixon, Bohemian Club member starting in 1953
Spotted on a business networking site, a recommendation made by a young fellow of a Canadian Dynasty for another:
“I had the great fortune to have partnered with XXXXX to operate [a Lake of the Woods seasonal business] for five summers. XXXXX has the most important qualities in an exceptional leader: A keen intellect; Superb communication; Boundless energy; But above all else an unbridled passion to be the best. XXXXX can be counted on to take tough challenges and achieve great results because his character is strong and sterling. He is supportive, a visionary and a man to whom, I am proud to call one of my closest friends. It’s without any hesitation that XXXXX has my highest endorsement.”
The ancient quarrel between poetry and philosophy: Jay-Z and Cornel West in conversation
…Watch the full program: http://fora.tv/2010/11/15/Decoded_Jay-Z_in_Conversation_with_Cornel_West#fullprogram
Quotes:
“Poetry and philosophy are always hostile to each other.” -Plato
“I bomb atomically, Socrates’ philosophies and hypothesis can’t define how I be droppin these mockeries.” -Inspectah Deck
Feminists offer up bewildering synthesis of conservatism and science fiction
Postgenderism, an offshoot of more recent radical feminism, is remarkable for having tried to synthesize two seemingly incompatible theoretical perspectives that both rank among academia’s greatest bête noires: sociobiology and poststructuralism. The former maintains that social behaviour is shaped by natural selection, and so rooted in genetics, while the latter views human nature as essentially a blank slate formed by social forces largely outside human control. Critics charge that sociobiology treats many racial, gender, and class inequalities as natural and inevitable, and therefore impervious to reform; and draw parallels between sociobiology and social Darwinism (a favourite pseudo-scientific theory of the Nazis). Some of the usual charges against poststructuralism include excessive obscurantism, flagrant disregard for empirical inquiry and unsupportive facts, and that it shares scary things in common with conservative counter-Enlightenment thought. Such accusations may weigh a bit heavy, but it’s hard not to see both theories, from their opposing stances on the nurture/nature debate, as implying real big limitations to the political left’s traditional ideals of social equality and individual autonomy; though their exponents have frequently tried to absolve them from these implications.
The coalescence of the two theories in postgenderism, simplifying here, goes something like this: postgenderists agree, if bregrudingly as feminists, that a lot of traditional gender norms have an innate biological basis, but like the poststructuralists regard them as restrictive of human potential and creativity, and therefore bad. Their wild solution: the use of advanced biotechnology to allow people the freedom to explore male and female personalities and assume an identity encapsulating aspects of both. Srsly. To this end, they see promise in reproductive technologies that do away with both intercourse and artificial insemination, like human cloning and artificial wombs. The number of men willing to abandon shagging in favour of becoming more like women I suspect would be somewhat less than pretty well none of them. And of course since most of the requisite technology talked about by these creepy utopians is nothing more than the stuff of fantasy, it’s fitting that many postgenderists make no bones about their writings falling within the description of science fiction. ♣
M.I.A.‘s (ironic) blend of conservative islam and feminism…
Yeezy, Diddy, and Hova follow in steps of New York gay subculture
Documentary film Paris is Burning is a fascinating excursion through the urban subculture of Ball Culture, chronicling its Golden Age in New York City around the late 80s. Poor black and hispanic drag queens dress-up and ‘walk’ in runway styled competitions, judged for their ‘realness’ in mimicking various personas drawn from the world of the privileged and empowered – Wall Street executives, military men, college students, bourgeois housewives. But the Balls would seem mainly an opportunity for the men to perform the image of feminine glamour and beauty reflected in the fashion magazines and television for which they share a common obsession.
A curious aspect of Ball culture is its infusion of elements from two cultures such worlds apart: high fashion, the prerogative largely of well-to-do white women (to allow a generalization), and hip hop, at that time still an underground subculture confined mainly to poor urban black men. As with breakdancing, graffiti, and rapping, Ball communities are divided into rival crews (called ‘Houses’, bearing names usually lifted from fashion designers) that go head-to-head in the Ball competitions, earning or losing status with the outcome. Balls often involve voguing, a dance style originating in Harlem characterized by model-like poses and simplified breakdancing moves, performed as a duel between two dancers as with b-boy battles.
If Hip Hop royalty Kanye West and Jay-Z have lately affected a more cosmopolitan aesthetic (outfits by high fashion designers, real artsy album covers and music video, beats sampling indie bands), I’d say this melange of ostensive high culture and hip hop was prefigured by the gay underground that gave birth to ball culture. ♣
Quotes:
“Touch this skin, darling, touch this skin honey, touch all of this skin! Okay? You just can’t take it! You’re just an overgrown orangutan!” -Venus Xtravaganza, leader of the House of Xtravaganza
Shawn Carter (AKA Jay-Z): “Personally I was very surprised at your extensive knowledge of hip-hop songs. Particularly how you can sing ’90s hip-hip songs word for word. I can’t even do that! How does a girl from Spence discover hip-hop?”
Gwyneth Paltrow: “I first was exposed to hip-hop when I was about 16 by some boys who went to collegiate. The Beastie Boys were sort of the way in for us preppie kids… I was fascinated by lyrics as rythym [sic] and how Dre had a such different cadence and perspective from say, Eazy-E, who I thought was one of the most ironic and brilliant voices hip-hop has ever had… I can’t remember what I ate for dinner last night but I could sing to you every single word of N.W.A’s “Fuck Tha Police” or [Rob Base & DJ E-Z Rock’s] “It Takes Two.”
Jay-Z and Beyonce Shuffling to Grizzly Bear Performance:
Liquid Modern Cop 