I’m not a food blogger, and have no desire to be. While in China, I only took two photos of food. But, because the food was so amazing, I feel I have to say something about it.

I expected that the food would be good. Here in Portland there are several very good Cantonese restaurants, that serve actual Chinese food and not Chinese-American food. I imagined dumplings, dimsum, noodles, crazy vegetables, weird meats, all of which we found in surplus in China.

But where China really exceeded expectation was the quality of the food, not just the content. We ate like royalty in China, thanks in part to a favorable exchange rate. (Our roast duck meal, one of the most expensive, cost about 30 USD for the two of us.) But it didn’t matter if we were out for duck, or eating at the corner place in the hutong. The food is overall very simple, and yet immaculately prepared. Everything from the main ingredient, to the side vegetables, to the garlic was cooked just about exactly right. It comes out fast, and before you know it the table is covered with dishes, and you can’t eat it all even though you want to. I’m not sure what the secret is to this culinary skill, other than that there are tons of hungry people in Beijing and the restaurants are crowded from ten in the morning until past midnight. But after 25 days in China, I had exactly two disappointing meals in China, and both were because the food was only standard.

I’ve been missing it, and dream of soup dumplings at night. As a way of coping, here are my favorite dishes.

Note: I’ve been a vegetarian for the past ten years. I went on a meat vacation in China, because simply the term “vegetarian” does not have a Chinese translation. Sure, you can get vegetarian food there (I went to a couple of Buddhist vegetarian restaurants that were exquisite) but if trying to eat at an average restaurant, you’re out of luck. Even a dish called “tofu and vegetables” invariably has bits of pork or chicken in it. Since I speak nearly no Chinese, I decided to be realistic, and just eat the food without worrying about it. Now I’m back on the wagon. Going back and forth is actually really easy: once you actually know how to eat vegetarian (read: you’ve moved past veggie burgers) it’s like eating French rather than Italian.

Soup Dumplings – These are not your Trader Joe’s potstickers. They are so tender, so perfectly formed, and then when you bite into them you suck out delicious broth like a vampire biting into a moody teenager. If you do it right, you don’t scald yourself. You also roll them in vinegar and pepper oil first.

Green Vegetable and Peanuts – Most Chinese menus have pictures (thankfully for me) but not just for tourists. The descriptions are always vague, and the locals like seeing what they are getting as much as someone illiterate in the Chinese language. This dish, normally called this, is some sort of green kind of like mustard greens or sweet chard, that is cooked in a wok just long enough to be wilted, with peanuts and a vinegar sauce. I could eat this at almost every meal.

Some sort of vegetable pastry – No idea what these are called, but they were sold out of a window around the corner from our hotel. After we tried them, we ate them almost every day. They have a thick doughy pastry, fried into a disc on a waffle-press like cooker (though without the waffling). Inside are vegetables, which changed every day, but was either the greens (like the above) or cabbage and onion. They cost one yuan each, which is somewhere around 15 cents. If you can’t wait to eat them because they smell so good, you can burn your face, because they were always made about five minutes ago.

Hot Wok Flaming Food – The contents vary, but it comes out on a mini-wok with sterno fuel burning underneath, and it is delicious. Two of the better ones I had were are follows: 1) tofu triangles and sprouts, with fresh onions tossed underneath right before they brought it out, simmering in a thin brown sauce. My face was full of frying onion smoke the whole meal, and it was awesome. 2) Pieces of what I think were chicken, in an oily pepper soup with the requisite onions and sprouts. You didn’t drink the broth as it was very oily, but the meat was so, so tender, it fell off the bones.

Roast fish – As in the photo above. It’s a river fish, on a bed of some sort of soy-based gelatin/aspic cubes, and broth. Once you figure out how to strip the meat off the bones with chopsticks, its amazing. By the end, I had refined my technique enough to go in and pull out the entire cheek in one, wet, tender, meltingly delicious piece.

Other Asian food – Chains from all sorts of countries are all over China, especially in Shanghai. A couple of the more interesting ones were a Korean place that brings a red-hot iron bowl to your table, and throws vegetables, meat, and an egg in the bowl and stirs it up for you. At a mall. Also, a Japanese-Taiwan mix place called Ramen Play, (kind of sounds like a sexual sub-culture, or something) that does the ramen thing, with crazy toppings, extra noodles, etc.

Noodles – I thought there were be tons of noodles in China, but both noodles and rice are kind of minimally eaten. I think the deal is that they are filler food, and people prefer to eat the meat and vegetables whole, and maybe have a little bit of noodles or rice if they are on a budget. Still, they were amazing, as in the case of a dish of squash greens and glass noodles, a seafood dish with fried noodles, and noodle soups with fish pieces.

Barbecue skewers – Big street food. At the window they have the skewers loaded up, simmering in sauce. When you tell them the ones you want, they throw them on the flame. At the big tourist street, they have the skewers with all the weird stuff on it, caterpillars, scorpions, etc. But no one really eats that stuff. I had one with a whole squid, and frankly I’ve had much better squid: this one just had the head and suckers visible, to please the tourists. At the more legit places, the lamb and the chicken wings are really the best. We went to an Uighur restaurant, and they had this dry rub on the lamb with cumin that I really can’t tell you about, because it makes me start to drool just thinking about it.

Shrimp Cupcake Dumplings with Sprinkles – Photo above. Okay, I don’t even know what this is. We saw sprinkles in the picture in the menu, and so ordered it. It is a little bit of cake, with frosting, with a piece of shrimp on top, the whole thing fried, and then dipped in fried potato shavings, and then with sprinkles on top. So weird. Very good, but after we ate the plate of them, it was exactly enough, and I don’t think I could have had another. Just too bizarre.

Other weird things that I ate that weren’t quite so good but were weird:

Donkey Meat – It tastes like gamey corned beef. People like this, and it’s pretty popular. I liked it, but I didn’t really see what the excitement was.

Intestine – I really can’t think of many foods that I actively dislike. But, this I did not like. It’s not gross really, but… okay. Let’s just say there is a little bit of an aftertaste that reminds you what part of the body you are eating.

Duck Feet – I was eating fried duck pieces, and didn’t really know what I was eating until I was crunching it up. Chicken feet are very popular in China, even sold at convenience stores individually wrapped like beef jerky. Not sure about the appeal. They are easy to crunch, kind of like cartilage. They do fry up well, kind of like chicken or duck skin, so that part is good.

Duck Brain – The head came with the Peking-style duck, and so bravely I went in. Not really much to say about this. Tastes like the duck, but is soft and fatty. No real feelings either way.

That’s about it. I could have been much more adventurous, but as I said, a chicken wing is a little adventurous for me, so I didn’t feel the need to push it. I’ve never really seen the point of the sort of food tourism that likes to eat weird things, though I’ve willingly eaten my fair share of eels, bugs, odd organs, and assorted sea invertebrates when they’ve been offered to me. From the way the food merchants in the tourist areas yelled, “Snake! Snake!” at me, apparently a lot of Western guys like to eat snake. Maybe it’s a ego thing, or something. I’ll take flavor over adventure any day. And in China, there’s plenty to be found everywhere.

The club is the mediator or frame through which the music is communicated. The band literally plugs into the technology of the club in order to magnify the sound, turning a possibility into actually, making what is heard by the musicians themselves accessible to an audience. People pay to see others believe in themselves.

- Kim Gordon, 1983

Videos of 3D weaving machines, which Lexus uses to build car components, among other things. Added strength, less material, and so forth. Via BLDGBLOG.

While once, extruded technologies (plastics) were all the rage of the future, the anality of the mechanisms of cutting-edge capitalistic production is now even more high-strung. Replace the urge to expel with a general increase in tension. The problems of infrastructural distribution that guided flows of solid material and waste, are swapped out for algorithmic Gordian knots. From muscular compression, and old-world-modernist strength, the present-day technologies have progresses towards stretching: no longer thinking bigger and better, pulling every last bit of surplus value out, pulling the thread as taught as it can get.

It might even work.

The interesting thing about it for me, is how this new burst of functionality actually creates a feeling of frustration for me. I’m frustrated for all the ways the Wii is not like Chrome.

Netflix is probably the first useful thing I’ve used on the Wii’s network connection. The browser is near pointless, the weather and news apps are useless in comparison to my cell phone, I don’t play multiplayer games online. I have downloaded a couple of games from the Wii Store (Secret of Mana and Zelda: Link to the Past, suckas!) but other than that, it just sits. But now that Netflix is pulling gigs of hot entertainment off of the cloud, I realize just how useless that pretty white box is.

Where is my Pandora app? A usable YouTube app? Free, pointless web games? Audiovox? Al Jazeera, or other news networks? I don’t know very much about the Wii programming front, but as wonderful and easy as navigating the Netflix native app with the Wiimote, I can’t believe I can’t stream music, news, or do any of the other easy web app tasks I do on all of my computers.

This isn’t the only inherent limitation in the setup. I can’t play DVDs in the Wii, so I’m constantly switching the RCA cables back and forth to my crappy single input TV. I can’t access network shares of any format. I’m expected to use a SD card to transfer pictures, for goodness sakes. And when I point my Wiimote at the toaster or the toilet, nothing happens!

Well, I might need some additional black market… hardware modifications… to make my waste elimination controllable via bluetooth. And I know that my Wii is several years old, so I shouldn’t expect cutting edge technology to be on it. But this is a common gadget problem, gadget problems being the localized “serious first world issues” that they are.

Everything electronic device I have seems to be limited by something. And not by being a few years old, or by having no interface to my spinal cord. I have devices running iOS, Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and whatever it is that is going on inside the Wii. Certain things will work with others and the larger network, via TCI/IP, CIFS, USB cable, or native app programming. But they don’t all work. Certain functionalities occur on certain devices, but not on others. I feel like I have a tool box filled with magnetized tools. The hammer is perfectly useful on its own, but bring it near my cold chisel, and the chisel flies across the room.

I know it is too much to hope that there ever be one OS to unite them all. But then, my good systems make me wish for what could be. There’s Roku, there’s Boxee, there’s XBMC. I could buy one of the pre-made systems, or I could hack together my own using free software and a small PC. These all get a little closer, but it still isn’t perfect. It will never be perfect.

What is perfect? Shouldn’t we at least have something to shoot for? What are people shooting for? I have some guesses as to what Apple and Nintendo are shooting for. It rhymes with “shmonetization”. Open-source developers like those working on XBMC might be shooting for perfect, one step at a time. But they are constrained by the pay services, and their own goals. Netflix won’t work on XBMC running on a Linux box, for example, because of the Silverlight DRM. Of course, Netflix is constrained in turn by their content providers, and I have no problem with this really. Their service is totally worth the money they charge. It provides real value, if you are into entertainment value. But it could provide more value, and yet is not. There are always limitations.

Limitations are a part of life. They only become frustrating when they seem arbitrary, and what is desired is just out of reach. I can listen to Pandora and Last.fm on Chrome OS, but I can’t watch Netflix. I can watch Netflix on the Wii, but can’t listen to Pandora. I feel like if I want it hard enough, I should be able to figure out a way past this impasse, but alas, technology is much more complex than wishing.

I could put this aside as just a silly little entertainment issue, and go back to doing something important. But, this desire to sync is not just a TV problem. It’s an information problem. We, the consumers, think of our technology in terms of features, not in terms of company motivation, operating system, or app availability. We want to DO functions, not understand the complex paths of compatibility. This problem engages all technology from car cabin controls, to social networking, to kitchen appliances.

Some of us (like myself, or so I like to think) can see past our desires and understand the reasons why things don’t work, and wait patiently hoping that some day they will work. But why is there a disconnect? Can’t we meet somewhere in the middle, with more easily component technological connections that more closely adhere to our schemas of functional understanding?

via Flickr user Mac User's Guide

Take RCA cables, for instance. In some scenarios, I’m the “tech geek”, simply because I understand the difference between red, white, and yellow, and between input and output. I don’t know anything about how a DVD player functions, but I can understand making a simple component connection between media source and display. I can figure out how best to organize the stereo receiver, the DVD player, the game system, and any other inputs and outputs to cobble together a home theater system from whatever is lying around. Just with some colorful little cables.

Everyone tries for this sort of component ease. Debian packages. iOS apps. Chrome apps. Web stores. Plug and play. But this component ease is always designed within a particular system, either an operating system, a gadget industry, or a particular company’s product offerings. Why isn’t the system the “consumer’s logical understanding environment”? Probably because consumer user experience only goes so far as to increase that consumer’s surface area as a customer. Why would anyone spend time and money working on R&D for improving UI purposefully outside of the scope of a product? Why would anyone want to potentially improve someone else’s product, outside of doing so as a way of improving their own product? Everyone is trying to use everyone else, be it the OS using its third-party developers, the developers using the interface, the interface using the customers. Except for the customers, who aren’t using anyone, and only getting used. It’s consumer capitalism, and this isn’t any revelation.

What would happen, if cell phone manufacturers actually wanted you to have better health care? Or if app developers really wanted a more directly representative democracy? If the world was made to help enable the synchronized functions we desire, rather than the functions that will earn someone money? First of all, we’d be living in a utopia. We’d be living in a world in which the human species was not self-interested and individualistic, and in which the consolidation of power in the form of money and resources didn’t beget the accumulation of more power and resources. All of which is not the case. No need to get weepy about it; we are whom we are.

But we could get much closer than we are now. I’d wait on my Wii apps, if it would help.

From Coilhouse:

John Murray Spear, a middle-aged Universalist pastor in [mid 1800s] Massachusetts, claimed to be receiving messages from dead men. Sure, it was somewhat strange that instead of talking to a deceased relative for comfort, he claimed that a “Band of Electricizers” made up of Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and others, had chosen him to bring a messiah into the world. But, in a twist fitting a new era, this savior was a machine, one that would, Spear relayed, “revolutionize the world and raise mankind to an exalted level of spiritual development.”

With “spirit guidance,” Spear constructed a contraption of zinc batteries, metal balls, and thousands of copper wires, encased in a wooden frame. He named it the New Motor. The purpose of this machine was as vague as the man himself, but he claimed that it not only harnessed spiritual electricity, but also housed an as-yet unborn soul.

Spear was hardly the first to build an odd contraption with spiritual properties, and he will not be the last. The article above mentions a number of other future-leaning types, abolitionists, women’s rights advocates, and others who dabbled in Spiritualism during that period. You can think of your own similar examples from other points in history.

I love this sort of thing, and of course I do, because I have some half-built machine/art project in my living room running off of the eccentric motors pulled out of half a dozen malfunctioning atomic-synced radio clocks. Art is my excuse of course. My excuse to play with technology that I only half understand, building nothing of consequence from pieces of things I have broken. I’d like to pretend I’m tinkering in the great tradition of gentlemen scientists who actually made most of the scientific discoveries in the world, prior to Spear’s time period, not unlike those whom Spear believed appeared to him in a dream to tell him how to build his own machine.

But I’m not. I don’t have the patience or the interest to learn how something works outside of a mental understanding. I don’t seek to create, or invent, or discover. I just like to tinker. I like to read. My field of real creation lies elsewhere. And so I understand when I draw a bit of those looks, those “woo woo” looks, the sort that one gives to a man who will just as easily discuss Game Theory as Orgone Theory. To an extent, I deserve them.

I don’t think that Orgone Theory is a real thing (not any more than I believe in Game Theory :) but I like learning about it anyway, just because it isn’t. There is something wonderfully tragic about such a theory that could so consume a smart man like its theorist, Wilhelm Reich. And while I’m not sure I agree with the author of the above piece, who suggests that maybe those whom are progressive and forward thinking are always a bit crazy, I think there is something about wild, unproven technologies, and the desire to build machines without knowing if they work, or in the full knowledge that they don’t. The pathos of dreaming, perhaps. Or the skill, and yes I call it a skill, to make one’s delusions real in the world.

It’s a capacity of performance art, and I think it lives in everything that we do. Whether or not your technology empirically “works”, there is a bit of performance art to it, that constitutes the will to make it exist, if not to make it functional. There is a sense of pleasure in this sort of creative work, whether or not anything ever comes from the science, or whether or not there is any science within half a mile of the project. It’s dreaming in real life. It’s the ability to creatively fetishize technology–to believe you are fulfilled, even though perhaps you are sitting inside an empty wooden box.

Take, for example, 3D films. It is a technology that “works”, empirically. And yet, what is the real use? Entertainment is important, sure. But I couldn’t care less. I’m entertained anyway. And while the inventors of 3D film technology might have had delusions of grandeur about the importance of their device, or simply been convinced that it would make them rich, they didn’t know this for sure. They had to build something, with an idea, and not much else. Most people see film, and they are satisfied. But these folks wanted it to be something more.

Maybe if I had an idea of where my clock machine was going to take us technologically, I would actually get somewhere. Spear’s machine was smashed by an angry crowd, and the new spirit he was theorizing never came into existence. But he DID end up working on the Underground Railroad, with several communes and other socialist projects. In the large, never-ending piece of performance art called life, his technology–if you want to call it that–did end amounting to something.

The world of ideas and mechanics are related. Video games, once a diversion, are now supposed to improve the cognitive facilities. Real, world-changing technologies are born and die on the backs of envelopes and napkins. I’m no scientist (really, not a scientist) but I wouldn’t be surprised if building a failed perpetual motion machine wasn’t in some way, good for the mind. At the very least, it is all an interesting piece of art. Perhaps the technology really does exist in the mind, rather than this world.

If there is an idiot born every minute, every five minutes one of them says, “Let’s go to Cozumel!” And then s/he does. There is something about awful tourist attractions and awful tourists causing them to fly together like rare earth magnets, perhaps even lacerating your fingers if each object is of a great enough mass, and you happen to carelessly put your hand between them. Of course, there must be some place in the world for the itinerant masses to go, when they decide it is indeed time to go somewhere. And hell, who am I to judge? We would all like to go some place warm in the winter (all of us in the Northern hemisphere, anyway). The water in Cozumel is insanely beautiful.

And yet, there reaches a critical mass of massy masses—so many overweight Americans bringing their vacation dollars to a particular place—that either through unwitting clodmanship or through straight-up rudeness they end up pushing other people off the crowded jewelry-salesperson strewn sidewalk directly into raw, Mexican traffic. This is not hyperbole; this actually happened. The fat, sunburnt, sunglassed, cruise ship of a woman who threw an elbow into my father’s chest did not even look back to see who or what she hit. She motored off on her flip-flops, just like any other hit-and-run, BMW-driving, American businessman after he knocks over an unmanned motor scooter in downtown Portland, Oregon (I just seem to witness the nicest people all the time, just in the act of living their lives).

How did we get to this point? Not to the point at which I have a thousand and one sob stories about the callousness of others; but to the point at which vacation destinations, through their own advertising and industry, become so beyond over-capacity with customers that they become less vacation factories than the Stanford Prison Experience™? Do we really not have enough third-world beaches we can harvest for the color of their water and sand? Why do they all seem to go to Cozumel? Do the red, white, and blue flip-flops, swim suits, and sun visors really have some sort of strong-attraction force, magnetically collecting into these conglomerated asteroid super-fields of holiday makers?

I admit that I am biased, being not one for crowds and certainly not one for large groups of fun-seekers. I don’t have to seek fun, and don’t always care for those who do. This is not to say that I am somehow more able to find fun than most people; rather, I have fun doing boring, mundane things. I’m always having fun. Exploring the nether regions of an underpass might as well be taking a hike, for me. Taking a hike, well, that’s a trip to the beach. And a trip to the beach… that’s my own personal roller coaster on the roof of a casino.

But I do like to see new places. And some places that are new to me, unfortunately, are old to the tourist trade. Key West, for example. Beautiful reef waters, within sight of the uninhabited Key West Wildlife Sanctuaries. The beautiful island architecture inspired and housed some famous American artists; best-known, of course, are Ernest Hemingway and Tennessee Williams. You can still visit Hemingway’s house, which is… right between the bar-strewn novelty T-shirt district of Duval Street and the cruise ship pier. I guess you can go if you want. Maybe I will not.

At some point, the aesthetic qualities of a place that attract artistry and travelers like myself—traveling for the sake of traveling rather than the destination—shrink in comparison to the mainstream economic-based motivators that draw the masses. New York is famously going through this problem now, as the artistic climate that has made New York what it is in the art world conspires to raise rents even in an economic downturn, chasing the artists themselves away. Until there are no artists left. It’s all part of the same cycle: attraction, and repulsion. And then what? I believe that gentrification is not a new phenomenon. It has been a problem ever since it because commonplace for people to move within a city. Times change, neighborhoods change, and people on the short end of the real estate stick end up moving to less than desirable places out of necessity. The cycle continues, life begets life, and the hipster chorus hits the high note as the credits roll. But, what perhaps seem un-cyclical is the extent to which these re-culturalizing forces are now becoming mono-cultural forces.

Certain places become miserable, all to their economic gain. While they rake in the dollars, I have a hard time believing that anyone really has a good time. They get drunk, yes. Spend money on stuff they don’t need. They buy antibiotics and painkillers over the counter; all of these are things we normally enjoy. But it is just so concentrated, so canned, and so monetized that it is really no more than a shadow of these fun things, now at twice the price. Will there be a tipping point at which Cozumel is no longer desirable, because it is notorious for being lousy with tourists and the hyenas who thrive upon their steaky wallets? I would have thought we reached that point long ago, but for some reason, people are still showing up. The mono-culture keeps paving, and people keep coming to park.

What is that we are trying to escape through travel, anyway? I mean “we” in the most populist sense—me, and those sorts of tourists and people whom I spend my life trying to avoid. I like to think there is a bit of capital-C Culture going on in where I choose to “tour”. A little bit of my high-falutin’ taste. But I like a dual-culture, if not more multiple than that. I like my small art galleries, but I like bars, too. Aren’t we all just trying to have fun? To see something different. To get drunk and stumble back to hotel. To eat some different food. And maybe take advantage of a beneficial currency exchange. A little warm weather. Maybe a sugar-coated moment of historical significance. Is this balance so much to ask? Is it so hard to find?

Cozumel, in trying to attract tourist dollars by promising just this sort of experience to so many people that it could never deliver on the promise, is really no different than any town in America. The mono-culture of economic expediency would extend itself everywhere, if it could Proof is in the billboards and signs on the sides of the Interstate. Thousands of towns, called out for their uniqueness. Redding. Amarillo. Lawrence. Elk Hart. Drink specials. Kids eat free. Free Wifi. The lowest prices on 1-40. The brithplace of a former Miss America. Memphis might not have the azure waters of Cozumel, but they get the scam. They know the hustle. People are passing by, thousands per day. They are going to spend money somewhere. Why not here? If you put up one sign, you might as well put up twenty. You tell a few tall tales. Then they might start to believe. Give it a couple years, hand out some bumper stickers, and before you know it, you have Wall-Drug—the Cozumel of the middle of nowhere. You get people to believe they’re having fun even though they’re not, and you have just created a tourist economy out of nowhere. And the mono-culture that is the mindless pursuit of capital flows.

The carnival of it all—that is, whatever that unnameable “fun” is that is sold to us for dollars on the penny—is not just in exotic destinations. Although some exotic destinations have some pretty great carnivals. But there are exotic destinations without carnivals, just as there are many carnivals in non-exotic locations. The carnival is everywhere. And so, it becomes that the carnival is only where someone has set up a sign. Wherever anyone sets up the economic tent. Some tents are bigger than others. Doesn’t mean the small ones aren’t tents. And all of a sudden, you aren’t having fun unless there’s a sign, a tent, and someone to take your money.

I wouldn’t suggest stopping at most of these tents any more than I would suggest going to Cozumel. The carnival ugliness is only so interesting in an academic sense, before it is just another freak show. And you have to watch out for those whom you’re gawking at. The anecdote about getting pushed into traffic wasn’t fiction. There are other ways they get at you, too. There’s evil in those crowds, just lingering underneath. A real mob is just below the skin of every good party. The truth about humanity is, that the distance separating a busy street and an orgy of beasts ripping each others’ limbs off and eating them, is about as long as the distance between a noun and a verb. Look into the eyes of a man who has had four daiquiris, and is about to buy jewelry for his wife. That is the seat of evil, my friends. As cold as a frozen drink, and the color of investment grade Tanzanite. Just before I went fully “small town Americana kitsch” on you, I thought I’d leave you with that.

But this is where we are, and this is how I somehow ended up in America, no different than other beasts of my species. More or less. The secret of vacationing, in my opinion, is to read all the billboards, but look for certain ones. You can’t avoid the tents, but you can choose. Don’t go for the biggest, the brightest, or the best deal. The signs you want are smaller, and probably a little broken, because the advertisers don’t have much money. For whatever reason they haven’t grasped the idea that to really make money you have to sell booze. Instead of foot-long daiquiris they’re selling culture, of all foolish commodities. And yet, their doors are still open. They are collecting nickels, but they’re collecting enough of them. That says something. And the something that it says is both what we’re looking for, and the subject of the next museum.

If you’ll follow me and try not to get separated from the group, Wednesday I’ll take you on a tour of the Museum of Small American Museums.

← Back to Lobby (Lobby RSS)

When a reader of Marx is laid off from another crappy job at a poorly run business, we might expect him not to be surprised. It’s just one more aufhebung of the old alienation. Another kick in the pants from the capitalists. Yet again, the pain of surplus value being extracted, like a sambok to his special spaces. We passed tragedy, and then left the farce behind, long ago. After the farce came the parody; after that, the fart joke; surpassing that, history was an email forward; and I’m not sure what’s came next, but I believe we’re now somewhere in between novelty T-shirt and minstrel show.

But no matter how much he (or as the reader might be aware, I) might be fully conscious of class relations, being laid off is still, apart from being a monetary problem, a big old ideological mind fuck. I had agreed. I was working an hourly wage. I was doing the work my bosses didn’t do, because they were lazy, stupid, or simply not there. I wasn’t happy with it, and even though I might have written a thick volume on all the materialist contradictions of history at play, I showed up every day on time. I worked hard. I didn’t steal. Didn’t complain. I didn’t even unionize. I agreed to the capitalist mindset, in order to earn a buck. And it all fell through. Some sell-out.

Of course, maybe because I did all this, was the reason I lost. If I had joined a union trade, I could have kept my job (even though I might have lost my pension). Or on the other hand, maybe I didn’t buy into capitalism enough. My mini-American dream of slaving for a low-stress hourly wage without health care (my health is already fully secured by my partner’s union membership) so I could spend my real efforts on my own projects was still, just a dream. If I had tried to make my buck on the backs of other people, then I might have had a chance. I should have worked on commission. I should have been banking a percentage, rather than making things with my hands, of all bodily organs to exploit. I should have been a capitalist, not just a capitalist whore. It may be the oldest profession. But for all of that history, whoring has always revolved around getting fucked.

So what am I, the good, capitulated Marxist, to take from my second trip to the Oregon Department of Unemployment website? A good dose of shame. You were right, Marx! And you too Engels, to a lesser, more sociological extent! I never should have put down Das Kapital, and picked up my resume! I should have been punching scabs, not the clock!

Well, I suppose that is shame, and anger. But in addition: simple horror. It really is that bad. Playing by the rules gets you nowhere. It’s no longer a decision between liberal arts and hard science. Between the career path, and the artsy hike-through-Europe path. If I had accumulated the amount of credit card debt I collected in the process of finding and losing two jobs instead in the process of traveling and having fun, I’d be in the same more place but with much better stories. Let’s face it. Debt is looking like a pair of twins I accidentally fathered in college (I name them BA and MA), that I will be stuck with for a good thirty years, because they sure as shit aren’t going to find jobs right after college either.

There is one more thing that I have taken from this experiment. It is a nice, thick scar. Do you have a good flesh wound scar? I’m not talking about a neat surgery incision; I’m talking about a wound on the surface, that you can see, and you watch every day as it heals. There’s something about the process of a scar forming. At first, it is a wound, and it hurts. Just touching the swollen, red skin around your inadvertent orifice reminds you of the horror of looking down as the accident happened, and seeing your own blood, and maybe even some raw muscle exposed. But little by little, the pain fades, and it closes. You can touch it. Skin grows over top, and it is tender, white and puffy. It still hurts when you press on it. And yet, it is a pain you begin to relish. Like a loose tooth reversing its course, growing back into your jaw, you pick and twist at it, unable to leave it alone, feeling the steadily numbing pain fade back into the asymptotic reflex arc as the scar rejoins the rest of your flesh. You press harder, taunting it, willing it to hurt you more. Really? You’re healing? That’s all you’ve got?

In the end, you have a thin line, tracing the path of where your skin was cleaved. It is hard, like gristle, but made of you. It is part of you forever, even as it continues to fade. Whatever it was that cut you has made its mark. But that mark isn’t part of that damaging knife, edge, point, or flame. It is you, and now always will be.

As far as scars given at the end of capitalism’s danger go, mine is pretty light. I didn’t have my child’s leukemia treatment revoked by an insurance company. I wasn’t murdered by scabs and dropped down a West Virginian coal mine shaft. I wasn’t even conscripted to fight in a war. But I feel it all the same. It’s really nothing less than everything my college counselors, teachers, TV, and America ever taught me about working for a living, either implicitly or explicitly, being proved wrong. Sure, I was unlucky. I could have just as easily had jobs where I didn’t get laid off. But I didn’t. And I’ll tell you, it has nothing to do with luck; both times I was laid off, it was done by actual people, who made actual decisions. Or perhaps, didn’t make any decisions. Not out of random chance, but because they didn’t give a shit. They were idiots. And they were in charge. And I suffered for it. And this is the scar I will remember.

Yes, I am pissed, emotional, and angry. I don’t want to make this all about me, and we will get to the more interesting museums soon enough. But I must make this clear. I must show you these exhibits here, and tell you what they mean. I blame certain, specific people for doing this, and I believe I should. I could spell out the whole narrative (both of them) and then appeal for your judgment, to tell me I am either correct or I am not. But I won’t do this. It won’t change the results. If this was just an attempt to placate my sense of moral outrage, then I would. But the point is this: different people, in different situations, twice allowed their own personal laziness, and their own pursuit of short-term overhead reduction, and their own unwillingness to listen to advice or observations, and their own complete inability to make any sort of concrete plan, not only ruin their own businesses (both are in tatters currently), but destroy the livelihood of their hardest working employees. We worked hard, we took extra weight upon ourselves, and we listened to their idiotic speeches about “hard-times”, and “belt-tightening” and “urgency”. And for what? So they could hide from their problems for an extra few months. The surplus value they earned from our labor, in this case, was their freedom from everything: work, responsibility, planning, and care. I’m carrying all of that now. All the way to the unemployment line.

The alienation, in the end, was not so much the distance between the worker and the product of his labor. I cared about the product. I might have been the only one. My real disconnect was from the job. The commodity I had bought into, the hourly wage job, something so simple as obtaining a regular income, is now a lost dream, flitting away. I have seen the historical contradiction here, and it is the whole damn thing.

Why bother anymore? Really? I defy you to give me a good reason. Why wake up in the morning, and sleep at night? I like being awake at night, and sleeping through the morning. These are the hours of the unemployed. Why should I spent hours trying to find a job, when I can spend hours working on my own projects? Every hour spent fruitlessly is another hour closer to death. What is the benefit of pursuing “adulthood”? As far as I can tell, the only benefit of being “grown up” is I own more tools, and there are fewer people I feel obligated to be looking up towards as role models. I still don’t have any money, I still don’t know what I’m going to do with the rest of my life, and I still feel like I’ve failed some test I didn’t know I was taking. This is adult. This is maturity.

I’m not selling everything and moving to the Yukon (yet). Nor are we going to live in the car and mooch the library’s Wifi (at least not for more than a week or two every so often). What I’m trying to say, is that it’s not so much as I lost the job, as the job has lost me. The big, Titanic luxury ship of gainful employment has left me standing at the pier, as it steams into the sunset, no doubt on what will be a successful trip across the Atlantic Ocean. The idea of a job has alienated me so far, that I fell off. I sat in the dust, watching it keep going without me. And all I have left is the scar.

The compromise is over. Capitalism broke the agreement. From now on, I’m on my own. I’ll pay the bills, I just don’t know how. I’m going to work, but on what I need to work on, not for what some ass who just so happens to have bumbled his/her way into owning a failing company thinks is important. I’m going to have a really hard time of it, probably. But hey, as I’m finding out, that’s what “real life” is all about. It’s about getting angry, but about waking up the next morning, walking outside, and looking at the condition of the lawn. For the same reasons we climb mountains and go to the moon. Because it is there.

My fellow Americans: we have a good many things to do. We have to quit our jobs. We have to feed our families after we have quit our jobs. We have to put our pride in our fists, so that prevents against calluses as we begin to work. We have to work. The only question is, what are we going to work on? For this one, I have no answers. Don’t listen to anyone who tells you that they know, either. Because they are just guessing, or trying to sell you something. I can only recommend one thing. Get really confused, and then go for a walk. You might not find what it is your are going to work on, but at least you’ll get some fucking exercise. We could all use it. Especially me.

But, before all of that: because I’m an American, the first thing I’m going to do when I’m disoriented, confused, and perhaps struggling with hand-eye coordination tasks and basic judgment, is get behind the wheel.

Tune in Wednesday for the “Museum of the Destruction of all Beat Poets.”

← Back to Lobby (Lobby RSS)

Now. Your opinion being correct, the government being wrong, and the differences between these ideas and reality being completely resolved, let’s think about it in a different way.

What is so wrong with being naked?

Full body scanner opposition has really brought out the prudes. Sure, you claim political reasons, (which I can’t hear right now ’cause I done bracketed ‘em) but I think you are just afraid of what the naked body looks like.

This is 2010. This is the year when it is completely reasonable for women to walk around wearing nothing but a thin layer of spandex clinging to the outside of their junk. This is the year when rock stars are photographed in the streets playing the drinking game where if you show someone your nuts they have to drink an alcohol energy drink. (That is a thing, right? Sounds like it is.) This is the year where pornography finally, FINALLY made it onto the Internet.

I know it’s the rule that we have to hate whatever it is the government is trying to make us do, especially in airports. But why do we have to be against it if it is nakedness? I also know it is a rule that the only people we want to see naked are supposed to be very attractive, and they don’t go to airports ever. But this is a recession, and we all have to make concessions.

So what is the real issue? If we’re not against nakedness, and we’re not against settling for a less than perfect nakedness, then what is it about full body scanners we really don’t like? It’s that nobody gets to see the pictures except for TSA. We don’t get to upload them to Facebook for our boss to find, accidentally expose them from underneath our skirt as we drunkenly trip exiting a subway car, or sit with it in our hand while we surf Chatroulette. The problem is not being naked. It is just such a limited, un-fun, anti-exhibitionist naked.

So here is my proposal. Share your nakedness. Rather than submit to the hand-off, monochrome, and frankly un-party-like atmosphere, opt-out of the body scanner, and OPT-IN to the pat down. Share your body with another human being. Talk to him or her. Look your fellow human in the eye. Extend your arms, and let the warm flesh underneath those latex gloves run over your frame. Encourage them to seek to ensure nothing dangerous lies in your corporeal crevices, not with any potentially harassing comments, but with a loving presence of a willing, giving fellow inhabitant of a physical form.

We all have bodies, and that has always been the danger. We have material beings that are fragile, vulnerable to attack, and susceptible to threats, permeated by fear. And this is why we must celebrate our bodies, strutting them through the streets, trussing ourselves up in meager strings of cloth that beg to let the skin underneath be released in full animal beauty. We are judgmental of our and other’s bodies, and just as defensive against such criticism. The terrain of our slowing rotting homes has always been the battlefield, both inside and out. And rather than force ourselves to see the truth of this messy, insurgent conflict, we disavow our bodies. We put on a coat, we tie a tie, and we declare mission accomplished. Even though this war can never be won.

What if rather than assign the battle of our bodies to a bureaucratic entity, we decided to fight this war ourselves. In a world of mutual human body security, you go to the airport, and approach a stranger. You introduce yourselves, and sit down together to open your luggage. You look through each others’ clothing and electronics, admiring what you like, and condemning anything that might be dangerous to either of you. Embarrassing items like underwear, hygiene effects, or pleasure items illicit a blush, and a knowing wink. Then you begin to undress each other. You look under each others arms, and between each others legs. In the mouth, and through the hair. Did you know you have the beginnings of a cavity there? And I think it might time to redo that hair dye. You have some roots showing. Not so bad yet, but in the next week or two. This is a check-up as much as a check-through. There is no sexual contact, because this is a public place, for goodness sake! There is exploration, examination, questioning, and eventually, approval. No one is embarrassed, humiliated or violated. Instead, we look out for each other, by looking underneath our coverings, and ultimately, inside of ourselves.

Rather than prepare for a trip by checking the codes and avoiding the fearful scanner machines, maybe we prepare for our inspection by flossing our teeth. We trim that extra bit of body hair we don’t care for, because after all, we want to look our best for inspection. We wash our ears and feet carefully, because we will soon be showing them off. The scrutiny of an other’s gaze is a heavy burden. Not because of what might happen to us, but because after all, we are inspecting ourselves.

If we live in a world in which threats hide beneath our clothing, then by all means, let us lay the danger bare. Opt-in to the opt-out, and feel what having a threatened body really feels like.