In the race to represent New York’s 13th district in Congress, the New York Times has given Harrison about the most resounding endorsement one could possibly give. Check it out.
[is pot good for memory?]
In Dan Savage’s sex-advice column this week, wedged in there with all the raunchy stuff, is this remarkable quote:
Google “marijuana” … and wedged in there with the stories about this week’s numerous, ineffectual pot busts — so many pot busts, so little trouble buying pot — you’ll find this: A study conducted by the reputable Scripps Research Institute in California found that marijuana’s active ingredient — tetrahydrocannabinol or THC — is more effective at preventing Alzheimer’s disease than any of the legal drugs on the market today.
Sure enough, here’s the Scripps press release. How ironic would it be if marijuana turned out to be good for your memory?
Disregarding the larger debate over legalizing recreational possession and use of marijuana (Nevada and Colorado will be voting this November on whether to do just that), the Scripps study strikes me as yet more evidence that the federal government’s opposition to even medical use and study of marijuana is faith-based — and not necessarily in good faith, either. It’s just one more way our government is replacing science and factual evidence with fantasies and baseless fear.
[agast report]
For all those in search of my AGAST report, don’t worry. It’s on the way, but it’ll take me some time to organize all my notes and write the thing up. If you’re one of the many artists I met on Saturday and Sunday, thanks for stopping by, and I’ll send you an email when I post the article.
[brooklyn and queens by the numbers]
Gothamist has a fascinating post that demonstrates just how closely population density is related to subway access in Brooklyn and Queens. The graphic, unlike the official MTA subway map, is to scale, and it reveals just how much more to Brooklyn and especially Queens there is beyond the reach of the trains.
Most of us who live subway-oriented New York lives have little notion of what exactly is out there in those territories beyond the subway. Who lives there? Where do they work? How do they get around What do the neighborhoods look like?
It also raises the question of what, if anything, the MTA is doing to expand subway service and bring those less densely populated areas into the NYC fold, so to speak. After all, population pressures are intense along the main subway lines, and the whole purpose of the subway from its beginning was to get people out of the overpopulated sections and spread them across the five boroughs.
[naturally queer]
In India, I was fascinated by the wild monkeys that live among humans. They are remarkably like us: visual rather than scent-oriented, omnivorous, given to games and amusements. And one of the most startling things I saw was homosexuality. I watched as a monkey attempted to mount its companion and assumed the latter was a female, but a moment later the situation was reversed. Clearly these males were attempting to mount each other.
One of the more common arguments against homosexuality is that it is unnatural. Clearly, the argument goes, our genetalia are designed for male-female procreation, so why sanction the supposedly deviant practice of homosexual genital stimulation? But it has always seemed obvious to me that human genitalia, and our fascination with our own, go well beyond any procreative imperative.
A tremendous amount of human energy is devoted to socialization. Our ability to cooperate in ever larger and more abstract groups has been a spectacular success evolutionarily, and socialization has been posited as the primary purpose of language. (The older, utilitarian hypothesis is that language developed as a tool for coordinating action on big game hunts, but it has been pointed out that among modern humans, something like 95 percent of conversation is social and only about 5 percent is directly utilitarian in a “pass the salt” sort of way. The more recent hypothesis is that language is useful because it allows you to “groom” more than one person at a time.)
Our sexual drives are also intensely social, far more oriented towards pairing up with appealing partners and satisfying our own desires than towards making babies. Is there any biological reason why sexual socialization shouldn’t follow the same patterns as conversational socialization in terms of gender distribution? Whatever the specific details might be, it seems clear that homosexual erotic desire is common enough in humans that to label it “unnatural” is to distort the very concept of what we mean by nature.
What brings all this up is a BBC report on a natural history exhibition in Norway entitled “Against Nature? An Exhibition on Animal Homosexuality,” which documents homosexuality and even long-term homosexual pairing among species as diverse as penguins and bonobos. The latter, in fact, are probably the closest relatives we have in the animal kingdom, and they appear to be wholly bisexual.
Of course, I’ve often thought that the whole debate over whether homosexuality is natural or not is beside the point. Lots of urges are clearly natural — desires to smash the heads of people who anger us, desires to have sex with attractive strangers, desires to defacate when we’re in inappropriate settings — yet we proscribe them. Much of the point of civilization, in fact, is to teach people how to repress their natural urges. (On this topic, Freud was absolutely correct.)
So the question of whether homosexuality should be socially acceptable shouldn’t hinge on whether it’s “natural.” A gay gene wouldn’t give homosexuality any social legitimacy, any more than a genetic predisposition to pedophilia would make such acts acceptable. What should give homosexuality social legitimacy is our liberal tradition of support for individual freedom. Homosexual acts are consensual and do not impinge on anyone’s liberties. As such, there is simply no legitimate reason to ban such behavior. Indeed, genuine support for liberty requires that we protect the rights of all adults to engage in consensual homosexuality as they see fit, just as it requires that we protect other rights.
(This doesn’t resolve the question of whether gay marriage should be legalized. I personally believe that the state should get out of the marriage business entirely — that’s really for individuals and their religious institutions — and simply allow domestic unions among any two persons, including close relatives, with shared property, shared child custody and all the other attendant rights. I recognize, however, that this is totally unrealistic. As such, I believe that gay people should have the same rights as straight people to choose their legally recognized life partners, and we should call it by the same name when they do.)
[agast reminder]
Just a reminder that this Saturday and Sunday is AGAST. Be there or be un-Gowanusy.
[why i have a job]
“Now I stand before to you deeply touched and bumbled by the honour and responsibility bestowed on me.”
You can’t make this stuff up, and I definitely don’t have to.
[seeing spots]
For some great coverage of the Fossella-Harrison contest in New York’s 13th District, check out Blue Spot, a Democratic blog covering New York politics. You can even watch a complete Harrison-Fossella debate, if you’re feeling masochistic.
[it’s official]
His Excellency Mr. BAN Ki-moon, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade of the Republic of Korea, is now United Nations Secretary-General-designate.
Beyond the big question of how his tenure will unfold, we now face the insidery game of figuring out precisely when Minister Ban will step down from his current post — he has until January 1, when he takes his oath of office as Secretary-General — and who will replace him.
Do I have any idea? I do not. The interior working of South Korean politics are, alas, still pretty opaque to me.
[beckology]
So The Information is out, and my considered opinion is that it’s very good — far more coherent and emotionally resonant than the scattershot Guero. That album felt like a sub-par rehashing of older Beck tropes. The new record certainly draws on themes Beck has been working since the beginning — indeed, I’ve often thought that if you pulled the lyrics from any given Beck song and put them over the right backing music, you could comfortably fit it into any Beck record — but it also strikes out in some new directions.
For one thing, there are serious raps here, which is something new. But more than that, what’s new is the overall feeling. In much the same way that Mutations, Vultures and Sea Change each had their own character, introducing us to a different way of hearing Beck’s recurring lyrical tropes (how many times can one artist sing the words “plastic,” “garbage,” ghetto-blasting,” “devil” and “hollow log”?), The Information has its own peculiar flavor.
To me, what Beck writes are travel records. I think of the early Beck records, especially Mellow Gold, as being about the deteriorating backwaters of America, particularly the South, and I fondly remember listening to Mellow Gold on my Walkman on bus trips during college, when it seemed particularly apt. Odelay continues to work these themes, mixing in a curious fixation on Texas (“Going back to Houston / To get me some pants”).
Mutations came out after my first visit to India, but it immediately lodged itself in my mind as the soundtrack of that experience. (The actual soundtrack of that experience was the Chemical Brothers’ Dig Your Own Hole, which, juxtaposed against the fluorescent-lit incomprehensibility of India’s highway nightscapes, was suitably millenarian.) Beck has claimed, implausibly, that an album named after a Brazilian psychedelic band, containing a song called “Tropicalia” and references to mangroves, mynah birds, magistrates, holy mountains and trains, is about Los Angeles. It is not. On Mutations, Beck moves his old fascination with decay to the tropics, to the Third World as viewed by outsiders whose very presence is morally questionable.
Midnite Vultures, Beck’s most misunderstood album, was superficially a return to the funkier sound of Odelay. Thematically, however, it broadened still further the theme of global decay and displacement, with references to Israelis, the Baltic Sea, “pop-lockin’ beats from Korea,” riots and refugees. (Another important theme throughout the record is the blurring of male and female sexuality.)
Looking at Beck’s albums this way, it becomes clearer how Sea Change might be the radical break its name implies. For the first time, the album looks inward, charting the latter stages of a devastating breakup and the first glimmers of hope beyond. Guero continues the introspection, if less successfully, and some of the rehashing of old musical themes came off as somehow autobiographical. The emotions of Sea Change were raw and unmediated; Guero felt like a self-conscious stock-taking.
So what next? On The Information, Beck takes off again — this time into outer space. With the increasing publicity around celebrity Scientologists, one might be tempted to see all the space talk as unironic Battlefield Earth-style lunacy, but it’s hard to see lines like “We’re in spaceships / Take a visit to the Pyrenees” as entirely straight. (Likewise, one could read the mentions of tin cans as references to E-meters, although Beck has been talking about cans in various contexts since the beginning of his career, generally as part of his trash trope.) As for the long, spacey conversation at the end of the record, which The Guardian reveals is a chat between Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze, one should keep in mind Beck’s habit of ending records with jokes and noise (Mellow Gold: squawks; Odelay: more squawks; Mutations: “Diamond Bollocks” as a hidden track; Midnite Vultures: “Debra”). Just because Beck is a Scientologist, that doesn’t mean he can’t use sci-fi imagery in non-creepy ways. Indeed, while the more outré aspects of Scientologist cosmology are utterly silly as a personal belief system, they’re actually pretty cool as a source for some rock-lyric imagery.
I’m still not exactly sure what The Information is about, but it does have a pervasive sadness and unease that feels somehow related to the high-tech, information-overloaded world we live in. And it’s quite lovely. Unlike Guero, whose surface I never felt like a penetrated, The Information has lodged deep in my skull, where I’m sure it will continue to resonate for some time.
Oh, and do check out the Guardian article. It’s a smarter take on Beck than just about anything else I’ve read on him.