March 2006 Archives

This month, I'm helping run mailorder for my friends' label while they're on tour in Japan. This "company story" manifesto thing is from their forthcoming company catalog.

Our company was formed when we decided to have one name and address for all things we made and all the makers. It is an imaginary general store from a time before figuring out all aspects of one's work became a novelty. In 2003 we started writing the brand name on our projects in order to unify our various objects and to jokingly participate on the uneasy commerce that we all live in, but in the simplest, most direct way we could think of.

Not knowing how to best be useful in a world that increasingly seems to need SOMETHING, some kind of massive sweeping broom and warm embrace, and finding ourselves with enough money to live, we are producing frivolous booklets and records and posters.

It is an uneasy life, living in the dark belly of the modern megastate with any kind of awareness, so we sing and write to keep ourselves and our customers aware and uneasy, not too comfy and not too guilty, awake.

No amount of well-intentioned song-products would be enough work, no matter how home-made or deliberately done. We must encourage each other constantly to nurture our literacies, leave our bubbles, increase our knowledge, refuse to accept stupidity, offer love in gentle ways everywhere. We must participate in real life.

I love this statement, and the way it points us to a mature, nuanced theory of the role of culture in this troubled age. Key ideas:
• Culture matters; it's not just about celebrity, commerce, entertainment, or even self-expression, or art for art's sake.
• Choices about methods of production, manufacture, and distribution are as much a potential space of resistance as the work itself. The way the CD or the book or whatever is made and the way it reaches its audience is as important as the information it contains.
• At the same time, cultural products are not enough. Participation in cultures of resistance is best understood as one component of a broader strategy of mindful living.
• We can be self-aware about the limitations of music-making/book-making/art-making/film-making without falling into cynicism or knee-jerk irony. We just have to remember that admonition from the Upanisads, that this cultural stuff we make is "the finger pointing at the moon, and those whose gaze is fixed upon the pointer will never see beyond."

Will Braun of Geez Magazine writes:

I was sipping a soda on the eve of Lent when it became clearer. The stars in my head - those specks of truth orbiting inner space - aligned themselves with rare clarity. The ancient rhythms of Lent presented me with a liturgical path leading beyond the consumer fatigue of our era, a gentle path of spiritual de-corporatization.

At that moment I recognized my willingness to not only fill my body with a substance of nutritional detriment, but to actually pay Mr. Coca-Cola for the self-destructive opportunity. It felt in every way like a matter of dignity. I was repulsed by the bottle in my hand. If I was making a donation of $1.39 to Mr. Coca-Cola in exchange for his plastic-packaged froth, he was smarter than I. I felt that change was not only possible, it was inevitable.

The decision to give up something for Lent had been made for me. It happened before guilt or duty had even stated their nagging case. The motivational force was other, and stronger. The forces of my inner universe placed the value of dignity squarely above the value of fizz. I would abstain from big-name soda (i.e., Coke and Pepsi products), and I knew that after Lent there would be little reason to revert to the carbonated ways of old. (Read the rest here)

Braun continues on about Coke's numerous human-rights and environmental abuses, and proposes that Lent be understood as a season of liturgical decorporatization.

I am going to try follow Braun's example and give up sodapop. Yes, this includes Slurpees. It also includes all Coke products, like Dasani water, Minute Maid juice, Odwalla, etc.

Really after reading about all the crap that Coke has been doing, I should have done this a long time ago. To begin with, Coca-Cola is responsible for the murder of eight union leaders at its bottling plant in Columbia. Many (hundreds?) more Coke workers have been tortured, kidnapped and/or illegally detained by violent paramilitaries, often working closely with plant management. Plus Coke and Pepsi play important roles in passing awful trade agreements like the FTAA. Plus the whole Nazi collaborator thing. Plus the obesity epidemic, and the fact that carbonated beverages have surpassed bread as the #1 source of caloric intake in this country. We are paying them to slowly kill us!

Braun writes, "[Coke's] legacy is littered with environmental and human rights abuses. Its greatest redeeming quality is fizz. I am pleased not to be a part of it."

This may not be easy for me. I like fizzy sweet things. But I will try to remember that smart guy who said "Noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good." Wish me luck!

The Ultimate Blogger is a hilarious online reality show that just launched its second season. Alas, I was eliminated from the field of potential contestants because my blog is also part of Urban Honking, the site that hosts and sponsors the competition. Nevertheless, I'll be among the viewers following along at home and participating in some of the challenges...with the nice bonus of not having to worry about getting eliminated if i decide to go off on some tangential meta-commentary or if i get lazy and decide to just tell you what my entry might have been like.

My "entry" is below the cut.

Anyone familiar with the evangelical right's rhetoric about homosexuality has undoubtedly run across the work of Paul Cameron. As chairman of the Family Research Institute in Colorado Springs, Cameron has made a career out of publishing studies that supposedly offer scientific justification for antigay public policy, depicting gays as diseased perverts. Of course, his studies are so flawed and biased as to render them entirely meaningless; Cameron was even thrown out of the American Psychological Association for violating ethical principles and repudiated by the American Sociological Association for posing as a sociologist. Nevertheless his work is still frequently referenced by relatively "mainstream" opponents of LGBT rights. When William Bennett claims "the best available research suggests that the average lifespan of male homosexuals is around 43 years of age", he's talking about one of Cameron's bogus studies. When televangelist Rod Parsley stands next to Texas Governor Rick Perry, celebrating the passage of yet another anti-marriage amendment and says "Gay sex is a veritable breeding ground for disease", when the American Family Association claims gays are more likely than heteros to molest children, or some nutjob on the internet starts shrieking about how gays average somewhere between 106 and 1105 different partners a year, they're talking about Cameron's work. His research has even shown up in state supreme court opinions in Massachusetts and Florida, in service of arguments that discrimination can be justified for public health reasons.

So, no secret that dude doesn't like the gays. But here's what's news to me: Cameron actually tells parents to encourage their teenagers to engage in heterosexual sex play as a method of warding off homosexuality!

In a 1978 book called Sexual Gradualism, Paul Cameron offered a "solution to the sexual dilemma of teenagers and young adults." The man who would go on to become America's most vitriolic anti-gay researcher proposed that teenagers and unmarried adults be encouraged by their parents, church leaders and society in general to engage in sexual activity that gradually increases in intensity, but always stops short of "going all the way" before marriage. What follows are excerpts from the meandering, 70-page manual, which is part social theory, part how-to guide.

Gradualism is a process-oriented approach to learning the physical skills of sexuality in step with gaining maturity in the psychological aspects of sexual intimacy. Gradualism is anchored on set levels of sexuality activity. These levels are:

Level 1: Being near another.
Level 2: Holding hands, hugging and the like.
Level 3: Kissing.
Level 4: Breast fondling.
Level 5: Mutual hand exploration of the genitals.
Level 6: Total nudity, perhaps in a bathtub. Manual stimulation.
Level 7: Oral sex.
Level 8: The final level of sexual intimacy.

Level 5 is the break-off point. Only people who truly love can care enough to handle beyond Level 5. Level 5 provides 60 percent of the overall fun of sex.

Gradualism would best be practiced at home. A responsible set of parents might allot a room, privacy, access to a bathroom, a television, and snacks to their teen-agers to practice gradualism. Some parents may shudder at this prospect. But they should remember that the minute a teenager leaves in a car, he or she is able to do anything desired.

Another advantage of gradualism is the insulation value it provides against homosexuality. By gradually introducing a young person to the opposite sex, gradualism steers in a heterosexual direction. While no parent wants his child starting the sexual process "too young," better too young than homosexual. (Link)

To this, I say, huzzah! It's about time the Christian right came out in favor of teenage bathtub handjobs. And parents providing snacks would be such a thoughtful touch! What teenager hasn't found himself thinking, mid-breast-fondle, "Damn, what I wouldn't give for a can of Pringles and some Sunny D right about now!"

Further reading:
An overview of Cameron's career from the SPLC's Intelligence Report.
An extended discussion of Cameron's bogus methods.