The Real Terrorist Threat

According to Graffiti Research Lab and its sister organization, the Anti-Advertising Agency, those cartoon lite brites are an example of corporate, not political terrorism:

It’s well known that marketing steals ideas from artists. But the connections are rarely so clear as they are in this case, and we don’t often get to see it backfire in such a spectacular way.

Apparently the lite brites were a bastardized version of a graffiti art device created by the Graffiti Research Lab for artists:

Again and again, as advertisers desperately try to break through the clutter they create, they try more desperate methods. The perfect irony to this story is that advertisers can’t get it right. What attracted the attention of the bomb squad was the wiring, circuitry, and large batteries that Interference Inc. added to the G.R.L.s original design in order to be more financially efficient. Once it was discovered as harmless, Interfrence’s next problem was the media’s derision because it was yet another desperate attempt to put advertising in front of people’s eyes.

Each week it becomes more clear in the media that advertising is using illegal methods, yet the fines and arrests remain disproportionately on graffiti writers and activists. We hope more people will see the hypocrisy of arresting, jailing, and fining individual expression of people like BORF, countless street artists, RNC protesters, and cyclists from critical mass, when there has still been zero jail time for CEOs of advertising and marketing firms that knowingly and repeatedly break the law promoting corporate products.  

I don’t think it was against the law (but maybe it was, who knows) but I call your attention to a problem I had with Bank of America taking over the Harvard subway station.

Anti-Bush Elegance

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“I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration. And I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself.” – Harry Taylor to President Bush

via tony

Anti-Bush Elegance

“I feel like despite your rhetoric, that compassion and common sense have been left far behind during your administration. And I would hope from time to time that you have the humility and grace to be ashamed of yourself.” – Harry Taylor to President Bush

via tony

Chomsky Rocked the House

He’s not what I would call a charismatic speaker, but he did leave me wanting to overthrow the government.

Someone To Love

Pardon me if I go Israeli on your asses for the next few weeks (if I update this blog at all, that is) as I am buried in BJFF work and will be suffering a bit of monomania for awhile. In my research I came across the dramatic photo below of Ronit Elkabetz and then came across this interesting essay on Feminism in Israel (as it relates to a documentary TV series that was aired there). Enjoy.

I Just Want A Damn Napkin

Is it wrong to want to punch someone with Down Syndrome? Not just
anyone with this handicap, but a specific person who has begun to
infuriate me. She works in a local eating establishment that I frequent
and every time I go over to the napkin counter, she is there stocking
things and blocking the whole counter. She gets irritated if you need
to reach over her to get a fork or a napkin. And if you do get a
napkin, she immediately gets huffy and follows after you and neatens
the napkins the moment you pull one from the dispenser. The first few
times it happened I thought it was funny, but now I’m tired of it and
I’m actually thinking of complaining, which is something I never do.

A Call To Arms (I Mean Movies)

I see a potential PdD dissertation in MoveOn’s efforts to use film
(particularly Hollywood film) as outright political propaganda:

Here’s how hosting works: you just need to set up a party online, and invite your
friends. It only takes a minute, then we’ll invite other MoveOn members to join (if
you open your party to the public).

We’ll recommend some progressive videos for you and your guests to watch and discuss—documentaries
like “The Corporation”, “OutFoxed,” and “Roger & Me,”
as well as feature films with progressive themes, like “Wag the Dog” and
“Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.” Or, if you know a film that others should
see, you can show that one.

These parties won’t only be about watching movies, they’ll also be about laying
the groundwork for upcoming actions. At these parties we’ll give you what you need
to form a local team, so it’s easy for you and your new friends to continue working
together. We’ll also give you materials for a simple action your group can do after
the party around a likely Supreme Court vacancy. We need to be ready to act quickly
to have an impact on who President Bush appoints.

Beating the Bush agenda and electing a progressive majority will take the help
of everyone who agrees that the Republican leadership is out of touch with America.
Help us fight the right by hosting “Progressive Movie Night”.

Old Men Are Hipper Than Me

Yesterday as I was crossing Mass Ave I passed by two old guys who were
standing on the street corner engaged in a vigorous discussion, and the
words “Woodward and Bernstein” jumped out as I walked by. I chuckled at
what I thought was a stereotypical couple of old guys discussing very
old news. But the joke was on me when I got home and saw the news that
Deep Throat had revealed himself.

Did I hear correctly that one of the names rumored to be Deep Throat
was Diane Sawyer? WTF? I guess there are a whole lot of porn jokes
circling around the country today too. My head’s too cloudy to make one
myself.

The Cost of Sex

…is not intrinsically low:

It strikes me as bizarre on its face to think of sex as a low-cost activity. Most people don’t want sex, per se, but want sex with a person with whom they want to have sex that wants to have sex with them. For many, then, supply is low, and search costs are high.

and on a related note, May is National Masturbation Month, an activity with a much lower intrinsic cost.

Who Knew Mother’s Day Was So Political?

All day today as I went around town I suspected all shaved-head and
punk-looking kids of being skinheads from today’s NeoNazi rally at
Faneuil Hall. I suspected the increased police presence in Somerville
to be related to that as well, as the neonazis apparently started their
day’s activities with an event outside a Somerville school. Dowbrigade went
downtown to check out the rally, which included Fascists, Anarchists,
anti-Fascists, Jewish Remembrance Day celebrators, and anti-veal
protestors. It sounds like it was pitiful from all sides: “It was hard
to tell who was the bigger drama queens, the Fascists or the
anti-Fascists.” He has pictures too.

Pain Is Good

Apparently all the tax-prep software we love so much is actually hurting us:

Once upon a time, Americans realized that something beneficial came
from the pain of paying taxes. In the 1920’s, Treasury Secretary Andrew
Mellon made this case repeatedly. “Nothing,” he told Congress, “brings
home to a man the feeling that he personally has an interest in seeing
that government revenues are not squandered, but intelligently
expended, as the fact that he contributes individually a direct tax, no
matter how small, to his government.”

In 1955, the commissioner
of the Internal Revenue Service, T. Coleman Andrews, went so far as to
decree that the agency should stop helping people fill out their tax
forms. His reasoning? Americans should be educated, not coddled. It did
a citizen good to come face to face with his tax bill.

[...]

We have created a vicious cycle. Congress has made taxes increasingly
complicated and burdensome over the years. To cope, taxpayers have
sought help from tax preparers and computer software. But that consumer
convenience has bred inertia, shielding bad policy from the wrath of
taxpayers who bear the burden of it. This is not to say that we should
go back to, say, the 1930’s, when withholding didn’t exist and
taxpayers had to pay their bill in one fell swoop on tax day. But we
may have put ourselves in a situation where no pain means no gain.

I Want to Be FREE

I’m listening to iTunes and I just caught myself dancing while filing
some papers here in the office. I feel like I’m in a Coke commercial.
It’s Jamiroquai’s fault. No I guess it’s Coke’s fault for making my
authentic experience feel inauthentic.

Kinky for Governor

Kinky Friedman is running for Governor of Texas. His campaign slogan is “Why The Hell Not?” Maybe I’ll move to Austin so I can vote for him.

More Bits About Summers

From Left2Right:

“Research scientists are entitled to their biases, in the sense that
science can’t get underway without people willing to place their bets
on sometimes controversial hypotheses as yet unproved, and can’t
succeed unless people are free to vigorously pursue such hypotheses
even in the face of rival hypotheses claiming their own empirical
support.  The issue is rather that Summers was not speaking as a
research scientist in the fields in question.  He was speaking as the
President of Harvard University.  In that capacity, Summers’ deployment
of his biases could not function in the fruitful way biases often
function among research scientists.  They functioned instead as lame
excuses for a poor institutional record of tenuring women.  (Lame,
because they can’t explain declining rates of tenure under
Summers’ leadership.)  A less arrogant Harvard would have borrowed a
leaf from MIT, which subjected its own treatment of women faculty to
empirical scrutiny, discovered problems, and took action to correct them.”

Larry Summers Should Try On A Dress

I have said that I think Larry Summers’ problems probably have more to
do with social skills than the content of his recent controversial
remarks, and Tina Brown seems to agree:

…the storm now drenching Summers at Harvard is not really about
PC politics. It’s an insurrection about his manners. If his pleasingly
polite predecessor in the job, Neil Rudenstine, had made some offhand
comments about the innate abilities of women in a closed meeting,
faculty members would have shrugged it off.

The presidency of Harvard has only magnified
characteristics Summers was just barely able to get away with in
Washington. Young Turk economists in the Treasury Department could
handle the cut and thrust of Summers’s ongoing seminar with himself,
but academics are more sensitive souls. In Tuesday’s meeting with
several hundred Harvard professors to discuss faculty criticisms of
Summers’s stewardship, Caroline Hoxby, one of two tenured women in
economics, told Summers the ties between scholars, their mentors and
students is a “great shimmering web.” “Every time, Mr. President, you
show a lack of respect for a faculty member’s intellectual expertise,
you break ties in our web.”

Poor, preposterously brilliant Larry Summers put his web foot in it all
the time. He even made enemies for himself during such tension-free
occasions as “Memorial Minutes,” the short remembrances at faculty
meetings of Harvard colleagues who have passed away. According to
Richard Bradley in his new book “Harvard Rules,” Summers infuriated
everyone there by “closing his eyes and drumming his fingers — as if
honoring the dead were keeping him from more important tasks.”

Hard-charging men are often stunningly oblivious to their own behavior
or their own motivations. Summers is notorious at Harvard for leaving
meetings that went horribly, thinking they went really well.

But the title of the article is “Why Can’t A Man Be More Like A Woman?” and Summers is merely her example to pose the following:

Some of the almost touching obliviousness of smart
men may trace to the fact that their gender has narrower options than
women for role-playing. Samurai or wimp are the only parts they get
offered. Women, by contrast, get a crack at boss lady, taskmaster and
office power woman along with mistress, wife, geisha, doormat,
chatelaine, vixen, goddess, nursemaid and she-devil — all in the
course of one day.

A woman playing any of these roles is perfectly in
her element; a man playing a role feels unmanned. It’s easy for Condi
to switch from standing on Putin’s corns to gazing into Chancellor
Schroeder’s eyes and laughing coquettishly at his Germanic jokes. That
kind of thing is harder for Bush — and off the table for Rummy.

Harvard now needs to appoint a committee of women to figure out how to
redress the innate differences in emotional intelligence by which men
feel compelled to shoot themselves in the foot.

via Mika

China-Smasher

The New York Times has taken a position on the Larry Summers “women aren’t good at science” controversy:

Last week’s release of the long-sought transcript of his remarks is
not likely to improve things much. Dr. Summers compared the shortage of
female scientists at the highest ranks of academia to, among other
things, the shortage of Jewish farmers, and white men in the National
Basketball Association. (Coming soon: Female Biologists Can’t Jump.)

Dr. Summers’s defenders say he is being tarred for the very
intellectual openness that places like Harvard are supposed to
encourage. Even in the best of circumstances, it’s questionable whether
the head of an institution that has a bad reputation when it comes to
promoting female scientists was the perfect person to free-associate on
why women have trouble getting tenure. However, the transcript provides
the best possible refutation of the charge of political correctness.
Whatever Dr. Summers was doing at the conference, it had nothing to do
with serious intellectual inquiry. “I don’t think anybody actually has
a clue” was one operative phrase. “I don’t remember who had told me”
was another. It was every woman’s nightmare of what a university
president thinks privately about equal opportunity.

We have
been informed many, many times in the past that Dr. Summers likes to
make waves, and who could blame him? It’s fun to toss out provocative
ideas and watch as everyone’s ears redden and all eyes turn to the
daring speaker who started the hubbub. But it’s an exercise better
restricted to radio talk show hosts than the heads of major academic
institutions. Harvard is supposed to be teaching its students not just
how to start a controversy, but also how to have an intelligent
conversation.

More Plough & Stars News

The Plough & Stars is holding an all weekend all music benefit this Saturday and Sunday.
The benefit is to help the club cover the cost of emergency sound proofing repairs required
as a result of the recent Cambridge Town Council decision. My personal
friends Los Diablos are playing Saturday 10pm, and I’ll be there.

Local Nightlife Activism

If you love the Plough & Stars in Central Square, read this, written by my dance partner:

“The Plough & Stars, a long time staple of the Central Sq. community and Cambridge music scene is at risk of losing its entertainment license.  Apparently, the neighbourhood committee is looking to stop music from being played at the Plough.

The Plough’s music has been a part of Cambridge culture for many, many years. I’ve been going to the Plough for the past 20 years. They’ve always offered great entertainment, at a reasonable price, in the most “Neighbourly Pub” in all of Boston/Cambridge.  It’s also offered wonderful opportunities for local up and coming artists to hone their craft. Many great artists have gotten their start at the Plough (Morphine, G Love, Kevin Connolly). There was a time when Van Morrison would play an occasional show (when he resided in Cambridge).

Quite frankly, if the Plough lost its entertainment license, it would be tough for it still make a go of it as viable business.

The meeting is Friday at 1pm at the Cambridge License commission, 831 Mass ave. (In the basement). Anyone who can be there to support the Plough would be a great help.

Alternatively, if anyone would write a letter and email it to May at ploughandstars@yahoo.com. She will print them out and bring them with her.

We always talk about getting involved and making a difference in something we believe in. This might not be about the war in Iraq, global terror or national politics. This is a chance for you to do something in your own backyard that you believe in. Besides, if the Plough didn’t have music, where else would you see Los Diablos?

So, please at least write an email in support of The Plough.”

One Reason Why the Blue States Failed

from Accordionguy’s account of Harvard’s recent Votes, Bits & Bytes conference:

One question from the audience
came from someone who wanted to volunteer for the Democrats’ campaign.
He complained that that he, and many others, showed up to help out but
nobody knew what to do with them.

• Exley:
  Our field program was a disaster. There was no plan, and there were no
  trained volunteers. “It was as if they did not see an election coming.”
• The
  Right is beating Left at what used to be the Left’s game: grassroots
  campaigning. The Left thinks that grassroots politics is “doing neat
  stuff”, but in fact, it’s still talking to people. It fundamentally
  comes down to a cultural problem: we on the Left don’t have trust in
  ordinary people. We don’t know how to talk to ordinary Americans.

Not Really True, But …

… in keeping with my recent over-essentializing gender posts:

Men really aren’t so uncomplicated, they just want to be.

via Makeoutcity