The Sea Horse Liberation Army "Dadaist guerilla semioticians”
[Recent Entries][Archive][Friends][User Info]
Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in the "cali_sla" journal:[<< Previous 20 entries]
|
10:27 am
[Link] |
required reading stainblue.com
Guzman, G. et al. "A new bluing Psilocybe from U.S.A." Mycotaxon 65: 191-196 (1997).
Stamets, P. Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World. Foreword by Andrew Weil. Ten Speed Press, Berkeley, CA (1996).
Weil, A.T. (Ed.) "Drugs and the mind." The Harvard Review 1(4): 3-82 (1963).
Weil, A.T. The Natural Mind -- A New Way of Looking at Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1972). Revised edition: The Natural Mind -- An Investigation of Drugs and the Higher Consciousness. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1986).
Weil, A.T. "Introduction." In: Lamb, F.B. Wizard of the Upper Amazon: The Story of Manuel Cordova-Rios. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1974).
Weil, A.T. "The love drug." Journal of Psychedelic Drugs 8(4): 335-337 (1976).
Weil, A.T. "The use of psychoactive mushrooms in the Pacific Northwest: An ethnopharmacological report." Botanical Museum Leaflets Harvard University 25(5): 131-149 (1977).
Weil, A.T. The Marriage of the Sun and Moon: A Quest for Unity in Consciousness. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1980).
Weil, A.T. Natural Health, Natural Medicine: A Comprehensive Manual for Wellness and Self-Care. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1990).
Weil, A.T. Spontaneous Healing. Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1995).
Weil, A.T. Eight Weeks to Optimum Health. Alfred A. Knopf, New York (1997).
Weil, A.T. and E.W. Davis. "Bufo alvarius: A potent hallucinogen of animal origin." Journal of Ethnopharmacology 41(1, 2): 1-8 (1992).
Weil, A.T. and W. Rosen. Chocolate to Morphine: Understanding Mind-Active Drugs. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1983). Revised edition: From Chocolate to Morphine: Everything you Need to Know About Mind-Altering Drugs. Houghton Mifflin, Boston, MA (1993).
|
|
10:59 am
[Link] |
Swarm & Destroy: The Revolution Will Have Pedals : creatures of the loin
Swarm & Destroy: The Revolution Will Have Pedals
By Lazlo Kovaks
The Hell’s Angles have called them the “gayest moped gang in the world,” and “the baddest club since themselves,” but the Creatures of the Loin insist that they are no club. They are a collective of quixotic visionaries living out existential mad max fantasies on marginalized motor vehicles in the “directly lived moment.”
“Why do I ride a moped? Because our world is on the brink of economic and social collapse. Let’s call it an apocalypse—I’m not saying it’s the Four Horsemen, I’m not talking about the Rapture, there’s no Jesus involved – but Jesus would ride a moped…. The currency of the country is floating on nothing, but on a moped, you can escape… pour in some 2-stroke oil, and you can dart through the rubble and do whatever the fuck you want. ” explains 23-year-old Creature, Jay Jean-Hank Ho.
And the core of the group share Jay’s catastrophic world-view. In their hearts and minds these ex-gas huffers, loser eccentrics, outsider artists, power rangers, hippy bums, vagabond photographers, new-wave filmmakers, beat dream writers, mushroomed musicians, and Loin scum misfits are bound together by a sublimely idiotic destiny – redemption through mopeds.
Founded by world-traveling cyclists and photographers Benjamin Broad and Graham French, the Creatures of the Loin emerged as an illogical conclusion to a desire for self-sufficiency. Moped riders pride themselves on being independent. Since most of the COtLs mopeds were manufactured in the 1970s, repair has become a do-it-yourself post-industrial folk art form, passed down from experienced tinkers or gleaned from aged manuals. “One day we’ll find a way to make our mopeds run on alternative energies. I read recently that there are some new types of, hmm, was it batteries, that can run on urine, I would love to pee in my gas tank and take off into the night, across the lands never to be seen again,” proclaimed itinerant Benjamin.
Graham and another Creature, Lee Lil Buddy, have recently embarked upon an ambitious, if not foolish, expedition to the southernmost tip of South America. With a record-breaking 6-month 26,000 mile trip on Puch mopeds ahead of them, their return is uncertain. Luck, fate, no more than 25 pairs of socks, a few spare parts, and a video camera will guide them to Tierra del Fuego and back. Before leaving, Graham enthused, “Destination is prime, but all the stuff in between is the real good stuff.”
Conceptual artist, Erik Seidenglanz, aka the Creatures’ “Minister of (Dis)Information,” believes that mopeds are an overlooked incarnation of the Dymaxion Revolution, R. Buckminster Fuller’s utopian philosophy of the getting the most out of the least. “Benjamin has helped me retrieve a moped from my subconscious. The moped that he helped me build is powered by the perpetual motion of my mind. I think he must be my guardian angel. When I ride I’m happier…. As Creatures we are able to play in the best playground of all, Hitchcock land-San Francisco. Soon we will have an all-weekend- you can’t go home inner-city-camp-out in John Mclarren Park. Evey four months Creatures will send two members touring long distances to claim more territory and document their endeavors, next is East Asia and German Austrian Border.”
The Creatures’ commitment to mopeds verges on the absurd. Investing one’s life with unbridled fervor in something as inadequate as a moped is a subtle, personal type of anti-hegemony, a refusal of reality, a rejection of traditional hierarchies. It is a means to transcend the boredom of everyday life that allows the Creatures of the Loin to experience life with or with our intention. As Erik explains, “you perceive multiple experiences simultaneously through your moped. Time is elastic. The city is the Internet. With this moped, I’m able to truly access the city in drift. Like Bucky said, ‘we are all astronauts on spaceship earth.’ What’s your ride?”
creaturesoftheloin.com
Current Mood:  crazy
|
|
04:58 pm
[Link] |
we set paris on fire, radio edit. paris riots 2005 the LAST situationist
http://www.seahorseliberationarmy.com/inthestudio/wesetparisonfireRADIOedit.mp3
download the song , and share. its contextual. it done. give us feed back please pass this aroudn so it functions as communcae #1
http://www.seahorseliberationarmy.com/inthestudio/wesetparisonfireRADIOedit.mp3
download the song , and share. its contextual. it done. give us feed back please pass this aroudn so it functions as communcae #1
|
|
02:09 pm
[Link] |
just a little glimps of nothiing
so im holding out on every one... i have too much to say and do and show so here is just my fiat and treasure iland obsession like 1 percent of it.
http://www.seahorseliberationarmy.com/thingsof2005/page_1.html
|
|
01:46 pm
[Link] |
goog
Google is a "fantastic company making the Web better every day for all of us. But always 'remember you are mortal, Caesar,' and act accordingly
|
|
11:59 am
[Link] |
I will never stop TALKING about BUCKY FUCK YOU IF YOU CAN TAKe me serious
A designer is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist.
R. Buckminster Fuller
A proverb is much matter distilled into few words.
R. Buckminster Fuller
By 2000, politics will simply fade away. We will not see any political parties.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Dictators never invent their own opportunities.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Don't fight forces, use them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Either war is obsolete, or men are.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Everyone is born a genius, but the process of living de-geniuses them.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Everything you've learned in school as "obvious" becomes less and less obvious as you begin to study the universe. For example, there are no solids in the universe. There's not even a suggestion of a solid. There are no absolute continuums. There are no surfaces. There are no straight lines.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Faith is much better than belief. Belief is when someone else does the thinking.
R. Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb, not a noun proper or improper.
R. Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb, not a noun.
R. Buckminster Fuller
God is a verb.
R. Buckminster Fuller
God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Gold and silver from the dead turn often into lead.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Great nations are simply the operating fronts of behind-the-scenes, vastly ambitious individuals who had become so effectively powerful because of their ability to remain invisible while operating behind the national scenery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Here is God's purpose - for God, to me, it seems, is a verb not a noun, proper or improper.
R. Buckminster Fuller
How often I found where I should be going only by setting out for somewhere else.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Humanity is acquiring all the right technology for all the wrong reasons.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I am convinced all of humanity is born with more gifts than we know. Most are born geniuses and just get de-geniused rapidly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I just invent, then wait until man comes around to needing what I've invented.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I look for what needs to be done. After all, that's how the universe designs itself.
R. Buckminster Fuller
I'm not a genius. I'm just a tremendous bundle of experience.
R. Buckminster Fuller
If humanity does not opt for integrity we are through completely. It is absolutely touch and go. Each one of us could make the difference.
R. Buckminster Fuller
If you are the master be sometimes blind, if you are the servant be sometimes deaf.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Integrity is the essence of everything successful.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Let architects sing of aesthetics that bring Rich clients in hordes to their knees; Just give me a home, in a great circle dome Where stresses and strains are at ease.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Love is metaphysical gravity.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Man knows so much and does so little.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Most of my advances were by mistake. You uncover what is when you get rid of what isn't.
R. Buckminster Fuller
My ideas have undergone a process of emergence by emergency. When they are needed badly enough, they are accepted.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Nature is trying very hard to make us succeed, but nature does not depend on us. We are not the only experiment.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Ninety-nine percent of who you are is invisible and untouchable.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Now there is one outstanding important fact regarding spaceship earth, and that is that no instruction book came with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Out of my general world-pattern-trend studies there now comes strong evidence that nothing is going to be quite so surprising and abrupt in the future history of man as the forward evolution in the educational process.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Parents are usually more careful to bestow knowledge on their children rather than virtue, the art of speaking well rather than doing well; but their manners should be of the greatest concern.
R. Buckminster Fuller
People should think things out fresh and not just accept conventional terms and the conventional way of doing things.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we've been ignorant of their value.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Rashness is the faithful, but unhappy parent of misfortune.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Search others for their virtue, and yourself for your vices.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Sometimes I think we're alone. Sometimes I think we're not. In either case, the thought is staggering.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Tension is the great integrity.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The earth is like a spaceship that didn't come with an operating manual.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The end move in politics is always to pick up a gun.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The most important thing about Spaceship Earth - an instruction book didn't come with it.
R. Buckminster Fuller
The pyramids, attached with age, have forgotten the names of their founders.
R. Buckminster Fuller
There is nothing in a caterpillar that tells you it's going to be a butterfly.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Those who play with the devil's toys will be brought by degrees to wield his sword.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Thou mayest as well expect to grow stronger by always eating as wiser by always reading. Too much overcharges Nature, and turns more into disease than nourishment. 'Tis thought and digestion which makes books serviceable, and give health and vigor to the mind.
R. Buckminster Fuller
To expose a 4.2 trillion dollar ripoff of the American people by the stockholders of the 1000 largest corporations over the last one-hundred years will be a tall order of business.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Tombs are the clothes of the dead and a grave is a plain suit; while an expensive monument is one with embroidery.
R. Buckminster Fuller
Truth is a tendency.
R. Buckminster Fuller
War is the ultimate tool of politics.
R. Buckminster Fuller
We are called to be architects of the future, not its victims.
R. Buckminster Fuller
We are not going to be able to operate our Spaceship Earth successfully nor for much longer unless we see it as a whole spaceship and our fate as common. It has to be everybody or nobody.
R. Buckminster Fuller
What usually happens in the educational process is that the faculties are dulled, overloaded, stuffed and paralyzed so that by the time most people are mature they have lost their innate capabilities.
R. Buckminster Fuller
You can never learn less, you can only learn more.
R. Buckminster Fuller
|
|
06:24 pm
[Link] |
http://media.putfile.com/creatures/800
http://media.putfile.com/creatures/800
|
|
10:49 am
[Link] |
THiS IS A GAME!
im off to the belly of the beast. los angles. need to finish this cover art , need to see sean im gone.
|
|
04:21 pm
[Link] |
re: Television Delivers People by Richard Serra
re: Television Delivers People by Richard Serra
Hold My Life by The Replacements
The distinction made between "video art" and "guerilla TV" is one that has its
uses, but should not be considered definitive. There are few, if any, "avant-
garde" videotapes that could truly fall within one of these categories. Rather,
most video makers integrate both socio-political and aesthetic issues in their
work. This should demonstrate that "art" and "activism" are not two opposing
impulses, but simply words given to specific forms of creative expression
within the medium. They refer to certain aspects of independent video
productions, and serve to place these works within a generalized interpretive
framework, but they are not antithetical nor mutually exclusive concepts.
This seems so obvious as to cause one to wonder how this false dichotomy arose.
No doubt it was due to the political agendas of the individuals who first began
working with the new medium. They specifically abdicated their status as
"artists" -- at least in name. This was done to remove the work from the
context of the "art world," with all of its ties to commerce and government.
Thus, independent video makers could be liberated from the constraints of the
Establishment, and so set about to dismantle it.
However, this was an exercise in self-deception. These people were artists, and
they were engaging in creative activity, regardless of what they called it. The
mere fact that this work was immediately absorbed into the art establishment
illustrates its true nature. One can say "This is not art" until one is blue in
the face, but if the work ends up being studied in a college art history class,
the claim appears completely ludicrous.
Of course, the first people to make this mistake were the Dadas. They, however,
can be forgiven, considering the novelty of the idea at the time of its initial
exposition, and the overall historical context. Dada was a necessary phase in
the development of modern art: the belated assassination of social conventions
and academic restraints. It enabled artists to start afresh, to explore
hitherto inaccessible realms of expression.
Unfortunately, the Fluxus movement, as well as those "guerilla" people (who
claimed not to be artists at all) merely resurrected an art form which was no
longer valid. This derivative approach was the first sign of the degeneration
of the arts, later to be canonized as "postmodernism."
The art/activism polarization also disintegrates when one considers guerilla
actions undertaken by "established" artists, who willingly operate within the
systems of state and commerce. Surely among the most radical of acts was
Richard Serra's broadcast of Television Delivers People. Here, a well-known
sculptor has chosen to brazenly display anti-establishment sentiments within
the context of corporate broadcast TV. (How did he get away with this???) There
can be no doubt that Serra considers himself an artist. He has used that status
to infiltrate the System to attempt to effect revolutionary change in mass
consciousness. This is true activism, even though it was placed in an aesthetic
context from the outset.
The lines get even more blurry when those activist messages are finally co-
opted by the very industries they seek to criticize. For example, the music
video for "Hold My Life" by The Replacements has a somewhat radical character
in that it violates the conventions of "commercial art." However, one cannot
consider it "fine art," because despite its superficial overtones of consumer
alienation, it remains a product to be parlayed solely for customer
gratification. (It seems paradoxical that alienation is now a commodity, but a
quick review of the punk rock movement shows that rebellion is easily bought
and sold by multinational corporations.) Nor is "Hold My Life" effective as a
guerilla action, and for the same reasons. Ultimately, the video reinforces the
status quo, and does not threaten the capitalistic structures which sustain it.
It is infinitely significant to note that the only intelligible text in the
piece other than the chorus line, "Hold my life," is the copyright message at
the end. After three minutes of ersatz political rhetoric, the viewer is given
a glimpse at the true underlying meaning of the piece ...
|
|
12:39 pm
[Link] |
Play is the only way!
For centuries, the work ethic has kept us chained to our jobs and routines. But the Play Ethic will change all that. Writer and social commentator Pat Kane explains why all work and no play is bad for us and bad for business
Sunday October 22, 2000
The Observer
This we know: we're stressed-out, debt-ridden, exhausted. We have less time for our families than we feel we should have. We take fewer pleasures from our entertainments and consumptions than we expected to take. We feel less connected to our communities than we ever did. In our workplaces, we subject ourselves to routines and duties which at best seem pointless, at worst unethical or immoral. Yet we also feel like hollow citizens, too weary to respond to any political entreaty with anything other than a shrug. In short, we are workers.
Yet why do we meekly accept this condition, when our brave new technological future - the amazing potential still to be unleashed in computers, genetics and molecular engineering - could change it utterly? Why, with all this power at our disposal, do we still feel like mere objects ourselves?
But this is how the work ethic continues to grip us. It doesn't matter how many machines could do our more tedious mental and physical labours. Forget the promise of the future, or even the possibilities of the present. Too many of us still regard turning up for work, however dispiriting or futile, as the very mark of inclusion and legitimacy, the measure of our moral fibre. 'I put in the hours, therefore I am.'
Anything beyond the steely certainties of the work ethic seem either frightening or flaky: the oblivion of no job, the insecurity of self-employment, the turpitude of domesticity. So the treadmill is wearily mounted, once again - in absence of any alternative vision. Yet why believe in work, when work doesn't believe in you?
The constant watchwords of the new capitalism are flexibility, creativity, self-improvement. Workers are urged to 'get up to speed' with a runaway world: we must become mobile and tensile, enterprising and capable. Yet these injunctions come from companies which hire you for a year, six months, maybe even less; which might be taken over at any time; which try to wriggle out of long-term entanglements such as pensions, wage and holiday agreements; and which shed labour whenever there's a dip in the markets. Trying to excel for companies that are themselves transient, provisional and unforgiving will one day seem like the grandest folly.
When that realisation comes - that is, when the work ethic crumbles - then an intellectual vacuum will open up at the heart of contemporary capitalism, and we'll need a Big Idea. Over the last decade, we've already seen a procession of not-big-enough ideas - 'downshifting', 'work-life balance', all those slackers and idlers. None of them with much success or distinction.
They all try to speak to our deep common anxiety: that if we keep up our loyalty to the work ethic, in a world where competition, mutability and innovation rule supreme, we will destroy ourselves.
The LSE's Richard Sennett calls this the 'corrosion of our characters' - where the acids of the new capitalism eat away at the old industrial virtues of self-discipline, sacrifice and duty.
What we need is a new, similarly powerful social ethic for these hyper-demanding times. Some other world view that can give meaning to our busy lives. Something that could make all these demands for 'creativity' and 'achievement' worth the effort.
I play, therefore I am
Welcome to the play ethic. First of all, don't take 'play' to mean anything idle, wasteful or frivolous. The trivialisation of play was the work ethic's most lasting, and most regrettable achievement. This is 'play' as the great philosophers understood it: the experience of being an active, creative and fully autonomous person.
The play ethic is about having the confidence to be spontaneous, creative and empathetic across every area of you life - in relationships, in the community, in your cultural life, as well as paid employment. It's about placing yourself, your passions and enthusiasms at the centre of your world.
By clearing space for activities that are pleasurable, voluntary and imaginative - that is, for play - you'll have better memory, sharper reasoning and more optimism about the future. As Brian Sutton-Smith, the dean of Play Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, says, 'The opposite of play isn't work. It's depression. To play is to act out and be wilful, exultant and committed, as if one is assured of one's prospects.'
So to call yourself a 'player', rather than a 'worker', is to immediately widen your conception of who you are and what you might be capable of doing. It is to dedicate yourself to realising your full human potential; to be active, not passive.
The play ethic is what happens when the values of play become the foundation of a whole way of life. It turns us into more militant producers and more discriminating consumers. It causes us to re-prioritise the affairs of our hearts, to upgrade the quality of our emotional and social relationships. It makes us more activist in our politics, but less traditional in their expression. And most of all, the play ethic forces us to think deeply about how we should pursue our pleasures - and how we reconcile that with our social duties.
So, just like the work ethic, the play ethic is a set of feelings and principles. But the difference between the two is huge. Work is always (to coin a phrase) the involuntary sector - the realm of necessity, where men and women have to do what they have to do. But as Sartre says, play is what you do when you feel at your most free, your most voluntary.
When every positive decision you make about your life carries both a risk, and a promise, of something new and challenging taking place. This is why the play ethic isn't 'the leisure ethic': the last thing it involves is slumped relaxation.
Ever since the 'Protestant ethic' achieved its dominance in the 18th and 19th centuries - making sure that workers turned up at the factory gates every morning - work has tried to keep play's unpredictable energies at bay.
Play has been corralled into the pen of 'leisure' and 'entertainment' - the workers' playtime, where we undergo 'recreation' for the next day's grind. Or it has been infantilised as an immature state of being, a permissible excess in the young, which all serious adults must put behind them. Or play has erupted through the cracks of our well-managed lives, as a series of counter- culture movements in the West - from the beats to the hippies, from punks to the ravers, from 'no future' to 'no logo'.
Yet it's only over the last half-decade or so that the conditions have been ripe for the values of play to assume their rightful place in modern life. This is the grand loosening-up of Western societies, under the pressures of feminism, market forces, and latterly our powerful new technologies. These pressures have untied all those constraints of class, gender and identity which secured our loyalty to the work ethic. Men and women now live in 'risk societies', where so many more choices and decisions have to be made about life. What do I need to survive? Is this safe to eat? Should I stay with this person? What am I going to do now?
Never before in history have so many individuals felt so individualised. We are 'developing a feeling for freedom', in the words of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. But the values of work throw a damp, heavy blanket over that development. The work ethic was always about battering down our responses, regimenting out behaviour - all those Christian inhibitions that were drilled into the 18th and 19th century worker, so that he could divide himself (and his labours) for the better workings of industry. Being a player, by contrast, is about the freedom to be inventive, nurturing and modern.
Brave new office
Why must we kill ourselves... for work? The play ethic is an attempt to kick-start a new conversation about how we bring creativity and dynamism into the heart of everyday life. We can start the conversation in one obvious place - with the overlords of the new capitalism, both in politics and business. Stop trying to corrode our characters, in Richard Sennett's words - and start helping us evolve and strengthen our characters.
If we need to 'get up to speed', then give us the right kind of vehicle, with the best possible fuel, to accelerate. Don't use your powerful technologies to regiment and discipline us, to squeeze more work out of fewer numbers and discard the remainder: use them to liberate as many people as possible into lives of self-determined activity and increasing fulfilment. Treat us as players rather than workers, and the promise of this new century might well be realised. Believe in us, and we might believe in you.
The play ethic holds out the chance that people can indeed increase their capacity to cope with this intrinsically demanding future. But if we're going to advance ourselves, we can't do it by ourselves. To be blunt, a world fit for players won't happen without a huge and visionary reinvestment in the public sector, and an even greater rethink of standard business practice - both taking the maximisation of human potential as their aim. Yet the movements in this direction so far have been pathetically inadequate.
We need the kind of tax-and-spend policies which would frighten the horses of the Treasury (despite the fact that each of these ideas are well-represented in the mainstream media and politics of mainland Europe and Scandinavia).
But that's not all. We'd need a welfare system that invested in and sustained our non-working lives, rather than distrusted and demonised them. And a powerfully comprehensive education system, funded way beyond current levels, aimed at establishing an 'intellectual democracy'. And an employment policy which set industry-wide targets for a progressive reduction of the working week to 35 hours, with no loss of pay.
On this, the politics of the play ethic is unashamedly democratic. It's the majority of the population, not just the much-vaunted 'knowledge elites', who should get to be players. Reducing work hours is one way (among others) of sharing out the 'clever' jobs.
And no one should doubt that employment will be getting cleverer and cleverer. As US technology critic Jeremy Rifkin says, the industries of the 21st century won't require a mass labour force. 'But they will require the best minds working together with very sophisticated software and wetware - computer and genetic technology. The Industrial Age ended slave labour. The biotech and infotech century is going to end mass wage labour. So what are we going to do with everybody?'
'We don't have a social and political vision', continues Rifkin, 'that is powerful enough to match these new technologies. We can't imagine what human beings could do if they're not needed in the marketplace or for government service.'
The play ethic is exactly that vision - an attempt to imagine what human beings could do under these coming conditions. Not slumped in front of the television, not lost in a narcotic stupor, not listless or apathetic or passive - but an imaginative, engaged and active citizenry. Active because motivated, and motivated because there is an intimate, enriching connection between who they really are, and what they actually do. In the words of Brian Sutton-Smith, 'Play as the action in which we truly live.'
All power to the soulitariat!
So who's playing right now? Has anyone escaped the bonds of the work ethic and broken through to the other side?
At the beginning of this new century, the social group that seems to be playing for keeps is the digital generation. For them, play is naturally what you do with your world: there's no angst or self-loathing about it. The technology that hovers like an axe over the neck of the traditional worker is more like a toy for them - a means of empowerment, not exploitation. They've left for the Playstation, these screenagers and cybernauts, and they're never coming home. This is the generation that was allowed to download their lives for free - browsers for nothing, web-mail for nothing, bootlegged software for nothing. So they've already got a weird, almost dotcommunist sense of property rights, which subverts the work ethic at its core.
When the Net-Gens graduate from college, and go to the job market, the first thing they do is play around with the idea of a career itself. As a recent Industrial Society report says, these 'free workers' also want to find an emotional content in the work they're doing. They wish to cut deals with employers that maximise their control of their time, their environment, their personal commitments. They don't believe that fun and pleasure should be confined to after-hours: they want it when they draw a wage as well.
They are neither the yuppies of the 80s, nor the downshifters of the 90s. They are eager to take all the opportunities that the new network society can offer, but wise enough to realise that wage-labour is only one strand in their life stories.
We've been struggling to describe them over these last few years - Gen-X to Gen-Y, alt.dots to screenagers. Let's risk another term, which tries to express their playful balancing of employment, environment and experience. The bearers of the play ethic, right at the heart of the new economy, are a different kind of worker: not proletarians, but 'soulitarians'. These are the backpackers of Alex Garland's The Beach , using cheap flights and travel literature to make the world their playground. These are the ravers who grew up, but who can't (and won't) forget those blissed-out moments of transcendence, when drugs and beats blurred the boundaries of their selves.
Great experiences matter to soulitarians as much as cool commodities. In the late 50s, the radical historian EP Thompson anticipated this in his famous essay on Time and Industrial Capitalism . Musing on what a post-work society might be like, Thompson suggested that its rhythms might rely 'neither upon the seasons, nor upon the market, but upon human occasions'. Which has happened: the soulitarian is above all a connoisseur of 'human occasions', from festival to tourist trail, from anti-corporate carnival to urban hang out.
True players wield a huge bargaining chip in their dealings with the new capitalism. They understand the core political fact of the knowledge economy: you need my brains, and my heart, and my willingness, more than I need your money and security.
The soulitarians happily flit between start-up and corporation, self-employment and job-sharing, being paid in cash and being paid in kind. If and when they work, they work because they want to.
The fact is that you don't have to be a dotcommer to be a player. It remains the case that almost everybody can be a soulitarian. The work ethic was essentially mind control: industry had to find a way to exploit the worker's body - so it had to tether his or her mind with a whole weight of guilt, shame and status. But now the worker's body is useless, replaced by ever smarter machines, industry is left with the workers' mind to exploit - and that's proving extremely difficult. For every time you ask a mind to reskill and upgrade, you make that mind more aware of its singular talents, subtler in its workings - and, therefore, more demanding about the life it wants to lead. The 'smart' workers are getting too smart for their own good.
Play times
So the play ethic can be embraced by more than the digital generation, those dotcom munards playing the future with their mouses and joysticks. Behind the soulitarians are the lifestyle militants. They are older; more conventionally employed in the information industries; mostly parents with children, but singletons and post-marrieds, too.
For them, being a player is about civilising the workplace, and then about putting work in its proper place. With employers, their demands are for virtual working rather than presenteeism, for collegiality over hierarchy, for information-sharing over empire-building. They want more free time because, with all their accumulations of children and partners, skills and experiences, they 'want a life'. And with the half-way point approaching soon, they're becoming militant in their pursuit of happiness.
When our non-work lives become more significant than our work lives, we become less tolerant of our office pathologies - the power-games, the sharp practice, the empty values. The play ethic raises the stakes here: to be a player is to be confident enough in one's abilities to seek the best possible environment for paid employment - either by kicking up a fuss in the organisation, or hap pily moving outside it into self-employment (becoming a consultant, a freelancer, or starting your own company). Meaningful work and serious play become the same thing.
Lifestyle militants come in many stripes, and with diverse motivations. For example, many women battling for workplace recognition of their parental responsibilities have been delighted by the increasing amounts of working fathers also joining the fray.
But it's still a gentle tide, rather than a thundering advance. And perhaps one reason for this tentativeness is that masculinity in the UK is a mess. It's wandering somewhere between New Man, Old Man and New Lad. British men are cripplingly divided about their responsibilities to their partners, their children and their communities. In fact, it's rare to find men even willing to discuss these issues among themselves.
Play might well be one new way of enlisting men in the battle for more free time. The wager might be: what happens when all work and no play makes Jack a bad father? As Anthony Clare points out in his recent book on masculinity, there are specific skills that men can bring to the nurturing of their children - vigorous games, fiddly projects on table tops, trainspotterish enthusiasms.
One way to turn a recalcitrant father into a radical father might be to appeal to the permanent big kid inside him: it's ethically right to want to play with your children, to enjoy that activity in and for itself. If that doesn't place men side by side with women in the battle for more parental rights, nothing will.
Of course, the fields of play extend wider than the family. Recent months have brought news of a backlash against parents rights: non-parents are beginning to complain about having to 'cover' for their parental colleagues, posing very uncomfortable questions for their employers. If John and Mary can get time for their children - whether they're sick, running in the school races, or grappling with Lego - why can't I get an equal amount of time off work?
Proponents of the play ethic would answer: well, why not indeed? If we understand play as the exercise of human freedom and self-fulfilment, from birth to death, then of course the playtime of the childless and the single should be equally rated. Rather than set themselves against radical parents, the 'child-free' advocates should join with them. Together, they could make a powerful common front for more humane employment conditions in the mainstream of the new capitalism.
The idea of 'downshifting' always had the faint implication of stepping back from an active life. The play ethic isn't for 'voluntary simplicity', but for voluntary complexity. That famous 'juggling act' - between work and non-work, individual and community, pleasure and duty - should be something which we enjoy rather than rue. But only because we've been to the best juggling schools that money can buy. Which makes us skilled enough to pick up the clubs when they fall, and get back in the ring, along with all the other acrobats, tumblers and trapeze artists.
Playing hardball
At this point, one can distinctly hear the hooting derision of the employers' organisations, several leading politicians, and maybe one or two trade union leaders. The play ethic! Good old British shirk ethic more like. Isn't this an argument for the return of the Skivers' Charter?
Yet the play ethic isn't anti-capitalism, but capitalist reform - and it's no less urgent for that. Like the work ethic was in its own time, the play ethic is a sincere attempt to legitimise a specific economic order.
The policy goals of the play ethic aren't rocket science: all have their benchmarks in normal European politics. Harmonising with France and Italy on a strict 35-hour week, which comes into full operation in both countries on 1 January 2001, is an obvious opportunity.
The French experience has been mostly a political success: reducing unemployment, redistributing the smarter work among a wider social class, and even increasing productivity levels (by trading shorter hours for more flexible work patterns at no loss of pay). Yet, more importantly, it has released millions of French citizens back into their own lives - with time to socialise, spectate, self-improve. As Lionel Jospin says: market economy, not market society.
The next target is a continent-wide citizen's income, guaranteed to all, bundling all existing benefits and tax credits into one payment. Here, the play ethic respectfully asks that the rhetoric of the Third Way line up with reality. How can those lower down the income scale be expected to become 'enterprising' and 'dynamic', embracing all the risks of the age, when one step away from paid employment sends them either into economic debt, or marks them with the stigma of welfare dependency?
Reskilling, taking several jobs in a lifetime, adapting to different styles of working - this is all about work as a discontinuous, constantly uneven and surprising realm. How can this discontinuity be made an opportunity rather than a threat? We can only all be players if we are enabled to be so.
Beyond the French-Italian axis, countries such as Holland and Denmark have had success with their systems of 'voluntary unemployment': every worker having the right to one year's leave in their working life, distributed as they see fit, with a state payment at somewhere around 60 to 70 per cent of their original wage. Apart from maintaining high-employment levels - and no noticeable reduction in national productivity - a citizen's wage enables people to feel that their non-work lives are socially esteemed.
The last obvious policy is in education. There is already a gathering counter- consensus in the UK around educational reform, led by voices such as Tom Bentley of Demos, CreativeNet and the Scottish Council Foundation: they want to stop 'factory schools turning out factory minds'. The creative child can imagine new problems (rather than have them handed down to them); mingles ideas easily from one realm to another; makes mistakes, as long as they lead to more interesting solutions; and focuses on goals with all their powers of attention. That's a textbook list of the psychological attributes of play.
Yet creative education should be about more than producing fodder for the 'creative industries', or a better class of info-worker. The democratisation of creativity could save lives - or, at a minimum, turn those lives away from self-destruction. If the play ethic means anything tangible, it is about occupying the gap that drug culture occupies in our poorest communities. And that gap is created by the distance between 'work' as it stands - Job-Seekers' Allowances, McEmployment of all kinds, the spiritual tedium of 'workfare' Britain - and the individuals who cannot (or will not) conform to its dictates.
Drugs, you could say, are the dream-seekers' allowance: the most expedient way to boost your sense of human potential, when all the official routes heading towards that end seem rubble-strewn, or impossibly long, or depressingly unrewarding. What Ibiza has really 'uncovered', for all its reckless, oafish hedonism, is an inarticulate but deeply-felt rejection of the false dignities of contemporary labour. 'I'm largin' it' should be taken literally: it means 'My precious self is bigger than this mousy, pointless social role.'
An education for creativity which wanted to be truly 'inclusive' would have to listen to this elemental and popular desire for playfulness. It's linked to an earlier, more carnival- esque Britain, evidently not entirely swept away by industrial capitalism. A time of 'happy Mondays' and 'the soul's play-day', when 18th-century Gloucester bishops complained about 'loutish mobs that are drunk with the cup of liberty'.
Teachers would have to find ways to tap into these disruptive energies, and turn them into a repertoire of usable life skills. That means, among other new approaches, that the much-abused 'media and cultural studies' would at last get its proper curricular due. Bringing context and history to pop songs, computer games and tabloid TV could provide kids with an exit route from the cul-de-sac of these escapisms, into richer areas of cultural tradition and understanding.
Economists who've read their Marx often talk about education as part of the 'reproduction of labour' - the place where the character of the good worker is made. The play ethic wants an education which aims at the reproduction of creativity, the nurturing of the good player's soul. Children should leave schools feeling motivated, in command of their faculties and capable of expressing themselves in ways which both please themselves and others. Why would such a child choose the temporary utopia of drugs over the actual joys of skilful self-creation? Why would they not choose to play?
Playing for keeps
Yet if arguments from the mainstream won't convince our new capitalist establishments of the need for serious reform, then perhaps a revolt from the margins will. The waves of anti-corporate and anti-globalisation demonstrations over the past 18 months, from Seattle to Prague, should be warning enough to the new capitalist establishment: they need to change their ways, and fast. If any movement takes the values of play to their most militant political conclusion, it's the 'no-logo' radicals so ably described by Canadian author Naomi Klein.
They rub global brands such as Starbucks, Nike and Gap in their own exploitative dirt. And by doing so, they withdraw their consent from the new capitalism, in exactly the ways they need it most: from the head and the heart. We're not going to play your games anymore. We're going to play our own.
And play they do - from their use of the net to co-ordinate global protest, to their subversion of billboards and public advertising; from the rave atmosphere of their street protests, to the humour and wit of their sloganeering. It's the combination of spontaneity and absorption, of applied creativity and voluntary action - in short, their identity as players - that defines their politics. How must those corporate marketeers who are trying to calculate the 'lifetime value' of future generations feel about these young semiotic terrorists, these gleeful 'non-sumers', who merrily puncture brands like balloons?
The anti-globalisers are still groping for an overall theory, or a defined political programme. Yet, as they do, they should look beyond their own tribes - environmentalists, trade-unions, third-world-firsters, disgruntled students, the digitally disaffected - and realise how much change they could catalyse.
At the moment the smashed shops and Monday-morning viruses to unsuspecting in-boxes (remember the 'I Love You' email?) are just shock tactics with diminishing returns. But, once the dust settles, what might the anti-capitalists bring to the politics of a play ethic? They might ask for fair trade, not free trade. For the use of information networks to co-ordinate global democracy, not just to facilitate the movements of global capital. For news media to reflect a much wider range of societal viewpoints. For marketing to talk about the efficiency, design and reusability of products - rather than emphasising the way they'll be the answer to our dreams. For political authority always to be justified, its legitimacy tested against the will of autonomous citizens rather than assumed.
What's the alternative? That an aggressive, business-driven order provokes further resistance - which could be a destructive mixture of cyber-terrorism and social intolerance, the computer virus and the funda mentalist commune. A ghastly prospect. But not improbable.
In the face of anti-capitalism, we have to devise a credible post-capitalism, a new balance between markets and society which can absorb all (or at least most) of the discontents that we all feel - from manager to tree- hugger, from worried mother to stressed worker. As a new 'spirit of capitalism' (to borrow from Max Weber), directing the new economy and its powers in the direction of human liberation, the play ethic has at least an even chance of striking that balance.
Beyond all the high concepts, the vision of a more playful world speaks to something elemental within us. Perhaps it is because our earliest selves are painstakingly built from acts of play. The hand and eye following the mobile in the cot; the meal that becomes a table-top collage; the cardboard box that turns into its own, rickety universe.
And perhaps it is no surprise that we adults feel tempted to suppress the intense, utopian joy of these memories. A time when the world was malleable, magical, under the thumb of our imaginations; a time when those around us were willing participants in the games and adventures of life, who shared our inexhaustible energies for the new and the challenging.
The radicalism of the play ethic is that it asks us to seriously consider what the American constitution calls 'the pursuit of happiness'. And the roots of our happiness, surely, lie deep in our playful selves. As well as all the previous prescriptions, proposals and policies, we could do worse than to occasionally becalm ourselves and try to recover those early moments - when the art of life was easily learned and joyfully practised.
So let's play. I believe it's our turn
|
|
01:48 pm
[Link] |
message is the medium... umm
"I don't necessarily agree with everything I say."
"Ads are the cave art of the twentieth century."
"Advertising is the greatest art form of the 20th century."
"Art is anything you can get away with."
"Money is just the poor man's credit card."
"There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew."
"Spaceship earth is still operated by railway conductors, just as NASA is managed by men with Newtonian goals."
"The Leonardo da Vinci of our time." (on Buckminster Fuller).
"We become what we behold. We shape our tools and then our tools shape us."
"We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror."
"People don’t actually read newspapers. They step into them every morning like a hot bath."
"All advertising advertises advertising."
"I may be wrong, but I’m never in doubt."
"If it works, it's obsolete."
|
05:46 am
[Link] |
PLAY PLAY pLAY
For blood and ideas to flow, there needs to be engagement - of the head, the heart, the body: there needs to be Play. Not trivial, diverting play, but serious play of boundaries, play of meaning, playing God, playing with ideas, playing to win, play of the day, power play. With play as the dominant ethos, each person in the team has a chance to make his mark: in a really playful team every one has a chance to score a goal. Play is the move from a finite game of success and failure to the infinite game of re-inventing the self, the product, the market and ultimately, the world we live in."
This is serious. Play as a formula for the foundation of empires.
Let's play!
-
pel@seahorseliberationarmy.com
|
|
06:38 pm
[Link] |
american apparel and bill o'riely
NO SEXUAL DEALING
History tells Bill O’Reilly to settle. Justice dictates he fight and stand. What would Thoreau do?
The conjoined lawsuits of Bill O’Reilly and Andrea Mackris contain everything future generations might want to know about what made this era so hopeless and rotten. Everything that made a farce of women’s struggle for equality in the workplace, causing outbreaks of violence against lawyers on the streets of major cities and eventually enabling the Taliban to become the third major party to come close to winning a U.S. election.
Their teachers will tell them it was lawsuits like this. Situations like this. It was the slow humiliation of a once-great nation having to constantly talk and think about fake crises and lurid garbage at a time when we needed our minds to be clear, at a time when we were facing true catastrophe. Most sexual harassment lawsuits are specious, driven by greed and rooted in their own brand of misogyny, the kind that infantilizes women, by sexualizing them and by commodifying their sexual distress. The only true liberation for women lies in their being freed from all angles of sexual determinism.
If we can't stop lechery, we can at least stop building a church upon it, stop measuring and quantifying and collecting it. Because to do so is only to be complicit with the very formula for regression that it implies, that we are inseparable from our sex value to a man, be it positive or negative.
The trouble here, as everywhere, is that we have lost all sense of proportion, justice and, most importantly, standards. Lechery is a drag—but it is not a crime. If the lechery makes it difficult to work, then report it. There isn't a corporate workplace in America that doesn't have an effective anti-sex-harassment policy in place that will instantly put the fear of all hell in any man who forgets the rules.
Bill O'Reilly is what he is, love him or hate him. But a $60 million sexual harassment lawsuit really ought to have some sexual harassment in it.
Instead, we have some very "inappropriate" whiskey-talk, or "boorishness" that can't quite attach itself to the larger conspiracy that is so hotly implied by its peddlers.
Nobody wants to deal with this on the human plane, like the fairly pedestrian matter it actually is. In America we don't think about things as emanating from the human realm, but rather from the unfathomable, alien realm, where only $60 million might set things straight again. "America is a pathetic place where something stupefying must always happen for fear we wake up," wrote William Carlos Williams. There must always be a fresh bogeyman in the unending flogging for purity, and everything must always be driven by fear and ugliness.
Liberals and conservatives have exploited this with equal relish over time, and lost most if not all of their credibility to address sexual harassment with a straight face. Still, the same hypocritical racket rises up each time, the same hand-wringing about sexual propriety, lust, power and judgment.
As of press time, the two sides appear to be negotiating a settlement.
What a bore.
I've read all the documents on both sides, and clearly O'Reilly has a strong case for extortion and could have used this moment to actually set some standards in this country. Everybody agrees it's one of the weakest sex-harass suits ever to come down the pike; for one thing, because it contains no touching, no quid pro quo sexual harassment (i.e., threats) and not a single complaint from Mackris prior to the big shakedown.
Tidbits emerge that aren't exactly confidence-inspiring: Andrea Mackris went to dinner repeatedly with Bill O'Reilly. She even went to his hotel room (where nothing happened). She herself is sexually outspoken, and maybe even exhibitionistic. She was divisive and capricious in the workplace, melodramatic, and deep in debt. She is rumored both to have had a crush on Bill O'Reilly and to have openly vowed to take him down. She returned to work for him after a few months at CNN, and he gave her a big raise. She never complained to anybody at Fox about the harassment, and even wrote an email to a friend gushing about how happy she was to be back at Fox, which she called "home."
Still, earnest liberals will ask of you that you entertain this as a serious case of sexual harassment.
I have been decrying the tyranny of sexual- harassment law for a decade, since I experienced one of these lawsuits first-hand in a lengthy federal court trial aimed against my then-employer. These things are carnivals of shame, fear, sadism and pedantry, and yet they have remained cloaked in a patina of pseudo-feminism and progressiveness. Far from liberating women, the terror reign has the potential to send women back to the stone age and ensure eternal warfare between the sexes.
When I offer up this point of view, those around me always get that fear in their eyes, as if I'm asking them to follow me underground to worship Satan. "But…but…don't you think sexual harassment is a real…problem…for women in the workforce?" they ask nervously.
Maybe. But I'm far more worried about the dictatorship that has grown up around these lucrative laws, the kangaroo courts and the mob-style whackings. The way people have been disappearing from their offices, around the country for years because they said something weird or inappropriate and their firms or universities didn't want any trouble. Can we talk about that?
If the Patriot Act worries you, this stuff ought to make your blood run cold.
THE LAW NEEDS to be amended to correct the rampant abuses, and the only way that will happen is if people don't settle. If, instead, they fight, we might see better standards enforced.
Sexual Harassment law, a part of the Title VII Civil Rights Act, is an open-ended set of loosely connected and ill-defined laws that "prohibits sex discrimination and sexual harassment in the workplace." Examples of sexual harassment include: "Unwelcome sexual advances, requests for sexual favors, verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature, and sexually suggestive or offensive personal references about an individual."
Then there is a laundry list of conditions that broaden the scope for the "victim," who does not even have to face the accused harasser once she's made the charges. The victim may be male or female, need not be of the opposite sex, need not have been economically injured or discharged, and does not even have to be the person harassed. It can be "anyone affected by the offensive conduct." The harasser in turn need not be the victim's supervisor, but can be a coworker, or even a non-employee.
Show me the behavioral psychologist who can delineate what "verbal or physical conduct of a sexual nature" may entail. It could be just about anything; people tend to weave sexual references into their patter and banter in a free society.
Add to those nebulous laws a mass influx of women into the workplace, bringing the dynamics of the home with them—father/daughter, mother/daughter—etc. Now add to that a hot market, a financial incentive for grievance. Millions of dollars start to change hands due to increasingly opaque charges and situations in which women were "made to feel uncomfortable."
And there you have a disaster in the making. Fear drives the prices up. The settlements are reached behind closed doors. Nobody fights it. Nobody dares question the substance or integrity of the "victim" because this may signal ideological impurity and may render that person vulnerable to attack.
If there were a way to measure the damage caused by sexual harassment in the souls and careers of the afflicted women next to the damage caused by the litigious and often extortionist machinery that cracks down on it, I am certain we would see that the cure is worse than the disease.
This is what makes the Bill O'Reilly case interesting, and pivotal.
TAKING KNEE-JERK exception to the idea that Bill O'Reilly may have been wronged, and fending off the bogeyman of their own sexuality, the legal pundits are busy redefining the word "extortion" for the American masses.
But lawyers are the worst people in the world at figuring out right from wrong. They only like to talk about what the law says, not what common sense says. If you want to know what's right and what's wrong, ask a child. What is betrayal? What is entrapment?
The legal punditry is arguing that what went down in the O'Reilly case is "common practice" in sexual harassment lawsuits: The aggrieved party goes knocking on a back door with cracked knuckles, seeking a "resolution" before a suit is filed. In this case, the aggrieved asked for anywhere between $60 million and $600 million.
Yes, it's "common practice." All that proves is that sexual harassment suits filed against high-profile, wealthy men (who coincidentally seem to commit all the sexual harassment you ever hear about) are generally preceded by extortion. No matter how much you may dislike Bill O'Reilly, surely you would agree that $60 million is too high a price to listen to him talk about vibrators. And this brings us to the next station of incoherent hypocrisy.
Only women are permitted to talk about vibrators in this country, and they can do it on prime-time tv. It's a sign of liberation.
If you find all of this a little confusing, you are not alone. The legal eagles are struggling mightily to make sense of it all, to keep the nation's soul dry-cleaned and germ-free. But O'Reilly complicated matters by getting mad as a bull. Clinton failed to get mad when he ought to have gone berserk. He should have said: "I am not going to let you people examine my genitals. Rewrite the Constitution if you have to. It's not going to happen."
I was hoping Bill O'Reilly would resist a settlement deal, and instead tell the American public what he means when he says this is the "most evil" thing he's ever seen. If that is indeed the case, then Thoreau would have wanted him to fight it—risk his career, risk everything and use "the whole of his influence."
O'Reilly is far from a clean-spun hero, and he is not even saying that he is "innocent" of the charges. He did what he did, and it was crude and bad and stupid. But it seems to me that by fighting back he could stand up to the tyrannical elements of sexual harassment accusations and focus our attention on how they operate. At this point in our history, that is far more important than the question of whether he's a sex fiend.
FOR EVERY IMPORTANT and honest sexual harassment claim, there are 99 dishonest, evil ones. What's now coming to light is the other side—the terror, the extortion, the sheer cowardice.
"I call it graymail," said my old friend Bob Guccione Jr., who prevailed in a sexual harassment lawsuit at Spin magazine at the peak of the hysteria in 1994. "It's legalized blackmail, because there is a presumption of guilt when they make the charge."
In that landmark case, plaintiff Staci Bonner's lawyers asked for several hundred thousand dollars in hush money prior to filing a lawsuit. Guccione, like O'Reilly, surprised his accuser by fighting the case rather than settling.
It was a bouillabaisse of charges: Guccione had "sexualized the workplace," permitted a "hostile work environment" and "offered professional advancement in exchange for sexual favors."
The entire female staff was thereby subject to a taxidermy that removed their hide, stripped it of all they'd ever tried to achieve as professionals and hung it back onto them branded with a scarlet letter that supposedly proved they were nothing but objects of Guccione's desire.
The prosecuting attorney identifies herself as a feminist, as did the plaintiff and all of their supporters.
This is how I came to learn what these lawsuits are really about, and why I think Bill O'Reilly chose the right word when he said "evil."
I don't want to dignify the lawsuit by describing it further, but it is worth noting that despite several years of ruthless interrogation and a month-long Federal Court trial, they lost their case. The jury sided overwhelmingly with Guccione. I was central to the case, and affected in ways I can barely describe. The plaintiff had been my best friend at the magazine, somebody I thought of as a sister and trusted.
There is no stopping these juggernauts, no mechanism for protecting innocent people against having their lives destroyed by opportunistic lawsuits.
In those days, anything and everything sexual that was uttered or even hinted at in the workplace was treated like a form of rape. Somebody glanced at somebody's breasts in a corridor in 1989. Maybe. Somebody asked somebody's bra size for fact-checking purposes. Guccione repeatedly addressed female employees by saying: "Hello gorgeous!"
The insults and accusations were so random, in many cases having nothing to do with sex and something vaguely to do with being personable in the office. I recall being attacked in my two-day, 16-hour deposition torture session for writing "Happy Valentine's Day" at the end of a memo to two colleagues. The prosecuting attorney thundered: "Do you think that is professional Miss Farber?"
For god's sake. We were kids in our 20s, working at a rock magazine, and suddenly we were asked to defend, explain, justify and atone for everything we'd ever said, written, expressed, laughed at… to a total stranger who was suddenly empowered to impose her own standards for what "appropriate" behavior looked like at a mid-sized magazine in the 1980s.
It was weird. Inexplicable. Astounding. Terrifying. It was a net that came down from the sky.
The fear spread as more and more women found summonses slipped under their doors. There were lists, good women and bad women: Who had flirted with whom? Who had had sex with a colleague? With a boss? Who had laughed at sexual jokes? Who had worn short skirts?
At one point I said to Guccione's lawyers: Fine, if we must fight this as though it is a real "lawsuit," then so be it. But let's be clear: This is a mass hallucination. This is not real. It is a demonic fever and one day it will break, and we will look at all these accusations that once looked so damning and see that they are nothing at all. Nothing. A bunch of incoherent garbage.
Three years and many blighted lives later, when the jury returned its verdict it found substance in only one of six counts Bonner had leveled against Guccione and Spin—a charge of unequal pay—and awarded her a mere $10,000 in damages.
The lesson is twofold, and contradictory. If you choose to fight, you will be broken, driven half out of your mind from the ugliness of it all. It will take on average 10 years before you even begin to recover. But on the other hand, you may well win, because when this kind of reductionist, Newtonian, PC stuff actually lands in court, it rarely flies.
THE FEAR AT the core of sex-harass mania is spun from an outmoded blueprint on female sexuality that assumes exposure to unwanted sexual banter and/or pressure is not merely annoying, but profoundly "traumatic."
It can be—in severe and real cases. But the assumption itself is subject to the ever-changing mores and beliefs in the culture. And this is not the 1990s.
Just 10 years ago, it was assumed that any exposure to a sexual reference in any work context was demeaning, harassing and de facto horrifying to a woman. I don't know how or why that belief came about, but it may have to do with the 1980s über-idea that sex is lethal, that every erection is a gun in a game of Russian Roulette. If sex is lethal, then sexual banter is dangerous.
Sexual harassment law, culture and beliefs grew during an era of unprecedented sexual hysteria, and we were left with the subtext of those old, dead beliefs.
But now the pendulum has swung, and we are once again in an era of sexual indulgence, if not mania. How can sexual harassment be measured in a culture awash in sex? How can anybody know what's "inappropriate" when television pours out sex continually, peaking with a hit show about four women who don't even wear underwear and share every single gory detail of their sex lives with anyone willing to listen?
Asking whether Bill O'Reilly is "guilty" is the wrong question. The question is how to measure the alleged damage, once the culture has reversed itself and gone from anti-sex hysteria to pro-sex hysteria. In sexual harassment cases, the supposed injury is internal, subjective, personal and impossible to quantify. That's what makes them so dangerous, not just to men, but to women. To humanity. What's dangerous is the lack of objective standards. Sexual harassment has become anything anybody wants it to be.
In the case of Andrea Mackris, there is no touching, there is no quid pro quo, no threats, no firing. If she chose to stay on the line as O'Reilly "climaxed," and if she was indeed taping it, then she was consciously enabling—even staging—the very trauma for which she is now seeking multi-million-dollar recompense. It's an amazing case in many ways. A plaintiff who serves as a technical engineer to her own trauma: Rather than interrupt it, she records the trauma. This would seem to obviate the notion that the trauma was so severe as to require a $60 million salve.
You can't choose trauma, enable it and then sue for it. It has to be inflicted entirely against your will. Hence, the price is extortionist.
Yes, it may also be sexual harassment. But they blew that, by extorting Fox as a first move. Sexual harassment must be recorded in the form of, among other things, complaints to managers at the workplace. You're supposed to try to stop it as a first measure. You can't just lay out a Roach Motel to collect specimens of boorish behavior and cut straight to the shakedown.
Like everyone else, I've read the parts of the lawsuit that were clearly verbatim transcripts of O'Reilly's decontextualized sex-talk. It's pretty generic stuff. What I really want is her end of the conversation. Were we to be given the full transcripts, we might resolve once and for all the so-called mystery of these unfortunate debacles.
These sorts of sex-eruptions never happen in a vacuum, and everybody knows it. They happen inside of a dynamic that is fully understood only by the two people involved. This took a long time to develop. There were billions of signals between these two, a cosmos of communication both spoken and unspoken, and at some point the signals began to misfire; it got ugly. She might have been complicit up to a point, but that doesn't mean she encouraged it. She may have suddenly relived a childhood trauma and slammed on the brakes. A guy like Bill O'Reilly may not have been attuned to that. Men are not attuned to a lot of things. These things are impossible to decipher.
What was he doing? What was she doing? What were they after?
WHAT MADE HIM call her over and over? What made her go to dinner with him all the time? What made her not hang up when he allegedly pleasured himself on the phone?
Mackris' lawsuit, almost comically, concludes every x-rated monologue from O'Reilly with a clean, punctuating, "Plaintiff was repulsed."
The awful thing about these lawsuits is that we wind up in obscure chambers of the female psyche, where plaintiff is "repulsed," and it is simply the end of the world. This utterly subjective emotion is intended to justify a request for $60 million. Or $600 million.
What is repulsive is the market in corporate America for feminine sexual repulsion. It's a completely inflated market, where the price is arbitrary and infinite, because the injury can never be measured. It is a matrix of feelings that are being manipulated, and ultimately sold on a blackmail market driven by fear. This is a catastrophe of the capitalist system, one that commodifies every last bit of our humanity.
Having grown up in Sweden, that silly country where sex is viewed as part of nature, I have a split lens. It is a cliché and it has been said before, but Americans have very bizarre perceptions when it comes to sex, pornographically inclined yet puritanical at the same time. The women wield their sexual power, but don't understand it; they imbue it with way too much drama, hostility and paranoia.
The men, meanwhile, are severed from their feminine side, unable to express normal emotions; they interact with women like angry zoo-keepers. Sexual harassment is a symptom of a deep imbalance in the ecosystem between the sexes. I doubt there is any culture on Earth where women are expected to be as impossibly, relentlessly sexy as they are here, and at the same time, so uptight and punitive. As a Swedish male friend recently remarked: "Sexiness can itself become a kind of burqa, where the woman can't be seen."
I have been loath to admit it, but in America sex is the ticket to survival for women—still the meal ticket. It has taken me many years to grasp this. I could never understand why sexiness and femininity were so overwrought here—why such desperation? It must be fear. Fear of not surviving.
Sex, then, is a currency that can bring financial stability. If a woman's sexual "Yes" is commodified, then so is her sexual "No." In both cases, the culture objectifies the woman, obviates the private universe and creates a litigious hell on Earth. In a purely mechanistic world, you are nothing but the sum of your parts.
Bill O'Reilly's heavy breathing is no longer just a miscommunication between a man and a woman, but a miscommunication worth millions.
Consider the specifics of the O'Reilly/Mackris case and maybe you will begin to see why O'Reilly used the word "evil" to describe it. Premeditated entrapment and betrayal, for starters. Public humiliation on a scale beyond belief. The possible destruction of an entire career. Does this punishment fit the "crime"?
I do think that Bill O'Reilly objectified this woman. I also think that she objectified him, only much more egregiously. The strange thing is, she must have absolutely hated him to be able to do this. A woman with a normal heart fends off unwanted advances with skill, grace, deftness, consideration and maybe the occasional irritation. Not with an atomic bomb. Where is the humanity? And if we can conclude that she is bereft of humanity, then why must the nation drop what it is doing to address her violated emotions?
Her violated emotions?
ONE MAY ARGUE that a healthy man doesn't behave like O'Reilly did either. A man with a normal heart listens and decodes and senses a woman's responses—before he becomes expressive. For starters, they should be in a romantic relationship before the rest even begins.
But men are tone-deaf in that kind of corporate American culture. They are trained to think in terms of exchange and barter and power and sex. The more corporate an environment, the more likely it is that a man will become a sexual autist. If he has feelings for a woman, he beats them back like an evil snake. He can express sexual urges, but rarely with any real sense of direction or purpose. It's just sexual friction that goes out everywhere all the time—a deflated currency.
Bill O'Reilly is a kind of cultural id. He's a wounded, edgy, rather mean animal whose perceived virility lies in his courage to express what he likes in times of great censure. You might say his refusal to be repressed extended to his sexuality, and you might say that that's truly terrible. He's filled with vengeance over the emasculation of men in America over the past several decades, and with this injured libidinal pride, he's the perfect Avenging Hammer to the police state of sexual harassment law.
On behalf of many people who never got to fight back, I hope he resists the temptation to settle. That will only encourage the next dreadfully painful lawsuit and lead us nowhere in the real fight, which is the fight to understand ourselves and each other—to become more human, not less human. It may be strange to suggest that Bill O'Reilly could in any way protect the powerless, but I do hope he chooses the hard road—on behalf of all those who are walking around silent and maimed from things far stranger, far darker, far more evil than…phone sex.
|
|
03:11 am
[Link] |
im in montreall canada
im in canda , downtown montreall tell augaust 1st. then la.. then sf again
|
|
09:31 am
[Link] |
wealth :
the measurable degree of forwardly organized enviornmental control in terms of quickly convertable energy capacity and performance ration system capabilities per capita per diem.
|
|
12:10 pm
[Link] |
aa quote of the day
"i can't even fuck a girl if shes wearing a christian dior necklace."
"when the going gets weird the weird go pro." hts
Current Mood: flirty
Current Music: sockhouse for little girls that think they are ponies
|
12:09 pm
[Link] |
bad french tranlation of web article
Woah! Bande(orchestre) de tueur!. Ils sont appelés l'Armée Seahorse de Libération, un groupe de Guérillero de Dadaïste Fransiscan San auto-décrit Semioticians qui regarde vers, parmi d'autres choses, le coup sec français et la roche pour l'inspiration musicale. Ce travail est si imaginatif et psychotique de ligne de démarcation que je rectifie mes dents. Je veux entendre plus. Je veux acheter un album ou un EP de ces types. Vous devriez, aussi. En fait, allez à leur site Web maintenant et bien amusez-vous juste .
Vous rigolez le meilleur début entrant à cette bande(orchestre) pour que quand ils viennent à Toronto ils auront une foule agréable pour les accueillir à la ville et ils peuvent nous fouetter dans la forme avec leur roche furieuse, hilare, atroce et contagieuse n '
Rouleau(Rôle).
L'ARMÉE SEAHORSE DE LIBÉRATION - ABC Intro
Un des membres de la bande(l'orchestre) a mp3 fantastique blog appelé Drugburn, que vous devriez tous fréquenter si vous êtes dans la substance française. Il y a même une certaine Pouvoir-duperie (pour oser je dis la Duperie de Québec ?), comme ils ouvrent les garages des années 1960 Montréal pour quelques gemmes Quebec-n-roll.
Nous avons décidé de renoncer l'Edmonton spécial cette semaine en faveur d'un profil sur Drugburn, si au lieu de cela, je mentionnerai que les Rapports(Records) d'Accueil de Normales laisseront tomber un peu de maladie de piste de danse sur ce côté du pays réel bientôt.
***** MISE À JOUR DE NOUVELLES!!! MISE À JOUR DE NOUVELLES!!! (6/24/05)
Cette page, par un peu de coïncidence d'automatisation bizarre, est maintenant disponible dans pauvre, a littéralement traduit le français.
|
|
12:45 pm
[Link] |
the sla is saved .. are web space is saved my job is fun. i feel like a studess
the sla is save .. are web space is saved my job is fun. i feel like a studess
working for aa is awsome.
|
|
02:18 am
[Link] |
i start working for American Apperal tomorrow. whoa i have a job
i start working for American Apperal tomorrow. whoa i have a job
i now live somewhere haight and laguna and have invested in a bass
i have a phone too. manifest destiny
ok
only 275$ with laundry and internet boom for real. and a garage its like 1972 all over again
erik christopher seidenglanz
148b laguna st. san francisco, california
94102
1415-255-4981
and you can find me at the one of the 3 american apperals in san francisco
california@seahorseliberationarmy.com
|
|
12:56 pm
[Link] |
check this out! we set paris on fire! single unmastered. and cambodian ye ye song
http://www.seahorseliberationarmy.com/mp3/wesetparisonfire27.mp3
http://www.seahorseliberationarmy.com/mp3/yeyecambiodia.mp3
let me know what you think of the new we set paris on fire any crits.
|
[<< Previous 20 entries] |
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small}
cali_sla's journal