Juliet Clark kindly forwarded this excerpt from Prof. Louis Jordan's recent report on economic conditions in the San Francisco Bay area:

The wrong folks made it in my town --
They finally got in;
And now I can't even muscle up enough money
To buy a shot of gin.

Things that don't scare me, a very special episode: Ray Harryhausen dinosaurs. As Hotsy-Totsyite Juliet Clark commented while watching the inexplicably controversial season finale of "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "I can picture the Mayor guy ruling the world. I can't picture a computer-generated lizard ruling the world."

Juliet Clark writes:

Speaking of film noir: when somebody at the movie site where I used to work suggested doing a special item on Pam Grier, the 23-year-old Minnesota-born Swedish-American who was the company's most favored "content provider" sprung out of his slouch and cried, "Lemme do it! I AM Blaxploitation!!"

We've been tardy about noting the nice write-up that Juliet Clark's Art of Walt Disney received from peterme a while back:

Join Juliet Clark on a well-crafted, Disney-inspired reminiscence. There's something almost haunting about it.

Juliet Clark initiates Hotsy Totsy's Irony Watch with the following, overheard on Shattuck Avenue, Berkeley, California, August 18, 1999:

"Yeah, there have been an awful lot of yellowjackets around this summer. July and August are the big months for them. Ironically, all of the times I've been bitten by yellowjackets have been in July or August."

Back-to-School Thesis Fodder: Juliet Clark informs us that a superbly self-aware description of film noir style was supplied by John McGuire in what's commonly cited as the first example of the genre, The Stranger on the Third Floor:

"What a gloomy dump! Why can't they put in a bigger lamp?"

The lights are strung up, Cholly's strung out, and the Club's finally got the true holiday merchandising spirit prancin' and dancin' and donnin' and blitzin' in The Hotsy Totsy Discount Warehouse Outlet:

To our left and right, we see samples of Christina La Sala's and Steven Elliott's Cootie Catchers, published by Chronicle Books. Perfect ice-breakers for the tasteful yet shy, these cunning hand-and-eye-developers are sure to replace Dan Savage and the Magic 8-Ball as your mystic advisor of choice. Arthur Lee once asked, "Pictures and words: is this communicating?" Well, if he'd been talking about the pamphlets of Juliet Clark, we'd have to reply that they're even better than communicating! And at only $5 each, including postage, they're cheaper, too! Give three copies and their grateful recipient can shelve 'em under "Comix," "Memoirs," and "Small Press Collectibles" for easy access. The perfect stocking stuffer for those with large flat stockings. Ray Davis's and Christina La Sala's much bruited about film The Ichthyoid Syndrome ("THE BLAIR WITCH PROJECT OF OUR TIME!") is finally available for home entertainment centers. I'll ship a copy on a videotape or Zip disk at cost -- that's only 14 dollars! (Actually, it sounds like a lot to me, too, but that really is the cost, if you include the envelope and all.) Sure to be a collector's item, since normal people don't buy five-minute-long movies!

• And Anselm Dovetonsils makes this ruggedly handsome offer: for every little magazine in which you publish one of his poems, he will pledge to provide a rave review of a book published by your small press -- and if you publish him in an anthology sold in real book stores, he guarantees that his review will appear in the New York Times! No other poet can match such a promise this late in the holiday season! Remember: Dovetonsils will not be undersold!

Who needs food when the menu's so delicious? Department:

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive, to an imaginative and excited mind" - Emerson

The other interesting thing about BBC America is its occasional presentation of "One Man and His Dog" (or, as we prefer to call it in our more enlightened household, "Person with Puppie"). (Link via Juliet Clark) Most Americans probably only know of sheepdog competitions through their parody in Babe, but the real thing is infinitely better -- if you like to watch genuinely happy doggies more than computer-manipulated pigs, that is (and if you don't, why am I bothering to talk to you?), because nothing could be happier than a working dog working. "Lassie" is soft-core at its most deceitfully mawkish and showdog shows are Victoria's Secret catalogs, but "Person with Puppie" is real hard-core dog-lover porn, hurrah!

So, as with "Iron Chef", we get a TV show premise so sure-fire that it probably doesn't even need a match. But that's not all we get! We also get the heartbreakingly damp beauty of sheep-country scenery, a color commentator who makes John Madden look like George Bush, and shepherds who're usually unflaggingly patient, wildly accented, and sexier than Harvey Keitel by a long shot and a close up both.

Spoken, this is a very short story: The nicest father-and-son event I can remember was during my 1981 visit from college when we drove together to see Sam Fuller's war movie The Big Red One. When we got back home, my mother asked us, "So how was 'The Big Red One'?"

In print, it needs some explanation. Fuller's title refers to the numeral on the insignia of the First Infantry Division, and so each word carries equal weight: "the BIG, RED, ONE," like "the hootchie kootchie man" or "the solid gold Cadillac." Whereas my mother rendered its "one" more generically, swallowing it, as in "they're all very nice but I think I'll take the big red one."

When I told this story to Earl Jackson, I figured he'd say something about the Phallus, and then I'd say something about not talking that way about my mama, and so on. Instead he said, "That's evidence that English is a tonal language."

Juliet Clark has since pointed out another tonal moment in movie history: RKO's making Nicholas Ray change the title of his adapation of the novel Thieves Like Us (as in "all those judges and politicians are just thieves like us") because the audience might misread it as "The law-abiding public can't stand to watch this thing, but thieves LIKE us."

Support Our Sponsors: Here's Juliet Clark to tell us more!

"HAPPY MILLENINIUM [sic]!" from Playmobil HQ in Zirndorf, Deutschland, where smiling figures from an alternate Fisher-Price utopia transport kids over 4 into the paramilitary future via System X. Before and after: first encounter the Aerial Police Unit (aka SWAT team), then stay a while in the lovingly detailed Hospital Ward.

Although most of these toys are equally applicable to European and North American situations, there are some differences -- for instance, between the American and German versions of the "Western" scenes. (One shoots, the other doesn't.) And certain scenarios are reserved for American kids only -- e.g. the buffalo-hunting Injuns. On the other hand, the Germans get their own Sheriff's Office, "with prison cell and escape route". And only the Germans get to play in the Dschungel (Jungle), complete with colorful African mascot.

Movie Comment: Having finally gotten around to The Straight Story (Juliet Clark: "If you're in a bundle of sticks, you can't move"), it's nice to find out that Paul Verhoeven isn't the only Hollywood director with the courage to flaunt his interest in fascism.

The odd thing is that so many reviewers have acted as if the movie is an anomoly in David Lynch's career. He's always maintained good fascist family values: drugs, perversion, urban life, and foreign things are evil; tidiness, lawns, and young Aryans are good. It's just that this time round he didn't try so hard to creep us out with his idea of "evil." For that relief, I'm willing to count it as the best thing he's done since the full-bloodedly Victorian Elephant Man.

But relief and Freddie Francis aren't enough to bring it to the level of his first, where the creepiness came from within. Or, for that matter, to the level of Starship Troopers. I mean, which Nazi visual trope do you think looks coolest on the big screen: bucolic nostalgia or shiny uniforms?

Critics rave: "The drinking man's weblog... the stinking man's weblog. The blinking man's weblog." -- Juliet Clark

In more "I would've gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those meddling kids" news (via Berkeley High School alum Juliet Clark):

• In November 1999, the story was "Woman Dies As Result of Defective Gas Heater."
• On January 19, 2000, the story was "Landord linked to carbon monoxide deaths faces prostitution charges".
• In between came The Jacket:

  "Every other Bay Area newspaper just had the story of the tragic death, but we were finding out (the girl who died) wasn't even going to school and she was 17," said Megan, 16. "That made me think there was something bigger."

San Francisco présent (via Juliet Clark):

"The great goal so long sought had finally been achieved: that of making Paris an object of luxury and curiosity, rather than of use -- a ville d'exposition, a display city placed under glass... an object of admiration and envy to foreigners, unbearable for its inhabitants."

In "The Humble Genre Novel, Sometimes Full of Genius," David Mamet notices that all interesting literature has been genre literature, and still goes on to make a condescending ass of himself.

Only someone with genre-blinders firmly set could call Patrick O'Brian's elaborately archaic prose more "simple and straightforward" than Raymond Carver's or E. L. Doctorow's, or claim that the tedium of MFA fiction results from its "artiness" rather than its pointlessness, or publish their praise of happy genre peasants (too delightfully unselfconscious to realize that they should be devoting their intelligence to SOUNDING JUST LIKE EVERYONE ELSE) in the New York Times. (Link via Juliet Clark, who adds, "In the same hard-hitting issue: 'Has the End Finally Come for the Old Wooden Barn?'")

Hotsy Totsy at Large

• Juliet Clark's The Art of Walt Disney: New Concise Edition has gotten the little magazine treatment from HOW2.
• Defying the lynch mob around the Amazon boys, Beth Rust has posted an illuminating Johnny Western review.
• Anselm Dovetonsils is still seeking a publisher for his new collection of next-best-thing-to-free verse, War is Kind of. Nice polite quiet sweet publishers only, please!

The Bright Elusive Button Fly of Love

From PRODIGAL GENIUS: The Life of Nikola Tesla by John J. O'Neill:

"I have been feeding pigeons, thousands of them, for years; thousands of them, for who can tell --

"But there was one pigeon, a beautiful bird, pure white with light gray tips on its wings; that one was different. It was a female. I would know that pigeon anywhere.

"No matter where I was that pigeon would find me; when I wanted her I had only to wish and call her and she would come flying to me. She understood me and I understood her.

"I loved that pigeon.

"Yes," he replied to an unasked question. "Yes, I loved that pigeon, I loved her as a man loves a woman, and she loved me. When she was ill I knew, and understood; she came to my room and I stayed beside her for days. I nursed her back to health. That pigeon was the joy of my life. If she needed me, nothing else mattered. As long as I had her, there was a purpose in my life.

"Then one night as I was lying in my bed in the dark, solving problems, as usual, she flew in through the open window and stood on my desk. I knew she wanted me; she wanted to tell me something important so I got up and went to her.

"As I looked at her I knew she wanted to tell me -- she was dying. And then, as I got her message, there came a light from her eyes -- powerful beams of light.

"Yes," he continued, again answering an unasked question, "it was a real light, a powerful, dazzling, blinding light, a light more intense than I had ever produced by the most powerful lamps in my laboratory.

"When that pigeon died, something went out of my life. Up to that time I knew with a certainty that I would complete my work, no matter how ambitious my program, but when that something went out of my life I knew my life's work was finished."

"The gentleman reader cannot fairly be expected to work up a professional interest in a woman who picked up threads and ate them." -- newspaper review of The Shutter of Snow by Emily Holmes Coleman

Let's take it for granted that insanity is interesting. Why the gender gap, then? Why the Padded Ceiling?

One obvious reason is that well-educated women are (still) more likely to be institutionalized than well-educated men. As the old formula goes, women are institutionalized, poor men are jailed, and the rest of us pretty much do what we want.

Another (not necessarily unrelated) reason is that story-consumers and story-makers prefer that protagonists who show weakness be female. And going crazy and recovering are both pretty obvious signs of weakness. When I was trying to write fiction about loonies I've known, most of whom have been male, I felt immense internal pressure to turn them into female characters instead. (Like, try imagining Repulsion with a male protagonist. No, I mean it: try. It's good for you.) The standard storylines tell us that women go into institutions because they go crazy and men go into institutions because they're rebels. Women get better and men keep insisting they were right. (Sylvia Plath vs. Ezra Pound; The Shutter of Snow vs. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest....) Men-going-under stories tend to be about addiction rather than madness: appetite, not fragility.

But there's another reason for the twentieth century having produced so many of these stories: the number of untold and unrecoverable stories left over from the nineteenth.

"My mom says that when she was growing up in New Zealand in the Fifties, there were three career options for women: emigrate, become an airline stewardess, or go crazy." -- Juliet Clark

"Any woman learning Greek must buy fashionable dresses." -- Henry Adams regarding his wife, Clover Hooper Adams

"We are working very hard, but it is all for ourselves." -- Clover Hooper Adams

"I shall proclaim that any one who spends her life as an appendage to five cushions and three shawls is justified in committing the sloppiest kind of suicide at a moment's notice." -- Alice James

"I wish it might have been Worcester instead of Somerville which is such a smelly hideous place."

"Ellen I'm not real -- Oh make me real -- you are all of you real!" -- Clover Hooper Adams to her sister, a few months before her death

A hundred years' worth of vanished victims seems to call for at least fifty years' worth of survivor testimony: It is possible to come out of the bin; it is possible to describe it.... Of course, the downside of so much survivor testimony is that the survivors are likely to get fetishized. And then a demand naturally develops, and the supply of survivors has to be periodically replenished....

Two tales of downtown San Francisco (as told by Juliet Clark)

1996, Montgomery St. BART station	2000, Montgomery St. Wells Fargo bank
Panhandler: "Please help me. I'll work for food." Tall 30-ish woman dressed in black: "Hmph. Can you code HTML?"	On the back of an ATM receipt:

Movie Comment: Prix de Beauté

Louise Brooks's international career was effectively washed and summed up at age 22 by Prix de Beauté: exhilarating innocent and amoral vamp and tragic Typhoid Mary of lust ("The Girl Can't Help It so we'd better kill her") all in one variably bouncing package. Even the title manages to do some summing up: as world traveller Juliet Clark points out, it can be translated as either "Beauty Prize" or "Price of Beauty." No long black limousine door ever swung shut more solid than the final shot of Prix de Beauté, the eternally radiant Brooks trilling above her thrownaway husk in as definitively cinematic a moment as Maggie Cheung's resurrection in Actress or Buster Keaton's simiantographer in The Cameraman.... And, while laying Brooks to rest, Prix de Beauté premonitioned the decade to come: Miss Europe dreams of glitter, is shoved into grinding poverty, and is finally blown apart by resentment. These reflections are occasioned by the recent restoration of the silent version of Prix de Beauté. Like in the early 1960s recording industry's mono-stereo transition, the late 1920s saw the movie industry making both silent and sound mixes, and like in the early 1960s, the old-style mix was almost always better. Well, plus any restoration is gonna have hindsight and research and new prints on their side. The point is you shouldn't run right out and look at the crummy semi-bootleg videotapes of the sound version, you should wait and support your local fancy-shmancy moviehouse when they show the silent version or wait till the silent version comes out on home video. Here's me to tell you why!

Thanks, me. Here's why:

1. Like with a lot of "Continental style" silents, the characters are meant to be annoying and abrasive. OK, but having already pushed that envelope as far as it could stretch, the envelope busts like an overheated can of beans when annoying abrasive voices are added.

2. In particular, Louise Brooks couldn't possibly play Miss Europe (née Miss France) with a Kansan accent ("New York Herald Tribune!"), so it's probably not her voice in the sound version, and she's the biggest star, so I feel ripped off.

3. Like with a lot of "Continental style" silents, Prix de Beauté relies on clear crisp photography for much of its impact -- can't really appreciate all that grime and glimmer without clear crisp photography. Restorations tend to be clearer and crisper than crummy semi-bootleg videotapes.

4. Most of all, the sound version blunders structurally in a big way. The second oomphiest sequence of the movie takes place in an urban carnival: crowded, obnoxious, irredeemably ugly, a fun time for Brooks's awful boyfriend but a headache for Brooks. I hate carnivals, I hate fairs, I hate parades, and I like this sequence.

   In the sound version, it's positioned before Brooks gets her crack at fame and fortune and seems pretty much inexplicable, although it's powerful enough that viewers are willing to work hard to explicate it.

   In the silent version, it's positioned after Brooks is dragged away from fame and fortune by "true love," and after "true love" proves so insanely insecure as to insist that she even stop fantasizing about fame and fortune. There, the sequence makes perfect sense: this is the reward that "true love" is willing to return her for her sacrifices: the honor of watching frantic clowns make assholes of themselves around a bunch of other frantic clowns.

   The old organization makes the movie front-heavy (where the front's the weakest part) and leaves Brooks unmotivated in the second half, where the new (and presumably older than old) organization builds logically and satisfyingly.

Headlines for a New Society

While indexing articles at the Pacific Film Archive library, Juliet Clark came across this rather racy item from the San Francisco Sunday ChronEx of February 10, 1985:

FLAMING SAMURAI SAGA BY THE JAPANESE MASTER

Kurosawa Makes 'Ran' Atop Mr. Fuji

Today we're proud to present Episode 2 of Juliet Clark's exciting new serial:

Special Anniversary Narcissism Week! (cont.): Secret Origins of the Hotsy Totsy Club

Last night, poet Owen Hill wondered within earshot whether the current spate of degrade-yourself TV hits would bring on a relapse of popularity for Terry Southern's The Magic Christian. And as if to prove his prescience, here's Episode 3 of Juliet Clark's psychedelic serial:

Movie Comment: Boy! What a Girl

As Juliet Clark points out, it's a rare putting-on-a-show musical comedy that could boast of such intimate acquaintance with desperate golddigging (although if Orson Welles had directed a musical comedy...): Given their strictly limited set of venues, race movie producers had to scramble even more than the Poverty Row studios, and this was one of their last gasps.

Like many a last gasp before and after, Boy! What a Girl bet on sheer quality being enough to change the world and save the day. (As we in the software industry know, that trick never works.) Its pressbook boasted that "the production cost of the picture is at least four times that spent on any all-Negro feature to date" (meaning, apparently, about $50,000), and predicted that "an all-Negro motion picture can be produced to play any theater in the country and not merely confined to the some 600 odd playhouses that cater strictly to an all-Negro audience."

They managed the sheer (very sheer) quality. Of the race movies I've seen, Two-Gun Man from Harlem and The Duke Is Tops were kind of fun, the others have been "of historical interest," but Boy! What a Girl is just plain (very plain) good: consistently knee-slapping farce (no one's ever come up with a silly French name to beat "Gaston de la Quatrième de la Douzième de la Pousse-café"), consistently professional acting, music (led by "Slam" Stewart) excellent enough to help us overlook the not-so-consistent lip-synching, and some of the dirtiest jitterbugging ever put on film. Even the familiar ugly-guy-in-drag shtick worked: unlike, say, Jack Lemmon, "Madame Deborah" gave forth with so much personality that you could really believe the marriage proposals.

But, of course, they lost the day. Even with cool white guy Gene Krupa making a cameo appearance, there was no way for a "race movie" to achieve crossover success in 1947: you can't reach the audience if the theaters won't show you, and that would've required the cooperation of major studios and their distribution channels. Instead of triumphantly launching a new business model, Boy! What a Girl signalled the end of an old one: in just two years, Hollywood began to loosen up a bit on its "servants and singers only, and make sure the singers can be cut" rule, and, unable to compete with the application of big money to limited visibility, the production of race movies ceased.

Though their timing may have been bad, the movie-makers' instincts were vindicated some years later when their show's leading lady was called out of retirement for a genuine (and typically compromised) crossover success.

Juliet Clark continues her multifacetidisciplinary study of movies and/or life with "The Real Glory: A Photographic Testament to the Irresistible Glamor of a Career in the Film Industry," a behind-the-scrim look at how the cultural sausage factory inspires its pigs.

Just in time for our Sexual Degradation Special, here's Episode 4 of Juliet Clark's tell-all serial...

Today we're proud and kinda sad to present the final episode of Juliet Clark's "The Dream Factory". Let's hope that her subject has infected Clark with a touch of sequelitis....

"a specialized shop, department of a store, etc., usu. catering to fashionable clients"

Pamphleteer Juliet Clark writes:

Re the Salon.com Guide to Feeling Hip Because You've Heard of John Updike:

I'd like to point out that Eggers misspelled "aficionado," and the copyeditor didn't catch it.

I think your copyediting/programming analogy is apt in a lot of ways. In fact the whole Salon Guide reminds me to a painful degree of startup culture: young people who won't be young much longer demanding to be taken seriously for not being serious; seeking the Big Time while clinging to a fantasy of countercultural identity; using strained irony, self-created urgency, and an excess of spin to mask a fundamental laziness.

All I can suggest is that you sell your author copy and use the money to buy a good book. Wouldn't that be, like, "ironic"?

I do think that the Salon guide fills a void. We currently have no one to tell us which of the many, many idiomatically similar novels are the real thing and which are the product of overheated middle-class ramblings. The academics can't be bothered with it, since they're too busy keeping their own little flame alive. People like Lewis Lapham hate it all, and people like Michiko Kakutani are either indiscriminate (if you agree with them more often than not) or too harsh (vice versa), and they lack consensus-building skills. The remainder of the book-reviewing populace don't have enough credibility to be reliable. So I think contemporary mainstream book reviews, if there's a strong enough drive to hold people's interest, will go the way of movie reviews and devolve into capsule reviews, top ten lists, and "personality-based" reviewers. I don't think I can blame anyone for this process; it just happens when the collective standards of the producers and the consumers are low enough that the work being produced becomes undifferentiated.

Consequently, tho, Carol Emshwiller will certainly be ignored, and even someone like Disch, who has needed to work his material into ostensible potboilers for the last 20 years. There is a need for something of a unified conception, and Carol Emshwiller may as well be Les Blank for all they care. (Which might make Michael Brodsky Kenneth Anger.) There definitely is a "celebration of shared limited knowledge", but who were the Salon editors to deny those who looked towards them for guidance?

If Auerbach's right about the editors' ambitions, the match was doomed a priori, since I'm even less of a consensus-builder than Michiko Kakutani. (Case in point: For the last twenty years every single time I've tried to read the NYTBR I've ended up throwing it across the room, and so I didn't even recognize her name.) When it comes to art, I don't see that consensus is necessary, or even desirable. That's probably what attracts me to the subject: I wouldn't be so exclusively an aesthete if I were a more enthusiastic politician.

One clarification / pettifoggery as regards "personality-based" reviewing: It's true that I believe a critic can only speak as an individual, and that criticism is most useful when individual works receive close attention as individual works. That means that I consider generalities issued from a presumed position of consensus to be bad criticism. It doesn't mean that I consider class-clown-ism a guarantee of good criticism. In my Salon.com tantrum I emphasized voice because voice was being emphasized by the book's publicity and reviews, but what really set me off was the 400-page-long lack of new insight into individual works: a generic free-weekly voice was just the means to that dead end.

In my own practice I use an overtly performative voice only because I have to. When I attempt a detached tone, I become too stumble-footedly self-conscious to move; when I do the jutht a darn-fool duck shtick, life seems better. That's a personality flaw, not a deliberate choice. Behind the Dionysian mask, I'm ogling those Apollonians plenty: I empathize with Jean-Luc Godard's film criticism but I'm in awe of Eric Rohmer's; Lester Bangs is a role model but I'd be so much more uncomplicatedly proud of something like Stephen Ratcliffe's Campion; my favorite Joycean is eyes-on-the-page Fritz Senn; my favorite historian is no-see-um Henry Adams; I loathe the bluster of Harold Bloom and Camille Paglia....

What matters is whether you communicate anything of what you see. If you don't have to keep twitching and waving and yelling "Hi, Mom!" while you do it, all the better.

Rogue librarian Juliet Clark alerts us to a boffo research tool:

No word for pantyhose, though n.b. hotsy -- strong performance at the box office; "The Devil's Advocate made a hotsy bow last weekend."

If you're going to quote a song lyric with a 'panties' link, I really think it should be Mason William's "The Prince's Panties."

-- Baaaaa.

To unclench our previous entry on the transformation of Insider Art to Outsider Art....

The process can always be side-stepped by looking at artifacts as History: History, like Cheese, is capable of digesting all. But inasmuch as we try to keep our receptiveness aesthetic instead of historical -- focused on surface pleasure rather than background book-larnin' -- when faced with an artifact imported from outside our assumed position, narrative impulse veers us towards seeing the alien context as the alienated individual and the artist as Outsider (rather than ourselves as Importer).

Some examples:

• Primitivism in general.
• Post-Mannerist reactions to Mannerism.
• Crazy Buddhist art. Crazy Hindu art. Crazy Medieval German art. Man, they're all crazy....
• Those corny old movies from before 1980 or so -- can you believe they used to take that stuff seriously? What a crack-up!
• A tour through the Musée d'Orsay's more peculiar late Academics, as led by art historian Juliet Clark, left me giddy with oddness. And the late 19th century collections I recently saw in Toronto seemed as grossly pedophilic to me as Léon Fréderic seems to Matthew DeBord. (via Subterranean Notes)
• To show how little geo-cultural shift is actually needed, Jack Spicer insisted that viable poetry could be made only within a poetic community: Insider talk, right? But because his poetic community excluded the urban northeast USA, he still gets considered an "Outsider"; a 1986 issue of Ironwood had no trouble associating him with Emily Dickinson....

And unless you're talking bestsellers and movie deals and posters on bathroom walls, it's awfully hard to be sure you've made it off an insular group and onto the mainland. "Professional" or not, in my cartography, the arts and book reviewers of the semi-major media look just as self-congratulatory and determinedly deluded as any communal gallery, small press magazine, indie rock scene, little theater group, or crosslinking weblog....

A little twernt tells us that our "online brand" is being devalued. Like most things once you hit forty, this is disappointing but not surprising: as tribes of hipsters migrate to the East Bay, appropriators were bound to gather around the most beautiful sign of The Most Beautiful Avenue in the World like flies on shit or UC Davis MFA poets on Hispanic graffiti. But what's a proprietor to do?

Option 1: Keep the brand name but diversify it. After all, there are many other Hotsy Totsy Clubs. Perhaps we could apply for an Absolut arts grant to go to each one in person and write up little reports full of our own special whimsy? Option 2, suggested by founding member Juliet Clark: Rotate our "look and feel" to pay tribute to the many other fine watering holes of San Pablo Avenue: Wanda's Cocktails, Club Mallard, The Missouri Lounge.... Option 3: Attempt to maintain some explanation for the "ht" initials in our permanent URL; e.g., by calling ourselves Hound's-Tooth or Hoity Toity or Happy Trails or Hangtown or Hard Tack or.... Option 4: Leverage our well-secured "Kokonino" "online brand" with a title such as Hoozoo by Cholly Kokonino or The Enchanted Mesa or Going Maybe to Kaibito or Kolin Kelly's Brick Yard or even a simple dignified "Jail". Option 5: Give the "personal touch" with a phrase that strikes deep into our singular soul. Possibilities include Ad Nauseam Per Aspera, Bellona Times, Now God Stand Up for Bastards, Fleet's In, Hick Jacket, The Ineffabilly Cat, Bunny Days, A Fustian Bargain, Topical Depression, The Grand Old Mopery, Rut, The Rest of Everything, Cerebral Pals, Essential Tremor, Twitchy & Screechy, Carp Per Diem, Boos Hound, The Disabled Debauchee, Alcoholic Children of Adults, Hoedowner, Now It Can Be Old!, Fromage to Eternity, The Interpretation of Dweebs, Meet George Jetsam, Eris Go Bragh, Chumps Elysées, and The Cruel Gay City of Love.

Gosh, I don't know. What do you think?

Juliet Clark forwards a familiar analysis from "The Problem of Living In New York," by Junius Henri Browne, Harper's New Monthly Magazine, November, 1882:

Why is it, may naturally be asked, that people should continually pour into New York when there is not room enough for half of those already here? Why should they persistently seek to live in a city where, with hosts on hosts of houses, there are no homes save for the prosperous? There is abundant space in most of the towns a hundred miles distant. Why do not people swell the census there instead of crowding into an overcrowded capital where the chances of success, of competence even, are ten thousand to one against them? They come in such numbers because so many have come before them, because New York is the commercial center of the republic, because it is immensely rich and strong, because, in short, it does not need or want them....

Thousands and thousands of men who have no regular employment, and no special prospects, who are materially and mentally out at elbows, whose whole life has been a spiritual tragedy, could not be persuaded to-day to leave the city where they have been so constantly baffled and tormented, where they have suffered so intensely, were they assured of a regular and respectable livelihood in some quiet town of the interior. Myriads of inmates of the squalid, distressing tenement-houses, in which morality is as impossible as happiness, would not give them up, despite their horrors, for clean, orderly, wholesome habitations in the suburbs, could they be transported there and back free of charge. They are in some unaccountable way terribly in love with their own wretchedness.

The American, like the Russian, has undertaken too much. He does more than anyone else ever did, but he does not keep up with the machine. New York promises to become a first-class tragedy. Life there is a tour-de-force. Rents are fantastic, prices are absurd, conditions are chaotic, but the trouble has hardly begun.

Progress Report

These are unsettled times, and there's nothing more unsettling than the question of Hotsy Totsy's new brand identity.

Long-time Berkeleyist Juliet Clark issues these gentle errata: Did you notice that the address for the "Towne Dandies" is in Saint Helena? That's not even in the East Bay! These guys are tourists. They have no right to be hanging out on our street. Also by the way, I actually don't think Club Mallard is a good idea; tho it too has a lovely sign, it has been thoroughly colonized by the scooter set. I suggest the Mel-O-Dee Lounge instead.

Addenda

Brown coleen Juliet Clark relieves us of the responsibility of Illustrating one Famous Ballad ourselves by finding a rare photo of "The Rocky Road to Dublin," which, it turns out, was a scenic railway in Coney Island. And I didn't even know that the Clancy Brothers had been to Coney Island! For that matter, I didn't even know that Coney Island was scenic!

I loike (typo, but I'll leave it) much about our previous Famous Ballad, but probably most the way it uses "Since it falls" in one line and "I should rise" in the next and then, since it already used "fall," completes the parallelism with the unexpected unrhymed flatness of "not." Piquant! The syntax may be stilted, but where would humanity be without stilts?

And ephemeral archivist Juliet Clark forwards the news that real American hero Rick Prelinger has opened an Internet Moving Image Archive with several hundred downloadable archival films "free for everyone to use for any purpose except resale," including such edutainment favorites as "About Fallout," "Helping Johnny Remember," "As Boys Grow," and "Narcotics: Pit of Despair."

Errata

• Given our very competitive memorial rates, the Dovetonsils Kids seem unduly upset over a supposed typo in yesterday's message, which apparently should have been printed "Never, in our hearts," as some sort of euphemism for the date their dumb dad died. It's only a comma, for crying out loud!

  In the words of the poet's own "I Have Been Half In Love With Easeful Joe the Barkeep":

      O grave, where ith thy mar-ti-ni?
    O Death, where ith thy thtinger?

• Some time back, we declared an end to our Man O'Sorrows Caption Contest, whereas in fact another entry arrived yesterday:
  "All together now: I've got the holes whirled in my hands..."

  We deeply regret our mistake.

• Neatly puncturing one of the most tenacious myths of the twentieth century, medicine woman Juliet Clark asks, "How can penicillin be a miracle drug when there's no 'z' or 'x' in it?"

Science News

We're accustomed to the obscuring of cultural artifacts by commercial interests and the destruction of natural ecologies by commercial interests, but it's rare to find a story that combines both processes as well as this one, passed along by Californian Juliet Clark:

East Bay Dining: Caffe Mediterraneum

The only "Med" thing about the Caffe Med is the state of its toilet -- a little slice of Brindisi right in Berkeley!

Recently, while reminiscing over a fine scotch at the Club, international troubleshooter Juliet Clark told us of her most treasured Caffe Med moment. Trying to distract herself from other sensory input by reading through the typically-Telegraph-Ave. graffiti, she found in very neat very tiny ballpoint pen the message:

That was ten years ago and she's never been back.

Speak nothing and lack a big stick

After his classmates ratted on an eleven year old boy who'd made some drawings of weapons, he was expelled from Oldsmar Elementary School in handcuffs. (via Obscure Store) The principal explained "We just need to get it through kids' heads that there are certain things you don't say and there are certain things you don't draw."

"... although you should continue to buy them," adds consumer advocate Juliet Clark.

In other Obscure educational news, Norwich High School for some reason thought it would be a good idea to maintain a course on "feminist literature" (no elucidating link available) in a community whose standards don't allow explaining the term "phallic" to a 17-year-old. Teacher Richard Bernstein gets a $3000 fine and a formal reprimand, courtesy of the school's principal and the Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court. (If he'd been a loyal Kokonino reader, he'd've known that the only correct answer to such queries is "Ask your mama.")

Hate the sinner, love the sin. As much as I dislike obscenity laws, I like the idea that exposure to Lacan can (who can? Lacan can!) be indefinitely postponed -- the guy bugs me, you know? If Lacan's "Phallus" [The proper page from Earl Jackson, Jr., has been purloined; the Google cache momentarily stops the gap] isn't to be construed as a weirdly and unnecessarily exclusionary and hierarchicizing penis, why didn't he just call it "the Object of Desire"? It's like turn-of-the-previous-century intellectuals who talked about "the Eternal Jew," always ready to point out (if, and only if, challenged) that they weren't referring to particular Jews; they were just using "Jew" as a convenient image.... Kids, images that seem to fit into an existing discourse that you don't trust and that require constant policing and clarification to prevent misuse are no convenience in the long run. (Except as branding, of course!)

I guess I should confess, though, that I wouldn't feel compelled to climb so high on my horse if he'd called the center of the symbolic order "Poontang" instead.

Natural born veterinarian Juliet Clark showed us a New York Times article that will soon no longer be available even though it addresses the important issue of donkeys, and specifically the donkeys of Brazil:

The donkey has more than 100 affectionate nicknames in Brazilian Portuguese, including "drought endurer," "reservoir maker" and "earth smoother." [Not "donk-donk," though, because that's English.]

[But] "Nowadays people think they have to be modern and only want to hear about tractors," said Fernando Viana Nobre, president of the Donkey Breeders' Association of the Northeast. "A tractor gets the job done, but it's not a substitute for a donkey, because a donkey doesn't require gasoline at $2.50 a gallon, need spare parts or throw you into debt with the banks."

As recently as decade ago, when a national census put the number of animals at 1.3 million, a donkey fetched up to $100 at bustling livestock markets like the one here in Currais Novos, whose name means New Corrals. Now, in contrast, sturdy young males can be obtained for less than $1 a head, compared with $3 for chickens. "A cow gives milk and a chicken lays eggs," explained José Mata, a subsistence farmer here. "But what does a donkey do nowadays except eat and reproduce?"

Out in the countryside the Federal Highway Police have set up a special donkey patrol.... Since the beginning of 1999 the unit based here has captured more than 1,600 of the animals, ranging from single strays to entire herds wandering on roads. So many of the animals are now roaming unattended that collisions on highways are routine and the number of motorists killed or injured is growing. Truck drivers in particular complain that donkeys have become a pest and a menace now that people have no use for them.

During the 1970's and 80's, Brazil's donkey population was stabilized by exports of meat, primarily to Japan and France, where the lean meat was especially relished. But African nations have pushed Brazil aside in those markets, with help from Brazilian animal rights groups that objected to the meat trade and forced the closing of more than a dozen slaughterhouses.

One step forward, two steps back

Earl Jackson, Jr. writes:

Memento, Fight Club and Usual Suspects seem to resonate in ways that I fear might be terribly obvious after the work I might do to discover that.... I think the producers of Memento should re-release it next year but retitle it Memento II.

• Reliance on plot twists that conflict with the rest of the film despite religious avoidance of any of the accidents of filmed reality ("Photographs are completely staged, and the cinema is completely staged 24 frames per second")
• Lack of interest in experience or environment in favor of completely determined characters
• Insane overestimation of the power available to individual white hetero American men

His Memento II proposal makes sense -- reckon I'll have to wait for Memento III? or Is It IV? before I finally get to see those PalmPilot scenes....

Little Deaths

Beth Rust must have, at some pre-Web point, told me about the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, the deduction workouts constructed by her fellow New Hampshirt Frances Glessner Lee, but Juliet Clark sent me a reminder yesterday. What a lost killer app for QuickTime VR....

On the calls to (any, don't matter which or where) arms: "It's like attacking Pat Buchanan by bombing the United States." -- Juliet Clark

In the nick of time, tireless indexer Juliet Clark sends the following:

Token Non-Trivial Item of the Day

Juliet Clark forwards her sighting of a very rare bird, actual reporting from a San Francisco newspaper!

"Tens of millions of Americans can no longer get medical treatment, a job, a home, a credit card or a host of goods and services without agreeing to resolve future disputes in confidential, unregulated proceedings riddled with conflicts of interest. They cannot claim injury, fraud or discrimination without paying filing fees that may reach thousands of dollars. They cannot rely on legal guarantees of due process and fair treatment. They cannot appeal, except in rare circumstances...."

Critics rave

Yesterday's entry was undoubtedly our Worst. Episode. Ever. ("Sort of ponderous!" - Juliet Clark) But should you for some reason desire more of the similar, see David Chess, Ted Honderich (via the above-mentioned wood s lot), and Flash (Flash not required).

Consumption Blues, cont.

A conversation with artist-historian Juliet Clark brought up these further points: The extent to which the sentimental can be distinguished from the profound may be arguable, but it deserves mention: in contemporary usage "profound" usually marks a (purported) weightiness of both emotion and intellect, mutually reinforcing rather than in conflict. What interferes with an art historian's (or a literary scholar's) emotional expression is less likely to be education than career. In scholarly research (and in academic advancement), the direct emotional experience of an artifact can be a distraction from other aspects of the piece, and at the very least has to be detached from them for the discipline to get anywhere at all. This doesn't mean that knowledge interferes with emotion; it just means that one has to leave the frozen moment of absorption if one is to learn anything outside that experience itself -- and that it's considered bad form to cry in the workplace. The Everly Brothers aside, to fill with love is not always to fill with tears. "Have you ever sneezed in front of a work of art?"

I feel your gain

Employment consultant Juliet Clark reports:

I don't know... maybe I'm an ingrate, but I've had employers say "I'm so sorry" while they handed me a paycheck, and it didn't make me feel any better at all.

Invidious comparisons

Eagle-eyed Juliet Clark plucks this juicy hank o' middlebrow from Lewis Lapham's column in the September 2001 Harper's:

"Because the schools serve a spiritual and political purpose instead of an intellectual idea, they cannot afford to make invidious comparisons between the smart kids and the dumb kids, between the kids who read Shakespeare's plays and those who watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer."

Photos by Juliet Clark

Scariest sight during last month's visit to Los Angeles was the line of normality-starved families waiting to visit The L. Ron Hubbard Winter Wonderland ("Santa's Home in Hollywood").

Department store Santas are disturbing enough; can you imagine the MEST-scarring trauma of a Scientology Santa? "Well, Jimmy, your free personality test indicates that Santa will bring you EVERYTHING YOU WANT FOR THE REST OF ETERNITY if you'll just stuff these copies of Dianetics in your parents' stockings...."

In Hubbard's holiday homily, note his characteristic replacement of wishy-washy "love" with manly paranoid "trust." That was the true meaning of Christmas 2001, all right: No telepathic mind control, no peace!

The nicest sights were at the Getty Museum's Devices of Wonder exhibition. Gadgets through the ages isn't that novel a curatorial idea, but not many curators get to plunge fist-first into Getty-sized pockets: a Chardin, for example, is casually thrown on as illustrative spice....

As usual in high-concept historical surveys, the contemporary work included seems an ill-advised afterthought. I'm not even sure what they were afterthinking: our investment-oriented rhetoric-privileging high art world pointedly shares neither intent nor craft with infotainment manufacturers. Better to just borrow a corner of the Exploratorium, or fill a plastic tub with boing-boing-ed swag.

On the other hand, the Joseph Cornell boxes fit right in, especially the knock-down twist-around pick-me-up gorgeous "Beehive (Thimble Forest)" -- with silver bells/boughs sadly frozen, though, by the conflict typical of such exhibitions: the fine art museum relies on preservation whereas the artifact relies on manipulation, and they compromise in mere display. Perhaps deep pockets somewhere sometime might be persuaded to provide replicas in the gift shop...?

Movie Comment by Juliet Clark, with unintended reference to recent Movie and Other Comments - Storytelling

"It's very difficult to express self-loathing in narrative without sounding like an arrogant asshole."

America: Open For Napping

(from the collection of Juliet Clark)

Neuraesthetics: Foundations, cont.

It's inherent to the mind's workings that we'll always be blinded and bound by our own techniques.

Another example of this -- which actually bugs me even more than ancient Egyptians taking brains out of mummies -- is when essayists or philosophers or cognitive scientists or divorced alcoholic libertarians or other dealers in argumentative prose express confusion (whether positive or negative) before the very existence of art, or fantasy, or even of emotion -- you know, mushy gooey stuff. Sometimes they're weirdly condescending, sometimes they're weirdly idealizing, and sometimes, in the great tradition of such dichotomies, they seem able to, at a glance, categorize each example as either a transcendent mystery (e.g., "Mozart," "love") or a noxious byproduct (e.g., "popular music," "lust").

These dedicated thinkers somehow don't notice, even when they're trying to redirect their attention, what they must already know very well from intellectual history and developmental psychology both: that their technique is blatantly dependent on what seems mysteriously useless to the technique.

Cognition doesn't exist without effort, and so emotional affect is essential to getting cognition done. Just listen to their raised or swallowed, cracked or purring voices: you'll seldom find anyone more patently overwhelmed by pleasure or anger or resentment than a "rationalist," which is one reason we rationalists so often lose debates with comfortably dogmatic morons.

Similarly, "purely observational" empiricism or logic could only produce a sedately muffled version of blooming buzzing confusion -- would only be, in fact, meditation. Interviews, memoirs, and psych lab experiments all indicate that scientists and mathematicians, whether students or professionals, start their work by looking for patterns. Which they then try to represent using the rules of their chosen games (some of the rules being more obviously arbitrary than others). And they know they're done with their new piece when they've managed to find satisfying patterns in the results. It's not that truth is beauty so much as that truth-seekers are driven by aesthetic motives. ("It's easier to admit that there's a difference between boring and false than that there's a difference between interesting and true.")

Studies in experimental psychology indicate that deductive logic (as opposed to strictly empirical reasoning) is impossible without the ability to explicitly engage in fantasy: one has to be able to pretend in what one doesn't really believe to be able to work out the rules of "if this, then that" reasoning. The standard Piaget research on developmental psychology says that most children are unable to fully handle logical problems until they're twelve or so. But even two-year-olds can work out syllogisms if they're told that it's make-believe.

Rationality itself doesn't just pop out of our foreheads solitary and fully armed: it's the child of rhetoric. Only through the process of argument and comparison and mutual conviction do people ever (if ever) come to agree that mathematics and logic are those rhetorical techniques and descriptive tools that have turned out to be inarguable. (Which is why they can seem magical or divine to extremely argumentative people like the ancient Greeks: It's omnipotence! ...at arguing!)

An argument is a sequence of statements that makes a whole; it has a plot, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so rhetoric is, in turn, dependent on having learned the techniques of narrative: "It was his story against mine, but I told my story better."

As for narrative.... We have perception and we have memory: things change. To deal with that, we need to incorporate change itself into a new more stable concept. (When young children tell stories, they usually take a very direct route from stability back to initial stability: there's a setup, then there's some misfortune, then some action is taken, and the status quo is restored. There's little to no mention of motivation, but heavy reliance on visual description and on physically mimicking the action, with plenty of reassurances that "this is just a story." Story = Change - Change.)

And then to be able to communicate, we need to learn to turn the new concept into a publicly acceptable artifact. "Cat" can be taught by pointing to cats, but notions like past tense and causality can only be taught and expressed with narrative.

It seems clear enough that the aesthetic impulse -- the impulse to differentiate objects by messing around with them and to create new objects and then mess around with them -- is a starting point for most of what we define as mind. (Descartes creates thoughts and therefore creates a creator of those thoughts.)

So there's no mystery as to why people make music and make narrative. People are artifact-makers who experience the dimension of time. And music and narrative are how you make artifacts with a temporal dimension.

Rational argument? That's just gravy. Mmmm... delicious gravy....

Vision Statement

Twenty years ago I encountered Academia and ran away squealing like a libertarian.

But now I return.

What brought me back? One goal. One goal I have in mind. One monochromatic battle of darkness against light. I hate that stupid fight.

For I will never rest until an end's been put to high-resolution bitmaps and our cultural heritage has been saved by eight-color grayscale GIFs (or until I reach early retirement, whichever comes first). For every effin' U. teaches its baggy-jeaned tots and cane-wielding toddlers that strict two-color black-&-white is how digital archiving must be done, thus destroying all they digitally archive, and the U.s do more digital archiving than anyone, for they have much to destroy.

I don't know how this horrible delusion started. Maybe it's like some remnant of IBM punchcard chic. Long-term academic toiler Juliet Clark suggests it's because those B&W grislies at least reproduce predictably on laser printers. It might also be from numbing habituation to microfiche, or from world-is-language overdependence on OCR software since OCR software works off monochrome.

But open your eyes, people! And, once opened, roll them down the curvy lines and plump gradations, and past the obvious paper blotches, forgiving the poor pulped wood for its imperfections as it forgives ours, and back again. OCR software is even dumber than we are! And infinitely-high-contrast is why! Contextualized dark gray that doesn't fade into light gray on the outside and black on the inside is ignorable, and uncalloused vision is smart enough to know it. Dark gray mechanically transformed into black is noise, and black that shatters directly into white also approaches noise.

This is a disgrace, well-meant and hard-labored-over. This (via Portage) purportedly shows microfilm vs. paper, but (being merely two different digitalized graphics displayed on your monitor) actually shows bitmap vs. JPEG. Don't blindly follow the one-eyed king! Compare and decontrast. As the poet sang:

Errata

Juliet Clark corrects my latest attempt at tech cred:

Actually, I wouldn't call "predictable results on a laser printer" a reason; it just happens to be the most common excuse I've heard. In reality the insistence on huge bitmaps as "archival" files probably has more to do with the reason why certain academics are still trying to deconstruct Madonna: because they heard a decade or more ago that it was the thing to do, and haven't been listening since.

But a rewarding exchange with pierre-martin's infinitely patient Olaf Simons has taught me a bit (I don't often make jokes!) more tolerance. Simons scans for paper publication, and therefore has a big old bitpile of bitmaps available. Once they're made, he generously attempts to repurpose them for the web -- but paper, in his case, is paramount. And, unfortunately, even though shrinking a 600dpi bitmapped image to computer monitor size will look better in grayscale, it'll never look quite as good as shrinking an originally grayscale image would.

I also didn't account for pierre-marteau's use of another mostly-academic technique: by setting image tags to widths such as "50%," the site relies on the web browser to dynamically resize graphics to different resolutions and window sizes. So, in fact, the bitmapped pierre-martin image I linked to is -- if saved to a local file and then viewed at its original size -- much better looking than I thought it was.

One benefit of this technique is that it saves on labor. Another is that the web pages will print out nicely on a laser printer. There are some problems, though:

• Being a web user, I view pages with a monitor and only print out very long texts, and therefore had no way of knowing what the graphics could look like.
• The only-displayed-as-smaller image files take longer to download than really-smaller image files would.
• More seriously in these larger-disk higher-bandwidth days, the quality of the image is drastically lowered by the browser's not-very-painstaking resizing. A human being using static-imaging software will almost always produce a better image of a certain size than a browser will.
• These latter two often combine into a universally unsatisfactory compromise, in which full-size 600dpi bitmaps are shrunk (to reduce download size, making them uglier when printed) but kept large and bitmapped (which keeps them ugly onscreen).

1. Original scans should never be done as bitmaps. With color or grayscale, it's much easier to figure out what's interesting source material and what are stains or dust or scanning errors, making it easier to eliminate such distractions before reducing the image size. (Noise isn't exactly discarded by compression; instead, noise coarsens the end results.) Also, grayscale better preserves curves and true relations between edges.

2. Graphics intended as webpage illustrations should be color or grayscale and statically sized. It often happens that I want to provide an extremely detailed look at a graphic as its own semi-independent artifact, and also want to include something more reasonably sized (both in dimensions and in download filesize) in a page's layout. In such circumstances, I usually hand-craft two different graphics files for the two different contexts. The smaller layout-fitting illustration usually takes much more work -- depending on the source material, I may shrink the entire graphic to a thumbnail or I may have to blow up a detail instead. I then link from the embedded graphic to the standalone one.

3. If one wants to support laser-printing "viewers" as well, use the old commercial-site trick of a "Print View" link that, instead of eliminating ads and page breaks, swaps in 300dpi or 600dpi bitmap graphics.

The Secondary Source Review

Sexual Revolution in Early America by Richard Godbeer

Having dragged a mature-content filter through pre-1800 American source material, Godbeer sorts his catches by region and period, arranged quasi-dialectically; viz.:

The conclusion, should conclusions be desired, is that technical and prison terms vary more across time-and-place than sexual behaviors do. But the real point of a book like this is to read the cool bits aloud, and although Godbeer has collected eye-catching material on such topics as bundling, sodomitical pillars of the Puritan community, and Philadelphia prostitution, he seems compelled to interrupt every few lines of quote with a few words of paraphrase. (That awful interference, wrecking your orgasm on the Playboy Channel.) Juliet Clark, star editor, explains this as dissertation house style, but we non-academics would prefer a straightforward anthology: interpretation is rarely needed, and, William Bartram aside, this stuff is hard to find.

Not that Godbeer is a bad writer when there's a need to write. He provides a usefully concise summary of the Thomas Jefferson Situation, for example:

If that sounds slightly incestuous, how about this?

Ah, good old plantation miscegenation.... It ain't incest if it's livestock breeding; on the other hand, it ain't bestiality if it's human beings. And rather than being a financial burden, the rapist's child becomes money in the bank. Kinda makes a feller proud, don't it?

(As an upcoming review subject points out, this win-win situation was exploited in typically enthusiastic fashion. When they call the American South a "slave-based economy," they don't just mean that slaves did the work. Unlike the industrialists and bankers of the North, the Southern aristocracy derived their wealth from property, and by far their most valuable property was people. That's why our Federal government never had the option of ending slavery by financial compensation, as England did: there simply wasn't enough money. Something to remember the next time you encounter a nostalgic lament over drove-down old Dixie....)

The Nature of Economies by Jane Jacobs, cont.

Jacobs first sketches the free-trade economist's notion of the export multiplier: the vitality of an economy can be estimated by weighing its exports (including such "exports" as tourism) against its imports, since the money brought in by excess exports and the added work that goes into supporting a population of excess exporters will be more than enough to keep the locals busy fat and sassy bees.

In the real world this formula has played out variably well, often distinctly unwell. Which, as Jacobs points out, makes it less of a formula than a hypothesis in need of amendment, and she reasonably suggests that we also take into account what's happening within the economy.

A community enjoyed by non-economists will likely include a secure diversity of local businesses and a reasonable distribution of local resources. In Jacobs's formulation, this localized recombinatrics is "import stretching" (where "imports" include geographical advantages and human skills), and it's not strictly correlated with increased summed export. She compares a prosperous economy to the biomass and diversity of a lush ecosystem. If you treat a rain forest as a black box, you may not find a startling amount of import or export going on, but it still thrives, and what it's largely thriving on is itself. The energy (water, sunlight, minerals) that enters the system is swapped around in a multitude of ways over a multitude of lives before leaving the system.

Expansion depends on capturing and using transient energy. The more different means a system possesses for recapturing, using, and passing around energy before its discharge from the system, the larger are the cumulative consequences of the energy it receives.

So far, so very good. "Economists would do better to abandon export-multiplier ratios and turn their attention to import-stretching ratios."

But at those naughty economists is where Jacobs stops, and it's not nearly far enough. Let's agree that the number of businesses matters more than the gross size of a few businesses, and the distribution of profits matters more than the gross sum of a few profits. Having so agreed, need we worry about any foes other than myopic economists and the committees misled by them?

I think we do, because it's not just academics who emphasize import / export ratios. Not everyone wants to live in a thriving rain-forest ecology (in my own bedroom, I maintain stringent restrictions on biodiversity), and not everyone wants to live in a thriving economy. Many a dictator and plutocrat prefers their current arrangement, and Google finds a high proportion of "multiplier effect" citations among the rosy forecasts of third-world governments.

Jacobs is right that efficiency isn't always what's needed for the health of the citizenry at large, and right that businesses don't always become more efficient with expansion. However, expansion always does concentrate more capital into a fewer number of hands. And so, efficient or not, healthy or not, supported by Harvard Business School grads or not, there will always be pressure for larger and more centralized businesses because people with power want more power and they're in a good position to get it. Free trade economics is less a science or a technology than an assuager of conscience; earlier analysts posited a similar magical correspondence between the health of the king and the health of the kingdom.

And when the chickens come home to roost, one can always slaughter the chickens and move elsewhere. Imperialism from ancient Egypt and Greece through Fascist populists and American corporations has been a matter of conquering other territory with the power seized from one's own: think globally, leech locally. The unseen hand that coordinates the health of an economy with the profitability of its wealthiest business owners -- like the unseen hand that protects the balance of nature -- can easily be held in check long enough for personal capital to be made and permanent waste to be laid. (I once asked Juliet Clark what happened to the self-sufficiency of rain-forested New Zealand, and she shrugged: "When every economy is forced to be a global economy....")

Is there any counterbalance? Well, if humans are part of biology, and money and trade are therefore part of biology, then government and politics must also be part of biology -- and laws (including protectionist laws) might be our only pseudo-biological defense against pseudo-biological catastrophe. Government isn't going away any more than trade is. When libertarians say that government needs to stay out of business, they simply turn government over to those with no such compunctions: monopolists and profiteers.

Very few of us complacent argumentative coffee-swillers can compare to Jane Jacobs: at least two North American cities might have fallen apart without her work. But when she tells their hard-fought and forever-tenuous victories as a story of the little people taking on big government rather than as a story of a government's policy being changed by its own citizens, she doesn't improve our chances to keep her winnings.

Notes & Queries

Tom rightly modifies our Shock-N-Awe:

Might it depend on whether one is looking at Tommy and the other actors, or at the representations of them served as our daily fare? I'm genuinely unsure of the differences - the game is delimited in order that it can be played so that it can be wagered upon. The war is a "mosaic," says Tommy.

Athleticism is a fine mode - would it include wresting, in which we take comfort in the mismatch and hiss the dastardly ones who break the "rules"?

Wrestling is an appropriate analogy for the requisite vilifying, but their video technique seems drawn more from inspirational NFL documentaries....

Another reader remains unheard and unidentified:

I am not going to say a damned thing.

In a time of crisis, Zap2it.com is looking at the big picture. At the top of their listings page, they ask the question on everyone's mind right now:

How will the War in Iraq affect my TV Listings?

How, indeed?

The quote that I was looking for -- a little context first. Krazy is reading the "Krazy Kat" strip in the paper, and is quite confused...

Krazy "But, if *I* are *here*, and you is here, *HOW* come I are in the paper, and you also -- ansa me that."

Ignatz: "Because, Fool, how could it be aught were it not thus -- you answer *that*".

I appreciated your entry on dissertation advisors, and I'd add that since those relationships aren't based on need or symbiosis but on pure charity towards the grad student, there exists a fundamental neurosis that can only be alleviated insofar as the relationship can be recast as collegial friendship. This is what I've seen, anyway.

The Poet's Poet: Louis Zukofsky Reads From His Uncompromising Works. (PHONOTAPE-CASSETTE).

Wendell Corey abraded 1950s Hollywood like an imperious acne-scarred iguana: outstandingly inexplicable as The Furies' love interest -- Barbara Stanwyck should've spent more time studying that copy of Are Snakes Necessary? -- and delivering his Rear Window banter with such open contempt that I half-expected him to try to pin the murder on Jeffries's little trollop.

But Corey also landed at least two parts perfectly suited to his Republican alienation from the species: "Smiley" Coy and Leon Poole.

"I don't know why you'd do such a thing."

I'd say Corey's Poole was as indelible a performance as Perkins's Norman Bates or Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter, except that no one seems to remember it. It certainly seems more realistic (although I've only met, that I know of, one mad killer myself), much more someone about whom you'd say, "He always seemed like such a nice man" and still never want to befriend or even stand very close to.

My shame to admit it, I probably wouldn't have gotten palsy with John Payne or Tom Neal, either. As Juliet Clark pointed out to me, Poole is a film noir hero in a film noir villain's role. The Killer Is Loose crossbreeds three strains of thriller (with a suggestion of the big heist film in the background):

• A war vet trying to make good is first humiliated and then hunted.
• A decent cop and his wife are targeted by criminals.
• A middle-class family is terrorized by a maniac.

"Even the island boys, they'd say Corporal Foggy, he get lost again, he forget his rifle."
"Yes, I remember."

"Yes, I remember."

Thus for the military. That other masculine bureaucracy, the police department, is equally dismissive:

"Worked himself into quite a stew, hasn't he?"
"Scared amateur -- bolted inside."

"Don't you see how wrong it was to do that?
I'm certainly going to settle with you for it."

"You said he wasn't crazy!"

"What's more, you've demonstrated an earnest and sincere intention to pay your debt." "I've tried to follow the rules, sir."

Although Poole remains self-possessed and hard-working, the clear-headed dignity of his first scenes proves anomalous. Unbenownst to us, he was being sustained by the love of a good woman. Love meaning:

"She never laughed at me once."

In Touch of Evil, Orson Welles mocked the narrative convention of the noble cop's good marriage with parody. The Killer Is Loose undercuts it more directly by collapsing that convention into the convention of the middle-class family who's never been tested by fire. By 1956, Joseph Cotten's schoolmarmishness had ripened into querulous old-maidhood, and his shallow bride (best known to noirists as Out of the Past's second-string femme fatale) makes his dithering dotage even more glaring.

The couple's domestic ineffectiveness seems catching, eventually spreading through the entire LAPD and squandering technology, time, and personnel in cross-purposed confusion.

"I think so, but I can't be sure." "Is it a man or is it a woman?" "I'm not sure." "If it is Poole, what's he waiting for?" "He's not sure it's Lila." "That could be...."

While Poole advances unprofessionally, clumsily, obliquely, bumping into a police car, driving over the center line, limping through the rain, slumping, slopping....

Does he make it?

Silly question. Naturally the natural order prevails, depositing a foggy pool of drag on a neatly trimmed lawn, to be mopped up off-screen later by some equally discardable service industry peon.

That's the story we've been told we were being told, but it's not the only story we've heard.

There's the triumph of being the one who walks out of the last frames of the movie, and there's another type of triumph in defining them. There's the triumph of victory, and a triumph in having set the game. And even a triumph in refusing to acknowledge the existence of a game at all.

What would such uncompetitive types want with winning anyway?

Science News

Dr. Earl Jackson, Jr., reports from Hawaii:

I'm glad queer theory is forging new territory. Look at this book published by Chicago UP! Interesting managerie, isn't it.

Peacocks, Chameleons, Centaurs
Gay Suburbia and the Grammar of Social Identity
by Wayne H. Brekhus
University of Chicago Press
Due/Published October 2003, 248 pages, paper
...
7 Vegan Peacocks, Christian Chameleons, and Soccer Mom Centaurs: Identity Grammar beyond Gay Identity
8 Duration Disputes: Identity Stability vs. Identity Mobility
9 Density Disputes: Identity Purity vs. Identity Moderation
10 Dominance Disputes: Identity Singularity vs. Identity Balance
11 Conclusion
Appendix: Grounded Theory and Analytic Fieldwork

"You are welcome, sir, to Secaucus.--Goats and monkeys!"

Actually, I believe the species most commonly discovered by pop ethnographers is the chimera, usually while on a snipe hunt.

i think the questioning bisexual trapped in a transgendered screenname analog would be best represented by the blast-ended skrewt.
phantazoologically,
earl
[a jackson chameleon]

+ + +

Juliet Clark points to another zoological controversy:

If I were a Moomin I'd never stand for being demoominized by your categorical litmus test of queer fashion looks.

Francis Goes to Pasture

Lawrence La Riviere White follows up:

How much of "actual scholarship" turns out as (to use Kierkegaard's word) chatter?

For example, during the last Cornel West debacle, UC's John McWhorter weighed in against Professor West. Professor McWhorter cited his own current project, some modest essay modestly proposing modest new perspectives on some modest problem in linguistics (& from my small experience w/that field, those folks really can pare down an issue to the thinnest shavings). At this point I say to myself, "Yes, we should all be working hard & earning those paychecks, & I'm sure Professor McWhorter does fine work in his field, & I have no doubts as to his fine intentions, but what are the odds that this essay will make any difference to anything?" Given my own experience trolling through journal after journal, I'm not going to bet my mortgage on it. & I'm not alone in this belief. Professor Wai Chee Dimock, a one-time guest of honor at our school's graduate American Studies conference, advised us to remember that the shelf life for our writing is about ten years. In other words, no one reads this stuff anyway.

What's to be done? Professor Dimock seemed to be arguing for lower standards. Don't get too hung up on anything you're doing just now, because you're going to be on to something else soon enough. If you don't like the weather, wait ten minutes & it'll change. This smacks of rank professionalism to me. Don't worry about the point of the game, just play it. I am too much of a romantic, but also too much over-invested in artifacts, to keep that down. If it's pointless why don't we just skip it? More silence, please. & when we do speak, perhaps a formal recognition of the insubstantiality of our discourse. Essays instead of books. Feuillitons (why I feel that word should be translated as "firecracker"?) instead of essays. If we can't prove anything, why not have fun? Put a bit of sparkle in it!

not that graduate students & professors are dim, but they're not bright enough. As in, these problems are really difficult, & only the best & the brightest throughout our glorious history have made substantial progress on them. Though a recurrence of my chronic nostalgia is undoubtedly muddling me here, I think our current historicism has exacerbated this issue. Back when the problems were timeless, one could (not that many availed themselves of this option) have a certain humility before them. Who am I to claim a solution to the mind-body distinction? But now that it's all ad hoc (today's solutions for today's problems!), what's to stop me from knowing it all?

Okeh I'm getting way too muddled here, but I hope you know what I'm trying to say. Let me say this much: perhaps more explicating what has already been said but not yet understood (how about an exchange of the "always already" (a phrase from Heidegger, which explains the stink of "I know the secret!" about it) for the "never yet") & less theory-making. Or as I'd say to the kids, let's clean up the mess we've already made before we start making a new one.

I should have made it plainer that I didn't mean any offense to real scholarship. As a blustering blowhard, I'm its dependent. (And as a blustering blowhard, I'm in no position to cast stones at philosophical hubris.) What motivated me was my continuing wonder at finding the grazing land of academic journals so lightly vegetated in comparison with fanzines or little magazines or genre fiction magazines or weblogs.

After, at White's instigation, considering more closely my use of the term "real scholarship" -- in the humanities, that would include transcription and translation and correction, letters and interviews, attention directed to the previously overlooked, re-publication of the currently out-of-print -- that contrast seems slightly less wonderful. Clearly my notion of "real scholarship" is as one with my notion of good fannishness. Again, I think of the amateurish era of Joyce studies, when the bulk of a journal could be taken up by "Notes" -- aperçus, speculations, elucidations, emendations, and jokes -- and its later aridity, talking long and saying little.

Grad school can't alone be responsible for thinning that fannish energy. As proven by the tender verdancy of academic weblogs, the joy of shared discovery continues ready to burst out, given half an opportunity. There's something herbicidal about professional academic publishing itself.

That's All, Folks!

Apparently, while I've been focusing on issues such as Elvis and the irrelevance of academic prose, Howard Dean has been declared unelectable due to his use of an overly directional microphone. Juliet Clark: "They interview Dean and his wife and they sound perfectly reasonable, and then the anchor comes on and says, 'But his campaign just can't seem to escape the memory of that scream — because we're about to show it again!'" So unlike the demure behavior of our own dear Texas queen.... Just imagine the gleaming array of cutlery being polished for John Kerry!

This is why it's best to control both intelligence gathering and mass media. The rule is "Repeat." That rule again: "Repeat." You need a repetitive medium for that. Intelligence gathering is just gravy.

It's an old gag. Moustached phrenologist Bugs or Daffy feels (squeegy-squeegy) Elmer's head, and —"No bumps? We make some!"

That's how it works. How to break it is a tougher problem. As I recall, Termite Terrace usually resolved things with a big explosion and everyone waking up in Hell.