Bling Bling in the ATL

I can't type, having spent last night in the ER letting a plastic surgeon remove a plank of wood which entirely punctured the base of my thumb. So... the basics of the blogpost brewing in my head...

1. flashmobs
A large group of people who gather in a usually predetermined location, perform some brief action, and then quickly disperse. —v., —adj.

2. verlan
I seem to recall that the code the Axis powers never broke during WWII was Navaho. And todays code? Never mind lol, rotflo, btw, 2moro. The Parisian suburbs have given rise to the back-to-front (envers) coded language Verlan. (arabic reads right to left as well... and then the whole concept of 'backwardness...' ) While most French people are familiar with the basics – woman (femme) becomes meuf, bloke (mec) becomes cem, cops (flicks) turns into cuf– but as soon as whole phrases are turned back-to-front, only clan members stand a chance of comprehension... meaning the cufs reading txt msgs are locked out.


3. spread of mobs from city to city we are seeing now in france - not sure how to call it, network epidemiology of ... err... crowds movements? anyhow, I'm saying, the spatial nature or the mob has changed too.

EQUALS: this is not your reup's social resistance movement. The battlefield is shifted to... I dunno. Some cute pomo poco techno-cultural space. It would make a lovely dis, what with all the history of semiotics and linguistics and france, and all that nice city planning stuff about george haussman remaking the city into a modern riot-proof capital in the 1800s.

So I'm a pretty conscious citizen of the earth. I think. I bike to work, or ride the shuttle, or the bus. I buy organic (mostly). I'd recycle and compost if it were an option in Atlanta.

But I do have one bad habit. I don't have a coffee mug at work. And every day, I go through the following ritual about 4 times: Go to the staff lounge, grab styrofoam cup from stack. 'Brew' 2 packets of espresso shots in the weird cybertronic barista-machine, dump 2 packets of swiss miss marchmellowy rich chocolate cocoa, and add add three creamers.

Total wasted packaging material per day:
4 styrofoam cups
8 espresso shot packets
8 swiss miss packets
12 creamers

EeeK!

In other news, the boy is in Berlin and managed to get out a txt message requesting shopping destinations. I sent him to flea market in Friedrichshain where I hope he will purchase lots of post-communist paraphanalia at bargain basement prices.

Ciao!

- Ms. bling

So my sister and the boy left town today. My sis to Boston for R&R; the boy to Berlin for a funeral.

Last night we all went to a Matisyahu concert - thats Matis to the left. He is - thats right - the hasid-from-white-plains reggae star you've all heard about.

Why was I there? Two words: guest list. One of my sister's buddies did his thesis on racial others in music - and scored a job as tour producer by interviewing Matisyahu. Su-eet.

Anyways, it was an interesting show. There was the usual hippie/urban indie contingent, as well as a handful of rabbis and teenage hasids whom you don't normally see at the Roxy on a Monday night.

Matis had an absolutely gorgeous voice - it was a pleasure to hear a concert sung so well. And he was really nice to his band. He gave them a lot of play, and walked to the back of the stage to really share the spotlight with the drummer and the guitarist.

All the same... he's a Jew singing reggae. There was something strange going on. The lyrics are not exactly, 'you gotta fight for your right to party' ... more like, 'god lift me up' which the boy says is a direct translation of aliyot? - which kind of means, send me to Israel?? I dunno. I forget, I was really tired after the show when we talked about it. Anyhow, the boy was definitely a little perturbed. He said it was the same as a Christian rock band and that Matisyahu was using his beard and hat for its iconic status - which I have to admit is probably right.

Maybe so. There was definitely a reggae-religious element to the music, and I felt like Matisyahu was getting a lot of respect from the crowd as a religious figure - someone who deserved a little deference because he ... was so spiritual in his lifestyle. At the same time, I didn't get the impression that anyone who wasn't already hasid was going to walk out of that place determined to embrace orthodox judaism - or that there was any call for that. At most, there was a priest-role being played... Matis was some sort of conduit, or he brought a spiritual presence with him.

Anyhow. Interesting show and I snagged a flyer. Alright, back to work now...

- Ms. Bling

Winter is coming, and for the first time in many years I feel an old gladness. Summer is such a heady season - glittery and bright, frivolous and shallow. Coming off it is like nightfall after a long day drinking beers in the sun. My feelings probably come from years of thoughtless vacations followed by the beginning of school, but regardless, something about cold and dark says 'buckle down'. Its a little ironic that I'm in research, where the work cycle is the reverse of education.

My mother is in Samoa, which is across the equator, so she's well into the hot and rainy season now. No one has heard from her but I for one don't need to. I can well imagine daily life at the Lee household, and if anything important transpires, like good therapy, it will unfold over several months. I am happy to learn of my mother's conclusions and the consequences of those conclusions then. Hopefully one consequence will be that my mother realizes she needs some sort of retirement income, and will finally take US citizenship so she can recieve social security benefits.

I recently read 'Bush on the Couch' - an 'applied psychoanalysis' of George W. Bush by object relations theorist Justin Frank. He appears to be well qualified. Somehow, of all the theories I've read to explain the Bush administration, Dr. Frank's approach seemed the most relevant of all. That Bush is a delusional tyrant who has drawn the world into some replay of his primary traumas seems self-evident. What is not clear is what to do about it. Justin Frank is better versed in the second half of 'applied psychoanalysis' than in the first.

Some of Dr. Frank's suggestions seem useful. He has the insight to guess what might drive President Bush mad - interruptions to his vacations, truthtelling, confrontation. However, the whole approach seems limited as far as political action goes. For reasons of integrity, I'm not interested in pursuing this through PsychOps or marketing literature, so I've been looking at ideas about the authoritarian personality, which (partially) grew out of a need to understand anti-semitism after WWII.

I wish I could say I'd been at it for long enough to come up with good suggestions for how to proceed politically but so far nothing. Except more reading lists - next is Erich Fromm. I came to him from several sources, the most relevant being the current New Yorker, which has an interesting article called "Breaking Ranks" about Brent Scowcroft.

Scowcroft relates colourful vignettes about his front row seats to the crazy-making theater in the Bush inner circle. And Scowcroft cites Fromm as a fundamental reason for opposing Gulf War II.

“I believe that you cannot with one sweep of the hand or the mind cast off thousands of years of history,” he says. “This notion that inside every human being is the burning desire for freedom and liberty, much less democracy, is probably not the case. I don’t think anyone knows what burns inside others. Food, shelter, security, stability. Have you read Erich Fromm, ‘Escape from Freedom’? I don’t agree with him, but some people don’t really want to be free.”

Somehow the concepts bring to mind Elizabeth Cady Stanton's 'Solitude of Self.' Anyways. Its nice to read a sane discussion of our policy options in Iraq. The article is a good read.

Ciao,

Ms. Bling