Foucault is METAL

A  hilarious bit from a conversation with a friend about Foucault being a badass and post-modernism (whatever that is):

Jack: I like postmodernism, but I usually take the radical end out and think it terms of history

me: history?
Jack: Yeah
9:03 PM Postmodernism thinks it has found the tr00 chaos underlying all things
It’s REALITY!
REALITY MOTHAFUCKAS
me: haha sounds like Nietsche

have you read the birth of tragedy?
Jack: I don’t do that
me: the nietzche thing is all about using dionysus as a metaphor for tr00 chaos
Jack: Hahah
Yeah, sounds like the Neech
me: and he claims the greeks weren’t really peaceful or stoic attall
but actually kinda fucked up
9:05 PM Jack: Hahah
me: but we looove our Appolonian boxes
after all, anything that touches the Dionysic void is destroyed
pretty fucking metal


And the real gem:
Jack channeling Foucault pwning someone in a conversation. Any conversation.
9:13 PM “Actually, as we discuss what we’re seeing is that we can only travel back and forth between mediational abstractions created by discourses of power that conflict with one another and make your reality FUCKED!”
Yes Foxy, but
FUCKED I SAY
But
DISCOURSE OF POWER

Continue reading “Foucault is METAL”

General Advice on Mongolia Travel

Bring lots of energy bars. _Lots_.

If, at any point, you manage to perform an act of explosive and/or otherwise notable bowel movement–be sure to proudly proclaim so to your travelling companions. If they fail to recognize you for your achievements (i.e. survival), realize they _don’t get it (yet)_ and have faith that _their time will come_. Or find new travelling companions.

Develop some form of superstitious logic to explain how best to preserve your gastrointestinal health–if only to maintain some semblance of composure (sanity). The mind does not take well to dreading diarrhea after every meal, arbitrarily.

Halfway home, the bus breathes its last breath. It’s really more of a wheeze. Watch the driver frantically fan at the flames peeking out of a hole in the bus’ side panel as you walk away.

I see it all unfold from about, without. A meta-travel. We goto this land for many reasons that are all the same. We run from broken homes, repentant lovers, dead pets.

Flip through the study-abroad brochures advertising semesters in Prague, Vienna, Amsterdam. Flip to the next page.

Now you are in the Exotic section. Beijing, Hangzhou, Dakar, Yaoundé. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese. It couldn’t have been _that_ bad.

The Dark Continent and the Exotic East, like two stepchildren. Appreciated intellectually, but when it comes down to the wire, people’s loyalties reveal themselves, and align conveniently with the flows of capital and genealogy.

You have narrowed your selection to two choices: Vietnam or Mongolia. Or Nepal. But you eliminate that because you’ve been, if only briefly. Feel bad for not wanting more to go to Africa. You must be an Orientalist asshole, or something. Make a note to work on that.

Vietnam, home of rice paddies and shards of American shrapnel embedded in jungle soil.

Mongolia is nowhere, nothing. Marco Polo and Genghis Khan. He is still Genghis to you.

Mongolia gives new weight to the phrase “Golden Years”. Nostalgia on a new plane.

But _now’s your chance_ to see Vietnam. _Before it develops_ they say.

Realize there is something morbidly fascinating about (post)-communism.

Choose Mongolia because you get to spend two weeks herding sheep and goats, and living in a yurt in the countryside. This appeals to you, but seems to be lost on others.

Develop some stock answers to the question, _Why Mongolia?_ Your favorites are: _Why not?_ or even better, _Because it’s fucking awesome, that’s why._ Deliver these with an air of definite confidence, as if the subject should require no further exploration.

you become a minor celebrity in certain circles. Your mom’s email list. Your sister’s friends. Relatives. No-one at your school cares, or they hide it well. It is likely they resent you for out-exoticizing-internationalizing them. This makes you happy.

Go away–far, far away. You are tired of living comfortable. Which is ironic, since for a rich white male, you’ve had it less than _easy_. Then again, that’s not saying much. you long for culture shock. To be hung by your feet and shaken until everything falls from your pockets.

_You are going to Mongolia_. Repeat 3 times. The words fail to become any less surreal. Two months later, you will echo this experience in downtown Ulaanbaatar, _You are in Mongolia_. Repeat 3 times.

Wonder if there’s something wrong with you because you don’t seem to be _falling in love_ with this place. _What does that even mean?_

And the food is bad enough to prevent any long-term relationship from developing [past the early stages].

Learn that everything extracted from, or grown in Mongolia goes to China; that everything that can be bought is made in China, perhaps from Mongolian materials. Which you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

You want to make sure your Mongolian language skills reach a decent level. Find one of the five Mongolians in Boston and organize private language lessons for th etwo weeks before you leave.

Buy “Colloquial Mongolian” by Alan J. K. Saunders and Jansangiin Batereedüi.

Six months later, the _most played track_ in your iTunes® will still be “Lesson 1, Dialogue 2–Fast”.

Have a sinking feeling halfway thorugh track 2 on the cd. Sample words: Sandal, Kharandaa, Tom, Jijig, Gobi. _Goiv_? Gobi. Figure it must be a mistake or typo. How can Gobi become.. well the G is swallowed, and calls up from the bottom of your throat, leading to a slippery o that somehow terminates in a soft V. Realize you won’t be learning this language from a book. You need corroboration for these crimes against reason. Wish you hadn’t dropped Chinese.

Enjoy thinking about how you must appear, Mongolian phrases emanating from your throat as you practice to the recordings on your daily commute on the wonderful MBTA.

Be glad you dropped Chinese.

Try not to think about how knowing this language will help you later in life. Fill your head with lots of liberal-arts _learn for its own sake_ bullshit.

_Mongolia is fucking awesome_, that’s why.

Reflections on Mongolia

####PART I. __TURBULENCE__

With perestroika and the decline of Soviet power in the late 1980’s, Mongolia entered the first period of its post-communist development. This romantic period was a time of hope; Mongolia was to become the next Asian Tiger. Yet with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the halting of related aid money, newly democratic Mongolia was faced with an economic crisis of epic proportions. The fruits of democracy were enjoyed as well; newspapers sprang up, their variety reflecting the budding of Mongolia’s new multi-party democracy. Churches tripped over each other to send missionaries to cultivate her fertile sands, and Buddhism re-entered the public sphere. However, the lack of visible progress led many Mongolians’ to enter into state of now-familiar disillusionment.

Elections brought the young Democrats into power, who hastily implemented an intensely neo-liberal plan to shock the Mongolian economy into complete liberalization. Despite optimistic forecasts from policymakers, the life of the average Mongolian took a serious turn for the worse. Problems that had been forgotten during the times of Stalinist ‘utopia’ ravaged the country. Unemployment, massive inflation (as much as 350%), shortages of essential goods, and an almost complete collapse of the Mongolian economy were among them.[^m1] Social ills soon followed, with Mongolian males and their fragile egos faring worse that the women; alcoholism and violence, especially, spread amongst the growing population of unemployed young men.[^m2] Such chaos swept the MPRP back into power, beginning another dark era of de-democratization, though with some economic recovery.

####PART II. AWAKENING THE TIGER

Big Brother is watching, don’t say the

Wrong thing, look the Wrong way.

Traditional systems dis-

Integrate. Morals, ethics, freedoms and structures of life on the steppe.[^m3]

Continue reading “Reflections on Mongolia”

Summer!

Yay for summer!
I have a job. More on that later… but I have to go help my Dad set up my sister’s highschool for their after-prom party (An Evening in Paris…)

I’ll post more after I take my computer back apart, then reassemble it…
Hope everyone is having a great summer so far!!!

Kitten Huffing, and Humor Writing

Via the Ultimate (Frisbee) list (in response to 4/20 et al.)

Kitten Huffing @ uncyclopedia.org

Kitten huffing is a controversial practice that has recently been growing as a popular and healthy alternative to street drugs.Despite a long history in Western culture, the practice remains largely taboo. Excessive huffing has been known to produce undesirable side effects, including addiction, damaged sinuses and, in some cases, death. Veteran huffers often caution against huffing more than a couple kittens per day as overdosing can be very unpleasant and quite dangerous.



The first documented case of kitten huffing is from Artemus of Capadocia in 432BC, who described “ae wydenyng of ye soule wyth yon huffe” upon sucking out the soul of a young wild lynx kitten from the plains of central Asia Minor. Kitten Huffing achieved only a minor level of interest outside of the Asian sub-continent until famed Englishman, This Guy, wrote his treatise Me and the Marquis get down with some crazy shit on an extended huff-binge he took with the Marquis de Sade and brought the practice to the forefront of haute couture.

Read More

A cute example of the kind of humorous faux-but-really-maybe-not-so-faux (as in, fiction gets at a greater truth etc…) intellectualism, which I’ve noticed is especially popular among frisbee team members, but which is pretty much all over the place in a brain-trust kind of environment where everyone’s stressed and people often take themselves, and their work )and studies) just a little too seriously… Actually, another more direct to remedy this is the recent growth of no pants day

And incidentally, the huffing site also serves as an interesting example of hyper-fiction…

edit: even better: http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/Making_up_Albert_Einstein_quotes

“It’s quite simple, really. If I’m the Moon, and I’m traveling at the speed of light in the general direction of your eye, and I then collide with it in the manner of a large circular object consisting of bread, cheese, and tomato sauce, then there is naturally an impact – which can be theoretically termed, in a word, amoré.”

And on how to be funny when writing articles (anyone can submit or edit articles, since it is a wiki)

THE ESSENTIAL JUDAS PRIEST

Well, I just stopped by wrmc to see if there were any new stuff for me to review, and there was one curious album in the usual pile… “The Essential Judas Priest”. Now I consider myself as much an expert on Heavy Metal as anyone, but Priest are one of the few bands I really don’t know much about (and haven’t really heard much either). So I grabbed it and gave it a spin (or rather, it’s spinning right now). And its incredible!! That isn’t too say it’s anything radically different than I’ve heard before… (actually very similar to Hammerfall for those who are in the know) but I actually LIKE some of the songs! (Half these songs were written before 1980!!!!) They’re not even that cheesy, which is what I mostly expected from a band I thought was largely active in the 80’s (or whatever you call Manowar’s situation… they’re still stuck). I had no idea they were that old, but apparently they were formed in the late 60’s!!!! (Old for metal)

Well that’s all for now… just had to share it with someone!

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Movie

Completely unrelated, but I was cruising around the blogs and found a link to some other site, where a writer had just posted a great review of the upcoming film, V for Vendetta. It sounds like it could be quite intriguing, and suffice it to say he gave it an “A”.

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TIBET LECTURE

DIGITAL STORY to be CONTINUED after this lecture at RAJ on TIBET ECONOMICS…. NOW!
(Friday at 4:28 pm)

I will return.