Triple Accord

My grandfather, the non-world-renowned Rixford Beals, invented the expression “less said better”: I find it useful in many contexts, and I’d like to explain why. Firstly, one has not said “The less said, the better” — i.e. offered a discreet tip to shut up any price. Secondly, one has not carefully explained the Mechanismen by which social reality is “constructed” and your constructive life options de-constructed.

Thirdly, although the matter is one of great import and the understanding of it by the two parties to the conversation not germane to its suitable progression, one has not actually indicated that one may be in the possession of information that is very relevant to the other’s life, yet immodesty forbids the expression of such; what you know about that will be the kindest possible cut, the least efficient mechanism for creating an understanding of some social dynamic not worthy of the name.

Pleasures of the grape

Now, an encomium to Old Lady Alcohol. There was a time in my life when I drank hardly at all: many times, when I simply could not stand the taste, the ill effects, or after-effects. However, today I see the value to a moderate level of consumption; not “a glass of wine a day”, which is not enough to do anything since it won’t get you drunk — the way alcohol prevents heart attacks, which is not a particularly “effective” one — and you’ll feel much better if you don’t drink every day but following such a prescription will not get yinz called an “alcoholic” — but as something else.

As intimated above, the practice of the Italian autonomist “art” of autoriduzione (“self-lowering” of prices, or more properly a science joke about how single atoms can be made to lose electrons pairs naturally lose) with respect to alcohol reveals the true meaning of the expression “pleasures of the grape”: as Jello Biafra once knew not everything goes better with “Pabst Blue Ribbon at popular prices”, but thee sucessful stealing of a beer reveals yinz is a regular guy — and, unfortunately, auto-reducing wine reveals something else.

However, alcohol consumption within the limits designed by the human liver and the difficulties absorbing calories alcohol consumption causes is an equilibrating force better than movies: drinking up robs you, and others, of illusions — including those of inadequacy for various kinds of social commerce. And, if you actually feel really bad, no contradiction exists in a “central nervous system depressant” that elevates mood in senso strictu helping considerably — in psychoses so intense I could not even cry out, I found that the old practice of moderate alcohol consumption in birra form helped more than any phony pill. Don’t overdo it, but someone already thought you were.

The guy’s a fool

Our favorite newsmagazine, MacLean’s, reports this Silvio Berlusconi quote: “Think of how many women there are out there who would like to go to bed with me, but don’t know it. Life is a problem of communication.” Many, many women, one imagines; but for an opposing perspective consider this non-Canadian item from one Antonio Gramsci: “Sexuality as reproductive function and as ’sport’: the esthetic feminine ideal from reproducer to plaything; but it is not only in the city that sexuality has become a ’sport’; popular proverbs — man is a hunter, woman is a temptress, he who can do no better goes to bed with his wife — show how widespread the ’sport’ is.” Actually, they don’t quite do so as per Columbia University Press’s diktat: the proverb is, as per “Laurence and Wishart”, “The man who goes to bed with his wife has no choice.” It’s a rightist saying, which I believe has this content: “He has no choice because she does, and she does have a choice.”

Tall Drinks of Soda Water (Mexican Pop)

Summer is definitely in full swing — it takes a while here, as countless stories of ruined Oregon Fourth of July street-fireworks shows attest — and keeping cool is a good idea for anyone. One of my favorite summer items is a Mexican soft drink, and I’ll tell you why. Unlike contemporary US pop, Mexican soft drinks are made with cane sugar and not corn syrup (which I personally find can give me kind of an unpleasant head-rush).

In Oregon many stores sell Mexican versions of popular US soft drinks like Coke and 7-Up, but there are also Mexican-only drinks that are quite wonderful: I’m particularly fond of the Jarritos line of fruit soft drinks which is pictured above, especially the tamarind flavor (for those that don’t know, tamarind is a tropical fruit grown the world over; the flavor is akin to “orange”). I would also like to dispel two possible concerns about such items. Firstly, the swine flu scare is over — no medical wisdom today, though – and furthermore Mexican bottled drinks are quite intentionally very sanitary.

Secondly, if you’re saying “We don’t have those around here, though” and you live in the continental United States, you are wrong. My advice: go have one.

A Tale of Two Bookstores (Cameron’s and Daedalus)

In the City of Roses it is the best of times and it is the worst of times; while the New York Times is “subbing” for the hometown newspaper, things change every day — sometimes they change multiple times in one day. What has not changed is the city’s love for books; although opinion polls put Seattle ahead as “America’s most literate city”, I would defy anyone to find another city in the English-speaking world where as many people are reading books on the streets, riding public transportation, and in cafés. The largest bookstore in the US, the ILWU-organized Powell’s, has been famous nationally for a while now: perhaps a little too famous for those of us in the area, who used to rely on it for “rarities” that are now snapped up by out-of-staters online. And, unfortunately, the care and feeding of such an 800-pound-gorilla is not cheap — the many smaller independent bookstores that dotted the landscape are dwindling, and even the chains are showing signs of wear.

To cap it off Michael Powell’s daughter Emily Powell, who took control of the chain in 2006, has begun to make her mark. The indie-intellectuals of Portland once relied on Powell’s for “high-test” reading material — although in truth the books purveyed were not always “no-knock” — but the Powell’s of today stocks more belletristic material, of the sort that lines shelves in big cities all across the country. Some sections are still world-beating (since the demise of Schoenhof’s, Powell’s foreign language expert Sam Cannon is the man to know if you need to get something untranslated anywhere in the damn country); however, other sections show some decline. How to remedy the lack? I suggest a “high-low” strategy involving Portland’s most venerable bookstore, Cameron’s, and one of its newest, Daedalus.

Cameron’s Books & Magazines has advertised itself as “Portland’s Oldest Bookstore” for as long as I can remember; during my teenage years, I would duck in there to see what was appearing on the cover of magazines I didn’t read and to pick up any bargains — I once got a copy of Matthew Arnold’s Culture and Anarchy for about $4. The vast selection of magazines old and new, plus the bargains, continue today: if Cameron’s stocks it in their small location at the corner of 3rd and Oak downtown, they will charge you roughly 1/2 what Powell’s would for the same book. Their foreign-language selection, though quite mutable, is also interesting — cheap paperbacks and weighty tomes, in a variety of languages and “priced to sell”. NB: Cameron’s is actually run by a man named “Jeff”; no relation.

Daedalus Books, owned by a Mr. Breedlove, is Portland’s only true scholarly bookstore. It stocks some of the latest monographs on various topics, especially philosophy, and contains many classics of ancient and modern thought at attractive prices — I bought a copy of the first volume of Braudel’s The Mediterranean for a very reasonable price, though I have yet to read it. Once a hole in a rent-subsidized apartment building on the South Park Blocks, Daedalus currently occupies a very pleasant space at NW 21st and Flanders; it is easily reached using the 15 line from downtown and disembarking around the Coliseum Fred Meyer. If you are indisposed to make the trip, their full catalogue is available at their ABEbooks website.

A Note on the ELISA Test

Now for a medical observation. I have felt for some time that the US is not effectively able to cultivate a “culture of health” because it is too beholden to medical professionals, who are beholden to corporate and other interests. The quality of information previously available from medical journalists and interested “laymen” was definitely of variable quality, but in the absence of a proper government health care plan (and of course that means an NHS-style public agency) figuring out what you should do with your health should definitely include thoughts from one’s peers and your own personal observations.

I have taken an interest in the science of HIV disease for a long time, being initially very frightened of it (as most people probably still are), and then at quite a bit of risk for it, and I have an observation to make about the ELISA test (the first-line diagnostic tool for confirming HIV infection). There are newer “rapid” tests today that require less labwork, but I gather they have some of the same problems as ELISA and suspect they have other problems, so I will restrict my comments to ELISA (which is still what most people get).

Compared to tests for diagnosing other STDs, the ELISA test is very good: the standard syphilis test only catches 70% of infections, whereas ELISA eventually detects nearly 100% of HIV antibodies in the bloodstream — and the “window period” after which those antibodies show up when tested has been shrinking for years, thanks to improvements in the test. The test has a slight problem with “false positives”, but the rate is much lower than that of the oral HIV test, and other diagnostic tools like Western Blot and PCR can be used to establish whether HIV is truly present.

All this is widely known – or should be – but here is my observation. The ELISA test is imperfect, and our knowledge of HIV disease is imperfect. But since it is the best diagnostic available for HIV at this time, “worried well” people who do not accept the results of an ELISA test at the time which is “determinative” relative to their risk factors (it’s rather obvious who should determine that, and a determination may be made based on information you provide that you were at no credible risk for transmission and need no test) are medically irrational. Of course it could be wrong, and of course our knowledge of what is happening with HIV could be incomplete. Those are realities of medicine and biology.

However, people who continue to obsess about the possibility of disease after a determinative negative test are failing to understand what medicine can do for them, and their personal responsibilities to others. Whoever you are, you are not so important that science needs to change for you, and it’s pretty dubious that it really can; whoever you are, you are not so important that finite medical resources should be lavishly allocated to fix a problem that the best medical science suggests is not actual, or is possibly actual but beyond us.

Once the healers are done with you, you need to heal yourself and think about who you are and what you owe others in life; get it together and fulfill your obligations to family, friends, country, and humankind. On the other hand, though, people who duck ELISA tests or accept nondeterminative negative tests — or, I guess, good diagnostic results after HIV infection has been confirmed – as “good enough” are medically unrational: they care too much about what other people think – including maintaining other people in the illusion that it would be okay to have risky sex with them. Those people have an obligation to themselves to not have their behavior refract on the aforementioned groups.

That’s how I see it, anyway.

This is the Army

Thought for the day: perhaps the Minutemen — not the band, or the ultra-right ’60s terrorists, or the contemporary AZ gringos — were so-called because they were both smaller than British soldiers, and they were going to be ready in a minute — it’s also perhaps true they were smaller “on paper”.

And since the Republican theme song ”God Bless America” shouldn’t be played in baseball stadiums:

But if Woody (who once wrote a column for the SF Communist newspaper and said concerning this ”it was something I always wanted to do”) is not for everybody, here’s an alternate salute to Columbia suitable for people of all faiths.

Station to Station

Here’s a fun one that I’ve been playing a lot: McFadden and Whitehead’s 1979 hit “Ain’t No Stoppin’ Us Now”. I previously addressed certain elements of the populist Philadelphia International sound, and this song has been a campaign song for “left-liberal” campaigns like those of Antonio Villaraigosa and Barack Obama.

An observation: I heard the song on the Tom Kent radio show, which has recently begun broadcasting in Portland as it does in many other radio markets (the show slurs over this a little, with market-specific promos and generalities about where people are). Much as YouTube enabled people all around the world (with broadband) to “share a moment” with music videos, the shake-out of the radio industry in 2009 has standardized sounds all across the US. Hmm.

The School of Flesh

Post-commitment readers may have noticed the blog is drifting into a sociological metier; given that social analysis is everybody’s game, this has had a certain cast of rationality to it. In this post I drift into slightly choppier waters, cultural criticism and the body, and although there’s a tint of Gesellschafttheorie (ha ha) to it, it may indeed not be to everyone’s taste. This year women’s clothing has become more revealing, and walking around the area it is evident to my research team that young women (18-24 demographic, roughly) have rather a lot to show of themselves. Although I won’t attempt to displace Unfogged as the premier destination for pornogenetic speculation on the Internet, I have a few “Lamarckian” observations to make.

Over the last decade or so, cosmetic medicine — for those that have insurance — has improved. I say “cosmetic”, but I mean a general attention to morphology rather than simply making sure the organs are checking out OK. Lichtenberg once wrote of the smallpox vaccine eliminating a visage from the world; looking at unblemished young faces makes pimply old people feel trapped in a time vortex, and apparently everybody works out these days to look sharp at their office job. There have been changes in diet: without making cheap jokes about food additives, though who really knows, let me suggest that it was probably secretly really OK for the socially acceptable caloric intake for girls to be adjusted upward. Finally, though I am loath to think of the “dimes” of my youth as akin to foot-binding, it’s hardly a new idea that the “smoke-filled rooms” some of us grew up in might put a crimp on physical development. (It remains to be seen whether the political skills we acquired there will put us in good stead in dealing with the larger and more agile.)

Now, since I eke out a modest living as a hate-filled misogynist creep, you might think dealing with these young women would be tough sledding. It is true that those initially wearing the new styles were under the impression that only attractive and well-dressed men would be looking at their decolletage, but by this point it’s on a par or easier than dealing with the previous generation of young Portland transplants, who though they dressed more modestly were hipper and better-educated than you and really saw no social role for men they had no economic or sexual tie to.What does this say? Something about men and women together, and something about less super structures.

This experiment in dress (though it understandably goes back and forth, to the point that female refuseniks have adopted the dress styles of the early 60s as protest) is a learning experience for society, establishing a new balance between the sexes. Look, and what happens? Nothing. What would happen? Who knows? Most probably, people will learn a new set of social skills for defusing a too-keen interest in the appropriate sex: look at Europe, where people see “the goods” right off the bat on the beaches — or refrain from going for sebaceous, spiritual or ethico-political reasons (before celebrating the “Continental” we should also consider Brazil, which numbers among its major exports gender-bending pornography but has a strict no-nudity policy on its beaches).

Of course this regime of biopower is not without its risks; coming off real social gains by women and minorities during the Bush years (as opposed to the ’90s, where we talked a good game) a lot of young men harbor reactively misogynist and sexist attitudes that make them unable to connect with their female peers. “The school of flesh” might teach understanding, but it might also teach that no response is as good as a yes. And looking beyond the facade, what is the cognitive motive force of this sea-change? The failure of the economy, which is going to continue for as long as we live. Clinton and Bush hollowed out the American manufacturing base, and even if every Oregonian got a degree in Advanced Hydroponics there won’t be the wages or security of the past.

Though they may be perfectly intelligent, these lovely young things are in it together with the mass of humanity; “the bourgeois virtues” celebrated and cultivated by a certain strain of feminism are not for them. What role, then, for the dirty old man? I certainly think it would be progressive for my generation to do better than previous ones (except, perhaps, the Greatest Generation) and accept that age is not just a number, that ultimately the youth must be allowed to live their own lives and take a certain priority in some matters. However, I also think one of the hardest lessons for an unassuming man of any age to learn is not about the brush-off, easily recoded in sexist language, but that sometimes the profoundly attractive want one to play a role in their lives – relative to differences, other commitments, and a fundamental attitude of respect. But perhaps the matter requires further consideration.

In Which I Imitate Peli

I would argue that anthropology has experienced a crisis in recent decades as actual no-fooling members of various cultural groups explain their cultures without the intercession of the pale and well-meaning. Question: will the democratization of media technologies (e.g., that anyone with a reasonable amount of income in a developed country today owns the equipment necessary to make a short digital film) lead to a similar crisis in media studies? Bloggers don’t need to be told about blogs, after all.