for your consideration...

i think this is a pretty interesting article that conflicts interestingly with this whole line of thinking i've been doing about alienation, labor exploitation under capitalism, greed, excess, money...for me, this makes me want to think more about the language i'm using to describe the system and where i'm placing (or depriving) people of agency/desire to do good. (what is the desire to "do good?") anyway. i'd love to hear your thoughts.

whole text is at http://billtotten.blogspot.com/2007/02/army-of-altruists.html

"Army of Altruists: On the alienated right to do good
By David Graeber
Harper's Magazine 2007

You know, education, if you make the most of it, you study hard, you do your homework and you make an effort to be smart, you can do well. If you don't, you get stuck in Iraq. -- Senator John Kerry (Democrat, Massachusetts)

Kerry owes an apology to the many thousands of Americans serving in Iraq, who answered their country's call because they are patriots and not because of any deficiencies in their education. -- Senator John McCain (Republican, Arizona)"

(continue reading here)

from the warm&quiet isolation of the regenstein,
elz

fuck all states

i cant, i wont, i dont have time. im supposed to be writing, or thinking, or sleeping, or buying a plane ticket to singapore, or dancing,  or or orrr or

my visa expires in six weeks. i dont want to leave. i have to leave and spendspend spend sending my money to jetairways or kingfisher so they can buy petrol and shoot me over to the land of fast bureaucracy where visas are fast and plentiful, 

if i can

if they allow foreigners to put their life and lineage and intentions on a PDF and pay $150 and get a stamp in a book and get punted back across the bay, sea, ocean to the land of slow bureaucracy and classical dance festivals and trains to the mountains

at this point it's just cheaper to come home in six weeks

fuck everything

i have a 10 page paper due about ________ by sunday morning (it's friday night). i have one paragraph written. all my friends are leaving tomorrow by 7pm. alex and chloe are ready to go, samantha never wants to leave, hannah is going to delhi to meet her parents and "do" rajasthan. i'll see her in chennai later. then pondicherry, ooty, and back to delhi? names names names and places i've seen so many places. im writing about temples... when they are sacred and when they are not. ive been in 9 active temples, 9 places of ambiguous or informal worship, and 18 abandoned temples. if there is no image in the center shrine, and if the image is not bathed and fed and adorned daily by a brahmin, there is no normatively sacred space but i still take my shoes off and stay quiet like a museum. why are ruins museums? 

hannah has returned to use her computer

now my room is hoppin

life is complicated

i hate a lot of things

but am confused and feeling so many thingswordswordswordsss

from my journal, laden.

stoned rantings 12/4/09 1am

building on last week's lengthy show
and all being equal (compared to what?)
certainly headworms' collidyskope sighs
collect, suspect in fortune and blue
as surely as the bureaucrats
turn cartwheels in the dew

anti-globalization + conditions of possibility

from across the world, or something, here's what i'm listening to...check it out. (listened to in reverse order, ideally with lots of instruments around)

(all available on youtube.)

kala - ali farka toure and toumani diabate - in the heart of the moon
mouse on mars - diskdusk
uske orchestra - mouse on mars remix
aphex twin - rubber johnny - (with movie by chris cunningham)
von sudenfed - fledermaus can't get it - (movie by chris cunningham)
aphex twin - windowlicker
aphex twin - come to daddy
christian zehnder - wat i no
concerto for violin, mvmt 1 - debussy
mr. ozlo - flat beat
stimmhorn
micheal herges (guitar)
summertime - sarah vaughn (sp?)

add 1 bottle of wine per person, or substitute.

love,
elz

dead birds

My grandmother is crying.  She has been crying since my cousin decided to leave unannounced and move in with her boyfriend in Texas.  She has been crying since her friends moved into hospitals and nursing homes, crying since I shaved my hair in some places and let it grow in others.

Everything about her sags—skin sagging off the bone, sagging until it sways and dips into the gravy that I cannot and will not eat.  This is her first Thanksgiving without my grandfather.

The new baby is all badsmells and bugeyes.  My little cousin sings politcally-incorrect songs about Indian chiefs.  Oh, happy day of mass genocide!  Oh, happy day when aunts and uncles gorge themselves with beer and birdmeat!

And they ask me how is school and I say "fine."

I dreamed that you were stringing dead birds onto a thread.  They were small and black and their eyes were like shriveled raisons.  I think they were crows.  And you were peering at me from behind those too-round glasses and smirking like I knew what you doing.   You tied the string around your neck and tried to kiss me but you smelled like death and I pulled away.

word vomit

hum hum hum hum of the machine in my room in my brain
churning burning twirling whirling
fucking my shit UP
there are scratches at my door and scars all down my left side
from impromptu costume design when feeling feels hard
grasping at straws, trying to breathe,
trying to ease into some happiness here,
smooth pill-shaped, bed-shaped, hear under the cracks of the door
the life that is still desired to be living

scuttle my way to catville
a place of dirt and spit and dry food spilt on the floor
where my shit's cleaned up
and i can't walk two feet without some motherfucker picking me up
moving me, touching me, dirty hands grabbing me, wanting me
what, dude, i just gotta be chasing ghosts in the hallway
protecting your shit
and you're messing with me?
one night i will purr subliminal messages into your ear
and how will you like feeling turned on by vegetable human?
yeah that's right, gotta go sleep.

an alpine rendezvous

ingredient list:
50 academics/pedagogists/PhD students
3 teachers
3 nervous undergraduate students
a team of cute submissive students
1600 wires, any color*
a wide diversity of ideas (5 or 6, max)
7 handfuls of laptop
5 cups of meta
a buffet
30 clementines
a bootful of snow, boot included
1 part "i'm not advocating for the destruction of schools, it's just..."
6 more than 2 many cigarettes, handrolled

the recipe:
add 12% german people in authentic bavarian dress. mix with beer and pour into a boot. then spit in it and pour it out of the boot into your throat, toe up (this is the trick for splashing it all over yr face/being a true bavarian man). vom it all back up and add the rest of the ingredients. put it all into a seminar room. mix until thoroughly beaten and sufficiently nebulous. pour in all other ingredients. if the 1 part radicalism is still chunky, extract grant money from the bootcider. climb a mountain. find a torch. drink gluhwein, sprinkle liberally with jokes about blondes, bitches, and whores, untranslatable words in french/spanish/german/portugese....and have a rendezvous. add web 2.0 if desired. enjoy with contradictions!

deLICious.

emily and i arrived here, in garmisch-partenkirchen, on tuesday morning by train and then a long walk down hauptbahnhofstrasse. garmisch is a tinyish town, super touristy/expensive looking, full of ads for permanent anti-aging makeup and hats for ruddy aryan men and their sons. we-ord yo. the hotel perched, full of precarity, on a hill by a ski jump. this guy named gerhardt gave a pretty sweet lecture on "cultures of participation" and how the education/university system produces this discontinuity between passive learning and then the expectation of self-motivated learning/living. lots of graphs and shit here. they're kind of pretty i guess...still amazing to me that people do this stuff full timeish. (that is, transcribing, coding, studying cooperation and collaboration in technology/educational settings...etc.) and i think i forgot about how just absurdly some people can question and jest about women's intelligence and all these smart smart people being so dumb dumb in some ways. don't try to tell me that "that's what she said" is a feminist joke, asshat. that night at the bar almost made me sick/cry, i didn't know what to do and then people were turning to me, "so how do you feel about this? what's the difference between sex and sexuality? why? how do you tell if it's time to clean the kitchen? is this a sexist/racist joke? if i tell a racist joke it means i'm NOT racist, you know? do you hate men? oh don't talk about that now there's a feminist in our midst."
dumb dumb dumb. come on. i forget to expect this from the world sometimes.

i do like the mountains here though. looking at them, that is. and there's a fair amount of snow; when we climbed up to the top, there was a ton of snow and lots of free food. i still stick things in my pockets, collect clementines and rolls for later or maybe tomorrow...mmmmm.

the workshop-y stuff today was kind of cool and kind of exhausting. my presentation is over and i survived. i have a lowlowlow tolerance for sitting still for a long time, so i squirmed a lot, slept a little bit, and had a lot of cigarettes and munched in the lobby with the student organizers from LMU. i've slept like 4 hours in the past 2 days...was up till 5 or so last night finishing up this presentation. blech blech blech.

but now it's done! i'm in a working group on "design principles for a utopic educational setting" tomorrow and then head back to munchen to hang with christian for another day and then to homeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee. this presentation was freaking me out--> not sleeping, kind of panicking all the time about how much i have to do. in lieu of weed [zum kiffen] to manage my stress, i've been breathing a lot and collecting moments of ecstatic calm...now i have a lot to write/do but blah blah blah.

wow i loved reading the baohaus housemeeting notes. you guyz. i'm missin you allz (official baohausers and otherwise)...speaking of which, where's corey?

xxxich-will-auf-dein-gesicht-spitzenxxx
that squiddly dutched-up batface homofreak


*must be produced by Mac