Seven Red

Alright people. I’ll give it to you straight. I like seeing Sidney Crosby have to eat shit as much as the next guy. Really I do. But all the U-S-A chanting breaking out over the US Olympic hockey team has me getting all gaggy. So Canada was favored to win the USA-Canada game, and the US won. Then all of a sudden every schmuck’s an expert, and every other schmuck is getting all teary-eyed about believing in miracles. Enough with the chanting. Enough with the Lake Placid.  Basta, already. I’m announcing it here, after the Canadians just held off a mad third period rush by the Slovaks to force a gold medal rematch: I’m 100% for the Canadian team as of right now.  When they hand out the medals for men’s ice hockey in Vancouver, I want to hear the best national anthem in the world. You know how it goes. You’re humming it right now.

Some of my facebook friends and others have been posting and reposting this email exchange between an NYU Stern School of Business professor and an MBA student. To summarize the exchange, the MBA student showed up for the first day of the professor’s “Brand Strategy” class an hour late, apparently because he or she was “sampling” the first day of other courses in an effort to determine which course to take. The professor sent the student away immediately, since he has a standing policy of refusing entry to anyone who is more than 15 minutes late for class. The student, who could not have known of this policy (not having the syllabus), complains to said professor in an email, explaining the situation, even though he or she has decided against taking the class. It shall be left at that, yes? Oh, no it shan’t. For the professor suddenly feels the urge to demonstrate how much bigger he is than the student, and fires off a rousing, caustic email upbraiding the student for all sorts of shortcomings, and suggesting that he or she get his or her collective shit togevah, like, yesterday. The email finds its way on to the intertubes, whereupon a cheer erupts, and all us betrodden professor-types are meant to fist-pump vicariously through the emailing skillz of our Stern Professor friend, hereinafter, Professor Bickdick (on account of his having such a bick dick). Take that, former abusive student-types!

Now, far be it from me to choose sides between an MBA student and a business school professor (I also don’t adjudicate the relative ethical merits of the Wehrmacht and the Red Army, for instance), but there is an odd irony involved in the exchange that most have failed to notice. To get to it, you have to follow the logic of Professor Bickdick’s reply, which I’ll repost here in its entirety:

Thanks for the feedback. I, too, would like to offer some feedback.

Just so I’ve got this straight…you started in one class, left 15-20 minutes into it (stood up, walked out mid-lecture), went to another class (walked in 20 minutes late), left that class (again, presumably, in the middle of the lecture), and then came to my class. At that point (walking in an hour late) I asked you to come to the next class which “bothered” you.

Correct?

You state that, having not taken my class, it would be impossible to know our policy of not allowing people to walk in an hour late. Most risk analysis offers that in the face of substantial uncertainty, you opt for the more conservative path or hedge your bet (e.g., do not show up an hour late until you know the professor has an explicit policy for tolerating disrespectful behavior, check with the TA before class, etc.). I hope the lottery winner that is your recently crowned Monday evening Professor is teaching Judgement and Decision Making or Critical Thinking.

In addition, your logic effectively means you cannot be held accountable for any code of conduct before taking a class. For the record, we also have no stated policy against bursting into show tunes in the middle of class, urinating on desks or taking that revolutionary hair removal system for a spin. However, xxxx, there is a baseline level of decorum (i.e., manners) that we expect of grown men and women who the admissions department have deemed tomorrow’s business leaders.

xxxx, let me be more serious for a moment. I do not know you, will not know you and have no real affinity or animosity for you. You are an anonymous student who is now regretting the send button on his laptop. It’s with this context I hope you register pause…REAL pause xxxx and take to heart what I am about to tell you:

xxxx, get your shit together.

Getting a good job, working long hours, keeping your skills relevant, navigating the politics of an organization, finding a live/work balance…these are all really hard, xxxx. In contrast, respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility…these are all (relatively) easy. Get the easy stuff right xxxx. In and of themselves they will not make you successful. However, not possessing them will hold you back and you will not achieve your potential which, by virtue of you being admitted to Stern, you must have in spades. It’s not too late xxxx…

Again, thanks for the feedback.

Professor [Bickdick]

Wow. That’s a big dick he swinging around, no? But we should notice a few things about this argument. Professor Bickdick first deploys the usual language of business discourse, suggesting that our hapless student should have performed a risk analysis, and probably would have been wise to hedge his bet. Well, that’s why he’s a business professor type: he can call up the most banal jargon for every situation. But the question is in fact central here: Professor Bickdick is actually quite serious (despite his protestations that he will only get “serious” later) – he’s quite serious, that is to say, that the student should have deployed precisely these decision making devices “in the face of substantial uncertainty.” What we know about Professor Bickdick is that he seeks, at least at the level of his instructions here (I won’t pretend to read his mind) to transform all aspects of life into business decisions. Can we go further? I think so. Apparently, before becoming Professor Bickdick, the good “doctor” (well, I wouldn’t go that far – ahem) made his name by starting a fun little internet site. I won’t link it here, since I’m not in the business of sending more hits to such venues, but suffice it to say that it involves envelopes that are red, and is primarily concerned with leveraging the gift relationship in the service of high priced commodities, to wit:

You give to affirm a friendship, to celebrate a new beginning, to thank a colleague, to honor family, to connect with a loved one, to commend successes, to mark passages, to give a little encouragement — or just because it’s a joy to give.

Put another way, there’s no aspect of your life or relationship in your life that can’t be translated (through the mechanism of Professor Bickdick’s brilliant web site) into a luxury item, like, for instance, a mother’s birthstone necklace ($95 USD), a silk and cashmere cardigan (when your friend or loved one is sick! – $150 USD), and etc. Everything – and especially the gift relation – can be commodified. Finally, Professor Bickdick was teaching a class on brand strategy. Now, I couldn’t find a direct description of a course called “Brand Strategy,” but what would seem like a similar course, “Brand Planning for New and Existing Products,” lists part of its goals as the following:

Creatively explores multiple ways that the branded product experience can create associations in the mind that may develop into mindshare (e.g., the immediate and preferential recalling of your brand when a need arises). Measures the knowledge effects of brand awareness, disposition, propensity, expectations, attitudes, and behavior and discovers the resulting level of brand equity.

Yummy mindshare! If I may risk a lay translation: the class that the student was sampling is concerned with hooking people affectively to a particular brand, or set of brand signifiers, at basically every level of their existence (disposition, propensity, expectation, attitude, and behavior). Or, simpler still, the guy teaches people how to create desiring consumers. So, to summarize, not only does Professor Bickdick instruct his almost student to treat decisions on attending classes as risk analyses; not only did he make his bones (and probably his substantial fortune) transforming the gift relationship – which is structurally immeasurable – into a calculable commodity relation; but the very class that the student had the gall to interrupt is directly involved in the production of a consumer subjectivity. And what is Professor Bickdick upset about?

He’s upset that this student acted like a consumer! He’s upset that this student treated his class as nothing more than another product on a store shelf, to be sampled at one’s leisure, tried out, inspected, and bought – or not. The “lucky lottery winner” that is the student’s Monday evening professor is not a lottery winner at all, but the brand that won the market share.

Oh, but wait, you say. Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “disrespectful behavior” and “decorum (i.e. manners)?” Isn’t there all that stuff in there about “respecting institutions, having manners, demonstrating a level of humility?” Doesn’t that count for something? Why, yes. That is where Professor Bickdick is at his most inconsistent. It is here where we see that all the blathering about risk analysis and all the background on brand building and mindshare never really cut it even for Professor Bickdick. Never mind that Judgement (sic) and Decision Making – presumably based on some derivative of rational choice theory that remains the grand fetish in our business schools – operates in direct contradiction to a notion of mindshare, which seeks to eliminate precisely such analytic calculations in the commodity’s consumption phase. You can’t square “immediate and preferential recalling” with the putative neutrality of risk analysis, however deluded both positions may be. But no matter. As we know from one of Deleuze and Guattari’s pithier aphorisms, nothing ever died of contradiction.

The real incoherence comes when Professor Bickdick tries to mix in remnants from what are essentially dead social formations (decorum, manners, respect for institutions, and the like) with his otherwise formulaic and predictable capitalist jargon. The professor is actually upset that the student treated his class like any other commodity on the market, but he’s equally upset that the sacred unity of his lecture was disturbed. Notice that Professor Bickdick never once suggests that other students themselves may be disturbed by late-comers, an easy enough argument to make, and the only real pragmatic objection to the student’s actions. Rather, the late-comers’ “behavior” is inherently “disrespectful.” It fails to pay due tribute to the eminence that is the professor, or acknowledge the size of his massive, er, congregation. In this sense, Professor Bickdick is quite right to introduce a paragraph break between his nonsense on “substantial uncertainty” and his real lance thrust on a supposed “code of conduct.” The first is the capitalist explanation of how the student erred. The second is the feudalist explanation of the same. We also know from Deleuze and Guattari, however, that the first effects a universal decoding – and indeed, it is precisely such a decoding that all Professor Bickdick’s activities actually serve to produce. It’s all the same to his “gifting” website if you’re celebrating a marriage or consoling the bereaved or honoring a colleague or whatever: it all translates into money, the universal equivalent, and all the dense cultural codes associated with these particular activities fall by the wayside. If there’s a better example of universal decoding than Professor Bickdick’s website, I’d certainly like to hear about it. What Professor Bickdick, in his dick-swinging zeal, doesn’t seem to understand is that such decoding would include his sacred “codes of conduct.” We have, then, the odd presentation of an MBA student who behaves in precisely the way Professor Bickdick teaches people to behave – in the mode of capitalist production, as a consumer, and etc. – but who Professor Bickdick must also sternly lecture (with the joke sent out to friends, no doubt) for violating in that very decoding behavior some archaic mode of feudal respect.

And we’re supposed to cheer about this? Even if we put Professor Bickdick’s incoherent email aside, we might at least say that, yes, yes indeed, we’ve all been tempted to write such emails. And we’ve all been tempted to do so precisely because we teach in this fraught context, where we’re constantly negotiating between the the decoding effects of the classroom gone commodity and the recoding or residual coding of the classroom as hierarchical institutional space. It is in that conflict that the desire to respond in these ways almost always erupts. So, why do most people I’ve taught with not write this email? Is it because we’re still mostly untenured, and such emails would look egregious to a tenure committee? Yes, certainly. Our labor interests are not spared the decoding. Is it because we generally don’t have time to compose such emails, given all our other work and interests? Yes, that too. But there may even be a simpler explanation – however complex the context in which such desires emerge and decisions are made.

Probably, unlike Professor Bickdick, most of us actually like our students.

“Resistance is born of desertion.” – Antifascist Partisan, Venice 1943 (qtd. in Hardt and Negri, Empire)

If one could condense the whole Empire trilogy into a nice little slogan, it would probably be the epigraph here: resistance is born of desertion. There are, of course, many ways to interpret this slogan (openness being both the benefit and the cost of slogans in general), but it is linked to broader concepts of exit, exodus, and escape. To situate it within the broader history of Negri’s thought, it’s impossible to talk about the role of exit and exodus without talking about the labor and social struggles of the 1970′s: exit from the union structure of the CGIL, and from the party politics that seemed completely compromised. It was not about arguing for better working conditions, but the refusal of work as such, or at least as it functioned in its capitalist and state socialist forms. The very notion of the autonomous social movement is defined by these forms of exodus from conventional (political) structures. Hardt and Negri will then, of course, add additional forms of exit that play key roles in the series, most notably global migration. It is also in this context that something like political apathy – supposedly one of the  primary villains today – takes on a much different appearance, as would the efforts to prevent it. If the other side of exit is engagement, then the current fetish (especially in my field) for “engagement” starts to look very much like a political project to cut off exit routes. On this point, the general form of power and what we generally promote in our classrooms are much the same: you can do everything but exit. Maybe hold on to that for later. But you certainly see thinkers from something like an Autonomia school (it’s not one thing) trying to work through this idea of exit. When Virno discusses kairos and metis, it’s almost always in these narratives of escape, like in the classical image of metis, with the mouse that quickly locates a hole and dodges into it just as the predator is bearing down.

So I’m late to the game on Roger Lowenstein’s widely discussed column from last month “Walk Away from your Mortgage!,” but it strikes me as a new narrative of exit that cashes out the exodus line from the Empire series in interesting ways. Needless to say, Lowenstein is not thinking of 70′s social struggles or Empire or anything of the kind. His argument, in some ways, could be read as quite the opposite. It’s slogan might be “Capitalism for everybody!” The problem, Lowenstein suggests, is that millions of underwater homeowners are required to hold some emotional and moral investment in their debt, while banks and big capitalist institutions are expected to act in a purely rational manner:

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials.

Lowenstein suggests that people should consider their house purely as an investment, and act according to the same rational calculations that Morgan Stanley does. Clearly, there’s a lot to be skeptical about here, but there’s also a lot to commend in this view. Mid-twentieth century critique generally viewed capital as transforming everything into cold rationality, but Lowenstein is in some sense right that this view was always mistaken. It’s not that contemporary capitalism is too rational; rather, it’s never rational enough. Or, to put it another way, it was always rationality for the capitalists, and emotion-laden moralism for everyone else (indeed, this structural feature explains very tidily why social phenomena that would seem “residual” in Raymond Williams’ sense are not residual at all). It was actually second-wave feminist thought that grasped this problem, though the solution was – too often – to privilege the emotional dimension (and, unfortunately, the moralism). Its diagnosis was correct, but its treatment plan was often wrong. (Certainly, feminist thought was correct to say that the very distinctions between emotion and reason, affect and thought, were themselves the problem, so I’m using them here mainly as shorthand that keys into Lowenstein’s argumentative framework, not as ontological givens). In any case, with that treatment plan, you end up with even more painful conditions,  like Rogerian rhetoric, the joke we call “business ethics,” and similar sorts of projects, all of which are essentially unilateral disarmament, or exit in a bad way. (Negri always talks about exiting with a weapon.) Lowenstein’s solution is the reverse of this treatment plan: let’s see what happens if everyone actually does behave like a capitalist. The stunned blabber that greeted Lowenstein’s piece speaks, I think, to the real threat it presents, even if few are likely to act on his prescription.

Just before the meltdown (ahem…), I noted in this post that “the proverbial cat that is out of the bag is precisely the conceptualization of the house as such,” which is to say, that the mortgage crisis could only happen because the constant shifting we had all been expected to do between the house as concrete lived space (i.e., use value) and the house as abstract investment vehicle (i.e., exchange value) had broken down, or stuck on investment. But I also noted that this wasn’t a breakdown that was likely to be reversed. Lowenstein’s piece adds an interesting new wrinkle here: yes, embrace the house as pure exchange value for the purpose of making financial decisions about it. There is no moral or emotional dimension to it. I have no doubt that Lowenstein’s underlying assumptions could be read as odious at some level, but they do seem to take the logic to an interesting limit. He notes, for example, that “if lenders feared an avalanche of strategic defaults, they would have an incentive to renegotiate loan terms.” The maddening intransigence of the banks on this question would seem to collapse if everyone acted like…a bank. That is to say, if everyone starts practicing techniques of exit, exit itself becomes a weapon.

The big story in Chicago this week—apart from the fact that Illinois Democrats elected for Lieutenant Governor a pawnbroker who once held a knife to his girlfriend (who happened to be a masseuse/prostitute, and by “once,” I mean five years ago)—is the major service cut for the CTA. Buses, trains, everything will have fewer runs, and therefore more time between runs, and the whole machinery of public transportation will therefore be more crowded. A thousand CTA workers lost their jobs. This all went into effect yesterday. So I get on the train this morning at around 7:20, and see this. I don’t know how long it’s been since I’ve seen a live paint tag on the inside of a running train, but I’d guess twenty years. It’s like that “Life After People” show, where everything collapses in 36 hours. Tuesday morning, the second day of the service cuts, and they’re running rush hour trains with effin’ paint tags on the inside doors? Is it gonna be a free-for-all?

MEALZ, Brown Line

Oh, and it appears that my obnoxious chuckling over southern snowstorms has come back at me, as we’ve doubled the season total in like the last six hours.

I didn’t really have time today to follow up on all that backchannel business, but I do want to take a minute to point to two curious New York Times stories from the weekend. First, probably one of the more interesting unfolding situations is the impending collapse of the Greek economy (“Is Greece’s Debt Trashing the Euro“), which – if the Times and various NPR outlets are to be believed, threatens the very existence of the euro. Apparently, according to the radio, the German taxpayers aren’t particularly keen on bailing out Greece, which they’d be bound to do to avoid a collapse of their own currency, should Greece default on its debt. The Times story is interesting because it presents the the more or less unvarnished perspective of the investor class on the root of the problem: outrageous spending on the part of the Greek government (even called, openly, “largesse!”), “appeasement” of the Greek unions – including, the Times writer notes, even the “prostitutes’” union, which protested “unlicensed competition from Russian and Eastern European immigrants.” Well, we all know the solution to such problems: immediately deploy the austerity measures! The problem is that – and I’m quoting NPR to the best of my memory – policy-makers fear “massive unrest” should that happen. The Times story says the same, wondering whether the 1 million public employees will accept that “the state can no longer meet its commitments” (I suspect “afford their sinecures” was cut by the night editor purely for reasons of vocabulary). Needless to say, the claims of the unions on the government are totally ridiculous, while the claims of the bond-holders are utterly sensible. The article ends with this quotation from Panagiotis Vavougios, the “head of the powerful, 200,000-strong retired civil servants” union: “It is not the workers that should be blamed for this; it is bankers and large capital.” Inverted pyramid arrangement tells you all you need to know about what the writers think of that, but in case you weren’t sure…

The Times does not neglect to inform us that Mr. Vavougios happens to be 80 years old, the suggestion on that point being rather clear. Just the facts, n’est-ce pas?

So, who’s presiding over the current and future Greek bonds that have suddenly been called into question based on the new deficit discoveries? None other than our friends at Goldman Sachs, of course, where Gary Cohn has “positioned his firm to be the leading underwriter of Greek debt — a role that will require it to convince investors that Greece will institute the [...] budget-tightening measures.” Lady, short the euro! If Goldman’s mixed up in this, you can expect a massive downside…for everyone but Goldman.

But that leads to the other long story in the Times from this weekend, which describes in some excruciating detail the goings on between Goldman and AIG that certainly contributed to financial meltdown (for everyone but Goldman, as it were). We already know that AIG was selling insurance like the proverbial Seinfeld car rental joint takes reservations, never expecting to have to pay out on these wacky hedge policies. We also already know that Goldman was buying up insurance like a dude who’s taken out a contract on his wife, which the article portrays as “negative views of the housing market.” Put another way, the people at Goldman believed the housing market was going to crash, and they structured their deals with AIG around that belief. Fair’s fair, right? If somebody’s dumb enough to insure my house with the hurricane bearing down, why not take out the policy, right? But if we may read between the lines on the Times story – in the manner of Russians reading the old Pravda – there is an unstated suggestion in this article (the AIG execs who bothered to be quoted practically hiss it) that it wasn’t merely a belief on Goldman’s part, or merely negative views. It’s a very interesting article that says a lot while also saying very little.

Let me irresponsibly suggest further by returning to our example of the dude and his wife. Suppose you were in a jury trial, and heard that the defendant had taken out large life-insurance policies on his seemingly healthy wife. Then she died inside of six months. Maybe he had a better sense of her wheezing at night? Or maybe it was just a standard insurance buy. That alone would be insufficient for most people to convict. Now, suppose he took out a policy with quadruple indemnity should she be run over by a Zamboni between April 4 and April 8, and lawd but didn’t she step right in front of it on April 5! With nobody else around but the Zamboni driver, with whom our defendant seems to have developed a close relationship in the months before the terrible accident. Yeah, that’s kinda like what the article is saying happened with GS’s insurance buys. “But ladies and gentlemen,” the defense attorney notes, “my client simply had negative views of his beloved wife’s Iceborne Survival Rate!”

Oh, by the way, you, me, and our children’s future?  That’s the icy, flattened wife.

Toward the end of last year, a somewhat extended discussion took place on one of the listservs I subscribe to. The post that started the discussion was titled “The Dark Side of the Backchannel,” and it referenced a number of recent articles and blog entries that deal with the way Twitter is affecting the conference presentation. These articles and blog entries were of interest to the list, and likely sparked the longish thread, because the group that populates the list – nominally, a Computers and Writing crowd – had seen their own Twitter/conference speaker event at the last Computers & Writing conference in Davis, which I touched on briefly in this post, turn into precisely the sort of audience revolt that these pieces describe. To be more specific than I was in that post, one of the keynote speeches at C&W touched off a fairly aggressive (and perhaps insulting) Twitter feed backchannel. Apparently, the paid speaker was thought to be condescending to the audience, in addition to performing some finger-wagging routine on points that everyone in the field has known for years. The feed itself is pretty brutal on this point, and the whole thing resulted in much rending of garments and/or self-justification, in a style only paid academics can summon up.

Over the next couple of days I want to address what happened in the listserv discussion, and, through that, the notion of a backchannel more generally. For now, I’ll just lay out a number of points. My primary concern here is the form of the critique that has tended to come up when backchannels are critically assessed at all. As I see it, what’s lacking from these discussions is any sustained attempt to situate the backchannel phenomenon. At best, those addressing the issue have discussed the way a Twitter feed shifts the rhetorical situation of the conference talk, with perhaps some cursory nod to the history of public address. McCarthy ends his blog post with a quote from Rob Cunningham, which at least draws parallels between what’s happening in public address (and really, we’re talking about a very specific genre of academic discourse) and what’s happening for newspapers and the recording industry. Fine. About forty minutes discussing contemporary social technologies would lead an undergraduate to that point, but it’s still well taken. The problem, of course, is that the ways even serious observers situate and discuss the linked phenomena are not terribly compelling. At worst, the discussions turn into rather naive anarchic sloganism (“Eliminate authority. Eliminate focus” says one poster on the listserv), or devolve into – and this is really the primary focus for many – concern for the personal feelings of the speaker – or arguments against such concern (“This might sound kinda bad, but I have a hard time trying to work up any sympathy for [insert speaker's name].”). Between these two species of points, you get all kinds of ideas about how to restructure the academic conference given the supposedly newly empowered audience, or you get various analogies to other forms of backchannels, and same-as-it-ever-was shoulder shrugging.

This is all fine, I guess, and I’m happy enough that people are talking about this stuff. What I want to suggest over the next couple of days, however, is that all this backchanelling has very little to do with the relationship between the speaker and the audience. Or rather, if the relationship between speaker and audience is changing, it is because both are being trained in novel subjective forms of contribution. In this sense, it doesn’t muych matter whether the backchannel turns into a nightmare of vicious snark, or cashes out as some paradise of collaborative knowledge building. It is the formal character of response that may hold the dangers. More on this in the coming days.

Supposing a fella wanted to make a playlist of 15 or so songs, the only selection criterion of which would be that every song in the list had to contain the word “lemonade” somewhere in the lyrics. What 15 songs might that fella use?

Nothing too exciting today. Just a collection of recent-ish stuff on and around the Brown Line. Enjoy.

CHILE and TYPE, Brown Line between Diversey and Fullerton

TYPE XMEN Detail

CHILE Detail

ROGUE (under the El tracks, near Fullerton)

ROGER/ Snack Attack faces, on Lincoln near Addison

Crazy NINE hits the Montrose rooftop, again.

1) Random Things I Don’t Want to Say on Facebook

A. I’m pretty happy about all the snow the South is getting, since we’ve barely had eight inches in Chicago this winter, total. Every time they describe another southern snowstorm, I smile, and even chuckle a little.

B. When foodies tell everybody what they’re making for dinner, I kinda roll my eyes a little bit and mouth the words “Fuck’s sake.” Also, people who post which bar or restaurant they’re going to. I know people probably roll their eyes when I post more 50-picture albums of my kids, though, so I guess we’re even.

C. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, name-dropping motherfuckers. Really. It’s beneath you.

D. Whenever Project Runway is on, I want to post “I have to question the taste level” as a status update, but then I forget, and then I don’t care.

E. Some people I know and respect are, surprisingly, pretty self-congratulatory in a way that makes me mildly uncomfortable. Isn’t it a little like walking into a crowded room and saying “Hey everybody! Here’s this thing I want to say that shows you all how great I am!” Or are people supposed to behave this way? Have I been wrong all along that there’s something distasteful and anti-social about that? Cuz it seems like people do it, like, ay-lot, and it seems like I always scrunch my nose up and pull my shoulders in when they do.

F. I’ve hidden posts on Mafia Wars and other such shite. Now they’re starting to use their status updates to tell me about it. I feel like joining the game. To kill them.

G. I’m kinda pleased that some people who always struck me as affected IRL retain their affectations in Facebook prose, but the sudden seeming authenticity of that renders their previous affectation less annoying, even though it remains affectation. Curious.

H. Facebook Axiom: You’re the only one of your high school friends who has really changed.

I. The way some people post music videos, it reminds me of that friend you had in high school (who hasn’t changed, by the way) who always tried to put music on in the car because he wanted you to like it too, and he’d play it off like he was trying to have a conversation with you, but would really be waiting for you to comment on how good the music is, which was always clearly signaled by the fact that he kept nudging the volume up a little for every minute you ignored the awesomeness of his new favorite song, even while acting all casual about it, so you finally had to say “Oh, what’s this?” and “It’s pretty good,” just to get him to stop that annoying behavior. Yeah, some people who post eight or nine music videos a day are like that.

Speaking of which.

2) Search Engine (or, The Hard-Headed Never Learn) – Some of the search terms that people use to find their way to Seven Red are hilarious. But my favorite so far is the person from Albuquerque who typed the following into Google: ‘”method man” “carpet get” explain.’ That led our New Mexico friend to this post on The Wackness, which cites the lyrics from Biggie and Method Man’s song The What?, to wit, “No question, I be comin’ down and shit / Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get.” Now, it would seem to me that the “explanation” for this verse could be pretty clear. Carpets get tore up (from the floor up, as it were). But more, no? In the early-to-mid 90′s, the term “rugged” was much favored in East Coast hip hop. Often paired with “raw” (as in EPMD’s Crossover “I speak for the hardcore/ Rough, rugged, and raw…” and later in The What, “Ninety-four, rugged, raw/ Kickin’ down your goddamn door”), the term was both a synonym for “tough,” and designated a style of rap that hadn’t yet been assimilated by the music industry. Its use in this case could also be a typical Method Man joke, switching from the signified to the signifier mid-line: “I gets rugged” turns back to the signifier (“rug”), from which it’s a short step to the new signified (“carpet”). We’ve already seen something like this in the lyrics from Protect Ya Neck (I mean ooh/ Yo check out the flow/ Like the Hudson or PCP when I’m dustin/ N*ggaz off/ Because I’m hot like sauce/ The smoke from the lyrical blunt makes me *uunh*), where the last word should be the word “cough” (rhyming with “off” and “sauce”) but Method switches it up to the actual sound of a cough (“uunh”), which rhymes with blunt, thereby introducing a new rhythm.  I’ve mentioned this moment before, largely because that simple transformation from the word cough to the sound of the cough is, for me, one of the singular genius moments in the maturation of hip hop lyrics, together with Rakim’s development of multi-word, multisyllabic rhymes that extend past the couplet (“The only time I stop is when/ Somebody drop and then/ Bring ‘em to the front cuz my rhyme’s the oxygen”). So that’s my explanation for our Google friend, but far more amusing is the situation that would have caused the search in the first place. So, our friend is sitting around listening to the song, hears the lyric “Yo I gets rugged as a muthafuckin’ carpet get,” and says “Hmm. What does that mean? I know, I’ll go Google it! Maybe somebody will be able to explain!” I kinda love that. So, there you go if you’re still searching, New Mexico.

The last couple of days, Ellie’s been coming home from daycare with actual writing that she’s done. Well, writing out individual words, but still. I’m impressed. Her latest effort seems to be focused on the letter U, as the assembled words make clear: bud, nut, cut, mud. I would have started with A, but maybe they covered that and I missed it. We also noticed that one of the words seems to be RUM, and that the theme itself seems to have to do with rum as well, or at least drinking in general. You have your cup, your mug, and even your jug. Come to think of it, the other words could fit into a drinking theme, too: you’re at the hub, some nut’s around, at least two people get cut (one of whom’s your bud), you end up in the mud, and then you have to take the bus. Sounds like a fun Friday night. Ah, I’m proud of her.

Ellie and I also just got through the 8th volume (out of 8 ) in the Judy Moody series. Let me tell you, Judy Moody is a world class pain in the ass. As a character, I mean. The books are really meant for second and third graders to read, I think, but Ellie digs ‘em as bedtime stories one or two chapters at a time, so I oblige her, and now I know more about Judy, Stink, Rocky, Frank Pearl, Jessica Finch, and even Amy Namey than, to be quite honest, I ever really cared to. It’s a lot of friggin’ pages of this stuff!

In other news, Rafe goes straight for the Bergson. I’d stick with Judy Moody.