I remember the first time I heard this song was around 5 years ago. It had been about a month since I had broken up with my girlfriend and decided to leave my circle of friends for similar reasons as to what is described in this song. Just the music and lyrics really filled me up with hope while also helping me to fill that sad spot in my heart for making my decision to leave her behind in my life. It still makes me think about her every time I hear this song. 

Where does the word ‘retro’ come from? According to the design historian Elizabeth Guffey, the term entered common parlance in the early sixties as a linguistic spin-off of the Space Age. Retro rockets provided reverse thrust and slowed a spaceship’s propulsion. The connection of ‘retro’ to the era of sputnik and the space race lends itself to an appealing analogy: retro as the cultural counterpart to ‘reverse thrust’, with nostalgia and revivalism emerging in the seventies as a reaction against the sixties’ full-tilt surge into the ‘out there’.
As attractive as this notion is, though, it seems more likely that ‘retro’ came into use as a detached prefix that had gotten unstuck from ‘retrospection’, ‘retrograde’, ‘retrogressive’ and similar words. Terms starting with ‘retro’ tend to have a negative connotation, whereas ‘pro’ is attached to words like ‘progress’. Retro itself is something of a dirty word. Few people like to be associated with it. The most bizarre example of this is the tragic story of Birmingham pub landlord Donald Cameron, who com“mitted suicide in 1998 when owner Bass Breweries decided to convert his establishment into a retro theme pub called Flares. At the inquest, his ex-wife Carol talked about how the humiliating prospect of ‘wearing a seventies outfit and a wig’ plunged Cameron into despair. ‘He felt he could not deal with any trouble in the pub. People would laugh at him because he looked ludicrous.’ A few days after being reprimanded by his Bass bosses for obstinately turning up for work in his sharp nineties suit and tie, the thirty-nine-year-old father of two asphyxiated himself in his car.


—Simon Reynolds, Retromania: Pop Culture's Addiction to its Own Past

Products for the Sensitive Guy Demographic

THE HALAL MARKET IN TURKEY 

The prominently secular facade of the Turkish marketplace significantly changed with the proliferation of faith-based offerings such as Islamic media, movies, music, novels, toys, swim suits, resorts, beauty shops, and cafes in the 1990s. The scope of offerings is telling: the debut of Islamized versions of existing products reflects the heated culture war between the pro-secular Muslims and the Islamists. As Navaro-Yashin (2002, p. 223) notes, "As Islamists came to forge identities in distinction from secularists, they radically changed the sorts of things they bought and sold. They wore different clothes, ate only certain kinds of food, frequented particular shops, started special businesses of their own. The rise of the Islamist movement in popularity and power is indissoluble from the development of specialized businesses for 'Islamic goods' and the formation of market networks for believers." Indeed, the rise of the halal market is inseparable from the surge of shift of pro-Islamist parties to power and the integration of Islamic capital—that is, the accumulations of the conservative businessmen—into the post-1980s economy. Following the military coup in 1983, Turkey has witnessed a major shift from a state-controlled to a liberal market economy during the Özal administration. The market augmenting of the Ozal years changed the etatist trajectory of the state not only by considerably limiting the role of government in the economy, but, most importantly, incorporating the previously excluded groups of conservative businessmen and religious sects into the national economic landscape. For example, the interest-free banking law of 1983 was instrumental in enticing the Islamic bourgeoisie to turn significant amounts of under-the-pillow savings into investments. These investments, in turn, promoted the growth of Islamic businesses, particularly newspapers and TV stations, which allowed Islamic groups to annunciate a visible identity and strengthen their solidarity (Demir et al., 2004). Paralleling the economic visibility of Islamic bourgeoisie was its rising political influence. As pro-Islamic parties successively came to power, they awarded Islamic businesses with contracts. Backed by such governmental support and remittances of Turkish guest workers living abroad, this new breed of conservative entrepreneurs, also known as Anatolian Tigers, established many Islamic enterprises, noticeably expanding their economic and political influence in Turkish society. 
Many of these Anatolian tigers are the backbones of the halal movement in Turkey. They play a fundamental role in the formation of the halal industry by both championing the demand for halal products and supplying the market with Islamic goods. The public face of the halal movement is GIMDES, which states its mission as "verifying that the halal qualifications, hygiene standards, and the nutrition value of foodstuff, cleaning agents, cosmetic products and pharmaceuticals are according to Islamic norms, issuing halal certification to the same, and exposing society's need and demand for 'halal food', 'righteous wealth', and 'healthy living' to the public" (gimdes.org)." With this mission in mind, the organization has joined the halal network of key international institutions such as World Halal Council and World Halal Forum, receiving accreditation from fellow member organizations (e.g., JAKIM of Malaysia). Currently, GIMDES oversees the halal certification process, performs audits of manufacturing facilities, and trains halal certifiers.  GIMDES also seeks to increase public awareness by organizing annual conferences and halal expos, publishing a bi-monthly magazine, maintaining, and informative website, and offering resources to help consumers lead a halal lifestyle.

GIMDES is a noteworthy example to the Islamist activists’ space-making for and discursive formation of a new market within a prominently secular marketplace with little halal consciousness. Similar to the other grassroots organizations leading contemporary movements (e.g., organic, fair-trade), GIMDES is primarily interested in creating halal awareness, distinguishing halal from other market offerings, and positioning it vis-à-vis the global and local socio-historical contexts. A narrative analysis of GIMDES literature reveals that modernity, industrialization, and capitalism are the key ideological resources that the halal movement appropriates in framing its agenda. On the one hand, the movement defines itself as a counterforce to Western modernization, and, on the other hand, it strongly relies on scientific studies and modern marketing techniques to legitimize and commercialize the halal concept. The following offers an analysis of how halal advocates selectively adopt the key tenets of modernism to forge the halal movement in Turkey. 

Contesting Modernity: Historicizing Halal as a Cure to Modernist Ills 

GIMDES accounts construe the halal movement as a countervailing force to social and economic problems posed by Western modernity. Underlying this countermodernist stance is the perception that Western individualism and the capitalist motives of modern markets have undermined the solidarity of umma, the Muslim community. According to GIMDES narratives, thanks to the strict observance of halal, Muslims have ruled over the world and have led a pristine life marked by benevolence and solidarity for centuries. This romanticized order is believed to have come to an end, however, when Western culture started infiltrating the Turkish society. In halal proponents’ narratives, the West is constructed as a “bandit” who forcefully enters the immaculate realm of Islam and cunningly introduces habit-forming non-halal products with deceiving marketing techniques in order to transmute Islamic lifestyles. The following excerpt from GIMDES’s Food Report demonstrates this view:

Western bandits raided our house, going into every corner and scattering everything we owned. What we’ve left is an umma scattered like loose prayer beads. . . . In return for the lifestyle we’ve lost, what we’ve been left with is an alien, intoxicating, supposedly modern lifestyle that’s imposed upon us . . . until recently Muslims could easily know what is halal and haram but now we’re faced with products that are new to us like Coca Cola, chips, marshmallow, and mayonnaise. . . . We have to question these products. It’s become evident that they’re harmful to both our health and our soul. 

The characterization of Western countries as “bandits” finds an equally interesting match in halal narratives’ portrayal of industrialization and capitalism. In historicizing halal and justifying its revitalization, halal advocates frequently construe the Western modes of production as evil, jeopardizing human health and overrating capitalist motives at the expense of moral principles. This demonization is evident in elaborate, scary-tale descriptions of factories as alienating places with “giant boilers, extractors, and gears” that have replaced “our homespun” methods with soulless processes and “dubious” ingredients. This repelling image is further reinforced by claims that large corporations driven by capitalist motives use inconceivable ingredients such as “lice, blood, human hair, hog bristle” (Büyüközer, 2007, pp. 10‒18) in their products, which are then marketed in appealing packages for Muslims’ consumption.
The concern over the growing use of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the agro-business, in particular, has fueled the halal debate, allowing GIMDES to dramatize the consequences of making non-halal choices. Progressive approaches in food biotechnology such as GM crops are perceived as the reflections of the greedy and imperialist agendas of multinationals who are seeking to play God. In appealing to the ‘conscious Muslim,’ GIMDES narratives criticize the public for remaining blissfully ignorant against the threat posed by Western producers, who are said to “transmute our foods.” 

The industrial movement, which has been rapidly growing under the control of the infidels, laid its hands on our food. It has significantly transmuted the contents of our food. . . . What should a Muslim do? Should he wake up and break free from this system or should he continue to sleep?

The monstrous consequences of “continu(ing) to sleep” are illustrated in elaborate conspiracy theories, which suggest that Western powers use GMOs to change Muslim consumers’ DNA structure and, thereby, manipulate them. The following quote from an article discussing the dangers of GMOs illustrates an interesting take on these conspiracy theories:

How do they [the capitalist powers] control our DNA in order to shape our society as they wish? . . . thanks to a game that is played on our genes. . . . They analyze the blood samples taken from our people and then develop viruses that would mislead our DNA. And then, they sell these viruses to us. How? Through the British chips, French-Jew’s patented yoghurt, and the German gummy bears that have sneaked into the farthest corners of our streets.

Halal proponents’ decided skepticism toward Western modernity tempts them to create sci-fi scenarios that would suggest that non-halal goods are intended to overtake Muslims’ body and soul, rendering them submissive to imperial motives. The pervasive suspicion that is embodied in GIMDES narratives regarding Western modernization naturally spills over to pro-secular elites and the Westernization project in Turkey. Halal proponents argue that the modernization efforts, which most noticeably began in 1923 with Kemalist reforms and the abolishment of the Islamic Empire, not only introduced foreign ways and ideologies, but also aimed to expunge the Muslim identity and their halal sensitivity.

For many orthodox Muslims, the secularizing reforms like the abolishment of the caliphate, the closing down of religious shrines, and the replacement of the Islamic canon law with the Swiss code marked a significant shift from an Islamic state and signaled the end of Islamic civilization. Changes like replacing the Arabic alphabet—the holy language of Islam— with Latin in instruction, when coupled with the annihilation of polygamy and enforcement of civil marriages, deeply touched the daily life of the population. Seen through this socio-historical lens, the republican era secularization efforts represent a break from Islamic traditions and practices, significantly diminishing the prevalent halal consciousness during the Ottoman times.
Today, this lost halal consciousness is associated with a wide range of contemporary problems, from the dissolution of communal ties to the increasing cancer rates that seemingly represent Muslims’ fall from grace. Consider the following quote:

As a society we witnessed a period in which we were suddenly thrown out of power. Western culture was rammed down our throat. Sadly, today we’re faced with an alien lifestyle . . . our people have problems, particularly, with the foodstuff that represents the fabric of our life. The essence of these problems is the frustrations with the foreign substances that don’t belong to our culture and don’t fit with our norms. . . . We’re also confronted by a series of health problems. In the past, coronary problems or hypertension weren’t at a concerning level, but today millions of people are diagnosed with these problems and even more with cancer. When we evaluate these problems, we have to consider the issues of halal-haram. The halal certification matter didn’t come out of the blue; there is a reason why it became an issue worldwide.

As the above excerpt demonstrates, an eroding halal consciousness is blamed for the rise in modern-age problems, and, by the same token, halal consumption is positioned as the cure for these modern ills. In situating halal choices as the solution to modern ailments, GIMDES narratives construct the secular mindset and the social structures as the most important impediments against the movement. The secular mindset, like its Western counterpart, is said to be motivated by capitalist anxieties rather than moral responsibilities, thereby tempting manufacturers to cut corners and use Islamically unacceptable ingredients. The secular regime is also criticized for leaving the halal movement short-handed of the necessary talent and expertise to rule over on halal matters. It is argued that the regime has not only eradicated Islamic jurisdiction by replacing the independent fatwa (religious decree) institution with a state-controlled one, but also jeopardized the future of the movement by failing to produce Islamic scholars via its secular education system.

Since issues of halal and haram relate to Islamic jurisdiction, these decisions are to be made by Islamic scholars. However, our religious scholars lack knowledge of technology. On the other hand, the people who have pursued scientific studies lack the basic knowledge of Islamic norms and canon law because the utterly secular education system deprives individuals of the basic religious teachings. . . . Following the collapse of Ottoman empire, the powers that sought to extinguish religion tried to annihilate the fatwa institution, the heart of Muslim life. During that period, the Islamic scholars were massacred and executed. They were to be replaced by a new generation of scholars programmed to suit their [secular] regime.

As these narratives demonstrate, halal proponents justify the emergence of the halal movement and discursively construct the need for halal certification vis-à-vis two ideological rivals: Western modernity and the Westernization project in Turkey. Accordingly, adopting modern practices and secularism have swayed Turkish people away from their ‘true path,’ the ordained halal lifestyle. Having lost their halal consciousness, Muslims have fallen from grace as evident in the declining communal affection and increasing rates of diseases in Turkish society. As such, GIMDES discursively forges its quest for halal as a cure to modern ills.

—Elif Izberk-Bilgin, "Theology Meets the Marketplace: The Discursive Formation of the Halal Market in Turkey," in Consumption and Spirituality, eds. Diego Rinallo, Linda Scott, Pauline Maclaran

“The Pradamalia are fantasy charms composed of elements of the Prada oeuvre. They are imaginary creatures not intended to have any reference to the real world and certainly not blackface. Prada Group never had the intention of offending anyone and we abhor all forms of racism and racist imagery,” the firm said.

"The conception of broadcasting as an instrument of education in the domestic setting was most valued by people whose Victorian parents raised them to place altruism and cultivation of feelings at the heart of moral action. These liberal moralists were convinced that political liberty would stimulate men and women to think for themselves, initiate independent action, and prefer progressive ideas. John Stuart Mill convinced them that democracy would nourish a free market of ideas. William Gladstone assured them that democracy would create a level playing, allowing customary and original beliefs to compete so that the best would emerge from reflection rather than unexamined tradition. The public-minded individuals who filled the executive posts at the BBC, however, found that democracy had not unfolded as projected by their intellectual and political guides, Gladstone and Mill. Democracy had not encouraged the common folk to entertain the benefits of modern planning of their cities. They did not give new art a chance; they didn't value musical innovation; and they didn't put communal good ahead of personal gain. Reason was nowhere in sight. Universal adult franchise, granted in 1918, had brought neither the triumph of duty over inclination, nor of will over appetite. The egoism of populist politics eliminated such generous concepts as altruism from public behavior. Self-governance, the moralists felt, had done nothing to cure the Britons of their philistinism, nothing to spark a desire for moral self-improvement. The young idealists attracted to the BBC had absorbed John Stuart Mill's lesson that self-government was possible only among people who had reached a certain level of moral and intellectual development." Only when they appreciated beauty and imagination could they rise above what Mill called "the littleness of humanity" and make wise and impartial decisions." Men and women who had cultivated a care for the finer things in life, [BBC founder] Reith's deputies surmised, would be more inclined to respect tradition, the authority of the state, and national (as opposed to immediate, personal, class-based) interests. Such a public would be partial to consensus, law, and order, thereby improving class relations and strengthening nationalism. 
To this pioneering generation of executives, John Reith's ideas glistened as the talisman that would relieve them of their discontents. Radio sparkled as technology's greatest gift, capable of bringing cultural progress up to pace with Britain's advances in self-governance. It would open up people's homes to experts and transform broadcasters into public educators. They would now have the opportunity to rope in "people previously left out from the notion of public." They would be able to influence just as forcefully "the invalids, unadmittables, house wives and spinsters," as they would the "not-so-intelligent and ill informed" and the "intelligent and ill informed." Just when electronic communication was beginning to challenge the superiority of the values associated with artistic culture and educated classes, the BBC gathered all sorts of cultural entrepreneurs and intellectuals to introduce listeners to the higher pleasures of life; all this in order to jump-start the robust participatory democracy envisioned by their forebears. 
Reith's staff were not naïve. They certainly had cause to be optimistic about their grand ambitions. In the course of six years, they had transformed from a company, established under a commercial license in 1921, to a quasi-autonomous public service corporation in 1927. They were no longer required to boost the sales of radios for their parent companies. They banned advertising. They had at hand a medium of mass communication over which the Postmaster General had granted them legislative monopoly in Britain. Freedom from market competition and political parties gave them freedom to carve out a mission independent of the exigencies of the public and politicians. 
In addition, the BBC staff drew their colleagues not from the pool of journalists trained on Fleet Street, but from elite universities—attracting scholars and civic entrepreneurs with reputations established through innovations in public-sector education." 

—Shundana Yusaf, Broadcasting Buildings

Why must Christ obey the law?

"John Dogg and Nadine were quite the couple now. John Dogg was showing with Helen Hellenberger. Helen was wild about him. All the important critics were at his debut opening at her gallery. There were slide projections of blank white light. And patterned light from shallow zinc rectangles of water he'd placed strategically on the floor. He'd aimed film lamps at the rectangular pools, which sent reflections up the gallery wall in veined and fractured shimmers.
John Dogg wore a well-cut linen suit and laughed easily and occupied the role of feted artist with perfect naturalism, no sign of the pushy tactics I'd seen at the Kastles'. He moved through the room confident that he was universally adored, and it seemed that he was. I'd met him the previous September and now it was late April, almost May, and he had been reinvented. This happened in New York, and you could never point to the precise turn of events, the moment when the change in human currency took place, when it surged upward or plummeted. There was only the before and the after. In the after, no one was allowed to say, hey, remember when everyone rolled their eyes about John Dogg? Shunned him, thought he was an idiot? I understood all this now. Sandro disapproved of that kind of ambition, said there was no hurry, but it was a lie, a thing successful people said, having conveniently forgotten that they themselves had been in a rush."

—Rachel Kushner, The Flamethrowers

P.S. As it turns out, "fascist alt-right troll" spells out FART. Yes, I do find that funny. Does that make "antifa" Anti-FART (with all that implies, including self-combustion)?

     Explain a bit about the Geneva School’s approach to labour mobility and what it revealed about their ideological framework more generally.     

     Right, well this is kind of a shadow subplot in the book that I wrote and in retrospect I wish I had drawn it out more but it’s something that I realize after writing the book that it’s sort of happening without me drawing the reader’s attention to it. But what’s happening is that things change over the course of the 20th century. And at the beginning of the 20th century the frame of reference for people like Hayek and Mises and Haberler is really the Hapsburg Empire and then the Danubian Basin or the area of Eastern Europe that is comprised of the different nation states that succeed the Hapsburg Empire. And when they are looking at that space they’re actually pretty doctrinaire in their support of the freedom of labour to move from one site to another. For Mises especially, I mean in his early work he is quite orthodox about the absolute necessity of the freedom of labour. That labour, like all other factors of production needs to be able to go where it’s most needed, and in his mind this is a salutary process that will probably lead to the kind of dissolution of some nations, but then it might lead to their recombination in different forms once they’ve emigrated, and there’s no central problem with this. He saw nationalities and ethnicities as unmoored from this or that territory. They should be able to form themselves in emigration as much as in the places they are ancestrally rooted to. So this is still a kind of 19th century vision of the great migrations that moved people from Central and Eastern Europe to North America and also the huge migrations that were moving internally from the countryside to the city that really drove the industrial revolution. So it’s quite absolute in its belief in labour mobility as a principle, this early Austrian position. What changes is really world wars. So the second world war produces a situation in which human mobility is now perceived as quite an acute national security threat, particularly when you think about the way the entire Japanese population was brought under suspicion as kind of a 5th column of the Emperor. The German population was, too, but to a lesser extent, stigmatized and brought under suspicion, even if they had been there for generations. And what people like Mises said, looking at the situation was effectively, this is a problem but it’s a temporary problem, but for the time being, let’s try to conceive of a system of global capitalism that doesn’t rely anymore on free labour mobility. So they say, given these constraints, what might we see as a provisional working model of something that could still work. And in that kind of, “let’s bracket this for the moment” state of mind, someone like Haberler comes up with the theory of comparative costs, which makes in sort of formal international trade economics terms the argument that if you have enough movement of goods and capital then you can profit just as much from free trade and free capital policies as if you had free movement of labour. He produces a kind of epistemological foundation or alibi for a “closed borders for people” position, not, I think, because he has any inherent antipathy towards foreigners or people of different races but because the circumstances of the borders that came up in the course of the second world war are sort of being taken seriously.    

     It’s telling perhaps that while Neoliberals are capable of cultivating such a utopian disposition toward markets, they are sort of realists when it comes to the boundaries of the nation states for ordinary people.    

     Oh absolutely, I think that’s unquestionable and the way that this develops only drives that point home all the more clearly. Because what we get in the course of the 20th century is not just two major world wars but also migration from the global South to the global North in significant quantities that we haven’t seen since, well, of course, the mass forced migration of slavery that effectively founded the United states, and the movement of Asian labourers to the western United States and to Canada and Australia in the late 19th century before it was shut down by exclusion acts. But when you get into the post-war period of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, you start to get the movement from French colonies, and then the former French colonies into the French metropole, you get guest workers arriving in large numbers from places like Turkey and Morocco into countries like West Germany and the Netherlands, and you get people from places like the British Commonwealth and the former British Empire migrating into the United Kingdom. So the creation of a multicultural and a multiracial Europe, a multiracial Britain, a multiracial France, a multiracial Germany, brings home this quote unquote problem of a clash between different cultural styles in a way that Neoliberals now are forced to confront. And the way that they confront it is exactly as you say, not exactly inspiring in the evenness with which they apply their principles to people as they do to goods and capital. What Hayek concludes in the late 1970s, looking at Margaret Thatcher’s policy, which was to effectively end immigration from countries of the global South if she had her way, this is her official position at that time, Hayek supports it. He doesn’t come out in principled opposition to that and say, even, that, you know, people deserve the same rights and movements that capital does. That would at least be a kind of honourable libertarian position, you could say, but he says, no, people are a special kind of factor of production in effect and they can be very disruptive. And, as he says, the kinds of origins of racialism come from the inability of the long-standing residents of countries to extend their welcome to newcomers. He creates and analogy to Vienna on the arrival of large numbers of Jews from further East in Eastern Europe and Russia. And he says, well, when the Jews arrived they were unable to assimilate quickly and they ended up being a disruptive force and they actually ended up producing anti-semitism. Their presence produced anti-semitism.    

—Quinn Slobodian interviewed by Daniel Denvir

Let Them Hang

 

Below is a list of the photos in order. Here's the legend:

        * '+'   means a pictures with an identifiable person
        * '-'   means a pictures with with faces obscured by cropping or
photoshop
        * '[+]' means the photo is widely available
        * '[ ]' means the photo does NOT turn up in reverse images searches.

? that last category is interesting, because it narrows the scope of
where the images come from.

        * [#]   means there's some interesting detail (below the list) about
its origin

The photos, in order:

- [+] Boston Dynamics robot dogs running
+ [+] woman wearing a keffiyeh with an assault rifle in the back of a
pickup truck
- [+] gender-balanced, faceless people in a crowd ? maybe a demo,
maybe a concert, probably in Europe
- [ ] Instagrammy composite photo of a skinny woman's arms, four hands
flipping the viewer off
- [ ] people eating, maybe communally, faces blurred in photoshop
- [+] stock photo of an athletic woman running on a race track
+ [+] composite photo ("harveryaftermath") of blacks and whites working
to save kids in a flood zone
+ [ ] poor Latin American kids, maybe in school, with a boy hiding his
face behind paper, bandana-style
- [ ] a punching bag hanging in some sort of crude training camp
- [1] composite photo of two white men crouching behind a mound, one
with a rifle, one with binoculars
- [+] two helmeted motorcyclists pulled off by he side of a remote road,
maybe coordinating
- [ ] arbitrary 3D-rendered thing (a "network" I guess, but quite
unusual ? interesting detail)
+ [ ] outdoorsy white woman, long hair flowing, resolutely digging a
trench
- [ ] hippyish white man (probably), framing a house
- [ ] someone welding
+ [ ] infrastucture-ish composite: white guy working on a tower
scaffold, container ships
- [2] ambiguous photo of someone burning branches, distant crowd visible
through the smoke
- [+] composite: car burning, small group of people in a burning forest
        source:
https://tineye.com/search/5db3c04fd14bd706fae384a44674a21bdcb9d457/
- [+] misc boats in a flood zone (also Hurricane Harvey, in Houston)

More details:

[1] The two men crouching behind a mound is cropped from an image that
appears in several articles about westerners who joined ~local forces to
fight ISIS
        https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3049019/Peshmerga-s-foreign-legion-fighting-alongside-defeat-ISIS-workers-ex-soldiers-brave-men-world-teaming-Kurdish-forces.html
        https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-normal-guys-from-the-uk-and-us-who-have-given-up-their-day-jobs-to-fight-isis-in-syria-10195105.html
        https://beta.al-akhbar.com/Arab/19873/%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%AC%D9%8A%D8%B4-%D9%8A%D8%AD%D8%B1%D8%B1-3-%D9%82%D8%B1%D9%89-%D8%A8%D9%8A%D9%86-%D8%AE%D9%86%D8%A7%D8%B5%D8%B1-%D9%88%D9%85%D8%B7%D8%A7%D8%B1-%D8%A3%D8%A8%D9%88-%D8%A7%D9%84%D8%B8%D9%87%D9%88

[2] the photo of someone burning branches comes from an image
("dakota2.jpg) that appears widely on college essay?selling websites
to illustrate a webpage called "law-enforcement-essays.html", with a
bias toward "racial profiling essays" and "essay on police corruption"
        https://www.google.com/search?source=hp&ei=1-nmW9WJIu3isAeVr6KYDg&q=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&oq=%22law-enforcement-essays.html+%22&gs_l=psy-ab.3...628.3317.0.3913.5.4.0.0.0.0.116.320.3j1.4.0....0...1.1.64.psy-ab..1.0.0.0...0.LHWyEv-PD5c

That last bit is interesting, because it suggests something that had
never occurred to me: essays-for-sale websites being used to identify
specific students' political leanings. Maybe some enterprising
journalist can take that one on ? by using reserve image searches to
identify where ~stock photography is used on anonymous, cloned
essay-selling sites.

Other possible follow-ups that could shed light on where this site comes
from:

- language analysis, to see where else the phrasing is popping up
- identifying faces (for example, the woman digging a trench)

One really interesting find: Reverse image searches turn up one more
photo that didn't make it into the final production, called
"hangingrose.203ee432.png," which was to appear in a section called "Let
Them Hang ..." It's a homebrew photo (not available elsewhere) of a
bouquet of flowers, hanging upside-down on a wall, above a US-style
electrical socket. That seems like a pretty sophisticated proposition: a
sentimental appeal phrased in the passive voice but strongly suggestive
of political violence as a tragic, forlorn necessity. I have
screengrabs. Who "they" are who'll be hanging is left to the reader's
fantasy. The phrase "let them hang" comes from Shakespeare's Twelfth
Night (1.3), but it's attained a slightly meme-like status in a variety
of music circles:

        https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=%22let+them+hang%22


—Ted Byfield on nettime

Windows96 is that guy from Arcade Fire? He's the root cause of all nostalgia in music since early 2000s. I don't think so... I thought he was from brazil

 

Presently they're linked and slowly descending from wee-hours Manhattan into teeming darkness, leaving the surface-Net crawlers busy overhead slithering link to link, leaving behind the banners and pop-ups and user groups and self-replicating chat rooms . . . down to where they can begin cruising among co-opted blocks of address space with cyber-thugs guarding the perimeters, spammer operation centers, video games one way or another deemed too violent or offensive or intensely beautiful for the market as currently defined...
"Some nice foot-lover sites too," Eric comments casually. Not to mention more forbidden expressions of desire, beginning with kiddie porn and growing even more toxic from there.
It surprises Maxine how populated it is down here in sub-spider country. Adventurers, pilgrims, remittance folks, lovers on the run, claim jumpers, skips, fugue cases, and a high number of inquisitive entrepre-nerds, among them Promoman, whom Eric introduces her to. His avatar is an amiable geek in square-rim glasses wearing a pair of old-school sandwich boards that carry his name, as do those of his curvaceous co-adjutor Sandwichgrrl, her hair literally flaming, a polygon-busy GIF of a bonfire on top of a manga-style subteen face.
"Deep Web advertising, wave of the future," Promoman greets Maxine. "Thing is to get position now, be in place, already up and running when the crawlers show up here, which'll be any minute."
"Wait—you're actually seeing revenue from ads on sites down here?"
"Right now it's weapons, drugs, sex, Knicks tickets . . ."
"All that real recherché shit," puts in Sandwichgrrl. "It's still unmessed-with country. You like to think it goes on forever, but the colonizers are coming. The suits and tenderfeet. You can hear the blue-eyed-soul music over the ridgeline. There's already a half dozen well-funded projects for designing software to crawl the Deep Web—"
"Is that," Maxine wonders, "like, 'Ride the Wild Surf'?"
"Except summer will end all too soon, once they get down here, everything'll be suburbanized faster than you can say 'late capitalism.' Then it'll be just like up there in the shallows. Link by link, they'll bring it all under control, safe and respectable. Churches on every corner. Licenses in all the saloons. Anybody still wants his freedom'll have to saddle up and head somewhere else."
"If you're looking for bargains," advises Sandwichgrrl, "there are some nice ones around the Cold War sites, but prices may not stay reasonable for long."
"I'll bring this up at our next board meeting. Meantime maybe I will just go have a look."
It isn't a promising neighborhood. If there was a Robert Moses of the Deep Net, he'd be screaming, "Condemn it already!" Broken remnants of old military installations, commands long deactivated, as if transmission towers for ghost traffic are still poised out on promontories far away in the secular dark, corroded, untended trusswork threaded in and out with vines and leaves of faded poison green, using abandoned tactical frequencies for operations long defunded into silence . . .  Missiles meant for shooting down Russian prop-driven bombers, never deployed, lying around in pieces, as if picked over by some desperately poor population that comes out only in the deepest watches of the night. Gigantic vacuum-tube computers with half-acre footprints, gutted, all empty sockets and strewn wiring. Littered situation rooms, high-sixties plastic detailing gone brittle and yellow, radar consoles with hooded circular screens, desks still occupied by avatars of senior officers in front of flickering sector maps, upright and weaving like hypnotized snakes, images corrupted, paralyzed, passing to dust.
Maxine notices that one of these maps is centered on eastern Long Island. The room has a familiar look, austere and unmerciful. She is visited by one of those rogue hunches. "Eric, how do we get into this one?"

—Thomas Pynchon, Bleeding Edge

Message from the Japanese Embassy in Vancouver to all Japanese citizens living abroad

The defunct band "TIA & tha Knutz" now simply called "Tia Ray", photograph circa 2013.

About legalization of cannabis in Canada Published October 4, Heisei 30 With the enactment of the "Canadian Canadian Act on Marijuana" that was adopted on June 21, we will inform you of the following reminders to Japanese nationals.   1. In Canada, possession and use of cannabis (marijuana) will be legalized from 17th October this year.   2. Meanwhile, in Japan in the Cannabis Control Law, the possession / transfer of cannabis (including purchase) etc is illegal and subject to punishment.   3. This provision may be applied not only in Japan but also in foreign countries.   Four. Japanese nationals residing in Japan and Japanese tourists should observe these Japanese laws and take sufficient precautions not to hand over cannabis (as well as foods and drinks containing cannabis), even outside of Japan I hope.

Source: https://www.vancouver.ca.emb-japan.go.jp/itpr_ja/00_000921.html

Hi Alex, I tried to answer your phone call the other day but was not able to hear you. Anyhow, I'm now playing low stakes poker (and tournaments) at the Big Easy Casino 4 nights a week until 2 am. It gets me out of the house socially. I work out most days in the pool for at least an hours, but still eating bad (McDonald's and Burger King most nights after poker, and sleeping most of the day). T is a successful acupuncturist in partnership in California and will be visiting with me for a few days in early November. I'm very happy with the Trump Administration and Kavanaugh's appointment to the Supreme Court. Best regards, Rick

Kanye West is not Picasso
I am Picasso
Kanye West is not Edison
I am Edison
I am Tesla
Jay-Z is not the Dylan of anything
I am the Dylan of anything
I am the Kanye West of Kanye West
The Kanye West
Of the great bogus shift of bullshit culture
From one boutique to another
I am Tesla
I am his coil
The coil that made electricity soft as a bed
I am the Kanye West Kanye West thinks he is
When he shoves your ass off the stage
I am the real Kanye West
I don’t get around much anymore
I never have
I only come alive after a war
And we have not had it yet

-- Leonard Cohen

Inception

 

 

JORF n°0229 du 4 octobre 2018
texte n° 113


Recommandation sur les équivalents français à donner à l'expression fake news
NOR: CTNR1826048K

ELI: Non disponible

Portée par l'essor des médias sur la toile et l'activité des réseaux sociaux, l'expression anglo-saxonne fake news, qui désigne un ensemble de procédés contribuant à la désinformation du public, a rapidement prospéré en français.
Voilà une occasion de puiser dans les ressources de la langue pour trouver des équivalents français. Lorsqu'il s'agit de désigner une information mensongère ou délibérément biaisée, répandue par exemple pour favoriser un parti politique au détriment d'un autre, pour entacher la réputation d'une personnalité ou d'une entreprise, ou encore pour contredire une vérité scientifique établie, on pourra recourir au terme « information fallacieuse », ou au néologisme « infox », forgé à partir des mots « information » et « intoxication ».
On pourra aussi, notamment dans un cadre juridique, utiliser les termes figurant dans la loi de 1881 sur la liberté de la presse ainsi que dans le code électoral, le code pénal ou le code monétaire et financier : « nouvelle fausse », « fausse nouvelle », « information fausse » ou « fausse information ».
En tout état de cause, la Commission d'enrichissement de la langue française recommande l'emploi, au lieu de fake news, de l'un de ces termes, choisi en fonction du contexte.

Nicole's Cage

subject:

A Lesbian Artist Who Painted Her Circle of Women at the Turn of the 20th Century

Inbox

x

Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 6:07 AM

to me

http://hyperallergic.com/325736/a-lesbian-artist-who-painted-her-circle-of-women-at-the-turn-of-the-20th-century/

The image at the bottom of “Una, Lady Troubridge” would be a good model for your Lesbian self portrait!
me thinks

Fri, Sep 30, 2016, 4:49 PM

to you Hi you,  I like it But I think maybe you had someone else in mind? My Lesbian self portrait would require several extra layers of paint, I am not sure I could pull it off. best wishes

Titles for Beth's paintings (but I might use a couple too)

 
1. If I look too closely all I see is Donair meat 
2. Subterbody 
3. Find the strangest website you can about ecology 
4. All ideas start as memes 
5. Banana with Adam's apple 
6. Painting in a vacuum 
7. Tirades 
8. Politics of synaesthesia 
9. Becoming anti-intellectual 
10. Academia saves you from stupid ideas 
11. Pig ribs at the scale of cow ribs 
12. Pickle of the scene 
13. Asking permission for rights to traveling wilburys song 
14. TED talk with rapping AI robot 
15. Algorithms of consent 
16. Attention payments 
17. You would be so poetic / as a pair of underwear / hanging from the balcony 
18. Clouds inside a house 
19. Digestive system in a bank vault 
20. Drapery in a server farm

For Beau

"The children," writes Ryman, "knew the Substitute was not a real teacher because he was so soft" (168). "Substitute" derives from the word "succeed," and the sense of possibility around the changeover is deeply embedded in the word. A substitute brings optimism if he hasn't yet been defeated-by life or by the students. He enters their lives as a new site for attachment, a dedramatized possibility. He is by definition a placeholder, a space of abeyance, an aleatory event. His coming is not personal-he is not there for anyone in particular. The amount of affect released around him says something about the intensity of the children's available drive to be less dead, numb, neutralized, or crazy with habit; but it says nothing about what it would feel like to be in transit between the stale life and all its others, or whether that feeling would lead to something good.

Of course, often students are cruel to substitutes, out of excitement at the unpredictable and out of not having fear or transference to make them docile or even desiring of a recognition that has no time to be built. But this substitute is special to Dorothy: he is an actor, like her parents; he teaches them Turkish, and tells them about alternative histories lived right now and in the past (171). Dorothy fantasizes about Frank Baum not in a narrative way, but with a mixture of sheer pleasure and defense: "Frank, Frank, as her uncle put his hands on her" (16g); then she berates herself for her "own unworthiness" (169) because she knows "how beautiful you are and I know how ugly I am and how you could never have anything to do with me" (174). She says his name, Frank, over and over: it "seemed to sum up everything that was missing from her life" (16g). Yet, face to face she cannot bear the feeling of relief from her life that the substitute's being near provides for her. She alternately bristles and melts at his deference, his undemanding kindness. She mocks him and disrupts class to drown out her tenderness, but obeys him when he asks her to leave the room to just write something, anything.

What she comes back with is a lie, a wish. Her dog, Toto, had been murdered by her aunt and uncle, who hated him and who had no food to spare for him. But the story she hands in to the substitute is a substitute: it is about how happy she and Toto are. It includes sentences about how they play together and how exuberant he is, running around yelping "like he is saying hello to everything" (174). Imaginary Toto sits on her lap, licks her hand, has a cold nose, sleeps on her lap, and eats food that Auntie Em gives her to give him. The essay suggests a successful life, a life where love circulates and extends its sympathies, rather than the life she actually lives, where "[i]t was as if they had all stood back-to-hack, shouting 'love' at the tops of their lungs, but in the wrong direction, away from each other"(221). It carries traces of all of the good experience Dorothy has ever had. The essay closes this way: "I did not call him Toto. That is the name my mother gave him when she was alive. It is the same as mine" (175).

Toto, Dodo, Dorothy: the teacher sees that the child has opened up something in herself, let down a defense, and he is moved by the bravery of her admission of identification and attachment. But he makes the mistake of being mimetic in response, acting soft toward her in a way he might imagine that she seeks to be: "I'm very glad," he murmured, "that you have something to love as much as that little animal." Dorothy goes ballistic at this response and insults Baum, but goes on to blurt out all of the truths of her life, in public, in front of the other students. She talks nonstop about being raped and hungry all the time, about the murder of her dog, and about her ineloquence: "I can't say anything," she closes (176). That phrase means she can't do anything to change anything. From here she regresses to yelping and tries to dig a hole in the ground, to become the size she feels, and also to become, in a sense, an embodiment of the last thing she loved. After that, Dorothy goes crazy, lives in a fantasy world of her own, wandering homeless and free, especially, of the capacity to reflect on loss in the modalities of realism, tragedy, or melodrama. To protect her last iota of optimism, she goes crazy.

—Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

Winnie the poo eyeing an aubergine

Capitalism is a system for concentrating wealth, which makes possible new investments, which further concentrate wealth. This process is accumulation. Classic models take us to the factory: factory owners concentrate wealth by paying workers less than the value of the goods that the workers produce each day. Owners “accumulate” investment assets from this extra value. 

Even in factories, however, there are other elements of accumulation. In the nineteenth century, when capitalism first became an object of inquiry, raw materials were imagined as an infinite bequest from Nature to Man. Raw materials can no longer be taken for granted. In our food procurement system, for example, capitalists exploit ecologies not only by reshaping them but also by taking advantage of their capacities. Even in industrial farms, farmers depend on life processes outside their control, such as photosynthesis and animal digestion. In capitalist farms, living things made within ecological processes are coopted for the concentration of wealth. This is what I call “salvage,” that is, taking advantage of value produced without capitalist control. Many capitalist raw materials (consider coal and oil) came into existence long before capitalism. Capitalists also cannot produce human life, the prerequisite of labor. “Salvage accumulation” is the process through which lead firms amass capital without controlling the conditions under which commodities are produced. Salvage is not an ornament on ordinary capitalist processes; it is a feature of how capitalism works.

Sites for salvage are simultaneously inside and outside capitalism; I call them “pericapitalist.” All kinds of goods and services produced by pericapitalist activities, human and nonhuman, are salvaged for capitalist accumulation. If a peasant family produces a crop that enters capitalist food chains, capital accumulation is possible through salvaging the value created in peasant farming. Now that global supply chains have come to characterize world capitalism, we see this process everywhere. “Supply chains” are commodity chains that translate value to the benefit of dominant firms; translation between noncapitalist and capitalist value systems is what they do. 

Salvage accumulation through global supply chains is not new, and some well-known earlier examples can clarify how it works. Consider the nineteenth-century ivory supply chain connecting central Africa and Europe as told in Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness. The story turns around the narrator’s discovery that the European trader he much admired has turned to savagery to procure his ivory. The savagery is a surprise because everyone expects the European presence in Africa to be a force for civilization and progress. Instead, civilization and progress turn out to be cover-ups and translation mechanisms for getting access to value procured through violence: classic salvage. For a brighter view of supply-chain translation, consider Herman Melville’s account of the nineteenth-century procurement of whale oil for Yankee investors. Moby-Dick tells of a ship of whalers whose rowdy cosmopolitanism contrasts sharply with our stereotypes of factory discipline; yet the oil they obtain from killing whales around the world enters a U.S.-based capitalist supply chain. Strangely, all the harpooners on the Pequod are unassimilated indigenous people from Asia, Africa, America, and the Pacific. The ship is unable to kill a single whale without the expertise of people who are completely untrained in U.S industrial discipline. But the products of this work must eventually be translated into capitalist value forms; the ship sails only because of capitalist financing. The conversion of indigenous knowledge into capitalist returns is salvage accumulation. So too is the conversion of whale life into investments.
 
Before you conclude that salvage accumulation is archaic, let me turn to a contemporary example. Technological advances in managing inventory have energized today’s global supply chains; inventory management allows lead firms to source their products from all kinds of economic arrangements, capitalist and otherwise. One firm that helped put such innovations in place is the retail giant Wal-Mart. Wal-Mart pioneered the required use of universal product codes (UPCs), the black-and-white bars that allow computers to know these products as inventory. The legibility of inventory, in turn, means that Wal-Mart is able to ignore the labor and environmental conditions through which its products are made: pericapitalist methods, including theft and violence, may be part of the production process. With a nod to Woody Guthrie, we might think about the contrast between production and accounting through the two sides of the UPC tag. One side of the tag, the side with the black-and-white bars, allows the product to be minutely tracked and assessed. The other side of the tag is blank, indexing Wal-Mart’s total lack of concern with how the product is made, since value can be translated through accounting. Wal-Mart has become famous for forcing its suppliers to make products ever more cheaply, thus encouraging savage labor and destructive environmental practices. Savage and salvage are often twins: Salvage translates violence and pollution into profit. 

As inventory moves increasingly under control, the requirement to control labor and raw materials recedes; supply chains make value from translating values produced in quite varied circumstances into capitalist inventory. One way of thinking about this is through scalability, the technical feat of creating expansion without the distortion of changing relations. The legibility of inventory allows scalable retail expansion for Wal-Mart without requiring that production be scalable. Production is left to the riotous diversity of nonscalability, with its relationally particular dreams and schemes. We know this best in “the race to the bottom”: the role of global supply chains in promoting coerced labor, dangerous sweatshops, poisonous substitute ingredients, and irresponsible environmental gouging and dumping. Where lead firms pressure suppliers to provide cheaper and cheaper products, such production conditions are predictable outcomes. As in Heart of Darkness, unregulated production is translated in the commodity chain, and even reimagined as progress. This is frightening. At the same time, as J. K. Gibson-Graham argue in their optimistic reach toward a “postcapitalist politics,” economic diversity can be hopeful. Pericapitalist economic forms can be sites for rethinking the unquestioned authority of capitalism in our lives. At the very least, diversity offers a chance for multiple ways forward—not just one.

In her insightful comparison between the supply chains for French green beans (haricots verts) that link West Africa with France and East Africa with Great Britain, respectively, geographer Susanne Freidberg offers a sense of how supply chains, drawing variously on colonial and national histories, may encourage quite different economic forms. French neocolonial schemes mobilize peasant cooperatives; British supermarket standards encourage expatriate scam operations. Within and across differences such as these, there is room for building a politics to confront and navigate salvage accumulation. But following Gibson-Graham to call this politics “postcapitalist” seems to me premature. Through salvage accumulation, lives and products move back and forth between noncapitalist and capitalist forms; these forms shape each other and interpenetrate. The term “pericapitalist” acknowledges that those of us caught in such translations are never fully shielded from capitalism; pericapitalist spaces are unlikely platforms for a safe defense and recuperation.

At the same time, the more prominent critical alternative—shutting one’s eyes to economic diversity—seems even more ridiculous in these times. Most critics of capitalism insist on the unity and homogeneity of the capitalist system; many, like Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, argue that there is no longer a space outside of capitalism’s empire. Everything is ruled by a singular capitalist logic. As for Gibson-Graham, this claim is an attempt to build a critical political position: the possibility of transcending capitalism. Critics who stress the uniformity of capitalism’s hold on the world want to overcome it through a singular solidarity. But what blinders this hope requires! Why not instead admit to economic diversity?

My goal in bringing up Gibson-Graham and Hardt and Negri is not to dismiss them; indeed, I think they are perhaps the early twenty-first century’s most trenchant anticapitalist critics. Furthermore, by setting out strongly contrasting goal posts between which we might think and play, they jointly do us an important service. Is capitalism a single, overarching system that conquers all, or one segregated economic form among many? Between these two positions, we might see how capitalist and noncapitalist forms interact in pericapitalist spaces. Gibson-Graham advise us, quite correctly I think, that what they call “noncapitalist” forms can be found everywhere in the midst of capitalist worlds—rather than just in archaic backwaters. But they see such forms as alternatives to capitalism. Instead, I would look for the noncapitalist elements on which capitalism depends. Thus, for example, when Jane Collins reports that workers in Mexican garment assembly factories are expected to know how to sew before they begin their jobs, because they are women, we are offered a glimpse of noncapitalist and capitalist economic forms working together. Women learn to sew growing up at home; salvage accumulation is the process that brings this skill into the factory to the benefit of owners. To understand capitalism (and not just its alternatives), then, we can’t stay inside the logics of capitalists; we need an ethnographic eye to see the economic diversity through which accumulation is possible.
—Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: on the-possibility of life in capitalist ruins.

21 and Provigo

I have attempted to outline this polemic in a fashion that displays some of my admiration for it. I agree with and feel hailed by much of No Future. Indeed, when I negotiate the ever-increasing sidewalk obstacles produced by oversized baby strollers on parade in the city in which I live, the sheer magnitude of the vehicles that flaunt the incredible mandate of reproduction as world-historical virtue, I could not be more hailed with a statement such as, “Queerness names the side of ‘not fighting for the children,’ the side of outside the consensus by which all politics confirms the value of reproductive futurism.” But as strongly as I reject reproductive futurity, I nonetheless refuse to give up on concepts such as politics, hope, and a future that is not kid stuff.

Juan Esteban Munoz, Cruising Utopia

Month of May

 
The issues did not always find the right players for them. Someone full of rage at existing conditions often seeks to join the protest movement around at the time—which since 1970 has often meant an environmental movement—and in some situations will even vent their rage against fellow-campaigners. Ideally, environmentalism needed people with ties in their family and locality, and with a keen sense of responsibility for future generations, who felt bound by certain rules and values and, when appropriate, viewed the state as a positive force for order. But such people are often not prepared for confrontation with the state, or have no time for a new commitment. After 1970, then, it was typically ’68ers who, having failed in their previous objectives, could be mobilized to campaign against environmental scandals: single people without children, for whom homeland, family, standards and laws were deeply suspect. What counted tor them above everything was their spontaneous impulses, and they liked nothing more than travelling around the world. This did not necessarily mean that they ended up doing nothing for environmentalism. The history of the eco-age provides material for success stories as well as tragedies, but also quite a lot of material for comedies.
 
—Joachim Radkau, The Age of Ecology

Vanilla

 
I have made every effort to locate the precise origin of the term vanilla. It appears in italics in a 1985 issue of Outrageous Women, one of the first magazines devoted to lesbian s/m. The italics here may signify that it was a fairly new term among lesbians at the time, or it may simply refer to the particular writer’s desire to signal that she means it in a special sense, though what that special sense is is not possible for me to verify. In Different Loving, the term is glossed as “conventional relations, or any intimate relations that do not include D&S or S/M sexuality” (49). This definition marks the term as an absolute “other,” while obviously there are elements of “vanilla" in s/m and vice versa. Such definitions erect a very rigid binary, a dualism that is bound to lead to tension and sometimes hostility. 

Larry Townsend uses the term as early as 1972: “Knowing the scene as I do, I feel it is important not to deflate someone else’s bag, simply because it isn’t mine. For this reason, you will find a good many comments wherein I will preface my remarks by saying, ‘It’s my opinion that . . . .’ I do not feel that there is any mutually agreeable activity, regardless of the number of people involved, that is intrinsically ‘bad’ or ‘wrong’ or ‘evil.’ I don’t happen to like vanilla ice cream, but it is not for me to tell someone else he won’t enjoy it. It is a matter of taste, and the way a thing tastes is sometimes difficult to describe. In an attempt to overcome this hurdle, l have included a number of vignettes to depict the particular action I am discussing. If some of these grab you, even just a little, I will have enabled you to sample the flavor” (The Leatherman’s Handbook, 1st ed. (New York: Affiliated with Olympia Press and Traveler’s Companion, 1972). (I wish to thank Gayle Rubin for providing me with this citation).

I cannot establish that this was the first use of the term, but it does establish the referential context as existing at that time. The question of the origin of the term is not, in my view, as significant as the way in which it came to take on a rigid oppositional connotation during the sex wars of the 1980s between lesbian feminists who were antiporn, anti-s/m and pro-sex, pro-s/m lesbians and their supporters. Obviously in the context in which Townsend is using it, he means to signify a range of possible sexual practices (a variety of “flavors”), none of which are subjected to judgment or censure in his mind. Sexual practices, as he states quite clearly, are a matter of “taste”—hence the analogy with ice cream. While on the one hand the ice cream analogy is an obvious one—signifying bland, ordinary, and pure—it also strikes me as interesting that vanilla would be lifted out of this context and come to signify non-s/m sexualities. It seems quite likely that the term began in the gay leather community, since Townsend uses it here as vanilla ice cream (my inference being that had it been current at the time he would simply have said “vanilla,” not that Townsend was the originator of the term).

Risking that this is the worst sort of overreading, the kind that literary critics and theorists are often accused of performing like the sending up of hot air balloons, I can nonetheless not resist wondering how or if vanilla signifies white in the Western collective unconscious? Freud’s depiction of women’s sexuality as the “dark continent” has been picked up by a number of writers and discussed as a racialized term (see Doane and Kofman). Both outside and within various s/m communities, sexual practices that deviate even slightly from normative, reproductive, heterosexuality are often referred to as the “darker side” of one’s desires. In Fatal Women, I pointed out that Havelock Ellis relegates the women who really do it primarily to his footnotes (the underside of the text). And that there we find that it is the women of color in other (“othered”) countries who are the ones that hold the place of the “real” in Ellis’s representation.

To go back to the cartoon in Bad Attitude, it is interesting that the s/m couple is depicted as interracial, while the other two couples are white. What was once called “miscegenation” was threatening for all sorts of reasons, but basic to the fear of interracial mixing was the threat to white supremacy and simply (or not so simply) the basic idea of “mixing” (of any kind) in and of itself. That is, “mixing" as a confusion or recombination of categories, the breaking down of boundaries. S/m communities have achieved this kind of mixing not only in terms of making affiliations between and among people who are otherwise kept separate by identity categories (bisexual, trans-sexual,’ lesbian, etc., etc.) but also along racial, ethnic, and class categories. These communities are held together, however sometimes uneasily, not by identity categories but by theoretical and and political affiliations. As Gayle Rubin has written: “There is a lot of separation between the straight, gay, and lesbian S/M communities. But there is also pan-S/M consciousness. As one wise woman who has been doing this for years has said,  ‘Leather is thicker than blood’ ” (“Leather Menace," 218-219). That is not, by any means, the way in which racial categories are held together by the dominant culture. The “white” race holds onto its “purity’ and psychic coherence by trying to guarantee the exclusion of all others. As James Baldwin put it in “The Price of the Ticket,”: “white people are not white: part of the price of the white ticket is to delude themselves into believing they are” (xiv).

I am not saying that vanilla = white, but I am suggesting that it is an interesting choice of words that conjures certain racial associations. For I think that part of the threat to the dominant culture of s/m communities is that they have achieved an intellectual, spiritual, and political bonding in ways that precisely contradict the dominant culture’s notion of maintaining order through disciplining categories. It is the dominant culture that is really “into discipline.” The “discipline” within s/m is inclusive and heterogeneous, though certainly not without its tensions and fears arising from racial, ethnic, gender, and sexual practice/preference differences. If white is the term that oversees the discipline and regulation of Western cultural orders, then it is a clever and apt (if unconscious) political move for s/m cultures to disidentify themselves from this particular “flavor.”

The etymologies of the word vanilla complicate this term further. The Oxford English Dictionary gives us entries that tell us “Vanilla” was an “Indian Nectar” ( 1662), which was “mingle[d] with Cacao to make Chocolate” (1673); it is of the “climbing orchid variety. . . which, like the ivy, grows to the trees it meets with” (1783); the pod-like capsules of the plant produce an “aromatic substance [which] is the succulent fruit of a climbing West Indian plant of the order [Orchid] ” (1830). If vanilla has come to signify plain or old-fashioned in the latter half of the twentieth century (“go to Schrath’s for a plain vanilla” [1955] and “old-fashioned vanilla sundae” [1984]), in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries it was an exotic import from Panama, Brazil, Jamaica, and Granada.

Furthermore; bizarrely enough, its etymology is linked to the word vagina“. “Vanilla dim. of vaina (:-L. vagina) sheath.” The vanilloes are “long flattish pods, containing a reddish pulp, with small shining black seeds” (1812); hence, I presume, lts association with vagina-from the Latin sheath.

—Lynda Hart, Between the Body and the Flesh