Around II · 12 February 2010

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society

Death & Celebrity · 25 October 2009

On Sunday I went back to Pierce Brothers, to watch the tourists take pictures of the graves. A young woman on a mission arrived in a yellow airport taxi, tumbled out and careened toward the crypt of Marilyn Monroe. She placed her palm on the marble wall as the rest of her collapsed inside her old sweatsuit. The driver stayed in the cab, studying his nails. A father and his slacker-looking teenage son enjoyed a probably rare game of bonding, looking for treasure among the headstones. Look, over here! It’s Dean Martin! Hey! Check out the subtitle for Rodney Dangerfield! A couple whose bodies resembled puffy white wonderbread loaves trudged through grave by grave, systematically, sweating in matching Wisconsin Tshirts.

You think I’m making this stuff up. Well, it’s only like this on weekends. The place is so tiny that, sitting beneath the ponderosa pine tree up in the northwest corner, I see visitors’ weird celebrity obsessions play out like the cemetery’s their stage.

 

Other days, it’s an electric green postage stamp, hidden between highrises just southeast of the intersection of Wilshire and Westwood. I go because it is secret, and greener than green, and because cemeteries are a calming thrill.

Graves connect to this excitement for Halloween and all November, and the enduring child-terror of apocalypses. The 2012 billboards got plastered all over town this week, scaring the shit out of me and chasing me in to the peace of Pierce brothers several afternoons. Cemeteries are the apocalypse hiding place: if we get all the way through the game before the mean old end-of-the-world God decides to trash the place, then we are safe. Good humans: here is your prize. A cool, smooth slab of marble and relatively quiet neighbors.

Pierce Brothers is nearly impossible to find, even if you know where to look, because the passageways behind the highrises all seem to lead into parking structures. But there’s one, guarded by a man in blue, that goes straight behind a brick wall and opens up in to this unimagined garden. I can almost hear the bionic hedge growing up over the entrace once I’m inside.

But Sundays, in the blazing sunlight, with the visitors who have managed to find their way in… it’s the wrong kind of creepy. Sitting under the tree, I’m usually pondering not the void of death but them: what the sounds and movements they make can tell me about this phenomenon of celebrity.

I often want to ask what it means that yoga has come to the west and been embedded, and propagated, inside this logic of ultra-notoriety and extreme reputation. I don’t know. Watching the woman who flew in to weep at Norma Jean, the father and son who experience a name on marble as a treasure. What is the self-mortifying magnetism of this stuff?

It’s the same as the good old love of power and leaders, the logic of high school popularity and every other social machination, the fascination with fascination… but it’s also not. There’s a piece I don’t get. It helps to run in to Arnold Schwarzenegger or his orange Mustang at the Pan Quotidien beneath the shala a couple of days a week: he’s my innoculator. Fascination: TERMINATED. (But wait… is that still fascinating? Shit!)

So it’s more puzzling all the time, but one thing is clear: it’s all intensely morbid. I’m sure there are a million cultural studies essays on the essential sameness of celebrity and morbidity: about how James Dean and Marilyn and Diana, in their enduring moments of conflagration, are the apotheosis of fame. A fortiori, doesn’t it seem that, if you theorized that psyche had structure, then fame and death would have to occupy adjacent cells?

I don’t know. The more I watch the celebrity machine, the emptier and more mystifying and stupider it gets. The only thing I do think I know is that knowledge of death generates the best of insight and energy, and celebrity steals them straight away. I wish I could know what yoga would be with more reverence for death and less for renown.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [30]
Categories: markets-networks-society

Ammabots · 19 June 2009

They call them the Ammabots. I met the first one, dressed in flowing white with her pupils dilated big as dimes, just inside the Radisson. “Your first time?” I smiled yes. She peeled a blue dot from a strip of paper and stuck it not to my third eye (as I somehow expected) but the edge of my sweater. And then I ascended the stairs in to an incence-filled bot-populated marketplace that seemed designed especially for the hipster Village Voice and Salon writers who would be infiltrating on their funny-cynical assignments. Circus of snark right there, for anyone who would fixate on the level of cultural otherness that is the Amma roadshow.

The exoticist set pieces on the business of east-meets-west have been written already. Hopefully some such accounts of the Amma Show include the part about the red velvet umbrella emblazoned with gold OMs. Amma twirls the OM-brella above her head as she enters the enormous conference room every morning at 10 o’clock. The room holds its breath, bells clang, and an invisible invocateur booms OOOMMM from bass-heavy speakers. My dad has a hollowed-out horn of a bull that he blows in the sanctuary when he preaches the horrible story of Jericho: the amped OM is the same portentous tone and drives any beta state hangers-on straight in to trance. Amma has the beatific gaze down perfect, the large fleshy mass of her sways like seaweed and without question she glows. You’d have to be dead not to feel that aura. Or on second thought, maybe the dead feel it even better than the rest of us.

The day I was there, I was set to meet L and G. G is a retired special forces operator who knows even more than I know about counter-insurgency warfare, but not because he’s read about it in books. He finally left the military in his sixties after some bad years in Colombia, fed up with Clinton-era drug war tactics. He went the next level more badass, and joined the Vajrayana in Tibet. He later settled in So-Cal because it’s where the women are best looking and the weather kindest to his hard-trammeled joints. But his ‘Nam-era hatred of hippies has always kept him from going fully native here. L, a woman thirty years younger than G and five inches taller, is my kundalini collaborator and in her work life some kind of cult actress. Unlike G, she drinks many kinds of Kool-Aid. Yet she is too in the moment, every moment, to be a bot for anyone in particular. She is dialed in to Crazy on her own terms, and knows too well from the receiving end how empty every groupie becomes. She is as open as G is closed, but neither of them is signing up for anything.

I’d talked to them by phone minutes before I entered the great hall, and then there was the commotion with Amma’s arrival. I somehow found myself all the way at the front of the hall, within 20 feet of her, involuntarily entranced. I knelt to touch the floor, find my own inner body in an effort to ground myself against the force of Amma’s astral wind. A rope-bodied man in white robes looked to me with those giant pupils and drew me over to a space he magically created in the crush of seated devotees. Forgetting G and L, I decided it would be a good idea to turn off my phone. 

I sat next to the man as Amma settled in to her throne and the 5-hour hugging juggernat fired up. A little train of chairs was arranged, two by two, from the back of the hall all the way to the saint. Visitors would go to the back of the line when their number was called, sitting in pairs in the last seats. As those at the front of the hug-train received their squash and their chocolate kiss, each pair of visitors would rise and move up to the next seat in the procession. I could see the composure of self and body begin to break up as people got to the last four or five seats before the hug. The actually physical vibration (which several of us mistook for earthquakes in the 4 or 5 Richter range) began to shake them loose, cognition would fate, the body would become slack, sometimes tears would begin flowing. By the time they entered their embrace they were ecstatic mush, and moments later would stumble away dazed, blessed, briefly transformed, forever a little closer to the astral plane.

Holding a number that would not be called for several hours, I settled to the floor next to the man in robes. He glowed at me as I took up a lotus and faced Amma, “Have you ever been to India?”

Aah, the litmus test. Soon the man, a 55-year old Finn called Rishi who has been following Amma everywhere for 13 years, was telling me of his first meeting with his guru. The day he met saw in Helsinki, he knew. But he gazed upon Amma now as if it was the first time, wept and smiled to me as if I were also participating in his inner experience. I told him Amma had been in Mysore when I was there in March, but I skipped it. “ Aaah, it was not your time yet,” he said, and asked my name. I gave it and he looked serious, “So you are a blessed one, a saint as well.”

“Who are you calling Saint, Rishi?”

“Ah yes she gave me this name to give me difficulty. It is my task to live up to it…. You know, she cannot be understood. She is mother, she is love, but also… she is in ABSOLUTE CONTROL of everything here. She is fierce and everyone does exactly what she says. The task is for my tiny mind to manage that contradiction, of total control and pure love.”

Well, I suppose that’s one way to make your head explode. Put an end to the vrittis, allright. I wanted to ask Rishi about everything he’d forked over for this deal—the home, sexuality, creative life, personal love relationships, self expression… the energy-blooms of all the lower chakras given away so that he can stay in Amma’s delta-wave forcefield and sustain himself on the one glorious love-emotion with which she infuses it.

But living on mother-love all the time has consequences. You become an emotional if not spiritual infant, do you not? Emotional addiction, trusting too much, taking responsibility too little. The spiral-eyed vulnerability and, well, neediness of the scenester-level devotees to any guru… have you ever witnessed that side of bhakti…?

The connection of Rishi and myself was uncomfortably obvious. Through the portal that is Amma, he was giving his self, jacked to the matrix and pouring himself in. So with all the other bots, creating a caravan across the spiritual desert of planet Earth, hoisting the mother on their shoulders. And to that mother, through that awesome portal of her, myself touching in for a hit of shakti, faith, love, delight. A free hit, as long as I stay grounded and recirculate it in to my own ecology. It is good that the darshan is free… but in the greater energy economy it is not really so free. I go to the see he hugging saint, and to the degree she really moves me I am playing with her fire, taking it and spreading it somewhere else. It’s a little like the tapas-strong thread that snakes around the inside of AVY culture.

There at Amma’s feet, before L finally found me and dragged me to cognitive safety outside the 100-foot perimeter, one of my synapses half-fired off a thought about Mary and Martha. If Jesus were alive now, he’d have a road show at least this well produced. And where would I be? Facing in, taking the blessing like Mary, or bustling around keeping the business of spirituality in order like Martha? As with yoga institutions, insiders pay dearly for that “special association” they seek. Energy and levels of insight are drained off to feed the system, so that the more secure seekers can touch in, take the benefits, and get on a little bit better with their lives.

The benefits of the one-off chocolate kiss are not trivial, though. To see what heights are possible with human energy and consciousness: this inspiration is so great that it almost distracts me from this new little undercurrent of love that's been deepened in me by no effort of my own. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society

Stealth Shala · 5 May 2009

It works like this. Mail the director 10 days in advance, asking for permission to drop in and directions to the shala. When he does not respond for four days, ask a student of his—who is also a friend of yours—to put in a word for you. Day five: send another email. Day six, find out a client of yours has been friends with the elusive director since elementary school and has just written to him to share the news that you are her teacher. Day seven: get a cell number and call him. When he answers and immediately hangs up on you, call back. When he answers again, cut in and keep him on the line, have a great conversation. Day nine: receive a .pdf map of the street corner where the unmarked building is located, and where to find the unlocked back door, where you should enter not before 5:00 but not after 6:00. A “before-hours joint.”

Day of: drive a concatenation of dark, empty freeways and city streets, right past the destination. Circle back, spot a full lot in this lower-middle-class commercial zone and pull in. Notice this place used to be an auto repair place or small factory. Notice the non- motor-city parking stock of Hummers, BMWs, a Volvo, plus several beater sedans and pickps; take the very last spot with your rented silver mazda (note: for a reconnaissance mission, do not rent a vehicle with a turning radius the width of three lanes of traffic).

Go to the back, find the metal door with the numerical lock and the small red Ganesh that one might mistaken for a painted rose. Appreciate the crisp hat-and-scarf kind of morning (even though it's already May). Inside, feel the warms. See sneakers and Ugg variations orderly along the walls, billowing silk alongside changing rooms, two graceful women taking your hand between strong, very soft palms to ensure everything’s in order with you and you know you’re at home.

In the dark, hear that a wood stove roars at the end of the short hall leading down to two barely-lit rooms—one for practice and one equally large for finishing—which will brighten as the sun comes in the old skylights. Next to the stove, glance an old porcelain clawfoot tub full of dry, yellow corn kernels, with a foot-long rough wooden scoop lying in the bottom. Art? Something referring to grist for the mill?

And then practice. Appreciate the darkness, good breath, silence, the tall teacher who laughs at my backbends and has nothing to prove to either the two brand-new students, me, or the many everyday people. Afterwards make some laidback talk on random topics—jewelry-making, convection systems, Colorado—sitting on the church pews by the stove. Find out the tub of corn is just a good clean heatsource. And take this little kernel he tosses at your feet: “There are some conscious pockets around here. They're hiding. But something is going on.”

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [40]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion

You can't have it · 24 April 2009

Good old commodities: iron ore, wheat, petroleum, labor power

These are capitalism’s creation, the stock in trade of markets. On the market, unit of Wyoming petroleum = unit from Kuwait. The commodity is brought in to existence for the reason of sale. Its key qualities are uniformity and exchangeability. Gold from Potosí = gold from Anaconda. Sneaker assembly in Vietnam = sneaker assembly in Mexico. X = X = X.

Commidification is good: it greases the world. Commodification is bad: it denies the differences between places and humans and puts in thrall to the market, only capable of thinking in terms of objects and exchange.

Modern commodities: RAM. Carbon offsets. Human hearts and kidneys. Yoga postures.

All made of the same stuff and therefore transitive. For the getting and the selling.

The yoga industry has come into being because of a massive buy-in to the idea that a yoga posture is a thing.  (It’s also, to a lesser degree, commodified “inner peace” and now sells it in 90 minute units, but that’s another story.) A teacher must advertise herself in the form of some god-awful contortion for all to see because this is the product she has to offer. She has to work on these terms: it's the language everyone speaks. Either you can consume her posture or, better yet, have it for yourself.

Ooooh… arm balance. I want that.

Yeah, you’re smart readers already. You know where this is going.

Commodification is what it is and it works, but there is a lie inside it. On a deep level, postures aren’t transitive. The body itself pushes back against the tide of commodification. Jack’s trikonasana is not Jane’s, neither internally nor insofar as anyone can “consume” it from the outside.

And, beyond that, doing trikonasana a bunch of times might natrally lead you from consuming that experience according to the rationale and valuations of capitalism… to just experiencing the experience.

Most of the teaeching and doing of yoga is locked inside the capitalist mindset. This is how it has to be. It isn't bad: consuming spirituality is still a kind of spirituality. It's oookkayyy: to rage against commodification is self-defeating and unintelligent, itself a denial of the way in which nobody fully escapes capitalism (for now). The capitalist mind is fully formed and sucks everything it touches in to its machine so that it can continue to function and expand. Reification is everywhere. It wants to be the only way, thinks it is the only way.

And yet!

It is in this context—the context so environing that we barely crane our necks to see it—that these Indian guys drop comments about the “purity” of traditional practice. It initially sounds like a rehash of the Puritanism that scares and repels us, but no. Purification is central to any mind-quieting spiritual practice, as Shinzen discusses at length. Purification is sweet and changes the nature of experience. It introduces new degrees of freedom.

Commodification will reduce humans and the planet to meaningless dust if it ever becomes complete. But that will not happen. The roots practices—humanism, environmentalism, traditionalism—are always here to push back, to create islands of “purity” vis-à-vis the logic that wants to dominate. And to offer options for the future.

To resist commodification in yoga is to fight that good fight, which has been in process for millenia and will never be lost. It’s not for everyone, but if you’re going to do traditional practice, recognize that it is a non-commodification practice. It is an island of non-capitalism. Rich, "pure," and not for sale. Not for sale because this yoga resists commodification, is too individal for it, too cool for it.

Because it operates on the logic of liberation, not the logic of get get get.

The paradox is doing non-commodified practice in the form of ashtanga. Because ashtanga, due to its systematic nature, due to the temporary things it makes and unmakes in the progress of a series, mistakes itself as a commodity all of the time. If you do it with your capitalist mind, you want postures, you show off postures, you lust for postures, you conspicuously consume postures for others to watch. Ditto for yoga abs and the nice ass. And the piece of the celeb teachers, the special relationship, you want for yourself. It’s all in the get. And it's in the uncritical participation in turning teachers into CEOs, and not calling them on it or providing some pushback when they act like extreme capitalists.

You don’t have to do traditional practice, but if you do, at least understand its power and participate in that rather than selling it out.

It’s simple: someone else’s posture is not a thing. You can’t have that. And your posture is not a thing. You can’t have that either.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [24]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society

Background Conditions · 31 March 2009

And I thought still spring mornings in Santa Monica defined jasmine. Here it is stephanotis—madascar jasmine. I sneak out the front door at 4:00 or 5:30, and within five steps the invisible wall of new blooms hits me. Almost the same jasmine I know—sharp and even a little bitter at the inside tip of the nose, tastefully—and unlike big storebought flowers—leaving the back of the nose near the soft palate alone to more private matters, and strongly recalling its best mixing-parter of a soft green tea. Blooms in the dark, the smog, the heat… the jasmine’s stronger than me, in a sense.

Women everywhere, sitting on the tile or marble floors after they’ve cleaned and made the first meal of the day, string them into garlands a bloom at a time. Or, I imagine, they gather before dawn to make the white 10-foot-long necklaces that men on bicycles balance on broad, overflowing but weightless plates and sell to middle class women for twenty cents.

Madama, the housekeeper here, takes in the garden’s daily yield around 10, sits beside the kitchen table and somehow weaves a garland for Ganesh. Draping it down over his head and ears and raised right hand. If there is too much jasmine even for him, she braids the rest in to her hair or dusts the last blossoms over my night table.

As if becoming at home in Gokulam is not an entirely and overwhelmingly sensory affair.

I’ll spare you more of these details but will say the palette here—of touch, taste, etc.—is every bit itself. There are the obvious comparisons between Mysore and Luang Prabang, Cienfuegos, Esteli, Cuzco… other has-been provincial centers now home to cultural treasures, but not after the first few days. Other than breeze blocks and spindly men hauling concrete and gorgeous children asking for change, this place tastes, feels and smells only like itself to me.

By the way, because some were wondering, it is nice here. if April is as hot and dusty as it gets, well whatever. Go to the pool if you must. The health and congeniality of the street dogs signal to me India’s liminal economy… it’s getting harder to think of this as the third world. The pollution—consequence of industry—is really something; and to read the papers and talk to middle class Mysorians, there’s a potent social rage about it. Far greater concern about the environment here than in I-eat-organic-so-I’ll-be-fine, SUV-zombie LA. And in the meantime there is so much attention here to detoxing and balancing and cleanliness that it is easy to find respite from the dust and smoke of the streets. My now not-so-secret compulsion for clean, soft feet—easy to satisfy.

Some background conditions:

Everywhere there are poor, extremely hardworking, extremely smart working people. Rickshaw drivers, corner shop clerks, the young men selling jasmine. There is a hopefulness and a hunger in them, an eagerness to engage and very little resentment of the privilege I embody. Humbling.

The caste system is still very much at work, though the tourist contingent of Gokulam cuts through it in constantly contradictory ways. Still, Saraswathi reminds us that she can not have lunch at a fancy local restaurant because the kitchen is not Bramin; and a local boy who was bitten by a snake languished to the point that his arm went gangrenous because as an untouchable his arm was worth more to him as an alms-getting mess and besides nobody but a foreigner would take him to the hospital. What will that arm be worth now that it’s been severed? The quarter of society excluded from all but the bathroom-cleaning economy continues to be crushed by poverty, even in a town so richly infused by foreign money.

Floors everywhere are hard. I mentioned this to Laruga and she chuckled, too floaty to notice the marble just beneath the rug at the shala. For me, sitting on the floor to write is still a bit much after a while, even with durvasasna hips and the pillows Madama brought me.

It’s vegetarian. If India were some other place, there would be spits roasting pork and chicken legs in the streets. I love that this is absent, love the way a rickshaw driver will swing over to brush his hand out against the flanks of a passing cow, toss a glance back and explain, “Seh-cun(d) muutha—.” I’m good and jaded but it still gives me shudders—and images of fat Americans and their hamburgers.

Women keep their chests and shoulders covered. The soft rolled belly and the back—these are fine to expose. But a shawl is always worn, even by us Americans with our pants and camisoles.

There’s plentiful aromatic, beautiful weed. I’d have a bit more fun with the sweetest yogis ever if I cared. But whatever. Pot makes you stupid.

Ghee. Enough said.

There are so many layers of language, and not just sitting out under the shelter at Tina’s while the Swedes carry on to your left and the Mexicans across the table and the Japanese down the way. But it’s been almost impossible for me to pick up any Kaanada or Hindi. Nobody will even try to communicate with me in a local language. The precision of my experiences depends not on my ability to articulate questions and understand conversation, but on the ability of those around me to communicate in the one boring leveler I carry around in excess—English. Everyone speaks some English (even if it’s just on the level of recognizing the sounds and head-wobbling in response); and economic chances increase along with one’s English skills. What a frustrating coincidence—that America should be the hegemon in the era of digitized globalization. If only there had been TV in the 19^th century, we’d all be speaking French.

Though it’s not Hindi or Kaanada that interest me but useless, perfect Sanskrit. I wonder if I’ll be able to resist it if I am here again. Saraswati is replacing conference this Sunday with a long session of Sanskrit chanting. Her voice when she speaks that language looks like liquid amber to me and feels like a container for whatever emotion I need to move in my body. God it’s so beautiful. There is Sanskrit around the shala and around Jayashree’s, around home temples and local rituals. There’s an anthropologist here and she speaks Kaanada and it gets her all kinds of knowledge. I should focus on that. But… oh the fucking esoteric Sanskrit. I love having it around the edges.

P.S. If you are interested in the Narasimhan commentary, I'll continue to drop bits in the previous and penultimate posts as I remember them. There's already been quite a bit added to the first of the two.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: markets-networks-society

Around · 23 March 2009

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

First Things · 18 March 2009

Night without qualities, every aspect so suave it feels empty. It is that good, a thick futon in a clean sanctuary of a 2^nd floor room, tiny warm breeze, bugless except for the fearful slow mantis daring me not to brush her from the sheets, pitch dark night after I blew out the Monte Cristo candelabra, and a toilet that trickles like a 90s zen serenity fountain.

The only mild disturbance a bit of evening traffic, more horn-sounds than engine bluster; even here in the Brentwood of Mysore there’s a honk if you’re sentient policy on the road, with most trucks blazing cartoon avatars on their lowhanging, testicular back axles and “PLEASE HONK” across a back metal bumper.

It’s 3 am now. I slept five hours thank god, though at first I didn’t know if that was going to work out. My solar plexus was pulsing as if a spaceballs alien would burst forth from my gut and when I twitched the hands lying on the crests of my hips would fly off and snap the mattress to jolt me back abuzz.

Poor taste to go manic in Mecca, though. I dialed it down with limited skill I guess the yoga has given… I’d rather sleep more and be calmer than I am now, but am getting there. The last real manic episode was a week long, three years ago, and the penultimate lasted 10 days, three years before that. No sleeping, complete loss of appetite, spitfire wits, blurring of the boundaries of self, and overwhelming, inspecific feelings of love that move both inward and outward. The chemicals that make this happen… I appreciate them and there’s nothing false about the being they make me in to, any more than other personalities are false. And nurture’s involved since I create the baseline for these experiences myself, by steadily reinforcing the gratitude-gestalt. Still, not here. Too easy to go native inside the Mysore bubble; too easy to attribute it to the not-quite-contact high—some PJ shakti cocktail—in a way that keeps me from feeling what’s really going on here energetically.

Thank god it’s at least late in the season—the parties and hookups are on the ebb and those who are here are not quite so eager to start new relationships because they’re re-entering their home’s mental space. There were still a lot of introductions yesterday though, though maybe self-protectively, or maybe just because I was delirious, I don’t remember a single new name. Not one.

Arriving around 8, driven by a man named Ramesh beneath the gorgeous stories-high aqueduct that has no end or beginning and looks to me like a concrete interpretation of the Seattle monorail, I landed and then spent the day circling inside Gokulam in an enlarging spiral out from the center stage of the coconut stand and the slightly less interesting but still bustling main intersection it overlooks.

Ramesh the driver, by the way, waited outside the airport with all the other sign-bearing drivers. His sign was block-lettered in my name and the name of my guest house, and my brother was right: I have always wanted to be one of those people with their own sign. But it’s just a nostalgic imperial style-cue here: Ramesh knew me on sight since he’d image-searched me on the drive in. But he was determined to establish a hierarchy: wouldn't sit with me for coffee or call me anything but Ma'am, scolded me for trying to carry my own bags, made me fill in a questionnaire that confirmed he had not harassed me sexually or asked me for money. Astutely service-class (a modern subaltern proletariat--talk about latent power). That quick, determined professionalism may quickly eclipse the lingering dominion of my dollars, Irish visage and SoCal English. Me the dissolute envoy from a declining empire, him the quick smart economic-subversive with a plan.

The airport is new this year and the land around smells like Montanan industrial agriculture and is staked off with telecommunications and YOUR AD HERE billboards like giant croquet hoops. I did finally begin to lose my mind those last four hours of driving with Ramesh. The sun came up on my lucidity’s retreat. We’ll see how many new sunups are required for some kind of recalibration.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: integration , markets-networks-society

AWOWL · 7 February 2009

Long days at the desk, this term. I love it. I’ve rigged my little paper lamp near the window where, having finally won the game against the motion sensors, I sit otherwise in the dark. For a week it has rained, a static-dampening pour that sent my focus a little more inside and left the walkways around the quad still covered in sheen and flecked with new drops in the lamplight.

Campus Crusade for Christ meets at night: they wail next door in Josiah Royce Hall, echoing down the sandstone neo-roman colonnade where I watched Tom Hanks stalk back and forth, back and forth, for regrettable Angels and Demons takes that were supposed to be set in Italy. Their hollering, a good saccharine match for Dan Brown adaptations if a defilement of the building’s namesake, Royce, sounds an awful lot like Counting Crows. Shame what’s happened to Christian music these days: if they were still singing Old Time Religion maybe I’d sneak in the back and join them. I do miss singing with others; maybe that’s why part of why breathing with others means so much.

And so, in that spirit…. BAW accepted a large sum of skymiles and I’ve made cover to disappear from here for spring break and then some. I want to go far, to MY State of lOst childREn, to take a long view of my life from here forward. Given the options that have opened and those foreclosed, which drives and duties will I satisfy, and which will I cast off? How much does the collapse of the markets change everything, and how much do the old shoes thrown in to the cogworks just give me cover to contemplate the nothingness that I wouldn’t have time to notice otherwise? I don’t know; but soon I will.

Meantime, for all my allergies to the little imperialisms of LOHAS, it is time to pay my respects. Because come on. I love SKPJ and the thing he’s made. The first time I met him the foot-touching line made me shudder in revulsion, so here I am dumping horrible tons of carbon into the atmosphere and shirking my work to honor the system and its professor-methodologist while he’s still on this side of living.

I know it’s the hot season, but I’ve spent a year in a cardboard and zinc shack in one the most deforested zones of the Americas’ tropics. I know it’s the party season, but it’s ok if that’s what my spring break is about.

Meantime: much to do, in ways that reveal how much I’d love the scholar’s life if I can hold out in this deluge long enough to secure it. I don’t really want to think about spring break until I get there in another month. Everything's excellent here now and, in a way that feels right, I have a ton to do. But I'm mentioning the plans here in order to ask we not chat about it—at all—on the FB. My efforts to bring my life together there in a single digitized identity have been tested by this and found wanting. Too many professors friending me there, and I’m wouldn’t even know where to begin explaining the fact that I am going to Mecca. Hey! It's for research purposes!

Sort of. I’ll have enough trouble as it is explaining to you, let alone myself.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [26]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

Act like you've done it before · 27 January 2009

From Ryne’s Sandberg’s 2005 acceptance speech at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Smarmy conservative David Brooks quotes this in today’s sort of beautiful column on social reproduction.  I’m for trusting your experience as the first and last word. But: doing that within the context of others’ experiences over time. Institutional structure and tradition are crusty-sweet old romantic gifts.

[Wo]man makes h[er] own history! But not under conditions of her own choosing.

I have to admit this gives life meaning, and offers to prevent one's becoming a self-congratulatory ass. Here's Sandberg:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect…. If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory

Human Creativity · 11 January 2009

I was in MacArthur Park this morning, practicing with friends in a grand century-old house that’s been a mansion and a craft shop of sorts, a fraternity, an apartment building, and now an ashtanga space. This—bohemian, in your erstwhile livingroom, with a man repairing furniture in the kitchen, a Salvadoran woman walking by the windows with fruit for sale and a Jack ‘n’ the Box billboard filling the driste of the farsighted—feels in a sense like how it should be. Kid on the instructor’s hip, unmufflered engines in the alley, vendors screaming in the street. Practice.

So much more creative than the way most choose to live in this town—antiseptic, paying the jacked-up rent, with dues to some corporate studio whose propaganda features stickthin yoga teachers spandexed in all white. MacArthur Park is teeming in creative risk-taking humanity, colorful, fecund, noisy. Yeah, scraping a life off the surface of society is a grimy affair. And beautiful. The things that people think up in order to live, and live well. Learn the insults, keep your head down, act a little knowing. Dodge the obvious punches and see so much beneath.

There’s this wave in me that rises and falls on my faith in humanity; and I drove home fast to Mountain Goats survival anthems, feeling so lucky to be part of the world now. Human creativity. The element that can never be predicted by any model nor explained by any theory. And it’s the main thing! Everything.

At the close of the day, the tide got sucked all the way to the floor. I sat in my car for the better part of an hour in the blocks surrounding the Federal building. This is where you go to demonstrate in LA. Yeah, I know the story of the conflict over the holy land, and am named decisively for one side. I know how everything that has happened the past 60 years is supposed to be god-made and how I’m not supposed to say I understand unless I have skin in the game. But this time, I’m just letting the celebratory violence and the death-wishes mystify me. What am I doing rejoicing in human creativity in these days—these months—of destruction? Yeah—I tried not to hear the lyric edge of John Darnielle’s flat out neuroticism this morning—but yeah. We are going to make it through this year if it kills us.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: arbitrage , markets-networks-society , social theory

Death Valley · 27 December 2008

Things are going wrong in academia: not the right year to do your coming-out. The anonymous rumor mills online are full of despair and rage, people who can’t insure their kids, can’t imagine themselves as anything else, but do envision pistols in their temples. Ain’t no “positive thinking” superstitions among scientists, that’s for sure.

Hello, pain.

Last Monday and Tuesday, my triceps ached from the 108 I tossed in before Sunday practice. Guess my chaturangas are true, but it brought some Monday woe to the prospect of a week of thirds.

I did a self-punishment check: “beating yourself up with vinyasas,” eh?

Nah. Though practice was painful, so to speak.

Funny how little—an extra 80 minutes on the mat Sunday morning—it takes to create resistance in the machine for several days. Amazing to do this all the other weeks without any such drag. Interesting to see the limits of practice so graphically—in a way that did not come up at the summer solstice at all.

Years ago I saw BKSI speak at Josiah Royce Hall, the building I gaze on all day from the office I’ll give up in June. Someone in the audience asked about pain, and he held forth for a good ten minutes about how yoga has to be painful. He was incoherent—if the audience took a lesson from those ramblings, it was whatever they wanted to hear.

I have nothing better on this subject though. MW tells me pain is a healing force, but of course he is the same one who forbids self-flagellation via vinyasa. He means real pain. And the Sutras say future pain can be avoided, though that doesn’t sit at all well with every eastern teaching about how suffering arises from efforts to avoid pain—which is in truth inevitable.

I dunno. What I’m experiencing is trivial. Or: I am no longer skilled at holding pain in place long enough to learn from it. Anxiety is here; sadness for friends too. But come on.

I tried to walk right in to it this Christmas, rescheduling the holiday in New Orleans for Death Valley instead. The Editor and I thought we would make it an Existential Christmas, embracing the void at the LOWEST POINT IN NORTH AMERICA. My idea of a good joke.

I expected desolation; no life anywhere; blinding light flattening all contrast; cracked earth; punishing, leathery winds. Some kind of object lesson in pain.

And got: more stars than I knew existed, kangaroo rats, salt flats churning like a slow-motion ice floe, sand dunes whose spines you walk like in some (terribly picturesque) refugee drama, too many Ennio Morricone moments to track, and hiking trails straight through scenes from Star Wars. Also: borax dust storms, snow in the high places, blazing blue peaks cradling you down in the basin, glinting iron ore and lime in the hills, a Red Cathedral hidden beneath Zabriskie point like some undiscovered Petra, a giant orange cinder cone so snuffed out that little French children can climb down inside.

Laughed at death, got the Christmas Dinner (with a stunning pumpkin soup with maple crème fraiche) at Furnace Creek, inspected the giant leftover machines of men who had a go at living here a century ago, cut out on to the oasis golf course as the sprinklers came on and watched Venus come up over the valley. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society

Great Vibes (For Your Toes) · 10 December 2008

KS up in the Portland office clipped this from the current US Weekly. Looks like ad prices are going down. More of the same to come...?

I wonder what they will think of next. Maybe...

-Electro-stimulation sensors to hook up to your spine at night. Let it raise your kundalini for you, while you sleep!

-Driste training wheels: a headgear dangles a tiny photo of your favorite guru, right in front of your third eye. Like this (note correct crossing of the eyes). This product is extra aerodynamic to accommodate gymnastic versions of “spiritual” asana practice.

-Interactive chant DVD with mantra recitations by all your favorite teachers. Learn to imitate the idiosyncracies, weird pronunciations and even lisps of your guru of choice.

-Posturefarming: pay teenage practitioners in third world countries to “earn” ashtanga poses for you. Like this. Maybe even hire them to practice deep concentration or enter bliss consciousness on your behalf. Hey, everything is connected.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: markets-networks-society

Soul Mat · 19 November 2008

I keep seeing the yoga mod squad tooling around Bentwood, a pride of golden lions at rest, bespectacled in oakleys and low-riding their surf shorts. They drive a screaming yellow new Land Cruiser, loaded with racks and mirrors and sporting a logo.

"www.yogamatic.com: your custom yoga mat company"

Fine. I just checket it out. They have a credo and everything.

We believe that one’s 12 square feet of floor space… should truly reflect one’s individual spirit and interests. After 18 months of research and development… we arrived at a formula that finally enables people the freedom to express themselves, whether that be in the creation of their own mat, or in the adoption of YM’s unique artwork… Your “soul mat” is sure to be found here.

I think I need to start an award. The Yoga Consumerism trophy. The Seriously Not Getting It medal. Kali Yuga Luminaries.

But I’d rather laugh than cry. They are having a good time with their venture capital:

 

What would the ashtangis put on their mats? “NO EXIT”? Rosebud the sled? Durvasa? A black hole?

Don’t say SKPJ. Don't even.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [33]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society

Eschatology · 16 November 2008

The city’s on fire. This morning the sun was blood red coming up through the ash. There are two streams in the heavy air, pushed down from the mountains by Joan Didion’s Santa Anna winds (but montionless, eerie-still, outside my wall of windows).

First is is a smell like life—the fast-living oxidation of brush fire. Earthy with undertones of vetiver just like my brother’s French cologne. Our father, also a volunteer fire chief, taught us to love grassfire because the hard-scratched soil couldn’t work without its nitrogen, and love forestfire because that’s what it takes for pine cones to open (there’s a sermon on “refining fire” in which he burns open a pinion cone on the altar—god no wonder I’m doing what I do now).

But, second, there’s just death stench in the air. Homes converted to tarry gas. Grass burns white; forest fires are browned by treesap; but a house burns a horrible plume of black—shingles, paint, insulation, carpeting, appliances, overstuffed furniture, shoes, records, photographs.

We are fine here, eye of the hurricaine style—a mile south of the Getty, a mile east of the beach. But others are not fine. Twenty-six square miles ablaze, 800 homes down. Yesterday on the north end of the city 500 trailer homes went up: the fire chief unfurled a charred American flag and wept in a school gym, telling a evacuated thousand senior citizens the team had done everything they could to save their little hamlet. Usually when my dad calls to ask about fires, I’m just disappointed he cares more about nature’s reclamation of  hilltop mansions that never should have been built in the first place—I ask whether he’s read The Tortilla Curtain yet and change the subject to some less natural disaster.

But this time feels apocalyptic, I guess. I’ve been wearing my apocalypse goggles for months, it’s true—those years training as Armageddon lookout coming back around with every ATM out of service and every thoroughfare billboard painted white because there’s nothing to say now, and nothing to sell. Even art in this moment feel apocalyptically bad. We saw Synechdoche NY last night and wished we’d sold out instead for a quantum of narrative solace. As the Editor said, it's fine for an artist to misunderstand Borges or Baudrillard, but don’t make art demonstrating that ignorance. Abstract referencing is the "art" of unlived experience with a private school degree in lit crit: sophomoric in the extreme. In this case, an incoherent mixing of two conceptual schemas (parallel worlds and infinite regresses) insults the audience--referring to nothing as if winking to a knowingness shared only by "deep" people.

EDIT: The script is so vacant that I was tempted to interpret it as a meditation on emptiness and form: but nothing is not nothingness. Any ape can pelt signifiers at a canvas: what that yields here is neurosis and death, not emptiness and form. I emerged from the theatre awash in manufactured mysterey pumped up on the raw but dehumanized emotion of beautifully rendered little episodes. Over the hours, my irritation grew as I realized that conceptual art has the greatest possibilities but the lowst standards, and that a conceptual piece that seems to be fashionably Buddhist would shortchange me with half-baked nihilism.

Pretentiousness is one thing, but pretentiousness that trades on fake depth blows. Like the Santa Annas. Is this what America has to offer as high art? Dada existentialism? In the end it’s just Kaufman throwing at the screen whatever shit (literally) surfaces from his subconscious, flattering the audience that this shall spark “deep” recognitions about the nature of whatever. Letting the shadow wander on screen is genius when David Lynch does it. But Charlie K is no David Lynch. The film rings false, a small falseness amplified by self-satisfaction, enormous budget, and the adoration of confused reviewers. It's a movie about lit crit posing as a movie about experience. It feels like the end of art not because it's a final statement, but because it's really, really bad.

I do worry for a culture that praises this as its own high art and funds it to the nines. But... Kaufman isn’t really America’s idea of profound. He’s Los Angeles’ idea of profound. Or at least what's left of this town's Bush-Schwarzenegger era conceits, playing themselves out.

Today we burn. Down through the tar to the vetiver, I hope.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Too Intense? Part II. · 26 October 2008

Someone asked if there's a magic bullet that’ll resolve the contradictions we generated on this topic. Maybe I could argue it's the red thread of kundalini...? Alas, sorry. :)

There is a refinement within and radiating from the body some old practitioners—I won’t try to deny that. And I can’t say what it’s about.

For what is at stake here, though, I think there is an elegant principle that resolves most of the antinomies. I usually hesitate to go integral, because the first layer of the theory (the fourfold table) is nothing but a compass with no intrinsic explanatory power; and the second layer (the map of the evolution of human consciousness) tends to either piss people off or reduce everything to evolutionary pissing contests. So I’ll ignore the second layer. But… the parsimonious, four-cornered map does organize the different kinds of concerns everyone raised about the prospects of this intense physical-psycho-emotional-whatever program. According to this map, every "moment" of existence (for example, me here now = a moment) can be seen from four angles at once. Inside and outside, collective and individual.

1. Inside-Individual (psyche, subtle body)	2. Outside-Individual (behavior, gross body);
3. Inside-Collective (Culture, shared values)	4. Outside-Collective (social structure: class, ethnicity, nationality, gender)

It’s not as obnoxious as it looks, I swear. When you hit a conundrum with the integral light saber, it explodes it into four. Who knows if this makes things more tractable or multiply more complex.

Is this bizarre practice suitable for a person: 1. Can the individual body hack it? 2. What about the individual psyche? 3. What are the shared cultural limitations and implications? 4. Is it possible and good within whatever social organization?

One, about the body (the exterior of the individual), sounds like a conditional yes. As V said, body type matters, and there are a lot of factors this comprises.

Question two, about the psyche is maybe more interesting. This practice is so intense! It forces a person into even more intimate contact with weird parts of her psyche and forces her to either make peace with them or “vomit them out” in service of an obsession. Sonya mentioned she’d seen people do this practice and be warped, sadly, into selfish jerks; Holden’s heard these rumors of the 3S programme leading to the vomiting of shadow elements… anyone else have a worst case scenario on a psycho-emotional dimension? Maybe Gopi Krishna isn’t so out of bounds after all. :)

Is all this just myth and mystification? The only generalization I’m comfortable making is that even the most neurotic, selfish 3S practitioners—the ones who maybe have been internally disfigured, though that is for their teachers, hopefully, to see—know their own minds very well. Better than most. The common allegation that advanced ashtanga creates bipolarism intrigues me: have these so-called ashtanga victims been unmasked by a truth-telling process or simply traumatized by their own poorly-chosen practice/teacher?

Maybe I should be open—later—about what that process has been like for me. For several kind of complicated reasons. I’m amusing the shit out of myself lately, moving through paradoxes of obsession/dedication, shadows/love. Something old Mr. MW has given me recently, in his deconstruction of my practice, is the criticism that ashtanga is hopelessly, blindly obsessive. To the point of generating collective body dysmorphia and chemical addiction. Rather than pissing me off or making me want to reject his teaching, this criticism endeared me to him and freed me to see the insanity in what we do. I’m not on a mission to prove him wrong, but I would like to circumscribe the cases in which he’s right and chart a way through this tradition that acknowledges the depth and truth of my own experience.

The third point of view, about what is shared but subjective, is I think what has made this conversation so tense. When it comes to beliefs about womanhood and what is socially appropriate, we carry feelings that seem so personal but are the more powerful because they’re culturally received and because we see them reflected in others. There is a pressure to reproduce the shared ideas… or a pugnacious urge to subvert them. Mircea Eliade wrote beautifully if perhaps unreliably about yoga as a deconditioning process—both of an individual’s hangups and of his [sic] cultural baggage.

People in this particular orbit seem to agree that a powerful, quasi-traditional, shamanic, contortionist breathing and meditation practice—while uniquely absurd in our context—creates women in a good way. Maybe even a very good way. The openness, independence, groundedness, self-awareness, bravery and strength of this programme may conflict with old school ideas about weak, soft, receptive feminity that "belongs in the home" because men's responsibility and because the owned female body should not be seen. But the residual tension of the last few generations’ problematic ideas about womanhood are part of what makes this practice vital. It is a very good challenge: to see what was good, beautiful and true in the old female archetype and carry that forward without being caught up in reactivity (as if we ever de-condition ourselves of culture altogether). The new culture that this practice creates around femininity—is there a degree of liberation in it? I would say, very often, this is so.

The fourth perspective is social context. Ashtanga is almost a hopelessly Brahmin activity—in the west as well as the east. Its first 1.5 generations were also hopelessly patriarchal and light-complected, as at least a good number of readers agree.

But yoga, once it becomes a lifestyle, manifests this counter-trend of quasi-freeloading authorized and certified teachers unencumbered by material things, who justify their bohemianism (sweetly, if deconstructably) with a glance to the cell-phone saddhus of the east. This is hippie-renunciant-ism, and insofar as this kind of yoga garlands the enormously privileged subculture of ashtanga, it keeps things interesting and a little more honest. There are, as a result, two cultures within ashtanga itself—the diamond-studded gold-chained householders with professional degrees and property, and the people who have given everything to the practice, and ironically carry on their lithe bodies a special contortionism-capital (kapotal, it's been called) to which the propertied folks pay respect. (The coming global slowdown will, I think, bring these two strands within ashtanga closer together….)

But I’m getting distracted. I think the social-structural perspective on women doing advanced practice has to consider both social class (for what women is this feasible, energetically, if they also have modern social responsibilities?) and this notion of staying fecund for the tribe. Can the social organization of the world we’re living in cope with women doing this shit—on a practical level? Does the change in women’s work, and potential for authority, and capacity for élan actually benefit us all when women start emerging as practical masters of psychological, physical or even spiritual practice? Do we need women taking it to the edge? Yeah, I think so. Actually, maybe this is the best argument for women who have the time, opportunity, and a certain physicality and the mental stability to take it to that level if they’re so inclined. I hadn’t really thought about it before, but it is funny to take a ridiculously elitist practice and reveal—over the course of just one generation—that being a woman, and being poor, actually can increase the likelihood of at least physical “mastery.” Is that trivial? I don’t think so.

Here’s my shoulders and me, looking at myself, against the background of Butterfield 8 Liz Taylor as a sacrificial, transitional woman under some man's objectifying gaze. (Admittedly, I am grateful enough for what she represents to pin her up in my bathroom.) Things change—a few decades is a long time when cultural and cellular exchange becomes as highly entropic as it is now. Apologies if my navel is TMI for you—that’s just your boundaries talking, pre-entropy. :)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [40]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality

"Spirituality" · 16 October 2008

The first two years of my asana practice were about going ever deeper into the altered state that was the two hours on the mat. Adorning and becoming addicted to a dreamstate I understood as spirituality. Thus, this idea of a post-Christian spirituality, something based in bodily experience, suddenly became fascinating early in my practice.

The word spirituality is what I hung on my ecstasy and my dream. Seems pretty common. This spirituality is a refuge or escape from daily troubles, and it feels nice. Spirituality as “me time.” Spirit as the source of wish-fulfillment and the place for hopes-against-hope framed in angeli mudra. If you don’t get your fix at regular intervals, you feel off. Disoriented. Locked in a too-concrete reality and a too-concrete body.

I’ve rarely gone more than a day without trance in the last five years, so I don’t know how I would deal, now, with a life in solid beta state. Without time every day in altered states, I might actually lose my shit. But are altered states spiritual? Is writing-mind unspiritual? 

I look at this “spirituality” tag on this blog and realize I don’t have a good use for it right now. It is not a dreamstate, and it's also not the dream of wishes fulfilled. Time in altered states doesn’t by itself frame my moral life (though it's true that I do draw moral sentiments out of those states, in a lot of ways), nor does it make me feel that beta state is vulgar. The easier altered states are to access, and the more different forms the take, the less holy it all feels. And the less I experience my own consciousness as a mystery to toss in to the placeholder category of "spirit." Consciousness is a variable, but so are introversion, hunger, weather, relationship, whatever. Spirituality doesn't seem like a category I can use right now.

Unless... I'm using, in a way, around the idea of interconnection. My schtick in the sociology classroom is that everything is connected. It’s a hypothesis I urge students to test in their investigations of society and economy. But, mostly this is still a proposition, still something I can only see on network graphs, Facebook sidebars and accidentally meaningful collapses of the degrees of separation. If there’s something that induces wonderment in me, it is the possibilities for intersubjectivity among beings and immediate experiences of radical interdependence. I wonder if connection feels like spirituality because it is what is sometimes but not always true for me. It’s the new fever-dream.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [37]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , spirituality

More Pieces · 14 October 2008

The beach at dawn is full of bums wrapped in Army/Navy surplus. I drove right past the shala and out to the pier this morning, under a huge harvest moon made orange not from the dust of tilled-under cornstalks but the ash burning luxury homes. There are fires in the hills and it’s just as well—gives local news something to distract the masses from calling their brokers. (That's what you get when you let riffraff like me invest.)

I walked a few miles on the beach, toward Malibu, which was all pink with a glowing haze like in soap operas, thanks to the fire ash. As the sun came up the oversize bum-caterpillars spread across the beach started moving, packing up, trudging in across the sand.

Great place to be homeless, in some ways. I wonder how many people will slip out of the middle class this year. I wonder if I will get a snot-nose job and slip in to it.

I was shocked to hear Dr. Doom on the morning news. Usually the financial media pretend he doesn’t exist—how odd it would be if this wing of the journalism profession practiced the compulsively “balanced,” phony two-sided reporting of the "objective" politics reporters. Roubini, because he sees an end to this, actually makes me feel better, given that the credit markets are still locked up and the DOW is full of puckey. Amazing to watch it oscillate.

To hedge that possibility—of slipping from the bliss-following margins and in to the middle class—and because I just about outed myself today (and in so doing got a large insulin spike—sad to see I still need subselves hermetically sealed off from professional life), I’m anonymizing this owl. If you’re here already, eh, you know me and I love your being around. But I’m not all that excited about new lurkers and am short-circuiting some of the routes to my house. More self-expression, less identity-construction. That’s the idea.

They say the moon is the time to observe the attachments and ridigity we form around practice (and also around compulsive non-practice—ever notice that there’s as much authoritarianism and superstition about You Shall not Practice on Moon Days as about You Shall Practice Correct Vinyasa?) To that end, I want to say that I’ve been disillusioned by rigid ashtangi refusals to think critically. Is it refusal, though... or inability? I never know whether some people shallow for life or if it's fair to say shallow a choice. But... it does seem to be shallowness that enables us to believe that subservient, unreflective expressions of this practice are deep. Ommmm....

It is wonderful to work within and negotiate a tradition, but this week I've been aware of ashtanga's fear-laced gullibility and ways in which it is not about going into our own immediate experience. The specific ways we use ashtanga to avoid our inner experiences.

Sonya of Long Island sometimes moves me very much, when she hits me with unadorned honesty that is not even looking for approval or agreement, when she shows her ability to just sit in the flames of her own experience and wonder what the hell it is about. By contrast, it seems much of what we do is approval-seeking, or neurotic self-control, or just using the body as a driste-suck on others.

I was stunned, in retrospect, that it took until the fifty-fourth comment (blisterkist) in the AshtangaNews thread for someone finally to call out the superficiality and self-fleeing nature of this ashtanga fantasy of having a so-called guru (the guru tradition is something so different from this beguiling culture clash), together with our failure of critical thought when it comes to the life-or-death matter of our own practice. Sometimes I give tradition itself too much weight and respect—trying to act compassionately but perhaps just avoiding disagrements. My wish is that we masses could have both beds in which to lay down our heads and brains to occupy those heads. This world is too beautiful to inhabit halfway outside of what's real to us, drifting between other people's mumbo jumbo and their competing assertions of rightness. Wide-eyed redulity is for summer blockbusters, but it just takes the edge off self-inquiry.

I worry this practice will dull itself with its fearful authority-worship and its repetition of arbitrary rules as if they were magic. If that is all there is, then of course we will turn outward, to performance and recognition, for rewards. I'm starting to wonder if any aspects of practice that take us out of our experience are a waste of energy.  

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [19]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Fear as Flashlight, Cont. · 8 October 2008

So this was the nightmare. The markets in Asia and then Europe last night would tank. And then Tuesday would be blackest black in the US markets. Then McCain would pack his brass knuckles town to Tennessee. Come out swinging and 20 minutes in give America the horror theatre we really deserve. You know what I'm saying. With the old guy out of the race, the machine back in control, Rove would install Mitt exec experince financial guru Romney on top of the ticket and we'd be looking at a sympathy landslide for the safe patriarch. October surprise on another level.

Sigh. The world seemed to be in trauma-fatigue yesterday, though; and decline of the GOP and the markets continued apace with nothing so dire. Thank gods.

It's too beautiful here for words, by the way. I always forget about October in Los Angeles. My senses and memory are so full now.

And there's the placebo-PTSD thing happening in me: a gratitude that the sky is intact. Even if it is closer now.

I've always been suspicious of the scare-the-shit-out-of-yourself approach to practice. Hello, manufactured drama. And yet, there seem to be obvious immediate benefits.

Possible virtues of scaring the shit out of yourself (Global Meltdown Edition):

-Wake up, Zen style. Bam!

-See clearly what got you in to this mess

-Get serious about changing everything immediately

-Experience gratitude for remaining "fundamentals"

-Rue the day you went "sub prime"

-Reevaluate priorities

-See what you're really made of—in a moment of truth, how human are you?

-Let go. Find out falling was no big thing

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: markets-networks-society , spirituality

Karl Marx, Hero · 7 October 2008

Spoiling my chances of running for President, one blog post at a time.

Actually, I didn’t write what follows below. It’s from Gregory Rodriguez at the LATimes. Very good. I've worked with the data he discusses and he's right that there's a lot of fear in there. A lot.

           ......................................................................................

The debate between faith and atheism leaves too little room for figuring out why humans believe.

Forget Bill Maher, Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris. These atheists du jour have nothing on the most famous anti-theist of all time. Good old Karl Marx is still the most eloquent and thoughtful nonbeliever, and his “religion is the opium of the masses” is still the best one-liner in the business.

But as famous as that zinger is, it’s too bad that most people have never read the sentences that come before and after it. Marx was a whole lot more sympathetic to religious faith than most people give him credit for. He saw religion as a source of solace that should only be abolished until the sources of people’s pain—an unfair economic system—had been eradicated.

“Religious suffering, “ he wrote in 1844, “is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

“The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions. The criticism of religion is, therefore, in embryo, the criticism of that vale of tears of which religion is the halo.”

Marx wasn’t just another hater of religion as a childish fantasy or a retreat from rationality. He saw faith as a symptom and not the disease, and he was interested in faith not in terms of right and wrong but because of what it told him about the human condition.

That’s a far cry from the tenor of today’s brand of assertive atheism. According to surveys, atheists make up only about 4% of the U.S. population, or about 5 million adults, who tend to be more educated and affluent than believers. But thanks to a slew of bestselling, God-debunking books and Maher’s new film, “Religulous,” in which the comedian lampoons religious beliefs, atheism has never had a higher profile in this country.

And, of course, you could ascribe at least some of the resurgence of assertive atheism to a backlash against evangelical Christians and the way they have assertively injected religion into civic life.

The fury of the debate between faith and atheism leaves little room for an inquiry as to why 90% of Americans say they believe in God or a supreme being and more than 40% say they attend religious services each week. These days, a typically silly argument between a believer and a nonbeliever revolves around whether religious extremists or godless communists murdered more people in the 20th century. Like so many other public debates, the one over religion is dominated by extremes.

A new study out of Northwestern University, perhaps without really meaning to, gets at something much more interesting. It starts to provide data and insight that add to our ability to understand what Marx was getting at—not if there is a God and not whether it makes sense that humans should believe, but simply why humans believe.

The study, by psychology professor Dan P. McAdams and researcher Michelle Albaugh, was aimed at finding out about the religious sources of political leanings. They interviewed 128 devout Christians in and around Chicago, and they avoided the usual questions of “How do you know God exists” or even “Why do you believe?” Instead, they asked their subjects to describe what their lives and the world would be like if they did not have faith. In other words, what would the world be like if Christopher Hitchens were right and there were no God?

The study analyzes the results mostly in terms of political divisions. It found that politically conservative Christians described a godless world “as one of incessant conflict and chaos, expressing strong apprehension regarding people’s inability to control their impulses and the attendant breakdown of social relationships and societal institutions.”

Liberal Christians, on the other hand, had a different set of concerns. For them, a world without God would be “barren or lifeless, lacking in color and texture, an empty wasteland that would not sustain them” and in which they would feel lost.

All of the respondents generally imagined life without God as “entailing fear, sadness, interpersonal isolation and loss of meaning and hope.”

The political findings are intriguing, but not nearly as interesting as the way the question and the answers it elicited get at deeper, core issues. It appears that we do believe out of need, but it’s not, as Marx suggested, primarily because of material deprivation. Instead, it looks as if faith answers fear, and many different kinds of fear, which we can begin to delineate in some detail.

In the end, even these specifics don’t intrigue me as much as this fact: Zero-sum arguments about faith and faithlessness just go round and round, generating heat and no light. It’s better to return to real knowledge and fundamental questions. Rather than arguing over the existence of God, rather than playing believer-nonbeliever gotcha, we learn a whole lot more if we just keep asking ourselves—in as many new ways as possible—why it is that so many of us feel compelled to pray.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Today · 1 October 2008

Three years ago, I spoke with a wonderful financial historian about all this. She said: let us hope that the US declines gracefully from its place of supreme dominance. Hope it for everyone’s sake.

Well… this is horribly abrupt and traumatic, and it will still be a long time before our mundane, taken-for-granted reality catches up. This vacuum of political power laid on top of a vacuum of market organization is ok, in a sense, because on mental and interpersonal levels things are holding together. We go on reproducing social order through our habits of being, thank god. It’s actually kind of great… the microsocial strength that sustains a whole society amid two phenomenal macrosocial failures.

Barack Obama’s ability to hold back from full-scale demagoguery makes me love him more—those crying for him to show more power and leadership are so very old school. He’s already running the show in his way.

For me, I love to watch the practical nature of the sense-making we’re all doing now. Had the LHC created a black hole last month the physicist would have all looked at each other shaking their heads Oops, tapping around to find where exactly it went wrong. The present crises are in certain ways the same. The levels of technical understanding vary, but even for those who have seen this coming for years, there’s some kind of aporia.

For me, there’s so much going on it’s ridiculous. I’ve been getting my dearest remaining presuppositions undermined to hell, and beautifully, by Mark Whitwell in recent days, and ought to blog about it but feel maybe it’s just too much to lay on you. Also, with what time? There’s none. I’d leechblock everything to stay on target, but the world is too good. Some bits for today in case you missed them and for my own future reference:

George Soros on a better bailout.

Thomas Frank on blame.

V Good Mark Buchanan Op-Ed

Kathy G’s Palintology

Oh, also important: Mohair Gravy.

Happy October. I woke this morning on the other side of about three rabbit holes, and will definitely need some time for these known and unknown revolutions to remake my everydayness.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Suicide Newscycle · 25 September 2008

I keep wondering what David Foster Wallace would say. With the collapse of the (financial) system and all. Each day is more accursedly interesting, pushes what I thought was the the solid envelope of social dis/order. The boundary between believability and unbelievability is moving. In a sense I am meditating on that boundary, like other times I practice at the edge of mind and body, and still others hypnotize by finding the space that is the meeting of the eyelids or the place the skin meets the air around it.

The question is: how do we believe the unbelievable as it goes down? How do we update the definition of the situation? The movement between belief and disbelief is, I have to admit, partly projection. I’m under hilarious stress at work—stress that feels epic. I see the dread in Nancy Pelosi’s eyes and think I understand.

Really, I wish DFW were here and could see all this, the same way I wish Hildegaard could listen to The Photographer through my ears or Mark Twain could look out of airplane windows from behind my eyes. DFW’s been dead two weeks now and the eulogizing’s done and forgotten. The first long obits appeared within hours (prepared in advance by those reading the signs? I have to wonder) and were bumped down within a day. This is what clickability does. Slashes mourning periods right down to the blip-length of “news.” But I love the way that some people resisted that or even pushed back in to it, turned the internet into an historical repository of memory and place for a new level of shared loss. The comments on the LA Times obit are better to me than any flowers at a grave.

I remember somewhere DFW wrote that Wittgenstein was the most terrifying writer of his century, but also so inspiring because the philosopher concluded that solipsism was for the weak. Did DFW really say that? Maybe I’ve made it up. Because it seems ridiculous—for an autistic genius between the wars, of course solipsism was a problem. For DFW? No, empathy was the problem. Lobsters and all. The few obits I saw wanted to understand DFW’s suicide as the conclusion to some sort of philosophical problem. You know, make it all analytical and conclusive and hold the man to account for his mistaken computations of the problem at hand.

Isn’t this all a bit high-minded, making it a philosophical problem? Sadness and loneliness are universal if stronger in some—the sharing of that sadness at ad-hoc monuments that would be postmodern jokes if they weren’t so deep and human is what we do despite technology (and other forces) that want to slice us thin. Community is as much the default state as isolation and “self ownership.” If there was any narrative that DFW’s deep natural sadness affixed to for me, it was the tragedies of connectedness as much as of isolation. He had a way of making me meditate on that boundary—individuation and community—better than my own discipline, which is supposed to be rooted in just that synthesis. He is behind my eyes now whether he likes it or not. He’d probably think this historization and borglike absorption of his perspective to be imperial and somehow mistaken, but this is what you get for dying, David.

Commencement.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [26]
Categories: integration , markets-networks-society , morality

"Instincts" · 23 September 2008

We now break from regular mind-body-malarkey programming for a commercial message. (I watched “Advice” and “Education.”)

Also: a letter on the topic of unconscious racism (someone told me the comments are amazing)

                                      .........................................

Proposition: The way a campaign offers itself to the voter says everything about its social vision. Both the way it knows itself, and how it sees America.

Proposition: Almost all racism in western society is self-unconscious.

Proposition: For historical and everyday reasons, the bedrock of anti-black racism in America is fear of black men’s sexuality.

Conclusion: The McCain campaign believes the one really good reason to vote GOP is that you’re racist.

Yes, I agree with them! The only reason to vote for this jingoist deregulator and his girl Friday is if you’re racist. Too bad Obama’s too nice to run a straight “John McCain is a fool” campaign. I guess the Dems feel that would be insulting to fools.

It might take a while for us to realize that the age of decadence is our political culture is over. Too bad the election will happen before that. This whole fall is blowing my historical mind.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: markets-networks-society

Mental Recession · 17 September 2008

Are the boxes of deskstuff carted yesterday out of Lehman just so much mindstuff, Mr. McCain? The houses bought on nothing and the cars with the no-interest loan—these are also whisps of consciousness and not part of some self-sufficient reality?

Everyone in fiscal conservative land wants to say this is a problem of trust and coordination.

When did the fiscal conservatives turn in to new-age mentalists? Is it just that this line is an easy means of denial? Are they solipsists? (I'm not joking.)

To call this only a coordination problem and collective loss of trust, and to pursue solutions through propaganda and only that is to deny that the entire American economy is rotting at its core.

The people who have been telling us for ten years to “trust” and buy are the ones get the fees from our transactions. To them, our trust actually is commodity. But for the rest of us, the commodities look more like macbooks and condos. It’s all the same.

The whole reduction of the institutional failure to only a coordination problem feels like more bad avaita in my life.

I don’t even understand advaita, but do see some keen people who have bothered to take it deep practicing a metaphysics that understands that both the mind and the body—both ideas and the physical world—are equal contents of some consciousness. The substrate of reality is nondual big-mind or somesuch; and the apparent differences in its contents (that is, mind versus body) are trivial. Ok, sounds like a sort of tedious philosophical argument. It makes sense to me insofar as I can practice spacious awareness when I sit vipassana, but whatever.

What amuses is the clearly bad avaita practiced by westerners interested in eastern stuff: the attempts at nondualism that actually are extremely dualist because they reduce all of experience to the content of individual consciousness. For example:  

If you let go of all your fear, you’ll be able to take your calves in a backbend: no concrete limitations there, just emotional ones. The body isn’t real—it’s a collection of mental tics. The physical is an illusion.

Good avaita is slamming the wall and declaring “This is god!” (the physical is a manifestation of oneness, just as much as the mental). Bad avaita is slamming someone to the calves in chakra-b because the resistance there is only fear (the body is not real but only a container for mental problems).

Good avaita: the economy is fucked backwards and forwards!

Bad avaita: there’s a mental recession but the “more real” economic fundamentals are in no doubt. (Again, this is a reduction of the physical to the mental that actually just serves to deepen a dualism between the two.)

How much pain do we have to experience before we admit that there is a structural barrier to taking the calves in a backbend? And to how many suckers can get mortgages? Practice plays with just that physical structure—affirms that the physical is not less real than the mental. And ultimately makes space to see the edge where the physical and mental interpenetrate and don’t have to be isolated in “opposite” realms.

For someone who came to this practice wanting to pretend it wasn’t really about the body, the affirmation of physical reality that I do every day on the mat is the best way to realize that the physical is not reducible to the mental. Sometimes a charlie-horse is just a charlie-horse… a fluctuation of consciousness, yes—but embodied consciousness.

For me, pretending that the body is a shadow of the mind is a kind of retreat from the physical immediacy of reality. I recognize it as a lie I sometimes tell myself. For the mental-recessionistas, pretending that the crisis isn’t physical is a way of avoiding the more difficult physical realm of hunger and disease and homelessness and unemployment and pretending this is all about the numbers.

This uncanny marriage of mentalist New Age metaphysics to conservative if not regressive politics, led by the "we make our own reality" Rovians, continues to give me the shivers! But... maybe it makes sense. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Obama Pranayama · 12 September 2008

Pretty excited about Obama Pranayama here. “Whether we are doing yoga or just taking our next breath.... let us consciously breathe in the intent for change and help move Barack Obama into the White House.”

I want a breathe-in. Not kidding. I’m going through an extroverted cycle here

But about the OP. On the one hand, ok, it requires the solipsistic worldview of a very small child and hilarously low standard of reality-checking to think you can actually shape external political outcomes by sitting around breathing. The aether theory of consciousness-raising.

It is interesting that we Santa Monicans, whose lives are the most disproportionately blessed in the world by technological advancement and the inequities of global capitalism, hold to the most hocus-pocus explanations for our dramatic privileges. “The Secret,” the apotheosis of the hocus pocus, is first and foremost a legitimation scheme for those who are disproportionately privileged—so they can believe their parking spaces and the SUVs they park in them are manifestations of their own superior mental power.

Yeah; because people in H3s are the smart ones.

We actually don’t get to sit around and will Obama in to office. Ever hear of precinct walking? That’s what they do in neighborhoods a little closer to the reality line.

Onnnnn the other hand, intention does have power. Besides mind-reading and occasional clairvoyance (didn’t just say that), there are no superpowers of yogic consciousness. What looks like siddhis is just the intuition trained to a very high level of self-knowledge and knowledge of its environment. The more you are aware of the operating systems, the more freaky-accurate your reading of the present moment and the better your predictions of what’s to come. Breathing is really good for that: pranayamites have a mysticism about them because they’re hyper-aware. More conscious of the fine details.

A corollary of the idea that you can effect political outcomes with breath practice is the magical thinking that you automatically make the world a better place by working on yourself. If I may part ways with Ramana Maharshi and co., there’s no magic in this either. You don’t sit in a cave and raise global consciousness by some “vibration.” It’s that if you’re more worked out in yourself, you relate to the world in a series of relatively healthy encounters that increase the goodness in the world. Sitting in a cave (or at obama pranayama) doesn’t do that: it just prepares you to do that really well.

Preparing the ground for action is not the same as action. But… it is still a good idea.

So, it’s all good. I’m excited about obama pranayama.

The thing is: I’m wondering about Obama himself. Is he doing the OP and tapping in to the world-soul/ prevailing discourse/ dynamic possibilities of the present moment in a way that’s prepared him to speak with apparently-magical accuracy? Does he have a better map of this territory and where it might lead than the GOP with its tired fucking culture wars?

It might not happen, considering what I’m little I’ve seen of recent days’ politicking but

The guy could bust out. He may have his intuition so finely articulated, and may be so ready for this moment, that he finds the way to speak to these angry ghosts so a margin of them hear him. I only say this because the race speech in March was that. He wrote it himself when the time for it was perfect. The content and tone were the most brilliant political moment in the US in my lifetime. I was amazed.

The guy is carrying some measure of awareness and discursive power. The charisma factor, easy to forget amid this week of dread, is a big deal. But he’s also moving along in the rickety old sinking mothership of the Democratic Party, filled with a crew that doesn’t get it at all. So we’ll see what happens. If he can get some headspace to tap in, and just allow himself to get righteously pissed off, something might happen.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Breaking it Down · 8 September 2008

Why do I feel more anger when Sarah Palin mocks the Styrofoam Acropolis set at the DNC than when I think about what is going on right now in Guantanamo?

1. The GOP’s campaign is an attack on my feminity on many levels. Their fun insults me personally... whereas my tax dollars going to torture innocents feels somehow less about me. And for some reason part of me needs to experience these global events as being all about me.
2. Also: she’s messing up the plan! It’s our turn already. No fair! We didn't plan on being foiled by a last minute comicbook nemesis! Those wascally wabbits!!
   

What’s the use of my outrage at injustice if it’s built on self-protective fear and schoolyard reactivity?

I am not sure. I think it’s still useful, but there are also (1) it can’t be trusted insofar as it’s not self-aware and (2) it will spark a backlash in anyone I scorn. But… given that there is just so much straightup killing and torturing going on right now, why not work through the childish, un-self-aware, hateful anger and direct that energy into open outrage? Then act on it in a focused way, and let it go. Hmm. It would be nice to have a leader who could take it to that level.

(By the way, at the time, I really did think the columns were campy. But now: I really do feel they were a nice, fun touch. Kind of like ice sculptures! And balloon drops! Only the columns have the added bonus of being phallic! {P.S. let’s not talk about the hadron collider this week, ok? I’m completely taken by it but the name is a bit much.} The only thing that’s changed is that SP has ridiculed the columns, so I deduce that my newfound like for them is as much defensiveness as it is good humor. Poor ridiculed columns. I hope the BOPL rescues them from EBay.)

Who do some people not know what to see in all this… feel like it’s not relevant?

1. It’s too much information and there are too many issues. It’s hard to see the true difference between these two campaigns.
2. Staking out a moral position is too uncanny. It’s dirty and connects you too much to social events. The intensity of feeling makes one feel that much more ungrounded and disconnected—that much more Camus’ stranger.
3. There is too much irony in acting. Malaise follows from the impossibility of acting, is the 21^st century version of Arjuna at loose ends.
4. Nothing really matters.

Just random possibilites, those. I don’t have an answer to this second question.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [18]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

Death Embrace · 8 September 2008

It has been asked: Do rural people really feel hated?

Yes. (Insert a decade of ever more alienated returns home. Also, many painful slips of the tongue on all parts. Cf, when professors say things like religion has no sociological relevance because it’s “atomistic” or that rural America is “empty,” they don’t look smart.)

I think there are two streams of feeling here. The first is straight up fear—the libertarian strain of rural feeling. Giuliani’s sneering use of “cosmopolitan” points to the sensation that rural people have interacting with the cosmopolite: they feel authentic, hardworking and sincere… talking to hypocritical, affected lazyasses. I actually love the critique of hipster-bourgeois consumption (latte-drinking, volvo-driving liberals) that goes along with this.

The second is the desire to be hated for one’s own righteousness, as the New Testament promises—the evangelical strain of rural feeling (for pure distillations of this see Matthew 10:22, Vengeance Rising, etc. etc.). Martyrdom is a really common sentiment all over the place, and (together with anti-conservative haters and liberal snobbishness) it feeds the anti-snob politics that have worked brilliantly for the GOP since Nixon. The GOP’s line that “they won’t like Sarah in Washington but we sure like her” trades on this martyrdom-turned-aggressive vibe. And the thing is, the left keeps feeding it. The too-good-to-hate-you hatred is everywhere. And it’s easy for a progressive to begin to feel it when her own freedoms from sexism, racism and homophobia are being attacked.

I broke down and joined Facebook this summer when I got all sad that my trip home was falling through. The trendy timesuck factor of Facebook always put me off; and the idea of my three main networks coming together made me cringe. But I wanted to feel connected to certain people from high school, and letting those networks intertwine in a single node required a level of self-honesty that was good for me. I don’t want to be particularly available to people, but I also don’t need to hide from them. In the end though, it’s not about who sees me. It’s about who I see with a degree of connectivity. Who I see is SAHM conservative activists, a diesel mechanic, a few people who escaped MT by the one dependable route—joining the military. And the rest who I still remember so sentimentally: they aren’t online. Because they’re working and poor, and don’t live the kind of lives where far-flung global social networks are a reality.

It raises the question: where do we learn about the world? I mostly learn through reading history books, mainstream internet sites, datasets on demographics and public opinion, and making my friends who live really diverse experiences tell me about their lives. How high quality are my data? Why are the people with the best data in the world—American political parties—using it in such different ways? Seriously. I’m asking.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , social theory

these times · 6 September 2008

Dahlia Lithwick: “There is a way in which she's cashing in on the ability of very, very, very pretty women to say very, very vicious things with a great big smile.” (Day to Day)

Gail Collins: “[Her] speech totally swallowed up all the attention in St. Paul, leaving nothing whatsoever for speakers like Mitt Romney… announcing: ‘We need change all right! Change from a liberal Washington to a conservative Washington.’ Tragically, nobody seemed interested enough to point out that this made no sense.” (NYT)

wozu: “since Plato, animals have played a vital role in political rhetoric.  That the barracuda, a fish universally regarded as vile, predatory, mercenary — a shark lacking even the nobility and solitude of sharks, a shark that also scavenges — has been elevated into the panzoon of respectable animals tells us a great deal about the state of American politics.”

Tom Friedman: “There is no bigger issue on campuses these days than environment/energy. Going into this election, I thought that — for the first time — we would have a choice between two “green” candidates. That view is no longer operative — and college students (and everyone else) need to understand that.” (NYT)

(0v0): Uncorked a cheap cabernet last night and caught up on Jon Stewart. It's all political theatre at this point, all of it, so of course the campaigns are going to be exercizes in overstatement all the way through. Statements made for effect. The bad cab shined up my sense of the absurd last night and here I am thick-skulled in the morning. I feel like archiving some thoughts here.

For months I’ve had a difficulty relating to people in my generation who would even consider voting against Obama. Or to be more accurate, the idea of voting against him makes me sick to my stomach. Facebook is a more private community than this one, but the (0v0) network—at least those of who talk to me—is much closer to me ideologically than the immediate friends in my Facebook. They are close to me in life, but far in feeling; and you are the inverse.

I have zero surprise that my family and everyone I know back home would vote against Obama—they have ways of seeing and hearing that pre-determine the message they’ll receive from him as Clintonesque and coat any line from the GOP in a sheath of pearl before they swallow it. Also, most of them are unconsciously racist in small ways, despite the best intentions of their hearts. Social conservatism is its own world of perception. But those from my generation—even the trust fund kids and the high-earners who I know have at times voted GOP even though it’s not hip—who are capable of even wondering how to vote… that’s just disturbing. Particularly those who do it for fiscal reasons, because fiscal conservatism is atomistic, whereas social conservatism goes much deeper inside. Yet conservatives of both kinds are fairly nestled into my life, and I don’t want it different. It is mind-blowing to read down a list of facebook updates with such a rage-range.

The theatre is out of control, but I really do have to engage this process sincerely. Both political science to my right and New Age Yoga to my left would say disengage and don’t identify with this, either because engaging is irrational or because it’s "bad energy." And then there's a certain hipster disconnectedness. To that, fuck irony. Irony is the near enemy of historical perspective. To all of it, we don’t get to sit this out. Don’t get to pretend that we’re moving to Canada. We’ve benefited from being Americans in every way, and constitute this monster both by our actions and our inactions; and that creates responsibility.

In a way, I wonder if my trust fund and high salaried friends who would think twice about Obama are practicing a form of cynicism. Disengaging from the political level of the question as staying the course as fiscal conservatives. Talk about making it easy on yourself.

Anyway. I wonder if all this will make my case to the academics that rurual America is real. Yes, the GOP is pushing this politics of “outsider” resentment because it’s just what has worked for them for so long—all the way back to Nixon. But also, of course their polls are telling them it resonates. Hello: people in rural areas have a completely different experience of nationhood. This stuff is real; the people who buy the “son of the soil” line are real. It actually is elitist not to know that.

A dear friend who is gay and Mormon—though not allowed, obviously, to go to church—is trying to convince the more politicized of her siblings that gay marriage is not a threat to their privacy. Some of them, meantime, are on the anti-gay activist rosters, and asking my friend not to “take it personally because it’s just about protecting our privacy.” This is the church’s line: if marriage is legalized, then the church’s privacy (their right not to honor the unions) will be threatened. First, pure lies. Second, what a brilliant inversion. It is the vagina police—of which the Mormon Church is an important constituient—that wants to violate privacy. What happens in the culture wars is that the public/private dichotomy gets breached in the wrong way. In a way that kills invidual choice while leaving the conceptual public/private binary intact. The right is so brilliant at self-identifying its own greatest outrage—here, that it is only the right that wants to invade your home life and your sex life—and declaring that this is exactly the sin of the “other side.”

Speaking of sides, these campaigns don’t even know how to talk to each other. They are both running against Bush, and doing so orthogonally to one another. It won’t go on like this—they GOP is trying to force the Dems to argue on their terms, as always—but wouldn’t it be interesting if they just talked past one another all fall? It’s what makes sense, really. The two campaigns are pitched at totally different kinds if mind. Luckily or cursedly, the media will make make them intersect. Must have “two sides” to things in the world of agree/disagree. It would be boring as hell if it weren’t so infernally interesting.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [23]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Dispatches from the twilight zone · 2 September 2008

First Day of School, Pop Quiz. Short Answer. Please define the following in 40 words or less.

New Age Spirituality:

Use of exotic practices and churingas to (1) decorate the ego or (2) flee the self. Based in fear, irrationality. Potentially transformational if (1) creates community or (2) induces peaceful altered states. Creates psychosis when repressed issues return.

A ha.(colloq., Boulder, CO):

A moment of unanticipated grace in the flow. E.g., In third series, consider that SKPJ’s edict “straight arms!” means a straight ninety-degree angle. Suddenly it’s about sucking into the solar plexus and letting yourself float, not just building linebacker shoulders to muscle through.

Campaign Themes:

Dems—Come Together “God to be good looking cos he’s so hard to see”

GOP—Stop Children, What’s That Sound “It starts when you’re always afraid”

Privacy; a.k.a. “family matters are not political matters”:

When women and men get to make own decisions about pregnancy and birth control. When a certain young woman “makes the decision on her own to keep the baby.” Diametric opposite of what John McCain and Sarah  Palin want for you.

Vagina Police:

Focus on the Family; abstinence-only education; I would “oppose abortion even if my own daughter was raped;” etc. Giving new meaning to the Sept 2 holiday of VJ Day.

Cynicism:

A woman candidate chosen to reaffirm patriarchy at the highest level; “call for action” instead of taking action when own party controls government; making this NOT ABOUT THE WAR; pre-emptive protester arrests; being anti-polar bear; climate change is natural

(0v0), Ovo:

An OK combination in times of hard physical work, but only if (0v0) is showering after practice. For three days and three night after ovo, (0v0) experiences “BO.”

BO:

Not sure. Ask the Editor.

The Editor:

Earning his name one high sign at a time. Making up for it with qualities which have been edited from this document.

September:

An intensely beautiful, spare, quickly fleeting species. Further classification incomplete.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , spirituality

Reticulation and the world inside the world · 19 August 2008

I love to watch networks of humans create themselves and halfway-retreat, surge, drop whole nodules, regenerate. In web space the networks never die—the information down to the last errant comment-thread always remains out there, somewhere: the relationships forged and ebbed away, the self-discoveries through expression and through being witnessed in this way, the vast inconclusiveness but inexorably forward, expansive movement of it. There will be more human nodes in this web, more journals deployed in blog form, more relationships and conclusions and hiatuses and returns. Events that seem to divide are vicariances, separating species that then flourish along parallel trajectories on separate self-identified “continents” (“India” and “the West” in our ashtangosphere, these days)… though on the web a new pangea is possible at any moment.

The sheer amount of personal and collective data in every corner of the blogosphere is wonderful, stupefying, trivial, transcendent: boring as fuck and at the same time uniquely totalizing it its human digitization. No single brain could really ever see it all or understand its dynamics.

What excites and frustrates me is that even in the little corner of the blogosphere that is ours, most of the digitized relationships flow through hidden channers. There is the outside digital self, and the inside, that is, the email side of things. Sitting here in my in-box this morning, waiting for the time I let myself read them late tonight, are new missives from two most fascinating and very far-away quasi-strangers. People who know me in a sense, and who I know, in a sense. I feel awed by these little connections--by these interestingly personal, decontextualized but also sweetly (uniquely?) private, and all-over delightful sparks between would-be strangers.

Would it double the data to add the email-train of relationship formation to the map of the network? Triple it? Would it crash even the most capacious network analysis? Is the secret email web where the reticulation of the blogosphere really happens—in simple, private dyads?

I suspect so. Here’s something else in my blogger inbox, from a reader I adore in DC.

i had a dream about you last night that i had to tell you about, it was so weird!

i was having an "issue" and i can't remember what it was, but it caused me to have a little temper tantrum and i threw the coffee maker through a picture window (perhaps i hadn't yet had coffee and that was the problem?).  well, to cope with/ fix the problem i decided i had to go visit you in LA.  the next thing i knew i was in LA with you at your shala and you gave me up to karandavasana.  then we went for a hike in some crater lake type lake bed.  the water was recessed and there were all sorts of amazing skeletal remains. we were just hiking around looking at everything, when all of the sudden someone came running and shouting that we had to get out because the waters were rising and soon the way we came in would be covered with water.  i knew this was silly and i wasn't worried because i knew we would be able to get out no matter what.  and we did, and then i was back in the kitchen with the broken picture window and no coffee.

The dream side of the blogosphere… world inside the world. Is the understory always this good? I guess it must be. Imagining the secret notes exchanged between so many twosomes out there adds a layer of romance and intrigue, somehow. I'd love to peek (just a little) in your inboxes; I really would. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , social theory

Ashtanga and Imperialism · 16 August 2008

CP wrote this post yesterday—one that’s difficult for many of us to handle. I’ve been waiting and hoping for just that kind of sacrilege out of him, and he delivered. In the comments (which are a terriffically honest and interesting conversation about the future of ashtanga), someone asked me the following:

For those of us who are long finished school but are still interested in these matters, what theoretical perspective has replaced tired 1990s neo-Marxism [and 1980s post-colonial theory]? I am serious. Please save this practicing lawyer from the tedium of her daily life by discussing some theory!

Ok. Trying to make a short answer. I’m just going to freewrite a bit and post whatever comes up off the cuff. Because if I try to make a coherent I’ll spend hours! It would be so delightful to build a study group or seminar discussing different philosophies’ and social theories’ perspectives on the moral, cultural and spiritual puzzles that the east-west meeting of ashtanga creates. I have a background in philosophy and social-political theory but rarely work in these literatures because they’re disconnected to real life. The mind likes to be bound; and I like the constraints of doing research on the ground—theory can say anything it wants without the discipline of real-world data. Abstract rhetorical wars are too easy.

Anyway, I should clarify that neo-Marxism and post-colonial theory have not effectively been replaced by something called post-modernism. Postmodernism is a disposition rather than a theory, and as much as it’s intellectually dishonest and stupid if taken to extremes it’s also the condition in which we all live. It’s just a suspicion of metanarratives (Lyotard’s line), or an awareness that all knowledge is situated in someone’s perspective and some matrix of power relationships. Postmodernism at its best is a background question of Oh yeah? Says who? It doesn’t stand alone as an interpretation and it explains nothing.

For me, by far the richest node of theory and research about culture and social philosophy now is in the little subfield of the sociology of culture. A lot of the subfield is bad, but the good stuff expresses what to me are the there most important aspects of what is now good theory: (1) non-essentialism, (2) a bit of self-aware empiricism, and (3) an attempt to synthesize all the modernist (Marxist and other) binaries like material/ideal, economic/cultural, structure/agency.

Briefly, non-essentialism (1) means that you don’t think race, nationality, culture, etc have any transcendent reality. They are social phenomena, or ascribed and acquired characteristics. This is huge—it takes the neo-Marxists’ critique of reification and follows it to its logical conclusion that culture itself is socially constructed. It means you don’t buy the idea that someone with brown skin is “naturally” a soulful dancer or the idea that someone with south Asian ancestry has a “natural,” superior claim to yoga. People are just people. Cultural artifacts are just artifacts. Which is not to say culture does not go deep—the ways in which we grew up, for example, determine our understandings of the world perhaps more than previous (non-empirical) theory could recognize! Culture may not be real on an “essential” or transcendent level, but the ways it shapes personal knowledge appear—based on research—to be very deep. As culture becomes increasingly complex and fast-changig globalized, this just becomes all the more interesting.

So (2) empiricism is the sense that social theory that isn’t rooted in examination of the world is probably BS. Seriously, how do we know that cultural traits are socially constructed? Well, for example consider how race works in Brazil vis-à-vis how it works in the US. Totally different ideas of what is blackness and whiteness, what characterizes race, how many races there are, etc. (Yet at the same time, some things are common: racial hierarchies priveliging white skin, the possibility of becoming more white as socio-economic status increases, local beliefs about the essential qualities of different “groups,” etc.) It’s complicated. The sense now is that even universal pronouncements about social construction have to be made in reference to something real. Pure theory is a joke. Even in philosophy, the richest areas of development are empirical—biomedical ethics, philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. For me, my hero of empirical social theory is Pierre Bourdieu. He makes me think, first, that pure ideas without social research are boring and, second, that living one’s life as a kind of social theorist—always considering the theoretical presuppositions and implications of action—is a rich and beautiful form of practical self-awareness.

The third characteristic I see in present-day theory, a valuation of synthetic work (3), is both the most interesting and the most difficult to summarize. For a while in the 1980s and 1990s, theory was obsessed with “difference” and “play” between the supposed binaries of male/female, dark/light, material/idea, structure/agency, objective/subjective, inside/outside, etc. etc. etc. And, since Hegel, the idea of the thesis-antithesis dialectic of consciousness has been encrypted within much social theory. To be brief, now there is a sense that theory does not have to be just about structure or agency, not just leftist or rightist, just about material or ideal, just from the subjective or objective point of view. In fact, theoretically insightful empirical work SYTHESIZES these apparent opposites. This is a dangerous idea, because it resonates with the wacky Integral people with their fourfould AQAL framework, and because it sounds an awful lot like eastern mysticism, what with yoga being the “union of apparent opposition” and all that. In my own work, I strive to synthesize whatever oppositions I find in the world, and not just settle to oscillate from one side to the other. Incidentally, this is why I find it difficult to take a hard line either way in the present debate on the regulation and commodification of ashtanga.

I have saved my withering remarks for the ashtanga mercenaries for the end, so hopefully they will be missed by anyone who will find them offensive, and only read by people who understand the lightness of heart— but also the impatience with self-deception —with which I write.

Anon’s critiques of the cultural imperialism of Cody’s market analysis, and righteous indications that Cody has transgressed against Edward Said, indicate little more than that Anon got a fancy western education before s/he went off to India and discovered huself. If Anon and likeminded western practitioners who see themselves as guardians of the Eastern authenticity (oh essentialist modern concept!) are the true guardians of the lineage, it is only because they’ve performed another level of the cultural appropriation of which they accuse others. They are, as Bourdieu would say, the cultural imperialists par excellence, both appropriating the tradition and then pretending to be its owners and protectors.

In case anyone out there didn’t quite catch it… Yes, traveling to India to practice ashtanga yoga is “imperialist” for both ideational and economic reasons, both material and ideal, both personal and collective. If you are actually concerned about “imperialism” because you think (erroneously, I’d say) that culture belongs to particular nationalities and races, than you really have no business traveling to India nor raging against anyone else for being imperialist. Because to the degree that you think you own ashtanga, you are the biggest “imperialist” of all.

The same people who are out to defend the integrity of the tradition are those who are extremely identified with it and fantasize that they own it, through all manner of superficial language study, celebration of holidays they actually know little about, professions of love for certain kinds of cuisine. But do these people really understand the culture they are appropriating? Do they see only light and spirituality in India—do they fantasize (ultimate Imperialist self-deception) that the beggars have equanimity or that Indians themselves are simply “more spiritual.” Do they recognize that they are using India as a playground where their currency and passport buy easy living and implicit international protection? Do they see that they see “spirituality” because it’s an easy life where they don’t have to deal with a more grounded spirituality that comes from their own early experiences, don’t have to deal with the economic pressures that give so much value to their dollars, don’t have to look their own history in the eyes but can instead vacation in an alternate spirituality with rituals that are easy to love because they’re different and new, and seem to offer an escape from all that is too real and too dark and to dirty to examine at home?

I’ve departed from social theory to psychological theory here at the end, but if we are honest with ourselves, isn’t this the terrain for examining this particular war over who owns ashtanga? The “imperialist” slur is a red herring, is it not? I suspect that when we westerners tangle over who owns ashtanga and whether it’s ok to see the practice from a (creepy but not at all irrelevant) marketing perspective, we are fighting at a deep level with ourselves.

Apologies for the incoherence and doubtless typos all over this post. I wanted to respond to Monkey’s question, but also am not going to take the time to make the response shorter.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , markets-networks-society , science , self-deception , social theory

Instrumental Rationality · 12 August 2008

Fussy. Sorry, internet. Here goes.

Remember the ashtanga energy market? This is related, in a way. 

When you love a practice—sociology or ashtanga—being around careerist people is sometimes really hard. That’s been the main distraction of letting academia draw me in on a professional level, as is now happening. And I’m transparent, so my feelings about this are inconveniently obvious.

Instrumental rationality is useful for getting things done and can coexist along with more value-based motivations. Actions can be partly instrumental and partly value-driven; people ourselves are some of both.

But god is pure instrumentalism tacky. It’s so apparent when someone asks “what can I get out of this?” with respect to every relationship. Yes—I see the little wheels turning. Right there.

It’s also obvious when someone is obsessed with social hierarchies and institutional power and jockeying for their own position in the web. When some self-promoter wants to be close to the energy, the power, the money—even if they have no energy or real intelligence of their own to contribute.

For two years I’ve considered writing an anonymous piece for the Chronicle of Higher Ed on the tragedy of professional success for grad students whose egoes are too fragile to take it—how this creates a slithering kind of professionalism and dissolves community. Today year I’d actually do it if I had the time. It would start with a discussion of how many people now practice yoga to get through their dissertations, and an exhortation to ethical arbitrage: bring the karma-yoga ethic of Arjuna over to your professional life. Put a little soul in your soulciology.

Anyway. It seems obvious that my love of true believers grows out of this exact shadow—my despair when I see the “what can I get out of this relationship?” mechanism churning. Userism. You don’t have to be a player to be in the game, and you don’t have to hate the game even if the players make it ugly. “Networking,” and some bit of instrumental rationality, are natural to professions and networks and social life.

But it’s people who actually have little energy or love or inspiration or intelligence to give, and who play for the get, who seriously damage the practice. Stop that, ok?

Here’s more free-association from the world of Evangelical music. It’s all coming back to me these days from my subconscious. You people listening to Madonna and Wham! in your misspent youths, oh what you missed without Sparrow Records. Good thing you read this blog. As a reward for getting through this post, here’s something hilarious. It's not a parody.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , social theory , sound

'Til we grow beards get weird and disappear into the mountains--- · 29 July 2008

Something about these crazy arm balances, I tell you. I went into the hip-hop archives of the Owl House CD shelves Sunday, and drew out The Eminem Show. I cannot endorse this record because it exhibits high levels of misogyny, pandering to children, preening rhymes so obviously non-spontaneous he probably copped them from a songwriting dictionary (but who doesn’t), and, sort of, the dreaded cultural appropriation. Also: it’s good. Sorry, embarrassing; but yes. I thought about stemming my habit on Monday, but it’s been the Show all week here. In my fragile 5:40 am state, it’s true that I can hew to the lowest common denominator.

The record was already two years old and tired four summers back when I was learning the first series. But I stayed in a similar can’t-quite-change-the-record groove for days on end at exactly this point in late July that year, and it worked. The rhythm was a little different: the Editor and I would go to campus around 8, and for two hours I’d write notes in preparation for my upcoming field exam in Economic Sociology. At 10:10 I’d sneak back up the parking garage, and secret through the backstreets of Beverly Hills listening to that record loud like a white university-schooled fool while the middle-aged men from Michoacan and San Salvador trimmed trees and hauled grass clippings at the curbs. I’d cut back to Wilshire at Comstock, where the country club forces you back into the big arterial, and hit just a couple of lights before landing at a now-bought-and-decommissioned (thanks, YW) beautiful little studio in the heart of downtown Beverly Hills. Park in the free garage on Beverly drive and take a manduka and change of clothes from the trunk, in time to be on the mat with hair braided up at 10:30.

Interesting that these are still my practices—Econ Soc, astanga, driving my Civic—and that a return to this place in the annual cycle shows me how much it is the same person now and then. Also, the country is weirdly the same one that the record—with its backwards E evocative of financial crisis and much to say about clueless White America and horrible wars and dirty Dick Cheney—addresses: will we throw everything away as manaically as we did in Fall 04? It took the dense evocations of Eminem’s bad but good record to see me and us in this light again. What’s different? Some edges softer and some harder, I guess, a shift in sense of humor and ideas about this and that. Maturity in some areas, loss of orthodoxy in others. Oh, and an even more obvious alternative come November. On both levels, this year’s shift in context will be a little dramatic. The four-year cycle is concluding.

In aught four the Eminem show ended when I parked the car for a week and flew to another city for the annual disciplinary meeting. Same this year. When I come back, it will almost feel like fall.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , sound

Between ADD and OCD · 17 July 2008

I am really ok with a little open disagreement. Seems like healthy exercise for not taking things personally—and not making them personal. Also, it ups the ante on figuring things out and makes for quick learning.

That said, this last thread on whether ashtangis practice something beyond asana is the most elementary thing this blog has ever seen. Conduct the primary series one thousand times and make your own brilliant deductions, Watsons.

Meantime, time for the semi-annual confab on the next tagline for ashtanga yoga. Everyone here? Here are some new ones to surface in recent weeks.

Ashtanga Yoga. Yes We Can! (From Katie, who just got Ekapadabakasana.)

Ashtanga Yoga. The breathing practice with guts. (A quislingism of 0v0 and the LadyGoverNess.)

Certified Teachers. Emotionally secure. So you don’t have to be.

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. So the spirit may live on.

            Or on second thought,

Authorized Teachers. Preserving the letter of the law. Whatever that is.

The one we settled on last time was just

Ashtanga Yoga. Shut up.

But my favorite is still

Ashtanga Yoga. Reviving the grail quest one true believer at a time.

Back to the authorized teachers taglines, maybe the first one would help all of us to accept these legalistic souls who are hyper-identified with the ashtanga brand and anxious to have you know they have "the blessing," like to talk about the (um) sacrifices involved in being a yoga teacher, and incidentally will have you know that’s not the correct vinyasa for Prasarita C. Authorized teachers are the footsoldiers of the code, the Knights Templar to the Certifieds’ Illuminati. It falls to them to keep the faith intact in a sea of anus-shiva-power-xtn yoga, which can manifest as a sea of maya. Brave quixotic knights, they are. Their generation has difficult role to play.

What do you do? Somebody’s got to fixate on the individual trees in the forest. What we tend to think of as insecure legalism also keeps the lineage coherent. In this sense, the “authorized” vibe is our Julia Butterfly. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [53]
Categories: astanga yoga , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Camelots · 8 July 2008

Ask not what your practice community can do for you… but what you can do for your practice community.

Rolling on toward Camelot as we are this summer, and with the ashtangi follow-the-energy vritti at its height, I just got to make the above suggestion.

Forget about consuming others’ energy. How much can you give?

There is an energy market in ashtanga. On a social network graph, I could map its shifts and pulses around the world and within key cities. The expansive tendency is to follow the energy, but involution requires putting down roots. Evolution, I have a feeling, begins with the first but shifts quickly to the second.

What’s it going to be? Changing your life at crucial times in hopes of shaktipat-grace, ok; but day-trading in the endless energy market…?

I love the practitioners who take a love the one you’re with approach to their home space. Everybody loves those practitioners, actually, so (in addition to being the most content) they end up receiving more energy than they lay down day after day.

That’s the funny thing. When you stop chasing the energy, you start being the source.

Yoga practice appears to be a pay-for-service kind of thing, but it’s really not. Sorry. You pay and you serve.

(And gain the world in the meantime.)

         <<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Incidentally… will Camelot-the-Sequel be routed? Why are Warren Christopher and James Baker (not exactly someone outside the blood-for-oil winners’ circle) moving now to limit the executive’s powers to take the country to war? I will not mention the crazy internet predictions false flag events at the DNC or the fact that my beautiful grandmother lives blocks from this year’s convention center. But I don’t trust the trans-national blood-for-oil conspiracy for anything and if James Baker of all people is worried, we and Iran should be too.

         <<<<<>>>>>>>>><<<<<<<<<<>>>>>>>>>>

Also incidentally, the Angels and Demons people are still crawling all over this place.

Super-dreamy: the quad, now slanted over in the best golden light of evening with its grass all vibratory and the rocks of Royce aglow, is scaffolded in giant spotlights. A tall dweeby guy with big hair is lurching around the outlook in the distance, pausing, hands-on-hips, to interact with someone behind a camera 10 feet away. Periodically, someone runs after the tall guy with what appears to be hairspray, as if the hair weren’t already well fortified.

They should have cast anyone else. Ed Norton, Ed Harris, Willem Dafoe (she wishes). Give the nerds a better face, with less air in the head and more fire in the belly. Clear-minded intensity (Obama, JFK, King Arthur, source-yogis present and past) can be dreamy too.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [14]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society

Is ashtanga like bad sex? · 3 June 2008

Ok, tempering the ashtangelism….  

People who dance often tell me the practice makes them feel beautiful.

People who practice ashtanga often tell me the practice makes them feel fat.

The median dancer is 20 years older and 40 pounds heavier than the median ashtangi. 

Other differences in form, state of awareness, and possibilities for expanding boundaries of “self”:

Ashtanga: lotus binds; pick-ups; strong boundaries around individual experience.

Culture of “working on myself.”

Mental states: advanced practitioners (regardless of place in the series) cultivate trance and practice meditative contemplation through tristana, while it’s key for earlier students to focus on the physical forms. Energetic thread is lost when posture takes over and movement stops. Weak correlation between mental state and physical posture because you can’t really deduce mental state from posture.

Dance: free form; spontaneous; weak boundaries around individual experience. 

Culture of deep introspection, acceptance, self expression.

Mental states: most people pretty instantly go in to trance with the pulsing rhythm and the energy of a large, sophisticated group. It seems like they go into either a gut-level, emotion-rich undifferentiated consciousness (a sort of primal state?) or a sophisticated, contemplative state that feels a lot like the open-inquiry stages of vipassana. If they stop moving, it may mean they’re “not feeling it” or that they’re in a trance state in which stillness brings even more depth than motion.

Does ashtanga make one feel fat while dance makes one feel beautiful, regardless of actual body-looks? What’s up with this? If good sex is partner-merging and bad sex is body-critical and self-conscious, what does that make ashtanga?

Also…

What’s the best place for the “self” within an altered state—front and center or “forgotten”?

If you experience emotion as “not mine” and “not-me” in dance, does that limit the possibilities for it to be a “transformative” thing during which you process your own shit and finally, personally, letting it go?

Does ashtanga give you less of an escape from difficulties of transforming the psycho-emotional stuff in your own body… is it more difficult in this respect than other embodied practice? More transformative?

Why don't ashtangis really dance?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , crypto-Hegelianism , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , spirituality

Advanced practice · 31 May 2008

People keep sending over this article from the NYT about how a sharp increase in yoga converts the past three years has led to a watering down of the intensity of practice. The writer doesn’t quite trace out the mechanism (increasingly superficial teaching, therefore increasingly superficial students, and advanced yoga’s inherent resistance to commodification because it is so weird and demanding) because she only sees "supply and demand" at work, but she does capture the effects. The gaps she leaves open are pretty thought-provoking.

Anyway, at the end of the article, the NYT lists advanced practice options in LA, NY, Chicago, Miami and Boston. Well, they get Miami right. In LA, they list Yogaworks 2/3 Flow yoga as the advanced option.

Really? Vinyasa flow, perhaps especially at YW, is inherently intermediate practice. That is great, and exactly right for many students; but it puts yoga in a poor light to market 2/3 vinyasa flow as "advanced."

In vinyasa flow, a 90-minute synchronized, led format is the pinnacle. This is a very good format, but no matter how much art and technique it packs, it is always going to deepen the student’s dependence on the teacher. Which is the exact conundrum the NYT article addresses. In terms of institutional history, many would say YW karma is all about not trusting students with their own bodies. The teacher is taught to consider “risk” above all else; and the original creator of the TT program publicly says that most people who finish the YW TT “have no business teaching.” Distrust until proven otherwise is the name of the game both of teachers and of students in relation to their own bodies: an ethos that makes good sense in an environment where everybody wants, a little too much, to be a teacher.

By its nature, vinyasa flow contains no transmission of old knowledge and certainly no initiation. It's dance-infused, post-aerobics group exercise, after all. It’s a very good way to begin practicing yoga, but those who want "advanced" the deeper challenges of advanced practice are just not available within that format.

Vinyasa flow is great--exactly what it should be. YW is a franchise, and should not be doing initiation. The majority of its students want not to be fully trusted, want to be told what to do. Some of its prominent teachers are known for claiming to be students of the lineage (when legitimacy is needed) even as they publicly ridicule ashtanga and students who practice it past a certain age (too dangerous; too demanding; created for teenage boys). That is fine too, but encouraging fear of and hostility to advanced practice is not exactly the mark of an institution where one can learn advanced practice.

And as everybody around here can verify, research shows ashtanga is amazing for practictioners at every age, given that practitioners have been initiated as their own teachers. Without initiation, yeah: ashtanga would be hazardous over the age of 14.

It feels, to me, like the main reason to ridicule ashtanga publicly and tell people it’s physically too hard is that when adept students find out it’s a place where they can finally get away from talking teachers and learn the deeper dimensions of tristana (when they discover it is advanced practice), they will take their pretty postures elsewhere. Ashtanga is so beautiful and badass that it dominates the flow experience, even on the more superficial level of asana. So students get protected from advancement, even though their own teachers probably at some point used ashtanga to nurture their personal home practices.

You can’t even begin to think about “advanced practice” without some kind of initiation into the tradition and self-possession of your own practice. You have to be trusted, and taught to trust yourself. Following the breath and quieting the mind is a whole new game when you’re not dependent on a teacher for every move.

Also, it’s not like you practice supta kurmasana and kapotasana in vinyasa flow. Pish posh on this whole "advanced practice" thing. Don’t deny yourselves.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [23]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society

Beyond the Pale · 8 May 2008

Los Angeles is segregated by ethnicity and by wealth. Very generally, the two residential indices of affluence are (1) elevation and (2) proximity to the ocean. The elevation peaks in the north and runs from west to east—along the raised spine from the Pacific Palisades through the Hollywood Hills, with some southerly heights in Mar Vista, Inglewood, Boyle, et cetera. Beachfront property is prime from north to south, though in general the money hugs closer and closer to the shoreline as one moves south away from the hills.

I will cop right now to the fact that my present studio sits on the most affluent, whitest commercial corner in town. Ashtanga ends before the Porsche SUVs quite fill up the valet parking, before the skinny ladies with their perfect children arrive to shop the kiddie shoe store housed in a quaint Tudor cottage, or the specialty chocolate nook opens in the back of the oh so provincial Country Market. We enter our own building before first light by a side door and, being ashtangis, tend to represent for the bohemians, the working professionals, the world-traveled, the somewhat ethnically and economically diverse, the hot chiseled bodyworker-yoga teacher service sector. So I’m sheltered from the full force of white Brentwood affluence, even as—when I leave each morning—I enjoy the deeply middlebrow string quartet that Le Pain Quotidien pumps into the building's passageways. The double provincialism of a restaurant calling itself “The Daily Bread” in French, for white people reaching for the sense of “the cosmopolitan” they find in packaged French country aesthetic is pitch perfect for this corner. Mass produced rustic benches, artisan nut butters packaged in China, lattes in ginormous (supersized) bowls. Which is not to say I don’t like le P.Q., which enfranchises within a block of any respectable ashtanga shala with a global clientele and has thus made itself—in London, New York, Santa Monica—an official home of the traveling  ashtangi meetup. Tasty, with chagrin on the side.

Anyway, why am I talking about geography of affluence and whiteness?

It’s Yogaworks, itseself franchising down in the South Bay in a way that crosses way, way, way over the line of getting off on your affluence. Fellas, I’m writing this so you will know what the seasoned people in the community are saying about you. People who know yoga, or simply know LA, who know your expansion is inevitable and are ok with this but nonetheless find the current wrinkle extraordinarily disturbing.

The new location is just off the industrial zone near LAX. Miles south of the east-west axis of rich that is the northern hills, down in the South Bay you find more economic and racial diversity, more quickly, as you move east from the oft-gated exclusivity that is Manhattan Beach. Indeed, the new studio in rent-cheap El Segundo sits midway between the health club set on the west and Inglewood on the east. Inglewood is an awesome, historically rich, cohesive zone—home to a lot of middle class people and, due to the heights on which it is built, some excellent real estate. There’s no major yoga studio there. Also, Inglewood is black.

Down the hill from Inglewood in El Segundo, Yogaworks—which in its other locations takes in its steepest revenue from drop-in students—is experimenting with a new visitor model (see another blog discussion here). Traditionally, Yogaworks franchises in exclusive zones: Manhattan, Santa Monica, Westwood. But again, El Segundo—with its unique geography and social diversity—is home to an innovative new model.

No drop-in students whatsoever are permitted. If you want to attend YogaWorks in El Segundo, you can buy a “membership.” So what is for sale is not exactly yoga instruction. It’s association.

Given the way I’ve laid this out, you now know exactly what people are saying.

Except, of course, for the corporate conservatives, who say it’s your “right” to pursue whatever markets you want or envision to be most “productive.” After all, the South Bay is an “untapped yoga market” and you’ve got to draw the line somewhere.

But those of us who understand that markets are not asocial, amoral autonomous forces will tell you that every “market experiment” is a social experiment. There is no passive, inert “yoga market” waiting for you to exploit it. Rather, there is whatever market you choose to create for your business. You, mighty corporation, have the power. You have the freedom to choose how you provide your service and whether your “serve” anyone at all. For now, you have chosen… exclusively, affluently, whitely. And the tastemakers--who have every "right" to judge your matters of taste--think it’s creepy.

The “bottom line” in the sands of El Segundo, like in any market, will always shift: there is more than one way to make money in that zone.

When the experiment ends and you change the policy, let me know. I’ll be more than happy to post a follow up praising you for taking yoga back off the gated community model.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception

Cutting through Digital Anonymity · 6 May 2008

Me: Are you there?
Gary: Hello. Welcome to Verizon's chat service. How may I help you today?
Me: Are you real?
Gary: How may I help you today?
Me: Gary, this is urgent. About a threatening phone call I just received from an unlisted number. I need the number traced and I don't know how to do this. Can we talk in person please? Internet chat is ridiculous at this point.
Gary: If you wish to speak to someone you can call Customer Service....This is a chat service and we do multiple chats at a time. I can give you the code to trace the last call that called you, but there are charges for that service. We also have an unlawful call center that I can give you the number for assistance with this...
Me: Already did *69 and it’s unlisted. Am a PhD student and not going to just throw money at this to set up weak protections.
Gary: Our Unlawful Call Center (UCC) specializes in calls of a serious nature that include a threat to your life; bodily harm; excessive, obscene, or harassing calls; kidnapping; and Bomb Threats. To use the services of the UCC, you must be willing to take legal actions against the caller. We regularly work with law enforcement agencies to resolve unlawful call complaints….
Me: Verizon might want to know about what happened here. Because the threatening call originated with an automatic sales call then referred me to a call center. It was the person at the call center who harrassed me. He has my phone number (read it to me over the phone so he can see it through his interface at work).
Gary: You can contact law enforcement or use the information for the UCC to report harrassing calls.
Me: I'll use the UCC. One more question for you:
Me: I want to get my number changed. This individual who harrassed me (it was horrible, horrible what he was saying) has my home number.
Me: He may have already traced it to my identity through a reverse directory.
Gary: In order to protect the privacy of your records, we need to verify the last 6 digits of your account before we can place orders or make any changes to your account. Once you provide this information, I will be happy to proceed with your request...
Me: Thank you!  What is the VERY first thing we can do right now to protect me? Not “place orders.” Is there a way immediately to delist my phone number? Or change it?
Gary: Through web support I can change the number but it may not be done right away. It is guaranteed to be changed today....
Me:I know how much dead air there is between me and customer service [by phone]. While i have you live i want to do everything we can immediately to protect me and my family from this freak.... (i'm in the fucking phone book, but if we can erase the listing in whatever online directory, good: anything we can do to anonymize.)
Gary: As I said, this won't be immediate. The due date is sometime today. It could be shortly but we don't know how busy they are at the Central Office. There are charges to make the number unpublished. I will look those up for you. You can go to Superpages.com and submit requests to remove you from the online listings, but please refrain from swearing. That is not necessary.
Me: Sorry. You're right. I'm just scared because of the things this man said to me and trying to act quickly. I will go to superpages and also report this incident to the UCC. Again: you are changing my actual home phone number or just delisting it?
Gary: I can change your number at no charge this time (usually it is $40.25). To make your number unpublished there is a charge of $15.00 and a monthly fee of $1.75. We would be changing your actual number and if you want the non-published that is the costs above.
Me: I will pay the fees to depublish if this includes online publication. Does it?
Gary: No. Non-published means it will not be printed in our printed directory and it will not be given out by Directory Assistance...that is it. It has nothing to do with the online services.
Me: Ok. I'll take what i can get.... How do I ensure that the UCC people can get the number of the company that originally called me and then directed me to the call center where he works?
Gary: I have no idea what they can do, I am web support and can only advise you of the department to call...
Me: Ok. Is there any other way you can help me considering the time-sensitive nature of this situation? Or any advice as i go?
Me: Oh, and i need my new number :)
Gary: Thanks for holding. Your new number is [ahem]. Unfortunately I can only advise you to call the UCC or to contact law enforcement.
Me: Works for me. Thanks for your help man. And thank you for being kind unlike the guy who just harrassed me. Cheers.
Gary: Sorry for the problems! Thank you for using Verizon's chat service.

The call that started this is from a company that rings through to my answering machine every day. I’ve gotten off every list but theirs. I’ve done “press 1 to be removed from our list” several times, so today pressed 2 to speak to a representative. He said he was in Daytona, but the connection quality and language make me think it could have been India or Bangladesh. The way he harassed me was so calmly businesslike, stilted, and so unbelievably obscene that I thought a coworker had smuggled him a fake transcript and he didn’t know what he was saying to me. It took about 10 exchanges for me to realize he did know what he was saying. I did not get emotional—figuring either anger or vulnerability could be turn-ons—but asked him to put himself in my shoes. Said: “Do you really want to be cruel to a stranger?” He said he understood and that he did not want to be cruel. I asked him to promise he would never do something like this again. He said: “I am very sorry Madam. I promise I will not call you. Please forgive me.” I forgave him. Then I hung up and spent the next hour quasi-anonymizing.

So interesting to have the archipelago of my global digital identity shored up like this. The limits of anonymity have less to do with a monolithic national “big brother” than with the breakneck innovations in marketing and digital communication, and the fact that "regulation" and national boundaries are years and years behind them both. Even as ideas of what makes for sexual obscenity--and the emotions that happen when different boundaries get crossed--remain located in particular spaces, cultures, religions, economic classes, genders. It's not like the guy on the line shared my specific, historical concepts of sexual harrassment, women's rights, and professional deference.

But when it came to the notion of compassion... he was both able and willing (at least for a moment) to meet me on that ground.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society

More PDA · 27 April 2008

So ok. I took the little animals to play at the store I have often ridiculed (more because of bad labor practices than cultural iconography, but see the footnote I'll post later I posted in the comments***). Did they get dirty? I don’t think they really did, even got as they rolled around on the floor of the yoga lifestyle mecca, temporarily seared with the post-OM loopdy-loop of the brand. If only chattel could remove their burned-in brands so easily as I did later, wriggling out of a corsetlike top that created the illusion of cleavage with my A-cups and left a line around my ribs where the elastic reinforcements had been.

The animals will probably get more dirty right here, as I confess I am mildly amused to have done this thing, and that it was pretty good practice.

So, this is the only remarkable thing: I had a deep practice, on a Saturday, on the floor of the Lulu store. I was expecting some kind of pre-performance jitters, but their edge was well removed by the experiences of earlier that morning, which left a kind of buzz that transcended even the apropos LCD Soundsystem record that accompanied my drive to the venue. I was expecting constant distraction and performance-awareness, but my experiences of practicing as a visitor in certain shalas has been far more outward-focused and performative than this.

When you visit a shala, you’re taking your goods in to a new house within your own community. The natives know the species of animal you’re offering up, and they know just how to evaluate it! Are the flanks in the right place, are the muscles of the belly indicating the right awareness, how straight are the legs here and do the hands reach the floor there? Edges edges edges.

In the land of pussy yoga (can I say that? No, really can’t say that), you have them from the transition to the first chatwari. Nobody has a vision of a Marichyasana D and there is no edge you can push there to impress make some mark on them. The animals themselves—sages, boats, turtles—probably don’t even count on that stage. Just the fact that you are moving on the breath is arresting, informative, interesting, maybe even educating… and least to the people who might notice in the first place.

I could write my best ethnographic fieldnotes here and fill you in on the most amusing details (which have to do with reinforced fabrics and a fussy assistant manager), but the details weren’t so important to the actual experience I underwent.

I lug my laptop to cafes all the time, because I focus better with a little ambient sound and commotion. I’ve always thought this is because movement around me reminds me of the passage of time—which gets lost behind the double doors of my office—and creates an urgency that makes me work better. Time is a shared category of the understanding, and the social nature of the now (the productive now, at least, is social) is unavoidable among others.

But after practicing deeply under a Justin Timberlake soundtrack and under the eyes of god knows how many passersby, surrounded by so much intensely overpriced lycra, I see that the social aspect of my focus in chaotic environments might be a bit more sinister. It’s that movement around me reminds me that the other is out there, and drives me to set the boundaries of my own attention very close. One-pointed, but in an almost protective—if not defensive—way.

Again, I come back to the mantra parable of the seven ten virgins who keep their lamps trimmed and burning.**** This is from the book of Matthew, which is why I resonate with the story so easily, but Tolle uses the story to talk about the ways you guard your awareness. Awareness is often depicted as a little candleflame in yoga and Buddhist commentaries, too. The preciousness of a focused presence, the cultivation it requires. But when there’s an external “threat,” at least in this case, it’s no trouble at all. Far more focused than most kitchen practices, in fact.

This disturbs me a little, but opens up some paradoxes about the social aspects of consciousness, the interaction of society and deeper layers self-awareness (below mere self-consciousness), and well, a certain—ok, limited—potential for doing contemplation in the marketplace.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [32]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , sound

SLI: Dirty Feet, Dirty Concepts, Ashtanga on Demand · 25 April 2008

Skipped work Friday and took my two-year-old niece to the beach. We rode the creepy carousel on the Santa Monica pier, me just zoning out to the nightmare calliope, staring into the spiraling mirrors, and waiting for it to end.

Then we rode it again. And again.

She’s so excited by her environment, her huge slate blue eyes beneath hair the same weird color as mine are wide, glinty, always hypnotically changing. She misses her mom and attaches to the thing that most resembles her… a big plushie owl. The intense, preternatural need in her, the rawness of emotion in this, her first transference relationship. Her trust and love for me, as perhaps with students’, come from other associations that map easily on to me. (I am not too maternal, but don’t throw up much static for someone who might want to see that here). It is wonderful to be there for it. I will be her Aunt her whole life. I feel myself reciprocating the bond, letting her pull me out to the water with my jeans on, even though there’s nothing I hate like dirty feet and sand in my things.

What else? This week, the longstanding rivalry between yogis and hipsters dissolved when Time magazine equated the two.

It’s not that a cultural boundary has changed so much as that both concepts have lost their crispness enough that the middlebrow milquetoast magazine can throw them around like nothing. As a notorious, maddening, extremely cute, French sociologist reminded me Thursday, our concepts are little animals and when we take them out to play, sometimes they get dirty. That’s when we bring them home and clean them up again for future use, so our thoughts become clear again.

I’m all for cleaning up “hipster,” restoring it as a properly circumscribed term of abuse. But maybe we’ll leave the concept of “ashtangi” a little more dirty?

Meanwhile, until the hipster/ashtangi boundary gets redrawn, I will celebrate yoga-hipster nonduality by publicly demonstrating the primary series, on a Saturday, at a yoga lifestyle store I often ridicule. (Turns out their labor practices are improving a bit). The friend who set up this event is upset that there is no ashtanga awareness in the culture this corporation is generating.

Ok. So I’m taking my manifestly nerdy ass over there in my anti-brand-name clothes. Will they dress me up in trademark garb to get a on my Marichyasana D?

It’s one o’clock Saturday at Lululemon, and don’t you dare bring a camera if you swing by. I’m feeling weird enough about it already, but I know two hours of secret Saturday ritual beforehand will mellow out the introverted awkwardness. Saturday after SS is when my wheels finally, briefly spin to a stop every week, so it’ll be interesting to see how public ashtanga-on-demand fits in to the energetic cycle.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [15]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , social theory

Apropos of Everything · 10 April 2008

It looks like Laurie Anderson is making all the connections. In Melbourne, they called her show the concert of the year. Tonight she’s at Royce Hall, so I’m cutting out early from Thursday faculty cocktails (where the cognac is free but one strange bird drinks only tea).

How amazing is she? Here’s an except from her talk with Wire and a piece from Homeland complete with wicked Oprah jokes, WMD riffs (at 3:45) and open talk on preemptive war (5:50).

There is no country called Terror that you can invade their borders or protect their borders or cross their borders. It's a war of phantoms and it will never go away…. And that is used to create a situation of control - and that combined with the absolute maniacal excess of late capitalism is very scary.

Our army is run by private companies who run it for a profit. The same with jails. Twenty years ago, there were 300,000 people in jail; now it is a privatised industry there are almost 3 million in jail. They're customers, unique customers - and you need customers for your war, which is waged as a business, as is healthcare…

…I became very interested in why you dream and no one really knows. There are so many theories. Is it the brain in idle mode? Is it processing material? Nobody knows. It is unbelievable how much we don't know about how your mind works…. I'm really interested in this book by Tibetan author, Mingyur Rinpoche, the Joy of Living, where he links meditation and brain states to neuroscience in a way that's thrilling. Mingyur and a lot of Tibetans study minutely what happens as thoughts and sensations travel through your body.

It makes you remember that people literally don't know how their minds, how their brains work. 'Things are always going through my head.' But they don't know, they don't have a clue what they're doing or what they've been influenced by as well, so they are perfect targets for people coming along to tell them what to be afraid of or what to love or what to go for, how to be famous. For what? To what end? It's just like demagoguery was invented here and you watch it in motion when there is a lot of corporate heft behind it and it's powerful. And it can hypnotise people in poisonous ways, because people don't know how to use their minds. They don't know what they're doing. This is supposed to be the age of information!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality

Dith Pran · 30 March 2008

 

There was a little morning sea mist over Santa Monica the other morning. I saw it out the secondstory window, gathering up my things in a fix after our very early Sunday practice (shhhh...). The mist hung in between the big hairy tops of the palm trees all fifteen blocks to the ocean, sketching in the distance between me and them. The closer trees made a stark shadow against the heavy air, but the further ones were sketchier and sketchier until, maybe 14 blocks out, they just disappeared into white.

Looking out, stoned receptive on sun salutations and all that, I had the strongest jolt of recollection from a decade ago.

Sitting atop a hill in the middle of Cambodian countryside, between my brilliant boyfriend and a traveling partner very quickly losing her mind. January 1998. Dazed in heat and history, still reeling from Tuol Sleng. That hilltop covered in a fort from the war—turrets and everything—probably build to fend off the Vietnamese back in the day. It was the height of the currency crisis and weeks before Nate Thayer would find Pol Pot out in hinterlands not so far from there, speaking up to “set the record straight” just before he fucking bit it.

The palms in mist drew the sensations of that day back on me suddenly, slipping out of my spine like the remnant of some old “trip.” I was thinking, sitting on that hill, of a field of dandelions gone to seed—the nearer palms in a heavy outline, the farther ones marking off the short distance to obscurity. But not a fertile summer field beneath those “flowers”: instead landmines, the horror of a collectively-suppressed memory, corpses, maybe battle lines, little source of commerce or sustenance.

It is ridiculous, the beauty and the peace, the utter possibilities and joy that are in my life here. I don’t understand how hard it could be—don’t understand at all.

I wasn’t going ot mention this, but Anna told me Dith Pran died today. Read on.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality

Saturday XLVII: Complicated · 28 March 2008

Doing some kitchen-practice lately. Friday nice and simple, while the Editor sat at his desk in the adjacent room and, well, edited. His focus is amazing now—locked in, supersmart, mind on target.

On the new year I threw away my anger at the discipline—for its locked-up blindfolded inability to make good on its promises to my friends. But even from the perspective of gratitude, I’m still more realized on a mat than at a screen. It’s so clear when we practice this way—him with the words, me with the body. Each in our element, and sharing a certain clear-mindedness even if the elements are different.

As for my own scholarly-element. Practice sets a high goddam standard. What do you do?

My earlier work was quantitative: statistical modeling. Clean data, nice punchlines. The stuff I’m doing now is a mucky interpretive bunch of historical whatever. More information, not so much of the beautiful clarity.

This reminds me: emotions can be complicated. Holding more than one strong emotion—holding it in your body—about some idea, or action, or person. It’s better than feeling nothing, but what comes up is this impulse to cancel out enough of the conflicting emotion so that there can be a single, uncomplicated pillar of “I’m right.” I am, but also strive to be, a simple girl who knows her own mind and acts on it without sabotage or doubt. Reduce the noise between inner sensation and outer expression.

But.... There’s a lot of emotional complexity in my life now: many-sided subjects and people. Can I deal with that with soft eyes and some peripheral vision, and cope with the many-sidedness of things? I love clarity and minimalism inside and out, but sometimes I have to up and admit that I am complicated and even moreso is the world. What I’m doing here is more than solving for X.

Links:

● An ashtangi has been freelancing (see bottom left). Tova…?

● Do you have a cool walk? Laban movement analysis figures that out.

● NYT: Yes, running can make you high. Duh.

● Scientific American: Careful, Meditation can make you kind.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society

Overedited · 18 March 2008

Our only weapon, only strength is justice, truth. But effect of truth, justice, sometimes takes longer time. Weapons power is immediately there.

The Dalai Lama, also today

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: markets-networks-society , social theory

Unedited · 18 March 2008

 

Also, Jonathan Raban in the LRB. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , social theory

Saturday XXXXV: Chaos on the Lockdown · 15 March 2008

I listened to Elvis on Friday on the drive through Veteran’s territory. The 405/Wilshire intersection slices the VA into squares like four corners in the desert: Federal Building/ Hospital/ Residences/ Cemetery. The passage through it each morning is slow: we sit in our cars checking each other out. So much makeup being applied, texts being typed, and me in silence with my bottle of hemp protein and third series fix.

I usually don’t get verbal until at least 10 am, but this week I’ve been trying to turn the words on earlier for dissertationly purposes. I despise the telephone, but even rang up a parent or a friend a couple of these past mornings to prime the system. Friday was a slow news day and I wasn’t brash enough to fire up my aging Razr, so I put on Elvis.  

GOODMORNINGLOSANGELES!!! Looking out over the wartime headstones in the cemetery, sitting in traffic, listening to Jailhouse Rock. The song always makes me think of the utter bound bliss of my asylum-based childhood—chaos on the lockdown. The mind likes to be bound! Don’t you forget it. That’s part of why we reign ourselves in with conventions, and (on another level) why meditation-mantra is so much easier than spacious awareness.

But do the boundaries we set up decay? I think about the kids dancing the goddam jitterbug to Elvis, and the unpredictable chaos of the dance I’ll make today with the wolf children at the Masons’ hall. What it used to take to make a film just 50 years ago (the rigid structure of Hollywood’s golden age soothes me), and how many of those rules are just elastic today. Of the yoga icons in this town who proclaim the ashtanga system finally cramped their creativity and they had to deconstruct it, make something new.

Genres divide. Is that the way it always is?

I am always the first to know when a solution has expired. I give credit to new ideas and welcome new perspectives to a fault. Mentors hate this because it’s no way to build a career; and friends who haven’t known me long enough take it as a mark of poor character. But it is this “openness” just the hungry ghost of the genre-divider in me?

Why don’t I do this with my practice—doubt it, decompose it, reduce it to chaos?

The mind likes to be bound.

Links:

● Intriguing. Limbs of Yoga, phase one of eight. Look in to the wheel. He’s watching you all and giving you this message. 

● Problematic. Aren’t Oprah watchers already doing nothing? Tolle’s great, but “live in the now; drop your problems” is a message the consumer-debt crowd has already appropriated....

● Accurate. Journal Issue researching bloggers is free til April. I like the piece on bridge bloggers, and always take note of Cass Sunstein’s well-tempered jaundice about this revolution we’re making with the internet. 

● All too human. Man thinks he can fly, gets off on his edge. Somewhere between awe-inspiring and just stupid.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [12]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Saturday XXXXIV: Joy · 8 March 2008

Brother is here now. You don’t even want to know the amazingness of him.

And you will not. He is too fast for internet documentation, and too handsome to be photographed. Also, too good for words.

Thus we are nonverbal. Always have been.

For now I function in eyebrow gestures, pinches, sighs, and single-word exclamations.

You should see the Editor, mister structured-thought man, starving for someone to utter a complete sentence.

Headlines:

● Still having trouble viewing this blog? It's a software issue: i.e., the site purposely doesn't function in that browser. Free firefox.

● The spirulina powder I mentioned two weeks ago: nope. My disgust only increases. It’s BAD. Does this mean I need to do spirulina practice? Did I transcend self-punishing Evangelical Protestantism for nothing? NO! Check it out: I’ve got a fresh $25 jar of this magic that I will happily give you if you live in LA and can hack the powder. Email me.

● Siddhis postcast! Ok, only listen to this if you understand it’s not serious. Great overview of different traditions’ orientations to magick. But overall, X-box is probably better than siddhis.

● Ok, what is serious is this. I’m not even giving you a warning. Read the 5-point manifesto, and the profiles. This is real.

● Daniel Goleman, the emotional intelligence guy, talks about childhood shit and transcending it though reflection and relationships with people who are good to you. Short, revolutionary message. [Via.] “Research absolutely demonstrates that if you take the time to make sense of what happened to you, then you can free yourself up to develop your own sense of security inside of you.”

● CP’s podcast on how to talk about yoga with normal people. First: do not tell them you dedicated a practice to them. Especially if they know you practice in the living room in your underwear.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Saturday XXXXIII: Invading the Inner Sanctum · 1 March 2008

My beautiful little office is a secret. Hidden behind one and then a second heavy oaken door in the corner of a first-floor suite, with a 15-foot window opening out over the heavy red California-gothic Royce Hall and the glowing-green upper quad. The office is “off-master,” so no janitors or building staff have the key; and it's off-limits in casual conversation so’s not to arouse jealosy in the other grads who huddle in the basement in cold little plastic carrels. Carlos Castaneda, when he was writing his dissertation here, hatched Don Juan in that basement—Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 in the building just across the lawn—and I can feel these and the detritus of far better, more difficult discoveries and creations pressing in. It’s like practicing at Eddie’s in NY or at the LA Center for Yoga: years of sweat and shakti hanging from the rafters, if you love your history enough to tap it.

I stayed in the office late on Thursday, but sometime before I slipped back in Friday morning, there was a visitor. Someone with a copy of my special key, a screwdriver, and a roll of electrical tape. 

They stole my lightswitch! And replaced it with an evil motion-sensor light! Curses! Sensate technology invading my space. I thought I was off the grid, but now I’m caught in a new game.

The massive window is all the light I could ever want before 5 pm, and a Japanese paper lamp picks up after that. I never even touch the two gaudy fluorescents in the ceiling panels.

But now they trip on with any sudden movement. Toss my hair, twitch a little too much in working out a thought, or even just recross the chair-lotus too quickly, and bling. Friday I was pushing away from the heavy desk, walking the 14 steps to the switch and back, and re-establishing, about every 8 minutes.

It’s going to change me one way or another, this fucking light. Create a stealth within stealth—dodging the colleagues on the way in, and outsmarting the machine once I’ve conquered the outer labyrinth.

I’d smash the infernal mechanism to bits, but the new Mission: Impossible element is just as sexy as it is stupid. There’s always a blind digital sentry of lasers and motion sensors guarding the big jewel in the inner sanctum. This is essential to the M:I narrative.

And in this zone I guess I’ll take any epic narrative I find.

Saturday links.

● The outer extremes of self-regulation: Listen to this NPR story: a modern nightmare. Preschool children forced to plan and document their playtime. Foucault told us this shit was coming. Who wants to write on Foucaldian dynamics as they apply—and can be avoided in—the teaching of yoga? Guest blogger applications welcome.

● A bunch of Japanese people like to film owls inside their houses? Wow. This one’s the best. (No, you wiseasses: I did not find this by auto-google.)

● Montana Diary in The Economist. Whores, strip mines, threats of secession, and wide open spaces.

[T]he scenery—and its emptiness—require no overstatement. I saw more grazing cows than people in the vast flats, and those humans I did see were in a small number of tiny towns abutting the road. The towns usually consisted of little more than a post office, a general store, a saloon and, of course, a video-poker casino. People live out there to be autonomous, perhaps even alone.

● Social networks are like the eye.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: markets-networks-society , science , social theory

Saturday XXXXI: Love Among the Ruins · 15 February 2008

Solidarity is not a product of time: it’s a product of shared transformation. Religious people know this, and summer camp directors and fraternity presidents, and the higher-ups in a good social movement. There’s a paper I’m not writing (because you don’t expose your friends like that) on how leftist social movements generate passion and unity by creating risky scenarios in which members undergo a collective trauma. But it’s beautifully surprising to see solidarity generated—and quickly—not in a situation where the group is doing ecstatic ritual, or political protest, or overt initiation rites… but instead just getting together each day for introspection. But it happens—you don’t mean to, but you do bond with your fellow travelers on a Vipassana retreat. Mysore practice is a little sketchier—different start times, more chances to dislike others and less opportunity, perhaps, to bond. But what I have seen these past weeks and months—it is collective effervence of a rarefied… but also a practical everyday… sort. And its sweetness has increased as the time grew short. I bet that, now that it is done and the distillation continues in memory, and the water drains out of this fruit we’ve been harvesting, its little pulp will get even more sweet. I’m not a sentimental girl, not so much (though is that changing?); but I feel like it’s ok to build up a memory like this to strengthen your practice as it goes forward, for a time. And that these students will return to the dried-up fruit of our memories when we need to, to eat some of the preserves and hopefully take strength from them.

Also. We watched the saddest movie on Valentine’s and then I slept on the sofa because the Editor’s new cold was at the height of communicability. Sad Editor. The movie is not supposed to be sad because it’s full of postmodern distraction devices and features an insincere, dislikable protagonist. But the Editor is so sophisticated that such devices don’t throw him off and he still gets moved by the most difficult things. He's post-jaded. That’s the problem after you deconstruct everything except for your heart: EVERYTHING might just transport you.

That’s the thing, I guess. 

Ok. Headlines. This blog is trying to get a little more personal, so some of these are, again, from my life.

● I blogged something about all the sociology papers I’m not writing during my time here at Anonymous Corporate Studio—papers with titles like Appropriating a Lineage: Classification Struggle and Karma in Marketing Someone Else’s Guru (a Bourdieuian analysis); and When Hierarchy Breaks Down: the Unmaking of Social Status and Discrimination in a Contemplative Community. But then I was a good owl and I did not post that entry.

● Obama links for internet-heads. Otherwise they won’t really be funny. One. Two.

● The higher being Dharma Mittra (who has a superstitious side, you could say) has a newsletter I don’t normally read. But today the first paragraph is this: “The cosmic wheel is sending rampant changes to all. Chances are you are experiencing or contemplating massive shifts in your personal world. Embrace the movement and flow with the forces of nature to your new destination.” Ok then. So maybe I’ll read it.

● Saw Deena Metzger speak this week at a memorial for Anais Nin. Deena’s like the Topangafied Ana Forrest of the diary-writers Anais so inspired. Imagining their life—in Silverlake, during the most myopic and materialist American moment thus far, breaking rules and living by their art, creating new forms and wild unexpected friendships—this transported me. The social values that are sold to us are soul-crushing! Wake the fuck up! What about personal experience, community, art, life of the heart and life of the mind? Forget your car payment. Stop buying shit. Whole worlds in this city live by creation and connection. They were post-materialist 50 years ago… why aren’t we post-materialist now?

● Oh, and I just want to say that Anna is dear and sweet and softer the closer she gets. She is bringing big gutsy changes to her world and it was kind of amazing to have her breeze through my life not once but twice this week. Thank you, Anna.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [9]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , spirituality

Humility Tuesday · 4 February 2008

The blog has been redesigned but several readers are lobbying for the installation of a widget before Alex brings the new template into being. The widget will set a quota for posts about popular culture and politics, and limit the amount of ineffable nonsense that makes it into these pages.

No widget! Don't do it!  Here, I'll go all-out. A whole post of my opinions about electoral politics. The most distracting kind of politics! And yet for my jadedness, I have suffered this week a little transformation. 

John McCain, old guy, what am I going to do with you? Who would have guessed that you would finally bring it together? Your relative good intentions belie a frightening level of social and fiscal conservatism bound together in a consistency that's even more potent than stupidity. And I'm concerned: if tomorrow ends with a McCain/Clinton matchup, we are in for a traumatic race around all the wrong differences, with all the meaningful differences off the table.

I used to be a political scientist. I joined the discipline with a BA in philosophy and journalism, and no idea the anti-intellectualism, rah-rah nationalism, and paradigm-bound incuriosity I was in for. Six months with the reductionists and it took a spring break in the Grand Canyon, hiking out through the sheer suffocating cliffs of the inner gorge, to make me realize my situation. I had to leave. Went home, rapped on the door of the Soc dep’t, and gave them my reasons. They were only too happy to take a disciplinary refugee. But that year in political science gave me as much respect for the accuracy of statistical models (which I learned to do well) as disdain for their truth claims. GET THIS: for about 80 years of elections and arguably right into the present, the outcome of a presidential contest can be predicted on just three variables: change in real disposable income, whether a candidate is an incumbent, and whether the country is at war.

Hokum? As if people still vote their pocketbooks. And is there even an understanding that the country is at war? What does incumbency even mean when the same two families have had someone on the ballot every election in my voting lifetime?

But still the models tell me something, and it’s more than the stupid heads on the tv. This is why the last two Bush wins didn’t take me by surprise. The reason I'll watch the RDI sink quarter by quarter and see it as socially beneficial process. But still... especially considering the fiscal fear that's building, the spectre of McCain is haunting me enough to change my vote to someone who can overwhelm him.

I’ve been for Hillary all the way through this thing. The argument was (caveat lector): to those in search of an “inspiring” candidate they "can believe in": stop identifying with the country. Heal thyself, nationalist: be citizen of the world! Stop deceiving yourself that America is a nice country. Let's make it a nice country (w.r.t., especially: trade [my obsession], welfare, war, prisons, education, environmental cooperation) before we think we deserve a nice face for it. No top-down national makeover. Hillary is not a nice person, which is why she works on an symbolic level. Way more importantly, she’s got infrastructure. All that matters in government is organizational resources and bureaucratic know-how. This is power. Hillary is ready to rush the power structure because she’s been writing the plays for a decade. She’s the only one I trust to go back and UN-DO as much of the last eight years of policy as possible. She’s the only one whose ego is invested in that. We can talk about “moving forward” after we do some serious policy repair, chez Hillary. "Moving forward" is naive and amnesiac when there's so much horror on the books, waiting to crust over into "the way things are done."

But no matter. She cannot beat McCain in this environment, I think; at least not without insane blood.

I’ve done my best holding out any emotional involvement in the symbolic nonsense. The Obama show with his fake MLK cadences and his plaintive open brow and cute ears and that anything-but-macho way he dips his head and touches a shoulder. Because I wanted a policy juggernaut, not a symbol to help me lie to myself about the deeper nature of the beast.

But this is why the cute man can do it: he can mobilize so many who want to believe in the show. And who are not your father's oldsmobile pocketbook voters (those anti-idealists). The show is a shallow construction, but even constructions made out of the fleeting miasma of culture can have consequences that are real. Enough people believe in the symbol now that it will be real. Who am I to look askance?

Of course he is sweet. Of course there’s a little bit of feedback from the ideas he creates of ourselves into the polity we are to become. Of course the symbolic shit and the culture it creates can be beautiful. Of course I can love this man and the new ideology we're giving him (though please don't ask me to sniffle at these bad Scarlett Johanssen videos--I don't have disposable emotion for electoral politics). I hope Obama appreciates all this psychic and emotional labor people are doing for him: charisma is in the eyes of the crowd and it is us creating the Obama tide.

I voted absentee two weeks ago, before the change. So this is my way of changing that vote. By proxy. One owl for Obama, this time around.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: markets-networks-society , self-deception

Saturday XXXVIII: Sour and the Tower · 12 January 2008

So. Speaking of dead brilliant women whose not-unbrilliant husbands got in their names. Dead brilliant women who will be remembered because of—and yet also so forgotten because of—those husbands. Last week, Laura Huxley. This week, Alice Coltrane. She died a year ago today. Brilliant Alice.

I’m noting for the record that vocab around here has been getting ahead of itself. Tapas—Grenadine appetizers? Siddhis—the plural of Sith? Nadis—bad people? Oops. I forget how much of my idiolect is dead languages—Sanksrit for the yoga and Latin for the (ivory) tower.

Ridiculing the latter has become too easy for me, I realized on new years. A professor whose mind I love is stateside again and I’m remembering that, for what they’re worth, intellects can be machine sof beauty. His is light and tough, hungry and fast. Refined like an Oxford don, and decorated with poetry and anime and about a dozen fluent languages.

Apropo of the tower, maybe my drawing it two weeks ago out of the tarot deck is worth more than I know. Since then everything is noisy mismatch between my visceral expectations for 2008 (great great things) and my lived experience of it (strange inner bullshit). I feel like an ingrate for even noticing the bullshit, here in world-historical paradise. There is incomparable abundance in Santa Monica, California, 2008, as I sit around studying far-flung sweatshops and global pollution, with colleagues mired in the political violence and disease of one century or continent or the other. And here: lack of resistance, lack of real difficulty, lack of outer conflict. It’s weird that sometimes the ease it makes me feel lost and dark.

Trust your feelings? That’s a call to intuition, not to the reification of emotions! I will sort it out. Not that I’m all happy and shit about it just now. Not at all. Salty Saturday links:

● Supply chains in which slavery is happening now.

● So many books arriving in the mail. I strongly dislike owning them, but what do you do? There was a grant to finish off with the year, so now all this printed tonnage is arriving. Not a single volume of it fiction. So would someone please read this so I can live through you? I don’t know why I like Coetzee so much. He is something between a sick old man and a great human soul.

● Do we have a natural bias toward superstitions? Here are some evolutionary biogists arguing irrationality is evolutionarily efficient. Their philosophy reeks. And yet, the argument itself is almost good.

● You know about what goes on at Fort Benning, right? Today is the first large peace vigil to close the School of the Americas, the training camp for Latin American Paramilitaries. The annual peace gathering in Georgia is in two weeks.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: esoteric shit , evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Saturday XXXVII: The Dry Soul Is The Wisest · 5 January 2008

The barometric pressure and the local news have been building up for a gale. Very exciting—unless you are on the streets, where dryness strategy in this town is thin—but where is our inundation? Still it’s grey and 100% humidity—a luxury only because it’s such a contrast. Turns down the volume on the outside world and brings the dissertation on strong. Mmmm. What if I ever return to my Pacific Northwest? The years in Seattle and Portland drove me to prolixity, writing-wise. Soul drunk on moisture, with Heraclitus insisting this was not good for me. Why? Maybe this seduction for rain will only make me more prosey and I should orient to… Elko?

Anyway, it is wet. And I love what a storm does for the inside spaces mental and otherwise. Steamy mysore rooms; intimate cafes; sheltering car; and my apartment so cozy for being in.

Speaking of everyday life, we decided to start going to the movies more than once a year. Both the good art-houses are within blocks, but since we saw I’m Not There at the new Landmark, it’s the only place I want to go. Place is crazy! It recalls theatres in poor countries (where rich people zones are—in the absence of a middle class—injected with markers of extreme class domination, such as ultraplush giant seating and snack-delivery direct to your seat courtesy some minion). But I guess the polarized class structure of the Westside increasingly resembles that of Latin America, so it’s no surprise. And FWIW, the Landmark is a trip. You select your seat numbers when you buy tickets from the “host,” wait for the show in an ultramoderne cocktail lounge, order fresh bruschetta, and piss behind frosted glass. Another “host” introduces the film and stays onhand in the aisles in case you need her to bring you a tissue or read you subtitles. Is this a strange place to go see Persepolis today after my always-unmentionable activities at the Masonic Temple conclude?

● Freerice. If you have a problem with this, holler at Patrick. Not me.

● Orlando posture enforcement.

● This year’s World Question is What Have You Changed Your Mind About?

● Ok. Hilarious. The sociology blogosphere just got really excited about this crude “How privileged are you?” survey. Sociologist are brilliant at parsing hierarchy… and they can also be totally self-deceiving about it. Cartographers of race, class, gender and national origin; appraisers of intellectual, cultural and money capital; and inventors of the backasswards “I’m more oppressed than you” game. Ohhh, confusing ourselves with our own categories. But this is interesting as a vague social locator and, more than that, an a suggestion of all the income-independent ways we are enriched. (Yes, I changed my mind about materialism a long time ago.)

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: markets-networks-society , science , social theory

Saturday XXXV: SFOWL · 14 December 2007

The best thing happened! Which was that my brother added a stop to the round-the-world game and touched tarmac at SFO just a few hours after me. He’s pulling down a contract; and I’m rooting around the superdynamic market in carbon offsets. Lots of open threads in a dissertationly direction, and sibling catchup in the interstices. Good god the world is interesting.

Meanwhile, moonlighting ashtanga. Too much to tell. Except that AYSF is a dream and so’s Eeyore. Links from the past week:

● Thursday the 13^th: planes, trans and automobiles hugging the westcoast, business travelers’ noses in the Style Section with this article big and eyecatching on the cover. Thanks, New York Times. Presidential politics be damned, in some dimensions we the people really are living in the Al Gore era. I came within one degree of separation from the great gomer twice this week. Getting Americans to face the connection between their consumption and climate change: governments aren’t making this happen. Grassroots movements and marketmakers are. Which is why Gore is better as a pissed off subaltern insurgent who has faced his worst fear—losing—and moved on. And why this dissertation is on regulation from below.

● End of the year lists. Blame the internet and blame the accelerated culture: the lists are everywhere. Rex has the metalist here. The only one that really rewards me, now the third year going, is the Guardian writers’ individual favorites for the year. I always find one or two treasures in here, especially because it’s blind to genre and publication date and so not just a list about “keeping up” with the world. Delightfully, though, the man who has kept the tiny pleasure-readerly flame alive for me the past five years—with the occasional pitch-perfect tip—is now an official listmaker as well: I give you Matthew Korfhage’s holiday ménage-a-trois (readers here know MK as the Daily Miltonian). And apparently I also need to read this, this, and this.

● Oh! Deeper into geekiness: a podcast about scholar-practitioners. This is just nice: a meditator-professor discusses hyper-objectivity in religious studies, the peculiarly American tendency to divorce study from practice, and the possibilities for “contemplative educitaion.” For her, it was Chogyam Trumka who “ripped out the division” between study and practice. Some words from the talk:

If we only practice meditation we become stupid meditators, and if we only study we become arrogant scholars…. If you don’t have some kind of wisdom [e.g., reading of historical texts] dawning in your practice, then there’s a sense of “what is the point?” But if you bring some light [from study] into the practice… the thing that I hear over and over again from my longtime practitioner-students is that they feel completely re-energized.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXXIV: Gridlock Hero · 7 December 2007

There’s this phenomenon. The December Congestion. Santa Monica gridlock in all directions, starting when darkness edges in at 4 and holding out until 8—every weeknight from about the 5^th through the 23^rd. You can’t go anywhere. Sidestreets are solid taillights in red. Flying over we must look like a colony of fire ants frozen in time. I just want to go inside and pull the blackout curtains or something.

Or go to SF. Is the holiday lighter up there? I’ll be in Union Square and surrounding from Thursday through Sunday. Any suggestions for the visit? I like a good salad, hipster coffee shops with free wireless, and something intense (I mean activity, not waffles) on Saturday mornings. Business trip that is really pleasure.

After: Portland/Seattle. Pleasure trip that is really business. Hmmmmm. First, maybe some art this weekend. Shepard Fairey is doing his first ever gallery show, which I definitely will be skipping. But this person, Francis Alys, might be amazing.

Also, I keep listening to the Flaming Lips’ Yoshimi record while I am sitting around staring into taillights. The lyrics are talking about waiting on a moment, and about surrender, and about battling the evil machines. It’s like the Bhagavad Gita for urban girls. Maybe.

I should probably switch out the CD before I start getting all heroic or something.

● The owl persona got ruffled up about politics this week, here and there. Yeah. I’ll own it. Heartfelt apologies if my directness was at all hurtful. Here is the thing: when some say they are on the left, they mean they disfavor the present regime and want to dis-identify with it. (Boomeritis?) When I say it, I mean I want a practical, everyday politics of social class. I mean an enduring conceptual leftism with egalitarianism in its veins. Not a screw-you politics of opposition. So sometimes we are going to disagree.

● By the way, in case your email is being screened by the feds, here are some emoticons to help you go undetected. Funny.

● Faith healing at Disneyland.

● The Dawkins and friends’ conversation about God continues in Edge. Pretty good. Sciency, though. Jonathan Haidt argues the following and several others respond.

I now think of religions first and foremost as coordination devices that bind people together into moral communities with effects that are mostly good for the members, although sometimees terrible for deviants and for neighboring groups…. [E]very longstanding ideology and way of life contains some wisdom, some insights into ways of suppressing selfishness, enhancing cooperation, and ultimately enhancing human flourishing.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [11]
Categories: markets-networks-society , sound

Saturday XXXIII: Tohu Vabohu · 30 November 2007

Him: How was practice this morning?
Me (matter of fact): The best of my entire life.
Him (blasé): That’s what you said yesterday.
Me: (shrug)
Him: And the day before that.

But actually, SS Saturday is quickly becoming the best of all. Yeah. Luxury, joy and beauty. I know there are those of you who do not approve. But excuse me: I live an extremely orderly life. Did you notice? O-R-D-E-R-L-Y L-I-F-E. Grant me my study in spontaneity.

Just so you don’t think me all sunshine, let me say that I am horrified that it is nigh on December. I am talking dark, existential, dread-laden horror. Time is satan. Dark and fleeting. Nothing happens, and then you’re old. You feel like the past is more real than today, the present is happening without even pausing to let you realize it and the future is going to crush you. Kill you slow and grind you to dust. It’s going to rush in and steal what you think you have as soon as it possibly can.

You feel like time is some human invention gone horribly wrong and all it has to offer you is darkness and dread. At least this is how you feel if you are me. I wonder if this is a basic existential condition… or a dissertation condition?

The only way to leaven it is to love what is. Love it like crazy because the dread makes you love. Sometimes looking into the existential maw, embracing the void, is the shortest route to living in the now. Lightly. XO

Links:

● Naked Indian bodies, manual labor, molten metal, and one terrible colonial product supply chain. I hesitate to link to Shakti Industries, because this stuff is just asking you to get off and there should be a question of why this is so aesthetically absorbing. But it’s a good story, and the slideshow will definitely make you respond.

● So, Sally Kempton. Dive-bombing the Esquire readership with feminist manifestoes in her 20s, dressing down a young Hefner on TV, and generally being smart smart smart and sexy in New York in the days of the new left. Then she accidentally has a peak experience in her living room or something. Shit. Meets Muktananda, goes east, disappears for a long time. Comes back integral and starts talking. Not about turning away from leftism, but about expanding it so it’ll actually work. Here she is in conversation with Ken Wilber about the oldschool hostility to any kind of interiority (even psychoanalysis) as somehow inimical to social change, about problems in the Dawkins-Hitchens agenda, about philosophical maturations that need to happen in order for the left to get itself out of its little old box. And with hints (in my interpretation) toward a spirituality that’s concrete—that’s not just about occasional altered states, but is practical and daily and not split off as woo-woo. (More.) 

● The wonderful thing Morgan Spurlock is doing has pretty well made the rounds by now. This is even nicer: Christians themselves calling out the greedy affluence, the grasping, and the nauseating amount of crap that will weigh down my own holiday this year in the heart of WWJB land. If you haven’t seen rich suburban American Christians, there’s a level of obsessive consumption disorder you’ll never understand. Lucky.

● You know the science writer Natalie Angier? Nice. Here she is elaborating two answers to the question: Why do we make art? There’s the sex answer—individuals create things to display what they have to offer genetically and to garner attention (this kind of evolutionary reduction is in these days... yawn)—and the communal answer. She loves the latter enough to put it beautifully. I like the hue this gives to the auteur-focused conversations we had here this week.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [10]
Categories: astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , spirituality

Commodification and Pushback--Subcultures and Scenes · 26 November 2007

Bear with me here.

I’m back from utopia, where subcultures still hide in the hills and cityfolk come around looking for a piece of the enlightened ones, the creators, the real libertarians. Big Sur. You can feel the almost-serene pushback—a quiet self-preservation—from the people who get it as the San Franciscans in beemers come around for fine fine food and flickr-ready views. My guy Henry Miller (whose get-a-piece-of-me memorial library does its best to discourage women from inheriting him, what with all their sick, tired, parasitic man-on-man hagiography) has wonderful things to say about utopian subcultures and how terribly real they can get, but here is someone else who has interesting thoughts about NorCal enclaves. Wm Gibson via Warmhunting, from 2003.

You’ve been talking for a long time now about the demise of sub-cultures, that they’re co-opted by marketing forces before they become established. Can you give me an example?

Well, my model for that has always been how long it took to recommodify whatever it was that was happening in the 60s and sell it back to the people who were actually living it. It took three or four years. It was still relatively clumsy. By 1977, it only took about a year and a half for punk to be recommodified and sold back. And whatever was going on in Seattle with Nirvana — from its discovery it took about three months before there were models on the catwalks in Paris wearing clothing based on what these kids wore on Sentinel Hill in Seattle.What that says to me is that the future of that stuff is veal. It never gets to mature because it’s too valuable. And I suspect it’s because whatever that was was an organic function of industrial civilization. We are now post-industrial and we no longer grow bohemias in the same way. I’m wondering where they are? Where’s the new equivalent?

Well, utopians, bohemians, and ex-pats at heart: can we really get off the grid now? Has Gibson finally lost the pulse—failed to see that now subcultures engage in SELF-commodification (start a record label, trend-set in your own community, get yourself one way or another “on the magazine” as my brother the artist of information systems likes to say). Or are there still subcultures that are a refuge? Is ashtanga a place for self-production or, as the Miltonian might have it, for a kind of self-consumption? Is the market at our door?

Well, god knows plenty want to be ashtangis. Thanks, Gwyneth. But the funny thing is that once most people get on the mat they’ll never hack it. Boredom will get you if weakness doesn’t get you first.

So increasingly I swim in a soup of commodities and images and attitudes “inspired by” this practice. So what. It’s tacky, but do I have to buy in… and let my subculture be sold back to me as Gibson says?

One thing that’s coming up in the dissertation is that, as I see it, commodification in cultural fields is always partial. Yes, it is a pernicious devil of a tendency, but with apologies to my Uncle Karl there is always pushback. Not in a latent revolution: in the now. Yes the market gets the hell into our home lives and our relationships both to our families and to the land—there is always an economic side to these things. But at the same time, there is reclamation. Stillness, even.

There is the possibility of not re-buying—and not merely producing—ourselves. And I don’t think I have to go to some remote enclave place to get that. If I can show up and practice sincerely, finding community among the dedicated ones in a room full of all kinds of intentions and inside an entity leading the world in yoga commodification, as I did this morning, then there is definitely a self-contained-ness, and a power of non-grasping, that this practice generates. So interesting to practice contentment and stillness in a world that wants to package those qualities into things and sell them back to you as magazines and t-shirts. So interesting to see that there is a little bitty subculture that's not moved by it, sitting right there at the center.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [17]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXXII: Stop Owl Commodification · 16 November 2007

I found the ecstatic grassroots movement I've been imagining. Uh oh. But I’m not going to tell you about it. Except to say it involves a secret society and does not involve naked yoga.

Returned to morning practice this week, which included Thursday contortions next to an intriguing New York ashtangi poet met through this medium. Somewhere between post-practice Fred Segal and Real Food Daily brunch, I realized I'd been charmed. Sometimes RL is so much better.

I have to admit morning practice and the rhythms it creates for me are what I love best, even though I have adored the evenings this fall. I’ve done six weeks of all 5:00 practices, milking the habituated morning energy spike for dissertationly purposes. Gradually over the weeks this has shifted my energy eveningward, and the mornings have slowed. The experiment has showed me so much about my choices in energy-distribution: between relationships, work and practice. About practicing to give energy to my life rather than letting practice be the main event. I’ll try to write more about this before it is gone.

● I am kind of excited about the little movie about bob dylan this week.

● Speaking of sentimental wonders: a re-realease of songs a decade old at the RJM Digital Archive. He never used to talk to me back in the days when he was making these recordings. I was generally pissed off and what people called "intense" while he was ethereal and lovey. Tendencies which have tempered on both sides. But one December afternoon after my shift at the library desk I passed him under the pine trees and asked for a cassette. Listened throughout the Christmas break, out there driving a Dodge truck on icy Montana roads. Up to the ski area for days alone on Red Lodge Mountain, and down to the bars in town for nights with my old nemesis—the only other one of us rural kids who escaped, albeit in her case to a worser fate. That’s where these songs go for me.

● What else? Well, here is some trouble. Some good discussion earlier in the week. If you come around, you better listen at least as sharply as you soapbox. We are so done with recycled opinions and 2004-era rants.

● Oh, and whoever sold my address to Yoga Pura also gave it to Anthropologie, whose catalog just arrived.

I tolerated it this summer when the outer hipstosphere switched from swallows to owls as their cute-but-disturbing bird of choice (ho hum). But now there are owl candles, an owl purse and (yes, Tova) an owl apron in the Anthro catolog. I mention this by way of saying to those of you who might be tempted: I don’t actually like owls. Please no owl things for the holidays. (Unless it's something really good, you know.) Otherwise, STOP OWL COMMODIFICATION.

That’s enough linking. I don’t care what else was being said in the world this week.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [16]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , sound

Bait and Switch Yoga · 29 October 2007

Wow. Which yoga-consumer group sold my mailing address to “Yoga Pura” of Phoenix, Arizona?

They want me to come to their teacher training, a “journey of a lifetime,” after I have asked myself the following questions.  

Am I fearlessly committed to living happy now?

Do I want to understand—really, really understand—the mysteries underlying yoga and all great spiritual traditions?

Oh yeah. Happiness, and real, real understanding. That’s my bag, allright. But Phoenix is some distance from LA. Could I do this training by correspondence? Probably, because it turns out that Yoga is ANYTHING I want it to be. Check this ad copy, you poor, unenlightened readers.

Yoga is not about stretching. Yoga is not about meditation. In fact, contrary to what you may have heard, yoga is not even about yoga. And while it may be true that yoga involves all of these, it’s [sic] real potency and value lies [sic] in its ability to create something much greater: the transformation of your life. Yoga is about living your life to the fullest…. It’s about joy in the workplace and love in the home. Yoga is about the fulfillment of your life’s purpose with a… fulfillment previously unimagined [sic]. At Yoga Pura we’re unlocking the real secrets of the ancient science of yoga to help people do just that. More than a simple course in yoga postures… the Teacher Training… will immerse you in your own personal voyage of self-discovery and awakening—transforming you into a mature spiritual guide able to help others do the very same thing.

Classic yoga bait-and-switch advertising here. Not just “happiness,” “fulfillment,” and “real understanding” but the wisdom and knowledge to be others’ “spiritual guide.” Right. Right up until you get about a month into some kind of practice and realize how clueless, monkey-minded, and how not qualified to be another’s authority, you really are.

To me, this Yoga Pura type of thing is more painful than blatant yoga materialism that promises fashionable pastimes and a nice ass. Because this is yoga as candy apple “happiness” that represents a quick escape from the life you presumably want to change. Since there’s nice enough intention here, these corny promises make it easier to forget that yoga is just a practice and not an express ticket to some other self.

Nothing in this ad is about establishing a personal practice and using that as the field for transformation and understanding. Rather it feels more like they’re selling me into yoga charm school where I will learn to think like Tony Robbins and walk like Christy Turlington and speak melodically like Rodney Yee so I can go out and reproduce more of this brand of self-help/actualization. My new consulting gig: Insideowl Lifecoaching!

Well, bother. If it is this simple, what am I doing taking the toll road?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [20]
Categories: astanga yoga , evolution , markets-networks-society , self-deception

Unscientific Postscript to Yoga is Dangerous · 25 September 2007

I’ve thought over this matter in the past week, thanks to the many people who have emailed me. Thank you, everyone. Sometimes it amazes me that there is true community here, and that these are relationships where we work out aspects of our practice as much as we participate in creating a bottom-up side of astanga culture. We are creating this world as much as its authorities who we mostly revere, and that is sort of revolutionary.

So, two notes on the matter of petite brunettes with daddy issues.

One. If the desire to “put oneself out there” as irrevently funny trumps a sensitivity to the real power big men have over small women—if ego trumps empathy—then clearly this person has not gone through the process of self-examination of inherited gender conditioning, and radical affirmation of human equality, that I’d wish he had as a modern yogi.

To do that, to learn to be feminists (get over the word already: it doesn't connote female domination and you know it), most men need to have a transformative relationship with a fully realized woman.

In the same way, white people in this country don’t even begin to undo their inherited racism (even if they emotionally antd intellectually despise racism) until they enter in to deep relationships with people of color as equals. It's not just a matter of professing the right politics. Politics is surfacy, but race and gender are visceral. 

It is difficult to imagine someone who understands the process of self-transformation through relationship explicitly taking advantage of his gender and size to leverage a sexualized power over small women. Someone who’d sensitized himself accurately to any women’s subjectivity would have some idea of the almost primitive responses that would call up in her, and would respect her enough to give her space. (It's not like women don't create gender inequality just as much or more than men.)

I do hope this teacher will find this discussion, because maybe he truly doesn’t know that his conduct is symbolically freighted and viscerally affecting. It's so much easier to be lighthearted about this, and not see its serious side. But you are a powerful man, man. Have some respect for that power of yours.

Two. WHATEVER! Ashtanga yoga is about doing what is uncomfortable. That's it. End of question-period.

This practice is a process undoing fears through direct experience. I worry that I have made a “thing”—a personal mental obstacle—out of my feelings about this stranger.

"I won't go to that teacher because he scares me." Hmmm. Really!? Again, whatever. Doing your practice in the presence of fear is one of the few things about which SKPJ is explicit.

Most people are still sexist on some deep level. This behavior is common in the world I inhabit: people who get it are the exception. It’s just not up to me to care. Or correct. Though if I'm in a relationship that's messed up, of course I have to do some pushback and take responsibility for protecting myself. Doing that is itself just a part of facing fear.

So it looks like at some point I’ll have to track this joe down and practice with him. Not repeatedly or anything, but for the sake of it. I’ll try not to flirt with him, which is exactly what I would have done if I hadn’t seen that profile (because word is he is a funny guy, and I would have cued into that to take the edge off any potential authoritarianism). But I might have to do something that violates his sense of propriety on my way out of “his” room. Any suggestions?

Ha!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [24]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory

The Natives Are Restless · 23 September 2007

Ruth: [hearing chanting] What's that?
Dr. Moreau: The natives, they have a curious ceremony…
Ruth: Tell us about it, Edward.
Edward: Oh, it's... it's nothing.
Dr. Moreau: They are restless tonight.

                                                         -Island of Lost Souls (1932)

Yeah, the natives are restless. Phone calls. Email.

Politics. Or, as they say, shalatics. Schedule changes. All these teachers, all these studios: and nobody can manage to offer an even vaguely consistent schedule. Woah! Trouble in OCD land!

Seriously, though. The amount of schedule drama in this scene is stupid. The best I can do is get an annual pass at one place and just take it for granted that that's where my mat lives, come what may.

Here is my situation. Around the time the Iraq War began, I made a decision not to commute. It’s about gas consumption, and about family time. Also (let’s be honest): the fact that I don’t suffer bad drivers at all well. So: my yoga practice, and what there is of a weekday social life, live on the Westside. So it is. Gives me a chance to defend this zone to the hipsters.

I made a choice at the beginning to see west side yoga as a land of plenty. This was a way of choosing not to see it as ground zero of yoga politics. Of course it’s both: land of plenty and land of politics. Plenty generates as much politics as scarcity ever did.

I’m a student of politics and a lover of the tiniest details of interpersonal stories (it’s always being suggested that I write an ethnography book on this scene—and sometimes I like the idea, though thank god I’m not trying to pass off such total nonsense as a dissertation), so while making that choice up front saved me a lot of distraction, it also meant sacrificing a few excitingly gossipy potential friendships. Walking out of the ladies’ when I had one too many good things to add; shrugging like I didn’t have an opinion when really I did. Not asking the crucial little questions I knew would open floodgates. Letting stories stop with me even though passing them on would be an interesting experiment. On the surface, sometimes it’s been a drag.

Funny thing, though. Over time, I’ve found that acting like I don’t have an opinion on shalatics means to a large degree I actually don’t have an opinion. (Completely revolutionary finding.) And the process is self-reinforcing: the less I appear to care about shalatics, the less interesting I am to talk to about them. The less I know. The less I harbor opinions. The more I love to practice. &c.

Putting together a practice in this town gets difficult if you’re a divider, a person who has some teachers and other practitioners with whom you're just not ok. If you are, well, a hater. Or just afraid. Practicing hyperexclusivity makes you take yourself more and more seriously, and can make for a  spiral of self-isolation.

Then the voices in your head become deafening.

Yoga can make you so inflexible.

The shalatics have been so prominent recently that I’m getting sucked in. Gezus. My job is to take the best out of any teacher (myself included), any circumstance. Yet I have less ease in extending that attitude to a certain large corporation. When something actually gets under my skin, I see there are still traces of a political creature capable of getting stirred up and involved in it. At this gets so, so in the way of having practice as a refuge or as a time I set aside to be content and grateful.

Ah, well.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XXIV · 9 September 2007

Been thinking about Puerto Cabezas this week. A category five laid down there on Thursday.

A few years ago I spent a week on the isolated Nicaraguan coast, lying around in hammocks, drinking batidos sin leche, experiencing an awfully advanced stage of giardia, and avoiding eye contact with the various America’s Most Wanted characters slithering around with schoolgirls. Definitely remote enough for a fugitive: getting there took a 12-hour drive down a dirt “road” in a retired US school bus (SRO unless you were a chicken and thus got your own seat in an overhead rack), followed by four hours in a cigarette boat down the Rio Coco.

At the time, things out there looked like this. Now they look more like this.

I don’t know how the story of Felix got buried this week. It’s wild.

Forget the other links here and just read the AP story.

Clark bobbed in the ocean for more than three days until relatives of his dead friend, Vendless, found him in the water near the Honduran coast.

His body was covered with open wounds from exposure to the sun and sea, and he was burned by boat fuel and a rope that he had used to tie himself to his sinking vessel. He was delusional, unable to explain what happened or recognize his friends.

Later, on land, he sat on his couch in Puerto Cabezas, still shocked nearly speechless. When Vendless' mother, Rosa Miller, came to see him, he told her through tears that he held on to her son's body until Thursday, when the stench became too much to bear and he let his friend sink.

Miller broke down crying with him, kissing him on the forehead and reassuring him that they would try to find Vendless' remains.

                      ……………………………………………..

In this installment of Know Your Empire, a bit on the US-Puerto Cabezas Connection.

US marines left their names (like Clark and Miller, above) and sometimes their blue eyes among the residents of Puerto Cabezas, and their grandchildren, during two lengthy occupations in the first half of the 20^th century.

Puerto Cabezas and Burlington, Vermont, are sister cities. Burlingtoners often organize delegations to Nicaragua, especially in the wake of catastrophe like 1998’s Hurricaine Mitch.

In 1984, the United States mined the harbor at Puerto Cabezas. Really pissed off The Hague. But Ronald Reagan thought it would be good for local residents. They were getting a little bit ahead of themselves.

In 1961, with Nicaragua into the second generation of the Somoza kleptocracy, a regime more than friendly with the US, a group of mercenaries set sail from Puerto Cabezas for Cuba. The mercenaries were defeated at the Bay of Pigs.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: arbitrage , markets-networks-society

Saturday XXIII · 25 August 2007

I’m still smug for getting out of jury duty, though now people are telling me a royal flush of five days without the call isn’t all that special. Six years in this town, and not once have I done my part to uphold the integrity of the justice system.

Even if the dispensation isn’t so special, the whole past week felt like a free trip, a 53^rd week that doesn’t show up on the books: so it was with the out-of-nowhere commandeering of my practice by a benevolent pirate who’ll soon disappear, and with the five days of pure-empty lines on my varied little OCD (“GTD”) calendars.

I felt creative this week with energy and focus like I couldn’t believe: because nobody was keeping track. I play games to slack at the margins whet I think my other self isn't watching—skimming the almond butter, taking halfassed notes on my background reading, skimming time off from sleep to read the newspaper. Note this  occurs when I’m playing both the slacker and the tracker—I don’t try to skim off waiters, teachers, employers, whatever. Subtle self-sabotage, in conditions under which I feel divided against myself, is the main kind that interests me. Sometime I should figure out it’s not actually a fun game.

But this week I was in a void because I’d put my diabolical inner accountant on vacation, and it was faith-giving to see that when I shut off that shadow I’m always trying to outfox, I’m not full of shit. In fact, I function pretty well. Go figure.

This spate of relative clarity makes for a good moment to slow everything way, way down. I’ll be in silence Wednesday-Monday, over a long Labor Day. The Editor is off grocery-shopping for faque meat and other BBQ items right now (he loves soy dogs, the horror). Guess my own self isn’t the only one who sometimes needs a break from my overly watchful eyes.

Next time I do a links post I’ll be vipassana-ed and probably back in a post-political blogging disposition. So this week, in honor of the fact that the world is at war and 99% of the ashtangosphere (the 1%) could not care less, and in honor of the fact that we celebrate “Labor Day” three months late because FDR feared placing it on the the day that’s actually associated with honoring workers, here is: owl as political animal. 

? Start here. Your political compass. Take the test. (My results. According to the graph, a little left of the Dalai Lama.)

? Then go here. Take this test too. (My results: 38 for Kucinich. But that’s not true. I’m pragmatic.)

? Next, order the brand new paperback version of “Marxist- environmentalist” Mike Davis’ Planet of Slums. For people who want to solve everything with feelgood token environmentalism, well come on now. If you think individual carbon neutrality will save us, prepare for heartbreak at this picture of the relationship of most of humanity with ourself and with the earth. The guy is a good writer. 

? Next, read about the latest in the travesty of de-regulation and fake-regulation that is the neoliberal era. This time, it’s the re-labeling of irradiated almonds as “raw.” There goes a staple of my diet.

In less political links (or maybe these are the actually political topics in this post):

? Thursday’s NYT story on Inappropriate Yoga Guy. I keep writing commentary here and then erasing it. Hmm.

? Hipster Olypmics! Does this offend you? Withholding my comments here too.

? Yogaworks Westlake opens today with a full schedule. "This is yoga adapted to American culture," said Maggie Mellor, a veteran Conejo Valley instructor who plans to teach at YogaWorks.... Americans delight in choices. They want their 31 flavors." Ditto.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: astanga yoga , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XXII · 19 August 2007

I’m just getting reaccustomed to the Southern California light. Anything more than a week away, and I wind up in Los Angeles-loving homecoming mode for days upon return. New York is perfect, though. I spoke a couple of times at the ASA conference, and it was not too disastrous. I’m trying to find a way to deal with speaking and teaching now that my bs bravado, which used to win prizes for impromptu speaking, has deserted me. I’m still pretty wobbly and adrenaline-wracked on stage, but I think it’s because I’m trying to communicate rather than perform. So I’m trying to to be patient instead of horrified by my own amateruity. In all, ASA has a way of reinvesting me in its world. I had an almost-four hour dinner with a big deal professor I’d never met before, and sort of fell for her. In the third hour, Tim Robbins walked through and when I bolted upright in response to a second’s eye contact (wow) she shrugged and told me to go back to what I’d been saying.

I practiced many times, and it was good. Met briefly the light and nympho genius boodiba, who gave me homework to improve my UKK-B, but repeatedly missed REW due to my gravitation away from (absent) Eddie’s and toward G and the excellent showers at YS. G introduced himself by criticizing my backwards supta vajrasana (I do it crim some days to ease the torqued lumbar), then put his hands on my sacrum and moved it brilliantly. That’s hours of bodywork I’ve been putting off, I thought. Worth the trip in itself.

Saturday afternoon, I skipped the conference’s key social event, where I’d only raise suspicion with my sobriety and meatlessness, and did a supposedly 3-hour workshop with Dharma Mittra that stretched past 9 pm. I think the experience deserves a review in this space, when I get a chance to recollect it.

Yesterday was our 7-year anniversary. He offered Encinitas, but I was still in LA reintegration space. Before dessert at some French café, we went to The Majestic for a terrible swords and sandals epic which I thoroughly enjoyed (the whole genre is so wrong, and I love it).

Then he finally showed me to the beautiful secret cemetery, hidden among highrises and accessible only through a long unmarked drive that appears to enter a parking structure, where various celebrities have plots waiting. Ray Bradbury, The Fonz, etc. For all my sincerity about it, I have to grant there is something kitchy about a secret garden whose entrance is marked by the sentrylike individual mausoleum of Armand Hammer. There are real-live dead celebrities there too. Billy Wilder’s headstone says “I’m a writer, but nobody’s perfect.” Someone had left fresh flowers for Truman Capote and Marilyn Monroe. The undead Jack Lemmon’s stone is engraved only with “in”—I suppose because it’s morbid to inscribe the “Rest” and “Peace” until the time comes.

Weekend links now.

? MIA’s record is officially out on Tuesday. Good to see some uncynical attention this time. Screw Pitchfork. Christgau’s review: “The eclectic world-underclass dance amalgam M.I.A. has constructed is an art music whose concept recalls the Clash.” Also, South Asia-o-philes will appreciate her Jimmy images.

? China tells the living Buddhas of Tibet they must obtain permission to reincarnate! “The so-called reincarnated living Buddha without government approval is illegal and invalid.” Read this article.

? The new Wm. Gibson book is pretty good, although for the hawkeye humor of his prose—he nails lines with the shrugging precision that Mr. Miyagi nails boards—it felt a bit thin. Still, while Gibson’s surfaces leave me cold, I increasingly feel in love with his subconscious. Here he is talking about process in Salon, and here’s a tribute website to Spook Country that goes a little far.

? More UCLA work on mirror neurons, this time their role in successful advertising. Crazy.

? Really good article by Jaron Lanier, whose idea of spirituality is “one’s emotional relationship with unanswerable questions,” on the Dawkins project. He writes:

It isn’t disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way.... A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs…. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God…. Because people are afraid to die, they sometimes find hope in the unresolved status of the biggest questions. Take away that hope and you hand victory to whatever creep can give it back.

Posted by (0v0)        
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , sound , spirituality

Owl In New York · 8 August 2007

Tomorrow, Manhattan.

(Just picked up the new William Gibson to read en route. Germane reading material, I anticipate. Will touch the earth, in the zen sense, for DZM when I land briefly at Sky Harbor. That oddest of places with the SciFi name.)

God I love New York. 

Friday, a conference at Columbia on consumerism and consumption.

That should be amusing. People who wear dockers and don't watch TV (I fit exactly one of these categories) talking about why others buy. Incidentally, I'm also into market research lately. To fill in the picture from the, well, Cayce Pollard side of things. 

Then: four solid days of the American Sociological Association, the main disciplinary conference where we enact all the rituals that tell us who we are as professionals, and establish the hierarchies, and posture like hell…, and in the meantime share ideas, get a handle on the leading edges, rub shoulders with people whose books have taught us much. Yes, I’m ambivalent. I don’t speak until Tuesday afternoon, by which time we’ll all be deeply wound inside this straaaaange world of thinking and interacting.

I’m looking forward, in a snarky way, to a wine a cheese reception entitled “Sociologists meet New York activists” as well as a presentation about how mindfulness practice is the handmaiden of the “late-capitalist” cult of self-creation. We’ll see if either is sufficiently bad to be blogworthy.

I’m also looking forward to thunderstorms, if any remain. God that would be a nice release; and besides, that torque of barometric pressure the seaboard builds up in summertime can make me a little weird.

As for the yoga. Yes. In addition to the astanga in the land of plenty (though I hear several teachers are in Mysore now?), I’m eyeing a Mark Whitwell workshop, Alan Finger the chakra guy with the inappropriate name, and Dharma Mittra’s midday masterclass. Since there are about 50 sessions going on at once at the ASA, sporadic disappearance will be achievable.

Colleague: I didn’t see you in the Global Supply Chains session?

Owl: No, I caught a different session. Brilliant.

Then… house-sitting some professors’ place up in Washington Heights for a few excellent excellent days before coming back west in time for Jury Duty the week after next. Of all things. Thanks for reeling me in there, Los Angeles Superior Court.

I’m a most quiet, clean, extremely grateful house-sitter who loves plants and pets and benefits immeasurably from a refreshing place to be a silent little writing ghost for a few days while you’re off in the mountains. All I do is sit at the dining room table with the notebook, take meditation breaks on the living room floor. I leave gourmet cheeses and nut butters and Green & Blacks in the fridge when I go. I pacify your cats because they secretly miss you.

Just so you know. Because for weeks I’ve been itching to get off campus and take my work on the road, and I’m free from teaching all the coming year. I’ve not much mentioned it here, but restlessness has overtaken me in a way that hasn’t been seen since August of ’99. It’s a little intense. I’m listening to Gordon Lightfoot and doing flickr searches for Reykjavik and thinking about storage units.

My father in law wanted to know the exact dates of the NYC trip so that he could mark it on his calendar to pray about it. (Christian fundamentalists do fear the place.)

God bless you, New York. And thank you for taking me in.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , science , social theory

Holy Bones, Part II: Reading the Entrails · 31 July 2007

I mentioned over a week ago in this space that I would write out my dark night of the sacrum in the next posts. Interesting how the commitment has clammed me right up.

There is avoidance here, a wish to be able to speak of the thing in the past tense. And there’s also a hesitancy to “own” the thing. I don’t want to identify with it—and that’s for the better—but I also have a fear of granting that it is inside of me. That, in a sense, it owns me.

Ooh but we can be superstitious about our pains. I am looking for a way to face this that isn’t in the form of complaining but that also doesn’t dive hopelessly into pain-interpretation. Because it is possible to read the pain patterns with all the misplaced sincerity that a shaman reads chicken entrails.

I’m all for interpreting my entrails, but not as if they contain a big scary-serious message from the beyond. And on the other hand, I’m all for expressing that I’ve been stuck, but have a childhood-engrained disgust for whining that sometimes gets my tongue.

Meantime, groping about for honesty, here I am, talking about this “injury,” this “shifting,” this dark night of more than just the sacrum, as a “thing.” Interesting.

We are always creating objects. What’s up with that?

It’s ok on some level—completely ok. We objectify as part of the process of transcendence. It’s only nasty to objectify the wrong stuff, like the beings we’d do better to treat as subjects. But yes, we do turn processes into things. Sociology and Buddhism both criticize this rigorously: Sociology in the critique of reification (which grew out of Marx’s “fetishization of commodities,” through the Frankfurt school’s cultural nonsense and into the critical work of my hero Bourdieu), and Buddhism in the injunction not to treat feelings or processes as if they were “solid” when truly they are fleeting. Both disciplines are always on the watch for what Whitehead called the fallacy of misplaced concreteness. This is part of why I feel at home (albeit on the margins of) both.

But sometimes there’s a place for concreteness. I’ve been excited this week about Hegel, the original owl-of-minerva curmudgeon who I never really understood. His theory of history, which I’m now learning is uncannily adaptable outside of western philosophy, is the “phenomenology of spirit.” Shit. What? Long story.

Basically, it’s something about how in the process of growing up and out—in the process of becoming our ultimate essence—we step up out of (Wilberspeak: “transcend and include”) certain stages. And then turn back and regard those stages as somewhat concrete, done-over-and-wrapped-up, elements of ourselves.

Maybe this is obtuse. But I’m caught in a liminal space here, between being wordlessly inside a process and being able to stand outside it and mark off its boundaries in words.

I will keep trying… even as I keep falling on my face in UKK-C. (A chicken pose, no less....) I plan on making it there eventually.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Monads · 17 July 2007

Thanks to those who went in for the what is fashion? Rorschach test the other day. I didn’t give you anything to go on, and you turned up many good and unexpected bits. I have this tendency to seek puzzles and hidden ironies in the things humans do (think Freakonomics, the apotheosis of the academic gimmick), but there’s a non-ironic nub in the things you say: people simply want to beautify, to imitate the beautiful, to copy those around them, to create “in” language that both demarcates a group and demarcates an era.

University is about closing off most thought-worlds in order to nurture and perfect singular lines of reasoning. This makes paradigms robust, but closes the mind. Bringing the conversation here opens me up to charges that I’m assuming too much, that I’m saying nothing but stupid common sense, that I’m forgetting to see the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the strange. Most days, the fact that organized society exists—that we’re not all anarchically killing each other but actually live together in crazy complex (beautiful) organization—blows my mind. But some days, here in the iron cage not only of bureaucracy but of extremely patterned thinking, I forget to be amazed. Could it be that our natural tendency is toward organization—not entrorpy? And that ingroup-outgroup dynamics are the primitive form of organization? Aaah, so.

The main reason I brought you this question is that I’m trying to think of what I might be missing about ethical consumerism movements—especially sweat-free campaigns and (less so) the new environmentalism of green industry and (cough) carbon offsetting. The obvious way to conceptualize this (at least green consumerism— sweat-free movements are harder to nail down) is as a social dilemma: we’re all gonna die when pollution chokes us out, so the best a girl can do is to encourage others to pollute less while herself covertly enjoying the “personal utility” of polluting. Moreover, she can use green consumerism as a coercive device— stigmatizing those who don’t practice it and motivating them to join the in crowd and do it. So it looks like a classic tragedy of the commons: individual rationality (using as much of the free resource as possible) leads to collective irrationality (we hit the margin and go extinct). Very Freakonomics.

Thing is, this doesn’t do it for me. First, it doesn’t help me understand why anyone would give a shit about their T-shirts coming from a sweatshop (whatever that is). And second, I don’t think most people really, practically, believe that we’re all gonna die from pollution. So I opened it up to see what people think about where imitation trends come from. I think the thing about existential anxiety and not wanting to be alone is pretty rich (and corresponds nicely with where neuroscience is going).

I can’t even begin to investigate this stuff, really, until I settle on a unit of analysis. Is it a society (whatever that is)? Is it individuals? Dis, with other tough-minded, clear-thinking individuals who see the social whole as equal to the sum of its parts, says: “Strictly speaking, groups themselves don’t think and act, individuals within groups do.”

Ok, yes. This is the part where I kiss your little typing fingers for letting the monads in by the back door. Monads! A decade ago The Editor and I discovered the little gremlins. I actually have no fricking idea what a monad is, but I do know that “monads have no windows.” What? Ok, so when I say a human is a monad, all I mean is that it’s a self-contained organism. When a human does something, all the “parts” of the human do it. They don’t get to do something else. When I take a bath, my spleen doesn’t get to stay out on the balcony. But, if there even is such a thing as a society, it definitely isn’t a monad. There’s not some dominant volition that necessarily takes its constituients to and fro without any say from the parts. Action at the level of a society just isn’t that clean: some of the subparts are joining the infantry but some are going to Canada. Some pursue only money, some art, and some would trade it all for an ounce of enlightenment. Or sex with Jon Stewart. It just makes more sense to try to explain and predict a monad’s (individual’s) movement than that of a society, especially if all a society is is a collection of monads.

Except, I would submit, it isn’t. Network theorists and biologists (the most cutting edge social thinkers in the game, I’ll admit) see groups as “emergent properties” of interactions. This has the advantages of being beautiful and of focusing analysis not so much on concrete individuals themselves as on the stuff they do. Groups aren’t made of people: they’re made of relationships. That’s a really great idea. And it’s great for explaining how groups form on, say, the playground or the internet. It’s all just interactions, over and over, and with time groups emerge.

Yet...this individual, processual version of reality doesn't work for everything. Would you study a school of fish like that? (Or junior high girls?) Or a dictatorship? A world trade agreement? A religion? Many groups are more than emergent: they’re institutionalized. We don’t reproduce them merely as individuals: we are born into them and die out of them and the group lives on. Stuff—like the weight of history, or the fact that groups aren’t made of homogenous or equal parts—gets lost when we say a trend is the aggregate of social actions.

I’m interested in what the regnant ideas can't account for with respect to something as irrational and bizarre as a bunch of US students making common cause with a bunch of Chinese workers. These people are monads… but have they through interaction created a kind of transitory group-level entity? Whose actions and efficacy are not reducible to those of its constitutients? (Mmm... Leibniz meets Whitehead.)

In case you missed it, the implicit question here is: what are the limitations of oneness?

I don’t know. A rote Marxist would say ethical consumerism is just the last gasp of late capitalism—a dialectical move to preserve the system just a little longer while it suffocates on its own contradictions. That’s a little too system-level to me: Capital, alas, is not exactly a monad. As usual, I’m trying to find a middle path between the view from above and that from below.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

What is fashion? · 13 July 2007

What is fashion?

What is it?

Throw me a bone, people.

I think I have 75% of the answer worked out, but what interests me is the remaining 25%.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [25]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory

New Machines for Expired Ideas · 11 July 2007

I’m looking at a headline: Brain Scans Reveal Why Meditation Works.

And thinking: Nooooo. Brain scans reveal that meditation works. A map is not an explanation.

Now that researchers have FMRI machines, there’s a boom in research on the so-called “effects” of meditation practices on the brain... or "causes" of the brain's effects on the meditator (clearly, the research designers are confusing themselves). FMRI takes very cool pictures of parts of the brain lighting up. But that’s it. It’s cartographic--and primitive, in a sense. But since it’s new, it’s spawned literature on the “effects” of meditation—something forward-thinking neuroscientists have cared about since the Dalai Lama started talking to them 25 years ago and some innovative philosophers, economists and brain scientists set up the Mind and Life Institute.

Ok, that’s great. The new UCLA study I’m reading is typical. The scan shows that certain neurons light up when people “experience” negative emotions (produced by looking at other faces embodying negative emotions—I'm not even going to unpack the weird assumptions loaded into this research design), and that the brain’s emotion center calms down when a subject identifies and takes a distance from these represented emotions. According to one of the authors, “These findings… suggest, for the first time, an underlying reason why mindfulness meditation programs improve mood....”

So ok, hold up.

First, the tautology problem. What’s the cause and what’s the effect here? They have essentially “discovered” that distancing yourself from bad moods… distances you from bad moods. The effect and the cause are the same. No wonder their findings are statistically significant.

Just because some neurons are involved does not make the neurons the “cause” of this whole process. They’re just part of the process—albeit the only part the researchers can quite recognize as real (and thus the one they identify as a “cause”).

The only reason the researchers think that the first phenom of mindfully identifying and detaching from an emotion is separate from the second phenom of the lights going dim in the emotion center is that they are crazy old dualists who believe thought is an gauzy ghost separate from the material “reality” of the brain. They imagine their finding is an instance of intention causing action… though any meditator could tell them that emotional experience and intention are inter-twined and mutually reinforcing. Sure, the meditator says: You can change your thoughts, but only after discovering how your thoughts are already changing you. One does not simply cause the other. And ultimately, thoughts themselves and the thinker’s immediate experience are not separate.

I wonder: if these scientists knew their own minds better from the inside, would the create more subtle, accurate concepts?

Second, and this is what irritates me, the main scientific excitement over this research stems from the assumption that experiential phenomena are only “real” if they have a measureable physical manifestation. Materialism 101. But thoughts and intentions are also real (I wouldn’t say they’re “things,” like The Secret says, but anyway). You can’t take pictures of intentions with FMRI machines, but on a practical, everyday, human basis, pretending thoughts aren’t real is some wicked reductionism. And that’s the thing: mind, subjectivity, interiority, thought—all these beautiful inner phenomena—do not reduce to neurons firing. Taking my cues from Bourdieu the master-synthesizer, I’d submit that the subjective (mind) and the objective (brain) sides of this picture are mutually constitutive and equally real. It’s just that you can’t take FMRI pictures of inner states per se.

The leading edge of western, and if I may, global, culture is rushing toward holistic understandings of mind-body. This shows up in social science’s sensitivity to embodiment, in athletes’ dedication to mental training, in the eastern-western culture of yoga, in the synthetic social theory that theorists of both mind and society are patching together, and in the dissipation (in certain cultural strata) of all kinds of mind-body practice.

Neuroscientists want to be a part of the revolution, as I’m seeing especially on the west coast—at places like the the UC Davis Shamatha Project, the Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies, UCLA’s Mindful Awareness Research Center. Since they’ve got the biggest budgets and the shiniest tools, they’re likely to get an audience in defining the 21^st century mind-body, but right now all they’re doing with it is advancing a new version of thought/brain dualism. This isn’t the same as reducing mind to brain, but it could easily go back in that direction.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [8]
Categories: beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , power of suggestion , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Fifteen for Thirty · 2 July 2007

Conspiracy theorist self: Holidays are power-written histories on the palimpsest of social memory—“Christmas” to cover for the solstice and “Easter” for the equinox, “Thanksgiving” to cover for smallpox, and “Memorial Day” for Mayday since the latter is so awfully dangerous.

Practical self: Ease up already. None of these “meanings” is inherent. Commemorate what you will.

The specifics of this life and the commitments I make with it take up most of my days. Given a break in the action, well, I’m going to create my own ritual out of it any way that I can. So I mourn this lifetaking warmaking entity and the red it’s spilt in the soil, even as I see I’m part of the red in its veins. There’s nothing for me to add to the national symbolic moment, which is pitch-perfect: GWB taking sweet old Pootie-poot for rides in daddy’s blue and white speedboat, pardoning the highest of criminals while they tool around the summer waters.

So that’s already perfect without me. I’ll make this day about a historical memory less symbolic and abstract—not of a country, but of one small coming-of-age inside it. For me, the Fourth is the watermark of every given summer, the arbitrary date I use to mark off the year in the little bedpost of this individual human history. Here’s the arc of the last 15 of 30, so I’ll have them for my own archives.

1992: Estes Park vicinity, Colorado. I make Grandpa mad when I use the campground bathroom to curl my hair. Waste of time and electricity! The six of us eat tacos in our little egg-shaped fiberglass Scamper. Off to fireworks in Granby.

1993: Colorado Springs, top of Fillmore Hill. Mom asks me to go up alone to watch the fireworks, and gives a desperate lecture against my Mormon boyfriend, TB. Then we are quiet. She doesn’t ask if I am drinking (TB is president of SADD—and the fact that this keeps me from driving drunk while my skills are at their least developed is a blessing she’ll never know, outweighing the Mormon tincture that will always be on my soul). For once in the face of efforts to control my sexuality, I don’t talk back. Because she is desperate, and there is something different in her voice. She knows her control is running out. I’m no longer oppositional, taking her guidelines as a point of departure. Rather, I’m turning independent; and this is boundless and awful. That night together is quiet and still and full of misunderstanding, as we sit on the hill where my dad used to dig up arrowheads as a boy.

1994: Laurel, MT, with J. Sit in her old red Subaru wagon, in which I used to lift up the gearshift-cover and watch the road go by beneath, and drink. Best place to watch the show is from the edge of the cemetery atop the hill outside of town. It’s close enough to hear the drunken emcee on the PA system out on the high school baseball field, announcing which local business donated each individual pyrotechnic. For the finale, financed by Exxon (whose local refinery is the most polluting in the country, because MT has effectively no environmental regulations), they blare Born in the USA and everyone in town sings their hearts out.

1995: Laurel, MT, this time with TL. Same spot on the cemetery. Same emcee. Twenty feet away, the QB and one of the super-athletic farmboys are parked in a Ford F-350, drinking and repeatedly playing “What’s Going On?” by 4 Non Blondes. TL (my second straightedge boyfriend) in his mail-order skate shoes and oversize clothes from the back pages of Thrasher, and his tricked-out Civic that nobody in town understands, grits his teeth and wants to hit them. If they only knew how ripped he is under all those strange clothes.

1996: Laurel, MT, now with G and R, right before I leave for Costa Rica. Again the cemetery. This year, singing the finale, I think I finally know what kind of song Born in the USA really is.

1997: Dillingham, AK. Skinnydipping with the fish-house crew in some warm shallow lake that goes for miles into the moraine. Then I stay up all night with TM, the swarthy auto-didact cold-storage foreman who would hold the ground until Editor had other ideas. The Pozos family (migrants from Guadalajara to Umatilla, and the heart of the fish-house operation) set off fireworks when the sun dips below the horizon for 30 minutes around 3 am. “How ‘bout them fireworks?”

1998: Washington, DC. The National Mall with M and a crowd of her Pakistani intellectual friends. We lie out under the obelisk with thousands of other interns. Metro back home to Falls Church is as packed as any third-world transit I’ve ever ridden. O, humanity!

1999: Portland and the Valley. Go to the party at the Rummel House, then met L on the Portland waterfront for fireworks. Sleep a bit in S’s empty apartment, then drive my Hyundai the 17 hours back to MT before boarding an airplane with a year’s-supply of malaria pills. Between Tri-Cities and Ritzville, Ray Suarez is doing a special episode of TOTN, on the history of the Hot Dog. When it finally fades to static, I think about how much I am going to miss Ray when I leave the country, and drive across the Hanford-radiated high desert writing out the utopia where my beloved Ray gets elected President of the United States. Later that year, they’d make him anchor of The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Take what you can get.

2000: Just back from the tropics and staying with inlaws-to-be in the stunningly tacky, yet rich, consumeropolis of Beaverton. Drink good Willamette Valley wine in their jacuzzi adjacent the neighborhood park, listening to adolescent boys with firecrackers out in the cul-de-sac.

2001: Bellingham with A, K and R. Lie out in the grass in some idyllic park in the hills above a lake. Everyone speaking Spanish. Then to a party at a waterfront house in Bellingham—mom and pop professors are out of town. See the fireworks rising above Anacortes on the drive back home to Seattle.

2002: Granada, Espana. Perfect echo of ‘98, there in the seat of a previous empire. Walk all over the Albacyn, and watch a huge red sun set over the mountains to the northwest. Read about Ferdinand and Isabella, eating peaches and pears.

2003: K, G, R, and I walk all over the LA Marina looking for our friends. Pre-cellphone days. Set up on the beach south of the canals and picnic among the crowds anyway. Head full of sand after lying back to watch the show.

2004: Koreatown Rooftop. Ten or twelve stories up for a “white trash” event whose Evite title is “They Hate Our Freedom.” We celebrate accordingly with wine coolers (Coors would be going too far) amazing vegan beans ‘n’ franks, and my not-so-vegan (but artistic) flag Jell-o. Later I feel like a jerk for satirizing the Born in the USA scene with a bunch of people who graduated from Amherst and Smith. Talk about anemic hipster cynicism. The fireworks panorama—from Compton on the south to the Hollywood Hills on the north, the Marina on the west to Echo Park on the east… and more importantly from half the rooftops in Koreatown—makes up for it.

2005: Hungover from the Marina mixup and “They Hate Our Freedom,” R and I leave town ISO something rootsier. Picnic according to habit in the park above Ventura, and then stumble on the last bits of the annual 4^th of July Ventura Street Fair downtown. Pledge to return.

2006: Just off a week of noble silence at Spirit Rock, I stay four days in somebody’s beautiful house on Portrero Hill. Their office is mine for the writing as long as they’re off in Chicago; and after the joy and peace of retreat I’m not ready to leave the Bay. On the morning of the 4^th, I ease off the ambient soundtrack and let Dangermouse take me to practice downtown, then spend the day alternately writing and walking the dead streets of Portrero, to listen to the hollers of the World Cup watchers waft out from the row-houses. The only flags are those of the soccer teams in the running, and not so much as a bottle rocket flies through the dead-quiet, post-game night.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [7]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , social theory

Reduced to Poetry · 25 June 2007

Been thinking my hermit-thoughts, of empty rooms and silence. But then they were reading Guantanamo detainees’ poetry on the radio, as I shuttled between the beautiful quarters where my days play out—the gorgeous little shala in Santa Monica and my Bel-Aire-adjacent campus idyll. Poetry about the insides of prison cells, the taunting of the sea, and us free rich Americans who let them waste away down there without protesting. Even though it’s such an easy, obvious thing to call out. God, who am I not to protest every fucking day; and who am I to live in this beauty while wishing hermitlike for a cell of my own?

The poems reminded me of something I read randomly in a bookstore in Havana’s university district at the height of the Clinton-Dole campaign with a hurricaine blowing in. The first poem below is from current Gitmo prisoner Osama Abu Kabir, and the second is a twisted anticipation, written some 50 years earlier by the Cuban poet Pablo Armando Fernandez. Reading these two against each other opens up space, and questions.

Is It True?
 
Is it true that the grass grows again after rain?
Is it true that the flowers will rise up again in the Spring?
Is it true that birds will migrate home again?
Is it true that the salmon swim back up their streams?
It is true. This is true. These are all miracles.
But is it true that one day we'll leave Guantanamo Bay?
Is it true that one day we'll go back to our homes?
I sail in my dreams. I am dreaming of home.
To be with my children, each one part of me;
To be with my wife and the ones that I love;
To be with my parents, my world's tenderest hearts.
I dream to be home, to be free from this cage.
But do you hear me, oh Judge, do you hear me at all?
We are innocent, here, we've committed no crime.
Set me free, set us free, if anywhere still
Justice and compassion remain in this world!

To a Young Freedom Fighter in Prison

You already know it:
suddenly
it's as if you'd awakened free.
Those walls don't isolate you,
they concentrate
all the world within you,
in your body which alone
without looking for itself, finds itself
resisting, living.
It's what matters.
Rumors from the world arrive
(never so many)
and they break the silence
of your brave solitude.
Torture, mockery,
do not degrade or humiliate you:
they've left your body transparent
and today, you see
your inner self more clearly.
You already know it,
you know what you don't want.
You don't want for yourself the freedom
of the commissioner, the district attorney, and the priest;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
of the bankers, the industrialists
and the landowners;
you don't want for yourself the freedom
that day by day brings you to the Parliament,
to the Army Generals, to the Academy, to the Stock Exchange;
you don't want that power, you don't envy that force.
You have no desire for adulation, for pampering, or obedience.
While your name is paraded in the press:
hero, bandit, sane one, crazy one,
adventurer, apostle, and many other things
that you didn't want to be, that you aren't,
you really know
because of you and for you, what brought you to yourself
to those four walls
where you resist without fear now.
That's what matters.

(0v0) isn't sure about Fernandez, the second time around. But Kabir has immediacy--more is than ought.

The first book is Poems from Guantanamo: The Detainees Speak.

The second book I think was called Aprendiendo Morir, and does not seem to be in print in English. If I remember right, it's beautiful--equal parts ideology and art. Translation by Daniela Gioseffi, retrieved here.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , social theory

Saturday XVI · 23 June 2007

On the edge of a breakthrough here; and it’s a sensitive time. My spine’s been talking back to me all week—a long last protest before she submits to something like alignment after embracing chaos for 10 weeks. Just stand up from my deskchair, and the accordion plays. I love it. My vertebrae aren’t quick to sublax, so after they went haywire in April in response to the sudden back-tension, they’ve been equally unwilling to marshal back to their quarters. So this is good; and someone in a backroom in my head is singing “Like a Virgin.” Time to re-learn some things.

Hello, backbends. Bring some endorphins with you when you come. Gawd can I use them. And goodbye entropy… for now.

But yeah, it is a sensitive time. And for the sake of the change, and the fact that the reopening does feel risky, I’m going to hold the scene constant right now. So I’m holding off on practice this weekend in Encinitas, and taking on the LA Film Festival as consolation.

Internet-diversions from this morning.

? First, last Sunday’s story on Chinese goldfarmers—the workhorses in multiplayer online games who labor for virtual money then arrange in-game exchanges to deliver it to RL rich players who then reimburse for RL cash. I’ve been waiting for The Magazine to write this story, because it is obsessed with social ambiguities: and what’s good about this story is its ambiguities. It delivers complications to every existing theory of choices within markets, virtual economies, work/play, and the metaphysics of online identity. There IS a world inside the world, in this sense: and the boundaries between the two are incomplete. Such a good story of our time.

? This is a frightening (and inspiring) commentary on UCLA research on students who say universities are failing to offer them the moral (and spiritual) development they feel they need. The article makes contradictory generalizations about the values university education promotes; and among my many responses, first is that all education is value-laden—even if the values it transmits are for rationalist objectivity and the scientific method of inquiry (or, alternatively, post-rationalism). Academics know this: and are moralistic about the craft—because (until we discover Bourdieu) we think we have to choose sides in the interpretation- versus- explanation battle. So, many academics to chunk off anything that looks like “morality/spirituality” within the world and ourselves—hermetically seal it off as unimportant subjective nonsense, and leave it to languish. Until one day we look at those childish beliefs, realize they're just a collection of old superstitions, and chuck them altogether.

Anyway, the article says that students turn to conservative religion, especially Christianity (which is happening at alarming rates all over the country) because professors refuse to offer moral or spiritual information. 

Maybe if my students had more classes whose motivating question was “How should we live?” or “What is the good life?” let alone studies of mindfulness and peace, they wouldn’t overwhelmingly report that their central educational goal is to learn to make as much money as possible. To be crude: the generation is out of joint, but it appears to know it.

? Pankaj Mishra’s (background) review in NYRB of Martha Nussbaum’s new book on India. Great short history on recent Hindu nationalism, and of social pressures brought by the WTO and other trade reforms and sudden economic change.

Not much discussion of Nussbaum, except for (1) on her point that the ruling party makes a “surreal” mixture of pro-corporate politics and promotion of crazy violence and (2) her Gandhian thesis that “the real struggle that democracy must wage is a struggle within the individual self, between the urge to dominate and defile the other and a willingness to live respectfully on terms of compassion and equality.”

In the final section, Mishra discusses the “culture of capitalism that thrives on ceaselessly promoting and multiplying desire,” and the selective ways in which India’s conversion to a consumer society is working with, and against, these tides of political violence.

? And, a trailer for an interesting little film. Parkour meets West LA.

? Human Tetris.

 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XIV · 9 June 2007

Self-loathing is here. She’s so uncommon in these parts that I barely recognize her, but this being the dissertation year(s), I should expect that symptom to arise now and again. It’s just an emotional state, an emotional state, an emotional state: don’t reify it, girl. You don’t need that shit.

 

But GAWD. She—the symptom—showed up in the night and bashed me and beat me with anxiety dreams. In one, I was in the most amazing airport-of-the-future, with old friends, headed toward an interplanetary flight. I dropped my “documents” (could the subconscious be any more obvious?) down a death-star-like shaft, but thought I could get through the boarding process fine on my finesse. Always one to work the system.  But as the line grew shorter, and shorter, and shorter, panic and self-loathing drew me down. Imposter! God it was horrible.

 

Marry years of fire-and-brimstone sermons (the terrible parable of the 5 foolish virgins is great for such torture) to a Philip K. Dick aesthetic and the possibilities for anxiety-narratives are horrid. I applied direct sunlight to my body, dragged myself to the studio for an excellent late-morning flow, then talked it all out with the Editor (which he semi-appreciated—it’s so rare I have the patience to discuss my work), and spent the afternoon in books. (Just an emotional state, yes: but one related to practical actions: oh the damn moral games writers play.)

 

Then we went reverse-slumming for our afternoon walk (Brentwood—our route takes us past the façade featured in the old opening sequence for the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air) and some people in a silver SUV cruised by and pelted us with eggs. Actually, they missed—though one that splatted a pole came close. My eff-you reflex fired instantly (spoiled kids, go find yourselves some real effing danger!), but now I’m delighted about it. Considering the neighborhood, they could have been assaulting People of Consequence. Brave. The Editor’s fumes didn’t start up until later and now he’s real mad. That’s the trouble with being uber-nostalgia-man: the past’s effects increase with time. Hell, I’ll take comic over cosmic egg-pelting anytime. Real egg in the face would have been a nice release, and cleaned up so easily.

 

Anyway, since it’s still a semi-ease-up Saturday, a few links before returning to the lit-review writing.

? You don’t say? They’re jacking the numbers about “offshore” (including uber-sweatshop) production? Straightforward discussion in Business Week to put yesterday’s widely-hailed drop on the US trade deficit in perspective. 

? Cult of the Amateur out this week. Andrew Keen, who has equated the democracy of Web 2.0 with Marxism (the horror), decries the death of “our cultural standards and moral values” as hierarchies in information-provision are flattened and we learn more from each other. Awwww. Keep at it, little bloggers.

? Most intense astangi I know sent over this vision of nuclear holocaust. Flash is annoying, but it’s hilarious. Even though the artist forgot South Africa and North Korea. 

? In honor of the egg-pelters, this is a crazy NYT Mag short film on kids and money in Los Angeles.

? Richard Rorty, post-pragmatist and the "most talked-about philosopher" of our time, is dead at 75.

? (Quiet hype.) (And.) Bad owl!

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [4]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception

Metaphysical Car Wreck, Part II · 7 June 2007

…As I was saying just before sleep the other night night: Lots of meditation teachers warn that it is easy to hide inside your mindfulness or contemplative practice; and the same is true for asana. Many of us feel this practice to be a refuge—a beautiful, true stroke of luck in our tragicomic lives. Even at our most sincere—when we’re not using the practice to construct a self-image that’s worked-out, insightful, balanced—we’re capable of practicing without looking at whatever it is we don’t want to see. 

Ok. So, it is easy to conflate practice and therapy. Personal time, quiet time, reflection time…, and the leavening sanitymaker, the place we air out the anxiety or the rage or the giddiness. 

Westerners are tormented by our selves, and we know it. The main way we run is by consuming. (Good thing for the capitalist elite, for now.) Meanwhile, floating around the ether are, let’s say, three broad entry-points to facing the pain: drugs, therapy, and religion. Let’s take all three treatments at face value, as if the do what they claim to do. So, drugs mainly go after symptoms. Nevermind all that: it’s not conceptually different from “retail therapy.”  

But self-analytic therapy and contemplative practice look for causes and, at their best, rip pain-sources out by their roots—the first by acceptance and/or release, the second by detachment. Contemplative practice posits that we have reactive habits which bind us; therapy posits that we split off, repress and project pieces of our inner experience in self-deceptive, painful ways.  

Both are accurate pictures of inner life, and both “solutions” are semi-successful. In fact, Western common-sense understandings of what it is to be a human are entirely shot through with everyday assumptions that both psychotherapeutic and contemplative theories of human experience are largely true. For pragmatists who define truth as “what works” (the Buddha; William James; me; you unless you’re a committed solipsist or other philosophical nutjob), then, the insights of each approach qualify the other’s status as any be-all-end-all solution. 

From this practical, non-fundamentalist perspective—cooking up nourishment with whatever happens to be in the kitchen—here’s the question of the day. What to do about anger—e.g., when a troll shows up in your community and both infuriates you and makes you act in ways you later regret? 

Here’s Ken Wilber taking contemplation and therapy on their own terms, and making them complements. When it comes to contemplative practitioners who use practice to transcend anger, yet have bits of anger they’ve previously split off and projected, he writes (IS, 129):  

Denying ownership [of anger] is not dis-identification but denial. It is trying to dis-identify with an impulse BEFORE ownership is acknowledged and felt, and that dis-ownership produces symptoms, not liberation. And once that prior dis-ownership has occurred, the dis-identification and detachment process of meditation will likely make it worse, but in any event will not get at the root cause. 

Does it work to rely on Integral thought here? Not that I don’t have a passel of doubts about this overall system: its central metaphor, the AQAL matrix, is one big philosophy-eating box plot. And its proponents seem to spend their efforts in forcing the world into its color-coded schema (I’d rather see them working to integrate the schema back into itself at the roots)—this focus leads to a lot of talk about the matrix, and less talk about experience. There is in this, unrestrained, the colonialist impulse of conquering-by-mapping (a trouble that Wilber, the original master mind, doubtless understands because his grasp of the last 30 years of social theory is awesome). And even though my hero Pierre Bourdieu deployed much of what I like best about Wilber’s sensibility decades ago, Wilber can synthesize like nobody’s business, in ways useful to people all over the epistemic-ideological-geographical-cultural map. In Chapter 6 of Integral Spirituality. He makes simple the complementarity of analysis and contemplation by describing pathologies in the ultimately more transcendent and interesting practice of contemplation (126): 

Once… repression occurs, it is still possible to experience the anger, but no longer the ownership of the anger…. I can practice vipassana meditation on that [disowned] anger as long as I want, where I… simply notice that “there is anger arising, there is anger arising, there is anger arising” – but all that will do is refine and heighten my awareness of anger [as a an object outside of me]. Meditative and contemplative endeavors simply do not get at… the fundamental ownership-boundary problem…. Painful experience has demonstrated time and again that meditation simply will not get at the original shadow, and can, in fact, often exacerbate it. Amidst all the wonderful benefits of meditation and contemplation, it is still hard to miss the fact that even long-time meditators still have considerable shadow elements. 

No kidding! Shall I name names, or will an awareness of our own shortcomings be sufficient? 

I love the idea of asana practice as a refuge, and in the past year of family trauma it has been nothing but refuge to me. I don’t doubt this or regret it: I’m just damn thankful. But if we think that having a practice means we don’t have to work on ourselves in other ways, it is a refuge from the world? Or, again, from ourselves?

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [13]
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , beta state , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Having Objects, Having a Body · 29 May 2007

So on Friday, Chris and I edged out of a nighttime reception at San Francisco’s Asian Art Museum and made up the escalator for the South and Southeast Asian galleries. Chris is the best companion for this kind of thing, since strapped with the most serious antiquities fetish I’ve ever witnessed, and because his talk is sharp and attentive and wryly clever. An historian, he’s writing a book on the half-forgotten American plunderer who “discovered” Macchu Picchu and packed off its riches to Yale University. In this age of crocodile tears for colonial sins (Harvard, the Getty, the South), Yale alone knows better than to undo the secrets of its own primitive accumulation, and so sits on its Peruvian treasures with the excuse that it paid for them back in the day. Interesting questions: patrimony and who owns it, the price of culture, the justice of market exchanges between such unequal parties. All this achatter in my consciousness, ascending on the escalator...

…and then we step into the museum-dim that is supposed to hood your perception—curate and domesticate it—and make modern whatever primitive, realer-than-real THING it pretends to offer for our dithering, sentimental edification…

And there’s Siva, four feet tall in sandstone and under those soft supposedly-harmless lights, surely more gorgeous than the first day he was carved. The THING pulls the plug on our banter. Something like nirodhah happens for the duration of a gulp.

O, goddam. Screw curation. That belongs in a museum, my foot.

And screw modernism, for the moment. Smarmy Singer-Sargeant, lame lame Monet: all this stuff intended to look good on the walls of the well-heeled, or in the postmodern cases simply unable to resist their own domestication, despite “subversive” intentions.

How often is it that a thing hits you cold like that? Maybe it’s just that Siva is stalking me now—tomorrow, for the first time in two months, I’ll face up to his terrible aspect, Bhairvasana, and the others—but even if I were safe from Siva, I think this chunk of sandstone would undo me a little. I think the yoga makes me receptive to, even credulous in, what the thing might have to say. For the superficiality of my engagement with the Indian myths (and superficial is all it will ever be), their effect is still interesting—and potent. “Art” doesn’t often know how to go to that place even when we want it to: it’s just there to comment on something, or to be appreciated, or to suggest the brilliance of its “creator,” or—let’s face it—to occupy space. Seriously: claiming to “get” most contemporary art is like claiming to “get” the emptiest passages of Derrida. And the whole stupid anthropology of museumification doesn’t exactly facilitate transformational aesthetic experiences: professional mothballers don’t exactly move from their guts.

Or… maybe I’m jaded, and a good dose of the ancient is my only hope.

I’d think so, but a strange thing actually happened last week between myself and an overt-avant mass of plastic and cardboard at the Brentwood Getty. A gimmicky, pandering installation piece, which left my brother the postmodern artist unmoved, made me want to cry. (Albeit not actually cry: maybe the best that contempo art can do is make us want to feel—itself a mediated response.)

This THING, Tim Hawkinson’s Uberorgan, is so damn wonderful. You walk inside it half-knowing, because it’s suspended in the atrium-now-peritoneum of the hilltop building—where glass and perfect Greek marble reflect and re-reflect the clarified white smog to encase you in unreal, heavenly brightness. In the midst of this, the billowing white plastic bellows of the Uberorgan are just one more strange membrane. But you stand under it, on the marble floor, and its shapes start to seem sensible—you see a giant white liver, an opaque stomach, and a heart. You’re so interested that when the Chuck E. Cheese factor kicks in, suddenly transforming the bodily “organs” into an organ, instead of getting caught in the pun, you yourself are transformed by it. The organ is bellowing, making an ultra-bass kind of whalesong that shouldn’t be possible for air pushed through giant plastic bags fitted with awkward cardboard pipes. The sound makes you be in the membrane, observe the functioning of the organ/organs like a living, digesting thing. It incorporates you, digests you a little. When the music stops, you’re like the idiot in a game of musical chairs, standing under the billows with a stupid wonderment that, like all postmodern experience, turns into an writeoff when you lower your head and make eye contact with all the others who, at the same moment as you, are getting and shrugging off the joke.

So the Uberorgan trivializes itself at the end of the day, but if you are in Los Angeles before September, you must experience it. If you liked Innerspace, you’ll love the Uberorgan.

Anyway, in these cases, there wasn’t much difference in my delight between a dead-serious god statue and a deadpan plastic organ. Odd, really.

I think the common passion here (if passion is a “capacity to be moved,” as the other ancients would have it) is the having-a-body practice: the yoga, for all its tendencies to strip down and dust off my inner and outer life, is shaping my experience of having-a-world. And the art that clearly speaks to the way I have-a-world somehow points to the physical practice—either its evocative history or its more literal inner pleasures.

CJ’s return to Sartre this week reminds me of his associate Merleau-Ponty’s every-other-page refrain: I have objects because I have a body. That may miss quite a bit, considering that M-P’s idea of “body” was purely physical and there’s plenty about a body that’s subtle and energetic too. But there is something to be said for objects that go for the viscera: if a thing cannot go to that place—pity. If it can, I’m ready to call it art.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

Saturday XII · 19 May 2007

Multitasking is such sweet solace.

Stupid solace, more like. I’ve got a 178-page .pdf and piles of forms from the university’s Institutional Review Board; and they are slowly eating my Saturday amid water-breaks and internet interludes. I’m an impatient foot-stamper in the face of bureaucracy, too immature or maybe just unable to muster the methodical resignation of the institutionally productive. I should just buck up another five hours and dispense with this task, but that would be criminally workish and there’s there’s only so much more sitting here I can do before secreting to the beach.

The diversions I shouldn’t have even considered today:

? Wiccans. Suggesting we question the secret lives of tax collectors. Closet nature-worshippers?

? Manufacturing belief, in Salon. Evolutionary biologist and fringe member of the Dawkinsian atheism-from-above (i.e. academia) project Lewis Wolpert comes on as much more satyr than sage here. In a nice way. His excellent argument is completely Lockean and happens to be unproveable (though he claims to dislike philosophers), so it’s obnoxious that he spends the second half of the interview dismissing things he knows nothing about on the allegation that concrete “evidence” is lacking. So his ego gets away with him. Strange.

? It’s not that I love The Yes Men just for infiltrating corporate meetings in a giant penis suit. It's that I love that they are pitch-perfect in isolating and talking back to the ideology of the free market. Here they are in a recent article, widely published.

The problem is that [the freemarket] is a force against which a few concerned citizens becoming vegetarians, planting trees in the Amazon, or riding bicycles are no match at all. And despite the almost psychotically sunny predictions of corporate seers like Stewart Brand and Kevin Kelly, the global free market doesn't want much besides profits and growth—its own survival comes in a very distant third.

? Speaking of intellectual crushes. I had a thing for Jerry Fodor for a decade, until meeting him in person. I’m getting it back, with each new essay he writes. He makes the hardest questions about the nature of consciousness look easy, including in this week’s short review for the LRB.

? This video is great, although it uncritically limits the field of political morality to “liberal” and “conservative.” Also, considering that in the era of YouTube "seven minutes is the new War and Peace," the beginning is slow. It’s social psychologist Jonathan Haidt discussing the roots of moral and aesthetic judgments at the New Yorker conference week before last. At the end he compares liberal and conservative to Siva and Visnu (sorry, Brahma): an unintentional illustration of the trouble with any attempt to simplify moral viewpoints onto a single left-right dimension. 

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Yoga Is Dangerous, Part II · 16 May 2007

A friend just took a group of welllll-off college students, most residents of the OC and pre-law majors, to visit a tiny downtown non-profit—a support center for undocumented workers. It was the first time many of these students had talked to an immigrant worker as a real person, even if such people inivisibly do most of their food preparation and house and grounds work at home. (People in the US who eat food, wear clothes, or live ‘neath rooves are every one of us dependent on deeply vulnerable immigrants’ low-paid work to make our own lives comfortable, in case that wasn’t quiiiite apparent.)

Visiting the workers’ center wasn’t revolutionary, but it gave these students a little bit of new data in case they ever want to imagine themselves into workers’ shoes and see them as hypothetical equals. Doesn’t it take some ability to go there emotionally—and some practice doing so—in order to have the heart quiver at the suffering of another? And doesn’t this kind of thing put one’s own social situation in perspective in a crucial way?

It got me thinking: many of these students are second-generation immigrants, with parents who have worked tirelessly to give them every kind of privilege. To live beautiful lives: in which most of the daily struggle to eat and find shelter and safety is edited out or made to appear easy. I always like the people who make things look easy. And many of my energies are, no kidding, dedicated to living a beautiful life. But I wonder if it’s at all beneficial to live with so little interpersonal contact on an (at-least hypothetically) equal level with people of other skin colors, or genders, or class, or national origin. I feel bad for these 20-year-olds, in that they’re just starting to learn how specific is their personal, comfortable experience of the world. They are at a loss to empathize with people who are not like themselves and, perhaps worse, don’t even know themselves enough to see that all the attributes they take to be their identities are quite accidental.

Mircea Eliade writes in Yoga: Immortality and Freedom that yoga is revolutionary because it is a deconditioning project. For centuries (albeit not from the edge of time), practitioners have sought to undo not only their psychological but their social and cultural patterns and presuppositions. In Pantanjali’s straightforward, no-bullshit schema, this is an arduous and “backbreaking” practice of quieting the monkeyness of the monkeymind.

“Now, this problem of the “conditioning” of man (sic) (and its corollary, rather neglected in the West: his “deconditioning”) constitutes the central problem of Indian thought…. With a rigor unknown elsewhere, India has applied itself to analyzing the various conditionings of the human being….. [I]t has done so… in order to learn how far the conditioned zones of the human being extend and to see if anything else exists beyond these conditionings…. [The sages] found that man’s psychological, social, cultural, and religious conditionings were comparatively easy to delimit and hence to master; the great obstacles to the ascetic and contemplative life arose form the activity of the unconscious.

[F]or India, knowledge of the systems of “conditioning” could not be an end in itself: it was not knowing them that mattered, but mastering them; if the contents of the unconscious were worked upon, it was in order to “burn” them…. (p. xvi: it pains me to quote so little of this wonderful book)

As mentioned earlier, yoga is dangerous. Undoing social and cultural conditionings may have been easy for sages, but look around and see how difficult it is for us. We are pickled in culture from the outside in: it’s coercive, it’s loud, it’s ubiquitous because internalized—consumerism, sex, bodyimage, race, status, prestige, power, and more consumerism. What does it take to crack our social identities, especially considering our love for reinforcing them by associating with similar people, in safe spaces, and taking our political-economic, gendered, racialized reality for granted?

In keeping with the Yoga is Dangerous theme, and understanding that Westerners are in a particularly remedial situation, I’d say this takes not less life-in-the-world, but more. The only semi-successful attempts at social deconditioning I’ve ever seen result from loosening up the edges of your own perspective. Culture is rooted in pre-judice and so is our sense of normalcy: beginning to undo it takes a cessation not of mere mental tics, but of consuming, accumulating prestige, victimhood complexes, out-group suspicions, and egomaniacal getting ahead of "the rest," at least long enough to see past our situated selves and see the world a little bit more as it is.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [3]
Categories: astanga yoga , esoteric shit , evolution , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Saturday XI · 12 May 2007

The real argument of last Saturday’s wisdom quiz was that fools seek situations where they don’t have to think deeply or engage fundamental questions. The wise eat it raw, and don’t need their world to be pre-digested by preachers or teachers or ideological shorthand.

I've been thinking about this in relation to the commodification of music: the smoothing, compressing, normalizing, generalizing, predigestion that happens to its perfectly edgy elements when an artist makes a bid for the big market. The difference between the genius Regina Spektor's penultimate record and her last, whose final track "Summer in the City" for all its soupy abstract over-beauty I can't heartbreakingly get out if my head.

However! I intend to get back to troubling about Monday’s meeting with my adviser. In which: I try to sell her on ethical consumerism (for a dissertation chapter, that is). Meantime, today’s links are all provocative and question-opening. May we remain open to the questions.

The views expressed here do not necessarily reflect the “position” of Insideowl dot com.

? PORN. Oh; I forgot. Not only is the internet edifying as hell and the ultimate community-builder--a ceaseless human wonder--but... what can beat skin? Great video from Good (safe for the office).

? NYTBR Review of Hitchens and his clever new religion-screed.

“The human wish to credit good things as miraculous and to charge bad things to another account is apparently universal.”

? Buddhistgeeks discussion on the birth of the seeker. Fantastic question and good connection of hungry-mind and the will to achieve, but is this as good as it gets?

? So is some kind of spiritual or kosmic consciousness the only hope for reversing the insane tide of consumerism and capitalism gone astray? Social scientists, take note. Daniel Pinchbeck at realitysandwich.

“In my head, I keep writing my movie of the next few years. In this gripping adventure yarn, the ticking time-bomb of ignorance and greed gets defused at the last moment by teams of stylish secret agents of consciousness and compassion, working in coordination across the planet.”

? Gadfly artist Bansky makes the New Yorker. Iyengar says never degrade that which another holds sacred. When is this not the best advice?

? Is all moral philosophy just a post-hoc legitimation scheme? Great article on the neurology of moral judgments in the WSJ science section.

? ALSO, candy. Math rock this, but ooh I like it. Watch. (Yes, they always sing like that.) "Atlas" on Altertube.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , evolution , having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound , spirituality

Saturday XI · 5 May 2007

Today’s extra four hours of sleep brought to me by: the American Sociological Association, Air France (“please keep your eye cover, with our compliments"), and... the Quadratus Lumborum.

Managing to sleep past dawn is reason to celebrate, but there’s a large chink in my equanimity. It’s going on five weeks without the endorphin-levels I’ve come to take for granted: 15 or so deep backbends a day make a big difference when they go away. Practice is the province of a different body, which today has me in a strop. Anyway, a few Saturday links, as usual:

? Christianity catches The Secret.

This is truly amazing: conservative Christians were unlikely to buy into the “law of attraction,” both because it signals the dreaded “new age” thinking, and because it directly contradicts the “God is in control” cosmology. But I guess there is no limit to how far a self-serving idea will travel. And, if it brings on some gratitude practice, so much the better.

? Speaking of syncretism: punk rock yoga. More punk than yoga. 

? Vanity Fair has a spread of airbrushed photos of “leading lights” of yoga. A few of them are very nice, but overall: Godhelpus. Not linking it, so google at will. Apparently this is part of their championing of ethical consumerism, which culminated in last month's "Green Issue." Commodify your good intentions!

? Are you wise? A sociologist’s scorecard.

? TLS review of the new book Inequality.com, which critically examines the potential for the web to foster news kinds of democracy and social equality.

In a clever reading of McLuhan, the authors suggest that his famous term the “global village” should be read less as a metaphor for the interconnectedness of far-flung places than as a forecast of the 360-degree surveillance.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , markets-networks-society , morality , power of suggestion , social theory

Saturday X · 28 April 2007

? Flickrblockrs. Funny kids.

? Speaking of, why do some people/ inventions/ ideas fly?

1. Social structure (Your cultural capital/ cred, or, “ideas whose time has come”). 2. Quality / Merit (The “cream rises” argument). 3. Karma (The “the caste system is there for a good reason” argument. See #2.) 4. Power (The agent you hired does it for you, or your gun-penis-bank account is bigger than the rest. See #1.) 5. God (No comment.) 6. CHANCE.

Epistemologist of chance, archaeologist of self-deception, and deep self-promoter Nassim Taleb has a new book this out week. His project is to trace the ways we fool ourselves into thinking we know more than we really do.

? Jack White, pasty and unrefined and exciting as usual. Is he channeling Eminem on a couple of levels or is it just me? Not that this ruins it for me.

? Larry Sanger, Wikipedia’s disillusioned co-founder, writes in Edge about the boons of Wikipedia’s egalitarianism and its revolutionary possibilities for reformulating common knowledge. Yet he also says Wikipedia is broken, both from a pragmatic perspective and ultimately from his realist position that, in the end, re-legitimizes traditional powerholders.

Wikipedia is the perfect vehicle for epistemic egalitarianism, since it allows virtually everyone to edit. [But] nobody really believes that reality is constructed by Wikipedia.... [T]he power to declare society's background knowledge is awesome… political decisions are deeply influenced by that…. [T]he internet makes it possible for society's background knowledge to be shaped by a far broader, inclusive group of people…. [But] if we reduce experts to the level of the rest of us..., we reduce society's collective grasp of the truth.

? The TLS reviews I Am a Strange Loop, Hofstadter's book on the science of (self)consciousness. Nice discussion of how investigating subjectivity is difficult for scientists, who work inside the ideology of objectivity.

? New Stuart Davis Show—an integral take on current events. Usually he’s hilarious, but this show is about Virginia Tech.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , sound

Saturday VIII · 6 April 2007

Links for another Saturday, in miniature, from someone who’s just coming back online...

? Profe Douglas Hofstadter makes a couple of nonchalantly brilliant quips in the NYTMag, on the occasion of his new book on orders of consciousness, the phenomenon of self-awareness and a modest proposal for the existence of souls.

? Alterati interviews documentarian Micha Peled, about his brave and crazy film, China Blue.

“We’re all told we live in democracies where the important decisions get voted on but in fact many areas of our daily lives are controlled by corporations that are not accountable to anyone—and we are not consulted on the decisions that they make.”

? Just so we are on the same page, The Economist points out that: “In secret locations and using secret methods, human beings are scanning lots and lots of books for Google.” Good thoughts on what this will mean for different genres of content heretofore known as “books”—from scholarly research to poetry anthologies. Nice; but blithely trusting as usual for TE.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [2]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory

Saturday VII · 25 March 2007

? Guns and Yoga, in the NYT. It does take a Burbank day in the life to bring the together phrases "namaste" and "lock and load." 

I was the only guy in the yoga class…. they know they had a rifle-eyed street panther in their midst? .... Like the legless, armless silhouette I shot at earlier that day, I had holes of self-loathing blasted out of me. My Corpse Pose must’ve looked eerily authentic…. All these thoughts whizzed through my head like tracer bullets as I lay there, in the evening gloom of the studio, with a dozen moms breathing mom-breaths around me. I floated out of my body. I hovered over Burbank. I was one with my target, and my target was bliss. Namaste. Lock and load. 

It's gross to get off on the idea of shooting anybody, there being a war on. But looking for meaning in Burbank, the author might have limited starting points. And he writes pretty good.

? NYT science article on the argument that morality’s rooted in our biology, and that four behaviors—empathy, the ability to learn and follow social rules, reciprocity and peacemaking—are the basis of sociality. This evolutionary perspective is a bad bad threat to the last 200 years of social theory, which assumes that social life is a product of human creativity and institutions. I’m deeply bought into this legacy, but sometimes the evolutionary stuff is sexy. For example:

Morality is as firmly grounded in neurobiology as anything else we do or are….” Biologists ignored this possibility for many years, believing that because natural selection was cruel and pitiless it could only produce people with the same qualities. But… natural selection favors organisms that survive and reproduce, by whatever means. And it has provided people… with “a compass for life’s choices that takes the interests of the entire community into account, which is the essence of human morality.
 

? Segment of This American Life, the  AV version. How does the moving image enhance this word-dependent narrative about… the moving image? Not enough to make me learn how to turn on my television. Or sit still for the rest of the show.

(Michael Leunig sounds like an old crabapple talking about television and relationship, but I have to admit it’s about that simple to me as well. No need for social theory on this one.)

? Smart review in the TLS of Mick Mann’s ethnic cleansing book, in which Mann argues that it is not African or Balkan nations but democratic countries that are responsible for “the most successful cleansing the world may have ever seen.” His examples: the US, which saw an 80% drop in its Native American population, and Australia, where 90% of Aborigenes died, in both cases mostly during the 1800s and early 1900s. No shit. This recollection suddenly puts these rich “white” nations’ liberal, missionary zeal in serious question.

? Am ambivalent about Susan Sontag, but not about Jenny Diski, who reviews a new Sontag collection and an Annie Liebowitz photo book in the LRB. The second half, on the photographs, is great.

A new S quotation:

I am often asked if there is something I think writers ought to do, and recently in an interview I heard myself say: ‘Several things. Love words, agonise over sentences. And pay attention to the world.’ Needless to say, no sooner had these perky phrases fallen out of my mouth than I thought of some more recipes for writer’s virtue. For instance: ‘Be serious.’ By which I meant: never be cynical. And which doesn’t preclude being funny.

And an old one:

I like to feel dumb. It’s how I know there’s more in the world than me.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: evolution , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory

Saturday VI · 18 March 2007

Uh oh. Interesting proposal in my in-box this morning, to assist a philosophy of science class next quarter—a small honors seminar. The prof is a chemist-philosopher who has written a great deal on the (very exciting) periodic table, and has a way of shredding those who poach physics to substantiate the claim that everything is connected. Given that I use sociology to make that claim, this endeavor would sharpen my schtick. And it would take me back to my undergrad years, of running the philosophy club (very Secret History) and writing papers on truth-claims of the Institute for Creation Research.

I ought give thanks for my grants and focus on the dissertation, but I haven’t taught for nearly a year and it itches. And I don’t have a strong practice of saying no, in general. We’ll see how the schedules mesh.

Meantime, since yesterday morning got away from me, here’s the usual Saturday sweep, a morning late. Hope all is well with you all.

? New issue this week of of democratiya, “the liveliest and most stimulating new intellectual journal on political themes.” Short reading-investment for decent context on global politics debates. The review of Saskia Sassen’s historical sociology is a bit awkward but covers key questions and ideas.

? The Guardian reviews Terry Eagleton’s new book. After all that overcooked lit crit, his popular writing (especially The Gatekeeper) has been delightfully smart and kitschily quotable. His new offering is on the meaning of life. What a public service.

? For an even more refined version The Secret, an infographic.

? This is amazing. Thic Nhat Hahn has returned to Vietnnam after 40 years of exile, fomenting Buddhist revival. For the ceremonies, “Marxists are invited to recite passages and statements from Marx which reflect his spirituality and his love for humanity.” That’s saying a lot, considering the so-called Marxism of the government that locked him out. SB, I thought you would be particularly inspired.

? William T. Vollman is one of the greatest writers writing, but he’ll be gone before he’s appreciated. He’s uncynically human, mercilessly so. Here’s the new book (& LAT Review), about poor people. Poor people In general. Bold guy.

? To see. Documentary arguing that “the west has become trapped in a false idea of what it means to be human.” It's a modern history of the rational actor model, the theory of action that makes mainstream econ and poli sci into such abstract-theoretical exercises that I got out of that business and into sociology. The film is only airing on BBC, but the linked article is a nice, practical overview of the theory, and an outline of the its worldly consequences. 

? Chris, T-shirts.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: arbitrage , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality

Saturday V · 10 March 2007

Ok. Here are this week’s Saturday diversions.

? How, or why, do we (evolve to) believe in god? Even if you practice panentheism (yogis, Spinozists), atheism or agnosticism, do you carry a deep-seated idea of a humanoid god?

On this note, a bright star in the smart-mag orbit (that is, it was forwarded all over the place) this week was Darwin’s God in the NYT Magazine. It’s print-it-out-for-the-bathtub long and focuses on logical debates in the socio-anthro-biology of religion, but the last two pages (beginning from “In 1997” on p. 10) are an elegant weighing of whether religion and science ought be separate spheres. Unfortunately, it leaves the answers up to us.

?  One suggestion for this scene: Ecumenical Spam. Wow.

? Here is Salon’s expose of The Secret, sent over by RE. I fly far enough below popular culture to have avoided the phenomenon, but Salon's righteous, crisp tour-de-force makes me suspect the truly weird aspect of this apparently superstitious, self-serving project is the way it leverages the idea that events begin with “thought-forms” to serve the most craven materialism of “getting things.” I mean: If thought-forms are what’s truly real, then shouldn’t thought-forms be sufficient for happiness?

Excerpt: I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don't have enough money because they're ‘blocking it with their thoughts’ [and] … by a culture in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement. …It's bound up in the… idea of self-esteem, the kind of confidence you get not from testing yourself, but from ‘believing’ in yourself. This modern idea of faith isn't arrived at… by asking questions, but by getting answers. Instead of inquiry… we have excuses for not engaging in inquiry at all.

? Jean Baudrilliard, the philosopher-clown and “sociologist,” has departed for the desert of the real. The guy was intellectually cute and terminally insincere, which makes for funny commentary. The TLS is a pretty good example.

? Have you ever gotten to compare everyday life in multiple third world regions, and noticed eerie similarities across the globe? Zinc roofing, breeze blocks, meticulously-swept earthen floors, firepit kitchens, struggles to find water. As Mike Davis is always saying, Wake up! This is how most people live! His Planet of Slums is out, reviewed in the LRB. Please do not let the torrent of images and numbers stop you.

? On which note, this guy takes very beautiful photographs of Americans’ refuse. He says:

When I... talk about our rampant consumerism, no one ever seems to think I am talking about them… [It] is like talking to someone with an alcohol problem. Our culture is in deep denial about what we are doing to our planet, to the people of other nations, and the people of the future. And… we are in denial about how our consumer lifestyle is sapping our own spirits. We are slowly killing ourselves, and we all feel it. We know we are somehow getting screwed, that all this stuff isn't really satisfying, that we have lost something sacred that is related to the very core of our selves. But still we don’t act.

? New book on modern India.

? I'm not a Speaking of Faith podcaster, but this piece on author and yoga instructor Matthew Sanford is good. It is not about the so-called triumph of the human spirit. It’s about having a body. About how a paraplegic body is still, if I may, a platform for awakening.

? For R and any other Studio 360 podcasters, people who read it are loving Kurt Anderson’s novel.

? And, the etymology of meh. They say it is just blog-glot.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: having a body , markets-networks-society , morality , science , self-deception , social theory , spirituality

Letter to NPR · 8 March 2007

I just read a nice new working paper by UC Irvine’s David Meyer, who researches peace movements (including the current one) in the United States. It got me thinking about responding to John Mayer, the famous musician I hope none of you know, who got a huge piece of Morning Edition air time today on NPR.

 

Dear NPR,

 

John Mayer (age 29) claims to speak to, and for, his generation.

In Thursday’s interview, he ridiculed war protest songs and championed a new “political” music about “waiting on the world to change” rather than taking action. Forget old-school music that intends to wake up a listener to “making a change”: Mayer sings to express his helplessness and inability to commit to any particular path of action. 

Well, in the terminology of his generation, John Mayer’s a wuss.

We are the generation who began Teach for America, vitalized the ethical globalization movement that altered the exclusionary course of the WTO, and empowered a new progressivism in the Democratic party by championing Howard Dean. Though we graduated college amid the dot-com boom, more of us opted for the Peace Corps than for Pets.com. We are teachers, hybrid-drivers, and yoga practitioners. We hailed Neil Young's Living With War without a freaking drop of irony (listen free), and are still streaming it and letting it make us cry. And if you think 9-11 killed our spirits, then wait a few years until it’s us at the helms of organizations and running the Congress. 

If Mayer thinks that everyone else his age is spineless, shallow and arrogantly self-centered, it’s not because he’s channeling the zeitgeist. Instead, he’s probably only listening to himself.

Our generation has a term for that too. It's megalomaniac.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [5]
Categories: markets-networks-society , morality , self-deception , social theory , sound

Saturday Morning · 10 February 2007

A while back when I lived in the tropics for a year, in a fiberboard and corrugated zinc sort of lean-to, I thought about luxury. Because I had all kinds of it: unlike my housemates, I had a laptop computer, occasional dinner in some excellent restaurant, the option for hailing a cab on days I didn’t feel like a 90 minute walk home through dust and crushing sun. A careening 15 minutes in a 1983 Lada, in that context, was far more meaningful than a jaunt these days down Sunset Blvd in somebody’s Porsche. Luxury isn’t absolute: it arises out of contrast. The ethical implications of this make me squirm, but anyway. 

Saturday morning is not like the others, and so I revel in it like crazy. I get up after the sun, scrap the esoteric breathing shit, don’t bother like usual to pack 2 meals and 4 bags of books and clothes for the day, and clean the house and my in-box until 10. At 10, the minute the despised Click and Clack come on the radio, I make for my friend J’s vinyasa class, which after six days of Mysore is a long cool iced tea. Now that I look at it, housecleaning and late morning vinyasa flow maps exactly on my (unkind) stereotype of the uninspired Brentwood housewife life. But god is it nice one day a week. 

Cleaning my in-box includes a couple of hours picking up links that have been sent me during the week, reading the smart mags and the not-so-smart ones, and a blogroll. This week, I’m going to try posting the notes I’d usually send to different sub-sets of you, to see if that’s useful. If I post something that’s 5 days old and so stale in internet time, it’s because when I read/listened to it this morning, I liked it anyway. Cheers. 

Princeton ESP lab closes. “How do you get peer reviewed when you don’t have peers?”

 

Jenny Diski explains Second Life to the over-30 set. I love her writing.

 

On neuroplasticity, or changing your mind to change your brain. No surprise to you fans of habits-and-will student John Dewey, or to yogis. (Skip the first 30 min.) 

 

Lethem on The Ecstasy of Influence in Harper’s. Read it as his typical looky-here cultural omnivorism, or an exploration of the boundaries between self and others.

 

Say Everything. NYM sociologizes the generation gap in privacy. Similar theme.

 

MIA video.

 

Buddhist geeks. Sort of promising.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment [1]
Categories: arbitrage , having a body , integration , markets-networks-society , science , sound

Prolegomena to any future manifesto · 25 January 2007

I. Matthew K says he didn’t see this coming. Me neither. I’m blogging because slow deductive academia is giving me a cramp and because Charles J told me to do it while I while I was entering a suggestion-receptive state. (That is, in the 15 minute brain-wave stretch we learn to do on ourselves before astanga practice.) 

II. ANYWAY, more later on faith in academia and the hooey of hermetic seals, mentioned earlier. The Dawkins posse have rallied at the edges this year in the most brilliant way. It’s a belief-purge!! I love that they’re screaming at us to get serious, root out superstition, and take verificationism to the limit. And: they are delusional. But that’s another day. I still take their point that skizoid belief systems are common and problematic.

III. Attempts at cleverness after yoga practice:            

A----So, what kind of sociologist are you?

B----((Lost for words))

A----That is… are you a Durkheimean, or a Marxist?          

B----(((Mental images of fuzzy Marx peering over my shoulder))) A nondualist! 

Yeah. It’s just as easy to keep the practice in an airtight container. “Me time” for achievers. But what when it eventually turns fom a consolation for daily life into its baseline? Then you might want the easy way out – cultivating alienation from the day job, or quitting it, because you can’t feel “authentic” doing it anymore.  Whatever.

IV. There’s also the possibility of pushing back into intellectual life, and the empiricist limits its placed around mind, consciousness, morality and evolution. The edgy ones are doing that in a way that’s loaded to shoot up kind of a lot of previously serviceable theory—looking at things like evolving value systems, the social nature of selfhood, and…mind. This is the time for revolutions in everybody’s working assumptions on the nature of consciousness and self, for practitioners of both inner and outerworldly research. Daniel Kahneman gets it. The Dalai Lama gets it. So do you, friends, if you’ll suspend the hipsterism with me for a second. 

Science is more a disposition than a methodology.  “Research,” as much as it’s inspired by speculation and intuition, is the bracketing of (1) faith and of (2) authority.  Research is investigating, first hand albeit aided and undergirded by traditions, what is the case. Do you really want to leave that work, in any realm, to somebody else? 

So before you yell at me to please go back to talking about the nature of American Empire, class divisions and social boundaries, and the subversiveness of the journalism profession, let me say that I’m doing all that while having bought in to the woo woo. Which, at its best, has a way of burning off the bullshit, because if we’re just reliving dead inquiries (while consuming the same culture over and over), there are simply more important, revolutionary, inquiries to join. 

So, what about: consciousness (yours and, um, transpersonal); evolving value systems; the proposition that everything is connected; the social nature of self; the push and pull of experimental faith and, its near-enemy, self-deception (?). 

If I can make a leap across the lacuna the rest of this journal seeks to fill in, all this is why I’m thinking about... consumerism. I submit that consumerism, a pervasive habit of being now, is a mode self expression through affectation of cultural objects, contributing to both self-commodification and group-creation with others of like taste. With consuming being so dear to self-creation, it’s not shocking to see some moves to make it “ethical." To feel better about ourselves when the label says sweatshop free. Yet... maybe, for all its great logistical limits and its self-congratulation, this new, aestheticized social value forges new connections between humans, and actually changes not only our minds but our future. What's the relationship of social networks and personal identity/value, and the implications of such a relationship for, well, social structure?

On which more later. For now, let me note that for the love of Karl, changes in consciousness are, oddly, a subject I’m not quite welcome to discuss up in the tower when we sit around in our empiricist caps. That’s ok, because for the moment I’d rather work some thoughts out here, in everyday language that doesn’t have to wait four years to get published on some journal that 30 people will read, sitting defensively at their desks.

Posted by (0v0)         Comment
Categories: arbitrage , astanga yoga , evolution , integration , markets-networks-society , morality , science , social theory , spirituality