The Irony That Is Shakira

An interesting irony occurred to me today, and it goes something like this:

Shakira is a hot babe. In fact, her music and especially her videos are so sexually inticing that they serve almost as an instruction manual for how to attract men. Ironically, the more "into" Shakira you are, as a man, the more you look like a homosexual trying to learn how to get a man. Therefore, very few heterosexual men are actually fans of Shakira, even though we all think she's really hot.

I've put very little thought into this (obviously) but I've also managed to come up with a scale of Shakira involvement and how it relates one's sexuality to those who observe it:

Level 1: caught watching Shakira video on music channel, acts guilty = blatant heterosexual

Level 2: owns poster of scantily clad Shakira = probably heterosexual, depending on how it is displayed eg. weightroom, behind toilet, etc. vs. next to Duran Duran poster in bedroom

Level 3: owns Shakira video collection = borderline; either the guy has a total Shakira crush or he's studying her moves

Level 4: owns Shakira CD and listens to it by choice (without female prompting) = heterosexuality can be openly questioned at this point

Level 5: drives around in a Mazda Miata in an Izod teeshirt with hair slicked back and Shakira blaring from radio = gay, gay, gay (not that there's anything wrong with that)


Feel free to test my scale as the opportunity arises. I'm sure you'll find very little enthusiasm for Shakira among your hetero male friends, even as they admit to having uncontrollable carnal brain freeze just looking at her. She's kind of the twenty-first century equivalent of Olivia Newton John that way.

There's something genetic at work here, because straight men don't even have to be told that constant exposure to that level of girliness will sissify you somehow. The lizard brain just knows these things.

You're Known By The Company You Keep

Just a short post to link to this post on Creating Passionate Users about the recent discovery of "mirror" neurons in the brain, and the impact that this has on all sorts of fields of scientific inquiry (and philosophy, and economics, and cetera). We're getting closer to an owner's manual for the brain every day.

Johnson DeLonghi, On Why Sixties Music Sucked But MP3s Suck More

A friend of mine, who I'll call Johnson DeLonghi, has a recording studio build into the basement of his house. His years of study and experience have left him highly knowledgeable about many aspects of the music industry, and especially about the engineering side of creating recordings. Whenever there's something about the music industry that I don't understand I write him an email, and his replies are always an awesome read. This particular exchange was so enlightening that I thought I'd post it to the old bloggeroo (with his permission, of course).

First off, here's my email to him:

I think you've final gotten through to me. And I have a question. First, the background story.

So I'm doing up a load of dishes in the kitchen tonight. I usually put on music on the satellite when I do household chores, and lately it's been a lot of classical again.

Not being in the mood for baroque (gag) or chamber music (which I dearly love, but just didn't feel like ) I put on the masterworks channel, which showcases entire symphonies, tone poems, whatever. What's on? A symphony by Gorecki, who I don't know at all. Apparently he's Russian, because there was a soprano caterwauling in Russian along with the dirge. Not wanting to risk that this was the first movement of an hour or more of this stuff, I switched to the seventies flashback station that I also normally enjoy.

Well. At some point during the past few days a switch was thrown inside my brain. I think it was a combination of closely listening to your production values foiled against too much Lighthouse, but I'm really starting to despise pre-digital recordings. Half of the stuff I'm hearing tonight sounds just awful, and I know that a week ago it wouldn't have bothered me at all. I also remember that you've said you respect the Motown stuff but you can't listen to any of that era any more because of the shittiness of the recording quality.

So my question is this: what is it about the Eagles recordings that makes them sound so much better than their contemporaries? "Take It Easy" (recorded 1972) came on in the middle of all of this soppy, plunky bassed crap, and it sounds years and years ahead of it's time. What did they do, what did they know, that put them so far ahead of everyone else? (Joni's Court and Spark is equally good. Is there a connection?)

Maybe you disagree and you think the Eagles are garbage too. But to my newly unleashed listening powers they sound distinctly better.

I'm breathelessly waiting for your answer to this, so if it's too long and complicated to write down right away, be sure to send a short answer to provide an iota of relief. I mean, it is partially your fault after all.

Thanks in advance for your soothing pronouncements.

Please note: I don't really hate the Baroque period, but certain elements (continuo in particular) start to grate after a while. I readily admit that some of the music written by Bach and Vivaldi are as yet unequalled in beauty and complexity, and count among my favourite pieces.

Anyway, here's JD's reply*:

OK Marty, here we go. It's going to a long one, but you asked for it.

In the beginning, there were analog, reel-to-reel tape machines. The tape ran at slow speeds and didn't work very well. They were originally mono, and soon became two-track stereo, but generally had poor fidelity.

Very early on, engineers at places like RCA and Bell Labs learned how to build very excellent microphones, some of which are still the very best around today. Many had tubes inside them for amplification. Indeed, early chamber and jazz (and even pop) recordings consisted of one of these excellent microphones and a shitty analog tape deck.

As time went on, engineers learned that by increasing both the tape width and the tape transport speed, fidelity began to improve dramatically. At one point, the 4-track reel-to-reel tape deck (multitrack recording) was invented - either by Les Paul or Leo Fender, I can never remember which.

Very clever engineers began to experiment with "ping-ponging" (as you know) which was the process of recording a drum kit, say, on 4 tracks and then mixing the whole thing down to one track, leaving the remaining three for something else. And so on. Problem was, whatever was "ping-ponged" to the single track left the mix permanent and unalterable. Usually, it sucked.

In these days, there were no effects, no compressors and no sophisticated noise-reduction techniques. Every time you "ping-ponged" you would also transfer all the tape noise and distortion (x 4) to the single track. The result was usually awful.

I am told that some classic albums like Sgt. Peppers, Band On The Run, Smile, etc. were all done on 4 track decks, using ping-ponging. Well, these guys must have had sacks of cocaine and endless patience, because some of them turned out not badly at all. However, you can have the best mikes and performances in the world, but if your decks are shitty and your label has left you no budget, things are going to sound like crap. Those turds cannot be polished.

Enter Motown, early Stones, most of anything done at Sun or Delphi records, and you know what I mean. A classic example is "La Bamba", the Ritchie Valens version. As with most great vocalists of the day (especially doo-wop artists), their voices were so powerful that the shitty decks and great mikes couldn't handle the dynamic range and sound pressure levels they were recording. "la Bamba" is a great example, because not only can you hear the equipment self-destructing, there is also a biblical train-wreck by the band before the final verse that is beyond belief - clearly the label had no more dough to re-record it.

The frequency range of this equipment, at the time, was not much better than AM radio. And it sounds it. Therefore, I cannot listen to it. Plus, the distortion and noise levels are like nails on a blackboard for me. Sure, the songs were great, but I can't get past it.

At some point in time, the engineers started developing effects. Phil Spector is a good example of a pioneer in this field with the "Wall Of Sound". He use to shoot a lot of people and was a paranoid schizophrenic. Get this - do you know how they first invented reverb? It was called a "plate". Literally, they hung a giant piece of tin from the ceiling, perhaps 10 or 20 feet in length, oriented vertically. They placed a microphone at one end, while the vocalist sang his lungs out facing the piece of tin at the other end. The microphone picked up the reverberations carried along the tin, and that's how they did it.

Echo chambers? No, they didn't have 'em. On a reel-to-reel deck, there are three heads. One, the erase head, clears the tape in advance of the incoming signal. Next, the record head applies the signal to tape. Then, the monitor head plays back to the monitor what actually went on the tape, just microseconds later.

The way they used to achieve echo effects (Steely Dan included) was to pull the tape out of the deck, in a loop, at the point where it left the record head but before it reached the monitor head. Then, they would pull the tape out into an adjoining room, or wrap it around a lamp stand, or whatever, and let it run great distances around the studio until they got a satisfactory time delay before the recorded signal came back to the monitor (or playback) head. Again, massive amounts of cocaine had to be involved.

Finally, in our trilogy of shittiness, analog tape has a condition called "saturation", which can be very pleasant, or it can be like a root canal. Analog tape isn't restricted by the limitations of digital recording, in that, it's perfectly OK to exceed a 0 Db signal level when recording to tape. In fact, nothing sounds nicer to me than a nice, punchy snare drum recorded to analog tape with a bit of saturation. Nothing in the digital domain has ever approached that warm, fat sound. Digital guys have gone to their grave trying to replicate it, but it can't be done. The reason is, saturation is a physical process, not an electronic one.

Having said this, the downside of saturation is that, when it's too much, it causes distortion of the most heinous nature, even worse than the digital equivalent - clipping. The early vocalists and bands, without the advent of compression, almost always pushed saturation to it's breaking point, and for this reason also I can't listen to the old recordings.

This is why, if push came to shove, I contend that the most important tool in the studio is compression devices, for both analog and digital domains, and for very different reasons.

Fast forward to say, mid-1970's. Companies like Studer and Revox (and then, Studer-Revox) became very serious about manufacturing high-end analog tape systems, with big, fat 2-inch tapes, blazing tape speeds, and 16 or 24 tracks on a single reel. Engineers had begun to perfect electronic effects, compressors and microphones as well as having the luxury of doing away with the dreaded "ping-pong". Shit started to sound really good, especially if the label could spring for $250,000 decks and $1,000,000 Neve mixing boards. Noise reduction systems (such as Dolby and, even better, DBX), began eliminating tape hiss and distortion as well as increasing the headroom and dynamic range of analog tape to the point where the high end sparkled, and the bottom end was like waves of warm honey. I was there. I have thousands of albums that sound like my first blow-job felt. Eagles included.

Then, just when all was perfect, someone had to fuck it up. Analog recording (and vinyl distribution) had become an incredibly expensive process. Tape machines were finicky, unreliable and expensive. All vinyl records had to be hand-mastered by geniuses like Bob Ludwig to compensate for the fact that the dynamics of a concentric groove on vinyl alters drastically as the circles diminish in size towards the centre of the disk. These were true artists of the day, and they were obscenely compensated.

Enter the digital age, and the end of the world as I saw it. Spoken like a true dinosaur.

Mitsubishi came out with the X32 digital recorder, oh, I don't know, maybe the early 80's. I had the capability of recording music digitally in 16 bits. It was cascadable. If the artist wasn't happy with 32 tracks, fuck it - bolt on another X32 and give him 64 tracks to work with. It instantly became the rage obsoleting multitrack analog decks within days of its release. The only problem was that, although it was pristine and flawless, it also had the characteristic sterility of digital recordings (especially given the 16-bit dynamic range).

Sidebar - at some point I can go on a tear about dynamic range, anti-aliasing, Nyquist's theorem, sampling rates, quantizing noise and all the other stuff that makes digital music sound like shit. That's a weekend-long discussion sometime over tea and crumpets.

Carrying on: engineers came up with what was not a bad compromise - run the output of the X32 (digital) through some digital-to-analog converters, some 12AX7 tubes at unity gain, and mix down to 2-track analog decks! Cowabunga! It turned out that by running digital signals through tube amplifiers replaced all of the warm, lovely odd-harmonics that are lost in the digital recording process, and the analog tape with some sweet saturation sort of restored the sound. I have experimented with this and know it to be true.

This went on for a while, with great success. Quite possibly, the best sounding records of the late 70's and 80's were exclusively done this way. One problem though - the end result (to the consumer) was still these nasty, expensive, hand-tuned vinyl records. This would no longer do, cried the record companies.

Enter the Compact Disc. By eliminating the 2-track analog tape at mixdown (and going strictly digital), mastering (as it was then known) could be eliminated, and the music could be purchased on a little aluminum-spattered plastic disc and could be manufactured for less than 25 cents.

Yeah, it was pristine. It was noiseless. It didn't degrade over time or use. It was rugged. It had many great features. The only problem was, it sounded like shit.

Guys my age are in the worst possible situation because, although we can tolerate listening to CD's, we lament the analog days when music truly sounded great, plus MP3's are just not an option. Marty, you have to believe me, when you were raised on the recordings I was, MP3's sound absolutely awful. I can tell you precisely why, but that's another sidebar. So, on the bell curve of fidelity, we are nearing the bottom. Again. I am sad. I am going to to hug some of my records and have a good cry.

Pretty awesome, eh? And when he says he can talk all weekend about this topic, it's absolutely true. And he wouldn't repeat the same facts twice. And he'd pull out, oh, five hundred albums on a variety of media for comparison's sake to prove his points. I alway's enjoy a weekend's worth of tea and crumpets at JD's house.

*JD: if you're reading this, sorry it took so long to post.

Pro-Test Movement

Here's an interesting development in the world of protesting, via Instapundit. If you've ever seen a bunch of idiots protesting something and wished there was a way you could effectively express an alternative view, you maybe ready for the Pro-Test movement. It's a an amusing idea, and I kinda hope it catches on.

Compelled By Melete IV

Bistro 44
01/02/06 - Kicked off the new year's sobriety effort by meeting Mick and Judi for mid-morning coffee and chit-chat at Bistro 44, a place I've come to thoroughly despise. It combines all the charm of a back-alley brothel in Amsterdam with the menu pricing of the toniest cafés of Nice. I mean, five bucks for a biscotti? A cookie? A dense, bitter, flavorless cookie?? A cookie that tastes stale fresh out of the oven??? I usually get two. And don't even ask how much the no-fat caramel latté I get with them costs.

We sat at a small table by the biggest little window in the place, near the front but not too close to the door. It's one of those old windows with stained glass on the bottom and clear on the top so that you can sit and sip without having to look at the hoi-polloi out on the side street, all held in place by enough lead to poison half the city. At night the unused tables are completely cleared. But the day manager, an angry, hulking showboat queen in his early thirties, decorates each table with a cheery vase and fake flower arrangement, strictly to express the irony-laced loathing he feels toward this place and by extension the world in general. It's completely appropriate and everyone who goes to the Bistro gets it immediately. Our vase this morning held enormous daffodils, so tall that they partly obscured Judi's face for much of our get-together. I was kind of grateful for that.

The clientel of the bistro are your typical no-job-out-of-college, still-living-at-home rich kids in their mid-twenties, slumming it on the West Side using daddy's platinum card. The sort of people who like a place that makes them feel dirty even as they maintain perfect hygiene. They dress themselves in a caricature of free-wheeling bohemia while shopping only at the best boutiques. (They sneer at the Gap and just the sight of a Walmart-style bigbox store gives them hives. Or it would, if they'd ever seen one.) Every now and then, when our own conversation dies down, I catch snippets from the other tables and I puke back into my latté bowl. They remind me of me at their age so much that I want to crawl into the bowl with the puke and drown.

Anyway, the Bis definitely has that dirty/clean thing going on. The bare 25 watt lightbulbs, the palid violet walls and shiny black trim, and the two-tone tile arrangement in dingy red and putrescent green combine in a way that would normally hide how dirty the place was. But at the Bis the opposite is true: the dank interior inconspicuously hides the owner's germ phobia-inspired cleaning binges. Only the occasional faint wiff of Dutch Boy gives it away.

Bistro 44 is the first of many small establishments in the same long row of old attached red brick masonry buildings. Except that the Bis' red bricks were painted black some time in the sixties and have stayed that way ever since. It's the same width front to back so that the washrooms, located behind the main seating area, are down a short hallway against the side of the building (which also leads to a mostly unused kitchen door marked "KEEP OUT"). The small black awning over the front door acts as an umbrella for the inevitable guantlet of smokers that other patrons have to pass through since the by-law started being enforced, a group usually lorded over by the day manager, who apparently gets to take a smoke break every ten minutes as part of the terms of his employment. A fresh coffee alway takes twice as long as it should because he's invariably outside when it's ordered, and he's the only one in the place who can properly run the antique espresso machine behind the counter.

In the back corner, opposite the hallway to the washrooms and kitchen, is a stage barely big enough to hold the microphone and music stand that sit on it. I've never seen it used and my personal opinion is that it's just for show, a half-hearted attempt to give the Bistro some real coffee house bona fides.

On the wall behind the counter, next to the espresso machine, is a yellowing reprint of a late 19th century French poster showing Balzac in a greasy apron standing outside of his own dingy little hole-in-the-wall in Paris, looking as proud as would any fellow whose name sounded like "ball sack". That and the Mapplethorpe photo hanging behind the toilet in the men's room are the only artwork in the place. I'm guessing the day manager, who slightly resembles Balzac, selected them both.

Mick and Judi have just gone through another rough patch in their relationship. They were subdued company and left me to make up most of the small talk, which I'm not really good at even under ideal circumstances. (Which these were not. Other friends of mine who know them secretly refer to them as "Punch and Judy", though if anyone gets tossed around it's usually Mick.) Judi was still nursing a New Year's Eve hangover. Must have been a real blow-out, to have her post-partydom depression last more than twenty-four hours. I didn't really ask for details. I already know more about their private lives than I'm comfortable with as it is. Suffice it to say that when Judi interrupted Mick shut up and stayed shut up.

Our visit lasted for just over an hour, and was punctuated by too many uncomfortable silences. I left earlier than I'd intended to and felt relieved for doing so. I've got to find a new crowd soon. Eric called from LA again, offering the same deal as last time but with a bigger retainer. Maybe I'll take him up on it.

Compelled By Melete III

Helpful Hints
The discerning individual can determine whether he's being kept in a basement CIA holding cell or the hull of an alien spaceship using the following three criteria:

1) Paint: CIA holding cells are painted grey, usually two coats and primer over plaster parging, which itself is spread over poured concrete.

The hulls of alien spaceships are just grey, the way a sugar cube is white. Grey, grey, grey.

2) Resonance: gently tapping the wall of a CIA holding cell will produce a dull thud. Again, plaster parging over poured concrete.

Gently tapping the hull of an alien spaceship produces a strange, hollow tinkling, like tapping two charred sticks together in a bonfire. (Warning: don't go overboard with this. You don't want to be making a lot of ruckus in the bowels of an alien spaceship. Trust me.)

3) Residue: No matter how much they scour, the CIA can never quite manage to get their holding cells completely clean. A small droplet of dried blood here, a fleck of unidentifiable tissue there, a sooty film in the crack where the wall meets the floor. Not much, but always present.

Aliens use some sort of irradiation technology, combined with whatever composite material their hulls are made of, to completely irradicate all traces of the former occupants of their holding cells. Two minutes after the bloodiest implantation procedure they could safely work on open microcircuitry in the same room. Donald Rumsfeld wishes.

The Oboe Cadenza Enigma

I've been wanting to write about this for a while. So, without having listened to the piece in some months, and having read nothing scholarly on the subject, I'd like to address the oboe cadenza in the first movement of Beethoven's fifth symphony.

Despite it's brevity, the cadenza's importance cannot be overlooked when listening to this piece. There are many potential reasons why the maestro included it, and it's impact is felt on many intellectual levels. I've given the matter some thought, and I've come up with my own short list of potential reasons for the cadenza's inclusion.

1) It's a form of musical joke. It's like the wannabe soloist who strikes out on a third out-chorus when the choirmaster has shortened the piece to two, or the lonely Protestant who adds extra lines to The Lord's Prayer at a mass. The clueless individual is so into his part that he keeps going after everyone else has stopped, with comical results. And just like the former group member who's become an isolated object of ridicule, the oboe cadenza's first notes are strong and logically consistent with the music that preceeded it, but then become progressively confused as it fades into silence and conformity.

It's worth noting that after his first symphony, in which he called the third movement a "menuetto" (standard fare for the time it was written), Beethoven used the term "scherzo" or joke for the third movement of all of his symphonies (except the ninth, of course, in which the second and third movements are reversed in order). Meaning (possibly) that he was not above the idea of injecting humour into serious music, or (again possibly) that he felt himself above following the established rules of composition etiquette.

2) Even if it is a joke, it makes a serious point. The first movement of this symphony is a monolithic display of the severe power of conformity. It turns a chamber orchestra into a unified force to sear it's simple melody and variations into the mind of the listener. The cadenza is a short, quietly juxtaposed off-melody, and can be seen to symbolize the lonely individual following his own path away from the crowd (much like Beethoven himself).

3) Beethoven wanted to create a sonata form movement that even the most basically educated music listener could grasp and understand. Sonata form is fairly simple to begin with: it is divided into three sections, being the exposition, the development, and the recapitulation. The exposition consists of two juxtaposed musical ideas, a strong theme and a gentle theme, presented in their most basic melodic forms and almost always in the strong/gentle order. In the development section the composer derives new music by applying techniques of variation to the two themes. In the recapitulation the composer re-presents the two themes along with some of the newly developed ideas, mounting to a crescendo and finale. However, in many examples of sonata form it is difficult for an inexperienced listener to discern where one section ends and the next begins.

Beethoven was a master of theme and variations, and no concept is more important in his work. His earliest composition, published while he was still a teen, is a theme a variations for piano. The first movement of the fifth symphony is a nearly perfect example of theme and variations, to it's very core. The strong theme consists of eight notes (which in themselves are a four note theme quickly followed by a four note variation) and a simple set of variations based on those eight notes. The gentle theme provides some relief by way of a longer melody designed to soften the dramatic, punchy effect of the strong theme. But even then, it is started by a six note variation of the core four notes from the strong theme, played by a solo horn so as to differentiate between strong and gentle.

Beethoven delineates between the exposition and the development sections is a unique way. When the strong and gentle themes have been fully presented, he stops the music completely and starts over again, repeating the two themes note for note. The effect is such that the beginning of the development section stands out, as it goes beyond what the listener has already heard.

To delineate between the development and recapitulation a different technique was required. The nature of development means that bald repetition could not be used. This is why the oboe cadenza comes in - it is used to clearly mark the boundary between the development and the recapitulation, much the same way the solo horn marks the difference between the strong theme and the gentle theme.

4) More than wanting to write a sonata form movement that was easy to follow, Beethoven wanted to write a sonata form movement that was textbook perfect, but for some reason he balked at the last moment. The oboe cadenza is an intentional anomaly in an otherwise perfect score. Perhaps he was superstitious, and didn't want to tempt fate by creating a work that was perfect, and therefore unsurpassable.

Compelled By Melete II

Untitled Character Study
My schedule, being as busy as a modern life is in daylight hours, leaves only the night for haphazardly timed visits to the local Y. The treadmills there face windows looking out over what at night is a mostly vacant parking lot, not much to see. But the glare of strip lighting also turns them into semi-opaque mirrors, useful for stealing quick glances at the twenty-nothing gym princesses who, by their general demeanor, apparently own the place. All things considered, I'm not entirely bored.

Directly behind the treadmills is a row of cross trainers, the most desirable of all gym apparati and nearly unobtainable during the peak hours between 5 and 7. During that time there is so much heaving, churning activity in that area that the sweaty narcisists who ride them meld together to become a faceless and unknowable mass. Later at night though, when things are winding down, they remain largely unoccupied and so individual users stand out.

This guy would have stood out even among the aprés-work crowd. He rode the machine almost directly behind me, slowly pedalling backwards, unconsciously cracking his knuckles, his visage an expressionless serial killer stare to nowhere. I'd seen him around at night a few times before, and he always struck me as a natural outsider, a genuine weirdo. But with all of that the thing that was really striking was his hair. Too black. Too long in all the wrong places, and carefully combed to enhance those ungraceful lengths to boot. It was like he'd just stepped out of somebody's 1974 high school year book, the kid most likely to kill his whole family. The first time I noticed him I thought "rug", but another time in the showers it was apparent that if it were a wig, he'd Krazy glued it to his scalp. With this guy, who knew?

Driving home one dreary night, I passed him waiting alone at a bus stop, in the rain, and I thought, "That's just so him."

Compelled By Melete I

Ilsa the Pirate
12/18/05 - Spent the morning on a closed off section of Bondi doing the SI shoot with Ilsa, using Aussie lifeguards as props, blah, blah, blah, typical stuff. Cloudless sky, hot as winter Down Under. "Hot enough to boil a monkey's bum" the Monty Pythoners once quipped. Hot enough to burst a saline implant in our case. Thank God that didn't happen.

Things went well all morning and we broke for lunch around 11. Ilsa had the usual - a smoke and a handful of paint chips plucked from the base of a lifeguard stand. You think I kid, but she spent her down time slumped on the sand in the tower's shadow, and she was eating something when she came back over to the car, and she didn't have any food with her at all. Most models don't bring food to a shoot on principle. Always with the health, this crowd. I tend to bring at least a bag Doritos and a Yoo Hoo, but then my flabby ass never makes it around to the other side of the lens.

Whatever it was, we had to wait an extra half hour for her to come down from the energy rush that a body unused to calories experiences after food is taken in. She had uncontrollable giggling outbursts that spoiled a couple of shots. After that we had about an hour of productive shooting, and then another incident that I say confirms my paint chip theory: we decided to do a series of shots of Ilsa clenching a disgusting old sabre in her teeth "pirate style" (her idea) and the rusty goodness of the blade put her back into spazz mode. That pretty much canned the shoot, but I think we got enough for the spread.

A few hours later we met the rest of the crews at Mal's winter retreat for a soirée, including the iconic barbecued shrimp and Fosters, which none of the models would touch. Except for Jenna of course, but she's got some sort of farmgirl genetic thing that doesn't let her accumulate body fat and so she eats like a horse. A carnivorous horse. Bitch.

I had no idea that Ilsa was political. Apparently she joined P(large 'e')TA a few years ago, which led to a brief flirtation with Chomsky. (I'm made to believe that most flirtations with Chomsky are brief, but that's a totally different story.) Then a few tentative Google searches led her to Kos and the DU, and now she does the occasional post on Huffington's blog. She started riffing on Bush, and then the war, but Mal cut her off. Having spent something like a hundred grand to get Howard re-elected, I guess you could say he's for the war. The conversation changed abruptly to gardening for some reason, and Ilsa had nothing more to say. Indeed, she spent the rest of the night in petulant silence, and returned to the States the next morning without her usual goodbye call.

(Addendum: I saw her again a week later in New York and it was business as usual - she was all hugs and kisses. Coincidentally, she had just come out of an Ethan Allen.)


[Ed. I know, it's blasé to write parodies about the supermodel lifestyle, but what the hell. I was compelled by Melete, upon awaking from a dream.]

Linguistic Totalitarianism

Jeff Goldstein has an interesting post on a topic he revisits on a regular basis, when he isn't molesting armadillos. Here's the money quote:

Some cultures are better at pushing back against this dynamic than are others; but ironically, free cultures, because they are the most willing to appreciate the concerns of its minority groups, are the most susceptible to the kind of linguistic totalitarianism that is the natural end to putting the receiver in charge of determining meaning and converting that meaning into the emotional justification for suppressing particular signifiers.

There's a lot to chew on in that paragraph. Read the whole post.