Building a Better Echo Chamber

So a historian wrote a book on Jesus.  Fox News invited him on.  Said historian pwned said Newscorp.

I try not to write about politics anymore, but I'd like to think the Aslan/Green exchange is about something bigger than partisan politics and represents a victory for anyone who thinks of themselves as one of the good guys.

Contemporary society has become so postmodern that it is skeptical of the very idea of expertise.  When we hear an expert speaking on something, we think they're just one more salesman pushing one more product.  Salesmen have facts and figures too, yet they always seem to omit those facts that don't support their desired end.  Understandably, we've all gotten pretty cynical when someone claims to be presenting just the facts, ma'am.

What makes this three minute video so fascinating and important is that Aslan strongly asserts that we need to get over all that shit.  This is the most vigorous, concise statement I've yet seen of what I'll call The Nate Silver Lesson.  Remember when conservatives thought Nate Silver was not a witch but merely a partisan hack?  How did that work out for them?

Experts exist.  Plenty of very smart people spend their entire lives pouring through hundreds of thousands of pages of Ancient Greek, developing ridiculously complex statistical models, and doing a million other really cool things.  The best part: they do so not to get over, but because they want to do the best possible job capturing reality, in all its complexity and messiness.  They constantly ask themselves whether their biases could be compromising their ability to accurately depict reality, and they take steps to compensate for those biases.  A worldwide community vets their work, and the vast majority of its members share the same commitment to presenting the world as accurately as possible.  The resulting product that they put out is measurably more accurate than the ranting of some person who's on TV because s/he is entertaining or looks like what we think an expert should look like.

If the notion of expert seems less than robust these days, it may be due less to the failings of the experts themselves and more to the inability of society to distinguish real experts from people who can act the part and still say what the audience wants to hear, rather than the truth.

Let's Talk About Girls

Have you ever read the 33 1/3 album review of Celine Dion's Let's Talk About Love album? I can't recommend it enough. 33 1/3 is waging a one-series war to keep pop music criticism alive. The series gives a music critic an album and book length to review it. By all accounts, the series is a fantastic success, but the review of Miss Dion's magnus opus is probably the most cited and most read.

The setup: 33 1/3 gave a hipster dude one year and the most horrible of tasks: to learn to appreciate Dion's music. What makes the book so awesome is that the dude actually gets there. By the end of the book, he states that he really, truly enjoys Dion's music, and this reader completely believes him.

How did he get there? First, he acknowledged that, technically, Celine Dion is amazing. Each and every person reading this blog has rolled their eyes at Dion's "oversinging," but we should all be able to admit that her voice is amazing, that there's nothing she can't do with it. So why do so many people have such a visceral negative reaction to Dion's music, when she's such an obvious, undeniable talent?

The author's contention is that the hate stems from the class consciousness of the listener. He shows how Dion's music has its roots in genres traditionally favored by the working class, genres that upper and middle class listeners have learned to reject as a way to separate themselves from "the rabble." The pop culture industry took that class consciousness and made it mass consciousness. In other words, they made it uncool. I don't want to like something that sounds like something the female students at Tech School might listen to.

In short, what we think of a piece of art depends highly on the trappings that surround it. Dress something (like country music) up in the clothes of Red America, and people like me are going to hate all of it, even despite the undeniable talent of someone like Alan Jackson. Dress something up in upper middle class clothes, language, mannerisms, and experience, and people like me will fall for it.

I can't stop thinking about that review when I hear people talk about Girls. If you like Girls, bully for you. I liked Entourage, because it was a fairy tale very typical to someone of my age at that point in time. However, I never claimed that Entourage was particularly good or meaningful. Girls is getting such accolades, and we have the class trappings of the show and its target audience to thank for it.

Girls is not original, profound, or even particularly well done. It trades in exactly the same shock aesthetic as the worst reality TV: promiscuous sex, bad behavior, and balling with no concern for real life trivialities like a job. It's JUST rich 20 something white girls pretending to be broke but otherwise acting like Real Housewives. You can argue that allowing young women a venue to express their sexuality on their terms is a good thing, but it's not like that hasn't been done before. Sure, there's some angst, but that's because, in the upper class 20 something worldview, there's SUPPOSED to be angst. It's not a very fulfilling fairy tale for the rich and elite if they don't rage against something. If you're just happy all the time, you must be stupid. You probably like Celine Dion or something.

But unlike the Real Housewives, these girls wear respectable clothes. They went to the right schools. Their vocabulary could ace the SAT Verbal. And, of course, Lena Dunham comes from NYC art royalty, so how could she possibly make something mundane? These cues, and these cues alone, have been enough to convince Very Important People (thanks, Paul) that Girls is an important snapshot of our cultural gestalt.

I don't begrudge the twenty something who are into the show, because, shit, every generation should get to retell the same old story in a way that resonates with them. If young women want their own Entourage, they should get it and enjoy it. What bothers me is older folks who should know better.

PS: I'm willing to grant a little ground on one of the most criticized aspects of the show, which is Lena Dunham's willingness to be naked on screen. Potentially positive message about body types and beauty there.

What We Owe the Gay Community

On Sunday, I had a great exchange with friend and former PASC staff member Saige Martin. He indicated that he would never attend a Pride parade so long as they continued to be the gaudy, flashy, decadent events they often are. In his view, such events provided fodder for the Right's efforts to continue the systematic oppression of the LGBT community. Saige would like to see Pride parades that show community members as normal people wearing normal clothes and acting in ways that the broader society would consider socially acceptable. In Saige's eyes, such parades would go a long way to erasing negative stereotypes and help the efforts of activists like himself to ensure full equal treatment for people of all sexual orientations.

(I've tried to summarize Saige's argument as best I can. Saige, if you read this, please feel free to clarify anything I got wrong.)

In case you couldn't tell from my entry on the Sexcamaids, I feel a lot more positive towards Pride. As pessimistic as I can be on a lot of issues, I am very optimistic that Western society is moving towards personal liberty, at least on social issues. Each year, more and more people seem willing to accept other people's lifestyles, so long as they do not harm someone else. We've clearly got a long way to go, but relative to where we were even 20 years ago, we're moving in the right direction.

And society owes a lot of this progress to the LGBT community. I am no expert on the history of personal expression in the Twentieth Century, but here's how I see it: after the backlash against the social movements of the 1960s, most groups stopped pushing the envelope and started to work for more incremental solutions, solutions that the mainstream society could accept. Word to them. That's one, completely legitimate way to achieve social change. Certainly, parts of the LGBT community adopted that strategy.

But other parts of the LGBT community seemed unwilling to compromise. Given even the tiniest opening as a result of the upheaval in the 1960s, certain people decided that they could not nor would not go back to the way things were and that they needed to allow their personality to flower in full. I see Pride as an outgrowth of that. The average gay man couldn't strut and preen in public like, oh, Elton John or Liberace...except at selected events one or two times a year, where, if only for a moment, they could express themselves. Hell, they could even go OVERBOARD in expressing themselves. In other words, while the rest of society moved away from expression at all costs, parts of the LGBT community embraced it.

We know how I feel about outlandish public displays of self-expression. But heterosexuals like myself have the privilege of being able to be as flamboyant as we want in public while still enjoying all the rights that come as part of what is deemed as normal and avoiding the stigma attached to being in the out group (no pun intended, but it's pretty good, isn't it?). I can't even imagine the courage it took just to put on a damn costume and dance in the streets during the 1980s and AIDS and all that horseshit.

So, to the LGBT community: thank you. Thank you for pushing the envelope. I know you don't necessarily do it for the broader society, but the broader society needs what you do. It needs to regard gender roles as more fluid. It needs to see that sexuality can be public without being vulgar. It needs so many of the things that it wouldn't acknowledge without you.

PS: I am sure everyone can tell, but I am painfully inexperienced at writing and thinking about issues of sexuality. In referring to the LGBT community, I've tried to use the terms I thought were most accurate or complimentary, but I freely admit I may have used the wrong words at places. Please feel free to correct me so I can get it right next time.

Sex and Mermaids

What's it like to be down with the Sexcamaids?

You may have seen stories or, hopefully, pictures from Coney Island's 30th Annual Mermaid Parade, held this past Saturday.  Basically, the Mermaid Parade is a Pride for everyone, a chance for any and all to let their freak flag fly in the middle of Brooklyn in front of half a million people.

In my incredibly biased opinion, no group better represents what the Mermaid Parade is and should be all about than the lovely Sexcamaids, a dance troupe that calls themselves 'the sirens of the sex world."  Saturday, they were the ladies wearing just enough clothes, rocking the best, most coordinated moves, pushing the loudest, rudest speaker stack, and otherwise behaving like those untouchable bad girls you were scared to talk to in high school.

(Please keep in mind that a heterosexual man wrote the preceding paragraph and that your experience with the Sexcamaids may vary.  For example, every little girl saw the coolest set of big sisters to ever walk the Earth.  If you want to see happy, you should see an 6 year old girl who sees the Sexcamaids and realizes that, despite whatever her parents have told her, she can play dress up for the rest of her life.)

I had the opportunity to join the 2012 version of Maids' support group, the (ahem) Sea Men. The Sea Men are the Alfred to the Maids' Batman. We do the logistical stuff that kept them dancing and looking good. We push along the sound system that plays their music. We drag along the coolers and give them the water that keeps them from passing out. We deal with the overzealous paparazzi. As befitting any superhero support team, the Sea Men are in costume, which is how I found myself pulling a cooler and dancing down the streets of Coney Island wearing nothing but a sailor's hat and a pair of white rhinestone-encrusted booty shorts.

It was one of the best experiences of my life.  Even as a sidekick, I felt and still feel like an honest-to-God superhero.

I had a bit of a "come to Jesus" moment Saturday.  Now I understand, to a far greater extent, Pride and Goth and Lady Gaga and S&M and so many other things.  Such diverse phenomenon usually get lumped under the banner of sexuality, but after Saturday, I'm convinced that all of these things are about so much more than sex.  They're about expression and freedom and experimentation and role play and performance and power and giving it up and community and billion other things for which either I can't find the word or the word doesn't exist.  We lump so many things under the banner of sexuality because, like sex, we're profoundly scared of many of these things, because they're SO powerful.  We worry that if we let them out even a little, they threaten to flood us and knock away all they fragile little bridges we've built that we think makes us into functional adults who don't have to sleep in cardboard boxes.

I'm not a stranger to self expression or risk taking or any of this stuff, but being a Sea Man hit me in a way I hadn't experienced before.  My enduring memory of the 2012 Mermaid Parade will be that I played with the boundaries of who I was in a way that I hadn't done before, and I had 500,000 people in the crowd who were THRILLED that I was doing so.  When you take a risk and show some side of you that you've rarely shown before in front of that many people, and they show you so much love in return, it can make you feel like every chance you've ever taken to be a better, more complete, more free person was completely worth it, and it makes you want to do it again and again.

Even if you can't see yourself down with the short shorts and pasties crowd, the Mermaid Parade and the Sexcamaids have a lesson for you, and it's really probably the only lesson that matters.  You know that thing you want to try, but you're scared?  You're worried you'll get fired, or your spouse will judge you, or you're just too old/Christian/cool/whatever?  Do it.  Find a safe space and supportive, decent, caring people who will provide you a healthy environment to try something you've never tried or even though of, and let it rip.  There's nothing to lose and everything, everything, everything to gain.

Thank you for letting me tag along, Sexcamaids.  If you'll have me back, I'll haul, push, water, or whatever you need in 2013.

Postscript: Don't get me wrong. It's not not about sex either. Ladies, I am in love with each and every one of you, and so is the rest of New York. You know it, and you wouldn't have it any other way.

Yoga as Identity

When I tell people I do yoga, I'm always surprised at how many of them are apologetic that they, too, do not do yoga, as if failing to do yoga was some type of sin.  After a conversation last week, I think I finally understand this reaction.  The general bobo population may be used to aggressive missionary sermons from yogis about how awesome yoga is.

But that begs another question.  Why would so many yogis care if other people did yoga?  It's hard enough to find a space for your mat at the 5:45 class at the World's Greatest Yoga Studio.

The Babarazzi hit on part of the answer with their hilarious and scathing discussion of asana as signifier.  If my experience is any guide, yoga can become a central part of one's identity very quickly.    The Spectacle recognizes this and has developed numerous ways for yogis to signify to the outside world that they are serious about this yoga thing.  You can practice on your Manduka mat in your Lulu pants and hit Whole Foods for some quinoa on the way home.  The capitalist pig dogs will nod earnestly until you turn around, then chuckle and count the money.  The Spectacle has plenty of non-financial ways to participate, like fancy asanas or (ahem) blogging.  As long as you're worried about whether others regard you as a serious yogi (or a serious sports fan or faberge egg collector or whatever), you're firmly caught in the Spectacle's web, and It's pretty sure you'll eventually buy stuff.

While the Babarazzi nailed the diagnosis, their bedside manner is shit.  The problem with so much cultural criticism is that it's wrapped in so much hipster condescension, as if the authors can't believe that anyone would be so lame as to care what other people think.  Caring what other people think is a natural urge that is essential to any effort to establish community.  Yes, capitalism exploits that urge.  Yes, people fall for the capitalist commodity version of community and everything else over the real thing way, way too frequently.  But, like, shouldn't those of us who recognize that cycle want to help break it?  Shouldn't we want to help people experience the real benefits of yoga, one of which is that you can stop caring so much about hitting a handstand?  If so, snark is a bad idea, because snark alienates.  When I act superior, I am not likely to be heard or respected.

And truth be told, looking down your nose at people who try too hard to show how yoga they are is a pretty effective way to communicate to others how yoga you are.

For whatever my amateur opinion is worth, my answer to both the problem the Babarazzi diagnosed and the problem with the diagnosis is to let go.  You don't need Lulu to practice, and you don't need to condescend to point people on the right path.

And now, for no reason, hilarity.

The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and Why Good is Overrated

Last night, I watched The Black Swan for the first time.

Dawg, HER ARMS TURNED TO WINGS.

It has come to my attention that some fools didn't like this movie.  Specifically, some fools be saying that this movie is melodramatic camp filled with ridiculous imagery.

Fools, STOP BEING FOOLS!!  Of COURSE it's melodramatic camp!  Some among you might recognize that there's nothing fundamentally wrong and a lot right with well-executed melodrama.  But I'd argue that The Black Swan is cool and amazing beyond any camp elements.  I love a well told, well executed plot as much as anyone, but to me, that's not what movies do best.  Movies have the ability to take advantage of image and movement.  Where a movie like Frost/Nixon, which I also love, uses plot as the device to engage the intelligent viewer, The Black Swan uses imagery, psychology, and melodrama.  The Black Swan people spend just as much time thinking about what Natalie Portman should look like as the best traditional playwrites thought about crafting a coherent plot.

Besides, in the postmodern world, do you really care about why a really cool image hits the screen?  Of course you don't.  You care whether the sheer specter of Cthulhu coming out of the water is the most terrifying, nightmarish image you can think of, precisely because it comes from a place that doesn't entirely make sense to you.  Does it hit you on a really primal, pre-rational level?  Does it get into your dreams at night?  Does it mess with your head, stick with you, blow open your mind to new possibilities about things that crawl around in muck hidden from everyday experience?  These are the questions that matter for the most meaningful art of our age.

That might seem to lead to down the road where I'm apologizing for the Michael Bays and James Camerons of the world, but nothing could be further from the truth.  Those lazy hacks are just playing to people's expectations and giving them comfort food.  In of themselves, special effects do not blow people's minds, because special effects have become the expectation for a certain type of film.  The people behind movies like The Black Swan, Speed Racer, and other such movies are working as hard as they can to expand our horizons.  In true postmodern/hip-hop style, The Black Swan blends genres to create the effect.  I can't imagine how the jerk marketing executives at Fox Searchlight felt when they started watching what they probably thought was going to be a beautiful little dance movie with Queen Amidala that they could sell to families at Christmas only to realize that it became a psychological piece about 30 minutes in and a complete psychedelic mindfck for the last half hour.

Look, man, I don't know how many ways to say it: the organizing principle of TWEDP is that human perception is limited, and that anything that gets us out of our rational mindset to consider what we have previously excluded is a great thing.  I could never, ever, ever have imagined that a movie like The Black Swan, or the images within it, could be imagined by people.  That makes it a win.

You Only Get What You Give

Is yoga spiritual?  Sure.

So is running.

So is knitting.

So is accounting.

So is any activity, pastime, occupation, whatever.

Where "is" equals "can be."

Why are you doing it?  How are you doing it?  Are you doing it mindfully?  Does it help you engage in the most rigorous possible self-examination?  Does it make you question your every relationship with the world?  Finally, are you prepared to do it for a really, really long time, until such point where it provides the answers to everything, until it encompasses everything?

All of those questions are much more important than what the it is.  In my completely elementary view, those questions, or some more eloquent, comprehensive, and advanced statement of them, are the most important thing with which a person can concern themselves.

Those questions are everything.

So are kittens.

Tara Stiles: An Outsider's Perspective

For the uninitiated, Tara Stiles is one of yoga's It Girls.  She hangs with Deepak Chopra.  Her story is written up in the New York Times.  Now she's balling out with Ryan Reynolds in car commercials.

And Tara Stiles does not care what you think about her.

Let me clarify.  Stiles has been the subject of a huge amount of controversy within the yoga community.  Now, some of that criticism comes from, if I may be blunt, the type of women whose sole mission in life seems to be to hate on any woman who dares to be too young, too pretty, and too thin.

The flipside is, some of that criticism is legitimate worrying about what happens when yoga meets capitalism.  I am not all that thrilled that Stiles models some of the packaging for her products on The South Beach Diet.  The dieting culture in this country is really, really awful.  That Stiles is tying her brand to it makes her part of a really big problem.  And regardless of how Stiles came about her particular body type, it isn't and shouldn't be a legitimate aspiration for most women.

(Tangent: it's also not the body type guys want, for whatever that's worth.)

However, that's not what I find most interesting about Stiles.  What's most interesting is that Stiles is the first yoga celebrity I can remember who is building her career and brand with a complete disregard for the yoga establishment.  Stiles is undoubtedly more famous and popular than other rising stars of yoga like Kathryn Budig or Elena Bower, yet it's Budig and Bower who are on the covers of Yoga Journal and headlining conferences.  I haven't heard of Stiles touring around the world offering workshops.  I haven't heard any hardcore yogas talking about the amazing class they took at Strala, her studio.

Instead, Stiles seems to be about yoga for the non yogi.  She eschews chanting in her workshops.  She helps normal, everyday people meet the goals they want to meet, like weight loss.  She offers a class called "Yoga for a Hangover."

My purpose in writing this post is not to judge Stiles.  If you want to construct her trial, just Google her name, and you'll hear plenty of people praise and crucify her.  Besides, Stiles has probably forgotten more yoga than I ever knew.  She lived on an ashram, for God's sake.

My point is, regardless of what one thinks of her strategy, Stiles represents an interesting development for yoga in the West.  The people who built the yoga culture in the United States focused on building a tribe of people who would be committed to following yogic ideals and support them with their dollars.  Put another way, even Rodney Yee, undisputed king of the yoga DVD,  wanted his DVDs to lead viewers to class, where they would learn more about the history of yoga and start down the path that countless others have trod over the past four thousand years.  That insularity made everyone very, very rich.  Yoga is now an eight billion dollar a year industry, and I would wager that most money comes from people like me who consider yoga to be a central part of their lives.

Stiles is not Rodney Yee.  Publicly, at least, she doesn't care about the yogic tradition, and she sure doesn't care about the tribe.  She shows that it is now possible to have yoga for the masses in the West.  Her yoga seems to ask for no deep commitment and promises the practitioner no great spiritual breakthroughs.  And her yoga seems to say, you can be a housewife who watches Oprah and still do my yoga.  You don't have to be part of the tribe.  You don't have to wear hemp.  You can take showers.

So Stiles, to me, is ultimately more about the growth of the yoga business than anything else.  The yoga business seems to be no longer dependent on a subculture of true believers.  As if we needed anymore proof, Stiles' runaway popularity shows that yoga has penetrated the culture on the deepest possible level.  Yoga is part of the Spectacle, and we can sell yoga the same way we sell hamburgers.