Spencer Greenwood

sonofbaldwin:

beautone:

Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde (Essence Magazine, 1984)

JB: One of the dangers of being a Black American is being schizophrenic, and I mean ‘schizophrenic’ in the most literal sense. To be a Black American is in some ways to be born with the desire to be white. It’s a part of the price you pay for being born here, and it affects every Black person. We can go back to Vietnam, we can go back to Korea. We can go back for that matter to the First World War. We can go back to W.E.B. Du Bois – an honorable and beautiful man – who campaigned to persuade Black people to fight in the First World War, saying that if we fight in this war to save this country, our right to citizenship can never, never again be questioned – and who can blame him? He really meant it, and if I’d been there at that moment I would have said so too perhaps. Du Bois believed in the American dream. So did Martin. So did Malcolm. So do I. So do you. That’s why we’re sitting here.

AL: I don’t, honey. I’m sorry, I just can’t let that go past. Deep, deep, deep down I know that dream was never mine. And I wept and I cried and I fought and I stormed, but I just knew it. I was Black. I was female. And I was out – out – by any construct wherever the power lay. So if I had to claw myself insane, if I lived I was going to have to do it alone. Nobody was dreaming about me. Nobody was even studying me except as something to wipe out.

JB: You are saying you do not exist in the American dream except as a nightmare.

AL: That’s right. And I knew it every time I opened Jet, too. I knew that every time I opened a Kotex box. I knew that every time I went to school. I knew that every time I opened a prayer book. I knew it, I just knew it.

JB: It is difficult to be born in a place where you are despised and also promised that with endeavor – with this, with that, you know – you can accomplish the impossible. You’re trying to deal with the man, the woman, the child – the child of whichever sex – and he or she and your man or your woman has got to deal with the 24-hour-a-day facts of life in this country. We’re not going to fly off someplace else, you know, we’d better get through whatever that day is and still have each other and still raise children – somehow manage all of that. And this is 24 hours of every day, and you’re surrounded by all of the paraphernalia of safety: If you can strike this bargain here. If you can make sure your armpits are odorless. Curl your hair. Be impeccable. Be all the things that the American public says you should do, right? And you do all those things – and nothing happens really. And what is much worse than that, nothing happens to your child either.

AL: Even worse than the nightmare is the blank. And Black women are the blank. I don’t want to break all this down, then have to stop at the wall of male/female division. When we admit and deal with difference; when we deal with the deep bitterness; when we deal with the horror of even our different nightmares; when we turn them and look at them, it’s like looking at death: hard but possible. If you look at it directly without embracing it, then there is much less that you can ever be made to fear.

JB: I agree.

AL: Well, in the same way when we look at our differences and not allow ourselves to be divided, when we own them and are not divided by them, that is when we will be able to move on. But we haven’t reached square one yet.

JB: I’m not sure of that. I think the Black sense of male and female is much more sophisticated than the western idea. I think that Black men and women are much less easily thrown by the question of gender or sexual preference – all that jazz. At least that is true of my experience.

AL: Yea, but let’s remove ourselves from merely a reactive position – i.e., Black men and women reacting to what’s out there. While we are reacting to what’s out there, we’re also dealing between ourselves – and between ourselves there are power differences that come down…

JB: Oh, yes…

AL: Truly dealing with how we live, recognizing each other’s differences, is something that hasn’t happened…

JB: Differences and samenesses.

AL: Differences and samenesses. But in a crunch, when all our asses are in the sling, it looks like it is easier to deal with the samenesses. When we deal with sameness only, we develop weapons that we use against each other when the differences become apparent. And we wipe each other out – Black men and women can wipe each other out – far more effectively than outsiders do.

JB: That’s true enough.

AL: And our blood is high, our furies are up. I mean, it’s what Black women do to each other, Black men do to each other, and Black people do to each other. We are in the business of wiping each other out in one way or the other – and essentially doing our enemy’s work.

JB: That’s quite true.

AL: We need to acknowledge those power differences between us and see where they lead us. An enormous amount of energy is being taken up with either denying the power differences between Black men and women or fighting over power differences between Black men and women or killing each other off behind them. I’m talking about Black women’s blood flowing in the streets – and how do we get a 14-year-old boy to know I am not the legitimate target of his fury? The boot is on both of our necks. Let’s talk about getting it off. My blood will not wash out your horror. That’s what I’m interested in getting across to adolescent Black boys.

There are little Black girl children having babies. But this is not an immaculate conception, so we’ve got little Black boys who are making babies, too. We have little Black children making little Black children. I want to deal with that so our kids will not have to repeat that waste of themselves.

JB: I hear you – but let me backtrack, for better or worse. You know, for whatever reason and whether it’s wrong or right, for generations men have come into the world, either instinctively knowing or believing or being taught that since they were men they in one way or another had to be responsible for the women and children, which means the universe.

AL: Mm-hm.

JB: I don’t think there’s any way around that.

AL: Any way around that now?

JB: I don’t think there’s any way around that fact.

AL: If we can put people on the moon and we can blow this whole planet up, if we can consider digging 18 inches of radioactive dirt off of the Bikini atolls and somehow finding something to do with it – if we can do that, we as Black cultural workers can somehow begin to turn that stuff around – because there’s nobody anymore buying ‘cave politics’ – ‘Kill the mammoth or else the species is extinct.’ We have moved beyond that. Those little scrubby-ass kids in the sixth grade – I want those Black kids to know that brute force is not a legitimate way of dealing across sex difference. I want to set up some different paradigms.

JB: Yea, but there’s a real difference between the way a man looks at the world…

AL: Yes, yes…

JB: And the way a woman looks at the world. A woman does know much more than a man.

AL: And why? For the same reason Black people know what white people are thinking: because we had to do it for our survival…

JB: All right, all right…

AL: We’re finished being bridges. Don’t you see? It’s not Black women who are shedding Black men’s blood on the street – yet. We’re not cleaving your head open with axes. We’re not shooting you down. We’re saying, “Listen, what’s going on between us is related to what’s going on between us and other people,” but we have to solve our own shit at the same time as we’re protecting our Black asses, because if we don’t, we are wasting energy that we need for joint survival.

JB: I’m not even disagreeing – but if you put the argument in that way, you see, a man has a certain story to tell, too, just because he is a man…

AL: Yes, yes, and it’s vital that I be alive and able to listen to it.

JB: Yes. Because we are the only hope we have. A family quarrel is one thing; a public quarrel is another. And you and I, you know – in the kitchen, with the kids, with each other or in bed – we have a lot to deal with, with each other, but we’ve got to know what we’re dealing with. And there is no way around it. There is no way around it. I’m a man. I am not a woman.

AL: That’s right, that’s right.

JB: No one will turn me into a woman. You’re a woman and you’re not a man. No one will turn you into a man. And we are indispensable for each other, and the children depend on us both.

AL: It’s vital for me to be able to listen to you, to hear what is it that defines you and for you to listen to me, to hear what is it that defines me – because so long as we are operating in that old pattern, it doesn’t serve anybody, and it certainly hasn’t served us.

JB: I know that. What I really think is that neither of us has anything to prove, at least not in the same way, if we weren’t in the North American wilderness. And the inevitable dissension between brother and sister, between man and woman – let’s face it, all those relations which are rooted in love also are involved in this quarrel. Because our real responsibility is to endlessly redefine each other. I cannot live without you, and you cannot live without me – and the children can’t live without us.

AL: But we have to define ourselves for each other. We have to redefine ourselves for each other because no matter what the underpinnings of the distortion are, the fact remains that we have absorbed it. We have all absorbed this sickness and ideas in the same way we absorbed racism. It’s vital that we deal constantly with racism, and with white racism among Black people – that we recognize this as a legitimate area of inquiry. We must also examine the ways that we have absorbed sexism and heterosexism. These are the norms in this dragon we have been born into – and we need to examine these distortions with the same kind of openness and dedication that we examine racism…

JB: You use the word ‘racism’…

AL: The hatred of Black, or color…

JB: - but beneath the word ‘racism’ sleeps the word ‘safety.’ Why is it important to be white or Black?

AL: Why is it important to be a man rather than a woman?

JB: In both cases, it is assumed that it is safer to be white than to be Black. And it’s assumed that it is safer to be a man than to be a woman. These are both masculine assumptions. But those are the assumptions that we’re trying to overcome or to confront…

AL: To confront, yeah. The vulnerability that lies behind those masculine assumptions is different for me and you, and we must begin to look at that…

JB: Yes, yes…

AL: And the fury that is engendered in the denial of that vulnerability – we have to break through it because there are children growing up believe that it is legitimate to shed female blood, right? I have to break through it because those boys really think that the sign of their masculinity is impregnating a sixth grader. I have to break through it because of that little sixth-grade girl who believes that the only thing in life she has is what lies between her legs…

JB: Yeah, but we’re not talking now about men and women. We’re talking about a particular society. We’re talking about a particular time and place. You were talking about the shedding of Black blood in the streets, but I don’t understand –

AL: Okay, the cops are killing the men and the men are killing the women. I’m talking about rape. I’m talking about murder.

JB: I’m not disagreeing with you, but I do think you’re barking up the wrong tree. I’m not trying to get the Black man off the hook – or Black women, for that matter – but I am talking about the kingdom in which we live.

AL: Yes, I absolutely agree; the kingdom in which these distortions occur has to be changed.

JB: Something happens to the man who beats up a lady. Something happens to the man who beats up his grandmother. Something happens to the junkie. I know that very well. I walked the streets of Harlem; I grew up there, right? Now you know it is not the Black cat’s fault who sees me and tries to mug me. I got to know that. It’s his responsibility but it’s not his fault. That’s a nuance. UI got to know that it’s not him who is my enemy even when he beats up his grandmother. His grandmother has got to know. I’m trying to say one’s got to see what drove both of us into those streets. We be both from the same track. Do you see what I mean? I’ve come home myself, you know, wanting to beat up anything in sight- but Audre, Audre…

AL: I’m here, I’m here…

JB: I agree with you. I see exactly what you mean and it hurts me at least as much as it hurts you. But how to maneuver oneself past this point – how not to lose him or her who may be in what is in effect occupied territory. That is really what the Black situation is in this country. For the ghetto, all that is lacking is barbed wire, and when you pen people up like animals, the intention is to debase them and you have debased them.

AL: Jimmy, we don’t have an argument

JB: I know we don’t.

AL: But what we do have is a real disagreement about your responsibility not just to me but to my son and to our boys. Your responsibility to him is to get across to him in a way that I never will be able to because he did not come out of my body and has another relationship to me. Your relationship to him as his farther is to tell him I’m not a fit target for his fury.

JB: Okay, okay…

AL: It’s so entrenched in him that it’s part of him as much as his Blackness is.

JB: All right, all right…

AL: I can’t do it. You have to.

JB: All right, I accept – the challenge is there in any case. It never occurred to me that it would be otherwise. That’s absolutely true. I simply want to locate where the danger is…

AL: Yeah, we’re at war…

JB: We are behind the gates of a kingdom which is determined to destroy us.

AL: Yes, exactly so. And I’m interested in seeing that we do not accept terms that will help us destroy each other. And I think one of the ways in which we destroy each other is by being programmed to knee-jerk on our differences. Knee-jerk on sex. Knee-jerk on sexuality…

JB: I don’t quite know what to do about it, but I agree with you. And I understand exactly what you mean. You’re quite right. We get confused with genders – you know, what the western notion of woman is, which is not necessarily what a woman is at all. It’s certainly not the African notion of what a woman is. Or even the European notion of what a woman is. And there’s certainly not standard of masculinity in this country which anybody can respect. Part of the horror of being a Black American is being trapped into being an imitation of an imitation.

AL: I can’t tell you what I wished you would be doing. I can’t redefine masculinity. I can’t redefine Black masculinity certainly. I am in the business of redefining Black womanness. You are in the business of redefining Black masculinity. And I’m saying, ‘Hey, please go on doing it,’ because I don’t know how much longer I can hold this fort, and I really feel that Black women are holding it and we’re beginning to hold it in ways that are making this dialogue less possible.

JB: Really? Why do you say that? I don’t feel that at all. It seems to me you’re blaming the Black man for the trap he’s in.

AL: I’m not blaming the Black man; I’m saying don’t shed my blood. I’m not blaming the Black man. I’m saying if my blood is being shed, at some point I’m gonna have a legitimate reason to take up a knife and cut your damn head off, and I’m not trying to do it.

JB: If you drive a man mad, you’ll turn him into a beast – it has nothing to do with his color.

AL: If you drive a woman insane, she will react like a beast too. There is a larger structure, a society with which we are in total and absolute war. We live in the mouth of a dragon, and we must be able to use each other’s forces to fight it together, because we need each other. I am saying that in our joint battle we have also developed some very real weapons, and when we turn them against each other they are even more bloody, because we know each other in a particular way. When we turn those weapons against each other, the bloodshed is terrible. Even worse, we are doing this in a structure where we are already embattled. I am not denying that. It is a family discussion I’m having now. I’m not laying blame. I do not blame Black men for what they are. I’m asking them to move beyond. I do not blame Black men; what I’m saying is, we have to take a new look at the ways in which we fight our joint oppression because if we don’t, we’re gonna be blowing each other up. We have to begin to redefine the terms of what woman is, what man is, how we relate to each other.

JB: But that demands redefining the terms of the western world…

AL: And both of us have to do it; both of us have to do it…

JB: But you don’t realize that in this republic the only real crime is to be a Black man?

AL: No, I don’t realize that. I realize the only crime is to be Black. I realize the only crime is to be Black, and that includes me too.

JB: A Black man has a prick, they hack it off. A Black man is a ****** when he tries to be a model for his children and he tries to protect his women. That is a principal crime in this republic. And every Black man knows it. And every Black woman pays for it. And every Black child. How can you be so sentimental as to blame the Black man for a situation which has nothing to do with him?

AL: You still haven’t come past blame. I’m not interested in blame, I’m interested in changing…

JB: May I tell you something? May I tell you something? I might be wrong or right.

AL: I don’t know – tell me.

JB: Do you know what happens to a man-?

AL: How can I know what happens to a man?

JB: Do you know what happens to a man when he’s ashamed of himself when he can’t find a job? When his socks stink? When he can’t protect anybody? When he can’t do anything? Do you know what happens to a man when he can’t face his children because he’s ashamed of himself? It’s not like being a woman…

AL: No, that’s right. Do you know what happens to a woman who gives birth, who puts that child out there and has to go out and hook to feed it? Do you know what happens to a woman who goes crazy and beats her kids across the room because she’s so full of frustration and anger? Do you know what that is? Do you know what happens to a lesbian who sees her woman and her child beaten on the street while six other guys are holding her? Do you know what that feels like?

JB: Mm-hm.

AL: Well then, in the same way you know how a woman feels, I know how a man feels, because it comes down to human beings being frustrated and distorted because we can’t protect the people we love. So now let’s start –

JB: All right, okay…

AL: - let’s start with that and deal.

Essence Magazine, 1984

I had no idea this conversation existed, so you know, right now, I am over the moon!

EDIT: Whew. Lorde GATHERED that ass!

Awww, Nicktoons made a really cute bumper of Korra and Tenzin having a snowball fight

That pickle name is copyright ok 

Panthay mosque in Mandalay. Wagaung/Wikipedia. Some Rights reserved

Myanmar is a predominately Buddhist country, with Muslims estimated to account for about 5% of the total population. Most of the Muslims are of Indian, Chinese and Bangladeshi descent and have been living in Myanmar for centuries. In fact, they have made a significant contribution to the country’s economic growth by engaging themselves in small and medium-sized businesses.

However, Muslim community still lags behind in the race of access to mainstream education in the country. This is partly because of the state’s discriminatory policy towards ethnic minorities in accessing basic rights, which led to a substantial downgrading of their status in society. Education is one of the sectors deeply affected by such discrimination, in which Muslims often face severe restrictions on their right to education. Especially after the military took power, it has been relatively difficult for Muslim children to get enrolled in state-run schools, due to the existence of many hidden barriers to their entry. The 1982 citizenship law was instrumental in officially denying the right of Burmese nationality to the Rohingya Muslim community and reserving secondary education for citizens only. This exclusion rendered them unable to attend government schools beyond primary education.

Muslims themselves are also to be criticised for not embracing the formal education offered by the state-run schools, particularly those legally recognized for Myanmar citizens. Most Muslim parents still don’t prefer to send their children to public schools where the teaching curriculum is not affiliated to any particular religion or faith, except Buddhism. They fear that a secular education might dilute their children's moral values of Islam. Moreover, the exclusion and fear have opened a space that madrasas (Islamic schools) have filled. Today, education for Muslim children in Myanmar is largely provided by madrasas. In Yangon and other major cities, a few well-off Muslim children are able to attend the privately-run English medium schools, but for the education of the majority of the children the madrasa remains the only alternative. 

A madrasa education

Throughout Myanmar, there are hundreds of madrasas currently operating with the support of domestic and foreign donations. The exact number is difficult to determine. A Ministry of Defence survey of religious institutions carried out in 1997 by the military government found that there were 759 madrasas, or full-time Islamic schools, in Myanmar. All these Islamic schools are exclusively designed for male students, leading to a broader undermining of female education. While madrasas in neighboring countries like Bangladesh, Thailand and Malaysia provide girls with access to education, religious leaders in Myanmar discourage the education of Muslim girls. A notable problem is that there is no specific regulatory body to oversee the education of madrasas. Not even a consistent set of guidelines is available for what a madrasa can teach its students. The choice of texts is entirely determined by the wishes of the head cleric or individual teachers, and sometimes even those making donations. In fact, most of Myanmar’s madrasas use textbooks similar to those used in Indian and Pakistani madrasas. Neither the government of Myanmar nor the modern universities recognize their certificates.

The general teaching curriculum in a madrasa is based on the following subject areas: Hefzul Quran, Tafsir, Sharia, Hadith, Islamic law and history. Most of the textbooks taught in this curriculum are very old and were written in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. There is no provision for science, mathematics, English, geography, economics and modern history, which hardly euips the system for the requirements of job markets in the contemporary world. With knowledge absolutely confined to religion, the prospects for madrasa graduates wanting to become doctors, engineers or other good professionals are bleak. Often, they find it extremely hard to enter mainstream employment. The only option left for them is either to settle in a local mosque as Imam or a teacher in a madrasa. The results are all too evident in the number of Muslim professionals in the labor force today.

As madrasa education does not satisfy the needs of students in the twenty first century, it has recently come under sharp criticism from the Muslim community itself. Muslim leaders in Myanmar have been calling for urgent revision of the existing system of madrasa education. They urge sweeping reforms in the teaching curriculum and syllabus by adapting modern requirements. However, the task of reform is very challenging since many madrasa administrations don’t want to change the content of their purely religious curriculum.

Steps for a reform programme

What is needed, first and foremost, is to form a central authority to exercise control over all madrasas or at least those within a particular region such as Yangon, Mandalay, or Rakhaine. The authority will have responsibility to take a lead role in the efforts to reform the madrasa syllabus, but not targeting all madrasas initially. The path to reform can begin with selecting 10 to 15 madrasas though a pilot programme aimed at addressing the following needs:

1. Set up an expert team consisting of academics and professionals in the relevant fields who will revise the existing curriculum and integrate appropriate content with regard to culture, society, gender, economics, science, technology, and other relevant areas.
2. Arrange consultations with key members of madrasa management, Muslim leaders, Imams and representatives from local NGOs to test implementation of the new curriculum to the selected madrasas and seek feedback from them.
3. Provide capacity building training for madrasa teachers to become familiar with the revised curriculum and methods of teaching. There is also a need to recruit teachers from other faith communities to make teaching culturally diverse. This will attract students to madrasa education beyond the Muslim community.
4. Improve educational infrastructure and physical facilities in the targeted madrasas including additional classrooms, library rooms, common rooms for girls students, science/computer lab rooms with internet access.
5. Arrange a series of dialogues with relevant education authorities such as the department of higher education or other governmental offices that affect the education system in Myanmar so that they become systematically engaged in madrasa education.
6. Arrange regional exposure and exchange visits for madrasa principals and teachers to Malaysia and Indonesia that will give them an opportunity to find new ways of thinking through observing the modernization of the madrasa education system in those two Muslim-majority countries.
7. Organize extra-curricular activities for madrasa students such as exposure to attractive places in Myanmar that will help them to gain awareness and observation of historical places, science museum, nature, culture and heritage etc.
8. Engage parents in the reform process in order to enhance their understanding of the necessary changes in madrasa education system.

If the pilot project proves successful, the curriculum could be expanded gradually to other madrasas after it goes through evaluation and subject to modification. However, such a reform will require a great amount of capital which the Myanmar Muslim community is incapable of providing itself. International organizations such as the Islamic Development Bank (IDB), the Asian Development Bank (ADB), or United Nations (UN) can assist in this regard, by including the madrasa reform agenda in as part of their development assistance to Myanmar. This will help us to shape the next generation of leaders in the Muslim community, particularly at this juncture when Myanmar is undergoing a democratic transition and also facing the ongoing threat of communal intolerance.

The Overly Attached Girlfriend’s desire isn’t oriented towards sex or even a boyfriend; both are just means to maximal intensity of feeling

This is the age of intensity and not of duration. The implicit premise of the Overly Attached Girlfriend, a popular YouTube series that originated as a meme in 2012, is this: A pretty young white woman has absorbed the lessons of pop music without irony, in the atmosphere of total surveillance exemplified by Facebook and the NSA, and now believes that love should be conducted in conditions of panoptic intensity. Each of the videos by YouTube star Laina, in her guise as the Overly Attached Girlfriend, have at least six-figure viewing numbers. Not a single one is all that funny. She remains very popular.

Jameson says of Warhol that if the work isn’t critique then he wants to know why. Laina isn’t making an explicit critique, and here is the reason. One side of the joke — that a woman would have to be crazy to long for entry into a couple — is negated by the other — that a woman who can’t negotiate her way into a couple is crazy. The coin turns on the woman’s possible worth and worthlessness, both of which are unstable even though the Overly Attached Girlfriend is a young, attractive white woman. Even (or perhaps most of all) in the gated community of middle-class white womanhood, women not only can’t have what they want, they are barred from frank expressions of wanting.

The Overly Attached Girlfriend began as a single image, multiply inflected with different captions. The logic of the meme: It must be instantly understood. Her huge eyes are fixed wide open in her otherwise unremarkable face, a face that avoids censure by being white, untroublingly pretty, young, etc.; all that could be condemned is held in the eyes, which won’t give up their object. She is a contemporary spin on the ancient European slur against women that they desire too much. Now, at least in most mainstream discourse, feels-shaming is more common than slut-shaming: the shame of being too much or too little, too warm or too cold, too ambivalent or too certain. Successful attachments, we are told, are pragmatic fusions of compatible values, something to work on, replete with quasi-contractual obligations to tell the truth, empathize, etc. Unsuccessful attachments, on the other hand, are failures of competence, embarrassingly lacking in the reality principle.

But don’t they, the purveyors of healthy attachments, know that duration is over, and this is the age of intensity? (For some, especially many of those not included in the institution of the White Family, duration never even really began.) The OAG embodies communications technology of all kinds, from social media to the recording device — she is the NSA in the form of a pretty white girl. She often threatens to attach recording devices to her mysterious lover, whom she is utterly bored by except when he is absent or threatening to leave her. This joke is how Laina signals that the Overly Attached Girlfriend is truly insane, as in so many other ways she seems quite ordinary. The world is increasingly communicative and demanding of attention and participation through technology, but it’s still mostly women who are construed as the agents of this excess. “Call him! Email him!” urges the Overly Attached Girlfriend of her fellow overly attached girls. Meanwhile, governments, like tight-lipped silent dads, collect all complaints and love letters as evidence of the population’s inconvenient surfeit of life.

What is the OAG’s origin? She is a new form of the cinematic Tragic Heroine, sharing some of her predecessor’s characteristics, inventing some new ones. She transmits herself faster, compresses more (this is the age of intensity). She cares less. She is what a girl in some kind of love with a boy looks like now that full institutional heterosexuality is over, or over, at least, in the minority world. The Tragic Heroine was one of the key figures of the invention of an erotics of heterosexual desire, which emerged alongside the invention of homosexuality as identity. (Imagine her as one card in a Tarot deck that also includes the Ice Queen, the Self-Hating Slut, the Teenager in Love, etc.) Her fatal flaw was her attraction to catastrophe; her other fatal flaw was her fidelity in love. The OAG — in her more baldly expressed ambivalence, her blank affect, her death-grip on perceived promises — represents the struggling decline, hopefully terminal, of the straight couple as normative destiny. Monogamy is over, long-term job contracts are over, retirement is over, mortgages are over, cinema is over (kind of), novels are over (pretty much), content is compressed into a single fleeting moment: the meme. Everything you need to understand you need to understand immediately. One date, one kiss, one glimpse is enough.

This is the age of intensity and not of duration. We begin again and again, we are all beginning and no middle or ending, or all three are collapsed into each other. Unlike the Tragic Heroine, the Overly Attached Girlfriend does not originate in cinema. Cinematic narrative still exists as spectacle, but the spectacle no longer unfolds over time, over any particular historical time. She is a meme and no more than a meme.

She is not unattractive, in a clean way, an ascetic and antiseptic cleanliness. In one video, a voice from off-camera instructs Laina, “Your ear is showing.” The performer hurriedly covers the visible ear with her hair. Nothing specific is left of her, she is a smooth, wipe-clean surface,  uncontaminated by sex, which might inconveniently interrupt her desire. She is pure desire and desire’s negation.

She’s at her most endearing when spoofing pop lyrics. In her breakthrough video, she sings a parody of Justin Bieber’s “If I Was Your Boyfriend.” “If I was your girlfriend/I’d follow you everywhere.” The lyrics, only slightly contorted from the original, and, significantly, re-gendered, take the surreal intensity of Bieber’s offer and turn it into violence, the kind of muted, self-hating violence that Girlfriends are capable of. Laina’s video doesn’t really respond to Bieber’s song, because the two intensities could never meet in the middle. The convergence between the central text of Laina’s video and the subtext of Bieber’s career is that the hysterical love he inspires in his fans over-literalizes his sexual promise and so renders it asexual, perfect for a teen dream. Although some of Laina’s videos reference sex, her desire isn’t oriented towards sex, or even particularly towards a boyfriend; both are just means to maximal intensity of feeling. Bieber too stands for sex without sex. The sex he has is transactional, and lives in the conditional tense of business deals: If you hire me I will do this, I will perform that. If I were your boss oops boyfriend I would spend every day with you.

Bieber could have been an Overly Attached Girlfriend, but he chose to be the bored seducer instead, pressing buttons on bodies he could never love because they respond too easily to his insincerity. Perhaps their ease secretly wounds him; bored seducers are dying of love inside as much as all of us, though in their case they are dying of the knowledge that if someone takes your insincerity as sincerity, it means the person could never really love you. Bieber could have been an Overly Attached Girlfriend if he took his own professions of love more seriously, but because he is also a young white man, he doesn’t have to suffer his own attachments. He allows himself to be filmed sleeping because he knows how to dream of himself.

Everyone hears the lesson of their own lives in pop songs, but pop music still has nothing to tell us. It’s what emotion might become when divested (cleansed?) of its learned hopelessness. Love is the catastrophe of openness to another, but what made openness so catastrophic? Laina may be right to mock over-attachment. We might not live long enough to see any improvement in the conditions for feeling. She is certainly right that unreciprocated love will probably, for all our lifetimes, remain ridiculous. But over-attachment knows no shame other than the shame of not being loved.

Love at present is always about gender, just as beauty at present is always about white supremacy. The Overly Attached Girlfriend pretends not to know this. She is so white she hurts the eyes. She is a vacuum in which only whiteness appears. Looking at her I am looking at my own invisibility. A black woman who over-attached to a white boy would know how to be ironic about herself. She would begin in irony: Imagine how strange and difficult it would be if you would love me! Her over-attachment would be more playful and much sadder. But I’m only talking about myself. Laina is not: Laina makes no confessions.

The couple is airless, the girlfriend is a shut wardrobe, boyfriends are cellars. In one typically unfunny sketch, the boyfriend tries to break up with the OAG, then gives up when she threatens him with a knife. But she stays in her halfway condition, both with him and not, because otherwise she will die. In this way they are in the same boat. Death is the sign ruling everything, but it is the most banal and stupid kind of death, a realistic death, a suburban death with no special character. She attaches and then she can’t detach.

***

In the great cinema melodramas, the cameras tip and swirl. The OAG, as necessitated by YouTube convention, usually appears in one fixed shot, head and shoulders and huge eyes, at her computer. This is a melodrama without movement, inert. Sometimes we see her elsewhere in the house, but never outside. This is something she has in common with the Tragic Heroine of melodrama, who also belongs to the interior. The Tragic Heroine lives in lush technicolour parlours, full of ornament, rugs, marble, silverware, candles, flowers. She only goes outside to procure interesting injuries to help her concentrate on her love-racked body. In the first scene of Fassbinder’s great melodrama In A Year of Thirteen Moons (1978), Elvira is beaten up while cruising in a park and comes home, where her lover forces her face towards a mirror so she can witness her own shame. She is victorious in his disgust and in her endless stupid love. The OAG’s eyes, by contrast, have no articulation, are forever fixed at their widest aperture. They are impenetrable orifices, they are virginal, they have never seen anything, that’s why she is always looking so hard into the camera.

Fassbinder was interested in the Tragic Heroine, although I don’t think he was one himself — his attachments were too various. His work in the 1970s describes the continuities between fascism and the German post-war ‘economic miracle,’ simultaneous with the US Fordism which has now become the shorthand for the highpoint of the brief détente between labour and capital. His career straddles the transition phase, in the west, between the post-war ‘family wage’ era towards today’s more fragmentary, faster-moving modes of capitalist valorization, which are not as dependent on state management of the family to mediate between the individual and capital.

In A Year of 13 Moons describes the slow death of Elvira, who made herself a woman for the love of one man, only to find out he didn’t want her either way. She surfs the contempt of men/the sympathy of women until the wave breaks. The eponymous heroine of The Marriage of Maria Braun (1979) builds a world around her love for her husband even though they only ever spend one night together. In Fox and His Friends (1974), the ugly proletarian hero gives everything, all his unexpected luck, to his handsome bourgeois boyfriend, wrongly assuming that he will know when to stop taking. Fassbinder’s Tragic Heroines are a way of talking about capitalism and the state. When Maria or Elvira or Fox die for their lovers, however they die, their lovers embody the savagery of a society mediated by money. In that sense there are no hard feelings. All the love objects are undeserving of the love lavished on them: They are silly, or cruel, or absent, or boring, or they have terrible taste. That is their job. The Tragic Heroine does everything else.

The Tragic Heroine can get a lot out of a little. What she can’t do is find a balance between her inability to take a disgusting world seriously and her longing for connection. At first glance she seems anachronistic, a love traditionalist, but on reflection it is impossible to assign her to any particular era. Perhaps she is an anachronism from a time that has yet to come. In any case, the Tragic Heroine is usually a woman, not in the biological sense but in the sense that she perceives the world as happening inside her rather than extrinsically.

The Tragic Heroine’s beauty is immoderate, her capacity to suffer is immoderate, she is immoderately “female” no matter what gender her body is assigned. Elvira has to stay in a body she invented for a failed love. Everyone who falls in love is this bodiless woman, or drags the body of a woman around; that’s why so many men (who have something to lose) fall safely in love with images, or not at all.

Unlike the OAG, the Tragic Heroine is not interested in surveillance. She is not interested in anything apart from her own feelings, which is not to say she is only interested in herself, because her feelings are collectivized, always for someone else. Beyond that she is languid and uninterested in the outside world except as a stage on which to play out moments in the intensity of her feeling. Her love has no real narrative structure, although it’s very dramatic: She loves immediately, deeply, and forever, and if you want anything else in the way of plot you have to look elsewhere. Nothing develops or unfolds, she reaches maximal intensity and then stays there until she dies. Possibly the worst thing anyone could do to her is fully return her love. Then she would be stuck at home forever (like the tormented heroine of another Fassbinder film, Martha); then she could no longer be too much, violently rendered just enough.

The Tragic Heroine understands the immanent meaning in sex. For her sex is full, swollen with significance, mimetic of itself, as Adorno says of artwork. Under one of Laina’s videos, someone has commented, “I would fuck her all day long.” This person hasn’t understood anything: One Overly Attached Girlfriend or Tragic Heroine can never be with another. In such love stories both lovers have to die as soon as possible, nothing can be done with them. Juliet’s tragedy in Romeo and Juliet is quite different from that of the true Tragic Heroine: Romeo denies her the pleasure of her longing, catches her out, by answering back from the shadows beneath the balcony. Go back into language, she tries to tell him, but he refuses. So they both have to die. A structural hetero-ness persists everywhere in this rule of the asymmetry of desire. Two equally desiring subjects meet nowhere except perhaps momentarily in sex. In every other way, heterosexuality is over, but they forgot to tell us. It is at once dismantled and generalized. The couple form is no longer a mediation between capitalism and the individual: Now it stands for the full capitalization of private life. What used to be a mediating layer now fucks you directly.

***

Attachment theory was popularized in the post-war period, influencing western states’ approach to the management of families (home-based care rather than institutions, extended maternity leave, etc). Its focus on the primary carer/child relationship effectively delineates the precarity of object relations, of the parent who is always leaving or inadequate or suspicious exactly because she is so beloved, so frighteningly singular. “Good” attachment patterns supposedly allow people to bear the flux of leaving and arriving, allow us to love where we are loved. But “good” attachments are a fiction while the world remains ruined; the gape of the OAG’s eyes is more accurate than the smiling stock-image couple balancing love with love.

Over-attachment is maximal, expansive: it uses words like always and never and every day and so much and so true. It is fiercely metonymic: my heart, my hand, inside me; one night is a relationship, one phone call might as well turn into ten, one person is the world. But it’s also a minimal form of life, because it requires so little to spin itself upon. Nothing you can say about love is too much or too ridiculous because at its heart there is a secret indifference. You pass through intensity into numbness and then you know everything and you can go on again, do your laundry, go to the supermarket, whatever. It’s because of this indifference that a fast-food restaurant bathroom is just as good as a bed, in fact only from the purest and most heart-rending love would you fuck there on a first date (as one video reveals about the OAG). In the secular world only the image of love can convert abasement into joy; that’s what makes sluts so sympatisch.

The power of elective suffering is that it usefully conceals whether or not you would have been made to suffer anyway. Suffering for love makes an unrequited love feel reciprocal; if it hurts it’s like they’re bothering to touch you. A friend told me that desiring without reciprocation is a form of violence. I didn’t want to think I was violent. But maybe I am, using emotional terrorism against what I experience, perhaps wrongly, as patriarchal alienation. Desiring without being desired in return is a kind of temporary fix — not a good one, only one with advantages — for the problem of being desired as a woman, or as a racialized person. When I think about the difficulty of accepting oneself as an object of desire in those mutually desiring relationships we’re all supposed to have, I think about how blackness or queerness or even being gendered female in a white male supremacist world can make it hard to accept love because you are encouraged from childhood to hate yourself. Meanwhile, despite all efforts to construct the political institution of heterosexuality as a form of mutual tenderness between people, men (as a group) have yet to learn to love women (as a group), and despite the irrepressible persistence of desire between women, women (as a group) still struggle to love themselves.

Now there are no layers of mediation between us and them (as Federici says, “Women are more autonomous from men, but less autonomous from capitalism”), and I don’t know what will happen, now there is neither form nor immediacy, there is only the moment of transmission without end, the invisible and fleeting transactions that subtend the visible world, the mismatched and unrequitable love of money for itself, no longer successfully able to self-valorize: Capitalism as Tragic Heroine, forever committed to a lost moment of promise. The forms must be overcome but the only way to do that is through an engagement with forms, if only as de-creation. Lyotard said that the job of the contemporary artist is to accelerate formal obsolescence. Who is a more paradigmatic accelerator than the creator of a meme? You saw it once and you understood everything. Subsequent iterations were only for the pleasure of repetition, or to show that you understood, and therefore that you yourself could be understood.

The OAG would do anything for her man, including die, which is how you know when she threatens her boyfriend with a knife she is not serious. The Tragic Heroine would die to fulfil an aesthetic decision, she’s such a modernist. The OAG would only die for an audience. But the question for women-identified people is how not to want to die. We might have to learn how to wish others dead instead. If love and sex have kept the OAG from her anger then she must learn to grow tired of them. Men could have loved women more, back when we still had full institutional heterosexuality, but they didn’t, because women are providers of services, not agents. They are luxury goods or bargains. In return women can do one of the following: attempt to be loved as such (provide incomparably excellent services); demand to be loved anyway (“see beyond my servitude!”), or forget about the whole thing. None of these choices is without some kind of pain. There must be another position, but we won’t find it on YouTube. Violent immovable attachment to one’s impossible position — the Tragic Heroine and the OAG have this in common.

The world where sociality is calculated in death or lifelessness (the office and the grave) also conditions our relationships with each other. Both too-much-ness and inadequacy, under- and over-attachment, can be construed as challenges to commensuration, attempts to evade the bounds of rational measure by falling radically below or wildly exceeding what is called for. Even intimate relationships without differences in gender, race, or class often falter against the obstacle of impossible differences in quantity or quality of desire. Yet sociality and the drive for shared pleasure must also form the basis for the possibility of communism. Some kind of transformative force is generated in the tension between the image of happiness and the experience of its impossibility.

Correct attachments are for the White Family; for the rest of us — people of color, queers, queers of color, single women, and so on, that whole mixed and conflicted bag of lives — there is whatever we can make do with, there are brief moments and long memories, there is daydream and pop music. For the White Family love is health, but for us love is at once a symbol of a possible future, a vanishing present, and the sign of the patriarchal white permafrost that threatens to destroy us. If we are ambivalent about love in its present form, it is only because, against the odds, we choose to feel something other than hatred.

Girl, you have always done too much or too little, and you are always too much or too little already. You are a mess of emotions, you live hand-to-mouth and from one day to the next, the slightest touch sends you into raptures or turns you cold as ice. It’s an achieved miracle, a form of heroism, that you still consent to be touched at all.

P.S. The turkey sandwich my Grandma made me was probably the best turkey sandwich I've ever had.

Richard Williams is awesome and I love his work.  I really like his book and I definitely absorbed some of his lessons from that.  I also love old cartoons and absolutely am influenced by that stuff

I was about to reblog, like, five posts from Nick Cross’ tumblr but I think I’m going to tell you to just follow him instead.  So click through!  Did you enjoy Over the Garden Wall?  Nick was the art director for that amazing show, and I have been aware of his work for a while, and I’m telling you, reader, that he should be raking in mad acclaim and gold and jewels and treasure chests in appreciation of his mad mad talent.

medievalpoc:

Khadak (2006)

A Mongolian post-apocalyptic sci fi/fantasy film about a plague that threatens to eradicate nomadism with a disabled protagonist? Get on my to-watch list!

You can view the trailer here.

cutevictim:

the-uncalm-nipples:

nodaybuttodaytodefygravity:

nateriot:

Obama on gay adoption 

yeah totally ruining this country what a horrible guy

Fun fact: Obama has attempted to fix almost everything that he promised to fix, but the republicans have voted almost all of his bills out of congress. He’s not the problem.

Fun fact: Obama is a fucking war criminal who has personal overseen the most aggressive and secretive foreign policy this country has ever seen so stop fucking defending him.

His progressive rhetoric doesn’t do much for any of the 2 million immigrants his government has deported, or those awaiting trial in immigration detention centers while he pushes to have them deported faster.

Or the Muslim and Arab Americans who are under racially biased surveillance because they go to Mosque too many times.

Or the Arab Americans who are on a terror watch list simply because they spoke out against of his wars or his airstrikes, or because they’re friends with a family member of someone who is suspected of speaking to someone who might have ties to extremists. Yes, the net is cast that wide.

These are policies he has actively enforced. Been directly involved in. Policies that have harmed more people than those under Bush’s government.

Have I mentioned he’s a war criminal?

Fuck off.

A caravan painted, “LADY WITH DIFFICULTY BREATHING”, ablaze during the eviction. Credit: Demotix/Graham Lawrence.

This weekend marks the anniversary of the Dale Farm evictions, when 80 families were forcefully removed from their homes of over a decade.

What was the evicted families' crime? Being part of an ethnic group reviled by governments and communities all over the world.

The site of Dale Farm was inhabited by travellers for more than a decade. Since 2001 the conservative-led Basildon Council had been trying to evict them. While half of the site received planning permission in the 90s, the rest of the contested land was classified as green belt and planning permission was refused. The council poured as much as £18 million into evicting the travellers, of which £10 million was for police presence.

While covering the evictions, Sky News built a tower on the outskirts of the compound, broadcasting the travellers' misery to millions of watching bigots. I appeared on their programming that day, being surrounded and assaulted by a gaggle of riot cops. Later I was arrested for wearing a scarf over the bottom half of my face on a cold day. 

On the morning of 19 October 2011, months of campaigning and legal back and forth came to an abrupt, violent conclusion. I felt sick as I watched more than 100 riot police marching towards our inadequate defences. A sad fence, reinforced with pinned together crates and boxes, cracking under the pressure of their batons and smashing shields. The sound of a friend being tazed, the first of many times police physically hurt him. A woman running from the armoured intruders, in her pyjamas, holding a crying child. 

These things happened in a matter of minutes, but I see them in slow motion. Why was the home of a community be violated in such a way?

Our surroundings seemed particularly incongruous to such violence: small chalets and caravans, adorned with catholic icons and kept with careful pride. This was not the scene of degradation described in the press. The Sun erroneously described a “stench of human excrement” and “bags of human waste”. In reality children and animals roamed around safely. The peace and calm was quickly smashed when the police entered, discharging their weapons with wild abandon.

It was the end of my time there. Three hours later I was led away in handcuffs; I did not return.

I was unprepared for the personal tragedies at Dale Farm. For ten years the residents had been subjected to enforcement notices, council harassment and numerous failed appeals. A caravan painted with dripping red letters, “LADY WITH DIFFICULTY BREATHING”, appealing to authorities not to cut the electricity off from a woman relying on it to survive. In 2008, after a promising finding that the council’s direct action against the residents was unlawful, the High Court overturned the ruling. The harassment, including attempts to physically remove the residents, continued.

At Dale Farm I learned that personal health is a privilege for the settled. Ill health is rife in the traveller community: life expectancy is shockingly low compared to that of settled people, the lowest of any group in the UK. Travellers are not afforded the same health provisions as the settled community. 

When Basildon Council decided to displace the families living on the site, they removed access to GPs and health facilities that rely on having an address. On the day of the eviction ambulance crews were on standby for any injuries that might occur. Staff hung around laughing and joking with bailiffs whilst leaving an elderly woman to suffer in her soon-to-be demolished house. This woman, after having been turned away from the local hospital, was treated like her life did not matter. An elderly person suffering from cancer had to be protected by activists and family.

That day, health practitioners were allied with those who were causing physical and emotional damage to the vulnerable, dressed in high vis like law enforcement professionals. They did not act like doctors sworn to protect and help those in need.

The eviction of Dale Farm exposed a pernicious vein of anti-traveller racism in the UK. Criticised for their “way of life”, being insular and not part of established settled communities, many settled people view travellers as a threat. The same slurs are levelled towards travellers as other minorities.

Those at Dale Farm had been settled for a decade, preserving their culture but being able to access health and education in ways previously unavailable to them. Yet this was not considered enough. Instead, the narrative was switched. Having argued that travellers need to homogenise, to become more integrated into settled communities, Basildon councils and settled residents then decided they needed to move on.

“Not in my back yard!” became a mantra. Travellers must disappear because their culture is different, threatening whether it is settled or on the move.

This bigotry isn't just disgusting from a theoretical perspective, it's dangerous and personal, destroying physical and mental health, homes and peoples lives. While at Dale Farm, I consider myself to have witnessed a incidence of ethnic cleansing. Whilst I was only an indirect victim of the state violence unleashed upon these families, I remain marked by what happened there. 

If the trauma of an eviction like this stays with a person acting in solidarity, I wonder how the trauma of multiple evictions hovers beneath the surface of human beings who are not wanted anywhere. I consider the difference between the Dale Farm evictions and the ethnic cleansing in Srebrenica, Bosnia – where thousands of Muslims were murdered and thousands more deported – one of scale rather than intent.

Basildon Council pushed forward the Dale Farm eviction on the grounds that the site was built on green belt land. In reality, the land they lived on was a former a scrap yard, used by the council no less. There were no tumbling green fields.

In the years following the eviction I have suffered nightmares, deep depression, anxiety and an angry fear of police so uncontrollable that I've been unable to continue with eviction solidarity work. But to have stepped away is a privilege that traveller communities don't have.

A few days after the eviction, when many of the solidarity activists who had lived at Dale Farm in the months preceding the eviction returned to our various homes and cities bruised and emotional, all of us mourning a place that had been home for a time, another crushing moment occurred.

At the Anarchist Bookfair a group of us rallied to increase the profile of the then newly formed Traveller Solidarity Network, a direct action group which aims to challenge ethnic and class discrimination and to promote travellers rights and eviction solidarity. Speaking publicly at the meeting, over a fuzzy phone connection, one of the elder travellers was asked: “Where have the displaced families moved to?”

She told us they had been scattered, split up, their families separated by a violently racist state. The meeting descended into tears, more than 20 adults crying. We cried because the government won, and destroyed that beautiful thing- a real community. A community that had let us in, had taken care of us as best they could and offered a kindness and humanity that Basildon Council could never understand.

it’s been a rough few weeks.  sending this reminder to myself for my birthday today.  :D 

staff:

Today’s the day. The day you help save the internet from being ruined.

Ready? 

Yes, you are, and we’re ready to help you.

(Long story short: The FCC is about to make a critical decision as to whether or not internet service providers have to treat all traffic equally. If they choose wrong, then the internet where anyone can start a website for any reason at all, the internet that’s been so momentous, funny, weird, and surprising—that internet could cease to exist. Here’s your chance to preserve a beautiful thing.)

tttaylorrr:

im literally crying
@duncepud

you had me at “Male Feminist" 

Seeds For Change has some good resources on running coops (i.e. running consensus meetings, group dynamics).

There’s also a great little book out on AK Press called Come Hell Or High Water, specifically about dealing with problems that you run into as coops!

Sarthos, and no, never. And not out of any personal embarrassment or shame, but because that was a very… special life-changing experience that really doesn’t translate into words very well. It’s too private a thing to share, even with the love of his life.

Though Lemuel knew. He’d elbow Duane and make a rude noise whenever a hot Silver guy would walk by on the street. “Brother’s Sterling Stirrings,” he dubbed Duane’s final year in school. Or, “Duane tarnished a young lad’s reputation.” Or, “Duane tried on a piece of silver and pricked himself.”

Yes, Sette’s wrong to assume they’re getting by in Ethelmik via prostitution but she assumes it because it’s what they did for Nary. Then they decided they didn’t want to do it no more, Nary didn’t like it, and told them to get the fuck out of town if they weren’t going to know their places. So they went to work for Stockyard to pursue what they were really interested in - bodybuilding and fighting for Knock and pymary for Anadyne.

The old lech on today’s page knows their histories and was probably just trying to make a little conversation, but Ana and Knock kind of want to move on from all that and be taken seriously. It’s like Toby with his junkie background and Stockyard with his executed daddy. Everyone’s come to the Nevergreen for a fresh start.

It seems far-fetched for an heroically successful composer from Luton to have never played a concert in London, but it seems David Arnold never has. All right so Luton isn’t London, unless your name’s Stelios, but the Thameslink isn’t that bad is it?

David Arnold is the composer of a few things you’re likely to have heard if you’ve ever watched a film, or any of the Olympics. He has put together the scores for a diverse selection of movies, including Independence Day, Hot Fuzz, Zoolander, Made in Dagenham and no fewer than five of the more recent Bond films. And this summer he is bringing his oeuvre to the capital as part of the Songbook Series at London’s Royal Festival Hall, on 6 July.

David Arnold: A Life In Song will involve new and reworked performances of his best-known work from the movies, and his TV work including the engaging soundtrack of the BBC’s Sherlock series. He will also be helping Londoners relive the fine times of two summers ago with some of his work as Musical Director of the Olympics and Paralympics.

Between performances with the orchestra and band, Arnold will also talk about his work, telling the stories behind the music and his various acquaintances across the industry, such as Danny Boyle, with whom Arnold has shared a fruitful relationship over the years (not least at the Olympics).

For a taste of Arnold’s work it’s tricky to sidestep the Bond franchise. Here is his remarkable reworking of the theme to On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, from 1997, alongside Propellerheads.

To underline Arnold’s relationship with the franchise, that track is taken from Shaken and Stirred: The David Arnold James Bond Project, an album of James Bond covers organised and produced by the man himself.

Arnold will run through some Bond and some non-Bond on 6 July, while the Songbook Series also includes concerts with Tim Rice, Tony Hatch and Burt Bacharach, also each in July. All events can be found at the Royal Festival Hall website.

David Arnold plays the Royal Festival Hall on 6 July. Full details and tickets are available here.

Image of David Arnold by Julie Edwards.