Mr Ben Digs

Like many middle class white boys, I have a furtive love for old school hip hop (Oh yes, I don't even spell it with a K, that's how uncool I am). Take a peek through a gap in the curtains on an average evening and you'll quite likely see me dancing around my house to Brand Nubian, Jurassic 5, A tribe Called Quest, or Del tha Funky Homosapien like Henry Kissinger on cocaine. Bearing that in mind imagine my glee when I heard DJ Format+Abdominal on the Adam and Joe show.


That video and the one below this little bit of text are good examples, and feature excellent nerdy computer games references, but essentially everything I've found by DJ Format and Abdominal is face meltingly good.


Other sounds that I've been listening to recently include the sadly no longer active Nic Jones, the strange jazz guitar-tuba-tapdancers combo that are the Born Again Floozies, and Chatham County Line who make some good hillbilly music.

-Ben

treadmilltreadmilltreadmilltreadmill

I went to the gym today, an event which happens rather more often than even I'm sure I believe. When I was there I was thinking about something that my cousin (who is super ultra fit) said about a good bit of exercise. She mentioned how it made her feel better afterwards, and how she found it invigorating - and she said it in a way that suggested that this was a universal reaction to running, cycling, running, etc. This is a line that I've heard many times from various different people, and it's a line which I think may well be the reason why a lot of people like me give up on this particular aspect of a healthy lifestyle.

Allow me to explain. I hate exercise. I don't feel invigorated, I feel pain and misery. I've learned to expect this, but I worry that a lot of people give up when they realise that the promised moment when it stops being torture isn't ever going to arrive for them; I worry that they feel awkward and out-of-place when others talk about how good it makes them feel and start lying to fit in with the others. I know I did for a while. It took me a long while before I realised the actual reason why I feel good when I get home from the gym. It isn't endorphins or whatever, but simply because that point marks the furthest I can get from the time when I'll feel obliged to go to the gym again.

I just want to make this clear. I go to the gym because I eat a lot, I'm quite vain, and I have a vague sense of concern for my long-term health. Not because I enjoy inflicting that stuff on myself. I think if more people said that they exercise because they think it's a good idea, rather than because it makes them love life, then more people would be willing to keep up.

-Ben

Buh?

I came across this caption when looking through a book at work. I feel it is necessary to point out that this book isn't one of ours, and I don't think it's in print any more. I was reading the chapter on the chinese economy when I saw this:

Below: An industrial complex at Anshan in Manchuria. Like most industrial installations in this part of china it was begun in the late 1930s by the japanese and symbolises china's continuing debt to the period of occupation.

Now I'm no expert on the Japanese occupation of China, but I've never heard any Chinese officials talking about how grateful they are for what the Japanese did there. Generally historians just focus on the horrifying war crimes and ignore the, er, valuable industrial development I suppose. That or this writer really liked Japan.

-Ben

I came across this poster at work -- it's for a John Wayne B-movie from the mid-thirties. I think it may well be the strangest poster I've ever seen.

The IMDB summary gives the plot of the film as this:
Sheriff John Higgins quits his job and goes into prospecting after he thinks he has killed his best friend whilst shooting it out with robbers. He encounters his dead buddy's sister and helps her run her ranch. Then she finds out about his past.

I can't figure out what the poster has to do with the film, nor can I discern what on earth the strange waxlike figures are supposed to be doing. Whether this makes more sense if you've seen the film, I don't know, but none of those people look like John Wayne, and I think they're wearing rather more rouge and lipstick than the average cowboy.

Oh, and I think the guy on the far left has just shit his pants.

-Ben

PETA

This is interesting. I have always found it odd the way that some animal rights organisations express their desire for humanitarian treatment of animals through campaigns that show a sickening disregard for the humanity of anyone other than themselves. The campaign linked there is a good example, they disapprove of the well being and feelings of animals being compromised in the name of some grand cause (medical research) but have no compunction with heaping even more stigma and distress on autistic children and their families to further their own cause.

Incidentally, since reading Bad Science, I've not been able to take statements like this on face value. Whilst I don't doubt this is a good thing, it took me ages to read through all the meta analysis abstracts to check the blogger's assertions that PETA's claims were wrong, which is a pain. There has been almost no credible research on this subject, and the results of that were inconclusive at best (the most scientifically rigorous of the studies only had 4 participants, which renders it pretty meaningless).

As a thoroughly uninteresting little side note, it's the association with that sort of crap that stopped me from ever describing myself as a 'liberal' on facebook.

-Ben

Hmm

Some serious political analysis here. A valuble work I think.

Oh, and this adage is brilliant. (it's not what you think from a quick glance at the URL)

-Ben

Bookshelf

I've always had a problem containing my book population. They tend to multiply when I'm not looking--before I know it, I have heaps of books piled haphazardly around my bed and shelves sagging under still more volumes. Between my degree in English Literature and my morning rail commute, I've felt the need to buy a lot of books over the last few years. This is only one of my bookshelves, my anthologies are buckling the shelves in the other room.

Underneath that picture, and just out of shot, is my other population control problem--my guitars and basses.

-Ben

Antichrist

Ah, I love the Ship of Fools. The other day they had a look at the state of religious political debate in the US and found it, er, rather odd.

I think this might explain why there's such a high chance of rapture right now (although, to be honest, I've never seen the rapture-o-meter drop below 70%)

-Ben

The West

This is shop related, but not shop. I just thought I'd add to my collection of 'great shitheads from history' (some mentioned towards the end of this post) with the following character.

Without further ado, I give you Colonel John Milton Chivington - Methodist minister, Abolitionist, and mass-murdering war criminal. Only read that if you think you have a strong stomach.

I came across an article on the Sand Creek Massacre when reading up on Native American history (I know that no-one outside of textbooks ever uses the term, but hey, I'm a middle class white liberal--I can't resist over-sensitive PC terminology). After I read it, I was so disgusted I spent the next half an hour struggling to keep my lunch down, and so angry that I couldn't concentrate on anything for hours. Which really, is a shamefully mild reaction to what I read.

At least I also learned of one person to add to the good people list, Captain Silas Soule. I know it's not considered intelligent to see people in terms of good or bad, and in general I don't. But I believe there are exceptions, and I'll cling to the romantic hope that there is such a thing as a heroic person, even if they only manage to be heroic for a while. When you read the accounts of the massacre you see the horrifying malleability of normal people. A person with a position of authority can just say the word and otherwise normal people will commit atrocities that you wouldn't believe even the lowest, most monstrous person to be capable of. Conversely, Silas Soule refuses to fight and, for the men he leads, the spell is broken and they see what the others are doing for what it is.

On a lighter note, have a read of this article. Hahaha, sigh... mormons.

-Ben

Vintage Shop

Printing a Book, Old School Via Badscience

This video is an interesting cultural artefact for two reasons, the first is because it shows the olden days of publishing (hot metal type and linotype machines--ETAOIN SHRDLU and all that, no digital presses there) the second is because it's really quite astoundingly dull. A fine quality of dull that you just don't get these days.

One thing I noticed though, was the way that they missed out the entire stage of making books that I'm involved in. Back then, the manuscript would have been typed up, then the editor would have marked up the typed text with his arcane proofreading shorthand (I can do that, which is satisfying) this then went to the printer who would have typeset the text following the changes that the editor had annotated. Unlike the video, it would have been sent back to the editor after the galley proofs had been made from the hot metal type, where it would have been checked again (probably by a few different people) and sent back to the typesetter with any changes marked. After that it went to the machine.

At least, that's how I understand it. By contrast for me the process is more like this: The text arrives as an attachment on an email. The text is flowed into the layout--it is then checked, rewritten and edited as necessary. After that it is passed onto another group of editors. These editors mark their corrections and changes and send them back to the first editor, who incorporates them. He then links hi-res versions of the images to those in the layout, gets the fonts onto his machine, and converts the layout into a hi-res PDF and sends it by FTP to the printing company. Who press some buttons on a machine, I think (it's not my concern).

Yes, I know this is a monstrously boring post, but at least you know what I do for a living now.

-Ben

New York (second half)

And here’s some more ramblings about my travels. I think this will probably be my last, as if you keep going on about foreign lands too much you start to sound like a boring gap year student (there’s one at every party).


The reason, incidentally, for the sprawling tone of these posts is that that is how it’s arranged in my head—I really can’t remember what happened on what day. I didn’t have time to sit and write down my day’s experiences at the end of each day; I took some paper, but generally I was either doing something fun or passed out asleep, so I never got time to write any notes. Without them, it’s all blurred together. An effect which the 24 hour cityness of New York exacerbates*--after a few days which go on for more than a day you completely lose track of time. Anyway, on with the rambling.


The Staten Island Ferry was the source of both good and bad experiences in our time staying in NY. The first time we got on it was an impressive experience—we arrived on Staten Island over the bridge from New Jersey in a cab** so we hadn’t yet seen the harbour and Manhattan island properly. It was at around sunset when the ferry set off from St. George ferry terminal when we got on it on the first day. The sunlight was a vibrant orange colour, bathing one side of the boat in a lovely glow. It was at that height where it reflects off shiny surfaces all over the place, you get shimmering lines of orange on the curved glass of the downtown skyscrapers and little crests of glowing sunlight on the top of the waves around the boat. That first evening, we watched—slightly dazed with the time difference (we’d all been up for about 20 hours)—as the sun lowered and dimmed, silhouetting the Statue of Liberty as we chugged past. We were all left a bit speechless by that, we weren’t expecting New York to announce itself quite so dramatically.


Due to our lack of knowledge of the timetable we probably spent a good few hours sitting around in either the Manhattan or Staten Island ferry terminals waiting for our boat to turn up. Most of the time this was fine, it was good to have some time to sit and talk, just to pause and mull over the day’s activities, or to plan what would come next. The ferry trips served the same purpose too, once the initial awe had worn off—they became a time to talk and plan. There were two particular occasions though, when the time spent in the ferry terminal wasn’t welcome.


The first came when we missed our 3am ferry home by a few minutes, having all had completely knackering days--walking miles, eating loads, and going to the top of the Empire State Building—we were all just too tired to have patience for it, and just huddled in a corner of the terminal like refugees listening to the endlessly looped Staten Island tourist promotional video and thinking longingly about bed. The second occasion was on the weekend, me and Kristen had been enjoying the company of hurricane Hannah, who got me the wettest I’ve ever been. I think more completely soaked than you get when you jump in a pool. When we were running from awning to awning and hiding out in hip cafés in the village it wasn’t too bad—despite the rain it was still warm, and there was a sort of mad hilarity to the whole thing. Once we were stationary in the chill, air-conditioned air of the ferry terminal, however, it went from fun to really fucking cold. There was water literally sloshing around in my shoes, my pockets actually had little pools in them, and everything in my pockets, bag, and internal organs was completely saturated. My headphones were annihilated and the book in my bag became very, very soft and bendy.


So far I may have given the impression that I spent my time in NY being super cool and hip--hanging out in Greenwich Village, wandering off the beaten track, etc--but that’s not really what we were about most of the time. We spent a lot of time on Broadway and wandering around Times Square. Rather more time wandering around times square than I think I ever want to do again come to think of it—it’s like oxford street, but with fewer Hare Krishnas and more ticket touts. I appreciated the fact that everything was cheaper in New York than it is in London, but I don't like shopping—which rather kills the fun of times square. On the second day (I think) we spent our time wandering around in the melting hot sunshine in Central Park. I think we went there just to tick it off the list, but I feel like if I had someone to lay around in the shade with and to talk to, I could easily have spent the whole holiday there. It was just so green and landscaped; no less man-made and artificial and planned than the rest of the city, but with more of a sense of fun and whimsy. I expect we only saw a fraction of the strange and interesting things that there are to see inside the park, but there was a sneaky feeling that we’d be sort of wasting our time if we spent our visit to NY in the bit of the city where you can almost forget that you’re in the city at all.


I haven’t really mentioned much about the people I was with, because I feel like that would be impolite. They were probably the most fun aspect of the holiday though, or certainly the factor that made it fun. I did write considerably more about the trip, but looking at it a few days later, it all seems pretty dull. I think I’ll keep the rest to myself.


-Ben


*Not a word I would have even attempted without a spell checker.

**well, limousine actually – it would seem that there’s not much work going for limo drivers during the day on a Monday.

And now, a mess

I'm afraid this post is just going to be a giant linksplooge, sorry.

Firstly this song by elbow, it's a freakin' masterpiece. Sit down, turn it up, and listen to the words intently. It's one of the most evocative pieces of poetry I've encountered in ages - and one that I think everyone can identify with. Hard. I had to go and sit down in a corner and stare into space for a while after hearing it, my dad linked it to me after having the exact same reaction.

On a completely different--but no less awesome--note* have a watch of this, very short video by Adam Buxton. It made me laugh until my face hurt. Adam Buxton is very cool in general, but especially when combined with Joe Cornish. The show they do on sixmusic is a good example, it's so funny I actually get up early on saturdays to listen to it.

From now on I'm afraid it's just pure dorky links.

When I'm at work i have a slight tendency to go off on tangents -- my job often requires me to look things up on the internet, and the first port of call is often wiki (usually for the websites and books cited). Unfortunately it is notoriously easy for the curious to get distracted by odd lines of thought and end up somewhere a long way from what you were supposed to be writing about.

Yesterday, for example, I looked up the film How the West Was Won for some basic information about who made it. I noticed that the screenshots of the film had funny join lines, which led me to the article about the interesting tehnological dead-end that was the Cinerama process. From there I got to a stub article about the Cooper Cinerama cinema -- which took me off wiki for a while -- and then on to the most interesting thing, and the reason for the preceeding string of tedious links: Googie Architecture.

I'd never realised that the style of wonderful roadside weirdness that you get out west had a name. Although I have to say that I much prefer the alternative name given to it by another architect: "Raygun Gothic". Just looking at those buildings makes me want to drive a large car with fins, and eat greasy food in neon lit diners.

The other interesting thing I came accross whilst doing some work related wikisurfing was the very good article on Yakima Canutt. I'd always sort of wondered how exactly the professional stuntman came into being-- just where on earth did hollywood find people who were willing to injure themselves for money, but sufficiently skilled not to die? Ah. The rodeo, of course. He lived an interesting life, certainly an impressive live for a man who never bothered to go to middle school.

But yes, if you've not heard it before listen to the Elbow Song.

-Ben

*The ability to type an en dash without fucking around with unicode is the most compelling reason I've yet encountered for getting a Mac, double hyphens just don't cut it.

NY

I went to New York at the beginning of the month, I should probably write something about that, seeing as it’s pretty damn rare that anything that interesting happens to me. I seem to be oddly reluctant to do so though. One of the reasons is that the part of the holiday that is most vividly embedded in my memory is well, personal, but the rest of my reluctance comes from fear of writing about something so big. I’ve tried to do this before – when I returned from the US in 2006 I attempted to write a sort of record of what I did, what I saw, and how this made me feel. I seem to remember that it ran to about 5000 words before I’d even started to talk about things that happened on the second day I was there. University work then took over, and by the time I had the time to resume the story I’d become unsure of the memories I had of events – not that I’d forgotten anything, I don’t think -- just that I wasn’t entirely sure if I’d be able to give the right emphasis to what I’d seen.


Anyway. Yes. New York. I wouldn’t go as far as saying that I loved New York, but I certainly liked it a lot – unfortunately you can’t get t-shirts with ‘I really quite like NY’ written on them, so I had to go without. I got one for my little sister though, because she’s a kid, and therefore loves New York even though she’s never been there. Nonetheless, it has joined London and Berkeley, CA as places that I’d be happy to live in (London has the lead at the moment on account of the convenience factor, as I already live there). The things that put me off the place were the subtle feeling that you’re standing at the bottom of a very deep valley (which comes from all those massive buildings), and the really icky state of the Subway system.


I could probably write a whole post about the New York subway. The first reaction was “wow this is so much cheaper than the tube, and it runs all night!” but after a while of moving about in the sweaty-balls-hot, rusting-oozing, and generally disgusting stations, I realised what happens if you don’t allow much money, or time, for maintenance and cleaning. The trains were spacious, air conditioned (often to the point of being really cold), and much, much cleaner than the stations they passed through, but their pleasantness was pissed on by their infrequentness* (the tube runs about three trains for every one that arrives on the subway), and the fact that their air-conditioning vents hot air into the already sweaty stations. The other thing that seems odd for such an ordered and sensibly laid out city is that the subway is utterly baffling, with a unhelpful map, confusing routes, and a color coding system that seems largely meaningless. I find it odd that the New York City subway map is geographic rather than diagrammatic like the tube map. I suppose that the regular logical layout that the tube map pretends London has is a sort of antidote to the complete lack of any form of coherence above ground.


The city above the pavements though, is just lovely. Take a structural engineer there, or an architect, and watch them walk awkwardly, trying to hide their serious geek boner over the prettiness and towering ambition of all the buildings there. The Guggenheim museum is probably my favourite thing. It’s a museum built to celebrate pure expression of art, -- not representational or functional in the conventional sense -- and that’s just what the building is. It’s a swirly-curly masterpiece of a building, all the more elegant for being explained by my engineer brother, who was impressed by the way that the architect had made all the important structural and functional parts of the building blend seamlessly into his vision. Very cool, and it’s rare for Ed to speak of architects in a complimentary way. There was some art in it too, but other than the Kandinsky and the precisionist stuff, I wasn’t hugely impressed by that.


We went to a baseball game on our second (I think) night, which was a very odd experience. Baseball is, as I had expected, a very dull game – although seeing as I’m not really a big fan of sports in general this view is hardly surprising. The thing that impressed me about it was the whole experience of a baseball game – the sport itself feels incidental at best. There is loud music, constant crowd participation, mascot-based activities after each inning, as well as lots of booze. I drank some light beer, for the same reason that visitors to the outback sometimes eat bugs – pure anthropological curiosity. It’s definitely not something I’d subject myself to deliberately again.


There is something that I wasn’t prepared for in my trip to the city, which was how welcoming and friendly the locals were. We were staying in Staten Island, which felt familiar to me, like the south east London of New York – the big difference being that no American would ever be given as friendly a welcome as we got there. On the first night we found a bar just a few minutes walk from our house, and close to the Staten Island ferry called Jimmie Steiny’s** which had an atmosphere unlike any bar I’ve been to before. In the UK (or in London at least) pubs are either places where people come and drink with their friends, interacting with no-one else, or they are places where a small group of locals drink and hang out, but subject any newcomers to the most intimidating silence and hostility until they leave. The idea of a pub where everyone knew everyone else, and was friendly and welcoming to new people was a strange discovery.


The one very odd thing that one of my friends noticed about the citizens of New York City was the strange number of people with amputated or otherwise missing limbs. I’m not suggesting that amputation is a fashion thing over there, but it certainly seems to be a much more common occurrence than it is over here. Possible causes I was given included wars and military service, and poor healthcare (if you can’t afford health insurance it’s quite possible that diabetes could get to the leg-amputation stage pretty quickly.)


Well, I’ve rambled long enough for now. I’ll write more about this when it occurs to me – there’s still the Empire state Building, Central Park, the food (oh the food!) and many other things that I can’t think of right now to talk about


-Ben


*probably not a word, but you get the idea.

**Their comments about having the best Jukebox may well be true; it was certainly very well stocked. Also their beer selection rocks, lots of good American beer, and a couple of very unusual European beers as well.

Odd

I was editing an article on transvestitism today. I managed to get a big picture of Eddie Izzard in, although I ended up having to leave out the part in the caption about him being an 'executive transvestite' because I needed the space.

For various reasons I won't go into (rather secretive publisher) I had a copy of this DVD cover sitting on my desk all day today.

In Harm's Way is your bog standard 1960's second world war movie. It follows various semi-heroic characters (mostly in the navy, I think) as they fight their way across the south pacific.

Now as you can see, the cover isn't exactly a work of art, some pretty grievous photoshop work and poor composition. I kept looking at it out of the corner of my eye all day and right towards the end I figured out what was weird about it.

Look at the ship on the front cover, the big one. Notice anything out of place, for a film that was made in 1965, and set entirely in the Second World War? Like, I don't know, the microwave transmitters; the anti-aircraft missile launchers; the automated gun turret?

I asked one of my co-workers (who is a military historian) and he confirmed what was bothering me; that isn't a second world war battleship. It's not even close, they looked like this. He informed me that it was a spruance-class destroyer, and a little Wikiwork (helped by the fact that its number is clearly visible on the side) informed me that this ship is in fact the USS Deyo - an anti-submarine destroyer built in 1980.

So the person who designed this cover used a picture of a boat that wasn't built until 15 years after the film was made, and about 40 years after the boats used in the film were built.

Yes, I know its nerdy, and I know that I have a rather strange knowledge of military hardware for a generally peaceful person, but come on, that's pretty shoddy.

I'll write something at least vaguely interesting soon, I promise.

-Ben

SCIENCE

Cows tend to align north-south

I expect the researchers got some odd looks from their labmates, but hey, it's interesting.

I'll think of something to say here soon, probably. I've just had a bit of a numb brain week.

-Ben

Misc

In general I'm a pretty squeamish person. I'm not generally one to fearlessly expose me to stuff that I don't like, whether it's people, ideologies, or music. For some reason though, this doesn't extent to every area of my life. Because, whilst I abhor the rantings of bigots and idiots, I always find there to be something strangely fascinating about them when I encounter these rantings in written form.

In the past my compulsion to read the views of idiots has led me to read page after page of moronic ranting on the 'have your say' section of the BBC website, even, on the worst days, to deliberately subject myself to the comments underneath youtube videos. At the moment though, it takes a slightly (but not greatly) more sane form. I've been reading a lot of reviews on Amazon-US recently, for reasons to do with work, and I've found myself gravitating towards the one star reviews.

I've found that regardless of whether they are saying things I agree with or not, the negative ones always seem more passionate than the positive. I relish it when I find a book with 10 reviews and an average customer rating of 2 stars.

Today though, I started to go that little bit further. I'd find reviewers whose output appeared to be particularly hateful or stupid, then I'd go to their profile page and read all the reviews they'd written. Sometimes this led to amusing little snippets of life, such as the woman who wrote a disparaging review of a self-help book on erectile dysfunction, but then a glowing positive review of a vibrator a few weeks later (yes, Amazon sell pretty much anything). Other times though it provides you with a fascinating character study.

Take, for example, this person - whose reviews display a charming mixture of strongly conservative views, and hints of just about every flavour of bigotry you can name. All coupled with a tendency to make things up, exaggerate, and launch off-topic personal attacks. I'm pretty sure that the books he writes positive reviews of are ones that he's actually read, but I'm not sure whether his vast number of reviews of books that he finds disgusting indicate that he's good at creative reviewing, or that he's a masochist.

I'm assuming it's a he. It seems like a fair thing to assume, when you read the reviews.

---

On an entirely unrelated note, Man Man are rather good. Certainly the creepiest use of xylophone I'd heard in a long time. And "It Overtakes Me" by the Flaming Lips has one of the coolest bass riffs I've heard in a while (cool partly for the riff itself, and partly for the crunchy and delicious bass sound). The video there is a little weird, but the recording is sound.

-Ben

Musicalness

SPLIT12.2 - Anna Ternheim - Subtle Men
Uploaded by lablogotheque

Anna Ternheim makes pleasing noises, she's another one of those ethereal yet catchy singer-songwriters that seem to make up a significant proportion of the Swedish export economy these days.

Also, this tour lineup actually made me squeal with glee - Future of the left and Ted Leo, joy! - but alas, in order to see it, I would have to emigrate or hide in someone's cupboard for a month.

One other thing. Not musical; shop, I'm afraid.

I was reading a lot of stuff about the American reproductive law controversy, and I was looking through lists of bestselling sex education books that actually boast that they contain no anatomical diagrams or safe sex advice. Between that, and a load of Christian advice books which all seemed to be based around the idea that women only ever have sex because men pressure them into it, I was seething at my desk for most of the morning. The safe-sex thing I can sort of understand the logic behind, although I don't agree with it, but what possible advantage is leaving out the anatomical diagrams going to have?

My dad's suggestion was "well, I suppose if you don't know where the vagina is, it would make sex rather difficult... Perhaps it's a sort of abstinence thing"

-Ben

Victoria Sponge Cock

Today, in my work-related researches I came across the following abstract. I'd been reading a lot of po-faced postmodernist gender theory that morning and this reminded me of the interesting, and sometimes a little bizarre, possibilities of academic study. It also made me laugh, because I'm juvenile like that.

"Getting a Piece: An Ethnographic Look at Erotic Cake Purchase"
Emily Wentzell
The Johns Hopkins University,
Program for the Study of Women, Gender and Sexuality
and The Johns Hopkins Department of Anthropology

This paper uses ethnographic data gathered from a Philadelphia erotic bakery to explore individuals’, particularly African American women’s, use of erotic cakes. People often understand “traditional” identity and morality as sexually and emotionally repressive, and use the cakes to assert “nontraditional” selves in which sexuality is joyfully integrated into life. Many American rituals, like birthday parties, involve cake and can be understood to inscribe “traditional” mores via celebration in traditional forms. Erotic cakes function not simply as humorous party centerpieces, but also as vehicles through which individuals revise the structure of these rituals, breaking perceived taboos and pushing social boundaries. Through this revision, individuals craft rituals that assert, support, and re-inscribe participants’ “non-traditional” identities. Erotic cakes, like humor and erotica/pornography in general, exist within interlocking and mutually dependent forces of perceived repression and transgression, providing pleasure through their challenge to what individuals view as the repressive force of “tradition.” Because cake purchasers are enculterated individuals, erotic cakes sometimes serve as sites for the support of certain “traditional” social standards such as heteronormativity, yet simultaneously provide a powerful tool for individuals to target and alter certain ill-fitting norms. Erotic cakes are particularly well suited to African American women’s needs, since their form matches that of the “textured” joke prevalent in black humor and women’s subversive humor, and speaks to a particularly damaging “traditional” association of black women with food preparation and lack of sexual control. However, individuals from multiple racial, sex, and sexuality groups use erotic cakes as an indirect vehicle for social redefinition.


PDF here.


One of the reasons why I'm not hugely enthusiastic about doing postgraduate study at the moment is because I fear that as a humanities man I'd never be able to pursue ideas like this. I worry that I'd just end up being prodded by my advisor into writing something indistinguishable from the output of the postmodernism generator.

-Ben

Tube

I was displeased with my fellow commuters today, I feel a line was crossed. I'm fine with commuters being unpleasant to each other - pretending that all the other people aren't there, or at least aren't real people, is an important way of keeping your composure when shoved into a sweaty fat man's armpit - but I don't like it when innocent bystanders get caught up in it.

I'd just got off the train at London Bridge - music on and loud, marking the page in my big book of Chekov with my finger, lost in my own thoughts - when I saw the following sight on the flight of stairs up from the platform. There were two women on one side of the staircase at the point where it turns into the tunnel that leads to the escalator, they looked really agitated and were looking at something on the other side of the stairs. On the rest of the stairs was the cattle-pen-thick river of commuters stomping up the stairs. Hmm. I thought, tourists, and I directed myself towards the other side of the stairs when the people were flowing faster. As I got to the bottom of the stairs, however, I saw what they were looking at. There was a small child, a boy of about 4 or 5, no taller than my waist, crying his eyes out and occasionally trying to penetrate the crowd of people and cross the 12 foot wide staircase. No-one who walked past seemed to be paying the slightest bit of attention to this, men or women. When I got level with the kid I stopped, tried to smile in the friendliest way I could manage, and hoped that the people to my left would stop too and let him cross (three people walked head first into my back in these few seconds). Unfortunately, I'm a big scary bear, even if this kid wasn't scared already, so he just looked at me, terrified, and didn't move an inch. Luckily a woman of about my mum's age stopped next to me, said something in a soothing tone of voice and led this him across to his mother.

The whole thing probably took about six seconds from start to finish but it left me in a bad mood for the rest of the journey home. I don't understand how people could just look at that kid and think to themselves (if they thought anything at all) "it's OK, the stairs will be clear in a minute or so, if no trains arrive on the other platform". I'm really not a cuddly child-friendly person, probably given another second of being shoved in the back I would have walked away from the kid out of embarrassment, but I can remember the feeling of being small and lost in a public place, if only for a few seconds, and wouldn't just ignore a child in that situation.

I am disappointed with my fellow unthinking automatons, and hugely grateful to the kind woman who saved me from ending up hating myself all the way home for walking away.

-Ben

Holiday

As I mentioned last night, I’m now back from my trip to Wales and I suppose I better write something about it. I went, with my family and some extras, to a place called the Gower peninsula, in south Wales, staying in a campsite near the village of Rhossili. The Gower is a strange place, all rolling hills and sheep, lots and lots of sheep. As far as I can tell, the Gower was a horrific backwater that remained rustic and rural when the rest of Wales launched themselves into the industrial revolution with great enthusiasm. The only innovation that they seemed interested in taking from the world around them at this time was Methodism, which they took to with the same vigour as every other part of Wales.

The religious denomination favoured in an area wouldn’t seem to be that important at first glance, but it seems to have had a substantial effect on the landscape of the land, long after most of the chapels have been boarded up and forgotten. The most important legacy is, of course, the chapel.


They are small, squat buildings, architecturally unadorned; they vary from being pretty in their simplicity, to being plain boxes grotesquely spattered with neoclassical decorations, like stone pillars on the side of a warehouse. They manage to be beautiful, however, by always being put in amazing places. I don’t know whether this was motivated by a desire to make people really work for their church, or something, but they are almost always in elevated positions, high on hills and mountains above the towns they serve. It means that their plain austerity acts as a counterpoint to vistas and landscapes more beautiful than anything that would be allowed in a protestant church. It made me think of this poem by Wallace Stevens -- which I’ve never really understood, and still don’t think I do, but it seems apt.

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawled around, no longer wild.
The jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion every where.
The jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens Anecdote of the Jar

I think it’s because I’m from a big city, one where the buildings are often pretty, but the landscape as a whole generally isn’t, but this opposition always makes me happy, like a kind of deference on the part of the locals to the world around them. Sadly I don’t have a picture of the most striking example of this; a utterly dull grey box of a chapel that sat on the top of a hill next to a shimmering, cascading waterfall. I do have a picture of the waterfall though.


The thing that makes the Gower remarkable is that in 1956 it was designated to be an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (mostly because it was such a pristine backwater) which means that planning regulations are extremely tight there, and very little new building goes on. Between the Methodism and the planning department, the Gower is left, tragically, with a dearth of decent pubs, or any pubs at all.

It has no shortage of nice beaches, however, beloved by English surfers (we’re not talking Hawaii-grade surf here, but it’s enough to work with apparently, and closer to home). I didn’t surf, obviously, because I have no sense of balance and wouldn’t look good in a wetsuit, but I did swim in the sea quite a lot. It has to be said, however, that quite often my swims were cut short by the feeling of hypothermia setting in (there’s nothing like swimming away and then being struck by the thought ‘my kidneys are cold… that’s not good’).


I like swimming, I’m like a seal in that I’m slow and ungainly on land, but can more with a little more grace when gravity is no longer an issue. I’m unlike a seal in that I can’t breathe through my ears, which is another one of the ways in which I feel that evolution has short-changed humanity -- along with our absence of tails, and independently movable ears.

There’s loads more to say, but this is all I’ve managed to say before I got distracted by shiny things (well, shiny thing – my new bass is still awesome) I might write some more on the subject when I remember - I feel I should write something about the peculiar delights of camping - but it won’t be for a few days as I’m heading up to my brother’s this weekend for a weekend of computer games, loud music, and drinking – to recover from all that nature and rustic living.

-Ben