Mehtaphysics ॐ

I managed to make it out to Morocco briefly last semester while studying in London, and among all the sights, sounds, and smells there's one indelible image I can't seem to get off my mind. I'll just let the story speak for itself:

A friend and I were winding down from a long day of exploring the souks, and we ended up and getting wrapped up in conversation with two English-speaking guys -- who I later found out made money as tourist guides, getting referral fees every time they brought an American lured by his or her home language to try out a favored restaurant or riad. We followed them to a nearby bar of theirs to just sit down and chill, and I noticed two of their friends on a padded bench, disinterested in the beautiful evening action around them and wrapped in a smartphone screen.

 

The main guy was looking down into his Samsung smartphone running Android, and the ubiquitous American top 10 pop song "Party Rock Anthem" by LMFAO was blasting from his phone. It seemed a little strange, because the music at these steamy Moroccan bars was all traditional and atmospheric, and the most American music I had heard on the trip was blasting out of used electronics stores. "Party Rock Anthem" didn't exactly fit within the ambiance.

But then I noticed his friend, a slightly lighter-skinned young man with curly hair but a similar leather jacket on, lean over and jab at the screen with his index finger sequentially in time with the beat. The video wasn't actually a music video, it was just images of the song's lyrics. The main watcher was trying to follow along. He already knew the lyrics from hearing the song dozens of times, but he matched sounds with the words he was seeing on screen. 

 

His friend spouted words of encouragement during the breaks in the song. First in Moroccan Arabic, but after he noticed I was watching intently he switched over to English: this apparently was how he himself learned English over the past year. And knowing English fluently was a major life upgrade for him. Now he was dating a Moroccan girl who was leaving to study and work in Canada. And he was able to converse flawlessly with tourists, leading to a new income source as a street guide.

 

The first lesson is one to app developers who want their new product to change the world in some material way: teaching English to Moroccans with an android app is a noble goal, but you really need to know (and might be surprised by) how people are solving the pressing need today. In this case it was something I would have never expected -- these young guys were literally learning through the YouTube app on their smartphones by following along with lyrics videos. Nothing can replace venturing out into the field and figuring out what users actually want.

 

The second takeaway is just pure amazement. I'm so surprised that people are using technology this way, and that Moroccan twenty-somethings are streaming American music videos on tiny handheld devices that almost all of them possess. And surprisingly, many of the guys we met didn't just have one mobile phone: they had two, three, or even more, with a whole suite of different SIM cards from different providers to save dirhams. The classy bros in LMFAO might be enabled more to help teach eager young Moroccan men than Khan Academy, Rosetta Stone, or even their own government. And that is a true revolution in education.

 

On November 30^th last year, Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain unveiled this crude image as part of his “vision for foreign policy and national security” on hermancain.com. Coming from a businessman who boasts his disregard for the “president of Ubeki-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan,” this graphic based on a map of worldwide Facebook connections might not be a surprise. But my first inclination upon seeing this map was toward realism and interstate conflict in international relations. Cain states in his platform a desire to “re-examine [the US’s] role within the UN,” and takes a decidedly state-centric view of the world—labeling certain countries as “dangers” and others as “friends.” Cain is a silly man, but these views hint at grander ignorance of international relations theory in the most powerful nation in the world; and by extension, a possibly graver ideological situation in developing regions and extremist-prone states. It's dangerous that discussions of which country to attack or befriend are often ideologically-driven.

 

How did we get in such a bad place? The study of IR has existed as a formal academic discipline since 1918, and isn't as well-formed as other social sciences like economics or psychology. But most interestingly and possibly importantly, it's been evident for a while that gender is deeply embedded in international politics. States are mostly made in the image of Man, and not necessarily Woman. They seek power and growth, are aggressive, and strive for independence beyond rational means. And once you start digging, it goes all the way down. 

 

For a fitting parable on the power of gender in global institutions, one must look no further than Iceland’s collapse four years ago in 2008. Starting in 2003, the previously miniscule fishing nation underwent “the most rapid expansion of a banking system in the history of mankind,” and catapulted to No. 1 in the United Nations’ 2008 Human Development Index before culminating in the now-infamous unprecedented spectacular bankruptcy of the tiny island state. What led a well-adjusted, well-educated, and historically rational populace with no previous experience in finance to create a debt crisis at 850 percent of G.D.P. and start blowing up their Range Rovers for the insurance money? The answer can be found in the predominantly young business-schooled males who moved from studying fishing economics to the Black-Scholes option-pricing model, and whose eyes became bigger than their stomachs from examples of Wall Street excess. After Icelandic nationals placed two women in charge of the largest nationalized banks, a government minister was quoted as saying: “Now the women are taking over. It’s typical, the men make the mess and the women come in to clean it up.”

 

We only measure a society's progress by resources and production. Materialism is the exclusive emphasis in politics and economics, and men in society generally control production, work, exchange, and distribution. History, and therefore international relations study, is centered around these same metrics -- as Foucault argued, history simply exposes "the endlessly repeated play of dominations."

 

But sometimes, we can learn a lot more by focusing around social issues rather than material growth. Instead of focusing on war itself, Katharine Moon interviewed Korean prostitutes serving American soldiers during the Korean War. As the South Korean government undertook a policy of policing sexual health and work conduct of prostitutes, military prostitution interacted with “US-Korean security policy at the highest level.” What will be learned by "finding the woman" always will be significant.

 

It's not something I ever thought about before. But now, when I read something about history or current world politics events, I can't help but try to follow the motivations. If you look at assumptions held in articles about conflict, religious extremism, and war -- they're all centered around the male perspective. By pure definition, half of us humans are women. If you don't consider how the women of the world are faring in any particular foreign policy decision, you're making a huge myopic mistake. And once you peel back the layers, it becomes obvious how many of our thoughts on international politics are based in purely male-centric bounds.

While reading Listen to This -- a great collection of essays about music by New Yorker writer Alex Ross -- one passage in particular struck me as prescient and vibrant. It stayed on my mind.

Ross breaks down popular adoption of musical genres into five clear stages: youth rebellion, bourgeois pomp, modern rebellion, avant-garde, and finally, retrenchment. It explains music perfectly, but I think it can be applied across the board. What about action movies, video games, or political views? 

 

I love interesting categorizations, so I thought I'd share this. I'll let Ross take it from here:

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a funny sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period:Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Secord, the era of bourgeois pomp: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of The Rite of Spring into "Salt Peanuts"). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the masses and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis's attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effor comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream.

The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high moderninists, rebelling against the bloarted Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? In the first years of the new century there was a lot of Stage 5 neoclassicism going on in what remaind of rock. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, the White Stripes, and various other bands harked back to the some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Many used old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was quoted as saying, "I intentionally won't use something I haven't heard before." A White Stripes record carried this Luddite notice: "No computers were used during the recording, mixing, or mastering of this record."

That was Seattle City Councilman Tim Burgess remixing Wiz Khalifa's "Black and Yellow" at last night's Candidate Survivor event. And it wasn't even the most ridiculous thing at the quasi-political event.

 

If you ever wanted to see a bunch of old part-time politicans proclaiming their support for marijuana legalization and rapping in Japanese, Candidate Survivor was crafted for you. It's organized by the great organization Washington Bus (who I've been volunteering with at the Capitol Hill Block Party and elsewhere) and Seattle stalwart indie newspaper The Stranger. It was essentially a debate, talent show, and popularity contest all rolled into one. Skinny dipping was admitted to, cookies were made and thrown out on stage, and 60+ year old councilpeople talked about sexting and danced around to disco music.

 

The pictures on the "Hella Bus" blog are great, so check them out. And man, this city council is refreshingly liberal. When there's 0/20 people on stage who are against same sex marriage, and our mayor is actively advocating marijuana legalization, I'm glad to be living in Seattle. The biggest arguments were about tunnels and trains -- they were functional and economic in nature, rather than emotional or partisan. I was happy to see the different breeds of progressive, rarely noticed in national politics.

Other cities should learn from Candidate Survivor and lighten things up. The humor and playful competition make our political system feel in touch, active, and actually likeable. We need more of that.

I just came back from watching Page One: Inside the New York Times, a new doc about our nation's "paper of record." The narrative mostly stayed out of any posturing, except for setting up the Times as a public institution by delving into history through the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, etc. Fortunately, it was mostly fly-on-the-wall; watching real journalists argue about Twitter, fret over unclear messages from Washington, and ship off to Iraq. 

 

As a younger media consumer, I'm not so into the whole David Carr narrative that everyone seems to focus on. He's hilarious and has a great story behind him, but the environment surrounding the Times was much more interesting to me -- it's how my generation knows and understands news. The scenes in the Gawker offices interviewing Nick Denton were emblematic of that: I recognized all the desks (and especially the "big board") from interning there a few months ago. The short (5min) interlude at SXSW also hit home -- I spotted Ev from Twitter and Dennis from Foursquare. Although they had one or two lines in the film, to younger media consumers like me they are the central movers and shakers in the story that Page One is attempting to tell. Through the lens of the Times, the film takes a flawed perspective on modern media.

 

For example, the film spent a ton of time with two tough issues: the Times coping with Wikileaks and also breaking the news of the Tribune Company going out of business. Sure, I liked Carr exposing the sexual harrassment and gross mismanagement at the Tribune with an air of NYC superiority, but it's stuff we've seen before and understand. The reason the Times is in such dire straits is because they're arguably too rigid and old to deal with stuff we haven't seen before, and don't understand, like dealing with renegade justice-dealer Julian Assange. Even the young, social media-savvy Brian Stelter couldn't decide whether to deal with Wikileaks as a source or a fellow publisher -- these are the rough areas that the Times has to solve in an age of increasingly open information.

 

Inter-media gossip and intrigue is interesting, but the grand trends of the internet, openness, and audiences being used to getting content for free aren't going away. The movie touched on them and tried to address them, but viewed it through the old world lens of the Times. Sure, they got Clay Shirky as a talking head, but it felt as if viewpoints like his were an afterthought. I hope the Times survives, but after seeing Page One, I'm not so sure it deserves to. 

 

I have some interesting videos to share with you:

First, a man in India that is truly the master of his craft. That craft is perfectly throwing parotas like a disc.

 

Next, the future of live electronic music. I downloaded Glasser's album a few months ago, and it's a sublime little experiment in sparse electro-pop. My jaw dropped when I saw how she performs it live:

 

Here's the classic piece 4'33 by John Cage being perfomed by an orchestra. It's famous as an avant-garde composition because it consists purely of silence. The sound of the environment surrounds the listeners, and each one perceives it differently.

 

David Lynch on product placement. Hilarious.

 

A couple Fridays ago was the #Offline Festival hosted by Pitchfork at Brooklyn Bowl (awesome venue). I had two tickets but couldn't go because my parents were in town. I also didn't realize it was 21+, and I decided to take that angle when trying to get a refund for that $20 I never picked up from will call. The festival wasn't sold out or anything, and I started the e-mail thread before the concert, so I felt I might as well just go all out for the refund by e-mailing the ticket provider (which is what the Brooklyn Bowl guy advised me to do.) Anyways, here's the interesting thread that followed. I was quite forceful. Commentary in italics.

From: ajayumehta@gmail.com

To: customersupport@ticketfly.com

Subject: #Offline Festival Ticket Refund

Hi,

 

Hello Ajay,

My name is Jamal Mahone and I am the Customer Support Supervisor for Ticketfly. I was made aware of your exchange with Carla Deasy, the Customer Support representative who handled your case. I wanted to let you know that we sincerely regret the brevity of the response. Although I assure you that we did our best to make the case for the refund, the actual response was not the level of customer service that we pride ourselves on here at Ticketfly. In your particular situation, we do have a firm all sales are final policy. The fact is that the show was 21 and over as most shows at the Brooklyn Bowl are. This was listed on the purchase page as a result an exception could not be made. As near as I can tell you were a first time customer and to have this be your first and only experience with Ticketfly is truly unfortunate. My hope is that in the future when you have the opportunity to purchase tickets through Ticketfly, it will not be met with reluctance and it will be a positive experience.

-- 
Jamal Mahone
Ticketfly Customer Support Supervisor

 

So Allen Ginsberg, literary hero to several generations, will be portrayed by James Franco (here's a crazy profile worth reading) in the surrealistic forthcoming adaption of Howl, my favorite poem. Here he is:

In honor of Ginsberg's most iconic work becoming a trippy indie film, here's the imitation long-form poem I had to write last year for class. It was very fun to write. I still like it! There are some twisted, interesting messages in there, but don't take it too seriously. Like Howl I tried to go down into depraved depths and then come back with an infinite optimism. Check it out:

Great article in which Ron Rosenbaum flies from Huxley to James Brown and offers a compelling argument for non-agnostics:

Why has agnosticism fallen out of favor? New Atheism offers the glamour of fraudulent rebelliousness, while agnosticism has only the less eye-catching attractions of humility. The willingness to say "I don't know" is less attention-getting than "I know, I know. I know it all."

http://www.slate.com/id/2258484/