Category Archives: CRITICISM (2009-2010)

Talking to pets and the individual sacred

While eating my egg and cheese sandwich/coffee breakfast this morning, I perused the paper and discovered that for some married folks pets are better listeners than their spouses.

While I can’t verify any of that from personal experience since I’ve never married, I have listened to plenty of talk from espoused male friends about their communicative challenges with their wives, usually, I think, with a certain masculine hyperbole attached that plays on gendered stereotypes of often puzzled and clueless male tolerance of female chattering.

(Why this or any poll focuses on the marriage class other than the cultural bias toward and privileging of that specific cultural institution despite it’s common dissolution continually befuddles me. It goes to the problematic of polls generally, their design flaws including and starting with the questions that are asked and their format. Most of them are ridiculously flawed!) Continue reading

On Woods and Ochoa

When I read that Lorena Ochoa, one of the best contemporary women professional golfers who would have been a shoe-in for the LPGA Hall of Fame if she’d only played two more years on the tour, announced her retirement from golf to pursue personal/family goals (including having children with her husband of a few years) and devoting more time to charitable work, I couldn’t help but think of the contrast with Tiger Wood’s brief “retirement” after being caught by his wife and the media living a lie.

Based on what I’ve read and witnessed from a distance it’s clear to me that the two examples of living with extreme talent and fortune, albeit in fundamentally different performance spheres, exhibit starkly different levels of mindfulness (that ability to live in the moment with sensitivity and openness to one’s surroundings while maintaining the focus on the task at hand) and character (that sense of one’s humanity that respects in a mindful way one’s spiritual and physical relationship to one’s environment and to the reciprocal desires and obligations for living life fully engaged). Continue reading

A Code for Dating (?)

On the continuum of thinking that we are rational, self-controlled beings to acting like instinctual evolutionary creatures, I think we are deluded about thinking we are the former and clueless about how much we are indeed the latter.

My assertion rises from a newspaper article this morning about contemporary dating doldrums and about the ongoing failure of social conventions and their regularly updated “rules” to get us past the normal dating confusion and challenges and onto the path of successful, healthy, long-term connubial bliss.

I suppose there have always been cultural schema for initiating and developing long-lasting intimate reproductive relations: Continue reading

Inscrutability, felines and heroes

As a cat lover, critic of heroic mythologies, and observer of masculinity in general, I have a few thoughts to air prior to Tiger Woods’ unscripted press conference today at 2:00 pm ET at the site of the Masters golf tournament in Augusta, Georgia.

One of the characteristics that highlight the feline personality in a somewhat stereotypical way is the seeming inscrutability of the animal. The relative lack of facial expression, compared to other domestic animals like dogs, that might expose the physical or emotional or psychological state of the creature that is relied on in the evolutionary struggle for survival might be a key to the animal’s predatory success especially in more “wild” natural settings where signs of weakness and vulnerability can be especially dangerous. Continue reading

Post-booyahs and healthcare reform

I didn’t watch the NCAA basketball tourney very closely on Saturday or Sunday.  I wasn’t surprised by Kansas State’s convincing win over BYU, actually feeling good about my revised prediction (KSU by 10; actually winning by 12). Maybe if I spent more time becoming familiar with the teams involved once the seeds are made my predictions would be more solid.

Regardless, my ESPN ranking improved to around 300,000 after Sunday’s games from 600,000 after Saturday’s games. A lot of folks took big hits with Kansas’ and Nova’s loss, as I did, but yesterday my picks did better. Wisconsin, Louisville, and BYU were examples of “ignorance” picks.

Only two of my original picks for the final four are still playing (Kentucky and Syracuse). And just under half of my picks for the sweet sixteen have survived. Continue reading

Los San Patricios

Quizas un poco tarde en el dia para poner este video celebrando el dia de San Patricios, pero justo lo encontre.  Simboliza algo significante en cuanto a la cuestion de la hibridez cultural en general y en la vida de yo mismo.  Asi que, esto es para mis parientes mexicanos e irlandeses.  Orale!

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Can you spell a-p-p-e-a-s-e-m-e-n-t?

Maybe I’m being unfair, too hard on him, expecting too much for a man of color, the first to be the President of a nation that continues to be in denial about its history of institutionalized racial inequality. (Tea Party anyone?)

Maybe I should be like others who give him a break for trying to be fair-minded with his political and cultural opponents in an attempt to change the way politics are done.  (As Rodney King asked post-police beating, “Can’t we all just get along?”)

Maybe I should agree with him and, implicitly, his handlers–those cagey strategists who so expertly read the opinion/political/historical tea leaves to shape such a pathetically limited vision for the candidate of “hope”–whose  incremental style is supposed to make Obama “not-Bush” and “not-Clinton” in order to create the conditions for a profound presidential legacy.  (Not!)

Okay.

Enough snide sarcasm. Continue reading

Incorporating the imagined body

Since I watched controversial Russian ice dancers Domnina’s and Shabalin‘s faux Australian aboriginal folk routine earlier this week during the 2010 Olympics “original” ice dance competition, I have been thinking about how the cultural “other” is imagined and enacted to reproduce notions of cultural authority and power.

More specifically, I have addressed in other essays on my blog the importance of the culturally imagined/defined body as a site of colonization and imperial control.  Indeed, the body as an experienced reality is simultaneously a metaphor that is ideologically mapped with value and power in cultural, economic, and political/ideological terms.  It would be difficult to dispute the assertion that fundamental to any examination of social and ideological relations of power, bodies and the way they are imagined would be at its center implicitly, if not explicitly. Continue reading

Not so nice Obama

In a recent blog I wrote critically about the fearful tendencies I experienced growing up in a conservative white community as a biracial child.  I drew the parallel of my own experience to current U.S. president Obama’s seeming need to be “nice” and respectful, to avoid confrontation for fear offending anyone, especially the real and imagined power of the white “master.” The underlying need to be liked, I suggested, had/has a racial component whose content is a constant sense of inferiority which exhibits itself in unconscious ways such as pandering and self-deprecating behavior–i.e., submission as in tail between one’s legs behavior–in order to deflect scrutiny of one’s racialized self.

So, for me, it was nice to hear and see Obama’s assertive management of disrespectful Republicans and cowardly Democrats in the healthcare “summit” yesterday. Continue reading