I doubt there are very many regular readers here anymore, if any. I’ve been shamefully neglecting this blog. I’m just too busy to put myself into regularly updating a project like this. I still write plenty, but it’s either for publication somewhere else or in much looser form, on Tumblr.
The more I think about it, the more I think that Tumblr is what blogs were when they started: a mishmash of things. Responses, links, pictures, personal stories and obsessions, portraits of the artist as an Internet Whatever. Sometimes I write things on Tumblr; I’ve written three today. Other times I just reblog pretty things that come across my dashboard.
At its best, Tumblr is a sort of modern-day zinemaking. Zines, self-published do-it-yourself magazines (often featuring photos and text cut from other magazines and photocopied) with limited distribution, have always been a part of underground culture, both as a product and as a galvanizing part of the community. As in the zine world, activists and weirdos alike thrive in their Tumblr microcommunities, posting photos of signs that read “Feminism Is for Lovers” or collages of child stars. Blogs have been accused of killing off zines (though they are still being produced), and tumblelogs seem to channel the spirit of zines more so than any long-form blog.
I keep up with the Internet differently now; I get more links from social media than from RSS feeds. I read bits of things at a time; I get news reports on Twitter.
All this is to say that while Tumblr is in much looser form than this blog is, it’s where I do most of my less-formal Internetting at this point in time. I won’t delete this blog because I love a lot of what I’ve done here, even if I’ve changed a lot since I started this blog. I learned here, met people here, made friends here, started shit here.
I’m still hellraisin’, it’s just elsewhere. Come play.
My latest piece is up at Global Comment. Some thoughts on healthcare, freelancing, racism at town halls, and equality.
For a country that relies on the bootstrap myth, the U.S.A. certainly has a health care system that punishes people who attempt to live that way. The self-employed, the small business owner, and most especially the scraping-by creative types—artists, designers, freelance journalists—have no easy way to get health insurance. We are stuck buying our own care on the “free” market, where a single person has very little bargaining power.
On Tuesday, September 1st, I became one of America’s 46 million uninsured. I have a graduate degree, a decent amount of published writing, and multiple regular freelance clients. There is a better-than-average possibility that I could pay my bills with my writing, except for that one problem. A survey by AHIP, the national organization of health insurance providers, reports that I can assume to pay an average premium of $4734 in New York state, where I reside.
Paul Krugman explains that employer-based health insurance is regulated by the government. Corporations can get tax advantages for providing health care for employees; benefits are not considered taxable income, so companies pay less in wages and make it up in health care. Krugman notes, “[T]o get that tax advantage employers have to follow a number of rules; roughly speaking, they can’t discriminate based on pre-existing medical conditions or restrict benefits to highly paid employees.”
Campus Progress reports that only 60% of the population is covered by employer-provided health care. 26 million small business owners or their employees remain uninsured despite having a steady source of income—because it simply costs too much.
Hi, darlings. I’m getting settled in Brooklyn and at my summer gig, which, if I haven’t already mentioned (and by mentioned I mean bragged) is as the web intern at The Nation. So if you don’t already read EVERYTHING ON THE SITE, you should start, stat.
Seriously, though, I’m going to be pretty busy so I don’t know how often I’ll be around, though I’ll be required to be even more obsessively informed on the issues of the day, so I’ll probably have some rants here and there.
If you’ve missed me dearly, I’ve had two pieces up at Global Comment this week in between the unpacking. “No Common Sense, No Pleasure: From Dr. Tiller to The Pill Kills” is pretty much what it sounds like–it’s a beginning of some thoughts on how we deal with women’s sexuality. (I wish I came up with the title, but Natalia is better at that than I am.)
It’s 2009, and yet we’re stuck on the old terms when it comes to discussion of women’s sexuality. We’re inured now to sex scandals among male political figures, but women are still subject to lectures about their duty to children and families, and even the debate over a new Supreme Court justice hinges on whether or not she is pro-choice. Discussions of birth control and abortion too often leave out the point that sexuality is normal and healthy, and women should be able to enjoy it without being forced to bear children.
We yield to discussions on mournful abortions, or else feel required to admit to absolutely no guilt or second thoughts, lest we unwittingly give the Right some talking-point ammo. We are left with no avenue to talk about the pleasures and pitfalls of adult and adolescent sexuality.
Then yesterday I wrote a quick response to the early reaction to the shooting at the Holocaust Museum. There are so many ways I could’ve gone with that story, but I got quite annoyed at the bickering on Twitter about whose fault it was that an antisemite got a gun.
Arguing over whose side the killer was on is as simplistic, reductive, and plain stupid as arguing about whether the Columbine shooters were victims of bullies or crazed Marilyn Manson fans (they were neither). It misses the point entirely.
We have a culture, especially in the Obama years, in which a radical fringe feels newly disempowered, and acts of terrorism like this are perpetrated by people who feel threatened. They take up arms in some attempt to go after the ones they blame for their situation. They may believe their actions will change things, or just be angry or disturbed enough to want to go out in a hail of gunfire.
Hope that will tide over anyone who cared. Be back soon.
I really enjoyed this conversation–there was much more we could’ve talked about, but we discussed the problems with environmentalism for its own sake, local economies, politics, how to save journalism, Karl Marx, corporate libertarianism, and centralized currency. His book Life, Inc. covers a lot more ground, and I’m not exaggerating when I say I think it should be required reading. It comes out June 2, and in honor of Rushkoff’s premise, you should get it from your local bookstore.
Here’s an excerpt from the interview, and the video preview for the book. Check it out.
S: A lot of the things that you mention as solutions, like buying local, are being tossed around now because they’re environmentally friendly, but you talk about them as good in themselves, because they connect you to the place where you live and the people that you know.
DR: Right. Which would I rather do? Hang out with these pretty girls on an organic farm, get some really bright gorgeous chard, or go into the fluorescent-lit A&P and push a cart around with a bunch of bored people? It becomes an easy choice when you think about it from a sensual level, rather than just an intellectual level. I’m trying to show people that I’m not asking them to live an ascetic life of renunciation and denial, but actually a much more abundant life of fun and pleasure.
When people are doing stuff out of guilt, which is what people get from the sort of Al Gore/”Inconvenient Truth” method of environmentalism or the Noam Chomsky approach to politics and economics, you get the feeling that you have to hole up somewhere and not consume anything. There’s this false dichotomy set up between doing it for the world OR having fun.
S: You talk about the connection to work, whether it’s on a farm or whatever you do—when I say it that way it almost sounds like the classic Marxist argument, that people are alienated from their work.
DR: Marx really did get a lot of it. It got used in some really silly ways and was a terrible basis for a movement. That’s why in the book I speak out against movements in general—you join this whole big thing and then the movement itself becomes a distraction from whatever’s really going on.
I’m massively busy lately and I just don’t have time to keep up with all the blogging I should be doing. My Tumblr page is updated daily, several times. I’m on Twitter. But most of my blogging is at Alterdestiny and Blog@Newsarama right now, and it’s just too much extra work to cut and paste everything here afterward.
So. Add one or more of those sites to your RSS feed. Because you miss me.
I’m still recovering from driving home for the holidays, and am drowning a bit in things I need to get done, but I have a few things up at other places that I wanted to cross-post here in case anyone was interested.
My piece on Gaza, at GlobalComment, which took me far too long and far too much agonizing to write.
I’m an American Jew, and when I state that fact, I invite a wealth of assumptions, not all of them anti-Semitic in nature. Renee Martin recently addressed the conflation of criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, so I don’t have to (though I would like to note that Modern Mitzvot has a very good point too).
Daniele Archibugi pointed out that upcoming elections in Israel and Palestine most likely have something to do with the timing and force of the Israeli attack. But being in the U.S., I have to see it through the lens of the election we just had, here, and one of the Republican party’s favorite anti-Obama attacks.
I picked up DMZ #1 way back in 2005 and reviewed it for Best Shots (wow, I’ve been doing this way too long). Since then, I’ve read and dropped many other monthly comics, but DMZ has stayed on my pull list. I’ve given it as a gift, made my professors read it, and flogged it mercilessly on this very site.
But aside from being an excellent story, it’s a story that at its core is about all the major questions of the Bush era.
DMZ picks all of us up and drops us into the middle of a war zone. But Brian Wood and Riccardo Burchielli (and some excellent guest artists) transfer that war back home, to a place we all know. New York City is the most familiar landscape in America even to people who haven’t been there, and it was the central point of the crises we’ve dealt with in the last eight years…
DMZ holds us all responsible for the failures of our government under Bush. No one gets a free pass. Each time you think you know who Wood is pointing the finger at, you find it twisting around to point squarely back at you.
I promise to write something for you guys soon. I miss you.
It’s my holiday break, and I’m celebrating it by working at the bike shop. In between battles with chains and grease, and catching up with friends, I haven’t had too much time for blogging or for the news–I’ve missed Maddow for two weeks straight and am sad about it!
I have been keeping up with the Blog@Newsarama, because, well, it’s my job, kids. Yesterday I wrote a post about webcomics that prompted a bunch of responses, so I thought I’d repost here and see if any of my regular readers have a favorite webcomic.
So I’ve been thinking about doing a weekly webcomic column here, but it occurred to me that I’m not actually that up on the webcomic scene. That said, I’ve got a few thoughts on the whole concept, as well as a couple of favorites.
I wrote below that print is dying, and I’m sticking by that assertion. However, to clarify, I would like to note that newspapers will be the first to go, and that magazines and books will be sticking around far longer. It just isn’t pleasant to read long articles or books on a computer screen, and I’ve only met one person who owned a Kindle–and that guy also had three cell phones and two laptops just in his bag.
Comics, I think, will maintain a print following for quite a while. The art looks better on paper, and comics fans tend to be the type of people who like the tangible items to collect. We’re pack rats. We see nothing wrong with buying all the single issues of a book, the trades, and then the fancy reissues when those come out, too.
Still, the Web has a place in the comics community, and not just as a place for talking about comics.
Webcomics seem to come in a couple of varieties (bear in mind that, as I noted above, I’m not really up on the webcomics world, and I’d love your input). There’s the comic strip, which seems to be taking over for newspaper comic strips the way Web sites are taking over for newspapers. Most of you are probably familiar with them, and some of your favorite print comic creators do webcomic strips too–I happen to love Becky Cloonan’s Comic Attacks.
These are bite-size comics that don’t tie into a longer narrative, and can be consumed quickly, like an mp3 or a blog post. Many media critics, Warren Ellis among them, have noted that the Web is a place for short bits of information. Ellis called it “burst culture.” Webcomics like this fit perfectly into that picture. » Read the rest of this entry «
I had my first written final exam of graduate school–and, I hope, my last–tonight. My knuckles are still sore, like I punched a wall. Also hope I won’t punch a wall when I find out my grade. Shouldn’t, though.
I hold myself to different standards than most of my classmates, it seems. Wish I’d done so as an undergrad. But even then I graduated with a 3.75. OK, yes, I’m a nerd.
Not a big enough nerd, it seems, to actually be upset if people slag me off on the ‘Net. See, this is the cool thing: I at least have a bit of a life when I walk away from this computer. A few friends who actually like me for me. That always helps.
Tomorrow I am off to see the reunion of a band I totally love, Boss Hog, at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC. Because I’m just rock’n'roll like that. Not as rock’n'roll as Cristina Martinez, but I can dream.
I officially have one semester left on my master’s. God knows what I’ll do after that. But I haven’t been able to sustain a freakout for more than a day. Good feelings, somewhere deep inside, are carrying me through. That and self-confidence.
It’s been a long time coming.
So, my dears, the holidays are coming up and I’ll be attempting to spend some more time with said friends and family. I’ll still be around, and sans schoolwork will probably be blogging aplenty, here, as well as at Newsarama, Bust and Alterdestiny. And don’t forget Global Comment.
I wanted to go dancing earlier today, after shoving off the weight of term papers on weightier subjects, and then I read this comic, and now I REALLY want to go dancing.
I didn’t read the first Phonogram but I read (and BUST-ed) Suburban Glamour and got a super-comics-crush on Jamie McKelvie’s sugar-candy-sweet art. But The Singles Club is even more of a love letter to pop music, dancing, and being a young, sassy girl in a club with just enough confidence in yourself and your moves that, well, it’s just a little bit magic…
This issue is set in a club with just three rules: 1. No Boy Singers, 2. You Must Dance, and 3. No Magic. Anyone who’s ever been to a dance club can guess that the third rule isn’t going to last very long, especially once you’ve met Penny B., a ‘phonomancer’ (read it and it’ll make sense) with super-sweet hair (that’s her on the cover above) and a bubbly smile and a love for dancing that comes through even in still images–no hipster shuffle for her, but all-out rock that doesn’t care what the uber-cool DJs think of her.
I love comics. I always love comics, but sometimes I have a day that reminds me just how much I love comics. That was totally redundant, but I don’t care. A little bit of joy goes a long damn way.
