Funny or Die – We have food sometimes..

“Funny” becoming on par with “death” or “cessation of effort”?

The site is linked through Huffingtonpost.com– where I receive my news predigested and populist: anyone can participate, anyone can resist copy editing (they often do), and everyone can cull the chaff of the day’s news to find that bright, shiny, nugget of newertainment

BREAKING NEWS: Romney’s house broken into! Bobby Jindal sounds just like Kenneth from 30Rock! Iceland is a land of Vikings and that inscrutable tormentor of swans Bjork!

that the blogosphere can work with– it’s striving, certainly, and its after a certain kind of affect– but the stakes are, even absurdly stated– rather high. To not laugh is to not exist, apparently. A smirk is akin to a pulse, perhaps.

And so the news becomes something to craft, to experience as a sensibility, to strive after a sort of “mythmaking”. As a praxis, it has real political potential, so long as it can be opened up beyond snarkiness and insult.

Myth is invoked as a means of deriving usable values from history, and of putting those values beyond the reach of critical demystification (Slotkin)…

The usable values here are entertainment, clearly–a good laugh is always beyond rationalization– how dreadful to have your jokes explained to you, after all.

Absurd might be

on its way to sublime

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

Wonkabout: The D.C. Guide. : Viking Music For Your Foreclosed Soul

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Colbert on Iceland or, Has anyone got change for a paradigm?

Stephen Colbert: On the disaster in Iceland

Highlights, because I can’t get the video to embed properly:

“Yes, they may have free health-care, a 99.9% literacy rate, and more clean, renewable energy per capita than any country in the World, but [dramatic pause] they also eat skyr.” 

Although overlooked in the economic armageddon of late, one of the more interesting facets, for me, of the meltdown has been the ways in which gender and sexuality have, somehow worked their way to the fore. 

A probability map for electrons in a Hydrogen atom

As the “Stephen Harper” quip in the clip may indicate, there is something about socialism that is read, satirically or otherwise, as effeminate: to fail to perform or enact free-market capitalist policies is to “be” a real “man” (or woman, if we’re buying into Butler’s arguments that discrete genders are intelligible when one presumes a heteronormative matrix). I wonder what it will mean to be “gay” or “straight” or “Icelandic” or “American” when so much of our time online problematizes notions of time, place, and “self”/”being”/”interiority”: just look the jurisdictional morass opened up by trying by taxing online activities- or only gambling:

“… categories equal metaphysics: what is real, and hence what constitutes problems and solutions, are relative to the apparatus. Or, as Thomas Kuhn said about paradigm shifts, a new paradigm does not solve problems of the old paradigm, it just makes those problems irrelevant” (Ulmer, Electronimc Monuments, 99).

If identity politics are  vexed by this new apparatus  (online, no body knows you’re a robot, a tomato, or a node in the worlds largest fungus), then why is gender/sexuality asserting itself again and again in American representations of this country’s meltdown? Why does this help us mythologize this disaster in a way that’s useful to us? And what kind of “use” are we looking to derive from it?

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

Wonkette : Iceland, The Country, Basically Gives Up

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World Economies are not as well marked as the Cliffs of Moher