Good morning. Hello. How are you? #457
The Kit Kat gap, Contapoints, food appropriation, Cosey Fanni Tutti, who would win in a battle between OG Google and current Google, unfriending a Facebook anti-vax friend.
Good morning! Hello! How are you? mmmkay lessseee what’s today? Thursday? Crap. I woke up thinking it was Saturday. I was very excited. I was having a nice dream about spending a lazy Saturday afternoon in Griffith Park with an internet model who shall remain nameless. That was nice. Oh well.
Just went out and checked the garden, checked the soil. It feels like it never rains here but it seems to be secretly raining every night. The soil has been moist for, like, three days and I haven’t watered in four. Most mysterious. But the plants are doing well. My radical animal protection methods are yielding positive results. I may even save the original beans, which is very exciting.
I tried my Fruity Cereal Kit Kat yesterday and it was everything I wanted it to be. It tasted almost exactly — not quite, but close — like Trix cereal. Which, even though I haven’t eaten in forty years, I can quite clearly remember. Which I guess I should caveat that it tastes a lot like 1981 Trix cereal. For all I know, Trix cereal tastes different today. For all I know it tastes exactly like 2021 Trix cereal, which is slightly different from 1981 Trix cereal. Wait do they even make Trix anymore? Why would I know Trix are for kids. Internet says yes, yes they still make it. Anyway, the Fruity Cereal Kit Kat is a stunning return to form after the slight misstep of the well-intentioned Key Lime Pie Kit Kat that wasn’t quite right. It’s as good as the Birthday Cake Kit Kat (RIP).
I’m super into Kit Kat bringing over to America their hugely successful Japanese Kit Kat strategy. I think it’s hilarious that, in doing so, they have done it with Kit Kats that are 4x larger because, you know, ‘Murica. Nonetheless, it’s good to see America slowly catching up and closing the strategic Kit Kat gap. I mean, it will be years until we get the radical innovation of the Whole Wheat Biscuit Kit Kat, but at least we are now on the journey.
Been watching a bunch of Contrapoints on the internet. I didn’t know much about her, I am not super well informed on the individual participants of our various culture wars, save for the supervillans. But a few months she won some award and I added her to my Youtube subscriptions. Since then, she’s only produced one video, about JK Rowling, but it was so long I never really took the time to watch it. But two nights ago I was out of YouTube videos to watch, and deeply regretting my previous move of starting to watch Fast 9, and so I decided, screw it, let’s see what this weird woman has to say about JK Rowling. And it was so good. So I watched two more over the last few days, including her epic 2-hour one about “cancel culture” and her own cancelling, and, oh, god, I know this paragraph sounds like I’m getting sucked into internet drama and I swear I’m not, though I gotta admit there are times when I’m watching them I think to myself “oh man am I getting internet radicalized against my will right now?” SCARY.
Also I think it’s hilarious she calls herself old at 33. And she does quality Gen X erasure, going from millennials to boomers, but I don’t care, I think Gen X erasure is hilarious. Gen X erasure is like that dude at the metal show that gets a good brawl started in the crowd and then slinks out and lets the brawl explode without him. Gen X got labeled and suddenly it was cool to label generations and everyone wanted to be a named generation and talked about and Gen X just slowly crept out of the room. MBV isn’t cool now now we gotta like Nirvana.
Here’s a thing I wrote on a group Slack yesterday:
The food appropriation focus on Asia also seems like it could marginalize Asian food’s influence on new fusion cuisines. I feel like one would get a lot less shit for making a taco pizza compared to a taco scallion pancake.
I don’t know if I believe that, but the “food appropriation” school of thought is interesting and complex to me, I can’t really quite find my way though it. (Here’s the article that spawned this conversation, and another that a member of the Slack had written prviously). And, since I make a lot of weird, hybrid, traditionally-inspired-but-changed fusion Asian dishes — I am thinking specifically of my daily Northern Thai-cum-Szechuan daily stir fry — it is something I keep an eye on. At one point I was semi-seriously considering trying to productize my Tom Yum Bone Broth to the Keto Crowd but this whole thing gave me pause. Well, that and the insanely complex world of food regulations. I don’t have a solid conclusion to draw here. It is a thing I am trying to think about with an open mind. To see if my thinking on the subject needs evolving, or perhaps, maybe, it’s just fine for anyone to cook any sort of food. Or maybe framing it on who gets to cook it, rather than market it, is a red herring. Etc. Etc. TBD.
I’ve made substantial progress in Cosey Fanni Tutti’s autobiography, Art Sex Music. I’ve gotten through the period where it overlaps with Gen’s autobiography. She has just left Throbbing Gristle, and broken up with Gen. She’s off doing Chris and Cosey with, well… Chris now. I do think I’ve read enough to buy that Gen was not a good person in that relationship, and an abuser, and it is hugely disappointing to learn this. I also think the book isn’t super well written, it, like, writes, rather than shows, to use writing parlance. I mean, lord knows I am a huge violator of this tenet, but it is clear Cosey was a stupendously talented artist, doing important work. She does a great job describing that work, but I don’t feel her motivations, her thinking, really. I don’t know, it’s hard to pin down and I am perhaps being overly critical. Writing an autobiography is hard. A lot of people use a ghost writer to help. I used to think that was cheating but I totally do not think that is cheating anymore.
Anyway, unless a Peter Christopherson autobiography is unearthed, I am probably done with my deep dive into TG. I will finish her autobiography because I am semi-curious about her post-TG live, and I am completely neurotic about not finishing books. But it’s time to move on to another topic.
Emma and I were watching Mythbusters again last night and they had their first celebrity guest — well, since season one, the pilots really, when they had Shirley Eaton, the iconic bond girl on. It was the baseball episode, and they had Roger Clemens on. And Emma and I are both not super up on our baseball stars, but, you know, lived in Boston, so, sorta a little. And we both thought “wait is he the one that went all assholy and Republican?” And wow yeah Google was unusually helpful with this question:
Thanks google! Roger Clemons you’re off the hook. Probably. Who knows. Also you are definitely not the sax player in the E-Street band, that much I know.
I think a lot about how much Google has changed and I really, really want to know how the current Google would stack up against “original Google.” Like. The google of the Stanford days. When it was just Backrub: an algorithm that counted all the incoming links and nothing but all the incoming links, and posted results accordingly. Before Google the company complicated it. Obviously, over time, the original Backrub algorithm got gamed: people made giant link farms and made a bunch of fake links and Google needed to start doing a bit of editorializing. Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t mean editorializing, I mean filtering, or algorithmically modifying, or some other BS term that means editorializing but adds a veneer of section 230 protection. But now, I mean, it’s been, like, 20 years. I suspect a lot of those link farms are dead, because that’s not the preferred SEO approach anymore. So, the question is: if you brought back Google 1.0, today, which would perform better. I suspect some terms would perform more poorly — terms that still have substantial SEO attention, especially legacy terms. But also new Google is kind of garbage and it’s an open question whether the SEO spam would be worse than what we experience now. It also seems like it would be relatively trivial, in a world of AWS and whatnot, to make old Google. I keep thinking someone is going to do this one day, but it hasn’t happened yet. One more thing to add to my list of “if I had more free time.”
Last night I unfriended someone on Facebook because of vax conspiracy bullshit. I mean, it wasn’t so much vax conspiracy as, well, I guess vax passport conspiracy. This is the new thing — get the vax, whatever, but the government requiring us to do something, well, gasp! that is inherently tyranny! Never mind every single person doing this has lived their lives with a vaccine record. I love when they say shit like “whenever the government can ask ‘papers please’ it is a problem.” Okay fine then get off the roads because a drivers license is a paper. And stop getting on planes. And stop going to other countries. And.. jesus. I can’t.
The prevalence of the phrase “do your own research” as evidence, as a secret thing, as some sign of brilliance is just exhausting. Like, okay, congratulations, you have graduated to seventh grade from sixth. Now maybe stop using the World Book Encyclopedia for your research papers. Some humans have been doing their research” for decades. Call me when you have thirty years of experience “doing your research” with methods beyond what is available sitting on your ass on the internet.
One person brilliantly said “do your own research” and “there’s a nobel laureate who opposes vaccines” in the same breath. So. let me get this right. You did your own research and, through your research, learned that someone else has an opinion? And you did not, um, do your own research and learn whether that opinion is valid or not? That’s as far as your research went? You researched your way right into blindly listening to people? Fucking fantastic.
These people are like someone telling a shot putter to “learn to throw.” They literally just discovered their fingers can move and type something into a search bar and now suddenly they’re “researchers.”
I think I liked, like, two comments from people fighting the good fight against this insanity, and then just unfriended the guy. There were a few friends in there trying to talk sense into these people but I just do not have that ability, not on the internet. My profound respect goes out to those trying to do some good here. There was one guy who, among the 60+ comments, made the joke “I think your account got hacked” and then, fifty comments later “still hoping that your account got hacked or your dad took it over.” I didn’t know that guy but he gave me a chuckle. But he also made me slightly paranoid I had unfriended a guy for a hacked post. But the prevalence of that many “do your research” parrots in the comments lead me to suggest otherwise, and in any case, that dude and I haven’t talked in twenty years, so, yeah. I need to clean out Facebook anyway.
Also I gotta say this whole “my body is a temple” thing is going to kill people. People are way too precious about their bodies. I’ve read a couple articles now about this link, and neither has completely nailed it, but there is something there. I have a friend going through some serious relationship hardships because of the growing, solidifying link between west coast, California yoga hippie and the anti-vax movement. It is really out of control. Somewhere along the line, they forgot that the body is a temporary vessel, a meat-sack holding the soul, that the body is not the thing. Here’s a newsflash: temples do not puke, piss and shit.
And, finally, while I have a good head of steam going, I’m gonna say something I’ll probably regret. A woman I know was ranting on Twitter about how she can’t get the vaccine and we need to stop shaming people who don’t take the vaccine because they’re not all lunatics some have real medical reasons for it, and I just gave a good chuckle to myself and thought:
“Not all men.”
I KNOW. I KNOW. Don’t hate me. It was a joke.
Anyway, let’s do a mix. Now that I’m sure I’ve offended someone.
Oh, before that, one thing Contrapoints did really well was point out how far we’ve gone from condemning actions to condemning people. She recommended a book Conflict is not Abuse by Sarah Shulman. Anyone read it? Am I going down some horrible rabbit hole here? I am nervous.
Moody and quiet mix today. New stuff. Wow yea, every song is new. I was on a huge new kick last week. Oh wait. Yo La Tengo is old. But everything else is new. But now I am back onto old stuff. Yesterday I listened to my new Mobile Fidelity Sound Lab pressing of the Sisters of Mercy’s Floodland, the Darling Buds’ Erotica and the House of Love’s last album (the latter two thanks to my new friend Roger). I wasn’t sure while you needed a mobile lab to remaster Floodland, but wikipedia tells me that MFSL started out recording trains and stuff. That is pretty cool. I owned one of those gold CDs from MFSL in the 80’s — a reissue of Dark Side of the Moon. I sold it for a gazillion dollars in 2017 or so. Just absurd amounts of money for a copy the third best-selling album of all time. Anyway, regarding the songs actually on this playlist, pretty excited about the upcoming new War on Drugs album. I remain a fan. Someone told me I used to sort of know them but I have no recollection and I’m sure they don’t either. There’s a new Damon and Naomi, too, which is very exciting.
Anyway, have a lovely Thursday. Let’s talk more tomorrow, shall we? Here is another custom button.
I think about food appropriation ALL OF THE TIME. To the point where I'm cautious to even share recipes given to me personally by people who I lived and cooked with in a country that I resided in for two years. In some's view, probably as a colonist.
I do think it boils down to money. Who gets to make it and who gets told to stay in their lane. Messaging competitive advantage has always been about differentiating your product from previous or similar ones, so it's very tempting to head down the path of "here's how I improved congee (and why you should buy/cook/click on mine instead of someone else's)." Add to that the double standard that many POC chefs have vocalized about the constraints on experimentation and restaurant pricing.
But the good news is, that makes food appropriation at least partially irrelevant for home cooks. You try something in a restaurant and want to try to recreate it for your family or friends? You want to wander around specialized grocers and try foods you've never heard of? Seems fine. There's a related argument that restaurant choice, cookbook purchases and impressions are home cook dollars to be spent carefully which is where it gets more complicated. How many recipes in a standard 75-100 recipe cookbook that use non-western ingredients (defined as???) make it appropriation? 1 recipe, 10 recipes?
Jumping in to defend the World Book Encylopedia!