She's Still Not Preoccupied with 1985

I first heard this song waiting for carpool pick-up in my Volvo SUV☺ Not very nice to mothers are you Bowling For Soup? In cheesy recent pop, we much prefer Fountains of Wayne’s “Stacy’s Mom (has got it going on)” thank you very much. While I did (and still do) enjoy a lot of 80s music, I was also happy to put that decade behind me—no snakeskin miniskirt, boyfriend, or Duran Duran concerts to wax nostalgic about there.

My memories of the high school in the 80s have a lot more in common with Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep than “The Breakfast Club” or “Sixteen Candles.”

So it is not without irony that I find myself shopping for an 80’s theme party at H&M, where clothes from that decade seem to have made a comeback. They are playing “Blister in the Sun,” a female-vocalist, Euro-pop version that lacks all the angst of the Violent Femmes original. I score a pair of leatherette leggings, fuchsia satin top and black Members Only-style jacket. Paying for these clothes, wearing rather conservative and uninspired “bourge-y” sweater, slacks and Ferragamo handbag, I’m sure the register girl at H&M thinks I’m schizophrenic or have a whole alternative night-life as a street-walker.

After the H&M experience, I feel the need to explain to the 20-something sales-girl at Sephora the objective behind my request for shimmery fuchsia eye shadow: “I’m buying this for an 80s party” meaning “I don’t normally have this bad taste.” The sales girl with the dyed black hair and nose ring (who definitely was not born earlier than 1980) is impressed. “Una fiesta, anos ochenta, que guay!” She explains this to her gay male sales associate with the Clark Kent-style glasses. He’s impressed too. “Una fiesta ochentera! We wish we were going.” Are the 80s suddenly cool again, even for people too young to remember that decade?

Actual items of clothing or accessories worn by Nathalie MF in the 80s

1) Baggy sweater and leg warmers
2) Stirrup pants
3) Jellies shoes
4) Neon socks
5) Shirts with shoulder pads
6) Large hoop ear-rings
8) Stonewashed jeans with zippers at the bottom of the leg. I babysat many hours to save up the $50 for that pair of Guess jeans.
9) Overalls
10) Catholic school-girl plaid skirt, white shirt with Peter Pan collar, knee socks and penny loafers--until my transfer to “The John Knox Institute” which didn’t have a uniform, but did have a strict dress code
11) Lots of Laura Ashley floral skirts and dresses. Embarrassing but true. I spent a lot of time ironing yards of floral fabric to perfect this look.
12) Bermuda shorts and argyle knee socks.
13) Kelly green and electric blue eye-liner
7) Pouf-dress for prom
14) Total write-off year? 8th grade: braces, bad Farrah Fawcett haircut, put on a few pounds, but did not grow taller, had chicken pox the summer before, which was not good for skin, almost failed Algebra…

Then vs. Now

Favorite High School Reunion depiction—30 Rock Episode where Liz Lemon goes back to suburban Philadelphia for her 20th reunion: their private plane gets stranded in the bad weather and Jack accompanies her. She says nobody will believe he’s young enough to be their classmate and he counters: “Rich 50 is like middle-class 37.” She remembers being a nerdy outcast, but they all remember her as being mean, sarcastic and intimidating. She plays spin the bottle and winds up with Jack. They not only don’t kiss, he decides her classmates are right about her.

Sure I was: Nerdy and sarcastic, but most definitely not intimidating.

Happy I grew up then because….no cell phones, messaging or Internet. The stupid things you said and did were confined to throw-away notes or your high school yearbook--not broadcasted, mass-distributed and memorialized in the ether.

Moved on to the 90s for:

Curtis Sittenfeld “Prep” fame-whore/narrow-miss media humiliation

Graduated from college in 1994. Pitched my failure to find a job, combined with large number of interview opportunities to Rolling Stone writer for their “Gen X column—looking for the first job episode.” Used winning lines like “I discussed this with my grandmother and her friends and they said “Honey, we just don’t know what to tell you. When we graduated from college, we joined the Junior League and started playing bridge’;” “I used to write about Personality and Artistic Theory, now look at me, I’m writing about evaporators and batch digesters;” “I picked which college recruiting meetings to attend based on the quality of their buffet spread;” “I failed my interview for a derivatives sales and trading position at a large multi-national bank. I don’t think it mattered so much that I didn’t know what a derivative was…it was the moment I discussed my senior thesis on Samuel Johnson’s theories about being un-able to enjoy/live-in the present because we are constantly fixated on a past or future, which is either far worse or impossibly idealized compared to the ever-vanishing present…where The Head wrote me off as not possessing the driven, goal-oriented Derivatives personality.”

Almost (sort of, not) briefly Infamous

The article never got published and I got three good meals out of this (including one at an upscale restaurant!) on Rolling Stone’s tab.

Will never be representative of my generation because

I actually know most of the lyrics to Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s “Cover of the Rolling Stone”…

Open Source, a modern day Marxist Utopia?

I have been palling around with Marxists. I know, I shouldn't. I feel like the odd duck... a multi-millionaire, reading modern marxist utopias. The Marxists underground still exists, it is even experiencing a bit of a revival. They feel even emboldened by the current soiled diaper mess western ultra-liberal capitalism has created.

Obviously choosing to be a Marxist economist wasn't a fast pace track to academic success. Truth be told, the main reason I relate, is that they are the only ones modeling banks and modern fiat money in a way that makes any sense to me.

(Main conclusions basically state that interest bearing instruments, a la bonds, are detrimental to a society's economy when said economy is not growing at a brisk pace)

But mostly I think some old Marxist conclusions, such as "Banks are pigs that are detrimental to society", are worth dusting off. They should be revisited in light of the current abuses of ultra-liberalism and the banking disgrace it has engendered, where those that caused the most pain, reap the most rewards. Free markets self-regulations, fairness and other bollocks.

Anyway... enough digressing. I was reading a paper by one of my favorite academics these days, Trond Andresen. You can find the paper on "Utopia/Dystopia" here. Handle with care, modern Marxist utopias are not for the faint of heart and mostly take root in science fiction ... The relevant passages to the OSS topic are

Another objection is “why should people at all work in/with factories and manufacturing plants when they instead can do all this more meaningful and/or entertaining stuff?” The answer to this is twofold:

• A minority of people is deeply fascinated by tinkering with technical processes, and gradually making them run even better. And they are not very interested in interacting with people as the central point of their job.

• Pride: The select few that control the utopia’s manufacturing plants and process industry are the persons enabling society as a whole to enjoy its very high living standard. They know it, and the others know it too

These factors have been already identified as driving forces behind Open Source. Open Source is done by geeks fascinated with infrastructure and plumbing. Yes, I did take pleasure in solving complex problems. There is a certain pride in being a alpha dog amongst alpha dogs. I always got off on that. Most of you also do. This need to create, even for free, for the sake of creating or showing off will always remain, in a monetary society or not. The profit motive isn't always the motive.

A final point in this section about a long-term utopian scenario, is “can we get there gradually”? Ignoring the controversies on the political left about “reform versus revolution”, I will here suggest that a modern market economy may (at least in theory, assuming that persons/parties with the political will for it is in power) be gradually changed in the direction of the utopia, by – among other things – carefully selecting activities that are “ripe” for being made public and cost-free for the users. Such selection can be done based on at least one of the following criteria being fulfilled for the product or service in question:

1. Limitless consumption is no problem, capacity- or environment-wise (example: local phone calls, Internet access). (This is the sole – and therefore unrealistic – premise of Marxian “higher-stage communism”.)

2. Consumption is due to its nature inherently limited or rationed (example: schools, hospitals, funeral services, local public transport but not long-distance travel).

3. Neither, but attitudes have changed, so that people voluntarily abstain from over-consumption of a certain good/service.

Hmmmm, are modern marxists completely underestimated? They have also laid out a clear reason why we were succesful in OSS. It was just a low hanging fruit. Is OSS's success, the clear first sign of a "higher-stage communism"? Afterall, limitless consumption of bits is harmless, production is low cost and work is play as per the first quotes. "From each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs" could definitely sum up how goods move around in the OSS communities: a few produce according to their abilities, the mass consume according to their needs. What may not apply or simply be obvious in industry that are "people intensive" becomes a plain truth in software.

Yet, a part of me shuts down when I realize this is making sense. What is wrong with me? After all, I spent most of my short professional life, making sure we made money at OSS and monetized our success. I still feel passionately that outstanding individuals should get rewarded in OSS, how "Ayn Rand" of me, how so 1990's!. That we would get paid for producing software, that we would market goods in order to make a living and beyond seemed like a foregone conclusion yesterday, it stills seems so today. I have not compromised on that point. And I am obviously very grateful for the luck we have had and in no way would I change what we have done with professional open source for some vague promise of a better tomorrow. I am still a realist at heart?

But are they incompatible belief? Can you be a communist in a monetary society?? In that light, isn't professional open source, a socialist utopia that embraced making money? More on the topic of monetary modern marxism soon.

The Beauty Issue

My husband and his friend both assume that another friend of theirs is quite a hit among the ladies. Apparently high school and college were good times for X. “Can you imagine that they used to call him the 'Devastator'."

The irony is that neither my husband, nor his friend, bothered to ask actual women, including their own wives, what they think of X. The man in question is nice enough looking, but I haven’t spent much time thinking about him. The truth is that all above-average looking people are simple abstractions to me, unless they’ve written, said or done something that particularly piques my interest.

I don’t relate too well to the (outward) absence of obvious flaws in other people—like being too nice or too beautiful. No doubt this stems from an instinct to preserve dignity. One wonders if the unnaturally beautiful or virtuous might be applying their own (higher) standards to us: aka “could use an extra hour of treadmill every day,” or “needs to use more age-defying facial moisturizer” or “if you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say it.”

Even worse, if I suspect that an above-average good-looking person spends a lot of time improving or maintaining their physical appearance. Extreme self-discipline also makes me uncomfortable—seems too much like a self-mortification fetish. I, myself, last tried a diet in 2005—the South B(i)tch ™, which is exactly how carb-deprivation made me feel. Every time I’ve made an effort to diet or exercise more, I’ve lost the same five pounds, which immediately come back--since I haven’t been willing to make a Permanent Lifestyle Change. I do love walking and hiking, for the pleasure of these activities, not because they are connected in my mind with Self-Improvement. The irony is that all these men who spend hours buffing up in the gym would probably get more female attention if they did something like join a cooking class or book club or learn to dance.

On the self-improvement note, I recently received an email inviting me to a book signing by a former high school classmate who has written a book of lists to help people cope with those life-changing events—buying a new house, getting married, having children, getting divorced, dealing with death, and even the impossibly improbable like the World Trade Center Bombing on 9-11. I thought about this. I make lists too. This gives me a convenient sense of accomplishment, while enabling me to further procrastinate from the tedious things I mostly don’t want to do. I put things in neat stacks or star emails in my in-box. My rationale is that if something is important enough, somebody will remind me to do it and it will then pop back to the top of the list, and eventually I’ll take care of it.

Are women less judgmental about physical appearances than men? I thought about men who would not fall into the category of Somebody Whom Other People Consider Exceptionally Attractive that I would find interesting, like Salman Rushdie, for instance. I loved The Enchantress of Florence. What sort of woman, I wonder does a sensitive, deep writer-type like Salman Rushdie find attractive? Wife number four, Padma, model, celebrity chef. She's beautiful and she can cook, what went wrong there? Apparently, she wasn’t supportive enough of his career. What could the source of the “connection” he feels with most recent girlfriend, Pia Glenn be? Oh wait, that didn’t work out either…because he couldn’t get over Padma. He may write like an angel, but he appears to have the emotional maturity of a 16 year-old…

The interesting thing about getting older is that, for most people, it’s a great equalizer. Apparently X has been going to pick up his children at their school, and noticed that the high school girls in their plaid mini-skirts and knee socks still look cute, but they don’t give him a second look. However, he feels that his appearance is quite appreciated by these girls’ mothers. Sorry “Devastator” you’re cougar bait now.

TF21: Detroit Techno

Detroit Techno by marcf999

I don't know if it is because it is autumn but I always seem to go back to the deep techno sound when October weather hits. Something about the melody and hard beats.

I have always loved Detroit Techno. It is funny how little most americans know about Detroit Techno. To them Detroit is a city living in 3rd world squalor. To me and most europeans of my age (40) Detroit is the birthplace of electronic music. When mop-rock was still all the rage in most inland US, the Detroit DJ's were touring european clubs and were blown away at 3000 kids dancing to inner-city black techno music. I remember sharing a cab with a journalist that was going to take pictures of Derrick May at his club, I was headed to the club myself for an afterparty during the Detroit Electronic Music Festival in 2003. He asked "who is he?", I explained just how influential he had been to the world electronic music scene and bla bla bla... the guy seemed genuinely confused, he was from Detroit and had never really heard of him, he was just there to take pictures. I was truly dumbfounded.

Anyway, nowadays, one of the artists that I think is most in line with what I consider Detroit Techno is "DJ Bone". He has been around for a few years. The stuff he does is really good. The label is called "Subject Detroit" and it features Rennie Foster, which I remixed last year. The sound is hard. Aggressive even. But in true Techno fashion after a few listens it starts sounding like a lullaby to me. This is a compilation of recent (and no so recent tracks) on Subject Detroit. Hope you like it.

Playlist:
Music- DJ Bone
Minimal- Matias Aguayo- Marcus Rossknecht mix
Alias- Aux 88
R.I.D.E - DJ Bone
Good Time Charlie - Rennie Foster
Break It Down - Alekxis Jaina
One More Tune - DJ Bone
Sin City - DJ Nasty
Structured Music - Stephen Brown
Belt of Orion - Rennie Foster
Dead or Alive - DJ Bone
Hot LZ13 - Rennie Foster
Beauty in Decay - DJ Bone
Change (Acapella) - DJ Bone
Crusin Down 7 mile - DJ Nasty
Flying Object - DJ Nasty
Cause of Action - DJ Bone
One Way Out - Mark Williams
Platform 9 3/4 - Alekxis Jaina