Gender: Female
Status: Married
Age: 48
City: Berlin
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Blog Archive
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July 3, 2008 - Thursday
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8:13 AM - Appalling "toys"
Current mood:  aggravated
Check out the latest in negative stereotyping for fun and profit: http://shop.eboy.com/products/peecol-bulgr
And Germans pretend to be horrified when their drill sergeants instruct recruits to pretend they are in the Bronx, firing on "hostile" African Americans.
Contact eboy@eboy.com if you don't like it. And you can drop a line to the people they name as their "clients, partners & friends" as well:
Adidas, Adobe, Amazon, Arena Magazine, Attenda, AXE, Bizz Magazine, Blender Magazine, Boston Magazine, Brazen, Bungalow Records, Carraro, Coca-Cola, Computer Arts Magazine, Create Online Magazine, Creative Review Magazine, DaimlerChrysler, Der Spiegel, Design Plex, Die Woche, Die Zeit, Diesel, DKNY, Edge Mag, Egg, Electronic Gaming Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Expo 2000, FontShop, Fortune Magazine, Gamecity, Geo Magazine, Grooves Magazine, Honda, IDN, Kellogs, Kidrobot, Levi's, Microsoft, Monster, MTV, Nestle, Nike, Panic, Paopaws, Paul Smith, Pentagram, Pepsi, Renault, Replay, RollingStone Magazine, Saatchi, SAP, Spin Magazine, The Face, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, Tomorrow Magazine, VH-1, Wired Magazine and many more …
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April 18, 2008 - Friday
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1:45 PM - Hobo Road
Another image roughly based on a public domain photo from the 1930s, in the Farm Services Administration collection. The images of economic privation and of a modern society that can no longer support its citizens seem very pertinent to me in light of the collapsing economic system of the United States.
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April 17, 2008 - Thursday
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10:20 AM - Alienation
I've been thinking a lot about it, since I live in a city where Albert Speer designed too many of the buildings. This is my latest piece -- mostly done in Painter, but then printed and painted with acrylic and re-scanned.
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December 28, 2007 - Friday
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2:19 AM - Missing in action
Current mood:  calm
Category: Life
For those who have wondered what happened to me....
I've been going through a period of reflection and have been keeping my head down, doing a lot more thinking and listening than writing or talking. I didn't even realize, until I got a message from a friend, that I'd been off MySpace for months. Part of what I'm thinking about is how to re-engage as an activist now that I am physically feeling better, and how best to marry my art and writing to my activism. I don't have any answers yet, but my thoughts are beginning to coalesce around a few projects. I also recently rented a large studio in which I'm planning to both work and host events open to the community (workshops, a film series), and have been busy thinking about and physically working in that space.
Race, gender and class are, as always, at the center of my concerns, and a large part of my silence results from my need to rethink and reposition myself as a white American activist in Berlin where all three factors need to be re-examined through a local lens. The underlying inequalities are very similar in Europe and the U.S., but the details of the situations in which they are played out is very different from what I'm used to; the shift in perspective sometimes induces a feeling of nauseating dislocation. It will take me more time to get a good sense of when and where I should enter the public discourse here, but at least I'm starting to see what the issues are.
In the meantime, I've been doing a great deal of reading and language study, since German language skill is a prerequisite for effective work in Germany and learning new languages is a very difficult project for me -- I've never been good at it, and I just have to keep hammering away doggedly, improving tiny bit by tiny bit. It's disheartening to find that after almost two years I'm still at the level of simple conversations about concrete concerns, but abstraction is still out of my grasp and probably will be for some time.
My eyes seem to have stabilized after slightly improving, so my total vision loss in the last 18 months is about 20%. It's unlikely I will be able to see better than this, and possible that I will have another flare-up in the future, since no one knows what caused the first one and therefore no one knows how to prevent it. I remain optimistic, though, and determined to use my eyes as well as I can, for as long as I have them, whether it's a matter of years or (hopefully) many decades. Though my vision is dimmer, I think that I now see certain things somewhat more clearly.
At any rate, I will probably be submerging again for a while, so those who want to contact me can do so via email. If you don't have my email address, drop me a note here and I'll send it to you.
Peace,
Kali
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September 7, 2007 - Friday
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4:31 PM - Tagged! 10 random things about me.
Sister Rain just tagged me and now I'm supposed to write down ten weird or random things people might not know about me. So, here goes.
1) I'm afraid of heights, but I often try to force myself into situations where I have to deal with the fear. Sometimes I can do it and sometimes I just freeze.
2) After two years together I'm still googly-eyed and madly in love with my partner, which probably surprises me more than it surprises anyone else. Even more incredible is that the moment I think, "this can't possibly get better," it does. I've always believed in love, but I don't have to take its existence on faith these days.
3) I'm really an optimist.
4) I hate olives. I keep trying to like olives, but I can't manage it. I think the problem may be genetic, and that olives taste different to me than they taste to people who like olives. It disappoints me because there are so many interesting varieties of olive and if I liked them a whole world of gastronomic pleasure would be open to me. I'm annoyed they apparently aren't an acquired taste.
5) Ida B. Wells has been my No. 1 personal hero since childhood. I found her autobiography in my grade school library (it was a good library), buried among the seven volumes on George Washington Carver and stayed up all night for two nights to read it under the covers with a flashlight. My greatest dream was to grow up to be that cool and that tough.
6) I have a magic ring, which may account for my wonderful luck. People looking at my life and the disasters I've survived might not think I'm lucky, but I know I am, because I know just how bad it could have been in the worst case scenario.
7) My eyes are green. Not grey-green or blue-green. Green like they write about. But I hide them behind glasses because I'm half blind.
8) When confronted by oppressive authority my initial instinct is to punch the person who's hassling me right in the face. I've never done it because I don't believe in hitting people except in self-defense, but I always have a quick flash of satisfaction at the thought of how great it would feel to just slug 'em.
9) If I could choose any woman in the world to stand in for the sister I never had, it would be Alyssa.
10) Water is my favorite element, and I'm happiest when I'm swimming in the ocean.
So that's me. I'm tagging my friends Alyssa, Tsappora, Shash, Lana, lamesha, Avalon, Joseph, Rikki, ABC Bodyart, and Naomi, because I always want to learn more about them...
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4:26 PM - More Stupid Evolutionary Psych Tricks: Choosing "Mates"
Category: News and Politics
Another pieces from Consuming Consciousness:
Feminist blogs have been bashing evolutionary psych lately, and for good reason. The pseudoscientific evolutionary psych findings reported and promoted in the mass media provide a seemingly endless series of "just so" stories to support the Status Quo, and they have been particularly bad in the area of gender. Lately pop evolutionary psych proponents have been claiming that women are "naturally" better shoppers because they have had, in our prehistory a (completely unconfirmed and probably imaginary) primary role as "gatherers" (as opposed to those he-man hunters); that they prefer "pink" (they actually, like men, prefer blue) for the same reason; and, most lately, that, "like the Neanderthals" (more made-up stories of our prehistory) women look for security and commitment in a mate while men look for beauty.
Here's a sample of the lunacy from an Indiana University press release (September 4, 2007):
While humans may pride themselves on being highly evolved, most still behave like the stereotypical Neanderthals when it comes to choosing a mate, according to research by Indiana University cognitive scientist Peter Todd. In a new study, Todd and colleagues found that though individuals may claim otherwise, beauty is the key ingredient for men while women, the much choosier of the sexes, leverage their looks for security and commitment.
This formula has served humans throughout time, with the model of choosy females reflected in most mammals, Todd and his coauthors write in "Different cognitive processes underlie human mate choices and mate preferences," which will be published the week of Sept. 4-7 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
"Evolutionary theories in psychology suggest that men and women should trade off different traits in each other, and when we look at the actual mate choices people make, this is what we find evidence for," Todd said. "Ancestral individuals who made their mate choices in this way -- women trading off their attractiveness for higher quality men and men looking for any attractive women who will accept them -- would have had an evolutionary advantage in greater numbers of successful offspring."
And how did he come to these amazing conclusions? Forty-six adults in Germany were subjected to speed-dating sessions. Todd and his colleagues assumed this was a "microcosm where mate choices are made sequentially in a faster and more formalized fashion than in daily life." Speed-dating... really a great laboratory. I don't know about you, but I always make my choices about "mates" in 3-7 minutes. Not.
Not only is the premise wacky (people make the same choices about relationships in their day-to-day lives as they'd make in the speed-dating environment), but the survey report assumes, without a bit of self-consciousness, that the results are determined by biology and not by cultural or social pressures. Like too much evolutionary psych, it takes essentialism for granted and has an incredibly naive view of culture... as if the field of sociology had never been invented. (And the right-wing has for years been attempting to make sociology and social psychology disappear as if they had never been invented, by forcibly de-funding it.)
It's also fatally flawed because the study doesn't reveal anything about the mates that people choose. We're talking about mating. Having sex and offspring. Wouldn't it be smarter, if you wanted to know about actual mate choice, to examine a population that has already mated? Like, uh, mothers and fathers? How about surveying people who have bred, and finding out what kinds of people they chose? Surely a good instrument could be developed for questioning that population about their decisions. Surely it would be more reliable than setting up a speed-dating event with less than 50 folks and extrapolating about who they would eventually breed with. I mean, come on.
Let's look at this evolutionary just-so story from a different angle. If women have evolved to choose mates based on their ability to provide security and committment, why do we make so many clearly awful choices? Why are there so many single moms? What's the evolutionary psych explanation for that?
The field may not be a total disaster, but more sober evolutionary psych scientists aren't featured as talking heads. I was just reading Robert Kurzban's refutation of Hilary and Steven Rose's attack on evolutionary psychology, Alas, Poor Darwin. The Roses have many of the same problems with the discipline that I do. Kurzban attempts to counter every one of their critiques (genetic determinism, just-so stories, and a conservative political agenda), but he's missing the point. Good science may be happening in evolutionary psychology, but it's the bad science that makes the headlines, and the allegedly "good" evolutionary psychologists are not out there bashing the research methods or conclusions of the bad ones.
At least in its mass culture manifestation, evolutionary psych isn't a science, it's a regressive political program intended to "prove" that women not only should stay in their place, but that it's "unnatural" for women to want to behave in ways that men don't approve of. Great, now we can be reprimanded for our audacity in questioning gender stereotypes by pseudo-scientists who want us to believe that Neanderthal women (to whom, by the way, we are not directly related since we descended from a different species) wore pink skirts and lipstick and went shopping a lot.
Yet these dopey studies continue to be funded, while real science is kicked to the curb. Sometimes I could just spit.
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3:14 PM - PETA and the "Pet Question"
I've been doing more writing over at Consuming Consciousness than over here, so I'm cross posting a couple of pieces. These are two posts I wrote about my stance on "animal rights".
First Post
I just read a sharp-tongued article on zuzu's blog that criticizes PETA's proclivity for comparing animal "holocausts" to human genocides. The comments were pretty interesting, in large part because they reflected a division in feminist thought, with one side clearly placing human rights at the center, and the other side (more fuzzily) supporting "animal rights." PETA, which is an almost all-white organization, has no scruples about appropriating the traumatic histories of minorities and oppressed peoples and using them in the service of its fight against... the poultry industry. If you want to get lathered, you can read the original post and comments, in which a woman's status as a feminist is challenged because she bought a dog from a breeder instead of getting one from the pound or (as PETA would rather) not getting one at all.
The whole PETA thing is pretty disgusting, and they're on awfully shaky moral ground because they regularly kill the animals in their shelters (see http://www.petakillsanimals.com/) -- healthy animals that no-kill shelters could certainly have placed. Those deaths are apparently okay in PETA's eyes, while the death of hamsters sacrificed in the cause of fighting disease and bettering human health are not. Go figure.
I can weigh in here as a Jew (and a Holocaust scholar), as well as a feminist and an antiracist, and a person who has had a lifelong relationship with dogs, wolves and wolf hybrids. Of course comparing the maltreatment (or perceived maltreatment) of animals to the wholesale genocide of peoples like Jews (or Gypsies) in the Holocaust, and like Africans in the forced diaspora of slavery is offensive.
I say "of course" because I freely admit that I privilege human life over animal life, and that I believe even the most loathsome human being's life is more valuable than that of even my dearest and most beloved dog. Personally distraught as it would make me, I would sacrifice my dog to save a person I didn't know. I love my dog dearly, but not more than I love the principles to which I adhere.
And that's what this comes down to -- a question of morality. Not the fundamentalist right's concept of morality, which is immoral nonsense, immediately and demonstrably incoherent and inconsistent. Instead, it's an ethical position derived from a set of clear principles that I can very comfortably defend:
Human life is of primary importance (no murder, no death penalties); human rights to life-sustaining food, water, housing, and medical care are inherent, as are the rights to self-determination and free exercise of thought and speech, the right to an education and equality of opportunity. Similarly, human responsibility is also crucial -- responsibility for the health and welfare of others through the mechanism of community; responsibility for securing the rights of minorities; responsibility for creating a sustainable future that includes the health and diversity of the planet... including the animals on the planet.
In my experience, PETA people tend to refuse to acknowledge their moral foundations, preferring instead to hide behind the argument that animal lives are just as important as human ones. But when you push them, they can't articulate why that is the case, nor can they really describe the ideal world that would result if everyone on earth followed their instructions. PETA people are upset at fur coats, but not usually at insecticides -- they do, in fact, draw an equally arbitrary line between the animals (usually mammals) that they think are important and the ones (insects, fish) that they don't think are so important, and they're totally unable to cope with the fact that each life necessarily depends on the deaths of other creatures. Nor can they cope with ideas about interdependence of species (for example, the notion that dogs and people evolved together in symbiotic relationships).
My experience with PETA people is that they don't really know much about animals -- they have all sorts of stories and fantasies about them, but they (despite claims to the contrary) have very little respect for animals. Vickie Hearn was the best of the animal-savvy moral philosophers. A Wittgenstein scholar as well as a trainer of search-and-rescue dogs and of dressage horses, her book Adam's Task: The Moral Life of Animals is as clear headed a reflection as I've ever encountered. Like her, I have no patience for those who let their ideas of what animals should be get in the way of seeing animals for who and what they are. It's probably good that PETA people don't believe in pets, because all their animals would be horribly neurotic.
A life-long cooperative working relationship with dogs and wolves has taught me that at the level at which they live (which is not a human level), canines are capable of thinking, of self-organizing, of making judgments about right and wrong, of memory and narrative and a certain amount of self-consciousness (by which I mean they are capable of thinking about what they are thinking). They are also capable of great emotion, though their happiness or sadness or boredom is not the same as human emotions of the same name.
Those who live with animals and have a rational, healthy respect for their pet's otherness understand that most relationships between pets and people are at some level consensual. If you've ever tried to get a recalcitrant dog to come when called, or a stubborn horse into a trailer, you know that's true. It's a totally different situation than the involuntary enslavement or wholesale murder of entire groups of people, and the comparison is indeed offensive.
I am in complete agreement with those who want to reduce needless animal suffering, but I am interested in reducing that suffering on a level that lasts from their births to their deaths, and I don't mind if they die if their deaths serve a purpose, like feeding me or other people. What I do mind is if they live in pain or terror up to the moment of their deaths. I don't condemn a wolf for killing and eating a deer and I don't condemn people for killing and eating a cow, even though we could both conceivably survive on beans and rice.
PETA, though, doesn't stand for anything I can get behind and they have been, as a number of people have mentioned, anti-woman and racist in their promotional campaigns, self-serving in the causes they promote, and hypocritical in living up to their own standards. To me, they're just another group based on the same hype that sustains New Age religion: they make privileged people feel good about their privileges, and relieve them of the difficult responsibility of making the world better for other human beings AND for animals.
Second Post: Why I Am Not an Animal Rights Advocate
This post was inspired by a continuing discussion about feminism and animal rights on the Feministe blog by Jill.
It's human rights that concern me, and it concerns me that many "animal rights" advocates are more willing to spend their time making things better for puppies and kittens and cows and harp seals than they are to saving children, stopping violence against women, working for racial equality, or ending war. I love puppies and kittens too, but I tend to save my strongest emotions for human beings. It reminds me of that moment in Michael Moore's Roger & Me, where a poverty-stricken woman kills a rabbit and skins it before the viewers' eyes. I'm always amazed when this creates a more powerful negative reaction and deeper emotional involvement in many of my students than the images of families being put out of their home and a community being devastated and destroyed. That was, I think, the film maker's point, and it sticks with me as an example and a reminder of the limits of human empathy for other human beings.
One of the things that puzzles me about "animal rights" advocates is that the very activity of organizing to secure "rights" for animals is based on the notion that humans can "speak for" animals -- animal rights activists think they know what animals want. It's a really paternalistic movement (certainly no less paternalist than the view that animals are, well, animals), and I think it must be a relief for some of its supporters to have found a subaltern who can't speak (and tell them when their views are bogus). It must be so much simpler to crusade for a group whose members can't contradict their self-appointed leaders, or contest their leadership. After all, when privileged white liberals start running around telling black people what they want, or when men who like to call themselves feminists run around telling women what's good for them, the members of those oppressed groups tend to talk back in no uncertain terms, and it really makes it hard for the do-gooders to, well, feel good. Back in the abolitionist days, when many white anti-slavery advocates were also terrible racists, there were black Americans who had their number and contested their assumptions. Oppressed people can and do speak, even in the most terrible conditions of oppression. Animals don't... even if they're smarter than the average bear. -->more-->
Obviously, I'm not an animal rights advocate. I've lived and worked with animals, raised and bred animals, trained animals, and slaughtered animals for food for too long to think that I, or any other person, is competent to voice their desires. What I am is a human responsibility advocate: I understand that because animals cannot speak, cannot operate politically in a human-controlled world, that it is incumbent on humans to care for them properly, to give them decent quality of life while they are living. (I'm opposed to factory farms, puppy mills and horse-racing, for example.) I also believe in the importance of bio-diversity for the environment as a whole and I care about the survival of species, from cute, furry harp seal pups to ant colonies in all their splendid variety.
For a while I slaughtered my own food, and I can assure you that one can love those cute little baby goats and kiss them on the nose and keep them feeling secure until the very minute the knife cuts their throat, without a single second of hypocrisy. One can cuddle fuzzy bunnies and then break their necks for supper, and soothe chickens before doing the same. This may not be a popular thing to say, but it's quite true. On the other hand, I can't imagine being able to do the same thing a human being, even if I was really, really hungry and the plump infant I was handed was declared brain-dead. (I'd probably choke on the higher primates, too, I admit, and on dolphins and whales, because they seem a little too close to humans in intelligence and language ability.)
It is completely possible (and I believe necessary) to respect the animals who give their lives for one's sustenance, as it is necessary to respect the animals who add to our emotional lives by giving us companionship, or who aid us professionally by the work that they do. But they aren't human beings, and I don't think that pretending that they have human qualities and "rights" is any help in the process.
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August 30, 2007 - Thursday
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2:51 PM - Vote for Your Favorite Spice
Category: Food and Restaurants
Head on over to Consuming Consciousness and vote for your favorite spices! I'm curious as to what flavors you folks like. I'll invent a couple of specially tailored recipes for the winners.
I'm out of town for the weekend -- sadly, Yaro's grandmother passed away, and we're going to her memorial service. It's especially sad because Yaro's been writing a beautiful series of stories about her for the last several months, and we had no idea she was so ill. It's a long way from Germany to Siberia, and she was always so cheerful on the phone; I don't think she wanted him to worry.
Despite my absence, recipes will continue to be posted at Consuming Consciousness daily -- WordPress is great for queuing up posts. The news postings will be thin until I get back Tuesday, though.
A good weekend to all...
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August 27, 2007 - Monday
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12:40 PM - Black No More? Coming Soon to a Pharmacy Near You
I posted this at Consuming Consciousness, but it was too mind-blowing not to share here....
In press releases that bring to mind a George Schuyler farce, a Bruce Sterling sci-fi novel, the Dr. Seuss story "The Sneetches," or a Michael Jackson wet dream, medical news sites are all talking about the discovery made by University of Cincinatti and Tokyo Medical University scientists: how to manipulate skin color and tone.
The significance of the study, published in journal of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology, is explained by the journal's editor-in-chief, Gerald Weissmann:
Most immediately, this study should lead to bioengineered skin grafts that more closely resemble the natural tone and color of recipients, which may help reduce the appearance of scarring. Down the road, however, this study opens doors to new types of cosmetics based on our understanding of how and why 'skin deep' differences in appearance evolved over millions of years.
Such sweetly naive prose; such utopian musings. "Skin deep," indeed. Not a murmur about or a nod toward the elephant in the corner: the question of ... race. Not a comment about what it might mean for people (probably rich people, at least at first) to be able to choose their color. Not a single mention of what it might mean to erase the color line with an over-the-counter "antidote." Science marches on.
From the press release:
In the article, researchers describe how cells responsible for pigmentation, called melanocytes, can be controlled by the most commonly occurring skin cells, called keratinocytes, which produce no pigment of their own. Working with bioengineered skin, which is used for some types of skin grafts, the researchers juggled various mixtures keratinocytes from people with different types of skin colors. In turn, the keratinocytes produced chemical signals to "tell" melanocytes to produce more or less pigment, called melanin, as well as how to distribute that pigment. The researchers found that using keratinocytes from light-skinned individuals had a lightening effect on the bioengineered skin graft material, while keratinocytes from dark-skinned individuals had a darkening effect. This is a significant finding as it shows a conclusive link between keratinocytes and melanocytes and because keratinocytes are much easier to manipulate than melanocytes.
So what do you think? What happens when the "suntan lotion" Sterling imagined in Islands in the Net is available on your pharmacy shelf; when the lightener cream of all lightener creams escapes the bounds of Madame C.J. Walker's caustic quackery and bleaches you to the whiter-than-white shade Schuyler describes in Black No More? What are the politics of color switching? What happens when almost everyone can pass with only a daily skin dousing and a little plastic surgery?
Is it a nightmare or a dream? You tell me, because for sure none of the medical journals are talking about the social, political and cultural implications of color switching on demand. You'd think, from the (lack of) discussion that skin color had nothing to do with constructions of race at all....
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