2005-03-26 - 1:06 p.m.
What I'm listening to: Dancer-Gino Soccio
This is one fantastic disco cut. I've never heard it anywhere except on the compilation 'Blame it on the Boogie', along with Funkytown, He's the Greatest Dancer, etc. Everytime I've played this at a party, people go crazy. It just has that right energy to get the jelly shaking.
So this morning I was thinking about what some ideal careers might be. First thing that comes to mind is a food critic. You get paid to have lunch, and write about it as well. And, you get to try some of the top restaurants in town.
Another would be a product tester for a duvet company. All you do is snuggle and snooze all day. Of course, when I was a kid I thought that being a garbageman was the best job in the world because you only had to get up to go to work on Tuesday mornings.
I remember thinking this around 1984 or so, back before the idea of 'politically correct' entered my consciousness-back when the Museum of Nature was the Museum of Man so garbagepeople didn't really exist to my knowledge. I was chatting with a friend about this yesterday, about how popular films in the 1980s went as far away from politically correct as is humanly possible. Rather, they are not in line with what we are aware of now as politically correct. Times change I guess, with regards to certain acceptable conventions. I guess in 1985 when A View to A Kill came out, the idea of having a female "M" in the Bond films was unheard of. But then again, I guess we were too young to be aware of such things at the time. I'm assuming that the idea of politically correct is a recent phenomenon.
But then I wonder, if we identify such concepts, are they implicitly in public consciousness or are they still something that we strive for? I wonder if we can get to the point where the idea of politically correct is in the past, because it is in fact implicit in public consciousness. It would seem that if we are aware of such ideology, if it is something tangible, then it is somewhat out of our mannerisms: we consciously think about it as being 'out there'-not absoluetly of course, but constantly occilating between an interchange of self and other, where the two become somewhat fused as part of greater discursive sphericules.
It is not a way of life, a way of thinking that is ingrained to the point of being somewhat automatic-I consciously avoid the term unconscious. Freud and I are fighting these days, so I'm trying to break out of the trap of 'normalizing' psychoanalysis. It's just one way of many of understanding things, and I try to avoid giving it implicit credibility by attaching it to the rhetoric of medicine, science, and 'objectivity'. Again, Freud is just another thinker just like Zizek, Agamben, Bhabha or Homer Simpson.
I've found another academic that I'd like to meet when I go to the UK. At this rate, after the conference, it won't be a holiday, but a series of meetings. But then again, for me the business is pleasure so I'm looking forward to meeting more academics that have similar interests to mine
Time for a smoke. MMmmmmm...pipe...
