Ninja Warrior, of course

Another G4 gem. I can't believe my host in Japan never competed in Ninja Warrior. It's a 4 stage obstacle course where everyone gets an equal shot. Postmen, gas station attendants, action stars, and the toughest transexual in Japan (their words, not mine).

Classical Walpurgis Night

A few winters ago in Mammoth, CA, as our lovers and their best friends skied under a gray and leaky sky, Sweatshirt and I stayed cosy with a bottle of wine and a volume of Goethe and a deck of cards, and the result was this game. It's a variant on seven-card stud, and if Matt Damon knew about "Classical Walpurgis Night," he'd undoubtedly call it "the other last pure game in poker."

Here are the rules I can still remember, suspecting that there were many more:

The deal: same as seven-card stud.

The wilds:

• Vampires (Jacks) are wild, unless a Slayer (Queen) is used in the final five cards, in which case the Vampire is staked and becomes a dead card--i.e., it cannot be used in any hand. Slayers are otherwise played normally.
• Angels (Aces) and Demons (Kings) are also wild, unless their opposites are present (displayed face-up in the draw), in which case both retain their face value without being wild; if an Angel or Demon is hidden until the final five cards are shown, it remains wild and can still tear its opposite from power.

Special rule: "magical preschool" - if a player has five cards consisting of any combination of fives, fours, threes, twos, and Angels, then they all become wild, even if a Demon is present.

Raw Dog It!!

I don't know if youtube links are this easy, but try this and you'll see my latest pleasure, Olivia Munn, doing a fly-by wiener eating. In many (but not all) things pop culture it takes someone else's opinion to drive my own. A while back I read in a blog or a paper or something that some guy liked Attack of the Show on G4 network, which is about video games and technology and hosted by a funny guy and girl. The guy said the topics weren't very interesting to him but the hosts were engaging, and that guy was right. So now I watch it whenever I want to waste my time. And usually just so I can see Olivia. The show opens with best of the net, and tonight it was five videos from the net of animals fucking. Mostly crossovers, bunnies and cats, or dogs and cats. You don't see that on the networks. Olivia now rivals Keri Russell for celebrity I'd most like to meet. In fact, I think I'll go put her on my myspace page. I'm so wired. I am the internet. I should have a blog.

Caulk me Amadeus

I've got a bathtub full of chrane, and all the gefilte fish in the world couldn't make it go down easy. The problem is the caulk. Fucking caulk. Well, the problem is deeper than that. When I bought the condo I knew the tub had to be replaced. What I didn't know was that it would cost several thousand dollars, so I have not done it yet. But when the estimator came to estimate the thousands, he clued me in to what I also didn't know, and that was that the caulk was fucked up, proving a more pressing fucking piece of concern than the fucked up tub. Since then I didn't do shit, cause that's what I do, but tonight in my boredom I decided to look up how I might do it myself, and found that it's complicated to recaulk, so I probably wouldn't dare, but that having leaky caulk isn't good for anybody, let alone the person who actually owns the place of fucked caulk. So I'll be up all night worrying that I'm mildewing my place to pieces. If I was renting I wouldn't give a flying fucking shit. But look at big old me, owning my place, and drowning in chrane.

my body is the battleground

Every day for me is a struggle against insignificance, insecurity, and indigestion; this morning at 2:30 a.m., I lost the last of these.

the enemy he hid

"[Negroes] have on their hands a vast work of self-reformation to do, and [...] a little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving would do us more credit and benefit than a thousand Force or Civil Rights bills."

"We find upon the world's stage today eight distinctly differentiated races [...] There are, of course, other minor race groups, as the American Indians [...]"

"We believe that the first and greatest step toward the settlement of the present friction between the races--commonly called the Negro Problem--lies in the correction of the immorality, crime and laziness among the Negroes themselves, which remains as a heritage from slavery."

In all I'd read by and about W.E.B. Du Bois, nothing prepared me for "The Conservation of Races." That as a young man he wrote such a decidedly 19th-century essay should not have shocked me--"Conservation" was, after all, first published in 1897. But coming after his staggering monograph The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade, "Conservation" read like a betrayal.

Will, I thought I knew you.

As though anticipating his future reader's discomfort and embarrassment, as though deliberately and cruelly to banish all hope that "Conservation" could be laughed off as a hoax, Du Bois not only stamped it from beginning to end with his inimitable style, but anticipated in it some of the great ideas he later became famous for. Consider these two passages, both worthy of Darkwater or The Souls of Black Folk: (1) "What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? [...] Is not my only possible practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, or Irish or Italian blood would?" (2) "We [Negroes] are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American fairy tales, its only touch of pathos and humor amid its mad money-getting plutocracy."

As a historical document, then, and as a marker of Du Bois's intellectual maturation, "Conservation" is difficult to place. It has sat uneasily with me for weeks now: on trains, in conversation, and while jogging through Central Park, I've considered and reconsidered how to make sense of this essay.

Over time, two clues have inched me toward an answer.

The first is the essay's obsession with "the purity of black women": "Conservation" asserts that "an alarmingly large percentage of [Negro] men and women are sexually impure," and laments "that vast army of black prostitutes that is today marching to hell"; like most rants against sex, these passages smack of hypocrisy, all the more so as they come--in the words of a recent Du Bois biographer--from a "priapic adulterer."

The impurity Du Bois hates most could very well be his own.

The second clue is the similarity between the passages in "Conservation" I quoted in italics above, and ideas Du Bois would later attribute to Booker T. Washington:

[T]he distinct impression left by Mr. Washington's propaganda is, first,
that the South is justified in its present attitude toward the Negro because of
the Negro's degradation; secondly, that the prime cause of the Negro's failure
to rise more quickly is his wrong education in the past; and, thirdly, that his
future rise depends primarily on his own efforts.

In Souls Du Bois attacks Washington as a "compromiser" whose "counsels of submission" and "indiscriminate flattery" "practically [accept] the alleged inferiority of the Negro races."

Even with all its skirting and concessions to (always qualified) praise, Du Bois's take on Washington has always struck me as false, his anger as misplaced and disproportionate. I now wonder if the true object of his scorn was the young man who wrote "Conservation"; he did have, as we've seen, a record of projecting his demons onto others.

In fact across Du Bois's life he all but made a habit of antagonizing other black civil rights leaders. His first fight was with Washington; later he would war famously with Marcus Garvey and Walter White.

Did Garvey and White also represent to Du Bois unflattering images of himself? I've got theories, but have yet to think them through.