Postmodern Conservative.

Cinco de Sucko

In honor of a holiday that needs a narrative, contrary to what some may think (judging by the incomprehensibly and perpetually packed Lauriol Plaza), Mexican food in DC sucks. My only consolation is having avoided Ezra's fate:

LA doesn't know how lucky they have it. I can hardly remember what it's like to have such a surfeit of delicious tacos that you'd support closing some down. It pains me even to think of it, particularly after last night's experience at the wretched DC chain "California Tortilla," where I got a mayonnaise fish taco that made me want to give up food forever. Seriously: I don't care if you support universal health care or progressive taxation or an internationalist foreign policy. But if you take nothing else from this blog, do not go to California Tortilla. I had to go by Tacos Pepitos this morning just to get the taste out of my mouth.

Which is all to say, if LA really feels overstuffed with taco trucks, we could use a few of them out here.

Give us your authentic, your tasty. If the taco trucks really look like they're in trouble, I may start a Facebook group advocating the exodus. If they can vote with their feet, we can vote with our mouths.

Just When You Thought Lunchables Were Already for Kids

They give us Lunchables Jr. You'll never have to buy raisins and peanut butter separately again.

Cowabunga

It's the Top 10 Awesome Nostalgia Foods "We" Want Back! Mutter bitterly about your neglected favorites. Better, start a meme.

Russia, Land of Holy Fools

Permit me to quote at length from this BBC report, possibly this year's favorite:

[...] "Unique and intriguing the case may be, but the accused faces a severe punishment," said Pavel Vorobyov, a deputy prosecutor in the northern city of Vologda.

'We were drinking'

Mr Lyalin, an electrician, had spent the evening drinking with a watchman at his workplace when they got into an argument, Interfax news agency reports.

The morning found him waking up in the watchman's office but instead of going back to work, he decided to take the bus home.

At home, Mr Lyalin had some sausage from the fridge and lay down to sleep, the Komsomolskaya Pravda newspaper says.

After a couple of hours, his wife noticed the handle sticking out of his back and called an ambulance.

Viktor Belov, a surgeon who treated him, found a kitchen knife in Mr Lyalin's back but "by good fortune, it had gone through soft tissue without touching vital organs".

His alleged attacker reported the crime to the police himself, Interfax adds. Mr Lyalin apparently feels fine and bears no ill-will.

"We were drinking and what doesn't happen when you're drunk?" he was quoted by Komsomolskaya Pravda as saying.

Land of the Yogurt-Eaters

For years yogurt was unceremoniously overlooked, a sad little presence occasionally used with granola for morning munchies. Then, rather suddenly, I noticed Greek yogurts like FAGE Totals elbowing their way into grocery stores. Curious, I took a Total home, scooped it into my customary cereal bowl and sprinkled it with granola and shriveled cherries. Ugh! It was like eating unsweetened frosting for breakfast — a little too thick and too tart for my taste. -- Jill Santopietro, NYT

This is like trying to eat a bowl of cereal without the milk. Squeeze a generous dollop of honey atop that wet lump of Greek yogurt (or, um, 'Greek-style yogurt', which somewhat sadly is still pretty good).

Chester the Molester

Chester Cheetah 'is back', and more 'delightfully creepy' than ever:

It's more in the atmospherics of the ads—the lack of music, the sinister tone, and, above all, Chester's cruel insouciance. Kudos on a successful rebranding of a character that had seemed destined to fade into cheesy oblivion. -- Seth Stevenson, Slate

Yes, because what is contemporary culture more painfully lacking than cruel insouciance? Cruel insouciance uber alles! A motto for our times, when it is better to live on as an evil wizened midget cheetah than die as a defunct 2-D early-'90s style cartoon a la Poochie. Yes, that era was hellish, but this new Chester is demonic, so, like, let's agree that camping up cruelty only makes it worse because it's more petty and trivial, okay?

Fight Through the Kitsch; Prize at End

I am toying with the idea of doing blog posts hereon out according to some kind of general daily theme. Last week, for instance, one day was a Posts About Whores, today it's Posts About New York, etc. Like most principles of organization, this one is stupid if followed faithfully and useful mainly as a heuristic to bring an ounce of focus to the goings-on here. At any rate check this out: someone actually wrote this:

Just a few years ago the prevailing style statement in Williamsburg featured metrosexually groomed urbanites wearing trucker hats and pristine Carhartt jackets and quaffing Pabst beer. Now some are choosing the real life behind the pose. [...] The Billyburg scene has changed, said Annaliese Griffin, who contributes to a blog called Grocery Guy. “Having a cool cheese in your fridge has taken the place of knowing what the cool band is, or even of playing in that band,” she said. “Our rock stars are ricotta makers.” -- NYT

The prize at the end of this instakitsch is...being a farmer! Yes, Wendell Berry's name appears in this article, though strangely only as an inspiration to young agricool kids from the 1970s. Whole books can and have been written trying to determine exactly what is going on here, and whether it's good, and I for one enjoy both PBR and clean country air, and, uh, cool cheeses as well. I'll try to restrict myself to point that maybe hasn't been made before: that this back-to-the-farm thing is natural in two ways. One, it's a market niche that makes perfect sense given how recently there were basically no alternatives to mass-produced artificial foods; it's something that reasonable people would and did think up given the homogeneity and undesirability of much of the food that's available today. In that fashion it's also a luxury. But luxuries, contrary to some opinions, are also natural, and it's natural then to think about what kind of luxuries one wants and pursues and enjoys. If you want to be less afraid of Nietzsche you can think about 'revaluing values' in this soft quasi-economic sense. What's your will to luxury look like? You may be less deserving of respect if it looks like a pristine Carhartt jacket than if it looks like cheese produced by a finely honed craft attuned to the productive quality of the natural world.

But organic cool is natural in another way, too: the luxury of religion -- as in, a long, deep tradition of religion closely enjoyed among family and friends across generations -- is foreclosed to many of the same people who willed the luxury of returning their orientation to the goods of natural life. This is to say nothing of the way that 'Billyburg' residents feel about Christianity in general. The return of organic is natural because when people are casting about for lives of 'integral' meaning they typically turn either to the soul or the soil. Wendell Berry himself was fairly clear I think that the Land, not the Lord, shall provide. Of course there's no inherent contradiction between living an organic Christian farm life. But the narrowing of horizons imposed by casting your gaze down to dirt and hearth does stand in a certain tension with the broadening of horizons imposed by casting your gaze up to God or out toward your fellow man. And returning to the recognition of this tension -- that abandoning one or the other isn't easy or right -- seems to me also both natural and a luxury.

Crossposted at The American Scene.

Mansinthe

The awesomely best name for the ultimate metrosexual's beverage. But Marilyn Manson's brand of absinthe has, uh,

been panned by critics, who compared the drink’s odour to sewage water. 'Mansinthe' was tested by a panel at gourmet food website Epicurious.com, whose biggest complaint was the smell of the beverage, which come compared to sewage water, swamp mud and rubbing alcohol. One taster says "If a smell could speak, this absinthe is saying: 'Do not touch.'" -- NME

On the one occasion I have tried to enjoy absinthe, I can't say it tasted like runoff from Elysium, either. Manson will not be inspiring any second-run attempts, but neither will anyone else. Still, I'd hoped it would taste like kool-aid, or at least, you know, children's cough syrup.

Why Nietzsche and Marx Hated Booze and Christianity

Helen Rittelmeyer reports.

I'm Not Buying It

Despite the overwhelming science behind that finding, industry and activists have called for a ban on cloned food products. Naturally, you might think that lockstep agreement from such unlikely bedfellows is a little fishy. And you'd be right. The losers would be American consumers, farmers, and the environment. -- Gregory Conko, AmSpec

Here comes The Science again, turning winners in yesterday's absolute terms into tomorrow's relative-gains losers. But relatively speaking, all the real reasons to clone are pointed squarely at satisfying the ever-expanding human demand for a cheap and steady diet of meats. Conko gets it wrong when he claims that the

abundant evidence of safety is why the critics have had to focus attention away from the science. Instead they ask, even if we can clone animals safely, why should we?

Maybe The Critics have done this to The Science, but the implication here is that any critic must make such a move. I however ignore the health-and-safety issue because it's irrelevant to the real argument, which has two parts. The motto that if we can do anything well we should do it merely begs the question. The first part can be illustrated like this: If we can safely produce towering udder-blobs, mutant vertical cows we can pack into warehouses like huge upright sticks of butter, then why shouldn't we? It's safe! The second part can be illustrated like this: it's a post-apocalyptic planet. Nuclear exchange has resulted in only five cows living on Earth. Clone gigantic cubic udders, or don't? Different calculus, isn't it, than one in which we clone out of boredom, or because we can, or because we want people to eat more hamburgers?

But of course the counterargument here is that if it's scientifically proven to be an acceptable risk to health, well then it's an acceptable risk to returns on investment, and send those piggies to market. It's easy for people with 'traditional values' to find cloning non-trivial on the theory that humans don't have the proper authority to machine multiply uniquely created beings. But clone boosters involve themselves in a dangerous game by pretending that cloning's a trivial exercise of power on its own terms, something we should readily do if the science tells us to. The logic of applied science pushes us progressively to take cumulative knowledge for granted. This is only natural as far as the logic of science itself is concerned. But when it's applied -- when it cashes out in power -- it becomes increasingly difficult to phrase any future arguments about restraint in terms of the abuse of power.

Which is where our new insect overlords come in -- a superintelligent visionary class of selectively bred human management-leaders who know what's best and have gamed out the next 10,000 years, to whom we've ceded the power to administer our own shared affairs on the basis of the organic judgments that politics can produce.

The scientific push for artificial social power opposes the natural social power of politics -- which, as history shows, can also produce some horrible things, when unchecked, but if power can't itself check power, then whatever can? Suddenly the argument from authority looks to have a practical force itself.