If you ain't about the ghetto, than fuck U2

- Capitalism’s Desire to “Get Rid of the Poor”: You absolutely must read this somewhat obvious yet strikingly-insightful-through-its-
obviousness piece over on k-punk about “the desire to 'get rid of the poor'…a garbled utopian impulse which exposes one of capitalism's fundamental fantasies.” Go read it. It’s short. So much realness in less than 100 words.

- The Constant Gardener: I saw “The Constant Gardener” (by Fernando Meirelles, the director of “City of God”) with my girlfriend this weekend and I loved it (summary). It’s a pretty conventional thriller dressed-up with some stylish visuals and a touching, heart-breaking backdrop attempting to expose the amoral nature of pharmaceutical companies in particular and, by extension, capitalism in general (notice I said “amoral” and not “immoral”). Perhaps I was only so touched by the movie because the recent events of Katrina have put me in a hyper-sensitive emotional state, but whatever the case, after I left the movie, I found myself feeling especially guilty about my inevitable complicity in our capitalist system. Of course, guilt isn’t a terribly productive emotional state, but I haven’t seen a movie in recent memory that drives home the point more sincerely and effectively that poverty is a systematic problem that we are all, to a very large degree, responsible for. This isn’t just a movie about drug companies using Africans as guinea-pigs because they’re expendable. This is also a movie about us—our reliance on poverty, how we contribute to it, and how we benefit from it. Of course, the movie isn’t terribly good at suggesting “what can and/or should be done,” but—as my man Rocco Chappelle suggested recently here--perhaps movies aren’t capable of being as precisely didactic as some of us expect them to be. Whatever the case, I thought the movie was great and it’s definitely worth a gander.

- Fuck a Fucking Cop: If you feel like hating cops more than you already should do, watch this. Fuck a cop.

- Mind Wide Open: I’m currently reading Steven Johnson’s Mind Wide Open: Your Brain and the Neuroscience of Everyday Life. It’s got some really interesting little tidbits especially the chapter about laughing. The basic argument is that laughing isn’t so much a reaction to something humorous as it is an instinctive social ritual (i.e. laughing isn’t “learned” but is actually programmed into us as a way for us to form social bonds). Did you know you’re 30 times less likely to laugh at something when you’re by yourself?

- Odd Behavior and its Relationship to “Creativity”: We all suspected this anyway, right:

New research on individuals with schizotypal personalities – people characterized by odd behavior and language but who are not psychotic or schizophrenic – offers the first neurological evidence that they are more creative than either normal or fully schizophrenic individuals, and rely more heavily on the right sides of their brains than the general population to access their creativity

- Victims vs Refugees: It’s worth asking: if this shit happened to primarily white folks if they’d be calling them “refugees”? Perhaps… but also, perhaps not.

-e