I want a new drug

We have been living in the age of serotonin. Bad moods, say the experts, result from a deficiency of serotonin, and are corrected by selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors—Prozac is the celebrity. But the discovery came from outside the pharmaceuticals, from guerilla drug warriors, in the form of MDMA—ecstasy—the substance that lets us swim in the sea of serotonin that our brains hide from us.

Finally science is surpassing this paradigm. From The New Scientist, the hormone that is now capturing the attention of researchers: oxytocin.

Emotions have structural relationships to drugs in the brain. Our brains, of course, produce drugs—people who run marathons are essentially junkies, who have found a less constipating way of encouraging their brains to produce opiods. When we fall in love, experience orgasm, or feel affection for our families, oxytocin is at work. When we take ecstasy, not all the credit can go to serotonin; the magic also comes from oxytocin.

Never mind the medical uses. What does the research surrounding this internal drug mean for the psychonaut, the explorer of inner space? The problem with oxytocin is that, like serotonin, simply taking the hormone has no real effect. What a drug would have to do is change the way the brain produces and absorbs the hormone, as outlined in The New Scientist:

Pharmaceutical companies are eager to find a small molecule that would enter the brain more easily and switch on oxytocin receptors long-term. An "oxytocin agonist" is the ultimate prize, says [Paul] Zak [director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies in Claremont, California]. So far, no one has announced such a discovery.

Ideally, such a substance would be beneficial but not prone to misuse. Yet given oxytocin's association with comfort, love and sex, such a molecule could turn out to be hugely pleasurable, or even make users fall in love. MDMA is often credited with unleashing the "second summer of love". Just imagine what the third could be like.

Hopefully some backyard chemist will get there first.

P.S. For the necessary background information, please take a listen to this excellent lecture by Andrew Weil, the face of "integrative health" who started out as a very serious analyst of drugs and the human mind.

Fey is the new Palin

Everyone was happy to see Tina Fey take the wheel at the sinking ship Saturday Night Live with her impersonation of America's Top Politician Sarah Palin. But no one has posed the essential question: who profits? Who profits from this comedy and the unavoidable talent behind it?

What we know of Tina Fey from the profiles written of her in The New Yorker and more recently Vanity Fair is that she is a relatively shrewd and sharp square who is impatient with people who aren’t squares. She hates strippers but loves to make fun of them. She fears terrorists with anthrax as much as or more than she hates George W. Bush. She recoils at the word “cunt” but gave a new life to the words “whore” and “bitch” during her tutelage as SNL head writer.

Both her humor and morality come from the interior world of a white woman. Not, to paraphrase Seinfeld, that there’s anything wrong with that, but there is certainly no political humor left in this world of highly personalized affectations and prejudices. The clever Tina Fey may engage in gender humor, but there’s no political content—just language games that grow out of personal identity and the social anxiety that comes from being surrounded by a multiplicity of other identities. A major source of humor on Fey's primetime TV show 30 Rock is the bewilderment of Fey’s and our alter ego Liz Lemon in a multicultural world—someone is always around to ruin our day by getting offended at an innocent remark, which we didn’t mean that way (like mixing up the names of the two black people who work on your set), or not matching a stereotype that we were perfectly rational in believing (like that quiet Arab men are generally planning terrorist attacks).

So does Tina Fey show us the real stupidity of Sarah Palin? Or does Sarah Palin reveal the hidden conservatism of Tina Fey? When Fey defended Hilary Clinton on SNL, declaring that “bitch is the new black,” she summed up the roots of today’s cynical comedy and politics. Mainstream has been out for a long time, and an endless rotation of marginalities is in. “Black” isn’t an identity so much as a signifier of “outsideness,” of difference, and that’s what sells—so, for a successful white person, your personal quirks and particularities may be your ticket to politically incorrect privilege. Everyone can be The New Black, whether they are teddy-bear Republicans like Jack Donaghy, Alec Baldwin’s character on 30 Rock, or edgy, career-driven post-feminists like Tina Fey.

Fortunately, there are oppositional tendencies within the contemporary comedy world. I am always dismayed when I watch 30 Rock by what seems to be Tina Fey’s hatred of Indians—the only Indians in her world are annoying convenience-store owners, hot dog salesmen, or Jonathan, the sniveling, overachieving personal assistant to Jack Donoghy—but I am filled with renewed optimism when I remember the glorious Kevin G., from Tina Fey's most progressive (and funniest) project, Mean Girls. Here what could have been a nasty joke became a liberatory force in the hands of a talented young actor.



On 30 Rock itself, the virtuosic performances of Tracy Morgan manifest the sheer force of cultural icons that come from the outside. His character is utterly incomprehensible to the rationality of the show—he embodies every imaginable stereotype so completely that we are no longer able to pin him down to an acceptable multicultural category. When Morgan appeared on SNL to defend Obama in response to Tina Fey’s political declarations, he represented the appropriate response to the anxieties of mainstream America. The cultural forces coming from the margins of American society are not just threats to mainstream identities, they have already destroyed them; Obama just drove the point home.



The Sarah Palins of television had better move over, because it’s time to celebrate a new mainstream. Black is the new America.

Sometimes people speak a English

There is really no such thing as a global language. English may be the language of international exchange, but languages are meant to be spoken. Every time people around the world speak English, they invent a new version--just as immigrants did so many times in America, saving our language from the nasty fate of sophistication. It turns out that Eastern Europe is a major site of innovation. In Hungary, inspired by his "black brothers, Dre, Snoop, Puff, L, Tupac Shakur, rest in peace," the rapper Speak, who learned English while working at a hotel, combines a pleasant anti-war message with total cultural confusion:

Of course, leave it to the new repository for aesthetic genius, the Pop Idol franchise, which like McDonald's can survive in any climate, to show us the joys of Bulgarian English:

Micro-narratives of mourning

A moment of noise for the great scientist Albert Hoffman, who died last week at the age of 102 after discovering a new form of software for the human machine. It was William Gibson who described "cyberspace" as a "consensual hallucination"; when Hoffman first inadvertently plugged himself into the network called lysergic acid diethylamide, he helped to accelerate a process which would allow us to understand new uses for the human brain. Cyberspace, virtual reality, already exist in the brain, once one has installed the necessary information, which it is up to us to develop and discover. Hoffman said of his discovery, “I think that in human evolution it has never been as necessary to have this substance LSD. It is just a tool to turn us into what we are supposed to be.” There is a lesson to be learned from his long life; as Joe Hill said as he faced the firing squad, "Don't mourn; organize." The memory of Albert Hoffman should be the spirit of affirmation, dedicated to young scientists around the world today who refuse to put knowledge in the service of the state, and choose to produce and disseminate new and infinite possibilities of life.

I Never Thought You’d Be A Pervert Because Deviance Is So Passé

Eating shit, in Pasolini’s Salo, 120 Days in Sodom, is the central consequence of totalitarianism—“we fascists are the only true anarchists.” There is no waste or excess, nothing escapes the system of control. Only the absolute authority of the law enables absolute transgression: only a fascist with 18 sex slaves can make all his dreams come true.

It is very reassuring to know that the shit in Salo is actually chocolate and marmalade. In self-defense, I assured myself that shit-eating was always a clever special effect. A little research quickly woke me up to the truth. There are full-fledged coprophage communities. The act is called “recycling,” and you can meet interested parties by subscribing to a magazine called Jack’s Number Two. They are mainly lawyers and accountants.

These days you no longer need to be a sadist or part of a marginal sexual subculture to be a pervert. You just set up a digital camera, get a few friends together, look up a video with a name like 2 girls 1 _____, SWAP.avi, or Church of Fudge, and giggle as everyone pretends to be shocked. There are 9,490 reaction videos on YouTube for 2 girls 1 cup alone.

The Care of the Self

One of my favorite internet activities is reading articles which explain how the most banal decisions of everyday life can become part of the perpetual refashioning of my self. A real winner is Men’s Health.

To emphasize the importance of building "protruding pecs,” the experts point out: “Guys tend to measure themselves by three criteria: income, sexual prowess, bench press.” I guess it’s one of those things that is so obvious you have to have it pointed out to you.

The attention to detail is truly spellbinding: "sleeve-busting muscle" is linked not only to the size of your sleeves, but also the “visibility of your cephalic vein, which crosses your biceps… To make this vein pop, you need to drop your body fat below 15 percent.”

But don’t make the mistake of thinking that the delectable nutritional advice is just about fat. Sandwiched between the disgusting recipes, which usually involve boiled chicken breasts and lowfat milk measured down to the half-teaspoon, there are quasi-scientific tributes to secretly transformative grocery-store treasures. For example, from a top ten list of “superfoods”:

Prunes contain high amounts of neochlorogenic and chlorogenic acids, antioxidants that are particularly effective at combating the “superoxide anion radical.” This nasty free radical causes structural damage to your cells, and such damage is thought to be one of the primary causes of cancer.

Wow! How totally incomprehensible yet strangely inspiring. I am sure that equally magical properties are hidden in Milky War Bars and cigarettes. Hurray for nutrition!

Of course, the best of the online advice experience is the girl magazine, Cosmopolitan. I have never had the time to look at their advice on fashion, careers, or fitness, because I have always gotten lost in the vast collection of sex tips. Again, it is the attention to detail which makes everything worthwhile:

the next time you're going at it with your man, let him know just how bad you want him by making the first move downtown. Confidently kneel between his legs and grip his shaft firmly. Then take him in your mouth and slide your mouth and hand up and down his penis in tandem, periodically gazing up at him or moaning with pleasure… First suck him for a while, then slowly lick all the way up and down his shaft, then use the tip of your tongue to titillate the supersensitive tip of his penis, and so on.

An appropriate climax is provided in a response to a reader with ingestion anxiety:

Another way to send him into orgasmic bliss: Let him come on your chest. Start pleasuring him orally, and when he's close to climax put his penis between your breasts… Then, place your palms on either side of your breasts and push them together as he slides his shaft back and forth until he peaks.

Who needs porno when we’ve got Cosmo?


NOTE: This entry exceeds the world limit due to the citations. The first two entries were exactly 199 words. This initial rigor compensates for the excess of the current entry.

Funky-Ass Shit Nearly Every Single Day

"I like this shit." It is impossible not to love Snoop Dogg just a little bit more as he bobs his head along to the banjo and sings along to a bluegrass version of his own song, the immortal "Gin and Juice" cover by The Gourds.

Some boring party, you have no choice but to converse, with one of the usual undesirable characters—the lightweight indie-rock pussy with the All-Star shoes, the brain-dead jam-session freak who never goes out without a guitar and a copy of Bringing it All Back Home, the macho white rockist who thinks Led Zeppelin invented rock n' roll.

"What kind of music have you been listening to?" As if you didn't already know, but it's the kind of question that should be worth asking.

"Oh, I like ALL kinds of music! Except country and rap."

As this moving video clip shows, those cultural fundamentalists are right to place country and rap in one category. They are the genres which best represent the real meaning of the term "popular music": music produced and consumed by people. Real people, not the walking cartoons who wear music like an accessory. Those dipshits can buy a fucking Prada bag.

Childhood Memories

As I bit into my madeleines this morning I remembered a picture of a man holding his asshole wide open.

Actually, it was madeleine-flavored ice cream. According to a very bored dude, the madeleine’s structure prevents it from crumbling the way Proust described it. The ice cream is closer.

When you are a young male virgin enduring the varied humiliations of middle school, the dark and hypnotic world of internet perversion can come to represent the anguished sigh of the wounded human spirit. In instant messenger you send your acquaintances a hyperlink—invariably goatse.cx. After cringing like you did the first time, they look for something worse to send back to you.

In high school, I knew a boy who was excited to no end by goatse.cx. He had a remarkably creative mind, further stimulated by Ritalin, and he would loudly rave about the website during lunch. Once I encouraged him to watch a documentary about Noam Chomsky and he became equally excited.

Last I heard, he is in prison. He bought some cocaine for his girlfriend’s birthday, two days before his probation meeting. If his girlfriend had been born a week earlier, maybe he would be somewhere else.

A User's Guide

At birth I was plugged in to the machine.

Since then I tried, in varying ways, to sever the umbilical cord, only to quickly realize that this cable was in fact a new extension of my brain and body. Somewhere I developed an urge for knowledge of self, and I studied the long history that preceded me in search of excuses, for the means to deny my body and become a human being again. But I only learned that knowledge is a function of the machine, and after tracing the evolution of its programming languages I discovered agency in the synapses.

As I struggled to reckon with my discovery a new node of communication surfaced, transmitting itself from the margin into the center of the network: the blog.

The blog was an excessively democratic form. Every anachronistic bohemian who had dreamed of writing a novel could now publish on a daily basis, everyone with a half-formed political opinion could broadcast empty analyses of all the current journalistic spectacles to the world, every teenager with a secret diary could now realize the ultimate dream of the diary writer: to have one’s secrets read by everyone.

The downfall of blogs is the failure to realize that new forms demand new styles. Blogs are frequently written as conversations: “This morning Jordan told me that Katie didn’t like my performance in the play.” Other than Jordan and Katie, who gives a fuck? Call your friends on the fucking telephone. Blogs are often written with a somewhat nauseating, industrially produced language of interior emotion: “I am SO not going to stop going to the gym. No way. Not when I look like this.” A blog is not a record of personal life. It should not speak of a life held to be separate from the universe of the blog. It should not be written with the language of an irritating everyday conversation, even if its content is valuable. “Last night I saw the latest Alien film. You guys have to see it!” This is unacceptable; it betrays a lack of imagination. A blog registers a flux of experience which understands the media of its own writing at the same level of interiority as the sexual life of its writer. “Last night I saw a YouTube video” is okay. Sometimes academics (worse, aspiring academics) write blogs about philosophy: "In the next entry I will try to show that Adorno's notion of regressive listening can illuminate the problematic contradictions of cultural studies." If you are writing about Adorno in your online blog, you are seriously fucked up. Quit lying to yourself and get an advertising degree, you miserable piece of shit. Then maybe you will do something useful.

An ideal blog would sever itself from all these regressive tendencies, and instead embody the tendencies activated by its technological form. The blog of the future would constantly shift between subject matters, between genres and styles, and in a utopian society, between languages, media, and technologies of dissemination. This dynamism is not a symptom of a declining attention span, but rather the capacity of the human brain to simultaneously process greater and greater quantities of information. The whole machine of modernist style—today used as a tool of repression by the central ideological state apparatus, the educational system—is now rendered obsolete by the blog. The very form of the blog demands neologism, shifting points of view, fragmentary narration, self-referentiality; the blog is the transient, the fleeting, the contingent. Of course, that was only one half of modernist art; the other half was the fucked-up aspiration to be separate from—elevated above—everyday life. The blog is nothing more, and nothing less, than everyday life itself. Proust, Baudelaire, Beckett, Joyce, Mallarmé, even Benjamin, Adorno, Derrida, whichever fucking names you like to drop, have all been superseded; anyway, their styles were not historically relevant due to any kind of personal genius, but rather because their work was a reflection of (and sometimes upon) certain technologies of everyday life that were already in motion, which have developed exponentially today. Finally, writing is available to everyone: an ideal blog is universally legible, and even if it is not, its spirit is one of translation.

Following is a set of rules, which outline the correct ideas for the production of a blog. If I have not followed any rules in this entry, it is only because, as the Little Prince put it, “Grownups never understand anything for themselves and it is tiresome for children to be always explaining things to them.” I am only going to explain myself once, after that, you can go get fucked.

1) A blog entry will never be longer than 200 words. An incomplete sentence is preferred over exceeding the word limit.

2) No two consecutive blog entries will be about the same subject. (No “to be continued…”—you hate it when they do that on TV, don’t you?)

3) A blog will be easy to read.

4) A blog will never conduct itself as an autobiography, a set of scholarly notes, a series of reviews, or any one thing; it will combine the maximum amount of genres and styles possible, preferably within each individual entry.

5) A blog will not be a simulation of a conversation; it will adopt the alienated and impersonal language of the internet, even if it engages in a personal dimension.

6) A blog will comprise as many media as possible. Not simply as a recommendation of cool links—it will really be constituted by the different forms of matter which exist in its network.

7) A blog will address everyday life in content and in form.

The final rule is that is my blog, and I will do whatever the fuck I want.

Stay hard.

Asad