Dang… Globalization is Heavy

http://www.sugarbushsquirrel.com

Sugar Bush Squirrel is a website run by a photographer named Kelly Foxton. Foxton tells the story of rescuing a squirrel who we now know as “Sugar Bush”, from certain death. The squirrel, now domesticated or largely intoxicated, is touted as The World’s Most Photographed Squirrel. Sugar Bush plays a number of roles on the website; we see the squirrel as newscaster, photographer (the object of the gaze, and the gaze itself, holla), Saddam Hussein, U.S. nationalist and Jon Benet.

A lot of creativity went into this site and kudos to Foxton for the “l’affiare du string” reference in the French Muslim “virgin” diorama — of which smacks of the unfortunate “oh geeze, decolonization sure is messy, I don’t know what to think”-intelegensia. It’s also clear that Sugar Bush supports the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which in my opinion, is a bigoted move. Anyways, the real issue is — I hate fun.

“It took time. They didn’t always get it the way I wanted first time, but we worked together and in the end it was great,” says Muir, 39, a Washington, DC native

Oh dang: http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/20080520/lf_nm_life/afghan_fashion_dc

Elizabeth Muir, white women and the UN are insane.

Thanks Sheila

Sometimes when I’m in charge of the music among friends, I put on music that is sort of uncomfortable or annoying. This basically includes music I was in love with as a young person: Placebo, Marilyn Manson, L7 and a little later in life, The Postal Service. While listening to the Postal Service the other weekend a story was prompted that reminded me of this blog…

An email correspondence of this story from H:

i just got back to nagoya。 hungover and want curry. at the party last night genki put the postal service on and some guy started skipping the tracks、stops it and then just plugged in his ipod and declared himself dj。genki looked at me and said it made him remember xxxxx 。i think he did that at a party with u。 i miss that guy

I guess the moral of the story is that hipsters in Japan, much like hipsters in New York are for some reason or another still playing the postal service at parties and are having it shut off by people they don’t know so well.

The weight of this global uncoolness is duly noted.

The BBC News website has had some hilarious photo captions this week.

The latter is probably only hilarious because it is taken out of context. The former is hilarious because it sounds like it is a sentence that my mother might use if she was a language instructor.

The other day I was thinking, If i had a tv news program, I’d definitely have a segment called “Dang… Globalization is Heavy”. With this segment, I could make vague, non-nostalgic comments about the current global order of things.  So, since I’m never going to be Amy Goodman — I’m starting this blog.  I will be discussing “globalization” and its varying degrees of “heaviness” and maybe some of its discontents.