Nicole Rogers Longo and Doug Longo, owners of The Cupcake Spot

After reading this article in the NY Times about The Latest Entrepreneurial Fantasy I was thus inspired to give a review of The Cupcake Spot, a cupcake store near my residence in downtown St. Petersburg. The shop is enticing and sells a lovely homemade variety of all things cupcake.

Located at 405 Central Ave. in downtown St. Petersburg, The Cupcake Spot is nestled in the heart of downtown. The sign is bright pink and hard to miss.

When I entered the store, I was immediately drawn to the gleaming display case of homemade cupcakes, some topped with cream cheese frosting instead of the traditional pasty bettercream. I was there for quite a while to get a good idea of favorites:

Better Than
-Cream cheese frosting. The cake part is really moist, not dry at all like some cupcakes I’ve had.

The Chocolate Elvis.
-Banana cupcake with peanut buttercream and chocolate on top. Holy hell.

Smores

-mmmmmm the name says it all.

There is also another Cupcake Spot in Tampa owned by the same people.

Henry Diltz Photo of Tina Turner

Since the beginning of rock music, the media and general public have been fascinated with rock stars. Their rises to fame (and often pit-falls due to self-destructive habits) have been carefully documented. As such, the Brooklyn Museum’s “Who Shot Rock & Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present” is an excellent photographic narrative of the rock stars we all know and love.

The exhibition, organized by photography historian Gail Buckland, displays over 175 images from 105 photographers. The eclectic mix of work includes album cover art, candid snapshots, publicity portraits, and live performance pictures.

A New York Times Review of the exhibition calls into question “What makes a high-quality rock photograph?” (and compares these photos to fashion photography) As the article states,

…Fashion photography is more immediately visual; you don’t have to know who the model is or who designed the clothes to be interested. With rock photographs it matters who the subject is. Knowing that the bearded young man smiling genially at the camera in a 1972 photograph by Lynn Goldsmith is Bruce Springsteen greatly enhances the experience of an otherwise nondescript picture, for fans of the Boss, anyway.

One way to make rock photographs more interesting would be to analyze them as sociological or anthropological documents. Examining them according to some quasi-scientific system could bring to light meanings and metaphors that we have come to take for granted in the cult of rock. Hero worship, sexual aggression, gender role-playing, youthful rebellion and the triumph of neo-primitivism in a consumerist age of unprecedented scientific, technological and industrial progress: these are topics worth examining…

However, “Who Shot Rock and Roll” is an entertaining show that most pop-culture enthusiasts will enjoy. This seems to be a show for all ages. Baby-boomers will look at the photos of young Madonna and Elvis and be called back to their youths, while todays 20- and 30- somethings will see photos of rock stars from the 80s and 90s and laugh at the styles they all once tried to copy.

Particularly stimulating are photographs of those who died young, as the NY Times article reports,

Of course, some did not get old. Buddy Holly, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison and Tupac Shakur will remain forever young, and pictures of them evoke thoughts of what might have been.

Full post here.

The third post in a row on Afghanistan…:

I suspect some on the political right unequivocally support any plan, though many reasonable people support McChrystal’s thinking, which should be given a chance to succeed they argue, and is designed to correct 8 years of misallocated resources and misguided strategy.  Some on the left support the equality of opportunity for women (as in the video above, which is well done and reported)…perhaps even enough that some could be convinced to support the war.  

Here’s a quote by Samuel Huntington, which might shed some light:

“Although the professional soldier accepts the reality of never-ending and limited conflict, “the liberal tendency,” Huntington explained, is “to absolutize and dichotomize war and peace.” Liberals will most readily support a war if they can turn it into a crusade for advancing humanistic ideals. That is why, he wrote, liberals seek to reduce the defense budget even as they periodically demand an adventurous foreign policy.

So…why does the Taliban keep coming back?  What political, social, and economic conditions allow for this to happen?  Where is Afghan public support strong enough to prevent the kind of Islamic rule supported by the Taliban and set up their own governance, if a majority of Afghans, in fact, reject the Taliban (or at least their reactionary form of Islam)?

What common goals and mutual interests do Afghanistan, Pakistan, and the United States share that justifies our military presence in the face of these odds?  

Addition:  What can we do to alter our strategy to address the threat of radical Islamic terrorism that finds a home in Afghanistan?

Also On This Site:  From The Washington Post: Andrew Bacevich ‘Let’s Beat the Extremists Like We Beat the Soviets’…From Foreign Policy: ‘Evaluating Progress In Afghanistan-Pakistan’…From The WSJ: Graham, Lieberman and McCain “Only Decisive Force Can Prevail In Afghanistan’…

Anthony Cordesman At CSIS: Resourcing For Defeat

” The Sunday edition of The New York Times newspaper is supplemented by The New York Times Magazine which features longer articles and more photography than the paper itself. T Magazine is a supplement to The New York Times Magazine exclusively dedicated to style. T Magazine is published fourteen times a year and each cover features creative interpretations of the infamous fraktur T by various artists and designers. In celebration of the fifth year of publication, T Magazine has created a retrospective online gallery highlighting some of the best covers. A behind-the-scenes look at the creation of Marc André Robinson’s T is available at the T Magazine blog “The Moment”.”

I think this would be a nice example of inspiration for artists and designers to see the art in wider perspective and to stimulate their creativity.

Source for the comment and photographs above

Some other creative pieces for T magazine fraktur

Dude, Where’s My Party?

—

The old man went on to say that the hunter was a different being than men supposed.  He said that men believe the blood of the slain to be of no consequence but that the wolf knows better.  He said that the wolf is a being of great order and that it knows what men do not: that there is no order in the world save that which death has put there.  Finally he said that if men drink the blood of God yet they do not understand the seriousness of what they do.  He said that men wish to be serious but they do not understand how to be so.  Between their acts and their ceremonies lies the world and in this world the storms blow and the trees twist in the wind and all the animals that God has made go to and fro yet this world men do not see.  They see acts of their own hands or they see that which they name and call out to one another but the world between is invisible to them.

-The Crossing

—

Since the election of our nation’s first black president—a write-off during nominations against the Clinton democratic aristocracy, and a politician for whom so many (including myself) worked diligently to nominate—I can’t help but wonder why it has become such a nauseating affair to read the opinion pages of the New York Times.  Let not the cable punditocracy sully our discourse with its banal stupidity, goes the choral chant, but to open floodgates of ink for Maureen Dowd’s obsessive and self-reflective rants on Sarah Palin, David Brooks’ token conservatism, Roger Cohen’s dogmatic secularism, Friedman’s liberal observations of the absurdly obvious, and Bob Herbert’s quasi-racial-but-usually-redeemable prejudice.  While each of these narcissists has their occasional glimmer of insight, as an editor I would sooner pull a Stalin and have them all liquidated:

…Then rose the mighty Paul Krugman to survey the wreck of battle ‘midst the pink-fingered dawn: sayeth he,  ‘All dead save me.’

Now do you see what I did just there?  Literally I made an entreaty to have the NY Times editorial staff assassinated for high crimes of banality and inane chattering.  (Sparing the Great Krugman, seemingly the only mind in their bawdy midst.)  But of course, such entreaties are anything but literal.  They exist solely in the realm of the rhetorically hypothetical, in their proper space of jouissance: the hypothetical enjoyment of acts which no person would consciously undertake.  And there they remain, along with every gay, Jew, white, black, purple, or chicken joke from which I ever gathered myself from the floor.  Because, my dear liberal ideologues, laughter is the stuff of life, wholly apart from those who might be negligibly and only laterally harmed by some mere pun, the not so tasteful and the deliciously not-so-tasteful.

Timothy Egan, however, takes the contrary view beholden to all hypocritical tools, such that every relaxation into laughter should be taken utmost literally, and that—under the scrim of egalitarianism—no one must feel the crack of a good joke unless that joke happens to involve inventive epithets for Christians, whites, conservatives, or working class males.  And thus, a dubious and somewhat stupid remark by a candidate for Idaho’s governorship is equivalent to wiping the sweat from Lee Harvey’s brow on a Dallas summer afternoon:

A Republican candidate for governor of Idaho, Rex Rammell, was at a political barbecue last week when somebody brought up the tags used by wolf hunters, and then made a reference to killing the president of the United States.

“Obama tags?” Rammell replied, to laughter, according to an account in The Times-News of Twin Falls. “We’d buy some of those.”

In the Idaho of the past, jokes about shooting a president could sometimes be dismissed without consequence. Indeed, the comment was buried in an initial news story about the gathering, and Rammell sloughed it off later, saying on his Web site that “Obama hunting tags was just a joke! Everyone knows Idaho has no jurisdiction to issue tags in Washington, D.C.”

Ha-ha. What a knee-slapper, these assassination jokes. And besides, he couldn’t hunt down Obama with out-of-state tags. Get it?

I certainly do not endorse Rammell’s insensitivity (after the fact anyhow), but Egan’s response reflects a total lack of understanding of the social context shoring Rammell’s ability to quip without the wildly unconstrained backlash.  It is a context in which any person can be subjected to any degree of joke, and yes, even especially the coarse and insensitive ones.  As any comedian worth their craft will attest, to enshroud this or that group or individual as inviolable only begs that one do so.  During the Bush years I could rattle off a hundred puns about what a glue-huffing dumbass our president was, is, and forever shall be unto all posterity.  Life was swell, and I don’t recall being accused of sedition.  Out here in the West, we still hold to the axiom that all’s fair in love and politics.  But what’s that?  Egan claims some sort of elevated knowledge of things western?  Ah, give me a break…

Since Egan believes that Rammell is endorsing assassination, an act subject to sedition and conspiracy laws and punishable by death, I wonder if he happened to attempt contact with Rammel’s office for any manner of explanation or apology?  After all, it would be a great journalistic scoop prior to those historic and controversial sedition trials.  But since an attempt to contact Rammell is nowhere to be found in Egan’s column, it appears not so, and thus Egan’s behavior falls into the legal category of “telling non-acts: things I could have done, but tacitly did not and—by extension—would not.”  Instead, Egan suppresses such an accusation by spinning it into a trite narrative about the “real West,” hunting, wolves, and cartoon rednecks bearing guns and good-books.

Subsequently, he calls Rammell a “nature-phobe” for operating an elk ranch (I don’t really “get it” either), deploys the rote stereotype that conservative outdoorsmen are ideologues hell-bent on the extermination of nature, and concludes his piece with the puzzlingly ironic statement that, “…the four-legged hunter is back in the West to stay. Still, it would help all concerned if what we talk about when talking about wolves was just that.”  You mean, such as not groundlessly accusing political candidates of sedition and conspiracy to commit murder against the president, nor meddling in the elections of states not one’s own?  You mean, not filling in the vacuums of these stupid “western-ness” narrative columns with equally stupid and superficial understandings of Northwestern conservatives—that  ‘ole “walmart-redneck” cliche?  Or, pray, perhaps you mean by not responding to wingnuttery, and thereby legitimizing these sideshows?

It’s a transparent rhetorical strategy exemplary of why Egan is such an awful writer, and yet also prototypical of his political (and white) contemporaries.  Common to such columns are claims to some fleet environmental insights about the socioeconomic nature of the West, specifically Northwest and Northwestern politics, but frankly his understanding doesn’t reach east of the Cascade Mountains.  Hell, for that matter it doesn’t even reach east of the 520 bridge.

Egan’s claims to knowledge of the “new West” (therein rendered into a vacuous buzzword) contradict his rhetorical appeals to the very paradigms of authenticity transcribing social identity in the new West, and the oppressively alienating identities dispensed by such paradigms.  His last column reaches into the yeoman myths about the authentic “real” West in a glorified narrative of living in a cabin at Lake Chelan without internet access for a single summer.  For crissakes, honestly?  That’s it?  That’s authenticity?  A daily eighty-five degrees with the breeze combing the tips of the pines at the center of Washington’s playground for white snobbery?  You gave up your access to the alter-reality of mass media, and that’s some holy sacrifice for the New Age altar?  That’s rustic?  Organic?  Real?

For the truth about the new West—as much as the old—isn’t defined by who can do such things, but who cannot.  If someone wanted to “really” experience the new West, they would have to shred their identity, learn Spanish, and pick apples for a year on subsistence wages; or work at a relative’s contracting business to save money for the unlikely opportunity that you might pay for a semester of books at WSU; or better yet, camp out in Nickelsville and look for recession employment after declaring yourself a sex offender.  That’s the “real” West.  You can take it or leave it, just don’t condescendingly pretend to know it intrinsically by way of some greenwashed cosmo-consumerism.

The point about Egan’s writing, and the culture of people by whom it is written and for whom it is intended (yes, self-exceptionally progressive and liberal), is that it is tragically contradictory.  At bottom, it is pure commodity.  The construct of “nature” upon which it depends is little except an abstraction, a parallel allegory of self-actualization in stark relief with the heterogeneous social reality engulfing it.  Egan’s “nature” is a simulacrum, an independent and non-contiguous space that is perpetually out-there; it is being beyond the matrices of the consumerist alter-reality. Thus, nature is a separate space “abroad” rather than an immanent actuality amidst which people (you lowly rubes, you) may actually live and directly compete with the elements of nature—people for whom 150 lb pack predators might, just might reasonably represent a threat to their livelihood.  “Nature” in Egan’s context is delineated as some bifurcation of the real and the experienced, gesturing to “the real” as a substitute and merely the denaturalized simulacra of late capitalist technocracy, a mere aberration of suburban, mass media normality:

What’s ‘nature,’ Daddy?

Nature?  It’s about two hundred air conditioned miles and two tanks of gas on a socialized highway, to the unspoken exclusion of minorities, under the arms of a missile defense shield, with the promise of a tomorrow, and with the protection of a civil security force to preserve upper class property while we’re absent.

Paradigms of authenticity guide and hone a sense of identity and “western” experience available only to the enclosed cabal of wealthy, white, bourgeois individuals who possess the cryptic ideological key for interpreting the romanticized ’separateness’ of nature as a political construct.  Thus, the noon of Egan’s expression is also its darkening: to be ‘in’ or ‘with’ nature is rooted not in this separate reality but rather is localized in a revulsion against the heterogeneous nature of its times.  And thus, since nature is merely distant or peripherally evident, it is permissible to unilaterally impose “environmental” policies on communities who may in fact be greatly harmed by those policies, and who in all probability will be justified in their searing resentments toward such urbane hubris.  These paradigms of authenticity, whether iconoclastically anti-conservative, anti-X, or otherwise, are the very stuff perpetuating the oppression demarcating the spatial boundaries of new Western identity.  It is the same political economy by which Hybrid consumers sneer at SUV’s when Hybrids are the more demonstrative artifacts of the same fetishizing economy of disposable automobilia and waste.  Egan isn’t against the oppression of the new West, writers like him are postmodern formulations of that very oppression; he is not independent from it, for that phallogocentric claim to independent grace is the self-exceptional myth itself.

Indeed, one need not speculate for very long as to how well an ideology with teeth in its own tail might fair when mapped onto differing locales.  Say, when Egan gives his take on the wolf situation in Idaho: is he an Idaho resident, a biologist, a hunter, or a rancher (such as *ahem* Rammell himself)?  Did the sole re-printing of the article reach only as far west as Dayton, Ohio?  Then to what shall we credit his jurisdiction over such concerns, if not just the mindless din of national politics and its colonizing effects?  The immediate assumption with these eastward glances is such that while “authenticity” is the prerogative (to the boon of all urban outdoor equipment retailers and, not coincidentally, the bane of Northwest Search and Rescue teams), communities with red leaning political tendencies are not granted the same cultural autonomy as corn-dancing natives and the white voyeurs observing nature from afar.  For after all, conservative communities do not represent the intersection of various fundamental beliefs about social virtues and the individual’s responsibility toward society, but rather they are the flattened ideological mechanisms of Rupert Murdoch, Walmart, and the Newt Gingrich gang.  What with their guns, their religion, and their occasional lapses into policies of natural despoilment, wherefore the individuals among them?  Where are the finer contours, the tensions, and the struggles in their midst?  With so much enviable authenticity, how could they possibly be so?

And thus my ambivalence toward contemporary environmentalist liberals: in calling conservatives racists, rubes, ideologues, and the like, they have replaced conservatism with the very same flattening and overtly bigoted “other,” in which case the levers and gears of ideology are far more apparent within liberal politics (of a particular-but-prevalent-sort, no less).

The most telling inconsistency of the liberals-attacking-conservatives cliché is that by delegating moral responsibility to the great conservative “other” many liberals seem to get off for concealing their own ideological rigidity, for suppressing deliberative philosophical debate about the priorities of a society, and for the impotence perennially afflicted on the Democratic party by these vain, mainstream, suburban elites.  Instead of engaging communities in the “new West” through an inward persuasion of their national and local priorities, the perpetual mode of communication is one of reciprocal derision, indignation, and scornful reprisal.  It is a purely dialectical repetition measured in cable news cycles and blog rants (*ahem*).  All one takes from these discourses is a sense of perplexity as to how much kitch liberals and post-Bush neo-conservatives are merely two parts to the same repressive dialectical whole, two joyless and vindictive tyrants rending their kingdoms apart because they have narrowed their vision such that they only perceive one another and not those whom they serve.  And thus, the world must wait on the baby-boomers and their binary, 1960’s Culture Wars logic, because so and so keeps looking at me, and such and such broke my toy truck, and all of American discourse must yield to the petty concerns of entitled byproducts of the anomalous fifties, et cetera, et cetera.  Please, get over it.

There is a sentiment among serious conservative ranks that America’s fickle and spineless middle-left yields them only supercilious and patronizing concern.  As a far-left democrat enduring the intellectually and morally bankrupt suburban liberalism of Egan’s “new West,” I know just how they feel.