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Having a "relationship," of course, is not the same as being together. Just as an attitude toward labor only hardened into an ideology called Marxism when the worker got cut off from the product of his labor, so erotic bonds only hardened into Relationshipism when people started, for a million familiar reasons, getting cut off from each other. A "relationship" is not to be confused with a union. It is an ongoing argument between two stubbornly sovereign selves about the possibility of a union.
The show lets us down, this review says, by asking good questions about the wrenching emotional element of sex in what amounts to a post-Seventh Commandment context—questions that at times border on moral philosophy -"how do you live a good life" in this context?—and then blithely refusing to address them.
- Speaking of Sex and the City, popular culture is awash with the sometimes-sappy sagas of single women, but what about the bachelors? The Boston Globe says bachelors are suffering from a surplus of peers and face the hardest road to romance in America—not that you'd know it from our culture's ignorance on the subject.
• Last month I linked to two essays (see sixth item here) on global McCulture—the threat of dominance and dilution of world cultures by mass-produced American culture. I should have included a link to this provocative piece in the Boston Globe. The authors question the reigning "McDonaldization thesis" that says fast food is a metaphor for the homogenization of cultural life. In fact, they argue, McDonald's is surprisingly adaptive to local cultures. The question they ignore is this: is local culture, as expressed through the Golden Arches, really authentic if it is produced by a global corporation, its identity determined by (and profits funneled to) McDonald's American headquarters?
Related:
My essay on McDonald's as culture at NBierma.com
Skip to Dialogue / Skip to Digest
PLACES & CULTUREFrom the New York Times:
VENICE, Feb. 25—November was actually the cruelest month. For about two-thirds of it, the water that usually edges and lattices this improbably liquid city sloshed amok, turning Piazza San Marco into a gargantuan puddle and other low-lying areas into shin-high wading pools. January was bad, too. Right at the start, the lagoon rose, the canals swelled and Venetians slipped back into their galoshes, while tourists teetered atop makeshift boardwalks that had been set up to bridge the dry patches, too few and far between. … This month provided a fresh illustration of how slowly and uncertainly Venice is paddling toward a solution.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/26/international/europe/26ITAL.html*
• Earlier: NYT on enforcing the speed limit on Venice's waters*
QUARTZSITE, Ariz.—Desert or not, traffic along the busiest one-mile stretch of Main Street here can take half an hour to pass. Motor homes towing pickup trucks choke gas station entrances. Septuagenarians in shorts amble fearlessly between busy intersections. Waits for a table at Silly Al's restaurant stretch to an hour. … Approached on Interstate 10, Quartzsite unfolds as a surreal sandscape of metal boxes packed side by side in town and scattered like buckshot over thousands of acres of Sonora Desert. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/10/national/10QUAR.html*
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