Big Pimpin'

In a very real sense, Jay-Z's song "Big Pimpin'" has long held a special place in my heart. Hearing it reminds me of the road trip my friends Josh, Aaron, and I took the summer after our high school graduation. As we made the long drive from Indianapolis to San Diego, we were regularly scanning the radio dial, trying to find a quality station in each new broadcast area we entered. Without ever intentionally seeking it out, this browsing continually brought our eardrums into contact with the distinctive tones of "Big Pimpin'."

I recall encountering the mega-hit at least once a day for four consecutive days. The three of us kept one another entertained during our extended sessions in the car by (among other things) doing our best "white boy" renditions of this song. I know in retrospect why I associate that track so closely with our road trip, even though none of have ever listened heavily to urban musical stylings. Still, after the seven-plus years that "Big Pimpin'" has been around, I've heard the song in its entirety no more than twice. And yet its chorus continues to pop into my head no less than once a month, despite the fact that I never knew the actual lyrics of even this part of the song until just recently. When I had to make up the lyrics I didn't know while rehearsing it for my own amusement, here's how I sang the chorus:

Big pimpin', spendin' cheese.
We be big pimpin' on B.L.A.D.s
We be big pimpin', oh yessiree.
I said a jigga, jiggamon, ABCFG.

I was always pretty confident the first two lines were correct, seeing as Aaron always corroborated what I heard in those places. My perceived accuracy concerning Line 2 only intensified my curiosity over what in the world "B.L.A.D." stood for. That summer my theory (constructed with reference to absolutely nothing outside my own mind) was that the acronym stood for "Beautiful Ladies of African Descent." I've always been proud of coming up with this possibility because it's genuinely creative, actually plausible, and I came up with it rather spontaneously. My recent decision to Google the official lyrics was prompted by the random return of my curiousity over the true significance of B.L.A.D. Here's what my research produced concerning the chorus:

We doin.. big pimpin, we spendin cheese
(Check em out now)
Big pimpin, on B.L.A.D.'s
We doin.. big pimpin up in N.Y.C.
It's just that Jigga Man, Pimp C, and B-U-N B

My biggest surprise was finding out that I had heard "jiggamon" correctly, although I didn't know there was actually a person who sometimes went by the handle "Jigga Man." I'm assuming Jigga Man is Jay-Z himself, but I can't be sure because that's not one of the three facts I actually know about Jay-Z. 1) He has his own line of champagne. 2) He retired for like 2 days. 3) For many years now, he's had regular access to Beyonce's revered and coveted booty.

As for Pimp C and B-U-N B, I suppose they are the less famous MCs backing up Mr. Z in the song. And you'd have to be numb in the skull and the nuts to not know the expanded correlate of N.Y.C. But what about B.L.A.D.s? Since my reading of the officialy lyrics did nothing to clarify this acronym for me, I Googled it next.

All this search brought to my attention was that, in the world of animal medicine, B.L.A.D. stands for "Bovine Leukocyte Adhesions Deficiency." Unless Jay-Z and his boys enjoy Big Pimpin' on cows suffering from faulty immune systems, B.L.A.D. must stand for something else in the context of the song. Is my previous theory right? Or is "B.L.A.D.'s" just a novel way of referring to "black ladies" or, more generally, "beautiful ladies"?

Ideas anyone?

Love That Nietzsche

[Blogger's Note: This is the last post I had backlogged from my extended period of silence.]

I already know that the defining experince of my first term of doctoral course work shall always be my intellectual and personal struggles with the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche. I previously shared the problems I had encountered in the Nietzsche seminar, stemming from a potent combination of difficult texts and the unfortunate structure of the course itself. The good news is that I survived all of this madness by achieving a grade of "A," and I arrived at an understanding of my instructor as an intellectual antagonist instead of a personal adversary.

The news that cannot be sugarcoated is the hellfire I had to pass through just to finish my final projects for that class. That's right, I said projects plural. Over the course of two weeks, I devoted an exorbatant amount of time to reading and reflecting on Herr Nietsche's writings as I strived to complete both a 20-page term paper and a take-home final exam. With no reading week provided by the quarter system, the time available for work was at a premium. To cut to the heart of the hellacious process I underwent to finish all of this, I needed a 5-day extension to finish my term paper and still had to spend nearly the entire day of Thanksgiving working on it, not finishing the damn thing until 5:30am the next morning. It was the second most stressful academic experience I've ever had, and I can unequivocally identify the Nietzsche seminar as the hardest class I've ever taken.

The primary reason this course kicked my ass so much was the great challenges Nietzsche himself posed to me. I don't mean simply that his writing proved difficult to understand, which is certainly true. I also mean that, in taking Nietzsche seriously rather than dismissing him with stock critiques, Nietzsche got to me. He successfully challenged deeply held values and patterns of meaning according to which I've made sense of my own life for years, irrespective of whether those values and meanings are rooted in Christianity or elsewhere. I've certainly not been provoked into apostacy but particular pre-existing doubts I held and critiques I levied against my inherited religious tradition have been intensified by this experience. The last week of classes I underwent a novel event: I become physically ill, not over the stress and anxiety of finishing an important assignment (that came the following week), but because the power of an polemic hit me like a steel-toed boot to the groin. Thus the completion of the aforementioned projects proved to be a struggle with self and worldview in addition to a challenging academic endeavor.

Now three weeks removed from the completion of all that maddening business, I find myself increasingly glad to have gone through it. One of Nietzsche's most quoted statements is that "Whatever doesn't kill me makes me stronger." I now see that the reason survival of this sort makes one stronger in a deep and meaningful a sense is that the very act of overcoming a formidable challenge requires us to draw upon potent and effective resources that, once tapped, we cannot help but draw upon with great regularity henceforth. The person that overcomes a threat also overcomes that previous constitution of the person that was threatened. I overcame the challenges Nietzsche posed to me last quarter, and I feel enriched as a result, now aware of resources in myself I had come to overlook or had failed to notice prior. The question that remains for me is whether I shall finally regard Nietzsche's writings themselves as threats to be overcome or resources to continue drawing upon in other ongoing battles. I suspect the latter shall be my course.

For those that may be interested in a relatively brief exposition of the materials that challenged me, see the post below. It contains one of my responses from the take-home final. Once I had this response finalized, I truly became confident that I understood much of what Nietzsche was up to and that I actually had a chance of finishing my assignments on time.

Nietzsche in 1200 Words

[The question being answered here: Explain in as much detail as is appropriate and with appropriate quotes or textual reference what Nietzsche means by the “will to power” and how that concept is closely related to such terms as “genealogy,” “valuation,” “transvaluation,” “ressentiment,” “higher man”, and “overman.” To what degree are these terms closely interconnected throughout Nietzsche’s writings, and what significance might you assign to each of them in other than pure Nietzschean language? A legend explaining title abbreviations is provided at the end of this post.]

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Nietzsche’s aggressive polemic against the traditions of Christian morality and Western metaphysics may be understood, in part, as a sustained effort to “remain faithful to the earth” (TSZ 188). Nietzsche sees the prevailing philosophy and religion of his time as repudiating the earth through “a moral-optical illusion” (TI 484). They construct an idealized ‘true world’ in direct contradiction to the ‘actual world,’ decrying the latter as a world of mere appearances. He unfavorably portrays such thinkers as “tarantulas” (TSZ 211) and “spiders” (TSZ 237) that spin elaborate webs of truth, meaning, and purpose in their efforts to define the ‘true world.’ But as long as one casts the world as a negation of another, Nietzsche contends, the motivation is not a love of the truth; it is “a profound vexation at reality” (AC 582).

Nietzsche’s distinctive term the will to power denotes the ceaseless, dynamic interplay of commanding and obedient forces operating within the world. Through his declaration that, “This world is the will to power—and nothing besides!” (WP 550), Nietzsche characterizes each of the individual forms which constitute the world as a manifestation or an instance of the will to power. Because everything that exists is an instance of the will to power, all the events of the world are a becoming master in which interacting forces subdue or are subdued by one another. Nietzsche states, “Whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it” (GM 513).

Thus the history of any thing—be it an idea, custom, etc.—may be understood as “a continuous sign-chain of ever new interpretations and adaptations” (Ibid.). Each transformation of a thing constitutes a new link in this chain, and its meaning, purpose, and (to use a more Nietzschean word) value thus cannot be regarded as fixed or intrinsic. On these grounds, Nietzsche pronounces that facts do not exist; “only interpretations” (WP 267). Of human beings, Nietzsche states, “life itself forces us to posit values; life itself values through us when we posit values” (TI 490). We cannot help but be involved in the world’s ongoing process of valuation. For this reason, the essence of existence—of our existence—should never be understood in terms of static states of being but rather as “a becoming that knows no satiety, no disgust, no weariness” (WP 550). Valuation cannot reach a point of stasis or final achievement because there is no preordained endpoint or telos toward which becoming progresses (GM 513). In this light, I imagine the will to power as the generative wave of energy that continually invigorates us to demonstrate our creative abilities (our skills of valuation) in new ways.

Through the practice of genealogy, Nietzsche investigates the process of valuation that has generated and transformed a particular sign. Genealogy is the labor to identify those forces that gave rise to it, as well as those forces which subsequently mastered it for their own ends. As genealogist, Nietzsche places great importance on the role origins play in valuation (BGE 234). I conceive of genealogy as the concept of an autopsy stood on its head: The genealogist skillfully lays back the most immediate layers of the subject’s form in order to study the components that constitute its deeper structure. The intent, however, is not to identify a cause of death but the cause of birth. In works such as Beyond Good and Evil, On the Genealogy of Morals, and Twilight of the Idols, we witness Nietzsche the genealogist analyzing the sign-chains of supposedly objective or eternal truths. Time and time again, Nietzsche concludes that the origins of traditional values, as well as the forces that have mastered them, are not divine or transcendent in character, but rather human, all-too-human.

Genealogy’s labor also facilitates transvaluation. The corollary of the statement “remain faithful to the earth” is Zarathustra’s admonition to “let the value of all things be posited newly by you” (TSZ 189). The insights of genealogy, in a sense, demystify existing values and thereby better equip one to reinterpret, obscure, or obliterate their previous meanings in appropriating them. It is truly a trans-valuation between existing and created values. When Nietzsche describes those “form-giving forces” which are “the essence of life,” he speaks of them as “aggressive,” “expansive,” and “spontaneous” (GM 515). Therefore, when transvaluation occurs as an active and self-assertive practice, free of any sense of personal obligation to what one ought to do, it is an affirmation of the essence of life and of the world as the will to power.

Antithetical to any such affirmation is ressentiment. Nietzsche identifies ressentiment as valuation that is thoroughly reactive (GM 472). He finds this mode of valuation to be evident in persons who bemoan their station in life (GM 473) or who are angry over their inability to change the past (TSZ 251), and then choose to avenge themselves against a world perceived to be hostile or unfair by fashioning their own values in direct negation of that world. Ressentiment is a form of spiritual revenge because this valuation does not result in actual deeds but remains a sort of ideological attack (my words) in which the valuator accepts the present state of the world. I see it as the attitude of sour grapes elevated to a worldview. Nietzsche declares that ressentiment has so permeated the values of the West that we longer see it (GM 470). Nietzsche need only observe the web-spinning spiders to confirm the prevalence of reactivity and negation in the European, intellectual culture of his day. In Nietzsche’s understanding, the society founded on ressentiment will only deepen in its “aversion to life” (GM 599). The person this society has produced is (among other things) sickly, mediocre, eager to please, and a herd animal (BGE 266).

Thus Zarathustra announces, “I teach you the overman. Man is something that must be overcome” (TSZ 124). In Zarathustra’s prophetic teachings, there is a vision of one who wills without ressentiment; in whom the will to power is spontaneously and creatively manifest. To will as the overman is to transform the bemoaning ‘it was’ of ressentiment into ‘thus I willed it’ (TSZ 251). In this transvaluation, the great affirmer “says Yes to everything questionable, even the terrible” (TI 484). The reappropriation of “evil” values, such as self-love and esteem of the body, is “necessary for the overman’s best” (TSZ 400). It is in this regard that the overman is not to be confused with the higher man. The higher men—Christians, Buddhists, Kantians—also seek to move beyond their present state but their ascendance still takes place within “an illusory higher order of things” while the real world remains unchanged (BGE 264). The higher man is a would-be perfecter of convention, not the boldly inventive creator the overman is. True overcoming does not begin with a climbing up, but with a going under (TSZ 122), acknowledging the reality of the world as layer upon layer of valuation, all the way down. However, in throwing off the weight of constructed morality and philosophy, the process of going under finally makes one light, an active expression of the will to power.

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AC = The Antichrist

BGE = Beyond Good and Evil

EH = Ecce Homo

GM = On the Genealogy of Morals

TSZ = Thus Spoke Zarathustra

TI = Twighlight of the Idols

WP = The Will to Power

News Regarding the World of 24

Over the past couple of weeks, I have made several discoveries related to 24, the only mainstream television program I make a point of watching each and every new episode the night it first airs. Thanks in large part to the proselytizing efforts of John and Nancy Speas Hill, I have been an avid watcher of the program since January of 2006. Having jumped in at the beginning of Season 5, I got caught up during my year away from the academy by purchasing and speedily devouring Seasons 1-4.

Thus it saddens me to learn that the television writers' strike has also taken it's toll on my beloved show. Production is indefinitely suspended on Season 7. In order to keep the typical broadcast format fans of the show are accustomed to, Fox has optioned to delay the usual January premiere. My only hope is that the writers will to continue to contemplate and revise the show's as-yet-unfilmed material during the interim. That would help make sure that Day 7 doesn't turn out to be as disappointing as Day 6 ended up being.

The silver lining of the production delay is that now less attention will be payed to the fact that star Kiefer Sutherland is currently serving a 48-day jail sentence as a result of (if I remember correctly) a recent DUI. Even if the writers were happy and working, 24's filming schedule would certainly have been seriously disrupted by Jack Bauer being in the slammer for a month and a half.

Returning to the topic of Season 6, it was recently released on DVD. Given my estimation of its relative level of quality, however, I'm in no hurry to own it. Nevertheless, I would like to pick it up cheaply someday if that's possible, so I'll have to keep an eye out for super-saver promotions. This time last year, Best Buy put all 5 Days on sale for just 20 bucks each, which allowed me to round out my 24 collection in an economical fashion.

As for the season that has now been postponed, I'm curious how many people saw the lengthy preview Fox aired during one of the games of the World Series. Apparently Jack decides to stop staring at the ocean and continue battling terrorism after all, only now the mastermind standing across the battleline from Superspecial Agent Bauer is none other than former head of CTU Tony Almeida. At this revelation, I uttered an impassioned, "What the hell?! I thought Robocop killed your ass!" I hope the reintroduction of a character that seemed very clearly to have died proves to be the work of some inventive writing and not a cheap, soap opra-style tactic employed in the absence of better ideas.

Fans of the show will know that Tony's better half was fellow agent and (in my humble opinion) foxy mama Michelle Dessler played by Reiko Aylesworth. I learned last week that Ms. Aylesworth's post-24 career is not going so well. Yahoo! Movies informs me that she plays a leading role in the upcoming theatrical release Aliens vs. Predator Requiem. It's gotta be rough to go from a featured role on an Emmy-winning drama to a thankless and perfunctory role in an exploitation, genre film. [Blogger's Note: This seemingly innocuous comment managed to provoke the ire of one visitor. Don't believe me? Check out the "Interested Persons" section.]

Finally, I was in Barnes & Noble the other night when I spotted a copy of 24 and Philosophy. About 5 years ago, I read Lord of the Rings and Philosophy and found the book to be surprisingly insightful, so I'm feeling inclined to pick up this more recent installment of academic reflection on popular culture. Of course, the essays contained in 24 and Philosophy might all turn out to be worthless. But I found a humorous, one-page feature at the beginning of the book that makes me optimistic that the volume as a whole will be worth purchasing. I am speaking of a letter written in the persona of Chloe addressed to the recently deceased Edgar, expressing how bummed she is about his death. If you're a 24 fan and happen to be browsing around a bookstore, I recommend taking a few minutes to read this brief selection.

Beowulf

Quite regularly I see the advertisements for a certain movie and think, "I would never go to see that movie on my own but, if a group of my friends was planning to go see it, I could be interested." Beowulf was such a film for me. It was obvious to me that Robert Zemeckis had taken the technological tricks he developed on The Polar Express and applied them to less family oriented material. I figured that could be groovy. I had also read an abridged version of the poem back in high school, having forgotten nearly all details of any consequence even though I remembered enjoying what I read. Those two factors combined to make me relatively interested in this latest film version. It was the combined enthusiasm of my friends RJ, Elizabeth, and Kit, however, that proved necessary for me to want to pay the ever-increasing box office cost of a ticket to see it.

Not only did we go see Beowulf (back on November 26th), we saw it in IMAX 3-D. That was the first time I'd seen any 3-D film and this movie was a good choice for my initial experience with the format. All in all, I give the move 3 out of 4 stars, it's solid but not awesome. Yet the visuals are every bit as spectacular as the TV spots would have you belief. Spear points practically scratch your cornea, blood and bits of viscera nearly splatter in your face, and the climactic battle with the dragon had me smiling like a 5 year-old watching Star Wars for the first time. An IMAX evening ticket in Denver costs a budget-shattering $13.50 so I was grateful that the visual bells and whistles were genuinely impressive.

In short, I enjoyed Beowulf, and I recommend it to those of you who may be feeling ambivalent about the seeing the picture as I had been.

I conclude by quoting the film's obligatory "hero monologue." Beowulf decides to shout this at Grendel just before severing the monster's hand, which gives the speech an aura of Samuel L. Jackson's Ezekiel schtick in Pulp Fiction. If I could ever improv something this manly in the heat of conflict, I would consider myself pretty kick-ass. Here it is:

I am ripper and tearer and slasher and gouger!
I am the teeth in the night,
And the talons in the darkness.
Mine is the strength
And lust
And power.
I...am...BEOWULF!

Son of Doost

Dustin Lafferty, the man who somehow withstood three consecutive years of being my college roommate, and his wife Emily welcomed their first child into the world at 4:21 AM on November 24th. Nathan Vance Lafferty weighed in at 7 lbs., 2 oz. and measured 21 in. in body length.

I am rejoicing with the Lafferty family on account of their new arrival. I'm looking forward to seeing one of my close friends being a father, and I'm even more curious to find out what kind of tiny human Nathan is going to be. Here are a few more pictures for your viewing pleasure:

Nathan chilling in a chair with his proud papa. I'm sure his childhood will be filled with many such moments.




Nathan demonstrates his impressive lung capacity for Emily's enjoyment.

Already sharing his father's love of The Simpsons, Nathan tries out his Mr. Burns impression on the hospital staff. Exxxcellent.

Dropping the Blogging Ball

I suck.

I know it. During my brief time in a doctoral program, I have gone from a mostly prolific blogger to an inactive sack o' dookie. However, I do have a back log of bite-sized (and one relatively substantial) posts planned for the immediate future. Usually when I've slacked off, I create a mega-post containing an egregiously large amount of content. To reverse that trend, I'll be posting a number of concise, to the point reflections in the days to come. Above is the most significant piece of news I've over looked in the last several weeks. Far more spurious bloggings are soon to follow.

To end on a positive, the typically dormant Yahoo!Group I moderate has just this week experienced an uncommon upsurge in activity. There I've been putting up mad postings. Boooong!