Forbes is right about career women being divorce-prone. By Jack Shafer – Slate Magazine

It seems that a lot of the hubbub over the Forbes article – like the one linked here – is about debating the details. But why not argue with the presuppositions? What’s missing from both sides of the argument – the for and against ‘marrying a career woman’ – is their predication on some very unpleasant thinking about feminism. There is no room left for, on one side, the idea of a complete career woman who isn’t married and, on the other, the idea of a successful woman who isn’t a participant in the modern business world. You either get stuck with a hyper-masculised ideal of the modern career woman or a June-Cleaver-like throwback. Nowhere is there any middle ground.

And for both Noers and the hastily-added rebuttal of Corcoran (original article here) instead of, say, addressing the root problem of the male dependence on being superior, they both assert the need for men to constantly improve their own ‘marketability’. The whole debate is an ugly mess in which relationships are reduced to the maintenance of desirability and the preservation of peoples inadequacies.

Good thing that capitalism hasn’t really affected anything beyond economics though. That was close.

Our strange fascination with box-office numbers. By Bryan Curtis – Slate Magazine

Finally, someone has done a decent job articulating some of the unease I feel about the weekly infatuation with box office receipts. Curtis totally nails it with the suggestion that “box-office performance is equated with cultural impact” i.e. the success of The Passion of the Christ and The Chronicles of Narnia being used by some writers as proof of the inherent superiority of Christian values. To wit, on the surface, success in a capitalist system is always about the unproblematic one-way equation, Better Ideas=More Money.

What Curtis talks around but never actually says is this – capital and cultural capital are inextricably linked. There is a connection between the perception of a film’s (or album’s, book’s etc.) economic worth and the perception of the same artefact’s cultural value as well. The failure in this approach is that it assumes people respond to what is best, not, as is often the case, what reaffirms their belief systems or reassures them, yes, you are in fact doing things the right way.

Well folks – my travelling is done for now and it is high time for this blog to become something a little more serious and full -time. To that end, I have (I admit, a little half-heartedly) given the blog a little green makeover and hope to move this thing closer to what that little subtitle suggests – thoughts on the present from a homeless space.
What I mean is to simply speak about, discuss and point to the ever shifting landscape of modern life and popular culture without getting too rigidly bogged down in left and right politics.