Delivering a keynote in San Diego, this coming Thursday (March 20), at "The Sacred & The Profane," a conference at San Diego State University.

Ted Neeley in JESUS CHRIST SUPERSTAR. The Messiah as don't-harsh-my-mellow SoCal dude.

Official Blurb:

In Case of Rapture, Car Will Be Driverless: Waiting for the End of the World in '70s Southern California

At the same time, Dery attempts to consider the "situated knowledges" and "lived experiences" of that lost world through his 15-year-old eyes and through his cynical, unbelieving 48-year-old eyes---to cast a gimlet eye on the creepy cultism and gape-mouthed credulity of the 'Jesus People' movement and acknowledge the fact that it brought him closer to a transport of metanoiac rapture than anything since.

No glossolalia for this boy, but I did have a few Theresa-of-Avila moments of spiritual ecstacy. One thing I really want to nail is the ineffable hippie sweetness of those lost times, exemplified by Ted "Jesus" Neeley's infinitely sad gaze in Jesus Christ Superstar, a far cry from the BATTLECRY/PASSION OF THE CHRIST right-wing pugnacity of the gen-whatever alt.Christianity of our moment...

VITALS:

When: 11-6:15. NOTE: I go on at 5:00 PM. For further details, contact Nathan Leaman (619.886.8109).

Where:
Scripps Cottage
English and Comparative Literature
Arts and Letters 226
San Diego State University
5500 Campanile Drive | MC 6020
San Diego, California 92182-6020

What:

(From the official website): "Sacred & Profane: Meditations on a World in Translation

Salman Rushdie once wrote, "human beings do not perceive things whole; we are not gods but wounded creatures, cracked lenses, capable only of fractured perceptions." In this interdisciplinary conference, we invite original works that explore the way we construct meaning out of historical, theoretical, and literary works.

Panels will include an interrogation of sacred texts, ranging from holy words to canonized works; the past as a sacred text; profane texts, which may challenge our definitions of literature as well as our tolerance for profanity; and issues involved in the process of translation, from one language to another or one time period to another. We invite submissions from visual artists that interpret or explore these topics."

If you drop by, be sure to tug on my sleeve. I'll be milling around aimlessly afterward, hoisting a margarita with faculty, grad students, and you.

What: Arse Electronika 2007, a conference about pornography in the Digital Age.

Speakers: the usual roundup of sexperts, theory jocks, gadget fetishists, smoke-shoveling cyberpundits, and hairy-palmed hangers-on.

When: I'm delivering a keynote lecture on Saturday, October 5, at 11 A.M. PST. Conference schedule here.

Where: Kink.com Porn Palace, 415 Jessie St. San Francisco, CA 94103.

What I'm Talking About: "Humanimal" Porn in the Age of Xenotransplants and Genetic Chimera." Executive Summary: "Humanimal" porn is calculated to blister the mind of even the most been-there, done-that pornsurfer. Armed with image-manipulation software, morph auteurs are conjuring up images worthy of a medieval bestiary or a postmodern Decameron. The result is Dr. Moreau's idea of Web porn: Hyperreal cheesecake in which nude babes with cow ears, tails, and udders suckle each other and naked werewomen flaunt donkey ears straight out of A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Is this an absurdist attempt to push the envelope of fetishism to the point where not even devotees of this obscure desire can take it seriously? Or an earnest attempt to feed the fantasies of a vanishingly obscure market niche that would have flown under radar cover in the lost world before do-it-yourself Web porn? Or is it something more profound---a campy, tongue-in-cheek exorcism of our cultural anxieties about genetic hybrids and human-animal transplants in the age of pigs with human hemoglobin and babies with baboon hearts?

Caveat: That's what I'm contracted to speak about, in any event. As always, there's a better than even chance I may just go off on some hairy-eyed rant about one of my current obsessions, such as: pathological masculinity in America, the country that brought you warporn, gorenography (a.k.a. "torture porn" in the Saw and Hostel vein), The Passion of the Christ (considered as Foucauldian fever dream), Ted Haggard, Larry Craig, and 300, that dyspeptic mix of homophobia and homophilia whose target demographic seems to be the sweet spot between Michael Savage and Tom of Finland.

Consider yourselves forewarned. And come up and tug on my sleeve if you make it to this thing.

Apologies, all, for the long silence. The fall semester has begun, and the professorial life (at NYU, where I teach) has swallowed me headfirst, taking the usual Great White-sized bite out of my time at the writing desk. Nothing but tumbleweeds blowing down the desolate main street of this blog, the batwing doors of the saloon making a lonely creaking in the furnace-blast wind... I'm thinking of re-naming this The Spahn Ranch Times.

In any event, an announcement: Salon just posted my personal essay "Remembrance of Tacos Past," a cultural critique-cum-social history of Taco Bell that asks the question clouding the American Mind: How can a partial-birth monstrosity like Taco Bell's Crunchwrap Supreme survive in a country flooded by Mexican immigrants, where the Real Thing (authentic Mexican food) is easier and easier to find, at least in most big cities?

I'm especially happy with this essay---the latest in a series I've been writing about what I pretentiously call the "cultural psyche" of Southern California---because it comes closer than anything I've written to realizing my vision of a polymorphously perverse cultural criticism that seamlessly stitches together journalism and critical theory, high style and lowbrow subject matter, snark-monkey humor and Deep Thoughts, and social history refracted (where appropriate) through the prism of personal experience.

It's a social history of white Californians' projection, onto Mexican food, of their nativist phobias about "dirty, greasy" Mexicans. It's also a cultural critique of Taco Bell's deracination of south-of-the-border cuisine, and of the fraught racial subtext of the company's glib use of Mexicanismo (Mexican-ness) in the mission-style architecture of its restaurants and in TV spots featuring a talking Chihuahua with a Speedy Gonzalez accent. Finally, it's a first-person, New Journalism-style meditation on the cultural politics of my obsessive quest, as an expatriate Southern Californian living in New York, for authentic Mexican food---a search that looks, at first glance, like Proustian time travel back to the San Diego borderlands of my youth but on closer examination turns out to be one white guy's problematic use of the taco as a metonym for a mythic Mexico whose use value, in symbolic terms, is that it is everything that middle-class Anglo culture is not.

For this essay, I worked the Proustian beat, dredging up my memories of eating, in the mid-'60s, at the first Taco Bell that opened in our San Diego suburb of Chula Vista. I reflected on the curious cultural alchemy that transmuted Mexican food, in my white, middle-class mind, into my food---the soul food of SoCal surfer-dude culture, the hybrid consciousness of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands wrapped up in a fried tortilla.

Here's a preview:

I'm having a senor moment. Dinner tonight is the unthinkable: a Taco Bell Original Taco and Burrito Supreme, abominations that haven't profaned this chowhound's palate since I was a kid in Southern California, birthplace of fast food. I'm committing this foodie felony partly because I'm a la recherche du whatever: the goldenrod-and-avocado-colored memories of my '60s-'70s youth, when dinner out, more often than not, meant Taco Bell.

Growing up white and middle-class in San Diego in those days meant that "cultural hybridity," as the postmodernists like to call it, was my birthright: Mexicans might have been "wetbacks" and "beaners," but our shared historical (sometimes literal) genes, reaffirmed on school trips to the region's Spanish missions, meant that Mexican food was "our" food.

Boy from Brazil: Ah-nuhld cathects the carrot.

Back from lecturing about sex, society, and Netporn in Porto Alegre, Brazil, for which I had prepared myself, as I told my audience, by screening the 1983 Playboy video "Carnival in Rio." Hosted by a helmet-haired Arnold Schwarzenegger, groping everything within reach of his pithecanthropoid arms and nudge-nudge, wink-winking (in his newly acquired frat-tuguese, which seems to consist entirely of come-on lines) about the delights of the mulatta and the bunda, the video is a cringe-inducing exercise in post-colonial cluelessness. It amounts to starring Conan the Barbarian in Black Orpheus. The section in which Our Man in Rio teaches a bemused Brazilian babe how to bite and suck a carrot---Freud-friendly close-ups of a carrot sliding in and out of heavily glossed lips, while Arnie chortles, "Good, yesss"---is enough to summon a righteously pissed Frantz Fanon forth from the tomb.

Anyway, Brazil was stupendous, a mind-stretching experience. With its cosmopolitan thinkers, fluent in colonial history and postmodern thought (at a churrascuria, my professorial hosts in Porto Alegre gave me the equivalent of a wine-fueled graduate seminar on the Brazilian cultural psyche); its stunning contrasts between amok urbanism and wild nature; and its mind-stretching juxtaposition of First World turbo-capitalism and Third World bricolage, Brazil pushed the boundaries of my thought. As a citizen of the Republic of Fear, where the air is thick with talk of terrorist threats and invading immigrants, and where the citizenry has been gulled into offering up its civil liberties as a burnt offering to the god of paranoia, I was thrilled by what Mike Davis would call the "magical urbanism" of Brazil's exuberant metropolises, and by the dark magic of its primordial matta---a smack-in-the-face reality check to laptop-toting citizens of American empire who think they've seen it all.

Some who attended my lecture have asked for hardcopy. Happily, a version of the text ("Paradise Lust: Pornotopia Meets the Culture Wars") has just been published in C'Lick Me: A Netporn Studies Reader by the Institute for Network Cultures in Amsterdam. The anthology also includes my interview with "realcore" researcher Sergio Messina, which originally appeared on this site.

In unrelated news, the latest issue (June 2007) of ID magazine includes my "Rant" column on the cult of the iPhone, in which I inveigh, on behalf of the conscientous objectors I call iTheists, against the interminable, culture-wide geekgasm that has greeted the release of the iPhone. This hallelujah chorus is hardly a surprise, given "the brown-nosing obsequiousness of most tech coverage," complicit in "the lip-biting, teary-eyed, Moonie-mass-wedding jubilation that greets the release of every Apple product." You'd think this thing was the infinitely regenerating prepuce of the Risen Jesus, for chrissakes. Give it a rest, Pod people. The geeky paeans to God's little blobject, the helpful hints to Jobs about how to make it even cooler: You're getting a little too Raelian about this thing, and it's starting to creep the rest of us out.

You are cordially invited to...

Another (!) lecture on Netporn, the subject that has captivated minds and moistened loins around the world.

This talk is part of the Frontiers of Contemporary Thought series, jointly produced by the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), the University of the Sinos River Valley (UNISINOS) and Copesul, a private chemical company located in Porto Alegre. According to Copesul's website, confirmed speakers for the series include Bernard-Henri Levy, Peter Greenaway, Pierre Levy, Marshall Berman, Christopher Hitchens, Camille Paglia, and Michel Houellebecq. I am reliably informed, by one of my hosts, that I'll speak before "a selected audience of Brazilian scholars, journalists, and decision makers." In other words, I'll have the Ear of Power as I talk, preposterously enough, about...

"Humanimal" porn in the age of genetic chimera and xenotransplants; the cultural crosstalk between warporn and gorenography (Saw, Hostel, et. al.); pathological masculinity in Dubya's America; male bonding in the military, stalked by the ever-present specter of the Queer Within; Theweleit; Sontag; Foucault; Zizek; and what happens when Matrix "bullet time" meets PhotoShopped cumshots, among other things.

When: June 26, 2007 7:30 pm

Where: Porto Alegre, Brazil Federal University Federal University Lecture Hall

Stop by and say hello, if you're in town.