5 Star Tossers

(*) I refuse to check whether this is/was a porn title.

It's finally out, dear listener!

Our new episode, long time coming, will take a whack at the concept -- and the social/sexual/political/racial/economic/religious phenomenon (did I miss anything?) -- of cuckoldry.

Though Sagi originally suggested it for the obvious purpose of exploring the alt-Right and their repeated "Cuck" accusations towards the left in the United States, Jake had the ludicrous idea that  a Shakespeare play that deals with cuckoldry was the way to go.

Is it something about the virtual - and homo-social/sexual - nature of paternity (and ownership) that makes the "cuck" spread so corrosively, not just in societal gossip, but in an ego? The woman's flesh and sexuality seem to get in the way of an inter-masculine relationship here...

Is it something about the invisible hand of "the market" that - like in the example of Blackwater (and other PMCs used by "the good guys" to "do the bad things") - that permits layers of separation from, thus allowing deniability of, the seat of power? The hand invisibilizes (sue me) itself from view so that it can continue this, its imperial violence by other means"...

Andy will chime in with Franz Fanon's analyses of the white man's "negrophobia"; it is the manifestation of guilt that is the result of having repressed carnality itself to the black body (the body of the non-Christian and the non-Jew).
The jealousy and feelings of insecurity that result are part of this, the white man's, fantasy. It often appears in the modality of a cuckoldry: the essentially-sinful woman is satiated (or, on the flipside, "must not be satiated") with the essentially-sinful man, while the pure (and sexless - all he cares about is work!) white man remains outside the picture, but firmly holding on to its frame.

Naturally, the air will be full of tossed salads, cookies, and other half-baked projectiles.
Join the fun

Main Stars: Beast and Sovereign; Pervs R' Us; WWJD

Though absent from the title,  we watched Ricky Gervais's "The Invention of Lying" and Jim Carrey's "Liar Liar" for this episode. Mainly as an excuse to discuss whether lying is something like the fundamental human factor.

Jake bundled the stars Beast and Sovereign, Pervs 'R Us, and Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais together to study Jacques Lacan's famous idea that animals cannot feign a feint, or falsify a falsification. The main idea here being that humans fundamentally lie at their core and animals never do. 

Jacques Derrida has a famous deconstruction of Lacan's idea, somewhat in defense of the capacity of the animal, and also in defense of the always feigning, effacing nature of a trace. 

Sagi helped us consider the possible Christian nature of Lacan's position, and Andy is a proud liar.

We ended up trying to defend both Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida, which was an impressive feat.

Hello listener,
This is a "retoss"  of a January 6th (no relation) episode, where we discussed 'From Software' games, particularly Elden Ring, particularly how  Sagi sucked at it, which led to his radicalization,  with him expressing Souls-phobic, extremist positions..
It's not the first time.
In the meantime Sagi went on a journey -- of self-discovery and community discovery -- through the 'Souls-Borne' gamer community, in its Twitch, YouTube and dedicated websites (stayed out of Reddit).
He came back to talk about it with a gleam in his eye. The games received new meaning through their mediation with a community of other gamers, a new understanding of their purpose. Apparently his search for fellow disdainers of Elden Ring led him down a deep rabbit hole  of addiction (to YouTube Souls-Borne videos). He knew it. Elden Ring WAS bad.
But  is was all a scam, a gateway drug; before long he was actively enjoying Dark Souls 1. Surely we have a powerful cult here.
The ideas tossed here will take us through Monotheism's various versions of the Father:
Dark Souls 1 features the father who is a present-yet-untouchable persona of death, conditioning the player/son through a survival-focused care/education, where the logic is as binary as life and death and the boy learns a value of overcoming adversity; an overcoming whose value can be shared with others (other Miyazaki "sons" - the Souls-borne community).
Elden Ring, on the other hand, lets the player simmer in the vacuum of the father, where the height of achievement has been flattened for the sake of a freedom of possibility; an absent father since now success is idiosyncratic, it's not shared, it circulates (like money, whose value has no singularity by definition). Like in Protestant 'Predestination,' the only  thing you can share with others is that the meaning of your "works" in the world are, as far as the living are concerned, without spiritual consequence. The 'Elden Lord,' like the protestant "Salvation," is an empty signifier of a success that is indifferent to the manner of achieving it.
Finding possibilities, like in Elden Ring, is lateral and disjointed; overcoming a challenge, like in Dark Souls, is more direct and cohesive.
(Do we really  need to ask which is the better phallus?)
When the community screams 'Git Gud,' more than a mere adolescent brag -- which Jake represented oh-so-well in this retoss -- they are referring back to the father that was still present in the Dark Souls games, in Bloodborne and Sekiro.
This also brings up the angle of these games' relation to the father as rituals of masculinity, which  we use to make fair sense of the Souls-borne community, understanding them rather than judging them.
Some gratitude is, in fact, in order.

Ok ok no more rant.
The stars here were: Beast & Sovereign; WWJD; Pervs R' Us (and maybe, begrudgingly, Marx).

Tossers are back. We always come back. This time we compare the "comedy" stylings of Larry David and Louis C.K. The frame for this comparison is that they are both assholes, but they are assholes of a different color: one is Jewish and the other is Catholic. This introduces a discussion on the different way that they interact with the law and also the different way that they make us (or fail to make us) laugh.

Jake dangles throughout the episode a complex thesis inspired by the work of Alenka Zupancic: the thesis, still undeveloped, is that because the Jew and the Catholic have a different relation to enjoyment (jouissance), they also have a different relation to comedy. Zupancic makes an interesting distinction between the joke and the comic sequence. The difference  is one of temporality. But it is not essential that the comic sequence be longer than the joke (thought it usually is). The temporal distinction concerns the time of satisfaction. A comic sequence carries satisfaction through its whole duration whereas the joke always comes to an end with satisfaction. This distinction allows us to consider  why Curb Your Enthusiasm is a much funnier show than Louie, whereas Louis C.K. is a better standup comedian than Larry David.  The idea here is that there is something about the humiliating Catholic position towards jouissance that ensures that Louis can only ever experience satisfaction as an end. Larry the Jew, on the other hand, can keep satisfaction alive.

Sagi distinguishes Larry and Louis at the level of the law by describing Larry's relation as that of a wall, and Louis's as that of a hook. Sagi also helps us think about Louis C.K.'s cancel-worthy transgressions as behaviors that are deeply imbedded in the confessional exposure of Louie the show.

Perhaps the most exciting element of this episode is the number of jokes we have to tell to get our point across.

Oh boy... Well Sagi found this obscure blog written by some academic dropout that had an interesting take on Mansplaining (but after listening to this podcast you will have gotten everything of substance in that ode to desperation this guy calls a blog)...

Again it's a hard nose dive into the shit, in the hopes of finding a golden shovel.
Did we? Time (and death threats) will tell.

We discuss mansplaining as an outdated social function of masculinity, and try to affirm it without pandering to its "glory days" of lethargic oblivion. The oblivion was enabled by a world where only a man was considered as fully "adult," the resulting dynamics with women - much like children - allowed reassurance  for its own sake; a reassurance that relies on man's superior status and capacity (persisting for many generations, it is secure in its own power). It's not about talent, but power/position: Even if he doesn't know what he is saying, he has the power to act on it, and maybe change it. Women did not, for a very long time.

Andy and Sagi make a point that, because the political power of the patriarchy is not the same as it was, that status, that power that was lost, should be grieved by men (and men alone).
Current "manosphere" phenomena - like Incels or MGTOW or Jordan Peterson-Tate - can then be seen as initial stages of denial and anger at this loss; a legitimate stage in mourning, but a temporary one. The reaction is childish and emotionally simple but is genuine, in the sense that it has some truth to it. They, at least, recognize and address the crisis of masculinity; but they, and we, need to man up and move on.

Mansplaining can be seen also as an inner monologue of the man as such, the way he talks to himself; it also shows this monologue as succor for an anxiety that haunts the man(splainer). While men can bond with other men on this basis - the formal necessity of the man(splainer)'s "air of confidence" - with women, when the relation is mediated through sexual difference/desire, it is becoming clear that the bond is more knotted, and this air is not something women naturally breathe. But as this is the visceral realm of desire - seduction, corruption, in-toxic-ation - perhaps mansplaining can be indulged sparingly, like a cigarette. We also speak in praise of "games" in the sexual-based relation, where mansplaining can indeed find a role that does not necessarily reproduce  the patriarchy that attended past mansplainings.

There's much more, since once you let the stupidities fly they soar on their own.

In other words, as the saying goes, it's trigger warnings all the way down.


Stars? Beast and Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; Marx Grudge(!)

In this episode, about Stanley Kubrick's classic movie The Shining, we divide our interests neatly between sexual trauma and racism. Well, we attempt to divide them neatly. Andy and Alicia on the side of sex, Jake and Sagi on the side of Race.

Andy starts us off by hypothesizing, in intricate detail, the possibility that the movie is about the actual sexual assault of young Danny by Jack Torrance. He also brackets everything with a comment about how endless the interpretations of this movie can be, and that we the "critical readers" end up trapped in the snowy labyrinth that awaits Jack outside.

Sagi is all about this word Overlook, and the way it is tied to the manifest destiny of the white man. He also thinks about the way the white man goes into trance or self-hypnosis in order to Overlook the violence he commits.

Jake introduces us to Frank Wilderson's theory about the difference between the grammar of violence committed against Native Americans and that committed against Black people. Jake reads this into the movie, since there is a famous interpretation that the Shining's violence represents the violent genocide of Native Americans, but few people have discussed the gratuitous murder of the Black man Dick.

Alicia brings it home for us, thinking about the traumatic sexual encounter that occurs in room 237, where Jack meets a gorgeous naked women who decays into a corpse. What does this say about the male gaze? What does this say about our objects of desire? And how does the trauma of sex relate to racist violence?

Jake and Sagi go Beast & Sovereign for the most part, and Alicia and Andy give us some good 'ole Pervs 'R Us.

Dear, patient listener..

We meet again, 2 weeks late, we know.. no creative endeavor is ever an assembly line and we had to drop a dud podcast  by the wayside.
Maybe it will be unearthed one day by a particularly desperate AI bot.
Maybe we'll sell it for a million dollars as a collector's item.
Until then, may it rest in peace.

This week's episode asked after the origin of identifying prostitution (typically female prostitution) as "the oldest profession."
One such delightful source can be found in the equally delightful short story by the British Subject Rudyard Kipling named 'On the City Wall' (1888). There we find Lalun, the whore grand-daughter of the whore demoness Lilith. She's a wealthy prostitute living on the city wall, manipulating the men around her, including the narrator.
Any Said or Fanon fan would find many of these discussions a blast (in one way or another), as the colonizer laments the hopelessness of the task to civilize the savage so as to deserve their freedom/independence - as is evidenced by there still being prostitutes there. There, means colonial India.
Did I say British?
I meant he was British in India.

There's more to this than can or would be covered here...  Professionalism, the book of Genesis, Lilith the cowgirl and so much more!

The stars reflect this eclectic debate: Beast and Sovereign; Marx Grudge, WWJD; and of course Pervs R' Us!

This week we discuss the movie version of John le Carré's novel The Spy Who Came in From the Cold. Alicia leads us in a séance of sorts, asking us to consider why the main character, Alec Leamas (played by Richard Burton) is such an effective protagonist. To make sure the ghosts are summoned, she does not offer us any definition of effective. We float around the following themes: the questionable distinction between political methods and political policies, the difference between betrayal and the traitor, the hardboiled qualities of a spy who believes nothing can rock his world, and, as always, the question of gender (in this case, we bring up Nietzsche's "Suppose truth was a woman."). Beast & Sovereign is there, and Alicia's thesis regarding Leamas' total lack of negation brings us face to face with the unconscious, and thus Pervs 'R Us. We also try to identify other handsome men Richard Burton looks like.

Oh it's you again.. welcome back!

So today it's always sunny in Philadelphia again, this time we're (loosely) talking about the first episode of Season 4, Mac and Dennis: Manhunters (2008).
Jake found  in it a certain brilliance, by which I mean a glowing excuse mainly to talk about de Sade... oh, and to push his Cannibalist agenda.

The cannibal appears originally as an ethnic reference, identified by the European colonist, before mushrooming into a particularly nasty (and suspiciously useful) metonym of the  good ol' 'savage.' With them good ol' Christians rushing to bring civilizing  light to the darkest continent, humbly accepting the enormous gains in Real Estate that such a charity mission necessitates (but only until such times as it can be re-entrusted to the reformed savages). In short, ripping land away from the savage mirrors itself in the limb-tearing savage, where one ripoff claims superiority over another: the cannibal becomes the "modern" foil to the andro-euro-fantasy  that underwrites modernity.

"We" also discuss the Marquis de Sade's Juliette, where we find Minski, the wholly-depraved "white cannibal," who holds on to the virtue of hospitality so tightly that he squeezes out its vicious underbelly. What is absolute hospitality in the case of the cannibal?  What does it mean to be a "white cannibal" (i.e. a cannibal who legitimately owns Real Estate)? Is it ok to play with your food?
Serious stuff over here.

Another theme that came up and refused to go down was  how cannibalism originally seems to be a homo-social activity, a transaction between men that carries meaning (like the incorporation of a defeated enemy). We left this strand hanging because we noticed that placing the burden of a civilizing foil on a taboo against maneating, begs to question what happened to the (supposedly central) taboo of 'civilization,' namely the sexual one (incest).

Next time we plan to come back to this strand.

Stars abused this time around: Beast and Sovereign; Il vaut mieux Lyotard que jamais; WWJD (a bit, something about the Eucharist and why the real Jesus didn't ask to be eaten after death).

Welcome back dear listener!

5 Star Tossers grudgingly presents: Shakespeare's 1596 play The Merchant of Venice! And boy do the grudges flow in this one: Marx, Jew, Woman, Lacan... even Peggy Kamuf and Beyoncé were pretty miffed by the end there.

Capitalism is of course (grudgingly) on the table, since both place and time are almost unanimously hailed as the cradle of global capitalism. But Christianity too, insofar as the play deals in the lives, loves, hatreds and pains of those that lived-out these realities in the context of Renaissance Europe (that just recently discovered Protestantism). The Jew -- by a necessity not of his making -- occupies an important structural support for the entire edifice as a money lender for expensive,  trust-unto-God's-mercy Capitalist ventures that involve Europe's colonial plundering of the rest of the world. The need for usury, for someone to bear the actual burden of risk, is prevalent, but no less "spiritually" reviled for it; perhaps even more.
As you can see (notwithstanding Andrew's totally phoning-in the summary) this one was less dumb than the  last one!
(you should really ask yourselves who is writing these blurbs at this point)..

Jake shows how Shakespeare, in his subtle brilliance, calls upon the agency of the merchant and muses about the spirit of mercy, and how -- not coincidentally, if near-obliviously -- the two words come from a single etymological source.
Alicia for her part spies a pervert in Shylock's insistence on the Letter of the Law (refusing the fantasy of "mercantile mercy"). Sagi wants to ossify everything, as per usual, in Jewish Law, and foreground how Christianity is only able to sustain its fantasy through foreclosing upon it, a denial of real-world stakes (and suffering) that underwrites Shylock's insistence on the flesh.
We all agreed that the flesh in this case represents the real, a remainder of the  Christian-Capitalist "mercy-fantasy" that sticks in its throat ; something irreversible, that, unlike money, cannot be redeemed or reconciled.
Put your flesh where your mouth is, mothafucka'! Then you'll see how easy you had it when it was just "money"...

There were many more strands that our attentive listener can pull on, like the place and role of women in the play (and in masculine structures of property and power, like Dowry and Marriage); the use of "fair" and its white-Christian "implications" (or, as Sagi puts it, an axiom), where the Jew's demand for fairness is never as "fair" (or as felicitous) as the Christian man's; or the vagaries of Christian "fraternity," as the love between Antonio and Bassanio is shown -- again with subtle brilliance -- to be the strongest love in the play (and the world it takes place in). And there's also the origin story for this podcast, and our podcast in general...
So we hope you forgive the length of this one which is almost 2 hours long.

Stars that were tossed include: Marx Grudge; Beast and Sovereign; Pervs 'R Us; and of course WWJD. Plus tard, Lyotard...