well, not really. I just said that because Frankie Ruiz was singing it, and because no matter how fluent they are in Spanish, most of my Californian friends probably won't understand what it means. Puerto Rican is not the same thing as Mexican, a lesson Martin Espada was at pains to teach us, and one that is expanded for me every day at work and on the dance floor. Among the things I'm coming to enjoy: the names-- Milagros, Cruz Maria, Santa, Grisele; mamí mamí todavia mamí, of course; ferocious defense of one's mother and children; I'm even getting more comfortable shaking my tetas while dancing.

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We had a successful performance of The Surveillance Camera Players today. Chase even got capture from the webcam. I am very very visible in a few of the shots-- my back's to the camera, I'm roughly dead center holding a sign by my legs; I'm wearing a black top which appears to have four shoulder straps; I have short hair right now. vanity vanity.

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OK, what I intended to say yesterday about writing goes with what I did say about being nothing more than a conduit for information: Not something, I think, that people of older generations will understand. But I read two or three blogs every time I hit Blogger. I read a half-dozen humorous comments in every Slashdot forum. The fact of the matter is that when we write we no longer work within a model where the best work ostensibly reaches more people's eyes based on its merit. We aren't even living a model where you can hope to filter information alone. There are so many sources of it. I could write for the New Yorker, sure (eh heh heh. it feels so comfortable to be delusional.) But what does that mean now?

I want to do the kind of writing Joseph Mitchell did for the New Yorker (well, what red-blooded young non-fiction writer DOESN'T, I mean for God's sake that's all we were given to read if we made the seductive mistake of taking classes in the field)-- that is, I want to write about weird people. I like Tom Wolfe, too, in his journalist years-- my copy of The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine Flake Streamline Baby has split down its spine and is shedding pages, it's so well-loved-- and I want to do like that, record cultures. But I remember what Len Glick encouraged us to think about in the ethnography class I took with him at Hampshire. That was: there are always issues of representation, of intent and bias and misunderstanding, when someone outside a culture writes about what goes on within it.

Unless you're a hardcore devotee of journalistic "objectivity," so much so that you feel someone's got to be out there evan-handedly monitoring other folks to get an unbiased story... well, I don't see the point in writing about other cultures anymore. Why not just empower them to make their own website? Personally, I don't think I have anything special to add to a situation by giving my take on it. Take the protests. In Philly, and in DC, and now in LA there are so many video cameras everywhere, so many still cameras and so many people preparing articles, that I don't think adding my voice will change the status of the world one way or another.

that's general cynicism talking, actually. After six months working for an agency which ostensibly should empower at least some of the clients it serves (maybe the ones who are getting job training?) and seeing the red tape and the unbelievable complexity of the problems of the people who come through our doors, I don't feel like I'll be able to make any change for anyone, maybe not even myself. I don't have the staying power for it.

so now I have to figure out how to extricate myself from the last three years of declarations that I would do nothing that wouldn't advance the cause of the oppressed in some way... tricky...