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March 29, 2001
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen
Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen are a brand. Let's just admit it, all right? Not people, a brand. Thanks to the reporter who stated the obvious in this article about their new magazine. It's called marykateandashley magazine. Clever, right? Did you know that the brand promoted by these horrible humanlike by-products of the television industry includes a cartridge which will turn your Game Boy into a day planner? Did you know that these terrible sirens are enticing children to do things which normally make children run screaming in fear, like taking cruises to Stockholm? Did you know they like shoes? Oh, stop already, I've had enough. How long until we hear that these scrawny chicken-birds are posing underage for P1ayb0y, and are reminded with a creepy-crawly feeling up our spines of the first time we saw them gurgle and coo at the camera on Full House?
Just so you don't get the wrong idea and think that being a twin involves having some horrible genetic defect that makes you want to turn yourself into an advertising device, I want to remind you that I have twin sisters who are perfectly normal.
Posted by me at 1:12 AM | Comments (70)
March 26, 2001
Vinyl Causes Cancer
Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman, writing for the Corporate Predators mailing list, noted in their latest column that tonight PBS will show an exposé detailing the chemical industry's silence about vinyl, which they have known since the 1950s is a cancer-causing substance.
More interesting to those of you who are smoking-gun wonks will be the more than 35,000 documents that will be released on this site tomorrow morning, primary-source evidence that Union Carbide, Dow Chemical, and others did indeed know vinyl is a carcinogen, and tried to keep it on the down-low.
no more vinyl pants for you!
Posted by me at 7:26 PM | Comments (0)
March 25, 2001
Found Documents: Among Other Things
Cleaned up my files today. "Files" being a wicker basket of crap, four plastic in/outboxes of crap, and the dust-bunny-riddled piles of crap all over my floor.
Among the things I filed were the following:
the above Bazooka Joe comic;
a torn out page from a day planner, which I had found tucked in a library copy of the Odyssey and which read in part "Library: Check for Unibomber/ Get Video for history" and which accompanied a now-lost card or flyer for a prison rehab job service;
at least two fragments of cardboard torn from maxi pad boxes with the email addresses of the incarcerated of the April 15th police brutality rally, remnants of my failed attempt to facilitate our release;
a notebook with a frail brown leather cover stamped with the word "THINK" in the center and "G.B. ANDREWS" in the lower corner (my grandpa's; I do not intend to mar it with further use);
a flyer for my favorite ballroom teacher's upcoming show "Cool" (Sunday, April 1st at the Kraine Theatre at 8:00 p.m., call (917) 568-8766 for tickets if you have any sense and go go GO, he is a genius), in which for some reason he's billed as "Chicago Louie;"
the quote "... PR Men, whose purpose it is to corruppt natural relationships for the purpose of making $," which I (perhaps mistakenly) attributed to an Argentine writer named Marcos Aquinas;
a spiral notebook of interview notes from my never-published article on last year's Geek Pride Festival, recording among other things an announcement from the festival organizer: "Folks, please don't hack the network and take it down... This is IN NO WAY to be construed as a challenge" (he later called this the "Don't Take The Brown Acid" plea for this zeitgeist);
half a dozen rub-on tattoos from the awful PBS cartoon "Dragon Tales;"
and a flashcard from my time in Sicily which says "Mi chiamo/ KEE-AHMO," on one side and, on the other, "UMass students: 'Tacobelle' is all one word. It means Mexican Food. Also Cheap Food." (I am pained that I don't remember if this is my line or someone else's).
If squirrels kept file systems, you'd find caches of manila folders labelled "DO," "Receipts Early NYC," "Stickers, Propaganda, and Mailable Art," and "AFTASCHOO" -- in other words, files just like mine -- under every tree with the acorns. I am not a good filer. I use a perfectly orderly system; it's just that I feel more compelled to keep things like the nitpicky handwritten letters from my landlady about how I am misusing the dish drying rack than I am to keep good files of utility bills, loan payments, taxes, and receipts. It also takes about three months for me to get any given scrap into the right file.
I feel terribly nervous about it. I was encouraged to keep a ledger of my expenses from the time I was six, and ever since I decided that recording each penny I found on the sidewalk was ridiculous and stopped, I've felt guilty. I look at a copy of my bank statement that has fallen from a chair onto the floor and been moved around under piles of clothes for weeks, and I hear my last boss's cronelike voice telling me I should never let a piece of paper pass through my hands more than once.
The worst file is the one I think of as my "memento file." The busted stub of the gourd rattle I broke in a vigorous moment at the Unpermitted Parade last December is likely to end up in this file. So are about a dozen nametages from IMCs where I have worked and the Apple "Think Different" ad with a picture of Cesar Chavez. Anything and everything can go in the Memento File, even things that aren't flat, which means I end up not with filing cabinets of nice flat papers, but boxes and bags of wadded-up detritus which may not ever be of any use to me.
The one thing that didn't go into a file today was the rejection letter I just received in the mail from Harper's Magazine. I didn't get the internship. (As far as I can tell they're not even willing to consider me as an intern in a less competitive season than summer.) I did file four or five documents I had wanted to use in my internship application, but I didn't find them in time to send it out. I also filed four or five letters to friends and family members which I'd never sent.
This, then, is the crux of it. I want to go to graduate school in anthropology or social science or some field where I can pore over documents and catch the telling details of human life. Right now, my natural tendency to do these things has got me so busy catching up with my own mess that I don't have the time to send in an application.
* * *
Worst Associated Press story ever.
Posted by me at 1:35 AM | Comments (0)
March 24, 2001
Canadians: Better Than Us?
Normally I'd say yes. Especially because it's Canadians who have devised a number of really fun blocs, including the League of Radical Toy Airplane Pilots, for the upcoming protests against the Free Trade Area of the Americas. (The FTAA, or ALCA if you prefer a more melodious acronym, is an attempt to broaden NAFTA and circumvent the roadblocks protesters have put in the way of the WTO's "progress" towards loosening governments' abilities to protect their citizens from damage done by multinational corporations.)
Then again, I got a collect call from Evan this morning. The answering machine picked up before I was awake enough to grab the phone and I missed the call, but I found out through friends that Evan got turned away at the Canadian border as he tried to get in. In addition to putting up a wall around Quebec City, where the protest will be, the Canadian government is cracking down on Americans trying to get into the country, for a change. They're checking past arrest records, and Evan's must have stuck out like a red thumb, what with his deportation from Prague, activities with the Independent Media Center and the logging road blockades in northern California, and all... The irony of this is that Evan could easily apply for Canadian citizenship, seeing as his father was a Canadian citizen and never naturalized as an American. He just can't do it now, when it's inconvenient for capital.
(Evan, if you're reading this, I apologize profusely. If I had made it to the phone on time I would have accepted the call, but Laurie and the answering machine got to it first, and by the time I picked up the receiver the automated voice clicked off and hung up.)
Posted by me at 4:23 PM | Comments (0)
March 22, 2001
Requiem (Habits of Coexistence)
While I was away in Seattle, my birds died. I returned to an empty house and an anguished note from Gareth saying I swear when I came in on Friday the bird had enough food, but I came back Sunday and (here, in hyperbolic desperation, he lapsed into medical jargon) bird was prone, not breathing, showing no reflex or sign of life. Gareth had put the body in the freezer, not knowing whether I wanted to bury or just trash it, and offered to hold the funeral in his own family's historic plot for dead pets (their backyard, three blocks away).
Bird, I thought to myself. He said Bird, singular. I had two birds.
I checked the freezer, and got a glimpse of dilute grey and yellow feathers before I got too creeped out and had to put it back. That would be the female. I called Gareth to clarify. He had only seen one bird in the cage since I had left on Wednesday. Where was the male?
I caught a flash of bright orange beak that night as I went looking for clean pajamas. He was sitting upright in the open lower drawer of my dresser, in such a way that I started, momentarily presuming he was alive. I have since been finding bird droppings on my stereo, on picture frames, and elsewhere in my room, which makes me disbelieve my original hypothesis that he'd bashed himself to death against the windows. More likely, he slipped between the bars of the oversized cage, spent the next few days finding other perches in the room as he tried to get back in, and eventually settled, exhausted, on the final nest of jeans. The female, I think, died of grief.
I sometimes catch myself inadvertently looking to the cage. I am still cautious when I turn on a light or make noise after sunset, checking first to see if the cage cover is on so I don't wake them. It disconcerts my subconscious to see the cage naked late at night. Though before they died the ceaseless beeping call noises they made led me to consider handing them off to a friend, I find my room too quiet to work now. These reflexes will probably linger for a while. I still look towards the missing fishtank when I enter the kitchen, even though Tiger died some time ago. I still feel loathe to leave my jewelry on top of the dresser, even though Ralphie, my cat, lives with my mom now.
I feel like I've said this before, but there is something particularly poignant about the habits of coexistence once the other has gone.
I buried the birds in the nest they'd made out of yarn and grass and unraveled sock. I sat them together -- lucky things, they were always together -- on their last two unhatched eggs, and wrapped the whole thing in lavender tissue. My family has a history of burying animals in state. Our first rat had a hinged wooden coffin filled with paste jewelry and decorated with yard flowers. I always wonder what archaeologists will make of this.
* * *
Please note I've added a Discuss link at the bottom of every post. Hope it works. I also plan to index my archives by title soon.
Posted by me at 2:23 PM | Comments (0)
March 20, 2001
Detritus: You're Not Serious About Donkeys!
Jeff Sharlet, a Hampshire alumn and a former editor of mine, appears to be editing an online 'zine about religion: Killing the Buddha. Of particular note is their Manifesto. The world needs more special-interest magazines like these and fewer magazines like Miniature Donkey Talk Magazine, which scream for freelancers from between the pages of the Writer's Market compendium.
Also a Dance Dance Revolution site which has printouts of steps. Critical, in light of the $1.75-a-game charge for DDR3. Practice on the kitchen linoleum and show off your rendition of Boom Boom Dollar or Oh Nick Please Not So Quick at the corner arcade.
OK, I take that back about Miniature Donkey Talk Magazine. If there was no Miniature Donkey Talk Magazine, where would we find use for phrases like these?
**NEW** DONKEY PRODUCT CATALOG
A magazine dedicated to ALL SIZED donkeys!
If you don't subscribe to Miniature Donkey Talk (MDT), then you're not serious about donkeys!
Posted by me at 11:58 PM | Comments (0)
March 18, 2001
Detritus Peripatetica: Queens on St. Patrick's Day
Now that it's getting warmer, it's nice to walk around Sunnyside again, even in the rain. Sokin and I went out for a stroll around the neighborhood last night, looking to have dinner and dessert.
We approached a grocery store I didn't recognize... five blocks away becomes the unknown. Three small dogs were tied out front, yapping uncomfortably at the rain. A black one on the end set up the most ungodly howl. "We're stopping here until the owner comes out," I told Sokin. The dog quieted down under my umbrella, and started shivering.
We had no solid idea where we were going for dinner. We gave pub after pub a pass. "It's crammed," he would say, peering into the smoky dark. Outside a Latin club, women wore heels half as high as their bare knees and clustered together in the chill. Outside the Korean restaurant, a huge crowd waited for the valets with yellow hip-hop jackets. A portent of the wedding season's approach.
Further proof I really oughtn't to leave this neighborhood, ever: Sokin and I found a studio a few blocks away which offers accordion lessons. Advertises them in the posters cramming its front windows, incredibly enough, from which also issued great Latin percussion. I stood and gawked through a narrow patch of posterless window at the group of men handling drums and chekeres inside, who looked back with mild consternation.
To put this in perspective, in Los Angeles there was one accordion studio, if you could find it, and it was a half-hour's drive from me. Sunnyside really has everything you could possibly want within a few blocks. Laundromats, clubs, hairdressers, pool halls, movie theaters, grocery stores big and small. Move another three blocks to the east and you find the same accoutrements with the ethnic makeup of the owners shuffled: a Colombian-owned market, a Chinese restaurant, Russian hairdressers; a Turkish-owned market, an Italian restaurant, Ecuadorian hairdressers.
I'd been out that afternoon enjoying my other latest stroke of unbelievable luck. By complete sheer utter random dumb-lucky fortunate serendipitous happenstance, I caught a glimpse of a storefront that said "DANCE" off the 40th St. stop of the 7 train. New place to find shoes, I thought, and headed that way. It turned out I was luckier than that. I'd missed the telltale "Stay Cool!" slogan across the awning, that faint echo of "all your base are belong to us" in its perky misappropriation of idiom... There is a Dance Dance Revolution arcade in my own freakin' backyard! I spent all afternoon there Saturday, and spent my week's dancing allowance on the game. I'm not going to write any more about the experience now; I'm trying to pitch an article about it to the Village Voice, seeing as the Playstation version comes out in the U.S. next week. However, I'll probably end up putting whatever gets cut back in here. The game is frightfully addictive and more available than Wednesday swing at Hush, so I'm sure as hell not going to stop doing it anytime soon.
Sunnyside! The crocuses are blooming! There's great junk at the curb on Thursdays! The man at Sunny Grocery is willing to give you credit, even if you walk in at midnight looking like hell and buy only milk!
* * *
Oh, I can rhapsodize, but I'm not too thrilled about the crowd of drunk men talking loudly at the end of my alley. "street culture." feh.
Posted by me at 11:49 PM | Comments (0)
:*
Perils of modern romance: You learn the emoticon :*, meaning I Kiss You, from one lover. The boy who burned homebrew software onto a CD for your birthday, who sent you ASCII roses, who turned on his :* icon whenever you IMmed over the local network. Ever after, that emoticon seems to be not another collection of characters, written by anyone, but him. His face, always.
Posted by me at 3:59 AM | Comments (0)
March 17, 2001
Announcing the Animatronic Repurposing Project
The moment you've not been waiting for has arrived. I've started a page about the repurposing of battery-powered critters I've started to fool around with. Can anyone recommend some simple texts on electrical engineering?
Back from Seattle. More on that later, for now here's a picture of Jen and Rufus, who was mopey all week after recovering from a seizure:
Posted by me at 3:25 AM | Comments (0)
March 12, 2001
Fries and Propaganda
I'm in Seattle this week shooting a short video, collecting animatronic critters for reprogramming, and trying to detox after my year of government service. This is Part Two of a dialectic review of french fries at area eateries, a joint project with the kindly folks at The Good Senator, where Part One appears.
Mc Donald’s at Westlake Center, Sunday
Fries (standard)
(On location for the Beanie Baby Liberation Front sketch.)
Gus: I’m still happy we got such a great shot of Hot Dog On A Stick. Hot Dog On A Stick is the epitome of depressing mall-vibe. Especially those degrading outfits they make the servers wear. Have you ever seen a man working there?
Jen: No. Oh, in Anchorage. He didn’t look very good in the shorts.
Gus: But he cleans up well. Like Collin Lynch, who also wears shorts and lives in Alaska.
Jen: (soul-pained groan)
Gus: These were McDonalds fries. I’m not dignifying them with a review.
Jen: What did you do with that burger?
Gus: Sssssh! Shhh shhh shhh! No burger! I’m not participating in corporate meat consumption, honest!
Jen pretends Gus hit her
Jen: heh heh heh… is that a hamburger in your pocket?….
Gus: I want it on the record that I tried to give it to panhandlers, but the only one who asked us for change at that point was wearing goth clothes and eye makeup and probably had a trust fund. How old is Bill Gates’ daughter again?
Jen: She was hungry.
Gus: She was a vegan. She wasn’t hungry.
Jen: You don’t know that.
Gus: She said she was a vegan!
Jen: Revisionist! Lies!
Gus: She said she didn’t eat meat.
Jen: You kept the toy from the Happy Meal.
Gus: Of course I did, it has blinking LEDs and a motion sensor. I only have one other motion sensor so far. Those things are useful!
The Hurricane Cafe, Sunday
Cheese fries
Jen: Again with the two fries in one day!
Gus: I got there a little late. You guys had finished most of them already. They were weird. A little sweet, with dry cheese, and like everything else there they were undercooked.
Jen: But there was fermented ketchup! And another hangover!
Gus: You got another hangover from the ketchup?
Jen: It was fermented!
Gus: Never use ketchup from a bottle at a restaurant. They just keep putting new ketchup in and they never clean ‘em out… Your brother never came up with a good memory of your dad.
Jen: No, he did eventually. It was something…
Gus: We were out in front of the Best Western at that point.
Jen: With the werewolf! Was it [the memory] teachin’ him to shoot?
Gus: No… I think it was… well it wasn’t about him shooting Eric’s dog.
Jen groans
Gus: Now I’m remembering things [someone else’s] dad did. Like dressing in a woman’s nightgown. Did your dad ever do that?
Jen: Well… yeah. But he’d always had a lot of fermented ketchup first. And we didn’t let him have the gun then.
Cowboy the dog: Guhurrrrrrrrr.
Jen: When my mom was a kid they had a dog called Suzie That’s The Dog, so they didn’t get it mixed up with her.
Gus: Wait, your mom’s name is Suzie too?
Jen: Yeah, Suzie That’s The Girl.
Gus: That’s almost as bad as my grandpa calling his son Rovie because he wanted a dog, not a kid.
Jen: That’s very sad.
Gus: Why did they have a dog named Suzie when her name was already Suzie?
Jen: They adopted her (the dog). And they didn’t love my mom very much.
Gus: This whole trip has been about dysfunction. And dogs. And french fries.
Jen: And hangovers.
Gus: Metaphysical hangovers, yes. Existential hangovers.
Posted by me at 4:45 PM | Comments (0)
March 5, 2001
Winners
Two weeks before the end of my government service, the pink-taloned secretary who was left with the job of coordinating the remaining volunteers in my program called me up to nag me one more time about paperwork. She needed my resume, she said, because she was planning a series of activities which would prepare us for returning to the working world. First on the agenda was a meeting with a temp agency staffer, which I've described before; the following Friday, we were to have a full morning to browse the job resource section at the main branch of the New York Public Library, followed by lunch and then another session at another temp agency.
I dragged my heels about the resume, which she couldn't give me a compelling reason for, and thought about "forgetting" the all-day education session. I find temp agencies odious. When I was temping at Scholastic Books, I discovered my agency was getting paid the same amount I was. (What is there of use to be learned from an organization which essentially wants to pimp you out? Temp agencies must inhabit a worse circle of Communist hell than landlords.)
I didn't relish the prospect of hanging out with the lady with the long fingernails for a whole morning, either. From the first moment I met her she has acted like we were old friends. I would come into the office for my check, and she would try to engage me in conversation about my life outside of the government program, which I was always at pains to hide. If my political involvement came to light, it would have been grounds for my dismissal. Grasping for some bone to throw her at one point, I made the mistake of telling her I was doing theater in my off hours (I was preparing a street performance for the Surveillance Camera Players that week); every time I saw her after that, she asked me how my acting was going and cooed over how far I was going to go with all my talent. She did this with such familiarity it set my teeth on edge.
There were a handful of women in my office who were the same way: every day they would make a show of hyperbolic concern for me, ignoring the cues I gave that I didn't consider them friends. We had never been formally introduced, and I still don't know any of the women's names. I worried for a while that the irritation I developed with them sprang from subconscious racism (most of them were African-American). Eventually, I excused myself as I realized the buttons they were pressing were wired to my family's culture more than their race. I associate unwarranted chumminess with door-to-door salespeople and telemarketers, the Great Satans my parents raised me to hate. My gut instinct when faced with a forceful smile is to say "We don't want any," and hang up.
But I pulled myself out of bed early on that penultimate Friday to make it down to the pink-clawed lady's office. I was dazed, operating on some three hours of sleep and trying to juggle the hundred lies which contributed to my safe continuation as a government employee. She was peeved that I hadn't turned in my resume after she'd badgered me for a week, and probably still suspicious of the fact that I only picked up my paychecks every one and a half (low rent made this possible), but she still kept up the vacuous cordiality. This morning, we were all "winners." "You're all winners," she kept telling me and the other three volunteers, and assuring us that we would be strong and god would ultimately provide us good jobs because we were all survivors.
Winners though we were, we lost about forty-five minutes taking a bus to the library when the subway might have taken fifteen. The driver was braking like a Hindu driving through a feedlot. This prompted the lady with the fingernails and the other volunteers to laugh nervously and excuse him. They knew it was my first time on a city bus. Most of them had been in the city all their lives.
We arrived at the library after a few minutes of lost wanderings following the Fingernail Lady, who hustled us around the streets praising our future prospects. The first order of business at the library was for everyone to get library cards. Everyone but me, that is. I have a card. I got it within a month of my arrival in the city eighteen months ago. I grabbed a copy of Mike Nelson's Movie Megacheese instead, since I didn't have any Valium.
Upstairs to the job resource section. The Fingernail Lady first gestures to a carousel of videos. Everyone oohs over the novel possiblity of getting their job training that way. "Take your wallets, ladies," says the Fingernail Lady, loathe to leave so much as a sweater on a chair within range of the rest of the library patrons. She runs a coral-tipped finger over spines of books with titles like How Hard Are You Knocking?, You're Certifiable, and Postal Clerk and Carrier. "So these are resources," she says, vaguely.
One of our number pulls down a book entitled How Canadians Can Survive in the New Global Economy and cracks it open. "Oh, this is for Canadians," she says, after a few minutes. Another volunteer eagerly opens Postal Clerk and Carrier. I reach for When Smart People Work For Dumb Bosses, and hope Fingernail Lady doesn't try to make polite conversation out of unearthing my accidental expertise on the subject. Fortunately, she leads my fellow sufferers off to another aisle looking for information on government jobs, and I find the opportunity to hunt down a copy of Writer's Markets.
I settle at a table, and eventually they join me. One of them has a book about opportunities in Baltimore. "Baltimore," says her friend, approvingly. "The economy is rising in that state so fast." Another woman starts rhapsodizing about the business she wants to start, without any plan for what that business will produce.
I'm being unnecessarily harsh. These women have great hope, and I really do think it would be great if they had their own businesses or really did move up the career ladder as a result of our service experience. It just seems so fscking unlikely when they've been at such a disadvantage all their lives. As we left, someone wondered about the maximum number of books we could take out at one time. It was thirty. They made little surprised noises, as if they'd never think that anyone might check that many books out. I was struck by the vivid memory of maxing out the 26-book limit back in my hometown library in third grade.
It took us a while to check out, because the job resource section is full of reference books. I was the only one who knew you couldn't check those out, and hadn't begun to suspect that even our erstwhile guide wouldn't know that.
On to lunch. The goal is BBQ's, a restaurant I've never heard of around Times Square which is revered by all and promised to have vegetarian food -- vegetable tempura, which is so greasy I make my placemat transparent with it. My first thought when I walk in the door is Now I know where all the working class men I see on the subway eat lunch. Honest that's what I think. I mean, the only people I ever see in Manhattan restaurants are skinny yuppies, which says more about where I eat than anything else.
BBQ's: Giant tacky murals of "Indians" on paint ponies on the wall. "Southwestern" decor. Tropical drinks the size of my head. I order a non-alcoholic piña colada, because I'm not paying, and corn and beans in an attempt to educate my unenlightened peers about the dietary needs of vegetarians. The corn is gummy and has a searing pent-up heat which burns my gums. The drink is like a glorified slushie. I give most of my tempura to someone else.
This is a wake for our term of service, an Al-Anon session, a women's support circle. I don't dare bring up how awful my year has been, because I'd have to explain about the p0rn and the charges of racism and the blackmail, but the women from an agency around the corner from me praise god they've made it through even though their supervisor was using them for base secretarial work, which goes against our contract. We all murmur amens. The lady with the fingernails delivers the last rites:
Well, ladies, we just have to feel sorry for the man, because he ain't gonna get nowhere in life with that attitude towards people. We're all strong, we're winners. One of these days we're going to be supervisors; I know we will, because we're winners. We will overcome.
Supervisors. What is the fscking point if all you want is a somewhat more powerful desk job? We were all supposed to go out into the community and learn to organize. I guess it was a lie before we started: the program we were in was hamstrung by the Ford, Reagan, and Bush I administrations, and what was once a haven for Students for a Democratic Society members is now a glorified welfare-to-work program. All that's left is the rhetoric.
By the time we made it out into Times Square I had already been to the bathroom twice to set up the first sally of a food-poisoning ruse. I clutched my stomach and moaned. It happened that we walked by the Condé Nast building, and for a moment I almost destroyed the ruse.
"Right there," I said. "That's where I want to work. The New Yorker, on the twelfth floor."
"Why don't you just walk in there to the human resources department and ask for a job?" said the Fingernail Lady. I explained that you don't just do that at the New Yorker, that it takes degrees and years of experience and a reputation I might not ever have. The other women murmured vaguely, with no idea what I meant.
There is a destructive disconnect here. These women believe everything is possible, which is wonderful, but they have almost no frame of reference when it comes to prerequisites, and at the same time they have a painfully cramped sense of what "everything" could constitute. The kind of education which put my childhood classmates on the fast track to power does not come into the picture. When a woman with status slightly higher than their own comes along, dressing professionally and telling these women how to do the same, speaking in pop therapy platitudes and bolstering their self-esteem, opening the door to a world of resources that has been hidden under their noses all their lives, they listen. This is how it ends, then: a woman without enough education to discourage us from checking out reference books pulls together a printout of a dozen entry-level administrative positions, arranges two sessions with temp pimps, and sends us out into the world with hopes as artificially extended as her nails.
I bowed out, exaggerating my stomach pains even to myself, and found myself on the sunny elevated train home at two p.m. Another lie to juggle, and one more week to lie low.
Posted by me at 10:51 PM | Comments (0)
Dance Dance Epiphany
I was organizing my bookmarks today and rediscovered a page called Team Gwailo. I had to load it to remind myself what it was.
This is what it was: a Dance Dance Revolution devotee page. As far as I can tell Dance Dance Revolution and its peers are what Nintendo wishes it had come up with back when it created the big floorpad you stomped on to move the characters on the screen. People get devoted enough to the game to choreograph complicated routines. I took the time to download this video. It struck some chord in the part of me which still regrets never becoming the Fly Girl I wanted to be in junior high.
I'm intrigued by the possibilities, though there's apparently only one somewhat laid-back New York team. A video game which revitalizes social dance? (I think this makes perfect sense. Most of the guys I meet on the social dance floor are engineers, programmers, and math and physics students. Why not combine two geek pastimes?) More opportunities to watch Asian kids make what they will out of hip-hop? Lead on. I only hope I can restrain myself from joining a team until I manage to pitch an article about it.
anyway, if I wasn't so achy tired and my fingers weren't stiff from the cold I would be making my original point, which was that this is giving me another moment where I go "gee, shouldn't I be in grad school for anthropology right now?" I look at these Korean kids dressed up looking like Spy Vs. Spy dancing Kid N Play in front of an arcade console, and I think, "What does this all mean?" If I can figure out a way to work dance, education, and labor into an anthro specialization and still work for social change, I'll do it. haa haa.
Posted by me at 3:09 AM | Comments (0)
March 4, 2001
Marquise McGraw
Once again I'd like to direct your attention to the homepage of Marquise McGraw, one of my fellow shock troops in the afterschool program. He's added a little more to his site recently. Marquise's eloquence constantly amazes me, especially in comparison to the unfocused, poorly educated people who surround him in his community. He is unafraid of using a confident "I" as he writes about his life; it reminds me of my own writing from high school. I hope Marquise will continue writing as well as following his dreams of pursuing a higher-level math education; it would be a shame if he didn't make use of his gift for clear prose and vivid imagery.
Posted by me at 3:21 PM | Comments (0)
Why Teachers Don't Talk Ghetto
Two Fridays ago I tried to lead a group of sixth- through eighth-grade girls through a discussion of a few documents about the Civil Rights movement, including a poem and Martin Luther King's Letter from Birmingham Jail. My idea was to get them thinking about how writing could change people's minds. The week before, in our first meeting, many of them had written that their dream was to improve their neighborhoods, so I figured this week we would start talking about how, as writers, people had tried to change the world, and how we could do the same.
The word "Birmingham" proved mortally humorous for the discussion, for reasons that escaped me. They giggled and repeated it -
"Burrrrrrminghayam"-- until I threatened to make them sit quietly with
their hands crossed in front of them. One of the girls, Catherine, was
hell-bent on getting out of the class by hook or crook. She talked over me
so many times that I sent her down to the afterschool director. Just what
she wanted. He sent her back with a mischievous blush beneath her
bottle-bottom glasses.
We made it through another paragraph, and then Catherine cut me off, blowing a steam jet of a question to the ceiling and nobody else in particular. "Why teachers don't talk ghetto?" she asked.
I remember sixth grade history class, where we used to compete to see who
could sidetrack the teacher the longest. We loved Mrs. Tuck for it.
Distraction provided some of her most teachable moments. So I pushed on for a
moment, finishing a paragraph, and then circled back to the question.
"Why do you think teachers don't talk ghetto?" I asked. Julia, who always wears an evening-dark look of
composure, responded. "Teachers have to be professional," she said.
"Good point," I said. "But what does professional mean?"
The girls sought answers for a moment. Catherine came out with it first.
"It means, like, you like have to talk like rich people," she said,
masking her Bronx pout for a moment with an accent. Unmistakeably, a
Valley Girl accent.
I was surprised. When I was her age, at a private school in the affluent
Los Angeles suburb of Pasadena, we exaggerated a Valley accent to connote
a class difference: it was stupid, tacky. Not from our curvy tree-lined
streets; from white-trash suburbs. We were no, however, immune: our own Valley taint came and went
depending on the situation. I still have friends from college who are
alarmed at the invasion of "like" and "totally" into my speech after I've
gone home for vacation.
Where did Catherine learn this about professionalism? I know a little
about her family: she and her chubby little brother, who is also pale,
with thick glasses and lurid scars on the backs of his hands, are apparently in a foster home or living with cousins. Because of this I
suspect most of her ideas about employment don't come from her parents.
Employers also seem to have some kind of prejudice against hiring people
from the South Bronx into the kind of job where you have to wear tailored
suits and keep your fingernails and hair drab, so it's not surprising that
she doesn't have the clearest sense of what most people mean by
professional. Probably, she learned this version of
"professionalism" from television.
I don't know whether one should expect any eighth-grade girl to understand
the nuances of the word "professional." Heaven knows their attention is
elsewhere. I was able to draw out of the other girls a more nuanced
response: professional means you don't use slang, you speak respectfully.
But this was a moment of revelation for me. I think Catherine was unintentionally letting me know that when she was speaking with someone who demanded that
all-important quality, respect, that underlying the code shift would be a
plain and simple response to the ongoing race dynamics in our society.
Before the writing workshop I had just come from another workshop
downtown, one aimed at preparing my fellow sufferers in government service for their
transition back to the working world. The workshop was led by an
immaculately-groomed, slightly accented Chinese-American woman from a
Manhattan temp agency. Her job was to give us pointers on resume writing
and dressing for interviews, an art more complex and nuanced than
Victorian fan signals. We were to follow strict instructions about paper,
font use, paragraph bullets, earrings, and fingernail length. Some of the
stuff - the rule about no-fingernails-over-half-an-inch provoked surprised
murmurs - was new to some of my compatriots, who are themselves from the
South Bronx. Some of it raised my own unplucked brows. (Apparently an old
rule has been reinstated since I was last in the market: despite over a
century's struggles by feminists, I still have to wear a skirt to an interview if I am really serious about the job.)
Having worked the past year in a welfare-to-work agency, though, I'd been
steeping in these instructions for a while. We were instructed in my
workplace to "dress professionally as an example for our clients," who were
coming off the welfare rolls. What this provoked in the way of uniform
among my co-workers is a range from stickpinned ties and three-piece-suits
to slit-up-to-lordamercy skintight miniskirts to sweatpants. I'd
personally gotten veiled comments from the administration about "the
return of the gypsy look." (Fsck them. As I've said before, anyone
looking to me for fashion cues is yanking the rhino's tail.)
Regardless. Dress was a big focus of my agency's welfare-to-work program, as were workshops about speaking properly to an employer, sidestepping questions
about the shadier parts of your employment history, and not fighting with
your co-workers. While we gave people other kinds of help -- counselling, drug abuse treatment, help with their welfare cases, housing
and child care assistance, and even entrepreneur training -- this and
motivational speeches are about all that the bulk of people coming through
get in the way of preparation for work.
There is a whole industry that has been created out of preparing people,
like welfare leavers and recent college graduates like myself, for jobs. I
wonder if the industry lobbied for welfare reform legislation when it came
on the table. They're cleaning up now. Hundreds of thousands of dollars
which once went to families so they could put food on the table are now
going to motivational speakers who are required to corral the family heads
into miserable classrooms for days on end. They come out and grumble in
the lunchrooms.
Elsewhere, there are prisons, which also take a lot of money to run.
And next door at the school, there is Catherine, who wasn't listening as I shared the commandments of skirts and bond paper (there was a second round
of giggles about Burrrrrrrminghayam while I droned on about hairstyles and
fingernail mores), and who will try to escape from my class again next
week.
I'm sorry. I can't help but think America needs to make up its mind about
what education is needed to make citizens. We can do a great deal of ex
post facto social education in welfare reform classrooms; that kind of
socialization is normally done through folkways outside of class. (Will
the job training movement end up looking like the "civilizing" of Native
Americans which went on in boarding schools in the 1880s? They are similar
in their attention to changing personal habits.) We can give people enough
rope to hang themselves with, send them to jail, and then either leave
them there or expect that even though dialog about the reformist mission
of prisons has entirely disappeared from the public consciousness, people
will come out as better citizens. We can continue to pump juice into the
Frankenstein public education system we've created, with its weird vestiges of training for future factory workers and its vague memories of
creating an enlightened citizenry capable of upholding democracy. Or we
can sit down and start looking at the whole damned picture, and make
something else.
Posted by me at 2:36 AM | Comments (15)
March 3, 2001
TV Go Home.
TV Go Home. Hooray! "8 Facts" leads to other good British web shite. What The Onion would be if it were TV Times and British. I especially like this one... "Largest Conceptual Schism Between Faceless Product and Contrived Mardi Gras Atmosphere." heh.
Posted by me at 1:51 AM | Comments (0)
8 Facts
8 Facts: some people are still making blogs that count.
Posted by me at 1:38 AM | Comments (0)