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May 30, 2001
We're Live!
Great googly moogly! My site's back up! Prayz lawd! Man it's been a while. Protest.net got hacked last week, and it *took* a while (cough) for the Anarchist Powers That Be to get it back up. uhh... Many thanks to Kellan and Evan for their help in remedying this situation... aaah, ultimately it doesn't matter if I damn or praise them here, because they don't read what I write anyway.
Well, then, let me catch you up on almost nothing. Here's a lot of sites I hit, and some observations about them:
Stupid Media Tricks
There's been a rash of articles on the AP and Reuters newswires which are drawn directly from PR releases. Blatantly freakin' obvious. Frequently, the writers are too stupid to explain the topic of their article well in the first few paragraphs: witness this one, where the writer neglected to mention until the sixth-to-last paragraph that the Eve from whom we are all supposed to be descended is NOT the bilbical one, but an African fossil dubbed Eve by a scientist.
weather.com has a pain index map! Hah! Today it is indicating that U.S. citizens will experience pains in a lovely unbroken swath of army greeeen.
Stupid Pop Culture Tricks
Tommy Hilfiger has his own line of dolls, which are like the American Girls dolls, only God knows what he was thinking if he meant these ones to be role models, or sympathetic to modern girlies. Witness:
Madison lives in New York. Her parents are divorced, but still good friends; once a week, the three of them go out to dinner. Madison loves to draw, and her favorite subjects are math and art class. She always carries her video camera so she can make movies of the people she meets.
I love that once again, a detail like "she loves to wear nail polish" gets mentioned in the three-sentence bios for these "characters." And that there's fifty million brand-name accessory packs, because "Dolls, just like real girls, are not content with just one outfit." (Of course, one of the packs includes the obligatory Ugly Pants, those pants which are too tight around the butt and knees, wrinkle at the thighs, and flare out repulsively at the calf. They look good on NO-ONE, but every woman in New York City wears them anyway. Not me! Ha!) And one of the dolls has hair just like Hillary Clinton. And the African-American doll is a jet-set-brat from super-white Denver. What the hell is this guy trying to prove?!
I promise you, one of these days I'll revive the "Real American Girls" series we created years ago (Sly and Arlo, remember them? I still have the original sketches), with Pearl Ann, the little Dust Bowl dollie who only has one dingy dress, and Theresa, the Navajo girl whose hair is shingled when she is forced into an off-reservation boarding school, and "Chrissie," the cross-dressing doll who is terrified that mom will find out that he, also, "loves to wear nail polish."
Reverse Jingoism
Logging on to Blogger mid-afternoon, when all the Europeans are posting, is fascinating. Why are most Spanish-language sites so much more interesting than your average American site? Is it MAYBE because we're a bunch of stupid uneducated hicks? Hmm.
They Give Good Ear
Usually all my good music tips come from my mom, an avid KCRW listener, but this time Dad's made a good find, somewhere around the bailiwick of Dr. Demento as usual: The Tiger Lillies are fsckin' great. Someone likened 'em to Jacques Brel and Tiny Tim and British music hall, and I would add Monty Python.
blah blah blah Indymedia blah blah blah blah blah
John Tarleton, an Indymedia volunteer and sometime co-author of mine, has his own website, which I only learned of recently. He's an interesting guy -- tells stories about the work he does harvesting blueberries in Maine, hitchhikes all over, stuff I wish I could do but don't dare.
* * *
Confidential to the Good Senator: Loopy mumuu toilet water, francs of Chef Boyardee, tartain plaid. I saw the Loper in Enfield, you didn't. Of course, this message is going to make as much sense to anyone else as it does to you. How's that for cryptic? (P.S.: that has nothing to do with how depressed I was.)
Posted by me at 5:45 PM | Comments (0)
May 22, 2001
Contemporary Art
Today's selections: A gewgaw which makes art out of bot-crawlings. (Extra points to the site creators for recognizing the connection between fly-blow and Google.)
Tony Earley has excerpts up on Salon. I do wish it was more than excerpts. Tony is my favorite author ever since I saw him paralyze a roomful of snooty author types (all of whose stories seemed to begin "They met while completing their master's degrees in New England...") reading his story about pro wrestlers. Tony was never without his red baseball cap; he's balding a little. I found myself doing laundry next to him once that year I was up at Bread Loaf. I still kick myself for not having struck up a conversation. He seemed very laid-back.
I am crashing badly, having been to Hampshire this last weekend for graduation. (There is more to this post, but it is strong stuff, and I'm not posting it now. Suffice to say I didn't need to go back.)
Posted by me at 11:19 PM | Comments (0)
May 18, 2001
Rock Climbing
I went rock climbing tonight, with Randy, for the first time in years. My arm muscles are in revolt now; they remember supporting my whole body weight off tiny little chips of bolted-on rock, and they don't want to type. Don't do that to us again, they say. We'll give you the jo-jeezly-Barbie-arm rigor mortis again if you do. Randy says when his dad was in town he tried to get him to climb, but since he's an orthodontist it's too big a liability for his fingers. An excellent point, say my fingers, and point rigidly.
This was an indoor wall. I did my early climbing in places like Joshua Tree and around the Kern River, and I spent a lot of time being snobby and telling everyone how I preferred that. (They looked at me like I was stupid, and said yeah, that's a given, we would too.) Randy, meanwhile, was drooling in anticipation of his next big adventure, which is going to be climbing cliffs in Thailand that lead from a sandy beach to a rainforest plateau.
There is a purpose to climbing indoors, especially in Manhattan. I sat at the bottom of the wall watching Randy scramble around fifty feet above, and the impulse bubbled up in me to go UP all those buildings whose shadows we live in, without an elevator. I don't know if I've felt that way the whole time, or if it just occurred to me.
Posted by me at 1:15 AM | Comments (0)
May 17, 2001
Virtual Near E-Death Experiences and other detritus
At about eight tonight I logged onto protest.net and discovered the server thought my files didn't exist. Soon after, the international cabal of geeks managing prot.net and indy fixed it up. Thank god I didn't have time to panic about the disappearance of my life experiences over the past two months. I really need to back up more often. Losing even a day's worth of work can send me into a weeklong depression. Anyway, if you hit DSWJ or All Mirth No Matter or the subway blog earlier today and they were reticent, that's why.
* * *
Blogger highlights some really good sites in its Blogs Of Note section, one of which I find particularly arresting: a blog of regrets. (The funniest ones are here.) I thought about posting mine there, but I think I'd rather keep them here, along with the things I don't regret:
I regret that the guy who was perfect for me came along at a time when my hormones were screaming at me to experiment with as many people as possbible, and that I didn't recognize how perfect he was then. That is not to say that I ultimately regret having fooled around with so many people. I wouldn't trade my insight into these guys for anything; my understanding of these dozen-or-so gestalts is one of my greatest treasures.
I do regret hurting one of them, in particular. When I say hurting I envision it the way this kitten I knew used to play with a toy snake. Pasha would wrap her front legs around the snake's head and kick the shit out of it with her hindclaws. It's a play behavior which gives a kitten practice with disemboweling prey, but it looks like the strangest combination of tenderness and reflexive, unthinking violence. I tore this guy's trust in me to ribbons. Years of clinging, then rejecting commitment, then cheating, then returning in terror of being alone. I can't fix that now. When I see him, I remember what I did to him and hate myself. (And all sorts of dysfunctional-torch-songs by Jacques Brel run through my head -- you thought I'd never live it down, but you see, I've forgotten your name -- and then the war began, and here we are tonight. A rather pleasant side effect.)
What else? I regret bringing my Game Boy on my trip across the country after graduation, and not looking out the window enough. I regret being in that awful government program last year, and I regret not taking a year off after high school or a year abroad during college. And I daily regret not taking the initiative to talk to people. I do not, however, regret going to Hampshire, or going to Poly. The excesses of each of my educational experiences have brought me to a crossroads which feels electric. I'm just feeling out the switches.
* * *
I am going to refrain from writing a review of David Byrne's new album Look Into The Eyeball. Mostly this is because, as someone who's listened to "The Great Intoxication" seventy times on repeat with my tongue lolling out of my mouth in a state of ecstasy, I can't be objective about it. I only ever want to review things I love, and then I say horrible garpy things about them. (When I reviewed "The Nightmare Before Christmas" for a media class in tenth grade, I ended up concluding that it was the best movie musical ever made.)
Besides, plenny of people have reviewed the album already. The world doesn't need their opinions, much less mine. The man wrote his own damn explanation of the album, ok? It's the internet; if you can't find your way to the primary source material, you're going to get eaten by bigger fish. (I do think I'm more familiar with Byrne's oeuvre than the reviewer for the New York Times Magazine was. That writer seems to have lost track of him after "Burning Down The House," and had to rush to brush up before writing his piece. He seemed to think orchestral arrangements are a new and exciting step for Byrne. They aren't. These strings are less extraplanetary than those in The Forest, or even the shuffling trashcans-in-the-alley-sounding orchestra at the end of his last album, though I think they're used to good effect. )
I have now read two reviews of Byrne which describe two separate albums of his as "more emotionally direct" than their predecessors: this one, and his self-titled album, released two albums previous. More indication that the music reviewer's line of work really is like dancing about architecture (and in chewing over that aphorism, it occurs to me that dancing about architecture might really be fun to watch, and that somewhere in New York someone must be doing it right this very minnit, and I should get off my can and go see it.)
What the fsck is that supposed to mean, "emotionally direct"? This album is full of dance music about women and men and god and genes and the eschatologies of life which are all koyannisqatsi and obscured by our governmental circus and the baroque web of social customs. Byrne has the same old obsessions. He's been thinking about the same things since "Sugar On My Tongue." The only thing that changes is the beat, and it gets itchier and itcher and swallows the world. The album titled David Byrne was in fact rawer -- it sounded like he was about to wreck his vocal chords -- and if that's what you mean by emotionally direct, fine. When it comes to Look Into The Eyeball, I'm going with Byrne's own description: he wants to make music which will make you dance and cry at the same time, and I'm doing just that.
So there's this left to say:
1) More god-talk than we've seen from Byrne since Uh-Oh. (Whose great intoxication are we talking about, here? The Creator's, or the creator's?)
2) He's gray. He's gone really, really gray. I miss that year he had the beautiful long flowing hair.
3) Hooray for gimmicky album art! Next time, I want album art with its own special brand of plastic-flavored Japanese candy included.
4) Check out Byrne playing with Space Ghost.
5) NO FAIR! How come Japanese listeners get a bonus track?! (sound of me firing up my rusty old copy of Napster in the background)
6)"Look into the eyeball of your boyfriend"? That was a surprise. Being the title and all you'd think it would be god or something.
7) Separated at birth: David Byrne and Tony Slattery (also, "The Accident" and TMBG song "End Of The Tour"?)
8) Can I be a renaissance man when I grow up, too? Where can I go for certification?
Good lord these things take a long time to write. And to what end? All I have to add, as any of us do, are my own memories about the music (Uh-Oh has an extra track in my memory, a high-pitched keening over all its twitchy beats: I used to listen to it on the family stereo while vacuuming). Or my own music.
Posted by me at 2:55 AM | Comments (0)
May 14, 2001
Pre-Moistened Howlette
from a letter to Xephreniaq
Alas, my life also seems to be full of brutishly short relationships with
guys who have crippling emotional problems. This may sound like more of
the same to you, but it's a bit of a shock after five years of steady (if
not stable) relationships that lasted for a few years, and a very
nourishing period of being single over the past year. I just keep fooling
around with guys who panic and withdraw so soon after getting involved
that I don't even end up with sweet charming moments to look back on.
These guys haven't even been worth the butterflies-in-the-stomach, and
it's pitiful to have to say that about someone. I wouldn't have expected
it; the main offenders have been good friends of mine. I don't understand
why things have turned out so rotten.
It makes for good antivenom, though. Comparing the steady productivity of
my life when I'm not seeing anyone to the imbalance and compulsiveness I
indulge in when I am clears out my head. I'm better off alone, thank you
very much. It makes me deeply upset, because I worry I am congenitally
unable to relate to or live with other people, and if that's the case I
feel like I'll be missing out on important things. I worry this is going
to leave me one of these old women with a rich intellectual and creative
life and nothing more than cats and a vibrator on the home front. Which,
according to most feminists, should be just fine by me, but which, by the
dictates of my emotional wiring, is not going to be tolerable in the long
term.
* * *
Administrivia: I have added a link in the left-hand column to a handmade index, which, unlike the automatic Blogger one, has titles. I did it in March and haven't updated it since, and I had intended to make pound links for each article, but it's better than nothing. I'll probably update it at some point, and I hope also get around to making a best-of kind of thing as a sort of clips page.
Posted by me at 11:04 PM | Comments (0)
Left Cred
Today Kim held her annual hootenanny. I went, even though I think
"hootenanny" is the most gormless, ungainly, mawkish word in the English
language. Stephan's shortening it to "hoot" did nothing to cut its
calculated rusticness; it sticks out with all the charm of a bulbous nose.
When I said that to Stephan, he looked offended, and countered that when
he'd invited Evan, Evan had said, "Gee, that's funny, my mom had one just
last week." As if having a hootenanny was a regular kind of thing.
It's not. Like nudist colonies, vegetarianism, and calling your parents
by their first names, hootenannies are distinctly outside the contemporary
repetoire of American behavior. I love Evan and Stephan, but sometimes
when they get snotty about things like this, I feel like tearing my hair
out. The ranks of organizers are populated with a lot of red diaper babies
for whom civil disobedience is a rite of passage, not an unprecedented
risk. It gets cliquish, with a culture you feel compelled to exchange for
your own if you're going to join in.
This can't possibly make newcomers comfortable. To a lot of people, I
imagine, sitting down with your mandolin-playing friends to sing old union songs as a means of entertaining yourself, or telling people to avoid
buying Disney t-shirts must seem like fanaticism. For me, it just plays
into my self-consciousness: my mom and dad were not active protesters;
they ultimately returned from the blissful fields of hippiedom to take
boring desk jobs; and as a result, in this kind of company I feel like I
missed a head start. (Don't worry, Mom and Dad; this is a schoolgirl
twinge, like when I'd listen to hip hop in high school and worry my hip
Nirvana-devouring boyfriend would snub me for it.)
I was pleased to learn, in the end, that I did know a lot of the
songs in the book, including some that the other people there didn't -
"Now That The Buffalo's Gone" and "Wond'rous Love," among others. I got to
see a dobro and a steel guitar up close for the first time, and heard them
played roughly, as I imagine is fitting. Some union types who were friends
of Kim's thumped out some hard old blues and Irish tunes. At one point we
had two mandolins, a guitar, a flute and a pair of spoons bumbling through
"Dueling Banjos." We sang "Goodnight Irene" and a breeze came in the window. I was suppposed to head to a party in Brooklyn, but hanging out
with a bunch of recent college grads terrified of their futures seemed
less appealing, somehow. I felt like I was back on Topeka Street, picking
avocados at an early summer family barbecue with A Prairie Home Companion
drifting from the radio inside.
Posted by me at 1:39 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2001
Little Trips
Went down to Chinatown on Thursday to, uhm, cough… well, I went looking for a place on Lisbon Street (I thought) which a friend recommended which had a lot of Japanese Playstation games, if you grok my drift, but I’d neglected to get directions. So I happened upon a policeman, whose badge said “So” on it (such a nice change, to see a pig with proper identification!), and asked him. He was not too busy, I guess, because after saying he didn’t reckon there was a Lisbon, and then changing his mind, and getting out his map, and not finding it, and offering about six other suggestions about which video store my friend could have meant, he said, “I think your best bet is this place down by the police station. I’ll walk you there.”
Just what I needed: an officer to accompany me on a mission to a questionable mod parlor around the corner from a police station. And then, “They can put in a chip so you can play Japanese games there,” he said.
I wasn’t sure if he was trying to feel me out, so I made big innocent Just Say No To Crime eyes at him and said, “No sir, that’s illegal.” He looked surprised; he didn’t know that, or said he didn’t, at least.
In the end he walked me partway down Canal and gave me directions – twice – to turn right at the Chase bank, I’d see plenty of cop cars there. I took off, half expecting to find a sting crew waiting for me.
All went well – the store was on Elizabeth, after all – and I was left with a half hour to kick around Chinatown in the sunshine. I made it a mission to find fresh lychees. I wanted to take some back to Aftaschoo and share the lychee-eating process with my students. Peeling a lychee is much like doing an alien autopsy; they have hard prickly red shells which yield to a thin, brain-like white fruit layer surrounding a sticky brown nut.
I set off through the maze of markets. Piles of strange vegetables lined my way, identified with characters still maddeningly opaque to my Roman-alphabet-only decoder. Chickens hung in the windows, in little holocausts of tormented flesh. At one or two aisles of fish I stopped. Not all markets can pull it off, but there are some as clean as the ice they pack the fish in. They maintain an immaculate smell of the sea capable of repelling the poisonous fumes of the city. I inhaled greedily.
I didn’t find any lychees; it would seem they are not in season. So my students, who innocently label any gibberish they hear Chinese, will have to wait until a later date for their "teachable moment" about China. I asked the Aftaschoo director, who is Jamaican, if we could take a field trip to Chinatown. He snorted, calculating the number of chaperones we’d need to take. I don’t even like to go to Chinatown, he said.
I can’t understand that. Chinatown is one of the best parts of New York, all busy with sensory overload. Better than almost any other neighborhood nowadays, in this age of chain stores, it fosters the right temperature and humidity for the breeding of independent shops and the proliferation of foreign brands – exactly why I could hope to find fresh lychees and obscure video games there.
I had been walking around with my traveling pack, ready to take my rejuvenated Playstation and other stuff up to the place where I would be housesitting for the weekend.
Evan is in town, and I find myself madly jealous of his backpack’s history: it has been to India, and the Czech Republic, and Brazil. Mine’s been as far as Seattle and Canada; with a lot of time spent in between in places like Mechanicsburg, PA and Dirty Sock, CA. In Chinatown, my jealousy quietly ambled away. I gripped the straps like suspenders and dug deeper into an obscure alley. Sun ricocheted off yellow and orange anime shirts with thug-life designs on them. A lone woman at the curb was weaving dry grass into beautiful little sculptures of butterflies and birds. Thin white women strode by, talking about computers and their jobs. Why leave home? Everyone’s on display here.
Posted by me at 1:12 PM | Comments (1)
May 7, 2001
Should You Invest In An Ant Farm, A Llama, Or A Skunk?
Stupid internet gimmicks #304,033: AOL has a little gewgaw which will tell you which pet is best for you. It's telling me a gerbil would be better for me than a guinea pig, but that hermit crabs would be most preferable. (Both of mine are dead.) It also recommended hedgehogs, sugar gliders, degus, and skunks (it asked if having a legal pet was an issue, as it would be with ferrets, but said nothing about splenetic, bitey, less-than-domesticated species.) It's also telling me a horse would cost me $200 a month (by whose bleeding estimate? Open-plains squatters in Montana?) while a llama would only cost me $25; it did not rule out the formerly-popular but classically ill-advised potbelly pig. Wherever she is now, my old boss from the education department at the Pasadena Humane Society has got to be grinding her teeth.
Posted by me at 9:35 PM | Comments (0)
May 4, 2001
Double-Dutch Season
Though it has been brutally hot in New York for the past few days, it is still double-dutch season in Aftaschoo, and everyone wants to be outside. Ropes, it would seem, are not readily available; my favorite student has twenty feet of wire-bare phone cord whose use she metes out imperiously to her classmates. The favorite chant goes like this:
Strawberry, strawberry, cream on top
Tell me the name of yo' sweetheart:
Is it A -- B -- C -- D...
Phone cord does not have the heft of a "real" jump rope, so usually that verse ends early in the alphabet as someone gets caught in the slow-flying strands. The next verses go like this:
How many babies will you have?
One -- two -- three -- four...
How many bottles (or Pampers) will you have?
One -- two -- three -- four...
Where will you get married at?
House -- church -- toi-let-bowl!
When I am jumping (which is never long, because white girls can't jump), I refuse to jump for the "babies" verse. "You not gonna have any babies?" asks my favorite student.
"I have other things I want to do," I tell her. "Like writing a book." She looks crestfallen. Her mother is nearing the final months of pregnancy, and my girl has been talking excitedly about it since the beginning of our program in September.
The past few weeks in Aftaschoo have been balmier than the weather itself. Despite my early difficulties, I have really enjoyed working in the program, enough so that I can't imagine a time when I won't take three hours out of an afternoon to play with a bunch of kids. Every now and again I consider going to teacher's college. The thought makes me happy. I enjoy being a part of a teaching community; I feel like I'm really getting something done here. Plus, you always have some small loved one to gossip about with other people who share your sense of purpose. The one thing I'd change, I think, is that I'd like to be playing some sort of support role for teachers, rather than cleaning up around the edges of the work they do with homework help. I don't know if such a job exists, but I think it's what I'd like to do. Sometimes I want to be the principal instead, because the one we have is such an as$hole.
But I can't, I'm not going to teacher's college, I have to resist it, and here's why:
Six Reasons Why I Am Fighting The Urge To Go For An M. Ed.
1) First of all, it would ruin my best routine from high school. For those of you who weren't aware, my grandmother was college counselor at my high school and my mother was her assistant. She had also been a teacher and student there herself. (My father, grandfather, and stepmother also worked at the college next door at various times, and I have two aunts who are also in one way or another connected to academe.) So when people asked me what I was going to do in college, I got to roll my eyes and groan that no matter what I did people would expect me to show up in another four years, diploma in hand, asking for a job.
Despite the joke, I really felt that was the expectation. I felt pressured to go into primary academia, and that feeling lingers today. I still can't shake that old aphorism "those who can, do; those who can't, teach;" although I loved them dearly, I always had the feeling that my high school teachers were either writers manque, or historians manque, or something like. I want to aim higher, which leads me to my second point:
2) I do want to write books. I don't know much about publishing, but it doesn't seem compatible with teaching below college level. Would publishers look askance at me if I spent my days pounding the Playdough with first-graders and then tried to pound out a few novellas in the summer? Is a summer really enough time to pitch and write a book? My continuing desire for a writing career also raises another issue:
3) The more I work with little kids, the more I feel I am atrophying. I can feel my neural pathways being rewritten to incorporate Herculean patience, simplify and slow my speech, and accommodate being around thinkers who haven't yet gotten it into their precious little heads that 3x4 is the same thing as 4x3. I have seen this happen to other people, so I know I'm not alone; I know a few early-childhood workers in particular who seem to be stuck in perpetual nursery-talk mode. I don't want to be that woman. I love my complex snooty brain!
4) Moreover, I still can't handle being a full-time nurturer. I am a tomboy and a feminist and I want to be out in the field fighting with the boys, not bringing up babies.(Well, I guess I conceive of education as activist outreach anyway, so I'm bound to gravitate more towards extending the minds of those who are about to become citizens of the larger democracy...)
5) Speaking of which, I have practical and ethical concerns about working for the government/Board of Ed. Sometimes as I find myself telling a child to take off his hat or not to get a drink of water, I snap to, and I think, I swear to god once I leave this job I will never again be an instrument in the oppression of a minor. I know too much about the history of public education to participate unthinkingly in it. I'm not sure how I'd deal with standards when I feel so strongly that everyone learns at her own pace. I also don't know how politically open I could be before I'd get fired, and at present, while I am young and foolish, it's proving hard for me to shut up about my ideals.
6) Finally, I know where I would want to go to teacher's college. Pacific Oaks is where my best teachers went; I credit it with much of the success of my elementary school. (I am sitting here salivating over its course catalog... among other things, they have a sociolinguistics course, which is something I've been dying to study for a while now.) The problem is, Pacific Oaks is back in Pasadena, and I ain't movin'. (Also, at second glance, it appears to be elementary-only, and I do think I'm aiming to work with the taller, pimply, gun-totin' kind of students.)
Right then. Anyone who can disabuse me of my hangups wins the satisfaction of knowing they've gotten one more warm body into the teacher-hungry public school system.
Posted by me at 10:01 AM | Comments (0)
May 1, 2001
Happy May Day
Happy May Day from IndyMedia, rtMark (which wants to reminds us that May Day is a holiday, and which was the launching ground for distribution of this flyer today at Nike stores around the world), and Reuters, which is sort of dazedly reporting that people all over the world (Bulgaria, Zimbabwe, Australia, South Korea, Britain, Italy, Germany, Taiwan, Russia, Iran, Greece) are in the streets today, without really registering that there might be some unity of purpose among them.
Posted by me at 11:46 AM | Comments (0)