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June 29, 2001
Henry Kissinger, Oh How I'm Missing Yer
One of Tony Lake’s and my assignments after each of the sessions in Paris with Le Duc Tho was to doctor the transcripts so that Henry would look good for posterity. There was a deliberate and conscious and very elaborate falsification of the record, including the insertion sometimes of humorous and erudite remarks that had not, in fact, been made at the table, but which we thought would serve historians well when they came to judge Henry's statesmanship as well as his humor-which of course was, I think, almost as important as his diplomatic achievements. I remember quite vividly, in fact, spending a good deal of time writing speeches and trying to concoct jokes for appearances in this very building, in which he was, as you must remember, the darling of the American press. --Roger Morris
Quote taken from Harper's forum on Kissinger, which I somehow missed though I caught Hitchens's two-part article. Again, a very edifying piece of work, check it out.
Posted by me at 11:18 AM | Comments (0)
June 28, 2001
Pa'lante La Dada: The Internet, Where Smalltalk Becomes Meaningful
Seen on Yahoo:
Hot Topics· Talk about the Weather! |
(among the subtopics: Best Weather, Extreme Weather, Acid Rain. A lot of these people are asking about what the weather's like somewhere else, like the Grand Canyon and McAllen, Texas. Apparently they have not discovered Yahoo's weather report section. Why do we waste our time like this?)
Posted by me at 5:06 PM | Comments (0)
June 20, 2001
The Antisocial Animal
I am spending the summer at a writing workshop far from New York. I may be writing less as a result; it takes a concerted effort for me to want to write in so social an environment. Though of course whenever I say I will write less I invariably write more...
I am aware again of how alone I am living in New York. I stretch on the prickly green rug in the living room before I play Dance Dance Revolution alone, and I like it. I mutter curses at myself when my score counter runs out, and when I rate a B I smile and pose. I drink the milk out of my cereal bowl without anyone watching at breakfast. I think about nothing and stare at the woven placemats. At night, I come home to a house which is dark. I sit in a little orb of glow, me and Galataea my computer, my mirror, my perfect blue marble, who delivers the affection of people far away without my having to think about whether they are noticing my bad posture or misinterpreting the note of weariness in my voice.
When I first moved to Sunnyside I would come home from a night out with the friends I was desperately clinging to, descend to the asbestos-floored basement, and cry. It felt like not having a body to curl around in bed, or someone down the hall to cross paths with on the way to brush teeth, was punishment I had unwittingly brought upon myself. I stared at the only window in the basement, at ground level up above my head, like those two feet of flicker were all the only way out.
I grew into being alone, though. About a year ago I finally developed a taste for hanging out with one person at a time rather than marauding with a pack. I'm having to re-orient myself to group life here at the workshop -- deciding when and when not to go out, which is hard because I always worry I'll miss the root of the next inside joke; orienting my schedule to other peoples' for lunch and dinner; trying to make personal connections in a sea of mass small talk. Because many of us are alumns, and because the counselor orientation encourages a lot of emotional openness, there's a feeling of premature closeness which doesn't match the kind of perfunctory conversation we're able to muster at the moment. The uncertainty of it all makes me doubt myself, and I'm vulnerable to opportunistic infections of depression.
It's good to be out of New York, though. Kind of like getting out of an abusive relationship, as so many things are, for me. Perspective on what's unhealthy, even if not all of it is.
Being back at the workshop is strange. My writing urge is paralyzed in the absence of subject matter that feels worthy and true. I compare myself to everyone else; there are some good writers here, all of us grown up and more confident in our voices than college students. I read a fiction piece about nud!ty and social mores I've been playing with out loud the other night, and was panicked by the silence it received. I want to run and hide behind my blog, where the people who like my stuff tell me so and the people who couldn't care less just click away.
The effect of this place is not what it used to be. Not that I'm not pleased to be here. After a year in the touch-and-go Bronx, working in a twenty-year-old program with a bunch of people well-versed in educational theory and child psychology is a blessed relief. But my first time at the workshop was something else entirely -- a shock of green leaves and water and boys with exquisite Virginian accents after years in dry Southern California; an ecstasy of common purpose.
Tonight we hung around the backyard of one of the staff in a nearby neighborhood, drinking beers on the wet grass. I asked LeAnne if she could figure how the magic was different. She said it was more of an inside magic, knowing how the program worked. I say it's like the magic of knowing how a computer works as compared to, say, unicorns. A nuanced magic, rough with disappointments as well as love. The common purpose is still what makes it, for me. We all know what a workshop is, and what about it made it a totemic experience of our teens.
The fireflies also never lose their magic. They're so much less predictable than stars. We have an experienced stargazer amongst us, so everyone spent a lot of time shielding their eyes from the porch light and looking up, but I just unfocused my eyes and looked for the solo green throbs in the trees.
Posted by me at 12:40 AM | Comments (0)
June 12, 2001
Dogs
There has never been a Kuro5hin story that struck me quite like this one. Innovative, and interestingly written. Ultimately I guess it's petit jeux, but it's a worthwhile etude to think about the effects of domestication. It also provided a link to the study on the domestication of foxes I learned about in Ray Coppinger's class back in the day at Hampshire. The crux of it is that when you take the friendliest foxes, breed them to each other, and breed the friendliest of their offspring, the progeny start demonstrating characteristics of domesticated dogs -- floppy ears, piebald markings, and neotenic (childlike) physical forms and behavior -- after a few generations. Neoteny is apparently the key, as it is with human creativity. Neat, huh?
Posted by me at 10:50 PM | Comments (0)
June 11, 2001
I Had A Thought For No-One's But Your Ears:
...ok, so it's for everyone's ears, but anyway, it came to me while I was being pretentious and riffing off Willie S. and stuff that his plays = Super Mario Brothers, and let me explain that to you:
There are certain video games whose characters we empathized with when we were small, even though they were represented by lumps of inhuman-looking pixellated blocks. This affection lingers; witness the popularity of emulators.
I was reading the "Speak the speech I pray you as I spoke it to you" monologue, where Hamlet says it should be "trippingly on the tongue" and you shouldn't saw the air with your hand, and all that. And his very need to say that, combined with Shakespeare's weirdo love of writing his lines in structured verse, indicates this ain't no Method Acting; what you'd see on stage came off as unnaturally then as it does when you see Shakespeare's plays put on today.
Why do we cling to these doll-babies of artifice? Maybe it's because humans can make symbols at all, and like Pygmalion, we are gifted (or cursed) with the ability to fall in love with them. Maybe we just have a hyperactive need to generalize, I don't know.
whoo boy, it's late.
Posted by me at 3:41 AM | Comments (0)
Why Dance
I have been out swinging the past two nights, as has much of New York -- it is Dawn Hampton's birthday, and there's been four days of swing at various venues around the city. Everyone goes, because everyone knows Dawn. She's one of these fixtures (that word is wrong -- you've never seen a woman of her years with more style) like Frankie Manning who's partly responsible for the vitality of the local scene.
But the vitality of the local scene... Well, I made it out to Irving Plaza tonight, but just barely. I used to think I could dance every night of the week, but somehow the 92nd St. Y last night seemed like enough.
You take lessons for years; you get the right shoes; you learn how to handle yourself in relationships, get into a few, fall out of a few; you come to realize your body is actually appealing to the opposite sex for the same reasons that your pre-pubescent female classmates mocked you -- all this, and still there's an overwhelming anxiety about not being liked when you first hit the dance floor. I held this romantic notion when I started dancing that guys would ask me, once I knew how. Every night was a re-enactment of junior-high dances, sweaty palms and all. At the same time I fumed about the continuing inflexibility of gender roles in social dance.
In the end it works out that you ask a few guys, and once other ones see you're not a klutz, they'll ask you. For the first set, though, I stood on the sidelines waiting, feeling more paranoid with every guy who passed me and didn't say anything. I always wonder if just in the way I stand, in the slouch I forget to correct or the way I hold my arms, I am sending off some vibe that tells them I am a loner or a tomboy or a harridan. I fiddled with the hem of my dress, feeling conspicuous. In my enthusiasm to be out dancing again I'd forgotten yet again that showing up in vintage drag in New York is frowned upon. Conspicuous also because I was wearing makeup, for a change. The gooeyness of it, its tendency to melt and run all over the place, kept all my sensation focused on my face.
Once I start dancing, mercifully, I forget all this. Adrenaline is my only liquor. It does its job.
Still, I feel the swing scene's grasp on me loosening a little. I'm not sure if this is because I've fallen prey to the charms of Dance Dance Revolution, or whether I feel alienated after being away so long. Getting ready for Irving Plaza, I found myself asking, Why dance? I came up with a couple of answers:
The scene. This ain't any reason to keep dancing. Pop culture has turned its spotlight elsewhere and the influx of fresh blood has dried up. Old men are still lurking out there waiting to cop a feel; young folks are largely tax accountants, or something equally soul-crushing. (ok, so I do keep managing to meet physicists and engineers and programmers and mathematicians -- and the occasional cartoonist -- and I do like them fine.) There's still a paucity of female leaders and male followers. Conversation tends to revolve around dancing. All in all it just don't nourish the soul.
The music. Yes, and no. I can last through night after night of wheezy Sinatra covers, more than I can say for pop or rock or even punk. But New Yorkers favor slow songs, and I'm going to go someplace where people get jiggier (California here I come, where Balboa's number one) if that Lindy twist fails to lift my skirt above my knees one more time. There's a tendency to re-polish old chestnuts, and little exploration of anything new or funky. I count the night I saw the Squirrel Nut Zippers play the Supper Club as one of the best nights in the history of local swing, and fondly remember my Seattle evening with Hot Town Jubilee. I'm a sucker for hot jazz and gut-bucket blues, I guess. I wish there was a scene around it, but I don't hear anyone else complaining after hearing Stompin' At The Savoy for the fifty millionth time.
Looking cool. I want so badly to look cool. The swing scene has passed its second American peak, so all cool is relative: the "look" is no longer universally cool, and it certainly isn't practical (where are your zoot suits now, gentlemen?) All I want now is for my Tacky Annie to stop looking like shit, and to have a better repertoire of shines. I want to cultivate a look of effortlessness.
Meeting a potential mate. A few months ago a friend and I started drifting into each other's gravitational pulls. One of the reasons he ultimately cited for not committing to a relationship was that he didn't know how to dance. "You need someone who knows how, and I don't," he apologized. Because I meet so few people I'm emotionally and intellectually drawn to on the floor, I hadn't been counting on it, but I'm starting to think he's right. It would frustrate me to be involved with someone who didn't understand the physical partnership of it. Sex feels so uncomplicated by comparison. Dancing with other people would always leave me curious if I had a steady nondancing partner, because in the end, it's all about...
Pressing yourself up against a complete stranger. The more repressive sects of Christianity were on to something when they preached that dance provokes unclean thoughts. Isn't it fun, though? When I dance ballroom or tango I end up closing my eyes and devoting all my attention to sensing the weight and velocity of my partner. I swear the other day I could hear this one guy's skeleton moving. It's such a profound relief to be so close to someone after days of nothing but electronic contact with other humans. Such a great excuse to get intimate with someone you'll never see again; it almost substitutes for the kind of questions that the bounds of small talk maddeningly dictate you must never ask a stranger ("So tell me -- how do you see your parents' relationship reflected in your own interaction with other people?" or "Do you think there's a universal right or wrong?") Almost.
Cultivating a potential dance partner. What I really want, what I've been looking for from the beginning, is a reason to dance every day. The movies made it look so fun to work up a paso doble or foxtrot routine. I want someone to practice with. A whole troupe to work with, maybe. There's a handful of them in town, but they're hard to get into. Having a good dance partner would mean more to me right now than having yet another boyfriend.
Getting airborne. Ah, the bottom line. Tonight a particularly smiley gentleman tossed me into the apex of every swingout and reminded me of this. It's why we choose to Lindy instead of foxtrot. It's why we suffer sweat and exhaustion. It's the cheapest way to fly.
For me this is a question like Hamlet's; perhaps more focused. To move, or not to move? Whether 'tis nobler in the body to enjoy each dance for the maddening closeness, or to partner with one person whose very balance you anticipate, and in their arms to know them. heh.
Posted by me at 1:46 AM | Comments (0)
June 7, 2001
Department Of Stupid Media Tricks: Reverse-Engineering AP Articles
Some AP and other newswire articles seem to be not just flatulent prose taken straight from PR bulletins (be that from companies or tourist bureaus), but also take on a coating of cheese from the fatuous personal fixations of the stringers regurgitating their content. I come to the latter conclusion under the presumption that John Travolta's handlers wouldn't really think it important to mention how many Golden Raspberry awards the man got.
Then again, judging by the casual mention of Travolta's "religion" in the article, methinks his PR flaks may well be of the same faith (that one as makes a sacraments of putting rattlesnakes in the mailboxes of journalists who expose them as the MONEY-GRUBBING CULTISTS THEY ARE), in which case they probably have all the facts on the man and are too whacked out to know how to use them to best effect.
But enough about journalists and whacked-out cultoid freaks. Let's have a letter to men:
This part of this post taken to "time out" until it can cool down and play nicely with others.
Posted by me at 11:41 PM | Comments (0)
June 5, 2001
Backwards And In High Dudgeon
(written on the anniversary of the post-parade assaults in Central Park)
"This is a local train, right?"
"Local?" The mustached man doesn't seem to understand what I am asking.
"Local train, right?"
"Local train." He's hanging on the same pole I am, and he's trying to maintain eye contact. "You are looking for more information on the express train?" I think he asks, and then "What number stop?" Before I have time to explain I really want the local, he moves into my space, like he can't hear me well. He asks me if I speak Spanish.
"Poquito," I say.
You have been living here a long time? he asks in Spanish.
"Si." (I don't know what that makes me, in his eyes, but he knows now I am not Irish.) To make conversation: "Y tu?"
"Portugues."
"Portugues?" I ask. Then why are you speaking Spanish?
I know it better than English, he says. He is still trying to make eye contact. His eyes are an indistinct color but brilliant, I notice, as my body kicks in a personal-space-adjustment reflex which requires I make eye contact again.
Number? he asks. I misunderstand. He makes a writing motion, and says again, Number?
No.
Why not?
I don't give out my phone number. Despierto.
Porque no?
Why do you want my number, anyway?
Because I like the way you talked to me. (All right, I think. So maybe he wants a conversation partner? The seven train is crawling with people looking for people looking to practice their English. The last one who buttonholed me was an Uzbek.)
Why not? You have amigos intimos?
(Rolls eyes.) Lots.
(pause) Porque no?
Because it takes a lot to be my friend. Despierto.
What, lots of time?
Lots of brains, intelligence. Emotions. Politics.
Porque?
He isn't getting it. How to explain that I just came from a meeting where six women had been discussing sexism in our daily lives, where we had been ranting about how much we hate being hit on by strangers? Do I know the words for "Approach me as you would a man, I'm just another brain tethered to a pair of feet"? Could I make it clear that I find it naive to want to get intimate with someone based on the way they ask directions on the train? I'm no baby; I know relationships progress into negotiations and recriminations and power struggles and divorce.
"Despierto. (He's not getting the message. I have mistaken the word for "I'm wide awake" for "I'm sorry.") This is my stop." He indicates he is getting out too, and that he has skipped a stop to do so. He'll walk back.
He is still asking questions as we prepare to cross Queens Boulevard. I button up my black overcoat to hide my gender. One more time: your number? He moves in for a European-style cheek kiss. Is he a freak, or are they all so impressed by the way a woman asks for directions? Am I his friend because I got annoyed when he didn't shut up? "You don't want?" he asks, when I pull away. No, goddamn it. I run, more because I'm giddy from this Ionesco-esque dialog than out of fear. My sandals slap out warning shots on the pavement. The late night crowd turns to look.
Still I am playing bird-with-a-broken-wing to lead any predators away from my nest. I go to the Edels' first, to tell this story. They're asleep. I bury myself in the foliage of alleys heading home, and run a check on my defense routine. Scan: nobody's following. If he didn't get the hint when I ran, he's too dumb to find me now. My nails are pretty sharp; I could take home some good DNA samples if I dug into his arm. I always hope I won't have to dig out an eye with my thumb. Shoes aren't hard enough to break an arch -- Kim taught me that, but I don't usually think far enough ahead. No matter. I'm on my home turf; I could yell and walk down the middle of the street, and people would notice. Kim taught me that too. I walk like I'm bigger and tougher than I am. I'm trained in the arts; I'm a modern-day rapist-maiming machine. Nobody better mess with me. I don't care that I'm a woman; I'll hurt you if I have to.
I wish I didn't have to think this.
* * *
So much going on. The meeting of IMC women expressed feelings that we're often the ones trying to get concrete things done while the boys play philosophy games. We dread that the future may hold husbands who leave us most of the work of raising children, and then we will have to cut back our activism until we no longer politically exist. We sometimes get the cold shoulder when we try to elbow our way into more technical media production.
Like a lot of the women at the meeting, I felt a little awkward even approaching the subject. I mean, feminist theory is a whole academic body of literature, right? I sure don't have it mastered. One of our number went back to Bell -- excuse me, bell hooks -- to make sure she had it right. (Thanks for de-skilling us, Gloria.) And it's already finished, right? We won; women are equal now, since women's lib. (The latter seems to be the presumption of certain red diaper boys I know, especially: "We took in feminism with our mother's milk; surely we're not sexist." If there's anything I have learned, it's that no -ism is ever a good one unless you have worked hard to make it your own.)
My feminism doesn't extend beyond the bedrock faith that men and women should be equal. I am not usually a strident proponent of abortion (though right now I should be,) or an inveterate railer against sexual harrassment. I don't want to get stuck in that ghetto. I don't like most women, anyway, or rather, who they are because of what society asks them to be. They negotiate conversations as if what they have to say isn't worth anything. It's maddening. So I feel like a turncoat when asked to comment on women's issues.
At one point Sunday night I said what's always just subconscious with me -- that it's lonely being an outspoken woman, because not only are you not a man and will never be accepted as one, you alienate "normal" women, too -- and another woman heaved a sigh and said, "I know." Damn, that felt good. It was good to look around at the rest of the women from the IMC and realize that even though I am sometimes frustrated when they don't speak up, they are all the kind of women I do like, and trust enough to throw my lot in with them. I am always happy to not be alone.
Posted by me at 2:51 AM | Comments (0)
June 4, 2001
Lo Siento, Me Despierto
Karma is rubbing my nose in my lack of Spanish fluency... yesterday I confused "lo siento," the words for "I'm sorry," with "me despierto," meaning "I'm awake." Today, almost everything I see features the word despierto -- videos, comics, songs. (Spanish-language karma is more ferocious when you repeatedly scour the Luaka Bop website, I guess...)
There is a story to my "me despierto" confusion. I'll post it later today.
Posted by me at 11:48 AM | Comments (0)