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July 27, 2002

City of Boredom?

I keep checking the 7 train on the NYC subway bloggers list, hoping I'll find someone who's worth going out to coffee with, but it's just not happening. Most bloggers don't present themselves as interesting people. Witness:

just a bunch of personal, popculture, and buffy banter
quasi-daily posts of happenings in my life. (from a blog named Like It Matters)
my journal. full of rants. about guys. and occasionally, about me. haha. enjoy.
basically its about two girls and their view on life :)
daily life by a girl whos just figuring out life
Stuff. Yep, all about stuff.

The words "musings," "ramble," "rant," "babbling," and "stuff" show up with alarming regularity in these blog descriptions, unbolstered by any suggestion of what the content is about. I'm especially anxious about the use of "life," as in "about life," as if life were a weighed and measured packet doled out to everyone equally. You'd think we've all heard enough about botulism poptarts in Afghanistan by now to know that life isn't an MRE...

Worse yet, many bloggers seem to have succumbed to ennui or self-hatred. As in:

This is just a blog like any other blog. It gathers the babblings of just any other girl.
no point really, it's just whatever i feel like sharing.
Self-deprecation and a big ego flourish in Sunnyside...
...it's like 'That Girl' meets 'Sid and Nancy,' but less heroin and more shoes, coffee, and clumsiness.
one girl's relentless pursuit of boredom

Well, so, maybe this is Queens, right? Surely people in Manhattan are having more fun, and have a better sense of what their lives are about. Let's look at the 6 train:

Weird random stuff that I don't give much thought to...
Mindless banter from an exceptional yet unemployed NYer
Random rantz on life as I see and experience it.
Daily look into my life.
Things about me. Random rants and raves.
my observations on life. pretty boring and self-centered. :P (taciturn.blogspot.com)
My personal blog, of great interest to my mom and much less so to others.
ARGH! i suck at this describe yourself thing, go read and figure it out for yourself
some silly things that i write
Bitching to hear myself bitch.
feigning intellect
read it and mock
webSighs
Lots of text and some pretty colors.

Can I worry about this, please? I think I want to worry about this. I'm going to blame it on American culture again, ok? It's not just that I hate American society and culture on their own merits; it's that I hate how it makes people hate themselves and their lives because they're not worth SELLING. C'mon, people! Everyone has a reason to get other people interested in their lives! If there really truly isn't, it's time to MAKE ONE!

oh, well. I suppose diaries don't have to have an editorial vision.

It does, I've found out, that people with more unusual descriptions have more interesting blogs. For example, this guy. "One nation, that has never heard of your nation..." tee hee.

Posted by me at 4:05 PM | Comments (7) | TrackBack

Who needs Michael Moore


when the president sets himself up like this?
``We're celebrating a victory in the House, playing golf with House members who helped convince their fellow members that trade is good for the economy and trade is good for the working people,'' Bush said Saturday.

Posted by me at 2:50 PM | Comments (0)

Better Than Abstinence


Through a couple of dyke-created, dyke-oriented p0r-n sites that M'issa referred me to, including one site with faerie scenarios (that's faeries, as in with wings, not effete males, and no, I will not link here, for crying out loud my nine-year-old cousin reads this site) I found the Technical Virgin site. Nice simple response to abstinence-only sex-ed. Totally worth the download on the PSA video clips they have-- they're short and very funny. The site that referred me there (and if you poke around that should take you to the faeries, all right?) has the best exit site I have ever seen -- what a great use for the sorry-you're-under-18 link, to point kids towards healthy information about sexuality.

Someone asked me recently why I write things like fsck and b00b13s rather than spelling them correctly -- it is self-censorship, yes, but it's not because I don't want to offend anyone; it's because I want my page to slide under the gaze of NetNanny-type software. this post is not going to make it through anyway, I think. especially with the Sc1ent0l0gy censorware, because it includes the word "poodle."

Posted by me at 1:05 AM | Comments (4)

July 26, 2002

Desultory Music Review

At H2K2, there was a guy who addressed peer-to-peer music sharing. (Later, he made a pass at me, and I apologized and said I was taken and gave him my card. Where did he go? silly.) One of the things he kept saying is that we can’t be ashamed of sharing music. We’re not stealing; from whom are we taking value? Not the people who give us the music; they still have their copy. The musicians are already being robbed blind by labels, and we need to find other ways to pay them. (Some people say live concerts, with which I heartily agree.)

[I’ve had occasion to think about similar issues from a writing standpoint at work lately, though I’m not sure how to fit this ultra-bleeding-edge kind of critique into the dead-tree-oriented work I do under the guidance of a stodgy old-school New York leftist...

The one thing I do know is that I don’t think anyone should make a living off writing memoirs and personal essays. Not anyone. Possibly people shouldn’t get paid for fiction or poetry, either. Do it in your off hours, when you’re not plumbing or teaching or farming or signing off on contracts which enrich you by exploiting the work of others (at least until the system collapses and takes the latter kind of work down too). It’s great that right now some people want to pay for this stuff, and I do exploit it, but I’m coming to think of getting paid for most writing as an unsustinable by-product of the current corporate system. This kind of writing (this kind. right here. and I extend the categorization to include anything written by Philip Lopate, Adrienne Rich, Barbara Kingsolver, Piers Anthony, Malcolm Gladwell, Neil Postman, anyone who writes product feature or home-decoration pieces for magazines, and, um, other writers who I dislike for either personal, political, or aesthetic reasons) doesn’t do anything useful for the world as a whole.

By contrast, I think real honest-to-god journalism is valuable, and requires a good deal of time-consuming work to do well; I was struggling to think of a sustainable system for paying journalists that didn’t compromise their ethics by making them dependent on some large corporation... so I thought about state sponsorship, which is obviously fatally flawed... Anyway, more thoughts on this sometime.]

Annnyway, so this guy suggested possible ways to help entrench music sharing into culture until we’re able to squeeze control of art out of the hands of the giant profitmongering media conglomerates. The proposal that I remember particularly is having parties where everyone brings drives and disks full of music, rips them, shares them, heads home, and comes with a new set for the next party. I’d actually recently been to something like (only more one-sided) at Jessamyn’s Fourth of July party, during which CDs were ripped continuously, adding to her already huge selection of MP3s. Seems like a good model, and I do always like practical applications to visionary whining.

Robert Durff sent me a CD for my birthday which I found fit well into what I’ve been looking for from music recently. He was surprised when I told him so, because the last thing I told him I was into was “Latin.” Which is still true, really. The bulk of the music I listen to has Latin roots, mostly because I find immersing myself in it is less irritating than immersing myself in the remaining trickle of the mainstream American rock tradition, which is so polluted with influences and demography as to be unswimmable at this point.

So. Let’s all get together and swap. Here’s what I’ve ingested over the past year; if you want some lemme know; if you know similar things I might like, tell me. Here’s reviews, which I’ve arranged according to my foraging patterns in response to record industry hysteria. Notice not one of these musical interactions involves theft, though one does involve questionable borrowing.

These are CDs I’ve actually bought in the past year:

Here’s artists I’ve copied in bulk in the past year:

Here’s copied music I’ve been passed in the past few weeks:

  • Barcelona

    Neil handed me one of their albums. Their songs are almost entirely about geeking out -- video games, sysadmin work, Commodore 64s -- and they rely on old-sounding computer sounds as well as some sort of garage band setup. My favorite: “Social Engineering” (will get you what you want). A little too close to pop alternative for me on the guitar front (boring, repetitive chords), but the lyrics make it worthwhile.

    Neil tacked on a song by Figurine (Our Game (Is Over)) at the end, which is more entirely bloops and bleeps; it’s sparer than Barcelona, and sounds like early eighties experimentation with synths, maybe Depeche Mode? Sprinkled with delicious video game noises, which I think is a hallmark of our generation, I could be wrong. Neil’s notes imply that it was remixed with some sort of AI.

  • ”Still Waters: Lounge, Trip Hop, and Acid Jazz from Robert (Durff)’s Hi-Fi”

    Zero Seven, Rinocerose, Thievery Corporation, and other good things, burned for my birthday. Pizzicato Five and Lovage are my favorites.

    • Here’s CDs I’ve received in the past week and have only barely listened to:

    Here’s a CD I ordered and haven’t received yet:

    Here’s stuff off of cassette tapes I’ve been turning into MP3s, but it probably won’t piss off the RIAA:

  • PYSO Coast to Coast concert, I think 1991

    It’s the stuff our youth orchestra played in Carnegie Hall, only this tape was recorded in Ambassador Auditorium back home in Pasadena, and includes solos, one by a flutist named Gregory Jefferson who I always thought was just way too good for junior high. Features Fiddler’s Stew by Richard Meyer. Anyone want a copy? I’ll swap for some of Meyer’s other works :)

  • The song I wrote at the Young Writers’ Workshop in 1994

    Featuring me on accordion and vocals, Lindsay Smith also on vocals, Greg Howard on Chapman stick, and I think a counselor named Charles on chicken shake. I think I called it Amphibian Astronaut Guys. OK, so that link is dead right now... I promise I'll upload it sometime, like when I figure out how to make the server stop sucking.

  • Soon I plan to make MP3s out of the old hard, pre-vinyl records in my basement (Robert says they’re 78s? and apparently I am not supposed to clean them with alcohol; they’re shellac, and will dissolve.) Some of them have hand-made labels, and appear to be made by ultra-local New York big bands. The music is not all that spectacular, but I’m looking forward to distributing stuff that could well otherwise be lost.

    • Here’s artists whose tapes I have had forever but haven’t listened to until recently:

    Here’s artists I know who deserve mad props:

    Posted by me at 2:14 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

    July 24, 2002

    Does this make my blog look phat?

    Hey, can y'all check in and let me know how the DSWJ looks to you on your different browsers/monitor sizes/OSes? I have had some comments that Netscape makes it all ugly (which is weird, because MT seems to be otherwise configured to work better with Netscape than IE, and this is basically the MT default template). Add comments below, indicating your OS, browser (including version), monitor width if necessary, screeds about noncompliance with W3C standards, dislike of the color purple, etc.

    Posted by me at 8:23 PM | Comments (6)

    streeeeetch, streeeeetch (hand gesture)

    streeeeetch, streeeeetch (hand gesture)

    Posted by me at 4:22 PM

    July 23, 2002

    absinthe and bacon!

    absinthe and bacon!

    Posted by me at 12:52 AM

    I like it, it smells like geeks

    I like it, it smells like geeks

    Posted by me at 12:52 AM

    that's where the money is, in the two cats

    that's where the money is, in the two cats

    Posted by me at 12:50 AM

    July 22, 2002

    Thunderbirds are GO!

    Sweet! It appears everything's back to normal around here, or at least patched up enough to give a semblance thereof. *cracks knuckles* Main column, right column, category headings... well, the archive page is still busted, but that's easy enough to fix. The old stuff from the side column is going away for the time being -- you won't really miss it -- and I'm going to link to all the old pages as statics at some point, unless Kellan gets around to decomposing it all the way he did the main column stuff.

    ("decomposing"?)

    Those of you who asked to be notified about new posts are on a list now. Please tell me if announcements about new posts the main column don't show up in your mailbox, ok? For some reason it doesn't seem to be working.

    Ohhh, I have such a backlog, you have no idea. Expect long posts.

    Posted by me at 11:25 PM | Comments (0)

    July 20, 2002

    Youthful Escapism

    There are a surprising number of pictures of me trying to wiggle


    out of the arms


    of various family members


    as a baby. Was this actually a pattern for me, or was it a function of having pictures taken -- or a function of my selection of family pictures when I was allowed to ransack the family collection in high school?

    Posted by me at 4:51 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

    July 15, 2002

    H2K2: Social Engineering (Will Get You What You Want)

    ed note 7-26-02: Two weekends ago I attended H2K2, the fourth Hackers on Planet Earth conference, put on by the folks at 2600 Magazine. I wrote most of the following super-gossipy, not-really-relevant-to-anyone-but-myself notes shortly thereafter but didn't finish them because I had sooooooo much to say, and then finished it up tonight because I sooooooo wanted to get it over with and off my plate. voila.

    Stage notes, for Xephreniaq: H2K2 was held at the former Penta Hotel, where (the inappropriately-named) LACC and (the more aptly named) PYSO both stayed when we went to play at Carnegie Hall. The now-Pennsylvania Hotel seems slightly less shabby than when I first visited New York. Most of the conference action took place in the thick-pillared top floor ballroom, where PYSO practiced when we stayed there. They somehow managed to secure the mezzanine, which looked as if it were under construction, as well -- a low-ceilinged floor with exposed works and peeling paint where a number of ancient computers -- Apple ][Es, Ataris, Commodores -- were set up like some fanatic’s model trainset with all the fun moving parts on display, the tape drives and joysticks and cartridges and manuals to remind you how to program the old things.

    I should establish from the beginning that I went into the conference with an unfair advantage which colored the experience with an almost unbearable giddiness: I showed up wearing a top which showed off my breasts. It's a grey old raggy piece of shit tank top I got during Hippie Christmas, but it does go right down my cleavage. Additionally, I had an accordion strapped to my back (wanted to trade it in at Accordion-O-Rama, which I had just discovered and which is just blocks from the hotel. It was my day off; plausible excuse, right?). The effect was immediate: within minutes I was hearing buzz behind my back about some chick with an accordion; after one of the first lectures I went to, the speaker made a pass at me.

    Irrational exuberance; inflated self-confidence. All of this is still so weird to me. I was the ugly nerd girl in school. Even at Hampshire, the overt expressions of lust never happened. Call it hypocritical, when I spend so much time bitching about being hit on on the subway. I’ve gone through the self-recriminations. I don’t want lust coming from random strangers when I’m trying to get to work or buying groceries. It’s more welcome, however, coming from a roomful of relatively intelligent, non-macho subversives. So I call this reclaiming control: I calculated a reaction; I got it; it was one of the headiest experiences of this past year.

    I wish I had more to say about the speakers or the topics or the vibe or the future of hacking, but (partially due to the abovementioned reasons) much of what comes to mind about the conference is personal. A key outcome of the conference for me was realizing that my lecture-going habits -- and more broadly, my information-gathering habits -- have changed dramatically. I think it was the presence of Emmanuel Goldstein that clarified this. I found out about his magazine, 2600, when I was maybe 11 or 12 through an article in the LA Times; Emmanuel was in some kind of trouble for hacking or phreaking. It occurs to me that I probably wouldn't have found that article today (and not just because I don't read the Times anymore).

    During my pre-teen years, I read like a baleen whale: the house was a sea of newspapers and magazines and books my mom left lying around, and I sifted through it finding things I liked. I liked hacking enough that I saved the article on Emmanuel and a few other pieces on hackers, along with stuff about Stuart Brand and some early pieces on raves. I wasn't anywhere near hacking myself, because I didn't program, and the topics weren't ones that I tried to look into any more deeply, but something about the topic felt enough worth coming back to that those clips are decaying in the bags and boxes of random papers in my parents' basement.

    I also liked an article in the paper about a woman who married herself in a performance-art piece in which she wore pink rubber gloves to underscore the cleanness of such a ceremony. Then there was a piece in the Los Angeles Times's Sunday magazine about the history of belligerence in Japan. I picked up books which I read parts of and never gave back to my parents: Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals; a book about the Penobscot people called Glooskap's Children; book one of The Authoritarian Personality; coffee table books on the Saarinen family of architects; Dad's copy of The Closing Of The American Mind. There was lots of other stuff I didn't read; for example, I never touched any of my mom's books about Russian poets. Sometimes I feel bad about the other stuff which I didn't read; my dad also has a pretty decent collection on US history, a field in which I often find I have fundamental deficiencies.

    Only recently have these reading patterns started to make sense to me. The parts I avoided are pretty easy to understand. I was a territorial kid: one of my sisters got to be into ballet, another got to be into anime, Mom had her poets and dad had his cars and as long as someone in the family was into that stuff I didn't have to be. The stuff I did read, I think these days, was all about saying NO. It was about saying no to marriage and saying no to being white and saying no to governments and to America specifically and saying NO to idiocy and to indifference. I went to look for my internal compass recently as I've been thinking about religion and morality, and it appears the word NO is stamped all over it. The needle even points NOrth(west).

    I was happy I was able to finally identify my compass. I think my favorite word is No. (Feel free to disagree with me if you feel I'm overgeneralizing.) I'm happy They Might Be Giants has put out an album called NO, although I am currently saying NO to They Might Be Giants because they have done things like saying YES to making a Coke ad.

    Speaking of which, the greatest thrill of H2K2 for me -- possibly the greatest thrill of my last few years -- was the four (was it FIVE?) hours back to back in which Mark Hosler and Jello Biafra spoke, with the resulting unintentional juxtaposition of Negativland's self-written Pepsi jingle ("Child-ren dy-ing of dis-ease -- Pepsi!) with old records Jello brought in which had been specially made for corporate sales conferences, including one from Pepsi and one from Coke -- the former written by Cabaret creators Kander and Ebb, the latter featuring a song called something like "That Great Big Bottling Plant In The Sky" in which hosannas are sung for the miraculous disappearance of the EPA and of protracted labor disputes.

    Getting back to the point: My information-gathering habits have changed. I do not blame the Internet; I could be an even better baleen whale these days with all this fantastic krill in the soup. My problem may be that I'm getting old or that I have a job where the boss tells me to shut up all day long, or possibly that I was pressured not to be a (totally unabashed) generalist by the demands of college. At H2K2, I found myself going to lectures I felt like I *should* be going to in order to bolster my ostensible career or the leftist ideas I espouse. As a result, I ended up missing all sorts of fascinating shit, like the lecture on lockpicking and the one on an autonomous nation that consists of a platform off the coast of England. This kind of be-dullishment has to stop. First thing I'm going to do is stop hanging out with anyone steeped in the old-school New York Left. Goddamn if they didn't mung up parts of the conference by trying to create unnecessary organizing structures and dragging their Upper-West-Side-hothouse-poodle-psychobabble neuroses into every single unrelated issue.

    The conference was much more oriented towards politics than I might have expected. I don't know how the geeks felt about the infiltration of their conference by so much overt political material. I've heard some of them grouse before (or heard of their grousing) about the efforts of Emmanuel Goldstein (2600’s editor and one of the conference’s lead organizers) to raise consciousness that the legal issues facing hackers, P2P software developers, free software advocates and the rest of the computing world extend to other free speech movements as well. The complaint, if I recall, was associated with those hackers who didn't see the issues from a leftist perspective... The traditional right-wing counterbalance-guy from Off the Hook showed his pointy little nose around the premises at one point, but I don't think he stayed long. Someone told me he'd quit the show, denouncing WBAI as "anti-American." There were dozens of Indymedia folks there, some of them not techies, though the radio crowd was in full effect.

    But I either didn't get a reading on the crowd's sentiments about the politics this time or everyone was content with it. Emmanuel seemed to think everything went well. In his closing remarks he thanked everyone for connecting so well with Mark Hosler (of Negativland, an experimental band) and Jello Biafra (formerly of the punk group Dead Kennedys).

    The presence of these artists (along with Aaron McGruder, the cartoonist who does Boondocks) and Indymedia types were the fruits of outreach that the 2600 crew has been doing for a while to the activist community. I was there the day Emmanuel offered the underused 2600 space to the folks who established the New York IMC... I had this strange sensation when we walked out of the restaurant that night that I could feel history, that I was a rock in it and it was rushing all around me. It gave me a certain frisson when I realized at the end of the conference that the non-techie speakers had been integrated into the proceedings so organically that it hadn't occurred to me that they might seem out of place to anyone.

    (I'm still not sure if it's a good thing to feel like a rock in the context of that metaphor. ed note 7-26-02: I'm *certain*, however, that it's not a good thing that I felt swoony enough to summon that last paragraph of self-important reverie when I wrote this. In retrospect, I'm a little worried I got so attached to the whole event. I barely ate for three days, I spent hours in an enclosed area cut off from the outside world and my usual daily routine, listening to fist-waving lecturers -- the list of environmental factors reads a little like the ingredients for brainwashing. And I want to note there was a hell of a lot of fronting going on at the conference, not just by me, either. You get a lot of geeks together, they go all alpha on each other.)

    Other notable moments:

    *At one point on the last evening the center ring turned to a public trivia contest, and Emmanuel and Bernie S. and Cheshire and a handful of the old guard, the phone hackers and the radio guys, asked questions about the blue boxes used to manipulate pay phones, staples of the phreaking world... and nobody in the audience could answer. There was a moment of palpable chagrin onstage, and then Emmanuel said, "Give 'em a question about UNIX systems." No complaints from him, just a quiet adjustment. I wonder how the old guys feel about having such a very different experience of computing from hackers today, such as they are.

    *The social engineering lecture was, IMO, the highlight of the conference. The old-school hackerati got up on stage and explained how information you were interested in could be got by simply calling people, posing as some sort of expert, and asking questions.

    As in years past, AT&T was to be a target, but they’ve been duped enough times now that they got wise well before the conference and circulated a memo telling employees to ask for human resources ID numbers and put up a few other barriers, for example blocking all 800 calls on the conference’s two lines. No big deal; while a call went out for donated phone cards from the audience to circumvent the problem, the veterans told stories of past exploits. One guy told of hacking into the intercom at at a major drugstore chain through their phone tree, calling for unneccessary aisle cleanups, playing Ina Gadda Da Vida, murmuring expletives, etc... another talked about duping people over nautical radios by knowing plenty about the ships picking up the signal.

    Eventually Emmanuel decided to call a local Starbucks for a basic hack. Told the guy who picked up he was with the company’s systems administration team, and asked the poor sap if they had a broadband connection down... and the guy said no, it’s our modem, we’ve been having problems. You’re going to have to give me the card number from the last transaction you tried to send, Emmanuel said, having gotten some technical specifications about the modem to cement his authority. Over the speakers in an auditorium full of hundreds of hackers, the guy read the card type, expiration date, and most of the number before Emmanuel stopped him out of common decency... Emmanuel wrapped it up, and the room exploded in cheers.

    He then went on to call the Russian Tea Room, saying he had reservations at eight but didn’t know what name his wife had used to reserve. The reservationist gave him the name (“Ah, that’s my pen name, I have a novel coming out soon,” he told her), then changed the reservation slightly later. He got the reservationist to give the phone number on the reservation, called that number, told the answering machine it was the Russian Tea Room calling and that their reservation had been moved to the later hour due to a Health Department visit.

    I’m not doing this whole scene justice. They had to shush the room a dozen times (“It’s hard to explain the cheers, guys,” Emmanuel complained). Jen Howk has suggested the whole thing was a set up. In retrospect, I think she might be right; it went too smoothly. If it was real, though, it was a hell of a set of social acrobatics.

    *This one guy had created a Linux port of Dance Dance Revolution and had brought it with him. At one point Funny-Hat-Ben calls me from another part of the hotel on his cel, as we had taken to doing, telling me to get my ass down there to check it out. There this kid was, booth set up in an obscure corner of the mezzanine... clearly he needed a better location, and AV equipment was ripe for the plucking, so I accosted the guy in charge of the performance area. DJs were supposed to be playing all day and all night, but they were running late and the next DJ hadn’t set up his kit yet. They grudgingly let us set up the mat in front of a large projection screen on the empty dance floor. A crowd had formed around the mat when the DJ, giant headphones and green hair and spike piercings, showed up by the booth and started making pouty faces at us... I’m really excited about this, I’ve been planning it for months, he said. Some of us got a song each in, then we had to fold. The DJ took up the booth. The dance floor *emptied.* Some of the DDR enthusiasts spent the rest of the night plotting how to get back at him.

    Don’t you try to skool me. I’ll show YOU what geeks like to dance to.

    Posted by me at 12:12 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

    July 1, 2002

    The Death of Recycling, and Possible Solutions

    Those of you following New York City news know that Mayor Mike Bloomberg has rescinded recycling in the city for everything but cans and paper. I haven't been unable to recycle since before Pasadena adopted the practice, which must have been before I entered junior high, and it's filling me with a strange panic. Tonight I went to take out the trash and reluctantly threw the bag of empties in the regular can. I think about the size of the bag, and where all that stuff goes, and how it's not going to go away, ever. And I know I'm not going to see it, so all my waste is just going to build up like problems you have with your boss that you don't talk about. *cough*

    I don't want to be responsible for that. I'm not the best when it comes to other everyday leftist things; I don't use compact fluourescent bulbs; I'm generally a pretty poor vegetarian; I eat lots of non-organically-grown produce; and I use tampons, the bleached kind. But I do recycle, reflexively; I even go out of my way to do it. And having my ability to take care of my waste hindered by the government makes me angry like the militias: I want to excercise my constitutional right to the pursuit of happiness unmarred by the worry that I am taking more than my share of the world's resources and using them to make big piles of crap. I'm tired of fighting my government about these things. I'd become a conscientious tax-objector if it wasn't so likely to fuck up your life.

    There's a very obvious campaign in this: get together with a few local environmental groups, the active ones from Hunt's Point and Williamsburg/Greenpoint, say; have the neighbors collect their recyclables for a week, and hire a truck to dump them in front of the Mayor's house; call a huge press conference to point out that this house-high pile is just a week's worth, and remind people that this is only what goes to the dump from one neighborhood in the course of a week, just imagine what we do in a year. It's a very visual issue.

    However, I do not read the local news, so I didn't have my head up about this one, not to mention the fact that I don't have good connections with those environmental groups. This news hook is going to expire very quickly in waves of red-alerts for the Fourth, and by the time this even reaches my site, which won't happen for a while since it's messed up, any hope of changing this series of events will have passed.

    I'm so fscking disorganized.

    Posted by me at 2:09 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack