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October 31, 2002
Failed Celebrity Encounters #10: Janeane Garofalo Gives Me The Finger
Sometime in the middle of Eugene Mirman's comedy night down in the East Village I realize a particularly forceful laugh coming from a back corner is Janeane Garofalo. I knew she was there. I knew she was probably going to be doing some standup that night, but I'm still not prepared when I make the inevitable pass by her as we exit the theater at the end of the show after she's done her routine and the show is over. I grin haplessly and think about how she is so totally short and beautiful and how I was going to say something about how she's my favorite thing since sliced bread and I loved her in Romy and Michelle's High School Reunion especially, but all that comes out is more grin and I think I'm starting to drool, maybe. Perhaps thinking I am hungry, she comes up with an open Tupperware container.
"Would you like a cookie?" she says, and puts the box under my nose like a feedbag. I can't see the cookies well. They look folded, or made out of strips of something yellow. I say something to the effect of "How very strange!" and feel dumb.
"They're fingers," she says. I take one. It is in fact a crone-finger-shaped almond cookie and the almond is the fingernail. I have vague intimations that either she is Martha-Stewart-like evil genius of cookies or else brilliant silly ideas still occur to her the way they used to when we are all teenagers, and then I am smitten with the migraine feeling that I am reading too much into five seconds of interaction because I have been encouraged by filmmakers to read a lot into things when I have seen Janeane Garofalo before, you know, on the movie screen.
Did I save the cookie? No, I ate the goddamn cookie! What am I going to do, let it fossilize on my shelf? Sell it on EBay? I had a moment of hesitation, because there used to be days when I wouldn't eat even my own genius decorated Christmas cookies and even when the plates of them went stale I insisted my mother photograph them before she threw them out, but I ate this cookie. It was a good cookie. Janeane wasn't skimping on the almonds.
* * *
Yeah, so I took the site down the other day, it's not Josh Crawford's fault. I had this moment of paranoia that it may have led to a serious setback in my employment situation. I mean, it could, at any time. I've been getting more questions lately about how I work up the cajones to put such personal stuff on the site, and the've been asked in a worried tone, not an awe-filled one. It's not a matter of balls... really, it's a lack of self-preservation instinct.
I don't have anything to write about anymore, anyway, now that I'm not getting arrested or taunted by small children on a regular basis. I'm pretty unhappy with the amount of navel-gazing I've been doing here lately. Like with the essay about community and romantic relationships, I feel like it's some big topic I just have to have understood about myself, and then it isn't. The stuff that garners the best comments and discussion is the stuff that isn't about me anyway. Somewhere along the line I'd started living for the comments.
I had this idea a while back that I'd start using my blog for rigorous public self-criticism. In addition to cutting the self-important bullshit it felt like it might be a nice parody of most blogs. Maybe I'll still do that. I have one or two archival pieces in the wings that should do the trick.
Also been thinking I want to do a blog that just rips the ad industry trade rags to shreds on a regular basis. Now that I'm out of my last job I don't have access to a subscription anymore, and I don't have the cash to spring for a subscription to Ad Age or Creative... If anyone wants to subsidize this project, my PayPal account is under my (initials and entering year) Hampshire address...
Posted by me at 12:41 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack
October 28, 2002
The Negro Problem!!! Fuck, fuck, fuck!!!!!
Dammit, I knew about The Negro Problem some eight years ago, and did I do anything about it?! No! I just got all politically correct like the nervous little suburbanite I was, and refused to go see the band even after I met one of its (former?) members, Jill Meschke, backstage at a TMBG concert (she's a friend of John Linnell's). I could have had another interesting pre-fame phenomenon to write about, but nooooo... now I've waited, and Rolling Stone, the Village Voice, Salon, and all sorts of other fucking outlets have written about them. And I still haven't heard the goddamn band, so I can't recommend them! Except they have an accordion player, or used to. Fuck.
Posted by me at 11:44 PM | Comments (1)
October 23, 2002
Message to America: Lay off the goddamn mutherfsking air fresheners, will you?!
I just got back from trying to lay the foundations of my Maslow's pyramid in Vermont, and all I have time to note is that America has an unhealthy relationship with scents... in particular, air fresheners... I was bothered by them in all the usual places -- the bus toilet, the hotel shower -- but then I was stalked by them in unusual places... in the car I am about to buy, saturated with an unholy stench of fake spice -- my father's old friend, a motorcycle dealer helping me with the auto hookup, found the source in one of those pine-tree-shaped mirror dingleberries, chucked it aside... then upon entering a slanty-floored old house -- Bellows Falls -- in which I was looking to rent a giant industrial-carpeted kitchen and two teeny adjacent rooms which the pike-faced man who would be my landlord called a living room and bedroom, there I found another pine-tree silhouette waiting at the foot of the slanty, slanty stairs like some bad hobo sign -- "Don't camp here, it stinks--"... then I started to smell them elsewhere... the floral waft of a baby at the pizza parlor... the car I rented smelled of one but tear as I might at the upholstery I couldn't find the damnable tree... look I know Lynda Barry has said this already -- and so, oddly, has John Steinbeck, whose Travels With Charlie I have been trying to make last as long as I can... long as the move... long as the UN continues to stall the US on Iraq, god willing -- and they have said it better than I have (Barry: "I've never heard a single person ever say they loved the smell of air freshener and yet there are so many people who fill their homes with it") -- but god damn it, America, are you listening?! YOU CAN'T COVER IT ALL UP WITH AN AIR FRESHENER... did I mention once upon a time when I was still indentured to the US, working in the Bronx, when I came into the office to a nearly lethal cloud of Lysol disinfectant lingering in the unventilated hall? a particularly fragrant homeless man had come in, and one of the counselors had tried to purge the scent, not with a common odor masker but with a breathable, ingestable cloud of antibacterial poisons... and they wonder why asthma rates are so high in the Bronx... not only does everyone in this goddamn country try to cover things up with manufactured scents, they're also too fscking ignorant to know the difference between substances of cosmetic and of hygenic use...
DEATH TO SCENTED CANDLES and all their ilk... I do not exempt the hippies and their goddamn incense... give me unwashed crotch or give me death!
Posted by me at 11:33 PM | Comments (3)
October 15, 2002
New Wallace and Gromit Short
For those of you who didn't catch it on Slashdot, there's a new Wallace and Gromit short out. It's debuting on Atom Films, also the home of Bill Plympton, master of the malleable face.
Posted by me at 11:29 AM | Comments (0)
October 14, 2002
Dancing at Diwali: Safety and New York
Yesterday some friends and I wandered out to Jackson Heights and found ourselves in the middle of a Diwali festival, with bright-colored strings of imitation marigolds swaying among bobbing yellow Western Union balloons. Women in beautiful saris everywhere, buying parathas and handing out literature at the Citibank booth. Had no idea it was Diwali -- I just wanted to grab some music for the dry spell I'm about to face -- but lucky me, there were singers and an area in front where a small knot of men and one woman were dancing. I pushed my way in, even though the vibe was really weird. It was very macho, nothing at all like the energetic but definitely queer-friendly environment of Basement Bhangra. A man with a big beard and a turban monopolized me immediately. He was pretty respectful of my space, but I soon got yanked around some, hauled by my belt loop into the center of the fray by a guy who I think was actually Puerto Rican or Dominican. We freaked for a while, and he embraced me tightly at the end, telling me I was a killer dancer. Then I was firmly grabbed by a drunkish-looking guy who kept demanding one more song.
I eventually bailed out. The DJ couldn't seem to stick to a song for more than a few measures. The younger guys on the floor -- I think a number of them weren't Indian, actually; my suspicion is that while I've had the radio off bhangra has made inroads into rap -- were roiling into an arm-waving mosh pit, and the one young woman there, though confident enough to stick out a number of songs, was looking around her a little anxiously.
As I left the dance floor, a friend remarked that it had looked like the guys were hugging me -- were they really? Yeah. It's social dancing. Despite the jarringly unfamiliar vibe and the posessiveness, nothing pressed my Inappropriate! button the way some of the old lechers at Irving Plaza have. (That usually takes some sort of groinage.)
A woman maybe in her sixties, slight and shorter than me but still carrying a familiar brazen authority, approached to tell me I was a very good dancer. But you must be careful, you know, she said. Those men are drunken, it isn't safe.
I told her I wanted to show them that strong women had a place on the dance floor too. Because I did -- though I had been worried about making my way onto the floor with a bunch of men slamming into each other, especially when there was a cultural rift and I didn't know what the slamming or my presence in it would mean, I had to dance.
I thanked her for her concern, and we smiled as we passed each other.
For all my big talk about my adventures in multiculturalism I haven't really gotten out enough in New York. Only been out to Jackson Heights a handful of times, can't really show anyone a good time in the Bronx, where I worked for a year. I was just petrified my first year or so. September 11th, while it made things worse, eventually convinced me I had to get over my fears or succumb to lethal psychosomatica. It only just occurred to me in the last month that the route I have always taken getting back from the subway was chosen to some extent for how well-lit and populated it was. Lately I've taken to a route with more trees.
I saw Michael Moore's new movie, Bowling for Columbine, this past weekend. He spends a lot of time talking about how the media work so hard to scare us ("escalators -- watch out, they could maim you FOR LIFE!"), and how we have fallen for it, buying up security products and services even as crime rates drop. He spends some time talking to Canadians, most of whom say they never lock their doors; then he does door-to-door in Canada, barging into people's houses, and proves they're not just bumpin' their gums.
I don't know if anyone my age has Mike's kind of perspective on what an unusual development our fear is. My father taught me the quotation "That which does not kill me makes me stronger; my mother taught me the Russian phrase da smerty ne umryosh: until death one does not die; but I remember getting panicked lectures about going across the street without telling anyone where I was going because what if someone kidnapped or killed me? Most people I know grew up with fear, with our parents nervous about sexual abuse at our pre-schools, locking our car doors going through black neighborhoods. It's magical thinking, but we still turn the locks without questioning ourselves.
When I suggest taking the G train to get to Brooklyn I invariably get comments about how G is for Ghetto and all the sketchy things people claim to have seen on that train. I've taken it at night, I've never had a problem. I don't know what everyone's so scared of.
New York has taught me that I can walk home from a late night of dancing at four in the morning half asleep and not fear for my life. Even if people are grabbing my ass and calling me mami chula on the subway. Being flirted with and having your ass grabbed on the subway are not the same as dying. Da smerty ne umryosh.
Granted, it helps that the streets are never empty; people come home from work and play at all hours. But I hope I don't lose this freedom when I move. Vermont is already spooking me... doesn't help that the managing editor was briefing me on all the grisly murders they've had in town. But there we're back to what Mike was saying about the news... this is their thing. (It'll be my thing too. If there's a murder, I might have to go to the crime scene. This is not something I planned for myself; not something I was looking forward to.)
Posted by me at 9:21 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Muppets: What *Can't* They Do?
Cute -- ok, heartwarming -- story on the Beeb about Muppets veterans and their puppets taking it to Afghanistan to teach kids how to stay safe from land mines. I really wish I was doing work like this. There's something very tempting about doing work where telling fairytales actually helps pass on useful knowledge, like it used to. Brings to mind Dwight Conquergood's Mother Clean (described in The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down).
Posted by me at 8:09 PM | Comments (0)
October 11, 2002
Thomas Builds-The-Fire-And-Is-No-Slouch-At-Self-Promotion,-Either
I got this sudden jones to see more of the work of the guy who played Thomas Builds-The-Fire in Sherman Alexie's movie Smoke Signals. Turns out Evan Adams has his own website, with lots of promo pix and an almost embarassingly detailed and strange vita -- the man is also a doctor. And if you thought Adams did the best filmic geeking out since Real Genius, we're in luck -- he's in a new movie, The Business of Fancydancing -- also based on an Alexie book -- which is now playing in New Mexico and will open this week in New York and California this month. (Dude, Sherman Alexie has a website. Screw all these older writers who've convinced themselves that computers are evil.)
Posted by me at 8:24 PM | Comments (0)
October 7, 2002
What You Call Those Random Sayings You And Your Friends Have
I am submitting to Macros2000 the zine because it is a repository of all of our little personal in-jokes and routines and I think it's pretty important, don't you, that we canonize all the frivolity our lives are made up of and liken it to computer scripts? And the page I linked to is going to mek no sense to you? Because you have to see the zine. Order the zine! It is totally worth the two dollars plus licorice. I have Jessamyn to thank for direction towards this link. She has good zines at her house. Dammit this post is no good. I will correct it later.
Posted by me at 6:38 PM | Comments (1)
in-laws?
Your cat has in-laws? -- Romeo de la CruzPosted by me at 5:36 PM
October 4, 2002
Cel Phone Symphony
OK, I know it was on Slashdot yesterday, but this musical arrangement of cel phones is just too cool not to pass along. Check out the audio clips especially. I'm now sitting here staring at my little silver Samsung wishing it would do something cooler than shriek when I get called.
Posted by me at 2:57 PM | Comments (0)
Statement Of Intent
Member conference today. Awards for the ethnic press in the evening, in a little Romanian restaurant in Sunnyside with ceilings looked like they were covered in meringue. Some dude at a keyboard playing synthesizer covers of Gypsy Kings songs.
I'm going to miss being the Rain Man of the ethnic press. Not only could I pronounce the names of all the Polish and Russian reporters correctly, with a good accent, I also remembered all of them without prompting. They'd start spelling their names and before they'd reached the third letter I had their nametags and packets ready for them.
But I've been offered a job in Vermont, and I think I'm gonna take it.
I said this to one of our editors, the one whose daughter ran the poetry workshop in Spanish Harlem that Fabiola and I used go to. Going back? he said. No, I'm from California, I reminded him.
"Americans move around a lot," he said. "Me, I'm going to stay here in New York." (He is originally from Puerto Rico.) You hear this a lot in New York. People ask me how I can stand living so far from my family, aren't they chagrined to have their daughter so far away.
They're right. They're all right. Sometimes I think they are just, all of them, right. This professional lifestyle, this ethic where you move where your career dictates, has its points but being so far from your support network is just corrosive to the soul.
This would not be the first time I moved to further my career. I did not want to come to New York, either, but there are only so many think-tanks with a progressive media critique out there, and the one in Western Massachusetts wasn't hiring. Cities become 800-pound gorillas that way, you know? They develop monopolies on professions. New York has a monopoly on the media. Vice versa? I'd like to think the city has some sort of organic will of its own.
My best friends in New York look at me quizzically when I tell them I have to take this job. They are both about to move themselves, but they are both moving to be with their girlfriends. (I want a boyfriend who would do that. I would subsequently panic about his spineless devotion to me and his overexaggeration of the meaning of our relationship, of course, and kick him the hell out the moment he arrived on my doorstep.) I don't want to move to Vermont, I say. Don't move to Vermont, they say. Nobody's forcing you. Move where you want to move. A co-worker said that to me too: Why not move to a place where you want to be, then look for work there? (I guess there are newspapers all over. I am just leery of living in expensive housing markets while flailing.)
I don't want to start over anywhere new. I have lives in Pasadena and Western Massachusetts and New York already, and they already conflict and I'm spread too thin. It is dreadfully sad to lose others' willingness to open up and be warm to you simply because you're not around each other every day to grouse about the minutiae of your life. (It is sadder at night when you can't sleep because the bright lights of a new city will not be blocked by your blinds. Vermont wouldn't build on any of my knowledge about New York or Pasadena or Hampshire College governance systems. It would not build on any social relationships I already have, aside from possibly one friendship. It would only invigorate my blind headlong desire to further my writing career.
My best friends from Pasadena have moved in order to further their careers. Isn't it sad to lose touch with each other? I say. Isn't it sad to come home and realize you don't know which restaurants to take your out-of-town friends to because things have closed and opened and closed again, and besides we were out of town during the transition periods, the formative years, college, young adulthood, we learn where the right bars are for where we are now, but we don't know how we got there and so we don't know where to take people at different stages of life. My friends look at me blankly and excuse themselves and their careers: I have to move where I have to for my job. I can't do this fantastic thing that I want to do anywhere else. Where I am is the best possible place for my career. (I would like to see Janice's distinct and somewhat dissenting story about social directives in the comments for this post.)
Maybe I never said those things to my friends from Pasadena anyway. Maybe I just nursed my little wounded thoughts to sleep, because it is crazy to ask an individual to give up their personal aspirations for the sake of other people.
Kellan, who has moved something like a dozen times in two years, says it's normal. Adults grow up, they move, reform social groups. What you're proposing sounds like a lot more work. What would you suggest instead?
Cohousing, I say. I want to buy land with and build houses with and live with my friends, I want them to all come together so we could do the great work we used to do together and get back to supporting each other through hard times. I want to raise children with my sisters and my parents and Robert Durff and Jen Howk.
Is it a lot more work? I know Evan's mom has had a lot of trouble with her co-housing group. But it is not totally unfeasible. I don't know how dependent it was on fate that this was possible in my suburb, but when I was young the only thing separating my house from my grandparents' was a hibiscus hedge and a small chain-link gate. The only thing separating our house from my aunt and uncle's was a patio and an avocado tree. This was apparently not lost on my sisters, either. They've practically suggested raising kids together before I did. (Who knew we were such a close-knit family? It didn't seem this clear in high school. We were never the kind of sisters who promised to time our pregnancies to coincide.)
What of this child-raising thing, anyway? (Inconceivable... for the past seven years I haven't seen anything grow for more than a few months at a time. Watching eighteen contiguous years of development is unimaginable.)
Nothing I have seen so far suggests that a marriage is the best foundation for a family. My parents' didn't last. My maternal grandparents' didn't either. I know what my own relationships look like. They have threateningly calm centers and gale-force exteriors and make you want to get down in the basement. They leave a trail of broken Kansas and no Oz. I don't want to put my kids through that. I'm terrified that at some point, lost in another heady mist of infatuation, I will forget that I figured out how bad a deal marriage is. Kim says we have too many societal expectations for our lovers. We want them to be sex partners and comfort food and our own parents and our kids' parents and business partners and worst of all our friends. The weight of these demands is crushing.
And I won't be tied down to one lover, either. Because being tied down to one lover means they are The Best Person. They're supposed to mean so much to you that you would further attenuate your relationships with your friends and family, who will always have a few dozen years' jump on your partner in terms of history, to be with them only. You pretend your sexual feelings extend only to them, which they don't. (Am I supposed to explain away the past ten years of relationships as horrible mistakes because I meet some guy I could live with now? The lid of that box can't be closed again.) The kicker of this whole situation is that if you get married and you still plan to move to further your career, they move too, as if one or the other of you were dependent children.
OK, I've badly damaged the soundproof wall that keeps me from hearing myself screaming SO, YOU WANT TO HAVE YOUR CAKE AND EAT IT TOO?!... I can't avoid it, the answer is yes, because what is life without cake?!
Normally when I talk about commitment to a community I mean activists, the ones who chase protests. Think globally, act locally, the saying goes, but with them it's sure-I'll-hang-out-anyplace-once-locally. No plan for sustainable change, the kind that really supports the global. When I talk about it I usually mean them, not me, and I'm thinking in terms of a life/protesting split which is maybe artificial.
I'm about to move one way or another. Last time I moved, to New York, I didn't know what I do now about being lonely. This time maybe I need to act on what I've learned. How long can I put off my support network for my career?
Posted by me at 12:45 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack
October 3, 2002
Saddam Hussein's Beautiful Idea
Why doesn't Bush just take him up on this? Lord knows it's what they both want. It would do away with some of Iraq's and the U.S.'s problems instantaneously. And I bet Saddam's a faster shot. I just want some sort of assurance neither of them would make it out alive. Maybe the victor could be torn apart by tigers.
Posted by me at 9:33 PM | Comments (0)