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April 25, 2003

Socks!


Another link coming from Randy's site: his mom's sock company. She used to make these incredible, brightly-colored, very warm-looking socks for Randy's friends by hand; then she went into business and developed machine patterns. They're so cool! Pricey, but cool. I have to love any company whose motto is "Life's too short for matching socks."

Posted by me at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

Randy in the Hills of Thailand


I got word from old buddy Randy Wakerlin that he has a website up now. He's been working on a documentary about hill tribes in Thailand. I'm looking forward to this -- I hope it will be as innovative as his final project at Hampshire (which apparently doesn't exist on the web beyond his few references to it, unfortunately).

Posted by me at 11:47 AM | Comments (0)

April 23, 2003

Neil wants to hoard it for himself, and Jacob doesn't want to go,


so I introduce you to the Bowery Bowel Movement Comic Jam. Not unlike 1K Blank White Cards with people who can draw and are following a plot. (Big shout outs to the playas of the PyCon/Twisted deck. Toggle that mfckin sock.)

Posted by me at 11:20 PM | Comments (0)

April 21, 2003

OK, so maybe Canadians aren't so great...


... some of their TV ideas are downright shitty. I can't help but wonder how they get the hamster to act. Oh, and that's definitely a RAT, not a mouse. Martha the RAT.

Posted by me at 10:13 PM | Comments (0)

Something in the air


I convince myself some days that my mood has been affected by things I'm not aware of yet. Today I was pretty down. I found out just now that Nina Simone died.

Posted by me at 7:56 PM | Comments (0)

April 19, 2003

Bruce Haack! Bruce Haack!


I didn't give enough attention to Bruce Haack in that last post. I didn't mention that his bio reads like a lesser-known Jim Henson's! Or that he'd been on Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood! Or that, like all good things, he was Canadian! Or that there's a movie about him! Holy shit, man, this guy makes Eno and Byrne look like self-conscious posers!
P.S.: They make "outsider music" just like they make outsider art. Who, you ask? Good ol' Thoth is on that album, among other people.

Posted by me at 12:25 AM | Comments (0)

April 18, 2003

A New Meaning For "Polyphony"


Luaka Bop will always be the #1 label in my life, but you know me... I'm all about the polyamory. And there's a new label in my life. I went looking for a genius little song by Bruce Haack called Electric To Me Turn, got the kind of heart-racy feeling I get when I find an artist whose entire oevre I will soon obsessively amass, and it slowly dawned on me after a few pages that his work was being released on Emperor Norton Records among all sorts of other fantastic stuff, some of which, like Senor Coconut, I'd heard before. On KCRW. And, um, people like Miss Kittin, who I heard about from my sisters.
Honestly, sometimes I'm so thick. I'm like, "Yah, music! I like it! I'm so hip and with it and I know all the stuff nobody else knows!" And I never bother to go and investigate the labels and network connections of groups I like, so I barely scratch the surface.
Annnnnyway, I want to have Emperor Norton Records's babies. Once again, that's Emperor Norton Records. As in, Emperor Norton. Yessir. E-M-P-E-- yeah, that gag doesn't work as well as it does on the radio.

Posted by me at 11:35 PM | Comments (0)

April 17, 2003

Impressed by cars

This is why we need to go back to being impressed by cars. And wearing hats. And saying "Good day." --Jacob Chabot (when I told him that scientists on Long Island were working on a project which, if botched, could "transform the entire planet Earth into an inert hyperdense sphere about 100 meters across." )

Posted by me at 2:35 AM

Worse than beef?


OK, I stand corrected: There are worse things than beef out to get your children. The beef girlsite linked to a chatroom on a "KidsCom, a fun site for kids" which apparently is little more than a tool for squeezing information about kids' predilections out of them.

Posted by me at 2:18 AM | Comments (0)

My next job will be working for a meat-industry site...


... because then I will be allowed to write copy which segues from earnest pop-feminism in one paragraph to a hearty browbeating over lifestyle choices in the next -- and then to a not-even-veiled marketing survey on the next page -- with nary an acknowledgement of the mind-boggling transition I have made.

Posted by me at 2:05 AM | Comments (0)

April 16, 2003

An Army Without A Harness

I haven't written much lately. Let me sum up 2003 so far for you:

I have completely shut down. I can't write anything right now. I try writing, and I get so completely negative, so thoroughly black in outlook, that even I can't stand it. To write you need to see, and to see there needs to be some measure of visible light. Right now I am operating out of a zone of total lightlessness.

If you have been around me lately this probably hasn't appeared to be the case. I function. But I function because I have shut off all of my usual reflective outlets. I have decided not to think about how I am feeling. I did not even have my usual hormonal mood swing this month, which is a good signal that something's off. I can't start to feel anything, because I'll fall apart. I allow myself one obsessive line of thought, the one which leads me most directly to receiving the next week's unemployment check. Where to apply next, and have I sent out enough resumes for this week, I can think about. I can't think about anything else.

I am not so much worried for myself and my own employment as I am for all of us. A number of very important people in my life -- including my mother, my roommate, and until recently my sister -- are also unemployed.

My neighbor is over fifty -- that's all I know about his age, though as he is a yakker I know more about his health -- and he is unemployed too. He is an NRA member, a local Republican organizer, a father of two grown girls, and a jolly, gregarious neighbor who plants flowers in my yard for me becuse he likes to see things looking nice. He has a solid history working as a financial officer for local nonprofit agencies and running his own computer consulting business, and he is unemployed. None of these things he has done to align himself with wealth and privilege have kept him from unemployment.

Some days after we have joked about parking spaces and shaken our heads over subway fare increases I ask my neighbor how he is doing. Recently he got a second callback for a job that he would have been perfect for, and was happy and hopeful. The last time I asked he hadn't heard back from them. I had another bad weekend, he said, looking greyer than usual.

Some nights I hear him shouting.

Some days it's pretty clear I shouldn't ask how he is doing. One day, this man, who as far from my sensitive New Age boyfriends as he can get, told me he'd been on a crying jag. I worry he'll start thinking about his worth in terms of life insurance.

People I know who are not unemployed are generally underemployed. Most of the people who are fully employed hate their jobs.

I spoke with two of my brightest, most creative friends tonight. One of them is optimistic about an application he has in at Nickelodeon for a job drawing other people's characters, which would let him leave his current job, as all his friends have recently done. His current employer is playing fast and loose with freelancers and has recently set rules for what employees can and can't do on their lunch break.

The other one called me at one in the morning, saying he was on a rooftop of a building. It was not the building where he lives. The first thing he told me was that he had walked into his office the other day, an hour late for work, wearing a shirt with "MURDER" written all over it in ornate script, and made a present of a pair of his socks to his boss. You need to understand how deeply this kid, the son of a Vietnam veteran, has been spooked by the war. As far as I can tell from this distance, that stress, coupled with the stress of the long hours he works, seems to push his creativity off the page and screen, onto his walls and into his dealings with other people. "My life is full of metaphors," he said to me tonight. It was like talking to Andy Kaufman.

The reason I came to New York City to begin with was because I was convinced that if I stayed here long enough, one of these two brilliant people would start something fantastic, and maybe I could get involved. They are so brilliant that I would trade any brilliance I might posess to ensure that their brilliance got noticed and put to use. Then I would at least have the satisfaction of some limited sense of justice.

The boy in the murder shirt was unemployed for a little while as a result of that stunt, but talked it through with his boss. He is still working, but doesn't sound confident he will be able to get a good reference from this job. He has had this job since he graduated from college.

I hate that my own employment experience has been marred by references from bosses who barely knew how to use me. It makes me lose all faith to think the same thing will happen to the boy in the murder shirt.

I worry that my current period of inactivity will build up visible scar tissue on my resum�. I worry that people will take it to mean I am lazy or unfocused. I may be the latter, but I am not the former. Still I worry that they will wonder why I didn't have the ambition to move up in the world during this period of my life.

Worse, I worry about the other scar tissue building up. I've lost the urge to dance; my sex drive is down. Things I write ring false in my ear. The other day I faced down a well-to-do relative known for clucking scornfully at my mother's relatively modest way of life, and told him I was choosing not to go to graduate school in dance history because I wanted to make sure I was in a profession that was more "drought-proof."

This was a cop-out. What I wanted to do was charm my way into a job at this snooty relative's magazine, but I have spent too much time lately listening to relatives concerned with family propriety. I should have just done it. I can't make people hire me, but I'll be damned if I'll let them lose sight of my ambition.

"Drought-proof." Those words. His kind of words, and the words my father uses when he can't be nudged into optimism. I feel like I'm steering myself straight into the rocks of the kind of midlife crisis I thought I was avoiding by going to Hampshire in the first place. Didn't I want to be a writer? What the hell is going on?

They's a army of us without no harness, said the preacher in The Grapes of Wrath. (God, but Steinbeck is a balm to the soul these days.) We don't all have to be doing something creative; we know that. Just put us to work doing something useful, at least. Not editing commercials, not writing press releases, not cobbling together scraps of grant money into senseless programs that don't help anyone, not telemarketing or selling clothes. Jesus, it's springtime. I could be planting vegetables. I could be helping children learn to read. Why am I being asked to spend all my time sending out resum�s so that some government functionary can deem me fit to receive a meager unemployment check?

Posted by me at 4:09 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

April 13, 2003

Useful

Scene from a few minutes ago here in Amherst, in a grey living room in the Boulders:

Thinking about my sister earlier tonight, being stubborn and talking like she's going to quit her long-sought new job just because she has to sit at a desk for eight hours a day... thinking how she said instead, she might teach. Thinking how the President and his friends aren't doing a damn thing to put useful people like us to work, and all of a sudden I realize I've been saying "I want so badly to be useful" over and over without knowing I was saying it.

And across the room Jen is smiling beatifically at me, and I don't know why, and then I hear ducks quacking, and this loopy vocal music issues from her laptop.

And she's looking at the most beautiful and heartening online animation I've ever seen.

I want so badly to be useful.

Posted by me at 1:23 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

Fries And Propaganda: Let's Go Crazy Amherst Style!


To be sharecast at The Good Senator

Miss Florence Diner

99 Main St., Florence, MA
G: Such a delightfully powerful corn smell.

J: I'm going to go find the Little Miss Flo's room.

(time passes, fries arrive covered in white cheese)

G: Is that cheddar?

J: It's white cheddar. It smells real. It's good, we got good cling.

G: It's still got the tongue-sterilizing heat.

J: Yes, it's very hot. Hard to avoid, though.

G: Good cheese.

J: Very hot.

G: Yeah, we should give it a break.

J: Yeah, but we're obviously not doing that.

J: (Puts cheesy brown clot on plate) What's that?

G: Giblets. Fry giblets. What are you inspecting them for?

J: Dude. It's beefy goodness. Very definitely. It's chunks of beef that were
on the broiler. Do you not believe me? Do you not taste it?

G: No.

J: Smell the thing on your plate.

(a few minutes and fries later)

G: By now I'm really tasting the beef.

J: Yeah, it's all at the bottom.

G: Like fruit-at-the-bottom yogurt.

J: (makes face) We can't win. This is the fry tour from hell.

G: Look at that cling.

J: It's beautiful cling, but at what price?

G: (scrapes cheese off wax paper on bottom)

J: Oh, you're not even a vegetarian. Haven't you read Fast Food Nation?

G: No.

(beat)

J: Are ya gonna?

G: Sometime maybe. I haven't read a lot of things I oughtta. I haven't read
Manufacturing Consent.

J: How did you get through Hampshire?

G: Did anyone assign it?

J: Well, no.

G: Did anyone really read it?

J: I did.

G: You read a lot of things a lot of people didn't.

Posted by me at 12:35 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

April 9, 2003

Fries and Propaganda: The Lost Diner

Queens Burger, on Queens Boulevard, in Queens, NY
J and G are joined by Itamar, who doesn't understand the appeal of cheese fries.

I: So basically you're reviewing things where you say this could be worse?
J and G: (assent)
I: (looking at the fries the waitress puts down) This strikes me as wrong.
G: It's the great American pastime!
J: It is not!
G; Well, baseball isn't.
J: I didn't say it was the right answer.

I: (trying a fry) This is not so bad.
J: We're saving the cheesiest one for you.
I: (flinches)
J: How rude, I'm offended.
I: That's ok.

G: (drops a ketchup-covered fry on the paper)
I: That's a review.

G: They went so quickly.
I: You could get more.
J: That's so against the rules.
I: You have rules?

I: How many of these have you guys done? (long discussion, which alarms him) I don't know what to say.
J: Nobody does.
I: So you mean everything I say is written down?
J: Yeah, and she's not going to get it right.
I: I guess I shouldn't say anything about the government.
G: (writes down "Itamar hates the government, and says so")

Jen reveals that she was trained, as a congressional intern, to kill a guy with an ice scraper or a clipboard.

Posted by me at 9:06 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 7, 2003

The Gus Sindex 2003: Arenotations

(Note: Clicking this image will load a page with a much larger image.)

Posted by me at 1:21 AM | Comments (1) | TrackBack

April 5, 2003

How to waste your time today


If you haven't been already, go fill out this Harvard professor's online dialect survey. Make sure you have a lot of time to waste; it's long, but it's well worth it to find out that your fellow Americans have fifteen different phrases for the crap that you find in the corner of your eye when you wake up in the morning. (That'll show those snooty eskimos, with their 300 words for snow.)
Check out the maps especially, though they are less illustrative than I would have hoped. The use of modals ("might could"), for example, seems to have less locational correlation than I thought. You have to wonder how much this is influenced by Internet use demographics. (I figure not only are Internet users more likely to be mainstreamed for their education, they're also more likely to have moved away from their linguistic base.)

You also come to suspect that the maps reflect the population density of the US more than they do dialects. Still they seem to confirm the lament of folks as far back as Steinbeck and before that America is losing its regional linguistic charms.

Posted by me at 11:22 PM | Comments (0)

Ceci N'Est Pas Une Pussy


When I write something like "pussy is pussy" in the context I write it in, it might or might not mean that I have a base-genitalia-level view of women. You'd have to know me and my interactions with women to know that. I assure you any disrespect I throw your way has nothing to do with the fact that you're a woman. It has to do with you as an individual.

People I know roll their eyes when I tell them I'm going out to see Jon Land, former editor of the Omen, Hampshire College's longest-running publication. Was it because Jon spent his final college years devoting a page a week to reviewing beef jerky at a mostly vegetarian college? Was it because his friends responded to feminist chalkings on campus with satirical pro-rape chalkings? Was it because the libertarian-rag-turned-string-of-ethnic-slurs-and-terrible-ersatz-linguistics-turned-pop-culture-review-slash-inside-joke he published every week was mostly a waste of paper? I dunno. But to those nay-sayers, I say you'e not paying close enough attention to what Jon's saying.

Posted by me at 5:37 PM | Comments (0)