The Dancing Sausage Web Journal

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July 29, 2003

destroying dick cheney's dears

I won't be making as much money as *I* would like until I can devote a small fraction of my disposable income to purchasing and then destroying everything that dick cheney holds dear --glyph

Posted by me at 11:42 PM

July 28, 2003

Good News I Have Been Waiting For

A study conducted on behalf of Yahoo says teenagers and young adults spend more time on the Internet than watching television. Certainly this has its bad sides (eyestrain! carpal tunnel! and yeah, who knows whether the study is biased) but I take this as also having a great many positive implications: proof that given a choice, people would rather have more control over and opportunities to participate in media; also that despite giant media corporations' hammerlock on the content of other mass media, there are still opportunities to reach a great many people with alternative viewpoints on politics and global events. This would of course mean that Internet pipeline issues (who owns the wires and airwaves) will probably be increasingly crucial. yeah, so maybe I'm restating the obvious...

Posted by me at 11:30 AM | Comments (0)

July 26, 2003

weapons-grade plutonium

gus: I told you [your present is] here in my room glyph: it could be in your room... on some sort of digital media gus: heh... what could I possibly give you that you don't already have? glyph: weapons-grade plutonium gus: on the WEB glyph: what?! you're not going to put weapons-grade plutonium and give it to me in a BOX, it would be a web-based control panel for nuclear holocaust.

Posted by me at 7:23 PM

When The Light Rail Returns To Pasadena

Eli made me aware that Gold Line service between Pasadena and LA opens today; he was going to the inaugural ceremony. That article features some neat quotes from present and former SoCal political leaders about mass transit; alas, it's also a reminder that this transit system is more oriented to serve rich bedroom-community commuters than poor short-hop ones.

Out-of-towners looking at the whole system map may not feel quite as sunk by the realization locals are bound to get that this rail setup is even more spread-out and useless than Boston's. Stops at Del Mar, Lake, Allen and Sierra Madre Villa, along the freeway?! That's fucking overkill, and won't be of much use to people in the residential areas; and then the route from there goes to desultory spots way off in the distance, with the other lines so spread apart that there's no way you could walk from one station to another. Still, the Gold Line will eventually go to Little Tokyo, which makes my selfish Other-consuming side happy. Maybe Little Tokyo will feel a little less like a ghost town.

Update: Eli took pitchers. The ones looking at traffic and freeways from the train are kind of neat, when you think about it.

Posted by me at 4:08 PM | Comments (1)

Birthday Mixes

By non-popular request (meaning only one person has asked), here are the song listings from the five different CDs I burned to go in the Kissinger pinata:

Bourgeois Love Mix
Song	Group	Original album
Sleep on the Left Side	Cornershop	When I Was Born for the 7th Time
Theme For A Nude Beach	The B-52's	Bouncing Off The Satellites
Ocean In Your Eyes	Smoky and Miho	Y Tu Mama Tambien Soundtrack
Didn't They?	Erin McKeown	Distillations
Our Game Is Over	Figurine	The Heartfelt
Soleil	Billy Tipton Memorial Saxophone Quartet	Box
Nixon's The One	Mono Puff	Unsupervised

Club Kissinger for the World Mix
Song	Group	Original album	Genre
Sar Me Khere Avava	Vera Bila	Rom-Pop	Gypsy
Insomnio	Cafe Tacuba	Y Tu Mama Tambien Soundtrack	Rock En Espanol
Mayeya	Mongo Santamaria	Skin on Skin	Salsa
plankton man- elemento n	nortec collective	the tijuana sessions vol.1	Electronica
aaja sonehya- shaz	unknown	unknown	Bhangra
Sorozo	Tabu Ley Seigneur Rochereau	Babeti Soukous	Soukous

Club Kissinger Rock Mix
Song	Group	Original album
She's Boss	Psycotic Pineapple	Where's The Party?
Have You Forgotten About The Bomb?	Barcelona	ZeRo-oNe-INFINITY
Lovely Rita	the Nields	Gotta Get Over Greta
Blackbirds	Erin McKeown	Distillations
Xiquexique	Tom Ze	Fabrication Defect
La Mer	Little Rabbits	Radio (?)

Dancing Sausage Birthday Mix
Song	Group	Original album
Como Ves	Ozomatli	Self-Titled
Cry 4 Help	Har Mar Superstar	Self Titled
Like Humans Do	David Byrne	Look Into The Eyeball
Disseminated	Soul Coughing	Irresistable Bliss
Lafitte's	Squirrel Nut Zippers	Perennial Favorites
Casino Soul	nortec collective/fussible	the tijuana sessions vol.1
Power Lunch	Har Mar Superstar	You Can Feel Me

Nixonfolk Mix!
Song	Group	Original album
Queen of Quiet	Erin McKeown	Distillations
Falling Star	Tom Prasada-Rao	Hear You Laughing
Mi Alma y Yo	Maria Marquez	Eleven Love Songs
Richard Nixon's Still Alive	Tom Prasada-Rao	Hear You Laughing
Sar Me Khere Avava	Vera Bila	Rom-Pop
Subterranean Homesick Blues	Bob Dylan	various
Didn't They?	Erin McKeown	Distillations
Sculptor	Dan Bern	Smartie Mine

Posted by me at 1:40 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack

July 25, 2003

Matrix Ping Pong

Jacob sent me a link to what appears to be a Japanese ping-pong performance piece. Wait a few minutes before you convince yourself you know what's going on. This is mind-blowing.

Posted by me at 10:23 AM | Comments (0)

July 23, 2003

Parties That Didn't Suck

Jessamyn has posted pictures of her Fourth of July party and surrounding events.

Posted by me at 4:59 PM | Comments (1)

July 21, 2003

Bitch Watch

My first article in Bitch Magazine has been published in the Maturity/Immaturity issue, though I believe it is not online. It's in the Columns section, On Language specifically. I would say go pick up a copy, but you should really subscribe! Bitch is in difficult straits right now, financially, and they need subscriptions to survive -- newsstand sales are not reliable enough, and don't give them as much money as subscriptions. This is a quarterly magazine, not half as demanding on your time as the New York Review of Books and light on the wallet, too. Great for boys as well as girls. Yes, especially great for the Sensitive New Age Man. (I have to say this; 90% of my readership is composed of doting ex-boyfriends. ok, that's a slight exaggeration. some of you are not aware yet that you are going to be my boyfriend.)

I cannot recommend Bitch Magazine strongly enough. I have known from the first issue I picked up that I needed a subscription. It is the first feminist publication I read that really spoke to me; it's not your mother's panicky, prudish feminism, and it most definitely not Antioch's code of sexual conduct. Anything that can convince me to switch to Lunapads despite my original gross-out reaction -- and some hectoring from a certain avowed-feminist ex-boyfriend who didn't really understand the ramifications of giving a woman control over her choices regarding her body (on this front) -- is great by me!

Posted by me at 2:39 AM | Comments (1)

Sunday In The Park With Kissinger

Despite the perennial fear of social awkwardness which almost caused me to cancel it earlier this week, my birthday party actually happened today. A good dozen or so of us assembled in the south of the Sheep Meadow in Central Park, on the kind of beautiful balmy day which brings the entire city out to sunbathe and read or play frisbee, not as a group but rather in myriad twos and threes which overlap peaceably as a giant Where's Waldo? illustration, discs gliding erratically overhead like feeding swallows.

Four of us from Pasadena were there, close friends and folks who have known each other from as long ago as first grade or before -- Casey, me, Pia, and Meredith. Our Girl Scout troop came up an inordinate number of times, for some reason -- I guess it was initially because I insisted that Girl Scouts was the reason I knew how to make a pinata, and we went from there. Meredith insisted she did not remember this; nor did she or Pia recall that our Girl Scout troop leader had revived an old badge that the Scouts had done away with that required us to wear white gloves and serve tea, the Hospitality Badge. (I swear it exists; it's the one with the steaming teacup I have sewn to the pocket of my black herringbone blazer. I'll ask Janice; she's the one with the encyclopedic memory.)

I brought the last one up because I like to emphasize the stuffy undercurrents of class and stiff gender stereotypes that ran beneath the surface of our otherwise girl-positive education. Stephan, on leave from his union organizing experiences in Detroit, grumbled that he thought that kind of thing was what Girl Scouts were for, along with political indoctrination. Meredith, meanwhile, defended hospitality as a good thing to learn.

It is a strange thing to bring so many of my liberal high school friends together with my progressive Hampshire friends. It is perhaps one of my few accomplishments of the past few years that my perception of mixed demands on my behavior in this situation didn't make me a gibbering wreck. Half the time I had the boy in the murder shirt -- not actually the murder shirt today, lately he has taken to wearing shirts inside out; this one, as far as I could tell, was camouflage -- murmuring things I couldn't quite catch but knew were either derogatory or despairing about the conversation in my ear. Totally rude, really, but I'm willing to give him some leeway these days. Had I been taking him seriously, I might have thought quite poorly of myself for being so superficial.

But no matter how trivial the conversation may seem when I am together with my oldest friends, there is something deeply nourishing to it. We can rehash the same decades-old event a million times, weigh the weaknesses and strengths of a personality of someone we knew as children still see through the lenses of teenagers, and it fills the holes dug in us by college failures and adult uncertainties.

Small and shining Pia... she formerly of the Horrible Perm, the Indian dancing techniques, the stutter aquired at age seven, the stubborn academic seriousness, now recently become a doctor and long since grown out of our shared adolescent awkwardness into a well-deserved beauty... Pia called me the other day to get directions to the party; when I told her that Meredith was coming, she said, You know, she was my arch nemesis in high school. Something I'm sure Meredith never really knew.

I laughed. For me, Meredith was The Woman Who Does Everything More Beautifully Than You Do, positively unreachable in her SAT and Harvard-acceptance perfection. Today she is something more; she has left international banking for a job assessing teaching recruitment programs in the city. And yes, she runs marathons -- actually, not just any marathons, but the original Marathon in Greece. A few days before, when she herself had called for directions, Meredith had repeated a few bits of advice on how to set up the party with an eerie echo of obsessiveness reminiscent of our prep school's stage mothers.

This is where good stories come from: the kind of human complexity which can only spring from a real sense of history. (Or, sometimes I think, twelve years in a prep-school pressure cooker and a healthy dose of reality thereafter.)

We are these things to each other. I offered to give Casey references when I told her I'd housesit for her dog, and she shrugged it off. You worked at the Humane Society, she said; I know your pets. Who else these days knows that I was That Girl Who Likes Animals? Who remembers that Pia was the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, then recalls her struggle to get cast when the theater director arbitrarily decided to shut her out of school shows because of her speech impediment? Who but Meredith would look chagrined to know that Casey packed her Russian-English dictionary when she prepared to move to New York?

We are each other's symbols and storytelling tools, and while we have grown out of parts of our stories, I mean something among these people.

It makes me think irony goes hand in hand with professional mobility (I mean geographical, not upward) and the decay of social support networks. It's an easy form of humor when you can easily detach from social meaning, and there's nobody's toes to step on. Postmodernism, of course, is another logical conclusion. It is important for liberating us, but the balance is easily lost. I have so many friends who are hurting for lack of their roots.

* * *

But I'm sure you're not hear to listen to an aging woman get garpy. You're probably wondering what happened with Henry Kissinger.

Midnight last night found me doubled over with laughter on the floor of the kitchen as I came to grips with how ad-hoc the pinata was turning out to be. I had slacked off -- taped the signature nose on afterwards, never really provided for adequate jowls, and, as it turned out, hadn't checked my paint supplies to make sure I had something to paint his suit and head. The tempera in the basement was mostly hard. The suit turned out all right, bluer than I'd like maybe -- but the combination of the red, yellow, and white paint, after I'd inadvisably fucked some green into the mix, was more or less the color of beef jerky.

So I ended up on the subway with an armload of too-skinny, pemmican-paper-mache Kissinger which looked more like a cross between George Washington and a cigar-store Indian caricature. I applied a "HELLO -- My Name Is Henry Kissinger" nametag to its chest. A woman on the six train was trying very hard not to laugh. A handful of Spanish-speaking guys spent their train ride sounding out the nametag.

We got some looks and inquiries heading through Central Park, which was fun. People would come up to kibbitz, discussing whether his poorly-made arms were bloody stumps or whether there was just blood on his hands. There were one or two opportunities for education; Ms. Pozner and myself, ever ready to be on-message, both took the opportunity to let people know about the case against Henry Kissinger. But unfortunately, it seems, we neglected to let everyone at the party in on the joke.

Because of my nervous liberal heart, I'd like it known that I saw this coming, and did take a few precautionary sidesteps. Murder-boy got the rope first, and was working his way towards making a noose. I don't know about that, I said; I don't like the lynching connotations. (I know someone made a confused noise about that -- I mean, after all we were about to beat the man -- but by that point things seemed to be moving a little faster than real-time; we were making a lot of noise, attracting some amount of attention, and I think we were trying to get the smashing done with.)

Well, sling it under his arms, someone else said, and we did. It was a good idea anyway; this was the kind of pinata that was likely to lose its head after one round of beating anyway, so we needed a stable solution. I went first; he lost a leg. Casey snapped pictures. Jenn hollered for blood. I spun Pia and sent her after the pinata. Jeff sang, "Anything you can bomb, I can bomb better" in a comic voice. Murder-boy quietly agonized over the spectacle we were causing. And then, behind me --

"You're proud that you're doing this to a black man? That's a lynching!"

The guy hollering looked like a crank. "It's not a black man, it's Henry Kissinger," I called, still spinning people towards the pinata. "He's wanted internationally for crimes against humanity!"

Things started to fall apart; I lost track. The crank wouldn't leave. Other people in the area seemed to be taking more notice. Jenn, who perhaps had not initially recognized the connotations of the beef-jerky skin, slunk off to play frisbee, mortified. The pinata lost both arms and its head and there were a few frantic attempts to string it up by its gaping armpits.

Well before the beating was done, my friend Marquise, who is black, said a hasty goodbye.

I don't know if it was just the pinata that did it; there was an awkward moment earlier in the party when deeply-pious Marquise had found himself onstage in a game of Adverbs (it's like charades, with talking) in a church choir with Rob and with Itamar... fundamentalist-hating Itamar, who had misheard the adverb "erratically" as "radically"... and was consequently asking his fellow choir members when they were going to go beat up some faggots...

I need to do what on the front lines they call a "vibes check"... I came out of the whole thing feeling like the rest of the party was buoyant enough that it wasn't too badly marred by the incident, but Rob, the only other person of color at the party, also beat a rather quick retreat soon thereafter... I suspect my feeling of equilibrium comes from the fact that I saw this coming from the moment I realized I'd made the paint too dark (jeebus, the guy is the king of international policy geeks, honestly -- how much time does he spend outside of his mole-rat warren? gotta be as pasty as the nerdiest of them); it's not like I went into this unaware that I was likely to be called a racist.

By now the word racist doesn't hurt me much. I have unearthed many bad prejudgements within myself, examined them and worked to eliminate them; I know they are not all gone, but all I can do is continue to confront them. And I done my time. I have been one of three white people working in a black and latino school, and I understand even that amount of being singled out probably doesn't compare to what it's like being on the other side of a minority equation. Similarly, I know that while the word "racist" is a terrible word to be labeled with, I am not entitled to feel it is on the same level being the target of a racial epithet.

Still, think about it. Today, "racist" is the worst insult you can level at a person. (An educated person? A professional, a center-to-past-liberal person? I'm sure there's qualifiers. And "Nazi" is worse, certainly, but people so often use it as shorthand for "the worst thing imaginable" that it has become almost a cartoon.) It's a horrible, horrible thing to say. Not only does it mean you're bad to other people, but it also means there's something inherent in your personality and attitudes which others can see and which is stupid and backwards. What does it say about our society that this is now one of our worst insults? I guess it's not so bad a thing. (And I think it's not so universal. I know people for whom insults to their mother or deficiencies of respect shown are still worse.)

But it still foregrounds race. I think we should make something like "classist" an equally bad insult. (In the world where social engineering actually has an effect.)

* * *

On a lighter note, I got really cool presents. Pia is going to take me to see Urinetown, and Itamar gave me a teddy bear wearing a Pokey the Penguin tee-shirt. I'm happy. Getting good presents makes you feel like there's people out there who really understand you. All the birthday wishes from everyone were also very wonderful.

Posted by me at 2:19 AM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 18, 2003

We are truly blessed

KCRW is going to present concerts in NYC. Apparently this is in response to online listening from The City Which Has No Decent Radio Stations. All I can say is thang god. No information yet about when these will be, and sadly, Clear Channel appears to be a co-promoter. And really, New York has plenty of good concerts; what it needs is good radio, so I'd rather they were opening up shop out here (which I imagine would be super-expensive). But regardless, this is good news.

P.S. -- Did you know that KCRW is among the top 25 webcasters on the planet? Awesome! KCRW ascendant! Los Angeles uber alles!

Posted by me at 11:12 AM | Comments (8)

Can someone please explain this?!

So Gray Davis is being put up for a recall vote. Understood; this asshole has done nothing but screw things up since he got elected. And obviously successors are being felt out. That makes sense. But the Democratic Party isn't running anyone to replace him?! And this is likely to leave Californians with a choice between Arnold Schwartzenegger and Richard Fucking Riordan?!??! Where is the logic, here? I don't understand that article, it dosn't make it clear. Is this a matter of supporting Davis against a recall? I swear to god, I am never voting Democrat again, these people are a bunch of fucking weasels.

Posted by me at 9:56 AM | Comments (1)

July 16, 2003

They're Chewable!

I'm not sure if Christine has read Jhonen Vesquez's comic I Feel Sick (sorry, this is the internet, but for some reasons there is shit-for-pages on that fantastic story), but she's channeling it nicely. She's stolen Brooke's throne for the moment; ILMFAO.

Posted by me at 12:10 PM | Comments (0)

July 13, 2003

Fascinating diseases

So I went and looked up shingles, which I am increasingly convinced I have (way to go, body -- couldn't you have waited a goddamn month and a half until I have health insurance?!), and apparently, like Epstein-Barr, cytomegalovirus, mononucleosis, and chicken pox, it is a herpes virus. Not the herpes, as in "I can feel them herpeying around up there," but a variant thereof. I find the relationship of these seemingly divergent illnesses fascinating to the point where if I had to do it over again, I'd write an NS Div I about them. but I don't have to do one, thang god.

In the process of locating someone who can assuage my fears about this rash, I reached my grandmother, who happened to let drop that a great-aunt of mine has geographic tongue. What a fantastic name. And hooray, since it runs in families I can now look forward to possibly having that, too. That, heart failure, manic-depression, and Parkinson's. Well, at least my family's not Ashkenazi (sorry IST ;))

Posted by me at 11:13 PM | Comments (0)

Name That Rash!

This is as close as I'm getting to putting nudie shots on my website. For now.

This started as five little blistery bumps which looked like they might be some sort of bite -- four teeth on the upper jaw, one on the lower? -- which I think appeared a day or so after I came back from Vermont (or the day I did?) You can see them, they're the darker red ones. They're slightly lower than my navel on my right-hand side. Navel shown for size comparison.

For those of you who are familiar with my self-mutilation habits, this is not just more of "the usual," although, ok, I fussed with it a little once it showed up. But it's itchy, has a sort of a crawly feeling to it, and is in an unusual location. And I've now developed a patch in a parallel location on my back:

So -- any bets? Yes, I think the crawly bastard who hangs out on my ceiling over my bed is definitely a suspect. Also, there is a family history of shingles, so that's also a possibility. Or you could figure this out the Hampshire way -- "learn by doing," rub up against me, and catch it for yourself. (leer) Discover from the inside!

Nobody's coming over to play at my house anymore, are they?

Posted by me at 9:13 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack

July 10, 2003

Preview

Here's the graphic that would go on the hypothetical CafePress T-shirt, if such a thing were to happen:

Gratis J Chabot, as usual.

Posted by me at 12:27 AM | Comments (5) | TrackBack

July 9, 2003

BIRRRTHday (I would like you to dance!)

After a lot of thought (and a great deal of whining which I posted and then took down), I have decided what to do for my birthday.

I am going to have a party in Central Park on Sunday, July 20th starting at 3:00 in the afternoon, weather permitting.

There will be a piñata. It will be shaped like Henry Kissinger.

If you're reading this, you're invited. Write or call me to RSVP and I will give you more details on where it will be. (The easiest way to write is to use the "Contact" link in the right-hand column, or I guess you can comment below, though that makes the guest list less of a mystery.)

If nobody shows up, I will beat Mr. Kissinger my own damn self and go swing dance and hang out with Thoth.

BYOB. Believe me, you don't want me choosing your alcohol.

Posted by me at 12:15 AM | Comments (3) | TrackBack

July 8, 2003

Detritus: It's Too Darn Hot

I'm having a profoundly difficult dance class experience this month, and I'm surprised to realize it's not the first time this has happened to me.

My dance instructor is petite and pretty. Much of the time the class has the same kind of atmosphere as the space beside the gym where the girls who were slightly more commanding than they were popular or cute would direct the rest of us, who were generally not popular or cute but loved dancing anyway, through routines they made up on the spot. I mean, literally. This woman will teach us one move by demonstrating it twice in its entirety -- no isolations -- put us through it, ghost another couple of moves to make sure she knows what she's doing next, string all the moves together, forget some of them, let a vocal member of the class redo a move, change the moves again... I ask questions about weight and balance which feel like they're in another language, and she repeats what she's just said, and nobody else seems to have a problem, and we move on.

Well, my questions are in another language. Bollywood dance moves are clearly influenced by classical Indian dance, which has a set of hand gestures which are ornate and exacting and play hell with my poor dumb carpal-tunneled mitts. And there's something totally maddening in what you do with your feet: instead of relying on step-ball-change patterns which start you on one foot and leave you free to move off on the other foot by the end, there's a very common ball-step-stomp move which usually progresses to another move on the same foot you started on. It's like relearning how to walk.

This feels like math class used to. Halfway through I start telling myself I'll never get it, and by the end I'm so convinced that I really don't get it.

Though I sometimes got frustrated with the inexactness of my African dance teacher, in retrospect I think I really took for granted how well she ran her class. I worked with her for a year and a half, and in that time I forgot how much it sours a dance experience to butt heads (metaphorically) with other people around you while dancing. African dance was ideal; I didn't have to deal with anyone's body but my own, and the teacher was seasoned and enthusiastic. In tango, swing and ballroom classes it was much more common for me to come away bored or frustrated; if it wasn't the teacher failing to explain some exchange of hands, there was some schlep who tripped on his own feet, or held me rigidly, or needed to have the moves explained to him again... or couldn't handle a woman leading. Learning anything as a woman in a social dance class can be difficult at best.

* * *

Drove up to Vermont for the Fourth and left my car with Jessamyn to sell. If you want it, that's where it is.

Most of the way up I listened to musicals -- 42nd Street, Oklahoma! and How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying. The latter is quite possibly the least compelling musical ever written, and yet somehow its songs are the ones stuck in my head now. Specifically, the mock-Ivy-league fight song. Where did they find a lyricist who was totally devoid of wit?

The other two I had roles in during my last two years of high school. One of those landed me on the cover of this month's Oak Tree Times -- see page nine of the Spring '03 issue, that's me in the center bottom bunk in the upper-right-hand photo -- with nary a mention of my participation. After four years in New York I don't have much pride left, but it's hurt.

I'm not quite sure why I gave up a focus on performing. Most likely it's because what outlets Hampshire College provides are either totally shitty, cliquish, or ephemeral. (Theater department, chorus, drum circles: totally shitty. Women's a-capella group, student bands: cliquish. Improv comedy groups and cable access shows: ephemeral. Student films: a little of column A, a little of column B.) I also had a sort of time-switch installed in me by a cousin who moved to LA at a tender age to become an actress; she convinced me that the brutality of the industry wasn't worth getting involved with. She was beautiful and hip, and I trusted her; so, well before I graduated high school, I allowed myself to give up on the idea of acting full-time.

But I really, really miss it. I love showing off, I love making people laugh, I love dancing and I don't mind singing, either, though I'm cowed by the entry of a number of my high-school friends into careers in opera. You know what? I love the fourth wall. I love this website acting as a fourth wall, but it's not enough. I love getting comments, but I need to hear laughter, too. It weirds me out that a lot of you reading this may not identify me as someone who acts (outside of being too dramatic on the subway). It weirds me out that I've lost this conception of myself, too.

I rode back from Vermont with two friends of Jessamyn's I'd just met, a married couple a few years older than me. They live in Providence, and got into idle conversation about the city. I drifted in and out of it. Both of them went back and forth about whether Providence is worth it. The guy said that Providence, like Boston, doesn't really have anything to it -- nothing going on, no business, no scenes. It has a complex, as a result.

They wrangled over where to go next. They've already done Seattle. I suggested Austin; I know a lot of people doing interesting things there. That's it, they said; that's where they've been talking about going, because there does seem to be a burgeoning scene there. And we debated what kind of skills one has to have to catch a scene before it flames out. The woman said, Is it really worth it to just follow scenes around?

Now there's a hell of a question.

I know one woman who seems to have stayed immersed in something or another which is interesting and marginal in New York City for a great many years. She was a groupie to bands which played at CBGBs back in the early days of punk. She's in touch with the folks at 2600, is an eye in the maelstrom that is the local Pacifica channel, and seems to know just about any local performance artist you could care to name. And, like anything that has been immersed for a long time, she's... well... bloated, pale and a little disoriented.

I follow scenes around. Small ones, usually, but I do try my hardest to, somehow. It's pathetic. I just attach myself to them.

Deciding to go to Columbia is the first thing in a while that has more to do with storing up my own fuel instead of barnacling on someone else's ship, but I'm still not sure exactly what I'm going to do with it.

I'm unsure of how to reconcile the various parts of myself right now. I am having a hard time identifying which ones are the most important. There was something to my engagement in activism at Hampshire and in subsequent years; at the same time, I feel like I lost part of me -- a good part of me, the part that wasn't so goddamn deadly serious all the time -- to it. And there was something to my hazy, creative lack of focus in high school, but I did leave it behind some years ago; should it stay there? Does it conflict with the bad case of morals I developed at Hampshire? Would it even come back if I called it?

* * *

There was some interesting activity over to the Crip Walk Project today; check it out. I happened to be online when a couple of people (from Houston?) called me on the mat about my take on tagging. They told me a few things I didn't know, though they still left a lot about that particular form of grafitti a mystery to me. Tonight at the 46th/Bliss Street stop there were a few tags scrawled across the beige paint in black marker, one of which featured the word PUSSY in large letters. It was strange to catch a tag there -- usually all you find of them is a new beige stretch and a "WET PAINT" sign in the morning. I found a little crawl going up my spine thinking about what the folks on the C-Walk page had said. Was this part of a game, like they said? Or was it some whitey-white-ass middle-class kid like the guy at my prep school who used to tag "ZONE" all over everything? How would the person who scrawled it feel the next time they walked by and saw it painted over? Would it really be like taking down a part of them, even if the tag was simple and done hastily? And what does that do to a person who's already bored and alienated enough from society that the first thought on their minds when they think about defacing someone else's property is making the next high score in a game?

* * *

If I could undo one thing about another human being's personality, right now I would make my landlady/roommate not the kind of person who likes to fall asleep with the TV turned up really loud.

OK, so what I'd really do is neatly excise George W. Bush's sense of entitlement... then I'd turn down the TV.

And then I'd go out and brutally silence whoever it is outside who is giving voice to cris du coeur.

Posted by me at 12:25 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack

July 6, 2003

Churts

I'm finally getting around to setting up a Dancing Sausage store at CafePress. I've got one graphic which includes the logo above plus a little somethin' somethin'. My question for you-all is this: On the back, should I put the "Strunk and White Enabled" slogan, or is the phrase just awkward and stupid?

Posted by me at 9:49 PM | Comments (5)