From the Archives. (June 2006, late) The French novelist and essayist Stendhal called his hometown "the capital of pettiness" and fled to Paris as soon as he could. I fled to New Orleans. With Danishgrrrl. And boy am I glad I did.
I savored every second of uninterrupted time that we spent together.
The city itself was sobering though, an empty shell of a once-vibrant place that I am only now able to even write about.
Flood-damaged vehicles still lie in rusted, crumbled heaps beneath overpasses. Small white trailers stand in the driveways of moldy houses still in serious states of disrepair. Blue-tarped roofs are everywhere. And plywood-covered windows and doors stretch across the entire city, punctuated by the snapped-off trunks of palmettos.
But where are the people? Even in the French Quarter—an area the floodwaters ostensibly spared—there were so few people.
I understand that tourist dollars are important right now and that our conference brought needed funds to the area, but felt as if we were invading the precious few remains of someone’s sacred shrine, that we were surfing on the residents’ collective misery in a gauche and callous way as the shell-shocked looked on, too tired and despondent to even react to our thoughtless invasion.
Empty turnstiles suggested where crowds once gathered and all I could think when I saw them was Here is the church. Here is the steeple. But where the bloody hell are the people?
No crowds filled the riverfront park or waited to board the Algiers ferry or stood in line at the cool aquarium and even the residents seemed baffled by the malfunctioning walk/don’t walk signs that nearly got us killed more than once.
And the over-riding stench of rotting garbage was everywhere.
Bourbon Street is a sad spilled beer of a place populated by a few mullet-wearing bleached-blond types clutching plastic and looking down the vast and empty streets, trying hard to find the party they’ve been promised. They whoop it up momentarily but, with so few of them there, their gesticulations are herely sad and overly desperate gestures, signifying nada.
Only Cafe du Monde seemed vibrant, still alive.
The place is surrounded by tropical courtyards maintained behind gorgeous wrought-iron gates, and the balconies still boast overflowing flowerpots set against beautiful pastel-tinted stucco .
Plenty of restaurants still offer gumbo and shrimp with remoulade sauce and crawfish etouffée too.
Danishgrrrl and I even stumbled upon a festive wedding parade be-bopping its way down Royal Street with a brass band leading the way.
That felt hopeful at least.
But what felt most hopeful (um, besides the fact that I learned oh so much that will help me do my job more effectively) was the fact that Danishgrrrl and I got to spend so much uninterrupted time together without the kids or our everyday obligations or deadlines and are now practically glowing in each other’s presence.
Sadly, we must now resume our workouts after all that Creole food that we consumed in the shell-shocked shambles of the once vibrant city that is now America’s shame.
READING: The Piano Tuner, which my reading group will discuss tonight.
BEST-OF SPAM (Subject Line): Your penis reminds a computer mouse? (Well, the florescent blue trackball on my Mac mouse IS a little like one of those dolphin dildos. And I do finger the little gray clitoris on my PC mouse when I need to doubleclick. Still, I’d have to say that my penises—‘cause who wants to be limited to one?—are much more shaftlike than any mouse I've seen. Dude.)
Thursday, February 21, 2008
232. THE MEANEST FLOWER, AND POWERFUL BODIES REDUCED TO TENDER BATTLEGROUNDS
Thanks to the human heart by which we live,
Thanks to its tenderness, its joys, and fears,
To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.
(Wm. Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood)
From the Archives. (June 2006) My former long-term partner has had to resort to anti-depressants to get through her chemo and her eyes look so damn haunted that I can hardly bear to look at her right now.
I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. I mean, she’s a 43-year-old triathlete with breast cancer who can hardly walk up the stairs now on bad days.
OF COURSE she’s depressed. And overwhelmed. And looking at the strong possibility of not living till old age. And exhausted. And in pain. And weak. And haunted.
And her medical degree, although helpful, comes with loads of statistics about every thing that can go wrong between now and the end of her life.
Who wouldn’t be depressed given this scenario?
I’m glad we’re having dinner tonight, but hate seeing her so sick, have such a very hard time swallowing this reality.
•
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
(William Wordsworth, from Ode: Intimations of Immortality, from Recollections of Early Childhood)
Now it is Sunday evening and I just ran inside after getting drenched in a downpour.
We’re in that stage of summer when there’s a thunderstorm with lightning practically every night and it is humid but beautiful so long as you keep the AC blasting.
Last night’s full moon was incredible. Danishgrrrl and I snuggled into the hammock and watched it darting in and out of the clouds, so luminous and beautiful and huge, then fell asleep with it peeking into our windows just ahead of the storms.
We slept in this morning, then went for a long hike by the river, where we hung out on the rocks and in the water and talked a lot before hanging out in the hammock again.
(Did I mention that the back yard is looking so cool now that a winding creek runs through it, inviting people to step out of the sunshine and into its shaded spaces?)
•
Had dinner with Tree Friday night to celebrate the end of her chemo. She looks and feels good now and even sauntered through the Race for the Cure on Saturday.
She’s not her normal marathon-running self yet but is doing so much better now that chemo has ended and even her hair is beginning to grow back in a little.
Radiation is easier but now she’s covered with tattoos and ink marks and plastic bulls’ eyes that tell the technicians where to zap her.
I guess you could say that her body is a battleground in an entirely different way than we’ve thought about that battleground before.
She said that Pottergrrl is terrified of this cancer and has returned to the Seventh Day Adventist vegan meals of her formative years.
I guess controlling the food you eat as a response to seemingly healthy people around you suddenly become gravely ill could provide some semblance of control, convince you that (given enough spinach) you might actually remain immune to death and illness.
And yeah,spinach could keep you healthy for a long time but, let’s face it, we’re all going to die.
I got no qualms with that, but would someone please get the sex toys out of the house before my family shows up to claim my stuff?
READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions
LISTENING TO: the glorious, sexy rain. Also weaklazyliar’s “Forgive Me”: I thought that truth was the line that anchored the kite. I thought that love was a kite to fly. I thought that I was holding on, but I was holding on to nothing, holding onto nothing. Forgive me.
BEST-OF SPAM: She needs better sexx, navy bean!!!
231 .JAGGED EDGES
From the Archive (June 2006) I can’t remember who said “Youth will go but passion and freedom will have to be reconquered each day of your life,” but I have been thinking about that line a lot lately.
So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.
It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.
Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.
This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).
Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.
Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.
Hope this helps.
•
So many things vie for our time, threaten to reduce us to strangers spasming at the stoplight as we worry about the next commitment we must reach on time because of some artifical frame that we have allowed our need for a salary to place around our true selves.
It is too damn easy to get wrapped up in crap like this and forget to live your life, forget to even notice that beautiful goldfinch right there in the tree beside you.
Work is consuming nearly all of my time right now and would be a twenty-four-hour job if I allowed it to be.
This isn’t surprising, given that it’s the end of the fiscal year—a normal June, really—but I am trying very hard to retain my passion, to hold onto the poet in the midst of my overcommitments and changing job landscape and arrogant yet oh-so-lousy new boss and her disappointing new administration (and did I mention that she has no idea how to perform my job yet keeps trying to micromanage me anyway?).
Mainly, this is very bad news because I must stay here another year before I am vested and have benefits for life upon retirement.
Danishgrrl says I am burned to a crisp and has suggested an impromptu cookout with friends till she can whisk me off to the beach for a long luxurious weekend.
Hope this helps.
•
Nothing good in the world has ever been done by well-rounded people. The good work is done by people with jagged, broken edges, because those edges cut things and leave an imprint, a design.—Harry Crews
So did anyone else hear that naval-gazing poet Billy Collins read on NPR last night?
Jezzzuslawd that man is self-absorbed! He read a precious little poem about poetry (with a capital P) that was basically a bunch of masturbatory self-congratulatory lines that didn’t amount to anything, and then Terry Gross practically peed her pants congratulating him.
Ugh.
I guess I need to remember that poet laureates are not chosen from poets’ poets.
As for me, I want to slap the pompous man in the name of O’Hara and Broumas and all the new and innovative poets writing meaningful lines today.
Meanwhile, the New York Times is running a series of articles on how genes move and change, written by the amazingly hot smartypants evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson and wow what a picture of her they have posted! It’s almost enough to make me subscribe to Times Select instead of reading my electronic freebie.
Not much time to read right now though—although I am following the impact of Robert Kennedy Jr.’s Rolling Stone article on how the Republicans deliberately stole the election in Ohio.
This is, what, the fourth report to verify this horrifying reality, but has the story been broadcast by the mainstream media
(who, for that matter, still haven’t reported that Gore actually won in Florid.)?
There’s something rotten in the state of Denmark when Americans have to listen to the BBC to find out about the demise of our democratic principles.
LISTENING TO: the wheels go round and round (I really love to watch them roll)
READING: Sartre’s Existentialism and Human Emotions
SANG IN SHOWER: Kasey Chambers’ “Pony”: When I grow up I want a baby. I’m going to name it after Ralph Stanley...
BEST-OF SPAM: Anything to please your woman (uh huh)
230. EROS
The inner voice of Eros is arbitrary, bizarre, impeccably honest, bountiful, and so powerful as to be cruel. It takes courage to hear its demands and follow them.—Patrick CalifiaFrom the Archives. (June 2006)That line is from Susie Bright’s site.
Huh. So Pat Califia of Macho Sluts fame has morphed into Patrick huh?
Frankly, I am not at all surprised.
I like the quote.
•
Meanwhile, I spent most of yesterday installing a French drain in my backyard and can hardly bend today, but it is nearly finished and I am heading out there again as soon as I finish my cup of coffee.
The drain runs along a dried-up creekbed that pools during rainstorms and stays too wet for decent grass. I plan to plant a weeping willow where the pipe empties today, after I take a photo of the huge pile of river pebbles that will form a rocky creekbed in my yard by this afternoon.
The mostly wooded backyard needs some attention, and, with luck, the landscape fabric I placed under the drain will keep the whole area clean of weeds and give it a nicer look while draining the standing water away efficiently and attractively.
LISTENING TO: Jenna Mammina’s cool cover of Honeysuckle Rose
READING: a biography of Benjamin Godard and The Poet’s Notebook
BEST-OF SPAM: pseudo saintliness
229. I’M LUCKY. I CAN WALK UNDER LADDERS...
Show me a 50-foot wall, and I’ll show you a 51-foot ladder—Arizona governor Janet Napolitano
From the Archives. (May 2006) Bush has come up with some dumbass ideas before, but building a 50-foot wall (which he calls a fence—I guess because he was advised to avoid those wall associations) that costs $3.2 million per mile along the border as our economy sucks is justifiably INSANE and doling this work out to cronies via yet another noncompetitive bid after every shady thing this administration has done is tantamount to shooting the bird at the tax payers whose dollars this president squanders on his ego rollercoaster.
228. SHE’S A HOUSE ON FIRE; I’M A HURRICANE
Remember that it only takes one hurricane in your neighborhood to make it a bad season” says Conrad Lautenbacher from the National Hurricane Center.
From the Archives. (May 2006) I hate to bring this up but hurricane season is upon us and guess who’s still in office, tuning his guitar.
I was thinking about the Katrina debacle last night after discovering some chilling yet somehow beautiful New Orleans footage and videos at http://www.filmstripinternational.com and http://www.chrisvids.org.
This made me remember how weird it was to drive from DC to Charleston after a hurricane nearly destroyed the city.
Signs as far away as Charlotte were bent to the ground and debris littered the roadside for hundreds of miles.
It got worse the closer I got to the coast. Then I reached Charleston and discovered that the damage was even worse than I had imagined,that the city had been effectively transformed into a bombed-out wisteria-dripping ruin.
Still, years later, when a local weather station warned that a hurricane was heading my way I said “Are y’all crazy? Hurricanes don’t come this far inland.”
Boy was I wrong.
Our seventy-year-old windows shook in their casements as Mud and I kept looking at each other and asking Is THIS when we fill the bathtub with water and stand in the stairwell with the mattress over our faces?
It was the only time I hated the fact that our house was filled with French doors.
The rain pounded against our thirteen-inch stucco walls so hard that they were saturated clean through. And, even though we scoured the neighborhood, we never found the patio furniture that the wind carried away or mangled beyond recognition.
(And did I mention that plants we’d never planted sprouted up everywhere even as we wondered what became of our tomatoes? Or that I was so damn desperate for a cup of coffee in our powerless town that I actually ground my beans with a rolling pin?)
All of which is a precursor to my saying that being in New Orleans next month is going to be mighty damn weird and I can’t believe that Bush isn’t doing more to prepare for this season (and that I can’t find some long-distance way to make plans to work in a neighborhood while I’m there) .
Meanwhile, Pat Robertson has announced that his god told him that a tsunami will hit the Pacific NW this year (which, to my undying delight, caused owlbear1 to write “Oh mighty Thor! I beseech thee to wack Pat Robertson’s pee pee”).
Meanwhile, tickets for Madonna’s new tour are a mere $350 apiece.
Puhleeez! I mean sure Madonna is great and like a virgin and yogatastic and all that and she survived that unfortunate equestrian accident unlike Christopher Reeves and I am sure that it is oh so fantastic to watch her because she is, after all, Madonna, but we are talking about HUNDREDS OF DOLLARS here and the biggest irony of all is that her tour includes a video montage of Bush, bin Laden, Cheney, Rumsfeld et al. juxtaposed with starving African children (all of whom could be fed and clothed for years if Madonna donated her profits to this cause).
Meanwhile, David Sirota points out in In These Times that the same neocons who preach the so-called culture of life are paid boocoodles of money from the health-care industry to look the other way when sick people skip a trip to the physician because they can’t afford to go.
He asks “Why do we hear so much about how well-off America is, yet our country has the highest number of uninsured citizens in the industrialized world?”
Why isn't that question asked? Because you can't answer it honestly without exploring how Corporate America has bought off enough politicians to make sure our government helps corporations perpetuate this travesty.
....I'm not naïve. I know that corporations exist for one reason and one reason only: the relentless, single-minded pursuit of profit, no matter who gets shafted. That is their stated purpose in a capitalist society, and that's fine. But in our country, corporations aren't supposed to pursue this purpose in a vacuum, unchecked, unregulated, unopposed. There is supposed to be a counterweight, a government separate from Big Business whose job is to prevent the corporate profit motive from destroying society.
That government once passed laws protecting the environment, so the profit motive wouldn't end up eliminating breathable air. That government once protected workers, so the profit motive wouldn't result in Americans toiling in sweatshops. And that government once demanded better wages, so the profit motive wouldn't result in a race to the bottom for poverty-level paychecks. But that government, as we all know, is long gone. Our government has been the victim of a hostile takeover. Over the last thirty years, Corporate America has applied its most effective business tactics to the task of purchasing the one commodity that's not supposed to be for sale: American democracy.
So yeah. Next time you’re watching one of those feel-good Blue Cross Blue Shield look-how-we-love-our-customers ads, remind yourself that HMOs doubled their profits in 2003 and spent $600 million on lobbying efforts and campaign contributions that year.
Sirota also points out that “Frist’s family was forced to pay $1.7 billion in criminal and civil fines for trying to rip off Medicare while running the nation’s largest for-profit hospital chain“ (a chain where I toiled in their crummy kitchens for 7 long years).
And to think it was once considered primitive to feast on the poor.
BEST-OF SPAM: Do you want your dick to be wallpaper for a computer? (Um. I’m not even sure how to answer that?)
227. BAD BREAKS AND EQUESTRIAN MEMORIES
From the Archives. (May 2006) Maybe it’s because I grew up in an equestrian town where the elite ponies train then race before going on to the big time.
Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.
Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.
And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.
Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.
Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.
Maybe it’s because racetracks and steeplechases and training grounds and polo chukkers are ubiquitous to the place.
Maybe it’s because my little brother was a fearless polo player.
And maybe it’s because a whole section of my town of origin was unpaved to better suit the magnificent thoroughbreds.
Yeah, maybe it’s because my childhood is laced with so many memories of hall-of-famers racing across the grass that I get a lump in my throat every single time I read about Barbaro.
Current headline > Barbaro’s Chances: 50/50.
226. VULVA LANDSCAPES AND FISCAL IRRESPONSIBILITY
From the Archives. (May 2006) Tee Corinne, author of the Cunt Coloring Book, is dying of cancer and needs some money. Susie Bright is holding a fundraiser for her but, well, I ain’t in California, so I sent in my donation through paypal because, as Susie says, Tee is the beginning of lesbian erotic photography.
Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).
Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.
This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!
Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.
He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.
Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”
Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”
And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?
Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..
Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!
Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.
With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.
Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.
I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.
I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.
LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”
READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet
BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand
Wish I could claim credit for my title, but Susie used it in Nothing But the Girl to describe Tee’s contributions to the lesbian community, so credit where credit is due for those vulva landscapes (which is about the only thing that would make me switch my painting style to landscapes).
Meanwhile my dear friend Tuscaloosa called to say she won a big writing prize and that a big-name press contacted her with a book contract.
This means that Tuscaloosa and I must hole up and write, but fast!
Meanwhile, with everything going on in the world, Yahoo! wants me to know that Jennifer Aniston is house-hunting in Chicago.
Meanwhile, Bush (the Texas touter of manufactured evidence and terror alerts who employs fear to convince working citizens whose wages continue to fall under his administration to wrap the American flag across their cross-adorned chests and slap yellow ribbon magnets on their cars and send their children off to die in an unnecessary, ineffective, and budget-breaking war against a population that didn’t even produce the terrorists who destroyed the twin towers) now has a six-year history of saying whatever he thinks will most effectively manipulate people regardless of the truth behind his claims.
He recently announced his plans to militarize the Mexican border, for example, but also told Mexico’s president that he does not plan to militarize the border.
Bush took his lying to new lows in a recent immigration speech though, when he said (with an um straight face) that “we cannot build a unified country by inciting people to anger or playing on anyone’s fears.”
Now I am SURE that the terror alert went up and telephone calls got traced when Jon Stewart commented on the ridiculousness of this statement by adding “that’s what terrorism and gay people are for.”
And what are we to make of this president’s assertion of a unified country when his administration has made it blatantly clear that it could give less than a shit about the mass of our citizenry?
Why doesn’t he just proclaim the truth: Y’all peons can just fend for yer selves coz I am giving my SEVENTY-BILLION-DOLLAR tax cut to my prep-school pals..
Budgetary brutality. Distributional bias. Fiscal irresponsibility. Oh my fucking my!
Molly Ivins notes that people who earn over $1 million annually will receive a nearly $42,000 tax cut while the average schmoe will receive a whopping $20.
With all this going on, I was only minorly surprised when a progressive legislator told me that she and her hubbie are going off the grid and joining a self-sustaining commune because they believe that we will reach an apocalyptic moment before the next election.
Well, I hope you have a lot of guns, I replied, since everyone will be coming for your goods after the big collapse.
Meanwhile, I guess I’m just fiddling as Rome burns, since I spent part of yesterday playing my long-neglected piano.
I am currently fascinated by the berceuse, which Jocelyn the tenor sings outside the cave of the eagles in Act II of Godard’s opera Jocelyn. The melody in the second section is especially wonderful, although my out-of-practice fingers just don’t do it justice.
I also went to a private garden's open house and purchased a few native plants that I haven’t been able to find elsewhere. This means that I need to quit typing and get off my ass and make a new plant bed, since it is already 11:30 on Sunday morning and my weekend is disappearing fast.
LISTENING TO: REM’s “Gardening by Night”
READING: Technobarons of the Twenty-First Century: Why Telephone and Cable Companies Want to Take Control of the Internet
BEST OF SPAM: hymen errand
225. NARROWSBURG, USA
(From the Archives) April 2006. Caught up on Bush&Co last night and the evidence of deliberate deception is overwhelming.
So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.
The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”
WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”
And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?
Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins
So here’s my suggestion: There’s a town called Narrowsburg in NY State. Let’s send the 29 percent of Americans who still support Bush there and let them live out their narrow worldviews in this aptly named place while the rest of us try to salvage what’s left of our democratic process and once vibrant system of checks and balances.
The deception started well before Colin Powell’s presentation to the Security Council but, as Howard Zinn notes in “Removing America’s Blinders” (The Progressive, 4.24.06), this speech, broadcast one month before the US invaded Iraq, “may have set a record for the number of falsehoods told in one talk.”
WMD evidence cited by Powell includes “satellite photos, audio records, reports from informants, with precise statistics on how many gallons of this and that existed for chemical warfare.”
And whee didn’t the newspapers and reading public jump on that irrefutable-evidence bandwagon as enterprising young conservatives launched their yellow ribbon magnet movement?
Edna St. Vincent Millay expressed her outrage at the outcome of the Sacco and Vanzetti trial by penning a chilling sonnet that begins
Read history. So learn your place in time, and go to sleep—all this was done before..
We do it better, fouling every shore; we disinfect, we do not probe the crime....
What would Vincent say today, when evidence of “the mendacity of our high officials” is so clearly fouling every shore?
Read history, so learn your place in time. That’s Zinn’s message too.
Zinn’s short list of lies our presidents have told to justify American wars follows:
President Polk and American slave-owners wanted half of Mexico, so Polk declared that Mexico “shed American blood upon American soil” and went to war.
President McKinley announced that America wanted to liberate Cuba from Spanish control, “but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out ... so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations.” Polk, likewise, said that we wanted to “civilize” Filipinos, but we really just wanted “that valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos” in order to get it.
President Wilson declared that we had no choice but to enter WWI in order to “make the world safe for democracy,” but the war was really fought “to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.”
President Truman “lied when he said [that] the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was ‘a military target.’”
And everyone—Kennedy (US level of involvement), Johnson (Gulf of Tonkin), Nixon (secret Cambodian bombings)—“lied about Vietnam ... all of them claiming it was to keep South Vietnam free of communism, but really [the US wanted] to keep South Vietnam as an American outpost at the edge of the Asian continent.”
Then [Pez-dispenser] Reagan lied about the invasion of Grenada and said that the tiny nation of Grenada was a threat to our nation.
Then Bush the Elder “lied about the invasion of Panama, leading to the death of thousands of ordinary citizens in that country” and “lied again about the reason for attacking Iraq in 1991” [on the day that his son Neil went to trial, thus effectively killing the story]. This invasion was “hardly to defend the integrity of Kuwait” but was, really, to “assert US power in the oil-rich Middle East.”
And the lies continue to hemmorhage.
Zinn points out the obvious—that, when leaders throw around the terms such as national interest, national security, national defense, most citizens assume that they are talking about We The People, but they’re actually talking about profits and markets, about protecting big business and increasing its wealth.
Zinn also points out that the WHO ranked the US 37th in overall health performance in 2000.
This rating was based on money our country spent per capita for health care.
And here’s a sobering (if oft-repeated) fact: in the richest nation in the world, one in five children is born into poverty.
(Remember those New Orleans photographs? There are a whole lot more poor people out there, even if the nightly news rarely serves them up for public consumption.)
We’re the most powerful country in the world, yet 40 countries have a better record of infant mortality rates that we do.
Cuba does.
We lead the world in the number of people in prison (yet resist charging our seemingly insane president with treason).
It’s clear our policies consider some people expendable. And it’s clear that Bush&Co are rewarding the megarich at the expense of the rest of us.
Our history of “slaveowner against slave, landlord against tenant, corporation against worker, rich against poor ... [of] ethnic cleansing, in which millions of Indians were driven off their land by means of massacres and forced evacuations ... our long history of slavery, segregation, and racism ... [our] record of imperial conquest in the Caribbean and in the Pacific, our shameful wars against small countries a tenth our size: Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Afghanistan, Iraq. And the lingering memory of Hiroshima and Nagasaki” tell a story that should make us all hang our heads until we summon up the courage to get out there and protest what is being done in our name.
Sunday, January 13, 2008
224. AGGRIEVED OUT-GROUPS
“The future. What’s that?”
—Belisario, one of a group of hunter-gatherers who left the Colombian jungle to join the modern world, as quoted in yesterday’s New York Times
From the Archives
(May 2006) I read today that Christianists are urging believers to participate in an Othercott by seeing a different movie on the day The Da Vinci Code opens.
And here’s a telling factoid. Their alternate movie of choice is Over the Hedge, a nice little animated feature.
(Keep those blinders on, guys, while the world moves right on past you.)
Meanwhile, the New York Times reports that the reverend Jim Garlow of San Diego is training pastors in methods to convince parishioners to throw Da Vinci Code parties in their homes because Garlow asserts that “it’s the task of the missionary to learn the language of the indigenous people” so that the missionaries can correct our ignorance.
(Interesting how he uses noblesse oblige empirespeak to justify his fundamentalism, huh?)
Meanwhile, writer David Brooks has announced that the problem with democrats is that we have become “a collection of aggrieved out-groups” who have not recognized that “multiculturalism and identity politics are dead.”
He sees democrats “purging the last vestiges of the New Left and returning to the older civic liberalism of the 1950s and 1960s” now . . . and yeah, I see a little of that too—but primarily from Republican wannabes who think assimilation with Bill Frist is how we move forward.
(Do you read “Forget The Queers” of “Forget Feminism” in this approach? How about “Forget Leadership?”)
Mother’s Day is this weekend, so perhaps David has been looking back fondly on the 1950s, when his mom no doubt wore a perky Ozzie-and-Harriet skirt and popped sleeping pills when no one was looking and filtered his daddy’s coffee through Eisenhower golf socks as she died inside.
Yes, David we all long for those golden days when the pill was unavailable and battered women’s shelters didn’t exist because no one saw the need for them and the thought of a husband being charged for raping or silencing his wife was unheard of. (But where would David have heard it anyway since women were so rarely admitted to positions of power?)
Dear Dave. Just so you know, we queers ain’t going away, despite how smugly you pronounce that we're passe.
Amazing how white men so rarely recognize that considering people unlike themselves to be special interest groups is just another example of their expectation of privilege.
Meanwhile, can you believe that the Senate approved a two-year extension of the boy emperor’s tax cuts that benefit the super-rich at the expense of the rest of us?
Turn off your television sets, boys and girls. This is reality.
SANG IN SHOWER: Holly Near’s “Simply Love”
READING: Donna Tartt’s Little Friend
LISTENING TO: Jennifer Warnes’ cover of Leonard Cohen’s “First We Take Manhattan”: I don’t like your fashion business mister. I don’t like those drugs that keep you thin. I don’t like what happened to my sister. First we take Manhattan. Then we take Berlin.
223. ADVOCATING A GAY “LIFESTYLE”
From the Archives
(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.
The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.
Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)
And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.
And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?
He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.
(Go team)
No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).
Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.
(May 2006) I’ve been catching up on my reading and so will be blogosampling again.
The Washington Blade reports that Brigham Young University is considering expelling 5 students who participated in last month’s Equality Ride demo whether or not they’re gay, despite the fact that one of them demonstrated off campus.
Why? Because their honor code forbids students from “advocating a gay lifestyle.” (sic)
And, on our side of the country, a judge has thrown out a case filed against UNC Chapel Hill by a Christian fraternity that wants funding even though it refuses to sign an inclusive pledge.
And speaking of hot-button social issues, has anyone else noticed that the governor of Illinois has taken a lesson from Bush&Co and is using his executive powers to make hot-button changes despite the homophobic Christianist legislators in his state?
He instructed the state’s health department to direct 10 million dollars in grants to embryonic stem cell research, for example, after Bush’s idiotic pronouncement of what is and is not appropriate scientific research, and used executive privilege to bypass the legislative process and grant domestic-partner health-care benefits to state employees.
(Go team)
No big surprise, but the Christianists (who make up the 32 percent of Americans who still support the boy emperor and appear to be just fine with his secret torture camps and wiretapping) don’t like it one bit when a Democrat uses such powers to set progressive policy.
Meanwhile, a 15-year-old created a set of videos about a group that Susie Bright refers to as our “Onward-Christian-Bullshitters Administration.” WWJD is the strongest of the bunch and will leave a lump in your throat and fill you with more than a little outrage (especially if you saw My Name Is Rachel Corrie last night).
Check out http://peacetakescourage.cf.huffingtonpost.com/ and please forward it to your friends.
222. THE EVERPRESENT EXPERT, NOW APPEARING AT A GYM NEAR YOU
From the Archives
(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?
Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.
Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).
Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.
In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.
I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.
Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”
Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.
THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.
(May 2006) Ever noticed how there’s always a guy who insists on passing himself off as an expert despite the fact that he doesn’t know jack?
Well, I encountered a member of this tribe today and handled it with my usual tact and southern grace.
Big surprise that he wore a big gold cross and a gleaming St. Christopher medallion (making it very easy to imagine him at anti-choice rallies, insisting that he instruct women in how to behave in their own bodies).
Dude and I attended a 2-hour Understanding The New Weight Room seminar, where he constantly interrupted the female trainer leading the session to inform us that (1) women have no upper-body strength and (2) women have no business in a gym.
In between, he told women where we should actually stand to use equipment, where we should actually walk in the new facility, how we should actually behave in general. And he became increasingly agitated when we either ignored him or told him (in my case) that none of us came to the session to hear his opinions, so why didn’t he just shut up and let the trainer do her job.
I’ve lifted weights for years now (but am unfamiliar with this new style of equipment) and, like the exercise physiology grad. student/trainer who led the session, know my way around a weight room. So, near the end of the session, when she asked for a volunteer who was familiar with the leg press, I stepped right up, smirked at the guy, then promptly pressed a 190-pound set.
Then, leaving my settings in place, I said, “So do you actually work out on weight machines or just talk about them?”
Turns out Mr. Scrawny could barely press these weights down and, when he did, they was so heavy that they flew back fast and loud, nearly pushing his bony knees into his chest.
THAT got a smirk out of all of us and left him red-faced and stewing for the rest of the session.
Conclusion: Sometimes it’s good to be the asshole.
221, MINUTEMEN IN LUNCH COUNTER TOWNS
From the Archives
(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.
Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.
As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).
Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.
Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!
•
This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).
Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.
Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.
So why the mad rush to production?
Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.
Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says
(May 2006) The ultra-conservative anti-immigrant vigilante group the Minutemen will be in Greensboro NC tomorrow and progressive organizations are calling for folks across the south to show up and tell the thugs that they are not welcome there.
Unfortunately, I will be in a tedious training session for our new and decidedly inadequate health insurance during this event.
As near as I can tell, this new PPO pays for my mammogram but, should it be suspicious and my doctor proactive enough to order an immediate ultrasound, then this diagnostic procedure will not be covered (because we “elected” to change the definition of my Routine Appointment by introducing a Diagnostic Procedure).
Put another way: BCBS is willing to penalize me and decrease my odds of surviving cancer in order to ensure that their organizational schemas are kept under separate nutshells.
Gawd. No wonder my doctor friends are leaving the field in droves!
•
This is one of those weeks in which I have something scheduled every evening through Sunday (which is why I am doing laundry at 11:30 PM).
Tonight, I attended a reading of the disturbing play My Name Is Rachel Corrie. My favorite local experimental theater company hosted this reading and asked invitees to help them decide whether or not to disrupt their fall schedule in order to produce it this year.
Rachel Corrie is the 23-year-old American peace activist who was crushed by a bulldozer while acting as a human shield for Palestinian homes in Gaza and this play was created from her journals and e-mails.
So why the mad rush to production?
Well, after 2 sellout runs in London, the NY Theatre Workshop was SUPPOSED to begin a run of the play next month, but they suddenly cancelled production, citing a need to “mollify” the pro-Israeli community.
Katharine Viner, co-editor of the play, says
if a young, middle-class, scrupulously fair-minded and dead American woman, whose superb writing about her job as a mental health worker, ex-boyfriends, troublesome parents, struggles to find out who she wanted to be, and how she found that by traveling to Gaza and discovering the shocking conditions under which the Palestinians live—if a voice like this cannot be heard on a New York stage, what hope is there for anyone else?
Besides the obvious censorship implications, this cancellation is of particular concern because the producer says he is not concerned about people who see the show, but is instead concerned about the people who don’t see the show but declare it viciously anti-Israeli anyway.
Viner again:
Since when did theatre come to be about those who don’t go to see it? If the play itself . . . is not the problem, then isn’t the answer to get people to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship?
Indeed.
Rachel's words condemn violence and express outrage about attacks by the fourth largest army in the world on people whose livelihoods and food and water and shelter have been taken away from them.
That’s powerful stuff and well worth presenting to the world, despite the censors’ threats.
This is the second play I’ve seen this week that asks how clean our tax-paying hands are.
The off-off-Broadway Guardians, staring Katherine Moennig (the actor who plays Shane on The L Word), was poorly attended and may have already closed, but I am so glad I saw it.
Moennig portrays Lynddie England as a somewhat sympathetic grunt who understands the implications of ignoring a direct military order far more than she understands the implications of her (abhorrent) actions.
Then there’s the vacuous Guardian reporter following her in search of a bigger office.
At first I was concerned that the playwright planned to make a series of easy jokes about uneducated southern hicks who grew up in violent landscapes and so spread their violence around the globe, but the play was better than that.
In fact, the Oxford-trained reporter comes off as the true empty shell in the end—as an opportunist who cares about the atrocities committed at abu Ghraib only insofar as they can further his career or heighten his experience of violence as an erotic sport.
A (gorgeous) lawyer representing Gitmo prisoners spoke after the play and reminded us of yet another of Bush&Co’s many communications ploys: They basically changed the way they refer to prisons in order to avoid Geneva requirements for how prisoners of war must be treated in prisons.
She also reminded us that, while armed services scandals are typically punished by moving up the chain of command to the ultimate authority who authorized the crime, in the case of abu Ghraib, a handful of women who all say they were following orders they were left no choice but to obey have taken the fall while their superior officers remain in command.
220. EPISTOLARY EROTICISM AND THE RICH AND THE ARTLESS
From the Archives
(May 2006) Just read Susie Bright’s description of being included on an infuriating Pushing The Envelope writers panel at the recent LA Festival of Books.
What fool would put Susie and Karen Finley and Dennis Cooper—legitimate visionaries who do push the envelope and encourage us to think and fuck and gasp and experience the world in new and profound ways—on the same panel with the milquetoast let-me-flaunt-my-riches-and-good-looks-as-my-bona-fides-’cause-there-ain’t-nothing-else-of-substance-here lame late-late-night TV host Craig Ferguson (a man who actually sums up sex as an act between “one man and one woman” in between berating feminists)?
The intent was obvious—showcase a privileged white man performing The Man Show and watch a bunch of progressive writers react (in the interest of creating a buzz at the festival, no doubt), but the organizer somehow failed to inform the writers that they were being set up for a public smackdown.
(May 2006) Just read Susie Bright’s description of being included on an infuriating Pushing The Envelope writers panel at the recent LA Festival of Books.
What fool would put Susie and Karen Finley and Dennis Cooper—legitimate visionaries who do push the envelope and encourage us to think and fuck and gasp and experience the world in new and profound ways—on the same panel with the milquetoast let-me-flaunt-my-riches-and-good-looks-as-my-bona-fides-’cause-there-ain’t-nothing-else-of-substance-here lame late-late-night TV host Craig Ferguson (a man who actually sums up sex as an act between “one man and one woman” in between berating feminists)?
The intent was obvious—showcase a privileged white man performing The Man Show and watch a bunch of progressive writers react (in the interest of creating a buzz at the festival, no doubt), but the organizer somehow failed to inform the writers that they were being set up for a public smackdown.
“Complacent, over-monied right-wing jabberers. They’re just as ubiquitous and just as annoyingly useless as the wanna-be Maoists back in the mid 1970s who did their level best to remind us that personal fulfillment and artistic expression were politically incorrect and counter-revolutionary. Popular politics invariably spawns a host of trend-riders just as surely as a damp basement spawns mildew.
—an apt comment someone left on Susie’s blog
Meanwhile, Kate Clinton said (at her show last night) that she woke up dreaming that Suzie Ormans was going down on her.
She also described our boy emperor as someone who gives new meaning to the term “unattended luggage.”
Apt, eh?
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
219. UNIVERSAL MUSIC
From the Archives
(May 2006) This just in:
(May 2006) This just in:
The poet Muriel Rukeyser said the universe is composed of stories, not of atoms. The physicist Werner Heisenberg, on the other hand, declared that the universe is made of music, not of matter. And we believe that if you habitually expose yourself to toxic stories and music, you could wind up living in the wrong universe, where it’s impossible to become the gorgeous genius you were born to be. That’s why we implore you to nourish yourself with delicious, nutritious tales and tunes that inspire you to exercise your willpower for your highest good.
Astrologer Caroline Casey offers an apt metaphor to illustrate how crucial it is for us to hear and read good stories. She notes that if we don’t have enough of the normal, healthy kind of iodine in our bodies, we absorb radioactive iodine, which has entered the food chain through nuclear test explosions conducted in the atmosphere. Similarly, unless we fill ourselves up with stories that invigorate us, we’re more susceptible to sopping up the poisonous, degenerative narratives.
The preceding oracle comes from Rob Breszney’s new book PRONOIA Is the Antidote for Paranoia: How the Whole World Is Conspiring to Shower You with Blessings
218. CONTINUITY AND THE DECIDER
Let's review the rules. Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put ’em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know—fiction!
—Stephen Colbert, keynote speech at White House Correspondents’ Dinner, 28 April 2006
From the Archives (Cinco de Mayo 2006) I’m on seemingly perpetual hold while trying to make an appointment to get my bashed-in car repaired and feel as if I’m standing at St. Burchardi Church in Halberstadt waiting for the next chord in John Cage’s “As Slow a Possible” organ recital to peal through the air.
(The next chord in the first movement of this recital won’t sound for another full month. Then either silence or another chord will follow and will perhaps offer some variation in musicology, if a pipe is added or deleted from the organ.)
Let’s mark our calendars in advance for 5 September 2070, when the second movement of this slow recital begins . . . and tell our grandkids to pass on the Prophecy of the Slow Recital, for it is foretold that, 639 years (after the second movement begins (or when the church gets sick of dealing with a deceased composer’s work), the composition will finally be completed.
Actually, hearing ANY new chord would be a vast improvement over the wretched musak version of “Afternoon Delight” that is currently playing on my speakerphone in between the sporadic Your call is very important to us and will be answered in the order in which it was received. Please stay on the line. message.
Meanwhile, I’m having a true lunch break for a change because I feel lousy and skipped my workout. Stayed up till 2:30 AM finishing an illustration project and slept very little in the city, so am probably just exhausted.
And I’m reading about teledildonics as I snarf down my salad.
Don’t know what teledildonics is? Well pull up a chair chere!
Author Liz Langley (of Alternet’s “Cybersex Grows Up”) describes teledildonics as “the ability of two people, in separate locations, to manipulate sex toys via the internet. You could finger your mouse in New York, and make someone in California sing the ten-second aria.”
Yep. Apparently, a few computer-savvy American soldiers are already using the Sinulator to keep their lovers happy from afar.
The possibilities are mind-boggling.
•
Meanwhile, student stores is closing for renovations, so I just purchased the following items for ~$2 each:
1. a CD of American lesbian composers
2. Physics Demystified: A Self-Teaching Guide (coz I have forgotten way too much)
3. House of Leaves
4. Susan Ludvigson’s Sweet Confluence: New and Selected Poems
5. Break, Blow, Burn: Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three of the World’s Best Poems
6. Carolyn Forché’s Blue Hour (poems)
7. Robert Creeley: Just in Time, Poems 1984–1994
Whee! Lots of reading to do after I finish this project.
I also have lots more to write about and am so so happy that I finally got to see my bestgrrl again. Haven’t had time to process the trip yet, so that'll have to come later.
LISTENING TO: John Cage and Lou Reed's Songs for Drella (of course).
217. UNDERWIRE ALERT. QUICK! RAISE THE TERRORIST THREAT LEVEL TO RED!
From the Archives
(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.
Yeah.
Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.
Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.
Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.
Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .
. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!
Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.
Whew!
•
So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.
After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.
As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).
Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).
Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.
(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)
Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.
So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.
They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.
This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.
These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).
We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).
They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.
Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.
We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.
And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.
Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.
What a shitty-ass situation all around.
(May 2006) I finally rolled into my driveway after a long day of traveling and, as my pal Cin (who picked me up from the airport) said, I can tell you’re completely exhausted, Medea, because your voice sounds different.
Yeah.
Mostly, though, it’s different because my reconstructed shoulder is hurting like hell from hauling a suitcase and laptop all over creation.
Lars and I left the Village around 10 this morning and I’ve been traveling ever since. Took the subway to Grand Central Station (while reading a scene in Carole Maso’s Ghost Dance that occurs in Grand Central Station), then hopped the express bus to LaGuardia.
Sat around for an hour and a half reading (after my underwires alerted security to the fact that I have big tits), then sat in the Atlanta airport for another two hours before finally touching ground here.
Cin took me out to dinner afterwards and we talked nonstop till she pulled up in front of her house . . .
. . . where we discovered that someone crashed into the driver’s door of my cute little car!
Fortunately, a young woman came running up as we were studying the damage and fessed up that her new-driving mom was making a U-Turn and hit me.
Whew!
•
So. Back in the nineties, the village of Chapel Hill produced a poster showcasing the coolest doors in town.
After staying at Shulamith’s apartment yesterday, I decided that someone should cop this idea and produce a Bathtubs of the City poster.
As any struggling artist (who isn’t subsidized by Daddy Warbucks) knows, the bathtub is seldom in the bathroom in low-income NYC apartments. Instead, it's usually somewhere in the general vicinity of available plumbing (and smack dab in the middle of the kitchen or living room, in most cases).
Shuli’s tub is by the kitchen sink and in clear view of any location except the toilet in her apartment (and, if I lived there, I would make a collapsible tabletop that fits over the thing).
Anyway, Lars and I stayed there last night because Shuli is currently in the hospital and we needed to take care of her cat this morning anyway.
(Actually, Shuli is not just in the hospital, but also currently believes that she OWNS her building and the two buildings beside it, and she demanded that Lars hand over the keys. She also said that Lars is dead to her and shoved her out the door. And she insisted that her own cat is dead, even after Lars showed her photographs of us petting the cat.)
Poor Lars. She’s a good friend and went back for more abuse today because she knows Shuli will remember the visit when she’s back on her meds.
So, understandably, I’ve been thinking about Kate Millet’s Looney-Bin Trip a lot today—especially because Shuli discussed the premise with Kate in detail as she worked on the manuscript.
They both assert that people with mental illnesses have the right to choose whether or not they take medication and both insist that medications blunt their brilliance.
This is a complicated subject for me, since my mother has an adult-onset suicidal paranoid schizophrenic disorder which caused her, at various points in my childhood, to OD in an attempt to silence the voices, and wrap the piano in tinfoil in an attempt to silence the voices, and douse her children with witch hazel or Lysol or whatever she believes at the moment would keep us safe from the voices at that moment, and to ultimately shoot herself in an attempt to escape the voices.
These occurred while she was off her medication as we were trying to get her help (but when she did not yet qualify for help because she was not deemed an immediate threat to herself or someone else).
We did manage to involuntarily commit her twice—a legal procedure that I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy—and this forced her to take the meds that keep her relatively functioning and, frankly, the meds have kept her on a fairly even keel over the years, so I have to say that I disagree with Kate and Shuli (but understand their resistance to meds).
They see the meds as blunting their brilliance, but it seems to me that mental illness is the real culprit here and not the meds.
Sure, mania can convince you that you are filled with brilliant perceptions as you crank out reams of writing (been on mania-inducing drugs; done that), but it can also convince you that your neighbor's mailbox requires you to kill them.
We're all familiar with those sad statistics too.
And the fact of the matter is that Shuli is not brilliant when she quits taking her meds.
Instead, she overflows her bathtub until the ceiling below hers collapses and sets her living-room floor on fire and stands in the middle of her apartment screaming until the police haul her away.
What a shitty-ass situation all around.
Monday, January 7, 2008
216. UNITED STATES OF STUPID’S DAY WITHOUT IMMIGRANTS
From the Archives
(May 2006) Irregular girl has a Flickr photo of a graffitied wall that reads “pay your own way.” I’m trying to parse this sentiment with our country’s resistance to illegal immigrants, who point out regularly that businesses survive on the sweat of their minimum-wage labor.
I’m in Brooklyn right now but we’re headed to PS1 to see Jessica Stockholder’s gallery show soon. We’ll head over to Dietch Project’s Garden Party next, where we hope to see a mound of earth with beautiful nude women draped on it. Then we’ll head over to Union Square for the big immigration rally.
The East Village is weird to Lars because the Second Avenue Deli, an institution, closed since she left and there’s just a big sad empty building where it used to be.
Meanwhile, yesterday was too beautiful to be indoors so we spent the day walking all over the city.
Met up with pals for lunch, then went to check on Shulie’s cat (because Shulie quit taking her meds again and was consequently committed). It took thirty minutes, but we finally coaxed the kitty out from behind some paintings.
Actually, Lars and I may stay at Shuli’s after we see Guardian, since I’ll need to hop the bus from Grand Central Station to LaGuardia early the next day and, well, the cat needs some attention.
I got up early this morning and went up on the roof to stare at the water. The statue of liberty was there with her white arm raised and, beyond that, New Jersey sat in a smoggy gray haze.
Instead of enjoying the view though, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to wake up in Seattle and have coffee on my deck while staring across the water at snow-capped mountains.
If Lars stays on the west coast, then there’s a good chance that I will wind up there eventually.
•
Met Tuscaloosa for an impromptu dinner before leaving town. She was awarded a two-week stay at a writing retreat and wants me to apply for the same time period, since we get tons of work done when we retreat together (and eat very well to boot).
Meanwhile, anyone keeping up with the King and King controversy—not to be confused with the Rodney King controversy, in which actual people were harmed—knows all about the uproar in Massachusetts over a teacher reading this tale of a crown prince who rejected one beautiful princess after another before falling in love with a handsome prince.
He and the prince marry, seal their commitment with a kiss, then live happily ever after just as het fairy-tale lovers do, and all was right in the world until a meddlesome “parents’ rights” group threatened to sue the school for portraying queers in a positive light!
Meanwhile California fundie doctors are claiming that their religious beliefs give them the right to treat lesbians differently than other patients and are refusing to provide fertility treatments to us.
It shocks me that this case was thrown out of lower court three years ago.
They’re job is to treat patients, not make moral or religious judgments about us.
Meanwhile, University of Cumberland in Kentucky expelled a twenty-year-old boy for identifying himself as gay on his personal webpage.
It’s happening right here folks.
(May 2006) Irregular girl has a Flickr photo of a graffitied wall that reads “pay your own way.” I’m trying to parse this sentiment with our country’s resistance to illegal immigrants, who point out regularly that businesses survive on the sweat of their minimum-wage labor.
I’m in Brooklyn right now but we’re headed to PS1 to see Jessica Stockholder’s gallery show soon. We’ll head over to Dietch Project’s Garden Party next, where we hope to see a mound of earth with beautiful nude women draped on it. Then we’ll head over to Union Square for the big immigration rally.
The East Village is weird to Lars because the Second Avenue Deli, an institution, closed since she left and there’s just a big sad empty building where it used to be.
Meanwhile, yesterday was too beautiful to be indoors so we spent the day walking all over the city.
Met up with pals for lunch, then went to check on Shulie’s cat (because Shulie quit taking her meds again and was consequently committed). It took thirty minutes, but we finally coaxed the kitty out from behind some paintings.
Actually, Lars and I may stay at Shuli’s after we see Guardian, since I’ll need to hop the bus from Grand Central Station to LaGuardia early the next day and, well, the cat needs some attention.
I got up early this morning and went up on the roof to stare at the water. The statue of liberty was there with her white arm raised and, beyond that, New Jersey sat in a smoggy gray haze.
Instead of enjoying the view though, I was thinking about how wonderful it would be to wake up in Seattle and have coffee on my deck while staring across the water at snow-capped mountains.
If Lars stays on the west coast, then there’s a good chance that I will wind up there eventually.
•
Met Tuscaloosa for an impromptu dinner before leaving town. She was awarded a two-week stay at a writing retreat and wants me to apply for the same time period, since we get tons of work done when we retreat together (and eat very well to boot).
Meanwhile, anyone keeping up with the King and King controversy—not to be confused with the Rodney King controversy, in which actual people were harmed—knows all about the uproar in Massachusetts over a teacher reading this tale of a crown prince who rejected one beautiful princess after another before falling in love with a handsome prince.
He and the prince marry, seal their commitment with a kiss, then live happily ever after just as het fairy-tale lovers do, and all was right in the world until a meddlesome “parents’ rights” group threatened to sue the school for portraying queers in a positive light!
Meanwhile California fundie doctors are claiming that their religious beliefs give them the right to treat lesbians differently than other patients and are refusing to provide fertility treatments to us.
It shocks me that this case was thrown out of lower court three years ago.
They’re job is to treat patients, not make moral or religious judgments about us.
Meanwhile, University of Cumberland in Kentucky expelled a twenty-year-old boy for identifying himself as gay on his personal webpage.
It’s happening right here folks.
215. YOU CALL THIS A SUSTAINABLE WORLD?
From the Archives
(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?
Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).
My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).
My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”
(Ponder that.)
The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.
How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?
(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)
Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.
There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.
Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.
My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).
Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.
My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.
Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.
•
Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.
Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.
(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)
Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.
Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.
A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.
•
And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.
That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.
So I’ll end with a poem:
(April 2006) Short, brutish, and dirty. Is that all life is?
Here I sit in my studio at 11:48 p.m. on a Thursday night on the eve of my trip to NYC. It rained all day (again) and my grass is suddenly very high (something I can do nothing about till next week).
My drive home from the theatre tonight was a journey through a foggy undifferentiated landscape that no more than suggested a sustainable world (whereas my pals' experimental Chekhov interpretation that I just witnessed squashed flat any possibility of a sustainable world).
My favorite local theater staged this adaptation of Two Sisters (On Ice), which they describe as “a passionate look at desire and disenchantment set in an Edward Gorey-like landscape with a Hawaiian soundtrack.”
(Ponder that.)
The male cast alternated between stiff brown uniforms and revealing tighty-whities and one sister masturbated whenever the subject of work came up. Oh I looooong to work. I really looooong for work, she moaned.
How could one possibly rise in standing ovation to a Chekhov play when his message has squashed you flat into your seat?
(And yet sex, in all its emptiness, does still offer at least momentary transcendence.)
Came home to play around on my keyboard and then stare at my cello and guitars and twenty-four-volume art encyclopedia set—at this stuff that can occasionally make my existence seem meaningful.
There’s The Life of James McNeill Whistler, sitting beside me on a shelf. And Vita Sackville-West’s letters to Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir’s biography, Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae, Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy, Kafka’s Trial and, because I live in the violent southland, Larry Brown’s Fay and Dorothy Allison’s Bastard out of Carolina.
Plato’s Parable of the Cave asks me to consider whether or not I am turning to look at the light and Warren’s Symbolism of Subordination reminds me that I have not chafed against black leather in entirely too long.
My worn paperback copy of Works of Love, Kierkegaard’s nonpseudonymous picture of his Christian faith, has been overtaken by the solid blue planes of Sartre’s paperback Existentialism and Human Emotions (since Sartre tied Kierkegaard to my easel some years ago and continues to lash him there as I cogitate, demanding that Søren face the implications of personal action in this purposeless universe).
Meanwhile, Daniel Chirot is bursting at the seams to explain in professorial terms How Societies Change as Jane Wagner shouts that reality is “nothing more than a collective hunch” y’all.
My Cherokee sacred calendar competes for space with Ken Wilbur’s Brief History of Everything and Carolyn Forché’s always nearby Against Forgetting: Twentieth Century Poetry of Witness.
Ernest Hemingway still sneers from The Sun Also Rises (a title, that, although the writer ultimately chose to end his life, nevertheless suggests hope) and shock and awe: america’s war on words offers cross-continental evidence that our bloody clashes leave us with bloated defense budgets even as we suffer from near-global and decidedly immobilizing post-traumatic stress disorder.
•
Meanwhile, the dada exhibit in DC ends in two weeks and I have very little chance of getting there, let alone considering firsthand the artists’ interpretations of their culture-destroying world ravaged by war.
Bet my favorite fur-lined cup is there, too.
(Yeah yeah. I know this is an exhausted image now—just a symbol of a time and a place in which artists still had sufficient faith in humanity to be outraged by the fact that, left to our own devices, we have a tendency to sprout short brutish hairs on our fine bone china and pick each other’s bones and feeble attempts at meaning clean—or to at least satirize them wickedly well.)
Then there’s Foucault, iconoclastically exploring why we as a species feel compelled to continually analyze and discuss sex.
Meanwhile I am trying to figure out what to do with my two plastic tubs of organic broccoli florets, half a plastic tub of organic mixed herb greens, bag of Brussels sprouts (which I hope will still be salvageable by the time I return), an unopened packet of good goat cheese.
A good meal, but that’s probably more broccoli than I can eat in a day, even if I do cook it in some good sesame oil and garlic and have it with tempeh for breakfast.
•
And now it’s morning and various experts are announcing that the possibility of frost is officially over for this season. I started fragile plants from seeds weeks ago and will plant them in earnest when I return from the city.
That’s not my worry right now though. For the moment, I just need to eat some breakfast and head to the airport.
So I’ll end with a poem:
WILD SWANS
by Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892–1950)
I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying.
214. CYNICISM SURVIVAL KIT
From the Archives
(April 2006) The New York Times recognizes today’s somber twenty-year anniversary with an interactive “Chernobyl’s Legacy: 20 Years Later” online exhibit that includes these observations:
(April 2006) The New York Times recognizes today’s somber twenty-year anniversary with an interactive “Chernobyl’s Legacy: 20 Years Later” online exhibit that includes these observations:
We all know what Chernobyl is, what an atomic plant is, but I’ll tell you how we saw it. An enemy had come to our country. We had to defend ourselves. And we set out to protect our country, our people. We all had those feelings, all of us in the 100-man brigade (that initially went in to create the sarcophage). But of course it differed from a real war. In a real war, shells explode, bullets fly, bodies fall, blood flows. Here, the sun was shining overhead. Beautiful gardens stood all around, bulging with fruit. Birds were singing. You couldn’t possibly have imagined that all this was death.—Arkady Rokhlin, Nuclear Engineer and one of the Chernobyl liquidators
In war you know where you are, where the neutral territory is, where the enemy is, where the plane is, how its bombing you, how its chasing you, how it catches you. There you couldn’t see the enemy. You see it when you’re burned already. When you’re a corpse. It’s invisible. It’s everywhere and nowhere.—Constantin Baskin, Nuclear Systems Specialist
Your soul is covered in blood. You want to cry, but you can’t.—Leonid Shavray, Chernobyl firefighter
This reminds me of a poignant poem that French surrealist and working-class hero Jacques Prévert wrote during his military service in WWII.
BARBARA
(translated by Harriet Zinnes and published in Carolyn Forché’s Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness)
Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest that day
And you walked smiling
Glowing ravishing drenched
Under the rain
Remember Barbara
It rained without letup in Brest
And I passed you on the Rue de Siam
You smiled
And I smiled too
Remember Barbara
You whom I did not know
You who did not know me
Remember
Remember that day just the same
Do not forget
A man was taking shelter in a doorway
And he called out your name
Barbara
And you ran toward him in the rain
Drenched ravishing glowing
And you threw yourself into his arms
Remember that Barbara
And do not be angry with me if I call you by your first name
I call all those I love by their first names
Even if I have met them only once
I call all who love by their first names
Even if I do not know them
Remember Barbara
Do not forget
That gentle, happy rain
On your happy face
On that happy town
That rain on the sea
On the arsenal
On the boat of Ouessant
Oh Barbara
What shit war is
What has become of you now
Under the rain of iron
Of fire of steel of blood
And he who held you in his arms
Lovingly
Is he dead missing or still living
Oh Barbara
It rains without letup in Brest
As it rained before
But it is not the same everything is ruined
It is a rain of mourning terrible and desolate
No longer even a storm
Of iron of steel of blood
Only of clouds
That burst
And disappear like dogs
Down the streams of Brest
Like dogs that will rot far away
Far away very far from Brest
Of which there is nothing left
If it’s raining for the fourth day in a row tomorrow, then I will probably hang out in a café and write another entry before I get on the plane. Otherwise, I’ll be back late next week with plenty of stories from NYC.
Now, however, I'm going to a play.
Ciao.
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