So much for space cowboys.
It’s official: Fox isn’t ordering any more episodes of Firefly.
update— What The Man has to say on the subject. Fingers crossed and wood veneer knocked.
Why shouldn’t we talk to ourselves.
These days it’s not so much, “If you aren’t outraged, you aren’t paying attention,” it’s, “If you aren’t outraged, you’re on another planet entirely.” —Got to thinking after whipping off that quick’n’dirty screed against landmines yesterday—what about, you know, the nukes? The depleted uranium shells? The fact that getting all huffy about use of landmines is in a weird sort of way conceding that there will, at some point, be an invasion? (Which point I am stubbornly unwilling to concede as yet—darkest before the dawn and all that—but I am a fool.) Speaking out against landmines—which, unlike nukes, will almost certainly be used (iff); which, unlike depleted uranium, poses a much more direct long-term threat; which will pose a threat to American servicefolks during the course of the war and Iraqi people for decades thereafter—still, it seems almost misguided. A reed in the storm. Whistling the wrong way entirely as you march past a graveyard in the dark.
Or from there to the Trent Lott imbroglio: it is nice watching him squirm, yes, and it’s bleakly funny watching everyone pile on now that it’s “safe” to do so, but it doesn’t change the fact that anyone who’d been paying attention had known this about Lott for years and years and it didn’t matter one whit.That, as Slacktivist puts it, “the GOP is not segregationist because Trent Lott is its majority leader. Trent Lott rose to become majority leader because the party is segregationist.” And removing him from nominal power while satisfying will do nothing in the long run to the much larger problem of which Lott is merely a symptom. Come 2004, there’ll still be fliers passed out in Maryland and Louisiana and Mississippi and elsewhere letting black voters know that if the weather sucks on that November Tuesday, why, heck, they’ve got a week left to turn in their ballots, unless, of course, they were late in paying a bill in the past year, and Sean Hannity and E.D. Hill will still be reminding their wannabe dittoheads that the Democrats were segregationists too, back in the day, and what about that Georgia state flag?
A couple of weeks ago over at Body and Soul—one of the few blogs which should be on everyone’s morning must-read list—Jeanne d’Arc posted the back and forth of an intriguing email conversation she’d had about liberal communication that wasn’t backs-to-the-wall knives-out-and-rats’-teeth defensive (all too rare, these days), and while you should read it through if you haven’t already, but I want to muse on something d’Arc said, parenthetically, in this letter, right here: “I mean, fundamentally, it’s the quintessential feminist demand: Let us tell and interpret our own stories.” And yes—yes, it is.
Yes, but.
Thing is, telling our stories isn’t the problem. (Or interpreting them; interpretation is another way of telling a story.) You get up on your soap box (wherever it might be) and you open your mouth and you speak.
The trick is getting people to listen. To pay attention.
Because other people have bigger soap boxes and louder voices and insist on telling your stories for you and getting them all wrong, and even then the people you’re all talking to have their own ways of reading this story or that story and interpreting it for themselves, and, well. And it’s frustrating because the truth is out there and attention must be paid and so you stand tall and tell your story—and yet. They’re all yammering about John Kerry’s fucking haircut, instead.
All of which reminded me of a book I still haven’t read. (Yes, Sara. It’s on the list.) But it’s a basic concept I’m familiar with from having read pop-science books on chaos theory and the like, so I’ll pontificate out here on a limb for a moment: I think one of the things blogs do, or try to do, is seek out and cultivate tipping points. About this, that, or the other. In an attempt to build momentum and talk it up enough until (sort of like a laser, bouncing back and forth inside its ruby echo chamber until it’s powerful enough to punch out) attention is paid. It’s not the cleanest of metaphors (though it’s better than meme, I think), and the way it progresses from echo chamber to echo chamber is weird and hard to track: Trent Lott’s remarks last week were the tipping point leading to a bubbling of outrage among the cognoscenti over the views we’re known he’s had all this time, the views we’ve known his voters and his party have more or less tacitly supported, but it was a simmering fed by the one newspaper to break the news within a couple of days of its occurence. And yet it was Al Gore’s remarks on Monday that seemed to signal the tipping point for the broader mediasphere, triggering the long-delayed comments of commentators and politicians—does Gore read Atrios? —Of course, without the pressure brought to bear by the simmering blogs of the cognoscenti, it’s questionable whether Gore’s remarks could ever have tipped it. (If you feel that Lott’s half-assed apology was the tipping point, it’s questionable whether he would have felt the need to say anything had the cognoscenti not already been set to simmering. Who tipped what first?) —And now, of course, a week later, other people in my office are pissed off about something blogtopia was on top of a week ago. But how, and why, and who’s responsible? —Those, I don’t think, are even the right questions. Tipping points.Smart mobs. Flocking behavior. The divine madness of crowds. Talking to ourselves. Preaching to the choir. Fisking in the echo chamber, yo.
(And we still haven’t solved the problem.We’ve just noticed that when you say the same things over and over again in concert other people are more likely to pick up on it, which, hell, the right wing learned a long time ago. We still can’t guarantee that anyone will listen. That “our” story, my story, your story will be heard. That attention will be paid.)
(And the whole time, the heart beats more quickly. The teeth clench more tightly. “Blood pressure,” says the Spouse. But attention must be paid.)
For your consideration, then, another tipping point, or not: from Helen Thomas to the watch to Body and Soul to me to you:
Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness Program will snoop into bank records and credit card records and track purchase histories and travel patterns but it won’t violate the holy sanctity of the records of gun buyers.
It’s just there’s so fucking much. And more of it, every day—
Let’s open with a joke.
Because it’s all going downhill from there.
Cast your mind back to the 1999 Darwin Awards, when this runner-up got tagged as “Fatal Footsie”:
Decades of armed strife has littered Cambodia with unexploded munitions and ordnance. Authorities warn citizens not to tamper with the devices.
Three friends recently spent an evening sharing drinks and exchanging insults at a local cafe in the southeastern province of Svay Rieng. Their companionable arguing continued for hours, until one man pulled out a 25-year-old unexploded anti-tank mine found in his backyard.
He tossed it under the table, and the three men began playing Russian roulette, each tossing down a drink and then stamping on the mine. The other villagers fled in terror…
Now: scoot forward in time to 1 January 2001, when the world had not yet become A Different Place, and the various signatories to the Ottawa Covention banning the use of landmines had their second meeting, in Geneva, to discuss how things had been going thus far. There was some discussion of the fact that the US hadn’t signed as yet:
In practical terms, campaigners admit that an American signature would make little change to their current use of mines. With the exception of the North Korean border, the U.S. has not manufactured or used banned mines for the last three years. However, few people doubt the symbolic significance of a positive gesture. “It would make a very important difference if America signed. There is some international stigma in being one of the pariah states that hasn’t signed up,” says Rachel Harford, Joint Coordinator of the Campaign Against the Arms Trade.
And though we may not have had the best reasons for not signing, we still had good reasons for not using landmines (outside of the North Korean border). After all, a GAO study of the 1991 Gulf War determined that the use of landmines by allied forces impeded us and didn’t necessarily impede the Iraqis. Moreover:
...even with clear-cut rationales for using landmines commanders were fearful of fratricide and decreased battlefield mobility caused by landmines and their usage. These concerns were based on “the obsolescence of conventional U.S. mines and safety issues with both conventional and scatterable landmines…and concern that reporting, recording and, when appropriate, marking the hazard areas created by the placement of self-destruct landmines or dudfields were not always accomplished when needed.”
And yet.
And yet, and yet, and yet.
The Pentagon is preparing to use anti-personnel land mines in a war with Iraq, despite U.S. policy that calls for the military to stop using the mines everywhere in the world except Korea by 2003.
Outrage. Anger. Fury. Channel it all into emails and faxes and letters to your Congresscritter now, people. Then CC it to Senator Patrick Leahy. Give him the mound of mail and the bursting letterbags he needs to go to the White House and the Pentagon and say with all our voices, “No. Way. In. Hell.”
—Of course, I realize I’m merely assuming you’re outraged at this news. It’s presumptive of me, I know. But hey—bygones.
Satire comes on little cat feet—
The rumors of Satire’s death are greatly exaggerated—
Satire is where you find it—
David Chess (via Plurp) wants to know if this site is a parody or not. (I think Steve’s readers are right: the quotes in the older news pages get a little more obvious—
“Parents should monitor their children’s activities, not librarians,” stated ALA spokeswoman Lilith Strug, “Librarians are much too busy to be bothered with worrying over the occasional incident of a child viewing bestiality. We have books to sort and overdue fines to track down, you know! If you don’t like pornography, just look away.”
Eminently sensible, no? —Also, the Irreducible Complexity Mousepad is less than wholly subtle, in my opinion—but the Ruby Matrimonial Thong is altogether too, um, revealing.
The people beg to differ.
Well, this one does, anyway.
“This proposition has been presented to the Supreme Court on a number of occasions and repeatedly rejected by the court, we hold that the continued opportunity to exonerate oneself throughout the natural course of one’s life is not a right so rooted in the traditions and conscience of our people as to be ranked as fundamental,” the appellate judges wrote.
—From the New York Times, via the incomparable TalkLeft (here, and also here).
We do, indeed, have a fundamental right to challenge our own deaths, as ordered by a system that has been demonstrated time and again to be fundamentally flawed if not actively corrupt. The idea that this right is not “so rooted” in my traditions or conscience, or yours, that it at some point runs out because it is too expensive or too tiresome or too embarrassing to allow it to be pursued, that proof of guilt is a procedural point satisfied by properly filled out paperwork, and not our best, most strenuous, most exacting efforts to find out fundamentally what happened, and how, and why—that, in a word, is insulting. Somebody really ought to step up to the plate and do something, take a stand in favor of life over process, justice over expediency, getting it right over getting it done…
There he goes again for the very first time.
First, read Barry’s righteous repudiation of Lott’s 96-hour-late apology for how we the people misinterpreted what it was he’d had to say (careful of the bile still dripping from that hideously neutral word, “discarded”); if every Democrat and moderate Republican had done the same thing to this wilted, diseased, insulting attempt at a high-hand, I’d feel marginally better about the current political discourse. (If every journalist on the White House beat peppered Ari Fleischer with repeated questions about his boss’s support of an unreconstructed segregationist until he tossed them all out and briefed an empty room from then on; if every journalist on Capitol Hill kept asking every Republican Senator what they felt of their elected leader’s views until they cracked and said something altogether unscripted—well, it’d still be only marginally better, but it’d be a nice, comfortable margin.)
Second—and oh, I know, you already know, you Drudge-skimmer, you Marshall-mashee, you habitué of the Times. But allow me a simple pleasure, won’t you?
After a fiery speech by Mr. Thurmond at a campaign rally in Mississippi for Ronald Reagan in November 1980, Mr. Lott, then a congressman, told a crowd in Jackson, “You know, if we had elected this man 30 years ago, we wouldn’t be in the mess we are today.”
—Yes, this is hardly news for those who’ve been watching Lott and his associates for years. But the fact that outrage is sparking in some highly visible watchfires, that it’s starting to catch in wood we’d never thought would burn, that this man will be made to feel even if only a little still uncomfortable (or more; or more) for having profited so egregiously by winking and nudging at his own hate and fear—that’s news. Or at least some tasty schadenfreude.
Kid detectives. Also, how magic works. (Really.)
Jenn wasn’t feeling well, so I went to Johnzo and Victoria’s by myself. And since for a variety of reasons I wasn’t feeling like engaging in another round of sartorial combat with Mr. Snead (among them: I’d been painting a bathroom and trying to figure out how to build a wall all day; I didn’t feel like a tie; and anyway, I’d just worn my green three-piece to an office party the night before), I decided to dress down: jeans, white shirt, yellow sweater, black Chuck Taylors. Encyclopedia Brown, I decided, looking at myself in the mirror. Twenty years later, that is, and mumblety-mumble pounds heavier, and while I’d like to imagine ol’ Leroy’d grow up to look devilish in the right light with a dapper Van Dyke, the indications are not favorable. —Also, I don’t wear glasses.
Anyway, because I was thinking of myself as Encyclopedia Brown, twenty years later, the pear brandy sipped from a coffee cup seemed that much the sweeter, somehow. The Veggie Booty that much the spicier. It was with an edgy, naughty glee that I larded my sociopolitical rants with unexpectedly crude sexualized metaphor. (Though I rather imagine ol’ Leroy’d ascribe to more of a get-by-on-your-own-merits winner-take-all I-got-mine-screw-you zero-sum libertarianism, rather than [say] tendencies toward Bakuninist anarcho-syndicalism, but one can muse. Regardless, he’d be more willing than I was to cut George Will some slack. Because of the whole baseball thing.) And there was something deliciously wicked about nipping out to score some cloves, even if they were filtertips, and even if it did take me three matches to get one of the damn things lit. —I palmed the matches all the way back to the party, where I threw them tidily away in a dumpster. My two Chuck Taylors, it seems, were still goody.
But what the whole Encyclopedia Brown thing ended up putting me in mind of was Josie.
Josie Has a Secret is maybe my favorite thing over at Kristen Brennan’s shrine to go-go late ’90s hyperactive possibilities. It’s squarely in the tradition of the kid detective, with the puzzle in each chapter whose secrets are revealed at the ever-important back of the book. But unlike Encyclopedia Brown and Sally Kimball, the Dragnet of the kid detective set, Josie and Darla kick it up a little on the amoral, wicked side—more like the Great Brain, say (and those with a better memory for Fitzgerald’s books than me are hereby invited to open up the Wikipedia entry). —Josie and Darla are, after all, not detectives, but magicians (Penn & Teller, that is, and not Harry & Hermione). That’s what makes the book special.
For one thing—toying with magic whether staged or otherwise (?) takes us one big step closer to the thing detective fiction is “really” about. For another, staging the puzzles in each chapter around classic magic tricks that are revealed in the back of the book encourages critical thinking in a more (I think) successful way than pummelling kids through trivia (Encyclopedia Brown knows there’s no Q on the telephone dial, and that the Confederates would never have called it the First Battle of Bull Run until after the Second)—you’re learning the bare bones of pranks you can pull on your friends, after all.
But most importantly: Josie manages to pull off its debunkeries with grace and charm, never stooping to the acidly dismissive sarcasm that Randi and his ilk are all-too prone to fall prey to. It’s a heartening display of intelligence and generosity of spirit in a field that sees all too little of either. (Where the fuck are the sequels, already?)
—Plus, illustrations by Kris Dresen. How can you lose?
So now I’m rifling through old memories of long-since-lost books. Emil and the Detectives, of course, though I’m really thinking of the book I always called Emil and the Detectives but which wasn’t—it was German or Dutch or (just maybe) French, and I was reading an English translation (you read weird books when you’re a kid in Iran), and this book’s shtick was that each puzzle chapter had a full-page illustration teeming with Purloined Waldo-esque detail that hid the solution in plain sight. (Anyone?) —There were also some books about bear spies; I want to say they had something to do with Bearsylvania, but Google just brings up teddy bear hobbyist sites (when I go looking for 25-year-old kids’ books, yes yes). Also: did Gahan Wilson illustrate some books about Loonies who lived on the Moon? With a Space Navy? Or was it someone else who just drew like Wilson? Or am I having another flashback? And there’s a couple of books on the tip of the tongue about a kid inventor—more a step sideways from kid detective than a step closer in, I think—but he invented all sorts of wacky stuff, like a flying bicycle, or at least something he could use to make a bicycle fly. I’m remembering this haunting nighttime flight home over moonlit countryside on a bicycle, and a midnight picnic of sandwiches in a field in the middle of nowhere… Also, I think he tried to make his own soda pop once and instead derived a frictionless lubricant. (Anyone?)
(What? Magic? How it works? Oh. Right. Forget Crowley; read chapter three of Josie. Right there in one place is everything you’d ever need to know about magic—“magickal” or otherwise.)
Good luck with your Fourierism.
God help me, but in spite (or perhaps because) of it all, I adore Metropolitan.
A snapshot of a time and place.
Ann Coulter thinks these folks should still be in jail, despite all evidence to the contrary, and the opinion of the District Attorney. “The odds of an innocent man being found guilty by a unanimous jury are basically nil,” says Coulter. —No footnotes are provided for this assertion
This man—who said this was a good idea—is still the leader of the Party of Lincoln in the Senate. —Moreover, he faces no tough questions over his remarks. (Or where he does his hair, for that matter.)
A large number of people feel government-sponsored racism is not necessary; that diversity in education is not a compelling state interest, and is, furthermore, insulting to minorities; and anyway, in a couple of generations this whole dominant racial majority crap will be a thing of the past, so why bother? (Myself, I agree with Barry that Ignatz hit it on the nose:
(...if you’ve got a test or series of tests that tends to suggest that white folks are disproportionately “deserving of” or “suited to” a college education, then the test clearly isn’t measuring what it ought to be measuring, because I take it as a basic truth that white folks in fact do not disproportionately deserve the good stuff that society has to offer; and correcting for that flaw in the testing system is commendable rather than invidious.)
Meanwhile, six frat members are not to be criticized by their frat for putting on blackface to look like the Jackson 5 or Louis Armstrong for an air guitar contest. —And altogether elsewhere, Sinter Klass is still beating Zwarte Pieten.
::
Update! Be sure to check out the MetaFilter comments on this topic for a defense of Lott. (He wasn’t talking about segregation, you see. He’s upset about the partition of Israel, which occurred during the Truman administration. Had we voted Thurmond into office, none of this mess in the Middle East would ever have happened.)
For the record, then.
Yes, it is true that I used to get my hair cut by Joey, at—I cannot recall the name of the establishment at this time. Yes, the one on Hawthorne.
I cannot recall the amount I paid per cut off-hand, no. I tipped five dollars, though, which I think is customary.
Yes, I did at some point last year make the switch to Bishop’s, across the street. When it first opened. I do not recall the exact date, no.
Yes, I am aware that Bishop’s offers a can of Pabst Blue Ribbon while you’re waiting. For free, yes. That may have been a factor in my decision to switch, yes. But also, and I want to stress this—their cuts are cheaper in price. That would have been the primary factor, yes. Not the Pabst. I want to stress this.
I do not recall the exact amount, no. Not at this time. Not for a regular cut. I have never had my hair dyed or colored there, no. Or anywhere else. Frosted? No. Not that, either.
The last time I visited Bishop’s? I had my head shaved. Yes. Bald. They charge ten dollars for that; that amount I do recall. Since then, I maintain my hair myself with electric clippers.
Is that it? Are we done?
—via Calpundit, Daily Howler, TPM, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Think this isn’t something to take seriously? Open the can of worms and peer inside.
Cue Nelson-esque “Haw-haw.”
Since the criticism began in late November, Planned Parenthood said, its card sales have risen, prompting extra card printings. The organization also is selling T-shirts with the words “Choice on Earth.” —via CNN.
It’s an ill wind blows no one any good.
moneylenders : temple :: scoundrels : ?
So I read a squib in the Mercury about how Eugene’s city council had passed a resolution condemning the USA PATRIOT Act—excuse me, the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act—but how Portland’s council hasn’t yet said boo on the subject, despite an active Portland Bill of Rights Defense Committee, a burgeoning petition, and a resolution ready to go at a moment’s notice.
I resolved, therefore, to write a letter to my council members. Should fellow Portlanders feel so inclined, well, you can reach Mayor Katz and Erik Sten via email; James Francesconi has a website, but no email links, so it’s an old-fashioned fax for him (503.823.3017), and though Dan Saltzman has a form-mail page (ooh!), his .cgi thingie hiccupped when I tried to paste my letter in, so it’s a fax for him, too (503.823.3036).
Fun fact learned while browsing for some background: the ACLU thinks Oregon’s laudable state laws limiting police actions as regards people who are under no suspicion of having committed a crime are targeted for a hit in the 2003 legislative session, thanks to a vengeful Attorney General Ashcroft. These laws were passed to prevent past abuses from ever occurring again. We should maybe keep our eyes open and our ears to the ground on this one…
(Don’t live in Portland? Want to get your local city council in on the fun and games? It’s easy! Head on over to the national Bill of Rights Defense Committee website, find out if your city’s got a committee going, and if not, get right on it!)
Anyway. The letter, amended with some links:
Last year, when Portland police refused to participate in the mass interrogations of Muslim men, I was proud to be a Portlander. This city had taken a stand for the Bill of Rights, remembering that they are rights accorded to all Americans regardless of race, creed, or religion, and not merely platitudes to be discarded when they become inconvenient. And we held firm to that stand, despite the insults and invective of others around the country who, motivated by a very real fear, had forgotten this basic truth.
I am asking you to make me proud of Portland again.
Cities all over the country have with the help of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee have passed resolutions calling for the repeal in whole or in part of the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act, and Executive Orders that infringe on our constitutional rights. The USA PATRIOT Act, while passed with doubtless the best of intentions to keep Americans safe in what suddenly seemed to be a much more dangerous world, is nonetheless a hastily drafted, ill-conceived piece of legislation. Legal scholars and civil rights groups are nigh-unanimous in their denunciation of the law. Members of Congress admit that they had not enough time to read and study the bill before voting in favor of it. Some of its more extreme measures have faced judicial challenge and failed, utterly, most notably in the recent ruling that allows Jose Padilla a chance to confer with his lawyers.
But other, equally dangerous provisions have withstood judicial scrutiny, such as the alarming decision to allow warrantless wiretapping of American citizens in the name of protecting us from terrorism. And we cannot afford to wait for all of the various provisions of the law and the Executive Actions it rationalizes to wend their way through the courts. We are told that we can trust our current government not to abuse these powers, but this is not acceptable. It only takes one unscrupulous person to undo the best intentions our government may have for our safety, and no matter how much we may trust our current government, we cannot say the same for future administrations that would have these powers at their disposal. We must let Congress and the President know that this law must be repealed. The actions of those who would protect us must be returned to the bounds of our constitution.
To that end, 17 towns and cities throughout the country, from Berkeley, Calif. to Burlington, Vermont to Eugene, just down the highway, have passed resolutions condemning the USA PATRIOT Act and calling for its repeal in whole or in part. I read with interest Mike Harrison’s comments in the 5 December Portland Mercury, in which he ponders what effect such a resolution could have. Make no mistake: such a resolution would largely be a symbolic act. But such symbols are vital. Portland’s decision not to aid the Justice Department in its interrogation had some measurable impact in protecting the rights of Portland’s Muslims from unwarranted interrogations, but it was far more important as a symbol that prompted other cities to follow our lead. Americans in every state are coming to realize how troubling this act is, and the acts performed and contemplated under its aegis. We are looking to voice our concerns in any way we can. Please, help us. Please take up this cause. Craft and pass a resolution condemning this law and defending our Bill of Rights, and add Portland’s name to this list.
Make us proud of Portland—and our country—again.
Spitting in his coffee.
Back a few years ago, before Rush started going deaf and went away and then stopped going deaf and came back, a friend of mine was working in an office near another office where the radio was tuned to Rush’s show. And the people in that other office would listen and laugh and share the better bits back and forth and “Oh, yeah” and “That’s telling ’im” along with him (and I should probably interrupt this ghastly stereotype of an office full of dittoheads and allow as how my own mother listens to him, or did, for a while, because she thought he was funny), and anyway for my friend this was a constant, low-level irritant, as he walked the halls between that office and his own. “He’s just—always there,” my friend would say. “He’s this smugly arrogant, smooth-talking, oily twit, bombasting away in the background with that pompous voice, and he’s there in your day and in your space making your life that much more unpleasant. But you can’t touch him. You can’t tell him to shut up and you can’t call him on his shit and you can’t argue with him. He’s just—there.” And he’d sigh and glower off in the middle distance somewhere. “You just can’t touch him,” he’d say, his hands rising up, fingers curled in a dramatic impotence. And then he’d get this look on his face. “You can’t trip him when he’s walking down the hall. You know? You can’t even spit in his coffee.”
Well, actually, you can. It just takes a little work.
Cold hands, and a winterscape.
So I was up late last night what with one thing and another and I finally crawled into bed at half past one the next morning. The cat was grumpy but he should understand when I come to bed at that time of night I’m going to shake the blankets out and he’s just going to have to deal.
Jenn was still drawing. (Actually, speaking technically, I think she was applying a texture from a Yoshitoshi woodblock print, but technically it was drawing.) Garbage was on the stereo.
Sometime later I halfway wake up. She’s crawling into bed. Her feet are cold and she shoves them up against mine to warm them which is maybe why I halfway wake up. Her fingers are cold, too. (She’ll tell you it’s because there’s a hole in the wall of her studio where the electric space heater used to be and so she gets this fearsome draft, but really, the woman has poor circulation. Ask anyone who’s shaken her hand.) I manage to find the clock and hit the glowbar: it’s 3:37 in the morning. The cat is on the pillow by my head, so this wakes him up. He lets me know he’s grumpy. Dammit.
This is what she goes through to put up new panels of Dicebox.
In addition to which, she’s also got a piece in a First Thursday group show. That’d be tonight, it being First Thursday and all. (Which I realize is short notice and I’d have maybe said something sooner but I just found out it was tonight and not a month from now or so this morning as I was putting on my jacket.) So if you live in Portland and you’re at all curious then I recommend you make your way down to PushDot, at 833 Northwest 14th Avenue, there in the Pearl; we’ll be there ourselves at some point or another from time to time.
But if you can’t make it; if you’re in another state or unforgivably busy or some such excuse, well, I’m telling you, it’s more impressive in person, but if you just can’t make it, we’ll understand; we’ll try to understand. Here, then, is a taste of Hecate.
London and France and Bruno’s underpants.
So Bruno’s stripping.
(You don’t know from Bruno? Possibly the oldest and one-of-if-not the best daily strips on the web, originally published in the pages of the UMass Daily Collegian [Amherst] and in painstakingly hand-assembled books and now seven years’ worth online and counting [though the books are still available, yes], about the daily misgivings and peregrinations of a 20-something—no, now 30-something woman who thinks not wisely but too well, who pissed off her parents and dropped out of college and corrupted her niece and ran away to New Orleans and discovered girls and invited a circus to stay in the house of a reclusive crank and helped her fondest enemy find the love of his life and worked for a newspaper and forgot to feed her cat and travelled across country with a theatre troupe and dissed Ginger Spice and moved to Portland on a whim and fell in with a philosophy group at the Pied Cow and didn’t so much try polyamory as get involved with more than one person at once and it didn’t so much work out and she got hit by a car and she traveled across Europe and for a while there she’d been optioned by Jeremiah Chechik and she has these dreams, and all of it in gorgeous black and white, and lately she’s taken up stripping. Exotic dancing. Ecdysiasting. —Thus, Bruno.)
The thing about Bruno stripping—and yes, I see your furrowed brow; let’s drag this out in the open: there is something (inherently?) salacious about a gynephilic artist writing and drawing stories about a woman working in the sex industry; all the good intentions in the world can’t change that fact. (There’s something [inherently?] salacious about androphilic artists doing stories about shirtless Foreign Legionnaires in the Algerian desert, too.) Luckily, Chris doesn’t try to hide this salaciousness; “Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” as he puts it in a recent journal entry. —But there’s nothing inherently wrong with this salaciousness. As most budding artists sooner or later get around to figuring out, one of art’s great, brute-force purposes is giving shape and form to inchoate desires—or, as Howard Cruse puts it in the delightfully screwball “Unfinished Pictures” (from Dancin’ Nekkid With the Angels):
Ah, for the newly-ripened sexuality of pubescence, the high-voltage horniness of youth! Yech, for the agonies of not being able to do anything about it! Artists have an advantage, though… I was thirteen when I realized I could draw dirty pictures anytime that I wanted to!
Don’t scoff. It’s a heady, potent feeling: you may not be able to control your desires, or the objects of those desires, but you can at least use words or pictures or both to effect some control over images of those objects, and those desires. It’s a damn sight better than nothing. —When done badly, of course, you end up with Victoria’s Secret commercials and Lady Death and everything else on the TV and the radio and the internet that reminds you marketers think there’s nothing cooler in this world than to sell to 13-year-old boys; when done well—in comics, at least—you end up with delightful trifles like Colleen Coover’s girly porno and Dylan Horrocks’s beautifully dirty stories and oh, I dunno, a decent chunk of early Desert Peach. So let’s make sure we’re clear on this: there’s nothing inherently wrong with salacious art.
that that’s what Chris is doing, per se.
He’s done his homework. He has an appreciation of the ironies and the cognitive dissonances; he knows something of what it feels like to have this as a job and something of what goes through your head on stage and when you don’t want to tell your boyfriend what it is you’re doing because he’s at least doing a pretty good job of faking it on paper. He isn’t (or isn’t just) playing salacious games with an object of his desire (“Me, I’m really attracted to naked women,” he says, disingenuously); he’s actively putting himself in her shoes (much as he has been the whole seven-year run thus far). It’s a more richly ambivalent incoherent text than it maybe first appears.
But more to the point: it’s only a small part of her life. —She’s been doing it for four months now, and it’s something of a part-time job; she’s also just self-published her novel and hates working in a mail room and hangs out with her friends and still forgets to feed her cat. And even moreso: we’ve seen seven years of her life so far. We’ve gotten to know Bruno like an old friend, or more importantly, a favorite character in a long-running serial. And for a variety of reasons that with hindsight we can see nudging here and there the past few months, she decided to challenge herself by trying to do this thing. Stripping. And she seems to have found something in it or about it she likes more than not. This person we know has become for the moment a stripper; this stripper is a person we know.
Think of all the strippers and hookers and sex workers, all those bit parts in all those movies and books and comics, good, bad and indifferent, all those calculating sexpots and hearts of gold with dark and violent pasts. How many of them were strippers first, and people only as afterthoughts? How many of them do you think had writers who knew or even gave a damn about what they’d done in college and the other crap jobs they’d had and the time they’d hitchhiked across the backwoods of Massachusetts and why they’d dumped their third boyfriend and the orrery they’d spent the night under and whether they still forget to feed their cat?
That, I think, is what Chris is doing with Bruno and the stripping, at least in part. Or finding himself doing. And I think that’s far more good than not.
—The reason I bring this up, though: since Chris did a lot of his research for these strips at Mary’s Club, he’s going to be doing a little giving back. He’s going to be hanging out there a week from yesterday (at this point): 11 December, from 7 till at least 9, and he’s encouraging all and sundry who are in the area and so inclined to stop by with books to be signed and dollar bills ($2 for each 3-song set at a minimum, apparently). Myself, I’ve never been to a strip club (I don’t think catching the Porcelain Twinz at Dante’s counts; that’s more of a cabaret setting). It’ll be interesting to see if my money’s where my mouth is.
Figuratively speaking. Geeze. You have such dirty minds…
A distracting thought, occasioned by having caught a repeat of first-season <em>Xena</em> on Oxygen earlier in the evening; also, an amusing <em>Buffy</em> link that involves calculus and matrix theory, courtesy the fine folks at Whedonesque.com.
The phrase, “A mighty princess, forged in the heat of battle,” is probably going to end up being one of the most important contributions of the ’90s to our on-going popular culture.
And, as promised: Vampire Population Ecology.
Taking a bullet.
The highly recommended CalPundit put his money where his mouth was on the whole cocooning thing, the echo chamber stuff, and spent 40 minutes he’ll never get back listening to Rush.
It’s a good thing he did. Those who doubt the vast right-wing conspiracy alluded to by Gore (if Krauthammer says I’m crazy, I don’t ever want to be sane!) should note how Rush has picked up on those unbelievable lucky duckies from the Wall Street Journal editorial page. (Paul Krugman lays out some more of the possible logic behind this bizarre assertion that’s seeking traction in the echo chamber: the man behind the curtain is letting his velvet glove slip. —Thanks to Kevin Moore for reminding me to check in with Krugman.) —Following Kevin Drum’s selfless example, then, I held my nose and plunged into rushlimbaugh.com, and saw the numbers game they’re stacking up to follow in the wake of lucky duckies—and it’s not so bizarre, anymore. It’s scary. They’re serious.
Christ. I’m thinking about the anthropic principle and Buffy and Robin Wood, I want to finally get started writing about web comics, which is one of the other purposes of this blog-thing, I want to think about Jo Maguire and Ysabeau and the City of fucking Roses and the crew of the Catalina de Erauso, and this comes along. I’m lazy and tired and no good with numbers and worse with policy—I’m a propagandistic hack, ladies and gentlemen, a glib farceur who can turn a phrase with a twinkle in my eye and a snort up my sleeve. —I can spot a number of places where holes can easily be kicked in this chimerical nest of deeply disingenuous nastiness: note the vague language with which the supposed canard all wealth is inherited is supposedly overturned: “Most of the rich have earned their wealth… Looking at the Fortune 400, quite a few even of the very richest people came from a standing start, while others inherited a small business and turned it into a giant corporation.” (Emphasis added to flag turns of phrase which really ought to be more specifically defined before taken at all seriously.) Payroll taxes are utterly left out of the equations, as they have been ever since the lucky duckies were first drafted. The enormous (and growing) disparity in wealth between the top 1% and the bottom 50% isn’t even mentioned, except in passing, alluded to as if it’s a falsehood we’ve already dispensed with. Stretching the numbers to include the top 50% is a stroke of necessary genius; it allows Rush to reach the vast majority of his audience, and coddle them into thinking they’re rich, they’re targetted by the Democrats, when in fact the Bush tax cuts would barely touch them, and will end up torching public services they depend on—this isn’t a sincere disagreement due to differing views of human nature and a just society; Rush is shafting his own audience of loyal dittoheads and laughing at them the whole time, and—!
But I’m tired. I’m tired of the rank, thug-eyed hypocrisy, I’m tired of the greed no longer even cloaked in a token veil, I’m tired of watching the Mayberry Machiavellis breeze by with a wink and a nod while blowdried newsbots give them hummers in the backs of limousines for exclusive pre-processed infonuggets. I’m tired of the cranky, mean and spiteful things they make me want to say. I’m tired of yelling at headlines and ducking the mid-40s on the cable channels, where the 24-hour news networks hang out. I’m tired of the clench in my jaw and the ache in my fingers and the fizzing anger at the base of my skull and thumping through my veins and even though I know there’s a good fight to be fought, I—
I start whingeing on about myself instead of looking for more. Goddamn. Links.
Anyway. —This is maybe why I at least tend to cocoon. More often than not. Rage and fear, and the Spouse gets worried about the blood pressure.
But if anybody out there has the numbers and a sharp piece of logic, and the time and anger-management skills, could you please fisk this tax-the-duckies bullshit into the oblivion it deserves? —I could use some decent talking points. If I’m going to go pick fights and all.
(“Most people have a particularly strong tendency to ignore views that they disagree with and are presented rudely.” Heh. I can’t even get that one right.)
