diemoniker

The day of love tchotchkes approacheth...

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:08:02 GMT

"It’s a funny thing about the modern world. What was it about this unlovable century that convinced us we were, despite everything, eminently lovable as a people, as a species? What made us think that anyone who fails to love us is damaged, lacking, malfunctioning in some way?

We are so convinced of the goodness of ourselves, and the goodness of our love, we cannot bear to believe that there might be something more worthy of love than us. No. Everybody deserves clean water. Not everybody deserves love all the time."

from:

White Teeth by Zadie Smith

Sean Penn is....Harvey Milk.

Wed, 07 Nov 2007 17:19:53 GMT

And Matt Damon is...Dan White. Welcome to the sound of my mind snapping. Apparently Gus Van Sant has been trying to get a movie made of Randy Shilts' The Mayor of Castro Street for the last 15 years, and now is actually getting a bit close. He could start shooting in San Francisco as early as December. This could mean the most attention the Excelsior gets, ever. I'm sure they'll be thrilled.

The book itself is so lively, complicated, and exuberantly political and Gus Van Sant's movies (well, the ones that I've seen) are so narcotized and airless that I have a hard time imagining a chain of circumstances that could lead to a film that is actually...um...tolerable. But then I find myself spacing out and thinking "Who will be Dianne Feinstein? "Who will be Joe Campbell?"

It's definitely worth it, if you haven't before, to read the book and see the documentary The Times of Harvey Milk. As far as documentaries go, it's not a masterpiece, but it's well worth the price of admission to see footage of 70's San Francisco (everyone was so cheerfully schulmpy then!) as well as surprises like footage of young Tom Ammiano.

Literary endeavors

Sat, 07 Apr 2007 01:28:18 GMT

My friend Novella wrote this.
I think it's awesome.

Halloweentown

Thu, 02 Nov 2006 08:38:38 GMT

I was walking down the street today, and saw something glittering on the asphalt. I looked down, and realized that it was a spangly, tinsel eyelash. Just one. Stuck to the asphalt, like some new species of stick insect. I looked up, and saw that the tree above me had a hot pink, ratty-ass, wig caught in its twiggy branches - way too high up for me to ever fish it out.

Which made me think of this passage from the very excellent The Mayor of Castro Street by Randy Shilts (which all of you SF people should read at least once in your lives):

Those were the days when the Catholic archbishop reportedly had veto power over the mayor’s selection of police and fire chiefs…Paddy wagons routinely rolled up to the doors of gay bars and police bused all the patrons to jail, generally for being “inmates in a disorderly house.” Charges were dismissed most times, but usually the city’s newspapers printed not only the person’s name, but his address and his place of employment.

…One evening a year, like a chapter from a Cinderella story, the police would bestow a free night on the homosexuals. Halloween had been staked out years before as the homosexual high holiday; gays did, after all, live most of their lives behind masks. The chief of police regularly escorted Jose [Sarria – early, early gay rights activist and campy doyenne of The Black Cat ] to the center of North Beach that night, opening the car door politely for the elegantly gowned drag queen and giving the traditional send-off for the night’s activity. “This is your night – you run it.”

Long and Rambling Book Review

Tue, 18 Jul 2006 20:36:31 GMT

So, I’ve got a personal goal during my stay at the mothership to get something that I find interesting on to the air. I didn’t expect it to be quite as frustrating. I had an idea early on that the powers that be wanted to run with, but the interviewee didn’t want to do it. Several review copies of upcoming books by authors that I admire have passed through the office. And they’ve all been dreadful. Or dibbed by other shows.

Then the new(ish) Michelle Tea book showed up. Rose of No Man’s Land. It came out last spring…you know…hot pink cover, teenage protagonists, mannequin in a wig on the book jacket. I thought, “How perfect! We can have a whole discussion about what a weird little ghetto young adult lit is. We can discuss the book…the allure of the genre for A Certain Kind of Adult…classics…Oh, the fun we’ll have! ”

Then I actually started reading the book. I stayed up all night reading it. It was fantastic. All glittery and weird and vivid and not-entirely-unfamiliar.

Then the meth showed up.

And I thought, “Oh no. How am I going to get a book where fourteen-year-old girls snort meth onto the show?” But it was so good – I kept thinking, “Maybe it’s a cautionary fable. Or maybe I can just gloss over that part.”

By the time I got to the part where the fourteen year-old girls are fisting each other in the bathroom of a Chinese restaurant (with the assistance of Even More Meth) I was so engrossed in the story that I had lost all logic and perspective, and was sincerely thinking that I could do some major soft-shoe and somehow sneak the book in there. The book was so good! A unique vision of suburban adolescence! Like Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, but minus the bicycle, and with fisting! But by then, every five pages the protagonists were dragging out the house keys and snorting more meth and by the time I got to the point where they were bribing an adult to give one of them a tattoo with $200 and…well…some meth I realized that Hope Was Lost and I was never, ever, ever going to be able to get this book on the show.

So, seriously. Rose of No Man’s Land = meth-iest teen novel ever. And, while I admire it’s Burroughsian debauchery-with-minimal-consequence, I have to say, it kind of creeped me out. It’s hard to tell at the end of the story whether the novel reads as more of a love letter to tumultuous love you/hate you, touch me/get the fuck away from me travails of adolescence, or Miss Meth. The meth propels what begins as a rather sleepy narrative like a jet engine on a soapbox car. When the supply runs out, so does the story.

This is not to say that the book doesn’t ring true. It does. When you’re young, often the people who point out to you unpleasant truths of Who You Really Are That You Have So Far Been Avoiding, are the kind of people that you will go to great lengths to avoid emotional entanglement with in the future. Partly it’s that those people are so intense that they can create their own reality – a reality so large that you, all timid and wobbly-legged, can move into for awhile. Of course, nine times - no, nine point nine times - out of ten, that big, shiny, “fuck all y’all and the rest of the world” attitude is fueled by a pretty impressive array of substances, which is why it is really imperative that you don’t stay there.

But still…meth…that just seems like overkill. In my day, all it took was enough strawberry daquiris.

Booze-lovin' monkey

Thu, 01 Jun 2006 05:40:33 GMT

drinkbeermonkeyarm
Originally uploaded by diemoniker.

Most of the wheatpasting that goes on in my neighborood is pretty amateurish, especially with this trend towards shakey drawings of bunnies and horsies and pastoral views of the way that the world must have looked back when mommy and daddy still loved each other.

But I am very impressed with this elbow.

Rock on, elbow.

What hath SRL wrought?

Fri, 11 Nov 2005 00:38:12 GMT

From a press release for the upcoming ComBots Cup and Robot Fighting League's 2005 National Championships:

"Robotics is becoming the new lifestyle sport of the thinking age. The Renaissance had classical music, we have hi-powered DC motors. ComBots is the channel by which it becomes validated and showcased to an audience both young and old. An audience with both a voice and a higher than average disposable income."

http://combots.net/index.php

zoooooooombies...(and art)

Wed, 19 Oct 2005 18:45:32 GMT

here is a very blurry example of the undead

but you get the idea

and here is the actual article

Encounters with Celebrity

Thu, 04 Aug 2005 19:54:32 GMT

1. I almost dripped gravy on Neil Young once at a benefit for the Elton John AIDS Foundation. He remained oblivious both to the gravy danger, and to the colorful montage of AIDS-riddled orphans flickering behind the head table, set to a medley of Elton John tunes.

2. My yoga teacher was peremptorily replaced by an 80s era swimsuit model with a cauterized heart. In case you were ever wondering what happened to the swimsuit models of your youth, apparently, yoga combined with spokesmanship on the evils of swimsuit modeling is a perfectly valid option, and not to be disregarded.

3. Approximately 43-57% of my dad’s head is visible in a PBS documentary on Buckminster Fuller. Later, while Buckminster Fuller lectures a group of rapt young people with heavy sideburns, my dad is visible in the distant background, violently stapling documents to a corkboard.

4. Once found myself standing about two feet from David Byrne, after a concert.
“Omigod! That’s David Byrne!” my acquaintance (at the time) hissed, elbowing me. “You love David Byrne! Go up and ask if you can have your picture taken with him!
“I don’t know.” I said. “That sounds pretty silly. What would I DO with this picture?”
“You would hold onto it and love it always!” hissed my acquaintance.
“No I wouldn’t” I hissed back. “It would feel all creepy!”
“Just do it!” they hissed, like some overexcited stage mother. “Do it now!”

I sneaked a glance over at David Byrne. He was just staring blissfully off into space, like he was thinking about some particularly lovely butterfly that he’d seen. Or like he was waiting for a cross-town bus to pull up in the middle of the swirly lobby carpet and whisk him away to the Land of Chocolate.

“No No No!” I muttered.
“Yes Yes Yes!” said my acquaintance, elbowing me again.
David Byrne looked up, as though he had suddenly realized that the Chocolate Bus was actually pulling up in an adjacent lobby. He turned on one heel and strode briskly away.
“There it goes” hissed my acquaintance. “Your one chance to be near someone famous.”

Cubiclelandia

Tue, 26 Jul 2005 20:47:28 GMT

Alas, when I came into work this morning, the last wee fishie –survivor of the giant serial killer fish, (aka Jeffrey Dahmer, aka Ted Bundy) was dead, dead, dead – bobbling upside down in the corner of the tank, beyond all mortal worries or cares.

“Oh yeah,” piped up the girl who shares the cubicle with me, “It died a few days ago.”
“This cubicle,” I said flatly, “is a place of death.”
I went upstairs, got a cup, and scooped it out. Its little black eyes were bulging spookily, and its fins were about half-dissolved. I thought briefly about leaving it there, to dissolve into the tank that it had won sole possession of through its sneakiness, diminutive stature, and unparalleled ability to breathe shitwater, but as I halted, paper cup in hand, one of the IT people from upstairs stopped by to drop off some forms.

“Ew!” she shrieked. “Ew Ew Ew!”

Yeah.

So I wrapped it up, dumped it in the office trash, settled down with my sharpie to make it a proper headstone. “RIP” I wrote. “Last of the Fish.” There was still some blank space at the bottom, so I drew a beer bottle and wrote” 40oz” on the side. If I’d had an actual 40, I could have poured it into the fish tank and said a few words, but a pictographic representation would do.

“Well,” said my cubicle associate, suddenly, as I snipped my way around the outline of the headstone with my plastic-handled office scissors. “The death is probably over. You’re probably not going come into work one day and find me dead in the cubicle.”

I’m often grateful that real life rarely conforms to certain literary conventions, or else I probably would come in next week and find her keeled over underneath the desk like a little hamster.

Thu, 14 Jul 2005 19:51:22 GMT

The first few days of any visit, my parents are (if all goes well) childlike with awestruck wonder. “Ooooh! We love visiting you in San Francisco!” ”Ooooh! Look at those mountains! Ooooh! Look at that ocean!” “Ooooh! Look at that otter!” Then matters pass, after the fourth day of travels, into what I call THE BAITINING. Adorable otters banging food on their tummies are no longer sufficient to distract them from their ultimate mission of Needling the Firstborn.

“I guess it’s not for me to decide whether being gay is wrong or not” my dad will say, staring contemplatively off into the distance. “That’s really for God to decide.”

Which is how, after another magical evening of discussing Old and New Testament doctrine with my father, I am skipping across Guerrero with a coffee mug full of scotch towards the barred gate of Doctor Maelstrom. I’m always amazed at how her apartment waxes and wanes with her various projects. It’s either spotless, or like a fertilizer bombing down at the fabric store.

“Look!” says the Doctor, waving her arms like a carnival showman. “It’s done.” Indeed, the new quilt is hanging above her bed. It’s made of raw silk and other strange fabrics, and forms the shape of an impenetrable hieroglyph. It glows with its own light.

I sip some more scotch out of my coffee mug. I love scotch. How did I ever deal with parents before scotch found me?

This morning, on the way back from the airport, John and I made up haikus all the way.

Interstate sunrise
As parents depart
Never more beautiful

It puts the lotion on its skin..

Tue, 12 Jul 2005 22:06:08 GMT

Sooooo..today I got moved to a new cubicle. It is my lot. I am moveable. “Yay! A new cube-mate!” said the woman in the desk next to mine. “Why, I’m charmed to meet you too,” I said, peeling a sign off my new filing cabinet instructing me to Bang Head Here. I find such signs offensive. My head will bang anywhere it pleases.

The new cube came with a giant fish tank, floating with kelp-like strands of what appeared to be congealed fish shit. “Is this your fish tank?” I asked my new cube mate.

“Oh.” she said. “That belongs to the guy who used to sit at your desk. He moved to China.”

“Well,” I said. “One of the fish is dead.” I pointed to the enormous fish lying on the bottom of the tank, one yellow eye pressed up to the glass as if vowing eternal fish vengeance upon its cubicle overlords.

“Do you think so?” she said.

I got a paper cup and scooped out the fish, then wrapped it in a plastic bag and put it in the lunchroom trash bin. When I got back to the tank, I noticed one tiny fish was left in there, swimming through the muck lackadaisically. I’ve never had fish before, partly because I think it’s unfair to keep a pet that can’t run away from you, but I’ve cleaned many a soiled tank/bowl/whatever belonging to various “Oh I didn’t even notice the bowl was that dirty!”- style roommates. I adopted Proper Lifting Stance and scooted the tank off its shelf, then walked it gingerly to the kitchenette.

The Story of the Tank emerged from various ramen-cooking kitchenette visitors. Apparently the tank was once flush with 20 or so fish, but they quickly began dying of both natural and unnatural causes. They gave each other diseases. They ate each other. Etcetera.

The Enormous fish had a name, and that name was (alternately) Ted Bundy/ Jeffrey Dahmer. Everyone was surprised that Ted Bundy/ Jeffrey Dahmer was dead, and that the little fish was still alive. Apparently, it had outlasted Ted Bundy/ Jeffrey Dahmer by hiding out in the aquarium’s princess castle.

“You know,” said one woman, as I rinsed off the little princess castle. “Two of Ted Bundy’s victims were found in the woods behind our house when I was growing up. They found them because the coyotes were just going nuts out there.”

“Wow.” I said. If only they'd had access to a princess castle.

Tue, 05 Jul 2005 20:58:55 GMT

Some As Yet Unknown to Me friends of John were getting married, and, somehow, I assumed that I wouldn't be going to the wedding, having momentarily forgotten that wedding invitations always have that +1, which is secret code for "current sex partner."

I'm actually acquiring a taste for the nuptials of strangers. Though the alcohol always helps.

The wedding folk had rented a house up past Marin, in a planned development overlooking the coast. All of the streets were twisty and had names like "Pounding Surf Road," "Oyster Bay Cul-de-Sac" and "Holy Shit! Ocean!!!Over There!!!Beyond that Private Property Sign!! Lane." It was obvious that someone had been mowing right up to the point where their ride-a-mower could conceivably roll down the cliff and into the aforementioned pounding surf, and I was, again, impressed at the American aesthetic that compels "lawn" to be airlifted into places where it was clearly never intended to go.

The house had a spacious view of the aforementioned ocean, and of the splintered heap of the house next door, which was being formed, apparently, out of particle board. There was wine, cheese, and pork bun. I got to talk to a couple of old friends of John's, one of whom lived with him briefly after her then-husband threw a typewriter through a wall. She told me this, not John. John can be kind of like those sundials that read "I count only the sunny hours" - he tends to forget less-than-ideal moments unless they're directly relevant to the present. Or unless they make a suitably vulgar anecdote. So his sundial motto is more like "I only remember only that which is sunny. Or vulgar."

The old friends regaled me at great length about how fabulously wealthy their neighbors are, and what fabulous parties they throw. I made the comment that people there must be more comfortable showing off their money than they are in San Francisco (It seems to me like here the only real flauntable status symbols are fancy cars and motorbikes, fancy dogs, and, of course, houses. Although I heard things were different when the whole dot-com era was upon the city at large.)

"Oh no!" the old friends said. "Our neighbors are very discreet! They are just like regular folks!" They appeared horrified that I had suggested such a thing.

They then launched into an anecdote about how their neighbors were planning on purchasing the home of a family they don't like, just so they can get them out of the neighborhood. The house of the despised neighbors, once purchased, will be pummeled to bits and replaced with a combination swimming pool/dog run.

"We actually don't mind the [despised] neighbors," they said. "Our kids are friends with their kids. But the [rich] neighbors say that we can use the pool when they're done. And we promised to help them build the dog run."

"Your children will like a pool more than they will like friends," I said, and they nodded, knowingly.

grapes o' wrath

Wed, 29 Jun 2005 18:42:46 GMT

For some reason, the Embarcadero BART station has the best "morning commute" buskers, the most frequent one being the Chinese man who plays the very tall, narrow stringed instrument - kind of like a yardstick, but with strings. And fancy looking. It's a fancy-looking stringed yardstick. Anyway, he's quite good and has been very instrumental in my becoming capable of hearing that specific kind of music and not immediately thinking of Zhang Yimou movies and becoming depressed. Now, I guess, I've come to associate it primarily with escalators. Much better, in my opinion.

Before the Chinese man showed up, the dominant Embarcadero busker was that really annoying guy who hangs out at the Ferry Building and plays the same five bars of "Birth of the Cool" over and over and over again. Occasionally he'll switch over to the most distinctive passage of John Coltrane's version of "My Favorite Things" which he will also play over. And over. And over.

It always makes me feel like I'm passing through the "It's a Small World, John Coltrane" amniatronic ride - which I suppose, is the effect that he's going for. People will walk by, hear the most recognizable part of what they know on some level is a classic piece of jazz music, toss a dollar in his saxophone case and be gone before the Spontaneous Urban Magic cycles along again.

Today, however, there was a new busker, sitting by the escalator and furiously finger-picking this gorgeously fast and rippling bluegrass number. It was so cheerful and jolly that it took me a second to realize that he was playing "John Brown's Body."

In Sarah Vowell's book, Assasination Vacation, she mentions what a hit song that was during the Civil War Era, and how John Wilkes Booth, when he murdered Lincoln, fully expected a similar song to be written about him. The song was so damn catchy that everyone was singing it, even the Confederates who executed Brown in the first place.

It's still mighty catchy - but the line "He is trampling in the vinyard where the grapes of wrath are stored" still seems a bit odd to me. That's a big, weird metaphor for one little sentence.

commuter art

Thu, 16 Jun 2005 21:47:06 GMT

marykategraffiti
Originally uploaded by diemoniker.

I saw this a few weeks back just as I was about to schlep my bike down the stairs of the Powell BART stop. It's this bizarre dual portrait of Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen that someone cut out of a regular ol' sheet of 8 1/2 x 11 paper, slathered with paste, and stuck to the inside window of an SF Weekly newsbox. There was no way that anyone was going to get it out of there, except with a razorblade.

The wavy line of text on the right says "starving millionaires" and those are (obviously) little skulls with mouse ears hovering above the scene like benevolent putti.

Let me just say that I love this city and its little tribes of art guerillas.

Excepting, of course, those nimrods who tag everything in sight. Scrawling your name with a Sharpie on someone's garage is not art. I remember, in college, this woman telling me about this guy that, for a date, took her to visit all the spots in town that he'd scrawled his name on. The tour ended at the football field, where it gradually became apparent that, after showing her such a good time, she was expected to blow him.

Yet another reason why I don't miss college.

From the Land of Green Ghosts

Wed, 08 Jun 2005 19:44:51 GMT

I just finished this book this morning, in the BART train on my way to work. It's a memoir by a writer named Pascal Khoo Thwe, who grew up as a member of the Padaung minority in Burma. The narrative "hook" in this story is that Pascal was, improbably, spirited away from almost certain death as a guerrilla fighter by a Cambridge professor, who had met him on an earlier visit to Mandalay, was impressed by his affection for James Joyce, and arranged for him to be granted political asylum and become enrolled as a student in Cambridge.

This, however, is not not not why the book is interesting. Pascal only attended Cambridge because he was put in the odd situation of having to choose between a) dying in the jungle or b) attending Cambridge. He might not have chosen Cambridge if he'd had any other options than "death." The interestingness of the book is entirely based on the fact that it is more gorgeously written than any novel. Also, it has recipes:

"Meanwhile, the enforced solitude and inactivity of the camp gave me a chance to revive my hunting and fishing skills in the jungle. In the evenings we would go shooting wood-pigeon among the wild marijuana fields. The birds were high on the marijuana seeds and barely able to fly...Just the sounds of the gunshots seemed to stun them, and they dropped from the trees at our feet...We cooked them with marijuana sauce according to the local recipe. Here it is - Smoked Pigeons with Marijuana Sauce: 'Smoke the birds with the twigs of marijuana for a day. Stuff them with lemon grass, kaffir lime leaves, garlic, ginger with a pinch of salt, and wrap them in banana leaves. Bake or boil according to taste."

You should read this book. It will most likely be the best book that you will read all year, and at the end of it you will know how to steam rice while on the run from the Burmese army.

The last time I saw Sleater-Kinnney play

Tue, 07 Jun 2005 07:41:16 GMT

I was in Detroit. At the Majestic, which, had a high, cupcake-y ceiling that was peeling and looked as though it might collapse down on us at any moment. The crowd was approximately composed of A) 23 shriekey little girls, myself included, who pushed their way to the front of the stage and jumped up and down and swooned ecstatically. B)300 rock critic guys in their Carhart pants, Converse, and their "Made in Detroit" zip-up jackets (Motto: "Saving unfashionable men from complete sartorial failure since 1992.")

They clustered in the back of the theater, hands in pockets, and nodded in time with the music, obviously trying to feel what Greil Marcus felt. My determination was to have The Best Time Ever, despite the fact that Sleater-Kinney was playing a really lousy show that night, and despite the fact that my hatred of rock critic boys (you know, the ones that come to your party and hog the stereo while opining to you about your record collection) was at its apex.

I decided after that night that I was done going to shows of theirs, and most shows, period. The whole thing reminded me too much of my childhood with the Pentecostals - of that desperate feeling that happens when a whole group of people are trying to force their way into an exaulted state.

So when my friend Holly called me last week and asked me to go see Sleater-Kinney with her at The Warfield, I was surprised when I said yes. I haven't liked any of their last four or five albums, and I listen to "Call the Doctor" maybe once a year these days, but I nonetheless put on my stompy boots and went. And it was great. Who knew? Even when they're playing their not-so-terribly-good classic rock later stuff, the evident skill and geeked-out happiness with which they were playing totally won me over. I loved Carrie Brownstein's garage band guitar moves, and her bratty Kim Deal voice, as I did the intense vibe between Corin and Carrie, with the dueling guitars and the yelping call and response. I didn't even realize that I missed that sexed-up exhiliration that comes with witnessing people who are in the middle of what they really love, and what they're really good at.
It was like feeling all of the good parts of being nineteen, and none of the bad parts.
And it was nothing like a fucking Pentecostal tent revival, thank god.

Reading list

Tue, 31 May 2005 19:35:22 GMT

Those of you who saw Farenheit 9-11 may remember Craig Unger, who appeared briefly to explain the close relationship between the Bush family and the House of Saud. I've meant to read his book, "House of Bush, House of Saud" for awhile now, but it just came out in paperback (aka "read me on the bus") size, and I've just been wandering around shocked at how many connections it makes that I never even wondered about before. A few interesting things: 1) Regan's campaign was under congressional investigation for having spies planted in Carter's campaign, who funneled Carter's daily briefings directly to Regan's handlers. The person who convinced the head of the investigation, Congressman Albosta, to withdraw his request for a special prosecutor (a la Watergate) was, interestingly enough, Dick Cheney. 2)The "asprin factory" that Clinton authorized for bombing during the whole Monica Lewinsky scandal was, actually, a legitimate target. While it was ostensibly a pharmaceutical factory, soil analysis showed that it was producing nerve gas, and the plant's general manager was living Osama Bin Laden's Khartoum residence. Clinton, at least according to the author, "got" the so-called "war on terror" in a way that the Bush administration was unable (or unwilling) to do, but was hampered by the Saudi government's unwillingness to cooperate with him (They kept on beheading suspects that the FBI wanted to interrogate, for example.)

The most interesting parts, unfortunately, are the most difficult to explain in brief, because they require a knowledge of distinct characters and interlocking relationships and political machinations that are unknown to most of us. Two strong characters in the book that I had NO knowledge of before I began reading it are Prince Bandar (essentially the Saudi's envoy to the US, and a very close friend of the Bush family) and Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI) a Pakistan-based bank that among other things, laundered money for the CIA during Iran-Contra. The chapters on how relationships formed between the US and Saudi Arabia are fascinating, as is the early history of the House of Saud, and how it's inextricably linked to Wahhabi fundamentalism (One of the other interesting facts noted in the book is that, while most American muslims are moderate, a lot of the money that goes to build mosques,or into campaign donations comes from Wahhabinist muslims, due to their extremely lucrative connection to the House of Saud.)

This and "Breaking the Chains" by Adam Hochschild are the best history books that I've read so far this year, but every time I read a book like this I get more furious at the New York Times, and Time, and Newsweek, and all of those other publications that so rarely manage to tell me anything useful.

Bike to Work Day

Thu, 19 May 2005 19:24:33 GMT

I moved to San Francisco on a one-way $40 plane ticket, so I spent my first six months here without a bike. I worked at one of the downtown Peet's, and was so broke that I walked or fare-jumped MUNI everywhere. The idea of using BART was inconceivable, because BART cost a whole quarter more than MUNI.

Some friends came up to visit and brought my bicycle in the trunk of their car. I was terrified to biking in SF because of all the hills/cars/blind corners, but a few nights later I steeled my resolve and remembered my favorite bit from "Dirk Gentley's Holistic Detective Agency" - the bit about finding someone who looked like they knew where they were going, and following them. And I did. Sometimes I got a little carried away shadowing bike messengers, but then, how else would I have experienced the incomparable fear/terror/delight of pedaling furiously between a solid canyon of hurtling streetcar on the left/breakneck electrified bus on the right. It's not the sort of experience that I need to repeat again and again, but I'm glad that I had it.

I have to say - biking down Market has gotten a lot worse since then. It was never exactly what you would call "fun" or "safe" but the concrete is so broken up now along the areas where bikes are supposed to go that I'm legitimately scared to ride along it - I'm continually having to scoot into traffic to bypass outsize chuckholes. I prefer the bike lanes on Harrison, except that the lights are so badly timed that I seriously have to book it on my bike if I don't want to be stopped at each and every light, plus there's the whole "truck-driver" phenomenon - trucks not only have a penchant for suddenly stopping in the bike lane, they also seem to be the least aware of the existence of cyclists. The two categories of drivers that seem most out to kill me are taxis and delivery trucks. And, of course, riding on Harrison means that I get to breathe a lot more truck exhaust, convenently belched in my face for most of the 20 minute commute.

I get carried away sometimes fantasizing about the day that the long-delayed city-wide bike plan actually gets carried through. And I'd love it if someday actual children felt safe biking around the city (though I have to say, during the 10 minutes or so that pocket bikes were legal I saw a lot of children riding those little deathtraps around - maybe with kids it's not so much a safety thing as a "I'd rather have something with a motor that makes an annoying buzzing sound" thing.)

I love how Valencia has all of these adorably foxy people biking down it in their party clothes, but it worries me that they don't ever wear helmets. It's a conflicted feeling - they sail on by, hair fluttering in the wind, and my heart swoons at their cuteness, but if I ever dated one of them I would worry all the time that someday I'd have to take them off life support, or teach them how to eat solid foods again.

Writer vs. Photographer

Tue, 17 May 2005 21:30:35 GMT

I was looking through an anthology of war photography and found one of my favorite photographs by Susan Meiselas - the one of the Nicaraguan family bringing carrying plates of food out to the guerillas. It reminded me of something she said at the conference - namely, that writers and photographers are naturally adversarial because photographers have to be there during the action, which is precisely the time that writers can't function. No one has time to talk to a writer while they're shooting over the barricades, or getting bombed, or executing political prisoners, but those are precisely the moments that photographers have to go out and hunt for. Consequently, they all hang out at the hotel bars at different times - the writers wait until things have calmed down enough for them to go out and interview people, and the photographers don't come home until they're sure that the dramatically Getty Images-suitable moments have ceased occuring. She summed it up this way: "When you find a mass grave, writers don't have to actually climb down into the grave and take pictures, and then go back to the bar smelling like corpses" (I'm paraphrasing, by the way)
I thought that was interesting, simply because I'd run across other examples of writer/photographer disconnect - like when a friend of mine was attending the Salt institute, and complained to a me about how the photographer assigned to work with her took soulless, cold, and dehumanizing photos of her subjects. But still - it was her subject, her topic, and her responsibility to determine what direction the story went in. The photographer had some freedom to determine what she photographed, but my friend had already laid down the boundaries of topic, persons to be photographed, etcetera.
I saw "War Photographer" a few months ago, and I have to say that Susan Meiselas is a hell of a lot more interesting than James Nachtwey. And her photographs are better. Why has no one made a documentary about her?

Thu, 12 May 2005 19:49:22 GMT

I went to a conference a few weeks ago on International Reporting, not because I have any compelling vision of myself wearing a flak jacket and chasing foreign people around with a video camera, but because I'm going to be going overseas in grad school whether I like it or not, so I might as well get all the info I can before I'm actually there, with my videocamera, trying to find a foreigner.

One thing that newspapers don't like to mention, but that journalists are quite honest about, is that overseas reporting is, essentially, impossible without the help of "fixers" - native residents who can connect you with interview subjects/clue you in on social protocol/tell you which neighborhoods are safe versus unsafe/and interpret the polictical climate for you. Ideally, these people are journalists (although the job description of "journalist" obviously, varies widely from culture to culture), but if you're in a country that has a habit of killing or disappearing its journalists, its more likely that this person will be a taxi driver/small time underworld figure/or some other person who is accustomed to putting themselves in danger for a cash payout. Joe Sacco's comic, "The Fixer" is an excellent introduction to the seamier sides of this arrangement.

Back when the American media invested more money in overseas reporting, a journalist might have years in a particular country, plus the assistance of an overseas bureau, to winnow out which sources are reliable and which aren't, and to figure out the political lay of the land so that the news that they report back home won't be skewed to much according to the biases of one particular group. One thing that was mentioned a lot during the conference was that coverage of Sarajevo was skewed by the fact that so many of the fixers had serious military/underworld ties, and many journalists didn't realize this until it was too late.

In the same way that rival gangs in Afghanistan manipulated U.S. intelligence in order to kill off their competition, fixers can demonize their rivals in the international media through hapless "I just parachuted in here today, and I have to file a story by tonight" journalists. And this, at least according to the journalists at the conference, happens A LOT. Hassan Ibrahim, from Al-Jazeera (he's in the documentary, Control Room) had the most harrowing fixer-related stories, including a fixer who turned Hassan's sources into the goverment for cash, most likely resulting in their deaths.

I also got the impression that he'd gotten the most fixers killed through reporting - all of the other journalists were stridently insisting that it was NEVER NEVER ethical to risk a fixer's life, and Hassan just shrugged and said that, to his knowledge, they'd lost at least five sources while reporting on the massacres in Darfur, but that it was worth it, since the number of people getting massacred per day had dropped by a few thousand. Again, I got the same feeling hearing Hassan talk that I did watching "Control Room" - life is just very, very different if you are a reporter who has acually lived in a war zone. He mentioned, for example, that his first wife was killed in 1982 during the war between Iran and Iraq.

Two other impressions: 1) Al-Jazeera has a LOT of money invested in overseas reporting - when Hassan mentioned how many reporters he had working on story in the former Soviet Union, there was an audible gasp of envy from the other producers/reporters on the panel. 2) Al-Jazeera is still investigating the death of Margaret Hassan (the British woman who was kidnapped and almost certainly murdered in Iraq a few months ago.) She, apparently, contolled the distribution of medicine from overseas, and although she was an ardent opponent of the embargo on Iraq, anyone who controls access to medicine in a country that doesn't have even close to enough is going to make a lot of enemies even if they have the purest of intentions. So, it's quite possible that her murder served a political function beyond that of the symbolic killing of a foreign aid worker.

Needless to say, all this talk of death and being lied to by interpreters and photographing mass graves left me a little hinky, so when I got home I immediately headed off to the new Hal Hartley movie (Bad. Like "Hal Hartley remakes 'The Fifth Element' bad" - complete with Russian model cast as the winsome, negilgee-clad space alien who can't figure out how to drink orange juice.) Then off to Osento with Dr. Maelstrom, where I was reprimanded by the attendent for thanking her for "manning" the hot tubs on a Saturday night. I changed it to "midwifing" the hot tubs, and the attendent was appeased.

I should mention

Tue, 03 May 2005 20:12:31 GMT

that I actually like William Gibson, and I always read his books when they do come out. Maybe I'm missing something - I'm used to the James Bond motif where the protagonist gets a lot of fancy new weapons, and I suppose the whole "purchasing a fancy calfskin messenger bag with my new corporate credit card" motif isn't that much different - it's just more common in the "how I clawed my way to the top and married a sexy wage-earning man who shares my taste in furniture" fiction that is so frequently marketed towards women.

I've been spending just alarming amounts of time surrounded by books lately, so I can't stop thinking of strange connections, linkages, and repetition of scenes among different genres. Certain authors feel obligated to put certain scenes in their novels regardless of the genre that they're writing in. How they write those scenes can sometimes tell you a lot about the sort of literature that they read in their free time.

Like, I've often wondered about Neal Stephenson - the rest of his writing is just so fantastic and original and non-canonical in it's sci-fi stylings, but then the sex scenes that he writes are so goddamn weird. Everyone that I know who reads Neal just wishes that he would Quit Writing About Sex. You know, just draw a curtain over the characters and just leave them be. Which is odd, because often the relationships between his characters are extremely well-drawn, and seem to be pulled from lived experience - like the relationship between Randy and his first girlfriend in Cryptonomicon, for example. But when he writes about actual coitus, he writes it in a style that is unmistakably American Romance Novel. Does he read romance novels? Does he just keep one by his desk crib from the naughty bits when he feels the need to insert some humping? It doesn't keep me awake at night, but I do wonder.

shop talk

Tue, 26 Apr 2005 21:02:06 GMT

I've been working at a local bookshop lately, which is fairly interesting for a variety of reasons. For example: We have the oddest list of bestsellers of any place that I've worked at. Haruki Murakami - can't keep it on the shelves. San Francisco: Imperial Power, Eartly Ruin by Guy Brechtin - they can't get enough of it. The Master and Margarita by Mikhal Bulgakov - the kids can't stop lovin' Master and Margarita. And my god, you can't keep them away from the Kafka.

Normally,the most disheartening thing about working at a bookstore is the fact that 80% of your customers come in for the sole purpose of purchasing diet or self-help books. The last bookshop that I worked at was independently owned, in a college town, blah blah, and I swear 9 out of 10 people still came in to purchase "The Atkins Diet" or "A Child Called It."

The Atkins Diet was my personal favorite - it was a runaway bestseller, so every time they went into another printing they knocked up the price even higher and made the picture of Dr. Atkins a little bigger. You know how in those daytime TV commercials for lawyers, the background is always a bookshelf full of hardbound books? Well, I think that when they were doing the photo shoot for Dr. Atkins, the set designer was asking himself "How can I convey, pictorially, that this man is a REAL DOCTOR. Stethoscope? Gurney? Oxygen tank?"

The end result is Dr. Atkins seated at a desk, with the shit-eating grin of the illegitimate dietician, and not one, not two, not three, but roughly a million billion pill bottles scattered on the desk in front of him. The man exudes doctoral suaveness.

Someday I'm sure that Taschen will get around to putting out a coffee table book of unsettling author photos, and that photo will be one of them (in addition to any and all photographs of Shel Silverstein, but especially the one where he's holding the acoustic guitar and giving you the "creepy guy on the bus that you keep avoiding eye contact with" bedroom eyes.)

Don't forget the bucket!

Thu, 21 Apr 2005 20:51:21 GMT

So, last night John and I watched the Cynthia Plaster Caster documentary, mostly out of a confluence of factors (boredom, ennui, dollar movie night)and I have to say that I was charmed by Ms. Plaster's earthiness and professionalism, and also the fact that she works in an unwashed postal shirt and a floral apron with no pants on underneath. It's clear that she has a rather well-defined set of groupie ethics - she only casts people that she considers to be authentic rock gods (although she did offer to cast her lawyer once, which I find completely sweet and hilarious) but of the people she casts, she only provides erectile assistance to those individuals whom she is sincerely enthusiastic about blowing. Which happens, according to the documentary, to be almost none of them. "A good groupie doesn't settle for her second choice," she says firmly, at one point, to explain her rejection of Jimi Hendrix's advances. She was there to cast Jimi, but she was there to fuck Noel Redding. No casting for Noel, no fucking for Jimi. It's hard not to admire such steely determination and eyes-on-the-prize attitude, especially when its cleverly layered under a very ditzy and flamboyant demeanor.

There is, however, a wholesome kinkiness to the scenes of Ms. Caster furiously pounding her alginate mixture as said monster of rock is being fellated by his wife/"friend from out of town"/or "the plater" (Ms. Caster's euphemistically named assistant.) "Wow. That was, like, my first threesome," says the vaguely dopey indie rock boy as Cynthia eases the bucket mold off of his boy parts and his friend Krista looks on proudly. "Don't forget the bucket!" chirps Cynthia, examining the hole in the plaster with the squinty eye of the professional.

drinking games

Thu, 14 Apr 2005 21:57:32 GMT

Once, at work, my friend Holly and I came up with a drinking game based on "The Passion of the Christ." We wrote out the rules on a napkin, and I've since forgotten most of them, except for "Every time Mary Magdalene kneels down and you can see down the front of her dress, take a shot." That one was my favorite.

I hadn't even seen the movie - I was just extrapolating from tried-and-true visual sterotypes. Holly and I also spread a rumor that Jesus falls down a lot when he's carrying the cross because he has an inner ear infection. Who's going to run to their Concordance to check that kind of nonsense out on a beautiful, balmy, San Francisco day? No one, that's who. So our lies remained unmolested.

Anyway, last night I watched "Nausicca, of the Valley of the Wind" and woke up this morning with the sudden realization that if you took a shot every time Nausicca yelled "Noooooooo! Nooooooo! The killing must stooooooop!" then you would be very drunk indeed by the time that the movie was over.

Highlights of Nausicca, of the Valley of the Wind: Bugs! Everywhere!
Drawbacks of Nausicca, of the Valley of the Wind: The Entire Narrative

I have never actually played a drinking game, probably because I would lose. I was very protective of my painfully low alcohol tolerance all throught college because it meant that I could make an entire six pack last over the weekend, and I was very indigent in those days. I however, shared a house for awhile that included two guys: Bob and Sim. Bob and Sim were secret gay lovers, but Sim was too repressed to actually admit it, so they'd hang out in the living room and play drinking games late into the night. Guess what all the dares involved? No, guess.
"Bob, take your pants off" said Sim.
"Sim, take your underpants off" said Bob.
"Bob, take your underpants off and ....uh...do a handstand!" said Sim.
"Sim, do a cartwheel and...ummmm...lick my balls!"
And so on.

So, one night I was sitting and reading in the other room, to the predictable soundtrack of boy-on-boy darefest, with maybe a little "Dark Side of the Moon" playing in the background for ambiance (Don't ask.) And then I heard "Bob, ride that bicycle around the block...naked!"
"Hey!" I said "That's my bike!"
"No" said Bob "I am not riding around the block naked."
"You bet he's not," I said, "Because that's my bike, and no one rides it around the block naked but me."
"It's my dare," said Sim, calm in his assurance of dare-based privlage. "And I say he has to ride the bike around the block naked."

Bob, well into the sauce by then, and discombobulated from multiple naked cartwheels, crumpled. "You know...he said, getting a faraway look in his eye...Someday I want to work with at risk children. And if I get caught riding a bicyle around the block naked I'll have to register as a sex offender and..(here he buried his face in his hands)... I'll never get to work with at-risk children!"
Sim looked at him thoughtfuully, ceramic beer stein in hand. "Alright." he said "Naked handstand."

Bob later went on to work with at-risk children, and Sim...? Sim started going to Bible Study in order to get into the pants of this woman at his job, and speedily converted to Christianity. He's probably trolling for post-Bible Study gay sex in the family minivan as we speak.

Do I miss college? Oddly enough, no.