tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-75387101368251222682024-03-12T18:51:59.022-07:00gorgeous curiosityart, culture, sex, drugs, rock n' roll, politics.Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.comBlogger111125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-17112025250726064382013-10-25T13:20:00.000-07:002013-10-25T13:21:30.695-07:00Can Torture Be Reformed Into Acceptable Punishment?<div class="p1">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Michelle Alexander, author of <i>The New Jim Crow</i></span></td></tr>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Last weekend I spent a sizable chunk of my waking hours listening to some powerful reformists discuss the state-sponsored torture that exists in California prisons. It was a coincidence, as far as I know, that both Michelle Alexander, author of <a href="http://newjimcrow.com/" target="_blank">The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness</a>, and <a href="http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Torture/SRTorture/Pages/JuanMendez.aspx" target="_blank">Juan Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture,</a> were in Los Angeles over the same weekend, speaking on the human rights abuses that are happening currently in the parallel universe that is our carceral state. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Nota bene: The following writing will not educate you on a few foundational premises. One of them is that indefinite solitary confinement is torture. Another is that the prison system as practiced in the U.S., and particularly in California, is not only egregiously punitive, it is run by profiteers who benefit from overpopulation, and it is organized in a way that capitalizes on racist narratives of criminality that are as ugly and diseased as any racist beliefs that circulated this country prior to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s. If you have any remaining doubt about these premises, I implore you to educate yourself. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Alexander, who was bold enough to claim that “we have allowed a human rights nightmare to occur on our watch,” locates herself squarely in the business of educating people about the prison system, but she did not publicly recommend any particular course of action other than the building of a “large-scale social movement” to address the concerns of prisoners and their families. (At least, she didn’t in Los Angeles. I heard from comrades up North that in the Bay Area, she was using the word “revolution.” Hopeful? Maybe. Pandering to audience? Maybe. Who knows.)</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Juan Mendez, U.N. Special Rapporteur on Torture</span></td></tr>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;"> Likewise Juan Mendez, who submitted a request to investigate California prisons in May 2013 and has yet to receive any acknowledgement from the State Department, offered that solitary confinement has “crept up” on us as a problem of international proportion, however, he made it clear that his power to intervene would be circumscribed by a United States and California governmental structure “well equipped to dismiss me,” and that any big changes would have to originate in civil society. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Some very well-respected people with heavy media connections are speaking out in public about solitary confinement and mass incarceration! That’s good! Isn’t it?</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">One of the most boring public debates is the one about how much is enough activism. How much work it will take to get any social justice actually visible on the ground. I’m not going to participate in it here. I’m glad that people like Alexander and Mendez are out there doing educational and solidarity projects with people who are making the painful move toward awareness of such injustice as California’s prisons. They both probably work as many hours as they are capable, and are pained by the information they are privy to, and so on. And even if they aren’t, they certainly are doing more to raise consciousness with their access to media than, oh, say, Gov. Jerry Brown. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">The question I’m posing here is not one of degree. My question is actually about the foundational beliefs that undergird projects of prison reform, and particularly the movement to end solitary confinement. One of those beliefs, which I do not share, is that prison itself could ever be a just and appropriate answer to “crime” as we have conceived of it in this country. I do not believe that putting human beings in cages is a conscionable act. At all. Ever. This makes supporting anti-solitary confinement movement work feel, to me, like offering a self-loathing alcoholic a beer in the morning, out of deference to her hangover. (Which is not to pass moral judgement on self-loving functional addicts of any kind. I’m talking about giving drinks to a trapped, wants-to-stop-but-can’t alcoholic.) In other words, if we can begin to conceive of our country as <i>dependent</i> upon the carceral system, adjusting its severity here and there simply doesn’t satisfy the call for real change.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">The nationally accepted concept of crime itself, the very category of action against law, is racialized and therefore unjust. Alexander acknowledges this, and reports on American’s racial biases and how they are institutionally supported in The New Jim Crow. Ninety-five percent of survey respondents describe a black person when asked who they imagine as a “drug user,” when consistently the statistics indicate that equal numbers <i>if not more</i> white people <i>both use and sell</i> illegal drugs? Let’s not even begin to head down the racist rabbit hole of why some drugs are legal and some aren’t.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;"> Not only do I think cages are wrong, I think that asking a privileged class of people (Congress, lobbyists, policy makers, NGOs, and the like) what to do about crime is like asking the alcoholic what she’d like to do about her headache in the moment it hurts her the most. Oh, she’d prefer to drink more if her choices are drinking or not drinking? Well, yes. That makes sense. Prison reformists would prefer to put people in slightly less disgusting cages, if the choices are more or less disgusting cages? Hm. That seems right...if the choices really are that circumscribed.</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">The fact that our country was built on genocide and slave labor should tip us off that we might <i>require</i> an underclass to perpetuate our function as a superpower, and that our notions of what is possible for reform are defined by that need. California certainly creates, perpetuates, and profits from an underclass. Nationally, that class is made of 2.3 million people who are under the surveillance and bodily control of the state. Inmates are getting paid cents per hour to perform factory work for companies who profit simultaneously from lower wage expenditures AND from their stocks in private prison corporations, which are expanding faster in California than any other private sector is expanding. In Southern California, upon release, men are bused directly to Skid Row and then denied jobs and state aid based on their status as felons, for the rest of their lives. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">We, as a country, need a huge prison population to support our power structure, and so anyone who wants to incite social justice movements around prison reform is in a terrible position: they must either ignore these facts in favor of continued American exceptionalism, or they must ask Americans to self-critically evaluate their own possessive investment in the continued functioning of the carceral state. Do you know how mass incarceration makes your daily life possible? Have you ever tried to figure it out?</span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Anyone can be against solitary confinement, and everybody should. It takes a much deeper level of self-imposed discomfort to realize that every day, you and I are living on the spoils of slave labor, contributing to the isolation and abuse of prisoners by allowing carceral facilities to operate totally para-legally and without oversight, and, that it is not just the prisoners’ or their families’ who bear the responsibility for upending the system as we know it. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">Perhaps entering the prison abolition mindset via reformists like Michelle Alexander and Juan Mendez is possible. However, even the powerful reformists of the world are most likely not going to discuss the total dismantling of the neoliberal carceral state on camera, lest they be called socialists, hippies, idiots, or worse. But we will. And we must, or whatever gains the movement makes in ending solitary confinement will silence protest against the foundational and constituitive elements of the carceral state that allow it to function at all. </span></div>
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<span class="s1" style="font-size: large;">In addition to the terrifying statistics and horrifying anecdotes that illuminate the errors of the California Department of Corrections, there are moments of hopeful action in California that are deeply affecting and radically defiant. Communities are capable of creating real alternatives to incarceration. Self-determination in codes of conduct and self-defense against state-sanctioned fascist policing policies are foundational ethics in multiple communities within this nightmare. More than being anti-solitary reformists, we do have the option to be abolitionists, without all the answers, without all the plans, and with each other, not just the experts I heard over the weekend, as guides.</span></div>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Members of Break the Lock and allies at USC's 2013 Conference on Cruelty</span></td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Get to know Break the Lock: <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W9pqx-gTIE">http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7W9pqx-gTIE</a></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">Read up at: <a href="http://www.tideturning/org">www.tideturning/org</a> (And come to the December gala!)</span><span class="s1" style="font-size: large;"></span></div>
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Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-80225142389043588592013-07-28T18:27:00.000-07:002013-07-28T18:28:58.493-07:00Embarrassment is not an Emergency. I don't think.<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">I am not very confident about this.</td></tr>
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<span style="font-size: large;"><br /><br />I went to the ER a few weeks ago, in the middle of the night, with a friend who is my Dad's age. Having friends outside of my age group isn't a new practice for me, but...well, here's the story. <br /><br />When I pulled up to his apartment complex around 1:30AM, the first thing I thought was that M looked old. He didn’t perform any bravery, or any fear. He seemed tired. He was in pain. He told me his fever had spiked and it burned when he peed. He reported these symptoms with equal emphasis. I immediately thought of my dad. How he suffered those horrible weeks before a diabetes diagnosis finally changed his lifecourse. That horrible panic he felt getting up to pee all night, and how hard it was for him to talk about. <br /><br />I said to M, "Well, I’m glad you called, because that sounds a lot like my dad’s symptoms before getting diagnosed with diabetes." <br /> <br />Then I told him my dad hid his illness from me and my sister for weeks, until he’d finally gone from his exasperated eye doctor to his regular doctor, who told my dad he’d been "this-close" to a full-blown attack. I remember asking Dad what might have happened? "Oh," he'd said casually, "it’s when your system shuts itself down." As in, kidney failure. Anyway, I told M, I would have loved to get a call from my dad at 1:00AM for a ride to the ER when he was feeling bad. M grunted in that sweet affirmative way he has. <br /> <br />We had a confused exchange outside the ER, when he tried to send me home. He told me he would take the bus back, and I said, “I’m sorry, but no thank you.” He said okay to my staying there, immediately. I told him if and when he got information that made my leaving make sense, then I would go. I couldn't imagine what that information would be. Maybe something like: Sir, we are giving you this wonder pill and sending you home with a free car service!<br /><br />M went into the ER building to pee again while I parked in a deactivated parking structure. I pushed the button twice before I realized the gate was already open, and that seemed both silly and poignant. I was very careful to notice where the car was. Not the time to lose the car. <br /><br />The glass hospital doors swished me in and a woman in a pink scrub top sitting behind bullet-proof glass asked if I was with Mr. M. I was startled by her saying his name to me. He is in the restroom, she said, to my fumbling. Thank you, I said, moving away from her. <br /><br />I sat in a mid-room corner seat. Strategy: (1) M could see me from the bathroom door and (2) it was a seat I’d be okay to stay in for a few hours. I could see the whole room. Not too bright. A table on one side, a row of empty minty-green vinyl chairs on the other. The lobby was empty except for a guy sleeping in another corner, his head and entire body, save his black sneakers, concealed under a thin white hospital blanket. <br /> <br />Almost immediately, a discouraging scene: initially quiet, gentle security guards progressed from asking the sleeping guy to leave, as he had been discharged, to telling him he had to turn over the blanket because it was “property of the hospital,” to threatening to call the police, if he didn’t get off the premises immediately. That interaction range, from helpful to threatening was achieved in under one minute. M emerged from the men's room fiddling a plastic pee cup into a plastic bag as that unhappy cluster of people, blanket not yet relinquished, moved out the front door. <br /> <br />M sat a chair away from me and put his pee on the chair in between us. He didn’t seem to notice my noticing it there, or if he did, he was done caring. Pain. Age. Institutions. Why the hell should I care about this perfectly bagged, sterile, unthreatening substance. Well, I didn’t. I just didn’t want HIM to become embarrassed. But he wasn't. Where was the embarrassment coming from then? Oh, me again.<br /><br />When the nurse came for him, M and I had another confused exchange, which resulted in my accompanying him through the patient doors. <br /><br />I followed M and the nurse to the exam room. Why would he ask me to join him? I considered: loneliness? Feeling scared? Wanting a familiar person to anchor him down, even if he didn’t talk about his feelings or even seem to have them? Maybe pragmatism: he was very sick and might not remember what they told him in there, it would be good to have another witness for any instructions. Maybe he just knew hospitals are businesses and hoped I'd act as an advocate. I could offer allyship. Muscle, even. <br /><br />So I thought about how to show this place who was boss. How to find an employee who would take us on. How to help M get good care. When the nurse told him to undress, in my presence, I slipped out behind her. A minute later, his head appeared out of the green curtain and he told me I could come back in. He adjusted his body onto the bed in his blue gown, ankle length. Nice look, I said. Yeah, he said, and chuckled. <br /> <br />After a few minutes, a nurse took his vitals and he mentioned the chill of the room. She ignored that and left. I hunted for the linens, found them, and put a sheet over him and his bare feet. He seemed genuinely surprised. I couldn’t understand why. Because I touched hospital property without asking? Because I believed a man could and should have his purpling feet covered in a motherfucking hospital bed? Maybe it was smaller, simpler: he was so exhausted and sick he’d stopped solving problems, stopped pushing. When I did it for him, he had to adjust a little, because he's used to being self-sufficient. Who knows. Maybe I made up the whole thing and he wasn't surprised at all. Talking seemed to hurt him, so I didn't ask right then, although normally I would have. <br /><br />I listened to the anxious beep of M’s heart rate monitor cutting the silence of the floor. I tried to describe that particular misery: the neo- indeterminate waiting period of post-waiting room waiting; I made an out-loud offer to read to M from the book I had in my bag. We discovered our shared love of Walter Mosely. I read M pages from <i>Bad Boy Brawly Brown</i> with some explicit sexuality in them, inadvertently. We both seemed successfully unembarrassed that time. At least, my twinge was more amusing than painful. <br /> <br />It is very difficult to communicate my desire to offer care in situations where I really don’t know what would feel good to another person, and particularly in moments when it’s pretty clear that pestering someone for instructions on how to help them would ironically undermine the caring project by increasing their suffering. But I've felt it so many times: <i>I really need you to help me help you! Use your precious energy to figure out how to tell me what to do! </i><br /> <br />The doctor’s name was “Mechanick.” It tickled M. The doc asked me to leave for the exam and so I exited the curtain, again, sat three feet from my last chair, and heard them both talk about M’s prostate, bladder, and other medical history, very clearly. I went into email-land on my phone, tuning them out, to try and give M some actual privacy. <br /> <br />Linz, who was away in Europe, was online for a brief moment! “Why are you in the ER?” she wrote. I lost the connection while trying to explain. <br /><br />Minutes later, M appeared in the doorway, dressed again. “A doctor named Mechanick,” he said, smiling, with his green hoodie pulled low over his forehead. Now he looked strangely and adorably young. He mimicked the Mechanick-doctor, in a show of false confidence, gesturing at an imagined patient and declaring, “It’s your plumbing!” Clever. But did he mean doctors treat people like cars to be fixed with interchangeable parts? Or was it a joke about all of it: bodies, houses, cars, interlocking parts, jesus, Vanessa, mechanics don’t know plumbing, plumbers know plumbing. Ok. We were both delirious. I had no idea why it was funny, and still. I wanted to say it too, so I did, “It’s your plumbing!” <br /> <br />Then I realized: it <i>was</i> his plumbing. The doc was sure M had a urinary tract infection, at the least. I might have just participated in a joke about his prostate without meaning to? I checked his face for discomfort, but having the one manageable, diagnosed condition seemed to have cheered him. <br /> <br />I drove him around the corner to the pharmacy. He ambled up to a 24-hour pill window with his hoodie up. A small child wandered rather far from whomever might have been attached to her. It was still so dark out. It was after 3:00AM. I thought about how empty that ER had been, and wondered where the people were. Maybe Tuesday nights were slow. Maybe ER workers had superstitions like we strippers do, plausible but specious explanations for ebbs and flows of business. Tuesday is when people feel their illnesses, Friday is when they get injured...<br /><br />I had to admit to my utter lack of internal compass while pulling out of the parking lot. “Go left,” M said, “back the way you came in.” He closed his eyes. We didn’t talk in the car. We listened to Leonard Cohen sing, “I’m going home without my sorrow/going home sometime tomorrow/going home without that costume that I wore.” It is a beautiful song about dying. Inappropriate? Oh, probably. Inward sigh. Usually I'd mention it; I'd ask him what he thought about listening to songs about death when driving out of the ER. <br /> <br />The gate guard waved us in and I dropped M at the curb near his building. He thanked me in the loudest voice he’d used all night. "Of course," I said. "I’m glad you called," I said. I meant it. I hoped he believed me.<br /><br />W.E.B. Du Bois wrote about "double consciousness" in his 1903 book <i>The Souls of Black Folk</i>. It's a complex theory of racial prejudice and stereotyping which I am not trying to invoke in total here, but there is a structural definition from it that is deeply helpful to me in conversations about "decolonizing the mind," or "deprogramming," or any of the things I say about challenging dominant cultural norms within my own self. Du Bois wrote"It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity."<br /><br />I am not claiming that being insecure and self-conscious are the same as having a double-consciousness. I do notice that my small moments of confusion during our ER visit were usually predicated on cultural values <i>I don't actually hold but thought M might</i>, such as: men who are not related to you shouldn't undress in front of you, or, it is a big imposition to take someone to the hospital in the middle of the night. These little rules are, in my experience, the senseless "politeness" ideas that don't actually communicate anything but conformity to dominant hetero-normative, capitalistic, individualistic, ageist, white supremacist, sexist, classist, etc. etc. etc. culture. M and I talk freely about these things (we are friends, after all), so I really noticed that night's tensions because I had decided not to talk about any of it in the moment of his being in such pain.<br /><br />Still, I got self-conscious because I couldn't tell if I was helping M in the way he wanted, and I trusted him to know what he wanted, and, I trusted that what he wanted was what was best for him, whatever that was. It sounds like deferring to patriarchy, maybe, but I experienced it so differently: I was trying to support his self-determination in a totally dehumanizing institution, and not add to his suffering. I'm sure my little struggle was visible in some way as a tight smile, a jerky body motion, or something, despite my efforts.<br /><br />I think I got the take-home message right here: It's hard not to stress people out when I'm trying so hard not to unnecessarily stress people out so that when the big stressors come, we can all deal with them without stressing each other out. Trying not to stress out is pretty much the same as stressing out. And "stressing out" is the euphemistic way to talk about anxiety over false problems (ego concerns, capitalistic concerns, etc.). M's health is better today, and our friendship matters as much as ever. I'm pretty embarrassed by this blog post. I'm going to try not to stress about that now. Shit. <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /> <br /><br /><br /><br /><br /></span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-7706396137480508182013-05-07T14:50:00.001-07:002013-05-07T14:50:14.212-07:00This too, is resistance.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsL8ERiPa1RydYjpYJpZxWkgh2uo1mgrrf3G0quofvFa0_6JA4NFJdTlfnvGbGIsR0PUW0htDn8WvzPo7P3HYk1SCfZj7Uw1N80QFS2w9Ez6rkbluz9ZtBs42QASb9Zg64_doE7f3sRhzl/s1600/photo.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhsL8ERiPa1RydYjpYJpZxWkgh2uo1mgrrf3G0quofvFa0_6JA4NFJdTlfnvGbGIsR0PUW0htDn8WvzPo7P3HYk1SCfZj7Uw1N80QFS2w9Ez6rkbluz9ZtBs42QASb9Zg64_doE7f3sRhzl/s320/photo.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is what happened when I tried to "relax" so I could take a less stressed-out picture for Linz the other day.</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I feel the violence of the state in the same places I have felt the violence of individual bodies that attacked me in the past, but I am no longer in despair, and I am no longer silent in the face of systems that create despair in service to efficiency or profit. Trauma doesn’t turn me inward anymore.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I wrote those lines here in the end of January, confident that I was standing up to the bully of the state apparatus as best I could and wildly hopeful that I might be able to inspire others to action. I don’t disparage that spirit, but I arrive at this writing with more of a limp. It is true that I have committed myself to be “no longer silent in the face of systems that create despair in service to efficiency or profit.” It is not true that “trauma doesn’t turn me inward anymore.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">April 26th, 2013: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Div 52. Judge Henry Barela not yet presiding. Linz and Bilal on their way. Right now I am alone. The longer I stay here, the more ridiculous it all feels. All structures of state power are bizarre houses of cards with the means to kill at the center.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The decisions are not made locally. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">They are made by political pressure, internalized or resisted. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I smell like coconut. I’d prefer not to remember what it felt like to sit on that bus, and yet, I’m certain I should have done it, and for that feeling, I am grateful.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I count: 11 people in this room before the judge enters. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">2 of them are armed.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">6 are wearing black blazers, 2 khaki</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">there are 6 visible iPhones, including mine.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The bailiff approaches me with a clipboard. “Do you have a case here?” he asks quizzically. (An adjective that is as surreal as I need here. Not as confident or cumbersome as “incredulously.”)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I show him my yellow Notice to Reappear. (As if I had disappeared without permission?)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">He nodded and made a check mark on his clipboard. “Does your attorney know you’re here?” he asks.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I don’t have one,” I say. “This is an infraction case.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">What is the shade closer to incredulous, if one starts with “quizzical?” He nods and walks away.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Later.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Judge is on recess. One of the employees here, who just shook hands with a very rosy-cheeked female pig thinks my scarf is “pretty.” It is a Keffiyeh from a family-run factory in Palestine. Help. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I’m drinking nice coffee from Groundworks. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I meet Jennifer Waxler, the Deputy City Attorney prosecuting my case. She has been handling OccupyLA trials with the same team of officers for many months now: see Jason Rosencrantz’ moving and informative piece on Tyson Herder’s trial. <a href="http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/the-trial-of-tyson-heder.html"><span style="color: #1800b1; letter-spacing: 0px;">http://www.kcet.org/updaily/socal_focus/commentary/the-trial-of-tyson-heder.html</span></a></span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Waxler was late, dressed just slightly trendier than the suited blonde who trailed her, and she spoke to me as if I were about twelve years old and she had to make sure I got to the principal’s office safely. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I got the discovery--two police videos and some officer’s statements that don’t mention my arrest. I also got a copy of the City’s Infraction Complaint, which I spent the weekend trying to comprehend/apprehend. It has a bright green sticker on the corner, applied by Waxler or someone in her office, that says “OLA” and “TEAM 1.” An infraction complaint classified by its association with a political event? Isn’t there something wrong with that? </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Count 1: defendant did willfully and unlawfully enter, remain, stay and loiter in a park between the hours of 10:30PM and 5:00AM of the following day. (False. I willfully and lawfully entered, remained, stayed, and peacefully exercised my first amendment right in a public space that had not yet been approved by the City as a “park,” where I had gathered for political conversation, made group consensus decisions, learned about downtown gentrification, eaten, smoked, made love, done homework, and slept for many nights, for two months prior.) </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Count 2: defendant did willfully and unlawfully fail and refuse to comply with a lawful order, direction, and signal of a Police Officer and a Traffic Officer. (False. I willfully and lawfully refused to comply with an unlawful order, direction, or signal, but I was forced to comply with brute force, insults, intimidation, threatening, and a weapon-brandishing army of pigs.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“All of which is contrary to the law and against the peace and dignity of the People of the State of California.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">What a feat of narrative colonization! The City Attorney’s office gets to call itself “the People,” and it gets to decide that Occupy went against the peace and dignity of The People. We thought we were the People. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Declarant and complainant therefore prays that a warrant may be issued for the arrest of said defendant(s) and that he may be dealt with according to law.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Wait a second. You already violently arrested me, detained me and my comrades in handcuffs on a bus all night until we peed ourselves, jailed us for 48 hours and lied to my and others’ families about where we were, refused us access to newspapers, dragged this infraction trial out over fifteen months, plan to bring witnesses and requested an hour and a half bench trial instead of the normal maximum of 30 minutes, and, now, you “pray” I should be arrested, for my prior experience of getting arrested? </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">And, according to this document, I could be multiple people, or a man, and it would all be the same to the state, since this is a template form for a group of such situations?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I call bullshit. I know it doesn’t mean much. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Over the weekend, I talked to two lawyers. “How much jail time are you facing?” One asked. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“None,” I said. “These are infractions. I’m facing fines.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“But you said the City filed a continuance?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Yes, back in January.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“A continuance filed on an infraction case, by the City?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“Yes.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">“I’ve never heard of that.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Two said, “Whatever you do, don’t incriminate yourself before the trial is over. You want to give the judge every possible avenue to acquit you or to throw out charges. You can tell your side of the story after the fact.” So here we are. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I watched the videos. Back in January I wrote this: “I will be watching the LAPD’s video of my arrest sometime in the next few weeks. (That will be a great test of my ego, I’m sure, since I’ve probably unconsciously self-aggrandized since the event.)”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I was more worried about the possible shame of discovering I wasn’t as brave and composed as I remembered than I was concerned about the potential consequences of revisiting a scene that had been painful to experience the first time. That first time, it was painful even though I was all hopped up on adrenaline and held tight on either side by comrades for a long time before releasing my body to the pain techniques. In other words, I thought I was being self critical by admitting I might have self-aggrandized. But instead of a “real story” on video that I could check against my memories of myself, I got hours of jumbled footage of pigs destroying the camp, tackling and arresting a number of other people, shakily jerking from Mayor Villaraigosa’s face to the attentive faces of the Occupiers. I saw a lot of black uniforms swarming over inert bodies of my friends. “Get your knee off of my head, please,” said one of my comrades, ever so politely, to a pig who was kneeling on his temple. Of me, there was little footage, but it didn’t matter.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">This is what matters: the experience of watching the videos and representing myself in the trial caused me a kind of dissociative anxiety and panic I didn’t experience in direct chronological “causality” with getting arrested at Occupy. The intrusively present emotional feature of trauma was greater during this past week than it was after I got out of jail, and that resulted in my being caught up in a series of feelings and behaviors that shot almost immediately out of my control. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Pain must be associated with an event, and the farther one gets from that event, the less pain one is supposed to feel. Pain is supposed to follow state logics of time and space, in order to be legible. But anyone who has had a traumatic event happen to them knows that trauma memories are recursive, cyclic, often on an uncontrollable rewind-replay, subject to a “repetition compulsion” or whatever other psychological frameworks you’d like to apply here. Sometimes, a similar experience will compound the pain of the first. Sometimes a dissimilar experience. Sometimes talking about it helps. Sometimes talking about it makes it hurt more. Sometimes hurting more makes sense. Sometimes hurting more seems insane. There is not one individual trauma that can’t be linked to a class of traumas experienced by others in similar circumstances, but this fact is hidden from us by individualized psychological diagnoses and simplistic cultural rhetoric around innocence and guilt. Ethics are not even part of the equation there.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The night before my trial, I broke on a video chat with loved ones in NYC. I started crying while reporting on my conversations with lawyers, told my loved ones I was scared, and then, how ashamed I felt of it, since this was really nothing in the scheme of things, a couple of infractions, and how could I have this kind of self-pity when all the people I respect, historical or living, have suffered so much more? You got hurt, they said. So what? I said. Well, they said, we care about you. That felt good, but it didn’t “help.” We all agreed that regardless, it was my duty to see this thing as far as I could, and that helped a little.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">On Monday, April 29, after an hour of frenetic crying, yelling at my family, rushing around the house, panicking in the car, and then laughing maniacally when Linz played Tupac for me on her phone as we walked up Main street, I went to trial. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember standing next to Officer Morrison, who ID’d me from a brief fuzzy video clip of a blonde woman, a paused blip of partial profile, my head bowed and three pigs standing over me, before I got pulled out of the circle, which was not captured on video. How did he “know” it was me? He remembered my fancy glasses, which he claimed to have carefully removed. It was a lie. I looked at the judge. I looked at Morrison. I wanted to bellow and scream. WHAT?! WHAT?! HOW CAN ANY OF YOU STAND THIS?!</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember asking some questions that I hoped would communicate my disdain for the process to someone sympathetic in the future, which I was advised to do by Lawyer Two. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember the judge asking me if I wanted to tell my side of the story, and saying no, because of advice from both Lawyer One and Two. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I remember Jennifer Waxler, fumbling through her notes, and with an effortless lack of respect, ending her argument with the statement “fortunately no force was used in this case.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">No force. Was used. This statement, uttered in the passive voice, permanently elides my bodily experience from the state narrative of my arrest, and absolves any and all force-wielding bodies or institutions of any culpability in my feeling hurt. Even the lie that “Officer Morrison did not use force in this case” would have given some credence to the possibility that he might have used force in another. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">As it stands, not only am I rendered illegible in my feelings, since what am I so upset about when no force was used? But in addition, everyone else who has been poisoned by the obfuscation and lies told in the courtroom gets their narrative of the “peaceful eviction” safely reinforced. And what’s more, the state legitimates its own narrative-creation capacities by continually telling the same story, and then saying that consistency is the measure of credibility. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">If I keep talking, I start sounding hysterical, and yes, I use the most anachronistic sexist word I can think of, because I am going batshit crazy in a female identified body and therefore I’m being read and treated like a hysteric, not like a revolutionary, by many people who don’t know me well, and even sometimes by those who do, and most sadly, by myself. “I’m irrational,” I keep saying. But am I really?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">When the judge asked if I had any closing words, I said, in a rather rambling, uncertain voice, “I have been present at every court date I was expected to be present for. These charges were not filed until statue of limitations was almost over. At this point, for an officer who has made likely hundreds of arrest since that time to identify me from an ear on a video, strikes me as very strange.”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">It was a half-assed jab issued from simultaneous internal forces: my principle about speaking truth to power, and, my body-brain shutting down in terror. (“I wish you’d just said ‘This is all bullshit,’” Linz said later. I wish I had too.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">The judge wanted it finished. Guilty on both counts. Time served. I lost, but I wasn't being fined.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"> Jennifer Waxler and Officer Morrison high-fived in the hallway. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I ate some food with the friends that had supported me in court, I went to my mother’s house, I talked about the trial briefly, I held my little sister's hand, I went home to bed, I got up at 7:00AM, I felt a little nauseous and joked with Craig that I was going to try and get through the day without throwing up. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">I did not get through that day without throwing up. I walked out of my class and threw up, walked back in and finished teaching. Walked to my office hour and threw up, then called Linz and checked in to the student health center. I slept for nearly fourteen hours after that. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Every day for the past week I have had at least one crying jag, usually a few in a day. I’ve also been yelling at my loved ones in unprecedented explosive fits of temper. When they’ve withdrawn from me, I end up feeling uncared for and abandoned. I can’t get my point across, no matter how hard I try. I’m hypersensitive to everything I read or hear and its potential nefarious connection to police state politics. I’ve got crushed feeling in my chest most of the time. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Plus, I know all these things to be “symptoms” of trauma, and that my wanting to discuss them will be misread as anything from a bid for “attention” (the go-to insult from people outside radical community organizing) to a kind of self-obsessed persecution narrative that elides the bigger picture of state repression against large groups of people who don’t have my race or gender or class privilege (the go-to dismissal from people inside radical community organizing). </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">So I’ll try to do it as clearly as I can, since anyone who has read this far deserves at least that. (Thank you.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">First: I had no idea what it would be like to fight this case and I didn’t try hard enough to get information early on. This is because (1) I found it difficult to believe the City of LA would do all the surprisingly punitive things it has done, and (2) once they were doing them, I got overwhelmed, procrastinated, and didn’t ask for help. My behavior and beliefs were directly related to the privilege I have had of being relatively safe from police violence and court intimidation until recently. I take responsibility for myself on this.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Second: As a result of my lack of understanding and lack of self care or research or asking for help, I panicked just before the trial. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Third: Once I panicked that hard, I didn’t know what to do, and neither did anyone close to me. I therefore spent a week, which hasn’t really ended, feeling and acting in ways that aren’t familiar, aren’t coherent, and are wearing us all out.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Fourth: I find this whole process to fit terrifyingly well into an enumerated state agenda of “teaching a lesson,” which is a way of making the cost of dissent too high for the people, which is what happens under fascism. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Formula for state repression: Make those who resist the system exhausted and scared, then tell them their experience never happened, but that they were all the time actually hurting everyone else, put that story on the public record, and then drag them through an extensive process of punitive “appearances” during which they are required to sit through continual denial of their experience under threat of further repression. Then high-five where they can see you, just in case they didn’t get the message about who is in charge. When a resistor tries to repair themselves with people who care about them, they will feel desperate, defensive, and alienated, which will reinforce the pain-avoidant logic of those with the privilege of choosing to "stay away from trouble," and potentially reinforce the depressive cynicism of those without that privilege. Either way, the state wins.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;"> This is also the formula for abuse between people: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">When your behavior has started to make the other person exhausted and scared, tell them their version of events either didn’t happen or isn’t important, remind them of how much they have hurt YOU either in the past or right now, and then drag them through more exhausting confrontation until you are satisfied. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tactics of coercion are a state science, but they are also a set of daily habits replicated at the individual level. I have participated. Everyone I know has. I'm tired of crying and yelling about it, but I think that really just means I should rest up a bit and try again.</span></span></div>
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Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-67533151121645730312013-01-23T09:11:00.002-08:002013-01-23T23:24:58.520-08:00This is the year of Ferocity.<span style="font-size: large;"><br /></span>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEe8R6wBeZ_keQhDWJsxiddqsGiSmlnwlq2Cof6Mzf7zsFLAS0CWcjNH5gb8dC90vBxGTiXCGNUC9mmBNCC4OlHlZGqT8XDwdl6DRWGmMJ5GV2q8rOQL8BR4s5CvAgKDCDizny-u-T_E4q/s1600/IMG_1033.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><br /><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhEe8R6wBeZ_keQhDWJsxiddqsGiSmlnwlq2Cof6Mzf7zsFLAS0CWcjNH5gb8dC90vBxGTiXCGNUC9mmBNCC4OlHlZGqT8XDwdl6DRWGmMJ5GV2q8rOQL8BR4s5CvAgKDCDizny-u-T_E4q/s400/IMG_1033.JPG" width="400" /></span></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The following is excerpted from a long letter I wrote to my friends and family on Jan. 16th, 2013. I am sharing it here. Welcome back, gorgeous curiosity. There's some new ferocity in the mix. If you'd like some background on my experience getting arrested at the eviction of OccupyLA, please do read my short piece at <a href="http://slake.la/features/occupant" target="_blank">Slake Magazine</a>. (And then buy it! They need support!)</span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Hello family and dearest friends.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I'd like to explain why I'm sending this mass email instead of offer you an empty apology for it. My priority is not convenience. My experience of a pretrial today, over a year since the Occupy arrest, was so confusing and difficult for me I'd prefer to very deeply and carefully record it once, share it with everyone, and avoid having to tell the story many more times. I hope you understand, and I'm so grateful that when I go to write something like this, I have such a long and trustworthy list of people I love to share it with. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">On Dec 27, 2012 (over a year from my Nov. 30 2011 arrest), I got arraigned and pled not guilty to two infractions (violations of municipal code, like speeding tickets). One of them was "loitering in a public park," another one some anachronistic code that ends up being something lighter than "disturbing the peace." At that arraignment appearance, the attorney representing the City of LA went against her own office's recommendation, and spoke off-record to advise me to plead not guilty so that at a following pretrial proceeding my fine could be lowered to something more reasonable (than the total of $800 she was calculating). I had already decided to plead not guilty but this was a surprise--that the office responsible for the ridiculous fine was now telling me to embed myself further in the system to try and get it lowered! I did enter the not guilty plea, and was given a pretrial date of Jan. 16. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The expectation for this morning was very clear: I would say not guilty, the court would probably set another date for me to appear, and at that future date I could expect a fine would be levied and the case would be closed. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I arrived for my pretrial hearing at Dept 40 in the Superior Court downtown with Jim, Craig, Gray, and Lindsey, who all sat with me and will have their own perspectives on what happened. (They were amazing, I am so grateful to them!) I checked in with the public defender, Jimmy, who told me I was "pro-per," meaning I had no attorney assigned to me. You don’t get a public defender unless you are facing jail time, and infractions don’t carry that possibility. They also don’t carry the possibility of having your sentence (fine imposed) lessened because of time you’ve already served, which means that the days I spent in jail are going to be effectively erased from the memory of the state. Like the arrests and time served that have been stolen from so, so many others before me, while more punishments, red tape, confusion, and implicit threats of incarceration are levied at them. Keep your head down or you will invite trouble. That is the ethic of a repressive regime, not a free society. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jimmy saw my infractions on the list, asked me about them, and when he heard that I was an Occupy arrest his eyes light up with a sort of hope and kindness I was not prepared to see. He took me outside and explained what the procedure was going to be, chatted with me about my choice to plead not guilty, and talked lovingly about his years in law school at Berkeley because he saw I was from “Burkley” on the court documents. (“Is it some other Berkeley?” he asked after showing me the spelling. “No,” I said, “that’s a lack of respect from the court.”)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Jimmy told me he supported the choice I was making to stick to my principles. He also told me I wasn't going to have my named called for a few hours because my case would be lowest on the priority list. He spoke very respectfully of his own cases: folks who were often already worn down by years of exposure to the unfairness of the police, court, jail system. I expressed my gratitude for his time and effort and he wished me luck. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I was surprised, then, when my name got called almost immediately upon our returning to the courtroom. My case wasn't coming up yet, but the city attorney's rep called me to her desk to give me some paperwork and discuss my options. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">She informed me that the city was filing for a continuance, because the one officer who was capable of providing the necessary witness evidence against me was unavailable until after his SWAT training, which lasts until April. Normally for an infraction, if a defendant pleads not guilty and the officer who issued the ticket is unavailable, the charges are dropped. Let’s remember I was not ticketed; I was taken into custody, detained for hours in ziptie handcuffs, booked into Van Nuys Metro Jail, and held for days. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In other words, instead of having this matter moving toward resolution, I'm being held on three more months of informal probation, during which I can't get approved to visit a friend in prison at San Quentin, can't get any more infractions without higher punitive consequence, and certainly can't get arrested at a protest action unless I want the court to make an even bigger case against me for a supposed "pattern" of behavior (which they are doing to other activists, right now.) I spent all of last year in this situation, because the City Attorney waited until the absolute last minute to file charges against me, and then filed injunctions, which are much more difficult to contest. You have no right to a lawyer or a jury trial. You just get squeezed for money. The California budgetary crisis, passed on to the working class, who usually plead guilty to infractions. Still, most people would be happy to face an injunction instead of a misdemeanor because of the removal of the possibility of jail time. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The city attorney rep handed me the unexpected continuance paperwork, and she pointed at another indecipherable form, telling me if I wanted to take a guilty plea that day I would be charged with two “lesser” infractions. Jimmy entered our conversation. He wasn’t representing me, because I do not get an attorney assigned to me without the possibility of facing jail time (infractions are always fines). But, he advised me in front of her as a friend of the court not to take the “deal,” to move forward with my “not guilty” plea, and he walked me back outside the courtroom again to show me which parts of the continuance document I should address when my case was called. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">As I read the document, I moved from a kind of annoyance at what seemed like some bloated little bureaucratic skin tag to real rage at an intrusive cancer. I won’t detail all of it here, but I’ll give one important example. The continuance claims as its foundational premise that only one officer has the necessary info for the case to proceed. Without his testimony, the City is unable to prosecute, so, the continuance is a request to wait until he’s good and ready to get up and bear witness. Which will be after he’s done with SWAT training. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">However. Three male officers were involved in my arrest, and two used “pain compliance” on me that night. All three officers carried me out of my circle of comrades to a line of other occupiers in custody. I did speak to the cops. I said, “The last man to touch me like that was a rapist,” and, “No thanks,” when the officer carrying my upper torso said “The cameras are off, you can walk now.” When my glasses fell, I said, “You knocked those off, I think you should pick them up and put them back on me,” and the officer on my left picked them up off the ground and folded them over my shirt collar. One of the three who took me into custody cuffed me, and another officer told him to loosen the cuffs when I cried out. Another officer entirely walked me to a different line, where my information was taken and my ID checked by another. Yet another officer walked me to the line to wait for the bus. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I refuse the premise that there is only once officer capable of providing evidence that I was processed in that mass arrest. I refuse to elide from this narrative the dramatic political theater concocted by the LAPD, in which 1400 armed, uniformed cops, many with riot gear and rifles, stood in concentric circles around unarmed protestors for hours, before systematically brutalizing every person who didn’t stand up when they were commanded. They used pressure points. They twisted our legs. They expressed their disdain for us over and over again. One officer stood directly across from me for hours on end, refusing to meet my eyes but no doubt hearing every chant I led. One officer processing my paperwork said, “You work at USC? How could you do something so stupid?”</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I refuse to participate in a political fiction designed by the City Attorney’s office: that an arrest is best remembered by the cop who puts his name on the booking form. I refuse to shamefacedly accept that I must wait another three months to have this matter concluded because that one precious officer, whose personal memory is the only one capable of narrating my arrest, has to complete his SWAT training and can’t miss a day or he might fail his test! I refuse to believe that his killer-training is more important than my peace of mind and ability to do the work I love so much, but more importantly, I refuse to allow the entire edifice of this response to protest, which is built to make the costs of dissent too high, to steal my sense of purpose or dignity. How could I do something so stupid? Well, which is stupider, participating in a system that hurts everyone, or saying NO and taking your lumps on your own terms?</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I don’t think I can write anything important, love anyone hard enough, work deeply enough at world-making projects, or overcome my fear of pain, repression, abandonment, death, what-have-you, if I haven’t let go the notion that what I believe in and what I represent has any more chance in hell of fitting in to the state structures Americans operate in today. In other words, I fully embrace the adversarial relationship I am in with the institution of criminal “justice” because I am disgusted by it on behalf of the millions of people who are bullied into submission by its punitive capitalist formula. My story is only interesting insofar as it is a window into the larger injustice faced by thousands, many of whom have been convinced that this is <i>just how life is</i> in Los Angeles, in California, in America. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">Thanks to Jimmy’s quick tutelage, I objected to the continuance. I mentioned that there were multiple officers involved in my arrest and so the premise of the continuance was faulty. I reminded the court that this matter had been dragged on for over a year. I requested discovery of all materials pertaining to the case. My heart was beating so hard I actually thought it might be visible through my skin.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">The judge granted the city its continuance despite my objections. I am ordered to appear again on April fifteenth. The judge did make a note that there were to be no more continuances after that date. I will be watching the LAPD’s video of my arrest sometime in the next few weeks. (That will be a great test of my ego, I’m sure, since I’ve probably unconsciously self-aggrandized since the event.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I’ll be contacting the NLG for some advice and will enter the courtroom four months from now with a statement that, even if it never goes on court record, will at least establish two crucial truths: I refuse to play victim to the City’s strongarm, and, I am not alone in my anger. My circumstances allow me the freedom to say NO--I can risk a higher fine because I have financial support, I can risk additional, emotionally taxing court dates because I have such a strong circle of love supporting me, I am healthy, my grad student schedule is somewhat flexible, and so on. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">And so I am resisting, because it is necessary. I will keep pleading not guilty. For those who are unable to stand and fight this kind of state-sanctioned abuse, and even for those who simply believe themselves unable for spurious reasons, I have compassionate solidarity. I know what it feels like to be absolutely sure there is no other option but to let an outside force continue attacking you. I have practiced despair, and it is a self-perpetuating, destructive force that often wears a mask of “realism,” “being honest about things,” or “being practical.” </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">I now attempt to practice something else: Nietzsche’s <i>Amor fati</i>. As I understand it, and I don't pretend a perfect understanding of Nietzsche, this is not love of “fate” as predetermined, but a love for the constant work of consciously creating beauty from the inescapable material reality of the world and the body. This is not a settling for making the best of what's around, this is a constant desire and effort to absolutely love what I believe in and what I'm doing RIGHT NOW, as if I were going to repeat this moment forever. </span>Despair and hopelessness are important guests, and when they arrive I attend to them very carefully, but I'm going to die whether I feel hopeless or not, so my goal is always to create something meaningful from what is. <span style="letter-spacing: 0px;">In my experience there is no joy greater than the co-creation of beauty with loved ones, whether that beauty is a piece of art made in the safety of a home or a piece of political resistance born in full view of the danger posed by the state's violence, or the exquisite combination of both that I am attempting now. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I feel the violence of the state in the same places I have felt the violence of individual bodies that attacked me in the past, but I am no longer in despair, and I am no longer silent in the face of systems that create despair in service to efficiency or profit. Trauma doesn’t turn me inward anymore. I hope I can model, even in miniature, the love and care I am taking in my refusal to just shut up and go home. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">I have been so inspired and comforted by others’ stories and by the history of those who did the near-impossible, those who kept pressing on when the momentum of the powerful class seemed too strong to meet. Here’s to all the people defying the oppressive silencing of a punitive and profit-driven dominant culture and state apparatus. Here’s to those lifting the veil on coercion and abuse, in all its forms. I’m proud to join them in whatever small way I can, and I’m grateful for your presence, comradeship, love, and support. I want to figure out how I have participated in these systems in my own actions, and keep learning how to live differently. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span style="font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif; font-size: large;">In Solidarity and with Love, </span></span></div>
Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-30492810641580425602011-12-19T01:47:00.001-08:002011-12-20T18:58:27.710-08:00We're Just Here to Watch the Game, Officer<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Riding the high of our freezing, raining, slightly disorganized and overwhelmingly policed action at the Port of Long Beach on Dec 12th, a table full of soaking wet comrades came up with an idea for a brilliant autonomous action. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Ruth Fowler, who wrote a <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/2838" target="_blank">great piece</a> on what we did, was the origin: she signed up to receive LAPD chief Charlie Beck’s tweets some time ago, to keep tabs. She got an announcement for what appeared to be a public relations event: the LAPD basketball team going to the Midnight Mission on Skid Row to play a team comprised of people who work at the various missions/outreach centers there. I kid you not: The LAPD “Young Gunz” vs the “Skid Row All-Stars.” The press release itself is a work of manic rhetorical genius: the LAPD are "just men doing what they love" on the court. Competition between the teams "shows the level of mutual respect." And other bizarre obfuscating tripe.</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Our instant suspicion of the event was not paranoid: the LAPD is notorious for its harassment of the residents of Skid Row, even more notably since the <a href="http://news.change.org/stories/is-the-safer-cities-initiative-increasing-homelessness-in-los-angeles" target="_blank">Safer Cities Initiative</a> was passed. This initiative has resulted in the area of Skid Row, which has low incidence of violent crime, hosting the highest concentration of law enforcement anywhere in the country. The money for services never materialized from the Initiative, and the cycle of homelessness and incarceration has not been broken, it has been reinforced. The missions in the area, while providing much-needed shelter, food, and care, especially to people attempting to get sober, support the Safer Cities Initiative and thus still contribute to the criminalization of homelessness. Please read more about the issues- this is a political quagmire, safely hidden from view as the gentrification of downtown Los Angeles rolls along per Mayor Villaraigosa's plans. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Like I said, we were still high on adrenaline from the port action, and trying to ignore our freezing wet clothes while we occupied a breakfast spot in Long Beach, and it was decided: Sometimes you just have to mic-check the police chief in his basketball shorts. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The following day, we descended on the offices of LA-CAN (Los Angeles Community Action Network), also located in Skid Row, and talked with organizers there about our plan to crash the LAPD’s little PR stunt. We wanted to make sure we weren’t jeopardizing any important relationships with the Midnight Mission, that there would not be repercussions on Skid Row residents, and that we were covering the right issues in our planned statement. We got some great advice on the statement and a smirking green light on the action from long-time activists we trust. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Nine of us walked into the Mission that afternoon with a script, a video camera, and hopes to show a few people that OccupyLA has the brains and the balls to disrupt self-congratulatory band-aid media stunts from law enforcement. We watched the cops serve meals, with sidearms visible under their plastic aprons. (Very friendly.) We sat in the stands, we stood for the anthem, and then when the players were getting introduced, I pulled the script from my pocket and screamed “MIC CHECK!” </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">This is what we said: </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">"We, the 99%, do not accept the criminalization of the 15,000 homeless people on Skid Row. Shelter is a human right, and by shelter we do NOT mean jail cells under the so-called Safer Cities Initiative. The police presence on Skid Row is highest in the world, with a greater deployment of law enforcement than anywhere but Iraq. We want real community change, not empty public relations efforts. We are here in support of the RESIDENTS of Skid Row, and all those who are doing what they can despite the violent selective targeting of City Council and the LAPD. "</span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">The LAPD scrambled to figure out how to kick us out without arresting us in the middle of a nice little time. They yanked on Ruth a bit, but we were escorted out of the building with no further incident. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">During the mic check, one of the officers kept saying, “This is private property, you can’t do that here.” It was hilarious logic: everyone in the stands responded to us, mostly with favorable cheers and “Skid Row! Skid Row!” as we left. If we’d been chanting something short and supportive, like “Go Allstars!” We would have had no problem. What we did was say a little too much, with a little too much conviction, and puncture the veil of Public Relations to remind everyone that the problems of our city are not only not being solved, they are being exacerbated by the LAPD. </span></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">There’s really nothing finer on a rainy afternoon than some good ol’ disruption of business-as-usual. </span></span></div>
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><u><a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJS3v8CO-yE&context=C318e7b9ADOEgsToPDskIG9lc5xH4IKLDSroPyGm5j" target="_blank">Watch Jared Iorio's video of the action here!</a></u></span></div>
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<span style="letter-spacing: 0px; text-decoration: underline;"></span></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com24tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-30767944886735084522011-12-05T14:44:00.000-08:002011-12-05T14:44:41.320-08:00On White Privilege and Going to Jail Part II<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjwDSfHZD2yyodf2rRaJjm3wCGoOrxs3585wlTnbqT0aK7Vtrx_lmwNtV6CPwaiNj1wf_9dKslXjlWvBtER0rKyyk4ZT7iNVbH2-zVw7QNwNdPf60UQGzxFYg5G3vJS0cY2NFrBin0ro1ex/s1600/IMG_4699.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"></span></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY0f8WFy5Qtl6RnxECocNmXWzR1n-o2Y0gSrNqx_qEogpXKMil5LGN249nY_MuR1LLSzI3H3FReNAti2BA3bgd5fPrwdpQK6UF9ziTdsLcwqUjFN5EbzJjgDUyIePNrUNJmAGfOktQWv2P/s1600/111130_occupy_la_605_ap.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="216" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY0f8WFy5Qtl6RnxECocNmXWzR1n-o2Y0gSrNqx_qEogpXKMil5LGN249nY_MuR1LLSzI3H3FReNAti2BA3bgd5fPrwdpQK6UF9ziTdsLcwqUjFN5EbzJjgDUyIePNrUNJmAGfOktQWv2P/s400/111130_occupy_la_605_ap.jpg" width="400" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I was arrested last Tuesday night/early Wednesday morning at the "peaceful" eviction of the OccupyLA encampment. I was released late Thursday night on my own recognizance, with a notice to appear in court on January 6th. I still have comrades in jail, some of whom were snatched just two days ago during a march. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One conversation that has emerged from this experience was sparked by the impatience many long-time activists feel in the face of the arrestee's complaints about tight cuffs, bad food, rough treatment, no showers, and so on. The conversation looks something like this: </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Occupy Arrestee: They treated us so badly in jail! This is an outrage!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Seasoned Activist: What did you expect? They've been doing this to people for fifty years. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">OA: But this time they did it to ME!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">SA: And so now you care? What about when they were doing it to the Black Panthers in the 1960s? What about when they do it to people in marginalized urban communities every DAY? What about when they do it to the house-less, or to prostitutes? It's so selfish to suddenly care about the treatment of incarcerated people now that you've had a taste of the system. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">OA: I know, I know. What can I do about my past? I didn't get it. I get it now. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">As frustrating as it is to know that many of the people who were radicalized by their experiences in jail could have potentially been radicalized by an education prior, I hope to help welcome my brothers and sisters into the radical fold, whatever their entry was. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For me, the real moment of radicalization happened last year, in an Ethnic Studies course taught by Dylan Rodriguez at UC Riverside. When I read the book "Pacifism as Pathology," by Ward Churchill, and sat in a room of activist-scholars who had much clearer and more nuanced understanding of the way privilege functions in our country, I had the first in a series of "aha" moments that have changed me. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Some statements of my privilege: I am a white woman from the middle class, who had not yet been targeted by law enforcement. I can see women who look like me on TV. I have never been told not to speak my native language. I have never been told that my clothes could be a reason for my imprisonment. I have access to birth control. I have an education. I can read very well. I have traveled to other countries. I have access to the internet. I know a lot about nutrition, and I can afford to eat healthfully. I do not support a large family. I have a supportive family. I have never lived with a substance addiction. I own a cell phone. And so on.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I am from Berkeley, and so my understanding of what it meant to be leftist was mostly pacifist, communicative, and passive towards state power. I had never questioned the efficacy or the inherent privilege of that position. I generally want to deescalate violence. I had never questioned the efficacy or the inherent privilege of that stance, either. Over the course of ten weeks in Dylan's class, scales fell from my eyes and I was in pain: the pain of realizing that for all my education and radical politics, I had actually been blind to the complex functioning of systems of repression and oppression. It wasn't my fault, but it was my fault. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In the holding cell at Van Nuys Metro, I watched women get angry at the way incarcerated people are dehumanized, bullied, and subjected to torturous conditions as a matter of course. One activist said, "Stop complaining at every little thing, it makes us look stupid. This is what jail is like for everyone." I interjected, "No. I think every grievance should get voiced. Our job here is to remind the LAPD, and ourselves, that we don't have to accept the 'fact' of jail, that we can look at it with fresh anger, and that we are fighting systemic acceptance of wrong, immoral, inhumane conditions for everyone, not just for ourselves." In that situation, the naive response was the most radical! It involved women seeing something for the first time, and recognizing its disease because they had not already accepted that it was status quo. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is why longtime organizers always need to listen to new voices and young people. We sometimes settle into a sense of "one must pick one's battles." Do I think my friend should have screamed so loud about wanting a toothbrush that she got carted off to solitary? Yes. Because she started a conversation on the whole cell block about why the hell they wouldn't let us brush our teeth. She started a conversation about repressive tactics of psychological torture that many thought weren't used on American civilians. One officer, when we requested a newspaper, said, "You don't get to have one today. You need a lot of time to think."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So we took that time to think. And as far as I know, not a one of us felt repentant at the end of it. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The move into more radical thought doesn't have to happen violently, but it feels violent, because it is the destabilization of all that one used to "know" about how the world works. It is an epistemological shift that hurts. But it is the best kind of pain. It is birth. And the more who go through it, whether in a classroom, in a jail cell, or from their childhood as it is necessary for survival, the more comrades we have in the fight. </span><br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com40tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-66277791533837034232011-11-23T14:49:00.000-08:002011-11-23T14:49:40.561-08:00On White Privilege and Going to Jail<div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><u><br />
</u></b></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSBKMhK-vc4VVU9ADpqYm1NmVS2b1b4TXZAsjmjBUYzQ9k_a4TKr6bz2Jf_ycy0PDmJm2iDVN6IwgfgUWPZFBl4W6YL1kjBPArJ_2eKeGXPNdnSW-H7oKGKerWnoJ5EBD75vw_3biluNi/s1600/photo-12.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEimSBKMhK-vc4VVU9ADpqYm1NmVS2b1b4TXZAsjmjBUYzQ9k_a4TKr6bz2Jf_ycy0PDmJm2iDVN6IwgfgUWPZFBl4W6YL1kjBPArJ_2eKeGXPNdnSW-H7oKGKerWnoJ5EBD75vw_3biluNi/s320/photo-12.JPG" width="320" /></a></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Guest Writer on Gorgeous Curiosity! Welcome Ryan Rice! </span></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; font-size: 13px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><u><br />
</u></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><b><u>Two Arrests For The Resistance: Padding My Resume</u></b></div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"> Since Occupy Wall Street began, I have been arrested in both Oakland and in Los Angeles. Across this nation we have seen protesters being beaten, pepper-sprayed, tear-gassed, and shot with rubber bullets and bean-bag projectiles. As of Sunday morning, there are a total of 4,619 arrests across the country. You read that correctly. The United States of America has arrested nearly five thousand people made up of nonviolent students, citizens, seniors, activists, journalists, and legal observers. I hope my arrests may highlight the permeating cancer we’re fighting. I hope my arrests may illuminate the overt attempts by the oligarchs to inhibit freedom, incarcerate the dissenters, and further the continued destruction of this great experiment known as America.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b>Occupy Oakland</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">I was in Oakland for their November 2<sup>nd</sup> General Strike, and was part of the 103 arrests in the nighttime raid of Alameda County Sheriff’s department on Occupy Oakland. I spent 16 hours in a cold, dirty holding cell in Oakland with other comrades bent on the devilish desire of restoring democracy to this country. The police took every opportunity to intimidate us, letting us languish in the jails with tight zip-tied cuffs for hours as many of us suffered bruises and wounds from the attacks at Occupy Oakland.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">Those arrested were the ones within an arbitrary “no-zone” around the tent city. We were the ones that came to investigate in the dead of night the hundreds of shock troops assembled around a community encampment. We were the ones that raised a peace sign and held our ground. Those that fled the state’s power were spared. They that submitted to the fears of the helicopters, guns, paddy wagons, and tear gas were out of danger. Yet the First Amendment was the only permit we needed! The occupy movement is a 24/7 protest on public space because of the immediate and dire need to change the course of this nation. But still the raised shotguns fired and flash-bang grenades exploded.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">I hope you have all seen the <a href="http://abclocal.go.com/kgo/story?section=news/local/east_bay&id=8438054" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">video of Ranger veteran <span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-color: white; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial;">Kayvan Sabeghi </span></a><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">being beaten mercilessly by shock troops for standing up against injustice. I witnessed first-hand as his internal injuries grew worse and he screamed from the floor of the jail hallway for medical assistance. I observed the smirks on the guards’ faces as they did nothing until hour fifteen.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">I was treated personally with mostly dignity. They saw my white skin, they heard me speaking policy, politics, and law, and they saw me look them in the eyes with a righteous indignation that I would wager they do not often receive. The National Lawyers Guild assured us of our timely release and the legal action they would be taking in our defense, so it turned into a waiting game.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">The worst feeling of the ordeal was the utter powerlessness I felt when trapped unjustly. Here I was, witnessing <i>wrongs</i> that I was incapable to stop. In all honesty, it made me very angry. For me, Oakland was a transition of sorts. As a white, educated, heterosexual male from suburbia, I had never experienced many of the problems I was now standing up against. Hell, I was pulled for speeding and the officer happened to be my life guard at the country club I attended. He told me to run along and slow it down. That’s it. Meanwhile, my brothers and sisters have their Fourth Amendment rights violated at every corner in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">So my transition was one from vicarious experience to truth. What was a sad or maddening article of injustice in the New York Times suddenly became a reality check. I was no longer discussing the problems of the prison-industrial complex in a campus coffee shop. I was talking about the War on Drugs with a disaffected young black man hauled in for possession with intent to sell as we sat chained to the wall.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">Once out of jail, cited and released for “Remaining at the scene: riot, etc”, I strapped on my gas mask, tied up my boots, and made a beeline for the occupation. Along the way, we passed a local black-and-white that rolled down their windows in a surprisingly friendly manner.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">“You guys headed back? Be good!” they exclaimed with hot coffees in hand and ready for their beat. My revolutionary brother raised his shirt and displayed the perpendicular 18” bruise along the middle of his back. The officers immediately expressed a kind of dumb-founded shock. These were not the black-clad thugs from the previous night.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">“Who did that to you? That could not have been us, we’re not trained that way. You can paralyze someone with a hit like that,” said the driver, disregarding a green light to further gawk at the police brutality.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">My comrade’s back was bruised when he was peacefully meditating between the state gangsters and the youth barricading themselves from the violence to come. Seated in the lotus position, the first blow directed at him was parried by a <a href="http://www.reallifesuperheroes.org/2011/11/09/occupy-oakland-arrests-armor-wearing-real-life-superhero-faces-resisting-arrest-charge/" style="color: #1155cc;" target="_blank">Real Life Superhero</a>’s shield. After he was beaten unconscious, they turned back to the danger-to-society pacifist and cracked him across the back.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><span><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">On our return to Occupy Oakland, we were greeted with cheers, hugs, slices of cold pizza and freedom. We were back home.</span></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><span><b><span style="background-color: white; background-image: initial;">Occupy Los Angeles</span></b></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">I spent a further 14 hours in a cold, dirty holding cell in Los Angeles with forty-six other freedom fighters. Ranging from ninety-three to nineteen, the wide collection of protesters served to show the LAPD how diverse this group was. This was the first mass arrest for this haven of a city. Since Occupy Los Angeles’ inception, the LAPD, City Council, and Mayor have all worked to facilitate a nonviolent protest around City Hall. This has also made Occupy LA toothless and my goal for November 17<sup>th</sup> was to raise awareness of the scope and seriousness of these protests.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">We had several actions throughout the day that were unpermitted, which set the course for the LAPD to grudgingly show their truer colors. The beat cops in their blues disappeared and the riot cops in tactical gear and missing badge numbers took their place. What had been a relatively passive occupation on the lawns of City Hall was gaining steam. Members of the occupation wanted to toe the line of what this whole thing was about: money in politics.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">So we marched to the plaza at Bank of America and set up a flash occupation on the grounds owned by Brookfield Properties – the same corporation that owns Zuccotti Park and a property that was smack dab in the middle of the hallowed halls of Los Angeles commerce.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">I joined other comrades in a fast that day, in order to recognize that we are all responsible for the woes we were raising our fists against. I was not a part of Occupy LA in order to protest a specific rich CEO or attack a single corrupt politician. If I was in a position of power, I just may abuse it as our leaders have. So for me, a fast was a symbolic gesture that in absolving this system of oppression we must also absolve those selfish ideals within ourselves if we have any hope of succeeding.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">Just like my personal transition in Oakland, Angelenos were feeling the reality of what the Occupy Movement is fighting as they witnessed hundreds of police assemble in riot gear around a tiny patch of symbolic grass. Deemed a ‘private persons arrest’ for trespassing by “Citizen Thompson”, the police moved in on 47 people at 4:30 pm that afternoon. They were blatantly taking orders from the 1% to move in and squash political action by the 99%. How threatening that rag-tag group of activists locking arms around a medical tent must have been.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">As we were processed, I immediately saw a chasm between the treatment in LA versus Oakland. We were, as an officer told us, “being treated with kid gloves”. I did not thank her for that, as unfortunately some of my fellow arrestees did. Why should I thank an officer for doing her job and upholding the presumption of innocence and satisfactory levels of human decency?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">Because of the kid gloves, I seethed from the injustice. Where were the dozens of detectives that were arresting and booking the white collar criminals that are destroying our planet? Where with the black-clad SWAT teams that were zip-tying the war-profiteers for making billions as millions of people died because of their purchased policies?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">Just like in Oakland, my appearance, demeanor, and speech made room for officers to try the classic “divide and conquer” strategy. I was festooned with compliments and calls for me to “forget about the partiers and homeless just there to party”. I was advised by plainclothes detectives to get serious, leave the “South side” (of City Hall… where most of the divisive language about the “partiers” resides) to them, and work on getting into politics myself.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">I met those suggestions with flat out rejection. I told several of the officers that strategy of throwing out the poor, wretched refuse is what helped fill their jails. Rejecting and discarding whatever he took a “partier” to mean was exactly what this movement was not. For one, I am wholly and totally against the wars on drugs and poverty that have imprisoned and oppressed millions. Why would I ever want to continue a policy that destroys lives?</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;">Secondly, I have witnessed the disaffected and unserious become empowered and solemn about the issues that caused camps to spring up across the globe. How dare this elitist tool of the plutocrats work to divide a people’s movement. It is even silly to think that his tactics could work when I have seen social progress at occupations that is far and away more substantial than a strategy of throwing people who share a bottle of wine or smoke a joint together in the cold night under the bus.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b>The Future – More Arrests?</b></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"><b> </b>I do not know what the future holds. Two months ago, I could have never predicted that I would have had a shotgun in my face in Oakland, protested the President as he drove by in West Hollywood, helped galvanize Occupy Long Beach in the face of police psych-warfare and sleep deprivation, or been surrounded by goons in black protecting ATM machines as curious passersby looked on.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"> Here’s what I do know: Standing up is an action that a lot of Americans have forgotten or left in the dust out of disgust. For decades, dissent and empowerment has been attacked on all fronts. Provocateurs infiltrate, groups splinter, and our education system falls short of honest dialogue on political and economic systems. Voting rights are attacked, gerrymandering is pervasive, and money in politics ensures any progress for the people is undermined.</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="border-collapse: collapse; color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-top: 0px;"> But I must resist. I am compelled to get on the frontlines and lock arms with Truth on my left and Justice on my right. Perhaps it is because of my youth that I have the nerve to imagine an alternative. However, that is who has always been the vanguard for change. Those that are naïve enough to think that people should be treated fairly are the ones that must Stand Up. Right now. See you out there.</div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com21tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-71328988621709328052011-10-28T13:53:00.000-07:002011-10-28T13:53:41.774-07:00Occupy Everything: Let's Stay Here 'Till it Sucks<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTrjwWUmpdy_z1wx7wN2nCMUOu3GkusrjDQW6gxWOT0qwtolx5EQucJ7Wt146z3lL7MT9EyrLUtpQfavFqQIjtBXPhNyD8lIVRmCJE9AEk4O9_nYYtap70PL4PNjNsk1Geu4nT8KA_y9j/s1600/IMG_4247.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhPTrjwWUmpdy_z1wx7wN2nCMUOu3GkusrjDQW6gxWOT0qwtolx5EQucJ7Wt146z3lL7MT9EyrLUtpQfavFqQIjtBXPhNyD8lIVRmCJE9AEk4O9_nYYtap70PL4PNjNsk1Geu4nT8KA_y9j/s320/IMG_4247.jpg" width="239" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One of the poignant hilarities of Burning Man this year was Ted's realization that most people live their lives according to a passive principle we now call "Let's Stay Here 'Till it Sucks." At Burning Man, when things are not sucking, they tend to be AMAZING, so the principle works the opposite way it works in the default world. In other words, Let's Stay Here 'Till it Sucks means "This is great! I love it! I want to do it for a while longer!" at Burning Man, but in the rest of the world it often means "I don't hate this, so let's keep going until I do."</span><br />
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</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The state of not-really-hating your life is what many Americans have mistaken for being happy with their lives. I think about this more and more often at Occupy, but also often in conversations with people about sex, sex work, the law, literature, art, traveling, and love, which are all political conversations to me, even if they don't seem that way to others. (Every day I talk about these things. This is one major way in which my life does not suck at all.) The point is, people stay in relationships that seem okay, because they aren't obviously abusive and everyone around them isn't objecting. They stay in jobs that aren't obviously soul-crushing or patently destructive to the world in an immediate sense. They eat food that seems alright because it was marketed to them in a relatively legible way. They have sex that has worked for them in the past, and even when it seems less and less sexy, they accept that as a kind of normal decline, and that's ok too.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And they don't notice that things have really started to suck.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Laura Kipnis wrote a book called "Against Love" in which she argues that this is why people cheat on each other: not because they are basically hard-wired to be nonmonogamous (although she believes that too) but because you don't really understand how bored or uninspired you are until BLAM! someone comes along and kick-starts your sexy hormones and ALL YOU WANT IN THE WORLD is to feel that good. It's the same argument for any drug, including the ones I like best: sugar and compliments. You seem alright, but then, something comes into your body or your peripheral vision, and it seems so much better, and you are faced with the choice to run after it and risk your life as it was, or ignore it, and risk your life as it was.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And this is why Occupy is so beautiful, even as the Los Angeles General Assemblies implode and the listerve gets cranky and the sleepless activists start hating each other for drum circles or pot smoking. It's still a group of people who looked at their toaster pastries and their bank statements one morning and thought, "This really sucks. This sucks BECAUSE it is supposed to seem as though it doesn't."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Our banks are supposed to seem like they are ok. Obama is supposed to seem ok. The WARS are supposed to seem ok. It's all supposed to seem inevitable and normal and even "natural," and people talk about "human nature" when the cops tear gas a crowd of incredibly dedicated, motivated people in Oakland. I say, bullshit. We stayed here (American status quo) long enough, everyone. It sucks now.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Our main-stream movies mostly suck. Most of our food sucks. Our constant self-congratulatory rhetoric about how powerful we are sucks. Women still make 74 cents on the dollar despite the fact that they are graduating from college at a rate of almost 2-1, which means some percentage of men are not only doing worse in school, others are clinging to their positions of power and not helping anyone. We put nearly 25% of our black men in prison and then pretend it's their fault they are under-employed.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It's not that I believe griping does much. But I do still hear complaints from those outside the Occupy movement about how we don't seem to know what we want. We do. We would like to see people starting to care about how much life in America sucks for a huge percentage of its population. Even that would be enough. Just that would change the tide of our media, would fundamentally transform us from a pseudo optimistic populace of people who have grown used to being lied to into a crowd of getting-educated voices attempting to redress grievances and understand each other.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And so if one thinks of every space as a place to Occupy, which means a space in which to think very carefully about what could be BETTER here, the whole zeitgeist will change. The philosophy of acceptance of things that don't seem to suck will give way to a philosophy of constant visionary attempts at change for the better. Do you know who already does this? Kids. Watch them. They are never satisfied with things that are simply acceptable. And this is the message of the Occupy movement that keeps getting drowned: we want things to be better, and that is a risky position we are willing to live in, and willing to make sacrifices for, and willing to defend against the inertia of a country that has been basically exhausted and worried and just trying to get somewhere that doesn't suck for so many years it doesn't seem to know how to run after the sexy, the bright, the unfamiliarly beautiful.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">The major tactic to use against the Occupiers, which is happening right now in Oakland, SF, NYC, and DC, is to make life suck there. Hurt them with tear gas, rubber bullets, and make them feel hopeless about their power. It's a more direct way of making people unhappy than the many years of consumer culture that make them numb. And this is why the whole thing is so important: the serious attempt being made to shed the years of voiceless, numb, nonparticipatory isolation that makes the middle and lower classes despairingly unable to change their government.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Living this way has made me extremely sensitive--if I wasn't already. I'm crying while riding the bus to school, I'm begging people in class to think about the life-and-death consequences of their beliefs and actions, I'm groaning and laughing and feeling overwhelmed and getting hurt all the time and getting in fights and inappropriately ruining "nice" conversations and feeling more urgency to everything. When there are moments of tenderness or rest, I'm sinking into them recklessly. I got sick last week and still all this was happening. Because it's always happening. I just caught the train this time.</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-60078660167704895122011-10-13T13:18:00.000-07:002011-10-13T13:18:35.616-07:00I Live Mostly in a Tent and It's Great<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTRrBxFFQVswZTcqyvVdcJ3V2PPd8BHWBWm6KD693d0bPDo6VJTal5ZeIzSOa6Gn5EGsiaM91kL1eGXcQKqlrZbYedU2S-wbWs0YPStEoH3inmJTDW3fNnhyVskcwW1uZZJVif2fEco4nP/s1600/IMG_2264.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiTRrBxFFQVswZTcqyvVdcJ3V2PPd8BHWBWm6KD693d0bPDo6VJTal5ZeIzSOa6Gn5EGsiaM91kL1eGXcQKqlrZbYedU2S-wbWs0YPStEoH3inmJTDW3fNnhyVskcwW1uZZJVif2fEco4nP/s400/IMG_2264.jpg" width="400" /></span></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I write from the apartment affectionately known as The Bedroom in MacArthur Park, downtown Los Angeles, where I'm on a break from Occupying LA to be online, eat food, clean my body, replenish supplies, and get ready for a weekend in the Bay Area doing readings for the new awesome anthology <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Men-Undressed-Writers-Sexual-Experience/dp/1936873087/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1318536793&sr=1-1">Men Undressed: Women Writers and the Male Sexual Experience </a>(OV Books! Get it!)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My new friend Jonas took this photo last weekend on the one-week marker for the LA Occupy group. Last night's General Assembly meeting was the first time I saw LA occupiers really lose their focus, yell at each other unnecessarily, break the consensus process, and generally break down before they rallied again in solidarity with each other. Because the movement is getting big, there were a lot of occupiers who never even saw the meeting. Democracy, and its incarnations here, fascinates. Someone very insightfully noticed that we were all getting scared--scared of the process breaking down, scared of the implications of warnings that came in from police, scared of what happened to our comrades in Boston, scared that we may get nowhere and all end up dispirited and jobless, scared and scared and scared. Try doing this out of love instead, he said. Cliche? Who cares? It was wise. People calmed down. I wonder if he has kids. I hope he has some soon. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I'm going to a few links below to those who want to read more about the Occupy movement, as many participants and sympathizers are offering incredible analysis even as we speak. What I want to say here is what I have been saying to many in my life who are reluctant to come down to the Tent City. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">One does not have to know exactly what the Occupy movement is demanding to know that we are doing something this country hasn't seen for years, if ever. That fact alone should excite anyone who is upset by the American status quo. My friends who are not occupying have many objections to the movement. I actually don't care to refute them. What I care about is that everyone who wants to have issue with us, must come meet us. You must know your candidates to vote responsibly. Just come down and visit, I say. We'll eat a sandwich on the lawn and talk to people. You don't have to pitch a tent in your first hour here. And who wouldn't want to see the spectacle? Well, the friends come. The people I can't be close to don't. Sometimes life offers you a litmus test of incredible predictability, and you have to feel some pain of loss to get to the truth. I'm relieved to know who I can trust now.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">At Occupy, we often use the rhetoric of consciousness-raising groups from the radical left of the 60s and 70s, and one phrase in particular that I love is :we've "woken up." It doesn't mean that we all agree on what exactly the "dream" was, but there is a sense of real exodus towards a new civic reality, and because we are downtown in the city where we live, it isn't like the high-on-the-mountain peak experience of Burning Man. It's a sustainable more transparent reality that is actually attempting to dig in its heels. We've got drum circle people, iPhone people, hardcore organizers, teenagers who stop by for dinner, lawyers, preachers, and full-time students who are suddenly discovering that living in tents with each other for weeks on end is not only politically radical, it is REALLY FUN. We want justice, and we also want to be able to eat some beans and rice in a circle and talk about justice for hours on end.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is something I'm not seeing in the media that much: how enjoyable it is to be frustrated by community, as opposed to frustrated by isolation. I would much prefer to witness a degenerated consensus meeting where 200 people are struggling to hear each other than retreat to the silent box of this apartment every day. And this is a lovely apartment. And of course I am grateful in this moment to have its amenities and its temporary quiet--but it is becoming more and more clear to me that in some truly deep-seated Foucault-ean sense, the rest of my daily life is designed to keep me from being in gatherings of large people. (BTW, fellow occupiers, contact me if you want to come over and shower or meditate or whatnot. We are easily accessible by Metro.)</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My Teds in Montreal say that there are tons of activists and demonstrations there, and that the crowd of people moving in on an issue is not a rare or anxious sight. I think the U.S. has trouble dealing with anything that isn't sound-byte or logo-ready, and so the Occupy movement offers a terrifying reality: we may be speaking truth to power simply by figuring out how to speak to each OTHER, and we're really not that interested, many of us, in coming up with a bumper sticker for KTLA to put on the nightly news. Some people are, sure. That's because everyone is here! But the lack of quick slogan is directly tied to the fact of community building--a large group of people talking does not a bullet point make. I'm not against the list of demands, I'm not against the pithy signs (oh, I really love a lot of the pithy signs!) but I think that the cacophony is truly delightful, and it is actually a sign of unity, not a sign of dissolution.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I've been waiting for this. And I still am not even sure what it is.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Check out the <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/">OccupyLA website</a> and get involved!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Read <a href="http://therumpus.net/2011/10/occupy-your-conscience-a-rumpus-exaltation/">Steve Almond's piece about OWS at The Rumpus</a></span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-15126314068962479992011-09-23T18:13:00.000-07:002011-09-24T14:33:17.582-07:00Notes from the Wall Street Occupation!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihVRZauDP28Jch_3gCyX7O6DlB1ov8prguVj04dLJoLE5RhJjMFazBhLs3mtsoJt4uVRhGFKCJXqwwZu_nIiWIeOyinRwN7_n_cIpKHnvLPgxyKx4EUuWx725-uVlAodOrlSbeVvk9fMr6/s1600/wallst-250-3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEihVRZauDP28Jch_3gCyX7O6DlB1ov8prguVj04dLJoLE5RhJjMFazBhLs3mtsoJt4uVRhGFKCJXqwwZu_nIiWIeOyinRwN7_n_cIpKHnvLPgxyKx4EUuWx725-uVlAodOrlSbeVvk9fMr6/s320/wallst-250-3.jpg" width="245" /></span></a></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.46070365817286074" style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;">Fall 2011 has crashed in! Crashing into new program at USC, crashing into Burning Man, crashing into my 32nd birthday! Crashing into the world: right now, the occupation of of Wall Street. </span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.46070365817286074" style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="white-space: pre-wrap;">Max Hodes, one of my closest friends, is participating in the demonstrations. This is his report from the front. Get IN!</span></span></div><div style="background-color: transparent;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.46070365817286074" style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><br />
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<div style="background-color: transparent;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: large;"><span id="internal-source-marker_0.06550584803335369" style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Letter from the Occupation of Wall Street</span><br />
<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">by Max Hodes</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Questions abound on the street here and in the media, what little of it has reported these events, as to what the intentions of this protest are, how it is organized, what it wants. From what I have seen that is because the narrative of the status quo, of what protests should look like, simply does not contain a logic for this event. It is not exactly a protest, not exactly a march, and doesn't have a defined goal. It looks more like Tahrir Square than any US political rally, though it lacks the focused demand of a leader to resign. It has international support, a supply chain, and a democratic organizational structure that arose spontaneously. My thoughts here represent an attempt to understand what is happening on Wall Street.</span><span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The General Assembly</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The NYT confuses this with an organized group. It is not. It is the name for a gathering of participants who need not be named or declare any affiliation or ever have been here or anywhere else before. It uses a consensus-building model to make discuss and make decisions democratically. Nearly everyone who is at the site seems inexperienced using this model. There are frequent arguments over abuse of process. These conflicts diminish with passing days. New committees and working groups are formed every day to deal with whatever issues have recently arrived. For example, when we arrived there was already a media team. They took it upon themselves to create a 24-hour broadcast on the internet, in addition to shooting and compiling footage with multiple cameras, also on a 24-hour schedule. It was later determined by the GA that there should be a separate Media Outreach committee, dealing with inventing PR tactics and training participants in same. There is a comfort committee, dealing with blankets, cardboard supply, soft things, to increase longevity. There is a medical team. There is a sanitation committee. All volunteers who notice problems and fix them as they see them. Anyone who has an idea is basically free to enact it unless someone in the GA has some principled concern about it. Each participant is given full license to use their time however they see fit. Volunteers are called for where needed, and usually appear in droves. There is a committee of facilitators who might, to the untrained eye, appear to be leaders of the outfit. While facilitating, they do not participate in discussion in the offering of opinions.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">As far as larger organizational structures go, this is as good a model as any, but it does have limits which become evident as the group grows.. There simply isn't time for everyone to offer themselves to a discussion and those that feel more inclined to lead than follow seem to end up facilitating. However, that level of participation is still more democratic than a simple yes or no vote. Individuals determine the level of participation they want to see from themselves. Gaps in leadership are filled as soon as someone wants problems solved, because they need to do the solving themselves. The GA seems to create a less inert population because people with the inclination against slow decision making are free to speak up and seem rarely shouted down. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think that on a large scale, the consensus model could be used in well-trained groups of up to 500. Smaller groups, being more agile, might serve larger communities better by volunteering representatives, training them, and sending them to larger consensus-bodies. In such a way I can even imagine an alternate societal organization to our current one. Over the course of 100 years with sufficient participatory training, unilateral action on the part of a large body of people might be entirely eliminated because the process has the feeling of fusing individual and group identities. Maybe that's wishful thinking. I'm well trained already in the process, and this one was excessively frustrating. When I disagree with the group at large, I don't want to participate at all. And my lack of contribution goes entirely unnoticed. This has it's advantages and disadvantages, but I ultimately like it more because of the choice one is forced to make moment to moment. In the film The Matrix the Architect describes the same choice to Neo: act, or do not act, choose. Without this choice, no process is democratic. Compulsory participation is fascism plain and simple. It's one of the million things we're protesting against.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Why are we protesting</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">No one knows. Everybody is enraged and everyone has a unique focus. We have not decided on a single demand, and I don't want to. I would like this to turn into a Burning Man-esque event. An ongoing party of the political, artistic and spiritual avant-garde, that becomes an ever-updated cultural institution; a continual protest against the status quo with real political consequences. For that to happen, we will need to find ways of becoming genuinely disruptive. That means we will more than likely be struck down, unless we can somehow strike a perfect balance of necessity and aggravation. If the world demands we stay because we are stirring up right conflict, then we've got a chance at perpetuation. More likely, the cold will get us before too long. The blue-shirt cops seem to like us. The city cut their overtime hours, possibly as a way to get at their pensions, and this is the best chance they've got to log hours before retirement. It's the police lieutenants who are doing the dicking around. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Still we keep getting asked, what we are doing there. And still no one knows. We are occupying because the world is outrageous, we blame greed, and those who feel entitled to their greed. Wall Street is the center of greed. It's that simple. We didn't keep Troy Davis alive. We haven't fed anybody who was hungry, we haven't stopped the monster or done more than create a slightly spectacular nuisance. No one has thrown themselves into the gears of the machine. Maybe what we're protesting is that we can't even see the gears. The machine is a phantom beyond any measure of control except perhaps this one. We are actually trying to alter culture by pushing and shoving it with phantom hands, which turn out to be the only tool available, since the culture is itself composed of phantoms, ideas, fleeting moments, rather than anything concrete and destructible. There is not, for example, any factory to strike against and shut down. The machine will continue with or without our participation. </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">My arrest on Monday morning was the first that I know of. It was carried out, as reported by the Wall Street Journal and The Colbert Report, under an obscure law from 1848 against the wearing of masks at public gatherings. The arrest, like many at protests, was possibly illegal, but of course legality is not the point of these arrests while disruption and intimidation absolutely are. It snowballed in many more, each more brutal than the last. This got people down there. That and the free pizza. Now the slog war begins. Get bodies in there every day and every night, marching, singing, laughing, being. Not too loud or they'll shut us down, but loud enough and long enough and we'll be undeniable, and then we can become unstoppable. Unless we issue a demand, which I'm pretty sure would get ignored. This is perhaps the point which is missed by the GA: why issue a single demand? Why not continue at this noise making, this occupation, with no singular demand and thus no end in sight? Why not confound the whole model of protest with an absurd action? </span><br />
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">So we press on, activating ourselves ever more despite all the forces that tell us to stop.. That's what we're protesting. The middle of the road with it's long yellow line. That's what we're protesting. A million little hurts and ten-thousand big ones. That's what we're protesting. That we're not allowed to protest aloud. That's what we're protesting. That public space, the space where thousands of tiny, healthy, necessary, revolutions can take place, has been stolen from us and remade as controlled space, sanitized space. That’s what we’re protesting. That the police, and by extension the state, do not protect us, the majority of the people, but the tiny greedy minority which conducts its business on Wall Street. That’s what we’re protesting. </span></span></div></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-72212915031935072972011-07-28T13:32:00.000-07:002011-07-28T13:32:31.376-07:00Oh Sweet Nothing: Chicago to Reno and the Loneliest Road<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivrXt_TL_1tCqhro4SKPH-YTzEcWNwDfxEHRqN5Oi9igRH7WBYXD8mSjkdZG-v84QnR_68i2vk9-uIYNDrv0dVsx-8brU7DlfACTeR6iInwExg8_vDuCjZR0pLBnQHGO4seJgrMmDlCzSZ/s1600/DSC00053.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivrXt_TL_1tCqhro4SKPH-YTzEcWNwDfxEHRqN5Oi9igRH7WBYXD8mSjkdZG-v84QnR_68i2vk9-uIYNDrv0dVsx-8brU7DlfACTeR6iInwExg8_vDuCjZR0pLBnQHGO4seJgrMmDlCzSZ/s320/DSC00053.JPG" width="320" /></span></a></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">We’re driving straight into the sun on Hwy 50. It was named “The Loneliest Road in America” by someone who came here before everyone who is here now. But how could one be lonely here, with all the ghosts around? Someone made those petroglyphs. Someone built those mining towns. Someone ate food, pooped, had sex, and walked all over this place. I’m suspicious of people who use the word “people,” who use “human nature,” or “natural,” because usually those words are actually obscuring the fact that the speaker means to say “people I’ve heard of,” or “people of a particular culture I know about,” and often “human nature” is a wildly inaccurate idea of human beings in the 20th century under global capitalism. But the notion that there were humans a few thousand years ago who lived in this desert, and who had at least these three functions in common with us: eating, pooping, having sex--is thrilling to me. It makes me respect the writers who focus on those activities more. They aren’t boring, they aren’t low-brow, they are a threads that actually do connect human beings across time and space, and that makes them deeply important.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In Chicago, we stayed with the fabulous Gina Frangello, inspired writer and publisher. Her 5-year old son Giovanni, when prompted to tell us something about himself, said “I think a lot,” and “I’m cute and a lot of girls like me.” Yes! We’ve been saying these phrases for a week now, whenever we feel the need to remind ourselves how to tell the simple truths that have been socially conditioned out of us. We watched Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom on a blanket in Wicker Park, I drooled at Matisse and Cezanne at the Art Institute, and I got handed free Cubs tickets outside Wrigley Field from a man who disappeared so quickly I wouldn’t know him to thank him today. Thumbs up, Chicago.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In Missouri, we took a long detour to Chillicothe, where one of the more important female mentors of my life, Virginia Sillerud, was born. Grandmother, fashionista, incessant teller of grand tales, inventor of “The Mini Breakfast”* and reckless driver, Virginia is mythical figure of the past who still lives somewhere deep inside a thin body and a fogged-over Alzheimer’s brain. I tried to imagine her walking along those small-town streets in her smart 1940s pumps, a young woman with a red lipstick pout and an itch to leave--she fled for St. Louis, eventually for San Francisco, and didn’t talk about her Missouri childhood to us as kids. I grieved the death of her stories--I don’t know enough of them, and she can’t tell them now. I filmed the town for my family, none of whom have been there. It had a one-street downtown with historic early 20th century facades, and then streets and streets of old homes, half of which were in disrepair. We got a beer at a bar that has been family-run for sixty years. On the wall: a big orange poster that said “Hunters Welcome.” </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">In Kansas, we drove off the highway to Lucas, where a bizarre cement sculpture marvel called The Garden of Eden made me the happiest I’d been in miles of prairie. Built by a Populist oddity named Duinsmoor, the G of E is completed with enormous Chagall-ish art that indicts big business, depicts original sin, and entombes the creator and his first wife. A relative gave the tour, and shined a light on Duinsmoor’s lime-encrusted face in his mausoleum. When asked why he had himself mummified, our affable guide said, “He was a visionary, an eccentric, and an egomaniac.” The town thought him insane, in 1900. They owe much of their revenue to him now.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">My sister Lauryl and bro-in-law Sammy have a gorgeous new life in Denver, CO, and they invited us into it for Captain America, a late-night diner discussion of the film, and a superlative and royal experience of cinnamon roll at Breakfast Palace before we took off the next morning. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I forgot my backpack at their house and added over two hours to our driving time. Luckily, we met Bri and Lucas in the town where I discovered my error, and they saved the day! When we returned from Denver the second time back along 70 West, we exited in Silverthorne, crunched along a dark hill, and arrived at a perfect 1980s ski cabin! These astoundingly cute people fed us, housed us, entertained us, and restored our faith in the possibilities for kindness and sharing and lack of suspicion among 20something Americans. </span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"></span></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">If you are ever in Delta, Utah, I highly recommend room #40 at the Rancher Motel and Cafe. It sleeps between two and twenty people. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I like towns named after objects: Rifle, Parachute, Yellowcat, Rabbit’s Hole, Dead Horse Point. But I </span><i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">love</span></i><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> towns named after states of being: Desire, Panic, Defiance, Deference, Tranquility. Naming places after people is so arrogant of us. We’re patently classist when it comes to naming human dwelling places--streets, buildings, neighborhoods are named for the white wealthy, and then occasionally renamed for a black, Latino, or American Indian person. When our hubris extends all the way to naming geographical phenomena after people, we are truly lost in the anthropocentric coil. Thompson hot springs? Thompson thinks he gets to privately own thousands of gallons of healing water flowing from underground?</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">For the phenomena and landmarks of the landscape, I prefer names that offer extreme practicality. Arches National Park. Filled with naturally occurring stone arches, of course. High Point Trail. Up a steep climb, you see. If not practical, they must be poetic: Black Dragon View Area. Yes.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But how about Eureka? There is a Eureka in every state that’s got a natural resource someone wanted to exploit. Gold. Eureka! Iron ore. Eureka! Cheap labor. Eureka! We went to the Eureka Museum in Nevada and got hypnotized by 1934 newspapers that expressed some concern over Hitler’s rise in popularity. I could have stayed there for a year, reading the papers through the war, looking at old marbles and writing desks and the entire collection of printing presses and lintoype machines from the days of the Sentinel. I have compulsive imagining in the presence of antiques: the hands that touched this, the people who read this, the lives that crossed here.</span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And this is why I am both ravished and ravaged by cities: I am buffeted around by all the lives: every face a piece of art, every building a history museum, every plant evidence of some geological force. I entered Los Angeles to the sound of the Talking Heads, dancing in my car in the traffic. This trip doesn’t end.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Georgia; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px; text-indent: 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0.0px;"></span></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-58298186984799099512011-07-19T09:16:00.000-07:002011-07-19T09:16:47.008-07:00Groundhogs on the Northern Haul: New York to Chicago<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5e_2G1y7qOr6VK_u9h99tthwC3f8_DnCimfAbcaefKgafAF9HIrdATL383H3LB5lAJiEbCgSePKcy7hPUAOQ-RQ_x4LmkWSwP2gOqIMpCYI7whpAPYDPxsMMaXpIXIqkTSBSn_2mg4E79/s1600/photo-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5e_2G1y7qOr6VK_u9h99tthwC3f8_DnCimfAbcaefKgafAF9HIrdATL383H3LB5lAJiEbCgSePKcy7hPUAOQ-RQ_x4LmkWSwP2gOqIMpCYI7whpAPYDPxsMMaXpIXIqkTSBSn_2mg4E79/s400/photo-1.jpg" width="298" /></a></div><div style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
We’re 227 miles from Chicago. My right hand is swollen with a cluster of mosquito bites that have become one enormous hard aching welt. Anthony has pink eye. The car has lost two wheel covers and the brakes are squeaking constantly. Entropy. Things fall apart. We drink a lot of coffee. I turn to the artists I admire for ways to talk about decay that are fearless and appreciative of its beauty: Henry Miller, Jim Morrison, Leonard Cohen. <br />
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In New York, I had the fascinating experience of feeling severely disappointed by the Museum of Sex. Max (Ted) and I went to it with high hopes. Only one floor, the “Sex Lives of Animals” exhibit, was really mind-blowing. My main complaint is that the Museum of Sex is actually more of a Museum of 20th century, Western cultures’, Sex-in-media, a kind of pornography and erotica retrospective that has unclear notions of where it wants to start and how it wants to progress. The place, in attempting to somehow stay out of any particular political debate about sexuality or censorship or taboo, has rendered itself rather boring and quaint. Great underground bar, great store, a few really good pieces by some mostly contemporary artists. Not nearly enough context for anyone to know the true importance of what they’re looking at historically. <br />
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The <a href="http://www.tenement.org/">Tenement Museum</a>, in contrast, was brilliant. Oh, all these museums are too expensive, but our tour guide, Rachel, made our tour the most exciting and important and informative and infuriating (in a good, activist way) 90 minutes possible. I turned to Max and said, “This is really, really fun for me.” Learning, real learning, is one of the most pleasurable activities there is, I think. And now I know quite a bit about the garment industry of the early 20th century on the Lower East Side, which helps me think about immigration history in our country, which helps me understand better what is happening now in Arizona, Texas, California, and so on.<br />
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And then we left New York! We met an Amish family in rural Pennsylvania. They had dirty clothes, blunt haircuts, four horses, and they sold us honey in old salad dressing bottles at $2.00 a piece. We drove through two small towns: Desire and Panic. In Desire, we saw a hutch full of baby lop-ear bunnies. They wore black rings around their eyes and most of them still had one ear pointing up, like some fantastic sound had just rolled in from the West. And that is where we’re headed. West on I90, listening to Springsteen and missing Clarence Clemens and drinking no-name coffee from yet another defunct Dunkin’ Donuts. There are maverick, functioning, former franchised donut shops all over this country! Just another reminder that the constant fight for survival is still tolerated by those who fantasize about being the next big capitalist, not the lower management or worker. Desire and Panic. We are not a Buddhist nation, sir, oh my, no.<br />
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We stopped in downtown Sykesville, PA and met an arrogant Israeli pastry chef who boasted that he had no employees. His cinnamon rolls were sweet butter dough dancing, and he’d built a replica of the Leaning Tower of Pisa out of cardboard and icing. <br />
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At the <a href="http://ohsweb.ohiohistory.org/places/ne09/index.shtml">Museum of Labor and Industry</a> in Youngstown, OH, I tried to understand how people in the 19th century poured pig iron, and imagined being a wife in a company town. <br />
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The <a href="http://rockhall.com/">Rock N’ Roll Hall of Fame</a> rose from Lake Erie like a disco-ball promised land and I walked into a U2 concert in Buenos Aires, in Cleveland, and got enraptured by the mad bright 3D crowd and their perfect strong shoulders, but especially by Bono’s screaming desire for the Overman. I last saw U23D in January of 2008, when I was a different Vanessa, living in a different city, thinking much different thoughts about my quite different life. Pow! Time and space collision! <br />
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One tendency I see in this part of the country that fills me with distrust is the constant architectural use of boxes. Especially in the depressed areas of cities, the boxiness of the strip malls, little houses, schools, hospitals, restaurants seems like a form of aesthetic punishment. All the signs are rectangular. The windows are rectangular. The siding is a long series of rectangles. The fonts used to advertise are square and symmetrical. I don’t believe it to be much or at all cheaper to write that way than to use script. There’s an inertia to this kind of urban landscape that people take for granted, and I think it’s one of the contributing factors to our being no longer a revolutionary country. When people are given only boxes to live in, they see boxes everywhere. If they are told, in the subtle form of their city planning, that they do not deserve beauty unless they are wealthy, they will believe it, and that belief spells the end of creativity. The Heidelberg Project offered a gorgeous “fuck you” to this homogeneity of aesthetics. <br />
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The <a href="http://www.heidelberg.org/">Heidelberg Project</a> is a street, a nonprofit, a community art organization, a cluster of unlivable, burned out houses that have been transformed into huge art projects in Detroit. One of the houses in the H. Project was covered with stuffed animals. They’d been nailed to the outside walls, and it seemed that new ones kept getting added. One could tell how long a stuftie had been living on the house by its level of disintegration--many of them were drooping and matted, greying and sagging from rain. I photographed their sweet sad faces.<br />
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I met a boy at the Heidelberg Project who offered me such hope for change. He was eleven years old, black, living in this ignored and depressed area of Detroit, riding his bike around the neighborhood with a few friends. He let us play with his basketball and I asked him if he’d contributed to any of the installations on the block. He said yes. Which one? I asked him. He refused to tell me. <br />
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“Come on, you’re never going to see me again,” I said. “Why not tell me?”<br />
“You gotta guess,” he said, smiling.<br />
“Tell me one fact about yourself,” I said. “Then it will be a fair chance for me to guess.”<br />
“I like art,” he said. “And basketball, and I play football at school.”<br />
We played a brief hot-and-cold game until I’d found all 3 art installations he’d helped with. One of them was a two story home covered with enormous colorful polka dots. <br />
“You painted some of those dots?” I asked. <br />
He nodded. <br />
“That’s my favorite house on the block,” I said.<br />
“Mine too,” he said.<br />
Hell yes. Hell yes. Hell YES.<br />
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Earlier. We kept seeing these adorable fuzzy animals on the side of the road--both alive and dead, and then found out that they are woodchucks! Groundhogs! They are incredibly cute, and the internet says that they get killed by cars in enormous numbers because they like to eat the grass at the side of the road. Immediately after reading that, we were hearing more and more reports on the Casey Anthony’s release, and we realized that nationally, accident statistics dwarf the statistics on crime, but it’s crime reports everyone seems to care the most about. It’s as if our collective desire for control over death manifests itself in a phobia of “criminals” instead of a logical move to prevent stupid accidents. Can’t CNN do a story on defensive driving?<br />
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We’ve killed nothing but some bugs so far on this trip, so our current level of decay and entropy feels lucky. And now I’m in Chicago, sweating out the dusk in Wicker Park, eating Wheat Thins and tuna on a blanket, waiting for Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom to play on the big inflatable screen. Pow! Another confusion of spacetime! You thought I was 227 miles from here! And I was. </span></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-3404089561668906992011-07-05T21:29:00.000-07:002011-07-05T21:29:04.519-07:00Balls on the Road: Citrusville, Phish, and Quebec Edition<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/zi1pmtoNqX8?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">This is one of the moments of hilarity and prankishness that dropped into the Superball IX Phish Festival Weekend. Normally the Ted summit is Burning Man, but this year we descended on Watkins Glen, NY for three days of transformative music, lights, conversation, dance, and art with the masters of derailment.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But First! Anth and I drove to Eutawville, SC, where Linz met us by plane, for the Citrusville Citizens' Sports Tournament. Every year Raymond Hawkins, Linz's mad genius younger brother, organizes a tournament of sports for his family and friends, based in his invented town of Citrusville. We played sports for 7 hours. We wore matching jerseys and ate boiled peanuts and Charleston Chews to keep up our strength. Something true: I adore badminton. The following day Linz, Anth, and the family all went out on a boat, while I cruised around the tiny town of Eutawville, eventually settling in at Aces High, the only bar in town. I met Mudhog and Hambone, and listened to their stories of southern living over a can of Busch. One must be a club member to drink at the Aces High, and I'd like to boast that due to bartender Gina's great generosity and humor, I now am one. I'll always have a place to drink beer and sit down in South Carolina. Does anyone know the name of that game that involves a large jar of water with a shot glass at the bottom, into which people try to drop quarters? All we could come up with was "Drop a Quarter in the Jar." It turns out that I'm perfectly at ease by myself in neighborhood bars populated almost exclusively with men. More on that later, probably. In the book on bars.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We packed Linz and our gear back into Aayla Secura (my little blue Toyota Yaris, who has been the heroic vehicle of this road trip and is named after an awesome Jedi Master) and drove 12 hours north to New York. There we met up with two other <a href="http://tedologies.blogspot.com/">Teds</a>, Janet and Max, spent an evening walking through Brooklyn with the venerable Jon Cotner, co-author of <a href="http://www.uglyducklingpresse.org/catalog/browse/item/?pubID=63">Ten Walks, Two Talks</a>, and practiced his "spreading of good vibes" by speaking simple compliments to strangers. He cooked us scallops, we talked for hours, a difficult but important fight erupted, and eventually the Teds fell asleep in a small heap in JanTed's room. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In the morning, we got five Teds into the car, and met two more, Aaron and Karine, in Watkins Glen, NY. Oh joy of reunion and material reality of bodies! Oh violently loving Tedpile! We pitched tents, we slathered sunscreen, we entered the rarified world of a Phish Festival!! We were missing one Ted: Josh, who had life obligations that forced him to stay in California. One must not worry too much about keeping the Teds organized in their mind. We are right now eight people, but we will likely be more, and we share basic principles and life experiences and love each other with familial fervor and thus any Ted is Ted. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And this is where a most important theme emerged, although it still slips by me, feels not-quite-tangible, and I grapple with my ability to articulate it...because the basic premise is a kind of ghost, a Derridean notion of the trace every word is and leaves, an encounter with the state of wistfulness and desire that characterizes living: nothing is ever truly finished. Phish is my favorite band in part because there is no "authoritative" version of any song, since many songs were played live before they became studio recordings, songs have multiple incarnations as each time they are jammed out a new textual, musical world emerges, and songs listened to outside of the live Phish show inevitably present themselves as truly different experiences than those we "do" with Chris Kuroda's lights, with the crowd, with Trey Anastasio's elated smile, and so on. This blog will not feel finished. This trip is not yet finished. That's the way things are, and often I worry that literature (and even more insidiously, bad TV and film) is trying to sew up the cracks in reality by inventing "endings" that are not the only real ending, i.e., "endings" which are not: "and eventually, all these characters would have died, had they ever been actually alive."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiamaklSCT_NyUoC2wegY3t9fou4t7YUcvQE1rByJV2zpN8TapraUcXV8lx1Pywi9iGhVJbGr7eUaFx3ekRMVFJHP3COJBKrLUqlzm5q4HJKAzDZv4EyGlntuFC5nOgYQ-Zc25D8uIQiJ_b/s1600/DSC00065.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiamaklSCT_NyUoC2wegY3t9fou4t7YUcvQE1rByJV2zpN8TapraUcXV8lx1Pywi9iGhVJbGr7eUaFx3ekRMVFJHP3COJBKrLUqlzm5q4HJKAzDZv4EyGlntuFC5nOgYQ-Zc25D8uIQiJ_b/s320/DSC00065.JPG" width="320" /></a>Over the weekend the music fixed us in emotive bodies with gorgeous harmony, asked us to focus outside ourselves and get ready for the fight for the working class AND our right to be weird, loosen up our identities and become overflowing cups of love, train us to be freedom fighters for people far away, and also, invited us to hop in a space ship and take off for planets yet unknown. We read sections of Nietzsche's <i>Thus Spoke Zarathustra</i>, and then Phish played us the song, "Thus Spoke Zarathustra." We also ate $1.00 grilled cheese together, napped in the shade of an enormous stage set, and talked with many other Phish fans who had innumerable philosophies on how to listen to and incorporate the music and its effects into life. The validity of ecstasy, of peak experience, of overwhelming joy and deep terror and big balls and mischief and true comrades was pounded into me with every kick of Fishman's drum. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">When we'd totally won Superball IX and it was time to leave, we entered our temporary Ted separations. Anth drove back to NYC with Janet, Max and Linz. Linz got on a plane and went back to summer school in Berkeley. I drove with Aaron and Karine up to Montreal, with one very important stop along the way: Boldt Castle, in the 1000 Islands. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is something perplexing at every turn in <a href="http://www.boldtcastle.com/visitorinfo/">Boldt Castle</a>. This is because it is a "restoration" of a building and a vision that was never actually created in the first place. It's an opulent mansion begun in 1900 that fell into disrepair before it ever was actually opulent, before anyone lived there. In fact, no one has ever lived there. CG Boldt was building it for his wife as a romantic gesture of a summer home. She died unexpectedly in 1904, a bit over a year before the Castle was scheduled to be finished, and he ordered work to cease on the behemoth. The place changed hands many times, was open for tours as early as the 1920s, but mostly people were touring an empty shell of a place, and were asked to be interested in the many carefully-cut pieces of granite on the outside. Eventually, it got spruced up. Bizarrely, it's all wrong. The furniture is a motley mix of things that belonged to various people related to the Boldts, and pieces that sort of resemble things a rich person would own at the turn of the century, and only about ten of the 127 rooms are "done." Aaron, Karine, and I went up every flight of stairs and realized that we much preferred the un-refurbished floors where people had covered the plaster with graffiti since as early as 1917. In the same huge mansion: layers of graffiti, fake rooms for people who didn't ever there, and a constant piping of an old Enya album (<i>Shepherd Moons</i>?) into every room through a series of speakers that were added to the mansion in the 1990s. We walked the grounds, in a slight daze, and came upon a gorgeous stone fountain. The basin was painted a garish blue and Karine and I said, simultaneously, "Oh, that blue is all wrong!" And then after our ferry ride back to Alexandria Bay we had a lively conversation in town over a few beers during which we decided that Boldt Castle is what happens when people become obsessed with the notion of Finishing Projects. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It seems to us that artists invent "finished" as a psychological trope to keep from going crazy with perfectionism or self-loathing, to let go of things that have been sold or published, or to create space in which to envision new projects. That Phish is able to keep making old songs different and new, to never let them be finished, seems a grand act of meditative calm and will. That Raymond Hawkins keeps improving the Citrusville Sports Tournament annually seems more understandable, but I think it's possible we'll all play the last Tournament without knowing it's the last one, and one day we will all just notice he grew out of it. And Boldt Castle will never be finished, as long as the non-profit running it now keeps getting half-baked ideas about how to simulate its authenticity. One can learn this lesson about the impossibility of endings on LSD, of course, and one can learn it by becoming a mystic, and one can learn it in meditation, and one can learn it in moments of sudden revelation due to art or sex or other pleasures, but I also think it has to be practiced somehow, thought through constantly. Because the impulse to tie things up in a narrative, to have discrete packages of memory or identity or accomplishment can be so very strong. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Now I am in Montreal, where the lilt of spoken French graces outdoor patio bars and the staircases are wantonly adorable. And more comes, more comes, more comes. </span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-21209560605160937172011-06-25T21:27:00.000-07:002011-06-25T21:27:29.021-07:00Getting to Know the U.S., Part 2: Texas and Gulf Coast<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EhSCsIzYkGnvQ1v1ObkfPEApDurc05jAS99br4DSYhqQ4nE3aadE09AtEuVBr8zumqxDVt45lLqpPZyFzqA1Go5eBa31pjbJRtBvXN2O-iVsSp5QtzjOVgCBxmVaHlAJrEE5Sa0n6C1m/s1600/IMG_4075.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj7EhSCsIzYkGnvQ1v1ObkfPEApDurc05jAS99br4DSYhqQ4nE3aadE09AtEuVBr8zumqxDVt45lLqpPZyFzqA1Go5eBa31pjbJRtBvXN2O-iVsSp5QtzjOVgCBxmVaHlAJrEE5Sa0n6C1m/s320/IMG_4075.jpg" width="240" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6uQuieh17XSr1PnRPni9XyEI3WBg41rVYK-3Vk-4kzIF5BphOb5XXD72UczEbv5e7DgwqXlwybGkX8HPhlgfDKinuQaF8uSlBrNF3HqT24Ajr-WHydnmGJitaHcRIn6wCl1qSsVt-uwUa/s1600/IMG_4080.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi6uQuieh17XSr1PnRPni9XyEI3WBg41rVYK-3Vk-4kzIF5BphOb5XXD72UczEbv5e7DgwqXlwybGkX8HPhlgfDKinuQaF8uSlBrNF3HqT24Ajr-WHydnmGJitaHcRIn6wCl1qSsVt-uwUa/s320/IMG_4080.JPG" width="320" /></a></span><span style="font-size: large;">On June 23rd, we were, unbelievably, still in Texas. Houston had so many surprising moments. <br />
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We spent the night at Super Happy Fun Land, where the artist ethos thrives and the conversations are encouragingly earnest. It’s a warehouse for huge paper mache Cabbage Patch kids, graffitti mushrooms, old car seats, and every surface is full of knick-knacks. I felt right at home. I dreamed I was back at Reed Reunions, playing a spin the bottle-type game with a roomful of hipster alumni. I stole away from them, found a boy I’d had a crush on at 20, and woke up just as we were falling into a sofa bed. I feel proud, inexplicably, of being able to fall that deeply asleep on a couch in the muggy southern heat with a train whistle blowing periodically too close.<br />
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I’d asked people about small museums and got directed to <a href="http://www.theorangeshow.org/">The Orange Show</a>. (Me there, above!) We wound through an unplanned, unfussed Houston neighborhood and suddenly, the circus appeared! This is not a roadside attraction. This is quite far off the road. It’s an entire whirlygig showspace made for the love of oranges. Jeff McKissack built it in 1976-79 by hand, welding whimsical railings and laying many mosiac tiles into the floor and walls. He died before he could actually DO an Orange Show at the Orange Show, but the space is still there, and we climbed the tiny steps, sat in the fixed bicycle seats, and bought the last three postcards left in the empty gift shop. The two Houston artists I asked about the difference between Houston and Austin (who has the unofficial slogan “Keep Austin Weird”) scoffed at Austin’s self-congratulatory attitude and said “Houston is where the culture really is.” I think it may very well be true. There’s something a bit too clean, sanitized, cheerfully white about Austin. Houston has some bayou creeping in. <br />
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On our way out of town we stopped at the Rothko Chapel--a circular space with Rothko paintings on the inside that change subtely, slowly, in the natural light. The silence was perfectly strong, and perfectly broken by the occasional human shuffling, and my muscles loosened in the restorative cool.<br />
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Finally, LOUISIANA!!<br />
We decided to get off the 10 and take the 90 through more of the bayou/swampland. We wound around, and eventually found Palmetto State Park. We made a friend. His name is Gunther, and yes, he’s an armadillo.<br />
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Pit stop in Morgan City, LA. We love the Waffle House. We stopped for eggs and stayed to talk with Crystal, Jagger, and Ifler--the Night Shift Heroes. I was the first person Crystal had met who ordered tomatoes instead of hash browns or grits with the egg breakfast. This is how the conversation started, actually, with me admitting I was from Los Angeles, and asking Crystal what she thought of Morgan City. “It sucks,” she said. “I need to get out of here.” Crystal told us that she’d beaten an addiction to pills, that her son was about to graduate from high school, and that she made $3.00 an hour. The three of them clearly cared about each other, and this is one of the best parts of the night shift, for me, anyway--the unlikely bonds between people who wouldn’t otherwise have reason to know each other. They were so cheerful, but the truth of their stories were heartbreaking. Not enough money. Not enough opportunity. “There’s nothing in this town for the kids,” Crystal told us. They don’t have anywhere to go, or anything to do. Her son is beating the odds, and I felt her pride. She wants to go back to Houston. We talked about how hard it is to switch shifts once you have built up a group of regulars who like you. Pills are easier to get in Morgan City than meth, we were told. Surprised me. There are a lot of corrupt cops who are on pills, or stealing weed. Ifler had watched a cop pull into her next door neighbors’ place, get high, drink beer, and then get back in his patrol car and drive off. “That’s why I don’t call the cops,” she said. It’s one reason why I don’t either. Somehow, the whole time, we were laughing. Jagger pressed homefries into the grill, smiled and cracked jokes, and I miss them now, after knowing all three of them only for an hour.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And I write it down because they really are the heroes, who are pushing against the forces of corrupt cops, low pay, not enough opportunity, the grief of losing loved ones. I write about them in solidarity and in hope.<br />
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We spent the first really poorly planned night of our trip in Houma, LA. We stopped at Jimmy C’s, a bikini bar about 10 minutes from the highway, for a drink and some satisfaction of basic occupational curiosity on my part. What stood out: drinks just as expensive as Los Angeles? Surprised again. Also, the stage for the dancers was sunk in the middle of the bar, with the bartenders walking around it. This meant that the only way to get tips on the stage was to wad bills into tight balls and throw them. In my experience, this is a rude thing to do. At this bar, it was just how things worked. A shifting of stripper paradigms! One of the dancers offered to put us up for the night, so we hung around Houma until 2am, which involved yet another Waffle House and some cramped-up sleeping in the car. Then she bailed. We spent the night at the absolutely most depressing motel I’ve ever been in. I’m saving my details for a short story. But we took some awesome pictures in the morning. <br />
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When we stopped at a local diner for breakfast and had two miracles: the best beignets, ever, and a conversation with David: former alligator hunter. Anthony asked, “Are there a lot of alligators around here?” and everyone laughed. Yes, indeed. We learned that they have powerful jaws for snapping shut, but they don’t have a lot of power for opening. So if you land on them right, tie their mouths, tie their legs, and avoid getting chomped from the get-go, it’s a cinch. <br />
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We drove through New Orleans, listening to local radio blues and squealing at homes in the garden district. As we drove out of town and toward the coast, I tried to put my finger on the feeling I have in Louisiana. It's a melancholic kind of awe, a sense of the temporary, of beauty being tied so closely with death. The houses are up on concrete blocks because of flooding. The hurricanes are always possible. The insects are loud and the creeping vines don't care about humans, and there's a kind of gentlemanly savagery to it all--breaking open the crawfish and sucking on their heads. Give it to me, Biloxi. Give me that white sand and soft air, give me that purple light at sundown. I love the way people kept saying "Oh come on now!" when I told them where I was from. </span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-27875464678216295142011-06-22T22:45:00.000-07:002011-06-22T22:47:13.083-07:00Getting to know the USA, Part 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpc7qzTm_KaxAnRcaw4nUH2MtwjGgebg5LH62RByU9AKe1QZT9XG8ibagHsdKMwMUGa34W1mb4h-vWtLO-H8dhP1y-hI7ksxwTWCbulEPnrKhM4j_cNOZyXYAD1m7ZFEGyCOvLFWjiKKWx/s1600/alamo_small1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><img border="0" height="265" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpc7qzTm_KaxAnRcaw4nUH2MtwjGgebg5LH62RByU9AKe1QZT9XG8ibagHsdKMwMUGa34W1mb4h-vWtLO-H8dhP1y-hI7ksxwTWCbulEPnrKhM4j_cNOZyXYAD1m7ZFEGyCOvLFWjiKKWx/s400/alamo_small1.jpg" width="400" /></span></span></a></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">33 miles from Katy, Texas. On our way to Houston. Anthony is driving, and I'm trying not to keep scanning the landscape for signs of life. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">This stretch of land is the bleak few days after doing methamphetamine or ecstasy. If that analogy doesn't work for you, imagine the day after Christmas when you were six. If that one doesn't work either, imagine the week after getting broken up with--when you tell people you're okay, but everyone knows you aren't. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I know that there are people who live in this expanse and like it, I know the entire world isn’t totally beige with mediocrity, and yet, yet, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all just on the edge of despair. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Arizona and New Mexico, I giggled at the cacti and felt reverent about the mountains. The small towns were quaint and beautiful with clapboard shack bars and smiling people willing to drink with us, smoke with us, talk about their lives with us. At the El Patio Cantina in Mesilla New Mexico we met Andy, a sweet-smiling boy who told us he loved his home and got us high in his ’89 Bronco on medical grade weed. He showed us a video on his phone of the elderly people he works with, proud and laughing like a father might be showing a video of a child learning to ride a bike. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">In Texas, the stretches of nothing along the 10 Freeway really do feel like no-thing, a void, not a sprawling freedom like it did outside of Los Angeles. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Exceptions: Comfort, TX, where we pulled off to find a place called the Cocky Rooster Bar, built of metal siding with no windows, where a dart tournement between four people was underway and we drank Lone Star beer with a wonderful man who said he’d seen us driving through town. (?) </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">San Antonio, TX. Especially the Riverwalk. After the rocky bleakness of the road, the lush tropical Riverwalk helped me breathe again. Anthony and I drank Shiners, smoked cigars, and marveled at the secret world under the city. Our Motel 6 room was bright orange and Mod-looking, with hilarious round cubbies for towels.</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">I walked alone to the Alamo and spent a perplexing hour trying to read between the lines of popular history. These words, “heroes,” “liberty,” and “defense” all seem leaden, bloated, misshapen. Where were the Indians? Where were the women? There is a series of five-foot-high plaques with timelines and photos and details of the area, an attempt to address the incredibly complex interesction of Native American, Spanish, Mexican, American, and French historical forces...but in the end, the Alamo remains a "Shrine," and it is clear that it's a shrine to a very particular group of white male Texans who were seen as fighting for something like "independence" before the clash between Texas and the U.S. over soveriegnty had begun. That this "independence," this "freedom," was implicitly and obviously tied to the enslavement and/or murder of the peoples already living in the area is somehow elided from the pamphlets handed out by the Daughters of the Republic of Texas. Fascinating that it's still possible, in 2011, to tell a colonial story without including our own culpability.</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">But I'm seeing and feeling the air change--it's getting warmer, softer, and I know that once we're in Louisiana it'll be harder to get my hackles up since Anth and I will be drinking whiskey sours and eating hush pupppies and the jazz will make my body feel more at home. </span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;"><br />
</span></span></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px Helvetica; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">And finally, in Houston. We eat etouffee and gumbo at Calliope's, and chat with the server named Stephanie who wishes she was back in Colorado where her hair didn't curl so much. We go to </span></span><a href="http://www.superhappyfunland.com/index.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">Super Happy Fun Land</span></span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif;">. Check it out. We're sleeping on the couches here tonight! </span></span></span></div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-16509642126267511372011-03-25T19:54:00.000-07:002011-03-27T14:06:32.353-07:00Bad News and Hope<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7IW7gYKExL2uQ9YZLN-nr85JW85v_vef7qrYiJgvcLWITlZlD1IKAB_NjibqNAwb_RvCZ6tkchuNjVwQtihb8bwQqN7WVmfhFOiRUK460mLnmtTPq2XOORfInRiWixdyliqusUrc0n65X/s1600/IMG_3580.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="298" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh7IW7gYKExL2uQ9YZLN-nr85JW85v_vef7qrYiJgvcLWITlZlD1IKAB_NjibqNAwb_RvCZ6tkchuNjVwQtihb8bwQqN7WVmfhFOiRUK460mLnmtTPq2XOORfInRiWixdyliqusUrc0n65X/s400/IMG_3580.JPG" width="400" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Of course I expect a certain amount of violence in retaliation for my being the messenger, but I'd like to just remind everyone that I personally did not close the National Center for the Preservation of Democracy. It was closed when I found it. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And what would it mean, really, if one day we woke up and found that (1) all democracy had been controlled by one national center with its headquarters in downtown Los Angeles next to the Museum of Contemporary Art and (2) it had abruptly closed one Sunday?</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Would "democracy" cease to have ever existed, if it turned out that it had been controlled in the modern world by one group of people, working out of one glass box in one American city? Wait a minute...</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I feel very alienated these days by words like "democracy," "freedom," and "liberation," as they've been effectively repurposed by American media to mean "American style of secretive non-representational government," "American style of capitalism," and "Choice between new American-supported government or a state of abject poverty and war."</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I watch Obama, who like all presidents has aged ten years in two, announce that we are engaging in a limited action in Libya, and I read what I can, and I realize, I know nothing. Obama says "We are acting in the interests of the United States and the world" and this statement is the foundation of my not-knowing. Simply put: the interests of the United States cannot be, and are not, the interests of the world. Therefore, I have no idea whose interests, or what interests exactly, "We" are acting in, anywhere.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">This is not to say that our interests are necessarily diametrically opposed to everyone else's, although during George W's era, it certainly seemed that way. No, I'm addressing a particular piece of national rhetoric and public belief: that we act in the best interests of other countries. That is simply false, and it contributes to a bizarre and increasingly dangerous myth of our being the Big Benevolent Brother of...everyone else. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I highly recommend Randall Williams' book </span><a href="http://www.upress.umn.edu/Books/W/williams_divided.html"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Divided World: Human Rights and its Violence</span></a><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">. Without spending three paragraphs explaining the argument or reviewing the text, I'll say that it is one of two books that I read in the last year that actually changed the way I think in a fundamental way. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">It goes like this. Human rights are obviously good. Therefore, any group or nation that promotes human rights must also be obviously good. Not so, says Williams. In fact, the post WWII project of defining and enforcing the International Declaration of Human Rights has become, in effect, a way to continue the U.S. cultural and military imperialist project. Very difficult to swallow. Very effectively argued by Williams, very bravely published by U Minn press, and very poignantly read and digested by me. For all the lives that have been saved, there have been large moves away from real freedom, independence, liberation. There are far more brilliant, trained minds working on the problems of imperialsm--but I want the concept to be clearer to people in my life, because it's happening all day long, all the time, in ways that are not always obvious to ostensibly free American brains. </span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Last night I stood around a makeshift fire pit with three youngish men: two in their late twenties, one in his thirties. We talked about competitive sports, and what the culture of sports can or should do for children. When I mentioned a sociology study I read last year that showed high school football players had a much higher rate of talking about performing acts of date rape than other high school aged men, they fell silent. "What do you guys think it means?" I said. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">"It's the general act of conquering," said the most thoughtful of the three. "It's imperialism. Win the game, take the girl. You can't really win the whole game without taking the girl. Same story with the Spaniards. Same story with the Romans. Same story with any imperialist." The conversation that ensued was truly hope-filled, as it demonstrated the possibility for courageous self-awareness and cultural consciousness. I learned.</span><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And this was, for me, a grand reopening of my own metaphorical Center for the Preservation of Democracy. A moment around a fire pit, with men who were willing to confront a deeply sad, uncomfortable reality in themselves, in me, and in our country. It made the Berkeley baby in my heart sing. </span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-45913960229444779922011-03-15T20:42:00.000-07:002011-03-15T20:42:48.073-07:00It's Time To Kiss An Elephant<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVyl52HSr3Y7eAIPmBf9_ESJ7BlhdzFARlf9iHC4UfyXU4_ylTfQkeNsewCGFV9uPXOMlV3l9ZIzC_WF_jmPA_eMebeSwX7cR_qeXsuqVSbqW7fjdC9jFVPcs-C9UAwDPynFW781qqb1S/s1600/IMG_3586.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghVyl52HSr3Y7eAIPmBf9_ESJ7BlhdzFARlf9iHC4UfyXU4_ylTfQkeNsewCGFV9uPXOMlV3l9ZIzC_WF_jmPA_eMebeSwX7cR_qeXsuqVSbqW7fjdC9jFVPcs-C9UAwDPynFW781qqb1S/s320/IMG_3586.jpg" width="239" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">It's true what they say about graduate school. Whatever it is that they say. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Anyway, six weeks later, all my great ambitions for being excellent at posting here at GC have been called out. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">HOWEVER! A dream of mine is underway, and it's called the Kiss an Elephant project. Here's an example by Kelsey, my sis who has already claimed space as one of the "stars" of the project. She is rapidly getting defeated by Lindsey! It's already very exciting.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Here's how it works: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">1) you go to visit <a href="http://www.kissanelephant.tumblr.com/">www.kissanelephant.tumblr.com</a></span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">2) you are inspired by all the pictures, and read the <a href="http://kissanelephant.tumblr.com/WHY?">"Why Should I Kiss an Elephant?"</a> page.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">3) Maybe you also read a <a href="http://gorgeouscuriosity.blogspot.com/2009/10/circus-and-temple.html">rad GC post on elephants</a>.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">4) You start looking out for elephants in your daily life.</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">5) You find one, you snap a photo on your phone of you kissing it, and</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">6) You <a href="http://kissanelephant.tumblr.com/submit">send the photo to me, via the tumblr blog</a> or all the many other easy ways of contacting/finding me, and</span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">7) VOILA!!! We build an enormous collection of Kiss an Elephant photos, and the whole creative potential of the internet is once again realized! Baci baci baci!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've already been told that this is a silly idea. I agree it's silly. I've been told it's dumb. Oh darlings, I beg to differ. In fact, I'm taking a totally irresponsible break from working on a seminar paper during finals week to tell you why it's so important to me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It's not just that I love elephants, which I do. It's not just that I think elephants are important symbols to consider in literary-historical, art-historical, spiritual-historical, and global-community contexts, which I do. It's not just that I like the idea of collecting a lot of pictures, which I do. And it's not just that getting people to participate in community art projects makes me giddy with joy, which it does. IT'S ALL OF THESE THINGS AT ONCE. Every time someone sends me a new picture, it's a brand new moment of joy.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Maybe I'm addicted to joy. Send me pictures, because I'm not ready to quit.</span><br />
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I have a vision for this project that involves THOUSANDS of photos from all around the world, submitted by people I know and don't know. I have a vision for a pack of elephant-kissing-agents who send me pictures on a regular basis and develop their own little character arcs on the blog. I have a vision for a ridiculous amount of pleasure getting derived (by me, and by many others) from the hunt for new elephants to kiss, the occasional moment of kissing a REAL elephant, the hilarity of a volume of photos of people kissing elephants, which is a really weird thing to do.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As a person who does graduate study in many utterly un-whimsical things, I stand in valiant, prankish, eccentric and sensual pleasured delight at this project. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I really, really hope you join me. I hope you facebook this, and tweet this, and make it your personal mission to find an elephant to kiss, to find people who want to find an elephant to kiss, and to contact me with your own moments of whimsical celebration of community embodied in your kissing of elephants.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Yes. I'm serious.</span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-9056905661791475712011-02-01T00:30:00.000-08:002011-02-01T00:30:26.030-08:00The Bittersweet Taste of Surrealism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwXNaXvVXkfqTsGlKYc0TEJM93Sp6XwAfodKpwTvzIk7IadradVWFFkVcMHpBMnueJ0IligyJ0onrXS790pq6N_LFvUx2iPH7Ybk2WH6k_eCqa1We1XCkwipxpqxVB_DxpYAjAxmrmVRaG/s1600/IMG_3149.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwXNaXvVXkfqTsGlKYc0TEJM93Sp6XwAfodKpwTvzIk7IadradVWFFkVcMHpBMnueJ0IligyJ0onrXS790pq6N_LFvUx2iPH7Ybk2WH6k_eCqa1We1XCkwipxpqxVB_DxpYAjAxmrmVRaG/s320/IMG_3149.jpg" width="239" /></a>Welcome to gorgeous, curious 2011! Overhaul and update! Hiatus ended! Sheets to the wind!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last week we screened surrealist films in World Cinema, the class at UC Riverside in which I am a proud TA. After we watched the 1928 Bunuel/Dali short film <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oJexaTmCVfI">Un Chien Andalou</a>, I asked the class, rather fatuously, if they were ready for Eraserhead.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Wait, wait," said one of the 75 undergraduates. "I have a question."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Maybe I can help you with it," I said. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"What just <i>happened</i>?" he said.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Indeed. "I can't help with that," I said. "Maybe there is someone in the audience here who is high, and would like to help the rest of us?" </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Of course I could have also said: Maybe there is someone in the audience here who is dreaming? Maybe there is someone in the audience here who is profoundly dissatisfied with current hegemonic rules of rationality and aesthetics? Or maybe there is someone in the audience here who is actively thinking about what dominant culture has taught them about "the abject?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">What happens in that film. Ants crawl out of a hole in a man's hand. An eye is cut open. A moon is sliced by clouds. A woman is man-handled. A piano is dragged across a room. A man holds a book/a gun in his shaking hand. Many things happen. A man in a nun-suit rides a bicycle. A woman is disturbed. And many more things. But this was not what I was being asked. I was being asked: "Where was the plot?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Later that week I read the students' film journals. One of the most startling lines: "<i>Un Chien Andalou</i> is a film in which essentially nothing happens." Was that my fault?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Essentially nothing, I thought. Maybe this is true. Where the student might have felt he was delivering an incisive critique of what seemed to him a worthless film structure, he inadvertently stumbled into my most secret dear heart of artist's longing. How beautiful can "essentially nothing" possibly be? Isn't it the goal of meditation to arrive at essentially nothing? Isn't true creative practice the state of controlling essentially nothing? Isn't love itself the miracle that springs from essentially nothing? </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Last quarter I read Heidegger's "The Question Concerning Technology." In the dense maze of abstraction, I found a window, a clearing, a space to gather: Heidegger's call for our awareness of efficiency and optimization as the governing principles of our lives. Efficiency. Plot delivery. Optimization. Moral and message. Clean lines. Making Sense. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In other words, technological thinking, which is ubiquitous in late capitalism, has so structured our daily lives that it feels terrible to try and step out of it. It feels like a sin. It may very well be a sin.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Walrus. By the way.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And so I came to lunch at a tiny Italian restaurant with my friend April, and I said, "How do I lead a discussion on Surrealism tomorrow? How do I let the students know that the disruption of 'rational' flow is one of the most important political acts of the 20th and maybe also the 21st century? That it took a kind of surrealist vision to come up with the idea of real social justice? That all revolutions stem from surreal and utterly unthinkable dreams of a future in which the rules of the entire socio-political order have been restructured? How? How?"</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">"Make them play," was her answer. "Ask them to do something surreal."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Make them play! Make you play! May you play! </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">There is no stopping you once you've decided to feel the intense pleasure of a fencepost in the moonlight.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exquisite_corpse">Exquisite Corpse</a>. We shall see if it is more bitter or more sweet.</span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-80135698643400194352010-11-10T22:47:00.000-08:002010-11-10T22:47:09.506-08:00New SARK book and Old Cowboy Song<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVCBd8b_okUkbQlGu-0Z163BLA8QP_gvvuYizNC4wum5jqZD6ZC28LU_WbVmslN35E7iXn_4idbF6ZH9b2bHZf-f6S4FbucRa1wSguSQ2snS6iA2Kg-ajARA-YazYJe9HQRHgdNgAK31y/s1600/jcash-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxVCBd8b_okUkbQlGu-0Z163BLA8QP_gvvuYizNC4wum5jqZD6ZC28LU_WbVmslN35E7iXn_4idbF6ZH9b2bHZf-f6S4FbucRa1wSguSQ2snS6iA2Kg-ajARA-YazYJe9HQRHgdNgAK31y/s320/jcash-1.jpg" width="283" /></a><span style="font-size: large;">Johnny Cash determined my life’s destiny in 1986. My father, then a senior editor at the San Francisco office of Harper and Row, was working with Cash on developing a book, and through some means of what I imagine was booze-induced networking, so popular for publishers in the 1980s, Dad landed backstage passes for Cash’s appearance at the Cow Palace in Oakland. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">I had been listening to the “Highwaymen” album, a collaboration among Johnny Cash, Kris Kristofferson, Waylen Jennings, and Willie Nelson, and had only just been allowed to move the needle on the player independently, since I tended to listen to the album front to back to front to back and Dad had gotten tired of having to reset the thing every twenty or so minutes. Endearingly devoted to me, my single, eligible father took me to the concert, instead of bringing a woman he could have certainly impressed into a second date or at least a one night stand.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">The green room was actually white and Cash’s head was huge. So was his collar, which was cone-shaped, like the kind one sees on a dog after an invasive trip to the vet. <br />
I asked him what it was for.<br />
“Hairspray,” he said, and demonstrated by creating a dense cloud over his impressive pompadour, without soiling his starched white shirt. “So, Vanessa,” he said, now towering over me, the collar still standing at attention, “What song do you want to hear tonight?”<br />
I was not prepared for that question. I answered honestly. “I’d really like to hear ‘<a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V_EkrYsTXC8">Jim I Wore a Tie Today</a>.’”<br />
Johnny Cash chuckled with the kind of gravel in his throat that I thought God must have and he said, “Well now, honey, that’s a real sad song for such a little girl.”<br />
Indeed it was a cowboy’s funeral song. I told him I liked it. He agreed to play it, because that was as good a reason as any to play a sad song. I was validated somehow by this, and that is the year I started writing stories.<br />
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</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">When I listen to it now, I make up all kinds of reasons why I might have liked “Jim I Wore a Tie Today.” They range from simple (it has a beautiful melody) to self-aggrandizing (I must have been emotionally precocious). The “real” reason is mostly lost except for a Proustian moment I have with this song lyric: "we did everything in the books, I guess/and a lot that they never thought up." The music lilts upward on an open chord progression that begs for resolution. But, it doesn’t get resolved. We never know what exactly these boys did together that made them so thoroughly inventive.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">I wasn’t obsessed with cowboys, or the West, or even any of the Highwaymen as a pre-pubescent. So I have to conclude that I obsessed over “Jim I Wore a Tie Today” at least in part for this moment of opening, adventure, maybe even “badness,” that came through in the lament. <i>There are things that even all the books haven't yet thought up</i>, Cash was telling me. That astonishing reality comes through even in grief.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">In 1986, I was overwhelmed with delight by what was in the books. I'd only been reading for three years. I was already two grades ahead of myself and started keeping a journal. That there could possibly be a frontier beyond the library, made of yet-un-thought material, made me feel something I struggle even now to articulate. I’m sure there’s a way to say it in German. Part thrill, part terror, part assurance. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">The first two are probably obvious: the grand scope of possibilities and the limited time people have to explore them before they die is thrilling and terrifying. The last feeling, of a kind of relaxed happiness that follows from the first two, is not obvious at all. In fact, many people I know and love do not share it with me. But it is something that I can access in yoga, in moments of relaxation, in moments of joy--an acceptance of the temporary and acknowledgment of the vast unknown territory just outside my current view. I learned it in part from years of reading SARK, and watching her navigate death, loss, change, success, surprise, and delight.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">Tonight I talked to my Dad on the phone. He was chatting about a conference he just went to. He had more energy than me. Weirdly, this thought pushed up from my unconscious: he could have died on his way home from Nashville. I felt profoundly grateful that he hadn't. I realized, as I do every time someone dies or I think of someone dying, that I usually assume the people I love will live another day, and it's just not going to stay true forever. They may not stay healthy, they may not stay sane, they may not stay loving, they may not stay, period. I hate this. I also gravitate always towards people who are wiser than me in these areas. Apparently, I've been doing that since I was a small child.</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
</span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">SARK's new book, <a href="http://www.tinyurl.com/gladsark">Glad No Matter What: Transforming Loss and Change into Gift and Opportunity</a> is living in my bed right now. It's her 16th book, and an incredibly vulnerable, gorgeous tome full of tips for what she's dubbed "practical gladness." I'm so honored to be one of the featured portraits of Joy and Transformation at<a href="http://www.planetsark.com/portraits.htm"> PlantSark. </a>The book is yet another window into this kind of joy/terror/assurance feeling that makes me feel happy to be a human being. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;">I'd like to keep overturning the little narratives that I feel are so necessary to my life--perfectionism, in particular, is an important one lately. There are myriad ways to feel differently than we seem to think we must feel. I'm happily indebted to the cowboys and SARKs and blues singers and writers who remind me. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: large;"><br />
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</span> </div>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-10730320700422962472010-10-25T01:07:00.000-07:002010-10-25T01:08:00.808-07:00Dragon, Pirate, Mountain, Dust<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; margin-right: 1em; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhItuvope1-jnkxH4O6_3L83gnkZrGpQHYocM-o9NGSAXGf7Rr6G1zMTnJrrqQBIGnUIQ_1XVyCkeXZaVDX6b1LyPEByYwQN7v3NAyHtRvqKSYPqgupbamMW9695GDEVS1RQYDZXvDSQOOM/s400/IMG_0122.JPG" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;" width="400" /></span></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;">Burning Man 2010: dragon tail, pirate flag, mountains, and dust. There's a LOT going on here.</span></td></tr>
</tbody></table><span style="font-size: large;">As a college freshman, I studied ancient Greek and Roman humanities at Reed. One of the assignments I remember being insulted by, and one of the only assignments I was ever insulted by, and also one of the only assignments I remember, was a sort of scavenger-hunt we were supposed to perform over the course of a week. The point was to collect as many references to ancient Greek gods and goddesses, characters from the Iliad, pieces of architecture that resembled columns of the Parthenon, and so on, that we could find in our daily lives. I was insulted by this assignment because it seemed like something I might have had to do in high school, had I gone to an okay high school instead of a desperately under-funded Los Angeles Unified school. The point is, I didn't feel like carrying my little list around everywhere and jotting down things like: "Goodyear tires logo: Hermes winged foot." I did do it, of course, because I am what's known as a "good student."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">And what happened was that I found so many references to ancient Greece in my daily life I felt a little scared. I felt scared knowing that I had just been cruising through a visual media culture that made references I didn't know before, because that meant that the academic culture I was entering was going to make a thousand times more. And of course, it did.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Skip ahead some years later, to a very similar feeling that happened when I read Nabokov's <i>Lolita</i> for the first time. I read the novel very soon after I'd been first introduced to Derrida, and there was a sort of dizzying effect to Nabokov's text as I felt I could fall inside each page, and this was a physical sensation that never stopped after I taught the book 8 times, because Derrida had told me I was already bleeding in through the spaces between the words. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I am back in grad school, attending seminars with extremely smart abstract thinkers, finding myself awash in visual imagery and idiosyncratic connections that sometimes enhance the discourse and at other times make it jumbled and clunky. Tonight I watched a Miyazaki film called "Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind" for a class I'm taking on anime--and really, the way anime can be seen as a portal to a new relation to technology a la Heidegger. And I was heartened by the fact that someone out there has a brain that moves in lateral, brightly colored directions like mine.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If that meant nothing to you, know this: I cried many times during the film, as connections came slamming through me: this is America, this is the global political body, this is the demonized dream of environmentalism, this is the problem of the ivory tower, this is Anthony, this is my old cat Boots and my new adopted cat Bembo, this is me, this is the unbelievably beautiful piece of visual art that somehow got enough people and money behind it to get MADE. And I fell into the movie in the same way I fall into a page. And the depth of these connections, the allusions I felt moving backward (the film was made in 1984, but visually seemed to reference Burning Man 2010 and Star Wars: the Clone Wars), the sheer weight of connectivity I don't understand because I haven't, still haven't read enough books or seen enough film was almost too much.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I know that for some people, in fact, it IS too much. They give up and watch TV without thinking about what that TV might be referencing. They give up and do all kinds of things, with the general theme of ignorance, indifference, or disinterest. This is the condition that most troubles people who worry about "the postmodern." But for me, those glimpses into the rampant allusive-ness of the world are like a drug. I want to see more. I want to trace them. I don't pretend I'll find origins, really, but I want to find swarms and packs and pockets and concentric circles of connection. I want to peel off and paste on layer after layer of the collage.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At the Getty last weekend for my Mom's birthday, I looked at ancient Greek art that I'd studied at some point at Reed. I saw a bust I recognized from a book cover. I read and remembered, vaguely, certain customs, names of gods and goddesses, and as we strolled out into the garden, I tried to figure out why the Koi in the pond "worked" with everything else. Pure aesthetics? Some reference in Ovid? Some cultural exchange between the Greeks and elsewhere that I don't know about? The questions are pleasurable. They're worthwhile. They feel like practicing piano or going for a run--I may not get an instant return on this hour, but if I keep it up, someday I'll have a moment when that little "click" will turn over, that flush of recognition, and I'll grab the arm of the person I'm with and crazily try to explain it. Eventually, one day, I'll get a piece memorized, I'll notice a new shapeliness to my calves, I'll read something new and feel I can love it more because I understand that it is a piece of homage to another book I already love.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm pretty sure I'm not arguing art for art's sake, although it may seem that way. What ultimately drives this desire and pleasure is a humanist passion: the more connectivity I can discuss, the more I can show, the more others can feel, the less distanced and dehumanized and disembodied we will be together. I actually believe this is possible, as a life-praxis, not just an academic exercise.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The biggest barrier to it is the ego. Wanting to feel like I already know what someone is going to say or show to me. Wanting to feel that triumph in argument, wanting to above all not lose face in front of people whose admiration I crave. When I am able to stop seeing through the ego-lens, I don't become a relativist or a confused little baby lost in the fog. I become even more convinced that creative moments of connection, collaboration, and realization of creative impulse is the way out. The way through, the way in, the way toward a moment in which the Dragon (spirit-body), the Pirate (the people's power to resist and organize), the Mountain (wisdom), and the Dust (the everyday made extraordinary) not only coexist in a lucky photo, but ARE together in my body and my body of work.</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-29325042228196853352010-10-14T18:49:00.000-07:002010-10-14T18:49:49.628-07:00...And We're Back!<span style="font-size: large;"></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEicUxsKtmbFG2Nm2fNMibBqEoha2vW106tVXvM2_jWHW6j3t6mj7jP70tlqupLNmIZks4_ULIpfRpsBfo9tABw1hhyeD1hhroMJaW3LY9j1vNyfdZJecAsTyAJJoKd5oWQelzUpjDs4hMSi/s320/CIEcover.jpg" width="212" /></span></div><br />
<span style="font-size: large;"></span><span style="font-size: large;">What happened here? </span><br />
<span style="font-size: large;">I'll tell you what. I went to Burning Man, I turned 31, I started a PhD program in Comparative Literature at UC Riverside, and my novel came out.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">That's right, folks. Remember a few months ago when I was writing <br />
about how I think self-publishing is a potential vanguard movement for fiction writers? Well, <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Crack-Everything-Novel-Vanessa-Carlisle/dp/1450243924/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1283965744&sr=1-1">click here and visit A Crack in Everything at Amazon.com</a>. I hope you're inspired to support me when you do. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">If you live anywhere near LA, come join me at the <a href="http://vanessacarlisle.com/Vanessa_Carlisle/Events.html">book events</a>!</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I've been going a little crazy reading heavy lit theory for many hours of the day, and then spending my "free time" trying to do marketing. I've designed purple underwear with "There is A Crack in Everything" printed on the butt. I've made custom condoms with the phrase "Even though there's A Crack in Everything" printed on them. (The novel is about a sex educator). I've bought a huge mounted poster of the cover to set in an easel at events. It's nuts, really, how much time, money, and energy can go into a project like this--I could be promoting full time, if I wanted to. Instead, I'm going to cut and paste the back cover copy of the book here and then write about the problem of "autobiographical fiction."</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So here's what the back of the book says: </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Twenty-five-year-old Tamina is a sharp-witted Jersey girl living in Hollywood with a near-phobic response to mismatching colors, an addiction to pedicures, and a hectic job teaching comprehensive sex education to urban youth. Suffering the consequences of a violent assault, Tam looks for relief in romance and LA's underground erotic entertainment scene. However, when Tam's young attacker unexpectedly resurfaces among a crowd of drag queens, porn stars, and musicians, Tam finally must make real choices. Fear or confrontation. Cynicism or curiosity. Silence or honesty. It would be surreal, if it wasn't LA.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Nearly everyone who's read the novel so far has wondered, "How much of Tamina is you?" and I'd like to answer this question once and for all.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Some. Some of her is me. Most of her is not me.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The truth is, I had a lot more in common with Tamina, in temperament, when I began the book. Her politics are my politics. Her experiences are not really my experiences. Her life is fiction. Her emotional problems resonate with me, and that's why I wrote them. Beginning six years ago.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Tamina is stressed out. She's anxious a lot of the time. She has a hard time telling people the abject honest truth about how she feels because she's afraid of being rejected. I used to feel this way a lot more often than I do now. It was freeing to me to write this character, because once I'd exposed some of these emotional realities I was more able to address them. Granted, they haven't gone away. But I don't worry as much about how people are perceiving me, and I would like to thank Tamina for that. She took some of the burden from me, I think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">In addition, this is a sexy novel--there's a very erotic scene about 2/3 of the way through, in addition to sexual tension between many of the characters, and I've already been fielding questions about whether the sex scene came from my imagination or my experience. So I'll answer that question, too. Both. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I think that Americans are obsessed with historicity, memoir, and "what really happened." I'm bored by the constant pursuit of an objective past truth or a pure memory, when it comes to literature. I believe that the desire to figure out the exact inspiration for any piece of fiction is a deadly moment--it's a way to kill the creative potential in reading. It's a way to fix a book in a particular point, instead of allowing it a spinning, fluid, expansive life of inspiring people. Sometimes authors have fantastically exciting stories about the origin of a book. But often the reading of a book is a truly creative act on the part of the reader, and too much interference from an author can be restrictive, I think.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I'm actually lucky that I'm self-publishing in an age when authors have to be visible. I'm young, I'm blonde, and I'm extroverted. There was a time when those things would not matter nearly as much as they do now. If I were shy this whole business would be more stressful than an MRI for a claustrophobic.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So I rumble along, trying to figure out the machinery of promotion. I try not to be too insanely attached to any particular outcome for A Crack in Everything, and just be grateful that its got a physical form. Because holding it in my hands, after all this time, is a pleasure of nearly transcendent character.</span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-38256433844380246432010-08-25T12:30:00.000-07:002010-08-25T12:30:44.138-07:00Thank You, Hefner. We'll Take It From Here.<span style="font-size: large;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQiaIso5hFDQAmu6NJyypS5yM39DTzkSI6Uuo6IYTUCmpdJJ9A2UbdACtFzfoqegFr2RyfUqNj0C0VW4NzTDrmjqzAwoB4brj9Sp3-IVxProfYGddDvHnANPSFy5h2_EKU7Wdly6XYdtEk/s1600/Hugh-Hefner-Playboy-Activist-and-Rebel-movie-poster.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgQiaIso5hFDQAmu6NJyypS5yM39DTzkSI6Uuo6IYTUCmpdJJ9A2UbdACtFzfoqegFr2RyfUqNj0C0VW4NzTDrmjqzAwoB4brj9Sp3-IVxProfYGddDvHnANPSFy5h2_EKU7Wdly6XYdtEk/s400/Hugh-Hefner-Playboy-Activist-and-Rebel-movie-poster.jpg" width="270" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">Brigitte Berman's new documentary, <i>Hugh Hefner: Playboy, Activist, and Rebel</i>, deserves attention. Read this great <a href="http://www.collider.com/2010/07/30/director-brigitte-berman-interview-hugh-hefner-playboy-activist-and-rebel/" target="_blank">interview at the Collider.com</a> for more background on the process of the film and its conclusions. Go see it if you're interested in sex, law, social justice, censorship, publishing, and/or sexy girls. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">On the movie's opening night, July 30th, I went with Linz and her mom Debbie to the premiere at LA's Nuart Theater. Both Hefner and director Berman were in attendance, and they did a brief Q&A after the film. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">As inspiring as the film was, the way Hefner has had to live on the defensive his whole life made me sad.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">At this point, he's no longer defending himself against the obvious enemies he had in the 60s. Then, it was the conservative Christians, the censors, the people who were out-and-out afraid of crass depictions of sexuality. That the feminists of the time (Susan Brownmiller, and Gloria Steinem, famously) also vilified him is fascinating, since he thought he was working on the same project they were.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But it's even more complex now. The people who scoff at Hefner are people my age, who know little to nothing about his heroism of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, and only see the caricature of male sexuality he's become. They don't care about the way he flouted racist convention, and in some cases actual law, to have black performers on his show and in his clubs. They don't care that he published Charles Beaumont's "The Crooked Man," a short story that questioned homophobia directly, when no one else would. He said during the Q&A that he thinks most people nowadays don't acknowledge "the other half" of his life.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The implication here is heavy: one half of his life is women/sex/silliness/parties and the other half is intensely focused intellectual, creative, activist work. Much like the way they were presented in Playboy, Hef thinks of the naked girls as a very separate experience from the writing.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is such a puzzle to me. On the one hand, it seems like he should have the right to be a sexual adolescent, to love big boobies and blondes, and spend his time on that. He's a grown man with consenting women, after all. On the other hand, I agree with the criticism that Playboy became, in some very important ways, a dictator of sexual taste, and that it presents a limited view of what is sexy. What's clear from the film is that this restricted taste that has become so ubiquitous is actually Hef's. It doesn't seem as though he had a mission to tell all Americans what they "should" like, in fact. It seems as though he was a brilliant business man who happened to know exactly what HE liked. That Americans are sheep, media consumers, and easily told what their preferences should be based on what they see around them, is their own fault.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Someone with Hugh Hefner's acumen for business and a different aesthetic might have changed the course of American sexuality. Maybe. Or maybe Hef's desire for a certain hour-glass gal is just so mainstream because it is also a basic biological imperative the way symmetry in the face seems to be in cross-cultural studies of beauty. Certainly a particular waist-to-hip ratio (.7) has been theorized as a beauty ideal in many cultures. If Hef was just tapping into some heterosexual evolutionary biology, what exactly could the feminists expect?</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">What's beautiful about Hef's current incarnation as an 84-year-old business tyrant (he's buying the magazine back from stockholders to, one imagines, exert some more creative control), strangely self-effacing lover (see a recent <a href="http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/hollywood/hugh-hefner-defiant/" target="_blank">LA Weekly cover story by Dennis Romero</a>), and general eccentric is that he still seems happily committed to being authentic--he really does exactly what he wants to do, no matter what. This I respect I great deal. I don't share my generation's disdain for the grandfather-aged patriarch of <i>The Girls Next Door</i>, because the sheer volume of good he's done simply outweighs the potential done by his perpetuation of certain boring sexual aesthetics. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">It's up to us to derail those aesthetics, offer alternatives in media, and so on. What is also up to us, and seems to be the next big project that Hef may never attempt, is to do real integration of the "two halves"--to lift the barrier between sex and intellect. They existed side-by-side in early Playboy, but they didn't exist as integrated whole. This is the ideal that excites me most: not just a culture that has stopped oppressing sexual expressiveness, but a culture that has no problem with sex and sexuality entering the ivory tower. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So overall I think we should see Hef as we see the early feminists or civil rights activists. We can never forget what they accomplished. We wouldn't even be able to think the thoughts we think now without them. But we can't pretend that the important fights have all been won, or we will be just a new generation of culture-slaves. There's always a new front for revolutionary thinking. </span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-59112129668089478822010-08-08T11:26:00.000-07:002010-08-08T11:27:27.590-07:00Cute Girls in Boys' Town<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HNioR7B3P9LSsL7X4tKG-0buHPs6c0VIz30ekiUWqaAlDwFSN8loKRJUsJ8KVFG7cNAKa2TT2U1PDFhvFjTD_x0u5Ic5vWG5QGzJ3lrIQeUOC5XfPVazdfGzHiBoZ9UoTB-MMKO_nnrO/s1600/Photo+on+2010-05-01+at+10.37.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh4HNioR7B3P9LSsL7X4tKG-0buHPs6c0VIz30ekiUWqaAlDwFSN8loKRJUsJ8KVFG7cNAKa2TT2U1PDFhvFjTD_x0u5Ic5vWG5QGzJ3lrIQeUOC5XfPVazdfGzHiBoZ9UoTB-MMKO_nnrO/s320/Photo+on+2010-05-01+at+10.37.jpg" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">I’ve never before been mistaken for a television journalist. I’ve been mistaken for an aspiring actress, mostly, and occasionally for someone’s old girlfriend. I’ve been mistaken for a normal blonde. When mingling with a litter of breezy sexy casual late-twenties hot girls, I could be mistaken for one of them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Those hot girls are the people currently running the film publicity scene, which means underneath their Los Angeles chic sunhats buzz the brains of a fantastically powerful marketing machine. I like to think that people mistook me for one of them because I am both cute and somehow look smart, even when I’m just standing around shielding myself from the sun.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><i>The Other Guys</i>, a new comedy from Will Ferrell and director Adam McKay (previous team-ups: <i>Anchorman, Talladega Nights, Step Brothers</i>), was the subject of scrutiny on that bright LA day. I shadowed Ted Chen from NBC, a news man of fifteen years who takes entertainment industry assignments when he actually wants to watch the film/go to the party/talk to the artists. <i>The Other Guys</i> opened August 6th in the U.S., and will open in the fall in most other countries. It’s a spoof of “buddy-cop” films like <i>Lethal Weapon</i>, and it ends up being a send-up of movie-making in general. Someone else can write a review. I’ll take you on the briefly thrilling journey to the publicity event. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ted Chen and I arrived at the Marriott Hotel, where the press junket was supposedly occurring, at his appointed time. We were ushered through a labyrinthian series of hallways and elevators to the adjacent Ritz Carlton. The junket was actually set up at the Ritz Carlton rooftop pool, so the cameras could capture a sparkling skyline behind stars Will Ferrell, Mark Wahlberg, and Eva Mendes. Never mind that the movie is set in New York. An LA skyline serves as symbolic stand-in cityscape for anyplace, we all know that. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Who are all these women?” I asked Ted, nodding my head toward a knot of particularly well-accessorized ladies in shiny sandals and jersey tops. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“They’re like me,” he said. “They’re doing the interviews. Some of them are publicists.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I discovered my prejudice: these people looked like they should be interns, still.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ted laughed. “I guess I’m kind of a fossil here,” he said, looking around. (He’s not.) “I don’t do entertainment reporting that often. It really is run by pretty women.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We ate New York-themed food in a luxurious Ritz suite, where <i>The Other Guys</i> DVD Press Kit played, in a loop, on a large HD television, with the sound off. The press kit included multiple trailers and interview materials with stars not present at the junket, like Michael Keaton. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">While we cut our sausages Ted and I chatted about how movie marketing had changed over the years. This publicity DVD we were seeing as ambient background video would be sent to news outlets that couldn’t pay a journalist’s expenses to the junket, in the hopes that an entertainment reporter would do a piece on the film for a local TV market.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Finally, it was Ted’s turn. We were ushered by a smiling brunette into the space between the suite and the pool where we were picked up by another smiling brunette and brought to a space between the space between and the pool, past a buffet of fruit and water, to a waiting space in the shade. We waited quietly. We chatted. Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg were visible on a temporary, elevated platform, under a white tent, wearing sunglasses, tan and smiling. They talked to whoever had been ushered into the director’s chair opposite them. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This was when I found out that these interviews lasted a total of four minutes. Every journalist was allotted four minutes with Eva Mendes, and four minutes with Wahlberg and Ferrell together. They would then take their tapes with them back to their station/show and build a story. As a writer, my notion of an interview is that it takes about an hour to get enough material for a story. I don’t know what I expected for TV, but I was surprised. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Four minutes?” I said, incredulously, to Ted. “That’s it?”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“It’s not long,” he said. “We used to get six.”</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">TV time is not regular time. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I didn’t get to hear what any of the other journalists asked. I imagine that the actors spent the whole day answering very similar questions about their rapport, what it was like to work with director McKay, and what they’re headed to next. When it was Ted’s turn to interview Will Ferrell and Mark Wahlberg, I stole twelve inches on the platform, held out my hand, and thanked them for “making my face hurt so much.” I was sincere--in a vast sea of bad comedy, I really did think <i>The Other Guys</i> was terrifically funny. And I loved the politics.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Ted asked a great question about whether Ferrell and Wahlberg were “on board” with the political angle of the movie, which is decisively anti-mega-corporation, even anti-capitalist. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Of course,” Ferrell said. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“It’s one of the reasons we wanted to do it,” said Wahlberg.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Considering the paltry amount of time allowed and the generally content-less entertainment stories mainstream journalists seem compelled to make, this moment seemed pretty good. When you take another step back of course, the paltry amount of time allowed and the lack of content in entertainment stories is a totally unacceptable situation. I'm all for compression. What I saw was that someone like me, who craves meaningful discourse, will grasp at straws where there is no content. It helped that Ted was so amenable to my questions--what's the point of these interviews if they're all the same? People want to see their familiar anchor/journalist with the stars. What's the point of doing a news story on a movie that's already getting so heavily promoted? Ted thinks this is the kind of promotion that matters most, actually, because it is part of other, socially legitimized media, not an advertisement. How exactly did the scene come to be run by PYT's? No idea, really. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">While Ted and I waited for his tapes back in the Ritz suite, I was again mistaken for a journalist. On our way out, we were handed a gift box, in perfect New York-doughnut-shop-pink. Inside: a Krispy Kreme Doughnuts gift card and a very nice Thermos-brand travel mug, emblazoned with <i>The Other Guys</i>, of course. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">“Coffee and doughnuts for the cop film,” Ted smiled. “Cute.”</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-10002878532752481212010-07-14T15:43:00.000-07:002010-07-14T15:43:26.114-07:00What's Not Wrong With Self-Publishing<span style="font-size: large;"></span><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: large;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHusIJNemWEd_OLXX8_WeLfQ59I-rjSlLROF0AD_DpezK4iTo-EGd9ckgfqY56hFqbzfo6fAGGz1A1iBABV6-Gu4HnhhFFDx_8dU8AcG58yBtWec6Hayyb7S7O5V_8kv0rN2oQb_8svFto/s1600/IMG_0141.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="300" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiHusIJNemWEd_OLXX8_WeLfQ59I-rjSlLROF0AD_DpezK4iTo-EGd9ckgfqY56hFqbzfo6fAGGz1A1iBABV6-Gu4HnhhFFDx_8dU8AcG58yBtWec6Hayyb7S7O5V_8kv0rN2oQb_8svFto/s400/IMG_0141.JPG" width="400" /></a></span></div><span style="font-size: large;">Let's start with a quick breakdown: the credibility of a DIY project varies dramatically depending on the medium one is working with. If you are a musician or a filmmaker, a DIY project can garner instant respect, especially if it turns out well. It is the fruit of a heroic devotion to your dream. If you are a writer, but even more specifically if you are a fiction writer, self-publishing is about as respected as blatant nepotism. Read a bit more about this basic disparity (if you don't get it already) <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/06/AR2009030603227.html" target="_blank">here at the Washington Post.</a></span> <br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">We've moved from calling them "vanity presses" to "self-publishing" houses. That does seem like some small forward motion. But the stigma that people who pay to publish their own books are (1) less talented writers than those who are already under the protective financial blanket of traditional houses and (2) narcissists, remains. And, due in part to the fact that most self-published titles are nonfiction, the stigma is stronger for fiction writers. (I openly acknowledge here that many self-published fiction titles are in desperate need of editing and don't bear up well under literate scrutiny. However, I also submit: the majority of websites are poorly designed and/or written. Somehow we don't dismiss the internet based on that fact.) </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Another reason why the stigma is strong for fiction writers is that underneath the grand ubiquity of the big houses, there is a thriving and brilliant culture of smaller presses such as Greywolf, Akashic, and Red Hen, plus hundreds of literary magazines in which fiction writers who are "serious" about literature (i.e. hold an MFA, read current literary fiction, go to readings, teach writing, and so on) can theoretically be getting published. So self-publishing a fiction book appears to be the choice for people who have generally failed to write well enough to be chosen.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">But here is an interesting fact: of the 750,000 self-published titles last year, average sales equals ten copies. Ten. There were somewhere around 300,000 traditionally published books, and it's harder to find average sales for those, but I'll put a serious amount of money on it being higher--much higher.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This disparity in sales is not simply because self-published books can't find their audience, it's because many self-published writers aren't interested in marketing. They wanted to write a book, they did it, and really they just wanted a few copies for their friends/family/coworkers. The self-published writers who are willing to commit some time and money to marketing their books end up doing very much the same thing authors at small houses do now: they schedule their own events, make their own publicity calls, send out their own books to smaller magazines for reviews, and so on. That at a small press you might have one or two marketing people serving 20 writers means that most authors who aren't getting a big push at Random House are doing a lot of the legwork on their own.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I believe traditional publishing to be a paternalistic, failing business model. What I respect and love about it is the way a team of people all work together to make a book, and to make a book available to readers. What I hate is that it is the publishers (i.e. people with financial interests at the fore) who are the arbitors of culture. With self-publishing, much like the internet, there is a theoretical democratizing of the means to cultural production. As a writer, I am no longer told by Big Daddy Publisher Man what is worth publishing and what isn't. I may be told what will be backed by marketing dollars, what will likely sell to the widest number of readers, and so on, but I have so much more room to breathe when it comes to just making BOOKS. The downside, of course, is that I am not in a close editorial relationship with someone who can help me make my novel better than it was. Oh, wait, most writers don't have that anymore either. It's only a few small presses that do any developmental editing anymore.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The advent of ebooks is another piece in the puzzle--and it is a big one, according to the <a href="http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704912004575253132121412028.html" target="_blank">Wall Street Journal</a>. Authors have even more control in the emarketplace.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">So the question I am fielding as I near the release date of <i>A Crack in Everything</i>, my first novel and a self-published title, is: Why would YOU choose to self-publish? The assumptions here are basic: I am an already-published writer in the early bloom of a career, I have the requisite degree, and I'm obviously serious about literary fiction, so logically I should have gone with a small press, if I couldn't get a deal at a big house.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">The fact is: even the small presses are flooded with submissions, and as literary agents feel the squeeze of a shrinking traditional publishing field, they aren't taking on a lot of new authors. So let's be clear: I didn't reject any offers from small presses in favor of a self-publishing model. I didn't and don't have an agent. (Yes, I want one.) I simply decided to stop pounding the pavement for a novel that needed to get kicked out of the nest. I love <i>A Crack in Everything</i> for what it is, but I'm done working on it. I'm writing a new book. I'm entering a PhD program. I wanted to give <i>Crack</i> a body, and then turn her loose.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is the great beauty of self-publishing, and one reason why I feel I'm part of a fiction vanguard, instead of an embarrassed band of self-righteous rejects. Publishing has already changed. Publishers are slow to catch up. Even the solidly creative, truly interesting and wonderful work coming from small presses functions in what feels to me like a rather incestuous clique of cool kids who like to print each others' stuff. I don't much blame them for this--they don't have time to vet the billion new MFA writers sending them manuscripts every day, and what they're putting out is by and large awesome. I'd love to be one of the cool kids with a punk-rock marketing plan and a Brooklyn freelancer doing my retro-chic covers. I'd love this more than I'd like to be a big-list Random House author, because of the great amount of creative freedom and teamwork that is missing at the top. </span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">I will likely never write a piece of fiction that you can buy in an airport bookstore--mainstream fiction is not how my brain works now and I'm only getting weirder. My first novel is a kind of hybrid erotic-political-literary-twenty-something micro-<i>bildungsroman</i>, and the next book I'm writing is more fragmented, more academic, and has more sex in it. Maybe I'll find a home at a small press in the next few years, and maybe not. What I care about is ensuring that I am in a situation where I can make art without concern for the market, and that is nearly impossible once you've been contracted by a publisher whose main goal is profit.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">This is what I celebrate most about self-publishing, small presses, ebooks, and every other force that undermines the New York hegemony: that the capitalists are less and less in charge of what is being bought, and therefore what is being written. Sure, Dan Brown will still sell millions of copies to my few hundred (or thousand, if I'm fortunate), but because of the internet I have the capability to connect directly with readers in a way that was twenty years ago nearly impossible. I know iUniverse (one of the largest self-publishing businesses, and the one I'm using) runs on a business model that emphasizes selling "services" to authors instead of selling books, but a savvy self-publishing writer can still use any one of the supported self-publishing houses for their basic book design, print-on-demand, and distribution infrastructure without becoming a victim of the company's system. In other words, we can use the tools of the capitalists to take back control of the means of production. Are most self-published books just a boring rehashing of existing cultural values? Sure. But the morphing structure of publishing offers greater opportunity for revolutionary work to take shape and become available, and that's thrilling.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;">Authors at traditional houses (with the exclusion, again, of many small presses) are generally left out of much of the production of a book, and give the rights to the publisher for a specified period of time--sometimes as long as the book stays in print. They are defensive players: constantly fielding attempts to change things that may or may not need changing, having to justify any problems they might have with typesetting and cover design. If they make a certain sales goal with one book and not the next, they can get dropped, even if their second book did very well. As a self-published writer, I retain copyright and could go with a different publisher at any time. I give design input that would never be allowed at a traditional house. As long as I keep my wits about what I invest, and remember not to become emotionally affected by the systemic prejudice against DIY books, I get to enter a whole new game. And in this game, I am the offensive striker, not the goalie. </span><br />
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</span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com14tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-7538710136825122268.post-88735942846128592742010-07-08T00:04:00.000-07:002010-07-08T00:04:05.316-07:00Sweatshirt, Sweatshirt, You Come Here!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK6GbabdCVBg6hK4Pw-_y8iilQ58pODCWwIQcpv4bfbcWyItlhTG-Io3-5o2Qfm7X9JVZSjYOzkWKrY7yQ-BR4zvb0HZRxpCJaVgWGbh-7FlfTIbjFUHa5pOFWv7OQHOsoKDUi_0Mee8Hv/s1600/Photo+on+2010-07-07+at+23.11.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhK6GbabdCVBg6hK4Pw-_y8iilQ58pODCWwIQcpv4bfbcWyItlhTG-Io3-5o2Qfm7X9JVZSjYOzkWKrY7yQ-BR4zvb0HZRxpCJaVgWGbh-7FlfTIbjFUHa5pOFWv7OQHOsoKDUi_0Mee8Hv/s320/Photo+on+2010-07-07+at+23.11.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZJN3-M9InMeJ41UVM16unTax8GU-rXB0JJ1Ftvgj_I3aml5mTx4Zi5VGaaYh_aCosoNRaGURbKO9Cv4wk9q_Tj9k8K9smJmnep8gNVUMxNqIL6YJhvHMCikN6I4-1vIpc_oUW0N3WsRkA/s1600/IMG_0359.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjZJN3-M9InMeJ41UVM16unTax8GU-rXB0JJ1Ftvgj_I3aml5mTx4Zi5VGaaYh_aCosoNRaGURbKO9Cv4wk9q_Tj9k8K9smJmnep8gNVUMxNqIL6YJhvHMCikN6I4-1vIpc_oUW0N3WsRkA/s320/IMG_0359.JPG" /></a><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">This horse sweatshirt is on its way to guarding my arms through a second round of summer chills. I bought it at the Hollywood Ross for less than half of what Hurley intended me to pay in the early part of summer, 2009. It has built-in thumb-holes, custom friendship-bracelet-like hoodie pulls, and no one can tell me for certain if it is red or orange, because it is both. I wore it on Phish Tour last year. I wore it to and from Manzanillo. I wore it to and from Burning Man. I wore it on many sad nights, and during many beautiful days. I wore it on beautiful nights and sad days. I wore it in New York and North Carolina and Washington State and back home again. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">When I was a small girl, I had a favorite green sweatshirt. Deep in my mother's archive of things-we-pull-out-once-every-five-years, there is a cassette tape, upon which I am singing a song I wrote that has a verse about the sweatshirt. I think it goes thusly:</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">Sweatshirt, sweatshirt, you come here!</span></span></i><br />
<i><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">You've got a mommy and you've got a daddy</span></span></i><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span><span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">At least, one of the verses goes like that. There is a microphone verse, too, in which the microphone's mother is crying for the microphone to come home. The point of the song, it seems, is that errant objects just need to be reminded they are loved at home, and they will come back from whatever their suspicious wanderings. This level of complexity seems a little farfetched? </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Imagine a small child who loses things constantly. Imagine a small child who loses things that are expensive as easily as she loses things that are cheap. Imagine a small child living in a communal household with her mother, for half the week, and a shared apartment, with her father, for the other half, and imagine this child knows, without being told in any rude or pressured way, that there simply isn't a lot of money around. Things that are lost are not always replaced. Imagine that this child wants desperately to make life easier for her overworked and loving parents, and imagine that every time she loses something she feels a horrible sense of guilt and sadness and also, a certain befuddlement, since she can never remember <i>leaving</i> anything anywhere. Imagine the small step it would take for this small child to conclude that it is the things themselves who behave poorly, since she never intends to.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Sweatshirt, sweatshirt, you come here. I probably said it many times, as I looked around my desk at school, as I ran back to the playground after the bell rang, as I checked in the car on my way to mom's, as I checked in the car on my way to dad's. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">I developed little systems, suggested by various people. Put your things in the same place when you come in every day. Count how many things you have on one hand when you get somewhere, and then count again when you leave. Eventually I started losing things less often. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Now, something bizarre has happened. I will have the sudden pang of "realization" that I have forgotten something (keys! phone! wallet! sweatshirt!) and then lo and behold, one of my reaction-systems, which are all now totally unconscious, has actually kept the "forgotten" thing in its right place. The panic ends, and I marvel simultaneously at: (1) how incredibly powerful my habit-training to not lose things has become and (2) how incredibly powerful the habit of feeling like I'm forgetting something still is, despite (1).</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">Maybe my attachment to this horse sweatshirt is just a replay of my attachment to the green sweatshirt of my childhood, and maybe my attachment to that green sweatshirt was the result of that effort I made, knowing I was Someone Who Lost Things, to have something I loved that I did NOT lose, to prove to myself and to Mom and Dad and especially Erica that I could be responsible, too, since responsibility was very much a part of giving and receiving love, and maybe through some psychological process I am loathe to find a name for the sweatshirt itself became the symbol of freedom from my old identity as a Loser and a badge of honor in my hoped-for new identity as a Keeper. A Keeper does not lose things, and therefore a Keeper deserves to be kept. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">The orange sweatshirt certainly is symbolic: I got it not long before Louis and I broke up, and I was wearing it the night we did, and that means this sweatshirt is a talisman of sorts. It soaked up my grief, it frayed and grayed a bit along with me as I traveled and healed. I have affection for it, this piece of my uniform during a long year of change. I would be sad if I left it somewhere--much sadder than if I left any one of about four other sweatshirts I own. It could be scrapbooked or framed. Instead I will wear it until it falls apart, or I inexplicably fall off the Keeper wagon, or I loan it to someone who never felt compelled to get on that particular wagon and they leave it somewhere. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large;"><span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;">In the last two cases, I will sing the Sweatshirt song, at least once, just in case the sweatshirt feels like coming home.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia,"Times New Roman",serif;"><span style="font-size: large;"> </span></span>Vanessahttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09464422287668486010noreply@blogger.com1