whoa!

So insanely fucked up.

http://jezebel.com/#!5780022/media-blows-it-with-pathetic-gang-rape-coverage

Evacuating 15 gigabytes of tears.

Today, January 21st, I decided to delete a large quantity of correspondences with an ex-partner – a very important one – that I had been saving in my email inbox for about four years, despite the sense that I would probably never talk to or see that ex again. I hadn’t wanted to delete the emails, but I also didn’t want to look at them, and there they were, accumulating space that was turning out to be badly needed for current communiqués.

I tend to run a somewhat tight and unsentimental email ship – except for my occasional sloppiness in getting rid of jokey and interesting correspondence that may or may not be of utilitarian value to me. I delete mass emails, things that are too abstract or belong to alternative trajectories that, I’ve decided, don’t belong to me anymore. Dry-eyed, I delete petitions on behalf of starving kids in Africa, raped and mutilated women in the Congo, pleas to sign a protest against the corruption in Chicago, newsletters for upcoming events of social and cultural import – these days, there’s very little that I don’t delete. For that which I truly need to save, I archive and file emails under labels – my favorite and most useful one being the long-winded “deserving of a response soon” – and then click the label and pull up those red-alert emails, those that need my direct attention. All others may get a star, which signals importance but is lower on the hierarchy than the aforementioned “deserving of…” and finally, for arcana that may be important somewhere down the road, I apply a more categorical label (“dissertation,” “theatre 369,” “Central America,” and the slightly chilling “JOB MARKET”).

And yet I awoke a few weeks ago to the notice that I was nearing the end of my Google cache. Even with my organizational systems in place, I was accruing emails at a rate and volume that were surpassing the capacity of the system. Google asked me to buy additional storage space. I gnashed my teeth and started deleting, going back in time to almost 2005.

We all knew that this would eventually be an issue, right? A person can’t forever gain information and yet stay within a limit. Isn’t there a mathematical theorem that might tell us something about our use of this space? And what of the coming demise of net neutrality?

Anyhow, as the warning repeatedly cropped up, I started trying to delete everything in sight, and today had me doing the same. I thought about that large stash of old, musty (or the virtual equivalent of) emails between myself and L., at first flowery, playful, and exciting, as we strutted our words and knowledge to impress each other – as we showed off, knowing that we were both incredibly smart and interesting, winning, sexy, lovely, humane individuals with synthetic abilities to integrate and share vast amounts of data. Then, a bit later, melodramatic, wistful, affectionate, ironical, jokey, masked, accusatory, bitter, frank, pointed, cutting, and sometimes abrasive…finally, utilitarian or occasional, and often indirect, as in “I think that your mother might like this link.” Those types of emails, as many of us might agree, mark the moribund end of the email chain, when the patient has all but flatlined.

Anyhow, today I decided, what the hell, might as well delete them. I knew what most of them said, and I didn’t take pleasure in retracing their dialogic lines and reacknowledging their cutesy bursts of cleverness, signs of a more naïve attempt at love and relationship-building. My own forays into that sort of sentimentality, especially with people who I might hope to date, have since been few and far between. I know how taxing it can be to shape and structure one’s words so lovingly, in a show of epistolary extravagance, and then later to note the diminishment of pleasure in that activity, as the vocabulary is shaved to the minimum, the written/verbal equivalent of throwing on an old sweatshirt and spending the night sedentary. I also wonder about the value of words – as words, especially the exchange of them, in media like email and physical letters, or phrases and references scribbled on the backs of old photographs and mementos lovingly dug up from strange archives to present as individualized gifts, were such an important part of our connection on many levels. I remember my extreme delight upon receipt of a letter from L., when we had just met, and I wasn’t sure about my level of interest in being with him. My occasional, sneaking feelings of tepid trepidation turned into certitude and joy as I followed the letter’s scrawl – his handwriting endeared itself to me, and I always recognized and recognize its inimitable structure and distribution. I remember feeling extremely fortunate and experiencing euphoria. Real euphoria, like I’d never had it.
Is it necessary for me to have that kind of wordy, emotive intimacy with a lover now? Even if I felt that our verbal exchanges were pitch-perfect, what about the other factors in the relationship that were off-kilter? Time and space were working against us, and those seemed to really overtake and embitter anything that words could sweeten. Either way, I know two things about the relationship, which I’ve established conclusively: 1) it was real; and 2) it ended because it needed to. So that’s my closure there. And I remember that even when we broke up for real, and I stared down into the Greek salad that I had ordered, suddenly unable to eat even a piece of lettuce, he laughed at a joke that I had just made and complimented me on my capacity for wordplay and verbal comedy.

In retrospect, ‘après le delete,’ I feel that maybe I should have saved all of the emails into a text file – but that thought did not occur to me, and I don’t even know if exportation of that magnitude is possible. When I hastily went back and ‘checked all that [applied],’ I found that there were almost two thousand emails between me and this person – a formidable volume, and something that suggests that we were very important parts of each other’s lives, and still should be, to some extent. Well, I already knew the former, but perhaps the latter isn’t possible…? I would hope that it is, but at the end we’d really run out of things to say, in the truest sense. A casual look at the emails’ volume and heft charts that precipitous decline, an almost embarrassing fall that parallels the protagonist’s arc from genius to mentally disabled subject in that book, Flowers for Algernon, that we all had to read in high school. (At least I think that that’s what happened. I may have skipped it.)

So I erased all 1938 emails – many more, really, if you consider that many of these were email chains with over 100 threads – and I guess that I want to monumentalize or commemorate this in some way. I can no longer access the information, and something about the action feels cold or even foolish, although part of me also knows that I’ll likely never read them again, and pragmatically speaking, I needed the space. Another part of me feels that the other person has likely done the same thing, and maybe years ago. I also feel that maybe it’s not a big deal to flush out these old things. Hoarding is unhealthy, or so the saying goes. In the past, I’d felt reluctant to delete so voluminously, so voluptuously, but now I felt okay about it, granted myself the permission, and there it went, and I don’t feel so bad. More like I’m watching a ship slowly pass through the Panama Canal. A kind of elbows-on-the-railing type feeling.

So consider this a verbal marker, paltry monument that it is, to what was an extremely rich conversation in my life. Hopefully I can find one as wonderful as that one was, or maybe I no longer need something of that exact nature to be satisfied. Maybe I’m romanticizing fruitlessly, for the sake of feeling worthy of being in love (especially because I haven’t really loved someone naively and fully like that since the relationship ended about 3-4 years ago). Maybe I’ve moved on and matured in my conception of what love or a relationship needs to function. Either way, I now have 17% empty space in my inbox, which I will doubtlessly fill in a year, at most.

“when to say nothing”

“When to Say Nothing”

 

The title of this post refers to my high school friend’s eponymous blog, although he tends to write about very different subjects. I chose this title, however, because I find myself thinking about and/or invoking this phrase on a semi-regular basis these days. In particular, I feel like we are currently living in a time in which too much is being said, all of the time, in all places, to everyone. And yet I’m not ready to propose a solution, so what follows will perhaps just gesture toward some of the points of the debate, namely around freedom of speech/censorship/incitement to violence or provoking words.

 

United States: Nation of Bombastic Immigrants

Exercising verbal discretion has never been a prized trait of the USAmerican citizen: if you think about it, over centuries the nation has been composed of migrants who forcefully elbowed their way to the front of the line, spoke well and charismatically and glibly to get what they needed, and otherwise employed many rhetorical tactics and flourishes to be in this country. (Note: I like taking a somewhat facetious cue from evolutionary psychology and thinking about the evolution of the U.S. nation-state, even if it is sort of tongue-in-cheek.)

 

I’m not entirely dismissive of attempts to theorize the culture of the journey, or the transformative processes by which immigrants become immigrants, and then participants in a new citizen body. I do feel that attempting to get a word in through the din and clamor of our public life has historically been, and continues to be, a central goal of representative ethnic politics…and now it’s transforming into something entirely different as the civil rights struggle gives way to partisan rivalries and weird little splinter groups form, like black and gay Republicans – capitalism seems to slice through the political pie, attempting to make certain identities intelligible but perhaps resulting in more illegibility where it counts.

Brief Background: Theories of the Left/Right Split of the 1950s (Plus Di/Transgression #1: Capitalism/Affirmative Action Rant)

There’s an interesting theory put forth by some people whose names I don’t recall that I remember reading in an undergraduate course called “Politics and American Film.” Helpful reference, I know – but the authors’ argument has stayed with me even during my tedious 6-year trudge through grad school. The argument goes like this: before the 1950s, there existed in the United States a sort of coalition between the middling classes with the radical left (Eugene Debs, the Pullman strikers, and people like the characters in Odets’s Waiting for Lefty), those who would be Communists, European style. However, during the Cold War and anti-Communist scare (not the first one in the U.S. by far), the middle class began to distance itself from the Left, using ethnicity and racial politics partly as a cover for its intensifying conservatism. Hence, the political life in the U.S. began to take a notably centrist turn, which it carries on today, implicitly using civil rights as a sort of screen for an unequal socioeconomic stratification. I don’t entirely buy this, but I do think that often ethnicity and racial identity are often used as attention-getting screens preventing the populace from confronting class hierarchies, which are often claimed not to exist in the U.S. At the same time, racialized groups, like African Americans, are notoriously marginalized in terms of class. Although this is the case, I think that the discourse tends to make the marginalization all about race – and yes, it is often very much about race – and not at all about class. There should be a political economy argument there as well. Until there is one, people will be promoted to positions of leadership based on racial taxonomy with the full knowledge – theirs and everyone else’s – that they have no intention of multiplying the effects. Why would they, in a society that rewards individualistic boot-strapping? To take on inferiors as a charity project, simply because they share the same skin color or through bonds of empathetic affinity, could result in these mentor figures’ lowered productivity, for which they’d be punished. What incentives, therefore, are they given to do this good work after having been promoted? Anyhow, clearly the capitalistic unfolding of affirmative action is one of its most troubling aspects, placing those who have benefited from a combination of their talents and the fact that they comply with a specific identity category in a difficult bind. I am totally in favor of affirmative action, don’t get me wrong. Despite its flaws, I think that it is a much-needed corrective to long-perpetuated sins in the United States. But one person cannot be relied upon to rectify the structural defects of a national system, right? For even one person placed in a position of substantial authority, the systemic race/class nexus is too powerful to be vanquished through, say, acts of grassroots community outreach and mentoring. What is needed is for racism to be acknowledged even as ethnic politics are put in their places and given over to a discussion of class politics, as these are shot through with widespread and institutionalized racism.

 

Digression #2: On the “Ethnic” Arts:

On the subject of ethnic cultural politics: Lately I’ve been hanging out with and translating some of the work of this really excellent Mexican-American playwright who is very interested in questions of the identities and psychic landscapes of migrants to the United States. Although Raúl has been chastised for his subject matter – apparently the lives of Mexican-Americans are considered by Mexican intellectuals too gauche and prosaic to be fitting objects of inquiry, and in the United States, Mexican immigrants, though extremely numerous, are basically invisible, or only sporadically glimpsed as they scramble between various work stations with differing degrees of legitimacy – he insists that the obligation of the artist is to figure/feature a certain community and be concerned with the problematics presented before that community – in other words, not to escape or be somewhere else, creatively speaking or speaking of the space of the mind, but to use art as a means of grounding oneself in the here-and-now and fostering a space for the analysis and processing of events that might otherwise fly by as news tickers and headlines, imbued with just enough novelty and gravitas to disturb our frames of reference but too rapidly for us to ingest on a more profound level.  Take the recent shooting of Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, for example: unlike many news stories, this one is receiving somewhat of a more nuanced treatment by editorialists and bloggers asking questions about how mental illness – conceived as a personal affliction – may link to the political debates unfolding in a society (ours) beset by a heated partisan rivalry. There is no question that the far right’s inflated rhetoric, interlarded as it is with paranoia and a sense of almost Manichean necessity to take the structural events of the world into one’s own, pasty/flabby/misanthropic hands, has attracted people who are already fermenting their own brands of crazy – this is, in fact, something that Jim Gilchrist complained about regarding the Minuteman Project, i.e., that in calling for the formation of a border vigilante group, he suddenly found himself surrounded by some serious, should-be-locked-away psychopaths looking to unload their clips into the targets of his cause, and oh, these people were not like him at all, he just being your average, harmless, mouth-foaming racist. Hm.

Anyhow, the point being that my friend Raúl’s sense of what an artist is obligated to do, at least in regard to his own creative output – which output, I should note, evinces a sort of fluctuating realist-absurdist mode, in which emotions are often superficially legible but sometimes the signscape isn’t, or isn’t as immediately accessible as we might initially assume it to be – leads me to ponder the ‘character’ of the USAmerican, in the here-and-now, and how that character has changed given certain circumstances. One of my major issues, which spends a large amount of time propping up my soapbox, is that the United States has everything to do with Mexico, and not just because of the beauty of theorizing the master-slave relationship, or the identity of the subject and its ‘other,’ on the margins, world-turned-upside-down, etc. Yes, people are often defined by that which they push to their farthest outskirts, the marginal, the abject/subaltern, and then which continually returns to haunt them, in the ‘return of the repressed.’ And of course cultures reassert themselves when faced with their unraveling, so that borders exhibit a dynamism practically unheard of anywhere else. The notion of “the border” ties into some integral human psychic formations. But I would hasten to bring into focus the issue of the actual border between the U.S. and Mexico, so that the symmetry and beauty of these border dialectics do not cloud the actual politics of the local context.

In 1848, the United States acquired a substantial portion of its current land holdings – including Texas, California, Colorado, and the Southwest generally – and delineated the U.S.-Mexico borderline at the Río Grande. The Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and brought about the sale of land from Mexico, intersected with some nationally-defining strands: the national project of Manifest Destiny, for example; the California Gold Rush (essentially, a rebuttal to the naysayers of the westward push, who had in fact been multitudinous); Native American massacres and forced relocations; the slave trade (as many of those who had opposed Manifest Destiny rallied their forces into abolitionist causes, sparking the Civil War); and other events in some way tied to the very crux of the U.S. imaginary. Racism, genocide, self-assertion, settlement, and land-grabbing are all, and have been for a long time, important parts of what constitutes the U.S. citizen – his/her identity traits and sentimental meanderings and apocalyptic fulminations, privatizing privations, prurient prudism, and conservative backwater nostalgia trips. To think that these strands are lessening, loosening, or are in some way non-intrinsic to the U.S. character (or ego-ideal, really) is to essentially miss what went on in our nation for the past, oh, 250-odd years.

And freedom of speech is crucial to the mix. On the face of it, anyone can agree on the importance of fostering a society in which people can speak their minds without fear of persecution. Words are just words, after all, and deeds are what will put you in jail (and in Hell!). Many are the political theorists who have held forth on the ins and outs of ‘freedom of speech,’ the “performatives” (Butler, Rawls, Derrida, Austin) being perhaps the latest wave, or the latest wave of which I am aware. I agree with the performatives, specifically Judy Butler, in her classic work Burning Acts, Injurious Speech, and feel that Butler makes an excellent case in ascribing new force and power to the word (as performative utterance). Rather than limiting herself to a mediating rumination on the texts of our times – as if textual analysis is really the best way to get at ideas about politics, I mean, come on now, really – Butler addresses a Supreme Court case involving a cross-burning by the KKK on a black family’s front lawn and, through her discussion of the conservative and liberal justices’ statements about this act, manages to create a fascinating argument about the ways in which hate speech can or cannot approach criminality, revealing in the process the lengths to which U.S. conservatives will go to hide behind ‘freedom of speech’ as a means of asserting the rights of provocateurs and supremacists of varying sorts. The polemic deserves to be read on its own merits and not paraphrased here, but suffice it to say that I consider this to be a major intervention in scholarly and philosophical considerations of what constitutes free speech and when speech crosses over into action, as well as the ethics of speech.

 

Palin’s Crosshairs: The Violent Tastelessness of Right-Wing Rhetoric

Recent conflagrations, in which people testing injurious speech incite (or, okay, fine, “just happen to coincide with”) actual physical violence, make me long for a new contouring of the U.SAmerican ability to hold forth, a curb on our collective national ability to speak. Perhaps we should all stand at the national mirror, American flag reflected in the background – one hand on the heart, the other holding the tongue. I wonder if it would be possible to inculcate a national “rhetorical mutuality” that would exercise discretion without everyone being legally mandated to do so. Already I think not. Even beyond the idea of political correctness – which is fundamentally flawed, as it only brings forth the impish desire to name that which has been excoriated and expunged from the increasingly anesthetized ‘proper’ speech of the public sphere – I wonder if we could potentially bring into visibility this connection between speech and actions by unleashing a storm of commentary on it, debating the methods and the ways in which speech acts have moral correlates as to physical acts. We do not all refrain from murder simply because it is illegal; neither should the illegality/legality of speech acts prevent us from saying that which we know will provoke an enraged response – speech acts designed to anger and incite rather than stimulate dialogue or move the conversation forward.

The news is always liberally peppered with idiotic questions about the connection between simulated violence – on TV, in video games – and actual violence. I think of these kinds of discussions as a leap directly into the void, or the masturbation of an oil slick, in which you will just get your hands full of slime and possibly never really emerge from the black whorl. A pointless endeavor that amounts to wheel-spinning and countless other clichés. Debating an issue does not always have to mean endlessly feinting or throwing out cues that your audiences will understand because of their well-trammeled familiarity; true debating might actually occur with the introduction of a radically new (and therefore thought-provoking) concept, and the search for these kinds of landmarks and landmines constitutes a lot of philosophical and humanities-oriented research. Anyhow, not to say that this is a new framework, but I want to shed light on the porousness of the public sphere, which endlessly fascinates us, and the ways in which what is not supposed to be said aloud is often said anyway, and is even more powerful for not being authorized. What is not supposed to be said but is said anyway is often the thing that actually rivets the nation, and yet because it is not supposed to be said, we are not allowed to talk about it – at least not in the civil, clipped speech of the public sphere – and ask whence it derives such power. This cycle of censorship, of marginalization of the comments on the margins (or underneath blog posts, or in chat forums) instead of placing them in the center of our national investigations into what is truly absorbing the USAmerican mind and acquiring all of its preoccupations, like a sponge filled with toxins, reduces us to a certain helplessness, in which the ‘high ground’ does not begin to touch at the festering wound off which the ‘low element’ – the far right – gleefully feeds, and from which it gains power. Case in point: Obama chastised the Democrats for being sanctimonious purists in wanting to reject the continuance of the Bush tax cuts. The tax cuts for billonaires suck, but the majority of the nation seems to be in favor of them, and politicians who want to keep their jobs are beholden to the people. In this case, the mass of the people are wrong and gaining power. In other words, wrongheadedness is holding sway. By ignoring this and voting their consciences, are the Democrats helping to reverse the tide? Are they? No. They are only being sanctimonious purists, further ensconcing themselves in their quiet Vermont homes and practicing their peaceable ways while the mob effectively rages outside. Obama, in his venal and self-interested way, was actually heeding/taking note of this mob. It is an important first step to recognize or acknowledge the ways in which power is actually shifting, even if you don’t agree with the orientation of the shift.

 

Has This All Been Said Before?

One thing that becomes noticeable after 29 or so years of life: people will take any opportunity available to come out with some of the worst, vilest ideas and thoughts. In the age of political correctness, they do this under cover of internet anonymity or among groups that they consider like-minded. We are actually seeing a reversal of PC culture, as people just increasingly start adding distasteful smears and provocative flourishes to the public sphere itself – a movement that is skewed rightward. You don’t see liberals calling for members of the oppositional party to be shot, while right-wingers’ language tends to be more violent and overtly racist, note Rachel Maddow and others. And then the release of the Nixon Tapes, for example – in which Nixon goes on an extended paranoiac diatribe against the Jews and Henry Kissinger, that penguin-shaped interloper, roundly agrees – demonstrates the extent of the hate speech, behind closed doors/inadvertently captured on tape/bursting out in public like the explosion of a raw, chapped blister’s contents.

 

Examples of the ways in which inappropriate speech oozes out of the lower and into the upper signscape abound. I will give some quick examples for easy reference:

Example A: Don Imus’s incendiary comment about “nappy-headed hoes.”

Example B: Speech hate groups like the Westboro Church

Example C: the Wiener Circle, Chicago*

 

*Note: I can go on about this, because I have actually experienced this licensed outpouring of hate speech that occurs nightly, needlessly, fruitlessly (and fruitfully for the employees, who make good on copious guilt-tips), but for purposes of expediency I will just direct you to Ira Glass’s televisual segment on it: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vo1LPf9mnyU

 

The question is, then, what to do with all of this. We can’t eradicate the thinking of these things in some of the population and, thus, the speaking of them. If we try to shame people into holding their tongues, the irrepressible hate-speech becomes more urgent in its need to exit their bodies and find a recipient or receptacle, occasionally emerging in the most inopportune ways. Yet we cannot condone hate speech or even give it a venue, as it will quickly grow out of control and overflow the constraints, as in the Wiener’s Circle example.

The first step must definitely be to take it seriously, and place it not just in the realm of speech. Speech must be seen as in some way on par with actions – not the same as an action, but an alarming sign nonetheless. Does speech offer a safety valve against harmful action? Here I might say yes, but I think that speech can lead to dangerous actions on the part of listeners. No one would argue against the power and influence that speech and writing can sometimes possess.

 

Is speech more effective an instigator than images of violence? I have no way of knowing or even speculating, so I’ll stay out of that quagmire.

 

To go beyond this for a second and get back to question of art/cultural production: I’m interested in the fact that everyone is continually delivering his/her opinion about every topic and text, regardless of whether he/she is qualified to judge…someone was complaining about this in a magazine that I read recently, framing it as a sort of elitist reaction to the popularization of literary/art criticism through organs like Amazon user ratings, IMDB, Netflix, Yelp, etc – consumer ratings are supposed to make us feel empowered or something, but the democratization of critique doesn’t always work. An extreme example is the market-based proposal for healthcare, in which we patients are supposed to review our options and choose the best one, without possessing a modicum of professional expertise about medical matters. The obvious pitfall here is that 1) as ailing healthcare recipients, our lives are in question, leading us to compound our lack of knowledge with the irrational knowledge of the moribund; and 2) while reason would seem to dictate more tests and diagnostics, we hear frequently now that too much testing is itself a menace.

Anyhow, the author of the article on the excess of popularized ratings systems was bemoaning the death of formal criticism, but I don’t care about that so much as what I see as an informational glut with no alternative but censorship/restriction (which isn’t really a valid option either). These days it seems that everyone is slavering with eagerness to deliver his/her opinion on everything, which leads me to want to write a novel or create an installation focusing on a character who bucks the trend, Bartleby-style, by remaining opaque and unreadable to his/her peers, finding strength in the withholding of information and the retention of a sort of private internal sphere/climate over and against those who would desire his/her opinion on all worldly matters. I am envisioning a character whose very inscrutability contains his/her power, in a way that mingles strands of Taoism (the potential of the uncarved block) with those of Stoicism, for maximum Eastern-Western fusion buffet.

 

I say all of this as one embedded in what I’m calling an ‘information competition industry’ (ICI), in which the sharing of information and opinions is what defines the discipline and sets the successful candidate apart from the failed competitor (unclear sharing, non-novel information, uninteresting interventions)…in light of that, the character who would refuse to share his/her information and inner thoughts, despite the need to do so and the screaming public demanding it, attains a new sort of heroism, that of the unreadable blank space.

 

And of course I recognize the irony in writing such a great deal on the need to not write so much. But in a way, I’m exercising my national cultural rights, and perhaps cartoonishly so. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m very much the ideal of the U.S. citizen: child of immigrants who built themselves up through a family-owned, multi-generational plumbing company, wanting nothing flashy – just a house in the Midwest and some kids through college. And even when it became more complicated than that, we retained a sense of our middling-class status (totally unsustained, I’d say, by this point, after our ivy league educations and entrepreneurial spirit, plus the inbuilt privileges of whiteness and general phenotypic desirability that got us in the doors of the ‘Big Houses’ of the New World). Anyhow, you know the story, because it’s the classic story – a fantasy, really, blowing into the desert winds of our direst longings…

So here I’ll stop. Perhaps I’ve laid out some rationales for ‘saying nothing,’ and my long-winded treatise might hopefully enlighten you a little bit about the peripheries of many topics, while not giving you a comprehensive knowledge of any one…but I think I’ve said enough. Following Lauren Berlant’s forthcoming book (Cruel Optimism) on the new ‘ambient citizenship’ exercised in a public sphere of audition (as in listening), lurking, passively spying, and quietly scavenging amongst the ruins of the American Dream, I’d like to hear what you have to say. Talk back!

-k

Shaking Politics: Sissy Bounce

On Saturday, October 16th, I biked down to Subterranean, in Chicago’s Wicker Park neighborhood, to check out Big Freedia and her special brand of sizzling sissy bounce. I should preface/contextualize this performance review, as it were, by stating that I’m a student of theatre and performance analysis specializing in African diaspora forms and Latin American/Caribbean/black drama. Yeah. If the academy were a giant tree, I’d be nesting in that part of it (the underfunded one, with the spindly little leaflets and angry and resentful, or cheerfully and actively sublimating, birds, as well as a smattering of identity politicians who fly by and peck our wood every now and again, arousing ire and desire in equal measure). Aaanyhow, but all that aside, and built-in privileges well acknowledged, I really like what I do. Lately, for example, I’ve become rather fascinated by the links between African American popular music and afro-Caribbean popular dance forms, like passa passa, dancehall reggae, reggaetón, soca, and dance moves like the “temper wine.” (If you’re ever interested, I can say a lot about a theory that I have connecting Beyoncé to Jamaica and Trinidad via her choreographers and a certain point in one of her recent videos…it’s super-fascinating but really just a conjecture at this point.) But how does this all connect with sissy bounce? Read on…

Ever so long ago, when I first met her, S. introduced me to a subgenre of bounce called sissy bounce. Bounce is that type of hiphop that’s really popular in the south, predicated on rapid beats and women jiggling their asses really, really fast without really moving the rest of their bodies. A lot of mainstream artists, like Ludacris and maybe Juvenile (?), became famous as purveyors of bounce. It’s now in the general hiphop repertoire and known to many.

But sissy bounce is probably the most inspired iteration of the bounce umbrella category, at least from the perspective of this white, middle-class, female armchair expert. I don’t really know what I’m talking about, but this is just what I’ve seen/observed. The thing that really makes sissy bounce something extra is that it’s very much live – as in, the artists sing and rap the syncopation, the downbeats and breakbeats and all that, so they need to be keeping up with this very fast, like ass-shakingly fast, beat. Another quality that’s attractive about it is that the tracks are extremely catchy and original mashups of things, studded with rap solos or gospel-like song, with call-and response and incredible audience interaction. All of this might explain why sissy bounce artists like Big Freedia and Sissy Nobby consistently attract large crowds, and also why they don’t get beat up or even killed. Because sissy bounce also foregrounds the sexual and gendered identities and expressions of its artists: they’re gay, queer, transgendered, or however-identified, and that is at the crux of sissy bounce. “sissy,” as you may know (but which is worth stating all the same) is a derogatory term for homosexual. Despite this, they appear to have a very large mixed-gender and also mixed-sexuality following, including heterosexual couples and – again, I’m conjecturing here, and there deeeefinitely needs to be a reception-oriented study around this – perhaps even straight-identified men who have homophobic tendencies. Perhaps. I don’t know, but their audiences do not seem super gay-friendly. More about that in a second, since I really don’t know who attends a sissy bounce show in New Orleans, or how the demographics have changed now that SB has been “discovered” by a bunch of white, wealthy, college-educated hipsters. More about THAT in a second too. Essentially, I want to explore some of the complex vectors of this genre and ask questions about how it’s changing now that the audiences and touring structure are changing. Then I want to talk a bit about my own experience and see how it might have related to the whole concept of sissy bounce as it is now.

Pop-ethnomusicological treatments of sissy bounce: casually browsing, I found two: XLR8R’s documentary and mixtape and a short documentary clip made by Diplo, former partner of MIA and a deejay who is really into searching out genres, like baile funk carioca, and incorporating them into his performance to produce a sort of postmodern globalized techno music that is kind of fascinating in its way.

And I want to say that I feel personally that it’s cool to want to do this. Being inspired by street dance forms is a sign of being aware of people and taking them seriously even if they’re not white, straight, or rich. It can contain an element of exotification, or a hipsterization that might be even worse, but there’s a fine line. I think that XLR8R walks this line better than does Diplo, because the former took intensive time and resources to the task of appreciating the sissy bounce genre, attending and performing at concerts, getting to know the artists, and helping them to make more money. I feel like the work done by the XLR8R crew was, in a way, the best example of how scholarship (call it what you will) can actually benefit the ‘research subjects’ (so to speak. I know, puke in my mouth. But that’s what they are in this framing). So I am not trying to throw out wholesale the idea of doing pop-ethnomusicology because it’s cool. I do, however, think that there are better and worse ways to do it. Diplo’s little doc seems rather uninformed, as if he’s the only person who has ever seen this form and he’s TELLING you about what it is. He doesn’t say people’s names or give them much credit in the film, and he doesn’t seem to spend much time in New Orleans. It feels pandery to me, like some sort of insufficient and superficial lip service that is essentially chapped (and chapping my ass). He also cites this white, hipstery friend as the expert on sissy bounce, when there are clearly copious black people in NOLA who know more about it AND can dance to it. I’d like to see that skinny white kid ‘shake [his] ass/shake it fast.’ More on that later too.

-who are/were sissy bounce’s original fans?
I don’t know who the genre’s fans were before it was discovered, but from XLR8R’s interview (which is actually very good, an in-depth and respectful treatment that contextualized the genre) as well as some footage during Diplo’s visit to the club and the youtube videos, they seem to be black people, straight queer and gay, with a variety of body shapes (ranging from the Panamanian-skinny to giant mountains of flesh with tiny features submerged in them) and of many socioeconomic groups. Black people, and blacks in New Orleans specifically, are often portrayed in the media as globally poor, but I am just going to refute that one a priori, because I can assure you that there is a huge black middle class in NOLA, as in other cities in the south (Atlanta being the mecca, or so I hear), and professional classes and upper classes and republicans and everything else. Nevertheless, the XLR8R folks discuss gunbattles at night and the essential poverty of these artists of sissy bounce, who are products of the ghetto innovating their way out and making their queerness the centerpiece of this.

One would think that when a societally disparaged figure – the gay black male or transwoman, for example – is entertaining an enormous crowd of oppositional folks, that his/her identity might be denigrated (apposite word choice there, hm) as part of the act, in the inverted way that, say, an obese woman can make a lot of money by consistently being “Fat Woman #2” in a movie. Or the classic example: black blackface (often called “ethiopian”) minstrelsy. This is always the paradox of parody: the person – or persona, rather -  being mocked and scoffed might in fact be having the last laugh, both because of the effect of the “minstrel mask,” by which the actor distinguishes him/herself from the persona who is the object of audience scorn, and materially, which becomes visible when one does the infrastructural analysis, i.e., examines the money changing hands and connections made, asking questions about who the impresario/producer is (because if the artist IS the producer or manager, what you have is essentially self-representation, and there’s a lot more room for lucrative profiting – as with henry “box” brown – even if the act itself is demeaning).

But IS sissy bounce demeaning? I would say profoundly no. I say this admittedly not knowing its former context in the mostly-black (? Not even sure if they are) clubs in New Orleans, but I would assume that it was not terribly derogatory even then. For one thing, the XLR8R people note that the dance form brings in women, including sexy women who are really adept at shaking their asses, which in turn brings in het or het-identified men. With these sorts of sexual networks forming, and with the respect and affection that the women seem to have for the queer performers, there are plentiful reasons for the het men to enjoy the show without enjoying the queerness, per se. Because the queerness is so obvious, there’s no need to call it out with mockery: like the classic purloined letter, it’s transparently available and therefore somehow hidden, or screened. This might change if the performers also shake their queer or trans asses onstage, as did Big Freedia during my show. I get the sense that they do. I don’t have the ethnographic data to understand whether 1) there are segregated queer and straight shows; or 2) whether gay men and trans people shake their asses alongside the hetero show of female ass-shaking. I don’t know how the spectacle of queerness incorporates itself, or doesn’t, into the shows. Again, there really needs to be a study ! and I smell funnnnding…and fun.

Autoethnography:
Okay, so this next part is going to describe a little bit of my experience at the show in Chicago and ask some questions. At first when I saw that Big Freedia was touring with a variety of non-sissy bounce acts, I was like, “hm, cool, whatev.” But then, closer to the show, I wondered if it would be weird, like if the show could possibly transcend irony and identity politics and avoid landing us in a kind of minstrelsy trap. This actually became a palpable fear for me when I saw the crowd, the opening acts (one of which was terrible, like TERRIBLE – a totally uninspired and unrelated act that had nothing going on. The other one, with its amazing Second Life projections and tutus with burlesque whiteface, was awesome, though). So then I started to feel nervous about abjection, the other, crowds, etc. But then Freedia herself came on, with her amazing hair (one side shaved in a design, the other hanging long with white-streaked bangs) and her very Panamanian-looking clothes – namely, a silver belt and jeans that were somewhere between baggy and skinny, Panama style. With her were a backup dj, a big-bodied water dude, and a white (or white-appearing) female assistant dancer wearing a sort of aquamarine satin unitard with fishnets. The thing that I could not get over was the female dancer’s makeup and expression, which was VERY sassy and definitely could have had something satirical/parodic going on. Simply put, she exhibited the exaggerated features of a blackface minstrel female figure. I am not bullshitting; she did. Or perhaps a white trash/po’ white minstrel figure? And when she flashed us the finger, twice, the impression was even more striking. Weird. I wondered what the relationship between Freedia and her was – whether she was the dancer for the entire tour, or just to places serving a mostly-white clientele, or what was going on there. Would it have been strange if Freedia had brought a black dancer to shake her ass for us? Was that too exoticizing? It’s not that this dancer couldn’t booty-dance as well as a black person – not at all, she was amazing. But her whiteness, or appearance of such, combined with the makeup, was very strange to me. I am still processing it and would honestly like to hear the interpretations of people of color in the audience.

Unlike the sassy backup dancer, Freedia projected a persona that was, I feel, very “pure” in a way – dignified, earnest, and honest. For example, at the end, she explained to us that she was very ill and therefore was sort of cutting it short but that she tried to hold out because she loved Chicago. This was all very touching and cool. Also, she was a class-A ass shaker but wasn’t arrogant about it. The whole vibe of her sissy bounce persona was, I felt, very put together and with the right amount and KIND of presence. The feeling that I had after the set was essentially that Freedia is a consummate performer, pardon the cliché, who really knows how to work with a variety of audiences. Not that this one was tough or turgid at all, however. The mood of the crowd was also very open to communing with the whole situation.

And I think that that provides one reason that the show transcended irony. As presented within the production/promotion of Decibelle, the event was queer-friendly, and gay rights were clearly on people’s minds there. I feel like gay rights and expression trumped race and class in this context, or rather created a venue for them, that people could relate to and that quashed hostility, to some extent. There was a sense of empathy, and I don’t say that lightly. Very few people were observing, arms crossed, from the sidelines. It was less hipster and more freak. Which I liked.

In addition to being very gay, and therefore very awesome, the show was very interactive, with participants of all shades and stripes getting up onstage and shaking their asses in various configurations. This presented a sweaty, drunk, and lusty subsection of the queer fe/male audience dancing together, on boxes, gyrating on the floor, humping and grinding against each other and the stage, eyes half-closed, in what turned out to be a very charming shambles.

But meanwhile Freedia would go through the crowd and physically point to the best ass-dancer, drawing the audience’s attention away from the poor imitators and to the one who really understood what to do with his/her body. What this did was several things: 1) established an embodied hierarchy, so that if anyone was to be mocked, it was the people trying to dance and doing so badly; 2) it prevented even those hacks from being mocked because of the eye-turning power of Freedia, the ass-connoisseur. She showed us that she was totally in control of this hierarchy, that this was TOTALLY a skill that required intensive practice and, often, athleticism, and that there were other types of power available to people. I saw quite a few people getting flustered or embarrassed when they realized the distinctions between those who really could shake their asses and those who were thinking that this was going to be something fun and casual. It’s actually a very serious thing, this dance. It involves keeping most of the body completely immobile while revolving your ass-cheeks like a washing machine. Even more tricky are forms in which the participant bends over, lies on the floor, or gets up on a structure and whirls her ass. It’s totally mesmerizing and extremely easy to pick out immediately who’s doing it well and who badly. In any case, this rearranged hierarchy defeated any attempts to mock the performance, as we saw what sexual power was also contained in this incredibly erotic dance (and it is!), which probably also explains its appeal at straight black clubs in NOLA.

To summarize, I had a great time and emerged feeling okay about it too. I’m not sure what other stops are on this tour, and I hope that there aren’t any to, like, frat boy bars in rural texas. That might produce an entirely different reception, and one that would bring out some of the worst and most racist and homophobic undertones of U.S. society and culture right now. I can say in our case that I was satisfied with the reception that we audience members gave Freedia. Despite the the mixed race but mostly queer-identified, white, middle-class audience members, the performance managed to transcend irony (while not ditching the realm of camp – using camp somewhat to its benefit, although this could have been more played up) due to its the inclusive nature, as well as the coalescence around issues of queer identity that went on, AND a hierarchy of movement that emerged and would definitely smack down any sense of irony cultivated by the lip-curling sneerers hanging on the periphery (not that there were any. In fact, the concert was remarkably upbeat and sincerely, wholesomely enthusiastic, which is a rare feeling to have from a show, especially one in Chicago, espECially one in wicker park.) I only had the sense that the organizers of the show might have wanted Freedia to directly invoke an aspect of queer politics and/or rights, but she didn’t. I’m not sure how much of a spokesperson she has been, is, or is becoming, but being linked to Decibelle, contrary to what you might think, does not seem to imply that she is incorporating their message in her work. But that is not to say that she should be: I think that Freedia knows who she is: that is to say, she is walking politics, there’s no need  to say it out loud. That’s the sense I get. I’m sure that she has views on gay marriage and DADT, but sometimes body politics are more powerful and transformative than npr’s talk-radio approach. and sometimes performance studies can be really validating, i think.

not so gaga

I don’t get gaga.

Her name is Lady Gaga. She’s a big baby.

And more to my horror, an article in harper’s (faludi’s piece on feminism’s ritual matricide, an excellent read) quoted  Judith/Jack Halberstam, the gender studies professor at USC, on the future of feminism being the “brave new world of Gaga girliness.” gulp.

For real? Is this really the direction we’re going in? She seems to me to be but a revival of Madonna-style subversiveness, yet so much less shocking, all about design and appropriation. I appreciate her eccentricity, but I also feel like dancing around in a thong, shooting her glamor vibes throughout prison is a problematic image.

What does it mean for us for Gaga to be the representative of the next wave? Any of you Gaga fans out there, please enlighten.

c

cross-bloggery

hi all,

i invite you to read this essay that i wrote on my own homegirl blog: http://funlandfunfunfurryfun.blogspot.com/

it’s about my grandmother’s death and life. i hope that you learn & enjoy. xo, katie

I <3 Chris Kraus

Here are some passages from her book Video Green.

At the art school where I teach, there’s a lot of talk about “multiple subjectivities.” … While the word “personal” is generally used as a pejorative, multiple subjectivities—the knack of being everywhere and therefore no where in particular— are seen to be a very good thing. (79, 1999)

[Writing about the artists Carol Irving and Jennifer Schlosberg] Perhaps because they are female, it is both Irving and Schlosberg themselves and not their works who are critiqued…

The willingness of someone to use her life as primary material is still deeply disturbing, and even more so if she views her own experience at some remove.  There is no problem with female confession providing it is made within a repentant therapeutic narrative.  But to examine things coolly, to thrust experience out of one’s own brain and put it on the table, is still too confrontational.  Like the most canonical conceptual art, Schlosberg and Irving’s work forges an interaction that implicates its viewers.  It’s the distancing of female experience that drives art critics crazy.  Refusing the realm of abject memoir/confession, Schlosberg and Irving’s projects presume to treat female experience universally. (63, 1999)

It’s best, of course, for the artist to be heterosexual and monogamously settled in a couple.  This guards againt messy leaks of subjectivity which might compromise the work and throw it back into the realm of the “abject,” which, as we all supposedly agree, was a 1980s excess that has long since been discredited.  If imagery of a sexual subculture is to be deployed… it’s important that any undercurrents of desire be cooled off and distanced… the viewer is led into that most desired state of neocorporate neoconceptualism: the empty space of ambiguity, which is completely different from the messy space of contradiction.  (17, 2004)

The artist’s own biography doesn’t matter much at all.  What life?  The blanker the better. The life experience of the artist, if channeled into the artwork, can only impede art’s neocorporate, neoconceptual purpose.  It is the biography of the institution that we want to read. (21-22, 2004)

On Professional Domintation …

so i have been thinking a lot about, oh, what should we call it … the THEORY end of this kind of work. gender stuff. connections between the sex industry and that freakish outside world in which we all still must put some time. what is influencing me is a combination of things i read and conversations with friends. and what is congealing in this conceptual quagmire is a stewy conglomeration of chunks like issues of masculinity, and psychological motives for doing and seeking sex work.

so i read this article in slate. it made a lot of observations i have made: that there is a lot of sex-negativity in my generation, that there is a conservative backlash against baby-boomers, the ’60’s and ’70’s, sexual liberation, feminism, etc. and that these reactionary turds lurk like shit-smelling explosives in a minefield that is ostensibly ‘liberal.’

here is an illustrative quote from lady gaga, who i must say i do not give two shits about: “It’s not really cool any more to have sex all the time. It’s cooler to be strong and independent.” um riiiight, whatever the fuck that means. like i say, no two shits. but anyway …

the article does not point out anything new because i observe these trends in my everyday life. i live in the world and probably do not come across many people in my urban milieu or what have you who are not ‘down’, ostensibly. yet dig a milimeter deep beneath this culture — and even the loose web of counter-culture, where i spend much of my social time — and the same old shit explodes in your face. duh.

so mainstream culture is pretty clearly the steaming pile of repressive poop it tends to be. and youth culture, even the freakier nooks, doesn’t always smell so great. so what are we pro-joy/pleasure folk to do? and what motives might we — ‘decent’ dudes and self-respecting, smart women alike — for seeking out the sexual underbelly of our society?

i found some worthwhile and insightful nuggets in this collection of essays about stripping: Flesh for fantasy: Producing and Consuming Exotic Dance. it’s edited by three lady academics, r. danielle egan, katherine frank, and merri lisa johnson, who have all spent some time as dancers. one interesting thing is they include essays both by sex work providers and sex work clients. we all know that 99.999% of these clients are men. and of course the outlook is largely hetero. let’s start with one of these nuggets. katherine frank interviewed a bunch of strip club customers; here’s what one had to say about why he kept coming back:

“Many of the men that I spoke with discussed their confusion as to what was expected of them as “men” in relationships with women. … “Other men complained that they were expected to be strong and assertive, both at home and in their workplaces, but their female partners were at the same time interested in greater communication and emotional expression. Joe summed this up very succinctly:

My wife expects me to be strong emotionally, physically, and I expect spiritually, too … But emotionally, she wants me to be strong but she doesn’t want me to be overbearing. She wants me to cry and be sensitive, to be the leader and the rock … I’m confused as hell. I wouldn’t say that openly in public but I’m definitely confused about what it is to be a man.”

boo fucking hoo, why don’t you dial 911 and call the waaaambulance, right?  it is so hard to be a man in this world, why don’t you cry me a goddam river.  no, seriously folks.  this is a pretty typical example, but i see this crisis of contemporary masculinity play out in the troubled psyches of even atypical men i know.  and i do not envy it, and i have SHITTONS of sympathy.  although we women often get this shit end of this shit stick of confusion, i have a fair amount of compassion for men honestly navigating the morass.

which leads me to my next nugget.  it is a patent fallacy that women who do sex work, especially professional domination, suffer or delight in the agonies and ecstasies of man-hatred.  quite the opposite.  plenty of them seek a place, like men, where the ‘confusion’ of real-world gender relations can be tabled.  or at least troubled. women can unabashedly be sexy and powerful, and (hetero) men can be unabashedly men.  sexual appeal and erotic desire can be openly celebrated, without all the landmines that we have grown to associate with such things. here is what one lady, merri lisa johnson, said about why she became a stripper:

“ In the context of an American culture defined by its intensely contradictory responses to sex – the lasciviousness and puritanism – as well as in the context of my own personal life which was, when I first entered the profession at age twenty-one, defined by an unexpected divorce that had thrown my moral framework painfully into question, this stripper sexuality offered a welcome alternative to marriage and the church teachings that had left me angry and freaked out about sex.  Other options were, I’m sure, available – tantric sex, swinging, etc. – but stripping was the venue through which I realized the possibilities of a freer sense of sexuality.”

you can easily substitute BDSM or what have you in place of stripping here.   let’s dwell on “a freer sense of sexuality.”  huh.  now i know i speak from a privileged position as an independent domme working out of a female-run space.  i come from a middle-class background, have no kids, and could be doing other things.  but Flesh for Fantasy also makes some good points on this front.  one, that there are plenty of women like me, who seek out sex work reasons other than poverty and desperation.  and two, that the danger associated with the work says more about the larger culture, the stigma and ghettoization, which leaves workers vulnerable to exploitation.

and how about the alternative, the straight professional world. here is johnson again:

“The abusiveness of a sexual script that encourages us to repress what Naomi Wolf calls our ‘inner slut’ cannot be compartmentalized as the product of the sex industry.  It is all around us, perhaps even worse in nonstrip-club spaces.  When I check the neckline of my blouse or blot my red lipstick before going to work, when my hips begin to ache from keeping my legs crossed for eight hours under my desk, I am living out a sexual script that prohibits the erotic in everyday life.  It can be seen in the ‘tight and constricted posture’ of conventional femininity, to borrow the language of Sandra Lee Bartky’s critique of patriarchal bodily disciplines, and unconscious physical ‘expression of [the] need to ward off real or symbolic sexual attack.’  In the strip club, there is no such thing as too much lipstick, and it is worth noting that my joints don’t hurt as much from spreading my legs as they do from crossing them.”

i must say, for a long time in real life i experienced my sexuality as a burden that i felt i was constantly shielding others and myself from.  while an unspoken asset, professionally and socially, i sensed it to be a kind of grotesque wildcard, threatening for everyone involved.  the elephant-with-a-boner quietly lurking in the corner of the room while we discuss work or bands we both like.  the playroom, in contrast, is a space where the elephant, in all his absurdity, is fully acknowledged.  which is to say, the eroticism that pervades much of human interaction is given free reign and not violently and awkwardly repressed.  yeehaw!

with love,

midwest mistress

and now i will leave you to chew on those nuggets.  and also to chew on this creepy and delightful gem:

casual musings about gender roles

minor disclaimer: this is basically a report/commentary on a conversation that occurred during my social psych class, a class i usually don’t care much about, but in which we recently have been studying gender asymmetries, so our discussion has tended towards observations of this. as is the nature of talking in class, these points aren’t refined, but somewhat essentializing…read on if you don’t mind stomaching that.

feminist psychoanalytic theory holds that basic gender roles and differential gender characteristics are not innate, but develop out of the earliest relationships through the oedipal conflict. all infants (within a normative family, with a dad and a mom, although the ‘dad’ role and the ‘mom’ role don’t need to be occupied by a man and a woman, respectively. even in same sex couples, one parent usually fills one role more than the other) create their first identification with their mother, as she births them, then continues to feed them. this primary relationship is defined by nurturance, tenderness, love, need gratification, caressing, etc etc all those things that are supposed to be essentially maternal. as the child ages, she or he must then separate and individuate from the mother, while also undergoing the oedipal transformation, which should result in the child establishing a stable gender identity.

Final paper topic– can you guys help me out w ideas?

Abstract:

In this paper, I examine the types of Western technologies that women have appropriated and re-appropriated from men. It is my goal to focus primarily upon the relatively recent phenomenon of Internet pornography designed for and by women, and to provide a critical analysis of a number of feminist texts regarding feminist pornography. This analysis will seek to prove that Internet pornography is in the process of being ‘reclaimed’ by women by means of independently made pornography, self-made female porn stars, the Feminist Porn awards, and an array of websites, including hotmoviesforher.com. In addition to examining women’s appropriation of Internet pornography in the context of the history of pornography, I intend to discuss historical examples of men’s appropriations of female technologies, as in the cases of the novel and the landscape painting; women’s appropriations of male technologies, as in the case of women’s progression in the field of computer technology and fashion; and women’s re-appropriations of technologies, as in the cases of feminine hygiene technology, vibrators, and sex industry communities, such as BSDM dungeons. Ultimately, this paper aims to predict future trends in Internet pornography.

Attention: A few more, more, more types.

Hello all, exciting news: I lay at your readerly feet another installment of the “Types to Avoid Dating.”  This one, I must confess, is more sombre than the last, and also more sober. But I think that you’ll find it enjoyable anyway. Please add on, refute, engage, disorient! Here goes:

I have always been a person with a low threshold for consumer options. If I walk into a supermarket and see three types of jam, that’s fine. Seven or more produces a sort of dazed clenching-up in my muscles, as my brain starts to flat-line and reaches an inevitable asymptote, shutting down my capacity to choose. This often results in my selection of none of the above: I just can’t handle the sheer variety. At my very best, I prefer that others whose judgment I trust – the philosopher-kings (and queens) of the fashion/connoisseurship world – choose for me, and I’ll plunk down the cash.

In love and dating, my life has of late been following the same trajectory as the jam example. Sad to say, the world of human interaction is becoming more and more a vast supermarket, with people flashing you a little leg and throwing their “selling points” in your face, leaving the slimy stuff under their rocks well submerged until the fifth date.  I don’t know if there’s a concise saying that would encapsulate the following sentiment, but lately the more new people I’ve been meeting, the more painfully cauterized my romantic organs are becoming – a sort of emotional constipation reaching the point of near-impaction – as I come to understand that there are so many hues and aromas in the infinite marimba of human emotio-sexual insanity and desire only to turn away to the quietude of my virginal bower, sleeping between pristine butter-yellow sheets. It’s as if the more I see, the more I DON’T want. Being in the world and encountering a round of new faces has seemingly exposed me to more types of romantically hazardous materials than I’d lately desire, to possibly culminate in a sort of conspiracy-theorist celibacy that I’m trying to ward off, a crazed “Army of One” sort of thing, wherein my pelvis is encased in an amalgam of chastity belt and machine gun. No, but seriously, I sometimes feel like a boat buffeted on all sides by crazies who are wanting to get in my pants. And if there’s anything worse than an irritating, infuriatingly crazy person, it’s one who wants to involve him/herself in some kind of romantic entanglement with you. Here I would quote Grace Jones: “Your private life drama, baby, leave me out.”

Meanwhile, there are people whose pants I want to get into, and they probably think that I’m one of the aforementioned crazies. Which I may well be – the whole Jacob’s ladder of angel-punching sex/dating is lately throwing my forces of judgment into doubt.  I wish that I could bring potential suitors before a panel of disinterested judges, so they’d evaluate the person’s credentials, prod his/her head with calipers, and the like, giving me concrete wisdom and insurance against foreclosures of the heart. Shadowed by my mistrust of my own instincts and reasoning capabilities, I increasingly opt to disengage from the fleshly ruckus, gather my wits, and write my goddamned dissertation. But shutting out the noise, especially when my body is acting fecund and feral like something out of a Bjork video (circa 1998) – think unfurling, animated maroon tentacles that turn into flowers with claws – is difficult.

I remember taking a road trip to Romulus, Michigan during my sophomore year of college with a friend and some guy who really wanted to date her but was clearly not worthy. She thought that he was irksome to begin with, but his romantic overtures soon began to crescendo, reaching a crisis-point after about the hundredth mile. As we rocketed down I-90 in our crammed little hatchback, she began to roll her eyes and kind of moo like a frustrated ruminant, bellowing, “annoyed!” at various intervals. The message was loud but also subtle, and I don’t think it ever penetrated his frenzied scrim of lust. Lately, I’ve also been lowing and rumbling with this phrase, an homage to her private-public howl of anguish in the face of banal, unwavering, loving miscommunication. Because that’s all that these untimely affections are, at base – misdirected vectors of impossible futures, blueprints for edifices that can and will never be built, romances being the closest that capitalism can come to a utopian arc of social constructivism.

And now, after that lengthy prolegomena, for the types:

-1. The Crazy Train:  You know this type well. This is the person to whose life you’d love to adjoin yours, except that he or she happens to be permanently wedded/welded to some sort of crazy vision for which you don’t have a great deal of patience, time, or respect. You meet this person incidentally, perhaps, and the two of you click – until she points out that her life goal has been to live in the Arizona desert and build cybernetic dolphins out of scrap metals and use them to communicate with the moon and create alternative energies through the constant vacillating of their dorsal fins. Don’t you want to go to Oracle, AZ with her and do this? Well?

Sometimes the “crazy idea” that makes this person’s eyes shine is present from the beginning of your engagement with him/her, and you think, “oh, soon enough this person will come to his/her senses and forget about that batshit-insane plan to XYZ in the ABC for all eternity.” Other times, the moon mission/radical vision comes creeping out over time like an insidious worm, because the other person has sensed that you might not be wild about the idea and is introducing you to it slowly. In still other cases, you might sort of like the idea at first – “okay, planting trees in the ghettoes of Michigan sounds like a good idea to me” – but then become sick of it, because it wasn’t your idea to begin with: it was your partner’s, and now it has become a sacred quest for a holy grail that to you feels like cheap Styrofoam, which you would have tossed out long ago. But you feel bad disrespecting your lover’s dreams, and so you try to uphold them and even start to be convinced by your own Goffmanesque performance. Whatever the case, you must soon consign yourself to the role of “tag-along sex partner” or even “Sherpa guide” as you truck through the desert/mountains/oceans/cities/restaurants with your other, hoping to dine on some crumbs from his/her table of joy. You wish that you could steadfastly follow an idea to its demise in that way, but you were not built for such things. But (sigh of resignation) you have to admit that you were built to carry a roll-up sleeping bag, some snorkel gear, and a few energy bars.

Warning to potential lovers: I am becoming increasingly convinced that I am this type. Is Katie the Crazy Train? The wild ride that leaves you dizzy and begging for more even while you acknowledge that less IS more? Discuss!

-2. The Moses, or the Jewish Homesteader: sorry to duck into ethnic enclaves here, but I am a culturally Jewish woman, and this identity permeates my being in some way that I am always still exploring. Non-religious – although I like the songs a lot – I nevertheless feel implicated in the social/political/cultural morass that is the “Jewish identity” in this current day and age. I also wouldn’t preclude myself from some sort of spirituality, because I don’t watch TV anyway, so what else is there to do.

Anyhow, but I would characterize the social aspects of my Jewishness via the following metaphor: until the age of 20 or so, I felt myself sublimely floating in a calm and tepid sea, the water the same temperature as the air, producing an unreflective feeling of contentment. Then my parents and I had an earth-shattering conversation at a Chinese restaurant, the Szechuan House, in Milwaukee. (Why is Jewish life punctuated by epiphanies at Chinese restaurants? This should be the subject of a dissertation.) This created the undertow that forever left me questioning my very bathwater.

They sat me down and simply said that, in their individual and collective experience, people tended to settle into things – habits, ideas, and ways – by the age of roughly 23. They acknowledged that I was a late bloomer and asked me about my future plans. They told me that, from their perspective, I had a few years yet to figure things out for myself.  I was stunned, and I believe that a few green beans fell off my fork as I pondered an answer. They told me that I didn’t have to respond right away. It was Bastille Day, I recall, and they were seated in a bloc opposite me in the red vinyl booth of the S.H., to which we had gone because of its spectacular (and reasonable!) lunch buffet.

Anyhow, so at the time this moment just filled me with unadulterated fear, like God Himself was wielding a gun and telling me to stand up straight. But for some reason, the eerie conversation lingered and has continued to inform my thinking. Late bloomer? 23? Settled? Bullshit! Nonetheless, there was something about it that produced a sort of current, the aforementioned undertow, making me aware of the water in which I had been floating: that in its temperate sameness, it was structuring my existence in ways that I could not possibly control. Nothing was arbitrary; I could not be absolved of culpability; the matrix of power-knowledge was fast closing around me and spreading its sandy tentacles into the seams of my bathing suit. It’s not incidental that I was reading a lot of Foucault at this time.

Another lengthy rumination! But so at this point, I started to truly understand the perils of Dating Jewish (DJ). Because dating, marriage, and child-rearing are major points on the normative Jewish roadmap to adulthood, and clearly I was engaged in none of these things. So I started to think about my relationship to Jewish men, around which I had always grown up but which I had not really thought about in a serious way, being somewhat repelled (albeit amused) by them. I started to think about Jewish men as potential objects of sexual attraction and desire. I also started to think about what Jewish men wanted in a Jewish woman, and I entered into some self-loathing identity complexes – not to mention the very present queerness factor, which I’ll touch upon in a second – and started to develop a particularly fierce aversion to what I’ll call the “Moses,” the type of Jewish man who is secular but seems to hold a lot of commanding authority in his arching nose and furry eyebrows, his denouncements and holdings-forth ringing with the knowledge of the ancients. There is something about the Mosaic Jew that attracts me, but I am ultimately afraid that he’ll raise his hand and produce a hail of locusts (emotionally speaking) or something like that, after having parted the Red Sea (heh heh). Because Moses was pretty belligerent, you know, and at times he could lay down the Law. I could go further with this half-baked hamentaschen, but I’m going to leave you here, with flour on your hands.

Why did I not consider Jewish women at this juncture? I can’t say, but I can tell you that I have later come around to Jewish women. Whereas my early interactions with Jewish women produced a sort of frustration and anxiety, I have, in later life, begun to really enjoy and value my friendships with JW’s. In fact, there are many Jewish women with whom I feel affinities in fundamental ways, and I could definitely see myself dating a Jewish woman, baking challah, wearing whimsical caftans, and sharing “life moments”  while dancing the hora. Jewish Moseses, however, continue to intimidate me with their protocols, shaggy salt-and-pepper manes, brooding brows, and their commanding words. And of course the way that lightning zigzags over their heads when they talk to God. In sum, I’ll say that I am still open to Dating Jewish, but the Moses is always looking for his little Gertrude, or whatever (? Did Moses have a lady friend? Or was he too thunderous for such petty things? Can’t recall), and so probably wouldn’t make it to my Promised Land.

-3. The Parent Trap: Who among you remembers the Unmothered Mother-Wanter in Disguise, or the Happily Untrammeled Wilderness, of previous blog post fame? To refresh your memory: the bumbling child in need of parental guidance and a reintroduction to the womb? Well, the Parent Trap is the exact opposite, residing at the chilly heights of the spectrum’s other end. The Parent Trap provides you, the (ostensibly) malleable and infantile figure, with a precious and seemingly unlimited quantity of “helpful,” “inspiring,” “encouraging,” and “productive” judgmental criticism, wielding his or her moral compass as the ultimate sex toy. Where the former type (and the Manchild) needed you to apply your superego to their orifices, the Parent Trap has a little too much in the way of superego but is only too happy to furnish said superego on your behalf, you eager and puppyish acolyte. You are initially drawn to this superego – the clear-eyed rational faculties of this person who seems so much more mature than you, able to see far into the distance and understand human nature in ways that will forever elide you. This is all bullshit, of course, but you are touched by the PT’s willingness to martyr him/herself to your cause and exert some effort to help you help yourself. But when the superego goes to work, you feel yourself immersed in an acrid, burning asepsis that has dissolved the structures of your very being.

I have to say that I am VERY susceptible to this type and have come under its sway frequently in my past dating experience. I’ve come to certain points in my life in which I just wanted my sexual/romantic partner to clean up my messes and show me the way forward. But then his/her critical faculties become too much, closing in on my source of light, as all of the things that I consider sacred come under the piercing scrutiny of one with a Superior Vision and are shown to be tawdry and flighty, ephemeral and indulgent.

You can only take so much of that treatment – and so soon enough, I would flee from the constant revelation of my flaws in the public square. I would typically follow a cleansing stint in the arms of the Parent Trap with a romp through the Untrammeled Wilderness, in which no one was scrutinizing nothin’, and my libido could run free and dirty, like water tainted with giardia. Then back to the Parent Trap with a hangdog expression (and a hangover).

But the PT will inevitably tire of these abusive ablutions, feeling his/her trust to be ever more egregiously strained and wondering why he/she became interested in you in the first place. The PT will, in other words, almost feel pushed to the brink of moral compromise and turn YOU into a figure of Satanic temptations. Readers, I can say this with certitude: one day, she/he will not invite you back. The ultimate moral rejection, branding the heart in ways that constant negative reinforcement never could! The superego’s threshold of tolerance will have been reached, and in the face of your repeated comings and goings, all patience with the patient will be lost.  You don’t want to let things get to this point. Stay away, and let the PT pursue his/her vision of world order without the complication of your morally ambiguous presence.

-4. The Blood Type: There are people who enter into relationships thinking in terms of “Alpha” and “Beta,” of A and B. Their constant exertion of energy in trying to figure out who has the natural upper-hand in the relationship, and whether there is the possibility for ‘upward mobility’ (by which the Beta turns into the Alpha, forcing the Alpha into the submissive Beta position), begins to produce poisonous strains of manipulative passive-aggression that eventually make things extremely sour while obscuring the social order of their dating life even more. They start to make wolf moves, dominating and forcing you down, while also dodging and feinting around you like some kind of post-Parkinson’s Muhammad Ali passive-aggressive shadow boxer. All of this, you eventually feel, is a mere smoke screen for their insecurities, and you find that you need to flee before they abscond with your emotional diamonds.

I’m sure that you’ve thought about the alpha/beta thing at some point – or maybe you haven’t, and you’re a lot less venal than I am. So let me spell it out for those of you who still believe that America is a classless society: in any social situation, you’ll encounter people who you feel are out of your dating league and people who you feel are below you, dating-wise. This doesn’t need to do with class, race, sex, age, weight, or any of the above – or those could be factors. As a sapiosexual, for example, I often instinctively dismiss candidates who I feel are not smart. That’s mean and prejudiced and blah blah blah – and there you have it. At the same time, I also routinely dismiss candidates who are only smart – nerdy but lacking in a skillfully calibrated sense of humor, for example, or an openness to some of popular culture’s lesser evils. This is a recipe for eternal solitude, I know.

But back to the main point: sometimes people start dating and, while in the process of beginning a relationship, try to assess where they and their partner stand vis-à-vis this alpha-beta thing: who is the top dog, who the underdog. Now, there are people who spend about a second on this question – and then there are people who obsess about it continually throughout the entire relationship, to the point that it ultimately causes the undoing of the partnership in question, along with an outpouring of substantial resentment, guilt, insecurity, and scars that remain to trickle into (sorry, mixing metaphors there) other, future unions once the malignant boil that was your relationship has been lanced. The Blood Type is this: constantly trying to figure out if you or she is the A or B, and reining you in with her insecurities like some kind of Medusa figure.  Usually, she envisions herself as the Beta and spends substantial time building a shrine to you, the supposed Alpha, and worshiping your presence/stating her luckiness to be with one as special and desirable as you, and otherwise building you into a formidable figure, the one with the power. In the meantime, she is undercutting that very power and making you a slave to her affections through the very application of those affections – all of this flattery is going to your head and making it swell like a balloon, but one with a minute hole in it, through which tiny amounts of air are imperceptibly leaking. This is a pretty Hegelian type, it occurs to me. Maybe you have never considered yourself the Alpha before – in fact, maybe you have never even thought in those terms before. But now you’re in the matrix, and you find that you increasingly rely on her recognition of your greatness to believe in this supposed greatness.

In the best case scenario, you’ll become wise to her jive early on and get the hell out of that manipulative coven. In the worst case, you’ll eventually BECOME the Beta, as you’re sucked under by her manipulative praise and support, so that the withdrawal of that affirmation will make you crave it. Bad voodoo!

-5. The Cosmopolitan: This person is not actually a cocktail but probably has spent a lot of time drinking these sweet-and-sour concoctions at fancy bars throughout the metropoles of the world. For a while now, I’ve been searching for structural embodiments of our current epoch, and I think that the Cosmopolitan, and perhaps the Hedge Fund (see below), are it. The Cosmopolitan is that person who has lived in so many places and traveled around so much that his/her sense of self is entirely distorted, if not obliterated. Often a well-dressed loner reveling in shades of heather grey and soft wools, the Cosmopolitan possesses no real center – in fact, prides him/herself on this point – and is the personification of an airport, albeit a fancy airport, with luxury stores and decent food. S/he is always passing through, leaving well-cut gems of wisdom or thought in your presence, but soon having to leave on the next flight to the up-and-up. This person is born of privilege and alienation, overexposure to high-class people and things without the sense that s/he has actually possessed those things: the postmodern flâneur, endlessly window-shopping.  His/her constant desire for greatness of sorts- whether this be in terms of epicurean experiences, aesthetic beauty, intellectual development, or career ambition – leads him/her to continual heights of study, travel, and consumerism that push the limits of his/her human relationships and leave you, the would-be interlocutor, feeling like you’re engaging in a monologue while witnessing a juggernaut on a high-speed train through multiple layers of tempered glass. Some part of you knows that the Cosmopolitan values you as a person – because s/he is not completely vapid – but another part of you is well aware that you can never satisfy his/her craving for more, better, newer, and sleeker. At an extreme, you feel like you might remind him/her of death (though he/she would quickly refute this idea), and somehow you know that your very presence is abhorrent to him/her through no fault of your own.  Nothing produces existential, mediated, resounding loneliness like being with a Cosmopolitan. Stay away, get your fingers into the earth.

-6. The Hedge Fund/The Rover: this person is the socially apt equivalent of the Cosmopolitan. For him/her, you are but a pixel in an ever-turning color wheel of faces and experiences, a chip migrating down the intestines of the world’s pachinko parlor and dropping into this slot, or that. Eventually, inevitably, s/he will tire and move on to the next. Of course, this person will also end in existential loneliness, but because s/he resembles a beautiful animal not entirely in control of its motor functions, you feel the fleeting need to entrap it and make it yours. Possession of the unpossessable – that is the driving force here. Whereas the Cosmopolitan gives you flashes of coldness when you come near, the Hedge Fund/Rover is an essentially warm, inviting creature excited by any and all possibilities of human interaction, in ways that may even strike you as dangerously egalitarian. Unlike the Blood Type, this person has long ago thrown out any notion of Alpha or Beta, or maybe his/her understanding of it has been through the washing machine one too many times and is fuzzy beyond legibility. Aphra Behn spoke of this person – a fleshly outcropping of the Will, or one who is in perpetual social motion and often sleeps with a lot of other people, giving you the feeling that somewhere s/he is marking down numbers or checks in a little book or trying to remember your name (as distinct from the Katie with whom s/he slept with last week). Despite the enticing nature of this sexual animal, you are left with a sense of vampirism: in being rejuvenated by new encounters with heretofore unencountered people, the Hedge Fund/Rover is sucking the very life out of you, hedging his/her bets, accumulating numbers, playing trick cards, trying to strategize around you, making excuses not to see you, up to no good when you’re not around, ingratiating when you are. You are a rock, and this person pools around you like liquid, sidling up and offering sexual solace but then ebbing without warning. Beware of the Hedge Fund, as interest rates run high and leave substantial debts.

oldness poem

a little bit of panic experienced

upon discovery of first grey eyebrow-hair

long and regally white, in fact.

going to pretend it’s an eagle feather…?

-poetess k.

red light districts

hiya ladies

been wanting to write about this for a while, but haven’t gotten around to it. what more paradoxically nice a time to write about the steamy sex galleries of amsterdam than on this white-out snow day?

around xmas time i was wandering around the cobblestones and canals of amsterdam. and i was totally fascinated by the sex shops: literally, tiny twin-bed sized shops that men can enter in order to buy sex. women, mainly non-dutch natives of all shapes, sizes, and colors in lingerie of all shapes, sizes, and colors, stood before windows that doubled as doors. they beckoned with lustful expressions to all the men walking by, including tom, whom i was clearly with. men would pause to window shop, in which the flirtation, the non-physical foreplay would begin.

re-bounce?

hi guys, shall we recommence the girl revolution? put the “re” in revolution? Or the “rev?” Or the “revol?” Okay, I’ll stop.

I miss you guys! I want to hear about the rom-com and bossy bottoms and wildebeests and STD furies…what’s cookin? And is it macrobiotic?

My recent reflection has been weighted in a whole different direction. Lots of things here, to unfold in time. But hello-o-o-o….let’s unearth our bodies from the snow.

-xo, k

Ventriloquism and Performance, Marnie Weber and Zoe Beloff

I was researching and free-writing about a particular strand in the work of two of my favorite artists the other day, thinking it might go into a paper I was writing about my own work, but it didn’t fit.  I thought I would post my notes.

Both Zoe Beloff and Marnie Weber have made work about the mid-nineteeth century American and European spiritualist movements, and both connect the mediums with feminist performance art.  In interviews, Weber and Beloff  talk about women “having a voice” through their performance as mediums.  Beloff also draws a connection between mediums and the women who provided the first case studies for hysteria, claiming that both spiritualism and hysteria were modes in which women could perform and be expressive.  Weber and Beloff are also interested in what is being spoken in spiritualism and hysteria, and address the ventriloquism of these performances. In an interview, Weber says of her interest in the spiritualist movement, “Women were finally given a voice publicly on stage, but it was in the context of a sideshow performance — they were put on stage to channel the voices of spirits”.  Speaking of her film and video representations of hysterical patients, Beloff says, “I wanted to give them a chance to speak, rather than be spoken about by the men who wrote up their pathologies. I see myself in some ways as attempting to give them a voice. I think of them as visionaries.”  Beloff claims that she is allowing the women to speak, as though she herself could channel their voices.  In a discussion at the University of Chicago last year, Beloff clarified her connection between medium and artist, stating that her installation The Ideoplastic Materializations of Eva C. came out of an interest in the medium Eva C. as a proto performance artist.  She writes, “I think of the séance as a model for a new form of storytelling that includes the audience” (here), positioning the medium herself as storyteller, creative director, and performer.  By aiming to give the long-dead woman whose stories she tells both “a voice” and “a chance to speak, rather than to be spoken about” she situates herself in the disjointed position of both medium, artist, ventriloquist and doll. In Weber’s 2009 film The Sea of Silence , the protagonists, five ghostly Spirit Girls (who are also an imaginary rock band) find life-sized dummies of themselves through which they are able to communicate to an audience, reversing the usual relationship between ventriloquist and doll.  About this work, Weber says, “Ventriloquist dolls were originally used to channel spirits but in this film it’s reversed because the dolls are doing the channelling and are the manifestations of their human selves” (Time Out London, Interview with Marnie Weber, Helen Sumpter, 9/11/2009).

A classic

It looks like “No Secrets” is a sleeper hit. New songs coming soon; I hear that Cervixon is brewing some goodies, with assistance from Super Ova.

hey lAdies

it’s been too long! i’m procrastinating from writing my papers about school violence by browsing old posts, and found s&a’s wedding rom-com mention…well? let’s hear more here!

one thought about the wedding landscape, and the actual wedding experience from which the screenplay derived (a thought inspired by a classmate of mine who is interested in the concept of ‘mother earth’ and how that unconscious association mediates our treatment of the earth) is all the septic trucks sinking in the field behind the house: so we’ve got the shit-baggage metaphor, what about the earth-action? there’s an enveloping going on, that can take on a positive or a negative spin: when we marry i’ll accept your crap along with everything else?

forum established. can you tell i’m fantasizing about summer and happy endings?

c

terrifying!

http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/11/13/today-in-traditional-marriage

Today in Traditional Marriage

Posted by Dan Savage on Fri, Nov 13, 2009 at 8:14 AM

Yesterday we learned that a woman diagnosed with cancer has a 21% chance of being abandoned by her husband while men diagnosed with cancer have 3% chance of being abandoned by their wives. And then there’s this stat in the NYT this morning…

Nationally, about a third of female murder victims are killed by a husband or boyfriend each year, according to the Justice Department. But that number was closer to about 45 percent last year in Kentucky.

Once again: if homosexuality was a choice, like conservative Christians insisting that it is, a lot more women would’ve chosen it by now.

ciar(rrrrrrr)a

i know it’s super cheesy, and you’ve probably seen it, but here it is anyway– there are some EXCELLENT dance moves, not to mention outfits in this business.

 

Bossy Bottom

Hey GirlRevs!

Check out this video that Ana and I made.  We would love to hear your thoughts.

~Sophia and Ana

Women get their own trains in India!!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/16/world/asia/16ladies.html?_r=1&hp

images to accompany previous post

mujeres en la plaza/women in the plaza – protesting the disappeared and “false positives” (civilians killed by the paramilitary and dressed as guerillas).

the Pussyphone

Guillermo Gomez-Peña’s fetish-fest

“las chicas extraordinarias”

Nikita, with green mohawk. Apparently she’s on the paramilitary’s wanted list and has to check in with them every day.

India-Bogotá – aaaaah

sorry, guys – a long one, and long in the making.

Cassie – a disclaimer. I was just about to follow up my impulsive response with a more reasoned wording of what I was thinking about. I don’t want to police experience with theory, but I also think that there’s a lot to unpack there, which is a good thing. I also feel like even though writing your comments may feel unpleasant, it might be therapeutic and also courageously open up important questions that many of us have been thinking about in a variety of ways. So I didn’t mean to shut you down, because your observations and interpretations should be front and center in this dialogue. The suggestion was meant to help, and I’ve been on a major bender of recommending that people read that article lately. I really do think that everyone should read it. Reading feminist theory in general should be part of more people’s lives – my post-dissertation-structural-transformation dream is to teach many young and middle school-aged children concepts from feminist and queer theory so that these things would not seem alien or academistic to them, since issues of gender and sexuality, especially as these intersect with race and class, are central in our lives, and growing more so every day (I’m convinced). Actually, my ultimate, ultimate dream would be to force my dad to read feminist theory (and like it). That doesn’t seem like it’s going to happen, but the idea is to widen the compass, not to “improve” your observations and thoughts. That’s not what I intended, and I’m sorry if it came across that way (as it does to me as I reread it now). Anyway…

shakir-ahhhhhh*

um, have you guys seen this? if louis or i could get boners, we’d totally have monstrously large pillows clasped to our laps at this very moment– so large, in fact, that louis might have suffocated his small self already had i not mercifully gotten him neutered. but as we can’t, we’re stuck trying to figure out what the fuck the song means while we watch it over and over (and imitate her crazy dance moves/dry-hump the air).

*no disrespect to indi-uh!

indie-uh

i find it difficult now to write something about india, as i have spoken about aspects of my experience over and over again, for the past month, and for the two months i was there, with antonia, my partner-in-everything for the time. i’ve been looking over my photographs, repetitiously, frequently, to gather some clue as to what the trip meant, which revelations are salient, but moreover to make more real to myself that i was actually there, in those wild landscapes and situated amidst the markers of lost civilization, for a long time.

where my girls at?

let’s hear about india! or whatever. i miss my femlove.

yo yo, when it comes to drew barrymore, my heart is an irony-free zone. field trip! ( yes yes y’all, anahid j.)

Larkin Grimm! I am now a tremendous addict of yours…

…and I’d like to say that it was excellent to hear you perform live at Housingworks. I really liked it and continue to bliss out (an antiquated phrase by now, but one that feels right to me) to it via myspace. Can I pick up the album somewhere? Should I get it out of the Amazon’s belly? Or could it come from the maw of someone less gigantic/all-dominating, capitalistically speaking? We’re talking music here, not market share. And I’m loving your tunes. an open letter to the ladies. xoxox – kt z

PS: I am also blown away by the lyrical stylings of AD – gonorrhealist, indeed! syphilanthropist, huh! genius. I want to send that to Dan Savage…

“Ah Feel Lahk a Wummin”

Performing (a Little) Femininity: Fieldnotes

Caveat lector: I want to claim that I am not really the type of person who has a significant investment in her appearance, i.e., vanity (which is not synonymous with a certain excessive femininity, though it is often made to be). At the same time, I have been experimenting with a particularly stylized femininity, something akin to high drag or what my parents used to call “verputzed.” “Verputzed,” for those of you not raised pop-Jewish (popish?), refers to a complicated and often overstated look, an ensemble that represents in symbolic capital the expenditure of substantial effort and, often, cash.

As in:

Mother: “Oy gevalt, will you look at Cousin Marge, she’s so verputzed, with her new perm and giant silver ribbons and all those decorative schmattes.”

Father: “Yeah, but at least she’s not zaftig anymore. At the bar mitzvah three months ago she looked like a real bow-wow.”

And I want to say: this is not even an exaggeration. This is what I grew up with, and let’s not get into that. I like to think that my own experiments with the intricacies of gender and sexual identity are far removed from the sort of hair-pulling, garden-variety neurotic Freudian 19th-century Viennese bourgeois subject on the velvet couch, but they’re actually intimately wrapped up in all of that stuff, the haranguing dialogues in which I grew up enmeshed, like Orestes hounded by Furies brandishing hairbrushes and store-bought stockings. As the popular adage goes, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree, and Jewish apples are often little, hard, and bitter, like premature testicles that never descended and will never undergo Matthew Barney’s elaborated Cremaster cycle but rather stay eternally bound to the parental thigh, l’dor va’dor, from generation to generation. There’s no parthenogenesis or mitosis, no mental splitting-off from the cells of patriarch and matriarch – rather, we children of the persecuted often bubble up and out like tumescent tumors, more swellings than independent life forms. If we have our own heartbeats, well, tumors do too. Rather unlike the prototypical hero we are – that hero who must strike out on his [sic] own through a series of liminal social ruptures, shattering bonds that have become oppressive obstacles in order to find his [sic] path. This account may be in large part facetious, but there’s also something undeniably true about it, at least for me – an extremely prosaic reality of endless circling far and away, outright rejection (better said in Spanish: “rechazar,” a verb that really captures the sonic and physical sensations of pushing something away forcefully with tongue and teeth) and the improvised, impetuous train-hop out of town, which turns out to lead us directly (albeit inadvertently) back, as if we are magnetized animals or characters in an intricate short story by Melville, some sort of tangled and obfuscating Gordian knot, or part of a Kafkaesque tautology that brings us back to what we know and then mocks us mercilessly for it. A lot of the authors who I most enjoy seem to write about the futility of constant human attempts to get beyond what we are and know ourselves to be, the inevitable disappointment of self-mystification or stylization.

a modest proposal – or, a benchmark of what, exactly?

hi all,

the other day i was thinking about my preferences/tastes/likes and dislikes, and i realized that i’m at the age where things that i don’t like are both becoming apparent and sort of settling into the eternal – tics that will last forever, and against which little ground will be made. and i thought that i’d do something that i’ve never done before and that might seem like a bad idea on the face of it but was in fact very liberating in the initial doing of it. that is, i’ve started making a list of things that i HATE. now, at first i was even loath to say “hate,” but i think that it’s a good idea to involve that word and see what kind of work it does. so i started making my list, and it’s been pretty short and elaborated – like a paragraph devoted to each most-hated thing (quality, habit, ideology, food, institution, what have you), demonstrating that these are not fleeting moments of rage but long-accumulated sediments of dislike that have crystallized into obstinate cul-du-sacs in the suburb of my brain.

I don’t spell it “womyn”…

…or call it “herstory” instead of history, so I hope neither of these pieces read that way.

This is my first blog posting, well, ever, and definitely the first time I’ve put my writing out there to be read by folks other than my classmates. That being said, I pull my sweater over my knees, and listen to sad, sad music as I cry if you say you don’t like my writing; I’ll be doing that regardless of what you think.

Both of these pieces were done for an Intro to Creative Nonfiction writing class I’m taking online at the New School. The first piece is a direct response to a piece titled “He and I” by Natalia Ginzburg; I used her “he is this…., I am that…” format, so I can’t take credit for that. My impression of the original piece is that everything Ginzburg writes about herself is not what she actually believes but rather what her husband has said about her. She writes that she is lazy, manages her time poorly, doesn’t know how to eat. In contrast, her husband is always productive, efficient, and has an impressive palette. This was the approach I used in my own piece, and according to my writing teacher, I missed the boat somewhat as a result. My teacher claims that Ginzburg is being true in all her self-deprecation, that she is obviously implicating her faults, and that my piece is “cool” because I reached a genuine conclusion even though I misunderstood the original work. Oh well…

(*Both of these pieces are in their rough draft form; the pacing of the class is such that, unless you specifically ask the professor, you don’t have the chance to go back and rework any of these brief, 2 works.)

this is short but sort of satisfying on a Tuesday

and it’s what i wanted to hear.

Strange Encounters

I wanted to post something that bothered me for a while and finally stopped bothering me when i basically forced myself to stop thinking about it.  Story below:

This happened when my friend and I were en route to Milwaukee, and we stopped to get my car’s emissions tested at the DoT (dept of transportation) for license renewal purposes. So, we were waiting in this little booth while the guy checked the exhaust – an operation that took all of 10 minutes – and this other attendant starts chatting us up– we being two diminutive women dressed in generic urban-casual wear, with nerdy academic glasses, clearly not from around these parts, socioeconomically speaking.

not sure how, but the brain came back

you know, it’s strange. (this is the kind of intro that i usually start my own journal-blog with, but i thought i’d just employ it here. or DE-ploy it. i’m never sure which one of those is more effective.) for the past few weeks, i’ve felt like my brain has been, like, somewhere else, or that there was a large and muscular ball of something  impeding my thought processes, sort of sticking there and blocking shit in highly unholy ways.  i felt like i was on the decline or something, not sure why exactly, because to all outward appearances, everything was the same. sort of abject in a way, though that term is mightily overused

cross-secting the space-time continuum

i went back to new haven this past weekend for the 40th reunion of the yale slavic chorus, about which we’ve posted previously. the women’s table (the name of maya lin’s marble fountain, found in the center of the cross-campus: the fountain which represents co-education, and which becomes the butt of many jokes about symbols of femaleness), materialized in the flesh, thus offering a view of how women develop, how sub-cultures at yale have changed, how types of off-beat women can be mapped on top of each other through the generations.

“Love/ Is like breaking your spine.” -SK

AKA: If ya’ll don’t start posting again I’m going to lose my shit and start using this blog to write to and for myself.

EX: Hey Antonia, you remember those 3 great poets you stumbled upon when you were at the über-hellish Deutsche Sommerschule Am Pazifik 2006, Portland, OR edition? Let me refresh your memory: their names were Sarah Kirsch, Ulla Hahn, and Gottfried Benn. Oh, of course! Anyhoo, I found a few poems that I thought I’d share with you on this cloudy day. PS: You

choose your genre

M’ladies,

Where has the love gone?

For lack of anything better to post, I’m showing off a few of my best essays from college, which coincidentally, are all about women.

Please forgive the many typos; these were all written (not researched)  immediately before the due date– and I disliked (and still do, egoistical moi) proofreading my own work.

PS: Attachments #s 2 and 3 are switched, and I’m too lazy to fix them. Enjoy (/Ignore)! -AD

Attachment #1: AMERICAN POETRY

Attachment #2: INTERNATIONAL FEMINISM

Attachment #3: FEMINISM AND ART

Attachment #4: RUSSIAN LITERATURE

fell down stairs

Sure everyone saw this, but felt it deserved its own link here:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/fashion/19brown.html?em

except… why can’t I make it be a link? arrrggggghhhhhhhh.

ok, but seriously:

“I don’t think he’ll hit her like that again.”??

“she probly ran into a door and was too embarassed so blamed it on chris”???

uhh…

okay, i’m tired, but i had to post this: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/15/fashion/15commune.html?em

for us all.

hi gals. happy new week to you. -kz

“S & M in this trial doesn’t mean sadomasochism. What it really means is Satan and Murder.”

-US Attorney Mike Smythers, United States v. Daniel DePew, 1991

I just read a fascinating and absolutely horrifying true-crime story about no crime at all- a fantasy of a crime that resulted in a thirty year conspiracy sentance. It folds in perfectly with what we’ve been discussing. At times Laura Kipnis applies a cloying and conventional pop psychology gloss to the defendant, but it’s entrancing nonetheless, both in its dramatization and legalization of the fantasy/reality interplay, and as an exposition of the trap set by the FBI to ensnare DePew. Basically, DePew thought he was engaging in foreplay with two undercover cops by spinning out scenarios of kidnapping and murdering a boy for a snuff film, but this erotic act of storytelling (which he was goaded into)– and his effective performance as a ruthless teller of violent tales– is taken as evidence of his “intent”– or his “ability” even– to murder a child. Of course, his between-adults SM sex life was taken as further evidence of his proclivity to “real” violence.

Here is a PDF, should open in Adobe…I think…bound-and-gagged1

-Sophia

fuck chris brown

rihanna made him do it, my ten-year-old tutee said about the beating the pop-singer received from her (ex)boyfriend, chris brown.

wow.

i asked her why she thought so. she told me a number of things—rihanna said nasty things to him…chris brown wouldn’t have done it unless she made him do it…my daddy said so—

while subbing in the detention room the next day, i asked some of the students what they thought about the rihanna/chris brown situation, and the first thing any of the girls said was she got what she deserved. the other girls agreed: she was talking about his mother. the boys didn’t say anything.
does this change the way you feel about chris brown?
no.

where does this blame the victim sentiment come from?

A few more types

Okay, here are some more of my misanthropic musings:

1) Prometheus Unbound – or, The Paradigm Shifter: This guy is sort of similar to The Weakling in that he’s also a petty tyrant, but unlike the coiled rattlesnake of the fascistic Weakling, The Paradigm Shifter has an axe to grind. He’s chosen you because you’re agreeable, but soon he begins to fixate on something about you that he doesn’t like. Maybe it’s your friends, your career choices, or some bit of ideology that has stuck in his craw. Whatever the source, he’ll start trying to ‘improve’ you by ridding you of what he perceives as an imperfection, which to you has been benign or even a source of enjoyment. Don’t let him shift your paradigms! Don’t allow his insidious view of reality to permeate your existence!

2) The Man-Child: This type is a composite of so many things.

Linnaeus on Dating

In light of the amazing, life force-taxing travails and testimonials that we have gone through and observed in recent weeks, I want to propose something that I’ll follow up on in depth very soon (I promise) and that you should all take part in too. I think of this as a cleansing exercise, something that uses rage productively and helps us to laugh about past and present sorrows.

I’ve talked to some of you about this, but my friend Emily and I were compiling a verbal taxonomy of wo/men to never ever tangle with romantically. placing our past bad experiences into static types was both amusing for the superficiality of the categories and truthful in the way that stereotypes can sometimes be – hence, helpful, therapeutic. i was also inspired by an article that Mr. Tom sent me about this really awful man-type, one who is not very handsome but has lots of attractive female friends who he never dates, because he “like(s) you better.” anyhow, he turns out to be horrible, as they all seem to do.

Regarding types that I’ve come up with lately: i really have some attachment to (as in, emotional investment in) the following, as ludicrous as they might be.

…and fuck the fucking world.

Dating Tales of an Enraged Hottie, by E.M.

Part 3: Fuck you, motherfucker…

 

“revisiting your email, i’ve decided

that i am not here if you want to resume things,

nor do i want to be your friend, or see you ever again.

i think you are a repressed, selfish coward in fact. so there’s that.”

-from a recent email to one of two lovers (see Part 1)

who spurned me (this one via the internet), E.M.

This one will be brief. I am in a haze, and have been for the past few weeks. The day that led up to where I am now also involved a botched dominatrix interview, being dumped by the first boy that I felt truly intimate with in about 3 years, and finding a stray kitten in a pile of trash outside my window (who is now Louis, my life-companion for the foreseeable future). It was a strange day. What was also strange was my initial reaction to being dumped. After reading this boy’s email to me, which started out this way: “OKAY. So I started dating someone else, and it’s exclusive. So there’s that”; and ended with something akin to: “I enjoyed the time we spent together. You made me think about a lot of things. DSHFJKDH I’m so confused. We weren’t SERIOUS right???”, I wrote back an email that was entirely apologetic, regretful, and supportive—to the point of utter irrationality and absurdity. I told him that I was glad that he met someone else in his own city (he was in Philly, I was in New York), that I should have done things differently, and that I would be here, waiting…in case he ever wanted to resume things.

all the women, independent, throw yo hands up at me

despite having read or viewed countless pre-women’s lib narratives demonstrative of the contrary, i long maintained the notion that personalities of women of yore were repressed/suppressed/oppressed so that the female functioned as a demure, perhaps ornamented, breathing, houseware. or, she was a prostitute. or, a witch.

i watched and listened to la rondine at the met the other night. the opera revolves around magda, a wealthy man’s mistress, who leaves him to realize her dream of luv with a bushy-tailed young man, new to paris. they build their ‘love-nest’; wrack up debts; sing some love songs. he proposes to her. after hearing both that old man wants her back, and also that young lover’s mother rejoices at the idea of her son’s marrying a ‘gentle, virtuous, and innocent bride’, paulette (nee madga!) leaves him, in order ‘not to destroy’ him.

ugh: brainfog setting in

So hello all,

Do you guys feel very “February” right now, or are we just entering the February of our lives? That’s what I keep asking myself and everyone I meet. I think that I’m finally beginning to transcend my tendency to be hysterical about life and its myriad challenges, but now that I’m giving up all of my struggles in favor of some sort of peace of mind, I’ve been feeling like a flaccid fillet of fish. Maybe this is February feeling setting in.

It’s like when the snow temporarily melts, and you can see decomposing grass and rusticating metal and lots of semi-preserved objects that people had thrown into it, thinking stupidly that it would hide those things forever. the other day, walking past my house, i saw unearthed what can only be described as a “family” of condoms, unwrapped, mixed with dirty salt and a swirl of disgusting crusted detritus. this is the end of the scorched-earth campaign – the finale morale-sucking gauntlet, which you sort of have to run without thinking about your surroundings.

Also, little snippets of things about femininity have been bobbing to the (admittedly hazy) surface of my mind lately, like half-torn magazine clippings.

to all the ladies

Mysteries of voices and penguins

Here is a video of The Mystery of the Bulgarian Voice that Cass wrote so well about:

And the classic deranged penguin scene from Encounters at the End of the World:

Happy February!

Sophia

on ethics, structure, and the Virtual, or: please imagine me shooting lasers out of my eyes

Well, i don’t know about you guys, but i am sort of getting the sense of time passing, snow amassing and melting, and our thoughts accumulating here in productive ways. as much as we’ve spoken spontaneously and honestly, i think that there are narrative threads and trajectories here, fiddleheads unfurling…call me a structuralist. so i felt that it might be a good or productive idea to devise some thought experiments and throw them out from time to time.

but i hope, actually, that it won’t just be thought experiments, because i tend to hate it when people spin in little circles or make creative tautologies that wind back into themselves, so that you find yourself in a small room with like-minded folk, and it never gets larger than that. i remember coming to college and thinking, “wow, i’m excited to be here with smart people,” but soon enough i realized that intelligence wasn’t enough and, in fact, could actually be as harmful and caustic as some sort of chemically refined cleansing agent: plastered on, eating away at its owner for his/her lack of responsibility with his/her brain.

tricia rose!

Check out my favorite prof’s words of wisdom in the new ‘bitch’ magazine. She rules.

+ there is an awesome article about Jane Eyre, one of the best books ever in my opinion. I plan to read it again soon, after I overdose on female YA novels  (Twilight and The Song of the Lioness* anyone?).

-Antonia

*”I don’t want to fall in love. I just want to be a warrior maiden!”

svatba

i saw herzog’s encounters at the end of the world the other night, and was moved.

while watching a sequence of shots in the depths of the antarctic waters beneath a thick surface of ice, i teared up. among the images captured were both undulant and jagged ice formations, sea creatures, plays of light. a bulgarian song, planino stara planino mari, was sung in the background by the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir, known more commonly as the Mystery Girls after they produced the album, Les Mystere des Voix Bulgares only a few years after i was born. a single voice began the song with an extended, melodic wail that makes me think of dido; after a few minutes of solo chest singing, a deep alto drone and a more complicated middle layer, each many-voiced, joined her. the effect lies somewhere between early polyphonic church music and a modernist string adagio.

as i listened, i heard the chorus cry, “svatba, svaaaatba” and realized, shit. this song is about marriage.

sleeplessness, killjoys, anarchy

this blog has excited me so much over the past few weeks. to the extent that i find myself bringing it up in conversations (with those who might or might not care), composing posts in my head on the cta, and putting off actually participating. i have a lot of performance anxiety with most things, and writing has always triggered it. one of the great things about this blog is the easy forum it presents, a space for casually expressed, off-the-cuff, smart ideas. like conversation with good people. i like the variety of style – from academic-on-a-coffee-break to diary – but a blank page, i’m finding, is still a blank page. fuck it.

i’ve been most fired up by a.n.’s points in the joy machine post. hipster malaise. post-post-ironic whateverness. her suggestion that this derives from a kind of anti-joy nihilism rings true to my experience and half-articulated theories.

i didn’t encounter hip people until i got to new york in 2000. 

rudderless desire, rudderless morality! Sounds like we’ve achieved equilibrium here

Hello A & A,

 

First off, I had totally forgotten about that Lush song. Thanks! It reminded me of Elastica, old Blur, old Liz Phair, and even that Breeders song, “Cannonball.” As a rule, I need very little prompting to undergo a complete tailspin into 90s nostalgia. Don’t even get me started on the Toadies and their killing rage! “Behind the boathouse…”

 

I must say that I enjoyed both of your posts for the ways that, in honest and straightforward language, they present grievances that have nagged almost everyone chancing to wade through the morally dubious world of subcultures, trends, fashion, ideological production, consumer desire-pruning, so-called ‘creativity’ – in other words, through the post-Nietzschean (for lack of a better term – postmodern would do, I suppose) world itself. As anyone who’s dipped even briefly into Nietzsche (or those stoner-oriented books that synopsize Nietzsche, or the entire industry of Nietzschean memorabilia) might recognize, Nietzsche has that famous ‘god is dead’ line, in which we, at sea, must carve out our own interpretations and applications of ethics ‘beyond good and evil’ because we’ve thrown out religion and, with it, a very nice way to understand the world, actually (say the evangelicals, slapping our hands with their rulers. Except for Ted Haggard, that is). This leaves many afloat, trying to make morally-synched bedfellows while invariably pissing off others. But let me just take my reductionist sickle and carve the past conversation (enfolding Sophia’s and Cassie’s as well, because you guys also hit on issues of relationships, love/lack thereof, ethics in friendship, and the problem of knowing other minds) into some terms: Politics, Ethics, Love, Sex, and Friendship/Affinity. Now I know that friendship and affinity aren’t the same thing, but bear with me, people.

on the apparent rudderlessness of female arousal

What Do Women Want? NY Times Article

conflict -> bifurcated analysis -> same ole conflict

reminds me of something a said to me, early in college: some women just want to be thrown against a wall and fucked. i also feel like this article says little more than what we discuss in our kitchen, but it’s a good beginning for conversation.

c

also: on authority

I think it’s interesting that no one’s overtly claiming authority for their posts. It’s sort of a game of having to figure out who people are solely through the timbre and tone of their writing. Sophia, I must say that your voice is pretty clear and identifiable. And that’s a good thing, I think.

Some pants designed by Eldridge Cleaver while exiled in Paris. Note the penis pouch. Submitted to you in honor of love and eroticism!

that’s not snow, it’s elvis’s dandruff!

i’ve been wondering why the winter hasn’t been upsetting me so much this year, as it didn’t last, but had every year before. i used to understand winter melancholy as an internal reflection of the seemingly dead vegetation and of the hostility of the weather—but my self-diagnosed SAD seems presently inept. i’ve been enjoying the season, that my fingers ache as i type this in my cold cold room, that my nose is alternately leaky and crusty.

i’m looking for the symbolism, and find comfort in the suggestion of the cycle, as i feel when my period comes, or when i see a new moon. now i think of hibernation, of storing up to shut down: rather than death, i perceive dormancy around me, and the potential, the urge, to dream.

artist statement

firstly, let me say how extremely psyched i am about this blog!

secondly, i am posting the artist statement i recently sent off to hunter.  it’s the first one i’ve written in a couple of years.  it appears here in a somewhat truncated version…

My work stems from my interest and belief in erotic art, feminism, and the female grotesque.  Erotic Art is a strange thing.  Its history of investment in the liberating forces of transgression and sexuality lend it powerful potential, but its more contemporary connection to pornography and the airbrushed idealization of the human body seem to drain that potential away, making it little more than an embarrassing example of kitsch.  A visual language of the female grotesque has the potential to purge the element of kitsch from erotic art.  Erotic art presents the body in an idealized form; an eros of the grotesque returns erotic art to the condition of reality.