Why, you ask, is a bleeding-heart pinko radical like me going public about this?

Because the changes he's talking about are not the only changes we need for this country, clearly. And because even the changes he is talking about are not going to be handed down by the president, obviously. We know the revolution will not be televised from the Rose Garden. I'm voting for Obama because, in addition to being the candidate with by far the strongest liberal background, he's the only presidential candidate* in my lifetime, perhaps the only one in U.S. history, who acknowledges and embraces the limitations of his position. His rhetoric is mostly rhetoric and he'll tell you that. He'll tell you that one of his main duties is to say what everyone in the U.S. is thinking and then tell us that solving these problems is our collective, democratic responsibility. This is not news to those of us left out, cast out or walking out of the American Imperialist Dream. What is new is a Democratic presidential candidate who knows we don't expect him to save us and is actively looking forward to seeing the fight go on.

The man values and practices actual conversation. Sure, he's going to make all kinds of "nuanced" or "strategic" decisions backed up by political euphemisms and a cabinet of advisers, all of whom are only slightly left of the middle. Some of these bills are going to suck and many of them are going to fall far short of radicalizing the nation. On policy I see him breaking even and not just compared to the Bush disaster he's walking into. We'll do no worse with him than anyone, plus or minus a horrendous double-term preceding him. What he will most certainly do better than any other candidate I've seen, and better than any other elected official will ever be in a position to do, is start a national conversation about justice. He will pave the way in soundbites -- soundbites but important soundbites nonetheless -- for the people doing the actual work: grassroots radicals. And I think he'll favor us, even if he doesn't dare show it on television. Which in my book makes him an all right guy doing decent stuff with a pretty meaningless job. And I'm okay with that.


*Don't gimme no lines about Ron Paul. His desire to make government smaller is a convenient disguise for his desire to neglect every person and class who continue to be ignored by the American government.

Do I really. Have to explain to you. Why rape isn't fucking funny.

And by "explain" I mean explain again, to yet another man standing behind his right to FOS, by which I mean freedom to make rape jokes, like making fun of sexual violence and survivors is his basic human right, one he needs to defend from teh humorless feministz... by which I mean me... not laughing... at survivors, who are the real butt of his precious "jokes."

Because rape is rape. It is not funny; it is rape.

That is all. Good night.

To the Earth’s core Antarctica must seem such a hard beauty. A house of wind that carves and polishes mountains; a continent of answers stored in ice. Ice that would never recognize the oceans it preserves, ice that melts as it buries itself, water and minerals turning upside down in stratas silently ignoring gravity, silently ignoring North.
 
To us Antarctica mostly means death. Death, and more questions. A person can go blind there from too much light, too many dry mirages on a relentless horizon. It is the largest place, the furthest away, with the harshest weather whipping the least amount of water – and life – in the world.

Antarctica is the palm of God that does not know that we exist.

Moral of the story? No more anonymous comments. The end.

Next week on tupelo_lights:

An open letter to everyone's new favorite feminist-shushing asshole, The Preachy Buddhist!

Special features to include:

- They don't have to identify themselves when they invade your journal because they've transcended identity!
- Did you know that pacifism is, like, ancient? And better than you are? Ditto Buddhism.
- You see, anger is bad for you and your goals because...
- Violence is in your mind, man!

Plus all the ways I remind them of their *feisty* feminist ex-lovers!

The "Open Source Boob Project" is the last fucking straw. I won't waste anyone's time on links to this crap; you're on the internet, Google it if you haven't heard about it yet.

Here it is, long overdue, my open letter to everybody's favorite class of asshole:



In short:

To all you geeks and gamers who slip so neat and slimy through the cracks every time you fuck up someone's day: get off your privileged asses, slap some bandaids on those insults you got as a teenager and start carrying your own fucking weight in the world.

Conversations about our installations produce the most baffled looks on the faces of innocent bystanders.


"So Rumi, with the third window... wait, you do know that it talks, don't you?"

"My show is basically one giant refrigerator magnet."

"I'm going to make a New Mexican Dia de Los Muertos shrine to the Manhattan Project!"

"At this point I can entertain a whole dinner party with egg trivia. Do you want to see me blow an egg?"

"I hung part of Antarctica from the ceiling today. This is going to be way easier than I thought."
"How long is Antarctica now?"
"Fifty-five feet."

"The giraffe is watching the frog who's watching the strippers."
"Nice bra straps, by the way."
"Thank you!"

I have a title for the show and a pretty good idea of how to hang Antarctica from the ceiling. I did the math yesterday and I've filled the rest of the gallery.


I should just ring that goddamn bell now.

Jonothan Kozol's Shame of The Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America was hands down the best book I read in 2007. Here is a link to an article adapted from the book.

One of the most poignant parts for me was on the attitudes of wealthy parents in New York City regarding the problem of impoverished schools in various boroughs.

This makes me think about a passage from Chief Justice Warren's ruling in Brown vs. Board of Education. He said, in so many words, that even when the "tangible" aspects of segregated schools were equal, segregation was inherently unequal because it will have a damaging effect on the hearts and minds of the children of color who are subjected to it. He said that it will instill in them a sense of inferiority. He did not mention that segregated schools would also instill an understanding of superiority in white children. I'm working on some prints right now trying to address these half-truths that seem to be everywhere, the willingness of a person with privilege to acknowledge that another group might be at a disadvantage but refuse to admit that this means they are at an advantage.

Excuse me, but the Earth doesn't get raped, farm animals aren't slaves and Baudelaire was most certainly not a prostitute.


Sweet Jesus, what will they think of next.



EDIT: The author also just compared the reconstruction of Paris to include boulevards that divided rich from poor with "the various opportunistic infections that beset a patient and in doing so signal the syndrome of AIDS" and it kinda made my eyeballs hurt. He then says that class warfare is the fence that divides history's eternal winners from its losers and I then stop being able to pay attention.

In other news, Jack refers to my thesis as my "mach 5 or whatever."

This cartoon is my daily life. Except I'm far more anxious.

Everything you ever wanted to know about race and class but were too deceived to ask.

[Link now active]

The day has finally come when I have to ask this question.

Back story:
I have been wearing the same pair of military issue combat boots since the fall of 1999. They've served me very well especially considering that I've worn them pretty much daily for 9 months out of the past 7 years (excepting Pittsburgh when I wore sneakers for work.) I've worn them at least once to every job I've ever had and to two proms. I tore the shit out of my feet for two weeks breaking them in and now, as Garth said so cheesily in the movie: they're almost a part of me. Most days I identify with my boots more than my goddamn gender.

Now the leather is tearing where the shoelace-hook piece meets the body of the shoe towards the inside of my foot. The hole is about an inch long as of this morning and will only worsen by the end of this week. I have a few options and one dilemma.


I feel doubly conflicted. What should I do, and should I even be worrying about this? As LiveJournal won't let me host polls without paying them or putting ads all over my shit, please weigh in with a comment. It's snowing and my feet are going to start getting wet.

      Yesterday my friend and I were talking personally about men's violence against women. Date rape, abusive boyfriends, men who have stalked us, etc. I asked in frustration: "What is going through these men's heads, when a woman tells them never to call her again and then they just go right on calling her?"
    My male housemate felt compelled to shout from his bedroom: "Hey! Be fair! Girls totally do that, too!" referring to girls who call their ex-boyfriends after being asked not to.
    I informed him that we were talking about a unique power men hold over women in romantic relationships and that stalking their ex-girlfriends is an expression of that power. I should really have said that in a discussion about men's violence against women "being fair to men" by ignoring gendered power dynamics was not even on our list of priorities. Or possibly just that he should shove off.



So this thought articulated itself today: That women understand [male] power in a way men can never understand [female] subordination.

My brother today, on the subject of homo-erotic bonding among straight men:

"Well, you know I'm very comfortable. In fact, I'm so comfortable, I probably make my friends uncomfortable. But it's not that I'm a homosexual. I just love winning. I will jerk a guy off before I will lose a game of Gay Chicken."

We're reading a novel called A Rebours for my class on symbolists and decedents. A Rebours translates roughly as going "against the grain," or "against the flow" and the novel is considered the breviary for decadents. It is particularly remarkable for the fact that it is "about nothing." There is but one character and the closest thing to a plot is the fact that he is insufferable; the only thing that makes the work remotely tolerable is that the author treats him with a great deal of dry humor and subtle mockery.

It is the story of the aristocrat, connoisseur, and eccentric Des Essaintes who locks himself away from all human companionship and society in order to enjoy the few works of art, literature, music, and perfume in which he can find any hint of joy, poor and tortured man that he is. The novel is composed mostly of long, detailed passages on what he hates about everything in neat categories. An example, regarding works in the Latin language:

    It is only fair to add that, if his admiration for Virgil was anything but excessive and his enthusiasm for Ovid's limpid effusions exceptionally discreet, the disgust he felt for the elephantine Horace's vulgar twaddle, for the stupid patter he keeps up as he simpers at his audience like a painted clown, was absolutely limitless.

    In prose, he was no more enamored of the long-winded style, the redundant metaphors and the rambling digressions of old Chick-Pea, the bombast of his apostrophes, the wordiness of his patriotic perorations, the pomposity of his harangues, the heaviness of his style, well fed and well covered, but weak-boned and running to fat, the intolerable insignificance of his long introductory adverbs.... and so on.

The only story-like events are short, irrelevant and annoying. At one point the novel breaks from Des Essaintes' ruminations when he decides that the perfect thing to accent the rich Persian rug in his study is a tortoise who will walk about on it, bringing out the light colors by virtue of its dark shell. (This takes more than a page to explain.) That fails to satisfy him (another paragraph), so Des Essaintes has its shell treated with gold plating encrusted with extremely specific gemstones (two pages.) Then he goes on for several pages composing symphonies for himself using the flavors of a variety of liquors as "notes" and "instruments." As soon as he notices the tortoise again, it promptly dies. (One paragraph, ending the chapter.)

The guy is what happens when an over-bred weirdo with too much time on his hands confuses himself with a nihilist, emotive dildo... and then goes on about himself for two hundred pages. It could almost inspire an over-confident second novel, written by me, explaining in as much detail and flowery language how much I hate sitting around reading about him. Just thank God I have no such time on my hands.

I arrive at Hampshire at 3:30 in the morning. I've driven 1,100 miles in seventeen hours, chainsmoking on top of a chest cold. Before I can sleep I have to arrange for a parking permit, carry my beer and wine across campus... and immediately start thinking about the giant mess that is my new apartment.

There are rotten tomatoes in the onion basket, assorted cardboard boxes blocking the heaters, dishes in the sink and on every surface, trash accumulating in paper bags under the counter, recycling overflowing in front of the back door, and a stalk of celery growing in a glass on a shelf. (I am later told that my housemate is "just keeping it fresh until he feels like eating it.") The bathroom is almost too disgusting to even bother trying to get clean in and the whole place carries the slightly sour smell that always lingers around Hampshire students who brew a lot of home-dried herbal teas and cook too much stir-fry.

I get up around ten o'clock and discuss the State of Things with Will, one of my new housemates. I am somewhat reassured when he says "I'm sorry about the mess, this is really uncharacteristic, the rest of us should clean later tonight...." That is, until I realize there is no toilet brush in the bathroom, nor anywhere to be found. It is especially disconcerting when I'm told that the guy I replaced was anal retentive about cleanliness; he didn't even allow cloth kitchen towels for fear of germs. This means that they're sick and tired of "overly clean" people and that the thick layer of soap, toothpaste and hair all over the bathroom must have appeared in just the last two weeks since the old housemate moved away.

Confusing me again, the next day Will volunteers to sweep and mop the floors. This is, at least to people like me, a normal enough suggestion when said floors are hosting little dance parties for garlic skins and dust bunnies. Then things get weird. First Will insists on boiling the water first with the reasoning that "if we're not just gonna Swifter the place, we should do it right." A "Swifter," I then discover, is a completely useless household aid that has all the maneuverability of a high-end automobile and all the floor-cleaning efficiency of a ten dollar bill. Will sticks with his idea to boil the water even after I point out that the first time he rinses the mop the water will be filled with germs, and that if his purpose is to have hot water, well, that's what modern plumbing is for. Halfway through he asks me how he's doing, confessing that he's never mopped floors before. I ask him rudely (if it is, in fact, rude and not just incredibly reasonable to ask such a question) how he made it to adulthood without mopping a floor. His explanation of his parents' house makes it sound as though they walked on packed dirt. I guess that's supposed to explain... something.

I'm not sure what bothers me more, though: cheerful but strangely executed chores or sheer amazement that chores exist. When Gina gets home she seems to think it is some kind of miracle that the bath mat, which could have shaken out a pound of dirt, has disappeared into the laundry and that I have set about scouring the shower, which had somehow accumulated more dust than mold. (I can only assume it all came up from the bath mat.)

Every couple of hours, one of these people proves themselves to be blissfully resistant to logic and common sense. Rumi's girlfriend, for instance, when making up a packet of powdered Lipton's soup, asks aloud: "When it calls for 3/4 of a cup of boiling water, do you measure out exactly 3/4 of a cup... or do you measure out more because some of it will evaporate?" We tell her, in so many words, not to worry about it. Lipton's soup is, after all, one of the more approximate phenomena in life. She then proceeds to boil several cups of water in a large stew pot (this after being offered a small tea kettle) and then leaves the pot with an inch of water in it on the stove all evening.

So we'll see. At least there are only four of us, one of whom is rarely here... and one of whom cherishes the idea that a man can have a single bowl of his very own, out of which he eats and drinks everything.  

The speakers in my computer (a Power Book G4 from 2004) appear to be broken. The computer played music just fine through a tape adapter yesterday but won't make any sound on its own today. The only thing that happens is an occasional hissing/scratching noise when I fuss with the power cable.


...Anybody?

My mom and Mick are moving to a new house in Jefferson, WI. In the coming weeks they'll need some help getting large furniture and boxes into and out of a moving van. There is also a gigantic slab of marble in the new basement, one inch thick and about 3.5 feet wide by 8 feet long (it basically looks like the lid to a sarcophagus.) We'll need a crew of big, strong people to help get it up the stairs and onto a truck bed. In the words of my mother, "afterwards you will all be fed and plied with alcohol." So if you're in the Madison area and want to help please get in touch.

Can someone in this town help me get Word back onto my computer? When I transferred all my backed up data from a friend's computer it decided not to come along. I have Mac OSX 10.4 "Tiger" or whatever the hell they're calling it these days.

(And yes, I know about Open Office, yes I've installed it and yes, I will shoot my computer in the face if I ever have to use that program ever again.)

Thanks much.