projects on the agenda

in no apparent order (though they should be in some apparent order):

1) article about the photography of greg s.

2) stories about people i know: D.G., P.S., L.W., R.M.D., R.R., etc.

3) Pan-American Institute research project and book distribution to rural Panamanian libraries

4) article about West Indian Panamanians hosting famous black performers and orators in Panama throughout the twentieth century

5) Research for oral history project based out of Vanderbilt U.

6) going to the National Archives and quilting myself in sheathes of paper

dreams - weird snippets of the hither and yon

so, lately i've been having dreams that feature things like parts of words, sounds, or movements. for the past week or two, i was hearing someone sing the words "LIVING ROOM" really loudly in my sleep. it was a male voice, i recall, with a bombastic air that i imagined might be accompanied by the twirling of waxen mustaches. which reminds me of the spanish word for mustache: bigote. what a great word (though not as great as remolacha).

finally i solved that puzzle - it was serge gainsbourg, of course, singing his song about the living room and "le smoking." i believe that that song is called "intoxicated man." great song that is. i should mention that in order to solve the puzzle i had to keep repeating the words to myself under my breath, as if that would help jog my memory. sincerest apologies to those who passed me by and were taken somewhat aback by the spectre of a lady muttering "living room!" to herself under her breath!

and then i started dreaming about a woman moving her neck gracefully like a swan's - sort of nodding and tucking it under herself. for some reason, i was associating this gesture with someone of the Continent. like the europe of the fin de siecle, before the trenches, you know.

Also, i did dream of a guttural phoneme, switched off mid-stream like a light -- but can't remember it. ah well.

and i've been dreaming about my ninety-year-old grandmother lately, but in these dreams she's lithe and vivacious despite her superannuated state.

military and civilian

okay, so here are some things that i got interested in while in DC:

1) military operation names, as referenced on wikipedia. these are so inventive, and the whole phenomenon of naming intrigues me. some of the best ones:

-Operation:
-Eager Glacier
-Lucky Alphonse
-Acid Gambit
-Bushmaster
-Mongoose
-Urgent Fury
-Overload
-Klipklop
-Alpha Tango Walrus
-Morris Dance
-Babylift

etc.


2) weird naval rites on equator-crossing, as referenced in wikipedia: this was something that i stumbled upon while searching for panama stuff in the national archives - apparently, the navy still has these rituals involving king neptune and pollywogs and the like. read on:

Line-crossing ceremony

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For other uses, see Crossing the Line.

U.S. Sailors and Marines participate in a crossing the line ceremony aboard USS Blue Ridge (LCC 19) as the ship passes the equator May 16, 2008. It has been a long naval tradition to initiate pollywogs, Sailors who have never crossed the Equator, into the Kingdom of Neptune, the legendary god of the seas, upon their first crossing of the Equator.

The ceremony of Crossing the Line is an initiation rite in the Royal Navy, U.S. Navy, U.S. Coast Guard, and other navies which commemorates a sailor's first crossing of the equator. Originally the tradition was created as a test for seasoned sailors to ensure their new shipmates were capable of handling long rough times at sea. Sailors who have already crossed the equator are nicknamed (Trusty) Shellbacks, often referred to as Sons of Neptune; those who have not are nicknamed (Slimy) Pollywogs.

The two-day event (evening and day) is a ritual of reversal in which the older and experienced enlisted crew essentially takes over the ship from the officers. Physical assaults in keeping with the 'spirit' of the initiation are tolerated, and even the inexperienced crew is given the opportunity to 'take over'.^{[citation needed]} The transition flows from established order to the controlled 'chaos' of the Pollywog Revolt, the beginnings of re-order in the initiation rite as the fewer but experienced enlisted crew converts the 'Wogs' through physical tests, then back to, and thereby affirming, the pre-established order of officers and enlisted. Like the old physically- and emotionally-intensive boot camp, the "Crossing the Line" ritual deconstructs then reconstructs the initiates' experience from newbie outsider into the experienced military fraternity.

The eve of the equatorial crossing is called Wog Up-Rising and, as with many other night-before rituals, is a mild type of reversal of the day to come. 'Wogs' - all of the uninitiated - are allowed to capture and 'interrogate' any shellbacks they can find (eg, tying them up, cracking eggs or pouring aftershave lotion on their heads).^{[citation needed]}

Polish line crossing ceremony (Chrzest równikowy)

After crossing the line, Pollywogs receive subpoenas ^[1] to appear before King Neptune and his court (usually including his first assistant Davy Jones and her Highness Amphitrite and often various dignitaries, who are all represented by the highest ranking seamen), who officiate at the ceremony, which is often preceded by a Beauty Contest of men dressing up as women, each department of the ship being required to introduce one contestant in swimsuit drag. Afterwards, some wogs may be "interrogated" by King Nepture and his entourage, and the use of 'truth serum' (hot sauce + after shave + ?) and whole uncooked eggs put in the mouth. During the ceremony, the Pollywogs undergo a number of increasingly disgusting ordeals (wearing clothing inside out and backwards; crawling on hands and knees on nonskid-coated decks; being swatted with short lengths of firehose; being locked in stocks and pillories and pelted with mushy fruit; being locked in a water coffin of salt-water and bright green sea dye (fluorescent sodium salt); crawling through chutes or large tubs of rotting garbage; kissing the Royal Baby's belly coated with axle grease, hair chopping, etc), largely for the entertainment of the Shellbacks.^{[citation needed]}

Once the ceremony is complete, a Pollywog receives a certificate ^[2] declaring his new status. Another rare status is the Golden shellback, a person who has crossed the equator at the 180th meridian (international date line). When a ship must cross these lines, the ship's captain will usually intentionally plot a course across the Golden X so that the ship's crew can be initiated into the Golden Shellbacks.

The rarest Shellback status is that of the Emerald Shellback, or Royal Diamond Shellback, which is received after crossing the equator at the prime meridian.

A watered-down version of the ceremony, typically featuring King Neptune, is also sometimes carried out for passengers' entertainment on civilian ocean liners and cruise ships.

Contents [hide] 1 Controversy 2 Equatorial Baptism 3 Honors 4 See also 5 References 6 External links

[edit] Controversy

In the 19th century and earlier, the line-crossing ceremony was quite a brutal event, often involving beating "pollywogs" with boards and wet ropes and sometimes throwing the victims over the side of the ship, dragging the pollywog in the surf from the stern. In more than one instance, sailors were reported to have been killed while participating in a crossing the line ceremony.^{[citation needed]}

As late as World War II, the line crossing ceremony was still rather rough and involved activities such as the "Devil's Tongue" which would be an electrified piece of metal poked into the sides of those deemed pollywogs. Beatings were often still common, usually with wet firehoses, and several World War II Navy deck logs speak of sailors visiting sickbay after crossing the line.^{[citation needed]}

Efforts to curtail the line crossing ceremony did not begin until the 1980s, when several reports of blatant hazing began to circulate regarding the line crossing ceremony and at least one death was attributed to abuse while crossing the line.

California Maritime Academy observed the line-crossing until 1989, after which the ceremony was deemed to be hazing, and was forbidden. The '89 crossing was fairly typical, as it was not realized to be the last one. Pollywogs participated voluntarily, though women midshipmen justifiably observed that they were under social pressure to do the ceremony but were targets of harder abuse.^{[citation needed]} Pollywogs (midshipmen and anyone else who had not crossed) ascended a ladder from the foredeck to the superstructure deck of the ship. There, they crawled down a gauntlet of shellbacks on both sides of a long, heavy canvas runner, about 10 - 12 meters. The shellbacks had prepared 1 meter lengths of canvas/rubber firehose, which they swung hard at the posterior of each pollywog. Pollywogs then ascended a ladder to the boatdeck to slide down a makeshift chute into the baptism of messdeck leavings in sea water in an inflated liferaft back on the superstructure deck. Pollywogs then returned to the foredeck where they were hosed off by firehose and then allowed to kiss, in turn, the belly of the sea-baby, the foot of the sea-hag, and the ring of King Neptune, each personified by shellbacks.

In 1995, a notorious line crossing ceremony took place on an Australian submarine HMAS Onslow. Sailors undergoing the ceremony were physically and verbally abused before being subjected to an act called "sump on the rump", where a dark liquid was daubed over each sailor's anus and genitalia. One sailor was then sexually assaulted with a long stick before all sailors undergoing the ceremony were forced to jump overboard until permitted to climb back aboard the submarine. A videotape of the ceremony was obtained by the Nine Network and aired on Australian television. The television coverage provoked widespread criticism, especially when the videotape showed some of the submarine's officers watching the entire proceedings from the conning tower.^[3][4]

Most navies have, since then, instituted regulations which prohibit physical attacks on sailors undergoing the crossing the line ceremony. In modern times, rather than a dreaded rite of initiation, the line crossing ceremony has become a popular tradition in the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Coast Guard. In the PBS documentary Carrier filmed in 2005 (Episode 7 - "Rites of Passage"), a crossing-the-line ceremony on the USS Nimitz is extensively documented. The ceremony is carefully orchestrated by the ship's officers, with some enthusiastic sailors chafing at the degree to which "harassment" is disallowed.

Line crossing ceremonies are also carried out on many U.S. merchant ships. However, without the oversight of military justice, they can often get out of hand and lead to the abuse and assault which occurred in line crossing ceremonies of the past.

[edit] Equatorial Baptism

Baptism on the line, also called equatorial baptism, is an initiation ritual sometimes performed as a ship crosses the equator, involving water baptism of passengers or crew who have never crossed the equator before. The ceremony is sometimes explained as being an initiation into the court of King Neptune.

The ritual is the subject of a painting by Matthew Benedict named The Mariner's Baptism, and of a 1961 book by Henning Henningsen named Crossing the Equator: Sailor's Baptism and other Initiation Rites.^[5]

[edit] Honors

A popular patch has also been created for shellbacks, that depicts Neptune battling a sea serpent with his trident.

This is the text from a certificate issued on a Royal Navy ship during the Second World War:

A Proclamation

Whereas by our Royal Consension, Our Trusty, Well Beloved .................... has this day entered Our Domain. We do hereby declare to all whom it may concern that it is Our Royal Will and Pleasure to confer upon him the Freedom of the Seas without undue ceremony. Should he fall overboard, We do command that all Sharks, Dolphins, Whales, Mermaids and other dwellers in the Deep are to abstain from maltreating his person. And we further direct all Sailors, Soldiers, Airmen and others who have not crossed Our Royal Domain, to treat him with the respect due to One of Us. Given under Our Hand at Our Court on board H.M.S. .............. on the Equator in Longitude .....° on this ..... day of ..... in the year .....
(Signed)
Cancer — High Clerk
Neptune — Rex

This is the text from a certificate issued on a United States Navy ship during the 1960s:

Know ye, that .................... on the ..... day of ..... , aboard .............. appeared at the equator at Latitude .....° , Longitude .....° entering into Our Royal Domain, and having been inspected and found worthy by My Royal Staff and was initiated into the Solemn Mysteries of the Ancient Order of the Deep. I command my subjects to Honor and Respect him as one of our Trusty Shellbacks.

(Signed)
Davey Jones — His Royal Scribe
Neptunus Rex — Ruler of the Raging Main

The USS Franklin D. Roosevelt (CVA-42), under way to Rio De Janeiro, crossed the line on 4 July 1966, and its crew became known as "Star Spangled Shellbacks;" however, no previous mention of such honor has to date been located.

Similar "fraternities" in the navy include:

• The Order of the Blue Nose for sailors who have crossed the Arctic Circle.
• The Order of the Polar Bear for U.S. sailors who have crossed the Arctic Circle.
• The Order of the Red Nose for sailors who have crossed the Antarctic Circle.
• The Order of the Golden Dragon for sailors who have crossed the International Date Line.
• The Order of the Ditch for sailors who have passed through the Panama Canal.
• The Order of the Rock for sailors who have transited the Strait of Gibraltar.
• The Safari to Suez for sailors who have passed through the Suez Canal.
• The Emerald Shellback or Royal Diamond Shellback for sailors who cross at 0 0 degrees off the coast of West Africa (where the equator crosses the Prime Meridian)
• The Realm of the Czars for sailors who crossed into the Black Sea.
• The Order of Magellan for sailors who circumnavigated the Earth.

[edit] See also

• Ducking and shaving

[edit] References

1. ^ Ceremonial Certificates - Neptune Subpoena
2. ^ Ceremonial Certificates - Golden Shellback Certificate - Personalized
3. ^ http://www.aamh.asn.au/news/0076.pdf
4. ^ Navy submarine hot bunking
5. ^ Matthew Benedict - Crossing the Line

[edit] External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Chrzest równikowy

• Brief description of equatorial baptism
• Some accounts of baptism on the line:

• [1] - The Anti-Vacation
• [2] - Pust-Norden
• [3] - Greenpeace

• Line-crossing Ceremony: Homophobic or Homoerotic?
• Matthew Benedict's painting
• WW2DB: Line Crossing Ceremony
• Video of 1957 Coast Guard crossing ritual

so incredibly much to recount it ain't even funny

hey blog - once again, the negligent "Terrible Mother" returns to claim her own! so it's been forever, but i've been fairly busy and have actually produced quite a lot. yesterday i stayed in the LOC for hours focusing on this one very measured, finite task that i had to do, and while i couldn't find the event that i was looking for in miles of microfilm footage (eyes scrolling through it all until i became quite queasy and looked down and realized that i was exuding this sort of vegetable-soup smell, not a good thing for matin' - or maybe that was my vegetable-based pheromone cocktail at work, who knows), i churned out an essay that was, i think, pretty good at about 2 am today. everyhing sort of fell into place with it, because the topic was well-known, the essay had already been half-written in the first place, and the evidence was there. and i realized that working hard can be so satisfying when there are these finite, road-marker sort of goals lining the path. in the lack of the short-term agenda, academia seems like a lifetime of sisyphean sloughing through endless piles of paper as heavy as midwestern snow, which then proceed to pile up again, confounding the slough-er. so i think that in future i'm going to start sitting down, sorting, reflecting, and weighing more than consuming linear feet of information as if i was a tape recorder with a tapeworm.

now a word about the library. lately i've been walking there, as usual, and noticing the little metal cards attached to the foliage planted around it - heavy metal panicum and common box, not to mention a yellowwood that is apparently part of the legume family. then i enter the place, this time not the manuscript reading room, where the steel-cut bob lady rules all with her withering gaze and non-indelible sceptre, but the newspaper and periodical room, which is like the laid-back hippie counterpart to the manuscript room.

and well it should be, because for the most part these documents are preserved, so that you can touch them with greasy fingers and not worry about destroying irretrievable evidence. no, the newspaper room is not fastidious, and in fact the opposite: it's run by a cadre of eccentrics, including several who i initially thought were homeless people, and in fact they might be. it's an open secret that the newspaper room is a good place for homeless people to hang out during the day, to pee and check their email, and the aisles are full of limping, shapeless forms with dreadlocks and absent gazes. this, i feel, is right - clearly the library needs inhabitants, and they're enjoying it more than anyone else in This Great Nation.

then there are the researchers, another type of lost person, who stumble around with unkempt hair and baggy, ill-fitting clothes, but have the look of mania rather than defeat. they always request microfilm adamantly and scroll through it like housewives at a casino, sitting at the machines, pressing buttons, scribbling furiously in their rumpled notebooks as the lines squeal past. although the machines do produce a sort of screaming sound as the plastic whips through the reels, the screaming can be sort of soothing, if modulated correctly. or it can be maddening, as it was yesterday, when the man adjacent to me (a soft-spoken elderly person looking for kentucky newspapers, i heard him whisper to the librarian) kept jamming his finger on the button, jerking the film around, and producing the sorts of squeaks and belches that, i imagine, he also did. that was driving me crazy, i'll admit. but by then i'd been sitting at the machines too long and had become a raw nerve, the body equivalent of a lacerated eyeball, with red veins sticking out and the moisture stripped away, leaving a sort of dryness exacerbated by the friction of the quick-moving tape. nevertheless, this state seemed to be "good for business," as they say.

work ethic is important to me, as is control over the frames of microfilm as they slide past. modulating the speed of the thing is very satisfying, as is bringing the pages into focus by adjusting the gear above the lens. there's something very nice about turning on the machine, hearing it hum to life, stroking its innards and making printer adjustments, like a lowing beast. then the task of alignment, and the joy of flipping an image by turning a crank - who would've thought that the lateral motion, the flick of the wrist, could spin things that were upside-down into intelligibility? anyhow, sitting in front of one of those stereopticons is definitely comforting.

and i know that this is partly why the men with tousled long hair and untied, mud-caked boots and pants with holes in the crotch and a million bags come to this place. today i ran into one, with the usual accoutrements - thick glasses, messy blonde mane, rosaceous nose, military apparel - and he commented to me that he had come on a long bus ride, and he'd taken four bags with him - "one virtually empty," he kept repeating to me and to the ethiopian coatroom clerk, who looked at him with disdain - but four, nonetheless, because he needed those things but was not prepared to get on the bus with more than four. at this, the clerk perked up and mumbled something about how his back prevented him from carrying three. i smiled at them and made a short answer. everyone - including several of the middle-aged men standing in the reader registration line - was actually staring at this long, lithe, wide-eyed girl who spoke about her work like a burbling stream: "oh," she said, "i study feminism." the clerk said, "what?" and she said, loudly, "feminism," and then asked him where she should go for that. he said that he had no idea. she kept nodding her head like a horse (her long hair was extremely reminiscent of a horse's mane). anyhow, the whole thing was rather droll and convivial. a vignette, one might say.

other highlights of the library walk: one day, i saw a low-flying hawk. i had come from the police station, where all these people were cooking up a fish fry. i bought two fishes, i was enormously hungry, but then after eating one i was fully and gave the rest to a homeless man who sleeps in this granite corner and keeps his sweaters in the nearby newspaper box. i actually just put it down in his pile of pilly woolen blankets and ran off. anyhow, the fish was good, the macaroni and cheese even better. and then i saw the hawk (see photo): amazing, so close to me, speckled brown and cream-colored, with an unmistakably hawkish beak. definitely a pro-war sort of bird. and i noticed that a woman was also staring up at it, and i wondered why more people weren't (probably because they were, to quote that magnetic fields song, "Washington, DC," "doing something real"), and she and i exchanged a few words about the hawk, which she called "Lady-Hawk." she said that she recognized it from the native american museum, which was just adjacent to its perch. i noticed then that she was like a solid black wall in her down coat, one of those women who look like pillars, possibly like Lot's wife, just impenetrable forces of solid, continuous flesh. (Note: there are men who look like this too.) And she had a long dark streaked braid. something very friendly about her aspect.

One more note about a recent encounter: so, i went to thanksgiving in this out-of-the-way suburb of DC, invited there by my friend from Chicago, who is also a person who "[does] something real." first i took the train, and then i got on a bus, which was a very strange-looking 'short bus' with a sort of fake-vintage prow. very odd. there were practically no people on the bus, except for the driver and this lady of indefinite ethnicity, though i'd hazard a guess and say that she was filipina or latina. she was going to work (which i intuited to mean cleaning a house, since she got off the bus in the middle of rippling suburban berms and other landscaped formations that dipped and rose gently, covered with a receding grassline), and we chatted about the economy for a while. she said, "is obama going to fix this or what?" the driver observed that he was shocked that the wheaton mall hadn't even bothered to open on thanksgiving, owing to a low turnout. half of his day, he said, had been spent picking up and dropping off people who were trying to go to the mall and disappointed to find it closed. A half-day trucking frustrated would-be shoppers. Then he and i got into a long and rambling discussion about Obama, which became so interesting that we both forgot to look out for my stop, and i had to cycle back on the short bus as it went back the way it had come. this was very pleasant, though, and i sat in the closed-up bus and marinated in the warmth of the sun streaming in and the flowing juices of my horrible, horrible cold, which had made me into a florid and stinking virus-spewing disease carrier. the busdriver told me to drink robotussin and go to bed, and he even offered to give me some of his, but i said that i was fine. but i wasn't fine - my nose was like a snot-volcano, and my head felt hazy in that certain way that lets you know that yes, you are sick, in the way that the papers are telling us that yes, we're in a recession. i was self-diagnosing at that point, and it felt reassuring, in a way, to be able to do that, backed up with copious material evidence.

And okay, to segue into thanksgiving: it was really nice, despite the fact that i was sick. first of all, i spent time with my friend, who i adore. A great lady, as they said of Eleanor Roosevelt. then there was the other company - it was this humongous, multi-family event, with three different mashed potato concoctions, something that George Eliot could've devised. Half of the people present were politicos in high places (including one of the main authors of the 9/11 commission report and his wife, a member of the obama transition team up for a sexy post), and then there was a lawyer for the democrats, something with the housing and banking commission or some such, and then two lit professors, a radical leftist history prof (ohoho was he ever the best! loved that old crusty rabble-rouser), this lesbian of color who runs a famous blog about LGBT and social justice stuff, and then assorted others. halfway through dinner, a bevy of congresspeople arrived, with their pert, wifey wives, including extremely well-preserved old ladies with frosty coifs, pearls, and expensive leisurewear. clearly it would have been amazing to be healthy for these people, but i did manage to avoid touching them and, i'd like to think, spared them the grief of future infectious disease. also, there were children running around everywhere, a good sign. these children had golden curls and soft little kitten faces, everything you'd expect of children. there was a baby who looked, as i commented, like the "essence of a baby." there was nothing of the shriveled old man about him, that's for sure. and two of the children were named after famous black people's last names - ailey and ellison. no joke. one of those was purposeful, the other accidental.

also, there was this weird guy who was sort of unplaceable. i kept trying to figure out how he fit into the family. he and i actually ended up talking a lot, and he told me that he'd met famous musicians like john prine, steve gutenberg, and minnie riperton. he also told me that he'd met his wife when he stopped to pick her up as she hitchhiked across the USA. hm. he kept reciting john prine lyrics to me, because i told him about my incidental encounter with prine through a former lover, but it was making me sort of uncomfortable, so i changed the subject. i do remember, though, through my foggy haze, that this guy was taken by the fact that john prine had been able to truly understand love from a woman's perspective even before feminism really got going. i don't know if i bought that. anyhow, at some point i found myself semi-passed out on the sofa, full of food that i hadn't been able to taste because of my clogged passages, and he seemed to be in the same state, dorsal fin pointing up. another time, he saw me eating a piece of cheese and said "i see you," and i felt sort of creeped out.

hm.

one last point before i move on: i realize how important the olfactory is to life-processes and the enjoyment of life. food, sex, it's all better with the sense of smell. taking smell away is a really egregious thing to do. another egregious thing would be taping someone's mouth shut when his/her nose was clogged by a bad cold. that would, i think, amount to a mild form of torture.

here's what i'm gonna do

an open note to everyone who's ever known me in any way approaching intimacy:

if you want, i'll write a story about you. it will be loosely based on fact and memory, but also somewhat embroidered as a necessary consequence of said fact and memory. this can be a gift, but you also might not like it. but i think you will. okay, who's in? i think i'm just going to start writing them whether or not i get any responses. a-hem.

spatial proxemics, wealth, class, race, history: basically everything

Sorry, blog-readers, if you exist. this will not be about most of the things listed in the title, but it will be about UShistory and its recent apologetic tone, which annoys me. Apologizing for what, exactly? Usually it's the blindnesses of the past, but you know what - first of all, i think that we all need to take a break from apologizing for the blindnesses of the past, because an unspotted history is essentially impossible; and second, i think that contemporary scholars of US history give the past a lot less credit than it deserves for having thought things through in substantial ways.

Just hear me out. Lately the discourse in US history has been to follow a sort of postcolonial rhetorical trajectory in discussing the fallacies of the previous era's thought, notably racial superiority and exceptionalism, but i think it's dangerous - and just bad historiography - to do too much apologizing for and critical vetting of the past, because it reveals the very problems that are present when you do any kind of history with moral judgments. which is not to say 'with a lack of objectivity,' because obviously people have ideological commitments, and it's important to put those on the table. but the invasion of postcolonial studies - essentially an outgrowth of literary theory - into historiography is not yielding very good stuff. in fact, it's yielding simplistic vindicating narratives.

almost nothing strikes me as so goofy as many current historians' theory-driven and -laden readings of previous conflicts and debates through the very construction of that rhetoric which informs triumphal narratives of history. a standard move is to invert those narratives and show their seamy underbellies; what gets buried in this technique is the agon that took place to shape each narrative before it became the standard that we, in our post-post 'wisdom,' revile.

my gripe is less about deconstructionism than it is about pragmatism and historiographic legwork. any rudimentary glance at a popular newspaper or journal of the day - say, the new york times or harper's weekly - reveals that nearly every issue on the table - for example, the early 20-C foreign policy quagmires that seem eerie forebears of our own - was exhaustively argued and approached from a multiplicity of angles before one won out, that one not necessarily synching up with the opinion of 'the people' or whoever held the means of 'power,' however that's defined. to think, for example, that the british people were wholeheartedly in favor of imperialism is to think that the american people are wholeheartedly in favor of GW bush's most brutal policies. it's sadly probable that in future history books, if they exist (and unlike fukuyama's naysayers, i think that they will), all of the gentle backlash among liberals to bush's illegal and cruel acts will likely be stricken from the record, because, in the final measure of things, they didn't stop the bush doctrine or prevent it from happening or anything dramatic like that. they just criticized it, and we all know that texts are not necessarily less ephemeral than performances; it's the power behind the rhetoric, its strategic emergence in the public sphere, and the narrative pull that counts. or, perhaps, just the PR framing of the past through its images and those sort of brechtian 'gestus' tricks to freeze-frame movement into easily comprehensible retrospective viewpoints.

it's like the panama canal and teddy roosevelt, one of the most beguiling and misleading figures in the US's historical record. in my scholarship on TR, i've found that very few people truly understand how controversial he was throughout his career. even measures that were retrospectively painted as fully positive - like the panama canal project, which was not steadily critiqued post-construction until the 1960s - received an onslaught of criticism and opposition in their development days, before they were launched and all problems patched up. it may be nearly impossible to gauge how popular support for the canal matched up to the administration's actions, but from what i can gather, there were at least three positions on the issue, and the administration's position was not the popular one until it got underway (aided in part by TR's physical visit to the canal zone, and if you're interested in that, well, you can read my paper on the subject....). there was a lot of touring, hand-shaking, photographing, and other public relations performance-y stuff that went into the effort to get the public to 'warm' to the idea of the canal as an american colony and economic investment - especially considering the french failure just a few years earlier.

anyhow, so that's one example of the multifaceted debates that have gone on for about as long as the printing press has been used to print things other than the bible (and probably then as well) about various events in human life - probably even before the habermasian public sphere and the entrance of bourgeois citizens into political life and all that. what about elizabethan broadsides, after all? okay, i feel that i've sufficiently made my point. ultimately, the goal of the point was to say to contemporary revisiters of history: hey. enough already! give them some credit, those people who you would primitivize like in their temporospatial ghettoes. all right, rant over!

feeling things well up in me - good things

hey all,

it may strike my nonexistent readers as odd that i have a baseline opinion of hating to talk on the phone. when given the choice, i prefer that ever-elusive 'liveness' (either that or the epistolary puppetry offered by email), and phone conversation often constitutes a middle-ground that leaves me unsatisfied, not knowing how best to inflect my voice (so as not to sound, oh, hyper-enthusiastic or jaded or logorrheic or flustered or what have you - conveying appropriate emotionality through voice modulation is harder than you'd think). yet today a friend called me on the phone and filled me with a certain sense of hopefulness and ideas - some swirling of possibility, let's say - that really redeemed the old móvil, whatever cancerous objects it may implant in my head sometime down the road. funny how laughing with others can be so good. actually, i want to do some kind of psychological study of 'the threshold of laughter' and why it's such a nice thing to make someone else laugh. also, sometimes i feel like the things that my friends are doing in the world astound me and make me say "yee-haw," because there are real aesthetic and political interventions taking place, people! not merely to be read about in books! argue with me about this, i invite you! if you're trying to contest the 'real,' however, i might just have to punch you in the head. in a non-violent way, of course. more like a gentle, obamastyle fist-bump to your insolent deconstructionist skull.

okay, so as not to get too gooey/sentimental here, i wanted also to mention that i was recently at a conference and on a panel about 'performance and the state.' it was a good panel, all told, and the papers were on the whole well-mellowed and mature things, not the objects of a lusty engagement with derrida amid fits of procrastinatory pencil-chewing. this by-and-large goodness of papers was partly the result of a couple well -seasoned old pieces of hardtack (that is, professors) having been included on the panel along with us mojados. anyhow, one of them had written what was basically a love-song to vladimir putin, and she included various pictures of putin without a shirt (apparently the phrase "man-boobs" was written in russian somewhere on the trash-mag included with this image), putin wielding nunchucks, putin singlehandedly tranquilizing a siberian tiger, etc. also included in this wildly multimedia paper were links to youtube videos - putin montages and sung homages, such as this one by a pop group called "Singing Together," the refrain of which goes:

Someone like Putin, full of strength
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t drink
Someone like Putin, who doesn’t hurt me
Someone like Putin, who won’t run away.

I just thought that that was sort of a gem, guys, and so i wanted to share it with you "all." interestingly, her paper concluded that putin presents two very different faces - one focused on the West, and one turned inward to the Volk of russia (which term i used to know, but which i've since forgotten. this lady, who is an excellent scholar of russian theatre and performance history, eventually started to get a little bit too intense with her 'analysis' and commented at one point that in the course of her research, she'd begun to fall for putin, or something of the sort. i guess that's some form of stockholm sydrome?

Coming up in the next post:
-more drear and droll thoughts about history (hopefully more droll than drear)

-thinking about writing a satirical essay entitled "new forms of radicalism" as a sort of eulogy to the Radical Left

-thinking about doing a series of performance art pieces predicated on the notion of "help" and the way that's developed in the US both globally and domestically...this would involve thinking about things like: current translations of judeo-christian practices of charity, including tsedaka/tithing or leaving the corners of your field unreaped; racism and voluntarism (like the thing that i was going to do several months ago involving a black male performer who went around and asked people if they needed help); gender and help (of course) - thinking especially about issues of aid and shame; and the welfare state vs. capitalist individualism, since this is now a prime moment to think about how the state shades moral and how this may or may not intersect with issues of collectivism/individualism. Which leads to a discussion of heroism in all its very American manifestations - the Anglo, square-jawed man who runs in to save the white-clad virgin from the little dark guy who means to do unspeakable things with her chaste body. Okay, perhaps this is a bit overplayed, but i do think that the collectivism/individualism/morality triad is worth examining. it's just interesting to me that 'communists' are linked to so-called 'degenerates' of all stripes, despite communism's ideological flexibility - though this could well be subject to argumentation, i know, since marxism had a lot to do with liberation theology and communism has often been extremely ideological, reaching into all areas of cultural representation and touting dogmas about fealty and the like...hm. okay, so this is not just political economy. but still, thinking about the welfare state as it intersects with the moral discourses contained in the multivariable concept of "help" is, i think, worthwhile.

any thoughts, please add 'em! this lady, like NYC post 9/11, is open for business.

oh - oh - also, help/disgust. for example, in order to strike many 'activist consumers' as appropriately deserving, those in need of help seem to need to hit certain marks of representation, be they the wide-eyed starving child in the third world or the manly, dignified anglo who has to suck it up and ask for help but would not normally do so outside of these extreme circumstances. help has a lot to do with a certain part of our brains linked to maternity, care, love, eros, generosity, dignity, and other keywords. i would argue that if our disgust sensors light up, we are much less likely to 'help.' okay, Jesus knew that, and that's why he did the stuff with the lepers. so the fact that Jesus was able to repress his disgust functions means that he was some sort of deity. See the problem with Christian love?

okay, that was nearly a rant. but the shame/respect thing is also strong. again, Mary Douglas is the one to see about these things. i do, however, think that exploring these ideas through methods of representation (be they performance, video, or another type of visual art, perhaps one more fixed) may help us to gain a better understanding of this whole 'help' nexus, which - with its shades of guilt, altruism, desire, and disavowal - seems to infect almost everyone these days. not that we should be 'free' of this - that's what the goldwaters in this world want. (and by that i mean the barry goldwaters. I'm sure that there are perfectly lovely and sweet-tempered goldwaters living somewhere in the world.) i just think that there are so many complications that arise from the idea of 'help' and the desire to help - which is extremely important, i would say - that often this inchoate desire does not translate into material effects and often results in harm. what's needed on this path between the desire to help and the outcomes of this desire is a sort of help intestinal tract, a middle(wo)man who can smooth along the aid and link the beginning of the worm to the end, as it were. not sure if this makes any sense.

or maybe (and this is the more cynical way to go) we can never control the things that we put out in the world, and our desire is destined never to amount to something concrete, because 'help' and its effects cannot necessarily be measured, even when it seems like it can. this is the direct result of confusing long- and short-term effects - the 'teach a man to fish' dilemma. i was actually talking about this issue in the company of some governicrats the other day, because one of them (about whom you will hear MUCH more, dear readers) works for the department of homeland security (yes, i had a beer with Satan) and so is in on these discussions surrouding the DHS's many interminable 'wars' with indeterminable outcomes. what happens when you can only measure bad results (like towers bombed, people killed, and defenses broken)? is this, in fact, inevitable? Wasn't this why people were skeptical of Freud - because his theories had no inbuilt process of proof? Marx, too - weren't his critics quick to jump on the fact that his historical materialist timeline could well be a bunch of hooey, because it ended with a sort of 'book of revelations' flair? Okay, people, i'm going to seriously turn around here and say that like Marx, like Freud, and like the War on Terror, we must continue to have these desires and projections even if there is no palpable way to measure their efficacy. That is, while we throw out cause-and-effect and consign ourselves to chaos theory, we must, nevertheless, continue to pretend that we can judge the outcomes of our actions. i say "we must" in the sense of inevitability and a certain mandate not to flag in our hope. which is to say that while i'm pro-marx and freud, i'm against the war on terror, because i have the sense from the outset that the war on terror is not going to yield as many good effects as it is going to yield bad effects. note that i have not been entirely cynical and said, "well, we can never know, it's in God's hands, so let's just continue these shoddy and disastrous policies." No, i'm saying that my commitment to the idea that outcomes have material effects that can be understood by someone at some point in time leads me to want to develop something better, more effective, and infinitely less harmful than the 'war on terror.'

again, that may have been convoluted. but i'm still developing all of this, rolling it around in my head...and actually, i left off with a pretty good segue into my new thoughts about history, which will appear in the forthcoming Blogge Poste.

-

something about history

so, right now i'm trying to put together my syllabus (not to be confused with syllabub, the british cream-based dessert) on western theatre history from 1650 to 1914, and it strikes me as extremely absurd that art would be divided up into movements and periods that correspond in some way with a little something called time. question: will we be able to say, four hundred years from now, that from 1980 to roughly 2080 (just to keep things in nice round numbers) there was an aesthetic movement featuring decadence (in Britain), whipped cream (in France) and eviscerated sheep (in the Low Countries)? or will things have splintered beyond movementization, as those poststructuralists would have us believe? is it, in fact, arrogant to consider oneself outside of history, when you're clearly not going to be the one writing the history? that is, is it arrogant to feel like you know as much as people will in the future, when we clearly know more than people did in the past? or do we in fact not know more - is THIS the truly arrogant move, thinking that we know more (and thus that there's been some sort of positivist development/progress narrative going on)than "they" did? what if i reverse this by claiming that knowing more actually makes us more "primitive," caught up in our own tangles of overknowledge? or is this a totally unintelligible and therefore untenable argument? okay. ohhhkay.

anyhow, it's really quaint to wrap up 500 years or so into a neat little package of "religious drama" or "realist art" or what have you. my guess would be that it's something like the rings of saturn - neat and consolidated-looking from a distance but fragmented and incoherent up close. i love that phrase, and the way that it rolls off the tongue as an explanation of chaos - "oh, rings of saturn." it doesn't even need a verb.

so, now to propose a solution to this 'rings of saturn' dilemma: let's start an aesthetic movement that consciously situates itself in history, taking place, oh, for about 40 years as a certain school attracting a coterie of talented youth of all shapes, genders, and races...so that it is at once a movement and a meta-movement, producing the documentation/archiving/historiography of itself as it exists. this is a sort of borgesian experiment, i'll grant, but i think that we should really make things easier for future scholars by inserting ourselves into history so they don't have to hunt around for us. ha-HA! this is so boring and not-funny! okay, enough.

seeing ghosts on the staircases of the upper west side.

hello - so this is not really a blog post, per se, but a couple of guilty moments grasping at pleasure. you know how that goes, readers. have to let the sap trickle into your mouth when you can.

so, i was recently at a halloween party, and i stayed out until roughly 3:30 am and took the A train home (how duke ellingtonian of me), to my friend's apartment, where i've been sleeping on the couch while doing some research in harlem. the apartment is very nice and swanky, full of delicate and expensive (and highly breakable) objets d'art. i feel as though i am a giant troll with rheumatoid arthritis while in this place, and so i've been happy to leave for my other friend's couch in the dust-filled crevasses of brooklyn. anyhow, though, so i was returning to this apartment, which is as far as i can tell full of israelis and ortho-jews, my kinsmen up and down the ivories of diaspora, such that the other night while staying there i heard the strains of "hinei ma tovu ma naaaaaim," as childlike voices rose up through the airshaft. it brought back memories, strangely poignant ones, which have lately fueled my weird fixation with the history (and historicity) of jewish music - or 'jew tunes,' as i've been calling them. you know, the greatest hits of the high holy days, sung by perry como and barbara streisand - songs so melancholic and good that they're allowed into the domain of goyische vegas crooners! amazing. kol nidre and its sort of "floating world" milieu, avinu malkeinu with its choir evoking some sort of cowering mass standing in fear before a column of fire; the good stuff like that. none of this new-agey, acoustic guitar, sitting on the bima crap. sorry, debbie whatever your name is, but your reinterpretations of jew tunes, and their emphasis on crescendoing major chords, are terrible. if i ever saw you at a bar mitzvah, i'd be tempted to throw a latke at your head.

but where was i? hm, oh yes. so there are a lot of jews around this building. and in new york in general - it's mindboggling for me to be around all of these different iterations of jews. i can't say why, exactly, but there's a visceral quality, something massy and epic and abysmal (in every sense) pervading this feeling. the other day i was speaking with some friends, and one of them mentioned that she'd had this "vagina dentata" moment while contemplating the ineffable hugeness of the marianas trench. the other said that his moment of incomprehension came when he contemplated the unbreachable gap between sensations and the language that we use to express them. mine, i must say, comes in the company of domesticated animals and orthodox jews. something about looking into the eyes of the other and reading a blank stare...something about ideology. something about the strange plumage of ritual, particularly regarding the hair, and the fervid looks in orthodox jews' eyes, along with their pale cheeks with points of pink in their centers, as they read magazines and check out dvds in the "adult video" (wow, that really confused me at first) section of the williamsburg(h) branch of the new york public library, where i've gone during the days to attempt futile and flaccid but occasionally pellucid stabs at my fellowship applications.

keep this in mind, people: i am a jew. so i can say these things...?

also, i recently learned that my grandmother used to take part in the ritual where you swing a live chicken over your head, and over the heads of your loved ones, during the high holy days. you see, she grew up orthodox, and up until the point that she married my grandfather, she never questioned this ceremony. sort of the vodun of judaism, i guess - but circusy, with all those flying feathers and grim-faced, dark-suited (is)raelians.

aaaanyway, back to't. so i was walking into the building (inside the elevator of which i actually got hit on by this large musician who asked me if i was 'a thespian,' to which i applied in the negatory and then countered by asking him if he was an israeli - clever with my parries and thrusts, eh?), and at about 4 in the morning i was going up the back stairs (for some reason - maybe i wanted to try them out, because i always enjoy seeing old stairwells and the ways in which people take care to design newels and banisters and things like that, even if they're never meant to be seen - herein lies the antiquarian/steam punk in me), and as i reached the fourth floor, i was stalled by a soft noise like someone riffling through papers. it was something like the noise that a mouse would make with its tail. i should mention that all the residents place their recycling on landings in the back stairwell, which i didn't know, and which was sort of a letdown, all these piles of garbage gumming up the institutionally elegant passageway - and anyhow, i saw this old, old lady, hunched over with major scoliosis, emaciated like anita webster (see previous posts on impoverished prodigal pianists in panama), and with dusty clothes and two-tone hair (red and white, the red seemingly layered on top of the white, wiglike). this lady looked up at me with an air of banal skepticism spiked with an almost imperceptible bit of fear/surprise, and she simply kept going through the garbage, though i don't know if she was putting things in or taking them out, because she was moving very slowly. stupidly, i said "hello" in an automatic and cheerful voice (good proof that i am finally ready to work in the service sector). she did not reply. my face was half-covered with an intricate and lumpy-textured fake blood pattern, i should note, but that's beside the point. for some reason, i briefly entertained the possibility that this lady was a ghost, some kind of yearning apparition, which i decided was probably preferable (the idea especially congenial to my hostess in the building) to the possibility of her being a homeless person. then i tried to silently and seamlessly shift my body past hers without interrupting her "flow," as she did not seem to enjoy my being there with her. i wondered how she'd got into the building in the first place, whether she was a resident, and what she was doing up at this hour. the whole thing was odd but not necessarily off-putting. she seemed a friendly and timid ghost, if anything, even one incapable of speech. there was definitely a mute quality about her, and she moved as if in a trance.

anyhow, the weird thing is that after i got into the apartment, i repeated to myself about ten times that i would definitely tell the apartment's owner and my friend about this incident, because it had struck me so definitively, and yet when i fell asleep, i completely forgot about it until about four days later, when i was pondering the stairwell. strange to completely forget about such an encounter, especially one whose details impressed themselves on my mind with such intensity, and which left many dangling questions that i'd have liked to answer. another example of the mind's endless little sinkholes, into which important things disappear, leaving us with the comforting oil-slick of idiotic arcana to lap up on long commutes and in those blank vestibular spaces that we all know so well.

related to all this, i've been thinking a lot about writing a story about my grandmother, because i think that she represents an almost allegorical force, some embodiment of all the ways in which a person can tend toward extremes of bitterness and grasping need. clearly my grandmother is not all bad - in fact, i love her dearly for her punchy attitude and her eternal ennui - and my hope would be to portray this person both as an emotional parasite/black hole and as a supremely sympathetic character. you know what i'm talking about. perhaps this is hackneyed, but i feel like it needs to be exorcised. also, my grandmother is one of the most compelling characters i know, for the way that she speaks extremely mean truths and is at the same time under major delusions of grandeur. she's also one of those very lucid and intelligent people who have been frustrated in their attempts to produce something of this (in her case, housewifery took the reins, as four children emerged and world war II started), and her sense of regret and pungent dissatisfaction is evident in nearly everything that she does. anyhow, a cautionary tale.

on another note, i'd like to write a story about a mother who accidentally poisons her child and the various ways that this has wrought havoc with her sense of maternal goodwill. this story would be a comic-macabre sort of satire, something sort of darkly funny. that's what i'm envisioning.

i should also mention, before i go (i've snatched enough gratification from this particular session, i think) that my recent research has been totally fascinating, the sort of thing that's sucked me in for hours at a time, as though i'm disappearing down some tunnel into fantasy. these days, time flies by, because there's so much to do. and yet i'm not deliriously happy, and i'm really glad about that. delirious happiness is a major drain on the faculties, you know. much better is the ability to sustain attention, display continuity, and surprise yourself with levels of commitment as yet unseen in this quavery little wet noodle of a resolve. i think that bravery is a good thing to have, but the modest kind, of course - and altruism is stupid. anyhow, i've been interviewing people and reading letters and unearthing multigenerational networks of an amazing afro-caribbean diaspora in the US. it's really something, and hopefully i will be able to accommodate all this in my dissertation...not to mention live up to all these expectations - this time put forth by real people, not bureaucratic juggernauts, star ac(k)ademics, or institutional review boards. (sorry, irb. but you know i hate you.)

something incomprehensible about music

or semi-incomprehensible. i've been listening to this group called

Trío Antimanierista

and specifically to their album "No decimos ni que sí ni que no"

here is their mission statement or what have you:

"This music was recorded by TA in 2002, during a special melodic stage of the group: rare melodies surprising to the players like a in a serendipity. Inusual combinations of rythms and textures playing classical instruments like clarinet, cello, viola, piano, spanish guitar, accordion (and a few of timid percussions and daily objects in special moments) produces an atmosphere between cult and any popular music from no one land. Only improvisation and open collective subconscious are the techniques for this creations. Little parts of someone track have a few composition, but TA never uses composition after this record until now.

Trío Antimanierista play and record improvised music since 2000. Antonia Funes, David Diaz and Víctor Sequí are a rare musicians with no one musical formation. This no formation is the key for a more free inspired soundworks of the group. Pitagoric system for music is not accepted by this musicians… they proposes return to the times before this singular musical method."

pretty good stuff, i must say.

menopausal estrogen, the ravages of age, and the circadian rhythms of elderwomen

so, at the moment i've been hanging out in DC, getting my research started at the libe of congress and walking around, seeing the sights. despite its status as the mausoleum of disneyfied americana (or maybe because of this), i love DC. love love love. i like that it's south as well as east, i like seeing the serious govuppies, robed like priestly initiates off to a slaughter, little govindas with lotus necklaces draped around their bodies, oxford shirts instead of saffron robes, jaunty side-parts instead of shaven pates. it's a relief to be in the center of power and find it outfitted in powder-blue and creased khakhis. or perhaps it's a disappointment. either way, i feel okay here.

once again, i've been pitched headlong into a new living situation, although in this case one that is peaceful and pristine, with caressing autumnal breezes rather than monsoon rains and garbage-flooded curbs. imagine that. i'm living with an interesting older woman, a retired former environmental lawyer, an ex-employee of the DoE or the EPA - a nature pig, in other words. she has friends in similar lines of work. they like long, brisk walks and are generally very fit, gracious and liberal. we've been talking about obama a lot, these women and i - my landlady is an old blue-blood whose ancestors came over not on the Mayflower, but on the other ship, and her friend is the granddaughter of italian cotton-choppers, an unbelievably spunky louisianan who i keep calling "blanche" after my own spirited grandmere. this lady used to be married to someone called "ambassador wooden." one morning the two had coffee while i looked on, invited to the table but a bit hesitant to chew on cheese-toast amid all the bitter detritus of old sex and love strewn all over the place (or so i imagined). these things are inevitably messy, but everyone acted very well.

the ambassador turned out to be quite the character: this unassuming bald-headed man who had served in burundi, barbados, syria, iraq twice, rwanda, malawi, the congo, and i think djibouti, among other locales. he'd been evacuated several times for political coups and once for some abstruse environmental reason; his experiences being airlifted out of there told him that the bush administration is not very good at evacking. he also had a really incredible story about a fellow diplomat who was shuttled into rwanda after having been an english professor at duke and oxford; full of sunny ideals (or "idylls," as sarah palin might pronounce them), this liberal arts man decided to align himself politically with the majority tribe (not sure if it was hutus or tutsis), against dean wooden's better judgment. he (the prof) figured that the majority tribe had more people and thus deserved to get his american stamp of approval. what he didn't think much about was the multicentury, ongoing tribal warfare that had ravaged the country long before he'd come to inhabit the rwandan ambassadorial mansion; it got to the point where there was a tutsi warrant out for his head, and he had to be evacked out of there. apparently the guy went back to his endowed chair, whilst wooden hooted with laughter and resumed his activities at the maintence-prong of the US foreign service. it's been a long while, i confess that i don't really remember, but i believe that DW told me that there were four 'prongs' or 'streams' to the foreign service, one dealing with political affairs (affrays?), one with economic, one with maintenance, and perhaps the last with cultural/kunst, don't recall. well, wooden worked the maintenance line, meaning that he supplied the bodyguards, sandwiches, and whiskey bottles for embassy soirees and fetes. he complained of the difficulty of providing swanky food and drink on a shoestring budget; he told us about cutting corners by reusing booze-bottles. he also remarked on meeting bush and various dumb republicans, and he said that despite all the dysentery and malaria, he preferred being in africa to germany, which felt like "the dc suburbs." it was sort of a fascinating breakfast, and it went on for several hours. you can always tell that something is fascinating when it goes on for several hours.

anyhow, let's see what else...oh, the usual ups and downs, hormones playing tricks on me, but everything's all right. lurching from one impulse to the next, i feel like i'm taking part in some crazy virtual reality game, something like laser-tag. where are my enemies, where my friends? well, at least i don't have any conspiracy theories, am not intimidated by people, have had a series of amazing ethnographic/interview experiences in recent past (working toward my dissertation, of course - i'm on the verge of blogging about the latest two, in fort greene and bay view, respectively), and am in generally high spirits. i might be transcending something or getting to know something here. also, sleeping on the couch of my very good friend is making me feel more grounded and centered than ever, like there's some stable point in a changing universe on which i can hang myself. it's good. the worst thing is when you question your judgment about people; i've learned that my judgment has not always failed me. good thoughts prevail. meetings will prove productive; fortune cookies open and spill forth their parabolic guts.

moving around a lot, iiiiii don't know what i remember

so that's a line from a talking heads song, at least as i remember it. there's actually a term for people who misremember lines of songs such that they come to laminate their own distorted interpretations onto the actual lines, but i don't remember it. anyhow, i have once again relocated, and it's a bit disorienting, all this fight-or-flight. i'm having a bit of the melancholy that comes with sudden uprooting and air travel, the discombobulation of having to recollect your parts around you and see things in that "new" light. i'm sure that this will fade soon, and i'll retreat once again into the inner world that's served me so well these past, oh, twenty-six years. all right - two fellowships, one conference paper, one presentation (replete with animated powerpoint tricks that would make a certain TCD very proud) later, i'm here in the town of spires and boob-looking domes, ordering my containers from the LOC (i'm loco for the loc - this is my new nerdkademic slogan) and getting ready to bury myself up to the elbows in the birthing of this golden calf. gold from straw! or rather, old papers well-preserved. more later - i can feel that this is going to be a very fertile working and thinking period for me. this is, in fact, what i needed after the hot and sticky information-gathering orgy that was panama. despite the double-fisted (and ham-fisted) election/bailout circus raging outside my window, i can tell that DC in the fall will allow for some cool and clear-eyed reflection for this particular overheated radiator.

note: the term that i was thinking of was "mondegreen." also, its close kin "soramimi" proves to be equally cool.

let me just say one thing

famous S&M picture of nietzsche and friends. Need i say more?



a handy reference to some dictators. which is to say: what do you get when you combine a penis and a potato?




Evo Morales: what a hilarious person. he reminds me of my friend, who i lovingly call the "gay pimp clown." although in this case i would describe Evo more as a "pimp clown king." Same basic idea.




A giant fish, caught in the canal zone at some point. Can you believe such a fish exist/s/ed?


also, a thought - friendship: oh, it's good. amistad! what would i do without it. o friends of mine, i love you. you should know that. and enemies, i don't really have you. please know that too.

now back to the procrastination-ization (that being the circadian act of preparing to procrastinate, following through, and finishing triumphantly, then gearing up for another cycle of the same).

and here are some pictures, to whet your nonexistent appetites - because you're nonexistent readers, more like ghosts than anything, which gives me relative freedom and leads me to ask: didn't you think that John McCain sort of looked like casper the friendly ghost up there at the podium? Although his striped tie also made me hum that inane song about "the Candyman." moreover, it's amazing how the internet lends itself to found art objects. okay, i gotta go. more later, when the brain's not so fried. muak!

unheard-of thing

shuttling information from one blog to the other, that is. i'm not yet ready to make my private, off-limits "dark" blog into a freedom-for-all, seeing-the-light-of-day entity, but there are good things in it. so i'm reproducing one of the early-july posts below for people to see, like a sort of bush administration redaction sort of thing. don't FOIA my ass, people! please! i just need to finish grad school, that's all.

July post: context - just arrived in panama.

well, hello again - up until this very minute, i didn't think i'd be able to get my fingers to the keys and into blogging mode, but here they are. after some chicago nights that truly defied the meaning of crepuscular, i am here in a sweltering, grey land, funded by a grant to interview disparate individuals about their activities. having slept for about 24 hours straight (i was completely exhausted from the final days of gin and glory), i feel grounded, like this might be the right idea after all. i've found an apartment with a charming group, an older couple and their daughter, whose name is, eerily, salome, and her daughter, 'la paula.' i keep expecting salome to do the dance of the seven veils around my decapitated torso, and she definitely has a somewhat surly, salome-ish air. the father is even weirder - he's italian but speaks english with a british accent and announces his vocation as 'sailor' - and he was wearing wraparound sunglasses as he embraced me and ushered me into the place. but they seem very nice and kissed me a lot. humans are drawn to making narratives, and i'd say that this one has ended happily enough. i've been reading about the brain, having been experimenting with some neurochemical 'dope' which i'm now happy to say is no longer part of my retinue, doctors be damned. reading about consciousness makes me feel slimy and uncomfortable, like i'm sitting on my brain, squashing it flat and feeling the jellyish matter push up against my inner thighs. you know? or maybe you don't. anyhow, so what have i learned about the brain? i've learned that the two cortices (or hemispheres, rather) are only connected by the corpus callosum and are actually very different. the right one's the one behind which we should rally. the left one is the petty micromanager, or the neurotic capitalist. the right one's all sentimentality, clotted with that oceanic feeling that freud liked so much. i also learned that music is often beneficial for the brain and can be good therapy for patients with a variety of maladies, including alzheimer's and autism. i learned that people often remember music over and above anything else, even when they have amnesia. hm, what else? there was more, but i think i left it in slot 22B of a boeing airbus. it was enough to consider the grandiosity, and the specificity, of the brain. ironically, between bouts of brain-adoration, i was dropping off to sleep like one drugged. and the druggedness lasted quite a while, leading me to consider myself as a crashed computer. but now i'm back up and running, feeling the life-force trickle back into my pores and getting ready (really ready this time) for the research.

and i'm getting ready for living in panama, which is looking basically the same but perhaps a bit cleaner and more closely surveilled than before. every place i've been has a guard with a giant machine gun (or perhaps an uzi - one of those large rectangular sling-y things) and a beret, scowling at la gente. i have to figure out why, as i don't recall this sort of armed presence last year. maybe because it's the fourth of july, and the country is preparing for a counterinvasion? that was a joke. also, the gentrification has been progressing apace, with monstrous condos going up, gay consumerism sprouting, and raw sewage spilling out into the streets because the infrastructure's overtaxed. there's a specialty cheese store here now, along with air-conditioned enclaves for the wealthy and flaxen-haired. i've been reading up on the news of late, and apparently it's election time, with balbina something-or-other, this frosted valkyrie, in the lead by a few points, her looks carrying her past the other contenders, who comprise a variety of buffoonish-looking men, one who's clearly wearing pink lipstick in his campaign ads. carnivalesque. i'm reminded of the debonair e. and his thoughts about land and water rights in mexico - here, the leftists are boycotting the elections and demanding similar reforms, but they're being shut out, for all practical purposes. panama is a mercenary, extremely neoliberal place. anyhow, today while walking i saw a bird hopping in a circle of barbed wire, unable to extricate itself; this same coil of wire was hidden in a cloud of luscious purple flowers and leafy green protuberances. maybe that's why the bird hopped in. allegory?

using my blog as a platform for the accomplishments of others

it's a good thing, no? here's something amazing and entirely obfuscating that my close friend Stevie is doing. Gobama, Go Stevie! So awesome. Close to obfuscated greatness.

can i just say

that i am in an extremely good mood right now and have been these past few months, after what was probably the worst spring of my young and tender girlhood. some kind of euphoria has been coursing through my body and making me hear major flights of trumpets, trombones, and other brass-section standards; it's like some sort of heavenly choir is always starting up just as i board my bike and wend my way to school. also, the smell of some kind of barely perceptible yet sweet and potent ester keeps wafting through the air, some kind of mango-human spit combination that's really excellent.

there's no explanation at all for this intense good mood - in fact, all current events and demographics would tend far to the opposite - but i'm glad that it's here, and i hope that it doesn't distract me too much from the work that i have to do. somehow, i feel very healthy and alive at this moment in time. everything's been light green and good-tasting, and i've been waking up full of a sense of my own and others' potential. i suspect a cocktail of hormones, libido, delayed-response functions, or vitamin A. now to harness this life-force for good...

midwestern feelings

this is nice.

a question about monies

hello elephantine masses, a question for you. so, the other day seemingly all the pillars of pecuniary stability crashed to the ground and wept and pissed their pants, asking for a government buy-out, but the government slapped their collective hands and said something to the effect of, "clean up your own mess." i should note that the government's earlier bailout of fannie may/freddie mac was a spectacular piece of quasi-populist, New Deal-era legislation - nationalizing these huge lending agencies! ha! and we thought that cuba and venezuela were communist! it's awesome. i wish we would nationalize more things, but then we'd also need competent people (i.e., not bush's drinking buddies from Tejas) to run them. hm.

anyhow, a debacle. that's what it appears to be. but at the same time, i look out my window, and all seems pretty comfortable and bright- there's a sort of celestial light pouring in, that early-morning light that's sort of hard and cold in a way, because it's so cleanly bright - and i don't feel like i've been shaken to my foundations. all of this is a leadup to say: will this financial crisis seriously disrupt the class hierarchy in the US? will it plunge the middle classes into poverty and those with low income into dire poverty? i'm guessing that it will due to sheer layoffs. but what of the rich? will their positions be disrupted? how are we going to materially gauge the effects of the crisis? breadlines, ketchup soup, spike in alcoholism and spousal abuse, packed movie-houses? i guess i want to crystallize the material effects of capitalism's creative destruction in order to have some vignettes at hand to show how the bankruptcy of banks, on the one hand, can lead to or interact with more expensive rice and beans in the supermarkets, with rising unemployment, unaffordable rents, and all of the other components that are accompanying this crisis. in some ways, i feel like it's a crisis collage, bringing in seemingly unrelated elements that somehow jive together when juxtaposed. can someone with an economics background explain to me how differently-positioned sectors of the economy will feel and are feeling this? i know that the poor will be hardest hit, and in the wake of the lovingly dismantled social service structure, they have basically no safety net. my only touchpoint is the GD (Great Depression), which was encapsulated in photographs and a broadbased cultural movement funded by the government, whose central purpose was to document the effects of uneven development and offer succour. amazing time that was - i wish that we could do the same thing again. art really proved its material worth. this time, there will likely be no original plays or oral-history gathering missions...we're at war, people.

i have more to say about the uproar over financial failure, but i have to work now. all i'd like to say in conclusion is that maybe the large hadron collider unleashed a financial black hole that is sucking in lehman brothers and merrill lynch and bear stearns and all those bignames/bignoses into subterranean french countryside. i also want to point out that the LHC's provenance underground in france would fit very well with Umberto Eco's writings on the Templars, jeje. furthermore, i want to relate a story told to me by some orthodox jewish girls, aged 9 and 11, respectively: the father of one of the girls was visiting the US mint as a child, and at the end of the tour, he asked,"do we get free samples?" gevalt. gestalt!

encounters in transit: three vignettes

1) I was sitting in a Burger King in Rio Abajo, a historically West Indian neighborhood in Panama City. I had been asked to wait there to meet some of the people from SAMAAP for the final activity of the "Conozca su canal" week, which was a visit to a sick elderly woman in a nursing home. I arrived late, but everyone else was later, so I wandered around a bit in the pouring rain, bought some vegetables and coconut from the fruit-market outside, and sat down in the joint to wait and outline an article that i was writing.

i ended up waiting for about three hours in the burger king, sitting at the sticky ketchup-covered table and scribbling notes on the only piece of paper i'd brought with me. throughout, i was observing the people at the "restaurant" - for example, spread out over two tables next to me were three middle-aged west indian panamanian men, clearly former or current employees of the Panama Canal. they were dressed nicely and had copious gold jewelry, and they spoke Bajan english. clearly identified. two were sitting together, and one of the two - this very attractive, slim man with longish hair - got in an argument with what seemed to be a complete stranger, the third west indian panamanian man, seated next to but not with him and his companion. the fight was about Iriving Saladino, the long-jump champion (and "Colon boy," as people liked to say, trumpeting his humble roots). one of the men swore that Saladino was afro-antillean, whereas the other insisted that he was afro-colonial, as he spoke no english and came from the Atlantic side. this argument grew larger and more elaborate, and the two men ended up at the same table, bickering for about as long as i sat in my chilly plastic booth, while the third man jumped ship, seemingly bored. the attractive man was all for the afro-antillean side, and he traced several polemics of differing persuasiveness - including some sort of culturally chauvinist argument about the afro-coloniales and their violent, crime-driven ways. the other man was quieter but intransigent, not giving way. anyhow, it was kind of fascinating to see that debate playing out before my eyes, and at burger king, no less.

i should mention that i hadn't been in a burger king in quite some time, if ever. i think that my paternal grandfather, who is now dead, used to take me there to eat this incredibly disgusting sandwich consisting of beef smeared with cheese, mayonnaise, grilled onions, and generally well-larded grease-fat substance. espantoso! it was so decadent that it wasn't even good - i remember wanting to throw up in the car on the way home. ick.

and i couldn't believe how packed the place was, considering that this westernized fast food is damn expensive. i don't understand how panamanians survive: food is extremely pricey, and salaries are miserably low. it may be the multigenerational living situation thing, but i simply don't understand how the middle-class of panama can afford to buy 6.00 burger-fries-drink combinations, which incorporate potatoes imported from idaho and beef from canada...so strange, globalization. and other clichés.

anyhow, while i was in the burger king, this old white man approached me. he looked like a wizened skull-face, kind of like larry david - his hair was shorn very short around his crown, and he was thin and wrinkly and pasty, with a hawkish nose and a sort of sickly stoop. he wore semi-sporty "leisure clothes," a sure sign of extranjero-idad. he had sort of come up to me before at the fruit market - as he recognized that i was a foreigner, his eyes flashed and he said something to the effect of, "do you know if this guy sells bebidas? mango? mango?" and i said, "no, it's only shredded coconut here, i think you're talking about the batidos, they're over there, i believe." his sports-clothes and sort of panicked inquiry annoyed me, but i tried not to get all liberal-fascist on him. but i knew that he wanted to linger and talk, and later he came into the burger king, walking in a meaningful way toward me. he sat down and said, "want some company for five minutes?" and before i could respond, we launched into a conversation that was weird and at the same time infinitely typical. he had moved to panama after being shown an ad for real estate, and he felt like it was fort lauderdale ("have you ever been to fort lauderdale?" i nodded yes, noticing his hairy chest and gold necklace. he had an old jewish man's raspy brooklynite-accented voice). he hated the architecture - "panama" he said, adopting a regal, halting tone, "is an ugly, ugly place" - but loved the people. it's amazing to me that foreigners with no understanding of spanish or anything else done or said in panama always "love the people." i guess they see that this is a very service-sector place, with no industry to speak of, but what i think is particularly interesting and even funny and cool is the gentle, almost viscous surliness and obstinacy - or just quiet peruke, rebellion through excessively slow movements - evinced by service-sector drones in this (or, i should say, that, since i'm back in chicago) place.

this reminds me, i want to talk about chicago at some point very very soon. i'm aching to write about chicago and the painfulness of being here, among spiking homelessness and poverty and despair and weary black and brown and smug white fat faces. not to generalize, but i've been taking the train and noticing these things. back to the land of the 'one-drop rule.' maybe it's the rain, but i'm filled with tristeza for this place, and i need to do something about it during my brief time here, before the research stint (where i also hope to act upon my sadness about the same issues - poverty, homelessness, despair - as they are magnified in the monumental white, bleached-bones ribcage and empty skull (death's head) of america).

but back to burger king. so i saw a bevy of young, healthy, greased-head panamanians eating expensive imported precooked beef patties, and then this old white man, and the west indians. the guy and i continued talking - he seemed like a thirsty person lapping up my english words, like someone who really needed to converse at that moment- and i felt a weird sort of pity-contempt mixture for him, though i try very hard not to feel contempt for others (because that is one emotion that is far too easy to throw around, like some sort of nuclear weapon. i try not to engage in arms races of contempt or arrogance. sometimes it's an uphill battle). but then he seemed to be satiated, having sucked my conversation dry with his invisible proboscis, and he scuttled off into his yellow all-terrain four-wheel drive, which he had parked, like a protuberant bumblebee, in the middle of the market.

so that's something of vignette 1.

2) the salsero and his pregnant wife. this happened to me one night down in the casco viejo, that beautiful crumbling place that gets transformed by steam and darkness into some sort of fantasy-scape, a james bond backdrop. there are two major hanging-out venues in the casco viejo - the aforementioned la casona, which is a hip-hipster-queer-rasta-etc gallery space in an old bank, and the 'baños públicos,' a rock joint that used to be the public baths for the nuns who lived in the monastery (or nunnery?) that was the old casona. this little club is free and basically outdoors, made up partly of tarps, partly of old stones (the baths), and partly with antiquated, mildewy velour couches and bookshelves for lounging. the sound equipment is minimal - an amp and a microphone stand - but there are always two musicians playing there: a skinny, ratlike guitarist who wears a beret, and a drunken old drummer with a dippy upturned montuno, the típico hat. anyhow, i was hanging out there with the lumpen-headed camel man (old chilean lecher), his 'spirit daughter,' otherwise known as my witchy roommate Salomé, and a weird Colombian friend who would later go apeshit and punch one of my other roommates in the face (long story). The crazy Colombian was recently getting over a breakup, and more recently reeling from a comment that her boyfriend made about her 'chortIZos' (see previous blogpost on jerga), and she wanted to sing melancholy eagles covers. she dragged me up to sing 'hotel california,' which i've heard maybe once in my life, and was very disappointed when i didn't know the words. when it looked like we were basically washed up, this couple appeared - a guy wearing a red t-shirt and pleated khakis hiked up to his waist, with a very angular panamanian haircut, and his wife, who had on her own latina uniform, with rhinestone sneakers and hair gelled to her forehead and a sort of placid half-smile on her somewhat indígena face. they were gorgeous, but in a slim and unassuming way. when they entered, the chilean lech got excited and motioned at the guy; apparently, he was one of the best amateur salseros (salsa singers) in these parts, and he'd often come here to croon to his wife. immediately, the guy runs up onto the stage and grabs the microphone, and he begins to sing - at first well-known standards, like "guantanamera" and "la bamba," but then increasingly esoteric songs, and finally just improvisational riffs. salsa sort of goes like this: there's a singer and a guitarist - perhaps the same person, not sure - and a drummer, at the very least. the singer does a lot of repeating, both of refrains and melodies, and sometimes keeps stringing along the same tune to different rhymed verses, until he decides to break into a refrain. i found the rhymed verses very suspenseful, because there was no telling how long this guy could continue to invent them, and he was extremely physically compelling: he had this huge grin with long white teeth, black eyes, something sharp and clear and hyper-animated about him. he looked almost like a cartoon, with large, bright swatches of color. the red background of the baños públicos, the red shirt of the man, and his clean khakis gave the whole place a surreal aura, such that i could not turn away from his jumpy, smiling figure, as he kept riffing verses until finally relaxing back into the refrain. the guitarist seemed to enjoy following along and taking his cues from this guy, and their faces got very close, but it was a lateral closeness, and neither seemed to notice it - a sort of clustering around the microphone. although the salsero's eyes looked off too the side, it was clear that he was singing only to his heavily pregnant wife, who sat there beaming and squatting a bit under the weight. the whole scene was riveting and intensely charming. i think i sat and watched the guy perform, rapt, for an hour. i just couldn't turn away. the music was measured but suffused with something of hope or optimism, some extremely evocative and full sound, and hearing it gave me this feeling of a sort of contentment without satisfaction. this is not, i should note, a scientific or technical description of what salsa is or does; this is like melville's writings on whales in moby-dick - somewhat pseudo-science-y, somewhat fantastic lore. i wish i had written about this when i saw the performance, when it was still fresh, but memory is seeming to serve. one song in particular was about this guy who couldn't stand his wife (all irony with this smiling salsero), and every verse ended on a somewhat minor key, and these continued for a long while before the upswell into the refrain. while we all clapped and jumped around like ebullient animals, the wife sat still and silent, staring forward and up at her husband. eventually the guitarist ran out of steam and the drummer started rolling around on the floor (it was our fault - we had given him some of our beers), but the man looked like he could've kept at it for a while. i was prompted to ask him if he was a professional musician, and he laughed and said that he worked construction.

3) this encounter is a bit silly, and it happened on a plane - specifically on the plane from panama to dallas/fort worth, where i had a layover and just enough time to bemoan the republican trickery while standing between texas-sized jellybeans and 'guns and ammo' magazines, not to mention obama-dissing tell-alls, at the airport newsstand. blah! anyhow, so in the morning i headed to the one restaurant in the airport, which was crammed with sunburnt dutch tourists and sweaty hairy businessmen. notably, these two cool-looking black guys were sitting in the corner, and i recall thinking, "they look cool, oh, they're probably too cool for me." i was still heavily into the whole talk-to-random-strangers thing, which happens a lot in latin america, and which i like to do in general. i think that this doesn't happen enough in the USA - here, we deny our genitality and other freudian detritus, cloaking ourselves with the aerospatial equivalent of styrofoam packaging. a buffer. this kind of thing definitely does not exist to the same extent in Panama, and i much preferred the proxemics there. anyhow, but so i was later sitting on the plane, and it turned out that i was sitting next to those guys. one of them was tall and skinny, with shoulder-length braids and baggy jeans, and the other was older, wearing a sort of trucker's cap. the tall, skinny one was reading from what looked to be a painstakingly handwritten list of spanish/english translations, all of which seemed to deal with sexual matters (the list read: YOU HAVE NICE HAIR/ I LIKE YOUR BODY/ LET'S GO TO THE BEACH/ HOW MUCH DOES IT COST/ DO YOU WANT TO GO TO A RESTAURANT WITH ME? and phrases of that sort). which wasn't strange, considering that prostitution is legal in panama. anyhow, before i could talk to them, i fell into this coma-like swoon, but after a while i woke up and we started chatting. at some point the younger man and i got into this very intense conversation; he told me that he was a nutritionist and only ate foods prepared on the george foreman grill, and he opened up his carry-on bag and showed me said grill, which he had apparently carried with him at all times during his one-week stay in panama. at one point, my glasses fell off my face, and when i went to put them on again, he said, "no - stop - when your glasses fell off, you looked like this famous, beautiful actress." unfortunately, he couldn't remember the actress's name, and so the pickup line flopped, and i felt suddenly plunged into this hilarity.

anyhow, he gave me his card, which reads:

End Result
Athletic Nutritionist Fitness Trainer
Ron James
ronromeoj@aol.com

The main reason which prevent people from getting fit is lack of being discipline. Are you happy looking in the mirror? Are You?

we began talking about obama, and he told me that he'd recently chewed out his african-american friend for having voted for bush in the past, saying, "what did the republicans ever do for us?" although he was sort of sleazy, he had something charismatic about him, and i told him all about my recent love issues, and he kept asking me seemingly unrelated questions. here's a reconstituted sample of what i remember our conversation being like:

RJ: Let me ask you a question.

Me: Yes?

RJ: What's your favorite movie.

Me: Uhh...don't have one. I uhhh don't really watch movies.

RJ: You don't????

Me: Um, no.

RJ: Okay. Let me ask you a question. What's your zodiac sign?

Me: Capricorn.

RJ: Well, that says it all! You're stubborn, girl! Stubborn! You have to compromise.

Me: Yes, I know that now. I made some mistakes...

RJ: No, no, no. Listen. What time is it.

Me: Um, about 5 after 3?

RJ: Listen: you'll never see 5 after 3 on September the 8th again. You have to enjoy life!

Me: Yeah, I am enjoying life...

RJ: Let me ask you a question. What is the first thing you do when you get out of bed in the morning.

Me: Um, make coffee?

RJ: See, that means you're responsible. You're a busy little lady, and you need someone who'll resPECT that.

Me: Uh-huh, I see.

So it continued on in this vein. We touched upon Bobby Brown's ill-fated marriage to Whitney Houston (RJ was displeased that she was "seduced by that bad-boy image"), the perils of drug-use among the celebrity caste, halle berry and her sex-addicted husband, the democratic primaries (RJ wanted Obama to name Hillary as VP), and a variety of other topics. and this brings me to the previous post, in which i stood inside the voyeuristic x-ray box, latest diagnostic sadism-masturbation tool of airport security, and RJ laughed at me, and i laughed too hard back, and they had to re-take the scan of my calzones. jajaja.