of course San Francisco is grey and cold, its high summer and everything is as it should be. I was feeling underwhelmed yesterday morning as I braced myself and tore down through the fog to Unsafers. Having a hound is good for the spirits, Akira is just dumb happy to have us home & I can tell by the way hes practically trotting at my side.
On Monterey Boulevard I spotted an outsize naked Barbie doll, her hair a little muzzed and her rigid legs thrust out showing her naked plastic nothingness to allcomers. She was sitting in a dolls pushchair and it would have made a good ravedrama photo if I’d had the means to take it.
Akira and I continued to the store, I was a little blue, the depressant alcohol still swilling in remote capillaries, wondering whether I really want to live here in california anymore. A chubby hipster pulls up in a turquiose Nova station-wagon, gleamingly restored and just fabulous.
As he disembarked I complimented him on his ace car and he scratched Akira’s head and flattered me with his mutt appreciation.
Wherever you are you still have to deal with yourself. sf has been a great home to me, I can put up with the summer fog.
We really don’t want to stay with the nakedness of our present experience. It goes against the grain to stay present. There are times when only gentleness and a sense of humour can give us the strength to settle down.- Pema Chodron
FIERCE is not an outfit or a sexy way of dancing. Now I know this – took me 37 years to get there, but I got it alright. Oh, yes I did. More on this later.
It was the Fourth of July in the mid-seventies, and some girl was doing the splits upside down. She was young, maybe in her late teens, and wearing an American flag bikini. My mom and I were at a gathering of bikers and hippies at a waterfront park near the Gate 6 houseboats in Sausalito, where we lived for a year, or until the boat began to sink, says my mom.
I remember this moment so clearly, watching this girl do slow motion sumersaults, pausing to spread her pale white legs while on her head. I think we noticed her only because she had placed herself in the center of the grassay area, and bikers were shouting her on, like she was a stripper.
“Is she a hooker?” I asked — and I’m not even sure how I knew what a hooker was, but hey, that was the 70s.
“I don’t know,” said my my, pulling me in closer. The energy was sinister, although the girl seemed to enjoy being a spectacle. Soon the bikers had formed a circle around her, and I either sensed or knew that she was removing her bikini. My mom pulled my hand, and we left as fast as we could.
What happened? Was the girl gang banged by a legion of Hell’s Angels, or did she just put on a show? Whatever it was — it was pretty dark. And her frightening vulnerability as the bikers closed in on her is something I will never forget. She had to be about 17.
The Fourth of July is hot apple pie, county fairs and bbqs that reek of burnt meat, cheap coal and lighting fluid. It’s a small paper American flag attached to a toothpick, stuck in some old man’s straw hat. It’s wood-paneled station wagons and little blond kids who can’t contain their snot. Beer bottles, illegal explosions and steep holiday discounts at Safeway. And also, teenage runaways and biker gang rape. Happy Fourth, and God Bless America, y’all.
Trina describing a slaggy girl bad-mouthing her, “she was cunting me off”, first verbal usage in my living memory.
Dude in photo is King Arthur Pendragon, Battle Chieftain of the Druids.He is a former British Army soldier that changed his name by deed poll and spends most of his time down at Stonehenge protesting for public access to the holy site. He was recently arrested for living in his camper van at the side of the road proximate to the stones. He argued that the van was just protest HQ, home is in south london where he drinks tea & nibbles hob-nobs with Merlin.
we got a cab to ‘trina’s from waterloo station, when we disembarked at the elephant Blivs looked up at the high-rise blocks and said “this is england”. both boys are loving the contemporary , brazilian, african , polish cockney london.
Trina runs her 8th floor, two storey southwark council home pretty much like we run ours at home, open fridge policy and wide berth on flat-screen tv watching. the view is tremendous, out around lambeth and across to westminster, we can see the Houses of P, big ben & the terrifyingly huge London eye.Its been hot like Lagos and we sit out on the balc, catching up & going forward, drinking lager & smoking roll-ups. trina has gotten engaged to the most endearing south london anarchist, and is happier than I’ve ever seen her. Blivs calls her man the Main Guy. He works for the council and brings Trina all kinds of good stuff from the move-outs, most notably DeadMans Bar, a kitsch piece that fits perfectly in the living room and didn’t come from the dead mans house.( A few weeks ago, Main Guy went to a move-out, thought something was seriously off in the fridge on entering but turned out to be an old dead guy, who left this life while sitting in his tv chair.
Otto, my bud & Trina’s twin, came for the weekend with Villette and their three kids. We were jazzed at how the next generation jelled, its in their genes to rave together, and they did, later & harder than us old school 40-somethings. As an example of how hospitable our hosts are they housed all of us, 10 in toto, in the most chilled out style. We needed it after tiptoeing around grandma. I’m glad we are here and I see the boys soaking it all up. Eldest is drinking stella shandies at the Main Guy’s request, I like how he is with the boys, no patronizing, good empathetic uncle vibe.
last night otto, villette & I took all the kids up west in their roomy mercedes van ( they drove in it to Morocco last summer!) the streets were tokyo teeming with people, mostly young, high-spirited and drunk up-for-its. the kids were loving it, we ate burgers in covent garden and people watched.
sight-seeing hasn’t occured on a large scale but the kids now know their way around elephant & castle shopping centre and are happy to be sent to tescos for supplies. they bought thirty bags of crisps on offer and I was glad to find a worchester sauce flavor packet, steak & chips flavour? no ta. Somehow I’m taking sugar in my tea and buying hob-nobs.. its south london and it must be done.
The night before last there was a terrible fire in a high-rise just down the road, seven dead and the whole block traumatized. Feeling grateful for every day and the friends that we love.
How do I write about the stuff that most interests me without including the stuff that makes the history complete? I guess it’s not possible.
For research, I’m wading through Greil Marcus’s Lipstick Traces…a real tome of a history. And it’s making me realize how very little I know about the history of punk rock. Since the turn of this century, punk has come back into focus. And suddenly people who were only touting electronic dance music in the 90’s are leaping to reclaim their punk rock pasts. It is trendy, almost, to say how punk rock you were in the 80’s. Especially if you are white. I cannot make this claim.
First of all, I’ve always been more of a lazy, moody bitch and less of an angry mover and shaker. Also, my mom was young, single and a hippie – I did not have much opposing parental ideology to rebel against. And by the time I was old enough to dye my hair black, my family unit was solidly middle class in so-not-punk Noe Valley. To front as a Haight Street gutter punk would have been pretty laughable.
The things we love — the cultures we buy into, both figuratively and literally — are determined by what is available to us. A baby only knows the love it is given; we only know the music we are fed. It begins as soon as we are born. A baby loves nothing more than the sound of her mother’s voice as she sings her a lullaby. Music, melody, repetitive rhythms, warm vibrations…humans crave this. It is who we are. Radio transmissions, TVs, movies, anything online, we surround ourselves in music for the rest of our lives. Even though a lot of it is crap.
My musical tastes in the 80’s were largely formed by Bay Area radio DJs on KMEL, the Quake, KSOL, and KFOG. Radio was huge and amazing in the 80’s — without it, the music would not have spread like it did, and let’s face it: the music made in the 80’s was pretty epic. Hip hop, electronic r&b, dance pop, post-disco, new wave, punk, house…it was a spectacular time for music. Which meant, for me, it was hard to be exclusive with only one type.
I was obsessed with Prince, but also with The Smiths and L’Trimm. The cross-pollination was made possible because not only I was lucky to have access to diverse independent radio, SF public schools had legendary after-school dances in the 80’s that were DJ-ed by early Bay Area roving hip hop sound system crews , and I had friends whose precocious older sisters danced at new wave nightclubs (Lipp’s Underground, the Oasis, the I-Beam) and owned copies of Upstairs at Eric’s — and that one Ministry album. Breakdancing crews set up in corners of the yard at recess at Aptos, including the famous Littles.
This was the era of Thriller, “It Takes Two,” TI jackets, Adidas, and weird arty girls wearing old men’s jackets, torn black tights and pointy shoes. Hodgpodge sounds corny, but that’s what it was.
So..I could never claim a subculture to have been a part of back then. That would be comforting to say I Was a Punk Rocker, I Was a Hip Hopper. I was nothing really. Just waiting to blossom into a stupid raver, I guess.
Eldest complained for years that he didn’t like his name, I told him that I’d wanted to call him Wolfgang originally and he said he would have preferred that, as the abbreviated ‘Wolf’ appealed to his six-year old self.
But they both recoil from the girl names we had picked out: Eldest would have been Imogen or Philomena, Blivs was looking at Violet Mabel or Drexciya. The latter Mad Mike warned me was a hex name and shouldn’t be considered-
Just letting you know we are a lame resource for baby names!
I hope not! but stranger things have happened… Although I thought Palin succeeded in utterly trivializing herself with her snl appearance, she did seem untypically human for a change… just another fuddy hockey mom getting her 15 mins! I did love the pantomine moose and sketchy eskimo dancers…
this lucky mutt, formerly of Baghdad, has been adopted by a U.S. serviceman who is coming home with his new best friend. Glad for a happy story coming out of the saddest city on the planet….
snore, work has become so boring this week that the mystery of the missing cheese has all the workers in a frenzy.
This is serious cheese theft – not only has rubberqueen’s organic Vermont cheddar been severely nibbled but now we find Farouq’s jalapeno cajun monterey has also been hacked into. I think the cheese thief is a thrill seeker: getting his/her appetite whetted by having to speed-chomp by the fridge door.
There is an email thread with about twenty cheesy quips going back and forth, a surge in late afternoon electronic activity which will probs crash the unsuspecting server.
I think the culprit is the same person who smeared poop on the handrail a few months back… we have a sociopath among us.. and its very exciting
I have been a bad blogger. One week I’m a typist on crack; the next I’m gone to the world. The truth is that I’ve been totally exhausted. Breastfeeding while pregnant has proved to be trickier than I imagined, and sleep has been minimal since Little P is now too big to sleep in our king-size bed without getting cranky and waking up every few hours (sometimes every 20 minutes after 4 am) and wanting to nurse until my tits fall off. Moving into a 2 bedroom is looking more possible, so hopefully sleep will be less of a fantasy soon enough.
Ahh, the hippie lifestyle certainly has its drawbacks. But I admit I love snuggling with P on one side and Norman on the other. It brings a level of closeness that most Western families shun, and I know we’re better off because of it.
In other news: Election is only 8 days away, and our world is about to change. Of course, if McCain wins, I’m still up for hosting the Jim Jones Picnic, dixie cups included.
Holy shit! only eight days to go before the fate of the nation is sealed…. the voteless, like myself can only hope and wonder like everybody: will the things we really care about change?
here petals are strewn on the new grave of Gayle, a british aid-worker gunned down in afghanistan, wtf is going on in afghanistan? people are still poor, coalition forces are still maintaining a presence and aid workers are not safe..
nobody should have to hang their washing out in a place like this.. Gazan conditions are bad, and the UN repeatedly broadcasts the humanitarian crisis to the closed ears of the west. Will Obama help Gaza to get the food & medical supplies they need? I like to think so..
lovely Amma, recently got some lack-lustre press, slyly accused of exploiting the adoration of western devotees, the goddess of warm embrace continues to plow money into supporting the poorest and the neediest.. her non-intellectual cult of caring is distasteful to the aetheist bourgeois, but the people she’s feeding are the ones I care about
do you see the face of the virgin mary in this grilled cheese sandwich? I see scarlett johansson….who does deserve a botox cult of her own..
a vegas casino paid $28,000 for this snack, so maybe they’ll buy
THE BLOOD OF CHRIST, a fine example of really crap art and the kind of thing vegas high-rollers and hedge-fund types could feasibly be sold: a few shelves of fake blood splattered asprins for 5 or 6 million bucks… I care that this stuff ends up in the right place.. a nevadan pleasurehouse is perf
he’d chosen a wise woman, like this senior hemp campaigner for v-p. You know this lady has salves for all seasons, can skin up in the most inclement conditions and won’t go over budget on sub-prada outfits or japanese designer glasses.
I have to pass on this truly revolting story: Ariceli was hanging out ambiently people watching as her freshman was at soccer practice in the Crocker Amazon park out on Geneva. She noticed a super tubby dad disembark from his Escalade and escort his little boy to his team practice. Oh dear, fatty started to puke as he waddled down the path: he puked once and barely stopped, just wiped off excess chunks from his t-shirt. He then waddled a little further and actually managed to puke off the path. Then he stopped and lit a cigarette before chundering again.
This is the kind of thing that gets 5 billion hits on utube…
What the fuck? I am in a state of complete paralysis until Tuesday night. Could the bitch win or not? It’s killing me! I can’t see it happening (the good guy losing, that is), but then again, weird shitty things always happen during elections and maybe it’s all a dream. Maybe the good guy can’t actually win. Yes, he can. No, he can’t. But he has to! If I could, I would be downing tequila all weekend.
Drama! I can’t come up with anything compelling enough. Although me and Little P are headed to the science museum in an hour or so, and we’re going to concentrate real hard on the penguins. I refuse to gawk at the albino crocodile because it makes sad and reminds me of his old spot, which was a shallow coin toss. Poor white fucker. And there’s also the pendulum, which should be grounding to stare at. And P can get “nake nake” in the tiny kids’ room.
According to Daily Kos, the average score is currently 51 to 45. Tighter than a pair of granny pants.
I have a fear of aquarium water and earthquakes. (By the way — that guy is dressed as Spider Man and he’s telling kids they can recycle by wearing the same Halloween costume every year. Sounds fun!)
I don’t want these shark things flapping around my feet. I’m glad that old manatee isn’t around anymore.
The science museum is for ravers.
This lights and the ceiling detailing totally ruin this exhibit.
Snackies!
Hey, it’s a big egg.
This made me think of Faces of Death, but it’s just a photo of another animal that probably won’t be around in a few years.
This fish exhibit underwhelms.
I can’t remember when, but I know I’ve seen people masturbating in the Shakespeare Garden. We stopped here on the way home, but kept everything in our pants.
People, especially women in their fifties wearing earth mama shoes and fair trade wool, were especially nice to me and P in the health food store. It’s because we have our Obama gear on. Liberal-looking people everywhere are being especially nice today. Is it the romantic rainy day? Or are people genuinely feeling optimistic?
Leopard man is in his seventies and has just recently abandoned his bothy ( tiny shedlike cottage) on a Scottish island and moved into some assisted-living spot on the mainland because canoeing to the mainland for his weekly shop was getting too much for him. When I saw the article I was intrigued, I thought Leopard Man would be some spiritual hermetic tattoo freak but he wasn’t like that at all: he an ex-British Army soldier and he took off to live alone on the island because he just wanted to be away from people. He did the spotty full body tattooing so that he would get in the Guiness Book of Records and get paid for being a spectacle. It just seemed weird and sad.. not unlike Sarah Lucas’ new works,
which are basically plaster casts of her man’s penis with bits of flint and stick stuck in meaningfully.. I never got her sex theme drift, I mean whatevs with the fried egg titty, cucumber dick sculptures, shocking and funny espec with the big pricetag – its your basic pseudo-intellectualismo and this Penetralia is just flinty dicks, which aren’t uncharming members, but really to me, a little sad,after all this is the gal who equated sex with smoking cigs and then made this !
can you see it? its a fag toilet, I’d probs want a cig penis sculpture but I’d rather make it myself than pay Penetralia to do it,
this guy just looks woebegone, I don’t think his peeps are endangered yet but he def looks on a downer
fuck, potentially a lot of melamine flavor candy here…
anyway, sorry to be a downer hopefully tomorrow everything is going to change and we’ll all be grinning
Time to find another repository for unspoken fears because the american peoples’ psyche has cleaned house! I doubt I’ll ever forgot the beaming rapt faces of my kids watching Obama speak at Grant Park last night. The only natives in a group of europeans, we could see how proud they were to be american, and Eldest wearing his Obama t-shirt was moved to something suspiciously like tears.
Thanks voters for bringing us our magic hour, and thanks Ugo Rondinone for great art to appropriate!
one of the first images from CMS, showing the debris of particles picked up in the detector’s calorimeters and muon chambers after the beam was steered into the collimator (tungsten block) at point 5
of course I know what all that means because I activated the psychedelic portal in my cerebral cortex, I did this with a $170 vaporizer and I highly recommend it to all marginal depressives
so sorry lovely gay sisters & brothers – prop 8 is a blight on California, it makes a travesty of equality and human rights! Why shouldn’t gay people get married? This isn’t a religious state! seems like Sex Drama to me!
Check out some pissed off citizens in L.A. last night- solidarity with all lovers!
among many monday morning resolutions (de-activate fakecrack, call the boys’ orthodontist, buy hippy dogfood) I promised myself that I will not post endless & inane Obams tidbits.. this however had to be done.
Interesting to think about the implications of Shep Fairey’s iconic Obama image: Shep must now rank as one of the most seen contemporary artists, I also think he is probs one of the most admired contemporary artists: his work looks great, its out on the street for free, or easily affordable as posters, t-shirts & stickers. He is demonstrating an artistic democracy which must have the art marketeers petrified, I heard Damien Hirst had his factory workers installing spot paintings on bus stops and Sarah Lucas was seeing if her Penetralia exhibit could be mass-produced into an arty dildo gift set.
hey Melissa, remember that DJ we were looking for? Strangely, in the course of my sporadic social networking I became a member of Twitter, this is because of twittermoms which is a nascent but lucrative sub-spot of twitter and it’s kind of a phenomenon. I joined and almost immediately twitterers were telling me they were following me- why, I don’t know. I sent messages to lowerhaight mom and nakedbollocks telling them thanks for being “there” but I wasn’t going anywhere and didn’t really know how to.
anyhoo, to use an irritating colloquialism, next thing I know, twitter is alerting me that DJ YouKnowWho is following me.
You could have knocked me down with a feather, I mean, DJ YouKnowWho & I aren’t even fakecrack friends and conversation has not characterized our relationship to date.
What a bizarre world, some semblance of me is being followed by local superstar djs & peeps who call themselves after their genitals, what next? Who the fuck might I be following? this beats the passive-aggressive one-upmanship of the fakewall!
Hats off to the funky hippies in the photo- they opened up a squat in some huge old mansion in Belgravia owned by Kuwait or somewhere- they have changed the locks and are busy giving each other piggy-backs and making art!
It was one of those situations I could have prevented, but I was trying to be polite. Never again.
Old Punk Rock Dude, smelling of wet tobacco, oil and sweat, is probably a very nice guy. But he has no idea about children, even though he apparently has an adult daughter of his own. We were at Debbie and Krishna’s art opening at a hair salon in the Haight, and Little P had stripped naked and was twirling around on a salon chair. She’s adorable and happy, and people always stop to take notice of her authentic charm. Old Punk Rock Dude paused to admire her, and said he was going to pump up the chair because he thought it would be fun for Little P. I knew it was a bad idea, but I didn’t want to be rude.
As soon as his foot touched the pump, Little P began to scream. She was absolutely terrified – not only of what was happening, but also of this strange hairy man. I froze for a second – feeling equally terrified of Little P’s first experience of terror – and then pulled her away and into my arms.
What had I done? Why had I valued some stranger’s feelings over the emotional safety of my child??
She eventually calmed down, but by then we were all weirded out and had to leave. This terrible moment floated away and P went down easily for bed the way she always does – nursing and cuddling.
But as I lay there with her, my mind went to dark, awful places – the kind of places that require magical visualization to erase. I never, ever want to see my child scared or hurt. My thoughts were so awful I don’t even want to repeat them here. But these are feelings I never knew before becoming a mother. I never imagined the depth of love it was possible to feel before P was born, and, unfortunately, I never knew such extreme levels of fear. Now I know why my mom would be up crying and on the phone with the CHP when I’d saunter home at 4 am when I was barely 17.
Fabulous Georgina of the UK Pesticides group won some serious writ-action from the High Court last week. The Justice pronounced that there was solid evidence that peeps exposed to chemicals used to spray crops had suffered harm. He also bollocked the Gov saying that they had failed to keep with the Euro directive designed to protect rural communities from agricultural toxins. Hey! he opined in a judge-like manner, if we give beekeepers 48 hours notice on the poison-farmers coming through, maybs humans should be told too!
Weird reality of the countryside not necessarily being a safe clean chill refuge from the smut of the city…I’m surprised the UK laws are so crap in this area- I mean its UK law that you have to disclose GMO products.. unlike here where you can go to Unsafers and buy tomatoes beefed up with rat hormones for extra juiciness..
ho hum, off to Whole Paycheck to buy a cauliflower and a pack of million dollar tampons…
I always felt sad when i saw this photo by Dorothy Lange: an anonymous depression era migrant widow, seven kids, no home, picking cotton in So Cal for 50cents a hundred weight. I always imagined her dying young of starvation, consumption or some other word for poverty. But thanks to the internetra today I heard this very same mama interviewed- she made it to Modesto in 1945- worked 16 hour days at the hospital for the first 8 and a half years they lived there. In the 1970’s she came forward to acknowledge that she was the Migrant Mother of the photograph. She gave a great interview where she matter-of-factly told her story, she was pretty darn chipper and surrounded by her daughters in her garden.
I was looking for an iconic image to celebrate Ariceli’s mom who passed away this day three years ago and this wasn’t really what I had in mind. But Florence Thompson is just too inspiring sitting in the back of her tented-up car with all those kids, I think Mimi would approve…
yes, old punker at the art show was weirdy.. I don’t think Little P would be disturbed by these impressive manic panic addicts tho. they are in a new photo book out in the uk of punk/skin photos from the 80s.
punk was so fresh when I was a teenager in London, everybody was making it up as they went along. The punk girls from peckham who had the stall next to me at Camden market, ( Debbie and Piglet) were manic panic addicts too, they looked ferocious with their sprayed hard blue mohawks but we’d all drink tea out of piglet’s thermos and I’d pre-roll spliffs and bring the biscuits. They made exclusively black gothy girl-punk pieces. Sadly we had a big fall out because I inadvertantly shagged Mark Boot-leg who Piglet fancied..
grrr, germaine.. I am unbelievably fed up of this washed up pseudy feminist hack. Because she wrote the female eunuch I’ve always given her journalism at least a glance .. no more. A month or so ago she wrote at least a thousand sickening words about how smart Posh Spice was to support some emerging designer & wearing his ultimate pink creation for some trumped up photo op in l.a… snore.. then last week she went off meanly critiquing Michelle Obama’s red dress at grant park.. now shes quoted as saying that some woman ( Cheryl Cole) was too thin to be a feminist & that real feminists are fat bottomed, “healthy girls”
what a load of patronizing chauvanistic bollocks, I always felt duped by those intellectualismo seventies feminist types and ever since Germs wrote beautiful boy I thought she was full of shit & I still think so. these so-called fems haven’t helped women overcome the aesthetic prejudices of patriarchal soc values in the last thirty years in my opinion,
Ms Dworkin, we miss you,
and Germy, didn’t you know real feminists don’t have ciggie-lip lines! so go pump those lip creases up and we’ll look forward to wiping our arses on your comparative study of Angelina & Jen’s Oscar party outfits
last thursday morning I opened an email from Blivs’ soccer club manager, it linked me to the youth soccer league and very sad news that a ten year-old boy, a member of another team, had just been killed in a car accident. His name was Jonathan, his nickname was Pretty Boy and he loved soccer so much that he begged the paramedics not to cut his jersey off him because he had a game the next day. A story like this is always sad but something happened to me when I read about this little guy and his family; it was like I discovered a hidden pocket of grief in my heart and it flooded my senses. I felt lucky to have a little money to donate to the family, for like many of us workers, they don’t have any health insurance. But I couldn’t bear how sad I was, I wept and shuffled papers, I went outside and then in desparation, I started to visualize; an image of a wave came to me, a huge clear blue swell that rose up and turned white as it surged back into ocean. I imagined that vast powerful element endlessly cresting and falling embodied the compassion I felt for this family; the poor dead boy, the sister who held his hand as he died, the mom and dad, the whole heartbroken U12 soccer team!
My manager took me out in the afternoon, ostensibly to do book research but he drove to Sunnyvale Indian cash n’ carry for shop-therapy instead. We ate dosas at Udipi and I cried again because I just can’t hear that god has predestined all this life.
I didn’t tell my boys about this and I did my level best to keep my sadness from showing all that night. Before I went to bed I read the day’s quote in our buddhist day book, I realize I have a lot to learn in this life and the Dalai Lama is my teacher.
In one sense one could define compassion as the feeling of unbearableness at the sight of other people’s suffering, other sentient beings’ suffering. True compassion implies the wish to put an end to other’s suffering and a sense of responsibility for those who suffer.
14th Dalai Lama
ps. donations for Jonathan Manoz Chavez family can be made at http://www.santaclarasporting.com/
hey melis, did you get my f-crack forward this morn? are you doing the auto bot/post bot thing which will mean that the f-crack team will expell you from ever posting another status update? It sounds serious (humorless) and really naughty ( thats why I thought you might be doing it, or at least knowing what it is that will be so heavily punished) Well, let me know, if you have some time to waste – I googled post bot and it said no eggdrop-vbullet2. x full res, hmm… I was going to post a pic of mark zuckerberger, the man of fakecrack, but I figured these workers’ boots were hotter..
that was mean to say that workmen’s boots were hotter than mark zuckerbook: he has a nubile charm thats all but indiscernable to a matron of my years, but I see in googleimages, many teeth-whitened sirens of silicon valley posing in crunchy taffeta gowns at zuckencrack’s side. Fakie must be the most eligible redheaded self-made bazillionaire in consumerdom, I wonder if he will find his life-partner through f-cracking? I enjoyed Simon Garfield’s interview with big Z, you can find it on the guardian uk site:
Garfield says that the fake boss is colorless and consults with two nameless aides/handlers/banana republic mannequins virtually every question and its true- the article is dry as a fakebook friend’s tears. Connecting & Sharing is what Mark says we are doing, although he was probs about six yrs old when silicon was rave-friendly, I like the connecting/sharing schmooze..I feel less of a manipulated cyber-goof when I’m promoting and snooping ( I MEAN connecting & sharing) I might be thinking the f-crack through too pseudo-intellectually but its too huge to ignore, espec as the fastest growth demographic is ravers over thirty….
as for fakeberg himself, I am not hating but I am not melting either…
apparently at myspace they call fakecrack, hatebook, I wonder why??
recession reality: last night somebody at my work got laid off, their position was terminated so at least they get to draw unemployment. Its not super surprising, but that desk has taken on a sinister cast..
who will be next? I’m useful but late coming in to the company, also I’m not a manager, so probs am more vulnerable.
If I get laid off, I will hang out in my room, like this skinhead aesthete, ‘cept I will be listening to obscure ambient techno, reading up on the Zapatista movement & Alan Watts, writing ferocious pulp fiction and eating a lot of rice & beans. My dream come true, next time I’m not a wage-slave I’ll be really productive..
uh-oh, we are really missing Samo & Nige now that we have a bold colony of squeakers living under the stove. yesterday Superhusb had to deal with two of the small vermin, both of whom he found munching soggy food scraps in the kitchen sink.
The first instance was quite distressing as when he spotted the critter, it didn’t run away or look concerned at all. Superhusb grabbed the first item that came to hand to dispatch the furry one and it happened to be a used coffee filter: the grounds instantly immobilised the tiny being which made it easy to effectively crush it with the expresso pot. I didn’t feel very good about it, SuperH told me almost tearfully.. the second one he dealt with more humanely- instead of enacting a repeat performance of death by coffee grounds, beloved scooped the inheritor of sink crumbs up in an old coffee can and took it up to the back of the back garden and left it to it’s fate. This was a happier scenario and the captive was even brought into the bedroom so that I could see how cute he was, I declined.
These photo mice are, or were, residents of The Salk Institute For Biological Studies in La Jolla. The skinny ones were the unwitting recipicents of Mouse E, the ‘exercise in a pill’ invention- the skinny ones were dosed and they burned more cals that the chubbly control mouse, the skinny ones run 44% farther and 23% longer than their undrugged buddies. When Ron Evans of the Salk Institute was asked what was in the pill he answered, ” have you ever been to a rave?”
amazing how a mid-week day out of the office can elevate the spirits! I am going to walk my dog & his two feisty buddies up Mount Fogg and if theres nobody around I’m going to do 10 minutes of yoga under the cross.
Also great to find empty gourmet mice trap with untouched almond butter – have tthe squeakers wised up or did we kill the whole crew?
There were some other slightly funny simple pleasures I had in mind but now I can’t remember them..I guess i feel like I should be aware that all the simple things I do: go to the store for food, walk the dogs, have my kids in school, have some kind of health coverage : these are all things that hundreds of thousands of mothers don’t have to bolster their reality.
The more I read Alan Watts, the more I realize that the connectivity between peeps is barely explored. The more I read in my Zapatista anthology the more impressed I am with their political philosophy and third world perception of the piggery of the first world.
the most tangible perk of the publishing job so far was getting a couple of tickets to go and hear the mighty Q at the Herbst Theater last night. SuperH was rapt thoughout, and I especially enjoyed that, (this must rate as highly as the old squeeze getting him in to see Kraftwerk at The Brixton Academy !)
It was weird being at a City Arts Lecture, I kept getting this sensation that I was in a radio. The audience, that I could see from the circle, was largely Q’s age group, and they also were rapt. I thought I knew his story from writing the press release & proofing through a chunk of the book we’ve just published, but he has just done so much for so long…
heres a few gems from Q, in no particular order-
when he was a kid in Chicago his Dad worked as a finish carpenter for the Jones Brothers, the scariest black gangsters ever: he, his brother & his half-bro, were dead set on being crims, and when they moved to Seattle they totally set themselves up as Baby gangsters, setting fire to buildings etc
he said Seattle in the 40s was wild and there were so many servicemen from all over the country, you had to be able to play everything
he met Ray Charles when he was really young, they were music addicts and were playing in dance clubs 4 nights a week by age 13!
he wrote the austin powers crazy theme- ( obv not for austin but, even more grooving in the 60s)
he wrote the theme to Ironside!! with the earliest rave siren ever!
he said Tupac hid his real sensitivity and creative impulses- that Starry Eyes was about Van Gogh
he got down on ‘pimp hip- hop‘ and said things like don’t practice being black, look in the mirror
he said again and again that back in the day ie 70s – that white people thought black people were neanderthals, that he’d be turned down for film score work if the producers saw he was black- they’d say ” there are no black characters in this film, so why have a black composer”
there was thunderous applause when he said that he wanted to talk to the Prez-Elect about appointing a Secretary of the Arts, because if kids got creative opportunities they wouldn’t be so fucked up…
my favorite soundbyte was when he said that Ellington, Basie, Dizzy G, Ray Charles etc would be seen as the Brahms and Mozart of contemporary music, and that what motivates him and his best advice: do it for love & love it !
so much art & experience reflected in those pale forget-me-not eyes!
is it menstrual twingeing or that passive-aggressive sort’o buddy on fakecrack inviting every fucker ‘cept me to party thats giving me the wage-labor blues?
Even uber-inspiring Quincy isn’t quite enough to lift me all the way up – ( cause frankly it was depresso being a whitey given all Q has lived through & articulated so well..
Anyway Ramona is my guiding light- I feel better when I think about her life achievements: bringing a new consciousness to the campesinas: the Zapatista Womens Charter is a plain-spoken revolutionary set of guidelines for women. We pampered first world mamas can listen up too, and get over our fakecracking tweaks. I will add the Zap Women’s charter it to this post, but now I have to go overeat at the office holiday beast out…
the other day I was driving on the 80 in the East Bay, somewhere around Point Richmond and I saw this huge billboard with ‘Free Leonard” painted huge & by hand in green paint. It’s a beautiful piece of activist art, because the letters are really big and bold and it must have been super-difficult to get up there and do it. I’m going to try and get a photo of it but until then this is good too - its in L.A.
Leonard doesn’t seem to get any press any more- I remember at the end of Clinton we were hoping he’d get a pardon. It should happen NOW! the evidence against Peltier has always been disputed, basically its bollocks. Come on, this national hero is a great-grandfather and needs to be freed.
I am really not into this anti-Obama backlash, misery f-crack backtalk about how the Prez-elct is practically a neo-con. Whatevs- lets see what he does when he gets in.. liberating lovely long-suffering Leonard straight after inauguration will put those gloomy naysayers in their place.
Leonard, Mumia and all the unfortunates in Guantanemo deserve to get out of jail and pick up their $200 ( plus radical inflation, lets call it 2 mill) at GO!!!
Not the Resolve you get in England for hangovers,( that does actually work very well) but the kind that makes resolutions stick. I don’t remember openly acknowledging any such with the exception of telling Grit Lad, late last year on the phone, in a show-offy way ,that I intended to post every day in 2009. GL was marauding around Manhattan with or without Bobby Ballsack, at that point and seemed little affected by my blogging claims, rather, I suspect, he was reliving the naked yoga session he had been reported to have had less than 24 hours before.
Anyway, thats my rez and i guess the other give-ups I have on hold until after the move D party, where I fully intend to go there in all appropriate ways.
Actually I haven’t smoked tobacco today, which is a good thing because i certainly had a lot of stonermom balcony moments with Ariceli last night. We had a really nice evening hanging with the kids, after very scrumptious seaweed-chicken-tofu-japanesey-make your own-wrap supper we cleared the dining table and played ping pong. Simultaneously we had the Wii Rave Tennis going. Rave because Hamish djed with serato on his laptap very comfortably on the sofa. Rave Wii Tennis is the best. Later on we went down to Stonberdad’s new extremely top floor soma residence- looking much better than it did back in the days of the bullock.. to cut 5 hours of very plez rave hangout short, I ended up in Stonerdad and Activistmom’s bed asleep with both of them, Superhusb , Jen Covens and possibly more! Great new year, no extreme partying but not much sleep ,but nice dog walk with family & Anders Kskin and Finn the dog up to Mount Fogg this afternoon. Having a late stonermom inspiration to make beet green & onion quiche and a pesto, potato onion pizza. What do i want a Martha Stewart award??
Blivet just came and showed me the silver casing of his lower molar that he just pulled out, he asked if he could go and bang it with a hammer..now I’m drinking wine, wll i smoke a fag too? I’ll tell all in tomorrow’s thrilling post. hope you guys had a nice first day of the year, I’m hiding from the Gaza news today so far..
Sorry to gloat, but I LOVE waking up on New Year’s Day without a hangover — or even better, I love WAKING UP on New Year’s Day, i.e., not still going, if you know what I mean, and some of you do.
But like it or not, I am a party bitch to the bone. The first thing I wanted to do yesterday morning was drive by the Endup – just to see, just to witness from afar. I wanted to watch the fucked up partygoers struggle to cross the street to the gas station to buy more smokes. I wanted to see veins pulsating on death white foreheads, and I wanted to hear the boom boom boom of the speakers. Just to have a faraway taste of what my life was once like.
“I wonder what the cokeheads are doing right now!” I said to Norman in the car. “Yout think they’re still up? I wonder if their noses are bloody right about now…”
“Why are you so interested in what the losers are doing?”
Because who cares what the other parents are doing right now? Who cares what the sober meditators are up to? Isn’t it infinitely more interesting to know who fucked who and who puked on the floor and who freaked out on acid and who did six hits of E and made out with a homeless tranny?
Hurray for your Natural Born Boogers post Melissa, seems like we’ve managed to hold on to Grit Lad’s attention, despite our inactivity and best efforts of wordpress to suppress front page postings…( do your new posts go direct to front page cos mine don’t..)
I have had an uneventful day, spend the morning doing boring bill shit, which included a call to a debt-collecting drone in New Jersey called Kineesha who luckily could tell me which one of my many debts Hamish had cleared for the bargain price of $1008 .
I worked a cleaning job for Amelia because she had no childcare & her boy doesn’t know me enough to stay with me.. so that was underwhelming but hey, it just paid for our two most recent parking tickets, one of which had already gone up to the next bastard price level.
Ariceli sent me a British tabloid link that showed sad scrap Lily Allen with Jay Jopling on a boat in the carib, doing the usual rich people crap. While wondering how much of a story some pop starlet & ageing art dealer really was & who had taken the pap shots, I also spared a nano second of pity for Poplily: The first one I gave up for her was the night I met her unfunny Dad in NYC,he was a typical overblown celeb type , I could see he wasn’t going to check his nose for coke-drib or hold in any farts while talking to me – why? because I obvs wasn’t either rich or shaggable. I hope I never meet Adrian Edmundson because I don’t want to find out he is another witless Hirst hanger-on. How weird tho’ for 23yr old Poplily to be hanging on the flabby
old artscene with her dad’s mates, this kind of celeb crap makes my heart warm to Brit-Brit even more.
As for tobacco intake – I’m still holding off, but dinner tonight with Unitarian neighbors might push me over the edge….
when Blivet staggered into our bed last night at 4am with a fever and weeping sore throat I was already awake suffering the anguish of the repentant. I was sleepless over having bitchily written that dinner with our unitarian neighbors might induce me to smoke a fag or two. Like Lynndie England in a sad but real interviewby Emma Brockes that I read today on guardian.co.uk ,I felt the horror of the mistake, the un-go-back-able-ness of reducing the Units to a religious half-joke. Not only was I cheaply bitchy in that instance but i also committed the cardinal ravedrama crime of celeb-ing. Melissa & I love d -listed but we swore we’d never to go there, dishing & worshipping the celebs etc we were above all that ,being more SF-like and stoney.
Anyway neighbor dinner was really nice, this family are really pretty inspiring, they are different from us and yet really we are all just families doing the same things, Blivs always gets nervous that one of our family will misbehave when we are all holding hands and standing in a kind of oval and somebody, most often Unit Dad says a prayer. Last night he wished that 2009 would be the most successful year for our family, which was very nice and heartfelt and I wished I’d brazened it out and tacked on some godessy-invocation wishing their family the same. However Stonermom is rarely that togeths, as we have seen.
Blivs is really ill, his temp is 102.1 and is laying on the window sofa , on his favorite quilt, propped up taking razor sips of honey&lemon…
i feel awful especially as his health insurance has just expired and a trip to his doc will probs cost $200!
all this ravedrama and still no fags! i’m just so bummed about the land invasion of Gaza, even beloved nicotine is making me sick…
half the time I’m feeling really fucking bad about the hellish sitch in Gaza, the rest of the time I am anticipating having a gratuious good time at SuperH’s party.
I am not complaining, exactly, but living 11 blocks from the beach in SF has its drawbacks. First, it’s cold as fuck. Second, there ain’t shit nearby but the hippie food co-cop (and goddess bless the hairy vegan goddess for that), and third, well, it’s just in the middle of nowhere.
The plus sides are enormous. We scored an excellent 2-bedroom flat with cheap-ish rent — and Little P finally has her own room. Not that she sleeps in it, of course, but, you know…she eventually will. Maybe. We also have a big backyard, the toilet isn’t lined in 50-year old grime, and there are no creepy nooks and crannies, i.e, there is no funk. Zero funk — which is a first for me. So I shouldn’t complain. Did I mention the cold?
Oh, wait. More plus sides! The fact that there ain’t shit nearby is good for the wallet. I can’t waste 4 bucks a day on a latte, and a Chinese lunch or a burrito for dinner on lazy nights just isn’t going to happen. See? All good things.
This isn’t a complaint, but I’m also just not used to heat you have to pay for. The last four places I lived all had steam heating, which is a blessing aside from the profuse sweating in winter (and summer when the meter is off). Now we have central heating — which is perfectly fine, but I’m afraid we won’t be able to afford a constant temperature of 72,. which is what my cats have requested.
So…am I saying I regret the move? Would I trade my gorgeous white toilet for the old one encrusted with ancient shit? Would I trade my clean, bright kitchen with NO FUNK for the old one that had scary holes leading outside, flaking lead paint in the cupboards and things too creepy under the stove to ever clean up? No way. I love my freezing, inconveniently located new home, and I am constantly amazed that we were able to actually score it. Now excuse me while I rub two stick together in hopes of sleeping sound and warm tonight.
Its not as though this kind of heartless brutal subjugation of a population is new. Our measly two thousand years of recorded history attest that again and again, ethnic rivals have enacted cruel genocide and general devastation on their perceived enemies. Those little Palestinian toddlers were not the first kids to be left alone with their dead mother.
Days drag on, and no real hope of ceasefire emerges, which is a depressing reality given the daily death rate in Gaza.
I really believe that if Palestine can be saved then the world can be saved too: and only a consciousness shift in the human race, one which engenders a species-wide pacifism will do this.
just when the only thing worrying the noble workers was who was going to get laid off next… Farouq’s cheese got nicked again! He was close to tears when he told me, cheese-less and regretful.
“Why did I buy slices,” he lamented, “I made it too easy for them.”
He is right our ghetto kitchenette has nary a knife and definitely no real cutting surface or chopping board.. those cheese thieves are just peeling off slices easy-peesy-japanesy and munching all the way back to their desks..
Melissa, now theres something of a ceasefire in Gaza and those with the photographic evidence have passed the pertinent pics along ( thx Rita & Jonah!!) I’m ready to report back on Move-D’s first dj engagement in sf. as you can see, there was preternatural early eyesshut -dancefloor action stimulated by JohnJohn who wasted no time whipping out the 303-laden atmospheric acid cuts to appreciative ravers. The concentrated disco-joy of the un-club was palpable early on…
then Velocette played live, swathes of ambient meeting beats in a shimmying delicious set but sorry no dice with photos here, faceless techno rules!
more happy dancing
segue to corridor conversations and off-shore sightings by un-identified raver
worth pushing thro the corridor past damien’s well-stocked bar to the chill-out room, where Mike B & Tim P kept things jigglingly ambient with some fine visual enhancements by surprise visitor Matt Biederman, video artist extraordinaire..
pictured here, hard at imaging on his laptop – and who said SF wasn’t the place for radical fashionista ravers, check out buddies deconstruct t-shirt.. love it..
back in hot & smoky danceland Move-D plays a monumentally groovy five hour set that saw us thro til the very early hours
finally it was me & erik, who joyfully drank Excruciating Cosmos for the last few hours, cleaning up & doing a strange robot dance to the buzzing in our ears
our gracious host forgave us our stickiness ( apparently techno peeps leave a stickier residue than the hip-hop crowd!)
Rita and crew left around 7am and took this poetic shot outside
we left a bit later & less poetically, but yay, cars here!
last picture of the morning ! lovelies!
extra underground love to everybody for coming down & PK, Pirate-Queen, Dave Door, Damien & Jesse Drink Gurus, Velocette, JohnJohn, Mike B, Tim P, Matt Biederman, Kara-Marie and last but not at all least Misters Moufang and Sharp
this beautiful palestinian boy is dead. his half smile reminds me of my teenage son. somedays I feel that humans are the crappiest species on the planet. however smart we think we are, there’s a big chunk of something good missing from our hearts.
yes, its not a typo, Stonermom is trying to be Tonermom, and I’m not talking about some pilates abdominal crap either. Hard to imagine that I could get more disciplined than I’ve already been in 2009, this being the 26th day of not a single grain of beloved tobacco polluting my less-than-pink lungs. Now for February’s challenge I’m planning on becoming a weekend-stonermom, starting as close to 4.20pm friday afternoon as possible.
A whole week without meds seems like a tall order but who knows how many words will be written, or how many different types o’ seeds will get sprouted? Buttons might get sewed on, drawers may be cleaned out, husbands may be axe murdered..
I just know I want to do more and time is of the essence…
where was I going with the Tonermom idea – toning what if not abdominal bulges-? Toning behavior? If I had some alliterative thread I was going with, I completely fucking lost it which makes me think that THC levels in my brain must have been getting dangerously low. Lucky we had a late night Spiral Mother session planned Melissa. BTW your new apartment is fantastic, well done, also dreamy sofa. looking forward to sitting deeply on that! Although the weekend was dripping with outrageous juicy ravedrama, it was not mine and not post-able but now I know Gritlad is reading I will have to find something exciting to write about meanwhile.. heres some great activist street art from Venezuela!
Ariceli just spotted a whole rack of Hirsty skull jeans at Crossroads thift store in the Castro. They are twenty bucks a pair and no need to rush, there are plenty of them. Obvs its not just one recession hit fashion victim tearfully selling her fave jeans, more some over-priced boutique ditching their inventory. I just read a slew of gushy art/fashion online postings from the launch of fabulous fashion guru Hirsty’s collaboration with Levis & Warhol Factory. They love(d) him, they love(d) the bad ju-ju skull , especially when its artfully appliqued onto the arse of a pair of overpriced levis.
This is your chance to own a valuable piece of art history ravers, you know that these precious denims will surely recover their value, despite having depreciated at least 4000% in the last five months.
Seems that damien has not only realized his ambition to get away with making really crap art ( see rare Gambler catalogue c. 1990) but in typical over-achieving style has managed to make really shite fashion as well. Watch out for his new formaldyde after-shave coming to rich sheep soon!
these old boots look happier than this old boot. what a fucking week, I haven’t had a good lead for days. Last week my one good call accepted another quote that came in, sickeningly, at half the price of mine! Now my boss seems sunk in depressive ennui. I think he is preparing me with his sullen silence for lay off. Lay me off already while California can still make unemployment payments! Its hard to heed this week’s buddhist quotes about savoring every precious moment when I’m spending 8 hours a day in a windowless room, getting the brush-off forty tmes a day. Maybe I deserve a fag! No, a delicious spliff! a spliff and a cold beer and some buddies to laugh about it with me! Its 4.13pm, the w/end is nearly here, thank Goddess!
dudes, how timely- just after I posted bad work day, my lily-livered supervisor told me we had to go to the COO’s office. I said to her, when I saw her lop-sided attempt at a sympathetic expression, ” Is this a lay-off conversation” Affirmative, her denture half smile told me.” I thought so,” I said, ” Because Farouq has been really horrid to me for a couple of days”, I looked at him squarely but sad case couldn’t quite make eye contact.
I didn’t say goddbye to anybody. Sadly, I couldn’t peel out of the car park blasting the bass breaking move-d track 5 because Hamish had driven further north to hippyland to work on money music. instead I walked a mile back to town through the Canal district. This is the latino quarter which fronts the bay, but is ghetto marin-style. I felt really happy and liberated walking the streets brought to life with day worker guys hanging with their women and kids, enjoying life, offering me Olas! becasue I was smiling…
Dudes, it was poorly handled, but I haven’t seen that publishing outfit handle anything well in the last year, and they are always sacking peeps. Some saps get sacked and then they come back.
Not I! time to get back to the important business of loving life, being uber-resourceful, second drafting The Life and Times of Stonermom, dog-walking & daily yoga on Mount Fogg!
Get it! I was looking for an appropriately camp and marvellous queen to illustrate my Lay Off Queen post but when I saw Sausage Queen here, I had to alter course. Who or why this earnest & open-faced girl was ever draped in sausages and given that Zion crown we’ll probs never know. Its a look tho’- if I ever get really twisted again and I’m near a butchers I might try and get in the End-Up wearing bratwurst knickers and a black pudding beret. Seriously, that crown has about 8 kosher salami attached..
These are the joyous meanderings of Lay Off Queen at dusk on a tuesday night. I’m really enjoying my new state of unemploy because, amazingly, I have time to do all the things that 40 hrs a week in an office precluded. For example Eldest and I just took a dog walk for an hour: we talked about all kinds of stuff, mostly school.. and we needed to- we hadn’t had that much time together since the christmas holidays. This is what I mean about full-time work not being conducive to family happiness, kids need more than just supper and a ten minute check-in, especially those who are challenged by their algebra.
I was upset, for a heartbeat in the car coming home, only because my supe turned out to be such a cowardly douche. He could have saved me a week of his brush-off dickhead attitude.. still he’s de-friended and I’m moving on…
the weekend was my karmic party reward for a year of relatively conscientious behavior. Pizza friday was considerably enlivened by two lovely french girls, one french-armenian the other french-algerian, exotic or what! So between the seven of us adults we finished off a good few bottles of wine & smoked it up in the back garden. Saturday we went to club-land and caught the whole of Wolfie’s set at dna, very intriguing: tight as a rats arse musicians who pulled off a live dance music set convincingly. Then Spun played a severely challenging set which had ravers emphatically dancing to 70s rock weirdness – stuff that sounded like Grand Funk Railroad on psychedelics, even Pixieman was there, it was quite great! Then around 5am we went to the Love Guru’s loft and were treated to his intoxicating hospitality whilst reclining to his deep detroit grooves. Nothing like a Stonerdad on the decks at 6am…
As if that wasn’t just a rewarding weekend right there, we had an invite to Little P’s Massive Birthday Rave on sunday afternoon.I laid on a blanket in the back yard, boys were bringing yummy food and mimosas without complaint and i watched all kinds of cute smalls trundling round the garden. By the end of the afternoon when we were after-partying on the same blanket we noticed that the sour grass had been neatly trampled by the toddlers, literally up to the fences. Bless! Life is good and we are super lucky!
Last night I experienced a slight drowsy epiphany about fakecrack : Melissa, I remembered you telling me that ever since you’d discovered the f-book it had replaced ravedrama as your online source of amusement, you and me both. I don’t care to consider how many hours i’ve idled away thinking of status updates ( laid off yo! being one of the many that didn’t make the cut) I visualised the f-crack as a similar malaise to the one which affects the world Pullman creates in The Subtle Knife- where one train of thought overpowers all other impulses.. and leads to brain ( and other) death. It seems the F-world network of linked acquaintances are evolving communication protocols which verge on the extremely artificial, dare I say gossip-less?
Let me explain: one doesn’t comment honestly with a ” Get a grip!” or , ” Did you have to share?” tho’ one might be driven to make a call to share that exasperated sentiment with another fakey. Online, one simply sends an innocuous glow-stick or good karma.
I’m not hating the f-book’s endemic success, I myself a subscriber & I’m not yet seriously considering dis-enrollment. I am surprised tho – becauase really F-ers doesn’t deliver online, the gossiping stays verbal with word of de-friendings and other passive-aggressive manouevering taking up offline conversation time. I miss the solitary exchange of emails…
Similarly, Ravedrama doesn’t come up with the goods: recent breaking Stonerdad lovedrama hasn’t made a posting, because well… you can’t air other peoples’ rd… if you want to stay friends. Thats where celebtrash come in – the people nobody has to really care about.
I remember Heather, one of the girlfriends of Pirate Queen, that crew- all lovely exciting girls – artists, filmmakers, porn-makers, chefs, poets , hard drinking , dance friendly and immaculate company. Last week Heather passed suddenly, unexpectedly and I just got sent these great psychedelic photos, beautiful Heather Montoya, see you in dreams
“and then, well, you wouldn’t believe what he* had in mind, but I already had the bottle of jameson in my bag so I was, like, outtathere….”
if I wasn’t lay-off queen I’d probs have already bought these dubious finnish zapatas – something about that hippy stitching and funky light green vegan leather, they remind me of the shoes the Elves made in The Elves and the Shoemaker, the Ladybird book version. When you have a crap job and direct deposit your closet fills up with semi-wearable gems like this. I really am open to retail therapy, look at, I’ve paid cash for sofas, second- hand sweaters,books, and as yet unworn red leather boots since my recent retirement from wage labor. I’m a pillar of the capitalist economy on the micro scale! But vegan consumerism is taking a direct hit from me today, I love these weirdy pc fairy pumps but I’m not spending $200 on them!
Last thursday the dog of my heart had a big fat tick on his neck. Really grossly gray and engorged – I smothered it with oliveoil & extracted the whole loathsome beastie. Ticks shouldn’t be killed by popping because the blood sac has unsurprisingly vile bacteria swilling in the blood, instead, drowning in a glass of water or flushing down the toilet are the recommended deaths for ticks. I wrapped the extracted blob in a wodge of kitchen towel while I swabbed the dog wound with witchhazel.. moments later I went to take the tick to its ultimate destination.. but it was gone!
Where the fuck does a totally bloated with blood tick go? the kitchen towel was there but horror bug must have dragged itself off somewhere. I had a manic & thorough search round the back of the table- the sofa … nothing…
I hope its not breeding away in a wall crack in the living room like some rejected sub-plot from a Stephen King nov….
well, it don’t look like much, and its probs true to say that the mysteries of the goddess have devolved in the last couple o’ thousand years and thus our sweat lodge looks a little dilapidated. Actually, it was looking a lot more luxurious and inviting on the bright cold morning of this month’s full moon. It was 10.26am when the moon turned full and into Leo, and the Directress of Good Lovin’, our fire-building hostess and mistress of proceedings was in her back garden with eleven ladies getting ready to sweat. the high priestess of the Forest Knolls Peace Club was rolling menstrual-strength homegrown joints out of a wooden salad bowl and the directress and I got down to the business of hauling the rocks out of the fire & beating off all excess ash with a switch made of a small branch from a bay tree that is growing right by the fence. Ariceli and a nervy anti-war activist were in for the first time and not a little anxious about entering the womb-like hot darkness, but a few tokes and they crawled in quite boldly.
nothing like a hot stoney sweat to make you feel like a prehistoric aboriginal, especially when its all women and nobody has to worry about unsightly swinging bits of genitalia. In the steamy dark we thought on all our heavy shit, personal and planetary: two of us were dealing with cancer and we were trying in stonermomly fashion to offer up the pure intention of health. the directress had invited 11 ladies because its a magic pagan number, but pregnant ladies don’t, so Melissa managed the fire and played with Skylar, who at 3 years old was brave enough to stick her head in, but wasn’t ready to stay.
I wish I could start every week with that kind of sanctuary, steam and sorority… Yasoda said, ” Sweating makes me laugh!” and she did!
what a hilarious story, Damien Hirst known as Lil’ Spin Pickle to his indulgent buyers, has been reimbursed by the dastardly plagarist Cartrain, an upstart underage street artist. Cartrain had appropriated the image of Lil’ Spin Pickle’s diamond skull and used it in his own work, but the ferocious world-famous artist unleashed his lawyer and Cartrain surrendered the 200 quid that he’d made off his skull collage.
Lil Spin Pickle needed that money! He only made 111 million off his blow-out auction last year and so he is really on the lookout for ways to keep his income flowing. I wonder if Eugenio Merino is being audited too ? – he just sold a dreadful sculpture of Lil’ Spin Pickle blowing his brains out, he made about $40,000, so I’m sure he’ll get fingered for that.
Luckily for Cartrain, there are rebel artists who don’t buy into Lil Spin Pickle’s demented vainglorious plop-plops.
James Cauty and Jamie Reid, both radical proponents of real & free art, have raised plenty of $$ to pay back Cartrain by selling limited editions of some piss-taking skullart, some of which I’m posting some of here …
(the one where the skull is reading copyright & intellectual law is Cartrain’s)
Interestingly the turgid Chapstick Bros, were recently accused of plagarism by street artist D-Face, when they made like million dollar sweatshop goons and “worked on” defacing fivers & tenners at the frieze art massive this summer. The extremely pseudo-intellectual sibs droned on about how graffiti art by its very nature is “an avoidance of authorship” Deary me! bros need to check the century!
Nobody is more disappointed in the ybas than me, I really thought that Lil Spin Pickle was an artist who’d reveal the mystic truths…. and maybe he still will.. but a more likely result is Penetralia Lucas coming after the sculptor responsible for this:
clearly this is some kind of snidey comment , if not a direct appropriation of the pasty one’s fag toilet. I mean that was art this is…. just a disco toilet???
I guess the reason workers at rainbow are so dour is the weight of their knowledge, yesterday I was in the hallowed store looking for big plastic water carriers- the kind that you invert and sit in a ceramic dispenser. I asked the nearest operative where they might be , she looked at me like I was in a time warp: ” we are not stocking any plastic water carriers anymore,” she said heavily,” because ALL PLASTIC LEECHES” I looked at the shelf that only housed righteous glass gallon containers. “But how will people dispense their water?” I replied helplessly, gesturing at the empty! ceramic dispenser that sat uselessly on display. The worker just shrugged her shoulder and fixed me with an unsympathetic stare, like I was one of the main bitches trying to destroy mother earth.
I wanted to ask her why Rainbow wasn’t abandoning all the leeching plastic container shit in their inventory.. because obvs there would be precious little left on the shelves!!
Plastic does suck & so do the recent stats from Greenpeace on americans’ toilet paper preferences: apparently 98% of us use 3-ply eco-disaster loo roll, which is made from virgin paper and is worse for the environment than driving a hummer! Most irritating is the luxury bog roll advertisements featuring celebs endorsing the evil tissue… this kind of thing should be legislated out of existence & americans should have to use Izal TP which can also be utilized as tracing paper….
The Gay Astronaut cat box has yielded exceptional results. Edsel has only shit on the floor once, and that was a fuck you I could handle: the cat box was a solid shit mountain. And he hasn’t peed on the floor, either, which wouldn’t matter here at the new place since our kitchen floors look like wood, but are actually just plastic.
Edsel is a big, lazy slut. He is obsessed with luxury, silky textures and bright colors, but rarely licks off his butt snacks. It’s that very paradox that keeps us coming back for more. Edsel is actually one of the world’s greatest house cats.
You will be happy to learn that the Cosmic Catnip Alpine Scratcher is a consistent winner. A little catnip always sets the vibe right.
But Edsel doesn’t just want to get high. He also wants to run free. He’s a big, sissy mama’s boy in a tom cat’s body. But he has wild manimal yearnings — an urge I keep consistently castrated for weird, cat lady reasons.
I had him blessed by a Catholic priest in a hot pink gown.
Edsel may be a big pussy, but he is also truly a man among mice.
He longs to leave and explore the grand world yonder.
Sadly, he’ll just always be my little prison bitch.
Andie & I met Pixieman at a free party in Golden Gate Park, summer of 1992. He was the best dancer we had ever seen- even on the turf and a heroic dose. He still is the best dancer and now he’s a grad student and poet..
I do love poetry, when I get it, you have to be psychedelically brave to write it.. thanks Pixie, more please….
Lysergic Acid Diethylamide
Micrograms become milligrams begin to look like
silver dollar sized dollups of blue gell mop up
on butcher paper in my palm puddled
smiling I think of England in a strawberry field walloped with a fist full of daiseys for Timmy Leary from
Ken Kesey
deliver me Mistress Delirium tremmens held at bay
you may stay with Tinkerbell or Heavy into Jeffrey
bridging gaps with chaps from the North where you
can not go because they ride hard while we hide here in the Electric Koolaid timewarp that is what it is
a symptom that resembles psychosis called
a vision quest to help you remember your third eye
or perhaps a grand mal seizure to better understand the celestine prophesy cistine chaple
painted by purple bass and acid house two bad
mice in a double fine zone down to the station
house nation nervous acid bomb scare from
Alfred Hubbard
a Merry prank to cure the Brotherhood of Eternal Love of their emotional disease
John Star Cooke sets his psychadelic rangers
laughing while Jay Stevens is Storming Heaven for Alen Ginsberg
whos Howl silently screams
see the rabbit in the moon on the mezanine
with a blanket of kittens to keep
out the cold
to guard against spiders spinning stories like Anansi and Mickey Mouse slangin’ tickets
’round the parking lot at Atomic Cock
blocking bragging blaggarts bogarting miracles
going off about a dream girl and some crazy
bigtime schwinger
calling all the songs one step beyond
right on
Lotus family liquid microdot eye candy at
frisky loop will get you in at willcall on the door
with a ticket for tilt a whirl but the list at lost it
is trickier than beaker says bagock
piggy back blind boy can get you all the way to the
Fillmore on the A train
life is a hologram selling captain crunch and his
keniesiology callisthenic perfect tommyknocker
workshop fuled by white russians and that
toothpaste sliver tab locking a briefcase full of
coffee brown marmite rye mold
served up above the spaghetti western before the
bulletproof molotov memphis mini british ivasion
double dipped on the window pane from across the street
staring at myself dreaming that I am awake again
for a while
in residual
——————–
breaking news from Ariceli is: Grit Lad touches down for a west coast weekend tomorrow lunchtime. He’ll be taking in the vintage baseball opening game in San Jose while we are all still in bed or lounging sunday morning… Why is Grit Lad called Grit Lad? I’m such a stonermom I don’t quite remember.. it can’t be anything about grits because he’s from Scranton, Pa. and I just don’t think its a grit eating region.. anyway from proprietary intelligence sources it sounds like GL has some racy ravedrama material to share of a polyamorous nature..!!?? Our Love Guru will be jealous!
its not exactly a trade secret but I have to confess i rip a lot of photos from the guardian. This is because its easy and they format great, unlike many sites where downloaded pics come out the size of a toytown postage stamp. I don’t quite remember what this forced frog embrace is about: not the Fest of Colours but some other groovy hindi tradition, its a bit pervy but shit its better than eating these little guys’ legs.
I’ve been reading the guardian since I was about 15, I try occasisionally to read the NY Times or Wall St Rag but I always go back to the soft-lefty guardian even tho’ I’m underwhelmed by their pandering to pop culture – really, they have done more hokey “whats up with brit-brit” articles than I care to remember ( of course I read them all)
This morning I read on the G: 2nd day trial reporting on digusto Fritzl the austrian who incacerated & raped his daughter for 24 years, the strange case of Joaquin phoenix who has a new schtick as a wannabe fat white bearded talentless rapper …what else… poor Natasha Richardson critcal with ski-ing head injury… I could have gone further reading up on Jade Goody’s already sold tabloid death..I might as well have been reading USA Today. Really, the G is a borgeois fake intellectual celeb sheet, it just looks like a “serious” read.
The rot really set in for me when Johnathan Jones, who wrote so amusingly & informatively about all kinds of visual art: really Hobbes to Merz ,( I almost had a kind of ugly guy- great writer crush on him, not surprisingly he wasn’t a YBA bottom-feeder at the time.) Sadly when Darth Hirst made the Bad Ju-Ju Skull, Jonesey had his head turned: he wrote that the skull showed that the Omen namesake had come of age as an artist & the skull was the best thing ever. So sad to see a functioning intellect crumble after a buddy few lines of coke squashed in the back room with the fakest artist of our time & the fragant corn-fed breasts of the ubitquitous rich gallery receptionist gals…
I have to own my shallow preoccupations and get with the program, maybe i should subscribe to The Nation again so they can join the forest-destroying copies of the New Yorker that act as a kind of protective covering for our floorboards..
I like to think so, I like to think that it was you, who clicked, a desultory underwhelmed kind of flick, to our url. I mean really who else could it have been? Theres nothing doing here & consequently, no one coming. Melissa has a great excuse for absentee status: having just very recently and admirably pulled off a magic home birth to a fine baby girl. But me..so-called Felicia, I really don’t have any good reason not to be ravedrama-ing. At this point I’d like to mention Philip Pullman because, as I’ve written obscurely before,the world he created with the dreadful ennui which literally killed peeps with emptiness, reminds me so of fakecrack. I must say that I admire your grit re. not fakecracking, I imagine you despise it for its gratuious artificiality but Grit Lad, don’t be disarmed, its real reach is far more insidious. Whats artificial becomes the norm, y’know wall-to-wall conversations, where many can “hear”, even “listen back’. I know that change is stability and all that, but what worries me is how we change without thinking, and then the old thinking is gone. You know its true,
Buckminster Fuller, apart from having a pretty crazy name had some really extraordinary ideas. I’ve been reading Operating Manual for Spaceship Earthwhich is very cool, optimistic about human potentiality in Universe ( Bucky never used preps for Universe, which he considered a living entity that we were part of)
I like that he dissembled our “time-honored” global accounting systems and had workable logical alternatives, ( peeps without jobs should be paid to think of good ideas!! if one in a million came up with something cool we’d all be quids in!)
He was loved by the hippies more for the geodesic dome, truly the funkiest ( if leakiest) contemporary structural design than his theories of ultimate automation & industralization.
Anyways, I discovered last night that Bucky really is the progenitor of the fakecrack principle: from 1915 to 1983 Bucks kept a journal which he updated every waking 15 minutes ( he also claimed to have figured out a way to sleep for 2 hours a night too!) Buck left 80 meters of journal behind. The earliest example of a status update?I’m not sure why he did that, some intelletual take on the zuckerbergian “connecting & sharing”?
The portal which may or mayn’t be a gateway off this spaceship was revealed in a dream to Philip K Dick’s step-father… who faithfully built it as he remembered it..currently the portal is dismantled… theres a so cal film treatment in that story!
it has been a beautiful sunny Cesar Chavez Day here in California , of all the hols we get to celebrate with a day off from public school ,MLK day And CC day are the best. Cesar was an amazing guy, thanks to him agricultural workers in the states have a better working reality than before his radical unionization of farm workers. Of course it still pretty much sucks but minimum wages, work conditions and exposure to hazardous pesticides all improved due to legislation that he fought for.
This is him and his little sister on their parents in Delano, California in the early 1930s.
We ate pesticide free California strawberries, (the fruit strike that he won) to remember him today.
nothing like a crusty to pen the immortal lines! I hope Obama is listening like he said he said he would. now is the time to rethink this bollocks capitalism that has 80% of humanity living in abject poverty!
Also good job Gruniad, more of this & less of Adrian & JJ
riding the muni is best described at muni diaries blog: theres one story about a girl on the 22 filmore screaming PRADA!! repeatedly like a demented mantra.. its very funny and you know its true. There is always somebody slightly off on muni, espec in the front few sets that are for the disabled and derepits, which is where I’ve been sitting,I’m making anew rez to go farther down, even if it looks a bit scary. I have to get away from the abnorms because I am absolutely drawn to watching whatever loony stuff they do: I have no self-control…yesterday there was a black guy, probs forty, clean clothed in garments only a 70 yr old mother could choose. He was holding his arms out in front of himself, bent at the elbow , and making a delibrate L-shape with his rigid fingers and thumb. He would push this hand shape forward in response to some impulse i couldn’t fathom. Today i sat opposite a very cross- eyed twenty -something, he was i-podding and staring at me, i think? ( diff to tell with the cross-ness) i kept smiling but he didn’t smile back.
I find the freaks more sympatico on the N-Judah, last time I visited Melissa & baby sister I sat on a bench seat with a sort of heroin/booze- faced fifty year old woman wearing stone-wash denim and on crutches , she had her two sweet dogs with her: a pitbull who was 10yrs old and a lady mutt who was 12! We were both sober & had a lovely chat all the way to 28th ave!
owing to severe paucity of material of a photographic nature i am dredging my desktop for images. heres Mr Projectile, a name I’ll never forget & Hamish pounding some drum machines down at 1015. It was a trance scene epic , not the usual line up at the tiredest disco in the city. They played really great and all the trancers were swinging out. This was the night that i met a really bizarre guy with a mad name, something like nordrick (?) who was a santa cruz dude who was a mega-scenster. i ended up in a truck that had transported a sound system and various trance props, drinking chivas and smoking nordrick’s finest. He didn’t make it back into the club with the bottle under his jacket.
other rarities grazing on my screen
yay! the assbomb banner that Eldest spray painted in the back garden..note the ass and projectile! also this..
a groovy book on acid that i don’t own and am unlikely to find on amazon
a synchronized moment somewhere in northern california, three luminaries from the spaz collective get coordinated
my favorite kooky indian dudes going for it at the festival of colors!
OMG LOL stoner chains! you know those things that retards and old people wear around their necks that hold their discount bus passes? Well, imagine that, but for stoners and thus a lot cooler. The whole idea came into play a few weeks back, when Felicia couldn’t find a lighter, and I had lost my keys! Oh, and where did those pesky rolling papers go? You mean I have to roll another joint out of mismatched tampon wrappers and fragmented bits of last night’s roaches? NO. I do not mean that. I mean you need the stoner chain, a free-trade organic PCP-free plastic piece of shit that hangs around your neck and contains everything you need to keep on being a fucking depressed loser who never accomplishes shit: lighter, unused rolling papers, newborn child. I ditched the Bjorn baby carrier for the stoner chain b/c I like to keep my personals in one safe, scared spot – where my illegal drugs are, dumbass.
You can order one by leaving a message on my voice mail about the “50 green t-shirts” you want to buy, wink wink, nudge nudge.
happy birthday hamish! sorry to hear it is crappy & gray in Buffalo NY, its global boiling here, the hottest recorded in northern cal since 4/20 since 1986!
i know you are probs eating something delicious right now & having a few single malts for good measure.. we are with you in spirit as we lick our ice lollies in the shade.. Blivs is trying to slide out of his guitar lesson citing his sweaty fingers slicking on the strings as his slip-out clause.
I walked the dogs this morning, but poppy refused to go further than the Mount Fogg bus stop, something about the sweat rolling down the insides of my arms made me follow her intuition and turn round & bring ‘em home.
it is 4.40 now and i feel I should make a combustive gesture for greenery, all I’ve been hearing today is that its Holocaust memorial day & horrible hitler’s b-day, which seems a really bizarre combo somehow.
many many hippy returns to hamish and hemp & all is derivitives!!!
the lovely Gritlad – coverboy for extreme antiquated sports!! this fine portrait graced the cover of the SF Chron at the weekend and complemented the amazingly understandable article all about vintage base ball. ( I am writing base ball as two words as I learnt in the Chron that back in the 1880s thats how they did it, fascinating huh??) Seems like vintage base ball was way more hardcore back in the day, the bats were huge and the gloves were skinny. On the upside, one position, I’ve forgotten which one already, is allowed to smoke a cigar and wear a top hat! Turns out in old time base ball everybody had a nickname, Ariceli’s husband Basil who is on the team is known as ‘Buttercup’ whilst Gritlad goes for a diminutive ‘Grit’…
This is very very exciting for me as I’ve never had any friends who were sports celebs but now I’m in! I feel sure the inside world of vintage base ball will be debauched beyond the wild imaginings of most team sports!
I’m feeling a re-reading of William Kennedy’s Ironweed coming on, although i guess that was set in the 1900s.. anyway I’m still not ready for the Roth baseball novel, probs not in this lifetime.
The burning question all vintage base ball fans are asking is , will Grit be true to the Pacifics and fly back into town for the May 3rd game??
Last thursday I took the boys down to Shoreline, Hamish’s penultimate gig with the Dead, he wanted us to come for the historical and cultural significance of the event. Boys were, understandably underwhelmed by the prospect of six or more hours in the company of the hippy massive. they need not have worried, backstage was executive entertainment boredom personified. The stage at Shoreline is measly, there really isn’t any room for backstage partying, instead there is an elevated screened-in loft attached to the side where the backstagers can hang, its aptly called the Posers’ Gallery.
Looking out into the audience was quite extreme, the capacity is 22,000 so which ever way you look at it there is a lot of humanity swaying around, the psychedelic aura of the deadheads was palpable even at a distance and this was the reason the boys didn’t want to mingle, too much freaky. Sigrid and i took full advantage of our all access passes and mingled with the swaying pungent crew out front.
Backstage we found psychedelic artist and countercultural historian Mark McCloud who resumed lesson 232 on the Chocolate Match Band and some other pointers on the Kansas Art School. This was good, this was the kind of thing that should happen at a dead show,even one that Jerry isn’t attending. In the company of Mark, we watched the kids monoploizing the basketball machine, we sat on dilapidated sofas at the perimeter,designated for crew to smoke,here was the spot for passing out the pre-rolled, basking in the warm evening whilst tuning into the acid monologue.
Driving back to the city was like being in one of those video racing games on the difficult level: really fast and foggy and acid. In a relatively lucid sense I think I got a massive acid contact high front of house, I felt weirdly calm and stretchy, just like you do.
I did not hear the Golden Thread but I really liked hearing Hamish’s wooshy samples & effects, I felt sad about Jerry especially as despite Warren Haines the vocals failed to pull me in , but as Sigrid said, ” This thing is bigger than Jerry”
I’m off it! I’m so sick of fakecrack world as a daily entertainment destination, I wonder why? Perhaps because out of my three-hundred odd fake-friends I’m only real friends with about twenty of ‘em The rest are people I know or have known in a loose and nightclubby way and as such they are not the peeps that I need to inform about my daily doings nor hear about theirs.
I knew there was something seriously wrong when I started fantasizing about posting status update tag-lines like, “Phew! Just took a three foot long dump! ” or less offensive but more incriminating, “Waking & Baking” I wish I could have the hours back that I’ve spent thinking of acceptable, amusing, impressive status updates, shit, the days i spent snooping & boasting ( I mean connecting & sharing) I could have been done with my book draft weeks ago…
Hey at least I didn’t EVER do a quiz or tag people to read twenty-five things they didn’t need to know about me – I was tempted tho- sorely!! Who doesn’t want to spill their their beans..
The biggest turn-off so far has to be hamish adding an ex whose profile picture was a tasty shot of her white arse.Haamy adds indiscriminately, never turning down a soul in the name of potential promotion.. but I don’t approve. I put it to him: Would you like it if one of my hot exes added me and his profile pic was his naked butt in a thong?
That is probs the only thing that is going to win me back to fakecrackery, come on ex-fuck buddies show me what you got!
Heres Bruce Nauman’s amazing neon sculpture, he did it in the sixties, inspired by commercial neon signs in storefronts, he appropriated the medium because he wanted to confound the use of the object and slotted in his own pronouncement. It was a cool idea and it worked and I think this one is the best, I saw it in life at MOMA in NYCand I was transfixed. its clever and funny & poignant and it was a way fresh idea when he made it.
Fast forward thirty years and witness Tracey’s neon
Neon is pretty much a standard art material theses days, Flavin kind of cornered the use in formal & minimal contexts but Tracey is right out there with the meaningless referential usage. I guess that pink neon is reminiscent of Topshop interior design & the platitude [oh christ I just wanted you to fuck me, but then i got greedy and wanted you to love me] is very Topshop customer vibe.
Its obvs not about anything as simple as a hag considering a failed love affair, but it ain’t actually about sex becasue Tracey says to the Gruniad this week that shes not interested in sex anymore! now shes interested in IDEAS
So strange then that her new show consists of 150 sketches of a woman wanking, along with an animation of wanking lady and the usual blankets etc.
Wanking is an IDEA and so are high heels and they are both in trace’s animation of the wanking lady too, which is really just high price lame porn, I mean IDEA! The animation, which is a limited edition, that quaint old moneymaker, is pricey at twenty grand.
If you want to see some really amazing fine arty sexy psychedelic animation free go check out Crazy Girl’s anime at her website at no charge.
Anyway I could bang on heartlessly about this crap, ugh the art world what a sick tired old capitalist game, what a pisser Trace is just another boring arthag who isn’t interested in sex only IDEAS.
Thanks for the mystic truths revealed by the freestyle anarchist artists of SF everyday!
I like this, old plastic bag sculpture , I guess I like it that high art peeps dig it too and the artist is getting cash for his efforts. Its apparently a statement about waste as well as a “play on the still life arrangements of vemeer’
I like it because tweekers hanging out under the bridge next to the End-Up do this kind of work, suspended from the wire fences. They will talk to you about composition and their inspirational sources. The imaginings of the marginal, better than some gallery fop who won’t give you the time of day if you don’t look like you’ll buy.
I really hated the 80’s. I hated the 80’s when I was living in them, and I hated the 80’s all over again when they became trendy at the turn of the 21st century, which means I hate legwarmers too. Of course, the only good thing about the 80’s was the music. Which is what the 80’s revival was about – or was it? I hope it was about the music and fashion/style trappings, because no one in their right mind would want to import the social values/struggles of the time. Reagan, Thatcher. A catastrophic failure with preventing the spread of AIDS. There’s a reason ACT UP was founded in the 80’s: the 80’s sucked. It was a very homophobic time.
The lies we were fed were pretty ridiculous. Like the lie that the biggest male pop stars of the 80’s – Boy George, Michael Jackson, and George Michaels — were straight. I was nearly fooled, and I was born and raised in San Francisco. I should have known better, but that’s how stupid we were taught to be in the 80’s. A complete fucking waste of time. Look at what these absurd lies did to these three guys? Each of them — a crumpled mess.
I feel like Michael’s homosexuality is the elephant in the room. No one’s really talking about it. Is it too much to handle? Not only was the biggest pop star black, but he was also gay and basically a tranny. I think the silence on this topic is pretty interesting. Is he just so massive and beyond being a sexual being — even in death — that we can’t even approach the topic? Would that be sacrilege? Instead of believing he was straight, most “assumed” he was asexual.
This article in the Daily Mail UK deals with his gayness candidly. According to the writer;
He was also playing a truly dangerous game. It is clear to me that Michael was homosexual and that his taste was for young men, albeit not as young as Jordan Chandler or Gavin Arvizo.
In the course of my investigations, I spoke to two of his gay lovers, one a Hollywood waiter, the other an aspiring actor. The waiter had remained friends, perhaps more, with the singer until his death last week. He had served Jackson at a restaurant, Jackson made his interest plain and the two slept together the following night. According to the waiter, Jackson fell in love.
The actor, who has been given solid but uninspiring film parts, saw Jackson in the middle of 2007. He told me they had spent nearly every night together during their affair – an easy claim to make, you might think. But this lover produced corroboration in the form of photographs of the two of them together, and a witness.
Other witnesses speak of strings of young men visiting his house at all hours, even in the period of his decline. Some stayed overnight.
When Jackson lived in Las Vegas, one of his closest aides told how he would sneak off to a ‘grungy, rat-infested’ motel – often dressed as a woman to disguise his identity – to meet a male construction worker he had fallen in love with.
When I read this, my heart broke. Suddenly it became clearer to me what he was like as a human – and he was simple, just like everyone else. He yearned for love. I find this incredibly sad. He was literally ruined by society. Would his life ended any differently had he been able to live his life freely, openly as a gay man? The answer is obvious…but then he wouldn’t have been the world’s biggest superstar, either. He would have been relegated to an obscure Sylvester level of achievement.
It’s going to take years to finally get you, Michael.
I am not being hard on myself when I say the novel I wrote in grad school sucked. It is a complete mess, and I never want to write fiction again. Seriously. But amid the jungle are a few ideas that are helping with a current project. One is the idea of being “divine in the vivid moment.” It’s that feeling you get on the dance floor when you really, really feel it and you let go and get creative. Or overdose on GHB. Whichever comes first!
Directly behind the bar is the dance floor. It is a stage that is raised several feet off the floor for two reasons: 1) Dancing provides visual entertainment for those too trashed to stand, and 2) the dance floor is what makes the club sacred. Everyone becomes entranced by the music. Dancing is for the clientele the only true moment of perfection in their ordinary lives. Here they bleed out grief and workaday boredom. Here dancers become divine in the vivid moment, and it carries them through the week — or until the next time they go out. On the dance floor they maneuver through naked male torsos, rank odors and space-hogging bitches vogue-ing. The visceral force keeps everyone coming back.
It’s that vivid moment that confirmed me as a raver. It’s also driving me on some weird quest to make sense of it now.
it was to use ravedrama every day for a writing exercise. i fell off the bandwagon, but i’m recommitted. thanks, felicia, for keeping the drama alive. our only reader is still just gritlad, but we’re thankful to have him nonetheless.
Last thursday I took the boys down to Shoreline, Hamish’s penultimate gig with the Dead, he wanted us to come for the historical and cultural significance of the event. Boys were, understandably underwhelmed by the prospect of six or more hours in the company of the hippy massive. they need not have worried, backstage was executive entertainment boredom personified. The stage at Shoreline is measly, there really isn’t any room for backstage partying, instead there is an elevated screened-in loft attached to the side where the backstagers can hang, its aptly called the Posers’ Gallery.
