the Skirt

And now I'm back, from outer space...

2009-05-10T23:01:00.000-07:00

Yeah, so. Lots of friends have started blogging and I have decided to give this a go again. Just in time to go out of town and get married, travel to Belize, and start working on the lit review portion of my dissertation. In other words, just in time to risk not having time. But I'll try. Sincerely. Look forward to posts about my work, my cooking, my knitting...

I also have another blog with my future mate: A Fish Farm Wedding. It will live on past our May 23 wedding, a place for our friends and family (and anonymous voyeurs) to continue to follow our exploits.

Decision: Spring 2008

2008-03-14T20:19:00.000-07:00

So, I have been away from this gig for a while (you knew it was coming), dealing with school and busy busy busy times. But I have finally decided the subject matter for my two large projects this semester: taxis and photography.

I'll be making a documentary film about St. Louis taxi drivers as a study of transnational subjectivity and mobility, trying to examine immigration and transnationalism as a circular or perpetual experience (like driving a taxi) rather than the more conventional, conservative view of immigration as moving from unidirectionally from point A to point B. We'll see how that goes. Hopefully I'll get in with some driver networks fairly quickly, people who will let me ride along and film interviews while they drive. If not, I'll have to come up with an alternative strategy or else face lots and lots of taxi fares. That won't work. But I have a feeling that some of these guys (and they are mostly guys) are networked with each other, and one relationship will lead to others. Let's hope.

Project #2 is a more traditional seminar paper. I'll be taking a look at the book that resulted from the photo exhibit, here is new york, which opened shortly after September 11, 2001 and is a collection of photographs before, during, and after that day's events in NYC. They were taken by both professional and amateur photographers and represent about a fifth (1,000) of the 5,000 photographs that were originally exhibited in various locales. I'll be developing my visual culture chops, trying to become more fluent with a visual culture methodology while analyzing the content, themes, exceptions, and inclusions of the exhibit. At this point, I'm considering this: why there weren't more photographs of the dead and dying?

If the point of the exhibit was to make the attacks more real, less mediated, and the tragedy we're talking about is the loss of more than 3,000 lives, why are those lives so absent?

It's official!

2008-02-13T21:15:00.000-08:00

I received a wonderfully fat envelope from the Journal of Urban History this afternoon. After seven long months of waiting, I finally heard back and the result is...

is...

revise and resubmit!

This is not as bad as it sounds. It was actually the best response I could have realistically hoped for. The alternative was a straight decline to review, which happens to most people, most of the time. This same paper has been declined without review at my ultimate publication destination, but this journal is a very close second. I am so pleased!

At this point, my article has already been peer reviewed and I have received extensive comments and suggestions from my two amazingly dedicated anonymous reviewers. The reviewers had a lot of suggestions, but nothing that will require an extensive re-write and nothing that I can't handle with a few months of work. Once I revise according to their suggestions, I resubmit to the journal and hope for the best. Sometimes a second revision is needed, sometimes it is taken at that point for publication, and sometimes it is declined and the process starts all over again with another journal. This can all take a very, very long time. I'll be lucky to have more than one article published before I get my degree (!).

On a previous note, more ideas for a paper for my Death and Dying class: an examination of urban roadside death memorials, an analysis of the rhetoric of cancer (is it seen as a war or as a misfortune?), or something about the life-threatening levels of urban healthcare options for the poor and working class. Or something having to do with the imagination of death, how we think of it in various forms as brought by various causes, similar in methodology to how we understand the imagination of nation and community. This would have to be much, much narrower. I don't feel any closer to a decision than I did earlier in the week. This is difficult. I haven't thought enough about death to have many ideas that sing.

Sigh.

Death and Taxis

2008-02-09T21:33:00.001-08:00

Above is an amazing photo J took at the Obama rally last weekend.
I love it.

So, I spent a lot of time today thinking about topics for the two projects I have to (somehow) complete by the end of this semester: a documentary video and an article. The article is for my Death and Dying in American Culture class and I have no idea, not even a kernel of an idea, of where to go with that one. Death is such a huge subject, and there are so many cultural manifestations of how we as individuals and as cultural subjects feel about it, that I can't seem to narrow anything down. All my ideas feel tired or monumental, neither of which are characteristics of a managable, interesting project. I've thought about doing something with the death penalty, or something having to do with images of cancer patients (think Susan Sontag as captured by Annie Liebowitz), or the cultural nuances of condolence cards...none of these inspire me completely. I will keep working on it, while I shower.

Showers, as if you haven't noticed, are great places for ideas. Every piece I have written in grad school has come to me either in the shower or while on a run. Something about the quiet solitude, the ways both of these situations allow you to tune out from visual stimulation and go rummaging around in your head.

So, while in the shower tonight I thought about making a documentary about taxi drivers for my class on globalization. St. Louis has a diverse immigrant population and, as is the case in many cities with diverse immigrant populations, many of the cab drivers are not native-born Americans. Not sure where this would go, but I like the aesthetic of shooting film from the back seat while conducting interviews. Not everything would be shot in the cab, of course - I don't have enough spare change to spend too many miles riding around town - but it would be a fun way to establish connections for out-of-cab interviews.

I'm interested in the drivers' experiences: whether they encounter overt racism, why they took a job driving a cab, whether there is a network of friends who get each other jobs driving cabs, whether there is division between immigrant drivers and native-born drivers, whether they bring friends or family over from another spot on the globe and get them into a cab as a first job, whether driving the cab provides spatial relief from the phobic spaces described in many globalization narratvies, and whatever else I land on.

There's something very interesting about the metaphor of immigration (as movement) and cab driving (as movement) and the felt lack of permanence in both. This could be good.

Crafty Ladies

2008-02-08T09:11:00.000-08:00

Last night my lady friends all gathered for the second installment of craft night. We sat, we knitted, we sewed, we talked politics. Here's K working on a new (appropriately sized) hat:

There were some minor sewing machine entanglements, but these were greatly overshadowed by the great conversation, spiced popcorn, and hard cider. Yum.

And then there was all the wedding talk. Two of the ladies are getting wedded this year (not to each other), and each week there is some new development in the dress, family, dinner, or ceremony department. This week L brought over one of those wedding magazines designed to make most women feel fat, poor, and unhappy: lots of models draped over furniture, sporting come-hither looks and the most expensive, ornate dresses I have ever seen. Not for me, thanks. When my day comes, I will be visiting my good friends at Anthropologie and purchasing that $600 dress whose purchase could not be otherwise justified, a dress that I absolutely love and will wear again and which will (most likely) not be white. And will not (definitely not) have sequins, poufs, or some crazy long train. I think wedding photos look strange with all that white.

(UPDATE: Upon further reflection, I don't detest the white-dress thing. Just big, poufy, taffeta-flounced white dresses, and especially $2,000 white dresses. So white is all right, as they say.)

Anyway, last night K made some valentines hearts for fun and for sending. I will sign off with a photo of one, to curb the quite audible grumbles from the previous paragraph. Happy Friday.

Obama?

2008-02-07T22:29:00.000-08:00

I have been so busy with work that I've missed several days worth of posting - oh, dear reader, how I have been busy. I went to the Obama rally here in the Lou over the weekend, one amongst the throng of 20,000 chanting, sweating, sign-waving people packed onto a convention center floor. It was tight. Here's where we were, in relation to the stage:

And this actually looks closer than it was. I may have been zoomed in - we really had to stretch to see the stage, which was so far away that when the crowd at the front cheered it sounded like they were on the other side of town. Seriously. Lots of people, and wonderfully diverse. I think that's what won me over, in the end, to vote for Obama: I have never seen such an alliance of races, classes, and (to a lesser extent) ages gathered for a common cause. It was exciting, and I let that excitement carry the vote. Perhaps against my more pragmatic side, perhaps against my more feminist side...I went with the race vote.

I still miss Edwards. I almost voted for him on Tuesday even though he's no longer in the running. On the upside, Obama and Clinton have actually been acknowledging poverty since he bowed out. And to that, we owe Edwards our thanks, dear reader. If you disagree, I will give him your thanks on your behalf. Trust me, it's for the best. (I am mostly kidding. Mostly.)

It was so crowded and exciting, one young woman passed out right in front of us. Right here, on the floor:

She was carted off, just like in the Superbowl (which I didn't watch, but from past experience I think someone is carted off on one of these exact same flatbed go-carts at least once per game; this is, not surprisingly, a large part of the excitement of the game). She was mostly revived by the time the cart arrived, which was good because Obama was about to take the stage and we all wanted to feel good and excited again.

Do you notice a trend in my vocabulary tonight? How many times have I mentioned excitement? Quite a few, and that is exactly what worries me about Obama. Is he all just excitement and hope? I still struggle with this, two days post-primary. I worry that we are going for the show instead of the substance, for the exciting outsider instead of the seasoned politico. What's a girl to do? I voted. Now, I wait. And worry.

To make matters better, my lady friends gathered here again tonight for another crafty affair. More on that in the morning...

About that snow...

2008-02-01T10:33:00.000-08:00

Last night it snowed. A lot. At least six inches. Here is J shoveling our front steps. He is so good.

And here is the excellent work he made of the back yard so we could go out for coffee and scones this morning.

I was glad that my lady friends still made it over here yesterday for the first ever craft night. They braved the elements, steered their little cars through snowy streets to come drink wine and play with yarn. Our man friends got together over beers and acted like men, only to return in time for apple pie and ice cream. They had been driven out of the house for fear of catching a bit of the lady-ness that had taken over the living room.

There is something really nice about a crafty circle, about a bunch of people sitting around and feeling comfortable with the inevitable silences. Knitting can do that. J's grandma just died and one of the fondest memories I have of her is from several Decembers ago, when she and I sat next to each other near the warm wood stove, in recliners with the foot rests up. She talked, I knitted. For hours. While I worked through some scarf or hat or something, she told me about J's early days, about her early days, about the family farm thirty years ago when Kay and Mitch first moved there. She was 97 when she died a couple of weeks ago. The things she had lived through...it gives me hope that life feels longer than you think it will.

The Man We Know as MLK...

2008-01-30T20:28:00.000-08:00

...isn't exactly the man you learned about in grade school. I know it's more than a week after MLK day, but part of the problem with giving the man his own day is that most white folk tend to only think about him on the third Monday in January. And considering that many white folks situate thoughts of Civil Rights and race relations on the body of that one man, one day is not enough.

So, in grade school, they get you thinking that King was a man who liked to be posed with American flag, a man who often wore a pensive facial expression, a man who eternally inhabits the space behind a podium on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. They tell you that he had a dream about white children and black children playing together, about a color-blind America. And they tell you that he was shot.

What you don't learn (unless you attend some pinko lefty school for the children of bohemian intellectual New York Times subscribers) is that King was an anti-poverty, anti-war, anti-corporate radical. He spoke openly against the Vietnam War and American global arrogance, he decried liberal reticence on the subject of poverty, he railed against politicians who claimed to have the best interest of the people (whose people?) at heart and yet still allowed poverty, discrimination, and an endless war to endure. In 1963, he wrote a little paperback manifesto entitled Why We Can't Wait, in which he urged immediate action to cure the immediate crisis of poverty in America. The epigraph reads,

"Freedom is never granted by the oppressor. It must be demanded by the oppressed."

Indeed.

While definitely a man of great peace, King was also one of this century's most vehement rabble-rousers. Check out this great clip from the good people at the video blog, Ill Doctrine.

Well, there goes that...

2008-01-30T10:17:00.000-08:00

I have not felt so politically saddened since the moment in 2004 when I saw, to my horror, that Bush, Jr. had indeed stolen another term in office.

John Edwards is exiting the race for the Democratic presidential nomination at 1 PM today. I didn't even have the chance to vote for him. I didn't have the opportunity to drop my name into the bucket that never quite got to filling, in favor of the only candidate that always addresses poverty, that openly discusses the latent racism affecting the lives of millions, that gave labor, environmental protection, and health care the attention they deserve.

I don't know whom I'll be voting for next Tuesday. I can't get excited about Clinton and I fear that racism and conservatism (yes, even within the Democratic party) will make Obama a risky candidate in the general election. He's exciting, he's refreshing, but he's also relatively inexperienced and a racial minority. Racism, despite all the efforts to declare it dead, is alive and well and thriving, trouncing opportunities, fueling unemployment lines and housing crises.

I'm not sure how to conclude this post, dear reader. My bubble of hope has burst. That is a crummy cliche, but I don't care. I miss my bubble.

For the love of words (and of winning)

2008-01-29T09:42:00.000-08:00

Today is J's mom's birthday. Happy birthday Kay!

J comes from a family steeped in the tradition of Boggle, that long-heralded word game that makes geeks feel like kings. It is one of those rare phenomena that actually rewards all things geeky with the awe and appreciation of friends and onlookers. Spelling, vocabulary, knowing the names of obscure birds and obsolete sailing vernacular...for once, all are deservedly envied.

Anyway, so we picked up a new Boggle set for Kay to replace the pencil-marked, scratched-up, taped-box version she currently has. She will probably argue that her set is just fine, but we like to play when we visit and we think she needs a new one. Only the best for special people.

If you haven't played Boggle before, you must try. Especially if you like crosswords and other egg-headed pursuits. The goal is to look at the letters (like in this photo of a Boggle set) and make as many words as possible with letters that touch each other, and without re-using individual letter blocks within a word. Three-letter words are shameful but acceptable. For example, here we have star, shear, slant, heat...I could go on, but I don't want to strike too much fear into the hearts of my dear competitors.

I wrote an earlier post about one particularly fiery match between J and I that set the tone for the next many years of Boggle bouts. I hate losing. Which is just one reason why, just last week, I gave him a rather thorough trouncing.

More on the smart front: Yesterday I found out that one of my papers has been accepted for presentation at an academic conference at the University of Tennessee. This is good news. It's the same paper that was accepted earlier in the month to be presented at the upcoming American Studies Symposium at Purdue. This is also good news. Now, if only the other two papers I've been shopping around would receive some attention...

What to say?

2008-01-28T12:15:00.000-08:00

Having spent so much time away from my blogging, it's difficult to know what to write about. I'm thinking about the pre-dissertation fellowship proposal I wrote over winter break, I'm thinking about the Racial Formation in the United States chapter I have to teach from tomorrow, I'm thinking about my power yoga class tonight, and I'm thinking about death and dying. Not because I'm dead or dying, or because I turn 30 in April, but because I'm taking a class called Death and Dying.

What's inspiring me right now? Leg warmers. I'm knitting a great pair of orange leg-warmers. A combination of fabulous Cascade wool and a soft kid mohair/silk blend. Warm and sexy! Nothing like a little knit-purl action on a circular needle - it doesn't get much easier than this, kids. And it knits up fast. I'm hosting an evening for crafty ladies this Thursday - six of us sitting around knitting, sewing, crocheting...J is contemplating exit routes as we speak. Somehow, he considers these crafty hobbies to be a bit incongruous with his masculinity, which I think is a pretty nice load of crap. I think he wants to knit, he just can't find the societal permission to allow himself to learn. Someday he will find the glory of knitting a hat, and then wearing his hat and feeling the goodness of his own handiwork. Maybe.

Hallo. Ég heiti Jackie.

2007-07-12T18:52:00.000-07:00

I am trying to learn how to say that phrase, which sounds more like, "hallo, yay hettay Jackie" than anything else. I am working at this rather simple task because we are leaving for Iceland in a little over two weeks! It's a spur of the moment thing, J and I got it into our heads that we needed to go somewhere interesting this year, somewhere awe-inspiring. Two days later we had booked our flights from home to Reykjavik and back, and now we're cruising through a guide book to try and figure out how best to spend our eight glorious days on the ground. Every corner of that country (it's only about the same land area as England) has some jaw-dropping, spiritually powerful scenery, from icebergs (which we plan to hike on), to fjords, to miles and miles of lava fields, cliffs, ocean, and friendly little fishing villages. We plan to stay in small towns almost the entire time, sleeping in our sleeping bags to save some dough (in Iceland, most accommodations offer a dirt cheap sleeping bag option, which includes a room, but not a bed). We are ridiculously excited about this bon voyage we are about to take. It will be something.

On an unrelated note, I have become a Bikram yoga devotee. I go twice a week at least, and I've introduced J and another friend to the experience, with mixed results. J got so dehydrated that his electrolyte level plummeted and he experienced cramps in his hands and around his mouth. Weird, scary. Next time, more water.

Here's to Iceland and sweat!

A hot panic

2007-06-13T13:07:00.001-07:00

Yesterday I decided to try something new. I put myself in a room heated to 105 degrees and crowded with twenty other people, received orders from a very tan tattooed man, and put myself into 26 different twisty, sweaty positions while staring at myself in a mirror for 90 minutes. This experience, what I would call panic-inducing torment, is also known as Bikram yoga. And I'm going to go back and try it again.

I sweat completely through my clothes, my towel, and my hair. I had sweat dripping from my elbows, my pigtails, and down the length of my legs. I was so wet I had a hard time gripping my ankles and feet for positions that required me to grip them. The instructor was not of the calm, soothing variety I had come to expect in a yoga class. His name was Angel, he had a big lotus tattooed on his abdomen, and he clapped and shouted at us like a step aerobics instructor. Very peppy, very strong, not at all relaxing. I felt a bit nauseous and almost passed out a couple of times. The instructor kept talking about focusing on my breath to avoid thoughts of panic or deep-seated emotional distress. It didn't help. Because every class features the same 26 positions in the same order, most people knew exactly what they were doing and didn't seem a bit concerned. There's a reason they have a rule that students can not leave class unless "bleeding, vomiting, or passed out." Were it not for that rule, and the calm composure of my fellow sweaters, I would have run out of that room after five minutes. Sounds like a picnic, right? There's a reason your second class as a new student is free. It might just be the only way to get you to come back.

But when I left, I felt completely drained and renewed. I felt calm, kind of wrung out and floppy, kind of cleansed. A bit disoriented, but cleansed. Next time I'll know better what to expect, which should reduce the anxiety and allow me to relax and enjoy the practice a bit more. The relaxation comes after class, not during.

Here's to trying new things.

TV dinners

2007-06-11T15:27:00.000-07:00

So we survived the heat. No harm done, and it cooled off very nicely after the apocalyptic-but-oops-we-were-wrong-it's-just-a-shower storm we had the other night. Went to a fabulous dinner party last night (can you say "French feta with fresh figs and mint"? how 'bout "Thai chicken with Holy basil"? That's right: holy. And it was.). The ladies were dressed to the nines in darling retro duds, the guys were all looking manly and freshly scrubbed. We ate, we drank, we complimented one another on our dashing good looks. Good times.

I was also treated to a good dose of new YouTube finds, including some high-larious Japanese pranks and this poor kid. At times I think I need to spend more time YouTubing, at times I am very thankful that my interest in the site is tempered by my relatively short attention span when it comes to online information. Everything online feels lazy. I almost feel dirty if I've spent more than a half-hour YouTubing or reading the Onion or something. It's just as eye-numbing as watching daytime television. And just as difficult to pull away.

I have started working for J. I put in some time today ordering software and shopping for couches. I think he's afraid I'm going to overcharge him, record an additional hour of work here and there, eat lunch on his time, go shopping for pantyhose instead of fixtures and furniture. And he might just be right...

Heat and its discontents

2007-06-06T15:24:00.001-07:00

The other night, the ceiling fan in my office broke. A blade just flew right off and shot straight into the corner of the room. Thankfully, no people or cats were decapitated or stabbed by the blade, just a bit freaked out.

However, the weatherman just predicted a record-breaking 98 degree day tomorrow. We don't have our air conditioners installed yet, so that will be a super fun after-dinner group activity tonight. Air conditioners are such mood killers, deprivers of fresh air and mandaters of drawn curtains for maximum efficiency. But unless I want to spend my summer naked and damp, surrounded by dead fish and panting cats, they're an unfortunate necessity in this city. I think there's a nonprofit program to provide poor families with window units for the summer. That's how bad it gets. Nasty, just nasty.

This also means going to the gym because, despite what I might think possible, it has been scientifically proven that I cannot get out of bed before 8 am to go running. In July in this town, runners get up at dawn. I just can't fathom. As much as I abhor carpeted environments populated by muscle-bound co-eds, their anorexic girlfriends, inane television programs, and horrible "rock" music, I can deal with it when the heat index is 105. I like running, not self-flagellation.

Last night J and I had a great dinner outside with friends - it may have been the last pleasantly cool night of the spring season. We ate yogurt-lemon-garlic-tumeric marinated chicken skewers, grilled mango, and cous cous. We drank magnificent ginger-infused mojitos. It was lovely, lovely.

Summer jobs

2007-06-04T21:44:00.000-07:00

It's been three weeks since classes ended. I was ready march myself to the doorsteps of this town's finest dining establishments, prepared to lean on experience from eight long years ago in an effort to get a decent job waiting tables a couple nights per week. The search for fundraising consulting work hadn't panned out, so I went on a vacation and planned to whore myself out as a tight-waisted server as soon as I returned.

And then the calls came. First from one organization, then from another. Both of them had told me they didn't have anything in the works only mere weeks ago. And now, my friends, I have too much work and I am in the enviable position of picking and choosing with whom I will consult for the remainder of my summer. I could take all the work and make a bundle, but that would take 40+ hours per week, and who wants that? Not I. I want my leisure and my money, thanks.

And since you spend enough time in front of a computer to get bored enough to surf on over to my blog, you'll appreciate Pandora. It's a wicked music site. You create a "station" (you can have many, many stations) around one band or song, and it plays an endless stream of music in a similar vein. I am, at this very moment, listening to The Shins Radio. Yummy.

Also, I haven't been back to Second Life since that last post. I am rather enjoying my first life.

And the quest begins

2007-05-14T10:04:00.000-07:00

I just created my very own Second Life avatar. My name is Mynah Kidd. I feel pretty ambivalent about the whole Second Life thing - I have heard and read stories of people becoming addicted to their second selves, having lots of sex, ignoring their significant others to the point of relationship-failure, spending way too much real money for fake land and houses...the list goes on. I am just really curious to check it out. And, like MySpace and Friendster, it will probably be fun for a week or so, and then I'll tire of it and find something else to do. I've never been one to spend hours and hours in front of the computer, anyway.

So, wish me luck. I plan to stay sane.

What to do?

2007-05-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

So, the semester is over. I emailed my last assignment this morning and now I'm sitting here wondering what to do with myself. It's about noon and all I can think to do is watch tv, which I refuse to do because watching daytime television is a sure sign that something has gone terribly wrong.

I think I will find myself waiting tables this summer, preferably in a fancy place with white linen, real silver, and talented bussers. I haven't waited tables in close to ten years, but I think it may be easier now than ever. There's a degree of calm and composure that comes with a decade of experience, and there's a good deal of task-management skill that develops over ten years of administrative work, not to mention grad school. I could be wrong, though. Waiting tables this summer could end up being the most difficult job I've ever held. It could end up causing me stress and I could end up slapping some corpulent bastard who insists on calling me Babe and touching my hand when I serve him. It could.

For now, I will just sit here and think about what other things I'll do this summer. Read a novel? Finish knitting that damned shirt that I started working on more than two years ago? Become a competitive cyclist? Or a marathoner? Take yoga classes? Learn to juggle? Take up drinking again?

So many options. None of them inspiring. Oh, the ennui!

* * *

Just as I was writing that last sentence, I watched some thug steal my neighbor's lawnmower right out of her fenced-in back yard. How's that for excitement? I went out my front door to see if he was actually leaving with it or, although landscapers don't generally wear muscle shirts and basketball shorts, if he was planning to mow her lawn. I saw him and his buddy scrambling to get it into their back yard a mere three houses away. What fucking idiots.

I'm not sure how smart this was, but I walked closer to them and asked, "Did you all just steal my neighbor's lawnmower?"

Thug #1: What? What lawnmower?

Silly city girl: My neighbor's lawnmower. Did you all just take my neighbor's lawnmower from her back yard?

Thug #1: No, what? I don't know no lawnmower.

Thug #2 (coming around the side of the house, looking very big): You gotta problem?

Silly city girl: Whatever... (turn and walk quickly back home).

J thought I should call the police, right away. But I was afraid the thugs would vandalize our house if the cops came and roughed them up. Besides, I called the neighbor - the lawnmower wasn't even hers. She found it in the alley last summer and had been keeping it in her yard, planning to sell it. She wasn't upset. I just hope those two baddies didn't get a good look at me - I walk my dog around here all the time and I don't fancy the idea of being messed with by a couple of small-time crooks.

Oh, the city life!

And the winner is...

2007-02-08T18:49:00.000-08:00

So, for my GQPC class I've decided to take a good, hard look at the 1969 St. Louis Housing Authority tenant strike. I think. It all depends on the archival material I can find - there seem to be several folders at the WHMC labeled "Rent Strike, 1969," but that doesn't guarantee anything. Sometimes you open a box, take out a nice fat folder, and despite the label on the tab the contents have absolutely nothing to do with what you're looking for. Sometimes that's a good thing, increasing the prongs of your research and improving the scope of your work. Sometimes it's just an hour paging through someone's doodles. But all of that is what makes this kind of research so damned interesting.

There are a few monographs written about tenant movements, mostly focusing on the long history of tenant uprisings in New York City, and George Lipsitz (*heart*) has written one about Ivory Perry, the leader of the St. Louis strike. What I'll be looking for, however, is the role that women played in St. Louis - typically, women play a big role in tenant movements, even if they don't get to be "the leader." As much as I love Lipsitz, I have a hunch that there were many, many women behind (or in front of, guiding) Perry in his leadership. I hope to use the St. Louis case to illustrate why women took such roles (that much is documented for many strikes in NYC) and why their leadership was not recognized or affirmed. Maybe I won't find any of that and I'll have to revise my thesis. Which won't be good since I won't be left with much of a gender-focused article. Which is fine, just not for this class.

Also, I've decided to make a presentation in that class about Sally Mann's photographs in Immediate Family. They're nude photos of her kids lazing around, running, playing in mud, swimming, and all other sorts of naturally kid-like behavior on their rural property. Beautiful, haunting photos that have induced some to dub Mann a child pornographer. Not so, I contend. At least, not any more than art nudes of adults are pornographic. Hardly, I contend. I intend to explore why the images of nude girls are automatically sexualized, how some photos of her daughters trying to look alluring are patently sexy and why the daughters would have posed themselves with come-hither body language, and why this all bothers us so much. They're just kids being kids. Then again, if anyone should know about the power of re-presentation, its a cultural studies PhD student. So Mann's decisions to show her kids as she did also deserves examination. All of this is sure to make some of my cohort squirm in their seminar chairs.

Another idea...

2007-01-30T20:33:00.000-08:00

Since reading Replaceable You by David Serlin last semester, I've been interested in exploring the various masculinities that were jockying for position in the 1950s, most notably the tension between working-class laborer and white-collar businessman as the two dominant constructions of (white) masculinity. So I'm considering a paper that would take a look at 1950s covers and contents of Esquire Magazine (the bachelor/style/white collar representation) and Argosy Magazine (for the working-class, hunting and fishing crowd). Below are the two magazines' covers from March 1950.

Rent Striking Women and the Problem with Netflix

2007-01-30T12:04:00.000-08:00

In continuing to consider paper topics for my gender/queerness class, I have come across the topic of women's involvement in rent strikes - particularly in the rent strike of 1969 in St. Louis. It seems that, historically, women have played a larger role in rent strikes than in strikes of the usual (factory) sort. Unfortunately, I don't think it's entirely appropriate for this class - there isn't a tie-in to popular culture that I can think of off-hand. Maybe if I'm nice, D will let me take this one on...it would fit so well into my work on working class resistance, and it involves women, so...

The other idea I have is to examine the film Spicebush, directed by Kevin Jerome Everson, for signifiers of constructed black working class masculinities. It's the story of a working class black family, their efforts to get by, etc. I'm interested in how Everson portrays the men (and the women...the focus could easily shift to an examination of working class feminities); as an independent, academic filmmaker, Everson may have created images that challenge dominant conceptions of black working class men and/or women.

Here's the challenge: I haven't actually seen the film and I can't figure out how to get a copy. It's a small budget, Sundance-screened film from last year and it's not available anywhere online. Perhaps I could call and request a copy from UVA, where Everson is on the art school faculty.

I could also follow an earlier idea and deconstruct working class masculinities in Deer Hunter. I just recently watched it again (J hadn't seen it yet) and I was struck by the overt, grotesque mannishness, especially in the first half before the POW scenes. That work would inform my interst in representations of white working class men as in opposition to representations of black working class men...which would be a topic for a second article.

And I'm still interested in taking a look at how working class women of color are excluded from "pink collar" occupations, often relegated to service and jantorial (housekeeping) work.

All of this takes so much time, just trying to figure out where to start. It's 2:30 and I'm starving, but I've been sitting here scrolling through JStor articles, searching for something to hang my hat on.

Oy.

Who needs fresh air?

2007-01-28T11:20:00.000-08:00

I've spent the morning reading selections from our good buddy Karl Marx, whose stunning portrait you see on the right. Look at that beard!

While much of it is, in a practical sense, outdated, the general flavor of his ideology still hits home. What would it be like to live in a world where your sense of self was not defined by your occupation, by your earning power? Where the work you performed benefitted you directly, rather than someone else? Where "stuff" didn't matter quite so much and there was more time for fresh air?

I know this all sounds fairly reductionist, and I don't really believe that a truly socialist state could exist in a healthy, civil manner considering our avarice and lust for product. Appetites have been whetted, consumerism has been the driving force for more than fifty years in this country, and powerful people really like being identified with their work (or, more accurately, with their ability to harness the work of others for profit...). But Marxist ideology is still valid and useful. The working class still resists, most often in a surreptitious, unsanctioned, unorganized manner. What they do is not considered political. But it is, deeply.

What I did with my summer vacation...

2007-01-27T10:50:00.000-08:00

Put on your sci-fi caps, folks. Pretend I'm trying to answer that question in September, like a space-age time traveller whose sense of duty to build an impressive CV has taken over a small portion her brain. It's only January, but these summer programs are quickly filled by eager beaver grad students and postdocs.

There's a paid internship available at the Missouri State Archives, but the pay only amounts to $7.50 per hour for ten 40-hour weeks of work...low pay for potentially boring (mind-numbing, eye-watering) work and the lost opportunity to take a trip with the man this summer. Not so great. There's also a week-long summer institute in Dublin, but I would have to get there and back and pay an additional $600 to participate. Pretty steep, and there isn't a seminar offered that fits my interests well enough to spend $2000 for the pleasure of joining in.

I will probably wait tables or bartend for cash. But I can't put that on my CV. Unless the chair of a particular department values the nuance of a finely poured highball. Not likely.

Readers beware!

2007-01-26T14:41:00.000-08:00

So, I write so irregularly now that I suffer from guilt every time I even consider looking at my blog. I have so much going on in my brain, what with all the readings for class, but I can't ever think of anything worthwhile to write about. So I've decided to drop the pretense that anyone reads this thing but me and a few close compadres. Which means you're in for some brain-dump posts: ideas for research, thoughts about my current work, as well as the usual musings.

Whenever I'm writing, keep in mind that I'm procrastinating. I should be reading a book about gender concepts for my class on Monday. But I'm not.

On the topic of that class, however, I have a few ideas for articles. The class focus is gender, queerness, and popular culture...I'm thinking of ways to work this up to fit in my research on the working class. I could research the transition of the masculine ideal from pre-WWII labor to post-WWII white-collar spiff; I could take a look at the exclusion of women of color from women's working class "pink collar" occupations; I would love to take a look at "prosperity theology" and the effective depoliticizing of the black working class, but I don't think I could put a gender lens on that. I could examine the exclusion of women from "Black Leadership" (capital B, capital L) and, in a related sense, from church leadership. Hmmm...

I am revising my Homer G. Phillips Hospital article from last semester - preparing it for submission to the Journal of Social History. It would be such a boost to have the article selected - even for review, never mind publication. Publication in that journal would be so great as to almost be unthinkable. But I've been encouraged. So I'll give it a go.

I have been immersed in a theory course for the past couple of weeks, taking a good hard look at the concepts of literary theory and historiography - both sound exceptionally boring but are actually exceptionally engaging. I can now win friends and impress neighbors with my adept use of such high-dollar words as poststructuralism, hermeneutics, dialectic, and semiotics. Oh yeah. Come on, feel the noise.

Next week: my new love affair with three big-brained cultural critics. You know you're excited.

Quiet.

2006-10-27T08:41:00.000-07:00

My house is very quiet. Every once in a while I hear something settle in the house. I hear myself breathing, I hear the dog moving from the carpet to her bed, and back again. It has been raining for five days now, so I hear the rain coating the windows and pinging off of the body of the air conditioner. I hear the algae eater in the fishtank digging around in the gravel to find his lunch. That's how quiet it is.

This grad school thing can be a very solitary, quiet existence. Yesterday, I worked almost continuously from 10 AM until 12 AM at home, in the quiet, dim light of a drizzly gray day. It was pretty lonesome. I got a lot done, but I wasn't feeling very accomplished. There was a lot of work to do, and not much else. When you're trying to live on 1/4 of your previous salary, the shopping trips and lunch dates can't happen as frequently. No place to go, so I work. And work. More of that today. More rain, more gray, more work.

At least my favorite man and I are going out for dinner on the cheap tonight, and then perhaps a movie. I need to get out of here.

I have been inspired.

2006-10-23T21:18:00.000-07:00

So, once again I have let the blogging thing slip.

The inspiration for this little re-entry into the writersphere is my good buddy Gail, as she has lately suggested some fine subject matter. As a graduate student (newly minted), I have access to some of the most interesting, eccentric, egocentric folk on the planet. I think I would be doing well by myself and anyone who bothers to read this drivel to write about some of my more interesting experiences and demystify this chimera we call academia.

Ah, you see the vocabulary is already on the upswing. When working daily with others who use such terms as hegemonic, normative, dialectic, and "cultural hearth," one must make do. While I refuse to thesaurusize myself into an academic jargon spout, I have learned a bit of the parlance of discourse. Ha! There it is again.

So, while I must quit just this minute and continue reading yet another book by WEB DuBois (quite possibly the most prolific writer of the 20th century...which is, of course, lucky for me since I have to read it all), I will try to get back to this blogging business at least weekly. It will be a good brain shift, from the cerebral to the creative.

Yeah. I'll be back soon.

Ciao.

It just can't get here soon enough.

2006-05-25T19:11:00.000-07:00

Four more weeks. Four more weeks of getting to work a half-hour late, leaving a half-hour early, and taking an hour-and-a-half lunch break. And sometimes that's two hours if I take my run during lunch. Sometimes two-and-a-half. But never three.

The morale at my office is lower than Brittany's waistline. Luckily, you can't see our thong...but suffice it to say that it's pretty unpleasant. Just about everyone has a resume or three floating around the city, the boss is being chewed up by consultants who are trying to help her run a smoother (and more legitimate) program, and everyone comes to me to vent. They know I'm leaving, so there's no need to worry that I'll go spill their guts to anyone who might care. All of this adds up to the near impossibility of getting out of bed in the morning and long mindless hours spent surfing the web at the office, reading trashy gossip and fashion blogs and bothering people with email.

But in four weeks, my favorite photo-maker and I are taking a trip, my friends. Two whole weeks away from lame duck syndrome, dirty floors, bosses, and anything having to do with responsibility. We're flying to Portland to stay for a few days, renting a car, camping in the Olympic National Forest, driving to Seattle for a day or two, and then spending an entire leisurely week cruising down the California coast to camp, lounge, and stay in as many weird motels as possible. Then we're battling our way through the Oakland Airport to fly home.

Four more weeks. Twenty-eight days. Maybe I'll call in sick tomorrow.

Howl, baby.

2006-05-04T19:39:00.000-07:00

The one, the only.

Just when you get to feeling like there's nothing doing on a Thursday night, throw on a little Wolf and you'll get to thinking there's a party goin' on.

I was feeling a bit like the blues tonight, and the Wolf never disappoints. I had lunch with a very good friend today who is moving to Connecticut next week (the good ones always got to go, isn't that what they say?), and we got to shootin the dust about relationships big and small. She's been married for five years or so, after a whirlwind courtship and quick engagement. At first they seemed to epitomize everything romanticized about marriage: true love, sure thing, hot lovin'...the whole package.

And this very same woman said something that stuck with me all afternoon. She said that marriage doesn't solve anyone's insecurity problem, doesn't solve very much in the way of feeling vulnerable or at risk of losing the one you love. It gets the law involved, sure. But that doesn't mean that every day both people don't have to agree to stay married. They do.

My parents have seven marraiges between them. You wouldn't think that I would be the one to place much faith in the institution, to have the desire to enter into such a seemingly risky proposition. But I do. Against my own desire to shun the concept as indulgent, empty middle-class schtick.

Perhaps I want the security that I assumed came with marraige. Perhaps I want the statement of love that marriage enshrines. But what I learned today is that the security isn't a gimmie. Everyone says that marriage is work; I'm just a bleeding, ridiculous romantic who envisioned marraige as a permanent ride on cloud 9. I've been around far long enough to know that relationships are work, but I suppose I always thought that marriage would mean that I had finally done it right. Hit it and quit, you know? Case closed. Right. Hm.

Marraige is more realistic than I thought it was. It's off of the pedestal. For now. Not off the list of things I'd like to do, though. Like I said:

Bleeding. Ridiculous. Romantic.

Caffeine, please.

2006-05-02T08:29:00.000-07:00

So, I started my workday at 6 a.m. this morning. Did a photo shoot for a new brochure to market the services of the nonprofit where I toil away the days until August 18 (the day I will most gladly resign from this last development position and enter the gleaming, romanticized world of academia). It was very early. I was very tired. I had a sour stomach, and the designer I am working with insisted that we tromp across the park to another location halfway through the shoot. Oy.

With the shoot finally over, I got to the office at about 8:30, poured myself some flat diet soda, and began to fantasize about capping off my 8-hour workday by leaving at 3. I don't even drink diet soda, but it was the only form of caffeine within reach at the office. Hello, aftertaste!

And then my boss comes into my office. Her hair is flying all over the place, her stack of papers is all out of alignment an threatening to fall on the floor, her eyes are tired. It's only 10 a.m. This is because we're facing the possiblility of losing a large federal revenue source. It's a very big, very hairy deal that she's been dealing with for almost two weeks. She needs me to stay "possibly into the evening" tonight to help format a manual that must be in Jefferson City tomorrow morning to help the lawyers defend our appeal.

Yes, of course this would happen today. And of course it would be an emergency. Of course.

By 5, if I'm still here, I will need to staple my eyelids open. Staple them right to my forehead because that is the only way I will stay awake. I will scare my boss with this tactic, but maybe she won't ask me to stay late again.

Maybe I'll just stay until it's done and deal with my fatigue in a mature manner.

I will be so glad to be done with this aggravating profession. Fundraising is for people who like to work really, really hard with no guarantee of success. Sounds like fun, no? I'd much rather be doing this, talking to these folks, or learning more about this.

The Wine, The Cheese

2006-04-30T12:55:00.000-07:00

This past Friday night, my favorite photo-maker and I gathered our friends for a very lovely, very tasty wine and cheese party. Not your typical late-90s yuppie ego-pumping suave-showing type of party. More like an early-70s gourmand festival, featuring more cheese, meats, nuts, chutneys, mustards, olives, and breads than anyone should be allowed to eat in one evening. We would like to thank Trader Joe's and Whole Foods for making us look like we know much more about cheese and the requisite accompaniments than we actually do.

I must say that now, however, we have been schooled. Fromager d'affinois? Ah, yes. A member of the Brie family, best with strong reds, dry whites, or champagne. You are impressed, no?

We set out a piquant comte, a nutty Leerdammer, the aforementioned fromager d'affinois, a danish blue, and a tame manchego. And of course, as I am a serious organization addict, I made little signs to stick in the cheeses. A good time, I believe, was had by all.

For the first time in a long time, the turntable was dusted off and put to use. I had forgotten how much I love vinyl. Especially when it comes to jazz, blues, folk and classic country. So last night I went vinyl shopping. It has been a long time. Came home with some Art Blakey, some Hank Mobley, some Sonny Rollins, and a collection of classic Bollywood tunes. Nothing like sitting around on a Sunday afternoon with some old records.

I'm back in black.

2006-04-04T16:56:00.000-07:00

Ah, yes. Black is the new black. You have no idea what a techno-giant I feel like, having actually written my own code changes to create this new look. I feel very sexy in it.

My boss called an 8 a.m. meeting today (ouch!) to announce my resignation, effective in August. What a way to start the day. And I didn't quite wake up until about 11, when I went home to grab an early lunch and a nap for 15 minutes. Maybe it was more like 30. Who knows?

Anyway, it's official and all cats are out of bags. I am leaving my job.

Oh, the joy.

Mothers...

2006-04-03T21:13:00.001-07:00

So after swooping back into the digi-world with that last post more than a week ago, and after much going on about how I was back for some admittedly inconsistent posting, my beautiful computer died. It just said, "click." That was it. Black screen. Dead.

After a bit of frantic searching on another computer to discern what home remedies could be performed, and finding none, my favorite photo-maker and I each took turns pressing and holding the power button, hoping. Then we would give it a rest. And then more pressing. Still nothing.

Of course, I had not backed up any files whatsoever. Who needs to back up files? This is Mac!

Right.

So I brought it in to the "genius bar" at my local Apple store. The "genius" (read: skinny kid who needed a shave) told me that my logic board had passed on. A logic board is also a "mother board" for all you non-Mac people out there. It is the computer. It does everything. My computer needed a new one.

And since she (the computer) was still under Apple's lovely warranty, she was taken care of for free. Which was a relief worth about $800.

Despite this story, Macs are better. And more interesting. And better looking. All the cool people have one. Ask your mom to buy you one.

I'll be backing up my files this weekend. Very exciting news. Aren't you glad you read this?

Happy trails.

Welcome back.

2006-03-22T19:46:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time. If anyone actually reads this post before the next one is up, I will owe them a handshake. That one person will have me on an RSS feed for sure...or else, s/he is totally obsessed and has checked in on a daily basis since the last post was made five months ago. Either way, to that techno-savvy and/or dangerously obsessed reader: hello again.

Back in November, I began preparing my applications to doctoral programs in earnest. That, and the new job, ate up gigantic swaths of time. By the time the app process was over in January, I had forgotten that I had a blog. Until Aaron told me I should post again. Thanks, Aaron. You're sweet.

I'll save you the long story and tell you that I've been accepted to one graduate program so far, but haven't received word about funding yet. Still waiting to hear from two other schools, not sure where I'll end up. It's a huge decision with truckloads of personal issues hauled around behind it...so I won't even get into it. I'll let you know where I decide to go when I decide to go there.

For those who are interested, I am going to work toward a Ph.D. in American Studies. I'm interested in the American work ethic, why the American Dream persists despite failing so many, the effect of the Dream on public policy and the working poor. In a nutshell, that's the next 5-7 years of my life. And I am completely thrilled.

Moving on: I tried to rescue a stray dog today. He was a smallish black and white scruffy mutt in an alley near my place - I pulled over in my car when I saw him standing in the middle of the road casually watching a minivan roll past. I thought perhaps he was newly stray - he was too bold. So I parked the car, got out and followed him up an alley. He came bounding toward me, making like he wanted to play, then turned and kept right on bounding away from me further up the alley. I squatted down and made that kissing sound people make at animals (why do we think that's going to work?), and of course he kept on up the alley, sniffing at dumpsters, eating chicken bones.

He came back my way a few times, and he stopped once to sniff my hand. He seemed happy enough. Dirty, but not too skinny. He had an old rabies tag on a very faded old collar, so he belonged to someone once. But I think today, in the sunshine in the alley with unfenced yards on either side, he was pleased to be free. So I wished him well. Good night, sweet dog.

A Stall Story

2005-10-29T12:04:00.000-07:00

Last week, I had a meeting in a shiny office building with a woman named Gina. Gina is nice and tough and professional. She talks fast and she runs the show. Her assistant offered me a glass of water; it was tall and clear with big glorious ice cubes that clinked. It tasted filtered and delicious. It ran through me like a river.

So I was glad when Gina got up to take a break and use the restroom. Now usually, I would wait until Gina got back from the restroom and then casually decide that, what the heck, I should use it too, smile politely, exit quickly. Not today. She must have seen something flash across my face when she started to excuse herself. "Come on," and she waved me toward the door. "I'll show you where it is." Ok. We'll go together.

Maybe I'm alone on this one, but I feel like there's something private about peeing. When you're in the restroom with someone else, it's best to pretend that you're alone. Or at least that you aren't paying attention to them and what they're doing in the other stall. Somehow, talking to someone while you're both peeing induces a mental image of that person on the toilet, peeing and talking. Which is, of course, exactly what they're doing. But I don't want to see it.

So we go into the bathroom together and each take a stall. I start to pee. She starts to pee. I am not paying attention to her. "So," she says. "How do you like your new job so far?" Now she's done it. "Great," I answer to Gina, who I am now envisioning sitting on the toilet, peeing. Hm.

The peeing sounds finally end, and now we're both pulling up our nylons, zipping our skirts, reaching to flush. Gina is the first to exit her stall: I hear water running at the sink, soap being dispensed. I flush and I'm going to join her for the awkward hand-washing side-by-side, oops, excuse me I need a paper towel exchange, but I can't open the door to my stall. I turn the little silver knob to the left and push. No give. I turn it to the right. I turn it to the left and right. This will make a fantastic first impression: the girl who can't even figure out how to work the bathroom stall. It will be one of those things that Gina will forever remember about me, like a sign around my neck that reads: "This is the girl that got stuck in the shitter." I do the fake laugh. "I'm stuck in here," I say.

"What?"

Rather than yell to powerful businesswoman-on-the-toilet Gina that I am indeed locked in the bathroom stall and can't get out, I throw my weight against the door: it opens and I just about fall off my high heels and into the beige tiled wall facing the stall. I look down the row of stalls at Gina to see if she knows what excruciating business just transpired, but she is just drying her hands, picking lint from her sweater. I straighten my jacket and walk over to the sinks. I compliment Gina on the quality of the soap and the availability of hand lotion. She holds the door open for me as we leave the restroom to return to our meeting.

There's all those sayings about women having to go to the bathroom in groups, movies showing women in group make-up sessions, crowded together in some great female bonding ecstasy. Right. I'll take the single stall, please.

Bad News on the Block

2005-10-24T21:28:00.000-07:00

My neighbor's building got broken into last night. Right next door to us. They broke in through the glass of the basement door and busted right through the thin wood doors into their apartments. They didn't take much, and what they did take would suggest desperation or teenage depravity, but certainly not experience.

We are most likely going to install a security system. Until then, at least I can rest assured knowing that my ferocious dog will protect me. She's a killer.

Miscellany

2005-10-09T20:32:00.000-07:00

My beau is on the phone with his parents. He is on a cell phone and he feels that he has to talk at a volume that closely resembles shouting, and there is not quite enough square footage in our charming apartment to find a quiet place for concentration and writing of anything meaningful. So, here is a run down of passing thoughts for the day.

We clipped all three animals' nails today. There was growling (from the cat) and a bit of whining (from the dog), but all went well. One of our cats has decided that the livingroom couch possesses a texture that simply cannot be replicated by any sort of stratching post, carpet remnant, sissel board, cardboard box scratchy thing covered with catnip, or cat tower. He must have the couch. I have covered the corners of the couch with double-sided cats-off sticky tape, but this cat is no slouch. He moves over six inches and has his way with the back of the couch. I cannot cover the entire couch with double-sided tape, so I have resolved to clip his nails at least weekly to minimize the damage. A slip-cover may be in order shortly, but I fear that such a simple measure will not deter him. Perhaps several slip-covers are in order. Hm.

My favorite photo-maker and I ate brunch at a new vegetarian diner today. We ate lots of tofu and my man has been producing volumes of noxious emissions for the past hours. I don't fart. Ever.

After brunch, we did some browsing around antique stores. We browsed through rusted crap, dusty crap, rotten crap, falling-apart crap. Some decent stuff, especially in the newer stores targeted toward the retro crowd. But lots and lots of crap. Who buys this stuff? I feel for the owners whenever we go to that area of town. They look at me and think: always a browser, never a buyer. That seems to be the rule for most people down there. I don't know how they stay in business, asking $50 for a dirty table with three legs. Call me unappreciative. I call it overpriced.

I am reading Everything is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer. It is great.

That is all.

Yum.

2005-10-04T21:39:00.000-07:00

To celebrate my new job (see next post), my favorite man and I went out for a fondue dinner. It was fun and tasty. I think it's kind of a racket to charge that much money for raw food, but I can't deny that the experience is worth it. It's fun to play with your food.

Here is our main course:

That's Coq au Vin (wine and broth and spices) for cooking our meats and veggies, sauce, and me and my wine. I love Charles Shaw. I call him Chuck. He makes a lovely merlot.

Here is my favorite man, doing the fondue thing:

It was quite a party for two. We made about six toasts, and I was in a veritable food coma after dessert.

An Office? Yes, an office.

2005-10-04T21:18:00.000-07:00

I have an office. With a window and an actual wooden desk and a printer right next to it. I am very pleased with these latest developments. Why such change, you ask? What did I do to escape the padded cubicle, to escape the beige world of white clock faces and pencil-necked bossmen leaning in over my low cubicle walls?

I got a new job. Ha.

I am still raising funds, but for a larger agency. One that works on several fronts to help rebuild communities in a particularly blighted area of St. Louis: providing free and reduced childcare to help the working poor, offering business incubator and small business development services, and organizing with the neighborhood association. And they really walk the walk. My boss lives in the neighborhood, our offices are in the neighborhood, and we bring our supporters into the neighborhood for meetings, lunches, and just to show them around.

I feel good about this. I feel like I'm walking the walk. Aside from the much improved working environment and the progressive mindset and atmosphere, I really feel like taking this position is my small contribution to the movement to bring people, families, and commuinities out of poverty, one neighborhood at a time.

My favorite photo-maker will back me up on this point: I have been in a great mood since leaving my last job, and an even better mood since starting the new one and dissolving the anxiety that always comes along with taking a new position.

I feel renewed. Check out their website here.

Who knew?

2005-09-29T21:29:00.000-07:00

I heard Senator John Edwards on NPR's News & Notes tonight. During the last presidential primaries, I was so infatuated with Howard Dean that I didn't give Edwards much thought. So tonight, I was surprised. Quite.

Granted, I was impressed by his mano-a-mano debate with Dick "where's he at now?" Cheney, his composure and confidence in the face of The Man. I started to like him more than I liked John Kerry. I started to think that the anti-Dean camp had picked the wrong guy. Edwards was young, attractive, affable, and spoke a lot about deepening class divisions. He could've been a winner, no?

But I digress. So Edwards was chatting it up with Ed Gordon on News & Notes tonight. And the entire conversation, all 20 minutes of it, was about Edwards' passion for bringing class and poverty issues to public awareness. He was talking about how the differences in average worth between black folks ($6,000) and white folks ($80,000) is unjust and needs to be addressed. He was speculating that the American people, "if asked by their leaders," would agree to have more of their tax dollars give poor Americans a hand up. He was speculating that this could be a unifying issue for all Americans, something to stand up and demand together.

He was speakin' the truth. Really.

Now, of course he's a politician and he's using the Katrina disaster to make his points more salient and timely. I just hope he doesn't quit talking about greater class parity once the spotlight created by the hurricane goes out. I kind of hope he runs for president again. I'd pay more attention to him this time around.

America's sweethearts

2005-09-13T19:37:00.000-07:00

Someone challenged me this week. In the midst of a discussion about my opinion that Americans need to learn to live simpler lives and be more generous to their neighbors and their community, someone asked me - pointedly - if I had donated my personal money, shared my personal wealth, toward emergency funds for victims of Hurricaine Katrina.

No, I said. I haven't.

It's interesting how a natural disaster unites our citizens across class boundaries unlike any other force (except, perhaps, terrorism). There are more than 38 million poor citizens in this country, and many more working class people who barely scrape by. Every day, the poor citizens of this country send their children to underfunded schools, live in blighted neighborhoods, subsist without health insurance and live in fear of sickness or injury. Poor children in America are exposed to lead contaminated soil and paint, suffer from malnourishment, inadequate health care, and various other conditions that may affect their development and certainly affect their quality of life.

There is an overarching notion that poor folks in America have clearly done something wrong. Or they don't work hard. Or they don't care to work. Or they are stupid.

All of which are wrong and harmful.

It amazes me that no one pays any mind (or charity) to the people who need it every day. A hurricaine wipes out an entire city and suddenly the supposedly undeserving poor deserve help. I don't dispute that the evacuees of New Orleans and everyone who has suffered loss along the Gulf coast deserve huge amounts of relief and funding to rebuild their lives. I think our government has done a fantastically awful job thus far and I fear that the bureaucracy involved with disbursements will leave many people sorely at a loss.

I just find it curious that, suddenly, the same people who most of this country would have gladly forgotten just a few weeks ago, are now Americas sweethearts.

They need to be our sweethearts every day. Not just for these few short weeks before the media circus exits and Bush moves back onto his ranch and people go back to thinking along the lines of Barbara Bush, who stated that most of the victims "were, you know, underprivileged anyway, so this--this is working very well for them."

No, I have not donated to the relief efforts. I give of my time and have dedicated my career on an everyday basis to serving those whom the rest of the country neglects to recognize under everyday circumstances. And that is more than a $25 donation could ever do.

Watch out. They're gaining on us.

2005-08-16T08:06:00.000-07:00

They have a savvy media campaign, hip baby-t's, a nice logo, gorgeous young models offering their wares, and a destructive throwback of a message. They are Feminists For Life, women who believe that "women deserve better than abortion."

I visited their website after hearing an interview on NPR with Jane Roberts, wife of the now-infamous Judge John Roberts, as she discussed her involvement as a pro bono attorney for FFL. Their main platform is that women's issues have yet to be fully addressed (duh) and that abortion is a result of short-sighted, male-oriented policies regarding women's health.

This is, unfortunately, intriguing. I am an ardent pro-choice feminist and I would never even consider taking away the right to personhood that women were granted in Roe v. Wade. But, like any decent human, I don't like abortion. It is a spiritually difficult procedure, emotionally taxing and stigmatized by the majority of Americans. I would be interested in ways to reduce the number of abortions per year in this country. What would these feminists propose to remove the necessity of abortion? Hmmm...

So I checked them out online. Their graphic design is snappy, their rhetoric is deceptively uplifting and empowering. But nowhere (nowhere) on the site do they discuss alternatives or actions. If their mission were realized, women would only have sex for reproduction and would take "responsibility" for their "actions" if an unexpected pregnancy took place. How? By having the child. Even if they're 13 and a victim of incest. Even if they already have six kids and can't afford to give adequate care to another. Even if they don't want to have a child.

They advocate for greater pre-natal and post-natal services for women in the US and abroad, which is great, but not any different from what the feminists for choice are advocating.
It's just a platform, a dressed-up, younger version of Right to Life, a leaping point for "feminists" to join the anti-choice movement and feel welcomed. They don't say anything new. They don't offer alternatives. They have slick packaging (like so many conservative platforms: glam image, same old turn-of-the-century misogynist message) and they're out in force on college campuses.

Why can't pro-choice groups be this slick? Why are we always so staid and proper, so intellectual and polite?

I am where I am, and that's where I am...

2005-08-10T20:43:00.000-07:00

I am still here.

I have been vacationing on the sunny shores of Lake Michigan, reading a fantastic little collection of short stories, knitting a camisole, writing new poems, working on submitting them, and reveling in the sexy benefits of a healthy tan. I have not, however, been blogging.

I realize that this is an unfortunate recurring theme in the past few posts. Over the past year, I have taken on the hobby of picking up new hobbies, and blogging was one of them. I have always been a writer of some sort, personally and professionally. Blogging turned out to be a useful way to get myself back into the rhythm of writing a few times a week, and a harmless way to feel a bit famous. Things were going well there, for a while. But then I got busy...

(I think that last part, about feeling famous, is the unwritten reason most people blog. No one admits it, though, except scary kidnapping sex offenders from Idaho who air their sicknesses online. And me. I admit it. In the age of easy media and reality television, everyone can be famous...and everyone expects that they should be. I, however, don't expect to be famous. I expect to be legendary.)

Now that I'm writing more often in non-blog forms, I've left you hanging, my dear readers. I am not going to promise more regular posting. That would be cruel. But if you check back a few times a month, you should find some tasty, brainy goodness.

...um, not so appetizing. Sorry.

The Game of Our Lives

2005-07-12T16:24:00.000-07:00

A little while back, my favorite photo-maker and I went to a Cardinals game. We saw the baseball, we saw the drunk frat boys and their screaming, waving female counterparts, we saw the beer hawkers and the cotton candy boys strutting their stuff in the stands.

We also saw three kids experience their first baseball game.

In America, that is (strangely enough) a pretty big deal. We mentor kids through a local mentoring program, and we decided to take them to a game with some free tickets I scrounged up at work. My mentee is a big-hearted 8-year-old girl named Armani; Jay's mentee is a energetic 8-year-old boy named Jerome. Jerome has a twin brother named Jyrome, so he came along as well.

We had to explain how baseball works, which is no small task. Every time someone hit the ball, there was a new rule to explain. Every time someone didn't hit the ball, there was a rule or strategy to explain that, too. They were interested enough to sit still for about an hour. And then they squirmed. And they were hungry. And they were bored.

So we went to the play area and let them run around, eat a hot dog, climb on things. They met the mascot. They didn't want to watch any more baseball, and I was tired from worrying about how they might fall and crack their heads on the concrete floor.

It was fun. It was exhausting. Here are some great pictures:

And the rain fell down...

2005-07-11T17:27:00.000-07:00

It's Monday. Some things never change.

It was confirmed today that Karl Rove was indeed the source of Time reporter Cooper's information. The White House, once so staunchly in defense of their main spinster's innocence, is now mum on the subject. In spite of my high hopes for Karl (prison, humiliation, exposure as a political juggernaut), I doubt that anything will come of this, legally or in the media. Except on NPR and PBS. It's not sexy enough for the mainstream, it's too damning for anyone else, and I'd bet public broadcasting listeners are too cowed by his threatening nature to make any noise.

So, there you have it.

In other news, it's a beautiful dusk. It's been raining for a while, my livingroom furniture is damp, the hardwood window sills are fragrant with the scent of old logs, and the fans are on. For the first day in a few weeks, the air conditioning is off and the windows are open. It's a bit sticky, but lord god is it refreshing. There's a healthy breeze blowing down the street and my dog needs a walking in the elements.

The Plain Truth?

2005-07-09T12:28:00.000-07:00

So, Judith Miller of the Times is sitting in jail. Conservative commentator Robert Novak is free as a lark, despite being the first to publicize the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame. With his source's permission, the guy from Time gets to wipe his brow in relief. Journalists everywhere are confused and pissed off about what this all implies for their future investigative efforts.

And we now have our first example of the fallout of this misguided situation and the failure of the Supreme Court to rectify the situation - or at least to hear it out.

Lawyers for The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the largest daily in Ohio, have strongly recommended for the editor, Doug Clifton, to withhold two important investigative pieces from publication. Despite the pieces being of "significant interest to the public," according to Clifton, they will not be released in the short term. The sources for the pieces are confidential, and the information they gave was leaked. The editor and owners of the Plain Dealer fear legal action that would force the journalists to reveal their sources in a situation parallel to the current debacle. Here's the NYT article if you want to read more.

I want to know what information is being withheld. I want to know what Karl Rove has to do with all this. I smell his stink somewhere.

The Horizon

2005-07-03T22:16:00.000-07:00

Not too far ahead, the horizon is alternately dark and starry, clear and cloudy. Well, mostly cloudy. But the point is this: big things are over there. Looming things that require attention, care and feeding.

The first of these things was tossed up onto the horizon by my buddy Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. She is resigning from the nation's high court. She beat Rehnquist in the game to get out quickest, fooling pundits and the public, leaving in a whirlwind, her black robes flowing behind her as she smirked her way out of the next session. I was certainly surprised. I had just sighed in relief to hear that the Chief Justice was hanging in there for another go round. And then this.

NOW has pledged to follow through with a resolution to enact civil disobedience if faced with the prospective nomination of a conservative judge from the radical right. Conservatives have pledged to make noise if Gonzales is nominated to replace O'Connor. Right to Life anti-choice groups are mobilizing across the country, preparing to make the most noise without anyone outside of DC hearing it. They are a snarky group. I don't know what the Bush camp has in mind, but someone is going to be pissed off.

As I celebrate my independence, I am taking steps to contribute my time to the Planned Parenthood and NARAL efforts, doing my part to ensure a moderate voice on the Bench. There are several things you can do if this is an issue you care about, especially as it relates to the future of women's rights in this country.

1. Volunteer.
2. Donate.
3. Get your friends to volunteer.
4. Talk about the issues.
5. Call your senators and representatives.
6. Call the White House and tell Bush what you think.
7. Write a letter to the editor about your views.
8. Practice voodoo on the President.*
*The least effective, most satisfying option. Combine with at least one other item for maximum results.

On other fronts, the CPB funding was spared from the bloody Republican axe by a good healthy margin. Whew. Yet another non-issue-turned-issue resolved.

Last week, my favorite photographer and I took three kids to their first baseball game ever. I have pictures. They will be posted, with a report of the action, on Tuesday.

Happy 4th. Don't blow your eye out.

Karl Rove vs. The Truth

2005-06-24T08:30:00.000-07:00

Somehow, Karl always wins.

If you are interested in just how slimy, exploitive, and deceptive Karl Rove is, read this. I can't believe this man. Not that I could before, but this is a new low. Very low.

It's time for Dems to play ball. Get your pads on, it's gonna be a long game.

Good news...

2005-06-24T07:59:00.000-07:00

First, let me apologize. I have been a bad blogger. I have been missing in action. I have been ordering an iBook so I can post more often than when I have a good hour to spend at my desk at home. The future is bright, dear readers.

Two things today:

1) With the support of my local Planned Parenthood grassroots organizer, I met with my state representative this week to discuss the special session that our young buck governor has threatened to call this September (read the post below). He is a mixed-choice legislator and I wanted to see where he stood on the issues at hand, and also to make sure that the pro-choice perspective was in front of him as he thinks through the legislation and considers his vote.

It was empowering. I was actually making a small difference. He was honest and admitted that we had given him something to chew on, some new arguments he was not aware of, and exposed some misinformation. He is personally anti-choice, but has a good helping of respect for the Constitution and a refreshing amount of common sense.

I sat there with my coffee and my scone and talked to this man for an hour. Maybe this democracy thing actually works...

2) LET'S HEAR IT FOR NEW YORK!!!

On Wednesday, the New York State Senate passed a bill that will allow pharmacists and nurses to dispense emergency contraception to girls and women of any age without a prescription. Given that emergency contraception is only effective during the first 72 hours after intercourse and most physicians don't work weekends and some physicians might not want to write the controversial prescription, this is a huge victory for girls and women in New York state.

I hope Governor Pataki signs the bill and other states follow suit once they see that girls and women are not running around having rampant and irresponsible sex as a result of the passage of this legislation. This bill is about women taking responsibility, not giving it away.

I [heart] New York!

Waste of money, waste of time

2005-06-14T21:05:00.000-07:00

Put up your dukes.

Missouri Governor Matt Blunt has announced that he will call a special legislative session some time this fall to reconsider some anti-choice legislation.

If you don't have time to read this full article, here is a summary of what Blunt hopes to accomplish, to the tune of somewhere around $50,000 per day of session (while Missouri enacts deep cuts Medicaid due to a severe fund shortage):

1. New "safety" regulations that would, though their excessive and unrealistic expectations, effectively close many clinics across the state. The regulations are unreasonable and intended to close clinics, not to make them more safe.

2. A provision that would require all doctors providing abortion services to have hospital privileges within 30 miles of their clinic. For outstate regions and small communities, this provision would force several rural clinics to shut their doors.

3. A provision that any adult who escorts a minor from Missouri across state lines to have an abortion in a state without parental notification laws (Illinois, for example) could be sued. I wrote about this issue in an earlier post.

Aside from the possible anti-choice outcomes of this special session, I have to stress that it is a blatent waste of time and tax dollars. This is special interest pandering to Missouri Right to Life. Blunt is making nice with the MRTL folks because he stood in the way of the passage of the above items during the regular legislative session.

Under pressure from some big business leaders, Blunt faltered in his support for the bills that carried these anti-choice provisions - they were packaged up with others that would restrict theraputic cloning and stem cell research. He wasn't being a good guy, he was just being a good Republican.

This is a fantastic example of the hypocrisy of the Right. Blunt was hardline anti-choice until something attractive came along that might boost business for the region, might make Missouri a leader in bioscience. Get your ethics off my business, right Matt?

The most likely conclusion of the upcoming fiasco is this: the bills will pass.

What can we do? Make a lot of noise about the waste of money and misplaced priorities. This is not a pressing state issue. It is a great big kiss on the ass for Missouri Right to Life.

Contact Planned Parenthood of the St. Louis Region and ask what you can do to help. I believe they're planning a trip to Jeff City for the special session to make pro-choice voices heard, and you can join them. Ask for Cora or Michelle in the political department. They'll hook you up.

I gotta give props...

2005-06-09T20:18:00.000-07:00

...to my sister. She scooped me on this piece about neo-pseudo-feminist Gwen Stefani. You might think Gwen is a girlie fem, but she's all about the benjamins. It all comes down to the dollar, no matter how low you have to go.

And I didn't even know Gwen was still around.

40 Years of Privacy and Control

2005-06-08T20:43:00.000-07:00

It's been 40 short years since the Supreme Court decision (Griswold vs. Connecticut) that confirmed the right of married couples to use birth control to limit the size of their families and free women from the burden of raising broods of youngsters. Until that day in 1965, it had been considered unlawful to deny God all the little children that would spring into the world through marital bliss (and unregulated sex - gasp! - for pleasure).

It took single women another seven long years to attain the right to regulate their ovaries.

This right of access to birth control is not entirely secure. Anti-choice groups have been describing non-barrier birth control methods as "abortifacient," and recommending their disuse. They are encouraging God-fearing pharmacists to stop dispensing birth control pills.

Recently, a number of pharmacists have refused to fill prescriptions for birth control pills, including emergency contraception. They don't "believe" in birth control.

If you think this is an issue that needs to be addressed before it's too late, sign this petition and call or email your local Planned Parenthood to inquire about what actions they're taking and how you can help.

Square? No. And yes.

2005-06-08T17:42:00.000-07:00

Another brief hiatus from posting comes to a close. Family in town, job interviews and the related (aggregiously expensive) shopping for suits and hose have kept me from this cushy seat. But I'm back.

Hello again.

I heard Michael Cunningham, author of Pulitzer Prize-winning The Hours, on the Diane Rehm Show today. He has a new book. Diane was asking him about his focus on past literary works in his stories. He was waxing on about how beautiful Walt Whitman's poetry is, how renegade the quiet, subversive Virginia Woolf was. He sounded very typical. He said, "ah, yes" too much. I pictured him leaning back in his studio chair, his stuffy British-type closed-mouth laughter indicating some sort of higher level of understanding he and Diane had reached during the last program break.

This guy is a square, I thought. A square with one hell of a flair for short fiction. But still, a square.

Here is his photo. Hm.

But then (I always write people off too quickly) he said something that caught me. He said that Whitman and Woolf were renegade authors (true) and that some of the best canonical authors and poets began their literary careers as outcasts (also true). He asserted that Dante's Inferno, written in the vernacular of the day, could be comparable to an epic rap today. His implication was that hip-hop is the next renegade literary form. One day, Mos Def may be the next Whitman. A common man writing of the joys and hardships of common people.

This guy isn't square.

This guy, however, is square. He is Brent Staples, an opinion writer for the New York Times.

Here is his photo. Hm.

Just so happens that this piece in today's NYT comments on hip-hop and how "the hip-hop media" and "the hip-hop press" advocate violence and glorify crime. Ah, those poor minority youth, he writes.

First, this is old hash.

Second, Mr. Staples doesn't know the difference between rap and hip-hop (the terms are not interchangable and are not synonymous). Maybe Brent needs to spend some time with the common people, shoot the breeze with the minority youth he's so concerned about. Rap and hip-hop are underground phenomena, created by people who are either angry or hopeful (or both), but who see injustice. Yes, there are bootie songs and drug songs and killing songs, but those won't make it into history. True hip-hop has roots and respect.

People like Brent Staples need to get hip to the notion that poor, angry communities raise poor, angry children. This music speaks to them and their feelings, glorifies what they see around them. If you want the children to have nicer, kinder music to grow up with, let's talk about the reasons gangsta rap has gotten so popular and so violent.

Let's talk with the people, not about them.

Secret Stuff

2005-05-31T21:36:00.000-07:00

Everyone has a secret that they haven't told anyone. Ever. Special secrets that you're certain would curdle your world if they got out. You'd have to move two states away to make another life free from your unleashed secret.

While we know, logically, that only about ten people would register that what they've just heard is a) true and b) worth listening to (maybe), your secret might reach someone whom you care about. Perhaps your secret is about that person. Or that person's mother. That person might become deeply offended and try to hurt you.

Of this you are afraid. Very afraid.

Or perhaps your secret is something truly embarassing but easily forgettable. Like eating your boogers or shaving your toes. This is the kind of unleashed secret that might brand you as weird or dangerous, especially if you live in a small town. If you are in high school, you may consider these kinds of secrets, if unveiled, to be a real threat to your health and well-being.

Maybe your secret is a pleasure for you to keep. You don't want to share it with anyone because doing so might diminish the joy you find in keeping it for yourself. These secrets are delicious. Perhaps you eavesdrop on people's conversations and write them into your short stories. Perhaps you watch Gilmore Girls religiously.

If you have a secret, I have found something that you may enjoy. It's a blog that posts other people's anonymous secrets. It's called PostSecret. People mail in their handmade postcards anonymously and Frank posts them. It's a confession of sorts, a kind of unburdening. Some are joyous, some are truly pathetic. Here is my favorite:

If you're in a Red State...

2005-05-27T21:08:00.000-07:00

...you might as well learn what that means.

First, my condolences. I share your pain from a city that served as a blue pinprick in vast, tubulent seas of red last November.

Second, check out this keen essay by linguist Geoff Nunberg on what being red or blue means these days, and how it has evolved over time into a backwards, oversimplified representation of demographics.

We think it looks like this...

...when it really looks like this:

Third, you can learn more about your heartland-living, red-meat-eating, god-fearing brethren by reading a blog that (will infuriate and humor you) claims, through its name, to have the red views represented as those of "mainstream America." Right.

There are a number of posts on redstate.org that you might find interesting (and many that will play as just plain delusional). My favorite so far discusses why men make more than women these days (yep, still $0.76 to the dollar) and why that's how it should be.

My favorite reason:
Men choose the harder, less-glamourous jobs; women choose to be teachers and nurses.

Well shit, he's got it all figured out! Women don't want to work hard. Women are fragile, lazy creatures who ought to be at home raising kids. Besides, women entry-level dietitians make more than their male counterparts by more than 30%. What more do we want? Equality under the law?!

Oy.

By the way, Missouri is one of the 15 states that never ratified the Equal Rights Amendment. It only takes three of those states to ratify, and this becomes law. To learn more, read here.

It's all about the talk...

2005-05-25T20:07:00.000-07:00

...but the walk is what gets you there.

I was listening to Talk of the Nation today on NPR. They were discussing the first Supreme Court trial in five years to address an abortion issue: the case involving a young New Hampshire woman and parental notification laws. The guests on the show were surprisingly one-sided (all in favor of notification laws), and I was mostly disappointed in the discussion overall.

One of the guests began a tangential discussion with the gross misstatement that most dysfunctional families already have some aspect of government oversight in place, therefore making it easier for pregnant young women in dysfunctional families to get help. (?!)

It gets better.

The other guest stated that younger generations are becoming less tolerant of abortion than the boomers are. But she couldn't back that statement up with citations. People who toss inflamatory (and incorrect) information onto the airwaves ought to be held accountable. Our buddy Karl Rove would have a lot of explaining to do.

But then someone called in. She was a young woman who had had an abortion. She had told her conservative parents beforehand, and had received (albeit reluctant) compassion and support for her decision. She made the argument that what is missing from the mad, fiery depths of abortion debate is compassion for women who find themselves with an unplanned (and perhaps unwanted) pregnancy. Anti-choicers can go on and on about the sanctity of life, but they miss the point when they don't take the woman's life into account in their arguments.

I agree completely. Like most difficulties progressives have these days, this is yet another example of framing the issue. Why hasn't more been done to paint anti-choice activists as discompassionate? Why are we still so apologetic? Furthermore, why are we still following their lead by using terms like "pro-life" and "partial birth abortion" (instead of "anti-choice" and "dilation and extraction")? And why does a woman still "get pregnant" when her man should carry half the responsibility for getting her there?

Framing, people. It's all about framing. Read "Don't Think of an Elephant" by George Lakoff and get to talking to the people around you. The conservatives have been doing it for years and they're way, way ahead of us.

The Mother Load

2005-05-19T20:09:00.000-07:00

It's confession time:
I was prepared to write a vitriolic response to Judith Warner and her new book, "Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety." From the reviews I had read, I gathered that she doesn't touch on the issue that lies at the sticky bottom of modern, anxious, painful motherhood. She doesn't address the notion that women feel undeniable, ubiquitous pressure to have children, and that our culture can't grasp the concept of a "childfree" lifestyle. She doesn't address the role of the media in fueling women's illogical desire to raise Ivy League, athletic, musically inclined, cultured kids at all costs.

But she does interview a lot of women, and she theorizes about why mothers today are so haggard and insane...and then she does something novel: she calls women to action. Hm. I read closer:

The title sounded like another tired woman's take on the perils of modern motherhood, the burden of raising children when husbands don't contribute emotionally (or when there is no husband), the strain of trying to be everything to everyone. And this is, in a sense, what Warner is writing about. What makes this book different is Warner's politicization of the issue. She argues that women today were raised to be apolitical, to privatize their problems rather than looking at societal root causes for their difficulties.

She argues that women need to get up and agitate for change. For affordable day care, for vouchers for child care, for health insurance for part-time workers, for middle-class standards of living that don't require luxury-class salaries to get by.

This message is, of course, buried in the depths of anything that is written about Warner's book. Most often what is covered are the stories of women at their wits end, stories that many modern mothers will find themselves nodding along with. Salon.com summarizes the book as another mother-blaming treatise on how women are "messing up their marriages, spoiling their kids, and losing their minds."

In the New York Times Book Review, reviewer Judith Shulevitz spends more time telling her personal story and criticizing Warner's "breathy women's mag style" than lauding Warner's efforts to spread the word on what mothers ought to demand (to which I would retort that a more pop approach to the subject may serve to attract more mainstream, "I'm not a feminist, but..." women to the effort). Or worse, I've seen several antifeminist contradictory articles telling women, "Don't worry. Mom is happy." Nevermind that screeching Warner woman. Go back to your kitchens, cubicles, commutes, late nights, and frustration. Surveys say you're happy!

I applaud Warner for her efforts. I just hope people read beyond the first few paragraphs of the reviews.

Do we need a leader?

2005-05-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

So Bill Moyers, speaking at the National Conference on Media Reform here in the Lou, threatens to get "out of the rocking chair and into the anchor chair." This was his first open reply to the recent revelation that our administration has been holding PBS to a kind of liberal-hunting litmus test. In secret. Surprise, surprise.

Bill has become symbolic of what conservatives love to hate about PBS and NPR. As such, he and his show have become the targets of some nasty comments and false accusations, including the erroneous assertion by Tim Graham of the Media Research Center (read: the Conservative Media Research To Snuff Out Commie Pinko Programming) that he never interviews conservatives, and that he doesn't give fair play to opposing viewpoints. The most fair and balanced man in the media is being painted as a yes man for the progressive agenda. Now, I love the progressive agenda. But no one wants to be a yes man. You can see why Bill is mad.

My question is this: as much as I love Bill Moyers (as is evidenced by my recent post), how much does his threat actually help the issue? He is a progressive icon, yes. Having him back on the front lines would be great.

But I think the issue of media reform faces the same overwhelming challenge that feminism faces. I'll call it Follow The Leader Syndrome. FTLS manifests itself when a brewing movement finds itself a leader (Bill Moyers for the Free Press, Gloria Steinem for feminism) and then sits back. Activism slows. People look to their leader to assume the burdens of furthering the agenda, but it's never something that one (or even two!) people can manage.

A movement is only as effective as it is active, and I would hate for the energy created by this PBS brouhaha to suddenly subside with the return of Bill to his throne at Now. The Free Press movement suffers from a lack of a discernible leadership, but I don't think we need one. What we need is a movement of concerned people who work as individuals within a community to create change. Get off your ass, basically.

This movement already has a problem with diversity. We don't need a white man (no matter how great his hair is) to lead us. I would love to see Bill back on the air regularly. But not as the leader of the progressive response to Ken Tomlinson and the CPB. We all need to do our part. Write now, sign on, join in.

If this issue is new to you, read here to learn more. We own the airwaves. We should fight for what we want.

This just in...

2005-05-16T21:03:00.000-07:00

...but you have to wait until tomorrow to get it. It was a long day. Sorry.

Coming tomorrow: more on Bill Moyers and why he should follow through on his most recent threat to get out of that rocking chair right NOW.

And a report on Mommy Madness: a media-generated anxiety.

For now, here is a good way to know thine enemy without getting too close to the stinking beast.

Who's cuter?

2005-05-12T20:03:00.000-07:00

Taking a cue from American television ratings, I've decided to pit Ann Coulter vs. Bill Moyers in one of the few ways that still gets attention: a beauty contest.

So, here we are. Welcome to the 2005 Pretty Pundit Pageant! Please welcome our final two contestants:

Ann Coulter (top) and Bill Moyers

In keeping with traditional, subjective Beauty Pageant protocol, we'll go straight for the most important feature of our two stunning contestants: their legs. See Ann's legs? They're pretty long and white. She's kind of pointy. Her feet look dangerous and witchy. Distorted for effect? Yes. Sexy? Well, yeah.

Bill's legs aren't in the photo he submitted for this contest, so we have nothing to go by. I've always imagined that Bill has some hot legs, but he loses this category due to his oversight in the photo department.

Ann: 1 Bill: 0

Next category: hair. Bill's hair is nice. A little fluffy, a little blow-dried, but nice. Well groomed. Is that hairspray or a light mousse? We'll never know.

Ann's hair is shiny and long. It is blond and flows like honey. But I think Bill should win in this category for doing such a nice job with what he has left to work with.

Ann: 1 Bill: 1

Makeup is the next category, and I know you all think that Ann's got this one wrapped up. She's a woman, right? I think it comes down to how they look at 5 a.m. when they wake up wrinkled from sleep, pale and powderless. Whose makeup made the most striking conversion from morning freakshow to publicity hottie? I think Bill wins again. After all, the man is 71 years old! Look at him, and think of your grandfather. Pretty good makeup job, right?

Ann: 1 Bill: 2

Public speaking is the final category and is worth two points because, while it may have less effect on a pundit's stardom than his or her dashing good looks, it's what lasts in the long run. Let's start with Bill:

Bill Moyers is a stand-up guy. He's a progressive icon. He deals with consumer issues through programs like Trade Secrets, a report on how the public's right to know the truth about health consequences of the chemicals around us gets compromised by the chemical industry. He reports on environmental issues, class warfare, economics, and writes really great, moving speeches like this one. He's a top-notch guy.

Now, on to Ann:

Most of the time, Ann makes no sense. None at all. Her writing is sophomoric and she is obsessed with the word that appears several times in every single one of her columns: liberal. She says it over and over again, scoring points with her following for the most nonsense bullshit I've ever read.

A prime example: In a recent column, she started in on liberals for taking issue with the fact that Catholicism doesn't allow for "girl priests." She asserts that women ought to stick with what they do best, "making men better people." Because men need that. They're all evil. Like this Brian Nichols crazy murderer she references to make her point. She says that Ashley Smith, the Christian gal who read to Nichols from the Christian book "A Purpose Driven Life" after he allowed her out of the bathtub he had bound her in, turned Nichols "from a beast to a brother in Christ." She said it was "a miracle."

Even if Ann's argument that Ashley Smith did something good for Brian Nichols is true, what she seems to be completely incredulous to is the fact that this story sounds like a ringing endorsement for the good work that "girl priests" could do. Way to go, Ann.

Bill wins this category. Hands down. And he gets 8 points. In fact, Ann loses the point she had earlier.

Final Score: Ann: 0 Bill: 10

I missed the boat.

2005-05-11T21:46:00.000-07:00

Just days after my recent post, stories started popping up everywhere about the swarm of conservatives that have decended upon the struggling, cash-strapped PBS. The New York Times had something to say, as did The Washington Post, NPR, and just about everyone else. Of course, the other team got their word in too.

There was an especially comedic conservative on The Connection (from WBUR in Boston) who is advocating that Nova, that most iconic of PBS science programming, should be giving "fair and balanced" coverage to creationist theory. And to scientists who think global warming is a hoax. And to anyone who can counter Bill Moyers, whom he painted as a loud-mouthed, closed-minded, fire-breathing demon. You can listen to him here. Enjoy.

Anyway, the point of this post is that I missed the boat. I was stranded in a digital void, internet-less and laptop-less (that sounds almost racy...ok, not really), forced to do what I could from work. Which was hardly anything.

Well, hell. I just might write about this issue anyway. Who will read it? Anyone who has a decent attention span and an interest in preserving the last two venues that Republicans haven't snatched or stolen.

Coming tomorrow...who's cuter: Bill Moyers or Ann Coulter?

I was missing in action...

2005-05-10T20:38:00.000-07:00

...but now I'm back. I moved (literally, this time) and was without internet service for more than a long, long week. I yearned for you, my friends. For all those who have checked back and not been rewarded with new posts, please forgive.

Regular posting to resume tomorrow...

Perhaps I'm allergic to Republicans...

2005-04-28T14:58:00.000-07:00

...since I don't know what else would have affected me so violently. I woke up this morning with a swollen tongue from an allergic reaction. I developed hives that spread with a virulence rivalling that of Bill Frist's Justice Sunday. And I learned that the House passed The Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which ought to be called The Abolishment of Girls' Personhood Act. But Republicans get to name everything these days, so CIANA it is.

Ostensibly, this law is designed to prevent "abortion mills" from luring pregnant girls from states that require parental notification into states that don't. This applies all those places that place sexy ads about abortion, the ones that glam it up to lure young girls into their clutches, the ones that make abortion the fashionable thing to do. All those thousands of places, just waiting on the other side of the Tennessee state line. Maybe Planned Parenthood, with their smart, responsible messaging and ability to convey life-saving information, will finally be able to get a foothold in the women's health market.

CIANA requires that pregnant girls from states that require parental notification get that notification regardless of the laws of the state they've travelled to. As Democratic Representative Jerrold Nadler said, "It would in effect make the young girl carry the laws of her state on her back wherever she goes." And it would make it a federal crime for any non-parent adult to transport the child to a non-notification state. And it would require physicians to notify the girl's parents, or else the physicians, too, will be charged with a federal crime. Suddenly everything that empowers young women to make this difficult, personal decision becomes a federal crime.

All of this, according to anti-choice politicos, to prevent "secret abortions:" girls forced into having an abortion by abusive boyfriends. Right.

All of this removes a girl's personhood and reduces her to a pregnant uterus subject to the whims of a reactionary conservative anti-choice movement and the politicians who respond to them. It neglects the possibility that a young woman might not be able to gain parental permission (due to incest or any number of other abusive situations) and denies her the counsel of a non-parent, responsible adult to see to it that her body and her wishes are respected.

Supporters of the act say that they believe firmly that the decision to terminate a pregnancy should rest with the young woman's parents. Be they abusive, conservative, or simply wanting to punish their daughter for "getting herself pregnant," they get to make the decision for her.

This act has taken away young women's right to choose. It can only survive judicial scrutiny if the judiciary concedes that a young woman is not entitled to personhood under the law. She will, in fact, be less of a person than the tissue of an embryo.

A version of this bill will be before the Senate this summer. Contact your senators. Now.

Wal-Mart vs. the Pope

2005-04-24T20:39:00.000-07:00

This JPII mania has gone too far. Even our local PBS station has become infected, afflicted with the strange notion that both Catholics and non-Catholics want to know every cultish detail about the selection of their new buddy Benedict. So they've decided to change their schedule, to jump into the sensationalist mix and broadcast a special report that will rival the special reports of every other cable and network news program.

And so it will be done. The Pope trumps Wal-Mart.

For these reasons our local affiliate has displaced a broadcast of Frontline that I have awaited for weeks. Rather than an in-depth consumer education story that Americans deserve to hear and need to know we get to visit, once again, with The Men of the Cloth.

PBS, you have let me down. The last bastion of neutrality, I felt you were immune to the religious macho-mania that has swept our worried nation. I was willing to overlook it when you gave Tucker Carlson such power through Crossfire; I was even willing to overlook the addition of the Journal Editorial Report.* And now this.

I am very disappointed in you.

At least I can watch it online.

*Eric Alterman speaks to this issue much better than I do. Read him here.

For Mary

2005-04-22T16:42:00.000-07:00

I met my neighbor the other day. Her name is Mary, and her husband is Bob. They live across from me on our narrow, one-way street and I've seen them many times getting in and out of their little tan car. They're pretty old.

Bob always has to help Mary down their front steps, and back up again when they return. He holds her by her upper arm to steady her as they make their way up the five steps. Mary makes a habit of standing on her front porch for long stretches of time, doing what appears to be absolutely nothing at all. She just stands there under the awning.

A few days ago, I was walking to my car and Mary called me over to her. She has a raspy, jaunty voice. She asked me if my name was Sally. We talked in the street for a few minutes. At one point she pulled me over to her so I wouldn't get hit by a car. She was pretty strong.

When I got home later that day, I was still thinking about Mary. She was so interesting and strange. So I wrote a poem.

Mary

She always wears wide black
wraparound sunglasses. After lunch
she stands on her stoop for an hour or two
under the shade and shelter of
a rusting aluminum awning
as if awaiting formal guests.
She waves and waves me over, but
I don’t recognize her without her glasses,
and her yellowed smile, too many teeth
pushing forward, distracts me from her face.
I believe her

that they steal the cars around here,
and that’s why she watches
from the porch, since she used to know
everyone up the street – here she flourishes
her arm like a girl, like a dancer – but now

they have all died, or moved
on to bigger homes that they have
purchased. Still, her yard is kept
and seasonally appropriate, mechanized
deer in the winter, spinning pastel
windmills in the summer, green wooden
cut-outs of frogs and dwarves each spring.
I believe her that things just aren’t

friendly anymore, like she thinks I am. Perhaps
she thinks we will be good neighbors, we will
wave hello from our porches, drink
lemonade on her stoop and watch
silently for thieves. I’m not young, she
says, but I get it.

The name game...

2005-04-20T10:00:00.000-07:00

So, I changed the name of this rag. I felt that "Icebox Plums" was too fluffy, too prim. It was kid gloves, broken bindings and dust jackets. It was a sneaky lover, but only if you recognized that I was paying homage to a fantastic poet. Perhaps I will resurrect it if I decide to start blogging on literature.

A skirt, however, is a woman. It is sexy. It is smart. And in this case, it is also a form of persuasion. Read on.

Looking for a few good women...

2005-04-19T17:22:00.000-07:00

There is a new brand of feminism out there. If you believe that the government is only in power to fuck things up, so much so that you think that date rape is not a crime that can be fairly prosecuted, you might be an ifeminist. If you think the Violence Against Women Act is unconstitutional and that it's great family fun to train your 6-year-old daughter to kill with a rifle, you might be an ifeminist. If you think that the existance of women's studies programs is evidence that universities should not receive public funding, you might be an ifeminist, or Individualist Feminist.

Athough they're really just a troop of libertarians masquerading as feminists, the ifeminists' increasing presence on the web makes me squirm. These days, feminism has enough trouble with the apathy of the under-thirty crowd and the political disconnect that the mass media has created even amongst self-avowed feminists - pseudo-feminist movements only exacerbate these problems in our tired, thirsty movement.

Ask a woman today if she's a feminist and there's a good chance she will view your question as an accusation. Feminism has lost its course. Political action is rare and stigmatized. Any action is seen as radical. There is a lack of cohesion among young, culture-influenced feminist women who grew up in a more gender-equal era than our mothers could have imagined. The result is something in the zeitgeist that was articulated is this irreverent cover story in 1998:

The politics aren't there anymore. We have the outragous notion that "W is for Women." Wearing a "girls Rock!" t-shirt is considered a feminist action. Becoming a knitter is a form of self-affirmation and signals a self-conscious return to the feminine arts, and this, too, is seen as taking action. The members of NOW are all frizzy-haired old ladies and the grrl zines are disappearing faster than Google can remove them from their search engine.

I am tired of this. If you know of any organizations that are working right now to further feminism - ways that involve 20- and 30-something women and include more than weekly reading circles of Bust Magazine(even though I *heart* Bust Magazine) - email me. Better than that, email me and then plan to join up yourself. I'll need the company.

Boxing Squirrels and Baby Chimps: The Finale

2005-04-18T20:47:00.000-07:00

If you're one of the people who just isn't interested in this topic anymore, you at least have to scroll to the bottom of this post. You have got to check it out. Really.

For those (nice, smart, beautiful) people who are interested in this last post on this topic, there are conclusions that I have reached. I will offer them to you. To begin, here are some squirrels in their natural habitat:

This is what they do in the trees where we can't see them. Why else would 19th century taxidermist Edward Hart pose them like that? Perhpas because Ed, like most modern taxidermists, considered himself an artist.

In covering the World Taxidermy Championships, I had to learn to divorce my concept of what hunters do from my understanding of taxidermy as a trade. Try to forget that most taxidermists are also seasoned hunters. That will only confuse you and weaken my point.

The reason the trade show felt so much like a craft show was because it was a craft show. The taxidermists, it turns out, obsess over the anatomy of the animals they mount. They study whole carcasses, read piles of physiology books, and sit in their hunting blinds just to watch and learn how an animal moves, how it behaves.

A taxidermist's pride, it turns out, doesn't come from mounting the giant head of a dead beast because they're glad the beast is dead, or because they are seriously insensitive. It comes from their ability to mount a lifelike pose. As one judge said, "they ought to look like they're about to breathe." And the good ones do. I can't tell you how many times I turned around in the judging area to come face to face with a deer - and caught my breath.

The result is that the animals and their reconstructed habitats are reduced to paint-by-numbers kits without any apparent reverence for the lives they are imitating through the use of putty, glue, glass, and plastic. The goal is to create an animal that is the quintessential example of its species, not to celebrate the life of each trophy buck.

All of this implies a certain arrogance that is at the heart of my questioning on this issue. As humans we are at the pinnacle of the food chain, and hunters and their taxidermist friends know this and live it. It's true that they're most often conservationists and that the fees they pay for hunting and fishing licenses cover the costs of land and habitat preservation in our parks and open spaces. They feel justified in their actions and often rationalize that they are performing a service, controlling burgeoning populations resulting from irresponsible land usage.

Honestly, though. I understand that argument when it comes to deer. But bears? Coyotes? Or any other predatory animal? I interviewed one guy who said I might think differently if I had ever visited a slaughterhouse. Unlike livestock, the animals he hunts "have a chance" to survive. As if the rifle is the great equalizer. And taxidermists are not exempt from this accusation: the men and women I spoke with absolutely love to work with exotic, endangered species.

As humans, we often assume dominance over arenas where we have no business presiding. We feel it is our right to shoot, stuff and mount these animals in poses that typify our perceptions of them: the snarling coyote, the swiping bear, the alligator eating a snake. We love the machismo-soaked stories of the kill and the capture. We say things like:

"There's room for all god's creatures,
right next to my mashed potatoes."*

*A note: This lovely sentiment was gracing the front of a t-shirt that was hung up across the way from a life-size mount of a black bear with a plastic bag over its head. As if that didn't sum it up...

In conclusion, I will leave you with something completely disturbing. It was the wildest thing I saw all day. These are freeze-dried pets. You can keep Fluffy by the fire forever. They are 100% real, skin and all. And yes, that is a baby chimp. This is another of Jay's photos you can see at Ambivalent Domain, the Mad Art Gallery opening June 3rd. You should check it out.

If you want a postcard for the show, email me your mailing info. Ciao.

Cows, cover your eyes.

2005-04-14T21:09:00.000-07:00

I called my sister today. She had just watched someone slaughter a cow and I wanted to know how it went. She's an animal science major. She likes to make dinner conversation about bull castration. This was par for the course.

I had read her blog earlier today and learned that the slaughter involved decapitation. So, naturally, my first question was about the instrument at hand. Do they use something like a circular saw? Or is it more like a guillotine? I wanted to know. I wanted to picture it. I would, of course, regret this later.

"They just use a knife," she said. A knife? I tried to picture it. Was it a machete? Does a circus strongman with a stomach of steel just saw the thing clean off? Just how does this process work, anyway?

"They stun it, then hang it up by it's hind legs and cut it's throat," she said. "They use the cow's blood pressure to pump out the blood," she said. And then, "Hey, my workout class is about to start, so I gotta go." Just like that. Hm.

Apparently there's some also flailing and some involuntary mooing involved, but I didn't want to get into all that. The hanging slit-throat cow image is enough. It's the kind of image that will flash before your eyes when you're eating your Cheerios one fine morning and make you push your bowl away.

But of course, I wanted to learn more. I did some more research into the topic, which I learned is termed exsanguination. You can learn all about it on this nifty website. There's even a flash animation of a cow being exsanguinated and lots of cartoon blood shooting all over the place.

To be fair to my sister (who is going to veterinary school in the fall, by the way), this experience was necessary. Euthanasia is the only recourse for a very sick or very lame animal. She may have to do it someday when she is a highly successful large animal vet (large animals, not large sister). She didn't vomit. She didn't even faint. She's one tough mama.

and now for something completely different...

2005-04-13T13:36:00.000-07:00

I need a break from taxidermy. I dreamed about a half-bodied deer mount last night. It was lunching on a the green sprouts of a young tree. It stopped and stared at me. This is too much. So I'm taking a breather and writing something else. About shaving.

When I was 19, I decided to stop shaving. I was a budding feminist and I had decided that enough was enough. I wasn't wearing pink, shaving my legs, or painting my nails. It felt like a one-woman revolution, but one that wasn't quite joyous or liberating. In truth, no one much noticed and I felt very anti-sexy. I felt hairy. Frustrated pleadings from my mother provided the only (mild) satisfaction I gained from this grrl adventure. I went back to the razor.

* * *

As of today, I have not shaved in a week. I was going to shave last night, but I just didn't feel up to it. I was tired. The hair on my legs is now 1/8 of an inch long. It is reaching the soft, silky phase. It makes me feel earthy and large. It makes me wonder how this whole shaving thing got started. So I've done some research.

Turns out that Neanderthal men were pulling out body hair eons ago to make body painting and tatooing easier, to reduce breeding grounds for lice, small rodents (!), and other wee nasties, and to eliminate the beard as a hand-hold during combat. Since the men trimmed their beards with sharpened stones to make life easier and eating less messy, superstition held that a man with a long, heavy beard was nearing the end of his life. Some men singed their hair off with burning twigs (I recently tried this on my favorite photo-maker to rid his ears of unsightly bristles. It didn't work so well. The hairs just curled up close to the skin so I couldn't get to them. We got the idea to do it from the two old men in Kitchen Stories, a gem of a Norwegian movie. They did it to each other. We ended up using scissors to finish the job).

Egyptian men shaved with copper razors to be fashionable, and women began concocting scary mixtures of arsenic, quicklime and starch to remove unsightly hair. Yikes.

Seems that the Grecians and Romans solidified the societal requirement to shave. Women began a "by any means necessary" crusade to rid themselves of body hair with regimens that included razors, pumice stones, depilitories, and crude tweezers. It is said that Alexander the Great, who went beardless to show off his striking profile, started the trend of the regular shave for men. If you conquer half the world, you get to set trends.

Women started to shave their pits around the turn of the century (they called it "smoothing"), and shaved, naked legs became the symbol of sex appeal during WWII when silk stockings became unattainable. Lest you think things have just gotten worse and worse for us, ladies, some things have changed for the better: during much of the middle ages and through the Victorian period, aristoctatic women were expected to remove all hair from their eyebrows, forehead, face, and neck. Like Whoopie Goldberg, but freakishly white. And if she was French, she also shaved her head to better wear those crazy powdered wigs.

In 1904, the first patent for a disposable razor was granted to King Camp Gilette. Sounds like a fop to me. Here is the diagram for it. I don't think I'd want it any where near my legs.

Tonight, alas, I will shave my legs. I have a much better razor than that contraption up there. Besides, it's not so bad. It's sexy, it's smooth, and everybody's doing it.

* * *

Stay tuned, my lovelies. Very soon, I will post the third and final installment of the taxidermy epic. I will answer those pressing questions. I will reflect. Check back.

Shot, stuffed and mounted ... part 2 of 3 (or 4)

2005-04-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

Oh my. I just got through transcribing more than two hours of interviews from my visit to the World Taxidermy Championships. There is so much to tell, dear reader. I want you to be able to absorb every facinating detail, so I'll split it up into two posts. I wouldn't want anyone to lose sleep, toss and turn in bed tonight, tortured by the effort to envision my entire day after one reading. I'm always looking out for you.

So, yeah. The World Taxidermy Championships. Listening to the interviews really took me back to that smelly hotel in Springfield, rekindled fond memories of fur and putty and the skin artists who mold them.

Artists? You betcha. The trade show at the Championships had the same vibe as your local art supply store: high-minded artisans obsessed with their craft who never fear societal backlash from lording their superiority over lowly customers. Ever try to buy a tube of paint there and not know exactly which brand flows best, or (god forbid) not know what makes good paint good? But I digress. The skewering of ArtMart shall have to wait. And besides, the taxidermists were much friendlier than that.

But really, the trade show at the Crowne Hotel was huge. Entire tables of turkey heads (some mysteriously branded - yes, with fire - "John 3:16"), glass eyes, handpainted acrylic eyes, paints, glues, putties, textured fur, faux lily pads and grass, deep-frozen whole bobcats to take home and mount on your own, colorful pelts of thousands of animals, and the aptly named deer capes (if you put the skin of the deer head on your head, the body skin falls just like a cape flowing over your shoulders as if you were Conan the Barbarian or Highlander or some random Celt from 70s television).

And then there are the forms. Forms are what the tanned skins get stretched over to mount the dead animals, and they feature bone structure and musculature of the animal to be mounted. What I thought was a skinned head stuffed with sawdust is actually a skin stretched over a foam polyurethane mold, or form. Some taxidermists become sculptors and get paid to sculpt skinless animals; the sculptures are then cast and used to make hundreds and hundreds of replicas to be sold at trade shows for around $30. Folks can mount anything as long as they have the right form. And boy, do they ever.

What you see below is a raccoon form, hanging as it would from a tree. Cute, right? This photo is one of several that my favorite photo-maker, Jay Fram, may be exhibiting in his upcoming gallery opening at Mad Art Gallery on June 3rd. Come see it if you can. If you think what you've read here is interesting, imagine a room full of images like the one of the nude coon below. Crazy, right?

Shot, stuffed and mounted ... part one

2005-04-04T21:26:00.000-07:00

You have waited long and with much anticipation. You want to know how the other half lives. Here's how it unfolded:

First, the drive: it's Illinois. If you've travelled through Illinois, you know that I need say no more. If you have not had the pleasure of visiting this fine flat state, you should know that my describing this two-hour drive would seriously hamper any pains I have taken to make this an interesting story.

Springfield is a small town boasting their claim as the hometown of the late great President Abraham Lincoln, and home to Lincoln Land Community College. A haven for mediocre strip mall developers, Springfield plays host to America's most heralded fast food chains and one particularly tasty Thai restaurant. The Crowne Plaza Hotel, home of the 2005 World Taxidermy Championships, towers over the highway, a beast of a building amidst a field of manicured lawns and hot black parking lots. My partner in crime drives a truck, and for this we were thankful. I don't think there was a single passenger car tucked in among the rows of pickup trucks and trailers.

After checking in and receiving our press passes from an unpleasant, Aqua-Net addicted woman at the Crowne reception desk, I rode the escalator with my favorite photo-maker to the mezzanine level where the judging of the World was taking place. Cigarette smoke was easing into the main hallway from a tapestried smoking lounge on the far side of the hotel, men in foam trucker caps and tight-fitting stonewashed jeans were congretating near the snack counter, and a weathered gentleman in a tan Izod jacket was standing at the ready to check our credentials.

We passed into the restricted access area, the main ballroom of the hotel where the Championship entries were being stroked, poked, tugged, and peered into by about fifteen judges. We were sternly warned against bothering the judges and allowed into the main judging area, where we were surrounded by hundreds of heads and whole bodies of mounted animals, divided into the Masters division, the Professional division, and the (often amusing) Novice division.

The sheer magnitude was disorienting. I had entered a dimension inhabited solely by heads and torsos of furry mammals and their slick, shiny fishy friends. There were the standard deer heads (staring, sniffing the wind, rubbing their antlers on tree stumps, caught in barbed wire), some with the beginnings of their front legs mounted but cut off at the knee to stand floating eerily amongst reeds or fake stone outcroppings. There was a creepy display of two deer heads poised as if standing around a frozen lamp post (complete with fake icicles, snow drifts, and stuffed squirrels crawling down from above). One deer had gotten his fat pink tongue stuck to the frozen pole while the other rubbed his antlers on the pole near the ground. No amount of commentary on my part could do this piece justice.

Joining the deer for this party at the Crowne were gads of turkeys (fighting, flying, lying dead in faux grass), bears (growling, roaring, swiping at prey), wild boar, elk, fish, badgers, snakes, alligators (one alligator eating a snake), mice, bats, zebras, coyotes (hunting, howling, sleeping), foxes, raccoons, wolves, and mountain lions. There was a bengal tiger, a kangaroo, and a black-and-white colobus monkey. There were baby animals, including a farmhouse display of a full-body colt, newborn pig, and various duck hatchlings. You name it, they've probably mounted it.

* * *

Dear reader, there is so much more to tell. But it's getting to be late and I need my beauty rest. I still haven't downloaded my recorded interviews with taxidermists, hunters, judges, and trade show salesmen. And I haven't shared with you the answers to the pressing, vexing questions I posed in an earlier posting.

I will be writing again very soon. Hang tight.

I have seen the dead.

2005-04-02T21:27:00.000-08:00

And they were facinating. Friends, I have been so very busy. I went to the World Taxidermy Championships on Thursday and a report is forthcoming, I promise. Just give me a day or so and check back ... there is much to be told. For starters, the roots:

taxi.dermy: taxis (Latin: movement) + dermis (Latin: skin) = movement of the skin

... more (details, gruesome and otherwise) later.

For whoever keeps track of these things:

2005-03-27T12:40:00.000-08:00

Demonstrating magnanimous vocabularic dominance over my helpless, awestruck partner, I earned 35 points in a single hotly contested round of Boggle last night. I read the winners slowly: lost, glut, sole, gelt, dolt. I felt taller with every word. Sullen, stollen, closet, lutes, glues. I was like the guy in Chariots of Fire, approaching victory in slow motion, an embattled soldier with that annoying song in the background. Dear reader, even if you've never played the game, know this: a round of such consummate beauty is a rare thing indeed.

Unfortunately, it was only the second of seven rounds that evening. Over the course of the next hour, I was beseiged by my opponent, his intellect betrayed by a run of five-, six- and seven-letter words: trifled (ouch!), rattled, rifle, gears, trust, cotter, wroth. He was a vision in plaid, chipping away at my precious 35-pointer, leaving it to die a slow death at my feet.

After six vigorous rounds, he was a half point behind me. I suggested we go to bed. Perhaps the thought of me in my skivvies would be enough for him to leave this game well enough alone. I should have known better. We played one more round: romp, creme, crepe, hero, gape. Looking at his list, I knew who had won before he even read his words. But for the sake of someone's pride, I cannot tell you anything about it. I'm still recovering.

If you want something done...

2005-03-22T20:27:00.000-08:00

...give a man a cookie. I tested this theory this morning on my boss.

A little background, dear reader: Next week, I want a day away from my ultra-luxe beige padded cubicle. Why is that, you ask? Why, to go to the World Taxidermy Championships, of course!

My favorite photo-maker and I are taking a field trip to visit some dead, stuffed, mounted mammals in the breadbasket of America's heartland. Aside from our mutual love of dead, stuffed, and mounted mammals and fish, he is preparing for a gallery show in June, a collection of fine photos exploring the paradoxes of this bizarre art form. And I'm tagging along because I have some questions for the bizarre, fishing-vest and camo clad artists. For example, why are some of the best stuffers and mounters in the business also ardent naturalists and conservationists? When's the last time you loved something so much, you wanted to mount its head in your livingroom? You see why I am interested, yes?

Now, you can't just go to your boss and tell him that you want to have a day off to go interview some taxidermists about their weirdness (weirdnesses?). No. You have to offer him a cookie, and then ask your question as he enjoys your generosity and takes care not to get any of it stuck in his mustache. At this point, he is sufficiently distracted and feeling the warm waves of your (manipulation) good will. Tell him you will "do some work from home" and he will grant you just about anything.

So next Thursday I will drive a couple of hours and spend my day, press pass in hand, talking it up with some shooters, stuffers, and mounters. I promise to tell you all about it.

Flannery O'Connor vs. The Rock

2005-03-21T07:42:00.000-08:00

Flannery O'Connor: queen of Southern Gothic literature, she had the sweet pleasure of creating the holiest of characters, peeling back the delicate layers of their hypocrisy, splaying them open for you to see and bestowing fate upon them. She gored old ladies with the thick, gnarled horns of stray bulls, she executed entire families in dark wooded areas, she granted heart attacks to racists and stole prosthetic legs from mean-spirited young girls.

Having just finished a collection of her short stories, I got to thinking: how would she fare in today's media culture, in a culture based largely on messages created and dispersed by ratings-obsessed media moguls, in a culture that values the shock of unhindered violence, minus the judgements she made that decreed her own violence forgivable?

In other words, dear reader: how would she fare against The Rock?

She would emerge from the shadows of a booming arena wearing a black Chanel dress and jeweled cat-eye glasses. Climbing between the ropes and into the ring, she would see The Rock in the opposite corner. She would sneer. He would raise his eyebrow. He would climb barefoot onto the ropes and slick back his hair. He would jump from the ropes with the elegance and speed that elude most large men, but Flannery O'Connor would not flee. She would cross her legs and arrange her skirt, patient and demure.

* * *

I can't finish this story, dear reader. I am only a girl whose ex is a closeted WWF fan. I was subjected to hours of bad television with the curtains drawn on Saturday afternoons, but not enough to be able to paint in an appropriate ending (and for this I am thankful). This is not for lack of trying, however. I smashed The Rock's nose, broke his neck on the ropes, made his lustrous hair fall out. None of that felt right, so I placed a shotgun in the hands of a crazed fan, loosened the ropes, and blinded him with spotlights.

But I can't seem to make it work. I don't know the wrestling lingo. I don't know much about The Rock. But I know, in the end, he would lose. Nobody gets past Flannery O'Connor.

And the point is...?

2005-03-18T14:59:00.000-08:00

Well, dear reader, it's come time to tell you. You ask about the plums? Perhaps you are familiar with the poem I am paying homage to, a most fantastic little ditty by William Carlos Williams. It brings to mind the importance of detail, the reward of a small act, and, lest we forget, the joys of being very, very naughty. It's also about things worth saving.

If you care to stick with me dear lovelies, future posts will for the most part (aside from the requisite occasional digression), likewise be inspired by thoughts of things worth saving. Not elephants or manatees or prairie dogs (all deserving of saving), but rather I'd like to give you things to hold onto for me. Things that would slip from me if I didn't give them to you.

Like a game of tag. And now you're it.

I once was strong, but now I've found...

2005-03-17T21:04:00.000-08:00

...that I falter and nearly fail in the face of photo-blogging. I'm exhausted from the effort it took to post that wee little photo you see up there next to my name. See it? Yeah, baby. That's an hour of trial and error and the re-education.

But there I am, in dazzling black and white. A fine photo, really, by a really fine man. More on that later...

Welcome to my world.

2005-03-17T13:22:00.000-08:00

Ok, so this is the first post on this blog and I am going to try my best to stay away from the whole "hello, my name is" format. I somehow feel compelled to introduce myself, but I'd rather let future posts do that for me. I am fighting the urge to attempt humor in my first posting, so bear with me. Really, I'm quite a gas...

Right now, if you can picture this, I am at work in my little fabric-padded cubicle. I have a small desk-top lamp in lieu of a window, a cork board on which to pin things I am proud of, an uncomfortable chair for guests in my "office," and various personal artifacts I have scattered around in an effort to express myself (miniature plastic indian, anyone?). I spend too much time here, so many of my posts will probably originate from this lousy old office chair. The only good thing I can say about my job is that it is a good job, in the way that firefighters have a good job. I'm a fundraiser for a non-profit agency. Even if I go home with lower back pain from this crappy chair and a headache from my boss, I can go home knowing that I've done something worthwhile.

So that's it. Now you know.