May 21, 2002, 5:38 p.m.
Wow, did I ever lie about being back more often.
Over the last few weeks I've managed to finish my Abercrombie & Fitch essay about the limits
of represention, the function of kitsch, and the dangers of certain political
appeals, which should appear on PopPolitics in the next day or two. The
interview I did with Dean Spade and Craig Willse about their arrests
during the World Economic Forum in February should also be posted on
makezine.org soon. They offer some brilliant
(yet succinct) responses to the state's investment in the regulation of
gender. I finished responding to some interview questions for The
Media Reader
and have one more to go for Venus,
and I got most of my syllabus for the summer course (Women's Studies
111.4: Gender, Race, and Digital Technologies
) squared away. Hopefully, some of these things will
also be posted here as well.
icki and I are leaving later this week for a road trip across the
United States for weddings, photography exhibits, work meetings, and
visits with friends and family. If you see a long-suffering white boy
with black-rimmed glasses and armfuls of tattoos being harrassed by a
scrawny, spazzy Asian girl in stripes and her mother's sportsjacket, say
hello.
April 29, 2002, 10:02 a.m.
Yes, it's been over a month, hasn't it? And I've been writing this
entire time. I wrote drafts of my second and third dissertation
chapters, a book review for Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust
Industry: Reflections on the Exploitation of Jewish Suffering, the
book proposal for the Performing Unnatural Acts collection, and
I'm revamping an essay for publication. I seem to have a quota -- I have
a finite amount of time and energy which can be spent writing, and this
site came out low on the list of priorities.
Oh, and we didn't move after all (too expensive).
But I'll be back this week, because this site does give me something
that nothing else does -- a space to think through those everyday
encounters with politics and power, and their implications. Oh, and I'm
writing an essay about the whole fiasco with the "Two Wongs Can Make it
White" Ambercrombie & Fitch tee shirts. That'll be a ride, I
promise.
March 21, 2002, 3:20 p.m.
So there's apparently an arsonist in the
neighborhood, which is the last straw. Late-night and early-morning evacuations (complete with squealing squad
cars and fire engines, bunny slippers and
bathrobes in the fast food parking lot) are not
my style. Our building has been broken into three or four times in
the last two or three months, and the mailboxes in front are always
busted, or the locks jammed, so we often find our mail a block away from
the apartment. Four years back my checks were stolen from those mailboxes and
someone went on a spending spree; a few months later, the Oakland police called
me to report they'd found a box of my checks --along with about
twenty other boxes of checks belonging to hapless others-- in a stolen
car. The arson attempt on the apartment building next door is an
appropriate end to our stay on this street. We are so
moving.
Mark and I now have a livejournal in which our daily exchanges of terrible
news and bad jokes are logged. We are neither professional comedians nor reporters,
just desperate, despondent people in a mad, mad world.
March 15, 2002, 9:40 a.m.
updated: POLITICAL ART REDUX, with additional commentary from a host
of lovely individuals
listening: Huggy Bear, Taking the Rough
with the Smooch CD
Because I will soon be unable to do so, I'm dying my hair flamingo
pink, in parts. Perhaps it will frighten my writer's block away,
and I'll be able to resume normal cruising speed on the
dissertation.
On the phone with Arwen, we wonder if punk rock will rise to the
challenge of the Bush administration, as it did Reagan and apartheid,
and after some thought we sink into despair.
Mattie informs me that she's always thought I was femme. "You wear a
necklace with a rainbow and a unicorn. Of course you're femme!" Again, I
squirm, because I cannot imagine how I could be femme with this bodily
memory of awkward tomboy-hood so close to the surface.