a not-annoying story by the not-annoying Jonathan June 24, 2009

How nifty was the story “Good Neighbors” in the June 8 & 15, 2009 New Yorker? I so enjoy Jonathan Franzen, and I so enjoy that he is not Jonathan Safran Foer, who I dislike for no particular reason except it just seems to be the right thing to do. Anyway, this line has been reverberating in my head for a week, so much did it make me laugh:

Merrie, who was ten years older than Patty and looked every year of it, had formerly been active with the S.D.S. in Madison and was now very active in the craze for Beaujolais nouveau.

Oh, too, too much. It made my week!

Monday Miscellany: pretties to eat, wear, and grow, + mixing business with [p]leather June 1, 2009

[Oh god people. Planes are disappearing, heroes are getting shot, my mother's best friend is in the hospital---and NPR is having a fund drive. And I wore the wrong hoodie to work and now it smells all oniony. In short: everything sucks. But I wrote this post days ago when life was much more rosy.]

No no no, not business + leather. Or Christmas with Heather. Or pleather! I just can’t stop myself from quoting Beck songs, OK? I mean, freaks flock together, what else is there to say?

yummyfun.com – YES. And how.

*

Peach Berserk!!!!1!1!! Through the magic of the internet, I was just reunited with this sweet small company, and I’ve had shivers of happiness all day because of it. Many years ago my loverboy (I just came up with that one!) and I were in Toronto to see….um….. um…well….to see Ani DiFranco, OK? Like, back when she was awesome. And she might have been opening for Dylan…or maybe that was another show. I was sort of obsessed for a while, but you had probably already pegged me for an Ani-lover, right?

So, we wandered into this shop, and I fell in love, hardcore. Sweet handmade bathing suits and dresses, everything wild and overdone and exuberant —and totally affordable, even for a college kid. The owner, Kingi, was sweet as the sweetest pea, and I took home a little booklet or flier thing about the store whose craziness deeply thrilled me. I wore the bathing suit I bought until the bottom got so stretched out that it fell down every time a wave came at me. I practically lost it in the ocean a hundred times, and now it lives happily in my “Old Clothes to Keep–Sentimental!!!” box. Peach Berserk–reunited and it feels so good.

*

I’m not sure you were in danger of this, but just in case: under no circumstances should you begin reading Martha Stewart’s dogs’ blog. Mostly because the comments are written by clearly insane people who write as if they are dogs. They are worse than I Can Has Cheezeburger comments, I swear. (I can’t put a link there to ICHC because if I go there to snag the link I will get lost in it for hours, so if you don’t know of what I speak…well, I’m just not sure what I can say to you. Happily for me, on my bedside table right now is the ICHC book waiting patiently to be devoured, courtesy of the above mentioned loverboy who got it at some music festival or another. I [heart] swag!)

*

Speaking of Martha, my sweet pals Ken + Doug from the Hudson Valley Seed Library are mentioned in the June Martha Stewart Living! And Sarah Snow, the talented and adorable designer of my new bonbon boxes, designed the seed packet pictured in the article!

*

I was totally touched that a fancypants newsletter I get about furniture (because I once ordered literally the cheapest thing in the catalog) sent out such a beautiful sentiment about Prop 8! And I thought I was unprofessional for mixing business and politics in my silly business emails! I wonder how many bigots there are in the modern furniture world who will angrily never order from them again? Well, I know where I’m going for my fancypants furniture from now on.

*

I really liked this idea from Sasha Frere-Jones (in last month’s New Yorker) It justifies all my Facebooking (and let’s ignore for now that I am not a digital native):

One way to understand social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace is to consider that younger digital natives are not necessarily being exhibitionists when they post photographs of themselves and share personal details there. Instead, these users are living a life in which consciousness is spread out evenly over two platforms: real life and the Web. Rather than feeling schizophrenic or somehow pathological, digital natives understand that these two realms divide the self much as speech and the written word divide language, a division that humans have lived with for a long time without going bonkers.

Awesome.

monday miscellany: wednesday “While the 2- to 3-year-olds recognized 8 out of 12 brand logos, most 8-year-olds were able to recognize 100% of the logos” edition. March 18, 2009

• Look at these beauties: buttons and other wearables made from melted plastic bottles. They have a lovely otherworldly beauty, but I am a little worried about the fumes the artist inhaled when making them…. (Via Mighty Goods)

• This American Life has an AMAZING segment this week that perfectly articulates my feelings about the going-to-college dilemma. At first I was preparing to write an angry expletive-filled retort, thinking it was going to go down the typical you-must-go-to-college-to-be-a-productive-member-of-society route, but I underestimated my beloved TAL—it ended up in quite a different place. Awesome.
• My junk might be on some pee-cam porno website, as I use this bathroom once in a while (of course, I’ve never bought anything at Starbucks—perish the thought! Ick.) Ick ick ick ick ick. (Via Brittany’s Facebook)
• Hiding friends on Facebook: best idea EVER. Why am I friends with so many sketchy dudes? Must. Be. More. Selective.
• Oh, David Foster Wallace. When his books were coming out, I was in a phase of not reading books by men, a sort of affirmative action program I enjoyed very much. But I just read the long article about him (and the fiction by him) in The New Yorker, and it was heartbreaking, and it made me put Infinite Jest on my reading list, and oh, how sad, how sad.
• I’d already read one piece of his, though: a few years ago my love for Gourmet magazine under the helm of Ruth Reichl was cemented when they published an utterly mind-blowing long, long, long piece about, pretty much, why you shouldn’t eat lobsters, by DFW. They had sent him to cover some horrid lobster festival and the manifesto he came back with, “Consider the Lobster,” was so beautiful that it actually made me cry. Ruth Reichl’s gutsy decision to publish an explicitly anti-lobster-eating article in a food magazine was equally beautiful. She got lots of angry letters, but she found a fan for life in me.
• I need to take some great photos (of you-know-what), and I have a great camera (Jacob’s). Whenever I use it I set it to “auto-focus” and it works OK, but I want super-focused, beautiful, professional photos, which I think entails setting things like “f-stops” and maybe “apertures” or something (those are the only photo words I know). Do any of you know any sites where I could read, very quickly and in super dumbed-down wording, how to set, um, f-stops or whatever they are called to take truly great pictures? I am hoping I don’t have to become a giant photo geek who knows everything about everything to take a decent non-auto-focus picture. This camera scares me, can you tell? It is very heavy. It has lenses. I’m terrified of it.
• My feeling about the dreaded wraps, pretty much exactly (thanks to Aaron for the link). And I’m sure you’ve seen this, but it kills me every time, so here it is again.
• My sweetheart is currently in the wilds of Austin at SXSW (here’s how he describes it when people are all “I heard SXSW is so awesome! It’s amazing that you go every year!!”: “Yeah. South By. Um. Here are my two least favorite things: Brooklyn hipsters, and Texas. At SXSW they combine. It’s amazing.”) working no less than twenty shows in five days with three bands (how is this possible? I am still not sure), but before he left (which I could also have written as “right after he came home”), we had this hilarious exchange: “Ahh! You just scratched me! Do you have man nails? You went away for three weeks and now you come back with the dreaded man nails?” “You mean—males?”
• And finally: I got the Adbusters corporate US flag in the mail today as a gift for my subscription, and since the rainbowy “pace” flag I’ve had up for five years literally disintegrated recently, I am thinking of hanging it (um, I am not sure why, but my house came with a flagpole. Yes, it is weird.). My mom thinks I should hang a flag with a picture of two kittens frolicking on it that she bought for me (oh mom. Kitteh house!), but somehow I can’t bring myself to do it. But I’m not sure about the Adbusters flag. My problems with it: 1) I don’t want people thinking it’s a fucking American flag. 2) I don’t want to look at those damn corporate logos all the time waving above my pretty roses. 3) What if people don’t get the irony?
• And finally for real: I am tempted to completely stop my life, move into my friend Than’s currently unused apartment on West 93rd street (right down the street from both Zabars and Lush!) and work full time on the Reverend Billy for NYC mayor campaign. Damn capitalism, keeping me chocolatizing all day long instead of in the streets!

postmodernist primer March 12, 2009

Let’s talk about postmodernism. It’s a fun thing to learn about in college if you have that kind of money to burn. But if you’ve committed yourself to a real, handmade life and might not be going to college, as I so emphatically recommend you do not, it’s up to you to educate yourself about cool concepts like postmodernism, deconstructionism, and other bizarro -isms to ponder as your mind wanders.

What, really, is the nature of language, and how far can the concept be stretched? Is language meaningless because words can never actually be what they signify (the word “book” will never be an actual book), and if so what are the implications for literature? And, for that matter, social movements? What were/are the effects of the postmodern project on modern literary fiction? Did postmodernism create, kill, or have no effect on the concept of irony? Fun ideas to mull over while driving or soaking in the tub, for serious.

Knocking around concepts like this is primarily what I use my very expensive education (which I will be paying off until 2023—sadly, I am not exaggerating) for most days. I conjugate French verbs to myself while driving home from work, I have the awesome advantage of being able to say to the many religious zealots I get in fights with that yes, as a matter of fact, I have read the Bible, I’ve read the whole fuckin’ thing: I took a whole class on it in college and got an A—it’s a fascinating work of fiction, utterly terrifying. When I can’t sleep I read untranslated Rimbaud poésies out loud to the cats, and take some pleasure in my quite passable accent (je est une autre, mofos!). And I think about postmodernism. That’s about it.

In the spirit of anarchistic skill sharing and celebration of the life of the mind without the need of uptight universities, I’d like to chat a bit about postmodernism.

Happily, Louis Menand has provided a supremely compact disquisition on the topic in the February 23 issue of The New Yorker, in the form of a review of a new biography of the pomo surrealist writer Donald Barthelme. Pieces like these are why I so so so heart TNYer—mad skills on display in full flower without snottiness, an intellectual workout without obfuscation. Here’s all you need to know about the pomo world, in five easy pages. Actually, here’s really all you need to know in one paragraph, suitable for clipping and keeping in a back pocket in case a last-minute cocktail party chatter topic is needed:

Boom. Roasted.

Louie Louie doesn’t tell you which one he thinks is “right,” he’s just giving you the facts. He tells you that the bio of Barthleme thinks he was “emphatically a postmodernist in the first sense,” that is, he believed that he learned from and worked within a tradition established by modernists like Joyce. “Modernism was formally difficult and intellectually challenging,” Menand writes. It was high art at its most high. In contrast, postmodernists in the second sense, as epitomized by Warhol, didn’t seek to be high art or lowbrow art—they sought to erase the distinction between the two:

Boom. Roasted. Really, that’s the only talking point you need to know about Warhol’s soup cans—they sought to point out that art is a capitalist product just like anything else. Warhol didn’t particularly care about this, in fact I think he rather liked it, which is one reason that I am not particularly concerned and am, actually, rather heartened by the fact that Valerie Solanas shot him.

There are loads of other goodies in here, even for someone like me who’s never read much Barthelme (I think I’ve only ever read one short story, but I liked it a lot.). Barthelme’s whole thing is adding in weird nonsensical passages to his fiction. It sounds like it would be maddening to read a short story that suddenly includes a few sentences ripped from a manual on how to repair a carburetor or something, but I like Menand’s justification for them (enough with the screen shots, I’ll just copy it out):

He tried to create a certain amount of noise in them [his short stories], on the theory that the distraction helped the reader. “The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude,” he explained. “As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will, that it’s being poorly done.”

Yes yes yes! Also:

The visual artist can deal with almost every kind of material, even sound, but the writer deals with only one kind of material: sentences. The solution, therefore, was to treat sentences as though they were found objects.

We rarely experience sentences this way, because we’re trying to look through them to the things they represent, just as, in traditional easel painting, we look through the canvas, as though it were a window, onto the world it represents. That’s the kind of looking and reading that modernism was committed to disrupting.

Fascinating, no?

It seems to me that blogging and so much of Internet culture in general is a terribly pomo practice. Most people I know use internet-speak like “omg!” ironically, in order to call attention to the hilariousness and weirdness of the Internet universe. Blogs (which, hilariously, is not in WordPress’s spellchecker) like mine that aren’t focused around just one topic and are written for fun (as opposed to profit) are postmodern in that they are little collages, grabbing bits of news, poetry, photos, commentary, and presenting them in a format that can’t help but call attention to the author of the blog and the meta process of blogging itself. The ability for anyone to comment on a post destabilizes the authority of the authorial voice even further, thus creating a more democratic exchange of information. This deconstruction and fragmentation of the process of information dissemination is a sign, maybe, that the lefty postmodernists, who fought so hard to erase all hierarchies by claiming that they were meaningless, are having the last laugh.

It is also, almost certainly, why newspapers everywhere are failing. It means that we need to work harder to find “experts” (to the extent that we believe in that word) to listen to, and that the people (largly white and male) who previously had an easy and possibly unearned ride as “experts” are feeling their positions of power being snatched from them.

Sigh. I miss writing term papers.

Lest anyone call me a hypocrite because I have previously railed against pomo feminism and the “pole dancing is political” viewpoint (I sense a Brittany comment is coming…) that it hath wrought in the name of feminism (what Twisty calls “funfeminists“)….um, well, I don’t think postmodernism would be happy if those who liked some aspects of it didn’t have problems with other aspects!

Its middle name is “problematizing,” after all.

(This post is dedicated to Veronica, my favorite non-college kid!)

patriarchal puzzlement February 28, 2009

How is it that I have a degree in feminism, yet I can never remember if “patriarchal” or “patriarchical” is correct, or if there is a difference, and if so what the difference is? I am pretty positive “patriarchal” is always correct, but Ariel Levy is throwing “patriarchical” and “hierarchical” all over the place in this podcast, and just like she don’t know no nothin’ ’bout vegans, I don’t think she’s right. The article she discusses though (the lesbian separatist movement in the 1970s, out of which my favorite place on earth, Bloodroot Restaurant, pictured here, evolved), was so fucking rad that I will forgive her.

(HA ha! My dudey—albeit pretty rad—landlord just walked into the kitchen as the speakers were blasting “there was a moment in the 1970s when lesbian sadomachosism became a big thing….” and he had the most deer-in-the-headlights look you have ever seen.)

AWW! I think this is already on the blog somewhere, but I love this picture of Selma and me so much I have to put it up again.

Ariel Levy fucks over vegans whilst discussing fucking generally January 28, 2009

I’ve always had a lot of affection for Ariel Levy. She’s a good feminist doing good work, and I loved her wife’s wedding tuxedo getup.

Unfortunately she’s done for me, and this is tragic.

I can’t let this go by. In her (interesting) review of the new vs. old Joy of Sex in the January 5, 2009 New Yorker, she drops this little bomb:

If “The Joy of Sex” was like “Joy of Cooking”….“Our Bodies, Ourselves” was like the “Moosewood Cookbook.” Everything in it was healthful, enlightened, nourishing.
Here’s a trick you might try at home sometime: pick almost any recipe in the “Moosewood.” Now add bacon. You will find that the addition of this decidedly unwholesome ingredient makes the food taste much better. “Our Bodies, Ourselves,” likewise, lacked a certain trayf allure. The revised edition of the book—even the original—is a fantastic resource for educating young women (and very sophisticated girls) about their physicality. But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little vegan.

Oh, fuck you!

OK, I see your point, but the reason vegans are seen in popular culture as pale pleasure-deniers is because popular culture is reductionist and idiotic, not because it’s a true stereotype. And while I find the Moosewood Cookbook adorable, no sane vegan (or, person) cooks from it.

The point is: this just has to stop. Well-meaning liberal people making jokes out of being vegan WILL NOT BE TOLERATED. I just hate this shit. To make fun of someone’s choice to decrease violence and unnecessary death in the world, Ms. Levy, is not funny. Not fucking funny at all. I’m taking Female Chauvinist Pigs off my “to read” Powells wishlist—which it seriously was on!

Let’s play a little substitution game that will point out how idiotic this faux-snarky little crap zinger is. If you wouldn’t say these things, you shouldn’t talk shit about being vegan.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little anti-rape.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little pro-human rights.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little against child pornography.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little pro-gay marriage.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little feminist.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little Democratic.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little anti-racist.

But as an erotic reference for adults in 2008 it’s a little multi-cultural.

You see? You’re trying to be funny, but you’re being REALLY OFFENSIVE.

STOP IT.

beloved barney: the radical congressman who wasn’t January 28, 2009

Peeps! BE EXCITED! I’ve got a super nice post and a super mean post lined up for you tonight, both about The New Yorker. Here we go! Guess which is which?

I’ve always had a lot of affection for Barney Frank. Remember when Bush took his cell phone out of his hands and talked to his boyfriend? Oy!

The New Yorker just had a nice Jeffrey Toobin profile on him which I read intently. I have this horrible trait of looking for reasons not to love the people I love, so I went through the article circling potential reasons not to love Barney. I do this not (only) because I am the most negative person you’ve ever met, but also because I want to be armed to instantly refute if someone points out flaws in someone I admire—people are assholes like that, have you noticed? The minute you say someone is interesting or smart or worthy of slavish hero worship they feel the need to tell you that their cousin once fucked them in a bathroom and they were “small in the game” (a phrase I just learned, courtesy of Lily Allen). I mean, I am always looking for more information on peeps, but man, people can be idiotic with that shit.

So here’s what I’ve got for Barney Frank:

Joe Corcoran, a giant developer dude, says,

Barney is a real capitalist. He understands that we have to make a profit.

Oh, sad face. (he also says: “Barney is the smartest politician I’ve ever seen. I have no problem with him being gay, or being Jewish. I like Jews. I like doing business with Jews. They know how to make a deal.” Of course!)

Michael Oxley, former chairman of the Financial Services Committee says:

Barney, to some extent, is misunderstood—with this image of him as a fierce partisan. He is an institutionalist. He believes in the House and in the process.

Of course, neither of these came straight from Frank, but this did:

And it struck me, before I conceptualized this, that the answer to that was public-private partnership, that that’s the way to do affordable housing. And then it struck me: You know what? This is the model for other things. Public-private-sector coöperation.

Really? I am not so sure at all. But I believe in you, Barney! Convince me! (& oh, I adore that TNYer does the accent over the o in cooperation!)

So…should I not love Barney Frank if he is a capitalist and an institutionalist, being as I am an anarchist antipreneur*?

When I was deciding who to honor for my upcoming line of feminist chocolates, I made a giant list of women and literally assigned point values: were they white? Minus 1 point—I had too many white women in the lineup already (bye bye Rachel Carson!). Were they born rich (I loved you once, Natalie Barney!)? Minus 2 points, I fucking hate richies. I dropped Dolores Huerta because she endorsed Hillary, and on and on.

And although I think that was the right approach for the chocolate line, as I wanted my ladies to be beyond reproach, I’m OK with looking up to people whose values and, most likely, actions I don’t always agree with. It’s like Naomi Klein says in that little text box on the right up there—politicians need rabble-rousers on the left to help move them along and to show that there is support for leftist policy.

I can work for anarchist utopia, which is never going to happen in my lifetime, while Barney Frank works to keep the system we have from being completely taken over by idiots on the right. We are on parallel but not identical trajectories, and while much of our work is the same, the end results are very different. I’m OK with all that. I’m OK with pretty much anyone doing anything to stop the madness, I guess that’s what I’m saying. And anyway, with the kumbaya president we’re going going on now, we need Barney Franks to make sure Obama listens to the left wing of the Democratic party.

Also, how could you not love someone who says stuff like this?

Not long ago, Paul Begala, the political strategist, was speaking at a fund-raiser for a gay-rights group and said, “When I told my father, back in Texas, that I was speaking to an L.G.B.T. group, he said that sounded like a sandwich.” From the audience, Frank called out, “Sometimes it is!”

*I stole the “antipreneur” title from Adbusters, do you love it?

from the ground up December 24, 2008

found on the beach today!

I’m writing up a series of candidate’s questionnaires for the New Paltz Greens to help us decide whether to endorse non-Green candidates. It’s pretty fascinating, and it’s stretching my brain in all kinds of ways. Based on a suggestion from a fellow Green, I just added this question:

“If elected, would you work to stop the common practice of municipal vehicle idling?”

And my heart just sang for a moment. Talk about building a new and better world, brick by brick—we are doing it! We’re thinking about everything—condoms in schools, Town and Village unification, expanded paper recycling, healthy school lunches, beavers, everything.

It feels good.

Then today on the beach I read the Naomi Klein New Yorker profile and, true to my chosen socioeconopolitico demographic, I adored it and adore her more than ever.

And! How perfectly does this passage fit in with what I was just saying a few days ago? It’s pretty much everything I believe about Obama and the left and life in one tidy paragraph:

Both Klein and Lewis [her kickass husband] are skeptical about Barack Obama. “I’ve been at rallies and seen him speak, and I feel that feeling that one feels,” Lewis says. “It is thrilling. And it’s churlish not to allow yourself to be thrilled. We crave inspiration, and it’s a bleak life to always be dissecting things. But the main feeling that Obama creates in me is fear, because I see people fooling themselves. If you actually look at his policies, what they reflect is the triumph of the right-wing political paradigm since Reagan, and I think he could set things back dramatically, because for young people who are getting engaged in politics for the first time, for them to be disillusioned is very, very damaging.” Because Klein doesn’t expect much from any politician, she doesn’t spend time wishing Obama were more progressive. “I don’t want to appear too cynical, but when I first saw the ‘Yes We Can’ rock video that Will.I.Am made, my first response was ‘Wow, finally a politician is making ads that are as good as Nike’s,’ ” she says. “The ‘Yes We Can’ slogan means whatever you want it to mean. It’s very ‘Just Do It.’ When you hear it, you catch yourself thinking, Yeah! We’re gonna end torture and shut down Guantánamo and get out of Iraq! And then you think, Wait a minute, is he really saying that? He’s not really saying that, is he? He’s saying we’re going to send more troops to Afghanistan. He’s telling regular people what they want to hear, and then in the back rooms he’s making deals and signing on to the status quo. But if people don’t like where Obama is they should move the center.” To this end, Klein has been taking every opportunity to call for the nationalization of the oil companies. “It’s the job of the left to move the center,” she says. “Get out there and say some crazy stuff! And then, suddenly, it’ll seem more reasonable for politicians to take riskier positions.” (emphasis mine)

FUCKING A!

on human perfectability, or: should I step down as the New Paltz Green Party chairwoman? December 20, 2008

(I wrote this on the plane to Hawaii last week)

I just got around to reading the November 17 love-letter-to-Obama New Yorker, and there is just nothing snarky I can say about it—what a beautiful issue. (The entire thing is available online, too.)

Well, OK. Obviously, it’s beautiful as a fantasy document, since all of us who were warning that Obama wasn’t our savior months ago are, sadly, being proven ever more right by the day, but I’m not going to get into that. It’s a very earnest issue written by optimistic, good-hearted, earnest people, and in that sense it was beautiful to read.

As we all know, and as the brilliant ZP makes clear, the New Yorker is dependably liberal and never radical. I know this, and I enjoy what I can and leave the rest. Obama winning was a real victory because of who people thought he was. The fact that he never was that person is almost incidental—or, will be until January 20th, 2009.

I was fascinated by the pair of pieces comparing Obama’s winning strategy and McCain’s losing one—what a great crash course in how to (and how not to) run a campaign. I’m saving the issue to refer to when working on the little local races I am sometimes involved in.

But the most instructive piece for my political life was “The Joshua Generation: Race and the campaign of Barack Obama,” all about Obama’s very reasoned and self-conscious journey to where he is now. It was saddening because David Remnick very plausibly argues that no one except milquetoast Obama-esque politicians could have achieved what he did—I don’t think Remnick finds that saddening, though. I think he is awed by Obama’s even temper and willingness to consciously step out of the “angry black man” mold. As these are the very qualities that leave me less than thrilled about him, the piece confirmed what I already felt in a disheartening way.

Remnick smartly compares and contrasts Obama and Jeremiah Wright, and of course I am on the side of Wright. We are flying over Spokane right now, and ever since Billings I have been staring out the window, thinking about this passage:

Wright saw himself as—and Obama understood him to be—an inheritor of the prophetic tradition, not an accommodationist, and hardly a politician. His jeremiads were meant to rouse, to accuse, to shake off dejection. At times, he called on the familiar metaphor of American blacks as modern-day equivalents of the ancient Hebrews, a people marked by terrible suffering and displacement. Wright was part of a tradition well known to millions of churchgoing African-Americans. But that would never be explained adequately on cable television.

YES. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my place on the political spectrum lately, and this passage literally made my heart pound: I don’t want to be Obama. I don’t particularly want to be calm and collected and bring moderates around to my way to thinking with beautiful rhetoric. I want to be the uncompromising voice of hardcore liberalism helping to keep the left left when people like Hillary come along. I don’t want to be Obama—I want to be Jeremiah Wright.

I want to inspire with my belief system, not my ability to unite people. I want to inspire people to change and, to be blunt, be better than they are. I’m not saying that I am perfect–of course, I am far, far from it. But I am obsessed with the idea of perfectibility–continued struggle toward the perfectibility of the individual and collective self is what interests me.

Not: what can we get done? But: how can we be better?

It seems to me that when we are continually striving to be better in all aspects of our lives we will automatically get a lot done.

This is especially relevant to my life right now because last May I had the honor of being elected chairwoman of the New Paltz Green Party. This position has made me think a lot about different types of activism, and how a third party in a tiny town can be maximally efficient. I get way, way too angry way, way too often when I should be acting as a better representative for the Greens (see here [scroll down], here & here), and lately Jacob and I have been having productive and heated talks (my favorite kind!) about how I can be a better Green.

He keeps telling me that it boils down to learning a more appropriate way to interact with people that wins them over to my side, and I keep telling him that it boils down to people not being so incredibly fucking stupid. We go back and forth with this for a while, and eventually I admit that one way to work for the latter is to work on the former, and we come to the same conclusion: the very whisper of the idea of being a politician fills me with intense, skin-crawly loathing for humanity. As a representative of the Green Party, it’s pretty much my job to be nice to everyone and try to get them to be Greens—to be a Green booster. But I just can’t talk to people I disagree with on major issues like that—if you’re not a Green, what can I say to you? You’re obviously either truly evil (and thus a Republican) or a mediocre wishy-washy Democrat, and in either case my life is really too short to bother with you at all. (Most of my friends are Independents, Greens, or we-don’t-talk-to-Lagusta-about-things-like that.)

It’s the same problem most long-time vegetarians I know have talking to non-vegetarians about vegetarianism: most of us avoid it because it’s so blindingly obvious that eating tortured rotting flesh is a ridiculous, outdated idea. Most of us came to that conclusion when we were about twelve, and when you’re thirty and are still dithering about it and doing silly things like eating “humane meat” (HA!!!!!!) there is really nothing to be said.

Believe it or not, I like being this way. And thus the problem. I like having beliefs and standing up for them and admitting that I came to them by thinking about them and if your beliefs are radically different you probably didn’t think that hard. It’s not that I’m very smart, it’s that I know how to listen to my heart. What’s wrong with being right? I still have space in my life for, say, vegetarians who are not vegan. I like to talk with friends about political differences, because my friends are my friends because they are smart and have good hearts, so I will listen to them even if we disagree on minor points—I haven’t totally closed myself off to the world, just, well, mostly.

But it’s not good to be this way and be the head of the Green Party. I don’t want to be a politican—I want to be the Karl Rove of the left, to be honest. I want to be behind the scenes, the mastermind, never emerging to show my inflamed heart to the world because I am just not acceptable to mainstream people. I don’t want to play the dirty tricks Karl Rove does, of course, I just want to indulge in the sense that I get from him: that he is the moral center of the party, an uncompromising figure the politicians on his side listen to. Of course, he is a terrible human being, unlike me. But he’s effective, and he doesn’t seem to compromise.

So here is the question, the one I always come back to whenever I feel like this and the one that never gets resolved: should I work on changing, or revel in who I am? Working on changing would entail learning to suppress my bouts of wonderful, searing manic righteousness—a practically hysterical edge I love to live on, where I get lots done and make lots of people angry. Am I truly productive when I give in to my ultra-passionate, furious side? I like to pretend that I inspire people by example. I like to bloviate on and on about how it’s important to not compromise, that we can’t all be family-friendly and tone down our hardcore lefty positions so Hillary-esque idiots join our side. I like to scream about how me being steadfastly on my side pulls the entire left a bit more to me. But I know this probably turns more people off than it turns on. But it’s so fun!

If I don’t resolve to change, I will not seek another term as head of the Green Party. I’m not sure that I would get elected, because I know there is a faction who think my anger and actions are hurting the party. I can still do just as much good work with the party without being the chair, and if I am not going to change I don’t think it’s appropriate that I am the chair.

Right at this moment we are flying off the coast of the United States, just north of the pretty little town of Eugene Oregon. Goodbye, mainland! It seems like a good time to be thinking about meta questions like this.

My most deeply felt, most passionate and beloved impulses—the things that make me me as I understand myself—are often ineffective and hurtful. What do you do when you realize that, and when you have no idea how not to be you?

yes, the director had a bullhorn December 12, 2008

The brand was “little big horn.” I kid you not.

The video shoot. Oh my gosh.

OK, It was in this crazy building:

I guess the pilot of ER was shot there, along with parts of Pearl Harbor, a bunch of horror movies, and other things I can’t remember because I never remember things like the names of movies or TV shows. But Howard Hugues apparently lived in the top floor for a while. It was a hospital until 1990, and has been used as a film set since then, and I don’t think it had been cleaned since about 1955.

There was a crematorium in the basement, and everyone kept talking about how there were human ashes all around in the crematorium room, but I never got a chance to make my way down there. I can’t say I exactly tried very hard. There were old hospital gurneys and terrifyingly dirty hospital beds scattered around.

But the building was insanely beautiful. Isn’t it amazing that the film industry can save places like this from destruction?

Leftover props!

I had a really good time taking pictures and wandering around, until LA actor-y girls started coming in and shedding their leggings and Uggs in preparation for being dressed as burlesque dancers and flappers. Then I got weirded out and shy—all the girls seemed nice, but I didn’t want to be a part of that scene.

I wanted to hang out with my friends in the band and my sweetheart (their manager)–with the boys. When the time came to get into the wardrobe room, I told my friend Than that I didn’t want to be in the video after all. I figured it wouldn’t be a big deal—I was just going to be an extra in the background.

But Than knows me and my initial reticence to living life as opposed to bitching about it, and he literally dragged me into the wardrobe room. All the actor girls turned to look at me and my skinny-in-any-room-but-this-one hips, and I shot daggers at Than, who turned me over to the wardrobe women and fled.

“Help!”

They turned to me and began holding up dresses. The wardrobe ladies turned out to be super sweet (and possibly the most styley people I’ve ever met), but they still made me try on no less than five outfits (two of which were authentic 1920s dresses that wouldn’t even pass over my hips, ha!), before we settled on a sweet Vanessa Bell (Virginia Woolf’s sister) number that I adored. They gussied it up with glued on ribbon and a brooch, tight pantyhose and tight knee socks, and witchy heels.

Then it was off to the dreaded makeup chair. I’m just not a girly girl like that, and all the accoutrements of traditional femininity make me nervous.

Happily, the bubbly makeup lady shoved all my hair under a ridiculously awesome hat, so that was easy. When she was putting the foundation or whatever on my face, I told her that this was only my second time wearing makeup ever. (I didn’t tell her that the first time was when my grandmother died and I inherited all her fancy makeup and old, old perfume and tried it all on for fun.) She said that was probably why my eyelashes were so long and my skin was so clear, and proceeded to cover both with tons upon tons of makeup, all the while saying that she was “going easy” on me because she wasn’t putting fake eyelashes on, which most of the burlesque dancers were wearing.

Done!

Now I just had to worry about dancing. I am not a dancer. I am a jumper, which sometimes looks like dancing:

But is not.

Most happily, my sweetheart Jacob was technically supposed to be overseeing the video shoot, but was recruited as an extra when they needed more dudes, giving us the opportunity to take an astonishingly large, wedding-like quantity of photos together. Not to brag or anything, but I think we are officially the cutest couple in the history of the universe:

Everyone who knew me before my transformation into the chic-est of the Bloomsbury set kept telling me that this should be my new everyday look, and I think they are right. I think drop-waisted dresses and 1920s hats are going to make an appearance in my day-to-day clothes from now on. I actually begged the stylist to sell me the dress I was wearing (the tag was still attached–$98 marked down for $400), but she said it was her dress and she had fallen in love with it, so no dice. But she did admit that it was made for me and that she understood why I so wanted it.

Several people told me that I was the most “authentic” flapper there, and Jacob admitted that though I was the least sexily dressed girl in the whole place, I was undoubtedly the most awesome. I was a fucking intellectual flapper, dudes!

Because Jacob was in the video, our part consisted of flirting with each other, which was easy and fun and fine. We stood on the set for a while, chatting with all the real actors and realizing that our version of “acting” consisted of saying “A HA!!” in weird high voices and doffing our hats a lot, while the real actors’ version of acting was to look ridiculously chic and talk in 1920s voices about how everyone else on the set had STDs and things. Seriously! The flapper girl at our table turned to us the minute the camera was moving and said, in a suave old timey way, “That fucking whore next you in the white wig has the clap!” Which made us laugh in a very festive, uproarious, authentic way, which I think might have been her plan all along.

In general, it was fun. All the actors talked about how cute they looked, which agency they should go to, the importance of good headshots, shoes they wanted, and makeup. The boys in the band absentmindedly jammed while waiting for their parts, the crew bustled around trying to herd everyone into their places, the director and label people and Jacob talked about whether the lead singer should wear a long sleeve shirt because his arms are so amazingly cut and beautiful that they were “distracting.” (In the end they voted no)

At about hour ten I got tired—tired of wearing heels for the second time in my life, tired of remembering to not rub my eyes, worried my skin was starting to rebel against its mask of skin-colored paint, tired of wearing pantyhose.

Feet hurting.

I’m used to working long hours, but I’m used to working all of those hours. A 12-hour way with only two hours of actual work is incredibly boring, and the minute the shoot was done we said quick goodbyes and went home to Echo Park (a very cute and interesting neighborhood with lots of vegan restaurants!) to sleep the sleep of the just.

That girl’s hair was already like that!

All in all, I’m proud of myself. I tried something new, didn’t let my hardcore feminist beliefs prevent me from having fun, and enjoyed an unfamiliar world.

(I am still waiting for my flight to go out! Jan and her entourage of two [see previous post]—it looks like a husband/partner and a nanny/PA, plus a cute kid— are patiently hanging out and entertaining the kid and snacking, and I am resisting the urge to run up to Jan—Jacob and I have been unapologetically calling her Jan this whole time—and tell her how I watch The Office online every week and I fucking adore it so much that it sometimes I think my heart is going to burst out of its body, it is so consumed with Office-love.)

PS: I couldn’t show you any of the trillion cute band shots I have because the label wants to save them for some behind-the-scenes-y stuff. Meh. Please forgive the me me meness of this post!