Short vacation

Cris and I drove yesterday down I-5 and up into the Mojave Desert to visit our friend Christine. The three of us, together with a couple others, had a postmodern dance/performance art group in San Francisco 20 or so years ago. Christine lived at that time in a loft with a dance studio near 16th and Valencia, a loft where we produced many shows. She moved from that maelsrtom to a lonely desert town in 1993, so she's now been in the desert most of the time I've known her, which seems strange. Since coming here she has become a painter and creator of installations. With other artists here -- of which there are an increasing number -- she produced a Homestead Cabin Festival this spring.

It'll be very hot this weekend. It's only 8:40 and it's already about 88, I think.

Republicans like to use writing as cover for affairs

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford, whose recent unexplained absence from his state for four days was first explained that he was hiking the Appalacian Trail and then that he was "writing something," admitted today that he had actually spent the weekend in Argentina, fucking his girlfriend.

The writing excuse sounded suspicious to me because you may remember that one of Ted Haggard's excuses for his frequent trips to Denver was that he liked to hole up in a hotel room to work on his books. Of course, he was holing up in a hotel room for different purposes. But isn't it funny that this has become a common excuse?

In light of this, perhaps we should wonder about the recent announcement that Dick Cheney is working on a memoir. Yeah sure, Dick! Since when did you need an excuse to disappear for weeks at a time in the first place? The "undisclosed location" excuse is still good as far as I'm concerned.

technorati: Mark Sanford, writing, Cheney

Today's fake: girl lied about not asking for 56 stars on her face

A Belgian teenager got 56 stars tattooed on her face, then claimed she had asked for only three but had fallen asleep and was the victim of an overenthusiastic tattoo artist. Today she admitted lying. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)

I hope she keeps them, they look awesome -- as she says she thought when she first saw the art. Moral of the story? The tattoo artist "now intends to get written consent from clients before he begins tattooing."

The only thing that would have made this story better is if she were Austrian.

technorati: tattoos

When I was 21

A lovely post on The Rumpus about what some famous people did when they were 21. While it's a bit hard to measure up to writing "Satisfaction" or "The Sounds of Silence," When I was 21 I did write several songs, part of a never-finished screenplay (though I did write two other complete screenplays before I was 23 -- I use the word advisedly, as they were not properly formatted, a qualification which I knew I would never meet [that was before personal computers and screenwriting software] and that the screenplays would thus never see the light of day), and a number of movie reviews and other pieces for the college paper. The only "grand gesture" I can remember making, however -- grand gestures being the theme of the Rumpus piece -- was to start taking classes at a dance studio. First postmodern dance with Deborah Hay, who had just moved to Austin, then modern dance with Daniel Llanes (whose web page strongly suggests he is still ensconced in the Texas-hippie culture which I purposely left behind in Austin), then contact improvisation. It was the last which motivated my move, just before I turned 23, to San Francisco.

I guess you can't help looking back on the time in your life when you were 20 or 21 or 22 and not see the beginnings of the choices which would influence your whole life. Even so, I almost never write a song or a movie review anymore, and I'm not dancing. But here I am in San Francisco, and I am still writing.

technorati: The Rumpus

Crank of the day

The novelist and short story writer Ray Bradbury, now 89, is the subject of a New York Times profile because of his campaign on behalf of his local library. "Libraries raised me," he says.

But on the subject of the internet and e-books, Bradbury turns up the cranky old man:

Yahoo called me eight weeks ago. They wanted to put a book of mine on Yahoo! You know what I told them? "To hell with you. To hell with you and to hell with the Internet."

While I admire the spunk, and acknowledge the author's right to control the distribution of his work, I wonder who he thinks has been reading his work for the last ten or twenty years. The same people who are crazy about the internet. And once a decent digital device is arrived at, Bradbury's books will be on it, along with everyone else's.

technorati: Ray Bradbury

On the other hand, 'Holy shit, they're shooting at us' pretty much covers it

140 characters is a novel when you're being shot at.
 

-- Oft-retweeted message on the #iranelection Twitter stream, presumably in answer to the objections
that posts on Twitter can't offer much in the way of detailed news

Today's fake: a troubled pregnancy

A Chicago area blogger who kept readers spellbound with reports on her "pregnancy with a terminally ill baby" was faking the whole thing, local media reported yesterday. Faced with the problem of finally coming up with a baby, the 26-year-old woman, Beccah Beushausen of Oak Park, furnished a picture of herself cradling a swaddled doll. Readers quickly noticed the deception:

"I have that exact doll in my house," said Elizabeth Russell, a dollmaker from Buffalo who had been following the blog. "As soon as I saw that picture, I knew it was a scam."

By Monday, outraged followers on dozens of Christian parenting Web sites unmasked "April's Mom" as a hoaxer, and hundreds more vented their anger.

Notice who got upset. The only problem with this was that it was not intentionally designed to punk the anti-abortionists, but was merely a symptom of a sick mind.

"I've always liked writing. It was addictive to find out I had a voice that people wanted to hear," Beushausen said.

"Soon I was getting 100,000 hits a week, and it just got out of hand," she said. "I didn't know how to stop. ... One lie led to another."

There goes the book deal!

technorati: Beushausen, April's mom, abortion

A citizen of what?

Some conversations I've had recently, along with articles and interviews I've read, as well as the upheaval in the world media industry, has made me think more about democracy lately, and the relationship between media and citizenship. By citizenship I mean not whether or not one is eligible to carry a passport from any particular country, but the role one plays as a citizen of wherever you happen to be living.

This train of thought started when I interviewed Trevor Paglen earlier this year about his work mapping secret surveillance projects, military installations, and government agencies. He talked about how valuable investigative journalists were:

Investigative journalists are becoming so scarce; there's increasingly less and less funding for people to do real time-consuming, painstaking forms of research and journalism. And let's face it, when we look at the big news stories coming out of the world of state secrets in the last eight years or so, they were pretty much all broken by people who spent years, investigative journalists who spent years working on these stories. Things like NSA wiretapping, CIA secret prisons. And people who are in a position to do that work are becoming rarer and rarer, and there's less and less funding for that kind of work.

So the endangered status of newspapers means not just that we'll have to figure out a different way to get box scores in the morning, but that we'll have fewer people holding government, business and other institutions accountable for their actions or failure to act.

Then I saw this fascinating interview with San Francisco journalist Richard Rodriguez, who says it's not so much that the San Francisco Chronicle (to take one example) is dying, it's the myth of San Francisco that the Chronicle sold all these years.

Finally, there's this annoying piece by Pico Iyer in the New York Times, in which he brags that his life is better without a car or even a bicycle, much less his own laserjet printer:

I still live in the vicinity of Kyoto, in a two-room apartment that makes my old monastic cell look almost luxurious by comparison. I have no bicycle, no car, no television I can understand, no media -- and the days seem to stretch into eternities, and I can't think of a single thing I lack. I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.

Later he makes clear two things: he hasn't divested himself of electronic possessions, for he exults in new releases by his favorite bands; secondly, "when I return to the United States every three months or so and pick up a newspaper, I find I haven't missed much at all. While I've been rereading P.G. Wodehouse, or 'Walden,' the crazily accelerating roller-coaster of the 24/7 news cycle has propelled people up and down and down and up and then left them pretty much where they started."

Great for his peace of mind. Of course most people want a simplified life, and if it means choosing between a stereo and a printer (although printers are cheap, and it just seems silly not to have one), then you have the advantage of feeling virtuous for (in his case) having to walk an hour to print something.

But I was alarmed at the note about how he reads a newspaper only once every three months. If everyone detaches like that -- sorry if this sounds corny -- who is left to defend democracy? Who is left to notice, and to protest, when a mining company plows a mountaintop into a fragile river, or when businessmen wreck an industry and profit from it? Or when the police or government agencies overstep their bounds, as they always will when no one is looking?

technorati: Pico Iyer, voluntary simplicity, living abroad