intellectual properties

revolutions: saying yes

this post was meant to be the first post of 2009, but it has been started many times and has taken a number of twists and turns. i’ve written some of it while angry, some of it while frustrated, some of it while hopeful, some of it while happy, some of it in one of my many other moods. i’m going to attempt to make all the pieces flow but it might seem a bit disjointed and it’s definitely as polished or coherent as i’d like it to be. i’m tired of working on it though, so here it is.

ariel wrote recently about coming into contentment around her age. i admit i have also been struggling with the aging process, but larger than anything superficial, although there’s that too, for me, it’s not so much about my age and what that means physically or culturally, but about how much time i have left. it’s also very hard for me to accept “i am where i am” when i’m not really where i want to be, and i feel like every day is a missed opportunity in a limited number of opportunities to get there. the problem is, i don’t know what “there” is, and every January 1 that rolls around gets a bit harder in that respect.

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the weeks passed

just some short notes on where my life has been the last 2 weeks. i could say a lot about many of these things, but i probably won’t get around to it. i’m already behind on blogging life-related things, so here’s an annotated list. i only took 1 extra day off work (jan2) other than christmas and jan1, but so many other people were out of work/out of school that it still sort of felt like we were all on vacation. mostly i just want to say I LOVE MY FRIENDS, they are all super awesome and beautiful humans, and hm…..considering that a large percentage of the past 2 weeks have involved lying around on couches, wow i’m tired right now.

mdec22: work, gym - step class + abs/buns. ouch.
t23: work, chillin @soapfactory for new year’s eve eve
w24: work, christmas eve @kyle and trish’s in SF, then to jeffrey et.al.’s house party that the cops busted like….4 times. woooo!
th25: christmas dinner @jack’s
f 26: work, jazz@bacar wine bar/restaurant with amanda and friends. quite nice.
sa27: sunny afternoon hike up the claremont canyon, friends over to loft to watch movies
su28: day of rest
m29: work, gym - step class + abs/buns. ouch again.
t30: work, went to see slumdog millionaire with ab+n in piedmont. good stuff.
w31: work, NYE @jack’s, then @monkeyfresh. went home relatively early (4am?), while others continued on unabashedly until thursday afternoon
thjan1: slept in, then went back to clean up NYE@monkeyfresh and hung out @ soaps until way late being silly
f2: slept in, live music @ireland’s 32, then to orange’s where we were tortured by a 2,000 piece puzzle until 2ish
sa3: alameda–>lake merritt–>concord running errands etc; then friends @loft until 4am
su4: indian brunch @ venus in downtown berkeley with ab+n, then drinking/games @albatross

today: work, gym, then focus group later tonight in SF
tomorrow: work, dinner with s+m (yay!)
wednesday: work, gym
th8: transportedSF

liquid tapestry

i don’t know why i have such a block about writing about things we’ve done lately - i have a queue of events that have not been written up yet, from burning man to the MMW show last month - but it just seems so hard to put my life into words these days. it also takes a lot of concentration and memory to write these autobiographical posts (as opposed to offhand commentary about a link/some cultural event/thing written somewhere else), and sometimes i just don’t have it in me. this, however, is fresh and so i’m just going to bite the bullet and do it now. plus, inquiring minds want to know.

we left for vegas on friday at 6:30pm and arrived in the MGM hotel around 9:00. as there were 5 of us (me, jay, ben, whit, nicole), we booked a 2 room suite. one of the odd things about vegas is that even when you get a suite, you don’t have things like a coffee maker or the standard amenities you would have in any motel 6 in the room. they want you to have the leave the room for everything.

friday night is hard when you’ve worked all week and then traveled to get to your location. we considered trying to find a place to go dancing, but for us jaded ex-raver/club kids/DJs who’ve been to vegas several (if not dozens) of times (this is us in vegas in 1998!), the prospect of paying $150 for the 5 of us to get into some tourist club full of amateurs and 22-year-old OC-types with horrible house music was just not appealing. so we wandered around and just hit the in-casino bars at the hotels within walking distance, including an irish bar where we settled into some guinness and a live band. we were able to amuse ourselves until 3 or 4 am, so it’s not like we crashed, but when nicole’s sister texted to ask what we did, the response was something to the effect of “you’re in vegas: step it up or go home.”

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and……..we’re back.

after last weekend, which was long and hedonistic, monday morning i jumped right into the work week by preparing for and helping to present a 3-day training course to colleagues in environmental public policy.  this meant i was getting up earlier, spending more energy, and working longer hours for the past 4 days. it’s always interesting during the breaks/lunches when people ask me questions like “so what else do you do?” and i have attempt to describe things like what kind of performance art my friends do to policy wonks.

it’s pretty exhausting being ‘on’ for 3 straight days and i was so tired last night i went to sleep at 9:30, which was super unusual since i usually have trouble falling asleep until midnight or so.  anyway, it’s over now and i’m catching up on all the internet and stuff. and whoo! tomorrow’s friday - we’ll be hitting a fundraising party for the flaming lotus girls in oakland and then probably mission bazaar on saturday to SUPPORT LOCAL ARTISTS and then who knows what else after that. it’s supposed to be in the 60s and sunny all weekend, so hopefully some outdoor time.

giving thx, nocturnally

thxgiving weekend was supposed to be super relaxed and full of long walks and movies. we didn’t plan to do or go anywhere except for actual thxgiving day dinner on thursday, and we had anticipated that would be a sort of eat, hang out, leave because it involved someone else’s family. otherwise i envisioned (sparkle)hiking, long walks, and maybe even a museum or somesuch artsy thing.

instead what happened is that i went out until very late for 5 straight nights in a row - wednesday (alx’s), thursday (brett’s), friday (velvet cantina, then amnesia, then justin’s), saturday (latin club, then soaps), sunday (mighty, then justin’s) - and did an unrecommended amount of drinking and staying up until it was almost morning and then sleeping all day and by the time i got home and crawled into bed after midnight last night, i was exhausted. none of it was very terribly exciting, but it was all very consistent. so despite my best intentions to be a productive daytime individual, instead the way of the world lent us to becoming almost entirely nocturnal and without much energy left for the sun. if it was a nice day yesterday (sunday), i never saw it.

it wasn’t a bad way to spend the long weekend, but i wished there had been a) more time outside during daylight, b) more physical exercise and less eating, and c) dancing. how did i go out for 5 straight nights with no dancing?

and now it’s less than a month to new year’s eve and 2009, and i wonder if in 2009 i’ll find a way to reach more balance in my habits, activities, goals (?) and preferences. right now, i sort of feel like i’d like to move on, but i don’t really know where to. marriage and babies and mortgages, definitely not. but this staying up drinking all night for 5 days straight like i’m 25 also isn’t really cutting it anymore either. the hangover i had yesterday morning proved that without a doubt. i hadn’t even planned it on it, but because of that lack of plan, it was the default.

i’m looking around, and trying to see clearly. i think i want a new default.

11/13-11/16

well, it’s wednesday and it’s been over a week since my last autobiographical post and i haven’t written about last weekend yet so i better get to it before i’m a week behind.

thursday 11/13:  obi-j played transportedSF along with nanda. it was a warm clear night with a full moon and it was absolutely gorgeous. first we went to ocean beach, where the moonlight on the water created weird optical illusions on the horizon, and danced to nanda’s set, which i really enjoyed. and then to crystal springs reservoir, where it looked a lot like this. jay was playing and the moonlight on the water and in the forest was magical and the whole thing seemed like a moment out of time. i live for those moments.

friday night 11/14 we went to the INdependent to see justin’s counsin’s band Ezra Furman & The Harpoons, who were opening up for Grace Potter and the Nocturnals. i really liked the energy of ezra furman and the sort of bob dylan-ish prose style to his songwriting. the band was tight but not too tight; definitely still had that raw opening-band feeling and really played their hearts out.

then grace potter came out, and the fancy lights came on, and everyone got quiet. grace plays the organ and sings songs about love and loss and drinkin’ and dancin’ in a very smoky-bar voice, and sort of the vermont version of southern rock - but without the boots. they were very polished and outside of the fact that somehow someone let this otherwise very fine-looking 30-something woman on stage in MOM JEANS (or, more specifically, the newer, fresher version of mom jeans: high-waisted, slim fit, tapered ankles that hipsters and other fashionistas victims are wearing, usually with ballet flats or with knee high boots over the top. i’m sorry, but unless you are built like olive oyl, the fit looks like MOM JEANS), there was obviously a lot of style/production value. the kind of style difference 10 years makes between that raw opening-band feeling and the slick mainstage act. which, to be quite honest, i thought detracted a bit from the kind of music they were trying to put on up there. grace was good, the band was good, and they were playing one of my most favorite styles of music, but we kept waiting for them to really loosen up, to really rip into it. it kept getting really. close. they would delve into a sort of deep psychedelic, rootsy grind, but there was no led-zeppelin-esque moment where after the organ swirls around in the smoke for a bit, the bassline drops and the drummer goes nuts and the room goes wild. it would just sort of ….. maintain. and stay dreamy. there was no primal scream. it just never happened. maybe they used to be that way and somewhere along the line someone told them to keep it all a bit more refined for commercial reasons, or maybe they really don’t know how to take to the next level, i don’t know, but even though the band conjured up the spirits of everyone from tori amos to lynyrd skynyrd to mahalia jackson, because they never really let it go, it sort of seemed cheesy to me, like a lounge act, and a gutsy bluesy rock and roll band. all the other ladies in mom jeans in the crowd really seemed to like it though. i told ezra, who was sitting next to me for much of the rest of the show, that i liked his band better.

then saturday morning 11/15 after not enough sleep i got up and went to do a photoshoot with miranda caroligne and LEC photo that took NINE HOURS. not kidding. it was all fun and games and a full day of playing dress up until about the last hour, when one of the other models had too much to drink and started getting really distracted and whiny and bitchy, and while we were all laying on the floor for the last long posed shot with her head DIRECTLY NEXT TO MINE, she suddenly started this incessant chatter and wouldn’t shut up about how long everything was taking and she had 2 kids at home and she needed to get out of there and WHY IS THIS TAKING SO LONG and i sort of got into it with her in a bit of a catfight moment, which i am not proud of. if her mouth wouldn’t have been directly next to my ear during her little bitchfest, i probably wouldn’t have said anything, but i just couldn’t take it any more. anyway, then i made the mistake of looking at my raw photos when we were done, comparing myself to the 20-something models, and left the shoot exhausted, cranky, and feeling old. i had meant to go out that night but was honestly exhausted and my body hurt from holding all the long poses. playing dress up is hard.

sunday morning 11/16 we got up and went down the peninsula to belmont, where jay and zach went mountain biking and i went hiking for about 2 hours near waterdog lake. i was still sore and tired from the day before, but it was an unbelievably gorgeous day (80+ degrees and sunny in november!) and so i pushed myself and hiked the full canyon. it was great. afterward we hung out in SF and had dinner at @ magnolia, which, since they remodeled themselves from a haight street pub into a much more “upscale” bar is not NEARLY as good to just hang out at (beers still good; menu now mostly inedible for me with mostly oysters etc. ). then we went out to the inner richmond to the buckshot bar @ geary and 3rd ave to meet up for our friend sam’s birthday, played some pool and skeeball (no one ordered the Ike Turner Special), and finally called it a weekend around 11pm.

next up:  MMW @ the fillmore tomorrow night, and the Black Rock Arts Foundation benefit on Saturday, for which i’ll be doing a bit of “fashion sculpture performance art”, whatever that turns out to be, wearing things from miranda similar to what we wore at the YBCA fashion event.

and then, probably, esctatic dance sunday morning.

and….i’m already tired.

self-portrait, 11/15/08

disco.punk.ish.

friday night we stayed home and did nothing while many of our friends went in for round 3 of the hay maze party down in half moon bay. (read last year’s report). i just wasn’t up for a drug-saturated ant farm and so we stayed home, although i did kind of want to be outside all night. it’s one of the only reasons i go to all-night parties. i like being outside all night. i like hanging out with other nocturnals. i like seeing the sunrise. once in a while i’m willing to put up with the bad music and the mania for my own personal rewards. just not this time.

saturday night we went to see The Faint @ the Warfield, and it was pretty kick ass post-punk post-disco electro rock. ish. high energy, full sound, good composition and lyrics, great performance. actually much more rock-n-roll live than the sort of stripped down sound on the albums, which was good. i hate it when it’s the other way around. fave track: forever growing centipedes.

they had two opening acts: Natalie Portman’s Shaved Head & Dr. Doom aka Kool Keith.

NPSH was frickin’ ON IT and looked exactly what i imagine all indie rock bands i hear on KALX look like. like american apparel exploded all over them. but they had GREAT energy and good songs and the early audience was into them. they even had a song that was prefaced by “this song is about making an extreme hair commitment and then wondering for the rest of the day if you’ve made the right choice.” i had just dyed 75% of my head blue-black that very afternoon, so i related to this.

and then came Dr. Doom. i don’t know who booked these guys, but FAIL. and especially FAIL that they put them between NPSH and The Faint. they should’ve played first to half empty room. hipsters only PRETEND to like hiphop. they don’t really. they really like fluorescent pants and synthesizers. not only that, but they were just not that good. 2 MCs and 1 DJ and it sounded like 8th grade kids from berkeley high. they only had 1 song that i liked but that had nothing to do with them; i just liked the bass track.

anyway, then The Faint came on and rocked it, and then we went home before midnight like old people.

next up on the music menu:

thursday night obi-j plays the Transported SF bus

friday night @the INdependent: Grace Potter and the Nocturnals and justin’s counsin’s band Ezra Furman & The Harpoons

next week: MMW @ the fillmore on 11/20, thx to our friend joel, who gifted us the tix

and now on the near horizon: NineInchNails on 12/13 in vegas. yes!

loose ends

i am way behind in writing about a lot of things because of the election. that’s ok i guess but i feel like i am losing track of things, and so this is gonna be a bit of a long brain dump.

i’m not going to write about prop8 anymore until something happens.

ideology and over-principled people are possibly prohibiting what could be the biggest leap forward for america in decades and causing it to be more like a small step.  i guess some people are more into baby steps than great leaps.  fear of the unknown. discomfort with ambiguity.

……………….

let’s back up a minute.

day of the dead: was a weird experience in that before we ventured into the streets, there was a discussion about white appropriation of other cultures and how someone else said the dia de los muertos procession in the mission was “just a bunch of lame white people with an excuse to dress up”. i’m ok with appropriation as long as it’s respectful, and used properly. in this case though, i was, personally, just straight up appropriating. but i felt ok with that; i’d never been and wanted to see this cultural event. i didn’t mourn, although i really enjoyed the thousands of laughing “dead”, and the celebration of life and death. i get tired of so much mourning. i also admit, however, that part of the reason that i went was that i wanted to wear my costume again. the costume turned out to be a little more interactive than i expected; a lot of people asked me to pose for photos. so much so that i lost my friends in the crowd because people kept stopping me. it was a little ridiculous. so much so that i got annoyed and finally started telling people no. this is not disneyland. i am not your mickey mouse. at that point i understood what was meant.

……………….

even further back: while at my mother’s house on our recent trip to michigan, she handed me a shoebox full of letters. i instantly recognized this shoe box, and immediately asked “DID YOU READ ANY OF THESE?” “no, of course i didn’t”, she said.

the shoebox was full of letters i wrote during the summer of 1997, during time i spent in the New England Literature Program (NELP) living in the woods in new hampshire getting all existential and naked and poetic and naturalist to my then-boyfriend who was back in ann arbor. when i left for new hampshire, we had been dating for about 7 or 8 months i guess. i broke up with my highschool boyfriend for him the summer before, in 1996, when we interned in DC together. he should’ve seen it coming.

anyway, he returned all of the letters to me that i had written him when i broke up with him later that summer, after i’d returned from the woods and had a whole new set of hippie poet friends and determined that a rich jewish boy who drove a yellow corvette and was studying to be a lawyer really wasn’t what i was looking for. he didn’t return them to ME, actually. he came over to my house while i wasn’t home and gave them to my roommate, and then proceeded to cry on her shoulder. she said i broke his heart. i don’t remember the breakup, really. to be honest, i think i just pushed him out of my life very quickly so that i could start being my new self as quickly as possible. i brought the letters back with me to california but i have yet to look at them. i don’t remember ever reading them again after he gave them back, and i can’t bring myself to read them now.

i told this to someone, and he excitedly said “OH MY GOD YOU SO HAVE TO DO MORTIFIED. i had thought of this too. because i no longer have many, if any, of my high school/college journals, these letters may be the only representation i have of my younger self, and could perhaps contain some very comic material. but the reason i can’t bring myself to read them now and why i am not excited about the prospect of publicly sharing their contents is that although that summer at NELP and the few months afterward was a great opening and growing experience, sometimes opening hurts, and i feel ashamed of what i think is in those letters, of what i think i wrote. there were things said and done in that raw communal setting that i am still not proud of. that i still turn over in my mind. i feel ashamed of what i probably said to him in those letters, from that place, that time, that me. i remember a very tearful phone call in which i did the whole “YOU JUST DON’T UNDERSTAND” routine, which was really me just saying “i’m telling you that you don’t understand because i want you not to. i want to have a reason to let you go.” i’m ashamed of the lies i know i told him and myself, about who i was, about love. most of all, ashamed of how i treated him, as a person, and how i might still treat people like that now.

even more than what is probably in the letters, in the few months after i got back, i enjoyed a certain hubris. a belief that i was more powerful than i was. i was young and blonde and tan and poetic and free and i could do whatever i wanted to do! oh, how i got brought down HARD from that pedestal a few months later in a way that is too personal to be discussed here. and maybe it’s that - maybe it’s the dark winter that followed that bright summer that is making me feel so ashamed of that time. maybe it’s that i feel like i was punished for that summer, for that hubris, and because i feel like i was punished i feel like i was a bad person. and maybe it’s that bad person, whether real or not, that is keeping me from reading the letters. maybe i am not remembering myself correctly; maybe i am wrong. maybe i was being more honest with myself then than i remember, but i don’t think so. the person i am remembering - i don’t want to be reacquainted with her. there is a certain part of me that i would like to leave in the past. she still shows up sometimes, in my darker moments, and when she does i don’t like her. and so i feel like reading the letters will maybe only remind me that she’s still here, and not really in the past. that i haven’t changed as much as i thought. and i’m not sure i’m ready for that right now.

ariel is maybe writing a book about her raver years, and she faces her former self with such openness. i’m not sure what it would take for me to do that. maybe because the context of my late-teens/early twenties wasn’t that “cool” that i have a hard time looking back - there weren’t awesome characters and crazy movie-material escapades and edgy west-coast rave parties providing the scene for my sex, drugs and alcohol; it was dirty basements and trailer parks and midwestern towns where nothing ever really happened. who would want to revisit that?

……………….

on sunday night we went to see Synecdoche, NY, the new film by Charlie Kaufman, who also wrote Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Being John Malkovich. the script was fantastic, and while the movie took a little longer than it needed to to get where it was going, it was really wrenching and beautiful. it was hard for me to watch. movies that delve into regret about how one has lived their life, even though i’m still relatively young and have relatively few regrets, make me incredibly, incredibly sad. i think my deepest fear, perhaps, is a fear of regret. but outside of myself, this was particularly difficult to watch right now because there are a couple of my loved ones who are currently struggling with this - with regret - really deeply. who are at points in their lives where they are having trouble looking forward and only looking back, wondering what could have been different, and to see characters in this film that so resembled them broke my heart.

love and marriage

with all this gay marriage talk, of course more than a few friends have re-asked the question about why jay and i aren’t married yet, and i’m sure a lot more people are thinking about what marriage means to them, from the Yeson8 people to unmarried straight people like myself who support gay rights. holden @ SF Love Story is also thinking about it, and wrote:

“A while ago, I made a little promise to myself that I would not marry anyone until I had the right to marry who I wanted. That secret turned into a full on refutation of marriage altogether for me, fueled by my parents’ recent divorce after 30+ years. Why get married at all?”

i still feel this way.
jay and i have been together more than 10 years, and people are always asking us why we’re not married, and i’ve blogged about it here and here.

again: of course there are some quixotic personal reasons (when people ask jay why we aren’t married, he answers: “because my girlfriend is weird crazy” (edited after jay said “no, i tell people you’re crazy, not weird.”), but in the end, until marriage is something for everyone, something equal, i see it as a legal situation for a privileged class, not as a sacred and blessed institution of love. i won’t say it means nothing about love, because for other people, it does. for them. i don’t boycott weddings, i don’t admonish my friends for getting married. it’s all very personal, why people do it. just like its very personal why i’m not. i just wish everyone had the choice.