|
|
Friday, March 30th, 2012
| |
1:07 am - I'm With the Band
|
Alternative title: When I Said I'd Given Up On Writing About SXSW, I Was Obviously Kidding Myself.
For a variety of reasons, I spent more time on my own this year at SXSW than I have in the past. I did a lot of work, then I'd sneak off to Austin's only aerial gym for a rehearsal, or sit by the hotel pool. Being conspicuously alone during an enormous music festival, with my funny hair and cartoonishly large sunglasses, a lot of conversations would begin with so, what band are you in?
Longtime readers of this space will know that I am not in a band. I have never been in a band, not even in high school. More importantly, if the bands I see at SXSW are any indication, the cranky goth girl with a headfull of black dreadlocks is not in the band. The girl with limp brown hair, awkward posture, and a closet full of third-hand cardigans? She's in the band. Extra points if she is wearing a pair of large plastic eyeglasses and Keds. And if the girl is young enough not to recall a time when these clothes were not ironic? Band. In fact, she plays keyboards. She might even play keyboards held up with a neck strap. Just wait until she discovers the keytar.
Since it was obvious to me that I am not in a band, I continuously passed up this golden opportunity to lie to strangers. I did not tell anyone I am a musician. I did not tell them I play the sitar, or the balalaika, or the accordion. I did not tell them my band is headlining the Latvian showcase, which is being hosted by the Quebecois showcase, but has been totally packed all week because the Baltic scene is really taking off right now. I did not claim to be the second drummer for White Savior Industrial Complex (it is a true fact that bands with two drummers are twice as good as bands with only one drummer). I did not describe my sound as ambientcore, hard folk, or anything ending in "step." Not once did I tell some inquisitive stranger that I was a singer/songwriter/cellist.
Oh no, my eye-rolling readers. I did none of these things because I foolishly believed that telling people what I do for a living might not result in a 20-minute discussion about SOPA. Next time, I swear I'm in a band.
|
|
(19 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, March 26th, 2012
| |
11:31 pm - Writing for a Living
|
The trouble with writing for a living is that I rarely have the time to write for fun. For the past month, my life has gone sadly undocumented, and as the number of things I have not written about (SXSW, the Stormkern show, the Hubba Hubba Revue's Goth show, last week's aerial act, protecting activists from pro-Syrian-government malware) piles up, I feel as if I've fallen hopelessly behind. How can I possibly write about what's happening now when I haven't written about Baratunde Thurston's How to be Black, or Rebecca MacKinnon's The Consent of the Networked or those endless George R. R. Martin novels?
I suspect that the only way to start writing again is to wipe the slate clean. I must accept that I will probably never write that perfect clever thing about the Hellraiser burlesque act, or the bands I saw in Austin, or injuring my shoulder and having to re-choreograph my entire tissu routine at the last minute. I will not finish my fiction for Write Club, or write cute little essays for other people's websites. I have spent my month writing blog posts for the Mysterious Workplace and reading papers with titles like "Problems
with
Extending
EINSTEIN
3
to
Critical
Infrastructure." I regret it a little, but I cannot fix it.
|
|
(10 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, February 21st, 2012
| |
10:15 pm - Living on Television
|
As Carmen San Diego, I don’t do television. I am a funny-looking creature with odd mannerisms and a fanciful dress sense. I have had to turn down television appearances because I was wearing a dress with a pattern that would moiré and I didn’t have time to go home and change. I spend a lot of time talking to print journalists, which I enjoy except for that one time that a magazine misquoted me and it looked like I was praising Facebook’s transparency policies. I am always happy to do radio—especially NPR. Appearing on public radio makes me feel competent and professional. Television does not.
In the interest of doing things that are hard (see also: learning Chinese, aerial circus arts), I take the occasional talking head request on news shows that I hope no one is watching. I have reached a certain level of comfort with Skyping into interviews. Having immediate visual feedback is very helpful in finding a camera angle that doesn’t cause my chin to completely disappear and stopping myself if I start to make a stupid face. I make a lot of stupid faces.
Television is outside of my comfort zone.
Last week, my adventures outside of my comfort zone put me on a red eye to Washington DC, so that I could co-host a half-hour news show about Chinese Internet censorship. Chinese Internet censorship is my comfort zone. It was the subject of my undergraduate thesis. This almost makes up for the pants.
Longtime readers of this space are well aware of my lifelong opposition to pants, succinctly described in this Euler diagram. There has never been any overlap between the times when I am truly happy and the times when I am wearing pants. Nonetheless, days before my television appearance I received a helpful primer from the show’s producer—here are your flight and accommodation details, here are some links to some of the things that we will be talking about, and by the way, wear pants. I can only imagine the unfortunate incident that led the producers to discover that the combination of the height of their couch and the angle of their cameras resulted in upskirt shots of their female guests. I scrapped my plan to wear a navy blue shirtwaist and brought out my pinstriped grey pants suit—the closest thing I have to corporate drag.
Washington DC is not a real place. It’s an airport and a shuttle between terminals and a professional chauffeur in a suit holding a sign with my name on it. Washington DC is a car with bottled water and a copy of The Washington Post. It’s a bright morning, driving past rows of bare trees. It’s a posh hotel with freshly-baked croissants and “Oh, I’m just here for the day to do a tv show.” It’s a hotel room with a view of the Washington Monument. Did you know that the saddest words in the English language are “empty hotel room?” This is a fact.
I spend the morning in my empty hotel room. I take a shower in a marble-tiled bathroom that is larger than the apartment I lived in in 1999. I use all of the fluffy towels. I pay for wifi so I can answer email and study up on Chinese Internet censorship. I try to sleep, because I did not sleep on the red eye. I get up and iron my jacket and pants.
The front desk calls me to tell me that my driver has arrived. I could not tell you where the studio is located, only that I seem to have driven past every big white monument in Washington DC. I track our progress by watching the little blue arrow move across the map on my phone, but this city is meaningless to me. There are joggers on the street and tourists with cameras. There are so many people in business suits and overcoats. I feel like the weirdest person for miles around. One of the producers escorts me upstairs. We talk about Burning Man and flamethrowers and quadcopters. He leaves me with a cup of coffee and the makeup artist, who complains that everyone from LA wants their makeup laid on with a trowel. He magically makes me look well-rested, for which I am profoundly grateful.
Live television is easier than I thought it would be. The studio is unusually cold. The producers and cameramen have piled on their coats and gloves and hats with flaps over the ears. We talk about travel. We speak in ridiculous Russian accents while we wait for filming to start. The hosts pace and throw balls and do yoga in an effort to keep warm. Newseum tourists stop to gape in the windows and see News Being Made. I sit up very straight and try to keep track of the cameras so I can catch myself if I start to make a stupid face. My hosts ask smart questions. The other guest, whose work I have been following for years, makes salient points. Once I relax a bit, I mostly do not make a fool of myself, though I think I may have fumbled a point about Facebook’s real name policies.
When it’s over, I’m relieved. I live up to the stereotype of Girl from San Francisco by constantly checking my phone, which provides me with a steady stream of messages from people who have seen the show. No one calls me an idiot. My work here is done.
|
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, February 3rd, 2012
| |
12:56 am - An Act of Desperation
|
I'm not going to talk about my act because I don't have one. That's the problem. In March, I am performing at the Hubba Hubba Revue's goth-themed Deathguild anniversary show and I have nothing: no music, no costume, no choreography, no concept. To make matters worse, March is a scheduling nightmare for gym time. My East Bay gym has just sent out a notice that they will not be having any open gym on the weekends in the month of March and all of their open gyms time during the week are scheduled in the middle of the day, when I am at work. I suspect I will have to pay for a month of open gym at the Very Serious Circus School and sacrifice my precious weekend mornings to the ravenous aerial gods. I may even go so far as to take the advanced aerial conditioning class with the Terrible Russian Woman, since I've been suffering from dangerously a high self-esteem/maximum number of pull-ups ratio.
I have seven weeks until my next act and I have nothing. Nothing. I was handed this gig because the promoter thought I'd be inspired and I don't even have the kernel of an idea. Normally I start with a piece of music that I wouldn't mind hearing a thousand times, or a character I want to play, or a story I want to tell, but all I can think to do for the goth show is to put on a black leotard, pick out one of the Deathguild standards, and slink around on the tissu for four minutes. This is not the kind of act I like to watch and it's not the kind of act I like to perform.
These are dark days. If I do an act to Dead Stars, I may actually die of shame.
|
|
(27 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, January 23rd, 2012
| |
5:38 pm - A Very Gorey Weekend
|
There are those to point out that the Edwardian Ball is neither particularly Edwardian, nor a ball. These are usually people whose primary interest is in period recreations of clothing, ideally worn while performing period dances. They are displeased by steampunks and circus and clowns, mechanical curiosities, and bicycle-powered carousels putting a damper on their recreationist vibe. I am not a recreationist. My interests run towards Edward Gorey, not Edward VII.
Even so, I have discovered my limits. I cannot do more than three nights in a row of Edwardian Ball festivities. I cannot drink any more absinthe. I cannot dance on any more boxes. It may be several weeks before I can bring myself to wear a bustle or a tiny hat. I must declare a moratorium on cage crinolines. I am a Top Hat and Cravat-Free Zone until at least February.
I wore clothes! Such wonderful clothes! I led Tugboat the Buffello around on a leash while wearing my gold-spangled circus outfit for the Thursday night Edwardian Ball edition of the Hubba Hubba Revue. I wore my Edwardian bathing costume to the Edwardian World's Fair on Friday. And Saturday I wore my "Extensive Commentary on Victorian Orientalism" costume, to great acclaim.
I saw acts! Such wonderful acts! Molotov did his knife-throwing act at Hubba and Jill Tracy played at the ball. I saw one of my instructors do her aerial act and some girl I did not immediately recognize do an excellent corde lisse act. Suzanne's paintings were all over the walls and Monique's Cindarella taxidermy display got its own little vitrine. I wandered through the Red Room and briefly regretted that J and I did not get married in front of the set of Faust, which is all about the importance of contract law.
I saw objects! Such wonderful objects! The most dangerous part of the Edwardian Ball is the bit where I become tipsy and wander downstairs where vendors are plying their wares. There were far fewer bustles than in previous years (perhaps the bustle market is saturated), but I saw some beautiful sculpted leather masks which I will be sure to purchase if I should ever take up a life of crimefighting, and an astonishing hand made gown whose "as quoted" price was (unfortunately) $1800. I am not yet so wealthy that I can drop purchase-a-laptop money on a dress. Digital civil liberties is not where the money is--take note.
I ended the weekend happy and tired and a little bit dizzy. My house looks as if a showgirl exploded in it. I have engaged in a half-hearted attempt to start choreographing my next aerial routine. My feet hurt. It's raining. And I have to write about the largely inadequate state of pseudonym support on social networks. I find this to be an acceptable state of affairs.
|
|
(8 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, January 12th, 2012
| |
12:43 am - Smoke and Mirrors
|
Berlin, we need to talk about your smoking problem. I want to love you, Berlin. You're pretty and hip and you stay up all night. I can always get a beer, which is preferable to paying ruinous prices for a bottle of still water. Your trains run at all hours. Your Thai and Vietnamese food is surprisingly delicious. I am charmed by your Christmas markets and glühwein. Your hacker spaces are like that club in that movie that one time. But you're suffocating me, Berlin. I can't breathe. I come back to my hotel and my clothes smell like cigarette smoke. My headsquid smells like cigarette smoke. Cigarette smoke permeates my skin and all night (okay, all of the daytime because I keep going to bed at dawn) I cough and cough. I am generally a hardy creature, but I have delicate lungmeats, Berlin. Have pity on me!
Fortunately, Berlin also has a Liquidrom, where exhausted, bone-chilled Berliners can soak in a salt-water pool in a dimly-lit room while ambient techno is piped in through underwater speakers. The saunas and salt scrubs and pools of varying temperatures have a restorative effect on my ravaged lungs. I drink cocktails and fall asleep in a lounge chair. My glamorous, globe-trotting software developer can't bring herself to wake me up because she swears I have dozed off with a smile on my face.
The Chaos Computer Congress, which is the reason I have come to Berlin in the middle of Winter, does an admirable job of meeting my expectations. I see several excellent talks (Morozov on surveillance, decrypting Skype communications, the "war on general computing" talk that I think Cory Doctorow wrote while sitting behind me at the SCADA hacking talk) and miss an even larger number of talks that I'm certain would have been good if only I hadn't been sleeping, or nursing a hangover, or eating dinner with a dozen other people who were speaking at Congress. The gender balance is approximately the same as DEFCON (80/20), but the women of CCC were frequently there on their own, while the women of DEFCON are usually there because they're some hacker's girlfriend. I meet a physicist that looks like Zoe Deschanel and a Canadian network engineer and many computer science professors. I meet an embarrassing number of fascinating people who turn out to be from San Francisco. I suspect that they are not spending their evenings at goth clubs.
I come home with a cold, a long list of projects to which I have foolishly promised my time and attention, and a profound sense of disappointment in ess eff nightlife. I come home to a place where I cannot stay out all night dancing, but at least I can breathe.
|
|
(16 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, January 6th, 2012
| |
11:39 am - About Last Year...
|
Remember last year, when I put on pretty clothes and read poetry at Neil Gaiman's bachelor party? Neil wrote a poem about it afterwards. Here is Jason Webley, telling the story of Neil Gaiman's bachelor party, and Neil himself reading the poem.
Just remember, if anyone asks you to be part of a poetry brothel, say yes.
|
|
(13 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, January 3rd, 2012
| |
9:00 pm - 2011: A Declaration of Love
|
I'm going to say something about 2011 that I don't think I have said about any other year for as long as I have looked back on my year and written down my thoughts: 2011, I love you so much I could kiss you with tongue. I will not pretend that there were moments that I did not enjoy, but 2011 was a year of International Mystery, from reading poetry at the Famous Author's bachelor party to drinking glühwein while watching fireworks explode over the Brandenburg Gate. I have traveled to more countries, met more remarkable people, and achieved more milestones than I have in other, lesser years. I made countless appearances on radio and television. I gave talks that I was proud of. I had an op-ed with a news organization that I respect. I did ten pull-ups in a row. I performed a good aerial act. In 2011 I had adventures. Indeed, think I could reasonably be described as an "adventuress."
I've always wanted to be an adventuress.
I never did keep my one small resolution for 2011. By summer, I had mostly forgotten to eat breakfast. I cannot even pretend that it was really about remembering to eat often enough that I would not get dizzy with hunger, having just returned from Berlin, where I would frequently forget to eat more than once in a 24 hour period. Is it still breakfast if it's your only meal of the day?
So I failed. But then I won. 2011 was unreasonably good to me. I don't think that I was especially virtuous or disciplined or hard-working this year. I probably did not deserve the 2011 that I got, but I'm still hoping it will continue into 2012.
|
|
(6 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, November 28th, 2011
| |
7:49 pm - Yad Vashem
|
Item #1 on the list of Things You Would Never Expect Your 90-Year Old Grandmother to Say is: the first time I killed a man, I...how do you say it, Evotchka? I threw up.
Let there be no goddamn doubt that my grandmother is a legend. I assume that other grandmas knit socks and bake cookies. My grandmother traveled the world as a professional opera singer. She was an intelligence officer in the Red Army during WWII. She speaks eight languages. She is your basic globe-trotting, glamorous, opera-singing, Nazi-killing international badass. She is also a tiny 90-year old woman living in an apartment in Jerusalem where she has a hard time getting down the stairs. She is dying of cancer. I expect that this is the last time I will see her alive.
When your grandmother, who came home from the war and discovered that her entire family had been murdered by the Nazis, takes you to Yad Vashem, the Holocaust memorial in the center of Jerusalem, you don't say a word. You try to mumble something in your slowly-unlimbering Russian about how it must feel to think that you're just like everyone else, right up until your neighbors start denouncing you and the government throws you into a camp, but no one asked for your opinion. This is not about you, not unless you count your learning to shut up.
You may, if you are asked, tell your grandmother that you are deeply moved, that you walked through the parks and past the plaques, through the museum of Holocaust art and into the children's memorial where you walk down a dark corridor and the mirrors make two candles look like a thousand. You may compliment the view of Jerusalem's many hills and sandstone-colored buildings. And if you feel the urge to tell her that this place feels like an enormous work of Israeli political propaganda, claiming a monopoly on genocide, and justifying Palestinian apartheid--shut up. Seriously. Do not talk. If anyone asks you about politics within earshot of your grandmother, make your blankest facial expression and tell them you don't really follow that stuff. When your grandmother complains that the Arab cab driver has overcharged you, tip him well when she's not looking. Whatever you do, do not talk to her about the Palestinians. Do not make a mental list of racist things your grandmother has said. That's just going to make you angry.
Make tea. Talk to your cousins in Tel Aviv. Go for a stroll through the bazaar in the Old City--a sexual harassment cakewalk after Istanbul. Fetch groceries and prescription medicines. Try to pet the cats, even if they are dirty and suspicious and a little bit mean. Talk about art. Try to follow those convoluted Mexican soap operas your grandmother watches. Set up a laptop with a Hebrew keyboard and wireless Internet access so she can still contact the world outside of her apartment when she can't walk anymore. Try to imagine what a good person would do. Pretend to be that good person. Know that if you are not a good person, it is a trait you have inherited from this strange, willful, ass-kicking old woman. And if you should feel the need to point that out: shut up.
|
|
(17 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, November 21st, 2011
| |
9:09 pm - City of Men
|
Istanbul has the most wonderful street cats I have ever encountered. There are thousands of street cats all over Istanbul, sleek and well-fed, who will walk into stores to climb up on a ledge and nap in the sun, or crawl into your lap while you're sitting in a cafe. There are cats in the Hagia Sophia. In Istanbul, the cats love you so much, they purr like motors, they butt their heads up against your hand, they try to crawl into your lap while you're still standing up--if you stand still, they will crawl onto your shoulders and try to eat your hair.
Unfortunately, so will the men.
I am not a delicate flower. I am used to a certain level of street harassment. I am unfazed by hey babys and what's your numbers. I understand that not every city is like New York, where the only people who bother me on the street are gay men and women who admire my clothes and/or hair. In Istanbul, I am harassed by street vendors who want to sell me things. They call after me in Turkish, Russian, Arabic, and English. Miss, you dropped something! My heart! Men who do not want to sell me things follow me down the street, around corners, becoming increasingly offended in a variety of languages when I ignore them. The waiter asks for me number. The philosophy/political science student we pick up in Galata to go dancing in Taksim thinks I should go home with him. Some jerk pinches my ass on a crowded train and there are so many men pressed up against me that I cannot be absolutely certain I will hit the right one in the face. Some guy reaches out and strokes my hair in the middle of the Grand Bazaar, and by than time I am so fed up that I turn right around and yell at him, even though he does not understand a word of English.
In the United States, everything about my body language says, "Do not touch me, I am covered in poisonous barbs." In Turkey, this reads as, "Go ahead and touch my hair, I won't mind!"
The philosophy/political science student suggests that I have it worse than most because I am particularly Western-looking, with my strange clothes and funny hair. He also tries to sleep with me, so I take his opinion with a grain of salt.
I cling to E, who has come to Istanbul from London so that we may see each other. She is patient with my desire to see the Hagia Sophia (which she pans: "looks like it was designed by users"), the Blue Mosque, Galata Tower, and the Spice Bazaar. I am perhaps less patient with her trolling the drunk Bulgarian/Turkish frat boy into making increasingly racist and anti-Semitic statements. We do not manage to convince him that race is a social construct. We go to a Turkish bath. We sit in cafes with apple-flavored shisha at three in the morning. We drink too much and sleep too late. We walk across the Galata Bridge, where fishermen stand shoulder-to-shoulder, casting their lines into the bay. We take the ferry to the Asian side, accompanied by aggressively cawing seagulls. We take cartoonish touristy pictures in which we are dressed as sultans. We walk along the shore, over rocks and through a gap in a chain-link fence to get to the overwrought gothic train station.
We pet all of the cats and curse all of the men and I cry on her shoulder in a way that is mostly metaphorical. More than any place I have ever been, Istanbul makes me grateful that I have learned to be friends with women--that, and my lack of cat allergies.
|
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, November 14th, 2011
| |
7:43 pm - Telephone Call from Istanbul
|
I get on a plane.
I almost don't get on a plane. I get caught in terrible traffic that results in my checking in merely an hour before my international flight. The woman at the check out counter says that she will print my boarding pass, but that I probably will not get a seat. I smile. The nervous Swiss girl behind me (also caught in the same traffic, also an hour late) asks me how I can be so calm. I tell her that the airport staff is more likely to go out of their way to get you onto a plane if you're nice to them. I know that there are many factors that decide whether or not I am getting on this plane, but this is the only one that I can control. I pass the time by talking to a paratrooper on his way to re-deployment in Afghanistan. He likes me hair. I like his tattoos. He tells me stories about how he got shot three times in the leg. We get on the plane. The Swiss girl doesn't.
I arrive, but my luggage does not. The clothes I wear on the plane need to get me through a fancy reception with cocktails and a full day of conference. Luckily, I compulsively overdress. I borrow extra tights and a scarf from my Mysterious Co-Worker. I try to imagine that I am the heroine of some international spy thriller while I drink wine at the fancy reception with a view of the Bosphorus bridge and some older guy in a suit points out all of the sultans' palaces across the water, but mostly I feel tired and unpretty. It has been a very long time since I have had more than four consecutive hours of sleep.
Traffic in Istanbul is some of the worst I've ever seen. The Turkish journalist sitting next to me tells me that they're talking about building a bridge to the Asian side, which is only accessible by ferry right now. She fears that this will only lead to another population spike, which will only make traffic worse. "We have seven luxury shopping malls--seven!" she tells me. "Why can't we just build one of something?" We talk about Turkish Internet censorship. The Turkish government blocks a long list of websites for a variety of reasons--everything from porn to defamation to political content. Everyone gets around the blocks by using a proxy, but no one in the government is willing to expend the political capital to stop blocking the sites. In the meantime, the Turkish government jails bloggers for making anti-government statements online, and the Turkish judicial system allows them to be held for up two years without any charges being filed.
The conference itself turns out to be highly useful. I am in a workshop with journalists who run online independent news networks in inhospitable environments such as Iran, Angola, and El Salvador. I sit across from a professor whose work I used to cite when writing my undergraduate papers about Chinese Internet censorship. I gape at how little some of the journalists know about Internet security, which is especially distressing when they work with sources inside of countries that actively spy on their dissidents online. I make some security suggestions, because I am the closest thing this meeting has to a geek. I curse the quality of currently-available tools for Internet security and anonymity. I give an impromptu talk on US Internet censorship. I try to limit myself to topics I know well, so that I do not sound like an idiot.
I wonder if I will ever stop feeling like an impostor in a room full of international human rights professionals. It gets easier, being Carmen San Diego, but I suspect that this feeling never quite goes away. At least it got me to Istanbul.
I hand out my card and smile.
|
|
(2 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, November 7th, 2011
| |
4:46 am - This Mess We're In
|
The first thing I do when I land in New York is listen to all of Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea, which makes me inexplicably sad. It takes about as long to finish as the trip from JFK into Manhattan, and I watch the Bronx and Brooklyn scroll by while I lean my forehead against the taxi window, then the Battery Tunnel and 7th Ave. and a tiny apartment and pad thai in the West Village while Polly Jean's long-distance relationship takes twelve tracks to fall apart.
The second thing I do is freeze. Remember a few weeks ago, when I crowed that New York was all balmy October weather and endless sunshine? As if to mock me, I returned to New York a few weeks later and it snowed on me. Snow fell on my squid-covered head and my lightly-lined leather jacket, on my two pairs of tights (one over the other), and my inadequate shoes. Sometimes the snow turned to freezing rain and sometimes it flew down the street in great horizontal gusts and sometimes it turned to slush on the ground, which I had to be very careful not to slip on. The wind destroyed umbrellas. Cheap and broken umbrellas, discarded in frustration, overflowed garbage cans on every corner. It was unseasonably cold. New York, if you are going to be this way, I cannot love you. There are people wearing shorts in San Francisco right now--shorts! Winter is a deal-breaker.
I would not walk out of the house into this weather. I would not cross the street in it. Nevertheless, hundreds of people traveled all the way into the wilds of Brooklyn for a masquerade ball in a theater that used to be a Presbyterian church. I am deeply impressed by their commitment. Popular costumes include the Red Queen and any number of Black Swans. Best costumes include Zombie Steve Jobs and M, who came dressed as Amanda Palmer. I kind of hoped that his Amanda Palmer was half of a couples' costume with a girl dressed as Brian in a bowler hat and that they would alternately argue and ignore each other all night. I danced to an awful lot of Beats Antique and stared at the ceiling truss. The next time I am in New York, I will arrange a gig in advance.
I visit with Molly the painter at her apartment near Wall St. She has only lived there for a couple of years, but Molly has the strongest nesting instincts of any human I have ever seen. Her apartment is encrusted in art. It is a coral reef of paintings and fliers, old glass bottles, and vintage furniture. Her cat has washed ashore on a row on vintage carpet-bag purses. I understand this place. We drink tea with other pretty, clever women, and discuss the formative powers of Anais Nin (who does not age well on re-reading) and Batman: The Animated Series. I make a solemn promise to see Sleep No More the next time I am in town. It occurs to me that I am practically the only person I know who is not contributing writing or art to Coilhouse. It occurs to me that I don't need to take on another project.
I wander Soho. I take the subway. I conduct a 30-minute phone interview with a reporter while walking through the Village. I try to get a feeling for how Manhattan hangs together. I try not to get run over by taxis. I try not to buy a $400 leather jacket from All Saints. I chat in Russian with my Uzbek cab driver.
The world beats dead, like a slackened drum.
|
|
(6 comments | comment on this)
|
| Monday, October 17th, 2011
| |
5:56 pm - New York. Zombies. Revolution. Dinner.
|
I am going to become one of those people who goes traveling and then does not write about it. This is the lowest class of human, because clearly the entire point of travel is to see and experience exciting things and then share one's clever observations. If I went traveling and then I did not write about it afterwards, people may have to resort to asking me how my trip was. This aggression will not stand.
I cannot come to New York without indulging in a fantasy about what might have happened if I had moved to Manhattan to go to law school at NYU instead of staying in San Francisco and speaking very patiently to Tin Foil Hat people. I try to imagine what it would be like to wander around Washington Square Park with armloads of law books. I try to imagine living in this new New York, which is impossibly clean, where almost no one cat calls me when I walk by, where no one asks me for my spare change, and a relatively minimal number of drunks piss in the streets. J and I wander through the Bowery and Nolita, the East Village and Soho, down St. Mark's Place, down Mott St., where J used to live in the 90's, while he tries to explain to me that New York was not always like this. He talks about garbage. He talks about Winter. But as far as I can tell, New York is a series of restaurants and posh stores, little boutiques, and long lines, with balmy weather in the mid-sixties in the middle of October, any kind of food you want at 2 am, and a bartender that looks at you blankly when you ask about last call and answers, "The club closes at 4:00 am."
The Occupy Wall Street protestors spent the weekend migrating from one end of the city to the other. Well-- first there was a zombie flash mob--but some of those zombies were holding OWS signs. Their demands were primarily focused on braaaaaains. The Occupiers took over Washington Square Park, where they stood around, holding signs and granting interviews, cheerfully consenting to be photographed. They took over Times Square, where J and I joined in, and protestors flooded the streets for blocks and blocks. J and I saw clusters of police, some of them listless, some of them bored, but none of the violence or confrontation I'd occasionally see reported in my Twitter stream. I saw a chant go up online, "Meet me there in Washington Square," and then watched a kid climb onto somebody's shoulders and shout it, and heard hundreds of people shout it back. We walked through Zuccotti Park, where the protestors had just narrowly avoided being thrown out by the city, where Officer Silverstein walking behind me wished that these people would all go home, where I spotted the Wikileaks truck, and pairs of Hassidic Jews did something or other relating to Sukhot. The best Occupy Wall Street pickup lines included "The real question is, can you keep me occupied?" and "The 1% doesn't have to be the only thing that's fucking me."
It seemed important to be in New York at this time, even as I read reports from OccupySF (and London and Sydney and Melbourne and Belgrade and Antarctica) and the hacktivism conference being sponsored by my Mysterious Workplace. I felt like I was in the right place, even if I alternated my protests with fancy dinners in the company of Mysterious and Important People. I salvaged my revolutionary credentials by writing a (hopefully) useful guide for protestors who are concerned about cell phone searches by police. I console myself by believing that if I was a lawyer in New York right now, I would be working at a private firm, trying to pay off six figures of debt, and helpful guides to digital civil liberties would be the farthest thing from my mind.
|
|
(4 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, September 27th, 2011
| |
1:43 am - Off Off Folsom
|
When the Folsom Street Fair comes around and the streets start to fill up with leather daddies and Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, girls in latex corsets tripping over smashed plastic cups and spilled beer, silent men in leather dog masks, and women who wear nothing but alligator body paint, I feel an inexplicable nostalgia for my concrete bunker. Oh, I know that we parted on bad terms. I remember the flooding and the sewage, the walls that had to be ripped out before they became happy homes for toxic mold, the landlord who, in an act of staggering chutzpah, took a thousand dollars out of my deposit to sandblast the pillars (which, when I look through the open ground-floor window, are just as black as I left them), the drunks who piss on my door, the wine bar patrons who blow cigarette smoke into my living room. I remember everything, but all that I want to do is live in my cavernous bunker, to have people come in off the street and ask "What bar is this?" I laugh and remember the time that some guy flew into a rage because we wouldn't let him ride his bicycle through the living room. What happy times we had.
It only takes fifteen or twenty minutes to walk to the near end of the Fair, but Bunker 2 might as well be on another planet, a planet with majestic herds of migrating Giants fans, all orange and black, sometimes sporting panda hats. Bunker 2 is on the planet where well-meaning software engineers take CalTrain to cubicles in the South Bay. On this planet, I have neighbors, and sometimes they complain about the half naked drunks shrieking and staggering down the hall during our post-Folsom St. Fair party. I hate this planet. Get me out of here. I will give up my precious floor-to-ceiling bookcases and rolling ladder, my proximity to glorious Sunday brunch, my abundant closet space. If I ever figure out why it is that I miss the Concrete Bunker so much in spite of its bewildering number of less-than-sterling qualities, I think I may uncover something profound about the human condition.
For the first time in many years, the sun did not shine on the Folsom Street Fair. Indeed, it threatened to rain. This was a mercy, not just because it meant a less crowded Fair,but because it spared the naked people from sunburn in places that do not normally see the light of day. Oh, there was still plenty of public masturbation, both stationary and on-the-go. There were public beatings, and the people who gape at public beatings. There was a man who loudly complained about "all the faggots" -- which I presume was a hint to all and sundry that we should indulge his fetish for being repeatedly punched in the face. The Aesthetic Meat Foundation did not bring their corsets, which was a pity. K seems to have designed a fancy new garter belt that matches my red leather corset, which means that Dark Garden may now return to its former status as a bottomless pit that I throw my money into.
The off-off-Folsom party at Bunker 2 did not devolve into a bachannal as it did last year. The combination of a carefully-pruned guestlist and a willingness boot the dangerously intoxicated paid off. Fancy cocktails were consumed. People danced around while wearing the head of Barney the purple dinosaur. J made pizza. Cats were harassed. I made it through the entire evening without shrieking about the crappy lack of security on Mexican narco blogs. I may have pledged my eternal love to some girl from Siberia-by-way-of-Israel. By 12:30, we had most people out of the house so we could snuggle under blankets and watch Boardwalk Empire. I dozed off thinking about how positively civilized the experience had been.
I may have dreamed about the Concrete Bunker.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Sunday, September 18th, 2011
| |
8:53 pm - Level Up
|
Very very late on Friday night, so late that it was early Saturday, I performed a new aerial act for the first time this year. I stepped out of the tissu and picked someone to flirt with. I stayed in character, varied the rhythm of my movements, and pulled different elements out of the music. Onlookers reported that my toes were pointed and my legs were straight (aside from that habitual micro-bend in my knees coming out of my straddle-ups). I hit most of my musical queues. I did not get hopelessly tangled in the tissu in spite of having to replace my swivel at the last minute.
I may now reasonably upgrade my aerial skills from "mediocre" to "pretty good."
|
|
(9 comments | comment on this)
|
| Thursday, September 15th, 2011
| |
6:50 pm - Exciting New Aerialist Problems, or Some Rules Were Made to be Broken
|
There is some things I try not to do. I have rules. Among these rules is a prohibition against talking about my aerial acts here, where people can read about it, before I have actually performed them. I'mnotgoingtotalkaboutmyact. It may look like I am going to talk about my act here, but only so I can talk about aerial performance and act-building in general. You see what I did there?
The good news is that I have exciting new aerialist problems. The bad news is that I have exciting new aerialist problems. I have problems with music, specifically the music to which I have choreographed my new act. I spend a lot of time listening to music and evaluating its act-worthiness. Do you hear that? That's where you're wrapping in. Do you hear that? That's the drop. Now you pose pose pose and switch, new pose new pose new pose and drop. I didn't really feel like an aerialist until the day I could get up on an apparatus and I finally had enough strength and a broad enough vocabulary of movement to improvise to music.
Choreographing an act to music is another matter entirely. I usually try to improvise a few times, just to see what kinds of movements suggest themselves, but eventually I break the entire act into sections of "I need to be here at this time." If I am feeling particularly uncertain, I will break the entire act down into counts of eight. And this is where my exciting new aerialist problem comes in: I can now perform my act to just about any music other than the music to which I have choreographed it. If I run my act to any of the songs on my aerial workout playlist, I have no trouble at all -- I'm fluid and relaxed, I can pull different elements out of the music, I can change up my rhythm and maintain a character. As soon as I put on the music to which I have choreographed this act, everything that makes me a passable performer disappears. There are moments when I am dancing to the music, but there are also moments when I am clearly performing a series of tricks to counts of eight.
If I was very very brave, much braver than I actually am, I would hand the DJ a different track for my act tomorrow night. Instead, I am going to listen to this song one more time and try to remember what was in there that made me want to dance.
|
|
(5 comments | comment on this)
|
| Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
| |
2:07 pm - My Spine is the Baseline
|
The human spine is surely strong evidence against intelligent design. When building the human body from scratch, what engineer in his right mind would put us up on two legs, supported by this stupid stupid stack of nerve and cartilage and bone that fails when we bend or walk or sit or back walkover? I look forward to the day I can have this ridiculous thing removed and replaced with a shiny metal cyberspine.
This is really just a long way of complaining that I have hurt my back. Those of you who know that I have a show coming up were probably counting the days until I pushed myself too hard in rehearsal and brought on some spectacular injury. That is not the case. I have been extraordinarily careful. I warm up! I cool down! And even though I spent most of the beginning of the year working on my back flexibility, I have not included a single move in this act that requires me to touch my toes to my head.
I came into the gym on Sunday with ambitious plans. I did approximately half of what I set out to do, which was still a considerable amount of rehearsing. I felt that my act was in passable shape, but that it could really use another week-and-a-half of careful work, which is was fortunate, because that's the amount of time I had left. I came home, sat down on the couch with the laptop across my knees, and when I stood up about an hour later, I felt like someone had sunk a knife into my lower back.
Do you know what your spine is attached to? Everything. It turns out that I need a fully-functioning spine in order to walk and sit and lie down and bend over and climb stairs. I have not tested this theory, but I'm pretty sure that I need a fully-functioning spine to climb the tissu and do straddle-ups. I have RICE-ed diligently, which should get me ready to perform in time for next Friday's show, but it may not be as pretty as I'd hoped.
Stupid, stupid meat suit.
|
|
(21 comments | comment on this)
|
| Friday, August 19th, 2011
| |
12:36 am - DEFCON 19: In Which I Learn That Children are the Future
|
Every year I tell myself I am going to stop going to DEFCON and every August I find myself on a plane to Las Vegas. Every year, I give my talk, I do some outreach on behalf of my Mysterious Workplace, I stay in a nice hotel, I have a few nice meals and sit by the pool, I pick some locks, and I witness some astonishing act of misogyny that fills me with profound shame for hacker culture.
The prize for this year's astonishing act of misogyny goes to whoever thought up the Bribe the Goons game, in which convention-goers were given cards with a list of bribes that they could use to score points with the security goons. Did you know that goons could be bribed with boobs? Did you know that some gentleman chose to ask the criminal attorney at my Mysterious Workplace to lift her shirt and flash the goons so that he could score points? Did you know that I actually had to explain to a member of the security staff how this might contribute to an unwelcoming environment for women at DEFCON?
The good news is that the member of the security staff that I talked to did not blow me off and dismiss me as a humorless bitch. He spoke to the security staff in the morning and I never saw the cards again. By DEFCON standards, this is tremendous forward progress.
In some significant ways, DEFCON started to grow up this year. The convention moved to the Rio, a great improvement over the decrepit former location, and sold over 15,000 badges. DEFCON also hosted a concurrent convention for kids. The next generation of miscreants learned to pick locks and solder. They learned about encryption and Arduinos. I did not actually see organizers handing out mandatory copies of Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, but I would not have been shocked to see it.
A ten-year old girl found a zero-day bug in Farmville and my Mysterious Workplace worked with her mother to organize a contest in which we gave other kids 24 hours in which to find the same bug in other games and we put together a responsible disclosure. Everyone was impressed that she was ten years old. No one thought it was even slightly surprising that she was a girl. The next generation of hackers is going to take gender parity for granted. I would like to live in a world in which DEFCON 30 is like this.
|
|
(comment on this)
|
| Monday, August 8th, 2011
| |
11:06 pm - Where is Carmen San Diego? Porto.
|
When I took the Carmen San Diego job, I was hoping that perhaps there would be travel. This summer, I got it. I have traveled, in professional capacity, to Porto, Portugal for a week, where I attended a conference for academics, activists, and journalists. Ostensibly, we were there to discuss "digital transformation." In reality, this amounted to a series of talks, followed by epic drinking, and occasionally interrupted by gossip about Julian Assange.
I met people whose work I had long admired, including a half-Icelandic half-Irish open government activist whom we accidentally left out in the sun for too long while discussing Mideast foreign policy in a cafe on the beach. Do you know what burns faster than an Icelandic Irishman? Nothing. He may have also been suffering from alcohol poisoning, no small feat for a man with an ancestry geared towards the metabolization of alcohol. Somehow he still managed to get up in the morning and deliver a talk about the importance of infrastructure which also incorporated the history of knitting.
I met Important People from the Internet, including a Beltway journalist whom I taunted relentlessly with stories about San Francisco: it's all parties and circus people! Why on Earth did you move to the DC suburbs to settle down with a wife and kids?
I met people whose work I had never heard of, who turned out to be blindingly smart and witty. There was a Canadian academic who gave a talk about digital literacy in Canada that included a fantastic montage of all of the little blonde girls who need to be protected on the Internet. There was her former PhD student, who gave a talk about failure in community tech projects. There was the man from the Indian equivalent of my Mysterious Workplace, who gave a talk about India's biometric national ID system (How would you fix the power dynamic in this picture? Give the other guy a gun!). There was the honorary Icelander whose talk I missed completely because I got hopelessly lost in downtown Porto during the lunch break and could not find the hotel.
Between lectures, everyone typed furiously on their laptops, tweeting and facebooking, updating wikis, and occasionally doing actual work. My co-worker and I snuck out of the hotel for an afternoon and took refuge in a cafe with wifi across the street. We typed furiously at our laptops some more while we tried to figure out exactly what was wrong with the Syrian Internet. A teenage cat came in from the street and curled up on the couch next to me. She stayed there for hours. Eventually, I had to pull my sweater out from underneath her so that I could get back to the talks. In some ways, Porto is very much like home.
All of the journalists (and some of the activists) adjourned to the Palacio de Cristal Gardens to discuss Important Jounalistic Matters and were immediately derailed by peacocks. It turns out that the Crystal Palace Garden used to be a zoo, and now all that remains is a bewildering number of free-roaming peacocks. There was a pea hen with her little chicks and a peacock that came within a few feet of us and fanned his tail. My co-worker and I immediately broke out our cameras and took MySpace-style photos with the animal. Look at me -- I'm next to a peacock! When we tried to have lunch, we were attacked by aggressive seagulls. Then we discovered that peacocks can climb trees.
I wandered around the ruins of the Castle of Guimarães in inappropriately high heels. The Moroccan doctor/activist stormed the ramparts:
"They built this place to keep the Muslims out? Then I win!"
Then we sat in a cafe at night overlooking the Duomo, with the lights of the port-wine lodges of Vila Nova de Gaia in the distance. We drank tiny glasses of beer. Even though it was four o'clock in the morning, the bars did not close, they just emptied out. And everything went silent, except for our arguing about politics and the taxi driver smoking a cigarette and waiting to take us back to the hotel.
I think I may have won as well.
|
|
(7 comments | comment on this)
|
| Wednesday, July 13th, 2011
| |
5:26 pm - A Face for Radio
|
I have camera vertigo. In a perfect world, there would be hundreds of pictures of me, all dressed up and doing interesting things, but every time someone points a camera at me, I freeze up or run away. I know that this comes off as shy or stuck up or standoffish, but please understand that I am motivated by genuine terror. Camera-weilders of the world, I am anticipating the terrible, unflattering picture you are about to take of me, which you will later post to the entire Internet. I am making a stupid face, and not only am I afraid that you are about to capture it forever, I am afraid that this what my face looks like most of the time and none of you have the grace to tell me.
I am frizzy hair and a funny-looking nose and that overbite. I am eyes half-closed mid-conversation. I am why did I ever think that dress looked cute on me and what the hell is wrong with my posture. I am not smiling because I am not a creature that bares its teeth when you threaten it. I look paralyzed by self-conciousness. I look like I should have been a little more self-concious. I want tangible proof that I have been out in the world, just not with my head tilted at that weird angle, okay?
So I keep reluctantly posing for photographs and I keep looking for photographs and when I find them, I cringe.
|
|
(12 comments | comment on this)
|
|
|
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=91.7){kind=small}
lilmissnever's journal