Yesterday I spent much of the day looking through old LJ entries, trying to remember the last time I felt the way I do now (totally disoriented after returning home from a difficult year in a strange context) and figuring out how long it lasted and what I did about it. In the process, I ran into an entry that I had written, and gotten a lot of really good comments on, about biking with Pete. The short version: he bikes, I don't, and we didn't know what to do about nights when we met up somewhere and he had the bike and I didn't want to go home alone. The churning subtext was of course a lot of stuff about safety and freedom and physical coordination and relationship negotiations and so on.

What I realized, after reading this, was that we wound up finding a brilliant solution, and I never posted about it! A few months later, we bought and fixed up an old Schwinn Twinn tandem bicycle. Now we ride to things together, and go home together. It's joyous. I get to sit on the back and pedal and feel the wind on my face and peer in people's windows, and Pete can steer and do all the scary city-cycling stuff like figuring out how to get around a bus.

In the process of figuring this out, I got a lot of wonderful advice about how to handle relationship conflicts that don't have easy solutions. I still often recall what nearly_there said, something about how sometimes it's less important to figure out what's fair and equal in an objective way and more important to figure out what leads to an outcome that both of you can live with and feel okay about it. I still draw on a lot of that advice all the time. This happened shortly after our engagement, so it was a good, though unintentional, space for a lot of people to bequeath us a lot of wisdom about how to co-exist lovingly with another person.

But then a wonderful, easy, delightful solution that required very little compromise from either of us dropped out of the sky! Schwinn Twinn ex machina. So that's how that story ended, and how many others began.

Hey all -
Pete and I will be making a quick pass through Boston on August 4th. I call pub night - we'll be at People's Republik starting at 4pm, continuing until something as yet unspecified happens, like we leave and go somewhere else or we get tired and go home. Come say hello!

So I've got something to share that I'm pretty excited about. Go check it out?

surrender and I have been working on a musical project together over the past year or so. He writes quirky synth-pop arrangements, I write lyrics and melodies about astronauts and libraries and loss and pirates and X-men and 1920's gangsters and the internet and that one time I got to kiss you. Then we record them. We've completed a full-length album, entitled Asteroid Love Song, and it is pressed and ready to roll.

If you'd like a copy – it's actually a gorgeous double-album digipack, with art by yours truly and a whole lot of bonus tracks from the long history of Rachael's Surrender – email reuben@surrender.com. If you send him $10 and your address, he'll send you a copy. It's Creative Commons licensed – feel free to burn copies for all your friends. Seriously, go ahead.

If you just want to listen to it, all the tracks are available for listening on our new website at www.surrender.com. Lyrics and other fun are there as well.

So yeah: if you've been hurtin' for some chick-fronted synthpop or wondering when another Liz project was gonna go down, go check it out at surrender.com.

Track listing:
1. The Ghost Watchers
2. In The Seventeen (featuring guest appearance by V. Nigel Taylor of Platform One)
3. Mrs. Oddity (new version with some tweaks since I posted it here previously)
4. Peppermint (featuring Michael Verzani on guitars)
5. The New Atlantis
6. Low
7. Shadowloss
8. Prohibition Suit (featuring Rob Byrd AKA Populele on ukulele, Christa Wellman on violin)
9. Pirates
10. Asteroid Love Song (featuring Reuben's guinea pig, Boo, on additional vocals)

In other news, Mathew Fuller formerly of Scissorkiss and I are also working on a project - we're calling ourselves fourlight firefly and have a 4-song EP close to ready for release. We've got a bunch more songs written, too, so you'll be hearing more from us. Stay tuned.

Hey all -
I hardly ever check my old "amadea at name of my old band dot net" email anymore. Now you can email me at my last name at uchicago dot edu. If you don't know it, and you want to find me, drop a comment here.

It's sort of like standing in a starting place from whence you can see your goal, the endpoint of (at least this phase of) your journey. But then you take a few steps forward and a new expanse opens up in front of you that you have to cross. And this happens each time you take a step forward. Each time you advance, the territory expands, and the goal feels further away.

When I was applying for the ethics board approval for this project, they had an online form that looked very simple: five little sections. The problem is that every time you moved forward into a new section, it expanded into an array of subsections, each themselves comprised of an array of subsections, some of which were quite extensive and difficult to answer. The process of writing feels the same way - as if every attempt to complete a manageable task results in its hydra-like transformation into something less manageable.

The problem with operating within a system like this over time is that it becomes very demotivating. At an immediate, experiential level, every time I take a step forward I am rewarded by feeling farther from my goal than I did before I tried to advance. So compounding my usual anxiety about writing is a conditioned fear of those unfolding expanses, those moments when I advance and am met in return by a far greater receding of completion (of the dissertation, of the chapter, of the moment when I actually communicate what I am thinking in a way that other people will get) into the distance.

It's really a lot more rewarding to play Tetris, which is why I just deleted all the games off of my computer.

Signal boosting to those of you interested in such things:

Electronic Saviors, a four CD-plus-bunch-of-bonus-downloads compliation to benefit cancer research. It's quite an extensive selection of awesome electronic and industrial bands and the whole project looks quite well-done. The compilation is organized thematically, with each of the four CD's devoted to songs reflecting/evoking a different aspect of the process of dealing with cancer, which the medical anthropologist/theme-nerd in me appreciates.

The compilation is put together by Jim Semonik, vocalist and founder of the US based project Rein[forced], who himself got diagnosed with and treated for cancer a few years ago.

The 4CD compilation features exclusive material on 83 tracks by bands such as Assemblage 23, I:Scintilla, Obscenity Trial, Combichrist, Nachtmahr, Suicide Commando, Freezepop, the Gothsicles, Leather Strip, Iris, Deviant UK and many many more.

All proceeds from the sales of this unique compilation will directly go towards cancer research.

The compilation is limited to 2500 copies and can be pre-ordered directly from Metropolis here:

http://www.metropolis-mailorder.com/product.php?prodnum=MET+630

All details about this compilation can also be found on Jim's compilation website here:

http://www.electronicsaviors.com/

Hallo, temporarily on LJ for a bit.

In fiction, novels, movies, et cetera: certain kinds of plots, certain kinds of ideas, tend to fall into the category of "genre fiction" while others do not. I'm thinking particularly of science fiction, horror, fantasy, and romance, though there may be others as well.

What I've been thinking about a lot lately is: why do particular kinds of plotlines (in particular, stories in which the known is combined with the fantastical, stories involving the introduction of particular otherworldly elements, stories where the natural is combined with the unnatural or the human with the inhuman) tend to fall into the category of genre fiction (thought to be governed more strongly by particular conventions) whereas other kinds of plotlines (woman goes on a journey, friends grow up together, man looks for a job in the city, et cetera) do not?

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

hint hint: I'm hoping to hear from teratologist, rosefox and redheadedmuse, all of whom I've had interesting conversations with about genre fiction... and anyone else as well.

Hey Boston people -

A friend of mine manages a Chicago band called Atomica, sometimes The Atomica Project. Female fronted trip-hop, downtempo, pretty stuff. Her voice is really terrific. They've got a show coming up March 6th at PA's Lounge in Somerville, so if you enjoy such things, think about checking it out. You can hear them here: http://www.myspace.com/atomica

I just finished reading Speed of Dark by Elizabeth Moon. I had a lingering question about a plot point, so I'm wondering if anyone else here has read the book and if so, what their take was. Spoilers below...
( Read more... )

Hey all -

I am looking for books (or articles) about tensions in contemporary American life, particularly the tension between individualism and conformity. I've got The Lonely Crowd, and Bowling Alone, and Habits of the Heart - does anyone have any other recommendations for things I should read?

(Thanks to deadwinter for the reminder)

This feels like a very important Veteran's Day to observe. Because so many of us are becoming veterans, or love people who are becoming veterans, or have complicated, perhaps resentful relationships with people who are becoming veterans, or whatever. Because the role of the veteran is so complicated when we have spent so many years entangled in a war that many of us now see, many of us saw from the beginning, as useless, tragic and misguided. How do we then make sense of the sacrifices of people who went and fought anyway? Does it make their courage, honor, and sacrifice less meaningful? Or does the burden fall on us to help them - help all of us - reconstruct the meaning of putting one's own feelings, opinions, suspicions aside to trust someone else's assessment of the greater good? That to me feels like one of the greatest sacrifices - it's not about your own will once you join the armed forces, you are a part of something bigger than yourself - and the total misuse of that trust by the Bush administration does not, in my eyes, make the sacrifice any less worthy. It makes my gratitude bigger, and my anger exponentially bigger. I hope, on this day, that my anger does not stand in the way of my gratitude. I wish I knew better how to show that gratitude to people who have served in the armed forces, on this day and on other days.

What does Veteran's Day mean to you?

I don't watch movies, really ever. They make me uncomfortable - bored at best and anxious and bored at worst - and I don't like what they do to my psyche if I stop fighting and let them in, hitch my breath and heartbeats to their swells and fades and my beliefs to their twists and turns. That being said, occasionally I hear enough about a particular film that I decide to watch it, either because it seems like such a huge part of shared mythology, or because I think it might have something to say I want to hear, or in this case, because it has a lot of Tears for Fears in it. So I finally buckled down with a supportive friend to watch Donnie Darko. Unlike Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium which I watched somewhat under duress but that had me in rapt tears for the duration, Donnie Darko left me in turns bored, anxious and bored, and eventually frustrated. Some of this is no doubt my neophyte film viewer status - I have not had much of the experience the film attempts to subvert and transcend - but some of it I can also link to disconnects within the film itself, moments of denial and withholding which I found distancing rather than enticing. That being said, it is clearly a film to Make You Think, one that is intended to extend beyond the frame of a single viewing, beyond the two hours of seated silence into a more active exploration and, well, here I am. Spoilers below the cut.

I think the main problem, for me, is that it felt like the director really wanted to make two movies, and tried to make them both at the same time, and as a first-timer, didn't have quite the firm hand and empathy with the viewer to draw them together and bring out their points of connection and parallel. ( Read more... )

Anyway, like I said I'm still thinking about it - and writing about it, and reading articles on Salon about it - the next day, so obviously something worked.

ETA: Also, the fabric on the therapist's couch is completely identical - I mean, it's the same fabric, stripes, color, texture - to what's on the chairs in our living room. weird.

Dear world:
I need to purchase a PC laptop to run a particular piece of software for data analysis. I have $650 to spend on it, and am probably going to try to buy something refurbished or lightly used. I won't be doing any kind of graphic or audio stuff with it, and the program I'm running is not particularly processing-intensive (ideal specs: Pentium 4). It needs to run Windows XP. It's going to be totally stand-alone, not networked - I'm not going to take it on the Internet. My priorities are: as light as possible, as sturdy as possible, as reliable as possible, given the money I have to spend. Obviously I'd love something that comes in a weird color like blue, but that shouldn't really be a priority.

Does anyone have any recommendations and/or pitfalls to avoid?

Hey there -
Ages ago I bought a pair of tix to go see the Mountain Goats at the Park West this Monday the 13th. Now Pete doesn't really want to go and I've had a can't-really-miss meeting scheduled for the same time. Is anyone reading who might be interested in the tickets? I paid about $20 for each of them and am hoping to recoup at least some of that - make me an offer if you want 'em.

And you do want 'em. The Mountain Goats, if you don't know them, are phenomenal - it's basically the mad, magnetic, poetic John Darnielle and his hysterical, bitter, mythic, melodic, nasal, triumphant rants - and I am really, really sad to not be going. :-( :-( :-(

the cave mouth shines
by pure force of will
I look out on the world
from atop of this lonesome hill
and you can run
and run some more
from here all the way to singapore
but I will
carry you home
in my teeth
- "Grendel's Mother"

Four days ago, Governer Sarah Palin took a quantum leap to political prominence as McCain's selection for Republican Vice Presidential candidate. Ever since, my friendslist has been littered with female reproductive organs.

I know absolutely nothing about Palin, but I am horrified that McCain is making such a transparent attempt to win over women voters by putting a vagina on the ticket.

Vagina, vagina, vagina. I hold among my friends many people who have a great and deep interest in vaginas, in general and specific, but I don't think I have heard so much obsessive invocation of any one person's one body part on my friendslist, ever.
McCain thinks we will vote for her because she has a vagina.
Having a vagina doesn't make you a good vice president.

Anger over the fact that McCain thinks some women will vote for his ticket out of identity politics - and, perhaps, anger that he may be right - elides into the assertion that Palin has nothing to offer the ticket but her female body.
She's nothing but the Republican's token uterus.

But Palin actually brings to the Republican ticket a wide variety of things: a history of fighting her own party for reform which will evoke memories of the old maverick McCain and thus appeal to liberals, the love and loyalty of social conservatives which will cement a base within McCain's own party, and executive experience (she's the only one in the race who has wielded the pen to single-handedly sign a veto). Furthermore, she brings with her a complex and interesting political history (if you don't know what Palin used that first veto as Alaska governor for, check it out - you might be surprised). She is a complex figure who has already displayed distinct political agency, keen competence in particular areas, and a willingness to fight for both popular and unpopular stances. Somehow, all of this baggage Palin carries gets reduced to a set of girly-bits. She's just a token woman-body. It seems that something about Palin's human complexity is intolerable.

All over the internet, smart people are doing stupid things. Palin's emergence has catalyzed an epidemic of brain-explosion, a deafening creak of cognitive-dissonance reduction. Liberal-minded bloggers whom I had thus perhaps unjustly pigeonholed as rational, evidence-based thinkers have been making statements about Palin's positions that are JUST PLAIN WRONG. Like that she is opposed to birth control

[Palin] is pro-contraception and said she's a member of a pro-woman but anti-abortion group called Feminists for Life. "I believe in the strength and the power of women, and the potential of every human life," she said.
- Anchorage Daily News, coverage of 2006 Gubernatorial Race, August 6th, 2006
http://www.adn.com/news/politics/elections/governor06/story/44186.html

or that she doesn't believe in climate change

What is justified is worldwide concern over the proven effects of climate change...Americans should become involved in the issue of climate change by offering suggestions for constructive action to their state governments.
- "Bearing Up", Sarah Palin, New York Times Op-Ed, January 5th 2005
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/05/opinion/05palin.html?scp=5&sq=palin+bear&st=nyt </em>

or that she is a creationist who would prevent the teaching of evolution in public schools and replace it with religion

In an interview Thursday, Palin...added that, if elected, she would not push the state Board of Education to add such creation-based alternatives to the state's required curriculum. "I won't have religion as a litmus test, or anybody's personal opinion on evolution or creationism," Palin said. Palin has occasionally discussed her lifelong Christian faith during the governor's race but said teaching creationism is nothing she has campaigned about or even given much thought to.
-Anchorage Daily News, 10/27/2006
http://dwb.adn.com/news/politics/elections/story/8347904p-8243554c.html

These claims are followed, authoritatively, by links or lists of links - but these links lead to other blog posts repeating the same unsubstantiated rumor, or to editorials written by Palin's political opponents during contested political races repeating the same charges with, again, no substantive evidence in the form of Palin's actual words or her actions while in government - sometimes even to articles on completely unrelated topics. I'm seeing this echo-chamber formation even from critical thinkers, well trained to evaluate information based on source and content.

Is it a deliberate smear campaign? Perhaps. But my suspicion is that such false attributions arise also from a strong need to believe that Palin must believe these things - because she is One Of Those People, and we know how Those People think. In lieu of proof or factual information, guilt by association will do, in the overriding project of assigning her to a consistent, coherent category - regardless of her actual unpredictable agency.

What makes Palin more than just another pro-life, pro-gun, pro-drilling republican politician, what makes her such a confounding and controversial figure, what makes people SO MAD, is the seeming contradictions she embodies, and thus forces us to confront. Like Faulkner's Joe Christmas, whose potentially mixed-race blood catalyzes a town's obsession with simplifying him into one thing or another, a white man or black, Palin's stances provoke not only straightforward rejection of her conservative politics, but exaggerated, italicized, blustery rage over her dangerous mixing. How dare she be pro-life and still call herself a feminist? How dare she project the image of a good Christian woman and still have am active political career outside the home? How dare she be beloved of Christian fundamentalists, and yet not adhere to all of their positions or blindly follow fundamentalist dictates?

The seeming contradictions that Palin presents are particularly tricky for liberal feminists. She forces us to see something that we are generally pretty good at keeping our attention away from: that there are feminists whose ideas of feminism are radically different from ours; that women who consider themselves to be pro-woman sometimes have very different policies in mind than we do; that some women have very different ideas about what's best for them – and for us – than we do. A member of "Feminists for Life", Palin's feminism prioritizes societal support over self-determination, access to the resources to bear and raise children over access to the resources to prevent them, the right to believe the life within you – and within others - is sacred, over the right to believe it can ethically be terminated. Palin – and others – truly believe that it will be better for women to live in a world where terminating a pregnancy is not an option.

No intelligent woman, it is said, could hold such positions - or seek, as Palin does, to enforce them upon other people. Therefore, the burden falls upon us to make sense of her, by demonstrating that she is either not intelligent, or not quite a woman. The former tactic is adopted by those who depict Palin as brainwashed or a bimbo; the latter, by those who rail against McCain for daring to demean this historic moment by attempting to install into the White House a woman who doesn't count.

At the end of A Light in August (the Faulkner book I mentioned before), the townsfolk castrate Joe Christmas and tear him to pieces, in a violent attempt to render visible that one drop of black blood by shedding it, to end his intolerable ambiguity. There is a similar violent side to the symbolic dismembering of Palin's female body, the separation and opposition of vagina from person, the synecdochic use of Palin's vagina to represent the absence – or fundamental irrelevance - of her political qualifications, history, agency. What is it acceptable to say about such a non-woman? She's a body without humanity, represented by isolated dismembered bits, lacking the cohesion that makes us people rather than piles of meat, the emergent characteristics that make us more than the flesh that makes us up.

I very much respect - and share - the impulse to take a critical eye towards someone whose political success would usher in 4 more years of leadership by a party with a history of disastrous failure. Those of us who support the right to safe, legal abortion, or gun control, have plenty of good reason to oppose Palin as an elected representative, since she is publicly and openly opposed to both. There's no reason not to hold her accountable for silly things she actually says, such as that the Pledge of Allegiance was “good enough for the Founding Fathers" (the Pledge of Allegiance was written in 1892). Furthermore, it is our right as voters to say that we do not want our country represented by someone who subscribes to a particular religion, or belongs to a particular church – many have already said the same about Obama. In the interest of full disclosure, I certainly do not plan on voting for a McCain-Palin ticket.

But let us keep a careful eye and ear on our rhetoric, our language. Think about what that language says, what it does. If you talk about Palin's uterus, did you talk about McCain's testicles? Or Obama's? If you are more willing to condemn her for her stances, find yourself showing more anger, or use markedly different language to do so than you have done in response to a male politician, ask yourself if a woman who disagrees with you – or, if you like, is flat-out, objectively WRONG – ought to face a different, or harsher, response than a man. If so, then what does such talk contribute to a feminism that includes equal rights, and the ability to freely speak and act on beliefs regardless of gender?

If you claim Palin would bring nothing more than her vagina to the vice presidency, how different is that from calling her a cunt? She's nothing more than a vagina – and a despised vagina, at that. Without a history of action, without agency, without complexity, without all the things that make us human. And if it is acceptable to speak of Palin in such a way - ask yourself why. Is this the just consequence, the proper response, an acceptable strategy to oppose a woman who disagrees, who steps out of line - a woman who doesn't act and believe as a true, proper woman acts and believes? She's not like us. She's one of Them. Believe me. I know how They think. I believe - and I know this is a stretch - but I believe that this is the kind of thinking that encourages violence against women, violence against Others, by propagating the belief that it is acceptable to reduce a person to a body - if they are unruly, if they misbehave - and that is is more OK to do that to some kinds of people than others. And that is something that I find it very hard to reconcile with feminism - feminism here defined as the radical belief that women (who disagree, who are misguided, who are frightening, who are wrong) are people.

hey there, I did some friendslist maintenance. I finally pruned a few:

- abandoned alter-ego journals, and
- people who don't have me friended, who don't post much that I can see, and who I don't keep up with in any other medium.

If you're off and want to be back on, give a holler here or privately (again, I don't think any of these are connected to actual people who actually read this, but just in case...).

So, I just finished reading this, and I loved it, of course. Savored every one of its multitudinous pages. And now I'm itching to get into a spoiler-rific discussion of all of its little mysteries, below the cut. Did anyone else wonder...
( Read more... )

Hey - a lot of you on this list know that Paisley, a good friend and major supporter and contributor to music and writing in Boston, was badly injured in a cycling accident last December. She's someone who has given generously of herself many times, turned her drive and determination and brilliant mind toward promoting music in Boston, never asking for anything back except for the art and community made possible by her efforts. She managed the band I was in, Scissorkiss, for many years, so if you've seen us play somewhere or enjoyed the music we made, you have her to thank for getting it out there to you.

Now some friends are throwing her a benefit party, to help her pay rent and bills until she can get back to work again, and it promises to be a great time. You should go. It's tomorrow night.

Also, as part of the silent auction, they'll be auctioning off a song. By me. I haven't written it yet; I will write it, and record it, for the auction winner. Custom. So if you've ever wanted the story of your life told in song - if you've ever wanted to be immortalized in verse - if you've got a situation going on that you really want there to be a song about, but there isn't - or if you have a friend who you think might appreciate having an Amadea song written for them - you should go to the party, and bid on this auction item! OK, I think that's the weirdest sort-of-self-promotional moment I've ever had in this journal. I can't do much, but I can interview people, and I can write songs, and so that's what I am doing for this event.

Benefit Party for Paisley Rojagato
Friday, March 14

Dilboy VFW, 371 Summer Street
Davis Square, Somerville, MA

9pm-midnight
Suggested donation: $20, or pay what you can

Event organizer: Regina Harrison
badriya at rcn dot com

Featuring open floor dancing with DJs Anechoic and Punketta Doilie, poetry readings, burlesque, banjos and belly dance along with a silent auction of fabulous items from artists, artisans and local merchants.

( Read more... )

Aww yea we got sweet sublet.