Emphasis on shooting very, very quickly while I was on my way to something else. I wanted to fill the card, but I didn’t succeed. I took a lot of surreptitious shots of people, trying to look like I was just holding the camera, not actually shooting anything. Most ended up as crap. 
The Library:
Waiting for the bus:
Once the bus comes:
When I read on firedoglake that Joss Whedon has a ‘blog, I thought: Great! Dude’s sharp, entertaining…
But it turns out it’s not his ‘blog, it’s a ‘blog for fans of his work, though he did post a piece to it. And the piece in question is an impassioned plea for answers as to why it’s so universal that women are on the shit-receiving end of so many cultural and social norms. The piece is sparked by the recent stoning to death of an Iraqi teenage girl who was seen talking to someone from another sect, and draws parallels to the portrayal of women in US mass media.
And it sent me off thinking, so here we go:
The question is: Why do so many in the world (both men and women included) seem to operate under the assumption that women are somehow inferior?
And my answer is this: Ubiquity. There’s always a woman around to blame for something. Or there’s always the threat against men of saying they’re feminine or sissies, or any of a million other take-downs. If ‘the other’ weren’t so ubiquitous, and were in fact rare, there’d be no example, nothing to compare. No one would know what you were talking about when you said they were being a ‘bitch,’ or a ‘sissy,’ or whatever.
Ultimately, if the lower caste weren’t half of your family/group/tribe/society, you’d have to share power with twice as many people.
So when you see the video of that girl being stoned (it’s widely circulated on the ‘net, and easy enough to find, so I won’t link), what you’re seeing is not ignorance or hatred, though of course it’s easy to find ways to make those words apply. What you’re seeing is a soulless power, flexing its muscles. And part of what makes it tragic is that this power doesn’t really understand itself. It just rolls right over its victim: the girl who dared to speak to someone from the wrong sect. Those doing the stoning are killing a part (maybe a huge chunk) of themselves, but their sacrifice gives them power, whereas the girl is now undeniably dead.
And that, in a nutshell, is how power works. And until we understand this, we won’t be able to change it for the better. Appeals for decency don’t limit power; paradoxically, they contribute to the power held by the transgressor. Hand-wringing over how to exorcise this evil that lives inside us misses the point, because the ‘evil’ is actually power. We have to re-define power to be equitable rather than divisive, so that its expression is healthy.
Check it out. Remember the raids last September, where thousands of undocumented workers were rounded up and put in concentration camps? Well, it turns out that when you take those people away from their community, there’s a profound economic toll. Who’da thought?
Hey, so, like, you should watch Kite Operations’ new video.
If you get a letter from a collection agency, and you ask yourself, ‘Wow, is that in collections already?’ then the answer is always ‘No.’
And here I was, thinking I had managed to sort out all my paperwork. Right.
Some pictures I took a while back, that I thought I’d post at this late date.
First you go down the path.
Then you get to the cabin.
Then you get to Ruby Canyon Creek.
And then you cross the bridge and look back.
This Memorial Day, what I really have to say is this:
War is bad.
That’s really all there is to it. People die tragic deaths in war. It’s bad. War is the opposite of hope. How hard is this to understand?
I’d also like to link to Josh Marshall who’s talking about Dick Cheney. Cheney said this at West Point the other day: “Capture one of these killers, and he’ll be quick to demand the protections of the Geneva Convention and the Constitution of the United States. Yet when they wage attacks or take captives, their delicate sensibilities seem to fall away.”
Shouldn’t that make news? Shouldn’t it be a huge fucking controversy?
And here’s another thing to consider: Why are we funding the wars as emergency supplemental bills?
Note: I’m re-upping this one because it’s Memorial Day, and if you don’t understand the connection, you haven’t been paying attention. Note also that Card gets booed in this video. It gives me hope.
In the sleepy west
Of the wooded east…
Yesterday I was all set to go up into the mountains, when I remembered I had a dinner date with a friend. I almost called to cancel, but then I realized the mountains would be crawling with people over the sunny Memorial Day weekend. The traffic on US 2 alone…
So instead I tried to help a friend get his wi-fi network working (no luck), and watched a lot of movies. And then I forgot to turn my phone back on and missed the call for dinner while distracted by a movie, and then it was 9pm.
Movies: ‘Back to the Future’ parts 2 and 3, which I feel no need to review, and ‘Spirits of the Dead,’ which is a sort of lost, rough gem of a movie from 1968. Around that time, Roger Corman was making a lot of horror movies based on Edgar Allen Poe stories, so the Europeans thought they’d cash in on the trend. Except what they did was the got Roger Vadim, Louis Malle, and Federico Fellini to each make a short film based on Poe, and then spliced them together, so it’s an art-house horror anthology film. Fellini’s segment, in particular, sears itself into your eyeballs through sheer willpower.
I remember seeing ‘Spirits of the Dead’ when I was maybe 10 or 12. It was on TV on a Saturday afternoon. And looking at it now, I’m struck by just how much debauchery and sadomasochism was paraded in front of my impressionable mind. Not that I’m complaining.
The first segment for instance, by Roger Vadim, is called ‘Metzengerstein,’ and it features Jane Fonda as a sadistic aristocratic libertine who engages in BDSM and rape in order to occupy her empty life. Naturally, Poe gives us a nice morally-acceptable allegorical ending, but really the point of the segment is to draw out both scenes of depravity and the beautiful images of the horse that represents her regained, overbearing conscience.
Of course, when I was 10 or whatever, I didn’t understand it, except that I knew she was a villain, the horse was beautiful, and it wasn’t really scary at all. The second segment kind of blew my mind, though, because it’s basically the same underlying tale in a more obvious setting: Cruel villainous bully William Wilson is matched at every turn by an identical twin who acts as his conscience. Even when he’s got the hooker tied up to the operating table, threatening her with a scalpel, ready to rape her, or when he’s whipping Brigitte Bardot, the carbon copy Wilson shows up and punishes him by releasing his victims.
The backwards-evil-twin story didn’t scare me, either, but it did send me off thinking about the nature of evil and conscience. At 10 years old.
And finally, Fellini’s psychedelic critique of celebrity has always reverberated through my own understanding of celebrity. The old story of selling your soul to be famous takes LSD. Fellini’s segment, ‘Toby Dammit,’ came out a year before ‘Satyricon,’ and many simliarities are visible, particularly in the Italian film awards ceremony segment. It’s quite amazing to watch Terrence Stamp go insane. He shows up in Rome to film an adaptation of the life of Jesus Christ, set as a western, and it’s all desperately downhill from there. It goes without saying that Fellini departs from Poe to the greatest extent… And was also the most frightening to a 10-year-old by virtue of having no point of reference in my life but alienation.
So here I am 30 years later. Hah.
The outlook is very, very good for the Wild Sky Wilderness proposal.
It’s passed the House (a previous stumbling block), made it past the watchful gaze of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, and now it moves on to the full Senate, which has already passed it three times.
And in just a few hours, I’ll be up there wandering around, because tourism is better than logging.
Unfortunately, my favorite road up there is washed out below Blanca Lake, so let’s see where we can end up.
