one of these things

7.03.2009

MySpace Isn't the Issue

I'm so sick of this:

MySpace victim’s mom disappointed by ruling

The girl was not a victim of MySpace. MySpace did not kill her or drive her to suicide. This issue is not MySpace.

The issue is that a young girl felt so dependent on the approval of a boy and social group that she killed herself when she thought she'd lost it. The issue is that another's girl's mother was so crazily enmeshed in her daughter's life that she saw fit to harass the victim. The issue is that interpersonal, romantic, gendered relationships were such primary and essential realms in which these women saw themselves, their identities, and their sense of power.

7.02.2009

Story Collection: Book Cover Follies

Me: Hon, what do you think of these as possible cover images for the story collection? (gestures to laptop showing shadowy pictures of broody men in urban settings)


Husband: Uh, they're kind of bleak. Like your author photo. Don't you think you could find something a little lighter?

Me: Hmmm, OK, let me look some more.

(later)

Me: Hon, what about these?

Husband: (looking at new pictures) A man lying down to die in the middle of a desert freeway is your idea of 'lighter'?

Me: Oh.

7.01.2009

New Wave Wednesday: Voice Farm

"I had an immediate urge to fling off my bikini!"


SF electro-art-pop posse Voice Farm (be sure to check out the cult-crazy video on their home page) put out their first album in 1982, the dark garage synth classic "The World We Live In." They've since gone through several styles, including an odd industrial phase, but they're perhaps best known for this sample-filled, sexrad classic.

First time I encountered it, I was going with a bunch of college friends to see Depeche Mode's Music for the Masses tour in ... 1988? 89? The opening act was supposed to be those butch queens, Nitzer Ebb (aka "that band that always shouts at you"), but instead we were treated to choreographed dancers with LED light-up nipples from Voice Farm. The broody crowd was not amused at the time, but now, ya gotta admit, it's a hoot. And it has a Twin Peaks sample! And frugging caveboys and cavegirls!

As our cat Chuck says, Wow....!


6.30.2009

Pina Bausch, RIP


I'm not a big dance fan (or "movement" as we called it in the performance art world), but German choreographer Pina Bausch took my breath away, especially her film Complaint of the Empress, which convinced me that dance could be cinema. Sad to learn today that's she's gone.

6.26.2009

Story Collection: Facing Ghosts

Rereading and revising the past 20+ years of short stories, sudden fiction, and performance texts has been an experience. And somewhat uncanny doing it in the month before I turn 40.


I had completed a manuscript for a story collection a couple of times in the past. The first time, my agent and I decided to focus on shopping around my second novel instead, as story collections are a harder sell, and I've never been in any prestigious literary journals or won any awards for my stories (although they've been in several notable and award-winning anthologies). That version of the manuscript was shorter and focused on male relationships.

The second time I submitted it to a writing contest that had an experimental slant. For that version, I added more performance texts and experimental writing, some short things that I wouldn't call poetry but are probably as close as I get to verse. I also took out some of the edgier gay stuff in that one, I think.

The third version was for when the publishers of One of These Things... wanted to bring it out. For them, I added some new stories I'd since written and evened out the prose/experimental balance.

This go 'round, for Rebel Satori, I thought I wouldn't have much work to do. But I reread the manuscript and got excited about really rebuilding it from the ground up. The last version was good, but I've been working on scholarly writing so much, I was really excited about digging into a literary project again. So, in addition to rethinking what to include, every single piece in there has been revised and reedited, plus I wrote some brand-new things as well.

But first, I started digging around dusty cabinets and cobwebbed computer files, including one titled "Old and/or Crap," which, to my surprise, had a few gems I'd previously dismissed. Things I'd written for a 'zine that I never heard from again, or an anthology that didn't happen -- I'd remembered them as juvenile, but this time found them sweet and direct.

On the other hand, there was one piece in the current manuscript I finally got rid of. I'd labored over it through different versions, in different publications, and in performances, but I finally decided to give up on it. It just didn't go far enough, and I'd recently cannibalized some of its best parts in another essay. Overall, it was interesting to see recurrent themes appear--crumbling and fumbling love relationships, disintegrating families, the influence of urban spaces, explorations of masculine and queer identities--but this also made for some redundancy, so some pieces were cut to reduce repetition.

And it was reassuring to feel continuity in something built out of so many ad hoc works over so many years. Unlike the novels (or, in a different way, the dissertation I'm working on now), where I'm so conscious of the project as whole, when writing stories it's all about that individual moment, expression, feeling, or idea. So it was cool to see that those individual moments added up to something.

Happiest part of it was finally finding an ending to an unfinished piece on Everclear (the band and the alcohol). Also finally getting out a new piece that I've been writing in my head the last couple of years and liking the result. It's set in Little Armenia, about about a guy who wakes up 5 years in the past, in his now-ex-boyfriend's bed.

Biggest surprise was rediscovering a short prose-poem I'd written while researching at the Library of Congress two summers ago and had entirely forgotten about, but rediscovered and really liked it.

Least surprising was that my favorites were still my favorites, stories such as "Gas Works Park," "Falcons," "Truncated Offramp," "New Wave Skinhead Flight Attendant," "Get on Your Bikes and Ride!" (Although one reviewer called that latter story "humorous, to be sure, but in a fat gay guy meets American Psycho sort of way." That's a bad thing?)

Biggest surprise-to-me-only was how dark most of it was. "It's kind of a bleak book," I told my husband. "Funny," he said, not missing a beat, "you usually write such shiny, happy things."

Story collection: Auto-Archeaology

So this week I sent off the manuscript for my new story collection, Love Hard.


(Btw that title is sort of humorous -- you can read it in the sexual sense of "hard loving" -- and, although there is sex in the book, it's really much more about how love is difficult. Imagine hearing the title grunted in a gruff, masculine voice like Frankenstein's monster: "Love hard.")

(Begging the question, do I see male lovers as monstrous? Hmmm, well... read the book.)

(Although, remember, Frankenstein's monster is sympathetic.)

I haven't posted much on my creative writing in a while because I've been so absorbed in grad school since my last novel came out. It's been nice to dive back into a literary project this summer, getting the manuscript finalized.

I'd put together several different versions of it over the years, and this one is re-assembled from the ground up. Remastered, I guess you could say: I reread everything in the last version and well as lots of old files on my computer. After 20+ years of writing fiction, I had do do quite a bit of text recovery and file-format translation to open some of them. Anyone remember AppleWorks? ClarisWorks? MacWrite?


(Permanently lost are some early academic pieces written on 5-and-1/2-inch floppy disk with an IBM computer in an early version of Word Perfect.)

Yes, I even have some stories that are typewritten. (Including their very funny critiques, quite neatly typewritten, by David Sedaris.)

Being a communication media geek, I had to wonder if my writing would've been any different if I had begun on a computer, if I hadn't lived the transition from writing on paper by hand, to typewriters, to word processors, to computers. I still do a lot of drafting and editing by hand, but I have to say, I hate it when writers get all pretentious and huff about how they only write by hand. (Yes, with a feather quill and pained expression, I'm sure.)

Rereading work written on different media, I couldn't sense a qualitative difference, but it's hard to tell because they were different stages in my life, when I was at different levels of writing skill. ("Oh, here's the year Trav finally learned the difference between 'that' and 'which'!") But I do have memories of the older, handwritten and typewritten pieces feeling much more labored--but that has as much if not more to do with my skill level than technology use, I think.

Optics & Color

Was forwarded this yesterday -- a striking color optical illusion reposted at the Bad Astronomy blog at Discover magazine. Somewhat shocking demonstration of how the eye and mind process information about color -- great example for teaching ideas of "reality" defined by sensory perception. (Would've been apropos at the Media Ecology conference).


Also good for teaching 1960s abstraction, and not only Op Art -- I just saw a nice Jasper Johns at the Saint Louis University Museum of Art that employed some similar, though not near as intense, optical effects.

6.25.2009

Carey Young's Call Centers & Telephone Art

So this was the other show I checked out at the Contemporary Art Museum of St. Louis, Carey Young's Speech Acts. Young is a UK conceptual/installation artist who does work on business and globalization, among other things. The Representative was a small, furnished sitting area with a red phone and two snapshots, one of a man, one of a woman. They were actual can center employees (American), to whom a red phone connected you directly. They had a loose script to follow, you were also encouraged to ask them about their personal lives.



Another conference room has several phones on a large round table. Two had prerecorded pieces: Follow the Protest was a phone tree of options for listening to different sounds recorded at the G20 Summit protests in London; another was a monologue musing about telephonic presence and ether-eal immateriality. (I found it somewhat sophomoric, but it's something within my area of research specialization, so that might be why.) The agent on the other end of Monster Flat Out talked to you about what previous people thought the artwork was about (mood alteration, big business) and encouraged you to pick a new theme or meaning.

I chose "anxiety" because I hate talking on the phone! Seriously, I liked Young's work a lot but it was really hard for me to interact with. Unstructured phone conversations send my blood pressure through the roof.

I was surprised the show was so local -- global outsourcing of call centers seemed relatively absent. Overall, though it was intriguing and nice to see cool installation /performance work at a major venue.

6.23.2009

New Wave Wednesdays: Caroline Loeb

French! Fashion! Cigarettes! Ambiguity! Irony! And a super-catchy jazzy tune, what's not to love? Apparently this was a big Euro hit in '85 -- I first heard it on a mix tape sent to me in '96 by my first-ever 'Internet friend,' a new wave geek in Germany. Thanks, Martin!

And, according to one translator, the lyrics are as weird as I thought they were:
Lazy
In fact, she is lazy
Is it really laziness
Or something else or what?
Obviously she is happy
She's the happiest of the lazies

Of all materials
It's cotton that she prefers
Passive, she's pensive
Abandoning silk
It's cotton
Of all materials
It's cotton that she prefers
Passive, she's pensive
Abandoning silk
It's cotton

And all the good things are growing blunt
She goes crazy,

She is shaking her ass with laziness
She's going crazy, she's shaking
To know what the others are thinkin' about

{Repeat refrain}

She's leafing through all the pages of dictionaries
She's got nothing but a few words in her vocabulary
Love on Earth and soporific
In other words, she does nothing

Fascinating 1904 Fair Picture

I love this picture. Sorry it's a crappy camera snap, I couldn't find it reproduced online or in any gift-store books: It's from the Missouri History Museum's exhibit on the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Centennial / World's Fair. It's on the wall devoted to the workers who constructed the fair: this handsome man was photographed a few months before the fair opened. I love his expression, the angle of his cap, the way he's hanging with the elephant, who seems all gregarious in contrast.

I'm not being snarky of anything (shocking I know), I stared at this picture for a long time in the exhibit; I think it's just wonderful.