* I went to a wedding recently of a young Chinese American couple-- both were in their twenties and American-born. The minister cited the passage from 2nd Peter and drove the point home again and again that the wife has to submit to the husband. He said to the bride: "No matter how painful this is for you, it's God's will that you have to submit to your husband". He even mentioned how early Christians used the analogy of slavery! He then said to the congregation: "I know some of you may not agree with this, but God's word is clear". And this was a young minister, too! After the wedding, I spoke about it with some of my younger women relatives, and they were all pretty upset by it. [bhuang] Take Texas Representative and Majority Whip Tom DeLay, "the former bug exterminator from Bend County, who calls the EPA Œa Gestapo organization.¹ Delay, among his other hobby horses, is convinced that there is no problem with the ozone layer and so there is no need to ban chlorofluorocarbons. Unimpressed by the report of the World Meteorological Association or any of the dozens of others, he refers to the committee that gave the Nobel Prize to the two scientists who first identified the ozone problem as Œa bunch of Swedish environmental extremists.¹" DeLay convened a collection of industry lobbyists for the petrochemical industry to draft a bill imposing a moratorium on all new federal regulation, even for health and safety. [commoncouragepress.com] "[Helen] Keller's commitment to socialism stemmed from her experienceŠ Through research she learned that blindness was not distributed randomly throughout the population but was concentrated in the lower class. Men who were poor might be blinded in industrial accidents or by inadequate medical care; poor women who became prostitutes faced the additional danger of syphilitic blindnessŠ Keller's research was not just book-learning: 'I have visited the sweatshops, factories, crowded slums. If I could not see it, I could smell it'. . . At the time she became a socialist, she was one of the most famous women on the planet. She soon became the most notorious. Her conversion to socialism caused a new storm of publicity--this time outraged. Newspapers that had extolled her courage and intelligence now emphasized her handicap. Columnists charged that she had no independent sensory input and was in thrall to those who fed her information. Typical was the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, who wrote that Keller's 'mistakes spring out of the manifest limitations of her development'." [James Loewen's "Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong"] A work from 1994 entitled "happy end" further illustrates Büchel's interest in disrupting the boundaries and blurring the edges between real life and the contexts in which art is presented. With the simple gesture of opening a door and adding a wooden bridge across the threshold, Büchel connected two very distinct entities - the museum space of the Centre PasquArt in Biel/Bienne, on one side of the wall, and the municipal old people's home, on the other. The viewer is forced to delineate her/his level of participation with the piece in a blatant manner: am I meant to simply look at the bridge and, consequently into the halls of the old people's home, or am I being invited to cross the bridge and enter the space? One must ask, Where is the work?	f e b r u a r y . 1 7 . 2 0 0 0 (12:51 am, san francisco) i'm a bit tired of this not-so-clever description i've come up for myself -- "girl, ungraduated" -- so i'm disappearing from here for a while. f e b r u a r y . 5 . 2 0 0 0 (8:38 pm, san francisco) reading : my year of meats (ruth ozeki); the haunting of hill house (shirley jackson); weapons of the weak (james scott); counting for nothing (marilyn waring); giant bones (peter s. beagle); the hidden persuaders (vance packard).and that's not even counting all the back issues of fantasy & science fiction i've read. i've been hiding from thinking - burrowed underneath several pillows and two comforters with something pulpy or cerebral it's easy to avoid regret. went to the alternative press expo with k today - picked up "the monsters in my stomach" by the guy who draws lenore and communed with it for awhile (herm. don't know it? OK. try this reviewspeak on for size : "an evocative ditty on loss that illustrates what was going on inside us those first weepy weeks of heartbreak.") so tonight is an exercise in ambition and self esteem. at the very least, i'm not going to fall asleep with all the lights on. the electric bill's been outrageous (82 bucks! we thought it had to be a typo). c continued : conferences the convergence of many hipsters under one roof [alternative press expo] with not much more in mind than buying and selling and schmoozing puts me in mind of all the conferences i went to the last few years. sometimes there were hipsters there (nyu's pda conference having the greatest concentration) but they were conferences, with panels and workshops devoted to creating action and change, to disseminating information. (though maybe KASCON was a big fat failure on that end, even if the hotel staff had fun watching drunken kor-am kids cavort in empty (but under surveillance) hallways.) i'm not knocking a.p.e., its organizers had different purposes and i'm happy with my loot (kewl comix! a picture of me with keith knight!), and i'm not glorifying my conference-fever last year, lord knows i went home loaded down with enough pamphlets on third world development, debt relief and annotated copies of the MAI draft that i did nada with because, because 2 days is not long enough to learn how to communicate or create when you don't know how. they pump me up and then plop me back into workaday with no sense of how to integrate activism into my selfish existence. but listening to m and e of giant robot natter on about how we (the audience for their workshop(?)) should rearrange borders' magazine stands to better display giant robot, crow over how a and yolk are just lame-ass copyheads right after they bitch out smaller zines for looking at their production/values with some kind of skepticism....well, let's just say i got cranky. last october walking down san pablo i saw a plaque commemorating the northern edge of an encomienda some late conquistador had been granted - the line drawn somewhere between pepboys and the el cerrito del norte BART. it's been nibbling at the edges of my conscious geography since then. california used to be encomiendas. f e b r u a r y . 3 . 2 0 0 0 (12:39 am, san francisco) i used to time-stamp my entries 4:50 am or 6:23 am but now i'm just a sleepy gal. // february blooms here. that is the difference. walking to work from the bus stop i stop to finger the flowers, orange daisies by the sidewalk, poofy white weeds, a small tree sprinkled with small purple blossoms that smelled kind of nasty. a quotidian life. *transportation* been taking the bus. last week under cover of rain everyone smelled soggy , shifting 'round in their seats impatiently, umbrellas held awkwardly and dripping. today a girl (woman?) with swollen fingers crouched in the stepwell moaning, her knees protecting plastic bags full of clothes. i feel myself holding myself away. i'm not hiding in a car, behind windows any more, but i hide in my satchel, in my book. a lot of us looked, only one man came up to steady her when the bus lurched to stops. my car is a mess of trouble. sunday night someone smashed a side window to steal...well...to steal nothing. they emptied my glove compartment onto the floor and left the door ajar, but didn't even take the car stereo.	home now *10.31.99 *11.03.99 *11.13.99 *11.19.99 *11.25.99 - 12.3.99 *12.06.99 - 12.28.99 *12.29.99 - 01.08.00 *01.17.99 - 01.24.00 and then weblog