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WTO Seattle coverage from CorpWatch Tell US Trade Representative Charlene Barshefsky to declare a moratorium on further WTO negotiations. Citizens around the world are demanding that the WTO review its decisions and repair damage they've done to the environment and human rights. Add your voice, send a free fax. seattle99.org seattlewto.org several weeks back there was a slavishly us-centric teevee report entitled "Is America #1?". pure booster propaganda. here's some fall-out from that idiocy |
d e c e m b e r . 2 . 1 9 9 9 (1:19 am, san francisco) | wto psst. go read mimi on drag versus blackface. my roommate and i both wanted to go up to seattle for the wto protests. not because either or us has a fondness for rubber bullets or the aroma of tear gas but because we're insatiable readers who've read enough to know that the wto has huge problems. courtesy of rtmark : gatt.org the internet is getting lazy, making me lazy, . all these print ads, towering billboards, smarmy tv clips have turned what used to be a messy jungle full of "Welcome To My Home Page" sites and careful listservs and link lists into one giant mall. i remember when i used to actually surf - drift from link to link, picking up animated gifs as i went, taking the time for a slow swim through a homepage i liked. today, for my daily dose of "surfing" i went to kozmo.com, determined to get my cd delivered to me free! in one hour! like all the ads in the weeklies promise me. and then sanity and the minister of the pocketbook struck, reminding me that i could just buy a cd in a real store and get it immediately. i don't appreciate how i'm getting backed into this realization that the internet is just becoming someplace to get something you always could get down the street. all the asskicking zines and home pages are still out there, but now that a layer of money and advertising have been poured into the worldwideswamp, it's that much harder to remember what is possible underneath shopping cart technology. cheap and honest communication. quotations of the udp : "For me, the function of knowledge is to provide people with tools to see the world in different ways and to be able to act and change the world. I work with Marx's aphorism : philosophers help us understand the world, but the point is to change it. If that's not the function of universities, I don't know why we exist. If it's simply to reproduce knowledge about the world or train people for jobs, why bother? twin peaks kept watch over us on our way out of safeway last night. and the sensation of loading groceries into a car surrounded by the small and friendly house lights of the people in san francisco who live on hills and not landfills, we got very happy. a rush of "city" to remind us why i pay what i pay to live where i live. n o v e m b e r . 2 9 . 1 9 9 9 (11:54 pm, san francisco) | urban mowgli well. i dwell in urbans. no wait, i am an urbanity dweller. erm. still doesn't sound right. how about, urban i do dwell. i woke up this morning at the amazed hour of 8 am thanks to the efforts of my roommate who wakes up at 6 am and when i tottered out my door i suddenly smelled city. it smelled like traffic, and washed asphalt and commerce but it also smelled something like a fresh start. here i will not scratch my back (too much), or subsist solely on cheese (just one meal a day), and when i pass before the public transportation review board on my way to heaven and personal chefs i will be able to say "yes, i waited for MUNI too." for all my hullabalooing about world travel and my fragmented sense of home i have almost always lived in something like suburbia. even 337 crown, which left us between a bad korean restaurant and a suspect filling station/towing business and had a beautiful view of one parking lot and three apartment buildings, even that house was ultimately not a city house. this is my first. this made me remember saul williams' imprecations against art as just entertainment. then again, i s'pose someone might imprecate against that whole spoken word thing (the wild gesticulations and overly dramatic musical rush variety) as being closer to spectacle than art. however you define it. Thus the must-see blockbusters have replaced the old, quieter exhibitions - a practice that was recently defended in the Times by Ben Hartley, the Guggenheim's director of corporate communications and sponsorships. "We are in the entertainment business," he said "and competing against other forms of entertainment out there." [sept20, new yorker, p. 106] yeah i guess you might find it funny. we subscribe to the new yorker and the new york times, but nary a san francisco chronicle in sight. although i guess no one was waiting with bated breath - our thanksgiving dinner turned out yummy. despite the plumber having used the "wrong washer" when fixing the garbage disposal [his words] and thus causing a small flood of kitchen sink water and partially disposed sweet potato peel right in the middle of dinner preparations [brave me continued to stir the au gratin sauce toe-deep in chilly nutritious water]. i had three helpings. last paragraph. i promise. then i go take a bath and get ready for plant shopping and library fumbling. if i'm writing a little oddly it might be because i just finished an elizabeth peters mystery. i like big words but looking over this i realize that i generally don't use the word imprecations twice in one paragraph. all i really wanted to say was that my job alternates between making me laugh weakly at the combined verbal idiocy of american teenagers "so, he was like, like do you want to go to the movies, and i was like, way" [i'm not even kidding - it's not verbatim but it's damn close], making me cry because some of them go through shit that no one needs to go through, not even under the strictest regimen of that-which-does-not-kill-you-will-only-make-you-stronger [and then turn to a faceless website for advice on babyfaced rapists] and sometimes making me twist underneath their words -----> jadranka's diary entry number three n o v e m b e r . 2 5 . 1 9 9 9 (5:34 am, berkeley) | thanksgiving cleaning been running errands from home, which is a funny concept. ordered some cds through merge records [much much cheaper than cdnow, even with 10 bucks off at cdnow!], "HomeBanked' a little with the bank of asinine, subscribed to the new york times, bought and mailed a late birthday present for the peter pan i know, found a recipe for thai curry, and erm, printed out my membership to yerba buena center for the arts. this is how i get my life together. |
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