Black Mesa Indigenous Support Trip

The edited version of an essay of mine, reflecting a recent volunteer trip to Navajo County, Ariz., has been featured in the PackratNest. Here’s the text, in full:

In our 30s together

I tried to help pay. I always do. He almost never lets me. He let me once in the entire time I’ve known him, and that was one of the first times we’d seen each other since I graduated college. (In fact that one time he not only let me pay for myself but for his beer as well.)

A response to Mark Morford

It’s like the Q-tip hitting just the right hard-to-reach itch. The thing that makes your senses come alive so fiercely you remember you were kind of numb before. Your mind gets caught up in things but your body, your body wants you to live in it, too. You can refuse it but it will remind you. The Q-tip will remind you. Or maybe the thought-equivalent of that Q-tip will remind you.

The spirit of Christmas: gone.

Six years ago, when I was 20, I decided to opt-out of most holidays, particularly Christmas. I told everyone I was not exchanging gifts and followed through on that (i.e., not the version of not exchanging gifts which means just not exchanging expensive gifts). I spent as many Christmasses as I could get away with away from family, or anyone really, instead creating my own traditions. And forget Christmas trees.

A New Burlesque Of Parody

At long last, my paper from last year about raunch culture, drag, burlesque, parody, Butler, Foucault, Munoz, etc. My intention was to rewrite it integrating some new ideas, but it got back-burnered and never happened. 20 months later, I am making it public for the first time.

Alternative (to) sex

I was fortunate enough to have been born after the rise of post-structuralism, which—though certainly not in the mainstream consciousness—gives at least the idea of an option alternative to an ideology which not only defines sex but gives it such prominence. Everything else is substitute. To the point where your “version of sex” is train-conducting, car-racing, model-building, and my “version of sex” is comedy and thought and rough-housing.

On the music of The Cure

A celebration of melancholia. It makes viable the associated passions and validates the emoting of the state not just as a purge but as connection, as creative expression, as celebration. As an exploration or some/one of the many unique things life brings us in moments. They are fleeting but through expression they are caught, captured, shared, “made visible.” And through this we can relive them, if we wish, or remember them, or feel less alienated because, alas, someone has managed to “make visible” that which we have struggled to explain our entire lives. The validation makes our experience somehow richer—perhaps because now we have the vocabulary for it.

Dangerous supplement

Rousseau hates writing, civilization, and masturbation/fantasy, because they are the dangerous supplements to speech, nature and “real” sex. Derrida deconstructs this and shows how a supplement both adds on to and takes the place of the “original.” So, therefore, Rousseau pines for these “original” states (speech, nature, “real” sex), but because they are never complete, they are always marked by the absence he hates so much about the “inauthentic” sides of the binary (writing, civilization, and masturbation/fantasy), and therefore he will never attain them (“them” being what he thinks they are).

On strangers

I don’t like strangers. I just don’t. It’s not the individuals I don’t like, but rather strangers as a class. All these extraverts, or faux-extraverts, or whatever, I watch them together, socializing in large groups, and think about how ridiculous they look.

On the spectacle and/of Circus Contraption

Circus Contraption‘s Grand American Traveling Dime Museum
Theater For The New City, NYC, 9/13/06

“A bracing curative for the afflictions of our times”

Circus Contraption opened with a bang—a spectacle-bang. The translucent curtain covering the band was yanked away dramatically, dragged across the floor by unseen hands/tools, and a massive billowing of smoke was released. Simultaneously, the decorated band plunged into the first musical number, a beautifully dissonant arrangement. The ringmaster began his seduction…