Friday, April 7, 2006, 10:02 PM - Technology
This week I signed myself up to be the hostess/ instigator of Net Tuesday LA. I had such fun in SF cocktailing with the progressive geek elite - I think it will be fun to start the same kind of event down here - there are lots of cool projects happening around the southland, and hopefully we can get the people behind them to drive to the same place once a month and plot the revolution in person. Anyone have suggestions for a good bar/ backroom space that would be geek-friendly? I'm aiming to have the inaugural event the second Tuesday of May.Friday, April 7, 2006, 09:58 PM - Politics, Friends, Technology, Art
This feels like it's been my first real week in LA - I've been working like a dog on the CA_50 special election that will happen Tuesday...setting up all kinds of hyper-geeky autodialiing/ web-based phone system tests to see if we can create a super-streamlined and foolproof phone bank infrastructure for the fall. Hopefully we'll help Busby win outright on Tuesday, but the evaluator in me wants another election in June to perfect the model...
I am getting used to the braces but feel horribly sibilant. You can catch my orthodontic voiceover debut on a MoveOn volunteer training call Monday, if you're lucky.
And yesterday I also had my first taste of what it will be like to have a community here - I went to an opening at Stephen Cohen gallery of photos from Democratic Republic of Congo with Jeannette- a fundraiser for Medecins Sans Frontieres - and ran into Noah Craft. Maybe someday I'll have a new network of friends to run into?? Maybe I already do?
I promise to post some braces photos this weekend, and will dish on what Ben Ball's party is like, too.
;)
Thursday, March 23, 2006, 02:30 PM - Travels, George, Friends, Food, Art
I've had not a minute to keep up with this little enterprise. Perhaps you'll be sympathetic if you hear that in the last 16 days I've been in Boston, New Haven, Bridgeport, Brooklyn, DC, San Francisco, LA, and Denver. Yikes! No wonder I slept in today. All have been good travels; really the optimal mix of work/family/art/fun/food that one can find on the East Coast. I made an excellent blanket fort with my goddaughter in Boston, went to the (kinda stinky) biennial with Andrew, ate homemade canneloni and cannoli with Leslie for the Sopranos premiere, and drank our signature cosmopolitans with my dear New Orleans friend in DC. I had a good visit with Dad - full of nice weather and walks by the water. I'm so lucky that he's still so independent. Denver had some swing dancing and a fun planning meeting for MoveOn's fall program, and back up in NorCal I took the Republican to Joan Blades' birthday party. He gets lots of points for a) venturing into the liberal lions' den and b) dancing with me even though he'd been on a million-mile bike ride that day. Now I have to finish unpacking my life and start seeing what things will be here....pretty much all I've done is see Claudia and Angel so far, but there's a whole city out there waiting. And an update on Griffith Park running: last night at dusk I saw a coyote and heard tons of frogs and crickets. I couldn't believe that I was in the middle of the great metropolis...Monday, March 13, 2006, 05:13 PM
Smartypants Pragmatic Utopian Rationalist. There was of course a movement to append a "T" to the end, but I'm resisting. Can someone come up with an "S" that's a little more academic? Then I'll put it on my business cards. Why is the taxonomic urge so strong, anyway?Monday, March 6, 2006, 08:39 PM
It's kind of astounding to me that it actually happened, but I've left San Francisco and am a dreamy new resident of Los Feliz. It can't be a bad idea to move to a neighborhood called "the happy ones", right? I left on Thursday, spent that night at Claudia and Angel's, and started to move in Friday. I had nothing but hottie young movers, and they did a great job. My couch seems very content in its new rat-pack-ish bachelorette pad, but it will feel better when all the boxes have been dismantled. That, sadly, will have to wait, since I'm on the east coast circuit for the next 2 weeks, then back to SF for a minute, then Denver, then back to LA. I feel like I've already experienced ridiculously stereotypical SoCal life, since I was both a) stopped by a police officer and asked if I was OK because I was walking at night (en route to Claudia's) and b) caught in an Oscar-related traffic jam. Lord help me. Here's the view from my new home (can you see the Angeles crest?), and my half-unpacked kitchen.
Friday, February 24, 2006, 12:48 PM - Politics
A while ago our government started the process of instituting tactics developed during central american counterinsurgency struggles in Iraq (reported in Newsweek, some coverage here). Seems like the Salvador model in an Islamic context would definitely include things like paramilitary squads blowing up shrines, kidnapping imams, nighttime disappearances, and secret detention facilities. I can think of some positive lessons we could learn from El Salvador - we should be shipping FMLN advisors to Hamas to share their knowledge about the risks and benefits of transforming from a military to a political institution. Instead we're exporting some of our least defensible tactics to a country where they're likely contributing to further destabilization, possibly just to keep the opposition to the occupation fragmented (more on this interpretation in the Guardian UK today). This is why it's terrifying that John Negroponte has so much influence; he thinks this stuff is a great idea. I am still mulling over Fukuyama's piece in the magazine last Sunday (* and there's a prize for someone who knows which of the fundamental principles of neoconservatism he elaborates I embrace), but I think the neocons are using all the wrong strategies in the face of the morass they've gotten us into. I worry (as does good old Francis) that we've now squandered our capacity for productive international intervention. I hope we don't really need to use it any time soon...and I hope we learn that teaching people how to run death squads doesn't exactly promote democracy.Monday, February 20, 2006, 08:47 PM - Art
;)
I snuck in just under the wire this weekend to see the Ecstasy installation show at LA MOCA. My favorites were a simple curtain of strobe-lit water (the only part of the show that actually looked like vision on E), the noise of the LSD crystal fountain, and the impercetably shifting enormous wall in one gallery. There were remarkable huge obsessive pencil crazy person imagined-world drawings, and a lovely green grid LED light installation. I wish I could have gone with Jeff; for all the hiply transgressive vibe of the show, there was (for me) not enough explicit dialogue about the impact of drugs in our perception or our culture- maybe best was the simple documentation of one artist's 6 (?) day regimented drug-by-drug week in Amsterdam. There was nothing that I could read as political except for the play-doh commentary on big pharma- kind of astonishing given the current drug laws' power in shaping our society and their disastrous enforcement. A grand total of one of the many X dealers I've known has ever been prosecuted. How can that show have evolved without someone commenting on who can and can't get away with altering perception? I'm not totally down with Terence McKenna (and btw where did all the mushroom art come from? what about good old fashioned CHEMICAL psychedelia?) but I do think the drive to alter one's mind is part of being human and central to the understanding of consciousness. It's sad how even that most internal experience and our artistic representations of it are circumscribed/determined by class and race and all the disconnects/discriminations of contemporary life.
Thursday, February 16, 2006, 12:14 PM - Dancing, Friends, Food, Technology
one new alternator belt
three boundlessly enthusiastic dream job emails
one long relationship rant
two dozen roses (four confused neighbors)
two chive dumplings
one hour of pure samba bliss
I can't complain, really.
Monday, February 13, 2006, 12:28 PM - Dancing
I've never been to Mardi Gras, so my empathy for New Orleans as Fat Tuesday approaches is pretty abstract- but somehow the least I can do to manifest an American pre-Lenten bacchanal is support Brazilian carnaval festivities here in SF. Last night I went to Ara Ketu, one of the most popular blocos from Bahia. The crowd was almost completely Brazilian, and it was so wonderful to be caught up in a little bit of the frenzied abandon. My samba muscles are creaky this morning and my clothes were sprinkled with beer by the end of the night, but I am so happy I went. ;)
Monday, February 13, 2006, 12:10 PM
I was running at Ocean Beach on Saturday when, I swear, a pacifier fell from the sky and landed at my feet. (Thanks to emdot on flickr for having a nice photographic representation of my experience). I admit, I had a few pangs of 'oh my, everyone is reproducing, aren't they?' at the baby brigade party last weekend, but isn't this overkill? I have the quietest biological clock of anyone I know, but I'm not completely immune to the overwhelming societal support for and biological imperative of parenthood. Plus I'm working on this MomsRising.org project which is putting motherhood (and all its attendant complications) into my consciousness, as is month-old Aurora. Is something trying to tell me...something? I blame the peeved seagull who was hovering overhead; I imagine she picked up the binky thinking it was a nice white clam, then dropped it in disgust. But what's next, carseats and diaper bags materializing in my living room??
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