Friday, June 23, 2006, 02:06 AM - Books
And at that point I might actually have time to read it...
I am astonishingly excited about the idea.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006, 06:31 PM - Sex
I seriously considered starting a melee at my dear friend Jennette's karaoke birthday party last weekend... I am slightly wistful that I didn't take advantage of the low lighting, orange walls, sake bottles that could have gone flying, microphone cords that were just begging to be wrapped around someone's neck, and utter ridiculousness of the situation. You'll be relieved to know that one well-placed dirty look did the trick, but I was secretly disappointed. It's been ages since I've been in the middle of a good scene. NEXT time I get invited to a private karaoke studio I will have been practicing a couple of pointed 'keep your hands off my man*' songs. It could be a flawed plan, since much as I'd like to pretend that my life is Bollywood-esque, I'd probably lose any objectively-judged idol-style competition.
* do let me know if you can think of songs that might be particularly appropriate in a 'keep your hands off my man, who's actually married to someone else, so obviously not exactly mine' sort of context. (did I mention the ridiculousness of the situation??) At least life is interesting.
Wednesday, June 21, 2006, 06:09 PM - Travels, Sex, Friends, Art
I talked with my former colleague Sybil yesterday - she runs the New Orleans sister site of the HIV prevention project I used to manage in SF (community-level HIV prevention for high-risk adolescents). They've been doing street intercept interviews with teenagers at nightclubs in Central City (where those 5 kids were killed over the weekend) - Sybil's had to suspend her project (again) until everything calms down. She told me that while some things haven't changed (there are still a lot of 15 year old girls in the supposedly 21-and-over clubs), most of the 'neighborhood' adolescents are driving in from Houston for the weekend to party. As far as I can tell, this implies that New Orleans is becoming a city of richer, whiter residents, and is now a short-hop tourist destination for its former underclass...which is a truly freaky demographic shift. Perhaps the national guard will start stopping carloads of black kids at the city limits?
And for something almost completely unrelated, my old friend Justin is very talented, if you didn't know. Check out Greetings From New Orleans - pre-Katrina, even more important now that found objects from New Orleans are likely mostly lost.
Thursday, June 15, 2006, 07:10 PM - Dancing
Last night was wonderful - it's easy to forget that a playful, connected fast-ish dance to live music is the purest joy I know (except maybe for 3 feet of fresh powder...).
;)
Thursday, June 15, 2006, 05:40 PM
;)
Got back in town in time to see Grendel - I was a little disappointed in the production. As you can see, it was visually pretty striking (although the problem child set wasn't as exciting as I expected). The piece was textually amazing (especially second half of first set), and a great performance by Grendel (Eric Owens).
;)
But it was a really self-indulgent and scattered production, with uninspiring
music, and crap choreography. There was beautiful costumery and too many puppets (yeah yeah, what else would I expect). It made me realize that I can still sing sections from St. Francis years later, and that Dr. Atomic last year was a treasure that I'm so glad I experienced.
Thursday, June 15, 2006, 05:12 PM - Sex
Yesterday, at the Santa Monica farmer's market (where I stopped on the way home from the airport).
"Hey. Nice braces."
Tuesday, June 13, 2006, 01:09 AM - Friends
was my favorite surprise in NYC. And of course the lovely Miss B. is charming as always....
Tuesday, June 13, 2006, 01:07 AM - George
There is no better check on my rampant ego than a trip home to Bridgeport. It’s impossible to believe I’m so damn fancy when I come home to a listing ’64 Fury up on blocks and rusting away under a tarp in the back yard. I had a relatively successful attempt to explain my current job to Dad the other morning – my favorite of his descriptives was “an actuary of the Twilight Zone” …trust me when I say this actually represented a breakthrough for us in him understanding what I do. Actuary= analyst, Twilight Zone= nebulous world of politics and political impact. He reiterated that real jobs include actually making things, so I tried to explain to him about the pretty new database I made for GCI – he wasn’t buying it. Of course the most fun part of the visit was getting paraded around in front of the crusty old golf course cronies, and spending an hour or so working on my putting. I got the abbreviated tour of the Bpt economic condition – there is actually some construction in the post-manufacturing wasteland along State St. – new tile and ice cream factories being built…and some of the neighborhood projects are being replaced by a Super Stop and Shop. No threat yet to the local pawn shops and strip clubs, though, so don’t worry too much about my neighborhood losing its ‘character’. And of course we’re now the proud home of the first-ever expansion of Pepe’s Pizza from New Haven, to which I made my dad drive me immediately from the train station. Not quite as good as the original, but easily takes any pizza in California.
Tuesday, June 13, 2006, 12:53 AM - Politics
I was at a meeting last week to examine the state of GOTV research and plot out coordinated efforts to answer the most pressing pending questions. Some of the people there were very impressive, and some seemed frighteningly dense. One of the more interesting proposed goals was developing metrics/ research protocols that would allow for true comparisons and more reliability across different experiments and programs… but the group shied away from discussing the really important outcome measurement: evaluating the movement as a whole. The right knows what’s on its scorecard, and has checked off a few boxes recently (supreme court). I suppose without a coherent ‘progressive’ agenda it’s difficult to determine shared hard benchmarks – but one would think we could come up with some numerical goals for the federal budget / economic indicators that would require the implementation of our priorities – a relative increase, for example, in education spending relative to military spending, a decrease in the % of medical care costs incurred because of lack of access to care, % increase in energy efficiency, reduction in poverty/ income inequality, etc. Even without those agreements, you’d think that we could come up with shared process outcomes that would be indicators of the movement’s growth – % of people who report that they’re civically engaged, % increase in voter turnout in primary and general elections, % of the Democratic party’s funding that comes from small donors, % of women holding elected office… but none of that large-scale evaluation is on the table – which is why you end up with hugely expensive enterprises like ACT that fail utterly to create a sustainable progressive infrastructure, or conferences with seemingly superficial impact. Changing the balance in Congress would be a nice start, but it's very far from what I hope are our ultimate goals.
Friday, June 9, 2006, 12:06 AM - Technology
If you haven't done anything yet on the Net Neutrality stuff, there's likely a vote tomorrow...get on it. Click HERE to get your name on the petition. And call your rep.
;)
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