Written last night:

Angela quote of the day, “It’s funny that Disco Fuck Shower and Department of Family Services start with the same letters.” Angela has a little bit of a wine buzz on. We just got back from Venus Envy which…

Written today:

Which was quite good. Though nothing to go to if you have claustrophobia. There were something like five thousand expected to attend. What is Venus Envy? Well, check out the link, it was an art show, music fest, performance “happening”. We entered through the lobby and immediately there was a press of people, like moving through the most crowded room at a college party, a constant negotiation of both direction and personal space. We of course made our way first to the bar, which required a sneaky elevator ride (sneaky as most people were using a very crowded grand staircase to get up to the second floor lobby). The bartenders were serving behind the old teller windows, think Jessie James hold up and you’ll get the picture. The second floor lobby is actually a two-story space with large windows facing in. A belly-dancing troupe was performing in the window to our upper right keeping time to a solo musician on the stage just to the right of the elevator we had ascended. Angela went to Webster with the performer, but I can’t remember her name. It was a dollar donation for a glass of either wine or beer, so we started on the Yellow Tail Shiraz and made our way back to the music. Every free wall space was covered with art installations and for many of them the artist was nearby to meet and talk with. There was also an assortment of chocolate covered truffles, cheesecakes, etc.

Who did you run into Karl? First I saw a guy I used to wash dishes with at Sadie Thompson’s on Demun. Then the parade of R’s friends began. First were Katie and Julie, the lesbian couple that live a few doors down from her. Julie went to high school with Brad and Katie went to college with us. Katie seemed happy to see me, Julie less so, but there you go. The same graded reaction when we ran into Casey and Jeff, Jeff was friendly as always and Casey was cold. She had been a friend of Erin’s so there we could have a double dislike. Casey & Erin have matching fish tattoos, but at the time Erin moved out she and Casey weren’t really spending any time together. Erin was having trouble connecting with the “new” Casey and wasn’t sure how she felt about their pending marriage. I know a great deal about the relationship dynamics of these two couples and am tempted to write about them as I am journaling, but I suppose it’s best not to in this more public forum. Suffice it to say that all long-term couples have their messy moments. So if I am to feel judged by them it is with a very large grain of salt. Those are R’s local friends, or they were during that first year here, maybe two or three more (Thomas, another Katie, and her current roommate Ann) and that’s it, she really felt lost here in St. Louis without the wider circle of friends we’d had in the ville & Katie didn’t always treat her very well. I wish her good supportive friends.

So after that set I ran into Marie and Amy from the center, a few HAC graduates, one of my former students from TSU, a few of Angela’s clients, one of Karen’s coworkers – Laura – Kelly from TSU – who didn’t recognize Beth. Many of these people are professional activists for women’s, gay, disability rights etc. I hear Kelly on NPR all the time. Paul the Osteopath was her last male date before she switched teams.

St. Louis really is a small town when it comes to circles of culture. Angela observed that there were lots of fascinating “real people” there and also lots of poseurs. She liked the photography more than anything else, I really went for a diversity of art, some of course was total crap – someone had bought seventies style oil paintings and did makeshift cats all over the pre-existing pictures – I could have done that instillation in under two hours including the time it would take to junk shop for the already painted canvases, to anticipate your argument it was not conceptually interesting either, it just sucked.

I liked the ghosts most of all; the elderly art critics in their 1970’s attire, the women in long hippie dresses and the men with turtlenecks, many of whom were walking with canes (ah the cane detail from my dream last night). Watching them was like watching slow moving dinosaurs, unhurried in the press of people, taking time to evaluate and digest what they were seeing, somehow tragic in their disconnection from the production of this moment. The women were all shrunken and then men were all bent, as though they had turned to ask someone behind them a question and were frozen in their twist, doomed now to move forward while always looking back.

After we’d explored every nook and cranny we headed over to Vanessa’s as we’d never been and we were close. I’m dog-sitting Stolzt the next two weekends so she’s going to bring him over later today to get adjusted. This coming weekend the girls are doing a girl’s trip to Chicago for Bethany’s birthday and the following weekend they are all marching on Washington for Women’s rights, together with Paul’s wife Caroline, Linda & Bob from the ville, I really know a ton of people who are going.

Vanessa’s place is really cute, she has these great huge prints that had hung in the cooperate offices of Purina for forty plus years. They are actually too heavy to hang so they’re propped against two different walls. My favorite of the two is an aerial view of checkered wheat fields, the view you’d have from a plane flying over Kansas. We have the same desk, a door balanced on two filing cabinets. As part of her increasing political activism she is reading Clark’s new book, as well as Bob Woodward’s assault on the Bush war machine. I need to make more time to go beyond my NPR education and get into the meat of this current nightmare. I bullshit daily in my blog and body bags are coming back into the country un-filmed and undocumented.

Rant:
After Vietnam the military realized it had to control the message. They over-controlled in Desert Storm and all we saw were hotel lobbies, unless you were anywhere else in the world and then you got to see the napalmed highway out of Kuwait, I remember this image of a blackened hand hanging out of a charred Suzuki Samurai.

How many bodies have our imbedded journalists shown us to really viscerally experience the human cost of warfare? And I live in St. Louis, where many of those bombs and the planes that drop them, come from. My daily economy is supported by this bloodshed. The bloodiest century in human history and I am worried about a new pump for my fish tank, capricious at best. Think globally act locally, is that enough?

Gore Vidal wrote about how Timothy McVeigh ran a bulldozer in his tour of duty in Desert Storm, pushing bodies into mass graves. Vidal argues that it was this experience, together with his reaction to Waco Texas, that turned him against his own government and led to his involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. He also calls America, “The United States of Amnesia.” It's easy to "forget" what you've never known about recent history - I guess my point is that I am constantly aware that we only only get the iceberg's tip from the mainstream media & I am castigating myself for my own apathy. bell hooks asks us to be “enlightened witnesses” if we are in the position of the observer we must observe critically and ask others to do so. Is that enough? I worry at times that to do more is to invite the Socratic response, martyrdom for corrupting the youth of Athens. The people don’t want to know the truth and they will kill you rather than hear it. (Plato's allegory of the cave - Dr. Martin Luther King, Ghandi). How to you crtique & challenge without getting killed for it? I think about Jen's recent "dialogue" with her former college friend, agreeing to disagree is not democracy - we need to converse - to dialogue - to arrive at actionable consensous..... Blahhhhhhh

Happy Easter, I’m going to my sister’s for ham.