Saturday, January 20, 2007

S.A.M. ... sudden art malaise?

Here's what they've done to my backyard. I'm not thrilled about it. Yeah, yeah at least not another 10-story condo but still. An eraser?!

Seattle Art Museum Sculpture Park


Thursday, January 11, 2007

Jesus, the Communist! (Like the musical only with more red)

About three months ago I saw an ad for an anti-Bush/anti-war group meeting. The Seattle chapter of the World Can't Wait had about a dozen members, including a half dozen core members. WCW was mostly middle-aged women and a smattering of idealistic, twenty something college guys. You know the kind -- they make their own punk clothes, are vegan, and write poetry worse than mine when they aren't reading Abbie Hoffman.

The big rally happened right after that first meeting on Oct. 5th. The WCW paid for a permit to meet in a Capital Hill park, had a string of not-terribly-good guest speakers and then we marched downtown. By the time we got downtown, there were about 1,000 people in the group. It was a gorgeous day and the whole thing was fairly successful; aside with WCW being a little pushy with the collection buckets at the rally in the park. They had me and several others wander through the crowd three times to beg for money presumably so WCW could pay for the rally. At least I think that's what the money was for. I've never heard a solid figure on how much was raised that day or what the total cost of the event was.

Afterwards, I went to their weekly meetings every Sunday in a very pretty and very drafty church in Ballard. They were usually two-hour bitchfests about the Bush Regime. Later, I went out in storms to put fliers up on phone poles, light poles, bulletin boards, etc.

The group got some members to fork over for some orange jumpsuits ala Gitmo style and started doing Thursday night vigils in the brutal cold in downtown Seattle. We were there to remind the holiday shoppers that hundreds of foreign nationals were being held illegally in Guantanamo by the Bush Regime and that the Military Commissions Act was an illegal trick that defied every known international law. Fair enough. I went to one of those and held a sign with a 70-year-old woman who had left another activist group because she said: "They were just all about the salmon and protecting the salmon habitat and I was just sick of fish activism." She was a nice lady but I'm not sure she should have been standing outside in the cold when she looked frail enough to blow away.

Things started to get weird. First I had to listen to a very authoritarian twenty something member scold myself and another meeting attendee for 'showing up late'. Well, shit. It's Sunday. It's awful weather out and we're here. (Citizen Alert was always grateful when anybody showed up.)

Then I found out that most of the 'core members' were also communists. That's fine. But they're members of a national organization called the Revolutionary Communist Party. I did a little reading on this group -- and it wasn't easy finding anything on them. The covertness of the RCP weirded me out to no end. I'd met tons of socialists when I was in the UK and especially Australia. Their socialist leanings were no big secret. They wanted national healthcare (the continuation of it) and more corporate accountability. What's wrong with that?!

Every time I asked one of the RCP members what they were about, why they were in WCW, I ran head first into the dreaded Smug Smile. If you've never experienced this, you've never been anywhere near Utah where the Mormons invented and perfected the Smug Smile. The Smug Smile basically sez: "You're wrong, I'm right. You're a sad, misguided unbeliever and you're going to hell. I, however, am going to heaven when I die. My own, personal heaven ... since we've already got most of Idaho by proxy."

I was getting that vibe from the RCP. So I did more reading and finally stumbled upon some truly creepy stuff. Like, for example, the RCP has founded numerous anti-war/anti-establishment groups since the 1980s. Most of these groups steam along for a few years and then just cease to exist. The websites come down, the meetings stop. No explanation. Coming from an environmentalist background I was shocked. The group I was in off and on from 1992-2002, had been in around since the late 1970s when it was founded to stop the MX missile system from being brought into Nevada by the Reagan administration.

I asked a couple of the 'core members' of the RCP what they were doing in the WCW. They assured me that they weren't looking for fresh communist recruits and that they only wanted to work with democrats, republicans, whoever to stop the Bush regime. But every single time I asked them WHAT their best-case scenario was they got cagey. I'd get the Smug Smile. What did the RCP want? A multi-party system? An abolishment of the electoral college? A few seats along side some libertarians and greens in the Senate? They always got super vague and would say things like 'well, that's the first step'. First step to what?

In December I went to a WCW meeting and one of the 'core group' (and RCP member!) announced that he was starting a Seattle chapter of a communist youth brigade. He was looking for members. He was doing exactly what the other RCP folks had told me they would never, do -- using WCW as a place to fish for new members for the RCP. This terribly idealistic kid wanted myself and the half dozen present to start working on fund raising so he and some other 'core group' members (RCP members too!) could fly to NYC and attend a meeting at WCW's national headquarters. I'm just wondering how close the WCW's New York office is to the RCP's national office ...?

I visited the website this guy had put up for the little youth brigade. It has rifles and bayonets as part of the motif.

Because politics -- any version of it -- always has a complicated history, I did a little more research. I learned that Mao, the former 'benevolent dictator' of communist China, was one of the RCP's favorite philosophers and they quote him a lot. I also learned he killed an estimated 15 million Chinese during his Great Upward Movement which was basically a food-for-bombs exchange with the Soviet Union. Chinese starved to death so Mao could arm his 'People's Army' against any real or imagined internal threats ... to him. Like Tibet, for example. A country where today it's illegal to teach the Tibetan language, they have 60% unemployment, thousands of ethnic Chinese were forced to moved there in the 70s and take over Tibetan farms and businesses. Oh yeah, and under Mao, hundreds of thousands of Tibetan Buddhists were executed or imprisoned because 'religion is poison.' And this guy is their rock star.

Then I discovered that the RCP has also founded NION (Not In Our Name), and they've been linked to ANSWER (Act Now Stop War End Racism). So why so many anti-war groups? Why can't the RCP just march under their own banner?

I learned RCP was founded by a 70s activist, Bob Avakian, who has been 'in exile' from the U.S. for decades and gives lectures on the pros of communism via an undisclosed location ala Cheney. He's supposedly an eloquent speaker. Personally, I can barely sit through a six minute lecture let alone a six hour DVD of one. If Mao is the Old Testament god to the RCP, then Avakian is their Jesus Christ. When they talk about him their eyes get real glassy and they get dreamy little grins. (Imagine that politics is your poison ... err drug.)

Finally, I found a couple of websites alleging that the RCP is the only communist party in America that continues to call for the 'violent over throw of the government.' That's right. Rifles and bayonets! Molotov cocktails hitting cop cars. They don't want any seats in Congress. They want to burn Congress to the ground.

Some would argue they're not above using scapegoats to get what they want. What's especially alarming about the RCP is that other, extreme Leftist groups are afraid of them. Anarchists hate the RCP and any of it's off shoots like the WCW with a purple passion. I've had several tell me that the RCP 'sets them up' at protests to get 'taken down by the cops.' An event some what like this occurred on Oct. 5th right here in Rain City. I wrote angry letters to feckless TV reporters over it because of their shoddy coverage of it. Afterwards, I read in a local weekly newspaper that the cops 'received an anonymous tip' that Anarchists were going to be joining the Oct. 5th rally. Hmmm ... wonder who called them???

So I'm done with the World Can't Wait, comrades. I'm all for the removal of the zit that is BushCo from America's ass but I support our democracy, however shabby it's looking, because I am a member of a democracy-by-representation society, not a displaced worker from the Hunan Province looking to re-educate my wayward Tibetan neighbors by forcing them to read the Little Red Book at gunpoint.

Monday, January 01, 2007

Heureux Nouveau Année ... eh?

Maybe it's because I'm stuck on the Dole while I'm waiting for my worker retraining classes to kick in, but I've been staring a lot more wistfully north these days. I don't know ... is the moss really greener on the other side?



I've just got this nagging curiousity about Our Neighbors to the North, those Molson Drinkers ...


Tuesday, December 26, 2006

I Found Him!

I finally found that nude painter I'd seen in a book at Tez's flat in 2003.



He's a UK painter and his stuff is pretty provacative, like his personal life. According to Wikipedia, he's got 40(!) illegitimate children. I wonder how he found the time to paint ...

Friday, November 24, 2006

Bareback ... Doctor?

Is it just my imagination or do these two make a hot couple?



I mean, I know Bryan Singer is queer, which is fine. But, ummm, is it just me or have House and Wilson been the secret gay odd couple since at least last season? For chrisstake, Wilson COOKED for House last season. He's clearly the bitch and House is the top. Who cares what these shut-ins say!

Saturday, November 18, 2006

It's Not Who, It's When

I was just watching a tape of Real Time with Bill Maher. This is from a November 3, 2006 airdate on HBO. I was so effing shocked by what one of his panel guests said, I had to sorta take dictation and now I'm gonna post the excerpt here.
BILL MAHER: “We’ve had this national debt for 215 years. It was $4 trillion when Bush took office, now it’s doubled. It’s $8 trillion. I know they like to say ‘Democrats are gonna raise your taxes’ but doesn’t SOMEBODY have to pay for this because when the deficit goes up, when the debt goes up -- it’s not who, it’s when. I don’t have kids so I don’t care, but if you do have kids, I would think you’d care?”

ALEC BALDWIN: “What this administration has tried to do is to increase the debt and to spend money on funding this war. And the money has gone into the hands of many, many private contractors and it’s been a big engine in the economy. Many of the people in this country are not enjoying the benefits of this economy but the Dow is up above 12,000. A lot of it has to do with spending on the war. Now this administration doesn’t wanna raise people’s taxes, they wanna shift that debt burden onto the people, so that the service of the debt prevents certain social spending in years to come --“

MAHER: “They wanna starve the people.”

BALDWIN: “Exactly. They wanna disenfranchise Democratic constituents by saying ‘we don’t have the money to pay for your problems because we have to service this huge debt.’ Literally that is their goal.”

MAHER: (to Rep. Jack Kingston R-Georgia) “Is that true?! Are you gonna admit to that one too?”

Comments?

Friday, November 10, 2006

Did you say 'cheap wine'?!


I went to one of these last night at this place. It was a gas but I only stayed to hear the first three poets (there were like 20 signed up to read!) because I was tired, frozen and hungry after holding a protest banner for World Can't Wait for two hours downtown.



I was gonna post a rough, un-edited poem inspired by last night's reading but my order from Campmor just got here and, damnit, I have backpacks, yoga tops and thermal underwear to go play with now. WooT!!!


Tuesday, November 07, 2006

What the Rocky Mtn. State is All About (sing it)!

When I was in Grand Junction, Colorado in Summer 2003 I went into a grocery store in search of some Odwalla juice. You know what I'm talkin' about -- that frothy, flash-frozen goodness that us non-juice machine people live by. When I couldn't find the juice, I asked an employee. He was about 60 years old, white haired and bug-eyed with one of those pretend twangy accents that Coloradians put on to make themselves sound extra inbred.

When I described the product, he said: "Oh-wallah?! Sounds like sometin' tha have in Cale-fornYah or other foreign countries."

I wasn't in the mood to remind this village idiot that California is a STATE, not a foreign country, and has a GNP so large its tax revenues partly fund Colorado's vast federal parks.

That said, here's a ditty to the un-realest state in the union, right next door to (and just a Tabernacle shy of) the State of the Cult where polygamization of child brides in the name of the one true religion still goes on. METH & MAN ASS!

Tuesday, October 31, 2006

One Small Step ...

In an effort to curb my rampant net surfing via this CPU (central procrastinating unit), I killed my MySpace account. This is good. I needed a mental health vacation.

I'm not sure which was worse -- having that creepy chick from one of the feminist groups virtually 'stalk' me because I disagreed with her asshat comments about pornography or spending 15 minutes out of every hour of the day in one of the "Lost" newsgroups arguing about the significance of the Dharma Initiative's logo. Ah, yes now onto the MicroSoft training modules and less time wasted on MySpazz with my head up my ass.

Or maybe I could try working on one of my unfinished novels once in a while,

-- Mz M.

Saturday, October 14, 2006

Petite Blonde/Giant Cajones & a TGILF !

My peoples,

Give it up for this little lady. Applaud. Send food. Send Band-Aids for the blisters. Sing her praises far and wide. Damn, that takes balls. Like I said in the Comments section, my overall impression of Los Angeles in January 2002 (sunny, 73 degrees) was: Wow! What a great place to live if it weren't for all these FUCKING CARS.

In other, less globally ecological news, I've got a new celeb crush.



David Krumholtz is sooo fifteen minutes ago! Not only has this theatre geek worked opposite Kevin Spacey on Broadway, nailed an Emmy on a sloppy, stupid David Kelley show but, NO, wait! There's MORE. He also used to be a comic book illustrator and has done the books-on-tape thingie for one of Neil Gaiman's stories. (Gasp!) I'm all a twitter. Ah, but of course, he's married to some blonde bimbo from the South, a mutant Reese-Witherspoon-meets-Cameron-Diaz freak.

I can't wait till we get the back story/history arc on his character on Lost. Oh why do I always fall for the emotionally unbalanced/serial murderer types? Why?!


-- Mz M.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Let's Be Kind and Move On



That's what my fine art photography professor used to say about my photos. In light of that and the fact that it's been a while since I held a protest sign in one hand while snapping photos with the other, I'm just gonna post the link for the Post Intelligencer's kick ass photo montage of the Thursday protest. Thank Gawd I didn't make any of them. Let's not zero in on the fat little dutch girl.

-- Mz M.

Monday, October 02, 2006

Civil Disobedience & Near Life Experiences

I went to my first World Can't Wait meet Sunday up in balmy Ballard. We met in this monstrous, three story Methodist church that towered over all the hippie houses in Ballard. Afterwards, I walked home putting up fliers for the big protest on October 5th as I went.



Also on Sunday, I got somefreak out news. My older (not oldest) brother, Dana, apparently hit a deer while riding his motorcycle. My sister-in-law said he basically stove in one side of his rib cage, collapsed a lung and broke both clavicles. Most serious, he 'tore' a section of his heart. He's had three open-heart procedures in the last 72 hours to stop the bleeding.

I've been musing on the number of times I've received batshit emergency news concerning my brothers. One of the earliest was when I was nine and Dana went off a cliff with two of his buddies the night before their graduation from Carmel High. They were driving in a 60's VW Bug and it rolled down an embankment. The friend who was driving (they were all shitfaced) died on impact. My brother, all 6'1" of him, was stuffed in the backseat. He kicked his way out of the VW and wandered with a fractured skull and brain hemorrhage several miles before collapsing in the backyard of some rich lady's estate.

My Mom drove white-knuckled from Reno to California and we stalked the gleaming hallways of posh Monterey General for several days until Dana woke up from his coma. A few weeks later, he was back home and brooding, agitated and driving my Dad insane with his California boy lifestyle. I remember him cutting the cast off his arm with a hand saw stealing two six-packs of beer and then disappearing with one of his friends on the back of a dirt bike for some macho mourning over their slain partner in crime.

We rarely saw Dana when I was growing up. He turned up twice in Reno after the accident, both times in a yellow Corvette Stingray that had come from settlement money after the accident.

The last visit he paid to Mom and me was a few months before the voices in my Mom's head told her to pack everything up and relocate us to Battle Mountain, Nevada before the giant California earthquake hit and caused all the water in Lake Tahoe to slop over like a giant teacup and drown all of Reno.

The visit did not go well. We fought constantly, mostly over Cap'n Crunch cereal, the TV (which monotonously aired the Watergate hearings) and what to do on those boring Nevada afternoons.

After Mom relocated us to the Armpit of America, I saw much less of Dana. I can only remember one very brief visit he paid while I was in junior high school. As we cruised that desiccated, gray-beige hamlet of nothingness, he said to me: "If the world had an asshole, this is right where they'd put it." It was an astute comment.

As relations with my emotionally abusive Dad grew worse, my contact with Dana withered down to a birthday card literally once every ten years usually included with a stern admonishment to "straigten up and fly right" or maybe "strive to perform at your potential". His comments weren't just ridiculing, they read like a fucking pamphlet from the local Army recruiters office. Meanwhile, Mom was reduced to having me phone my well-off Dad every single month for the measly $150 child support so we could pay the electric bill.

In 1985, at my Dad's relentless request, I left the tiny community college in Elko, Nevada where I was on scholarship and moved to Sacramento for a temporary custodial job Dana had lined up for me. It was union and $7 something an hour, big pay for 1985. I think my Dad erroneously believed that some of Dana's talent for making money would rub off on me. It didn't happen.

Dana was a changed person in Sacramento. He was impatient, a devout fitness fanatic and elitist thanks to his youth spent in Monterey. He lived in a gated condo complex off one of the busiest intersections in THE blandest of all California 'burbs. He drove a BMW, wore polo shirts and hunted perky aerobics instructors when he wasn't making his first million. In the six months I lasted in Sacramento, sharing an apartment with three trust funded assholes in one of the poorest neighborhoods, I saw him three times. Once was while at work, cleaning the bathrooms at Cal Expo and he was working as a state cop cum Cal Expo security guard. He even had those cop mirror sunglasses to complete his stoic image.

Dana avoided me like the plague. He eventually sold his start-up business and hit the rare air of the upper class. He had time shares in Mexico, a cabin in Lake Tahoe and several vacations to Europe, Hawaii and Australia. Once every six years my mother got a card from Cancun or Amsterdam. Even less frequently, he would show up on Mom's doorstep with a meek girlfriend in tow, always at least ten years younger than him.

In 1993 when our Mom died, Dana flew me and my Dad up to Washington state to meet my oldest brother, Glenn. We went up in Dana's antique Cessna, another toy gotten from his admission into the Upper Class. September 1993 was a black, ugly time in our already tenuously-shared history and Mom's death seemed to accentuate the ugliness in everyone.

After we had her body shipped back to Reno, everyone left all the funeral arrangements up to me. Dana paid for all of it but I had to do the phone work, the leg work and the numbing job of finding a casket. It wasn't Six Feet Under, it sucked. I remember Dad admonishing Dana for crying at the funeral. Yep, Daddy was that dysfunctional.

Post 1993 I chose, wisely, to avoid my brothers. I did this mostly out of self preservation and also out of the deep need for a mental health vacation from their relentlessly manipulative, misogynistic ways. I didn't need anyone telling me not to swear, what to eat (or not eat) or what to wear. I was an adult -- had been for some time -- and I just couldn't get either of these men to grasp that concept. Their inability to 'get it' -- that I'm an adult, a multifaceted individual with my own valid opinions, beliefs and experiences and someone whom in many ways they've never really met, isn't a roadblock to our relationships, it's the fucking Grand Canyon.

Dana lying in a hospital has me remembering something that happened around the time of his first accident. I think it was a few years after. I was staying at my Dad's in Carmel Valley that summer.

It was hot. There was another drought on. My step-mother was growing more and more resentful of my existence. I'd gotten thrown from a neighbor friend's horse but not seriously hurt. I'd then gotten into an argument with the neighbor friend's younger sister. She'd dragged some other neighborhood teens into it. They were all older than me and more cunning in the ways of ostracizing mouthy, hyperactive twelve year olds like me. To show that I was officially 'out of the club' for the remainder of my summer vacation, they'd thrown my denim jacket up into one of those massive California oaks, like twenty feet up.

The thing about the jacket was Dana had given it to me a few weeks before. He said he'd found it while fishing along the river. I'd seized on the idea of wearing it because it looked exactly like the one he wore. It was cool and my big brother had declared it cool. He knew all about cool. He rode surf boards and drove sports cars too fast.

One afternoon, I dragged him up the road to where the jacket was suspended high in the branches of an oak and pleaded with him to get it down for me. Gaping up at that ridiculously high tree, he kicked at the trunk and said 'hell no'. He said there was no way he was climbing that thing and, besides, he had a party to get to.

He left me standing under that giant tree with the horrible new idea that there were things in this world my brothers were incapable of doing, great dark expanses that they could not cross either by motorbike or Corvette. This is where I first fumbled with the idea that there are lengths too great to go for love.

Right now -- more than anything else in life -- I just want my big brother to get out of his hospital bed, go back in time and climb that oak. And get that stupid denim jacket back for me.

-- Mz M.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

YOU Can't Wait




World Can't Wait.org


When the Nazis came for the communists,
I remained silent;
I was not a communist.

When they locked up the social democrats,
I remained silent;
I was not a social democrat.

When they came for the trade unionists,
I did not speak out;
I was not a trade unionist.

When they came for me,
there was no one left to speak out.


-- Pastor Martin Niemöller



They came first for the Communists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Communist.

Then they came for the Jews,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a Jew.

Then they came for the trade unionists,
and I didn't speak up because I wasn't a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Catholics,
and I didn't speak up because I was a Protestant.

Then they came for me,
and by that time no one was left to speak up.

-- New England Holocaust Memorial version



-- Mz M.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

Strange Fruit

Okay, someone please go to this slide show and then identify the fruit for me. I've seen them growing wild out in the Cascades by the meadowful. What the hell are they? Gardeners PLEASE help.

-- Mz M.

P.S. I was wrong about the electric cars! Damnit, they only go about 30mph tops. Shite.

Monday, September 25, 2006

$4,000 Pussy

I'm perplexed by this brave new world.



I mean, you still have to deal with the steaming litter box and the middle-of-the-night lungings at your face and/or loud crashing noises because felines are nocturnal ninnies who want to frolick at 2 a.m. And they still get higher than kites on catnip.

It is cool that they are all going to be showing up neutered/spayed. At least that's one nice twist.

I was always led to believe that the allergy problem was most prominent in un-neutered males, something to do with hormones and saliva.

Now if they could just come up with genetically modified dogs that can bag their own poop ... or even better, use doggie potties.

-- Mz M.

Sunday, September 24, 2006

Ultimate Hetero Male Fantasy?

In case you were wondering, James, I've only bought the first one but it ROCKS.



I just put in some hold requests for the next 5 volumes at the Seattle Public Library. At 15-20 bucks a pop, I can't be buying one of these every week.

An, of course, since they started running this thru Vertigo in like 2003, I feel yet again behind the curve.

-- Mz M.

Thursday, September 21, 2006

A View From Harborview Medical Center

I took these pics on Monday evening and really early Tuesday morning after they set me free from yet another weird sleep over at the Sleep Clinic.

I'm experimenting with www.photobucket.com ... let's see how this goes.

This one is my favorite so far.



Click on the link above to read a little about each shot.

-- Mz M.

Sunday, September 17, 2006

More Horrors, Same House (Regime)

I just watched this in it's entirety. I urge everybody else to do the same, or better yet, blow 20 bucks and buy the DVD.

Be patient, it takes a while. You might wanna turn the sound off on your computer and walk a way for a couple hours while it downloads the stream.

No big surprise in that "our friends" the Pakistanis had a heavy hand in 9/11.

Just wondering now if the detainees at Git'mo maybe DO know something ... some thing that would incriminate the Bush Regime, not bin Laden. Maybe some Marine-sized interrogator asked Omar the wrong question four years ago during one of their torture sessions. Perhaps something like: "Did you ever see any Westerners while you and your crazy fundamentalist Daddy were staying in Jalalabad?" And poor little Omar -- literally dying to tell the truth -- probably blurted out: "Oh sure, we saw CIA operatives talking with bin Laden all the time. They used to bring us money and guns ... and fruit juice!"

It just gets worse and worse,

-- Mz M.

Saturday, September 16, 2006

House of Horrors

I've been listening to Randi Rhodes on Air America talk about the Geneva Conventions all week and then I finished reading this Rolling Stone article last night at like 3a.m. because I couldn't sleep. And then of course, the horror of the Bush Regime sunk in anew and I really couldn't sleep.



Somebody needs to start a letter drive to get this kid and the others like him out of Git'mo. I mean, Marines incarcerating pre-adolecents in some sub-division called 'Camp Iguana'?!

WTF?

I'd like to wake up from this nightmare now,

-- Mz M.