rockin' our World

"An object at rest will remain at rest until an unbalanced force acts on it.
An object in motion will remain in motion until an unbalanced force acts on it."
-Newton's First Law of Motion

One of the easiest selling points of Conservatism is comfort. Societies are always changing, whether we like it or not, and there is a fantasy held by many that things can (and should) remain 'As Is'. This often arises from an erroneous belief that there was a 'Good Old Days' where things were simpler (meaning better) and that Things are getting Worse because people (insert caption of 'Liberal') keep trying to change things. Not all conservatives are inert, but it is a core belief that lies beneath many conservative talking points.

Why am I rambling on about this? No reason.

A couple weeks ago, a friend e-mailed me an invite to a global warming lecture. It was with this guy named Andy Revkin, a noted (or so I've been Told) science journalist for the New York Times and was being hosted by the Rainforest Alliance. Kat and I showed up in our eco-friendly garb - denim, concert T-shirts, steel-tipped Doc Martens, and nice, vaguely-hippie clothes. Our first cue that we might be swimming in strange waters was when we stepped off the elevator and were greeted with a sea of nametags. Kat had been listed as my guest so she was relegated to pencilling in her name. I hadn't a suitable pocket to attach my tag so I clipped it to my belt buckle and headed inside.

The room was stuffed with khakis, business shirts and dress-pants. Kat and my nametags looked woefully inadequate beside the corporate names and titles that began with the words Vice President. Many looked as if they had just shared a taxi from the East Side where they had just attended a U.N. summit on deforestation. Fortunately, awkwardness can be overcome with an adequate dose of alcohol and/or pills and the Rainforest Alliance provided free wine and beer exclusively for that purpose... that's what I choose to believe, anyway. Kat and I huddled near one another for comfort. Our previous notion of an environmental meeting involved refreshments provided by a vending machine accessed "down the hall and to the right". If it wasn't for a diorama-style room of glossy testimonials to fighting deforestation and supporting self-sustaining businesses, I'd have thought I was standing outside a board meeting for an Upper East Side non-profit group (also known as the 'Thing To Do When You're Rich and Bored').

I stared at the shiny, bright handouts and my first thought was 'This doesn't look like recycled paper'. Fortunately, my friends arrived and bailed me out of further observation. I had more primal needs to attend. The lecture was going to start and the gravy train of foccachia snacks, chocolate-dipped strawberries and free wine would soon dry up. I had to make my move. I approached the dour woman who manned the bar. I smiled pleasantly and offered my wine glass and a nonchallant play for a refill. The woman offered a "eat hot death, deadbeat" glare, then begrudgingly offered me 1 inch of red wine... somebody was a little bitter about working overtime.

Kat and I scored a pair of fold-out chairs in the back and set our paper-plate booty on our laps. Despite our spoils, now was the moment I secretly dreaded. Although I am passionate about the environment and do my best to spend my money as eco-friendly as possible, I am gun-shy about environmental lectures. They tend to make me feel ineffectual and angry. Lecturers often talk about atrocities of such scale and in lands so far away, I feel like I've been trying to piss on a forest fire. When I go to an environmental discussion, I want it to be focused and, preferably, local. I want to be able to wrap my hands around it and affect it and mobilize myself against it. It's not that I don't want to affect international issues, but I believe that the best way to get others to change is to live as an example and do it first in your own back yard.

So... how was the lecturer?

Over the years, my tolerance for bullshit has dropped to zero. I have even less patience for politicians and corporate PR. They wield masks that present me well-crafted lies and dreamy appraisals of how they want me to think as they prey that I'm not intellectually curious enough to learn any more than they have fed me. Political/scientific journalists are, sadly, cut from much of the same cloth. In order to stay on the Inside and, hopefully, find an opportunity to break the Big Story, reporters must convince the Public, and the Insiders, that they're probably (wink wink) on the Right side while maintaining the facade that reporting is a non-partisan act. It's the same delusion that documentaries are non-fiction. We all hope that the responsible reporter will convey the 'truth' of a moment, but these things cannot always be found without pointing a few fingers and making a few enemies.

Mr. Revkin offered no finger-pointing on this evening. Before he began his lecture, he had to read a disclaimer that anything he said did not represent the opinion of The New York Times. Thank God for that, otherwise I'd think that he was speaking the opinions of an inanimate, corporation and not speaking as a regular human being. He told us about how busy and tired he was from following hurricane news over the last 3 weeks. He told us how journalism isn't good for environmental reporting because it happens slowly instead of in big, catastrophic bangs. He told us that we need to educate our children better if we are going to have any hope of properly addressing global, environmental issues. Basically, he showed us that he was burnt out, frustrated, world weary and needed some sleep. He was a notch off of completely cynical, but I'd give that a couple years. I didn't find myself pissed off at the end of the lecture, but I wasn't exactly raring to get out there and have babies so I could educate them, either.

The wine and snacks were good, though.

my 'seven things' answers

My blogs are running thin, so I am happy to accommodate Muse's blogging questions...

Seven Things Quiz

SEVEN THINGS

Seven things you plan to do before you die

1. Travel around the world.
2. Publish a novel.
3. Live abroad.
4. See my abs again.
5. Sustain a living through my art.
6. Let 'it' go.
7. Have a kid. (those two thumps were Kat and my mother hitting the floor)


Seven things you can do

1. Write
2. Talk movies
3. draw
4. vent my frustration
5. worry
6. play guitar
7. cook


Seven things you can't do

1. Give myself a break
2. Work a 9-to-5 office job
3. Work on an oil rig
4. Dance to techno or rock music
(unless pogoing, tapping my foot, or moshing counts)
5. Conduct a non-emotional discussion on the environment
6. Keep it to myself
7. Sing


Seven things that attract you to the opposite sex

1. Challenging (punky) attitude
2. Intelligence
3. Wit
4. Adventurous nature
5. Gothy or Hippie style
6. Butt (not big, just perky)
7. Piercing eyes


Seven things you say most

1. "You know what I can't stand?!" (the answer is usually yes)
2. "What the fuck was that?!" (when I'm watching the news)
3. "What? What?! What do you want from me?!" (directed at Pippin (one of our cats) when he meows then flops down next to my computer desk for the umpteenth time, soliciting another petting session. Immediately followed by perfunctory petting.)
4. "I am Switzerland. I have no opinion." (when I refuse to answer a loaded question)
5. "Cool as the other side of the pillow." (when I'm stoned or have reached the sweet spot of drunkenness)
6. "God-dammit!" (When I have gotten my ass soundly kicked in a computer game. Usually requires a cooling off period of 5 minutes. With no context, this usually makes Kat and our two cats, jump.)
7. "I need a drink!" (Normally presented in an e-mail to Kat after I've emerged from another mind-numbing meeting with incompetent co-workers.)


Seven celebrity crushes

1. Cate Blanchett
2. Lauren Bacall
3. Audrey Hepburn
4. Allison Mosshart (singer for The Kills)
5. Helena Bonham Carter (in Fight Club)
6. Karen Allen (in Raiders of the Lost Ark)
7. Gwyneth Paltrow (in The Royal Tenenbaums)

the blue birthday

Last Wednesday, I celebrated my 34th birthday. It was a mellow affair. We ate sushi and wine then, later in the evening, Kat presented me with a lemon-blueberry cake that was fantastic... and it got me to thinking about my blue, birthday cake. (cue hazy, flashback sequence)

It was an old war in my family.

"What color cake do you want," my mother would ask... but she knew what I wanted.

"Blue," came the swift reply.

"Ugh," she would groan in that cataclysmic way that drives a refuted child into madness. "I'm not making a blue cake."

"Why not?"

"It's unnatural," she answered. It was as if I'd asked a Southern Baptist minister what was wrong with being gay. "Nothing in nature is blue."

"The sky is blue."

"The sky isn't a thing," she would proclaim as if it made perfect sense.

Thus began The Exchange wherein I would offer evidence of all the blue things in the world and she would condemn them to some off-shade of purple or lavender. Inevitably, my single-digit experience would lose to Mom's debating skills and a chocolate or yellow box cake would arrive on the 7th, clad in yellow or green frosting. Sometimes, a blue candle or piece of rock-hard cake candy would be added to placate my wounded ego (or mock my frustration).

But then, my 11th birthday arrived and Mom decided that she'd had enough and it was time to Prove how hideous a blue cake would look. We were enjoying a front-yard birthday/barbecue bash with the neighbors. Mom emerged from the front door, cleared the bags of hot dog buns and potato chips from the picnic table and presented a brilliant, blue cake.

"There you are," she said as if she were absolving herself for having constructed a biological weapon.

I approached it like Roy Neary in Close Encounters of the Third Kind as he cautiously ascended a hill at the side of the road and beheld Devil's Tower for the first time- wonder and awe. It was like nothing I had ever seen before. Mom was right. Nothing in nature could quite achieve the hue of blue that stood before me in the guise of a confectionary spread. It was a swirly monolith of anti-matter that defied the label of ''food' and Dared us to eat it.

It was perfect.

The mad gleam in my eye told my mother instantly that she had lost. Rather than greet this pulsating mass of radioactive buttercream, I had fallen in love. Mom refused to cut the cake or even eat a slice. In fact, none of the adults had apparently saved enough room for dessert that day. So much the more for me.

After running family and neighbors ragged from a already-manic kid now hopped up on 'blue cake', sugar shock, I slept well that night, with a brilliant, blue tongue.

I was never again asked what color cake I wanted, but I was cool with that... I'd got mine.

looking for the Cure

The last few weeks have felt like a year. That happens when you're going through a growth spurt and things are really Happening. On Saturday, the Study Abroad on the Bowery program wrapped up our three week workshop with a final performance and 'graduation ceremony'. Names were called out while workshop students whistled a heinous rendition of "Pomp and Circumstance". I met some really cool people over the last few weeks and was sad to see them go, but I'm ready for a break. By a break, I mean that I have to start applying all the shit I've been absorbing over the last few weeks. It's like I've spent too much time in a good art museum. After a while, I overload on the visual stimulation and just start mindlessly looking at blotches of color mounted on walls.

I've been obsessed with Spalding Gray over the last few weeks. Actually, I have been a huge fan of Spalding Gray for years. I have always been a huge fan of The Killing Fields and when I heard that a performance artist had done a monologue of his experiences in making the film, I immediately went out and rented Swimming to Cambodia. The movie was incredible. Here was a guy who sat at a desk with a glass of water and a microphone and delivered a stunning, storytelling display that effortlessly blew away 90 percent of the acting I'd seen. I immediately went out and rented Monster in a Box and Gray's Anatomy which proved to be equally-fulfilling. When he committed suicide early last year, I was crushed. His style of performance was referred to as a 'talking cure' and his neuroses, insecurities, and discoveries often seemed to mirror my own. Spalding felt like a passive-aggressive member of my unspoken club where We all struggled to Keep It Together through our art. I had never met the man nor had an opportunity to see one of his live performances, but I felt a kinship. It's hard not to when the work you love is of such a personal nature.

After I'd graduated with my MFA in playwriting, one of my professors told me that my writing style was similar to Spalding's work. He suggested that I rent out a theater and put on a one-man show. Of course, I was flattered to have my writing compared to Spalding's, but the idea of memorizing and performing anything over 10 minutes was laughable and the suggestion that I do it solo was a double-decker sandwich of Laughable and Horrifying. After 3 weeks of performance poetry though... I've been watching my copy of Swimming to Cambodia and thinking that, maybe, the sandwich has become more of a Snort and Grimace affair... and not so ludicrous an idea.

NPR did a very good retrospective on Spalding and his work.