UMB, MPG

Pet peeve. When I was between four and five feet tall I’d go to the grocery store with my father every Sunday. I enjoyed walking across the parking lot, observing the birds nesting in the letters on the side of the store. “UMB Bank”. Just like I thought the airline was literally pronounced “twah,” I believed the bank to be “uhmmb”. Imagine my concern when I learned the adult world was calling something the “United Missouri Bank Bank”.

Today a radio personality enthused about cars with “25, 30, 35 MPGS! MPGS you wouldn’t believe!” You know, the minivan I drove in highschool ran at 36 MPGS. Miles Per GallonS. Two gallons, to be precise.

Anyhow. Drummer continues to be the most wonderful creature. I can’t imagine being without him. And I picked out classes for next semester.

Rant, rant, anxiety.

Rant: While perusing the Facebook, tanned female crotch caught my eye on an old friend’s profile. The cause? A “What kind of lingerie are you?” quiz. Okay, _______ is a g-string. How fascinating. Only it wasn’t a g-string, it was labeled as a “v-string”. Ready to lol at the clueless code-monkey who made the typo, I googled the term. Victoria’s Secret is trying to deny that if it looks, walks, and quacks like a duck… Meh.

Rant: When did Threadless.com become so high-end? My first purchases from them were made at $10/shirt. Now they’re touting $25 sales. Good for them, but bad for those of us likely to blow $50 on five shirts a year or $0 on a potential two shirts. Damn hipsters.

Anxiety: Flatmate. Heard through the reputable side of the grapevine that he may have done some physically invasive things to at least one female while drunk, while having a girlfriend of his own. No good. May be considering locks on main and bathroom doors, just in case. I trust him not to be creepy while sober, which is 90% of the time, and I feel fairly safe as Drummer has been over (or I at his apartment) most nights of the week. He has been a solid flatmate so far and has shown no signs of ever disrespecting my space. There is also a chance that the flatmate has been confused with his former flatmate, who really was an alcoholic skeeze. I am hoping this is the case, and am gathering information to confirm that more reassuring hypothesis.

Amtrak, my dear…

This just isn’t going to work out between us. It’s in part because of the ways you’ve treated me, but mostly because of today’s debacle involving my mother.

She boarded you at nine this morning, and she’ll be with you for at least another hour. Your website states that the ride should take about five hours, not eight. At two o’clock you ran her into a truck– no word yet on whether the trucks passengers survived. I curiously perused your online materials and learned that in the past twelve months, only 21% of your rides between our two major midwestern cities have been on time. Really, Amtrak? Wouldn’t it be logical to tack an extra half hour on to your expected ride time and boost that damning statistic up to at least 1/3? Your seem quite content to trap passengers on you and kindly announce that the dining car is open– a bottle of water is only $3.50. Last time I checked, you weren’t Disney World.

I am sick of you for my own sake as well. Last time I rode you, you caused a young business-woman, trying to save money on a 45-minute ride, to be three hours late for a job interview. Your constantly-harassed coachmen did not make it clear whether a refund could be made available to her. After she got off, she was replaced by a gang of 30-something redneck men, who loudly talked about how much coke they would buy if they won the lottery, and how to scam one’s doctor for testosterone supplements (take your gf’s birth control pills.) The time before that, a creepy man harassed me the whole ride, and a one-armed cowboy a few seats back had phone-sex with possibly more than one woman at once while several small children sat within ear-shot. Their parents? Wearing headphones.

And although this is not entirely your fault, I hate the often non-existent cell service along your track. It’s often impossible to contact anyone at your destination if the train is sitting still for hours in a dead zone. Yes, your friends and relatives can check the Amtrack website, but not when you DELETE THE MOTHERFUCKING TRAIN BEFORE IT HAS EVEN ARRIVED YOU COCKSUCKERS.

Now I’m off to pick up my poor mum. She’s going to be terribly frazzled.

Loaded/Load of

Lawyer1: “And then what did you see?”

Witness: “I saw him swinging an ax at the other man, obviously trying to kill hi-”

Lawyer2: “Objection! ‘Kill’ is a loaded word and unfairly prejudices the jury against my client.”

Judge: “Objection sustained.”

Lawyer1: “Could you rephrase your statement?”

Witness: “I saw him swing an ax at the other man with the intent of… of… ending his biological processes.”

HOW MOTHERFUCKING RIDICULOUS IS THAT??? I will punch anyone in the face who can stand before me and try to say that the word “rape” should be barred from courts. It didn’t happen during the Red Scare when Communist was the loaded word and false accusations really were being made. Saying that most rapes are false accusations is an unsupportable statement. This is fucking unbelievable, and life just got a little worse for women across the nation.

In other news, that hike in the unemployment hike? Totally my fault, yo. That pesky 16-24 age group, unable to find summer jobs. But I’ve got some leads and interviews coming up! Also, Drummer is a dream. Today is exactly four months since we first met.

Ebert, suck my cock.

While studying for a film final (fingers crossed for this evening), I noticed something very odd about Ebert’s 1976 review of the movie “Rocky”. If you’re familiar with the movie, you’ll know what I mean. I tried to find clips to illustrate my point, but no luck. It opens:

She sits, tearful and crumpled, in a corner of her little bedroom. Her brother has torn apart the living room with a baseball bat. Rocky, the guy she has fallen in love with, comes into the room.

“Do you want a roommate?” she asks shyly, almost whispering.

“Absolutely,” says Rocky.

Which is exactly what he should say, and how he should say it, and why “Rocky” is such an immensely involving movie.

Um, that’s not how that scene went at all. I’ll get into that right after a couple of other exerpts:

He is awkwardly in love with a painfully shy girl (Talia Shire) who works in the corner pet shop.

And then there’s Talia Shire, as the girl (she was the hapless sister of the Corleone boys in “The Godfather“). When she hesitates before kissing Rocky for the first time, it’s a moment so poignant it’s like no other.

What, she doesn’t get a name? At the end of the movie, Rocky screams Adrian, Adrian, Adrian, over and over– don’t tell me you forgot, Ebert. She’s not just “the girl,” and the scene where she (is kissed) by Rocky for the first time is called sexual assault. He used manipulative tactics to coerce her into his apartment, started taking off his clothes, invaded her personal space, and despite her numerous protestations that she didn’t belong there and should leave or call her brother to let him know where she was, Rocky backed her into a corner, blocked her escape, and presumably raped her.

So then they’re girlfriend and boyfriend, right? Right. And the tearful and crumpled? This is right after she screams in the face of her abusive and alcoholic brother that she’s been the one taking care of him, and that he’s holding her back, not the other way around (all true). With wrath, she storms into her bedroom and slams the door after having properly intimidated the creep. When Rocky follows her (after standing up for her point of view, thank goodness) she is not in any state of womanly distress. Her emotions are understandably high– she is flushed, full of verve at finding her own voice, and sits with ram-rod straight posture. “Tearful and crumpled” my ASS. While she does ask if Rocky wants a roommate in a quiet tone, this is far more a re-assertion of her rational control over those exhilarating emotions of savagery and anger than out of bashfulness.

Ebert, is “Rocky” a good movie because you interpret it to conform to patriarchal standards of rape-based romance?

My teacher argued that “Rocky” could be seen as a story of two trapped people who escape from their situations. Rocky, a fighter on skid row, gets a one-in-a-million chance at glory and respect through the opportunity to fight Apollo Creed. He becomes a hero for the every-day man, and wins in the sense that he holds his own against all odds. Adrian escapes from her brother’s keeping and from her shyness by getting Rocky.

Fuck you, teacher. That’s not growth, that’s not liberation. That’s trading one prison for another, except now instead of getting yelled at every once in a while she gets fucked (or raped) and lives in Rocky’s smelly bachelor pad, forever dwarfed by his fame.

Let’s not even get into the interpretation of “Rocky” as diatribe against black people. I’m so angry I need to go increase the size of my biceps before this final.

end of semester rants

My apartment-mate had her sophomore review today. I’m a little unclear on what her final piece was, but it involved family and the idea of blankets. One of the male reviewers immediately tried to pigeon-hole her piece as “feminist,” just because it involved domesticity. I CALL SHENS. A sculpture student last semester hung his laundry across campus green and painted it white. No one mentioned feminism. Another made a swiveling potato-cannon cockpit. No one mentioned male-ism. This pisses me off to no end.

Next issue. If you wanted to play a game of baseball, would you head for the pool? If you wanted vegetables, would you go to Coldstone? If you want to chat loudly with friends about HOW FUCKING AWESOME YOUR PROJECT WAS AND IT COST 300 DOLLARS or about YOU HAVEN’T SLEPT IN 36 HOURS AND HOW THE BULLSHIT PIECE OF CRAP FINAL YOU SUBMITTED LAST SEMESTER WAS TOTALLY LEGIT BECAUSE BAD THINGS ONLY HAPPEN TO POOR WEE INNOCENT YOU…

Get the fuck out of my studio. I have work to do. Sound-editing work. And my noise-canceling airplane-approved head phones can’t keep your asshattery out of my ears.

logical fallacies

I spend time deducing the causes of my actions and feelings, and find it imperative to divorce two seemingly intertwined ethical standards– what I would do and what everyone else should do. To avoid holes in my argument here, I should preface this all with the opinion that everyone should strive to be critically self aware and to construct a logically sound moral and philosophical system.

The Yale girl came up in class between myself and two other girls. For reasons that become obvious, I shall call the first girl “White,” the other “Gray,” leaving black for myself. White opined that the piece wasn’t even art, and tried to imply that it mattered at this point whether the girl actually had the miscarriages or not. Can you really get to the second year of art school and be so dense about conceptual art? I told her that this (and the dog fiasco) are the most successful works of art in years– we’re talking about them nation-wide, probably world-wide. She then equated first-month miscarriages to murder, and said that the girl should be thrown in jail if the piece was factual. She said that no one should ever abort, ever, and that she felt so strongly because she had nearly been aborted a month before her own birth. I suppose terror of the void overcame her rational facilities, because she went on to state that humans fundamentally know that murder is wrong. Fundamentally. In the basis of our reality.

To borrow a line, my brain nearly exploded. I pointed out to her that morality was culture-based and absolutely subjective, and that the US as a whole operates from a christian-based morality, in which she seemed entirely invested. The response? Outrage! Nooo, she’s not christian at all, how dare I make assumptions about her. This, to me, is like telling someone who has just said, “Send all those niggers back to Africa where they can’t steal our jobs and women any more,” that they are a racist and subsequently listening to an adamant disavowal of any sort of racial discrimination whatsoever.

She wailed against the separation of art and ethics, two realms of thought that have held a dialogue– but existed as separate entities– since the days of Plato. I can’t even get started on that misconception.

Throughout the discussion, Gray held the middle-ground between my radical stance of individual choice and her strict blanket morality. She said, “I think that abortion should be avoided at all costs, because I do feel that it is wrong, but if I had a fifteen-year-old daughter and she got pregnant, I would talk to her about it as an option.” White’s eyes practically bugged out, and she asserted that, “Old enough to spread your legs is old enough to raise a child.”

Damn. I tried later in the period to mend fences by telling White that I wasn’t trying to argue with her convictions or change her mind, but just point out the logical fallacies in her argument. “What holes? I don’t have any holes, I’m right!”

I give up. There will probably be more on similar topics later.

body ownership

So the girl who artificially inseminated herself at Yale and proceeded to herbally abort any possible pregnancy? Good for her. Although she’s going about it a bit brashly or with a lack of finesse, the issues she’s raised are amazing. If it really did happen and is not staged performance art (which is every bit as legitimate in the art world– stfu mainstream media) I am concerned about her health. Herbal abortions are just toxins and work through giving you low-level poisoning, so I hope she had good advice on that front. It was her own body, either way. The sperm was theoretically gotten from men who knew its destination. No harm, no foul. And the great big mystery of whether she ever was or wasn’t pregnant? Delicious and relevant.

I am surprised that people get so wrapped up in the way they think other people should be living their lives. When rape is discussed, there’s usually a subtext about whether the girl was asking for it– was she living a life we would not condone? George Clooney’s girlfriend– if she got raped at a party, would we pay attention? Only long enough to tell her to stop being a whore on the dance floor. Are we so wrapped up in a mob mentality that we need to force others into our mode of living in order to feel comfortable with ourselves?

Here’s some other things in the art world that are close to that topic. Damien Hirst’s works, like the shark or the mating cow and bull, depict dead animals. These were not accidental deaths or found-object skeletons– these animals were killed specifically for the piece of art. I’m not going to put a moral judgment on that, simply follow a train of thought (as the pieces were hopefully designed to do). Enter Guillermo Vargas, who allegedly (the humane society says differently) chained a stray dog in a salon and starved it to death. Alright. If Hirst’s work is acceptable, in which the moment of death is an abstract (the title of the shark piece is “The Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living”, Vargas had hit a vein with the reality of death.

I’ve completely lost track of where I’m going with this and need to go to studio. So, expect refinement later.