frequencies
Thursday, June 8, 2000 :: 11:32 a.m.
josh kun is a smart & sassy cultural critic who also does a regular column for the san francisco bay guardian. he's not only a great writer but has a head for analysis i'd like to sit in on, if i could actually occupy space in someone else's synapses. he's tackled the question of white appropriation of black expressive culture several times & always with flare, which i appreciate always. he's looked at billie holliday's "strange fruit" & eminem's blatant homophobia (& suggests that despite all the machismo, he still bottoms to n'sync's number one albums, ha ha ha). plus, he's got a 90210 diary, how great is that--?!
culture shocked
Thursday, June 8, 2000 :: 11:28 a.m.
katherine mieszkowski writes a pop culture column at the san francisco bay guardian, the local progressively weekly. she weighs in on everything from good vibrations' national masturbate-a-thon, a nin hartley' class on making porn and guerilla feminist artists to the masochism of cat shows, and well, anything else that strikes her fancy. she's a witty girl.
scholars of smut
Tuesday, May 9, 2000 :: 09:03 a.m.
i've been thinking a lot about sex & capital lately. an undergraduate student of mine asked for my opinion on pornography & feminism, so of course i went off on how sex work in the context of late-modern capitalism was just like any other kind of labor, but that also meant that labor exploitation was part and parcel of the "industry," et cetera. he was going to be on a panel about pornography & feminism for an asian american issues conference on campus, & mentioned the other panelists in passing. alarms went off in my head -- one of them was a rich girl i knew from a few years back. while hitting on me at the dyke march, she told me she'd just started dancing at the gold club but that she didn't really talk to the other girls because they were just doing it for money; she, on the other (& to her, superior) hand was doing it for art. whatever, can we say serious, mad wack class issues?! so while searching salon for a review of sex: the annabel chong story i luckily stumbled across this article by carina chocano about the 1998 world porn conference. it's a critical article, not because she's anti-porn a la catherine mackinnon or andrea dworkin, but because she very clearly & succinctly (& with sarcasm) skewers the "sex-positive" sex radical contingent for their equally-simplistic politicking and theorizing. carol queen chastises a girl for not letting her boyfriend fuck her up the ass (never mind her own comfort levels, it's all about her responsibility to meet his needs, according to queen) & nina hartley blames everything from rape to domestic violence to general misogyny on the (heterosexual) women who don't want to, more or less, swallow cum or give men blow-jobs. i'm not even joking. "they're mad!" hartley carps, and because men aren't getting the sex they want, they of course are going to react with hostility, so why not just give it to them? how totally & incredibly lame is that?! but chocano does an amazing job here, deconstructing the rosy rhetoric & noting significant absences (virtually no mention of AIDS at all) with a critical eye.
leaving las vegas
Tuesday, May 9, 2000 :: 12:00 a.m.
i love las vegas for its overbearing, carnivalesque atmosphere. it's a shame that all the new hotels are behemoths designed to attract a "classier" (i.e., suburban) clientele because i'm all about the pasties & the thousand-bulb neon signs. this site has an architectural review of las vegas & the strip, which totally fascinates me.
mamasita
Monday, May 8, 2000 :: 11:52 p.m.
i love bianca from afar, almost like a stalker except we're not actually that far from each other geographically speaking, & she does come over to my apartment to do the "where dem dollahs at?" jig on my futon/couch with chandra. she also happens to be the ab-sol-utely effin' brilliant authoress of various zines like ladies' homewrecking journal, hey mexican!, mija, & of course mamasita. sometimes i sit & hold her zines for critical inspiration because she is so fierce, insightful & sharp-tongued. i love it, & now she's ready for mass dissemination via the web. ('bout time this thing got put to some use.) you should quake in your boots, give up dem dollahs, & thank your deity of choice for bianca.
blues skies & white picket fences
Monday, May 8, 2000 :: 11:50 p.m.
a cut-and-paste project about suburban angst, i like the juxtaposition of old photographs with sparse text & sarcasm.
404
Monday, May 8, 2000 :: 11:34 p.m.
stefan not only hosts a photobooth strip archive, but his writing (suitably cryptic & referencing jeanette winterson novels) appeals to me as well. disposable photographs, "words with which," & more.
photobooth project
Monday, May 8, 2000 :: 11:22 p.m.
icki is working on a book of found & delivered (i.e., you send 'em) photobooth strips. he's got well over two hundred, i think, with the addition of two posters full from the now-closed lookout! store in berkeley. (the punks are goofing it up in pirate gear & cool cuts.) we found some amazing strips from the 30s & 40s on e-bay as well, & a few of the ones he's got now come with stories about near-death experiences & medical equipment (attached to the body in the photographs, even). there are even a few salacious ones ("boobs for everyone!" seems to be the theme of one strip). check these out & send him yours now.
