Saturday night: continuing the notes from my conversation with M. on transfetishism versus transsensuality

On “Butch Flight”:

Susie Bright coined this phrase for butches running away from their female bodies into the decision to transition F to M. Of course, it trivializes the real and painstaking decisionmaking process people go through. But there are dilettente FTMs, people who aren't transitioning in any direction, and who ten years ago would have been happy identifying as butch.

These same butches sometimes choose to start identifying as FTM without actually a) passing as men, b) trying to pass as men, c) wanting to pass as men, d) taking hormones, or e) even considering hormones (never mind surgery).

These butches may or may not be FTM in a long-term transitional sense, they may be 3rd gender, intersexed, and/or simply lacking a better term than FTM for what they are. They may not be transitioning in any direction whatsoever but see that calling themselves FTM will help get them play (with girls and/or boys). Other motives for taking on the FTM moniker in the absence of transitioning gender can include trendiness, wanting to act in solidarity with an oppressed minority (being a political FTM but living a butch dyke life, the way so many women are political lesbians while living a straight woman’s life), actually liking being in FTM spaces (in the tradition of femme fag-hags, there are butch FTM-hags), and liking the way femmes flock to FTM spaces like so many grandmothers picking over the tomatoes at a market.

Probably the two main motives for identifying FTM without being in transition from F to M come down to sex and friendship. If we are going to be a sex-positive community, we need to be happy that people are exploring their sexual boundaries, and (if we prefer butches to FTMs) contain our anxiety about the scarcity of butches. OK, I have found myself needing to contain my anxiety about the scarcity of butches. Specifically good butch tops. It’s hard to watch a good butch top dematerialize into the faggy orgies going on in the back rooms of the FTM community, sometimes never to return, but I can always just pocket those thoughts and turn them into positive sexual fantasy fodder. And as for friendship— in general this community needs to be more supportive and friendship-based. Building a movement through extended families of ex-lovers is not exactly a sustainable long-term plan for revolution that we want to pass on to our replacements. They are filtering even now into the queer bars out of the pre-teen gender mochepit and they are looking to their elders for values systems to follow. Do we really want to teach sex first, friendship second?

I’m not saying don’t have sex with these juicy youngsters, I’m just saying that we have to model respectful behavior towards eachother’s ever-changing identities that we impose on the 3-dimensional sexual animal we each carry in our core. Let whoever call her/him/hirself whatever, and ask respectful questions about what you don’t understand about her/his/hir choices.

=====================================

The Slackerstalker Shimmy Down Market Street in the Pride March Sunday:

Yes I marched, without expecting to. I was hanging out among the contingents about to depart, where a wonderful (Lebanese) femme friend was playing finger cymbals, so I was shimmying along, when the (Egyptian) contingent leader (also a friend) needed someone to hold the "Strong Middle Eastern Queer Women" sign, and I was the only female nearby without something to carry.

Which is how I ended up marching with the South West Asia North Afican Bay Area Queers (SWANABAQ)--- still wearing my sex worker rights stickers and little slutty black leather outfit from the night before. So, I was a middle eastern sex worker for a day… I told a friend this in the neighboring South East Asian contingent, and he made the "rock on" hand gesture and said "the more the merrier!"

=====================================

Sunday night at the girl rock-n-roll movie “Prey for Rock and Roll” at the Castro:

Gina Gershon, the star of the movie, was there answering questions and fending off brazen offers from the local dykes.

On picking out the hottie for the movie's lezzie sex scene: “I saw her picture and said- please god let her be able to act.”

Gina was very sassy, even talking back to Linda Perry (of 4 Non Blondes, former band also of Cheri Lovedog, the writer/ protagonist of the movie) who was asking about the research she had to do for the sex scene: "Shut the fuck up Linda."

Cheri's only instruction to Gina for the sex scene, apparently, was, "this isn't making love. There's no candles, flowers, soft music. You are fucking her." And then when the scene rolled around, Cheri was nowhere to be found, so Gina just had to figure it out for herself. I'm not saying this movie is perfect, but that sex scene is completely realistic. Rock on, Gina! Oh, and she does her own singing in the movie. And the band that came together for the movie is going on tour in support of the movie, so watch out for Gina Gershon on your local punk dive stages, America!

=====================================

More notes from Femmebottomville after this last week’s festivities:

I know Shar wrote the book on this stuff, but remedial femmes like me might need some even more basic pointers:

-- Use two different tissues to correct your mascara and to blot your lipstick.

-- Remember how last time I wrote about doing your nails and then fixing your hair? Don't do your nails right before flossing either. Ew.

-- Never run on yellow. If you are a femme bottom, you are either barefoot or ridiculously shod and shouldn’t be playing deer-in-the-headlights at crosswalks. If you are late to an appointment, you should still strike a relaxed pose and wait for the green. Your date may be somewhere down the street watching, and s/he doesn’t need to see you falling ass over teakettle.

-- I’ve (re)discovered that a lot of femme-chasers like a little something to hold on to. Don’t diet for attention— diet to look good to yourself. Looking at yourself should turn you on. It’s the surest way to attract people turned on by who you are. I thought I’d gotten over those issues, but I have been watching a lot of Buffy this past year and one starts to wish one could fit into those little
gauzey slip-thin numbers she wears to such great effect…

-- Bring an oven mitt if you ever anticipate marathon use of your Hitachi Magic Wand. That little motor gets pretty hot.

-- I highly recommend wearing lace-up leather arm cuffs with slippery nylon laces that are always coming undone as a way to test-drive potential personal knot-tiers.

=====================================

Reportback from Femme-Bottomville



I mark today six weeks into being sexually active again, and two weeks into dating again, after a year and a half of heavy grieving from my girlfriend's suicide. I have to say, it's a bad time to run out of antidepressants. But, on the other hand, I'm enjoying rediscovering my femme-bottom identity after being a tentant of Celibate-Misanthropolis.



Some new discoveries about my femme-bottomhood:



Reprising my teenage experiments with makeup and nailpolish -- where the goal was to be punk and different -- are useful for knowing the color-combination DON'Ts. Punk is an aesthetic that is ready to be put on its pension. Especially if you don't like to make the first move (i.e. are trying to look approachable).



Losing my compulsion to locate someone on the socio-political activist spectrum in favor for operating from my gut reactions -- essentially subjugating my intellect to make it bottom to my sexual instinct -- was the best new thing to come out of the complete crash-meltdown that was/is my grief-process. Butch tops often have sordid personal histories leading to interesting political insights that are not positioned in relation to the rest of the progressive movement, but all the same are valid and worthy. Being less judgemental makes me a better, happier bottom.



Asking my date what I should wear, something my ultraliberated mind would never do before, is now fun. Ultimately, I don't care what I look like as long as it doesn't fall under the rubrick of "embarrassing to my date."



And lastly: do your freakin' hair BEFORE your nails. Good god you'd think I would be smart enough to have figured this out by now. But just now with the putting in the bobby pins with the wet nails. FYI, there's no better way to completely and instantly ruin a nail job.



By the way, thank you Shar Rednour for being a beacon of good sense in femme self-caretaking. I keep remembering parts of your book The Femme's Guide to the Universe. Especially the advice about not cheaping out on things that go on your skin.



Some historical discoveries I've been mulling about femme-bottomhood:



I just have to say, the days of the Lesbian Avengers were good days. But the L.Av. are dead and it's because we were the sorts to challenge labels and gender/ sexual identity, so when we looked around and the entire group here in San Francisco was identifying as FTM or MTF or bisexual or a supersized combination order of these, and nobody's first choice of identity was lesbian, we tried to change the name and the group dissolved. Honestly, I bailed before the name change. I just didn't care enough to sit through endless processing about the word "lesbian." But BEFORE we all gave up on identity politics and were happy to be assumed to be lesbians, we had a kissing booth fundraiser at the Folsom Street (leather kink) Fair where all the bisexual femme bottoms (me among them) made a rule. We would not kiss a strange bioman, anyway not as a cheap-ass $5-per-kiss fundraiser. The butch tops, on the other hand, were all gung ho (ahem) to give the boys a taste of a lipsticked shaved-headed manly-woman. They wanted all the money we could get.



So what was that about? You'd think to us femme bottomy types it wouldn't matter whether we kissed another boy. But we had all been in some way or another scarred by consensual bad boy top experiences. I don't think I was able to completely embrace my femme bottom identity with a feeling of empowerment until I extended this Folsom Street Fair Kissing Booth rule into the rest of my life: no kissing of bioboys I don't know. It's a good rule. Especially since I've extended my definition of "know" to require one calendar year of being around the person. It effectively makes me a lesbian. But I can't rule out bioboys, even under these conditions, so I still call myself bisexual. I think I used to think that these rules made me a coward, but now I know it makes me a good bottom. Good bottoms make their own rules and make their rules known, and then abandon control from that seat of power.



Why I think femme bottoms don't have a special community support network like every other damn microdemographic:



We should, but we don't have a lot of spaces to ourselves. We are essentially the most private/ invisible sector of the queer community, partly because we tend to pass as het. Also because - even though most of us are politically or socially very active - we tend to be really very independent and reluctant to go outside our inner circle of friends for support. In other words, you don't find a lot of femme bottoms in support groups. In mountain climbing clubs or circles of artists, yes, but not in a place where we advertise our weaknesses to potential caretakers. We know the power of the caretaker, and we select our caretakers (tops) with extreme care. So, it's not that we wouldn't do well to have some unity among us, but wherever we make ourselves a public demographic, we become the targets of bad tops. So, we are quiet and grateful to find eachother where we do.



And where do we find eachother? In kink-positive space. I was a fan of the famous "Fuck Fests" here at the dear, departed Castlebar in San Francisco, where we separated the room into two sides, top and bottom, and it was your choice to define yourself as you wanted to be for the duration of the party. There were tables on which we could extend ourselves (from neck-down) under a thick black curtain, on which we would pin (on the "top" side) our list of limits and desires. The tops weren't allowed to communicate directly with us, only through dungeon monitors who were standing on guard on both sides of the curtain. I found such amazing sisterhood among the (butch and femme) women/ FTMs on the "bottom" side of the curtain. We took care of eachother, we enjoyed eachother's pleasure, we gave hugs and butt-slaps where they were needed, and we fed eachother complements and food. It was the most powerful, pleasureful, sexually secure space I've ever been with a group of people, and it still strikes me what a rare feeling that is. There won't be any more Fuck Fests (the venues for such things are basically gone from the city), but I will always cherish that memory of bottom-bonding. It was like the hard workers of the non-management part of staff getting together to just see our numbers and temporarily unionize-- viva the struggle of the hard working bottoms!

Stalking a Social Life



Well, my dear readers, I have been slacking on blogging because I have been stalking a social life. I think I have it effectively cornered and I am figuring out how to feed it. Here are some morsels I have thrown at it that were tasty:



The Monterey Bay Aquarium - I went with friends to grovel before the Cthulic cuttlefish, but they did not demand a sacrifice... this time.



The Ruby Room - I've been trying to log hours under the red lights to get my hipster quotient up out of the negative numbers. Some mighty dykey bartenders, who (bonus!) are also usually my neighbors in East Oakland.



Exodus - I was honored to organize a reading/ performance thingy with this incredibly talented, young and powerful lady hiphopster, the author of these words (the poem "My dinner plate/ grandma's back yard"):

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Corn meal

Knee- d- ed into corn bread

Light Mango spread

On Banana bread

Eat your spinach like your mother said

And charge your chard

Paint the rainbow with your squash

And cry like the Nile with

Saboas

Lentil jump around in my

Arroz con pollo

Tauro, Tauro, Tauro

Ahora usteds....

Con Orchata

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

The last of the mo-ji-cama'

Dance the rain dance in my tang

Pina y pina

The ripe co-co-nut on the floor of the cut little hut

Simple greens

Verses frozen beans

Don’t taste like the skillet of my grandma hands

In her southern ways

Too much pork fat in those days

Caused her to sing simple

Songs

'Bout simple green verses

Frozen beans

In California....

Rock on, Exodus!



Another tasty tidbit: the PornOrchestra -- a recent development in the East Bay, they improvise music to bad mainstream porno flicks. I'm afraid I have to say it is an idea that is better on paper: in practice I found the music and the porn both a little tedious. The highlight was a 70's porno with the female figures blotted out, and some particularly thoughtful jazzy instrumental accompaniment. If you want a taste of this sort of thing, improving/ innovating soundtracks to original film is much better done by the Sprocket Ensemble. But hey! I got out of the house, down to that amazing Oakland cultural institution the Parkway Speakeasy Theater with all my fingernails and toenails painted (all the same color purple- I'm such a vamp!) and a nice slutty outfit to go with. I even had a date.



The SF Lesbian & Gay Film Festival -- which I stupidly eschewed for years because they don't have "bi" and "trans" in the title of the festival -- and the National Queer Arts Festival -- hopefully these two festivals will keep my social life fat and happy for the rest of the month. The only drawback is the initial immobilizing shock of sudden immersion in seas of queer people (including exes who I enjoy not seeing) that exhaust one with their combination of unfathomable optimism with unfathomable cattiness. You know, there you are, crying at a touching low-budget movie short about coming out to your family and someone behind you says "that is so GAY." I mean, I'm glad we're reclaiming "gay" as an invective for our own saccharine white-washing tendencies, but really. A little after-school-specialness isn't going to make queers irrelevant to the counterculture.



Or maybe it will. At an event Saturday Kate Bornstein gave a heady lecture about the poisonous nature of assimilation that seemed very old (can I say retro-90's yet?) which was followed, as if to illustrate the point, by a slide show by some ladies who have bought a farm in the country and got married there (and wanted to flaunt a little apolitical propertarian privilege). Going from Kate Bornstein to the married farmers gave me some serious vertigo: one, throwing her speech's pages angrily on the floor, shaking a fist at the violating nature of marriage constructs, and the other waving her spotless (still price-tagged) chrome hay hooks at the audience, boasting about how she had actually figured out how to use them to move hay. *I* never had hay hooks. I got hay burn all over my arms and legs every spring, loading hay with just gloves. God how we hated the dilettante cityfolk who fled NYC to the far reaches of the north to recover their sense of humanity by buying shiny toys and white-washed fences that would be auctioned and abandoned after five years. They never rode their horses enough to warrant owning the purebreds they invariably bought. But yet, at the end of the night, I still had more to talk about with the farmer wives than the communist demagogue. These awkward social mixes are just a necessary hazard of social life husbandry, I guess.

Another Stake in My Innocence



I have been doing personal ads on Craigslist and finally got curious enough to research what "420" meant. Of course I thought it was something much more interesting, involving more people and fewer clothes. The origin of it is pretty funny.



Said former pot-smoker Steve to the LA Times (from this article)...

The group [of friends] agreed to meet that afternoon after school at 4:20 p.m. by a campus statue of Louis Pasteur, he said, and head out to search for the marijuana patch [one of their brothers-in-law had given them]. "But one thing led to another," he laughed, "and suffice it to say we never found it. Every day we'd meet at 4:20 by this statue, and every day we'd just end up getting high and driving around for hours." Over time, the mere phrase "four-twenty"--exchanged in a hallway, or discreetly mentioned in the presence of teachers and parents--became their personal code for "time to get high," he said.

More Reasons Why The US Doesn't Completely Suck



The Banjo - our first indigenous instrument! Here is an article about women in the "banjo craze" of the 19th century.



Edward Gorey - indigenous Victorianesque weirdness! Here is the quiz to find out which Edward Gorey book you are.



Baseball and Softball - strangely relaxing, superstitious, and supremely geeky! Here is a nice and weird list of ways for baseball players to get good luck. Not through practice and hard work, silly.



Immigrant Pride - every Columbus Day! From the home of Gay Pride and Pagan Pride! Here is the lovely "Who's the Illegal Immigrant, Pilgrim" poster by San Francisco's own Yolanda M. Lopez -- this poster is usually widely wheatpasted for Immigrant Pride day, especially since the anti-immigrant legal changes in California in the mid 90's.



NYC Dyke Immigrant Jewish Theater At the Turn of the Century! Who would believe that the first depiction of homosexuality on the US public stage was in the early 1900's in the Jewish emigre theater: "The God of Vengeance" by Sholom Asch, featuring a lesbian relationship between a Jewish woman and a prostitute. Here is an article about "Schtick" by Sara Felder, the San Francisco show that brought this play's existence back to light a few years ago. The censors didn't go apeshit about this play until it hit Broadway in 1923, when I think the playwright was actually thrown in jail for his depiction of explicit lezzie love-- even though it was actually a conservative cautionary tale.



And now, the Slacker Stalker Guide to the Best in US Children's TV Entertainment:



Science Court aka Squigglevision - when I first got my own television in 1999 I was addicted only to Xena and Science Court. It was an instructional kids' television show illustrating complex science concepts in a satirical take-off on Law and Order, Ally McBeal, and other such self-important social commentary/ legal shows. I heart(ed) Science Court. Here you can sing along with some of their rockin' learning songs.



The New Adventures of Mighty Mouse - short-lived in the 80's: it was cancelled after John Kricfalusi (of later Ren & Stimpy Fame) had Mighty sniff some white powder and regain his strength. Wonderful, wonderful camp.




Count Duckula - ok, this one was British, not US-made. But such a goddamn hoot-- a flamboyantly gay vegetarian vampire duck. I love how he redecorates the family castle and has a flair for show tunes.



The Tick (cartoon) - no, I didn't have a TV when The Tick was on, but I was friends with fans with TVs and VHS recordings. I was a frequent houseguest. Maybe the better way to describe it would be "indigent waif." There are so many sites devoted to this cartoon, I'll just give you the adoring Jump the Shark list of gushing comments.




Reboot - ok, this isn't a US show either. It was made in Vancouver. But I include it because I had a crush on Hexidecimal. Here is a well-linked up page about this, the first TV series produced entirely with computer graphics. The characters had slow and wooden movement, but the voice actors were really witty. The main super evil villain was revealed to have a secret ambition to be a rock star at one point.



The Real Ghostbusters (cartoon) - just thinking about this cartoon brings back warm memories of curling up with a mug of cocoa and a honey sandwich after school. It was my evening ritual before going out to feed the horse and check the fence. It was my daily dose of candy-corn parapsychology. Sometimes they even had real little bits of myth and magic lore that would send me into research frenzies. Like on Buffy, much later, the demon hunters were often friends with the demons.



    and of course



Pinky and the Brain - of course, who couldn't love the little mousey take-off on Orson Welles with a mousey goofball sidekick/ lifepartner who is gay, gender dysphoric and telekinetic. Here is a list of those ever-useful Are-you-pondering-what-I'm-ponderings. When Pinky gave the Brain "the world" (a globe keychain) for Christmas one year, I actually cried.

826 Valencia -- Another Reason to Love the US



Granted, Dave Eggers' brainchild 826 Valencia (where I volunteer) and its fundraising store - "the pirate store" - for which these fabulous piratical signs were written - wouldn't have such a booming business if our public schools had smaller classes and kids had more options for extracurricular language skills development. They have something like twenty kids coming in for their free tutoring help after school these days.

A Coupla Reasons to Stay in the YouEssAy



I am not alone in thinking it's time to take my anti-war patriotic ass away from this country for a while, while it recovers from its recent blight of warmongering and regime-changing. So as I'm readjusting to speaking nothing but English all the time (today I spelled the name "Maureen" Marine and didn't notice it until later in the day when I reread my notes) I am finding myself grasping for reasons to stay here. It would be an awfully lot more convenient to stay than go.



Today's reasons to like the United States:



Black Mary - a tough 6-foot tall cowboygirl who was an ex-slave sharp-shooter bar-brawler and enterprising sort of woman. She died in 1914 in her 90's. They don't make role models like this in EVERY country.



the International Gay and Lesbian Human Rights Commission - I know, it's self serving, since I work here, but really, I wouldn't get to know how much I dislike the US if this organization - founded in the US - didn't support me galavanting abroad to promote a human rights agenda.



I know I know it's a cliche. But I can't help it. She's one of my role models and she is not only a product of the US but of North-Western New York, not all that far from where I grew up. I'm so glad the RBRmy finally got that freakin' web page going. And look! I didn't know that Ani had signed Bitch-n-Animal! How very cool.



And now a scattershot list of things that occur to me that I put together in a brainstorm session with a few friends.



The Chicago Manual of Style - the exquisite, nervous, extreme fringes of geekiness!



SpongeBob SquarePants - this is a site ONLY for serious fans. SpongeBob is soooo gay. I ate a whole box of SpongeBob SquarePants CheeseNips the day after I got back from Slovenia just to ground myself in the neon orange food group for which the US has become famous.



The Nation - unconventional wisdom for the uppity intellectual.



The Daily Show With John Stewart - oh how John Stewart makes me doubt my lesbianism. In a brainy sort of way.



The Boondocks - the gospel of Huey Freeman, the little black intellectual version of Calvin (from Calvin and Hobbes), from the pen of Aaron McGruder.



The Wild and Massive but Rather Untranslatable Popularity of Buffy the Vampire Slayer That link is to "Buffy the Patriarchy Slayer." One of my (gay) college friends did a thesis on the movie the year it came out-- about how the vampires represented rapists and Buffy represented the new "take back the night" generation. I thought he was so silly to be so obsessed with that movie. And now here I am, obsessed, turning on the TV at 7 am to watch Buffy reruns on FX. Every morning. At 7 am.



Zora Neale Hurston - said Zora I want a busy life, a just mind and a timely death. Well, two out of three ain't bad.

-- I was at an activist meeting about getting California Native American History incorporated into the gold rush centennial celebration studies going on in California public schools, and this cool 5th grade teacher had this poster on her wall. That smile captivated me. I had no idea who Zora Neale Hurston was, but her smile was the smile of a genius, a troublemaker, a confident thinker and mover and shaker. So I wrote down that name and over the years picked up her books and searched out her story. I blogged about her and her connection to Santeria and the creation of zombies here. Zora is now featured on a US stamp, which kind of astonishes. It's like the Vatican producing rainbow flags. Didn't anyone do their research?

Hometown Vertigo



For chrissakes would you all PLEASE go to this website and vote against the war. I know, I know, the war is over, but this pissy ass website, built as a community site for my high school (sigh, a military cow town), has a poll running which gives you the choice of supporting our troops and country (adding to the brave blue column in the poll results) and opposing the war (wussy pink). I'm a goddamn patriot, I just have a HUGE healthy distrust and dislike our government, and sure as hell don't appreciate being given the choice of EITHER supporting our troops or opposing the goddamn war. Now I remember why I grew up angry.



I can't believe spelling bees used to be one of the ways I got award trips to get out of town. I mean, I can't believe I actually used to win trophies for being able to spell in English, I can't believe I used to go to such lengths to get out of town for any period of time, and I can't believe I now, sitting in my San Francisco queer human rights activist office, consider it a long trip out of my way to walk all the way to the Thai lesbian cafe for afternoon espresso instead of just going to the Japanese place on the corner. It's all so dizzying.

Stalking and Killing and Leaving for Dead The Matrix, Reloaded


Well, I liked it, but not ten-dollars' worth of liking it. I would have paid a fiver for that and felt pretty good about it. Ten? Sigh. Luckily we made the extra five dollars worth of fun ourselves by dressing up in black plastic tight clothing and mugging in all the reflective surfaces of the fancy art deco Grand Lake Theater. That was the way to see this super-empty super-sparkly piece of pseudo-zen.



Jesus Figure: of course, Keanu Christ/ Superman Reeves. Uno. Emo. Whatever his name is.



Gay Figure: what a completely compulsively heterosexual movie! I really need some nominations for this one. I just have no idea. OK, I thought that the council member (old white eyebrows-like-wings guy) was going to make a pass at Uno there for a minute, taking him down to the engineering level to show him the whacky machines with all their mechanical thrusting, thrusting, thrusting...



Lesbian Movie Standard (two female characters who have at least one conversation about something other than a man): no chance, kids! This one is pure, pure Hollywood. Although, it was filmed partly in my own backyard, here in Alameda and Oakland! You'd freakin' think they'd have Trinity have some tactical defense conversation with one of the other (many) female warriors, wouldn't you? The tough ladies of Oakland talk to eachother!



So, for your smart science fiction, go rent Starship Troopers. Readhere a Liquidtheater.com review that reflects some of my own thoughts, especially this part (quoting reviewer Mike Shea):

A couple of years ago I was walking through an airport in Stuttgart, Germany. Two 18 year old kids were patrolling the airport armored in flak jackets and armed with sub-machine guns, pistols, and other forms of submission devices. I remember thinking how much nicer our life in America was compared to that. Six months ago I watched a guy in a flack vest and a 9mm pistol poke through my shoes on his steel table while I sat in my socks a few feet away. While wishing I had used more bleach on my grey socks, I thought about how much our life has changed in the last couple of years. Watching Starship Troopers again gave me another dark wake-up call. Watching it again was a far different experience for me today than it was three years ago.

Hear hear. The Matrix Reloaded just didn't chill me. After all, I'm pro-Borg. A totally militarized community freaks me the hell out, on the other hand.



You know, I didn't see any live weapons except for border crossings the whole month I was in the VERY RECENTLY war-torn former Yugoslavia. One day in Oakland and San Francisco and I feel like military helicopters are following me.

When One Is Struggling With a Transition From a Nice, Sensible, Phonetically-Spelled Language Back to English




...it occurs to one that English is extraordinarily capricious in its spelling. Fantastical, even. I came home the other night and hit "play" on my answering machine and failed to write down the number for my dentist because her first name is Polly. I spent the entirety of the message trying to spell the word "Polly." I finally crossed my misspellings out and wrote "Dr. Rivas" -- but by then the machine had deleted her message. The next day I called 411 to get her number. By then I had figured out how to spell her name.



These are some of the ways I would have prefered to spell my dentist's first name:




Paulie

Palli

Poli

Poly



Another time when I was flitting back and forth between the sensibly spelled Russian language and whack-a-mole krazy-quilted English I was completely unable to piece together the correct spelling of the word "carousel." My first attempt was karasol. I think I was three paragraphs down the page when the faintest annoyance of a suspicion of error drew me back to check the spelling of the word. I was so out of range of the correct spelling that my spellcheck turned up a complete blank, except for maybe suggesting "kerosene."



I have plenty of witty and insightful things to write about Slovenija and Croatia, really. I just haven't settled back into my loving, snuggly relationship with English yet. I took myself to Borders and got a pile of books--- that was a nice first date. I'll let you know how the romance rekindles.

Aren't We All Russian Teenage Lesbians?



This just sent to me by my friend I'll pseudononymously call AlAl:



Morissey, former singer of The Smiths, who originally wrote and
performed the song "How Soon Is Now?" in 1984 had this to say about
t.A.T.u. in the U.K.'s Word Magazine:

Word: Did you hear t.A.T.u.'s version of "How Soon Is Now?"

Morissey: Yes, it was magnificent. Absolutely. Again, I don't know
much about them.

Word: They are teenage Russian lesbians.

Morissey: Well, aren't we all?

Soon come: reportage from my month-long Adriatic Odyssey, when I feel my grasp of English (as opposed to Slovinglish or Croanglish) firming up a little more.

A postcard from the edge of the alps



OK, here is the breakdown.



Croatia and Slovenia are like my first and second born. I cannot choose between them. I could live either place. There is nothing keeping me from moving here except for my job and my cat and about a dozen permanant obligations.


The places they call tourist traps here are what I call comfortable populated and slightly more expensive but still worth a visit. I have not yet (in three weeks of travel around Croatia and Slovenia) found a place I couldn't feel comfortable living.


The queer scene in Croatia is having a renaissance, and I am blessed to have participated in the first ever explicitly queer (as in, not just lesbian) conference held in Croatia. I made contacts with Serbian, Bosnian, Macedonian, and of course Croatian and Slovenian activists who are professional, smart, young,and determined to succeed. The future is bright here.


I will now go back to the edge of Bled, the pristine alpine lake in the south central alps. I will be back on my regular posting schedule in a week.


Stalking on....

Stalking the Slackerstalker in Slovenia and Croatia



Follow along on your maps, stalkers! I will be gone (maybe entirely) from the interwebs for the next month on an Odyssey, minus fleece but hopefully with sirens.



First Stop: the land of the Bird-handed Girl - Opatija, staying at the Imperial Hotel, inspired by this woman's account of the place. I will dance barefoot on the sand just like Isadora used to.



Second Stop: "Cheers Queers" the queerest spot in the former Yugoslavia for five days - where I'll be a guest of the coolest women's center in the whole of Croatia (it is said). If it's not cool enough I will be at the only youth hostel I could find in the whole city of Zagreb.



Third Stop: Rijeka at this beautiful old (cheap) hotel on the water.



Fourth Stop: Via a former convent in Venice to Florence, with parents in tow. May all our genetic revelations be amusing. We'll be staying at this hotel - I can see why they didn't post an outside view on their website.



Fifth Stop: in beautiful Fiesa and Piran, Slovenia at this sweet little brick number. We will rent a car and drive to a farm where I will ride a Lippizzaner and a town (Lokev) where my parents will ogle old things from wars and stuff. Before or after that we will go sit in hot water.



Sixth Stop: on our way to our hotel in Ljubljana we will stop at the famous Lipica stables where I'm having a riding lesson. Then we're going to the Predjama castle a visit inspired by that site's virtual tour, and by this article where a tourist notes that the noble who lived in the castle fended off troops by tossing roast duck and fresh cherries down at them from the parapets.



Seventh Stop: the unfortunately (for English speakers) named resort town Bled, where they tend to have world conferences on things like suicidology and nervous disorders. And chess. I will be disappointed if we don't make it to Kobarid for the award-winning WW I museum, but this site's virtual tour of the place will make up for it.



Eighth Stop: back to Fiesa and Piran and Portoroz for the maritime festival that has the cyberstyley name "Internautica."



Ninth Stop: brez roditijelej - sans parentals - I will be going to a beautiful place in the western Slovene alps to ride for a few more days before I leave via Ljubljana (and this hostel, the cheapest one I could find) and Prague (where I think I'll be staying in a student dorm- parrrr-ty!).


Hopefully I have not been mislead by the maps and schedules at Euroave.com, Routenet.nl, Trenitalia, the Slovenian bus system site and this little UK-Croatian site.

More From the Genre of Strange Online Tarot Innovations:



The Blogger Tarot - today's card is the High Priestess/ Web Grrrl. I got this in a reading last night, in fact. However, to be correct, I didn't just run into Ani in a deli. We had a long, long string of chance and intentional run-ins on the street and fan-to-starlet chitchats backstage. I was quite the stalker in my day. It started at the Bottom Line (NYC) in January 1992, when I dressed up in my fanciest clothes to sneak in (I was underage) to see Ani open for Two Nice Girls. Ani used to be so, SO enthusiastic to meet her fans. Back when Gretchen Phillips was a diva.

She was a Panther before Panthers were Cool.



Born in 1892 Rebecca West (nee Cicily Fairfield) was a socialist, suffragette, and feminist journalist who had an unmarried partnership with HG Wells. Their partnership produced a boy who took his middle name from HG's nickname for Rebecca: Panther.



I'm absorbed in reading her famous 1100-page Yugoslav travelogue Black Lamb, Grey Falcon. She writes in this book like a matron of her time, aged 45 and becoming increasingly reactionary in her cultural tastes (she mentions feeling nausea when she sees a woman perform a male folk dance in male clothing, or when non-Negro dancers perform Nego dances: to her it looks like primitivism, backsliding, viscerally wrong). So she's no great beacon of open-mindedness, but she is a very self-conscious and astute observer of the 1937 Yugoslav state that she's observing. She mournfully add (when the book was printed in 1942) to text where she talks about the Hapsburgs' treatment of Croatia as the worst betrayal ever enacted on a people in Europe the small footnote reminding the reader that it was written in 1937. The book's (1942) dedication is "to my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved."


Besides providing rich historical context for my trip (in only five days!) to the former Yugoslavia, she has also given me clues for packing. She and her husband endured a freak snowstorm when she arrived in Zagreb a day before Easter 1937... I arrive two days (and sixty-six years) after she did, so into the pack go the long underwear. Read for yourself a short bio of the fierce, opinionated Rebecca West.


Here's her pouncing controversially on the Habsburgs:

?I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else,? ... ?the Herzegovinians had found that one empire is very like another, that Austria was no better than Turkey.?

And pouncing again-- this time on the assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand:

?Nobody worked to ensure the murder on either side so hard as the people who were murdered.?

You Can't Change the Ocean-- You Can Only Change Your Course



Read about the Tall Ship Semester for Girls-- how cool.


"Girls who might otherwise be hanging in the mall now find themselves hanging in the rigging."



Coming from a San Francisco-based organization, that sounds fairly ominous, but in fact it's completely wholesome and inspiring.

While the US Troops are Busy Planting Evidence of Weapons of Mass Destruction and Scrambling to Explain Their Own Violations of the Rules of Combat...

Like bombing press headquarters...



Take a Break and Enjoy a Little Safe Pre-Stalinist Communist Art


At An Exhibit of Children's Books of the Early Soviet Era.



It reminds me of what I liked about my brief time in the Soviet Union at age 15 in 1989, and in the immediate post-Soviet years 1993-4. For example, the understanding that girl-children can grow up to be great architects -- as taught in a children's book illustration published in 1933.

This Week's Circumlocutory Heavyweight World Championship Belt Goes to...
Unnamed British Official as quoted in this week's Global Development Briefing, for using the word "people" more gently and euphemistically than I've ever, ever seen it used.



Here's the KO:

"There is a temptation to say why should we be subtle after we weren't supported in the Security Council. We certainly hope people will resist that temptation."



- An unnamed British official on the likelihood of another acrimonious political battle in the UN Security Council over the administration of Iraq's oil industry after the war, in an interview for The Washington Post. The US Defense Department is reportedly pressing ahead with plans to temporarily manage the industry and use the proceeds to rebuild the country, creating a conflict with US allies in Europe and the Middle East. UN and British officials said the US lacks the legal authority to begin exporting oil even on an interim basis without a new Security Council mandate.

I don't always read through the whole briefing, but the quotes are always special. It's the feature with which they always start their round-up of world events affecting "developing" countries. Subscribe to the (free) Global Development Briefing mailing list here.