January 21, 2005

Watching the speech given by the 43rd U.S. President at his second inaugural I was astounded at what it contained and didn't contain. It contained practically nothing on the major efforts that he has announced and will surely attempt to fulfill to dismantle what is left of the gains won by U.S. workers in the previous century primarily in the programs of the New Deal and Great Society. Perhaps that is because he believes that requires no preparation, that the servile working people of his country will accept having the gains their parents and grandparents fought and died for rolled back to conditions of the mid 19th century without complaint. Maybe he's right on that one.

What I'm sure he's not right about is that the people of the rest of the world will allow him to impose the social order that made him, a singularly ungifted individual, POTUS, on the remainder of the earth.

What unparalleled arrogance is displayed in this! As if this person who never had to struggle for anything in his life, whose intellectual acumen is an embarassment to the English speaking peoples generally, this favored son of privilege and champion of mediocrity somehow had a divine mission to impose uniformly on the entire planet the particular and peculiar style of democracy that he deems appropriate.

This whole experience is fraught with absurdities of epic proportions. First there is the very limited extent of democracy in the United States itself, constitutionally established from the beginning and now having reached it's logical conclusion in an electoral process which completely excludes any possibilty of challenge to the established order and it's interests. Next there is the laughable absurdity of the puppet regimes being set up in Central Asia being touted as democracies. It is as if these people think that since their own populations accept the bullshit and lies they continually spew, the lesser peoples of other nations couldn't possibly object or see through them.

More troubling still, the fact of Bush-like figures nearly everywhere from London to Moscow, and elsewhere make one wonder about the very institution of democracy itself. If bourgeois democracy leads the people to such self inflicted harm, perhaps it is not the be all and end all that it is cracked up to be.

In any case it is clear that the final word on what form of people power will ultimately prevail on a global basis is not going to be spoken ex-cathedra from the White House.

Winston Churchill famously said that the American people can usually be counted on to do the right thing ... after they have exhausted all the alternatives. In view of what appears to be about to happen, one wonders if in this case such profligate use of the precious resource of time will be possible and at what cost?

---

Noung found our comments on the rollback of the safety net hyperbolic. Let's hope in the end he'll be right.

The last couple of days have really sucked.

I moved to Louisville, Kentucky yesterday. On the drive down here from Chicago my VW overheated. I pulled into Lafayette, Indiana to check out the problem. Turned out two of my head gaskets were blown. I spent the night at a local hotel unable to sleep for despair at the cost of the repair and the indecision as to what to do next.

Well the next day I rented a van, shifted all my stuff from the VW to it and drove the rest of the way here leaving my van sitting at a Firestone lot 190 miles to the north. Saturday I'm going to go with my friend Dave back up there with a tow dolly we're going to rent from a U-haul shop and pick the avn up and tow it back to Louisville.

Once it's here I don't know what I'm going to do with it. I might try to find a new engine for it or I might just leave it sit and buy another car.

So today I went out to try and 1) find a job and 2) find a new car. Found out that no dealership will finance an auto for me without me having a job. Won't be able to get a job let alone go to nterviews untill I get a car. Catch-22. So then I found an ad looking for a roomate and called it. The man, Michael (I'll call him), called me back and I made an appointment to see the house at 7pm tonight. I go there (in the rental van) only noone is home. I call him back, "Oh I had to run some errands, I wanted to call you to tell you that my roomate wouldn't be home till 9pm and that we needed to make another time... but I forgot."

Thanks you fucker for sending me out in the cold and rain on a fool's errand. Perfect par for my course of a day. Final straw was watching Catwoman with my buddie Dave. This movie sucked almost as bad as Vanilla Sky. Whatever you do don't waste your time watching it. Sad thing was I had new DVDs of Solaris, Starsky and Hutch and Lost in Translation that we could have watched. But noooooo....

So now I'm filled with anxiety about my decision to move to Louisville. I don't have a car, I don't have a job, I have about 5k insaving that I must now spend on a new car... or repairing my VW. I have no job opportunities. I can't even take a real job because I'm going to Europe in March for three weeks and who the hell is going to hire someone to work for a month. I'm fucked up and I know it. Desperation sets in.

Maybe tomorrow will be better. I hope so. Still it's not the end yet. I do have the savings, I will be going to Amsterdam and Spain in March. I'm now living in the same town as my son Quinn and once I do get settled down I will be able to spend a lot more time with him. Just wish the damn car hadn't died in Indiana. That really fucked up my whole momentum and movie.

Sometimes I take a few steps back from my life and try to examine it objectively. This was one of those times. DJing a yakuza-themed birthday party for an internationally recognized fetish photographer in a huge loft apartment in downtown Seattle, surrounded by artists, geeks, goths and fetishists? It's very strange, and very silly, and a little thrilling. I never take any of it seriously, because it's all so...something. This whole weekend just pounded it home. I get culture shock when I hang around 'normal' people now, which I'm sure happens to many folks who frequent E2. Not -because- of E2 particularly, but because this place is a mecca for the bizarre, the nerdy, the super-normal. Or maybe it's just that noders see the super in the normal. Maybe I'm rambling. I'm not sure if I should post this or not, really. But it is a good episode in my life, it is bizarre and funny and silly, and yes, maybe even interesting. On to the party.

Tonight was a birthday party for my friend Kevin Hundsnurscher, the aforementioned fetish photographer. The theme was Yakuza, and he admonished us to dress appropriately in the evite. Alex hosted the event, and the apartment was gorgeous. They hung huge caligraphic kanji on brown paper from the ceiling, and Noelle was our nearly-nude sushi platter, and most everyone dressed to the nines in gangster, geisha, or amorphously asian-fetish attire. I was asked to DJ (snort...snicker...me and my broken TiBook and some freeware), which I did under the nerdtastic moniker of "DJ Boushh." Yes, I told the man who asked, I did know what 'bouche' meant in French. It's an appropriate nom de disc in any tongue, believe you me. I was wearing patent thigh-high platform boots, fencenet fishnets, black vinyl bodysuit with red piping and mandarin keyhole collar, red cincher, big hair with skull-adorned silk flowers, and lots of black eyeshadow and red lipstick. In the photos I look absolutely ghastly pale, which I approve of, but am a little surprised by. I'm always pale, but perhaps I haven't seen any honest photos of myself since winter and my hermitization started.

The most intriguing person there was a punky little asian fellow with blonde/black skunk-striped fauxhawk, traditional japanese sleeve tats, and get this, a big black eyepatch. The story was that he was a tattoo artist from Japan, born into one of the actual Yakuza families. It sounds like bullshit me, but I really want to believe it. Kevin swears it's true. The supposed Yakuza boy was extremely attractive, but his drunk friend was hitting on me and I was busy with the aforementioned phat beatz to investigate him further, anyway.

Kevin drank sake steadily throughout the night, but managed to hold his own until the very end. Rose, a designer and fetish model herself, administered the birthday spankings with a wooden spoon, while Kevin tied on his kamikaze headband and inquired if she could "hit any harder than that." She ended up breaking the spoon in half, and he didn't flinch the whole time. BALLS.

Notable costumes included my roomie Shannon's red/black latex geisha ensemble, which leans towards cyberkabuki in terms of aesthetic. I like it a great deal. Hey boyfriend Scot was looking extra sharp in a simple black suit, skinny tie, and black molded leather mask. Christy painted a gorgeous tiger-in-grass scene and some accompanying kanji on her beaux Thanos.

Picture URLs for copy/pasters:

1. http://elaisted.com/ljprev/nicole-red-kimono-1.jpg
   Vienna Le Rouge, the most talented and charming of Seattle's burlesque population. She moves like a river in stilettos. Backstage, we were getting dressed together:

   Vienna: "Damn it, these sequins are going to be falling off me all night."
   Me: "Ha, it'll be like Blade Runner."
   Vienna: "Yeah, each one has a tiny ID number engraved on it."
   Both in unison: "NOT FEESH!"
   Me: "Bulesque dansa!"
   * Vienna gets 45 points.



2. http://elaisted.com/birthday/nicole-noel-eliza.jpg
   From left: Vienna, Noelle and me, acting all serious and shit. (note the Boushh photo on the secondary monitor)


3. http://elaisted.com/ljprev/noel-sushi-girl.jpg (NWS)
   Noelle as delectable sushi platter. Note her graceful hand curving about her sake glass. And Kevin wouldn't let her up to go pee until all the sushi was served.


4. http://elaisted.com/ljprev/pre-party-group-portrait.jpg
   The elite partygoers: everyone who showed up before 10, pretty much. Does this look like the box cover for an indie gangster movie to anyone else? "FETISH PHOTO JUNKIES," directed by some dude you've never heard of. Cameo by Christopher Walken.


5. http://pics.livejournal.com/syren666/pic/0000bst8
   Totally soused, post-spanking, pre-cake Birthday Boy Kevin. Why did we hand him that knife? It was very Samurai Delicatessen in there for a few minutes. The lady in the background is his mom, by the by. She was this tiny little woman with an accent, who participated in eating sushi off Noelle like a champ.


6. http://pics.livejournal.com/syren666/pic/0000c5ay
   Noelle and Alex, looking outstanding and holding sake and what looks like a screwdriver, respectively. His coat wasn't that green in the real lighting; the flash is doing weird things to it.


7. http://www.andraste.com/yakuza/images/DSC_6207.jpg
   Alex came up with an ingenious method of body painting, and I'm about to ruin his secret. He's using a small opaque projector to beam a diagram onto the girls, which he then paints over. The result is a highly accurate, clean-looking kanji. This would work with any sort of body painting, I think. He painted on several girls and did an excellent job. I didn't have enough exposed skin to take one, unfortunately.


8. http://home.comcast.net/~lucidx2/Tiger_in_the_Grass_back_Lo.jpg
   Thanos' tiger. Really gorgeous work. It looked even better in person.


9. http://images.fotopic.net/?iid=ysm20h&outx=600&noresize=1&nostamp=1
   "...and I forget the rest, but your mother's a whore."


10. http://pics.livejournal.com/syren666/pic/00009cpx
    The very end of the night, after Kevin was finally overcome by the sake. Alex and I usher the Birthday Boy into sweet, pukey dreams. He was back on his feet (and his knees) by the next night, but that's another episode entirely.