the grace fracture.

2012-01-24T05:45:00.000-08:00

This is an incredibly difficult time for Norris Square Neighborhood Project. There have been several recent violent tragedies that have occurred in our community- to our families and loved ones. As we are trying to provide the best supports for our youth and their families as they are struggling to process these events, we also want to make sure that our own staff has time and supports to process themselves.

If you have childcare or youth programming experience for K-12th grades (or just want to help out in our after school program), we need volunteers who can help us right now in our youth programs. If you are available, especially from 3-6pm, please email reed@myneighborhoodproject.org, or comment below with how we can contact you.

2011-12-14T15:58:00.000-08:00

Katy’s Top Ten Organizations to Give to in 2011

The end of the year brings about two things in my world of note – top ten lists of the best of and year-end giving appeals for nonprofits, arts organizations, and community groups. I wanted to compile a list of my top ten favorite projects to donate to this holiday season. In difficult times such as these, organizations doing visionary work need your support more than ever. Consider giving as generously as you can this year to work that moves you, and also remember you can donate in someone’s name as a gift to them at the holidays!

1. Service Women’s Action Network – SWAN takes on the difficult work of advocating for gender equality and safety in the military. SWAN works to transform military culture by securing equal opportunity and the freedom to serve in uniform without threat of harassment, discrimination, intimidation or assault. SWAN also seeks to reform veterans’ services on a national scale to guarantee equal access to quality health care, benefits and resources for women veterans and their families. They provide a Legal and Peer Support Helpline for service women, veterans and their families, as well as free yoga for vets. One of the bravest feminist organizations I have ever seen, doing work that is difficult and vital.

2. New Paradise Laboratories – NPL is an experimental, interactive theater company based in Philadelphia. I am in love with its projects, and I don’t know much of anything about theater. New Paradise Laboratories (NPL) was founded to create surprising, meticulous, spiritually challenging, and wholly distinctive experimental theatre productions that investigate physical expression, on-stage and in life. These productions are assembled using collaborative creative processes developed by the company. The work tends to value wild humor, shock, a concern for history, a muscular visual sensibility, and a fascination with the utopian impulse. The project is also meant to engage people like me, with a large part of its theater drawing you in online – for those of us who aren’t accustomed to going to the theater.

3. District Alliance for Safe Housing – DASH is a Washington, DC based no barrier domestic and sexual violence housing and advocacy program. They operate a myriad of projects to provide vital housing and other services to women and their families who are fleeing abuse. They also partner with government and corporations to strategize about how to create more housing possibilities. Domestic violence and homelessness are intricately connected, and this organization aims to tackle a social crisis holistically, with lessons learned made available to the movement at large.

4. Life Pieces To Masterpieces – LPTM is a Washington, DC based youth arts organization. Since 1996, they have served hundreds of young African-American men ages 8-22 with an engaging human development arts program afterschool. They believe in instilling in youth a resiliency and skillset to turn the grave challenges they face in life into possibilities, and value them as creators.

5. Men Can Stop Rape – MCSR exists to mobilize men to use their strength in creating cultures free from violence, especially men’s violence against women. Their work is international, social and cultural – with direct training, public awareness campaigns, messaging, and community activism. MCSR takes the vital work of sexual violence prevention and education into schools and organizations, and into the hands of men and boys who can play pivotal roles as allies and empowered bystanders capable of combating rape culture.

6. Girls Rock Philly – Help support the next generation of young women musicians! Part of an international movement of music and empowerment camps for young women, GRP supports girls who are interested in playing music, connecting with other young women, and expressing themselves. In addition to donating money, the camps always need equipment. If you don’t live in Philly, investigate the camp nearest to you!

7. Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive – Run by an incredible woman Cyndee Clay who I went to college with, HIPS assist female, male, and transgender individuals engaging in sex work in Washington, DC in leading healthy lives. Utilizing a harm reduction model, HIPS’ programs strive to address the impact that HIV/AIDS, sexually transmitted infections, discrimination, poverty, violence and drug use have on the lives of individuals engaging in sex work. HIPS is a nationally recognized program that meets the needs sex workers and assists them in their efforts to eliminate the transmission of HIV, increase sexual health, and reduce violence and harm associated with sex work and drug use.

8. Compassion Over Killing – Please give to this visionary, awesome animal rights and vegan/vegetarianism education organization before you EVER give to PETA. Working to end animal abuse since 1995, COK focuses on cruelty to animals in agriculture and promotes vegetarian eating as a way to build a kinder world for all of us, both human and nonhuman. The organization also hosts a number of social events, and can tell you great places to eat as well as animal-friendly products to consider buying.

9. Sylvia Rivera Law Project - Transgender, transsexual, intersex and other gender non-conforming people face persistent and severe discrimination in employment, education, health care, social and legal services, criminal justice and many other realms. The Sylvia Rivera Law Project (SRLP) works to guarantee that all people are free to self-determine their gender identity and expression, regardless of income or race, and without facing harassment, discrimination, or violence. SRLP is a collective organization founded on the understanding that gender self-determination is inextricably intertwined with racial, social and economic justice. SRLP works to improve access to respectful and affirming social, health, and legal services for our communities. The organization believes that in order to create meaningful political participation and leadership, people of all genders must have access to basic means of survival and safety from violence. Also, look up the work of SRLP Founder Dean Spade – social justice genius and brilliant speaker.

10. Decarcerate PA – I learned of this organization because of my best friend and bandmate Diane. You can give this organization your support, your phone calls, and your energy. Learn more and stay involved. Decarcerate PA is a coalition of organizations and individuals seeking an end to mass incarceration and the harms it brings our many communities. Decarcerate PA seeks mechanisms to establish and maintain whole, healthy communities and believes that imprisonment exacerbates the problems we face. The organization therefore demands an immediate and lasting moratorium on all new prisons: no new prisons, no new county or city jails, no prison expansions, no new beds in county jails, no immigrant detention facilities, no private prisons. If you are new to issues of the prison industrial complex, investigate the work of Angela Davis and check out the book The Celling of America.

These are urgent times. We may all feel down, defeated, depressed. However we have to stay vigilant and engaged, and remember that change is possible. These ten organizations made 2011 better for thousands of living beings. Help make 2012 easier for them.

XO,
KO

2011-10-08T19:07:00.000-07:00

people whose understanding of love i understand.

of the literary/artistic/cultural figure variety:

polly jane harvey
langston hughes
cristina nehring
jenny block
dan savage
trent reznor
the band blonde redhead
marina abramovic
maynard
imogen heap
pema chodron
guy picciotto
anne sexton
bell hooks
inga muscio
cornel west
jeanette winterson

my kindreds:

andy spiers
heather mcentire
aimee argote
beck levy
violet levoit
diane foglizzo
damian hade
geoff rickly
alex saavedra
daisy schwartz
danielle kurzweil
matt davis (RIP, all love, always)
tristan
my otto family
daniel hukill
beth cameron
mary brown
jon ilhan
jenn peck
chris bickel
jeremiah kelley
joey gates
marc nelson
chad clark
sonya koshuta
al burian
chris lauterbach
berdan
ketch wehrwolf

There are other people who I relate to in moments but I felt great comfort in assembling a list of people I feel kinship in around love very, very consistently. Because I wanted to know this group existed. Because I want to engage in a curiosity around love as long as I live.

So many thanks for all you give me.

If you even want to talk about your own experience or thoughts around love, I will listen. I can be found, and I can listen. If you are not on this list maybe I just haven't gotten to listen to you yet, or maybe your voice is best heard by others.

EVOL.

2011-09-13T22:08:00.000-07:00

One of the best interviews I have read in a while.

2011-08-28T10:15:00.001-07:00

Check this out!

2011-08-15T07:30:00.000-07:00

Almost finished with the book Sex at Dawn. I feel bad that I ever wrote this book off or questioned its merit. Fantastic. I am going to be writing my next column on it.

2011-08-06T15:42:00.001-07:00

"The more separated we become from the Earth, the more hostile we become to the feminine. We disown our passion, our creativity, and our sexuality. Eventually the Earth itself becomes a baneful place. I remember being told by a medicine woman in the Amazon, “Do you know why they are really cutting down the rain forest? Because it is wet and dark and tangled and feminine.” — Alberto Villoldo

2011-08-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

Lately I am obsessing on THIS.

2011-07-08T05:56:00.001-07:00

So so so good.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2011/06/14/137178421/bad-vibrations-investigating-sound-as-terror

2011-05-05T07:27:00.001-07:00

Childhood dream realized:
Touring Europe.
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=169959299719529

2011-04-24T12:20:00.000-07:00

I am of the opinion that the "Radical Honesty" movement is neither.

2011-01-31T11:26:00.001-08:00

THE URGE TO CREATIVE LIFE
This realisation brings us to the consideration in a little more detail of our fourth point, which is the urge to creative life through the divine use of the imagination. As we have seen, it is necessary for humanity to recognise that there is a world of meaning behind the world of appearances, of form—behind what has been called the "world of seeming." It is the revelation of this world of inner meaning that lies immediately ahead of the race. Hitherto we have—as a race—been occupied with the symbol and not with that for which it stands, and of which it is the outer appearance. But we have today largely exhausted our interest in the tangible symbol, and are searching—again as a race—for that which the outer world of appearance is intended to express.

Much is heard today of the New Age, of the coming revelation, of the imminent leap forward into an intuitive recognition of that which has hitherto been only dimly sensed by the mystics, the seer, the inspired poet, the intuitive scientist and the occult investigator who is not too preoccupied with the technicalities and the academic activities of the lower mind. But one thing is oft forgotten in the great expectancy. There is no need for too great an upward straining or too intense an outward looking, to use terms which the usual limited point of view can grasp. That which is to be revealed lies all around us, and within us. It is the significance of all that is embodied in form, the meaning behind the appearance, the reality veiled by the symbol, the truth expressed in substance.

Only two things will enable man to penetrate into this inner realm of causes and of revelation. These are:

First, the constant effort, based on a subjective impulse, to create those forms which will express some sensed truth; for thereby and through this effort, the emphasis is constantly shifted from the outer world of seeming to the inner side of phenomena. By this means, a focussing of consciousness is produced which eventually becomes stable and withdrawn from its present intense exteriorisation. An initiate is essentially one whose sense of awareness is occupied with subjective contacts and impacts and is not predominantly preoccupied with the world of outer sense perceptions. This cultivated interest in the inner world of meaning will produce not only a pronounced effect upon the spiritual seeker himself but will eventually bring about the emphasis, recognised in the brain consciousness of the race, that the world of meaning is the sole world of reality for humanity. This realisation will, in its turn, bring about two subsequent effects:

1. A close adaptation of the form to the significant factors which have brought it into being on the outer plane.

2. The production of a truer beauty in the world and, therefore, a closer approximation in the world of created forms to the inner emerging truth. It might be said that divinity is veiled and hidden in the multiplicity of forms with their infinite detail, and that in the simplicity of forms which eventually will be seen, we shall arrive at a newer beauty, a greater sense of truth and at the revelation of God's meaning and purpose in all that He has accomplished from age to age.

Secondly, the constant effort to render oneself sensitive to the world of significant realities and to produce, therefore, those forms on the outer plane which will run true to the hidden impulse. This is brought about by the cultivation of the creative imagination. As yet, humanity knows little about this faculty, latent in all men. A flash of light breaks through to the aspiring mind; a sense of unveiled splendour for a moment sweeps through the aspirant, tensed for revelation; a sudden realisation of a colour, a beauty, a wisdom and a glory beyond words breaks out before the attuned consciousness of the artist, in a high moment of applied attention, and life is then seen for a second as it essentially is. But the vision is gone and the fervour departs and the beauty fades out. The man is left with a sense of bereavement, of loss, and yet with a certainty of knowledge and a desire to express that which he has contacted, such as he has never experienced before. He must recover that which he has seen; he must discover it to those who have not had his secret moment of revelation; he must express it in some form, and reveal to others the realised significance behind the phenomenal appearance. How can he do this? How can he recover that which he has once had and which seems to have disappeared, and to have retired out of his field of consciousness? He must realise that that which he has seen and touched is still there and embodies reality; that it is he who has withdrawn and not the vision. The pain in all moments of intensity must be undergone and lived again and again until the mechanism of contact is accustomed to the heightened vibration and can not only sense and touch, but can hold and contact at will this hidden world of beauty. The cultivation of this power to enter, hold and transmit is dependent upon three things:

1. A willingness to bear the pain of revelation.
2. The power to hold on to the high point of consciousness
at which the revelation comes.
3. The focussing of the faculty of the imagination upon the revelation, or upon as much of it as the brain consciousness can bring through into the lighted area of external knowledge. It is the imagination or the picture-making faculty which links the mind and brain together and thus produces the exteriorisation of the veiled splendour.

If the creative artist will ponder upon these three requirements—endurance, meditation, and imagination—he will develop in himself the power to respond to this fourth rule of soul control, and will know the soul eventually as the secret of persistence, the revealer of the rewards of contemplation and the creator of all forms upon the physical plane.

This use of the creative imagination and the fruits of its endeavor will work out into the many fields of human art according to the ray of the creative artist. We must not forget that the artist is found on all rays; there is no particular ray which produces more artists than another. The form will apparently take spontaneous expression when the inner life of the artist is regulated, producing the outer organisation of his life forms. True creative art is a soul function; the primary task, therefore, of the artist is alignment, meditation and the focussing of his attention upon the world of meaning. This is followed by the attempt to express divine ideas in adequate forms, according to the innate capacity and the ray tendencies of the artist in any field which he may choose and which is for him the best medium for his endeavor. It is paralleled by the effort, constantly made upon the physical plane, to equip, instruct, and train the mechanism of brain and hand and voice through which the inspiration must flow, so that there may be right expression and a correct externalisation of the inner reality.

The discipline involved is great and it is here that many artists fail. Their failure is based on various things—on a fear that the use of the mind will cripple endeavor, and that spontaneous creative art is, and must be primarily emotional and intuitive, and must not be crippled and handicapped by too great an attention to mental training. It is based on inertia which finds creative work the line of least resistance and which seeks not to understand the way in which the inspiration comes, or how the externalisation of the vision becomes possible, or the technique of the inner activities, but simply follows an impulse. Again it indicates an uneven, unbalanced development which results from the fact that, through specialisation or focussed intense interest over a period of lives, there comes a capacity to make a soul contact along one line of endeavor, but not the capacity to be in contact with the soul. This is facilitated by the fact that the artist for many lives comes under the influence of one particular personality ray. Hence the occult paradox stated above, which warrants the attention of artists. Another factor upon which failure is often based is the supreme conceit and ambition of many artists. There is the ability to excel in some field and, in that one particular, to evidence greater capacity than the average man. But there is not the ability to live as a soul and the vaunted excellence is only in one direction. There is frequently no life discipline or self-control but instead there are flights of genius, stupendous achievement in the chosen line of art, and a life lived in contradiction to the divinity expressed through the artistic achievement. The understanding of the significance and technique of genius is one of the tasks of the new psychology. Genius is ever the expression of the soul in some creative activity, thus revealing the world of meaning, of divinity, and hidden beauty which the phenomenal world usually veils but will some day indicate in truth.

2011-01-27T10:11:00.000-08:00

Have we failed you? You wanted it. But the world wouldn't give it.

2011-01-26T11:18:00.000-08:00

Lyrics to the Universal Order of Armageddon song Stepping Softly Into:
"You broadcast: "What it is to be a man"
Channel changes- so does your mind
In this day -at this time
Your mind declines- your chair reclines
No more butterflies left in her blue sky
(air is still)
Ripped out her flowers one by one
(field left empty)"

2011-01-25T17:12:00.001-08:00

These past few weeks, two incredible artists and people passed on.
I think there are people here who knew of some of their work or of them.
I know the internet is a terrible place to try to process and grieve.
But I know it has been really rough thinking about how such incredible folks are no longer with us.

In honor, and for people who also might want to pay respects:

Bobby Scandiffio
http://ritualofnames.blogspot.com/2011/01/in-loving-memory.html [ritualofnames.blogspot.com] »

Brendan Majewski
http://www.brooklynvegan.com/archives/2011/01/brendan_majewsk.html [www.brooklynvegan.com] »

I am sorry this world failed you.

2011-01-23T16:33:00.000-08:00

This is a photo of me playing a show in a shirt from Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive (HIPS). Stoked.

2011-01-15T15:43:00.000-08:00

Some thoughts for a recent Trophy Wife interview:

Being a queer woman extends beyond just who I date (which has been mostly but not all dudes) but also, having a queer or deviant or different arc of perspective on the nature of relationships, the nature of partnership, of parenting, family, attraction, sex, etc. We have the following lyrics in Cat and Dog that best sum it up:
"Am I less your daughter? Am I more a stranger? What does it matter to you anyway who we fuck how much why to what end? Some of us will never be immune."

The final line refers to the idea that making choices outside of the mainstream, or even having those choices made FOR you as regards to your romantic or sexual life, relationship structure, etc, can be painful and lonely and leave you more vulnerable to scrutiny, derision, and judgment. Part of the song also acknowledges that you can be a sexual, loving, intense person and choose NOT to engage your sexuality for any length of time for any host of reasons. And that is a valid choice, and actually has nothing to do with your viability as a partner, person, soul.

2011-01-13T22:54:00.000-08:00

in secret, she documents
foresight?
is this the reduction campaign anchored in revenge?
she forgives him and dreams of her own hands covered in his blood
in her room, under a large down comforter, incensed and immobile
each square of her flesh that he touched is sick to her - sick, and intent
once she found the lifeline she clinged to it
vein collapse.

2011-01-02T19:10:00.000-08:00

this is me, playing in my band in dc. i had just gotten off the phone with someone
very dear to me. this is me playing when there was energy, when there was light.

http://fairfaxstation.patch.com/articles/ahead-by-a-century-top-fairfax-station-patch-stories#video-4182080

2010-11-13T09:56:00.001-08:00

http://amyandronicus.tumblr.com/post/1553264741/top-ten-ways-to-be-a-feminist-in-2010

2010-08-05T09:16:00.000-07:00

YES!!!! A thousand times yes.

http://www.intuitive-connections.net/2004/book-couragecreate.htm

Rosie "Peppy" Parke and company present Life Pieces to Masterpieces: Cr...

2010-07-23T08:27:00.000-07:00

2010-07-11T16:05:00.000-07:00

My heart is FULL. I just found this old footage of Exotic Fever's SXSW showcase and it made me super proud and happy. I love these incredible men more than I can say.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UZCYzRpwqsw

2010-05-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

In thinking a lot about the use of the word "slut...."

http://claudiabellocq.blogspot.com/2010/05/slut.html?zx=54ef6e08b9c932a3

2010-03-29T07:31:00.001-07:00

Because Andrea Smith is a total genius, I took notes when she spoke. Figured some folks on here might be interested in a few key points that jumped out.

-Sexual violence is a logic of domination. Gender justice must thusly be centralized in social justice movements and work.
-Sexual violence is a key strategy that naturalizes other kinds of domination.
-It is dangerous that we have moved towards thinking only people with PhDs and MSWs can lead healing processes, and that we have tried to make survivors buy in as allies to the prison industrial complex and sentencing.
-Studies show half of men would rape someone if they thought they could get away with it.
-Laws put in place have actually led to BATTERERS calling the state/police more often and getting women locked up.
-Restorative justice maintains that transgressions are the result of a community breakdown, but we should be careful to romanticize the notion of community. Communities often don't support or believe that what happened to a survivor is bad.
-The goals we have then should be to build shared community standards of accountability.
-When community approach goes wrong, or when the state is relied on, survivors and their allies are alienated and people are thus less likely to speak up in the future.
-Patriarchy itself relies heavily on a gender binary system.
-We can opt to govern ourselves with interrelatedness. This means radically viewing oneself in relation to others, and caring about the nurturance of those relationships.
-How do you take ideas and operationalize them? Revolution through trial and error. Collectively continue a conversation. What would it mean to start to build the world we want to live in now?
-We need to figure out how to make organizing part of how we already live.
-"Counter culture" - they build the highway for you, you travel around in circles, but they've still created the roads. You did not DESIGN the roads.
-Agencies (sexual assault and domestic violence shelters) should just be SUPPORT orgs for a broad scale anti-violence political organizing MOVEMENT - they are not in and of themselves the movement.
-Capitalism has limited our political imagination.
-Focusing on cultural and artistic work is therefore a central component to any movement for change.

For more information on Andrea, check this out:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrea_Smith_(academic)

She has her PhD in the History of Consciousness, which I find hugely fascinating. As I do her.

2010-02-18T18:51:00.001-08:00

My new brain crush.

So stoked.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGPIhhkavUc

2010-02-17T13:00:00.000-08:00

Extremely evocative and peaceful. Makes me miss Vienna.

http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php?v=127989917707

2010-02-11T16:42:00.000-08:00

Just found this fun photo of the DuoFest we played in Raleigh. Makes me happy.

I miss living close to df. And musing, and making art!

2010-02-10T06:42:00.000-08:00

Years ago, Eve Ensler came to my old work to interview some of the young women there as part of a project. It is thrilling to me to see this work come to fruitition. She remains one of the most inspired thinkers and artists I have ever encountered.

Look: http://www.v-girls.org/

2010-02-07T17:32:00.000-08:00

"This is the last time I'll abandon you. I wish I could."

It gets easier to feel okay walking around the planet when you embrace the notion that, for the most part, humans are a bunch of scared and/or hurt animals, bumping around this planet in search of happiness.

I get suffocated and want to choke when I feel like I am observing a palpable power struggle socially, even in small contexts. Everyone wants the upper hand. Everyone wants the attention. I was told recently that humans will also regularly seek out information to verify what they already believe to be true.

2010-02-03T16:59:00.001-08:00

I wonder if it is weird to want to throw things up and then not look at them again. Purge.

"You must pick a side - will you choose fear or will you choose love?"

-tori

2010-02-02T20:59:00.000-08:00

Fresh from her win at the Grammys Imogen announces what promises to be a night of monumental proportions. On 5th November 2010 Imogen will play her largest ever UK headline show at London's legendary Royal Albert Hall!

Saw this today...

This woman is magic but I am haunted by her specific magic.

I thought about how beautiful and gorgeous this show will be.

The other day a wise person spoke words of the pain inherent in lives of those of us who dream just a little too huge and a little too hard.

All I ever chased or valued was mutual surrender. I do not care the cultural scripts others offer, or spew. There are things I want, conversations that resonate through my head.

Imogen's words are always in my head. She is a painter for my heart.

There is only one way I would want to see this show now. Her consistent appearances in my life startle me. It will always mean one thing.

2010-01-25T06:46:00.000-08:00

Next book to read. Excited about it - ordering momentarily.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/21/books/review/Roiphe-t.html?_r=1

2010-01-22T12:40:00.000-08:00

It is nuts and weird. Feels like a natural disaster, and I understand my faraway brother. He affords me constancy of camaraderie. Keep up, stay up. Do I hold certain things close to my chest? Like you wouldn't believe. I just hadn't lost the fight to share them still. I need my drums back. They are good sense-makers. I need a trip, to travel and run. I need to feel grass on my feet. Where does your tribe hide? I look around in the morning and think of how the sun rises, where you are. I can't believe the news I got last week. I want to go see Maynard play. I want to find a place of soothing dark instead of menacing dark. Does it exist? I still listen to PJ Harvey for solace. Regularly. I found some people to play music with. I am interested to see how that goes. I want to hole up and write stories about all that has gone on, like you wouldn't believe. We got him, my brother, in our house. We would trade his words and feel akin, less lonely, less futile. Vascillate. I hate your adherence to your timeline and your set of rules. None of us control anything but what we do with what shows up. I am exhausted. I never saw these changes coming and I am learning at a breakneck speed. I am frustra/devastated. I am alive! I jump and dance and sing. I am still here. I am still Katy. I am still the one to do cartwheels for. I am still pushing open bathroom doors and screaming FORGET THAT MISERY, you are owed such better grace. Cowards cowards all around. I know what I have seen. It is mockery. This is a mockery for the true hearted. I will think and feel and write like this forever you know. Harpies never quieted but surging never quitted.

Miss it. Like skinned knees, and a childhood imperfect. Petulant, tyrannical, and costumed. I like collarbone kisses and bravery that scares.

2009-12-31T19:48:00.000-08:00

Goodbye 2009.

I don't even know where to start.

This was a pivotal, difficult year in my life.

This was the year I finished a Masters program and thesis, squarely placing my career path in nonprofit development work. I wrote about girls' rock camps as a healthy youth development intervention strategy for young women. I thought on what music has been for me, and how crucial it was, is, and will forever be to me. I definitely credit music with my life, and I consider its production, creation, and performance an inalienable right to any young person (and for me, young women in particular) who is called to it. Any adult as well. It is one of the two strongest life forces I have ever, ever touched or tasted or known.

This was the year I had two animal companions with me. I needed to guard them while their owner went to learn things and discover and grow and feel peace, and trust - and also frustration, inspiration, confusion, friendship, passion, intrigue, rage, love, history, potential, promise, refusal, and the meaninglessness of any of our best laid plans. Those cats became such beautiful friends. I would tell them dreams. Once on a night where I sorely missed their owner, one of them literally held my hand. She held my hand!!! In her paw. I think of them often. I lost one of them and worked so hard to find her. She was gone weeks! It was awful.

This was the year I told a person I was in love with him and meant it with every fiber of my being. This was a year I did not apologize for doing so, and timelines and geography and distance and rules be damned, I did and said exactly what I needed to, when I needed to.

This was a year I made music with the kind of kindred spirit I have searched for my creative life. I had the kinds of practices that only two particularly suited creatures could have, and began to co-write lyrics - something I had never done. I wrote about things I was scared to even commit to paper. I could write about this and do so simply because of every single thing about this person.

This was the year I got two tattoos because this was the year that called for it.

This was the year I counted on my hands about twenty humans that I will forever and always be (non sexually) in love with. I tried to grow and challenge myself to be better to all of them. To break some of my bad habits. To be the support and love for them that they invariably are to me.

This year I turned down lots of unhealthy shiny things.

This was the year I met two women that reshape how I feel about creativity and passion: Mary Brown and Susie Ibarra.

This was the year one of the most important connections I have ever felt died and was severed. I mourn it daily. I am frustrated and confused by it daily. I also try to know I did the best I could.

This was the year I met a writer, musician, comic book genius, and crazy fucking kindred spirit. Just knowing he is existing in the world and fighting the despair that any thinking/feeling person wrestles with makes me feel more okay in the world as well. I spoke German to him and hugged him and we traded puzzlingly good stories.

This was the year I would make rash decisions with another person who probably does not realize how seriously I took him, how much I wished for the impossible, and how I really did wish we had crossed paths nine years ago. I would get to speak with him and be so enraged by his perspectives yet crave them. I would be honest with him about the messes I had followed and hope, on some level, that he would respect how much I offered. I would tell him I loved his last name.

This was the year I would meet the baby of my two musical friends, one whom I had known since we were teens. I would cry with relief at the incredible, gorgeous parents I know they would be.

This is the year I would learn that there are some people strong enough to hold me up and strong enough to force me to hold myself up.

This was the year I would observe.

This was the year I would actually listen when my mother said, "If you hate the cultural norms regarding women and what you are "supposed" to do, throw them away. Never look back. And never think of them again."

This was the year I would write bristling critique of a book that raised my ire, only to be asked to become a sex columnist by its author. She would also become a friend, and the best editor I ever had.

This was the year I would meet a creature containing possibly the most magic of anyone I have ever, ever met. He would show me words and sounds and surprise me by exactly when he chose to hold my hand. He would watch movies with me and understand exactly why they made me cry. He would ask me how my heart was and for real, it did not feel like cursory bullshit.

This was the year I would miss a fucking world of people spread so far across.

This was the year I would talk about things that made people uncomfortable because not talking about them was terrifying me more.

This was the year that nightmares would teach me things.

This was the year I threw my resume and heart across the country in hopes of direction towards a path I should take, a place that needed me, and fire and fuel again. This was the year that Philadelphia chose me, and I chose it, as a new home.

This was a year I would finally, finally see Elizabeth Elmore. Good. God. Damn. What a woman.

This was a year I would write songs with my past. Not Sisters.

This was a year I would tour again for the first time in two. And realize I still belong there and still have work to do.

This was a year the bands Thank God and Pygmylush would serve as a balm. This was a year I would remember I was my parents' daughter.

This was a year when I would encounter the result of a hell wrought upon a young man and his terrible and terrifying, simultaneous hunger for and inability to provide love. I would see his demons up close and I would run. I would find his past and I would learn how strong a 22 year old younger woman who is fighting to make sense of her reality can be.

This year I would meet with melancholy and Depeche Mode and feel understood.

This year I had my heart broken.

This year I had my life saved.

This year I would play drums to be human and to be an animal and to live in my body.

This year I would begin to try to be okay with quiet. To find and author inner sanctuary.

This year I would leave DC, one of my greatest loves of all.

This year I would feel absurdly, insanely close to someone across the Atlantic Ocean. This year I would plot for meeting this person. It would come as a gift and a beacon and a promise in gray, transitory times.

This year I survived. And created. And loved. And learned. And hopefully in its final hour, with so many people inside my heart and spirit, and one in particular in a more unique place than I ever knew existed, I will restore.

2009-10-24T19:50:00.000-07:00

Lyrics to a song that gave me chills. Features Imogen Heap.

My Secret Friend

You have loved
You were not alone
You have braved the weather
When the storm cut you to the bone
There was always shelter

My secret friend
I'll take you to the river
My secret friend
We can swim forever

In your skin
To die a little death
This time there's no code word
When everyday frays in hollow ends
Dream sweet love submersive

2009-09-28T07:38:00.000-07:00

In a weird twist of fate, I have been asked to be a sex columnist. Uhhh.

I thought I would post the first piece I wrote - I have to change it because she says it is too long. Here it is though. These will be appearing on www.sexreally.com in the future, but since this one needed editing down, I figured I would post the full.

Eyelash Batting, Pursuit until Conquest, and Cognitive Dissonance

Big big smile to the gas station attendant. I was ten years old, and it was summer. I was riding in the front seat of my grandfather’s camper, on my way to meet my mother and sister at the pool. I could detect a glint in the teenage boy’s eyes, and found myself tossing my hair and batting my eyelashes. At ten.
My stoic German grandfather looked over at me. He frowned. As we pulled out of the lot, he moved the van into a parking spot. “Katherine, I need to talk to you about something,” he said firmly.

I loved having the favor of this brilliant, eccentric, bellowing man. A German immigrant, a vegetarian at the age of 7, my Opa taught me the value of independent thinking and living in accordance with one’s own ideals. I could tell he was unhappy, and became silent and attentive.

He looked me square in the face. “Throughout the course of your life, you are going to be encouraged to participate in a whole host of behaviors. Some, you will be encouraged to participate in simple by virtue of being a young lady. You are an attractive girl and you will realize that you can use this to your advantage in life, to receive things or hold power with men. However, I am going to ask something of you right now. I am going to ask that you never be the kind of woman to abuse someone’s real and true interest in you, real and genuine feelings, for her own gain. I am going to ask now that you never exploit someone who has taken to you in that way, because I think you are a stronger, better person than that. You do not have to reciprocate those feelings EVER – never let anyone make you feel you do. But you can at least be respectful of someone having them as long as they are being respectful towards you.”

Fairly heavy for someone who hasn’t hit puberty yet.
I nodded. And I thought.

This moment would come back to me over years, in a host of ways. It would come back to me as I observed attitudes of my friends, both male and female. It would come back to me as I watched men and women string each other along, power struggle, bait and switch, mislead, and misrepresent. It was a heady feeling to be a teenage girl and notice the way adult men would stare at your body, apprising, appreciative – and at times scary and leering. It was terrifying to witness the nature of friendships with boys change, the nature of teasing change, of banter and roughhousing. Befriending a girl labeled a “slut” in high school afforded me the tag of one as well, years before I had ever even slept with a boy.

After a few experiences of being the sidekick to the popular girl at parties, in vans, at raves and behind the schoolyard, and after navigating my way (usually with humor and awkwardness) out of messy, scary situation after messy, scary situation, I began to get the message that attracting men was a form of power but also posed an undeniable threat. I failed to consider most of what flew at me initially as this “well-intentioned” sort of admiration my grandfather had spoken of to me.
When I began to date and had a first boyfriend, I was able to feel some of what sexual agency and experimentation could bring in the way of joy. I was frustrated that against the backdrop of any relationship I had as a girl, there was a narrative and script preceding it of how boys and girls are supposed to view and treat each other. How the story is supposed to go. It was nothing short of cognitive dissonance to realize a. I was boy crazy, b. boys often hurt or angered me, and c. boys terrified me.

We wonder why young women are confused. We are encouraged since elementary school to focus intently on our appearance, we reward the prettiest girls and often conflate “pretty” with nice; we sexualize girls from an early age yet penalize and ostracize them if they actually have sex. Young women recognize quickly that they will be afforded more benefits in life the more sexually desirable they are to others, but it centers around a lack of subjectivity. Young women do not get to have a lot of spaces to talk with one another and safe, trusted adults, about what they want from sex, dating, love, relationships, men, their own bodies. We get a lot more messaging about how to be what others want. We also did not get adequate information that some of us might not date men – we might date women. Or we might date both. Or we might want to spend years not dating.

It becomes clear to most women and girls fairly quickly that to arouse desire also means to invite unwanted advance, comment, assessment and demarcation. The same guy who tells you how fine you are one moment can scream at you that you are a worthless cunt and a bitch when you ignore him the next. Against this kind of a backdrop, is it any wonder girls and women struggle with feeling safe being sexual?
The issue is further complicated once a young woman experiences some form of sexual assault, harassment or violence, as one in three will in the course of her lifetime. Public discourse around sexual violence still penalizes women for their own victimization, shaming them into silence or self-blame. Sexual violence is so widespread that it will touch all of our lives, even those who believe themselves immune. There is no way to talk about sexuality and agency in this world without talking about the construction of sexual subjectivity as a survivor of assault. Oftentimes this victimization may occur before a young person has even been introduced to adequate discussions of consent, boundary setting, and communication.
When I do workshops on Community Response to Sexual Assault, which I have at activist gatherings numerous times now, I ask the people in the room to raise their hand if their high school sex ed curriculum included a meaningful discussion of consent and boundary-setting. Usually, in rooms of 60 or more, one or two hands only will go up. This is unconscionable.

I often think of sex as a site. In its best form, it can be a place of communion, healing, passion and restoration. It can be an exercise in hope. It can also be a place of pain, rage, confusion, and dominance. I remember talking about this to a former partner whom I loved very much. In the context of a fight, I said to him – “Your sexuality is a playground and mine is a minefield.” He countered me brilliantly and said, “How do you know what you think of as a playground isn’t a minefield for me too?” It was insightful and searing, and served as the entry point to a number of subsequent conversations we had about gender, power, relationships, social expectations, and barriers to meaningful connection. As another friend once said, we did not ask for these roles and delineations any more than we asked for ten fingers or ten toes. I know sexual violence affects men in significant ways – as survivors themselves, and often as family members, friends or lovers to those who have been assaulted.

I bring this all up because we live in a world with a tremendous, overwhelming, engulfing amount of violence and trauma. It touches everyone, and discussions about sex cannot ignore it. What I am particularly interested in is discussions of powerful, respectful sexual agency for survivors. What I am also interested in is empowering young women to ask for and get what they want from their relationships, choices and lives. Moreover, to do so in ways that honor other people’s humanity, and allow men the flexibility and right to not have to adhere to unreasonable definitions of masculinity. It can be painful, but important, to realize that if women and girls reward the behavior of hurtful, manipulative, violent and abusive men, there will be less cause for its cessation. I have been guilty of it myself, allowing charisma and physical attraction to interrupt deliberate, critical thinking around the choice of a partner. That doesn’t mean we can’t look back and assess with clearer vision, and pledge to move forward accordingly.

After all, sex, love and attraction are that much richer and more powerful when experienced in unscripted ways, by complex, whole human beings – with their own share of assets, histories, and foibles. Humans who perhaps, in the context of their relationship, can find ways to appreciate some aspects of traditional gender roles that work for them but also challenge those that don’t. As a culture, we have everything to gain from being frank about this – and, as my Opa said, honoring genuine respect and admiration in one another, as depraved as the backdrop we are living against may be.

2009-09-21T11:10:00.000-07:00

today i made a comment to a friend that what separated humans from monkeys was our ability to create art. he pointed out that there are elephants that draw. i have to say honestly that i never knew this. actually, when you consider the amount of bad art humans create, i wonder if parsing through it is a task worth it.

2009-09-17T09:04:00.000-07:00

http://www.splcenter.org/blog/2009/09/11/justice-department-takes-a-second-look-at-new-black-panthers-voter-intimidation-case/

This is interesting to me.

2009-09-10T19:53:00.000-07:00

serpent stealth. i met you
on the arctic periphery
(not surprising that i'd wind up there)
here it is. a chaos intoxicating,
a full-scale thwarting
a toppled tower of Babel
pierce me - like a tarpit
anchor me - like a diamond
reflect every mistrust and
uncertainty that life affords us
breathe...
quiet me.
i have talons and have spent years shrieking,
harpie-like
i crave noise more deafening than my own
(i am never cold enough)
at least let me burn
to fend off those who would wish
me their prey.
which kind are you?
it's a pulse. kinetic. terror/fervor.

2009-09-10T11:04:00.000-07:00

diane and i are going up to nyc this saturday to play buddyfest, the final show of nakatomi plaza - a band i have been friends with for the ten years of their duration. this should be a nice trip. we have a new song that we did not finish yet. i had the idea of possibly calling it "disclaimers be damned," dealing with issues of people who rely on one sentence or two to discount or make okay lots of their behavior to the contrary.

i have been reading some zen buddhism books lately. i find a lot of peace in things that the dalai llama has to say. i am fairly sure i spelled that wrong.

i feel proud of the lyrics we have worked on. regardless of where i live and where diane lives in the next year, i would like to and i think we are committed to, making and recording a full length.

2009-09-03T12:41:00.000-07:00

I just ordered a new Toni Morrison book. It made me think back to college, and to a time when I felt a great deal of excitement at learning new ideas and reading writers I had never heard of. I remember staying up for hours on end with people in the dorms, discussing ideas. I wonder sometimes if there will ever be space for stuff like that to be recreated. Exchange of thoughts and values and analysis. I suppose a lot of the web messageboards I belong to play that role to some extent. It was nice to be able to do in person.

I wonder where a lot of people from that time in my life are now.

2009-08-30T15:56:00.000-07:00

Everyone always says timing is everything.

I got the new Imogen Heap cd. I have put off listening to it. I got it before some events transpired in my life that make it a challenging but important listen. So here I am. A musician who was introduced by someone very important to her and now long gone to this musician. When I get records like this, I listen and pay so much attention - when I get a new release by an artist who has this much emotional significance for me. It was the same with PJ Harvey and Victory at Sea.

It is strange how music and artists can mark certain periods of our lives.

When I listen to people who make music like this I want to be in rooms with them and ask questions. Or just look at them when certain parts of song lyrics come on.

I had a band practice with Diane today. First time we have played in a while. Felt so good. Continually, drums ground me. It is odd to be able to access a force that creates your own grounding. It can be your reset. When you have poured out, lived externally, extroversion combined with acute sensitivity.

I just want September 1. In my heart I guess I have looked towards it as a beacon. I guess I have to hope that rebirth and renewal can happen in fall, in a season of death. I have so often felt in reverse.

Did you ever notice how the concept of "settling down" includes the concept of settling?

Brave women I keep hearing about. Fierce hearts and fucking sad hearts. Heavy heads. Formulas that are supposed to work for us don't. I am looking for my tribe still. Every day. It escapes, we are broken. The bravest we can do is try to heal and spread wings again. To clean out crevices of our minds and have faith in ourselves, even when we have hit brick walls face on, eyes open.

I am writing a book. About the past decade. It has been hard.

2009-08-07T12:40:00.000-07:00

the schizophrenia of loving a moving target.

usher out summer 2009. i am ready for fall, and maturation, death, and eventual rebirth.

2009-08-03T10:18:00.000-07:00

in pursuit of peace and calm.

i had to point out to someone the other the strange reality that i actually find more comfort, peace, and stillness in loud, huge, death-defying sound. it is a cool part of recognizing who i am. as much as things have been in continual flux, music has never waivered for me. there will always be the freedom i feel behind a drum kit. every doubt and worry and anxiety and pain and let down and rage and sorrow is sublimated. i am lucky to have fallen in perpetual love with something as much as i have with drums.

i am going to try to make plans to take a drum lesson or some form of instruction with susie ibarra, an incredible free jazz drummer in nyc. she apparently offers these, and i think it would do wonders for me to participate in something like that.

2009-07-29T21:37:00.000-07:00

you are all so traceable. it is boring and translatable. can't you hide with a little more wisdom, a little more fervor? get it down and siphoned. hide in the reeds, where they won't see you, only hear you. the earth and the sun mix together to feel you. tester/shaker. BRIGHT burn too fast blister. how could you command such a philistine prophecy? she bleeds from her brain, crazy wild sphinx and arrows, embers and cinders. it has since been poisoned and who knows right from wrong? eternal spotless sunshine mind blockage. LIFETRAP she says. i deliberate. you are safer as a spectre, you are more like a risen demon, sent back a decade later to haunt me and recall each flailing, each fissure in my armor. i will summon my boldest heart shards and command you back to the grave. i will make the edges of my erosion sharp and challenge you to battle. broken in interest.

2009-06-05T10:06:00.001-07:00

Acoustic planetariums.

2009-05-01T13:05:00.000-07:00

Create for us a savage creature. A spectre, a stalwart caveat. I can't command anything like this terror, this seizure. Bliss bliss and sunshine all over your skin. I'd claw your peace out of you. Five times the monstrosity of a frenzied demon. Take good care. Lie in release, sanctioned. How do we grow and change in several years? What do we forget in six months? How strong are our youngest and how wise our oldest? I can't believe we can all exist at once. You are a trumpet and a mistake-keeper. Watch me instead of blasting me with words. No titles no labels no ceremony. Please keep your hands off me, her, and anything else you care to deride. I want to be the eldest daughter and most insubordinate. I am lying in the cut, in wait, restless and worth worrying about.

2009-04-22T10:56:00.000-07:00

I have had a good day. Learned some lessons about the value of quiet, of taking information in. There are some things that do need to change. Spring is a great time for this kind of renewal and reassessment. I have been playing a lot of shows with my Bikini Kill tribute band, Rah! Rah! Replica. Last night we played one that was a benefit for the Girls Rock Camp in DC. There is a book about the camp that just came out, with a truly compelling forward by Carrie Brownstein of Sleater-Kinney. In it, she talks about how rare it is to see something totally new, totally brave, that knocks you off your feet. That is how you feel when you see young women perform music in front of a crowd of hundreds, particularly if they only just started playing an instrument that week. It is awe-inspiring.

I was also reminded yesterday that I possess the skills to navigate stressful situations and encounters. As soon as grad school is done, I want to focus more on playing my drums on a regular basis. Diane and I are going on a Trophy Wife tour in the fall (more information about that at trophywifetheband.blogspot.com - as well as a song). Shows have been good. It is a very connected feeling, playing music with her. I tried to write about it in my most recent column for Give Me Back.

Part of spring will involve cleaning out our house. A lot of possessions of past housemates take up space there, and I think that kind of energy is not always the best to be around. I had a great talk with Kevin last night about reorientation towards the world in a lot of ways. He is quite simply one of my wisest and most valued friends.

On Monday, I turn in the first draft of my Masters thesis. It is on Girls Rock Camps, and how they serve as a healthy youth development strategy for young women. I am drawing the connection between the camps and the impact that sports instruction has on the lives of young women, in terms of feeling able to inhabit one's body and also to collaborate and take up space with other young women. I am looking forward to wrapping this up.

2009-03-22T19:32:00.000-07:00

i just got back from south by southwest, my first time going. i have lots of things to say about that...truly incredible experience, great parts, stupid parts, the works.

however right now i just want to rant about something.

it is not ok to ask people what they thought of your band unless you truly believe your friendship is close enough to invite the truth. what a goddamn awkward question. it is also obnoxious to consistently ask people if they are going to your show. a simple flier or invitation is fine. there is no need to beat a dead horse. if you work hard enough at making something beautiful and compelling, others will be hungry for it.

you can't create hunger. you also can't really be a hunger midwife.
one of the members of a band on my label that i love was talking last night about how ego-driven making art is, and how the assertion that you are doing it for others is even MORE ego driven. i can't parse out making art from being part of a community, perhaps because i want different, richer, more intriguing, more enraging kinds of interactions. i want things to pick apart and examine with the people around me. perhaps i am sort of like my mother in that when i start to feel a social dynamic or even art or music event is getting mundane, i wander off and around and probably look semi-crazy to the outsider for trying to find things that intrigue me - whether it is the girlfriend that got dragged to a boring show of white boys screaming by her boyfriend, or the bartender that plays ukelele hours a day on the side of a crap job, or the drugdealer in the street outside (this is of course where things become problematic - fascinating and intriguing people and things are often not necessarily the world's greatest ideas).

i giggle when i think of blunt, overt conversations my friend berdan and i have had in bars, saying things that people usually opt out of saying and seeing people in proximity look both drawn to and horrified by. therein lies the paradox. i think it breaks my heart more than anything when a person i considered paradoxical to their core does something absolutely predictable and by the book. what i crave are the kinds of people who you can know ten years and one day look at them with utter rage at their perspective and ferocious awe the next day.

maybe this is the danger in being a person who gets bored easily. however, i take my parents' words to heart that only boring people STAY bored...i have even used that over the years when questioned by them about any host of misadventures. "well, you both taught me never to STAY bored!" i remember being ten and my mom and dad both saying "katy, boring people are ones that get bored. don't get bored. figure out how to get away from boredom."

i think my parents were amazing. i kind of can't believe they exist sometimes.

their entire relationship is a paradox and my sister and i resulted. funny thing, procreation.

2009-03-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

There are moments that really shock you, like polar bear ice water jumping. Refreshing and heartstopping all at once. And after the initial burn and bliss and thrill, you are left freezing, once again having to fend for yourself. So much of the mythology we are or were sold when we were young is just that. Careening towards/away from a white picket fence. When those who touted the value of a life of risk and penchant for insecurity scramble for the formulaic. You are in the tundra. Glance backward, make a snide remark. Does it help you or them? Self sufficient princess rescue. Time honored traditions.

In such hurtful people and in such dangerous comrades, you can feel such light. Radiance of what they might hope for. Sadly it is incongruous to know your own deep, rich capacity. Hunger fervor. With music, there is the single most complete reciprocity. There is intimacy and it is in blinding sound. Starving voice. I never thought life would involve this much struggle and bravery. I am so thankful for those who have the guts to keep pushing and to not settle, when we live in a culture that begs us to settle every day - begs our apology for existence. Begs our acquiescence.

There is no reward. It is like Coehlo writes in the Alchemist. We make choices out of their own integrity and if we are to settle too early we have no regard for the riches that lie a few miles ahead.

"Soul mates" look a thousand different ways. The ones of us never immune terrify the myth of security.

Sanctify me. Grant me the grace to breathe fire and rescue everyone I love who has no choice other than to drown.

Every flap of their fins is innately gorgeous to me.

2009-03-12T14:13:00.000-07:00

My new boss attended this. Exciting times!!!! Keep moving. Walking solves it.

The Chicago Sun Times DC Blog
March 12, 2009
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2009/03/obama_signed_order_creating_co.html

2009-03-11T13:19:00.000-07:00

a post of lyrics from a song "shields" by the uncanny big business.
thrones for the worthy, graves for the rest, as my friend moe once said. there are so many things i want to say in this that i just can't. words are failing at this point. maybe they know i have exhausted them. so, i will borrow words from loud riled up wild dudes in a band i love.

What could go wrong I can't count the number of ways You could be mauled or burned for starters You could still drown in knee deep waters That's enough to hold up and hide in this cave What could go wrong I can't count the number of ways You could be struck by lightning walking Look at the cross and your soul starts talking Nothing prepares you for the freeze that's coming I won't dare, I won't dare I think I feel a wicked breeze blowing I won't dare, I won't dare Nothing prepares you for the freeze that's coming I won't dare, I won't dare I think I feel a wicked breeze blowing I won't dare, I won't dare Nothing prepares you for the freeze that's coming Lights out and draw the curtains I got the means Wait patiently I won't dare, I won't dare Wait patiently Nothing prepares you for the breeze that's coming I won't care I won't care I think I feel a wicked breeze blowing I won't dare I won't dare Lie down and drown your good dreams I've got the means I won't dare I won't dare That's enough to hold up and hide in the shade Lie down and drown your good dreams Wait patiently--

2008-11-21T08:01:00.000-08:00

I felt complimented the other day when someone asked me if I blogged anywhere. I led them to this site and realized it had been eons since I made an update, so I thought I would. I have been thinking a lot lately about the importance of keeping connected to the work of the small (or large) number of artists/thinkers/musicians/writers/friends you find inspiring as they go about their lives and make work. It is something that can help me when I am feeling down; making an assessment of what I see around me that is brave and fierce and raw and real.

We had a show at my house the other night too that blew me away and reminded me that there are still so many gems left for me to continue to pursue and uncover. This fantastic band Curtains of Night from Chapel Hill played. They are a duo, and actually I had played with them once before when my old band played Chapel Hill. But this time I got to focus on them a lot more. They are heavy and layered and gut-wrenching. My friend Danielle bought the CD and left it in my car so I got to listen to it - fantastic, and wonderful lyrics. Heather from the band Bellafea put it out on her emerging label Holidays for Quince. I highly recommend it.

I also just got to see the art that will be the cover of the Pygmylush/Turboslut split lp. It is fantastic!!! Woodburning, found art / collagey feel to it. This January!

And - what can I say about having a new President? It is a fantastic change. Let's see what happens, and try to step it up ourselves.

Happy Weekend.

2008-07-23T09:46:00.001-07:00

Inspiration for Getting Up Off Myspace and Facebook

hah me and myspace were serious for a while, but he just cant really give me what i need.

xoxox

peep this wonderful piece in the new atlantis. it presents a lot of the thoughts ive been mulling over with others re: my dissatisfaction/concern w the role of the site in my own life.

and yes, i know its a tool etc etc. but this stuff is really interesting, regardless - and i will be keeping my label/band pages. so i ll still be able to see all my beautiful friends on occasion.

Christine Rosen

For centuries, the rich and the powerful documented their existence and their status through painted portraits. A marker of wealth and a bid for immortality, portraits offer intriguing hints about the daily life of their subjects—professions, ambitions, attitudes, and, most importantly, social standing. Such portraits, as German art historian Hans Belting has argued, can be understood as "painted anthropology," with much to teach us, both intentionally and unintentionally, about the culture in which they were created.

Self-portraits can be especially instructive. By showing the artist both as he sees his true self and as he wishes to be seen, self-portraits can at once expose and obscure, clarify and distort. They offer opportunities for both self-expression and self-seeking. They can display egotism and modesty, self-aggrandizement and self-mockery.

Today, our self-portraits are democratic and digital; they are crafted from pixels rather than paints. On social networking websites like MySpace and Facebook, our modern self-portraits feature background music, carefully manipulated photographs, stream-of-consciousness musings, and lists of our hobbies and friends. They are interactive, inviting viewers not merely to look at, but also to respond to, the life portrayed online. We create them to find friendship, love, and that ambiguous modern thing called connection. Like painters constantly retouching their work, we alter, update, and tweak our online self-portraits; but as digital objects they are far more ephemeral than oil on canvas. Vital statistics, glimpses of bare flesh, lists of favorite bands and favorite poems all clamor for our attention—and it is the timeless human desire for attention that emerges as the dominant theme of these vast virtual galleries.

Although social networking sites are in their infancy, we are seeing their impact culturally: in language (where to friend is now a verb), in politics (where it is de rigueur for presidential aspirants to catalogue their virtues on MySpace), and on college campuses (where not using Facebook can be a social handicap). But we are only beginning to come to grips with the consequences of our use of these sites: for friendship, and for our notions of privacy, authenticity, community, and identity. As with any new technological advance, we must consider what type of behavior online social networking encourages. Does this technology, with its constant demands to collect (friends and status), and perform (by marketing ourselves), in some ways undermine our ability to attain what it promises—a surer sense of who we are and where we belong? The Delphic oracle's guidance was know thyself. Today, in the world of online social networks, the oracle's advice might be show thyself.

Making Connections

The earliest online social networks were arguably the Bulletin Board Systems of the 1980s that let users post public messages, send and receive private messages, play games, and exchange software. Some of those BBSs, like The WELL (Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link) that technologist Larry Brilliant and futurist Stewart Brand started in 1985, made the transition to the World Wide Web in the mid-1990s. (Now owned by Salon.com, The WELL boasts that it was "the primordial ooze where the online community movement was born.") Other websites for community and connection emerged in the 1990s, including Classmates.com (1995), where users register by high school and year of graduation; Company of Friends, a business-oriented site founded in 1997; and Epinions, founded in 1999 to allow users to give their opinions about various consumer products.

A new generation of social networking websites appeared in 2002 with the launch of Friendster, whose founder, Jonathan Abrams, admitted that his main motivation for creating the site was to meet attractive women. Unlike previous online communities, which brought together anonymous strangers with shared interests, Friendster uses a model of social networking known as the "Circle of Friends" (developed by British computer scientist Jonathan Bishop), in which users invite friends and acquaintances—that is, people they already know and like—to join their network.

Friendster was an immediate success, with millions of registered users by mid-2003. But technological glitches and poor management at the company allowed a new social networking site, MySpace, launched in 2003, quickly to surpass it. Originally started by musicians, MySpace has become a major venue for sharing music as well as videos and photos. It is now the behemoth of online social networking, with over 100 million registered users. Connection has become big business: In 2005, Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation bought MySpace for $580 million.

Besides MySpace and Friendster, the best-known social networking site is Facebook, launched in 2004. Originally restricted to college students, Facebook—which takes its name from the small photo albums that colleges once gave to incoming freshmen and faculty to help them cope with meeting so many new people—soon extended membership to high schoolers and is now open to anyone. Still, it is most popular among college students and recent college graduates, many of whom use the site as their primary method of communicating with one another. Millions of college students check their Facebook pages several times every day and spend hours sending and receiving messages, making appointments, getting updates on their friends' activities, and learning about people they might recently have met or heard about.

There are dozens of other social networking sites, including Orkut, Bebo, and Yahoo 360º. Microsoft recently announced its own plans for a social networking site called Wallop; the company boasts that the site will offer "an entirely new way for consumers to express their individuality online." (It is noteworthy that Microsoft refers to social networkers as "consumers" rather than merely "users" or, say, "people.") Niche social networking sites are also flourishing: there are sites offering forums and fellowship for photographers, music lovers, and sports fans. There are professional networking sites, such as LinkedIn, that keep people connected with present and former colleagues and other business acquaintances. There are sites specifically for younger children, such as Club Penguin, which lets kids pretend to be chubby, colored penguins who waddle around chatting, playing games, earning virtual money, and buying virtual clothes. Other niche social networking sites connect like-minded self-improvers; the site 43things.com encourages people to share their personal goals. Click on "watch less TV," one of the goals listed on the site, and you can see the profiles of the 1,300 other people in the network who want to do the same thing. And for people who want to join a social network but don't know which niche site is right for them, there are sites that help users locate the proper online social networking community for their particular (or peculiar) interests.

Social networking sites are also fertile ground for those who make it their lives' work to get your attention—namely, spammers, marketers, and politicians. Incidents of spamming and spyware on MySpace and other social networking sites are legion. Legitimate advertisers such as record labels and film studios have also set up pages for their products. In some cases, fictional characters from books and movies are given their own official MySpace pages. Some sports mascots and brand icons have them, too. Procter & Gamble has a Crest toothpaste page on MySpace featuring a sultry-looking model called "Miss Irresistible." As of this summer, she had about 50,000 users linked as friends, whom she urged to "spice it up by sending a naughty (or nice) e-card." The e-cards are emblazoned with Crest or Scope logos, of course, and include messages such as "I wanna get fresh with you" or "Pucker up baby—I'm getting fresh." A P& G marketing officer recently told the Wall Street Journal that from a business perspective, social networking sites are "going to be one giant living dynamic learning experience about consumers."

As for politicians, with the presidential primary season now underway, candidates have embraced a no-website-left-behind policy. Senator Hillary Clinton has official pages on social networking sites MySpace, Flickr, LiveJournal, Facebook, Friendster, and Orkut. As of July 1, 2007, she had a mere 52,472 friends on MySpace (a bit more than Miss Irresistible); her Democratic rival Senator Barack Obama had an impressive 128,859. Former Senator John Edwards has profiles on twenty-three different sites. Republican contenders for the White House are poorer social networkers than their Democratic counterparts; as of this writing, none of the GOP candidates has as many MySpace friends as Hillary, and some of the leading Republican candidates have no social networking presence at all.

Despite the increasingly diverse range of social networking sites, the most popular sites share certain features. On MySpace and Facebook, for example, the process of setting up one's online identity is relatively simple: Provide your name, address, e-mail address, and a few other pieces of information and you're up and running and ready to create your online persona. MySpace includes a section, "About Me," where you can post your name, age, where you live, and other personal details such as your zodiac sign, religion, sexual orientation, and relationship status. There is also a "Who I'd Like to Meet" section, which on most MySpace profiles is filled with images of celebrities. Users can also list their favorite music, movies, and television shows, as well as their personal heroes; MySpace users can also blog on their pages. A user "friends" people—that is, invites them by e-mail to appear on the user's "Friend Space," where they are listed, linked, and ranked. Below the Friends space is a Comments section where friends can post notes. MySpace allows users to personalize their pages by uploading images and music and videos; indeed, one of the defining features of most MySpace pages is the ubiquity of visual and audio clutter. With silly, hyper flashing graphics in neon colors and clip-art style images of kittens and cartoons, MySpace pages often resemble an overdecorated high school yearbook.

By contrast, Facebook limits what its users can do to their profiles. Besides general personal information, Facebook users have a "Wall" where people can leave them brief notes, as well as a Messages feature that functions like an in-house Facebook e-mail account. You list your friends on Facebook as well, but in general, unlike MySpace friends, which are often complete strangers (or spammers) Facebook friends tend to be part of one's offline social circle. (This might change, however, now that Facebook has opened its site to anyone rather than restricting it to college and high school students.) Facebook (and MySpace) allow users to form groups based on mutual interests. Facebook users can also send "pokes" to friends; these little digital nudges are meant to let someone know you are thinking about him or her. But they can also be interpreted as not-so-subtle come-ons; one Facebook group with over 200,000 members is called "Enough with the Poking, Let's Just Have Sex."

Degrees of Separation

It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on the curious use of the word networking to describe this new form of human interaction. Social networking websites "connect" users with a network—literally, a computer network. But the verb to network has long been used to describe an act of intentional social connecting, especially for professionals seeking career-boosting contacts. When the word first came into circulation in the 1970s, computer networks were rare and mysterious. Back then, "network" usually referred to television. But social scientists were already using the notion of networks and nodes to map out human relations and calculate just how closely we are connected.

In 1967, Harvard sociologist and psychologist Stanley Milgram, best known for his earlier Yale experiments on obedience to authority, published the results of a study about social connection that he called the "small world experiment." "Given any two people in the world, person X and person Z," he asked, "how many intermediate acquaintance links are needed before X and Z are connected?" Milgram's research, which involved sending out a kind of chain letter and tracing its journey to a particular target person, yielded an average number of 5.5 connections. The idea that we are all connected by "six degrees of separation" (a phrase later popularized by playwright John Guare) is now conventional wisdom.

But is it true? Duncan J. Watts, a professor at Columbia University and author of Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age, has embarked on a new small world project to test Milgram's theory. Similar in spirit to Milgram's work, it relies on e-mail to determine whether "any two people in the world can be connected via 'six degrees of separation.'" Unlike Milgram's experiment, which was restricted to the United States, Watts's project is global; as he and his colleagues reported in Science, "Targets included a professor at an Ivy League university, an archival inspector in Estonia, a technology consultant in India, a policeman in Australia, and a veterinarian in the Norwegian army." Their early results suggest that Milgram might have been right: messages reached their targets in five to seven steps, on average. Other social networking theorists are equally optimistic about the smallness of our wireless world. In Linked: The New Science of Networks, Albert-László Barabási enthuses, "The world is shrinking because social links that would have died out a hundred years ago are kept alive and can be easily activated. The number of social links an individual can actively maintain has increased dramatically, bringing down the degrees of separation. Milgram estimated six," Barabási writes. "We could be much closer these days to three."

What kind of "links" are these? In a 1973 essay, "The Strength of Weak Ties," sociologist Mark Granovetter argued that weaker relationships, such as those we form with colleagues at work or minor acquaintances, were more useful in spreading certain kinds of information than networks of close friends and family. Watts found a similar phenomenon in his online small world experiment: weak ties (largely professional ones) were more useful than strong ties for locating far-flung individuals, for example.

Today's online social networks are congeries of mostly weak ties—no one who lists thousands of "friends" on MySpace thinks of those people in the same way as he does his flesh-and-blood acquaintances, for example. It is surely no coincidence, then, that the activities social networking sites promote are precisely the ones weak ties foster, like rumor-mongering, gossip, finding people, and tracking the ever-shifting movements of popular culture and fad. If this is our small world, it is one that gives its greatest attention to small things.

Even more intriguing than the actual results of Milgram's small world experiment—our supposed closeness to each other—was the swiftness and credulity of the public in embracing those results. But as psychologist Judith Kleinfeld found when she delved into Milgram's research (much of which was methodologically flawed and never adequately replicated), entrenched barriers of race and social class undermine the idea that we live in a small world. Computer networks have not removed those barriers. As Watts and his colleagues conceded in describing their own digital small world experiment, "more than half of all participants resided in North America and were middle class, professional, college educated, and Christian."

Nevertheless, our need to believe in the possibility of a small world and in the power of connection is strong, as evidenced by the popularity and proliferation of contemporary online social networks. Perhaps the question we should be asking isn't how closely are we connected, but rather what kinds of communities and friendships are we creating?

Won't You Be My Digital Neighbor?

According to a survey recently conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project, more than half of all Americans between the ages of twelve and seventeen use some online social networking site. Indeed, media coverage of social networking sites usually describes them as vast teenage playgrounds—or wastelands, depending on one's perspective. Central to this narrative is a nearly unbridgeable generational divide, with tech-savvy youngsters redefining friendship while their doddering elders look on with bafflement and increasing anxiety. This seems anecdotally correct; I can't count how many times I have mentioned social networking websites to someone over the age of forty and received the reply, "Oh yes, I've heard about that MyFace! All the kids are doing that these days. Very interesting!"

Numerous articles have chronicled adults' attempts to navigate the world of social networking, such as the recent New York Times essay in which columnist Michelle Slatalla described the incredible embarrassment she caused her teenage daughter when she joined Facebook: "everyone in the whole world thinks its super creepy when adults have facebooks," her daughter instant-messaged her. "unfriend paige right now. im serious.... i will be soo mad if you dont unfriend paige right now. actually." In fact, social networking sites are not only for the young. More than half of the visitors to MySpace claim to be over the age of 35. And now that the first generation of college Facebook users have graduated, and the site is open to all, more than half of Facebook users are no longer students. What's more, the proliferation of niche social networking sites, including those aimed at adults, suggests that it is not only teenagers who will nurture relationships in virtual space for the foreseeable future.

What characterizes these online communities in which an increasing number of us are spending our time? Social networking sites have a peculiar psychogeography. As researchers at the Pew project have noted, the proto-social networking sites of a decade ago used metaphors of place to organize their members: people were linked through virtual cities, communities, and homepages. In 1997, GeoCities boasted thirty virtual "neighborhoods" in which "homesteaders" or "GeoCitizens" could gather—"Heartland" for family and parenting tips, "SouthBeach" for socializing, "Vienna" for classical music aficionados, "Broadway" for theater buffs, and so on. By contrast, today's social networking sites organize themselves around metaphors of the person, with individual profiles that list hobbies and interests. As a result, one's entrée into this world generally isn't through a virtual neighborhood or community but through the revelation of personal information. And unlike a neighborhood, where one usually has a general knowledge of others who live in the area, social networking sites are gatherings of deracinated individuals, none of whose personal boastings and musings are necessarily trustworthy. Here, the old arbiters of community—geographic location, family, role, or occupation—have little effect on relationships.

Also, in the offline world, communities typically are responsible for enforcing norms of privacy and general etiquette. In the online world, which is unfettered by the boundaries of real-world communities, new etiquette challenges abound. For example, what do you do with a "friend" who posts inappropriate comments on your Wall? What recourse do you have if someone posts an embarrassing picture of you on his MySpace page? What happens when a friend breaks up with someone—do you defriend the ex? If someone "friends" you and you don't accept the overture, how serious a rejection is it? Some of these scenarios can be resolved with split-second snap judgments; others can provoke days of agonizing.

Enthusiasts of social networking argue that these sites are not merely entertaining; they also edify by teaching users about the rules of social space. As Danah Boyd, a graduate student studying social networks at the University of California, Berkeley, told the authors of MySpace Unraveled, social networking promotes "informal learning.... It's where you learn social norms, rules, how to interact with others, narrative, personal and group history, and media literacy." This is more a hopeful assertion than a proven fact, however. The question that isn't asked is how the technology itself—the way it encourages us to present ourselves and interact—limits or imposes on that process of informal learning. All communities expect their members to internalize certain norms. Even individuals in the transient communities that form in public spaces obey these rules, for the most part; for example, patrons of libraries are expected to keep noise to a minimum. New technologies are challenging such norms—cell phones ring during church sermons; blaring televisions in doctors' waiting rooms make it difficult to talk quietly—and new norms must develop to replace the old. What cues are young, avid social networkers learning about social space? What unspoken rules and communal norms have the millions of participants in these online social networks internalized, and how have these new norms influenced their behavior in the offline world?

Social rules and norms are not merely the strait-laced conceits of a bygone era; they serve a protective function. I know a young woman—attractive, intelligent, and well-spoken—who, like many other people in their twenties, joined Facebook as a college student when it launched. When she and her boyfriend got engaged, they both updated their relationship status to "Engaged" on their profiles and friends posted congratulatory messages on her Wall.

But then they broke off the engagement. And a funny thing happened. Although she had already told a few friends and family members that the relationship was over, her ex decided to make it official in a very twenty-first century way: he changed his status on his profile from "Engaged" to "Single." Facebook immediately sent out a feed to every one of their mutual "friends" announcing the news, "Mr. X and Ms. Y are no longer in a relationship," complete with an icon of a broken heart. When I asked the young woman how she felt about this, she said that although she assumed her friends and acquaintances would eventually hear the news, there was something disconcerting about the fact that everyone found out about it instantaneously; and since the message came from Facebook, rather than in a face-to-face exchange initiated by her, it was devoid of context—save for a helpful notation of the time and that tacky little heart.

Indecent Exposure

Enthusiasts praise social networking for presenting chances for identity-play; they see opportunities for all of us to be little Van Goghs and Warhols, rendering quixotic and ever-changing versions of ourselves for others to enjoy. Instead of a palette of oils, we can employ services such as PimpMySpace.org, which offers "layouts, graphics, background, and more!" to gussy up an online presentation of self, albeit in a decidedly raunchy fashion: Among the most popular graphics used by PimpMySpace clients on a given day in June 2007 were short video clips of two women kissing and another of a man and an obese woman having sex; a picture of a gleaming pink handgun; and an image of the cartoon character SpongeBob SquarePants, looking alarmed and uttering a profanity.

This kind of coarseness and vulgarity is commonplace on social networking sites for a reason: it's an easy way to set oneself apart. Pharaohs and kings once celebrated themselves by erecting towering statues or, like the emperor Augustus, placing their own visages on coins. But now, as the insightful technology observer Jaron Lanier has written, "Since there are only a few archetypes, ideals, or icons to strive for in comparison to the vastness of instances of everything online, quirks and idiosyncrasies stand out better than grandeur in this new domain. I imagine Augustus' MySpace page would have pictured him picking his nose." And he wouldn't be alone. Indeed, this is one of the characteristics of MySpace most striking to anyone who spends a few hours trolling its millions of pages: it is an overwhelmingly dull sea of monotonous uniqueness, of conventional individuality, of distinctive sameness.

The world of online social networking is practically homogenous in one other sense, however diverse it might at first appear: its users are committed to self-exposure. The creation and conspicuous consumption of intimate details and images of one's own and others' lives is the main activity in the online social networking world. There is no room for reticence; there is only revelation. Quickly peruse a profile and you know more about a potential acquaintance in a moment than you might have learned about a flesh-and-blood friend in a month. As one college student recently described to the New York Times Magazine: "You might run into someone at a party, and then you Facebook them: what are their interests? Are they crazy-religious, is their favorite quote from the Bible? Everyone takes great pains over presenting themselves. It's like an embodiment of your personality."

It seems that in our headlong rush to join social networking sites, many of us give up one of the Internet's supposed charms: the promise of anonymity. As Michael Kinsley noted in Slate, in order to "stake their claims as unique individuals," users enumerate personal information: "Here is a list of my friends. Here are all the CDs in my collection. Here is a picture of my dog." Kinsley is not impressed; he judges these sites "vast celebrations of solipsism."

Social networkers, particularly younger users, are often naïve or ill-informed about the amount of information they are making publicly available. "One cannot help but marvel at the amount, detail, and nature of the personal information some users provide, and ponder how informed this information sharing can be," Carnegie Mellon researchers Alessandro Acquisti and Ralph Gross wrote in 2006. In a survey of Facebook users at their university, Acquisti and Gross "detected little or no relation between participants' reported privacy attitudes and their likelihood" of publishing personal information online. Even among the students in the survey who claimed to be most concerned about their privacy—the ones who worried about "the scenario in which a stranger knew their schedule of classes and where they lived"—about 40 percent provided their class schedule on Facebook, about 22 percent put their address on Facebook, and almost 16 percent published both.

This kind of carelessness has provided fodder for many sensationalist news stories. To cite just one: In 2006, NBC's Dateline featured a police officer posing as a 19-year-old boy who was new in town. Although not grounded in any particular local community, the imposter quickly gathered more than 100 friends for his MySpace profile and began corresponding with several teenage girls. Although the girls claimed to be careful about the kind of information they posted online, when Dateline revealed that their new friend was actually an adult male who had figured out their names and where they lived, they were surprised. The danger posed by strangers who use social networking sites to prey on children is real; there have been several such cases. This danger was highlighted in July 2007 when MySpace booted from its system 29,000 sex offenders who had signed up for memberships using their real names. There is no way of knowing how many sex offenders have MySpace accounts registered under fake names.

There are also professional risks to putting too much information on social networking sites, just as for several years there have been career risks associated with personal homepages and blogs. A survey conducted in 2006 by researchers at the University of Dayton found that "40 percent of employers say they would consider the Facebook profile of a potential employee as part of their hiring decision, and several reported rescinding offers after checking out Facebook." Yet college students' reaction to this fact suggests that they have a different understanding of privacy than potential employers: 42 percent thought it was a violation of privacy for employers to peruse their profiles, and "64 percent of students said employers should not consider Facebook profiles during the hiring process."

This is a quaintly Victorian notion of privacy, embracing the idea that individuals should be able to compartmentalize and parcel out parts of their personalities in different settings. It suggests that even behavior of a decidedly questionable or hypocritical bent (the Victorian patriarch who also cavorts with prostitutes, for example, or the straight-A business major who posts picture of himself funneling beer on his MySpace page) should be tolerated if appropriately segregated. But when one's darker side finds expression in a virtual space, privacy becomes more difficult and true compartmentalization nearly impossible; on the Internet, private misbehavior becomes public exhibitionism.

In many ways, the manners and mores that have already developed in the world of online social networking suggest that these sites promote gatherings of what psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton has called "protean selves." Named after Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, the protean self evinces "mockery and self-mockery, irony, absurdity, and humor." (Indeed, the University of Dayton survey found that "23 percent [of students] said they intentionally misrepresented themselves [on Facebook] to be funny or as a joke.") Also, Lifton argues, "the emotions of the protean self tend to be free-floating, not clearly tied to cause or target." So, too, with protean communities: "Not just individual emotions but communities as well may be free-floating," Lifton writes, "removed geographically and embraced temporarily and selectively, with no promise of permanence." This is precisely the appeal of online social networking. These sites make certain kinds of connections easier, but because they are governed not by geography or community mores but by personal whim, they free users from the responsibilities that tend to come with membership in a community. This fundamentally changes the tenor of the relationships that form there, something best observed in the way social networks treat friendship.

The New Taxonomy of Friendship

There is a Spanish proverb that warns, "Life without a friend is death without a witness." In the world of online social networking, the warning might be simpler: "Life without hundreds of online 'friends' is virtual death." On these sites, friendship is the stated raison d'être. "A place for friends," is the slogan of MySpace. Facebook is a "social utility that connects people with friends." Orkut describes itself as "an online community that connects people through a network of trusted friends." Friendster's name speaks for itself.

But "friendship" in these virtual spaces is thoroughly different from real-world friendship. In its traditional sense, friendship is a relationship which, broadly speaking, involves the sharing of mutual interests, reciprocity, trust, and the revelation of intimate details over time and within specific social (and cultural) contexts. Because friendship depends on mutual revelations that are concealed from the rest of the world, it can only flourish within the boundaries of privacy; the idea of public friendship is an oxymoron.

The hypertext link called "friendship" on social networking sites is very different: public, fluid, and promiscuous, yet oddly bureaucratized. Friendship on these sites focuses a great deal on collecting, managing, and ranking the people you know. Everything about MySpace, for example, is designed to encourage users to gather as many friends as possible, as though friendship were philately. If you are so unfortunate as to have but one MySpace friend, for example, your page reads: "You have 1 friends," along with a stretch of sad empty space where dozens of thumbnail photos of your acquaintances should appear.

This promotes a form of frantic friend procurement. As one young Facebook user with 800 friends told John Cassidy in The New Yorker, "I always find the competitive spirit in me wanting to up the number." An associate dean at Purdue University recently boasted to the Christian Science Monitor that since establishing a Facebook profile, he had collected more than 700 friends. The phrase universally found on MySpace is, "Thanks for the add!"—an acknowledgment by one user that another has added you to his list of friends. There are even services like FriendFlood.com that act as social networking pimps: for a fee, they will post messages on your page from an attractive person posing as your "friend." As the founder of one such service told the New York Times in February 2007, he wanted to "turn cyberlosers into social-networking magnets."

The structure of social networking sites also encourages the bureaucratization of friendship. Each site has its own terminology, but among the words that users employ most often is "managing." The Pew survey mentioned earlier found that "teens say social networking sites help them manage their friendships." There is something Orwellian about the management-speak on social networking sites: "Change My Top Friends," "View All of My Friends" and, for those times when our inner Stalins sense the need for a virtual purge, "Edit Friends." With a few mouse clicks one can elevate or downgrade (or entirely eliminate) a relationship.

To be sure, we all rank our friends, albeit in unspoken and intuitive ways. One friend might be a good companion for outings to movies or concerts; another might be someone with whom you socialize in professional settings; another might be the kind of person for whom you would drop everything if he needed help. But social networking sites allow us to rank our friends publicly. And not only can we publicize our own preferences in people, but we can also peruse the favorites among our other acquaintances. We can learn all about the friends of our friends—often without having ever met them in person.

Status-Seekers

Of course, it would be foolish to suggest that people are incapable of making distinctions between social networking "friends" and friends they see in the flesh. The use of the word "friend" on social networking sites is a dilution and a debasement, and surely no one with hundreds of MySpace or Facebook "friends" is so confused as to believe those are all real friendships. The impulse to collect as many "friends" as possible on a MySpace page is not an expression of the human need for companionship, but of a different need no less profound and pressing: the need for status. Unlike the painted portraits that members of the middle class in a bygone era would commission to signal their elite status once they rose in society, social networking websites allow us to create status—not merely to commemorate the achievement of it. There is a reason that most of the MySpace profiles of famous people are fakes, often created by fans: Celebrities don't need legions of MySpace friends to prove their importance. It's the rest of the population, seeking a form of parochial celebrity, that does.

But status-seeking has an ever-present partner: anxiety. Unlike a portrait, which, once finished and framed, hung tamely on the wall signaling one's status, maintaining status on MySpace or Facebook requires constant vigilance. As one 24-year-old wrote in a New York Times essay, "I am obsessed with testimonials and solicit them incessantly. They are the ultimate social currency, public declarations of the intimacy status of a relationship.... Every profile is a carefully planned media campaign."

The sites themselves were designed to encourage this. Describing the work of B.J. Fogg of Stanford University, who studies "persuasion strategies" used by social networking sites to increase participation, The New Scientist noted, "The secret is to tie the acquisition of friends, compliments and status—spoils that humans will work hard for—to activities that enhance the site." As Fogg told the magazine, "You offer someone a context for gaining status, and they are going to work for that status." Network theorist Albert-László Barabási notes that online connection follows the rule of "preferential attachment"—that is, "when choosing between two pages, one with twice as many links as the other, about twice as many people link to the more connected page." As a result, "while our individual choices are highly unpredictable, as a group we follow strict patterns." Our lemming-like pursuit of online status via the collection of hundreds of "friends" clearly follows this rule.

What, in the end, does this pursuit of virtual status mean for community and friendship? Writing in the 1980s in Habits of the Heart, sociologist Robert Bellah and his colleagues documented the movement away from close-knit, traditional communities, to "lifestyle enclaves" which were defined largely by "leisure and consumption." Perhaps today we have moved beyond lifestyle enclaves and into "personality enclaves" or "identity enclaves"—discrete virtual places in which we can be different (and sometimes contradictory) people, with different groups of like-minded, though ever-shifting, friends.

Beyond Networking

This past spring, Len Harmon, the director of the Fischer Policy and Cultural Institute at Nichols College in Dudley, Massachusetts, offered a new course about social networking. Nichols is a small school whose students come largely from Connecticut and Massachusetts; many of them are the first members of their families to attend college. "I noticed a lot of issues involved with social networking sites," Harmon told me when I asked him why he created the class. How have these sites been useful to Nichols students? "It has relieved some of the stress of transitions for them," he said. "When abrupt departures occur—their family moves or they have to leave friends behind—they can cope by keeping in touch more easily."

So perhaps we should praise social networking websites for streamlining friendship the way e-mail streamlined correspondence. In the nineteenth century, Emerson observed that "friendship requires more time than poor busy men can usually command." Now, technology has given us the freedom to tap into our network of friends when it is convenient for us. "It's a way of maintaining a friendship without having to make any effort whatsoever," as a recent graduate of Harvard explained to The New Yorker. And that ease admittedly makes it possible to stay in contact with a wider circle of offline acquaintances than might have been possible in the era before Facebook. Friends you haven't heard from in years, old buddies from elementary school, people you might have (should have?) fallen out of touch with—it is now easier than ever to reconnect to those people.

But what kind of connections are these? In his excellent book Friendship: An Exposé, Joseph Epstein praises the telephone and e-mail as technologies that have greatly facilitated friendship. He writes, "Proust once said he didn't much care for the analogy of a book to a friend. He thought a book was better than a friend, because you could shut it—and be shut of it—when you wished, which one can't always do with a friend." With e-mail and caller ID, Epstein enthuses, you can. But social networking sites (which Epstein says "speak to the vast loneliness in the world") have a different effect: they discourage "being shut of" people. On the contrary, they encourage users to check in frequently, "poke" friends, and post comments on others' pages. They favor interaction of greater quantity but less quality.

This constant connectivity concerns Len Harmon. "There is a sense of, 'if I'm not online or constantly texting or posting, then I'm missing something,'" he said of his students. "This is where I find the generational impact the greatest—not the use of the technology, but the overuse of the technology." It is unclear how the regular use of these sites will affect behavior over the long run—especially the behavior of children and young adults who are growing up with these tools. Almost no research has explored how virtual socializing affects children's development. What does a child weaned on Club Penguin learn about social interaction? How is an adolescent who spends her evenings managing her MySpace page different from a teenager who spends her night gossiping on the telephone to friends? Given that "people want to live their lives online," as the founder of one social networking site recently told Fast Company magazine, and they are beginning to do so at ever-younger ages, these questions are worth exploring.

The few studies that have emerged do not inspire confidence. Researcher Rob Nyland at Brigham Young University recently surveyed 184 users of social networking sites and found that heavy users "feel less socially involved with the community around them." He also found that "as individuals use social networking more for entertainment, their level of social involvement decreases." Another recent study conducted by communications professor Qingwen Dong and colleagues at the University of the Pacific found that "those who engaged in romantic communication over MySpace tend to have low levels of both emotional intelligence and self-esteem."

The implications of the narcissistic and exhibitionistic tendencies of social networkers also cry out for further consideration. There are opportunity costs when we spend so much time carefully grooming ourselves online. Given how much time we already devote to entertaining ourselves with technology, it is at least worth asking if the time we spend on social networking sites is well spent. In investing so much energy into improving how we present ourselves online, are we missing chances to genuinely improve ourselves?

We should also take note of the trend toward giving up face-to-face for virtual contact—and, in some cases, a preference for the latter. Today, many of our cultural, social, and political interactions take place through eminently convenient technological surrogates—Why go to the bank if you can use the ATM? Why browse in a bookstore when you can simply peruse the personalized selections Amazon.com has made for you? In the same vein, social networking sites are often convenient surrogates for offline friendship and community. In this context it is worth considering an observation that Stanley Milgram made in 1974, regarding his experiments with obedience: "The social psychology of this century reveals a major lesson," he wrote. "Often it is not so much the kind of person a man is as the kind of situation in which he finds himself that determines how he will act." To an increasing degree, we find and form our friendships and communities in the virtual world as well as the real world. These virtual networks greatly expand our opportunities to meet others, but they might also result in our valuing less the capacity for genuine connection. As the young woman writing in the Times admitted, "I consistently trade actual human contact for the more reliable high of smiles on MySpace, winks on Match.com, and pokes on Facebook." That she finds these online relationships more reliable is telling: it shows a desire to avoid the vulnerability and uncertainty that true friendship entails. Real intimacy requires risk—the risk of disapproval, of heartache, of being thought a fool. Social networking websites may make relationships more reliable, but whether those relationships can be humanly satisfying remains to be seen.

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Christine Rosen is a senior editor of The New Atlantis and a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center.

2007-10-15T09:07:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post a little bit about some of the music that has captivated me lately. I rediscovered my love for Your Majesty, a band from DC that was around in the mid-nineties. My friend John Beckham turned me on to them years ago. They have a full-length called "Jive Shucker" that is incredible. There was a woman named Michel Adi that played drums in this band and I swear to GOD I wish she was still playing music. Maybe she is! I can't seem to find much on the internet about it. This music is dark, melodic, driving - all the things I like. Noisy, etc. The CD is available for like a penny on amazon and you definitely wouldn't be sorry if you got it. My beloved roommate Beck also found me an awesome split seven inch they put out with a mysterious 90s era band called Rugtip. The Your Majesty side has one song not on the full length and a different version of another song.

Also, I have been enjoying Big Business SOOOOO much. Featuring former members of Karp and Murder City Devils, this is crazy good. Drummer Coady Willis is left-handed, sick as shit, precise and brutal all at once. Jared's vocals sound like a mountain preaching from on high! Check this shit out.

I got to hang out with a friend this weekend and talk about visual art, and it reminded me how much I also love Renee Stout. Her retrospective book is cheap on amazon, and she has a piece up at the Hirschhorn as well. You can see some of her images on google I am sure, but I really recommend trying to see her work in person if you get the chance.

Finally, everyone should read Miranda July's book of short stories. Incredible. God she rules.

2007-08-09T11:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted to post this article that captured my interest and passion years ago. I think Steve Albini is one of the most talented, driving, vitriolic, important figures the music world has ever, ever seen. This piece remains one of the bravest columns I've read.

The Problem With Music
by Steve Albini

Whenever I talk to a band who are about to sign with a major label, I always end up thinking of them in a particular context. I imagine a trench, about four feet wide and five feet deep, maybe sixty yards long, filled with runny, decaying shit. I imagine these people, some of them good friends, some of them barely acquaintances, at one end of this trench. I also imagine a faceless industry lackey at the other end holding a fountain pen and a contract waiting to be signed. Nobody can see what's printed on the contract. It's too far away, and besides, the shit stench is making everybody's eyes water. The lackey shouts to everybody that the first one to swim the trench gets to sign the contract. Everybody dives in the trench and they struggle furiously to get to the other end. Two people arrive simultaneously and begin wrestling furiously, clawing each other and dunking each other under the shit. Eventually, one of them capitulates, and there's only one contestant left. He reaches for the pen, but the Lackey says "Actually, I think you need a little more development. Swim again, please. Backstroke". And he does of course.

Every major label involved in the hunt for new bands now has on staff a high-profile point man, an "A&R" rep who can present a comfortable face to any prospective band. The initials stand for "Artist and Repertoire" because historically, the A&R staff would select artists to record music that they had also selected, out of an available pool of each. This is still the case, though not openly. These guys are universally young (about the same age as the bands being wooed), and nowadays they always have some obvious underground rock credibility flag they can wave.

Lyle Preslar, former guitarist for Minor Threat, is one of them. Terry Tolkin, former NY independent booking agent and assistant manager at Touch and Go is one of them. Al Smith, former soundman at CBGB is one of them. Mike Gitter, former editor of XXX fanzine and contributor to Rip, Kerrang and other lowbrow rags is one of them. Many of the annoying turds who used to staff college radio stations are in their ranks as well. There are several reasons A&R scouts are always young. The explanation usually copped-to is that the scout will be "hip to the current musical "scene." A more important reason is that the bands will intuitively trust someone they think is a peer, and who speaks fondly of the same formative rock and roll experiences. The A&R person is the first person to make contact with the band, and as such is the first person to promise them the moon. Who better to promise them the moon than an idealistic young turk who expects to be calling the shots in a few years, and who has had no previous experience with a big record company. Hell, he's as naive as the band he's duping. When he tells them no one will interfere in their creative process, he probably even believes it. When he sits down with the band for the first time, over a plate of angel hair pasta, he can tell them with all sincerity that when they sign with company X, they're really signing with him and he's on their side. Remember that great gig I saw you at in '85? Didn't we have a blast. By now all rock bands are wise enough to be suspicious of music industry scum. There is a pervasive caricature in popular culture of a portly, middle aged ex-hipster talking a mile-a-minute, using outdated jargon and calling everybody "baby." After meeting "their" A&R guy, the band will say to themselves and everyone else, "He's not like a record company guy at all! He's like one of us." And they will be right. That's one of the reasons he was hired.

These A&R guys are not allowed to write contracts. What they do is present the band with a letter of intent, or "deal memo," which loosely states some terms, and affirms that the band will sign with the label once a contract has been agreed on. The spookiest thing about this harmless sounding little memo, is that it is, for all legal purposes, a binding document. That is, once the band signs it, they are under obligation to conclude a deal with the label. If the label presents them with a contract that the band don't want to sign, all the label has to do is wait. There are a hundred other bands willing to sign the exact same contract, so the label is in a position of strength. These letters never have any terms of expiration, so the band remain bound by the deal memo until a contract is signed, no matter how long that takes. The band cannot sign to another label or even put out its own material unless they are released from their agreement, which never happens. Make no mistake about it: once a band has signed a letter of intent, they will either eventually sign a contract that suits the label or they will be destroyed.

One of my favorite bands was held hostage for the better part of two years by a slick young "He's not like a label guy at all," A&R rep, on the basis of such a deal memo. He had failed to come through on any of his promises (something he did with similar effect to another well-known band), and so the band wanted out. Another label expressed interest, but when the A&R man was asked to release the band, he said he would need money or points, or possibly both, before he would consider it. The new label was afraid the price would be too dear, and they said no thanks. On the cusp of making their signature album, an excellent band, humiliated, broke up from the stress and the many months of inactivity.

There's this band...
There's this band. They're pretty ordinary, but they're also pretty good, so they've attracted some attention. They're signed to a moderate-sized "independent" label owned by a distribution company, and they have another two albums owed to the label. They're a little ambitious. They'd like to get signed by a major label so they can have some security: you know, get some good equipment, tour in a proper tour bus -- nothing fancy, just a little reward for all the hard work. To that end, they got a manager. He knows some of the label guys, and he can shop their next project to all the right people. He takes his cut, sure, but it's only 15%, and if he can get them signed then it's money well spent. Anyways, it doesn't cost them anything if it doesn't work. 15% of nothing isn't much! One day an A&R scout calls them, says he's "been following them for a while now," and when their manager mentioned them to him, it just "clicked." Would they like to meet with him about the possibility of working out a deal with his label? Wow. Big Break time. They meet the guy, and y'know what -- he's not what they expected from a label guy. He's young and dresses pretty much like the band does. He knows all their favorite bands. He's like one of them. He tells them he wants to go to bat for them, to try to get them everything they want. He says anything is possible with the right attitude.

They conclude the evening by taking home a copy of a deal memo they wrote out and signed on the spot. The A&R guy was full of great ideas, even talked about using a name producer. Butch Vig is out of the question — he wants 100 Gs and three points, but they can get Don Fleming for $30,000 plus three points. Even that's a little steep, so maybe they'll go with that guy who used to be in David Letterman's band. He only wants three points. Or they can have just anybody record it (like Warton Tiers, maybe-- cost you 5 or 7 grand) and have Andy Wallace remix it for 4 grand a track plus 2 points. It was a lot to think about. Well, they like this guy and they trust him. Besides, they already signed the deal memo. He must have been serious about wanting them to sign. They break the news to their current label, and the label manager says he wants them to succeed, so they have his blessing. He will need to be compensated, of course, for the remaining albums left on their contract, but he'll work it out with the label himself.

Sub Pop made millions from selling off Nirvana, and Twin Tone hasn't done bad either: 50 grand for the Babes and 60 grand for the Poster Children -- without having to sell a single additional record. It'll be something modest. The new label doesn't mind, so long as it's recoupable out of royalties. Well, they get the final contract, and it's not quite what they expected. They figure it's better to be safe than sorry and they turn it over to a lawyer--one who says he's experienced in entertainment law and he hammers out a few bugs. They're still not sure about it, but the lawyer says he's seen a lot of contracts, and theirs is pretty good. They'll be great royalty: 13% [less a 10% packaging deduction]. Wasn't it Buffalo Tom that were only getting 12% less 10? Whatever. The old label only wants 50 grand, and no points. Hell, Sub Pop got 3 points when they let Nirvana go. They're signed for four years, with options on each year, for a total of over a million dollars! That's a lot of money in any man's English. The first year's advance alone is $250,000. Just think about it, a quarter million, just for being in a rock band! Their manager thinks it's a great deal, especially the large advance. Besides, he knows a publishing company that will take the band on if they get signed, and even give them an advance of 20 grand, so they'll be making that money too. The manager says publishing is pretty mysterious, and nobody really knows where all the money comes from, but the lawyer can look that contract over, too. Hell, it's free money. Their booking agent is excited about the band signing to a major. He says they can maybe average $1,000 or $2,000 a night from now on. That's enough to justify a five week tour, and with tour support, they can use a proper crew, buy some good equipment and even get a tour bus! Buses are pretty expensive, but if you figure in the price of a hotel room for everybody In the band and crew, they're actually about the same cost. Some bands like Therapy? and Sloan and Stereolab use buses on their tours even when they're getting paid only a couple hundred bucks a night, and this tour should earn at least a grand or two every night. It'll be worth it. The band will be more comfortable and will play better.

The agent says a band on a major label can get a merchandising company to pay them an advance on T-shirt sales! ridiculous! There's a gold mine here! The lawyer Should look over the merchandising contract, just to be safe. They get drunk at the signing party. Polaroids are taken and everybody looks thrilled. The label picked them up in a limo. They decided to go with the producer who used to be in Letterman's band. He had these technicians come in and tune the drums for them and tweak their amps and guitars. He had a guy bring in a slew of expensive old "vintage" microphones. Boy, were they "warm." He even had a guy come in and check the phase of all the equipment in the control room! Boy, was he professional. He used a bunch of equipment on them and by the end of it, they all agreed that it sounded very "punchy," yet "warm." All that hard work paid off. With the help of a video, the album went like hotcakes! They sold a quarter million copies!

Here is the math that will explain just how fucked they are: These figures are representative of amounts that appear in record contracts daily. There's no need to skew the figures to make the scenario look bad, since real-life examples more than abound. income is bold and underlined, expenses are not.

Advance: $250,000
Manager's cut: 37,500
Legal fees: 10,000
Recording Budget: 150,000
Producer's advance: 50,000
Studio fee: 52,500
Drum Amp, Mic and Phase "Doctors": 3,000
Recording tape: 8,000
Equipment rental: 5,000
Cartage and Transportation: 5,000
Lodgings while in studio: 10,000
Catering: 3,000
Mastering: 10,000
Tape copies, reference CDs, shipping tapes, misc. expenses: 2,000
Video budget: 30,000
Cameras: 8,000
Crew: 5,000
Processing and transfers: 3,000
Off-line: 2,000
On-line editing: 3,000
Catering: 1,000
Stage and construction: 3,000
Copies, couriers, transportation: 2,000
Director's fee: 3,000
Album Artwork: 5,000
Promotional photo shoot and duplication: 2,000
Band fund: 15,000
New fancy professional drum kit: 5,000
New fancy professional guitars [2]: 3,000
New fancy professional guitar amp rigs [2]: 4,000
New fancy potato-shaped bass guitar: 1,000
New fancy rack of lights bass amp: 1,000
Rehearsal space rental: 500
Big blowout party for their friends: 500
Tour expense [5 weeks]: 50,875
Bus: 25,000
Crew [3]: 7,500
Food and per diems: 7,875
Fuel: 3,000
Consumable supplies: 3,500
Wardrobe: 1,000
Promotion: 3,000
Tour gross income: 50,000
Agent's cut: 7,500
Manager's cut: 7,500
Merchandising advance: 20,000
Manager's cut: 3,000
Lawyer's fee: 1,000
Publishing advance: 20,000
Manager's cut: 3,000
Lawyer's fee: 1,000
Record sales: 250,000 @ $12 =
$3,000,000
Gross retail revenue Royalty: [13% of 90% of retail]:
351,000
Less advance: 250,000
Producer's points: [3% less $50,000 advance]:
40,000
Promotional budget: 25,000
Recoupable buyout from previous label: 50,000
Net royalty: -14,000

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Record company income:

Record wholesale price: $6.50 x 250,000 =
$1,625,000 gross income
Artist Royalties: 351,000
Deficit from royalties: 14,000
Manufacturing, packaging and distribution: @ $2.20 per record: 550,000
Gross profit: 710,000

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The Balance Sheet: This is how much each player got paid at the end of the game.

Record company: 710,000
Producer: 90,000
Manager: 51,000
Studio: 52,500
Previous label: 50,000
Agent: 7,500
Lawyer: 12,000
Band member net income each: $4,031.25

The band is now ¼th of the way through its contract, has made the music industry more than 3 million dollars richer, but is in the hole $14,000 on royalties. The band members have each earned about one third as much as they would working at a 7-11, but they got to ride in a tour bus for a month. The next album will be about the same, except that the record company will insist they spend more time and money on it. Since the previous one never "recouped," the band will have no leverage, and will oblige. The next tour will be about the same, except the merchandising advance will have already been paid, and the band, strangely enough, won't have earned any royalties from their T-shirts yet. Maybe the T-shirt guys have figured out how to count money like record company guys. Some of your friends are probably already this fucked.

2007-07-31T07:12:00.001-07:00

2007-03-17T06:07:00.000-07:00

my bandmates got me listening to this incredible band the twilight singers lately. good grief, they are incredible. one of the guys used to be in that band afghan whigs. there is something about his quiet, rumbly, gravelly voice - i want to see them play live so much. some of the lyrics he has written just knock the wind out of me. i love getting surprised and excited about a band that you are introduced to totally out of the blue.

they have a myspace if anyone wants to hear them. i want them to come out this way so bad!

2006-10-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

I think so much about age, particularly as it relates to being involved in a punk community, particularly as it relates to your life when you want to be part of a community, when you desire change, when you want to live with a spirit of resistance but you also want to build security and stability for yourself. I think about it in terms of gender, in terms of the expectations of what it means to be a woman in this society, what defines femininity, what I want to extract from that, whether I want children, what I want out of life, work, art, love, community - how to love fully, and include yourself in that process, what partnerships look like that make me feel comfortable, what kinds of adventures I want to have, who I want to hold close and why, what choices I want to make for myself.

I feel lucky to live in DC, in a place where there are a number of truly inspiring people in the punk community a generation ahead of me who are active, engaged, and who have lives that make sense to me. So much doesn't resonate to me about the way some people approach punk - when it becomes a ghetto of self congratulation, when people fall into a party line, when you get evil looks if you aren't stoked on lettuce from a dumpster that is brown. There are some things that strike me as laziness. I don't know - I feel, for example, like I was afforded a great privilege to go to school and get a degree. I don't think that means I shouldn't question our incredibly fucked up system of higher education, and of class and privilege, and how it plays out in the world. I do think though that there is something to be said for hard work and completing what you start. It doesn't have to be school, but I get saddened to think that there are punk kids content to sit and talk amongst ourselves, to pontificate to abstraction when there is a world out there that is fucked beyond belief, that needs us active, engaged, and alive.

It needs to be flexible. Punk was my catalyst, and will always be. It is a part of my life, a joyous, celebratory part. But it isn't my whole life. And growing older means for me looking at what positive role it can play in my life, what music means to me, what community and cultural production means. It means writing history, listening to the incredible voices of my friends, understanding that bullshit that is corporate media and media production, resisting. It means I need to share that with younger people, need to learn from older people, and vice versa. It means we have to reach out and connect to each other, and for me, it has also meant understanding when I am using substances as a crutch to connect because of pain. So, it means examining the role of substances in an underground music culture, in my own life, in the lives of my friends.

I want to resist a lot of the bullshit that I hate about how we are taught to be as adults, but I also want to embrace wisdom, hard work, learning, stability, community, commitment, and cooperation. I think there are lots of punks out there that think about this sort of stuff. I want to hear more from people. This is only the beginning of this discussion for me.

2006-08-03T06:56:00.000-07:00

I joined dictionary.com's word of the day program. For a word lover like me, this is terrific. They send you one new vocabulary word each day. I love it! :) I am a dork.

2006-07-26T06:53:00.000-07:00

I just spent part of this morning reading about Lebanon and the bombings, particularly that a U.N. posting was hit. I feel so strange inside about the state of the world, and my own complacency, and the truly desperate nature of the situation. Last night while playing music, I asked the question to my friends of whether or not there were any truly great, admirable, beautiful political leaders left, in the vein of MLK or Ghandi. Erin pointed out how institutionalized everything is. Is there room for bravery, or innovation, or creativity? Thinking outside the lines?

I am not interested in being part of a radical punk ghetto that is not interfacing and responding diligently to the needs of its community. I am not interested in a subculture that trumpets laziness and privilege exploitation and lack of intellectual rigor. I am interested in humility, in learning lessons, in doing difficult shit. And this year, I am also interested and trying like hell to be a healthy, loving person to myself. In years past, in work I have tried to do, I have lost that in the fray.

Here's to being emotionally healthy and not celebrating our fucked uped-ness. We need to be wide awake and cogent in the world. There is too much horrible shit not to. I can't anesthetize any more - not now.

2006-07-25T10:19:00.000-07:00

I have been listening constantly to Majority Rule's Emergency Numbers lately. It is making me feel good, it is making me feel unstoppable. I think this is truly one of the most brilliant hardcore records ever written, and I feel giddy that my friends made it. The lyrics, the vocals, the arrangements, the delivery - it is so strange too how incredible life seems when you look at your past. I get huge fears that I will never experience some of the amazing things I already have - touring, playing incredible, mindblowing shows, that kind of fellowship. Things change so much each year and I sometimes worry that I experience things so intensely that it causes me to grow emotionally at a different rate.

This album is so visceral, so urgent. I want a life of urgency but I burn so hard sometimes that I end up feeling hurt. I want so much and I love with ferocity but I want to regenerate. I want to realize things in this life, envision and enable change. Build something beautiful. Be part of a legacy. I am never satisfied but sometimes satisfaction scares me as complacence.

I also have way too many books to read at home right now. I want to hole up in my room with them. I want to practice the art of being introverted more in the next couple of months. I feel fragile, and like I need to build armor for a next round.

I love my city. So, so much. I love its music and people and sense of community and possibility. This city needs me strong. So I need a hibernation.

2006-07-03T12:45:00.000-07:00

AHH !!! The amazing Ashley has posted our Exotic Fever Fest website.

http://www.exoticfever.com/exoticfeverfest/
Awesome!!!!!

2006-07-03T07:25:00.000-07:00

Hello.

We held a 21st birthday party for Positive Force last night as a benefit for the All Our Power project. www.allourpower.org. Please let me know if you are interested in being involved - we need all the help we can get! It was awesome seeing all the footage of bands, particularly Slant 6, Nation of Ulysses and Jawbox. GOD I loved Jawbox and I wish I had been at even more of their shows when they were active. Also, there was incredible footage of Fugazi playing Reclamation outside on a freezing day with heat rising from them. Totally worth seeing.

I miss that band immensely and had forgotten how much they did for me, and the path that they helped swerve my life towards.

The Wrong Day to Quit cds should arrive at my house today and we are still waiting for the Hope and Anchor ones. We are doing a show tonight for friends Hanalei from Chicago, featuring my friend Brian Moss, formerly of the Ghost. Sean McArdle and The Last Sixteen are playing, who Exotic Fever is releasing a split seven inch for.

I go to Bloomington, Indiana this Friday night for Plan It X Fest, to do a workshop on Saturday on feminist direct action with my friend Beck. It is kind of insane that we are driving this far to do this. We are nuts. I hope I do not die of exhaustion.

Katy

2006-06-30T06:51:00.000-07:00

Hey! Sara and I decided to take some of the musings and conversations we have with each other a lot and about a lot of issues and things we hate/love and make them into a blog. A lot of this has been inspired by the people we met and work we saw at the Allied Media Conference this month. Both of us will be making entries here. Visit our label site to learn a bit more!

www.exoticfever.com