21 April 2003: Mr. Thompson

I turn my head to the left and I see four shelves of compact disks, hers and mine no longer separated into hers and mine, her Indigo Girls mated with my Iggy Pop in an improbable menage-a-trois brought about by a mad Cupid with no criterion but alphabetical order.  Our respective political stances ironically summed up by the placement of her Tracy Chapman albums side by side with my copy of The Clash's London Calling. 

In the bathroom, she belches with as much zeal and bass as a man, then shouts, "I'm alive!"  Starts giggling, and calls out in distress, "I'm cracking myself up, baby!"

I turn my head to the right and I can see all the way across the Bay to the hills of Marin.

Yep, I'm moved in with Dragon Lady now.  Finished unpacking last night.

I dreamed that I was teaching at a high school.  Everyone called me "Mr. Thompson," because I'd got the job by pretending to be Hunter Thompson.  When I woke up and looked in the mirror, I realized that I have started to look like Hunter Thompson. 

In my dream, Samuel Delany had written a novella about basketball, which had been made into a movie which had become popular among teenagers, and this gave me an excuse to have my high school students read Heavenly Breakfast.

Bitter Pie has an online journal now.  Laramie's got a cool website going, too.  Link's already up on my Pack page, naturally.  And Lexicat's gone all lavender on us.  Color-scheme-wise, I mean.

From Geminica's journal:

I want more of us, people like me and you, to be doing this kind of shit. We need to get up and be the movers and shakers of this world. We need to do it not only by expressing our disapproval for the systems as they exist, and by buying our products from socially responsible sources, and by trying to be good people, but by infiltrating deep into the roots and power structures of the systems and coming up with the ideas and the method for improving them.

I'm leaning farther from the Fight Club approach -- burn it all down -- and to something I think will actually work: slowly replace each element with a better one, until we're left with an entirely different and superior structure.

OK. I don't really know how, myself. But we have so much potential! I want us to be presidential advisors, insidiously spewing peace propaganda into the ears of our leaders, in place of the advisors who would spew self-serving filth. I want us to be on boards of directors, I want us to be making the decisions, not always just struggling against the decisions.

But we seem, generally, adverse to participating in politics and business, two of the most direct modes of influence in our country, except for by way of providing criticism to the existing powers. Maybe I am just speaking for myself.  [...] for all my good intentions and struggle to understand the world, and even my occasional insights about how the world might be improved... I don't have the know-how or experience to actually do anything with these ideas. There's a cap on the effect I can have on the world; a cap created by my inability to expand beyond a certain, rebel-hippy-lowly-artist-buck-the-system mindset. I shouldn't be complaining about the system. I should BE the system.

We have so much potential. We should take advantage of more tools, get louder and louder but also more targeted, more practical, more multimedia, more cross-genre. We can do a LOT more than we have done so far.

I've been leaning in this direction myself lately.  The turning point for me came recently, when Oakland police opened fire on a group of peaceful protesters and bystanders, shooting them with wooden bullets and continuing to shoot them in the backs as they ran away.  The police and their pet weasel of a mayor came out with the usual lies about the protesters being violent and the police using only the necessary amount of force.  Next day there were four videos up on the internet, shot by people who were at the protest, in which one can clearly see that the protesters weren't violent, that police advanced and opened fire when the protesters weren't even looking at them, and that the police continued to fire into the crowd as it was dispersing.  The power of this footage (plus Michael Moore's Academy Award acceptance speech) has convinced me to go into the field of video documentary filmmaking.  This is an easy transition for me, because I'm already a Multimedia major.  The Vista College Multimedia program offers various specializations; this new direction, for now, simply entails switching my area of specialization from Digital Imaging to Digital Video.

And Dragon Lady is already doing what Geminica's journal entry talks about.  She's spent the past year learning how to be a mover and a shaker and a policy maker, interning with politicians and corporations and lobbyists and whatnot and finding out how it all works.  Exciting, very exciting.

"All artistic creations are born of a resistance to one's era."

- Yukio Mishima