Hustler of Culture
Every postmodernist worth their quotation marks will be present at Living Literacies, a Toronto conference about literacy in the digital age. The opening panel will be a site for discursive analysis on the meaning of “conference” and whether the attendees are actually present or not.
If you got a charge out of the movie Pay It Forward and its concept of doing nice things for three strangers instead of “paying back” the person who did something nice for you, check out how its ripples in the real world: The Pay It Forward Foundation underwrites school programs that teach kids about social contribution and creating their own “pay it forward” projects. The Pay it Forward Movement site is a thorough directory of community groups using PIF principles to thrive. A woman who calls herself Ariel even named her blog Pay It Forward.
And while the movie didn’t exactly set the world on fire when it came out two years ago, it seems it will have social impact that will long outlast its brief movement in the spotlight. Getting recognized after the fact is still better than not at all.
Waiting for me in my inbox this morning: The Al-Queda Telemarketing Scam (via Justin).
100 pages read, 3 naps, 2 baths, 1 1/2 movies, 1 book finished and a whole lot of sleeping in. MY DAY turned out rather nicely.
Today is my first day in three weeks with no work, my first day off in recent memory. Suzan is out of town. Therefore I have declared it MY DAY. Mine. Get it? Mine, mine mine mine. MY DAY has three simple principles…
1. Kevin does exactly what he wants on MY DAY with no planning, thought or consideration. Why? Because it’s MY DAY, that’s why. Neahh. That’s why even though it’s a beautiful Saturday afternoon in San Francisco, I may very well spend it inside reading Naomi Klein, watching movie trailers and wondering why I can’t be as cool as Ben Brown. In fact, I think I’ll do just that. Why? Because it’s MY DAY.
2. MY DAY begins and ends when Kevin says it does and does not obey any laws of nature, common sense, health or decency. I may sleep at noon and do the lambada at midnight. I may menstrate. You say I don’t have the parts? Shut up. I say its MY DAY.
3. MY DAY. See 1 and 2. Neahhhhhh.
I spent much of yesterday talking over the last year with Suzan. She was camping with her sister on September 11 of last year and didn’t find out what had happened until a few days later. We both realized how much farther our relationship had come since then, how much better we understand each other and how much easier it is to share our fears.
That night I spoke to my friend Laura who came home from work early last September 11th. We spent the day together, watching news, talking but mostly just being there for each other through a lot of long silences. We ended the conversation yesterday with this.
“It was honor to spend that terrible day with you.”
“For me too.”
When I went to bed, I prayed that one clear day in the future, we can take this horrible experience and use it to reach beyond ourselves, to become better people rather than swearing new ways to enact revenge.
I hope.
Apparently there’s fear in the land that Baltimoreans are going to stop using the word “Hon” in everyday conversation, as they have since George Calvert stabbed his tent pole into the earth there 300 years ago. Some local residents, like famed Baltimore filmmaker John Waters are horrified. Others like former mayor Kurt Schmoke, the first African-American ever to hold the post, do not see the term translating so easily across racial and class lines.
Baltimore held me close to its chest when I lived there from 1991-1997, first as a college students, then as an iterant journalist and video store clerk. I probably got called hun about 8 zillion times by everyone from waitresses to longshoreman, to my first boss, who was 3 years older than me, male, Jewish, and from New Hampshire. He’d just been in Mobtown a long time.
Frankly, I never thought much of it, seeing the little sentence-ender as Baltimore’s version of “dude,” or “man” or, “guv’na”. But the “hon” is embedded deep in the city’s image of itself as a kitchy 50’s throwback of bee-hive haircuts and crab feasts on Sundays, not a “real city” like neighbors Washington and Philadelphia mind you, but more like that crazy town where your great aunt Trudy still lives way after her decendents split for the suburbs.
And that’s really what’s at stake here, Baltimore’s continuing confusion over whether its a town or a city, whether it wants be the muse of John Waters and Ann Tyler or to say proudly, “We have a Hard Rock Cafe too!” Don’t look for this debate to be settled anytime soon as the sad Cafe’ Hon aptly illustrates. Once the center of all things “Hon” in Baltimore where my college buddies and I used to breakfast for 3$ each, it is now a tourist monstrosity where it now takes 45 minutes and 6$ to get a blueberry muffin. And they taste terrible.
Diddy Reese’s a tiny little sweet shop near UCLA in Los Angeles, has raised the price of its cookies from 25 to 35 cents. I used to frequent this little treasure over two miserable summers of slave labor on the Warner Brothers Lot (1991-92, I think). My favorite was the ice cream sandwitch wedged between two cookies. Total cost: $1.
Times change, I guess. Light night I had some friends over for dinner and we desserted on…Skinny Cow low-fat ice cream sandwitches (via Obscure Store).
I’m back. Much to tell. Off to unpack now.
183, a new record. Even Suzan had fun.
Who’s coming next year?