(In this posting, I will make liberal use of the 3rd person singular "they." I assert its properness, and if you cross me I will cut you.)

I hate being wrong about things. One of my favorite ideas from Intro to Psych (a generally heterosexist class in which I did a lot of sighing and boy-watching) was "cognitive dissonance," which is a fancy way of saying, "when you are wrong about things." According to our professor, people prefer to agree with themselves than with reality. People go to great lengths to convince themselves of their rightness, despite all evidence of idiocy. One desires to cohere, to be consistent (to consist?), to resemble the phantom of selfhood with which they tango.

I think our president has become such a posterboy for "WRONG" that now, when I am wrong about something, I feel very much like him. Which is to say: When I am wrong, I experience a physical sensation of wrongness, and I point to that sensation and label it "George W. Bush."

Since Election Night 2000, when he was declared president-elect, I have felt George W. Bush in my body. That moment was the first time I felt politics transpire in my flesh. I felt deflowered. It was a rumble of fear and disgust and concern, and it has persisted in various guises throughout the past four years. That man is IN me. And he is IN you. And all the yoga in the world won't iron him out of our muscles.

Luckily, he changes form. For a while there, I experienced George W. Bush as terror. Now, I experience him as folly. When I am wrong, when I am stubborn, when I am woefully unable to conceal my flaws, when I feel beaten and flailing and desperate and absurd: that is when I feel the George W. Bush inside of me.

Which means he is losing. He is being exorcized. We are being healed. And that's a good thing.

THIS is a Cheese On Bread song waiting to happen.

Wow, the blog is really acting up. Sometimes I'll try to post, but it won't show up online for another day or so. And I end up repeating myself. Blah blah. I'm trying to fix that by deleting things now, but it doesn't look like the deleting is working. Blah blah. Blah.

I got the Sunday NYTimes this past weekend. It was very luxurious. That thing is freaking huge. I spent all day reading it, and I'm still not done. The Book Review section is in my backpack right now. I like Book Reviews, because they're shorter than books. Lately, I've had an aversion to large books. An infantile aversion, I admit.

I found the obituary on Derrida to be really condescending. In fact, everything I've read about Derrida's death has been pretty condescending, except something someone posted on the Writers House Hub listserv (my only remaining tie to the old College years). He wrote about how Derrida's writing, while difficult, inspired him to think harder and read more. That's a legacy to which we should all aspire, I do believe.

Ah well. Back to work. (I just had a really good bagel. Chive cream cheese. Yum. Dairy though. What a bad idea. That stuff should go into a baby cow, not ME. Jeez!)

xoxo
dan

HAPPY COMING OUT DAY!!!!

I came out 7 years ago, the same year as Ellen.
I encourage you all to come out about SOMETHING.
Today, I come out as a fan of the song "Escape" by that guy. He's in the video with that tennis player girl.

xoxo
dan

ha...that's funny. i posted about the police incident unaware that dibs already did. compare and contrast!

Wow. Yesterday Cheese On Bread journeyed to exotic Staten Island for our cinematic debut in the independent film, "Hell Week," a motion picture about fraternity life and transsexuality. Dibs and I took an early morning ferry, on which we ruminated upon the Statue of Liberty, and how it was originally supposed to depict a freed Black slave, but was changed at the last second. We shared a lament that this historic fact has not been absorbed into the public conscious.

The next thing we knew, we were wandering around Staten Island, looking for the filming location. We took a wrong turn, and ended up on some random suburban street corner. I tried calling Gregg on my cell phone, and Dibs got bored so he opened up his guitar case and started playing.

[Police vehicle stops at corner, makes loud siren noise]

Dan: Oh hi! Could you tell us how to get to Wheeling Avenue?

Police Lady: What's going on here?

Dan: We got lost and we're looking for Wheeling Avenue.

Police Lady: What's he doing?

Dan: He's playing guitar.

Police Lady: Why is that guitar case open?

Dan: Because he opened up his guitar case to play his guitar. We can close it if you'd like.

Police Lady [rudely]: Do you know that's a fine?

Dan: To have a guitar case open?

Police Lady: DO YOU KNOW THAT'S A FINE?

Dan: I'm sorry.

Police Lady: NOW JUST WHAT IS GOING ON HERE!????

Dan: We got lost, so we stopped here to call and ask for directions, and my friend here had nothing to do, so he started playing his guitar.

Police Lady: Then why did someone call us here??!!!??

Dan: Someone called you here? I'm sorry.

Police Lady: What are you doing, just walking around here?

Police Dude: Where are you going?

Dan: Wheeling Avenue.

Police Dude: Walk up this way, make a right on Fosters.

Dan: Thank you!

[Police car drives away, Dan and Dibs look at each other as if to say, "What the crap?"]

We proceeded to complain about this incredibly rude Police Lady on the Very Long walk to the film shoot. How odd it was, that the norms of life in that town are so narrow that two people sitting on a corner with a guitar (in a COMPLETELY empty suburban neighborhood, in the MIDDLE of the day) was suspicious enough to call the police. What a terrible way to live.

Anyway, the film shoot was just as surreal. We sat around for 4 or 5 hours in the backyard, where all the extras were waiting around for their scenes. We were told in advance that we would play music, so we brought amps and stuff. When we got there, we discovered that we would only lipsync. We were totally bummed. After a while, we got super-restless, so we decided to have a little rehearsal. We set up our equippment on the grass and tried arranging "The Awkward Song." I think it sounds pretty good so far! We felt very productive.

Finally, the "party scene" began shooting. Whenever the camera was aimed in our direction, we had to dance around and pretend to play our instruments. It was hilarious and exhausting. The extras were duly intrigued. At one point, one of the actors started freaking out, so the director had to bring him aside and have a chat. In the down time, the camera man decided to film us doing a whole song. Since there was no P.A., all we could hear was drums. And since we were playing Biological Romance, it was totally absurd! I don't think the crowd knew what to make of the spectacle, but they applauded, at least out of courtesy. At long last, me and Sara filmed our one line ("Is that Rich [Last Name]? By HIMSELF??") and then we packed up and left.

When Dibs and I got back on the Ferry, we both said very profound things about Time and Experience, and how odd it was to see the Statue of Liberty again, in different light, when it felt simultaneously like we had just been there, but had been away for a very long time. By the time we got to Manhattan, we didn't feel like getting on the subway, so we started walking uptown.

We remarked upon the names of World War I personalities engraved into the sidewalk, and said very profound things about History and Pedagogy. I hypothesized that schools would work better if all children were ENTIRELY sheltered from all historical events until they were 14, at which point the adults would be like, "Let me tell you about something called WORLD WAR ONE!!!" And the kids would be like, "OH MY GOD!!! I CANNOT BELIEVE THAT!!! THAT IS RIDICULOUS!!!"

The way things are now, it's so hard to truly grasp the absurdity of the horrors of the past few centuries. It takes such a long time for it to really sink in. Just as we were talking about this, we came upon the World Trade Center site, which neither of us had ever really visited, and so we walked up to the gate and looked at it for a long time.

We were quite taken aback by the UNEXPERIENCEABILITY of life, in it's hugeness and smallness -- how hard it is to really absorb or experience the things that physically happen to you, let alone the things you only hear about, or watch on TV, or acknowledge from a distance. Neither of us could comprehend such a speedy devastation -- the murder of 3000 people in such a short period of time, in such an outlandish fashion. I remembered, back when it happened, how preoccupied I was with the physicality of the deaths. The individual pains involved. How it must have ACTUALLY felt to see walls fall in on you, and crush parts of your body. It's the bodies that I could not comprehend. The buildings -- I did not care about them except as implements of death. In the final moments, it was not the airplane that physically destroyed human bodies. It was pieces of the building itself.

I remembered how sexual I felt in those weeks afterwards -- so preoccupied with bodies. With the inherent destructability of the human form. How fragile and fleshy we all are. I took NJ Transit into Manhattan on September 19. And there was this really cute boy on the train. He was sitting on the Left side, in front and across from me. I was totally fixated on his shoulder. It was beautiful. It was very specifically round. Its depth was very pointedly not an illusion. Shoulders like his disprove even the most realistic photographs, the most gripping movies. I looked at his body -- his curvaceous, audaciously organic body. And I thought about what it would be like to make love to him -- to touch his shoulder, to put my hand around it and feel its mass, its dimensions. To feel the suggestion of bone and fat and muscle.

I thought about his body, and then I imagined it in a building that explodes and crumbles to the ground. His body: Where would it rip? Where would it be crushed? I imagined his shoulder -- open, unrolled, flat, like paper, or a TV screen. I wanted to kiss him -- right there, before it was too late, before he was crushed. But I sat in my seat, and made myself look away.

I made myself look to the Right. And by the time we got to Newark, everyone was looking to the Right. People started getting out of their seats, moving as close as they could to the windows, watching and waiting. But we never saw the new Manhattan skyline. It was too dark, and rainy, and foggy. It was absurd: We'd been looking at it ALL WEEK. We'd been watching it on TV over and over again -- and now we were there, and we couldn't see it. We'd been looking at it ALL WEEK LONG, AND NOW WE COULDN'T SEE IT.

So it was odd to stand there, staring at this void which was not a void -- a space that I knew was emtpy, abstractly -- but a sight that was, in fact, filled with other buildings. The buildings on the other side of the gap. The windows that spelled out "NO WAR." I was NOT looking at nothing, and I had to remind myself of the "real" nothingness that opposed the "apparent" crowd of images. It was odd to stand there, and try to understand it all, and try to experience it all, all the while knowing how fleeting those experiences are, how quickly a run-in with a rude police officer becomes the memory of that, how quickly a conversation about the Statue of Liberty becomes the memory of that, and how quickly a moment of mourning becomes, so crassly, but a memory.

And knowing that I would eventually come back here, and write about it.

So, Happy Birthday.

I was hanging out in Staten Island today. With my friend Dan. We got lost, as we so often do in Staten Island. So he called our friend Gregg, to see if we could find our way. We stopped on the corner to do this. I was bored, and I wanted to play guitar. I decided that I would, as that is what I so often do when I'm outside with a guitar and being bored.

I was walking around, and cars are passing us. And I thought to myself, "It would be nice if we could get directions from one of these cars." Then, a minute later, a police car was coming around the corner. How convenient. Maybe they would see us, clearly looking lost, and offer us some help.

They come around the corner and stop. I was about to walk over and tell them our dilemma, but they beeped they're police-sounding horn. The one that sounds like "weeeeooop." I found that quite unneccessary. But they got my attention, and I knew I should walk over. An incomplete, and therefore inaccurate, portrayal of the ensuing conversation ensues:

"Hi"
"What are you doing here?" says police officer.
"We're lost. We're trying to find Wheeler Avenue," says Dan.
Aggressively: "What are you doing? We got a phone call. Why is he playing guitar?"
Dan, confused: "He was just bored, I was talking on the phone. He decided to play guitar."
"The guitar case is open. That's a fine."
"Should I close the case?"
"Did you know that's a fine?"
"No."
Then she pulled out her pistol and shot me in the foot.
"We just wanted to get to Wheeling"
"It's in the other direction," said the second officer.
"Thanks, " and we walked about two miles to Wheeling. I think I left something out. The officer mentioned a church. And she didn't actually shoot my foot, she just wanted to.

This is really just to say, that I wish I got a ticket for busking. On Staten Island. In the suburbs. Because there was *nobody* there to give me money. It would have been a ticket for forgetting to close my guitar case, while playing guitar outside. I would have felt like such a badass.

phew. the collective:unconscious production of boi with an i is over. what a relief and a tragedy all at once! this was such a fun and rewarding project. lacey langston was such a generous director. dibs was managed to do perfect lights and sound, despite the broken cd player. joe's keyboard playing was so hilarious i almost cracked up laughing in the middle of the most dramatic moment of the show. the audience was so warm and friendly. the whole situation was so relaxed.

it's funny, cuz when i'm totally scared and nervous about a show, i feel like i'm walking through some kind of viscous tank of energy. i feel like i'm manipulating some sort of force around my body, and it pushes back on me. but when i'm relaxed...the air seems huuuuuge somehow. and i feel like i can do whatever i want. sometimes i worry that the latter is boring. but i think it went rather well. it felt intimate and serious and light and fluffy and crispy and sexy. i can't wait to do it again.

andy horwitz of culturebot wrote a really nice review here.

this weekend is my downtime before i start recording with cesar again. happy sukkoth everyone!

love
dan