So, Kellymundo has a subscription to Vanity Fair, which I happened to pick up (RFK cover story) in the bathroom today. This happens to be the issue with the crazy Miley Cyrus Photos!!!!! ZOMG BARE 15-YEAR OLD SPINE!!!!

Sometimes I’m ashamed of America. Sometimes it’s because we start pointless wars of choice that kill thousands and leave millions homeless and destitute. Sometimes it’s because we’re so collectively sexually confused, repressed, frustrated, nervous, and (updated inre Joe’s point in comments) desperately depraved, we can’t fucking tolerate the challenge of, you know, Art.

Annie Liebowitz is the real thing, and this photo is completely respectable.

America, you’re crazy baby but I love you.

Bonus Liebowitz: Sting portrait, and homo Arnold.

God we’re stupid sometimes.

Soon the sassy bastard will be mine: squid w/monocle. Want your own? Talk to the boss-lady

Bonus pic!

Gotta do a lotta work today, but here are some quick hits:

• Anna got her camera charged: photose from Mooste Estonia. Children carving soviet-era soap. Awesome.
• RIP Hunter. Memorial notebook, charity fund here.
• Google (and a bunch of less-cool companies) will try to bring the US back to the level of Estonia in WiFi access. The major players here are actually Sprint and Clearwire, so who knows how this will pan out.
• Obama consoladates the PBR vote.

Last night seems to (finally) have cemented it for Obama. Black President here we come. For those of you who’ve been in the trenches, Mike Lux has some good next-steps laid out. For those of you waiting for this nomination process to be over, well, it may take a few more weeks before it’s officially over, but you should start thinking about:

• How to explain to people that John McCain is a warmongering child of privilege who has no respect for women, no plan on healthcare, no grasp of economics, no idea how to address global climate change, and who’s publicly stated he wants to pack the Supreme Court with more extreme conservatives.
• How to explain to people that Barack Obama is not a terrorist, or a communist, or even (too bad) the second coming of FDR with extra melanin, but might in fact be just the guy to prevent Miami from being underwater in 100 years, keep Wall St. from completely fucking over homeowners, do something creative about the 2 million people we’re letting rot in jail, get some needy kids food and medicine (in the US as well as elsewhere), and prevent Comcast, Verizon and Rupert Murdoch from taking over the internets.

I have high hopes that Big O will close it out in Mighty Oregon. That would be solid.

Oh, and this:

Update: whoa.

Subcommondante Kos says Oregon should be the clincher:

If Clinton were to drop out this week, we’d face an uncomfortable situation in West Virginia, with Clinton likely crushing Obama. That would look terrible for the presumptive nominee.

Better than that would be to garner enough superdelegate commitments this week, so that Oregon can push Obama past 2,024. That way, it isn’t the supers who clinch it for Obama, but actual voters.

Mighty Oregon!

Real quick, I uploaded some photos of Coachella to flickr.

New tag. Drupal set message “Power dating.” Backstory on that is here, and I’ll elaborate with new thoughts now.

Well, actually, first I start with self-quote, to illustrate just how sisyphusian this feels at time. From my report back from Baja, which feels like another lifetime:

I realized, for instance, just how blatantly I’ve been keeping myself out of range of romance out of fear more than anything else. Sex and love have always been intertwined in my experience, and avoiding one is a pretty good way to skirt the other. Much as I bemoan my lonely state, it’s my own choices and habits of action that render it so. I’ve been rationalizing this to myself as a kind of jaded maturity, but now I think that’s just bluster.

The truth is I’m afraid of what might happen: of getting hurt, of hurting someone else, of getting into unknown territory where the possibility of both those things just gets greater. It’s weak sauce, really, because this is what life is all about; but as they say the first step towards finding a solution is admitting you have a problem. So there’s that.

I also realized in conjunction with the above that I’ve been looking backwards a lot, for similar reasons, when really I should be looking forward. The possibilities of the future are almost literally endless, and when I begin to entertain them I feel a real true gut-level sense of trepidation — “don’t make plans; don’t invest; shit doesn’t pan out, remember?” — and it feels like it might be that good kind of Allen Ginsburg brand of fear. The kind I know I should pursue.

That was nine months ago. Today I remain in almost exactly the same position. The Girth sort of confronted me with this last night — in the good way that friends do — as we were getting ourselves fired up to go out in Berkeley. Because it’s true. I am afraid, and even as I can feel my whole being becoming increasingly energized, I have nervousness and trepidation in my heart. I have performance anxiety, concerns about failing to meet my own high standards. More than any of this, I have layered defense mechanisms which are used to rationalize and obfuscate the whole situation under the auspices of reducing hassle.

This is childish. It is time this ended.

So we went out to a nice little drinking establishment where they have ginger beer (great with gin) and soothing live jazz music. I rode my new Mission Bicycle down just for kicks. After a little seat adjustment it feels like god’s own chariot, and I’m actually kinda bummed to be leaving it here for a while. Doesn’t do me much good in the HC though (or doesn’t it…).

Anyway, the speedy ride and sparksplus get me well-primed to hit the scene. Not that we’re doing anything crazy, just having a couple cocktails and looking at pretty girls of a Saturday evening. There are two such behind the bar, and as a sign of how high I feel I’m riding of late, I skip on past the Girth’s worldly wisdom of not attempting to engage such creatures — to wit: pretty women who wait tables, sling coffee or pour drinks are virtually un-flirtable owing to their massive overexposure — I give the one a little friendly sass while ordering our beverages.

Conversation turns to the increasingly bourgeoisie nature of our lives, and my man is nice enough to humor me with some flattering words about how I’m going to be successful without losing my humanity, and to let me spin out my faux philosophical ramblings on our first-world problems. I invent a good bit about Maslow’s pyramid of human needs as a series of mechanisms for social control, and the ascending of said pyramid as the sweet road to freedom. We talk about the general fuckedupness of the world. The evils of the prison system. The gradual stripping away of the fourth, fifth and sixth amendments (only true checks against a police state), and the strong chances that we will get a Democratic president and congress, but not universal health care.

The revolution misses us, and we miss it. Part of my feeling better and better about life makes me think once again that there’s something good to be done with our cultural capital and freedom to work outside institutional structures. There’s a lot of injustice, especially when you’re not a financially comfortable, physically fit, straight white male American. What to do with all that dumb luck, you know?

By and by we get another chance to make friendly with the bartender since the gentleman to our left is being a bit of a prick. Common enemies are good at producing solidarity. Her shift finishes at about midnight and she takes a seat next to my buddy, and I think suddenly this has potential, though she spends a good amount of time talking to the handsome long-haired fellow further to the right and at some point a very skinny man with a very trendy haircut enters and exerts some signs of social ownership.

It’s at this point that I disengage, and upon reflection I’m a little disappointed. She was obviously at least somewhat interested in me/us, initiating small-talk and asking to try on my hat, etc. She introduced herself, and when we did finally roll out she put her hand on my chest and told me it was nice to have met me. Her skinny/trendy companion could easily have been an affectionate homosexual friend, but I used the pretense of a putative boyfriend to ignore the fact that this girl, who I legitimately thought was attractive, seemed to think I was attractive as well. And this is a move borne of fear, or perhaps even cowardice.

So yeah, baby steps. I’ve been making some progress. Getting it up to flirt in the first place, and I did an ok job talking to a cute girl down at Coachella, and with a couple of shiny local faces in the elevator at work, and having nice correspondences and the like. But the killer instinct is lacking. As my brothers at Wu-Tang Financial remind me, you gotta play this game rough: in, out, grab, get, bonk. Coffee’s for closers.

To that end, I think the next logical step for the plan of Power Dating is Operation Get Real Hot, which involves improving my personal grooming routines and getting into a healthy gym habit for the next three weeks I’m up north. After that it’s Operation Get Out There And Mix It Up, which is a little more of an unknown.

So, this is woefully incomplete; In fact, it covers only the up-to-the-event story... I almost don't want to post it but I think it's good to get the first part out there. More likely I'll write the rest. I have a few photos which I'll add once I get back to the HC and can get 'em off my camera, and for the latter part of the story I can lean on Stephanie and Andy for graphics. Indeed, the above is an Andy Smith original (some rights reserved). In very brief: I had a great time, and it was actually semi-Important for me to get out of my routine and mix it up. All work and not play is not a pragmatic plan.

Travelling from SFO, Cheney drops me off at the airport, ran into the Girth’s lawyerly friend Eric at the terminal. He’s delayed on the way to San Diego so we have a beer. It’s a little hard to make small talk since we’ve only met a couple times, but there’s basketball, Cavs getting trounced by the Wizards, and that’s en entre, and he’s a good guy so we pass 45 minutes like that.

Flight in to LA is fast. Julia picks me up. New haircut. We talk about the important things first, how our respective love lives are going. You already know my scene (nada). She’s got a man-friend who’s got a moustache he likes to wax (to good effect, IMHO) but also says she’s really mostly interested in “good sex and working on myself.” I tell her that’s very LA, but I also think it’s great, and tell her that too.

We go out to her neighborhood bar for a couple beers and to catch up. It’s the former haunt of the Girth, the Lost and Found. In a strip mall — like all things there — but also dark, mirrored, with old-school-classy leather upholstry and a crowd of semi-feral regulars. Things are good, taking family news and the times, being close to thirty years old and still searching, etc.

I like Los Angeles. It’s popular and easy to hate, and true there’s a lot there to loathe, but this is true of everyplace. I think the thing that gets to people like me is that all the reasons we love LA are difficult to own. They seem cheap, weak, materialistic. The weather is nice. People are beautiful. It pulses with the certain energy and power that only a major global culture node can possess. Reeks of ambition.

Anyway, I sleep on a big old couch, and in the morning we do Starbucks, gossip about college people, and then it’s time to pack up and roll. We do a quick stop for me to get some swim trunks at Ross, then to acquire amazing Italian sandwiches involving a long wait for our number to be called, then pick up Julia’s friend Heather, a shining example of humanity. She has a pink scooter, a vintage 1945 map of the USSR, a tiny tv that she watches infrequently (much to the derision of the TiVo-praising Julia) and is allergic to sunlight and ibuprophen, which is a rough hand to be dealt. She wrangles an office full of world-class architects (Frank Gehry). We discover much common ground on the theories of human organization, power, and the virtues of being houseless “for a time” and living off the fat of the land.

The last stop out of town is Leonardo’s, the afformentioned man-friend. Among many other things, Leonardo drives a FedEx truck so we were picking him up after he wrapped his shift. He’s a LA native, a legitimate Lakers fan, and he really does wax his moustache to give it a jaunty point. The effect his that his face looks a fair bit like the Eric from Vagabond Opera, though as a man he’s less operatic and more folksy in bearing.

Anyway, we all pile in and eat as Julia fights our way through traffic; downtown LA, into the burbs, a million “Babies ‘R’ Us”s, a roadside brushfire, the windmills, and finally into the Greater Indeo Area and the festival scene. Several defining things happen almost immediately:

1) We put on sunscreen. The “group lube session.”

2) We observe egregious and utterly shameless littering on the part of festival-goers.

3) We begin receiving VIP treatment.

These three things encapsulate much of the experience I ended up having for the first couple days.

Comparisons to Burning Man are inevitable to me. It’s pretty brutal out there in the heat of the day, and even though it’s not the Black Rock Desert, and it’s just April, it’s still 90+ degrees and savagely sunny. The desert setting, various ravish overtones, and the presense of several art installations I recognize from the Playa make it all seem familiar. But it’s full of kids (Burning Man skeiws older overall) and has a kind of Spring Break vibe at times, which can be unfortunate. And there’s the massive amount of littering, which is omnipresent and frankly saps my hope for humanity.

We’re also Very Important People for this thing. Via a connection, we’re rolling in under the auspices of the owners of the festival grounds — the Empire Polo Field, which is exactly what it says it is — and so we park real close and roll in the back way along with a lot of pretty people and Steven Tyler, etc. There’s a general “VIP” area of the festival which just takes a more expensive ticket to access, but has some amenities (couches, liquor in addition to beer for sale, etc), and then there’s a “Tiki Hut Area” which we have special wristbands for, and also backstage etc.

It’s sort of ridiculous. Waiting in a traffic line in the car before we arrive I read aloud the strongly-worded-letter Julia received concerning the access and expected behavior of all parties within the Tiki Hut Area (consistently capitalized as such). Basically they’re saying don’t be an asshole, so we’ve got it covered, but it’s still kind of funny that they have to write that out in a strongly worded letter. The aforementioned Area itself is a big (15’ x 30’ maybe) tiki hut with a thatched roof, and professionally-staffed open bar. This is some kind of clubhouse for the Polo grounds, it seems, and is situated in a garden area featuring several large lilly padded pools, lush grass, shady trees, sculptures, etc. It’s about 7 degrees cooler than everywhere else. The whole thing is behind a gate and several security dudes, and there’s a “viewing area” where you can watch the mainstage, as well as all the people who you are lording it over. Like I said, ridiculous. But definitely nice. This is a feature of the weekend.

We arrive on the scene just in time to catch The Breeders, which Julia’s happy about. It feels sort of trippy, being out in the warmest air I’ve felt in months, big soundsystem going with giant video monitors on the side. There are five big stages there — two outdoor, three ginormous tents — and by 4pm on Friday things are in swing. Partytime.

More to come.

I have a lot of stuff to write, but I may or may not get it all written, and so I quickly wanted to alert everyone to a new good thing to read if you’re looking for something to tickle your brain. My friend Anna (or Anita, the first girl I ever slow-danced with) is a real live professional Artist, and is currently spending some time in rural Estonia doing an artist-in-residence thing. She’s writing about it. It’s good! For instance:

I was already surprised to be speaking with my mom on skype- with me in Mooste, Estonia & her in Eugene, Oregon- then it got even more exciting- when Marcel, my younger brother calls my mom from Prison, in Umatilla, Oregon & she puts him on speaker phone and we are all three speaking to each other as though we are in the same room, only thousands of miles apart and each with completely different circumstances. Marcel could ask me about Mooste and I could ask him about how his parenting class is going & other such matters and my mom could intervene at any moment. If only i could have recorded our conversation it would have been an art piece in and of itself- a sound piece. I guess it was recorded through the prison- as they monitor and record all telephone calls- Now to get a copy!

Check it out y’all: A May in Mooste

Also, in one of the best examples I’ve yet found of how other parts of the world are starting to seriously kick our ass in internet access, this village of 500 has total WiFi, as did the bus she drove to get there. Which is what makes this possible. The assumption that US Citizens lead the best life becomes more and more faulty over time, it seems….