Sister Nancy Beth After Dark

random thought

2006-06-27T21:22:00.000-07:00

If terrorism can be defined as the commission of a crime to further a political goal, then George W. Bush is a terrorist.

Dream fragment - 06/23/2006

2006-06-23T21:25:00.000-07:00

I was getting into doing this a few weeks back, but I quickly got out of the habit. Here's what I can remember from last night/this morning:

My boyfriend & I are in the back yard of my dad's previous house. We have a 5-qt pot of steamed brown rice, topped off with steamed Nantes carrots with their tops still attached. We enter the sliding glass door into the dining room. Somehow the pot ends up in my father's hands. He puts the pot out with both arms, away from his body, as if he were expecting me to take it from him, and he lets it drop to the floor. All of the rice has ended up on the floor and door mat. I see that there are only a few grains of rice still inside, clinging to the nonstick surface of the pot. My dad says the rice is salvageable, but I am upset because it is brown rice and will take 45 minutes to cook.

The triumphant return of the Friday random ten

2006-06-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

I've enjoyed doing this particular blog meme because it gets me to look at my music collection, and it also gives me a challenge: at least one song released within the past two years needs to show up, or I am officially Old. I quit doing this because I ran out of space on my d drive. Since my computer has been acting up, though, Jesus & I figured we should back it up, so we got an external hard drive with 250 gigs of ram to facilitate transferring our cd collection to the iPod. I haven't resumed the profligate downloading from days past, however, because even though that sounds like a lot of memory, I know there will come a day when it still won't be enough. Does anyone remember when we had to make do with ... was it 256K of memory? Here's what's rocking Sister Nancy Beth's world for this Friday evening:

King Me - Palace Brothers
Greater Windmill Street Blues - Cakekitchen
I.O.U. (Nought) - The Ex
Am I Right? - Erasure
Le Freak - Chic
Big Gorilla Man - Gladys Bentley
Hate - Cat Power
Big White Cloud - John Cale
Faith - Sex Clark Five
Ching Soortukchulerining Yryzy (Song Of The Caravan Drivers) - Huun-Huur-Tu

I notice from my Sitemeter statistics that I get a smattering of hits from the Southeast every time a Sex Clark Five is posted, so I say this to those visitors: If you were in the band, YOU GUYS ROCK!!! I bought the Beehive Rebellion reissue of Strum & Drum about 1o years ago, and it has sweetened many a morning's commute to downtown LA.

Dream fragment: 06/10/06

2006-06-10T07:15:00.000-07:00

I am at my mother's house, in my former bedroom. The bed is on the opposite side of the room from where it was when I lived there, but the stereo is in the same place. On the floor in front of it is an empty jewel case for Faust IV. I am looking on the floor for a pair of swimming trunks to wear, but the elastic waistbands have been stretched out in all of them. I go into the back yard. A storm window has replaced the dilapidated screen door on the side door to the garage. Behind the fence is a stash of new and still shrinkwrapped vinyl lps that an online merchant is storing at my mother's. I flip through them and wish I had enough money to buy them.

Dream fragment: 06/09/06

2006-06-09T21:48:00.000-07:00

One of my intentions with the Nancy After Dark blog is to keep a running journal of my dreams -- truly Nancy After Dark. I once attended a workshop run by Radical Faeries co-founder Don Kilhefner, and while I may not have cottoned on to all the shamanic mumbo-jumbo being presented, it was certainly an experience that massaged me into being more receptive to theories of consciousness and community that I would have previously dismissed out of the purest of cynicism. Keeping a dream journal was one of Kilhefner's recommendations, an endeavor that lasted for me all of four days. Remembering them in the morning was hard enough, but writing them down seemed absolutely herculean. So, in an attempt to get in the groove, I hereby present last night's dream, or what little bit I was able to recall:

I am standing erect and my head is turned over my shoulder. I am staring into a mirror and looking at my naked backside. On one buttock is something that looks like a combination tattoo, port wine stain, and anatomical cutaway drawing. The arteries have been either drawn on or exposed, and layers of muscle are visible.

****
Sorry, that's all I remember. Keep in mind that this is my first attempt at doing this in a while.

Paging Heloise

2006-06-04T07:14:00.000-07:00

Just passing along this serendipitous discovery. Sheer sloth forced me to leave a bag of Feline Pine cat litter (the kind made out of compressed sawdust) in the Praisemobile for a couple of days, and the musty odor that I've been contending with for three years (ever since I accidentally left a window cracked during a rainstorm) is gone. My theory is that the pine absorbed whatever moisture was in the car that was allowing the bacteria(?) to persist. Sometimes laziness is the mother of invention.

Friday random ten - Sista Nancy bringz tha Rawk!!!

2006-06-02T16:00:00.000-07:00

Well, not quite:

Remapping - Pan*American
Sygyt: Lament Of The Igil - Huun-Huur-Tu
X - Bailterspace
Charms And The Girl - Dentists
La La La Song - Low
Sentimental Journey - Esquivel
Today - Jefferson Airplane
Each Dream Is An Example - Gastr Del Sol
It Ain't Fair - Aretha Franklin
Jennifer - Faust

another democratizing aspect of blogging...

2006-06-01T16:57:00.000-07:00

... is that now millions of people can experience writer's block, whereas before it was the exclusive province of an elite few.

ethical dilemmas, etc

2006-05-23T17:31:00.000-07:00

The purpose of this blog is to be a forum for the thoughts, writings, bad photoshop jobs, etc. that don't fit with the "editorial" focus of Edicts of Nancy, which I consider to be my main blog. I've actually felt the need for another outlet for these ideas for some time now, but don't relish going in & out of character over at Nancy, thus Sister Nancy Beth After Dark. I guess I'm giving myself permission not to conform to the stylistic mandates I've placed on myself.

I started Nancy as a parody of the paranoia, stupidity, bigotry, and projection of rightwing bloggers, and have been alternately flattered and disappointed when people haven't quite gotten the joke. I had assumed the utter wretchedness of my pen name would have tipped them off to my satirical intentions, as I like to think of it as a potential character in a John Waters movie. And here's more back story, for those of you who care: I'm a gay man living with my boyfriend, and my giving up my carefree days of whoring around and committing to a monogamous relationship is the model upon which the fictional marriage of Nancy Beth & Jesus is based. For the record, "selfish hedonism" is the Alan Keyes' description of homosexuality.

Michelle Malkin is an obvious inspiration for parody, and I had briefly posted an item today based on her typically shrill and disingenuous reaction wherein she claims racism, sexism, etc., in Wonkette's gag about her shooting ping pong balls out of her ladyparts. If I may weigh in on the Wonkette ping pong ball reference, despite this controversy already having passed its expiration date by late Sunday, I thought it was funny. The most uproarious scene of the movie Priscilla, Queen of the Desert involves an Asian woman shooting balls in the same manner across a crowded bar, to the hoots and hollers of her appreciative audience, despite her husband's determined efforts to keep the balls under lock and key. For me, the humor is the irony of Michelle Malkin (or Hillary Clinton, or Dick Cheney, for that matter) doing something so gleefully sexual and in direct opposition to her dour public persona. I thought the gag works, mostly as a reminder of a hilarious scene from a funny movie, and I don't equate the act exclusively with women of a particular ethnicity, but rather with an exuberant sexuality that I doubt Malkin even possesses, and would probably demonize in others.

The thrust of the piece I had written is that because American women were doing the same ping pong routine (go here, scroll down to "Volley Folly"), "The Left" had engaged in shoddy research, were intellectually lazy in their racism, hated America, etc. There was even a photoshop number of Michelle at her favorite 7-11 with a blurry ping pong ball in mid-flight behind her... oh, just trust me, it was funnier than it reads here. However, when I further investigated the woman in the "Volley Folly" anecdote mentioned above, it became evident that she made her living making pornographic films, a field ripe with exploitation and distinctly unfunny. While I'm confident Malkin entered into her position as rightwing mouthpiece on her own free will, I doubt the woman in the story did. Anecdotally, it appears that a majority people who enter the sex trade do so due to a lack of options; addiction, sexual abuse, and debilitatingly low self-esteem, if not actual physical coercion, all seem to be factors. My own second-hand experience with the sex trade is through my ex-boyfriend, a high-functioning autistic who works as a "massage therapist" to supplement the disability benefits he receives. So while I don't mind insulting Malkin, I do draw the line at making sex workers the butt of my jokes. I don't particularly enjoy the doctrinaire finger-wagging that constitutes the bulk of the discussion at some of the more academic-oriented blogs, though sometimes they have a point. I'd rather be thought of as a bitchy fag than an insensitive jerk, so I removed the post.

In my opinion, Michelle Malkin deserves every insult that comes her way, because she cashed in the last chips of her human decency long ago. Her sole purpose as a commentator is to invalidate the injustice and discrimination others in her situation (female, ethnic minoriy) routinely face so that the her readership (and the people they vote for) can continue to deny their responsibility in perpetuating these injustices. Her pretenses at having feelings and occasional lapses into crocodile tears would be laughable, were it not such a blatant call to arms for her readers to defend her "honor" while engaging in some of the most brutish behavior imaginable, such as levying credible death threats against Michelle's "perpetrators" -- c.f. the unfortunate UC Santa Cruz students whose press release made its way onto her blog.

The blogosphere I am most familiar with is a giant elementary school playground where we throw the pointiest stones we can find at the opposing side. It so happens that the stones closest to us are insults based on easily recognizable differences -- age, weight, sex, sexual orientation, race, etc. The "best" bloggers on the Right don't avoid this, they just cloak their name-calling in the jargon of their respective professions and hope we're gullible enough to revere it as erudition. Calling Malkin a bitch/slut/whore/cunt strikes me as little more than shorthand for what the right's revered political bloggers are doing, but done in a hurry and without the rhetorical flash. I don't begrudge anyone doing it; it's all part of the game. As shallow as it sounds, rhetorical flash is what I aspire to, albeit in a form that is organic to myself. If I were a skilled enough writer to insult Michelle Malkin without making light of the suffering of the women (and men) who make their living through what I perceive as sexual exploitation, we'd be yukking it up over at Edicts of Nancy. But the truth of the matter is I'm not. Until that day comes, though, please enjoy my offerings here.