Cambodia Fundraiser Update

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18%!

My goals to raise $5000 to return to Cambodia—with your kind assistance—are coming along swimmingly, thank you for asking. The assistance of a wonderful Cafe Society event last night in Hyde Park, the new book-lette Cambodian Grrrl, and a rigorous spate of helpful online compatriots linking to my funding proposal are not to be overlooked, and only mark the beginning of a season of events that will send me off to investigate women’s education and employment opportunities in Cambodia in December in style.

Code Name: Aquarius

I did a performance last night for the Encyclopedia Show, an all-ages mostly poetry themed reading series that is really fun. Our topic for the evening was the Zodiac, my assigned subject was Aquarius, and this is it. It is a pack of lies, except for the parts that are true.

Born February 15, 1930, my aunt Sarah Jane Moore is a brilliant and talented woman, despite that she attempted to murder a high-ranking public official because her horoscope told her to.

She was a renegade. The mission of FBI agents, after all, is to protect and defend the United States against terrorist and foreign intelligence threats. Not to, as my auntie did, use intelligence to attempt to assassinate the President. But, as she later told Matt Lauer, he was a Cancer. Aquarians and Cancers never get along.

On September 22, 1975, my middle-aged aunt shot off two rounds at Gerald Ford in San Francisco. The sun was in Virgo, moving into Libra—not a good time for Aquarius. She was arrested humming that song. It was the second attempt on President Ford’s life in two and a half weeks. By a woman.

Anablogging in Monrovia

Ok, so the young women of Cambodia do it without the religious fervor, but this Monrovian Analog Blogger’s onto something awesome (especially if you equate the UN with the devil).

Cambodian Grrrl: Self-Publishing in Phnom Penh

Yes, people, I’m rushing a small book-lette into production that you are welcome to pre-order, if you so desire, here. It contains five essays from Camb(l)og(d)ia, and some other kinds of things like page numbers and paper that are generally involved in books of all kinds. The front-cover original illustration is by Heng Savry. I’ve added a few more bits about this works’ relevance to (and differences from) Riot Grrrl culture. I’ve been getting a lot of questions about this lately.

Cambodian Grrrl is being printed in advance of a few bookish appearances I’m doing, partially to raise money, of course, for the return trip to Cambodia. (We just hit 6% of the fundraising goals!) Here are a few other related resources you may have missed in recent weeks:

• Article: Women Are Diamonds
• Interview: Outside the Loop Radio 
• Roundtable Interview: Chicago Women’s Media Group
• Profile: Time Out Chicago

Emily Jacir (in the Progressive)

“I’m not trying to teach people about Palestine,” Emily Jacir says, brightly and reasonably. The conceptual artist, whose most recent major project was cancelled with little explanation from the Venice Biennale, notably resists all urges toward irrationality. Others wouldn’t: stazione, intended for the offsite exhibition Palestine c/o Venice, was so simple it might have appeared an official act by the Board of Tourism. Jacir proposed a translation of stops along the Route 1 Grand Canal waterbus route into Arabic, to sit alongside the Italian names. “My audience is Palestinian,” she explains, “and we’re talking to each other.”

Yet this is a conversation the Biennale—or the city council, or the waterbus company, it remains unclear who—decided in March they didn’t want to hear. The proposal was eventually hung in the Palestinian Pavilion, with a description, map, and retouched photographs. Only Jacir’s affable intervention into public space was disallowed. Recent attacks in Gaza were offered as one possible explanation, but no concrete reasons for the censorship have yet emerged.

[The remainder of this piece, in a slightly altered format, can be read in the latest issue of The Progressive.]

Nicole Garneau’s Uprising #22

Performer and cultural worker Nicole Garneau yesterday prepared the space for a 1:00pm  rally at Dvorak Park, across from the Fisk coal plan in Pilsen in honor of the international day of climate action. It was her UPRISING #22 performance, a series of monthly, site-specific performances that explore less-violent notions of political impact. “Public demonstrations, ” Nicole writes of the series, “of the possibilities for a more loving, just and humane present and future.”

She’d asked for spiritual collaborators with this note:

Between 11am and 12noon Central Time, I am wondering if you would participate virtually in some way, and then send me some kind of documentation.

Ideas for what you could do:

• Sit at your altar, mesa, or nice sunny window and visualize peaceful and just solutions to the climate crisis
• Work with the air: shake a feather, fold paper into a fan, blow out your mouth, fly a flag
• Write a poem that envisions people acting in unison to restore a healthy environment
• Draw a picture of a repurposed coal plant
• Take deep breaths
• Anything else that seems appropriate and supportive.

Afterwards:

• Send me a text or email telling me what you did and what it was like
• Take a picture and send it to me
• Call me and leave me a message about it (XXX-XXX-XXXX cell)
• Embroider your documentation on a pillow and throw it on your couch

 
As that’s about the level of collaboration I can rise to these days, I took a few moments to really think about climate change. Specifically, I thought about how the notion of “climate change” has corresponded to an increase in the number of urbanites making environmental concerns their primary cause, and how I feel about this, and how the language sort of understates the situation which perhaps more accurately might be described as “climate disaster” or “people fucking up and not giving a shit” or “capitalism”. Then I pet the cat, quite vigorously, and sincerely believed in a future where actions like Nicole’s—or any of the hundreds of other amazing activists working in this city (and in others), who operate steadily, personally, deliberately and with integrity—would be impactful, appreciated, and duly supported.

I sent her this note:

nicole,

i have done as you asked. so far nothing has changed. i’ll keep you informed.

heart,
aem

And she sent the above photo from her performance this morning.

Reimagining the National Border Patrol (in Annalemma)

Located in El Paso, Texas, the National Border Patrol Museum (and its surprisingly cheerful gift shop) is, as it stands, a confusing testament to a whole mess of confounding issues. These include: How do national boundaries line up with the political, emotional, and natural ones? Who do we mark as “self” and who “other”? Who is the bigger problem? And what should their punishment for transgression be?

Regardless of such multiple interpretations, the museum website proclaims it to be one of America’s “best-kept secrets,” and promises a “journey through the history of the US Border Patrol from the beginning in the Old West, through Prohibition, World War II, into the high-tech Patrol of today.” This is a little bit true: the mish-mash of items on display, even those clearly identified (and many are not), are certainly from diverse points in the history of patrolling borders. Such as the early-‘30s photographs that show four Model T Fords bedecked with Border Patrol logos, and the array of fancy weaponry that, if not on loan from a science fiction film, must be very recent. It might, however, be better said that the facility stands as a thinly veiled homage to the genius of the Department of Homeland Security—itself an only slightly dressier version of rampant jingoistic patriotism.

[Read the rest here. Please be advised that these are jokes on the theme of the National Border Patrol Museum (and Gift Shop) and not intended to be perceived as threats against the National Border Patrol Museum (and Gift Shop).]

Surprise Package

I recently received in the mail several boxes full of my earliest correspondence, journals, yearbooks, and sketchbooks. The yearbooks were useless; I could barely make out the inscriptions on the inside covers and couldn’t open them at all. (My memory is such that this does mean I will never again know what I looked like in high school.) The journals and sketchbooks were telling; and the correspondence mostly from sad, frustrated boys on whom I later had to call the police for one reason or another. (Blake, who I used to babysit, kept writing me letters while I was in college asking if I had any boyfriends. His letters will be preserved for another eternity.)

But some of the drawings folded into the rest of the batch are sort of charming. I did this one when I was nine. Obviously, it is something of an idealized self portrait. I never really had boobs that big.

Turtle Stories in the Chicago Reader

Unci Laura came to tell the children stories that looped back and made points you didn’t think you were coming to. She was small, and her voice was on Valium. It talked around things instead of describing them, or even more rare actually saying them, and it squeaked, just the teeniest bit. She was old, we all knew, and had survived the boarding school system. It must have been hard for her to work with the all-white camp staff. She was being encouraged and paid to tell stories about how white adults had treated her as a kid. The staff tried to make it easier but she just looked past us. Of course she did. We were trying to help but wouldn’t. We were there because the kids’ parents weren’t. Read the rest, from the 2001 Chicago Reader function issue (just online now) here.

Happy Birthday Harvey

My friend Harvey Pekar is 70 years old today. In honor of his birthday, I’m posting his self portrait above, a contribution inspired by the ongoing and increasingly massive Pekar Project. As you are likely aware, Harvey doesn’t actually draw comics; he lays them out and paces them in a Lenny Bruce-inspired rhythm, drawing only the barest of stick figures so the more talented, he would say, could draw them better. But of course, any lover of the genuinely quotidian counts this as drawing; and any fan wants to know just how visually the man most famous for his contributions to a visual medium thinks. Harvey drew this storyboard illustration accompany the massive interview with him that I did in Punk Planet #75.

After the jump, I’ll post the sketches from the diary comic I started when Harvey and I went on tour together in 2006 for the Best American Comics (animation by Lilli Carré), an ongoing project I like to call, the Autobiography of Harvey Pekar by Anne Elizabeth Moore.