. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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.

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.

Ford had been appointed to office in August of 1974, after Nixon’s resignation. Within months, his wife Betty Ford was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was one of the reasons he had decreed 1975, by Executive Order, International Women’s Year.

Even so, Ford’s record on women’s issues drastically improved after the assassination attempts. He immediately reached out to over 300 national women’s organizations, and began supporting the Equal Rights Amendment in a bitter struggle. He even named August 26, 1976 Women’s Equality Day. No previous president had given women a full day of equality. Ford personally appointed more women than ever before to public office: 14% of his new appointments were female, the highest such percentage to date.

Early in the 1970s, Aunt Sarah was conscripted to join the FBI. Her “frumpiness”—later reviled by Time, the Washington Post, and USA Today, and rarely if ever connected to her status as an often-single mother of five, married to a succession of five cheatin’ no-good skirt-chasin’ husbands at a time when the courts viewed women as property—this “frumpiness” was why the FBI sought her out. Well, that and her 180 IQ.

The discrepancy between her physical appearance, of stressed-out housewife, and her brilliant mind made her the perfect undercover agent. Aquarians are natural liars; their symbol is water, yet it is an air sign. If you are sitting next to an Aquarius, check now for your wallet.

For two years, Sarah trained as an agent, running off to the shooting range every day after dropping the kids at school, back by three to pick them up, spending the evenings studying Russian and various codes in thick books hidden within Good Housekeeping or TV Guide. When one of her philandering husbands was home, she’d cook him dinner.

For in the 1970s, husbands worked. Wives stayed home. If they weren’t lucky enough to develop a secret life—a lesbian affair with a neighbor, membership in a feminist consciousness-raising group, getting a job as a spy—they drank and took drugs during the day. Like Betty Ford.

But Aunt Sarah was asked to infiltrate the radical Marxist group, the Symbionese Liberation Army. They kidnapped Patty Hearst, 19-year-old granddaughter of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, and had demanded as ransom that the elder Hearst establish a food giveaway program for the poor. Frumpy Sarah volunteered at the program alongside radicals half her age, for the FBI. There, Aunt Sarah realized that middle-aged women with few rights apart from their husbands have a lot in common with the American underclass. Sarah Jane Moore, FBI Code name: Aquarius.

Then one day Lynette “Squeaky” Fromme, a Libra, and devotee of Charles Manson, walked out into a beautiful Sacramento day to aim, for whatever reason, an unloaded pistol at the President of the United States. Exactly 17 days later, Sarah Jane Moore checked her horoscope.

September 22, 1975. AQUARIUS. Today is the day. Where others have failed, your special Aquarian skills will allow you to succeed. Only one man stands in the way of your success, and it is time for you to eliminate him. You will only have one shot, so make sure to take it. Your lucky number is: 17.

Aunt Sarah was an excellent shot—top marksperson in her agent-training program. She aimed carefully that morning, and squeezed the trigger. President Ford did not fall. A shadow crossed her brow. Her son Ben needed to be picked up from school in a few hours. She aimed—more carefully this time—and squeezed the trigger again. Still Ford stood. Never elected. Pardoned Nixon. “Ass hat,” Sarah called him. And still he stood.

But in a moment, she no longer did. Jumped, gun wrestled from her well-trained grip, my cousin Ben waited at school that day for four hours before it occurred to anyone that his mom might not be coming. “We, ah, never thought to check the evening news,” the principal told Ben apologetically.

Sarah was released from prison last spring. She now knows that the sight on her weapon was off, a fact that she never caught because she had trained with another. The agent in charge of assigning the gun later admitted that he gave her the faulty pistol because he was pretty sure the frumpy housewife would never have the guts to use it.

Today, workplace discrimination based on gender is illegal—under laws originally proposed by President Gerald Ford, who, after two assassination attempts by women, saw the dawning of a new age of harmony and understanding.

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).

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

“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.]

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.

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).]

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.

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.

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.

Now, because my handwriting and drawing is just as bad as Harvey’s, I’ll translate:

“First Class”—10.20. 06, Airport

EARLIER.

AEM: Do you want a Cinnabon?

HP: No, thank you. Do you want me to get you one?

AEM: I know you’re going to be all jealous of my Cinnabon so don’t come crying to me when I’m all happy and you’re staring. This is so good.

HP: Good. I want you to enjoy it while you can.

AEM: ‘Cause we’re all gonna die?

HP: That’s right.

AEM: Seriously. It’s like eating a melty stick of butter. Which is good. But now it’s gone. it was so good.

HP: Yeah, I’ve been looking at it covetously this whole time you been eatin’ it.

AEM: Yeah, it was making me really uncomfortable.

HP: Hey, people are lining up. When do you think we board?

CLEARLY LABELLED ON YOUR TICKET IS YOUR BOARDING ZONE. DO NOT BOARD BEFORE YOUR ZONE IS CALLED.

Man [obviously recognizes Harvey]: Uhhh, that’s first class. They called you a long time ago!

(Line is now crowded.)

HP: Oh, let’s just wait.