I hate theater -- sort of,

but it is disturbing to see directors, playwrights and arts administrators wondering aloud in the New York Times Theater Pages if it's about portraying more real people and more real life which for these FAME graduates translates into more plays about minorities and people with disabilities.

How much more insulting and ridiculous can "traditional mainstream theater" be? I have cringed my way through only a few overacted "mainstream" productions in my day, so I find it hard to shell out to see people emote on stage. -- I was a devotee of the East Village, the late Ethyl Eichelberger and The Wooster Group who were moving by turns and wonderfully, over the top THEATRICAL. I'm not going to say any more about theater I like because that would take too long, but let's get this straight
"traditional mainstream theater"! -- If you think that I am going spend 25 bucks to watch a bunch of overearnest, overcaffeinated thespians emote their way through a play that is supposed to be about my life, you're going to have a really hard time prying those bills from my hands.

Suspicion about expert testimony

can lead to all sorts of problems for plaintiffs suing big corporations. Chris Mooney at American Prospect Online shows that it is perfectly possible for liberal Supreme Court judges to make terrible errors of judgment having to do with everything from philosophy of science to regulating corporate malfeasance, so chill out about the Roberts nomination. Moveon.org made a big mistake trying to rally the troops on this one. The jury is out so to speak and there is no reason to jump for one's checkbook or one's soapbox.

Has anyone heard of "picking one's battles"? The battle in Ohio was gratifying, even though Hackett lost.

Beauty and the Bleach : Hard Hair!

Every other television commercial in Taiwan featured a willowy young woman caressing her face while describing how this amazing cream actually makes your skin soft, downy and white. So now the LA Times has caught on in theBeauty and the Bleach , an article describing -- and I've seen them -- Asian women, mostly Chinese to my eye, or Taiwanese, wearing these anti-UV welding masks while driving, walking their toddler, pushing a shopping cart, taking out money at an ATM -- doing whatever. They look seriously freaky and definitely not attractive, not to me at any rate. Indoors, they may be total babes, but this chador of the face has something to do with the deep anxiety being dark that afflicts almost all the women of Japan, China, Taiwan, South Korea, Hong Kong, etc. etc. Perhaps their best bet for total sun avoidance is to move underground.

I wouldn't bother blogging about this again, but I encountered another freaky example of Chinese self-hatred when I went to the beauty salon attached to the huge Chinese grocery store here to get my hair cut. The Thai-Chinese owner discussed my short hair (I'm trying to grow it out now) and he brought over some mags with pix of short hair cuts. I pointed to a few and he said, "Your hair won't do that it. Your hair is too hard." My hair is too hard? what the ef? But I realized he was saying that because all the girls with perky short hair cuts in the mag were WHITE and that according to this freak, WHITE girls have soft hair. I felt as if I had straw growing out of my head --straw that I had wanted him to spin into WHITE, soft silky gold.

Well he can ask my red head husband who has hard hair! I was pissed off, but it seemed a bit hysterical to jump out of his chair and call him a racist self-hating weirdo, especially since we'd been kibbitzing in Chinese and I would have had to switch to English to call him self-hating. I really don't know how to say "self-hating" in Chinese and that in and of itself would be my lording it over his recent immigrant ass, so I did some deep breathing and went through with the whole haircut thing, but I won't be going back there ever again. I'm going to have to find a non-Chinese hairdresser -- and I regret this because I never paid more than 20 US for a haircut in Taiwan and they were all excellent -- especially after I learned to ask for pun-ku!

It will be dorky hair for the time being in SoCal where "feathering" was pioneered if not invented --

Ugh! Hard hair indeed.....

Bush is corrupt and dishonest,

and he gets away with it! Tiresome! Is this really news any more? You can read about How Bush's Berlin Ambassador Pick Profited from Protective Tariffs against German Companies - , but it's getting a little redundant.

John Bolton, abusive boss and intelligence fabricator is US ambassador to the UN, the situation in Iraq contradicts everything that Bush & Co is saying about it. Republican cronies are cashing in everyday, the average California family makes 60,000 USD less a year than it takes to actually buy a house in Southern California and yet, the Republican administration seems to be able to get away with every sort of distortion, lie, insider dealing and outright abuse of human rights in the book.

mourning my new york

I think I've finally made my peace with the fact that I'm never going to be able to live in New York City or its vicinity. I always believed that somehow, I would be able to will myself back home again, not just to a place, but to a mindset that had to do with good public schools, progressive teachers, likeminded friends who were willing to fight for their convictions that might have to do with something about art and politics and a commitment to something more than hustling some one or something for profit. Well, amazing shrinking academia, the New Economy, Rudolph Giuliani, the real estate boom, endless it seems now, and my increasingly dissenting views in academia have made this dream almost completely impossible.

I always thought that eventually I would raise Leo in New York, however hard it was going to be. He was going to go to a neighborhood school (in my imagination, I started with Manhattan, and then had us move to Brooklyn) and then get into Stuyvesant High School. We were going to go to Curtis' and Tania's in Montauk for a little relief from the summer heat. The multicultural reality of everyday life would be more than some bureaucratic notion, thought up by reformists to make themselves look good.

I was going to be able to learn more Yiddish from cab drivers (except now it would probably be Sikh). I would be able to take Leo to the Met when no one was there. He would go to City Center with his school class and do the inevitable Children's Theater interactive activity just like me.

I left New York City unthinkingly after graduate school, never realizing what it would mean never to live on those mean streets again. I was sick of the noise and the hard commute on the L train, the perpetual financial uncertainty. I didn't realize what I was giving up until many years later. But then when I have returned for visits over the intervening years, despite my happy rediscovery of the accent, the hustle, I realize that it's not my city any more, and that maybe it never was. I was always for getting by on as little as possible and that is not really an ethic by which one can survive in that place. But New York taught me to be idealistic, just as it it taught me to dream tinselly dreams of glamorous impoverishment that are like the outdated currency of a deposed regime.

Bolton makes it to the UN

Yeah, f*** parliamentarism -- that's for pussy dems who are a minority anyway, what has George to fear from them anyhoo? So an abusive, paranoid megalomaniac is our man at the UN! Faneffingtastic.

I'm learning a lot from these Republicans.