Latest Entries
anti-gay shooting of teens in Israel
Visual Notes of My UnPresenting workshop
San Francisco has a pie truck
Just one more reason to be homesick.
Frederick Douglass on Power
There is no progress
Those who profess to favor freedom
And yet depreciate agitation
Are men who want crops
Without plowing up the ground
They want rain without thunder and lightning
They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters
Power concedes nothing without a demand
It never did and it never will.
-Frederick Douglass, 1857
The Dish (sullivan readers) speculate on romance.
RIP social space of indie bookstores – Toronto's Pages closes
photo by Matthew Kim
Pages was a beautiful indie bookstore with lots of large coffee table books in the window and a mix of academic, indie and arty stuff. There were more magazines than I’d ever seen and more gay, lesbian and generally sexy material than I’d ever seen outside of the porn section of the family corner store where I sometimes worked. There was nothing about those magazines that was for me.
There was one lesbian bar and a feminist book store that carried ear cuffs, women symbol earrings and cassette tapes full of songs about spilling up and over like a waterfall. I tried all of these. I admit it. But how else were you supposed to meet women or more specifically womyn? How would you know thy were gay?  How did you even know what it was that you felt inside? Until our feelings are mirrored, we aren’t sure it’s ok to have them.
I didn’t like to drink and I wasn’t going to the Michigan Womyns Music Festival (one woman I met gushed about how people there braided their armpit hair). Pages was much more my speed. Dorky and thinky, it was a place where stylish, chunky glasses and footwear prevailed. It had gay stuff but it wasn’t only gay. It was maybe the first space I was even in that had room to be gay and not gay together. I could try it out without having to give myself entirely over to it. At Pages I could stand somewhere and be excited about ideas and cute women.
Richard Nash is right that books are social objects, social glue (as are all artists and our work…especially performances..more on that to come). But bookstores are social spaces. And Pages was a great one. I never did meet anyone in its aisles. But I could have. Just being in there meant a lot to me. There was some place that felt right. Some place I belonged.
Don't Go To Law School: The Army of the Middle Class
Great post on The Stimulist about why you shouldn’t go to law school.
I have a law degree. It’s the one thing I keep in my closet. There is really only one main good reason to go to law school and that’s because you really really want to be a lawyer. Those people do exist. But the only way I think you’ll know if you are one is to work with real lawyers first. it’s very much a question of temperment. And that’s something fancy schools generally don’t teach you about. You can only find out, like you say, on your own. And law school is consuming. And it does reward fearful thinking. And the very process of being there can make it harder to know yourself if you’re giving every waking minute to memorizing the 8 part Lemon Test.
Law school is the army of the middle class. It’s where people go who don’t know where else to go. And it saddles us with a different kind of injury or disability than a war, without having served anyone or anything but our fears.
“Aw but you must find that degree really useful?” I get asked all the time. Well, I did start stand-up in law school. And I’m making a show in which I teach all of law school in 70 minutes.
Here’s the cartoon I drew to get me through the experience.
