Anyway, on Sunday, I had to do some research at Harvard Business School's library. And lucky me, I got to PAY $15 for ONE DAY. Can I just ask what the hell they think libraries are for? And Harvard's endowment is 30 billion dollars right now. the richest university in the world. It all fits in with the harvard mentality --knowledge is a treasure, and libraries are big bank vaults. besides, if you're the kind of person who worries about where fifteen dollars is coming from, you'll probably spill beer and cheez puffs on the books or pee in the stairwell of the stacks. Luckily the staff are always quite nice there.
Sunday night I checked out a local hiphop show back at the same bar/club/restaurant as the night before. It was in the back room upstairs, and it was pretty inspiring. I wedged myself up on a speaker on stage left and had a good sideview show of the antics. The two folks I really wanted to see were The Jedi Mind Tricks (from philly), and Ninja B, a faaantastic battle dj from back in the day. they did not disappoint. Then there were the Schizofreniks, virtuoso and a ton of freestyle mcs. Th mcs got larger and larger as the night went on, begining with two skinny guys, then a couple other guys who were a little beefier, and the jedi mind tricks, one of whom was a cornfed pennsylvania german behemoth blond boy, plus another crazy energetic guy who was three feet wide, then this absolutely mammoth local guy leapt up to freestyle. He was as wide as he was tall. Mcs were larger than life, --increasing as the evening went on. Actually, the room was full of very large men. There were probably a dozen women there all told. But the atmosphere was upbeat, the boys were in a good mood, no hostility. And the lyrics were occasionally inspiring.

11/6 argh I hate this. Well writing in a cul-de-sac, it'll reach you eventually.
Oh everone should check out this little snippet about critical theory, race, language, ideology, grandmothers, and everything else that's kool to write about.

Although I'm hesitant to get into marxism much here, for fear a gaggle of old-school dyed-in-the-wool hardline self-identified red hat marxists will pounce on me, cracking lines of dogma over my head and stamping "enemy of the people" on my face, i want to get into a response by the fabulous anacaona (who never responds to my emails) to the divine melty. There was a certain appeal of marxism to rebelling teens like I was, that is very different than the way i feel about his writings now. This is actually true for my relationship to ideology of any kind. My response then was based in both the understanding that a lot of his writings are very important and useful, and in the understanding that it will shock conservative older people (and young ones too). One of the things that was often missing from my early experiments with marxism was a historical context for marxism and the ways it has played out in various countries. The lessons, negative and positive, for how marx's ideas can be put into effect. As a raging teen, i was unaware of the complex and changing nature of marx's ideas, (any ideology) as opposed to some of the most mule-stubborn rigidity of many marxists. One of things about Marx-the-person that is really interesting is the way he refined his views over time. This is something that is lost on dogmatic folks, they hang on to his earliest, most simplified, binaristic deterministic ideas.
When any great thinker emerges into a scene, the writing that usually makes the biggest bang is in some ways their intellectual adolescence. Signalling rejection of an old order, a binary opposition to it, usually. Marx (and his followers still more) was no exception. In the writings which became most popular (for reasons often having to do with the political climate/situations surrounding his followers), Marx talks about the universality of economic development. Like classical economists before him, he came up with a model of economic development which was supposed to work no matter what the country. Stages of economic development would basically go from feudalism, to capitalism to socialism. In that order. It was the alienation of factory life that would lead people to a revolution. With the benefit of hindsight, we find a weak point --where has marxist ideology taken root the hardest? in countries that were primarily made up of peasants. And, as Anacaona points out, marxism has continued to mean a lot to people in Third World nations. Even though such places were not the nations Marx was writing for.

This issue, by the way (heh heh) was the main question behind my mother's first book: Lenin and the Problem of Marxist Peasant Revolution. Amazon sez it's out of print, but it's in Libraries, or you can order it and give my mom some much-needed royalties.

Anyway, Marx continued to work on the "problem" (hole in theory) of peasants for the rest of his life. Follow his mind to Claudia Jones, a black Caribbean (Trinidad?) socialist feminist liberationist woman who ran socialist newpapers in the islands and in London --her grave is next to his in highgate cemetary...with nary a plaque to tell you who she was..
Anyway anyway, later on in his life, Marx come to think that maybe peasants have something to say about their own development. Did I tell you this before? If so, I'm telling it again, a story my mother found while researching her new book ,which all y'all should read, especially if you are into third world/development studies (In Search of the True West: Culture, Economics and Problems of Russian Rural Development): So before the Revolution(s) in Russia, there were groups of would-be revolutionaries, frustrated by the model of development put forth in marx's main writings, which states that after feudalism must come capitalism, and only after capitalism is the revolution. These activists looked around them and saw that Russia was still mostly peasants (peasants never fit in really well to marxist ideology -were they feudal or some kind of rural proletariat? people kept classifying and reclassifying them). "What are we to do?" asked one revolutionary, named Vera Zasulich, in a letter to Marx. Were they to wait for capitalism to develop? Was there anything they could take part in now? Marx took over eight years to answer that letter. In the meantime, others in her group decided that the way to hasten the revolution was, paradoxically, to hasten capitalism, thus bringing Russia further down the 'inevitable' path of history. This was a potentially very profitable decision. Some might say they sold out the basic ideals at the root of marx's theory. some might not. It is evident that many revolutionaries had as little respect for the lives/minds/voices of peasants as did the czarists or the capitalists. Meanwhile, marx was writing and writing. Another revolutionary, with a different focus, (named Daniel'son) wrote incessantly to Marx about his work with and about peasants, and the peasant commune, an organization which he thought had great potential as a way to model socialism in Russia. Marx responded occasionally, and after he died, Engels (son of an industrialist) did not respond at all.
So what was Marx's reply to Vera's letter? Eight years later? He told them to look to the peasant commune. It is possible, he said, that the Russian Peasant Commune may hold the seeds of a particularly russian kind of socialism. A historically rooted kind. This reply was not what the revolutionaries in Vera's group wanted to hear. They buried the letter, in fact, and it was not rediscovered until the 1960s.

Ahhh, this is what is fun about history. The man was learning and growing and developing his views until the day he died. Unfortunately his followers, like many followers (Darwin being a similar one) hung on to his adolescent theories, occasionally took'em and ran..all the way to the bank, or to purges, or various other places.. "I am not a marxist" Marx said, bless him.

11/4Still no email, no website. Got a panicked phonecall this morning from my mom in Sweden, who thought since I hadn't responded to her email in 10 days that something must be wrong. It's OK, mom. Sometimes technology fails us, is all.
tj's journal reminds me of a guy I knew in college. I was coming back for my junior year, I think. Got in early, a week before classes, but most of my luggage was coming later, all my books etc. So I was pretty damn bored. Nobody in town yet. So there's this little punk guy working at the cafe, and we get to talking and he seems pretty nice and i tell him how bored I am. I tell him how I miss my guitar. He says "I can lend you mine." It's an acoustic, but it's something to pass the time with. What a nice guy, I think, and accept. So the next day he brings me a guitar in a case and I take it home. When I open it later, there's a sticker on the guitar, at the base of the strings, that says "Abortion: Hitler totally loved it" with swastikas on either side. I put the guitar back in its case and look at it for a while. What does this sticker mean? What's the deal with swastikas on your guitar? It seems anti-abortion (also historically inaccurate, --actually the fetish of racial survival is something that many anti-abortion extremists share with nazi ideology)... I was freaked out enough that I didn't touch the guitar for a day. I wasn't sure how to deal with the guy. i decided to say nothing.. see what this guy has to say. So I play the guitar a little at home, and it does make me feel better, help to pass the time. It was pretty nice of him to lend it to this woman he just met. we hang out a little more, and chat. I don't ask him anything about his beliefs. But I figure he must be wondering, I mena, that's a pretty inflammatory sticker. But he seems like a nice guy. He seems to genuinely care about people. Someone else tells me that he and his girlfriend are christian straightedge--that she sits and reads the bible on her breaks at the cafe. hmmmmm...I can't remember how it comes about, but when something finally does come up about the way he views the world, we are already friends. And it makes such a difference. I felt he was genuinely confused by the fact that he liked me, and thought I was a good person, but I was and did things he thought were bad. When he started talking about homosexuality I was able to say something that i never would have said to someone I'd just met, "when you say that, it makes me feel bad. I'm bisexual, and it sounds like you don't like me or think I'm a good person." I don't think he'd ever had to deal with the reality of hatred. He had zines filled with furious language about "those people" about abortion, so violent. But he never had a friend in the enemy camp. And neither had I. I can't say we were really close. And I never pursued our friendship after I moved away, but I'm glad I knew him. I don't know if that kind of friendship is one I would necessarily seek out, but life works out better than one might expect. 11/3 Well, my server seems to be down, so I'm getting no email or website access, but i figure if I start writing now, then y'all will have a double helping or more when i get back online. Presuming that a double helping of me is good.
I ended up having two costumes this weekend: on Friday night me, my best friend from highschool, her girlfriend, and my roommate went out to a party at a club downtown run by this collective of lesbian/queer/trans folks who do parties and poetry and punk. Silly music,great costumes. We stayed there until about 2. Then my roommate and I split for a party a few blocks away with better djs, in a loft filled with kids from the club/rave scene and people who like to go to parties in lofts. Actually, when we first got there it was full, so we went to a diner and ate overpriced food, then went back and I knew the door-guy. He very nicely let us in. It was a million degrees, but not overcrowded, at that point. And the music was pretty good. We were both struck by how straight the beat music scene is in Boston. So heterosexual. This is not just because the kidz are homophobic --it's also because Boston gay men are uptight and preppy, for the most part. And the ladies have their own parties, but I don't see much crossover. Anyway, the music was good and we stayed till around 5. My roommate was a construction worker and I was a beatnik. My costume smelled so bad when I got home that I knew I had to come up with something else for Saturday night. But what? The new costume idea started when this kid I know offered me a cigarette. I thought I could use it if I was a beatnik again, so I took it. Holding it, I thought: "hey I am in costume right now, as a smoker." then I realized if I showed up at a party with a cigarette and a beer I would totally be in costume. that'd be pretty funny. But in-joke costumes are no good if you're going out. So i decided to be bad. bad in some way. I thought about my closet: motorcycle boots, tight buttonfly jeans, white t-shirt with a pack of cigs rolled up in the sleeve, a belt with a big buckle.. and hey! I could sculpt my har, couldn't I? So, using elbow grease, hair bands, and some mangled bobby pins, I muscled my hair into an enormous pompadour the size of a large grapefruit. the silhouette was tremendous. Marked on some sideburns and I was ready to go! I'm going to scan that image in, eventually. This guy took a polaroid of me at the second party we went to. he heh. Costumes are fun.