4/27 i think i'm getting sick.

4/26 The eviction party went down quite well. We had a vegetarian barbecue on the early side, where all our friends with children and/or dogs came, plus folks from work, and our hungriest friends, or folks who like to chill in the sun of a Ssaturday afternoon... hung around and played darts and swapped clothes.. Then, at the late shift, booze and smoothies were consumed, and my friends Gwhite and Cosmo slammed down some techstep, and this drunken baravrian friend-of-a-friend spilled a LOT of red wine over one of my turntables, rendering the pitchshifter inoprative, fucking up the needle, and make the whole thing smell like a wino's ass. i found out after it happened, Cosmo came up to me and said "when we turned over the turntable, all of this wine ran out of the shifter-slot like blood." aigh! not what i needed to hear. $400 electrical equipment.. my babies, and one is stinky and sticky like a real baby. I think I need to take it in to get it serviced now. grrr. But I used a hairdryer and rubbing alcohol and fixed it kinda, and then I spun a set for TWO AND A HALF HOURS!. it was so much fun. People were dancing and cheering and recognizing tunes...I kept peeking behind me at the crowd in my living room, and I was getting tired but i wanted everyone to keep having fun, as i ran out of records and started playing the b-sides. It's such a different feeling than composing a set alone in my living room, where I get probably too conceptual.. when there's a roomful of people actually responding to the music you play, it's a whole other concept of how you pick your tunes. I like that about being this kind of DJ. I'm not the rent-a-dj with the popular hits, but neither am i the competitive tricks-doing battle-dj. I like it as a craft, as a service; I'm creating, but I'm also presenting other people's music, music i love, and showing people how it can all fit together. whee!

Sleep-dep-delirious Sunday, woke up too early after too little sleep for brekkie with my pal/roommate, nosed a thrift store for a second then slid to harvard square on her way to work. I ran into an old friend from high school, with her son and boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband. We spent a couple hours wandering around the place catching up. boy skating circles round his son, heading him of from toddling into the street. I split, after agreeing to play their wedding reception (i don't really have wedding-receptiony music.. I said. she said: that's what we want! We want to get down!) downtown, at the ONI gallery, a groundfloor warehouse artspace that people live behind and above, they were having a Sunday afternoon open house. the space has a loading dock onto the street, opened so the sun licked in. later on they set up turntables and their new roommate who's a battle dj did some superfast cutting tricks with the Afrika Bambaata and songs from back in someone's day. A gaggle of tall skinny mod boys and girls, some baggypants hipsters, tattoo-bedecked, lounging in the doorway watching folks go by. a few lowrider/bmx bikes out front with my friend robyn zooming in circles in the street, music spilling out, sun spilling in. except for being so tired i was occasionally nauseous, it was a lovely afternoon.

4/23 the numbers are in. the ratio of the highest-paid employee to the lowest-paid employee in the US: 290/1

that ration in US fortune 500 companies: 370/1.

for comparison's sake, I will give the ratios for japan: 8/1 and germany: 12/1.

Damn me, WHITE BOYS with guns, not just BOYs with guns. After they found out who was behind the Oklahoma bombing, TIME and a buncha other rags had covers featuring the new scary villains, the white militia groups. even while downplaying the specifically white-supremacist stance of most militia groups they profiled, at least the magazines were finally hyping the people to fear, white guys with guns.

4/22 Slid into sleazefest TV --Inside Edition last night. As usual, hyping up the scary youth subculture, emphasizing boys who wear makeup and paint their nails black. I foresee more beatings for such kids in schools nationwide.. linking goth kids (who are often so weedy and/or femme and wouldn't hurt flies) with hitler-lovers? that's not exactly a typical correlation. The CNN website had a link to a fact sheet about the puny puny gun control laws in Colorado. and then that total asshole Charlton Heston comes out to say that if one kid had been armed in that school, he could have saved a lot of lives. oh yeah? by having a shootout in a hallway? and besides, don't you think there's a temperament issue? of all the kids in that school, I bet it was the 'trenchcoat' kids who had fantasies of armed standoffs. Them and Chuck Heston, his brain filled with some kind of "high noon" showdown image. Doug Dean, the Republican Congressman said the same thing about an armed faculty or administrator. what a fool. i think there's some kind of gun safety rule about firing weapons in enclosed spaces filled with innocent people. you know, gun safety, something the NRA is ostensibly concerned with. I mean maybe having a TRAINED SNIPER on staff at every high school could be an option, but wouldn't you rather think about reducing the number of lethal devices on school grounds?

I have this vision of some classroom dispute: little joey grabs little billy's notebook, billy whips out his .22. "freeze!" shouts the teacher, pulling her Glock. two other kids in the back pull their pieces, train sights on the teacher. She looks to the sawed-off under the desk, but it's too far to reach.. it's a standoff, just like in reservoir dogs.. who'll shoot first? the teacher inches her toe, under her desk, towards a selection of buttons: one is marked "armed standoff", right next to "hostage situation" and above "suicide threat," she taps it. A red light goes on in the principal's office, he pulls on his bulletproof vest. Minutes later, he swings through the window of the classroom, guns blazing, striking the kids in the back of the room in the knee and shoulder. as they go down and billy looks over his shoulder, teacher shoots joey in the stomach. billy drops the 22 in tears, and runs to teacher, who cradles him with one arm as she sweeps her glock across the room, scanning for other hostile armed children. The prinicpal unclips himself from the line, and tosses it out the window. "Better call 911, Mrs. Krabappel, and have them come to the detention room."

So now more and more people are talking about metal detectors and armed guards. Oh that's such a fabulous educational environment. Armed guards. frisking. Why not manacle them while you're at it? or wait, --if nobody went to school at all, there probably would be less school shootouts. Lets just lock up all children until the age of 21!

this is another place where much of the rest of the industrialized world is looking at the US in disbelief. how much longer can we insist that access to firearms has no connection to the use of firearms, to the belief in firearms as a sane response ?

and as usual... the people who are doing the killing are all BOYS. they are BOYS. BOYS with GUNS. have any of the school shootings been done by girls? I don't think so. yet why is this not an issue? why is the language of the news so fucking carefully gender-neutral? just like the jonesboro killing where they 11-year old boys opened fire on an all-girl classroom with a female teacher. ya think maybe gender was an issue?