Dear Readers,
Here are some superpowers that you can have in real life:
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yes i think about this a lot
Posted August 25th, 2010
There's a portrait on the fourth floor of the Harvard Law Library of George Lewis Ruffin.
At the bottom of the portrait are two nameplates. The newer nameplate says, "George Lewis Ruffin - First African-American Graduate of Harvard Law School."
The older nameplate, attached directly to the picture frame, says something a little different: "George Lewis Ruffin - First Known Black Graduate of Harvard Law School."
"First known?" The older nameplate introduces doubt that gives me that Hitchcock dolly zoom feeling. Is Barack Obama the first black U.S. President or the first known black U.S. President? Is this your only life or your only known life? Are those your parents or your only known parents?
The older nameplate is as frank as a trumpet blast. It acknowledges that identity is constructed; you are whatever you want to be, provided you can pass. So is everyone else.
And, when the older nameplate was engraved, the public was probably much more aware of how often black people might pass as white to ensure they had access to, oh, say, Civil Rights, voting, well-paying jobs, law school, marriage, property &c.
In the U.S. now there is less urgency to pass; identities are now protected by Federal law; hence, identity is taken at face value more often; hence the unequivocal statement on the newer nameplate. The stakes are lower. Just this week, the court set a new Federal precedent to ensure identity does not disadvantage certain citizens who wish to marry.
I dig Judge Walker's decision in Perry v. Schwarzenegger, but my mom is still the author of the most elegant logical take-down in favor of gay marriage of all time:
internetPhone users of those without Flash click mp3:
ericaricardo.com/musics/mom_080822.mp3
ericaricardo.com/musics/mom_080822.mp3
“Hi Bubs, it's um, I think it's around 7:15. I'm calling cuz, I love you. I tried calling you from the fair but, no reception. So I have one story. Only one person did any kind of confrontation.
“This middle-aged man from Texas came up to us and said, 'so this is the Freedom to Marry. So men can marry women, and men can marry men, and women can marry women,' and I said, 'yes!' and he said, 'so, but what if people want to marry animals. What if a man wanted to marry a cow?'
“And I started laughing and I said, 'why would a cow want to marry a man?' and he started laughing too. And I said, you know it's a miracle anybody stays married, you know that don't you,' and he laughed.
“Anyway, that's your story from your mom. I have all kinds of memoribilia that I'm sending you. I love you, bye bye.”
moms harvard law school
Posted August 7th, 2010
George Lewis Ruffin.
Dear Readers,
At work I used to watch a lot of Bobby McFerrin videos on YouTube. A lot of Bobby McFerrin videos.
- World Science Festival 2009 demonstrating the power of the pentatonic scale
- I Got the Feeling which ends with Bobby mouthing and feeling up a lady in the audience in a way that I promise you is awesome and not-creepy (promise)
- Bach Prelude & Ave Maria in which Bobby sings a Bach prelude and the audience accompanies him with Gounod's Ave Maria, without any rehearsal or training
The best video is from the World Science Festival though, and my friend Chris edited it. Bobby and the science guys are talking about the human brain and expectations, and Bobby gets up to demonstrate that the mind anticipates sequential tones in the pentatonic scale so well that all he has to do is sing a few notes with the audience and then jump left or right to play their voices just as easily as the black keys on a piano.
This video is so good that TED kinda sorta pretends that it's a TED talk. It gives me crazy chills, even when I watched it for the first time sitting in a windowless room under flourescent light in a plot of cubicles insulated with industrial carpet—an environment not meant for emotional experiences, or magic.
We are all machines with beautiful music hard-coded into our personal BIOS, and a mancer like Bobby can just jack right into it. In the video, those scientist guys sitting down study the brain, but Bobby knows how to play the brain.
i also watched john tesh and nina simone videos for reals
Posted July 28th, 2010
World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin rocks your neurons, world.
I Got the Feeling
Ave Maria:
Lovely.
Dear Readers,
I've been fairly absent these last seven months. A lot's happened!
I left office life in San Francisco last December, planted boots on the ground in Brooklyn, fell in love, hustled to make ends meet, made a lot of art, wrote a lot of writing, played some shows, and sang new music. But income never came with enough regularly to exceed expenses, and so I am back at a dayjob at an office, writing blogs for computers to read; yes, my tech-savvy and San Francisc-friends, you've guessed it! I am writing search engine optimization text: blogs with plenty of links to push traffic to the client sites.
I'll tell you what: it sure does have me thinking more carefully about my strong tags and title tags! It sure does tune my sensitivity to recycled, specious, and reconstituted information on the Internet! You know where content like that comes from? I do!
Yea though I have returned to the orifice, concurrently a crazy plan hatched last December with Jason "The" Doty has slowly unfolded. "I have a silly idea ... " he said. His skills in programming + my skills in art + our shared love for video games = a killer iPhone app.
Some intense months of production later, and we now have a company (Grumpy Dodo) and an awesome game: Crazy Shapes. It should be in the App store in mid-July. You can buy it once and play it on any of your Apple devices: iPad, iPod Touch, old iPhone, and new iPhone.
It is my best art ever. I am looking you in the eye, I am telling you to your face: this game. This is the realness. And for those of you who know Jason, this is his incredible programming talent and zany brilliance at its best.
We've been working on it non-stop for months, and still, when we were shooting the trailer we were each eager to be the one who got a turn. "I want to play!"
It still makes me laugh out loud. I hope you like it too :)
Our idea is to achieve a certain financial escape velocity, enough to continue to live simply (as we do now on low and no income) and make beautiful and delightful things.
tight as can be
Posted July 13th, 2010
Crazy Shapes!
Dear Readers,
People ask me all the time, "Erica, what's the difference between San Francisco and New York?"
It's like this: there are plenty of freaks in both cities, but in San Francisco you'll get lots of thumbs up and social support for, say, wearing a winter hat with kitty cat ears sewn on top; in New York, nobody's going to do that for you.
Or, it's like this:
In San Francisco, if the businessman in the train station told me, "you know there's a giant run in the back of your stockings," I would have smiled and said thank you.
In New York I just stared at him blankly until he looked away.
But here, I had full social license to do what I wanted to do, which was tell him to go do something lewd to himself.
ok for real i'm going to get wordpress no really for real this time
Posted June 23rd, 2010
... and your little dog, too.
Dear Readers,
In the late 15th century, before Italy was Italy, it was a loose network of city states without a unified government, currency, or language. But they did have one thing in common: the Roman Catholic Church.
In 1494 a Dominican monk named Girolamo Savonarola took power in Florence with a series of bitter, angry speeches against the Church and the Pope (all unpopular) as well as loose morals, loose clothing, gambling, and pornography (all very popular).
In 1497 he organized a massive bonfire for all the "vanities": not just the pornography, but everything that suggested beauty and art. They burned sculptures, mirrors, chess sets, lutes, wigs, and pretty clothes. They burned philosophy texts, ancient poetry, and some of the great works of Renaissance Florentine art.
Can we be surprised that in school, the young Savonarola was a devoted student of music and design? Truly, it is our fate to wrestle with the things that we love.
The next year Florence revolted and they burned him at the stake. The lesson: you burn the vanities, and they're going to come back and burn you.
some things are more fun to wrestle with than others
Posted April 8th, 2010
Everyone is looking for something / looking for something they can't find
Dear Readers,
I went to a select board meeting last night.
some explanation
Here's how it works in my little Vermont town:
Here's how it works in my little Vermont town:
- The Select Board (a council of five people) (usually old people) (usually old white dudes people) makes the budget.
- The budget includes some appropriations that get a "yea or nay" from the town citizens. Like: "here's the budget. But also, do you want to give $1,000 to the local municipal basketball fund? It will add $.001 to your tax bill" etc.
- Every voter in the town gets a chance to argue over a public address system about the budget. That's called Town Meeting.
- Then on Voting Day the town votes on the budget. If they vote in favor of it, then that's the budget. If they vote against it, the Select Board has to write a new budget. Repeat, until you have a budget.
- What money gets spent in the interim? Unbudgeted money.
The current Select Board is mostly newly elected (= still oldly lived). In the recent budget vote, the town voted not to give some appropriations of needed money to arts and community programs, including: a domestic violence program, Meals on Wheels, and the arts center where I am playing music this Saturday.
Major drag. But the town still didn't pass the budget, by a margin of five votes.
The Select Board felt a clear mandate: make deeper cuts. So they held a surprise meeting at 7am (surprise!) where they drafted a budget that cut the entire office of Economic Development (= 1 dude) and gave a 6% pay-cut to everyone making over $50,000 per year. At the same time, the School District threatened to cut the junior band teacher, also known as the most popular teacher in the school system.
Jason said, "right, they'll do this kind of thing to get everyone riled up. Like: 'until this budget is resolved, NO COOKIES! No cookies for anyone!'"
at the select board meeting last night
Everyone there was duly riled up. Some people felt that Economic Development is a goof-off position anyway, and good riddance. More people were quite certain that their businesses had stayed in town because of Economic Development and wanted him to stay. Or they found the secret meetings held by the light of dawn, and the lack of any alternative plans for economic development, quite distressing.
Everyone there was duly riled up. Some people felt that Economic Development is a goof-off position anyway, and good riddance. More people were quite certain that their businesses had stayed in town because of Economic Development and wanted him to stay. Or they found the secret meetings held by the light of dawn, and the lack of any alternative plans for economic development, quite distressing.
the vote
After hearing the points made by the citizenry—up to two turns at the mic! It took three hours—the Select Board voted again on their budget draft. Each member voted exactly the same way as voted before, including the board member attending by speakerphone (who was also the only vocally dissenting member).
After hearing the points made by the citizenry—up to two turns at the mic! It took three hours—the Select Board voted again on their budget draft. Each member voted exactly the same way as voted before, including the board member attending by speakerphone (who was also the only vocally dissenting member).
which means
The voters will vote again on the budget, and they will vote this budget down. We are dealing with Yankees, who are very stubborn people, and this could continue for a very long time.
The voters will vote again on the budget, and they will vote this budget down. We are dealing with Yankees, who are very stubborn people, and this could continue for a very long time.
my take
It seems like the basic problem is that there's no money, and I don't have any solutions for that. If I did, I wouldn't be writing articles on the internet at $15/pop and skulking around the fancy grocery store for free samples of fancy cheese.
It seems like the basic problem is that there's no money, and I don't have any solutions for that. If I did, I wouldn't be writing articles on the internet at $15/pop and skulking around the fancy grocery store for free samples of fancy cheese.
I do know that the town spent millions and millions of dollars renovating the middle school a little while back. During renovations they shuffled all the students to alternate locations, including my little brother, who said, "I had to learn in an abandoned dog food factory,* and you better believe I learned the s--- out of that material."
*This is true. —ed
you know my feelings on democracy boldness over speakerphone
Posted March 23rd, 2010
"You better believe I learned the s--- out of that material!"
Dear Readers,
The thoughts below were written last November, when I worked in corporate marketing. —ed
unprompted thoughts for today
That at work we get free coffee, tea, milk, hot water, and hot chocolate. That in the kitchens there are boxes of Rich Hot Chocolate stacked high in the cabinet.
That I could go on a hot chocolate binge, hanging out in the small kitchen all afternoon, tearing open pack after pack of hot chocolate, two and three packs to a cup sometimes, dark rings accumulating and calcifying around the inside of my Monet coffee mug. That I could double-fist hot chocolate using one of the disposable compostable coffee cups, and leave a terrible mess of brown powder and silver-white packets all over the counter and floors.
That I could do this without speaking or making eye contact with anyone who came into the kitchen. That I rarely speak or make eye contact with anyone in the kitchen anyway. That if I were to use up all the packets in all the boxes in the small kitchen, that I could walk forty feet to the big kitchen and do the same thing with those cabinets of Rich Hot Chocolate. That there's also Sugar-free Lactose-free Hot Chocolate, containing some mysterious chemical simulacrum of sugar and milk and only 20 fewer calories per serving anyway.
That if I exhausted the supply in the big kitchen that then there's the other small kitchen by Quality Assurance. That there are kitchens on every floor, all endowed with the exact same kitchen resources. That I could have as much hot chocolate as I wanted to take, and more. That, effectively, I have access to unlimited hot chocolate. That I could tell this to the classroom of 10-year-olds that live in my head, and they would flip their shit.
"Unlimited hot chocolate? Unlimited hot chocolate? Wait, wait wait. Wait," and the lead 10-year-old would stop me with one of those deadly-sober kid faces, make certain I was really listening. That it would be important to get through to me because the world is at stake. That I would be throwing every known observation of reality and experience into question, and the world might be bananas now, utterly bananas.
"They give you unlimited hot chocolate? As much as you want and no one will stop you? And you're not drinking it? None at all? When you could have unlimited hot chocolate?"
That the children would get be at once selfishly envious and also stunningly empathetic. That they would feel pity for me, since by some perversity I am anhedonic and insensate, and neither drink hot chocolate nor care.
That children anticipate many possible pleasures of being a grown-up. That anticipation is actually more pleasurable than fulfillment. That anticipation of being a grown-up who might anticipate drinking from an ever-flowing cup of hot chocolate must be an exquisite pleasure indeed.
That their pleasure in anticipation of anticipation would be tempered by frustration that I do not appreciate the glory of my chocolatey riches. That adulthood is wasted on adults.
i don't work there anymore
Posted March 16th, 2010
Give yourself a present New York, and visit City Bakery today!
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