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Back To: The Tyranny of Materiality
July 1992 . . . hanging out at The Bold Dragoon with Gordon and Natalie in Cooperstown . . . I used to cross my leg all the time . . . Gordon was as wild and crazy as I was [almost?] . . . I remember him telling me years later that he didn't feel like "him" but "my brother" when I was in high school . . . we were very close growing up because all we had was each other to play and fight with . . . moving out created a rift between us, especially after he wanted to move to my father's but Wanda and Dad said no because of all the trouble I had been in . . . Ben seemed quite angry with me for abandoning him . . .
View Video Clips from Earlier in the Day: Select *The Family Picnic Clips* . . .
August 1992: Walter's birthday up at Scott's . . . an interesting image of my body, dismembered from my head . . . Walter's eating his misogynistic birthday cake: there were supple frosting breasts and a pubic area at the bottom of the cake [where he's eating] . . .
Irony Update: July 9, 2000 . . . I found the above photo on a Devotee of Wheelchairs section with several photos depicting women in wheelchairs: Zeppo's Devotee Site ...
I find misogyny facinating in its pervasiveness, its valorized stature within our culture . . . the cake is representational of the objectification of body parts, though these aren't just any body parts, are they? There is no personality, no person connected to breasts and vagina, the places that are fucked . . . moms and daughters and sisters and nuns don't fit into this paradigm, do they?
I'm
no heroine
at least, not last time I checked
I'm too easy to roll over
I'm too easy to wreck
I just write about
what I should have done
I just sing
what I wish I could say
and hope somewhere
some woman hears my music
and it helps her through her day
'cause
some guy designed
these shoes I use to walk around
some big man's business turns a profit
every time I lay my money down
some guy designed the room I'm standing in
another built it with his own tools
who says I like right angles?
these are not my laws
there are not my rules
I'm
no heroine
I still answer to the other half of the race
I don't fool myself
like I fool you
I don't have the power
we just don't run this place
-- Ani DiFranco
Billy's wedding [left] [Glennie, right] . . . compare this to the photo directly above . . . I didn't know that I had smeared frosting on the camera lens at Walter's party . . . after these shots were developed I noticed the haziness and cleaned the lens . . . Billy lived a few miles down the road from us when I lived in Toddsville: he was bullied cruelly by the older boys [Craig, Scott etc.] of the group . . . they called him an an albino and named him Bildo among other slurs . . . though, like misogyny, this behavior was condoned by the majority who felt happy that it wasn't him or herself who was the target . . . Billy's father made wine . . . I remember going to his house and seeing the basement loaded with different wines . . . we knew if we took a bottle it would be missed so we took sips from a bunch of bottles . . .
"Majority does not mean large number, it means great fear."
Jean-Francois Lyotard