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After two and a half years, I'm being called for jury duty again. What sucks (aside from the obvious) is that the summons is under my old name. I don't know if it'll make a difference in my eligibility or not, but it could get complicated. I'm not sure if I should/can contact them beforehand, or just go in normally and explain, or what. Wanna know how to get people more involved in participatory democracy, such as it is? Make it one or the other: if you vote, you don't have to serve on a jury. I don't mean if you're simply registered, but if you actually take the time to vote. See if turnout doesn't skyrocket. (Whether or not people voting for that reason alone is a good thing is another question entirely.)
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In lieu of actually doing something productive yesterday, I updated the kittypr0n site. (And that's not to say there weren't more productive things I could have been doing. I just lieu'd them, is all.) There are new screenshots, a faq, and hopefully it's a little more streamlined in general. I used to do this sort of thing professionally, don't'cha'know.
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I finally made it to Spanganga last night, after having missed both Scabaret with Phred and Bucky's one-man show there. The event was The Spang Bang, a weekly open mic which Lynnee had said she was going to attend to work on his stand-up routine. Except that she never showed up, the flakey bastard. I kid, of course; I'm always happy to discover a new open mic. Though the format is "anything goes," the emphasis tends to be on comedy, and the crowd was a bit more SWM-oriented than I'm accustomed to, but I didn't feel particularly out of place. I didn't have any of my stories with me since I'd gone just to see Lynnee, but thankfully my APE Spellcheck Poetry was still in my notebook. It was kind of an odd first piece to read, since it's nothing like my usual stuff (and a whole lot shorter; when I finished the host asked me if I had anything else, as I was allotted seven minutes), but what the heck. I'll save the pornographic self-disclosure for next time. The really weird part was the lighting. It's the first time I've read without being able to see the audience, since I was on a stage with lights shining directly at me. Maybe it's just as well I was up there for less than a minute. It's going to take a bit of getting used to. Bryce was there. You never can tell where some people are going to turn up. Splosh! Good lord, but that's a fun word.
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I'm reading Liberace: An American Boy by Darden Asbury Pyron. It's a biography which relates Liberace's life history to the history of American pop culture, queer and otherwise—mostly "otherwise," since he never came out. His first teevee show was on KTLA, the first commercial station in Los Angeles, which was owned by one Klaus Lansberg. He was quite the visionary. Lansberg made other innovations in the medium. His cameramen appeared wherever something seemed to be happening. He turned human-interest stories into news, news into entertainment. Once, for example, he provided round-the-clock coverage of the ill-fated attempt to rescue a small child who had fallen into an abandoned well in 1949. The coverage galvanized the city, won national media treatment, and dominated the television ratings. The affair of the girl "intimized" a news of human-event story. Viewers lost the sense of being merely passive observers; they felt engaged in the rescue operations; they became a part of the broadcast; they gained membership in a family of television watchers. The unknown child's death, then, became a "personal" loss. Lansberg's camera "created" an event that then demanded a certain effect, popular grief, in this case, for a figure that would have been of no national consequence otherwise. Sounds awfully familiar, doesn't it? Bite me, Klaus Lansberg. You fucked things up real bad.
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So I'm browsing the Re/SEARCH table at the Alternative Press Expo yesterday, and the next thing I know I'm agreeing to help the publisher V. Vale set up a blog. It went like this: I was buying The Essential Perry & Kingsley (one of the few purchases I allowed myself at APE, though I wish I could have bought something from every exhibitor), and Vale offered to throw in Zines! Vol. 1 for free. He seemed happy to hear that I already have it. Anyway, in the recent Re/SEARCH newsletter he commented that he had a zillion cool links but no idea what to do with them, so I asked if anyone had responded. Someone suggested he do a blog, but he doesn't have the foggiest idea what a blog is or how to go about making one. I'm actually not entirely certain on the latter myself (this page is a hand-coded diary, not a blog, and for some reason using livejournal doesn't feel right) but I'm sure I can figure it out. Of course, my answer to "what to do with a bunch of links" isn't "blog" so much as "a links page arranged by subject," but I guess I'm an old-school webmonkey, and it might be kinda cool anyway. And I certainly like the idea of helping the company. I have no illusions about it leading to an actual job, though. Most of the places that I'd really like to work for aren't currently hiring, or don't hire at all. APE's rockstar guest was Jhonen Vasquez of Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and Invader Zim. Maddy stood in a very long line to meet him and get a comic signed, but I opted not to join her. I've heard that he really doesn't like crowds, and if the celeb's not into it, it just doesn't feel right to me. One of the few times I've done the long autograph line thing was when Michael Moore was on the Downsize This! book tour, and at the Mystery Science Theater 3000 convention in '96. Otherwise, I need to be able to walk up and offer them some of my gelato. Which I did with Ted Naifeh and Kelly Crumrin. (Ted declined, but Kelly helped herself to the gelato Kyle bought me.) It helps, of course, that we're already friends with them. I didn't come to their table until after I'd pretty much finished our circuit of the convention—Maddy was still in line for Jhonen—and Kelly teased me about finally getting around to talking to them. We spent the last hour or so before closing with them, and accepted their dinner invitation. We went to a German restaurant in The Mission (where I had my first beet in years), and then, since we were on a roll, to Ted and Kelly's favorite karaoke bar. Maddy still hasn't quite worked up the nerve, but I did Nirvana's "All Apologies" and "Rose Tint My World" from Rocky Horror. Regarding "All Apologies," I told Ted that I can only sing songs that I actually believe in. He looked like that was most the heartbreaking thing he'd ever heard. More heartbreaking is the fact that I fux0red the intros to both songs. Gotta work on that. The people at the table next to us seemed to be enjoying our collective vocal stylings and were sorry to see us go, at least. From there, it was to one of the many APE afterparties going on throughout the city, this one at Isotope, a local comic book store. One of the employees is our friend Tristan, a painfully cute genderqueer boi (who makes an even cuter girl, which you can tell just by looking) who's collaborating with Ted on How Loathsome, an equally genderqueer comic. We have the coolest friends. At both APE and the afterparty was an old coworker of mine from Le Video. I've seen him quite a few times in crowded rooms over the last several months, the first time being at Pow! back in June. He's seen me, but doesn't seem to recognize me, although I know Stanley told that I've transitioned. I guess my appearance has changed sufficiently. Although I've had opportunities, I haven't spoken to him, and have come to realize that I'm actively avoiding doing so. I'm not sure why. He was always a very nice guy and probably still is; we even went to a Star Trek convention together once. Maybe I'm just enjoying this little bit of, as it were, anonymity. But it feels kinda mean. He'd probably like to be reunited with an old friend, after all. I should probably talk to him the next time I see him. It was midnightish when we arrived at the party, and we were pretty much running on intertia at that point. Maddy's back and neck can be stronger than inertia, so around one we called it a night, except for giving Weaselboy a ride home. (Somehow, an evening's just not complete without giving someone a lift somewhere.) We're giving APE's second day a miss, both for recuperation and financial reasons; admission is cheap, but there's way too much tempting stuff. Besides, K'vetch is tonight, and Timbre will be joining us.
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It wasn't terrorists, okay?
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