i am fifteen today (a few things considerably not about ronald johnson)

how am i fifteen today?...

-i think it's an internal rebellion about being depressed about politics and the state of the world.

-also because i'm spending so much time around my family. i am literally recovering teenage feelings that a party is a wild and exciting foray away from the all-encompassing house of family. (in this case, i'm going to a halloween party with tony _after_ going to an italian restaurant with my grandparents, uncle, and mom. well, you know, ... , etc.)

-is wire's pink flag the best album ever made? yea -

-tony and i are going to that old costume party as danzig tonight. (as two glenn danzigs, that is.) i'm trying to figure out how to post a picture of the matching iron-on t-shirts tony made for us.

-i am relishing the mode of the kiss-off....like in the song 'mannequin' from pink flag ("you're a waste of space/no natural grace"). but my current favorite (in the form of a kiss-off to all of Western Civ) is from stephen greenblatt in _renaissance self-fashioning_. greenblatt is criticizing a sociologist named daniel lerner who claims that empathy is unique to western society ("the capacity to see oneself in the other fellow's situation")...and that this empathy comes from mobility and the mass media. so greenblatt says:

"...the great missing term in the analysis of modernization....is power. For my own part, I would like in this chapter to delineate the Renaissance origins of the 'mobile sensibility' and, having done so, to shift the ground from 'I Love Lucy' to _Othello_ in order to demonstrate that what Professor Lerner calls 'empathy,' Shakespeare calls, 'Iago.'"

as rhetoric, that knocked the wind out of me when i read it - i wasn't expecting it (even though the chapter is called 'the improvisation of power'). the idea connects the dots in a lot of hypocrisies...

and i take it as a kiss-off to me as well - but i like getting slapped on the wrist so smartly.

happy halloween!