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2004-06-22 - 5:22 p.m. This week’s excitement, in brief: 1. I finally caught the mice. All my recent houseguests will know what I’m talking about, and the little fuckers are trapped in my garbage can under my kitchen sink, which unfortunately means that I’m unable to use aforementioned cupboard until my landlord comes downstairs and gets rid of the little beasties, but the consolidation of their little wee scratchy noises to one place from whence I know they cannot escape has provided a great deal of late-night relief and calm. 2. North Country Fair rocked. I am so happy that I missed last year’s rain – the year before was beautiful, and this year, with the exception of a fifteen-minute monsoon, was equally gorgeous. I have the HAWTEST tan ever. This Band was fantastic, as always. Schlepping was entirely too much fun. The people, more than anything, made the Fair: gourmet vegetarian meals served up with love, husbands-with-mohawks randomly showing up, sunrise with two temporarily-sleep-deprived and –bitter, beautiful people. But next time, we’re all jumping in the water. I don’t care how cold it is. 3. Got through Heartbreak . Although I still think she’s insane, it’s lovely to finally peer into where that all stems from. I can now almost see, from her vantage point, why her crazy theories make sense to her. Still, the immaturity that I’ve noticed in certain people who adhere so strictly to their ideologies sure comes up obvious in certain bits. 4. I am THRILLED about getting this comic book. This week’s somewhat-but-not-quite deep thought train aka mopheaded rants again This thought train began during the ride up to Jouissard, when I had slept only five or so hours the night before and am therefore quite certain that I made no sense. The boy with the mandolin and I were discussing to what extent “graphic cultural products” i.e. porn, violent movies, etc. are capable of implanting ideas in one’s head. I made some asinine comment about being militantly anti-censorship followed up by an assertion that such products, when normalized or unproperly-contextualized or viewed without critical thought, may serve to propagate the violence they depict. I think I may have mumbled it all somewhat incoherently. As always, I had violence against women (should that be capitalized? in scare quotes? has it become a trite-enough catch-phrase as to warrant capital letters? ”Violence Against Women like the “War on Iraq”?) on the brain, and was thinking particularly of how violent images of women in advertising seem to infiltrate our collective unconscious and normalize the sorts of violence perpetuated within our culture. Sorry, hate to use big ideological concepts—again, with the capitals—like Patriarchy and what have you, not very Foucault-lovin’ of me, not very big on promoting agency alongside awareness, but really… Okay, back to my point. So, the point in my head that wasn’t coming out well in conversation was that, while I have NO desire to censor anyone’s (and I actually mean that, for better or worse) form of expression, I DO think that we as a society are a little too sheep-like in our consumption of everything, including imagery, and that we don’t question enough of what these pictures tell us about the bigger picture of how women (in this instance) are viewed in our culture, and how these images serve to condone and normalize an already-violent cultural attitude that allows, for instance, that police deaths make front-page news when deaths-by-spouse are mitigated to the middle of the paper, even though they are all-too-often occurrences perpetuated by a systemic culture of violence. These guys are actually my absolute favouritest EVER in the Offensive Disgusting Imagery Hall of Fame, for those of you who tire of my feminist ranting. (And yet, under it all, they’re equating women with the KKK and Nazis, those fuckers!) If ever an image was used so grotesquely… And then the thoughts were crystallized by a bit of graffiti penciled in the woman’s washroom at Remedy Café that said “We need an anti-pornography anti-censorship movement.” I was glad to already be on the toilet, so there was no chance of me pissing my pants. Ah, sweet ignorance. Amazing, how bathroom graffiti can range from brilliant, radical, and astute, to just plain retarded. Susan Sontag has some really great ideas on images and voyeurism in this book . Enough out of me for today.
--mopheaded saw your number on the bathroom wall
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