Geoff Cordner

“Saint Anthony, Saint Anthony, please come around. Something is lost and cannot be found.”

Saint Anthony, patron saint of lost persons and things, has his own trailer park, just south of Mecca.

I’d guess a person living in the Saint Anthony Trailer Park is indeed lost, at least to the rest of the world, as is the case with pretty much everything near the Salton Sea.

North Shore, Salton Sea.

Complicated delivery instructions on Sunset Blvd in Echo Park

To master this vision of ugliness, people acted it out. Today, after more than [three decades] of punk style, when a purple and green Mohawk on the head of a suburban American teenager only begs the question of how early he or she has to get up to fix his or her hair in time for school, it’s hard to remember just how ugly the first punks were.

They were ugly. There were no mediations. A ten-inch safety pin cutting through a lower lip into a swastika tattooed onto a cheek was not a fashion statement; a fan forcing a finger down his throat, vomiting into his hands, then hurling the spew at the people on stage was spreading disease. An inch-thick nimbus of black mascara suggested death before it suggested anything else. The punks were not just pretty people, like the Slits or bassist Gaye of the Adverts, who made themselves ugly. They were fat, anorexic, pockmarked, acned, stuttering, crippled, scarred, and damaged, and what their new decorations underlined was the failure already engraved in their faces.
(Greil Marcus, Lipstick Taces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Harvard University Press, 1989, pp 73 - 74)

The factualist/empiricist idea so rooted in traditional historical thinking, that if we can find “the facts” then this will stop interpretive flux, fails because only theory can constitute what counts as a fact in the first place. When we talk about facts we always do so under a description, so that to claim that “x” is a fact can only mean that the description it is under is adequate. Arthur Danto has made this point: when we talk about facts and reality we always refer to them within a specific framework of description. Phenomena as such are therefore never the things explained, it is only phenomena as covered by descriptions, so that when we speak of explaining them it must always be with reference to that description: “So an explanation…must…be relativized to a description of that phenomenon” (1)

The idea that facts/reality can thus exist independently of the historian so as to stop what Hayden White has termed the “de-realization of the event” is thus an implausible idea. For as Callinicos has put it…statements about the observable/authenticated facts will always have an “irreducibly conjectural” and thus “theoretical” character.

(Keith Jenkins, The Postmodern History Reader, Routledge Press, 1997, p 18)

(1)(A. Danto, Analytic Philosophy of History, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965, p 218)

When my friend got married, he decided he wanted more privacy, and so he built a large wooden fence between his place and the place next door. What he didn’t realize (or maybe he didn’t care) is that this gave his elderly Asian neighbors more privacy too.

While Brian and Julie are relaxing privately in their new hot tub, the elderly Asians are on the other side of the fence, pissing in their driveway.

Maybe it’s the sound of bubbling water that entices them. Before the hot tub went in, B & J had a little bubbling Buddha fountain.

Grandma exits the house, hikes up her dress, squats and pisses in the driveway. Grandpa comes out a few minutes later and pees against the fence.

It seems to me they were peeing in the driving around this time last year, too. Maybe it’s a seasonal thing.

I’m not sure I’ll miss looking out the window and seeing this sort of thing when I move next week. The new pad is pretty much just up the hill, all surrounded by trees, a view of a different kind of nature. I won’t be in the ghetto anymore.

There are things I like about my ghetto, things I’ll miss. There’s always something going on down here in the flats. But I don’t think I will miss witnessing so much of humanity pissing and shitting in driveways, at bus stops, in alleys. I think I’m taking a step up, visual standard-of-living wise.

It’s been a big week for protests. If only they/we could’ve been this organized BEFORE the election. Here are some shots from the Nov 9th protest/march.

No on Prop 8 is a cause I believe in so much that I actually tried to urge folks to vote No on Prop 8, which is more than the No on Prop 8 people did.

Facebook in particular, and other social networking sites as well have changed the face of politics, especially activist/protest politics. How else could a protest thrown together on a day’s notice become the event for a Saturday night? Not only did we know there was going to be a protest, but we knew all our friends were going to be there and there were all sorts of places we could go to download ideas for signs if we weren’t able to come up with any ideas on our own.

The best part is that it pushes crotchety old timers off the map. There’s no room anymore in politics for folks who ask questions like “what’s a blog?”…and, hopefully, this means that soon enough we won’t have a bunch of old white men legislating like it’s 1958 and color TV hasn’t come out yet…because these morons have been making decisions with a worldview based on a world that hasn’t existed in my lifetime (and I am not exactly a spring chicken).

It’s all very good and fine to blame the Mormons and the Catholic Church — after all, they pumped a bunch of money into Proposition 8…but we need to take a look at the piss poor job done by Proposition 8’s opponents — us.

I received a letter from some guy called Gilbert Torgenson urging me to votes yes on 8. I blogged about it. There was a bunch of Christians demonstrating in favor of Prop 8 outside the bike shop in Eagle Rock. I blogged about it. Election Day I received 3 robo-calls urging me to vote yes on Prop 8. It was too late to blog about it.

My blogs, and the blogs of a handful of other folks I read, are the grand sum total of all the street level, not-an-ad-on-TV No on 8 stuff I saw. I know there must’ve been more, but I didn’t see it. From my perspective, there appeared to be absolutely no organized opposition to Prop 8. There was just a smattering of individuals, like me.

In fact , there was a well funded No on 8 group, and they made just about every idiotic decision that could be made. Knowing that the Yes/No vote was fairly evenly split along the usual lines, the wildcard factor in this election was clearly going to be minority voters, who were likely to come out in record numbers and, when it comes to “moral” issues tend to be conservative while being reliably democratic voters on everything else. There is also a well known antipathy towards gays in those communities. So if these voters are gonna be the deciding voters, what do you reckon an effective strategy might be? The No on 8 folks decided to write these folks off. Well, that’s a sure way to loose, and they did. What did they spend their money on? Not demonstrations. Not robo calls. Not letters…but door hangers — wedged in between the Thai restaurant menu, the Pizza joint menu, the Golds Gym discount, and all that other crap I throw directly in the trash…and as far as those door hangers go — I didn’t get one.

In the aftermath of Prop 8 passing, the No on 8 folks, when pressed, have apparently claimed ownership various efforts in the black and latino communities set up at the last minute by independent folks incredulous that No on 8 was ignoring these areas.

There’s a pretty great article in the Nov. 14 - 20 LA Weekly about all of this.

I’ve got nuthin’ personal at stake in Prop 8 either way, aside from the desire to see a just world in which everyone is treated fairly and with respect…a world in which gay marriage is just a part — a big part in San Francisco but probably a non issue in Darfur. Prop 8 passed by 2 percentage points — which means had the no on 8 crowd done more than sit around with their thumbs up their asses in the months leading up to the election, it probably would not have passed at all.

Today I got a handwritten letter from Gilbert Torgason in Glendale.

What Gilbert is worried about is that I might vote No on Proposition 8, which means voting against stripping people of their constitutional rights. (Not being a conservative but rather a progressive, I am interested in preserving our constitutional rights as well as the environment and a bunch of other stuff)…

Gilbert is afraid that a vote against proposition 8 (a vote against stripping gays and lesbians of the constitutional rights that only straight folks should have) is a vote against things like freedom of speech (since hate speech directed at gays is hate speech, not free speech, as long as we are deprived of our freedom to deny people their freedom), and a vote against freedom of religion when the foundation of that religion is God hates fags. Of course he phrases it all a bit more delicately than I am phrasing it.

I’m touched that Gilbert took the time to write me this handwritten note, even though I have no idea who he is or how he got my address.

But he can shove it up his ass.

I’m voting NO on prop 8.

Summer seems to be ending…the water’s still gonna be warm for a week, maybe two.

The election is a month away.

I haven’t much to say and I am kinda happy about that. Existential angst seems awfully pointless when banks are failing (mine did) and 90 year old ladies in the Midwest are attempting suicide to avoid being evicted in foreclosure.

Darn right.

I’m kinda over my apartment. I’ve lived here 6 years. The building has become overrun by folks who are a bit more desperate than I’d like to have surrounding me, especially as I am feeling considerably less desperate than I have the past 40 some odd years…and I’m good with that.

Last Saturday we had movie-set fog, the stuff that swirls around your ankles as it moves down the street. Every other day had been hot and sunny. Zuma beach was the first place heading up PCH that offered any hazy sun. Here are some shots from there and a coupla others tossed in for good measure.

You betcha.

I’ve never really explored color before. Black and white served my purposes better, because when all elements and objects have a uniform visual weight in monochrome, it becomes easier to explore the relationships (or lack thereof) between elements/objects in a scene or situation.

That’s not so interesting to me right now. I wanna see stuff strut like a peacock.