Champagne Candy

For you, Tumblr, my video of Angela Davis addressing the GA in Washington Square Park back in October.

Apologies for the shitty sound, it was recorded on my phone.

God, that feels like ages ago and also I can’t believe it was only October.

1:28 pm • 27 January 2012 • 4 notes • view comments

Happy Bday Angela!

Activist, Scholar, Writer, Professor and FBI’s most wanted

When Angela Davis strode on the political stage with her fist raised high and her iconic Afro standing higher, people noticed. She is a rebel and a revolutionary, a bookish philosopher who has lived out her theories with action and purpose.

Smart, stylish, eloquent and fearless, Davis never lets her style get in the way of the substance. Her life’s work has been built around issues of race, community and the criminal justice system. In the 70s, she was involved with The Black Panthers, but much of her energy was focused on what she termed the Prison-Industrial Complex, the systematic privatization of prisons as profit-making machines. This means the more people in prison, the more lucrative the business. Hence, the absurd increase in men (mostly poor, young, black) sent to U.S prisons in the last two decades.

Davis herself was on the run from the law in the 70s, following the murder of a California judge. Innocent, she went into hiding, which sparked a nationwide search and worldwide media attention, propelling her to the FBI’s most wanted list. Two months later, she was arrested in a motel in midtown Manhattan. Despite pressure from famous rightwing fear-mongers – Richard Nixon (who branded Davis a “terrorist”), the then California governor Ronald Reagan and rat-bag FBI director J Edgar Hoover – Davis became an international cause celebre. A global campaign called for her release and Aretha Franklin offered to post quarter of a million dollars in bail. She was acquitted in the end.

Angela Davis inspired people all over the world, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono, who recorded their song “Angela” on their 1972 album, Some Time in New York City. The Rolling Stones also wrote about Davis, recording the song “Sweet Black Angel” on their 1972 album, Exile on Main Street.

Davis is now a retired professor with the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz and is the former director of the university’s Feminist Studies Department. She is also the founder of Critical Resistance, an organization working against the Prison-Industrial Complex.

www.theuniquecreatures.com

I was planning on sitting in a cafe and reading Angela today even before I knew it was her birthday. Now OBVIOUSLY that is the plan.

(via guerrillamamamedicine)

1:26 pm • 27 January 2012 • 2,624 notes • view comments

"Taking care of people is only work when they fight you over it."

— this was my insight yesterday, stepping out of the shower, based on something J said to me what feels like ages ago but was probably last month.

10:36 am • 26 January 2012 • 3 notes • view comments

"
Because of all this want, we sometimes are afraid we feel too much. Some of us try to go numb; we turn on the television and zone out on political debates, or reality people showing their other selves—their nasty bad acting selves—or read news about serial killers or car bombers or we drink too much or eat too much or run too much. We make our lives numb so we can take care of ourselves and be separate from a collective anguish of powerlessness.

But in that last hour we are into feeling. We are into intimacy. My beloved says the single most poignant thing I have ever heard. She says, “I love to go to bed and I love to wake up.”
"

—

The Throwaways - The Rumpus.net

more from Melissa Chadburn, because I am in love with her writing and just sent her a fan email, and because this this this this.

also am thinking about waking up next to someone, or rather thinking about waking up next to someones and how different it can feel. rolling over in the middle of the night to get a kiss that then extends into touching, moving, before the sun comes up. how sweet that was compared to waking up because the person next to you is shifting, tossing, turning, pulling away from you and no matter how far you reach you can’t reach him.

how lying awake next to someone is the worst or the best thing in the world. but either way yes I wonder if I feel too much.

10:17 am • 26 January 2012 • 8 notes • view comments

"Let’s face it; we’re a generation with no tolerance for longing."

—

Melissa Chadburn | The Spookiness of Want and ‘The Marriage Plot’ | The Nervous Breakdown

I really liked Melissa Chadburn’s writing when someone first told me to read her and I thought of that today and went looking for her again and found this.

And—oh yeah.

I think of the tension that arises in me when a waited-for email or phone call doesn’t come within minutes, then as those minutes stretch into hours my nerves fray and snap. But what about slowing that down into days and weeks? I have to do that now, missing someone who is gone for months, and I am realizing how little I am equipped to miss people anymore.

Not that I don’t do it all the time—one of my dearest friends on earth lives across an ocean from me, after all—but it is an altogether different kind of missing, now.

I was talking to a friend this morning, and she told me she doesn’t follow her boyfriend on Twitter and I thought, yeah, that’s maybe a good idea? The constant surveillance, it’s not always helpful.

One of my favorite Lucero songs, “It Gets the Worst at Night”, has the wonderful line “On the way out of town/I drive by your house/two times.” When they do it live Ben always holds up two fingers and gives the audience a semi-sheepish grin, and everyone shouts “two times” with him because that’s such a human thing to do, right?

I had a boy who was The One Who Got Away (regular readers of this blog will know who I’m talking about) and he lived not far from where my parents still live. I used to drive by his house whenever I was in town and we weren’t together (which we were and were not, over and over, off and on, for something like six or seven years), drive by down his dead-end street which was set up so that I had to drive by it two times if I wanted to drive by it once. I never sing along with that song without remembering him.

That boy still isn’t on Facebook but most everyone else is and I almost miss those times when you had to do something a little wild, a little frightening, to get your fix. Longing isn’t a feeling, as she says above, that we are used to anymore. We replace it with too much information, easy adrenaline hits that are good or bad, and I miss the days when seeing a light on was enough.

I’m singing along with Fiona Apple’s “Shadowboxer” as I write this and I’ve been singing along with this song since I was sixteen, yes nearly half my life and I wonder if Fiona feels like I do about it, that I thought I knew what it meant when I was a teenager (she was one too when she wrote it, Fiona, three years older than me) but now it hits me in a new place. Each time.

It’s a song about longing, though, and maybe it wouldn’t be written the same now. I’m trying to think of a good song about longing for right now, a recent one, and the ones that are coming to mind are all Robyn songs, and they are about surveillance as much as longing, they’re about going to the club and seeing him with someone else, they’re about that exquisite self-torture that comes from observing.

Like I said about Charli XCX below, there’s always that knowledge that a little of it is your own doing. That awareness that is power even when you feel powerless. I told another friend today that I don’t think feeling powerless is ever helpful, which spun out into us talking about the idea of serenity, addiction, sex.

And sometimes love and attraction feel like an addiction themselves, you need that next hit coming, and my best way of figuring out how I feel about someone has always been to get away from them for a bit and see if I miss them at all when the fix isn’t coming.

It’s so hard to step away now and do that. There’s always some connection you’ve forgotten to silence. And so you’re looking for the microscopic changes in each little interaction, each little brush of contact like fingers at the end of your hair—you can feel it but not where it is.

6:07 pm • 25 January 2012 • 16 notes • view comments

I have been thoroughly obsessed with this song since I heard it and watched the video. It’s poppy and gothy and synthy and there’s some Blondie in there and lots of other things I can’t put my finger on. Love.

It’s the song of a girl who didn’t want to fall in love but did anyway, who is pushing and pulling at once; every one of her “stay away“‘s says exactly the opposite. She blames her lover but also knows she did this to herself—“Licking up the blood yeah I made this decision”.

That’s true of all the best sad love songs, isn’t it? We know, really, that it’s not as if we were or are powerless, we run over in our heads a list of the things we could have done differently; we go through waves of magical thinking that alternately give us all the power and with it all the blame and then we come crashing down to earth knowing that no matter what we could have done or not done, things are what they are right now.

Is she asking the person who broke her heart to stay away literally, or is she trying to sing them out of her head?

1:38 pm • 25 January 2012 • 4 notes • view comments

hitrecordjoe:

hellogiggles:

15 mins of laughter or giggles equals the benefit of 2 hours sleep @ lovesocial (Taken with instagram)

Good thing shit’s hilarious around here, because I’m certainly not sleeping.

so I was having this conversation the other morning about the calculus of sex vs. sleep—like, you know those nights when you don’t get much sleep but you had some great sex and so you feel totally refreshed anyway the next day. And we were joking about the tradeoff-how many minutes of sex translates to an hour of sleep, etc.

anyway, this happened. and um it’s from Hello Giggles so of course it’s mildly infuriating but, Tumblr, I know you feel me on this sex thing.

7:59 pm • 23 January 2012 • 4,228 notes • view comments

isabelthespy:

imathers:

bbook:

[last lines]
Joel: I can’t see anything that I don’t like about you.
Clementine: But you will! But you will. You know, you will think of things. And I’ll get bored with you and feel trapped because that’s what happens with me.
Joel: Okay.
Clementine: [pauses] Okay.

I know some people read this differently, but I’m firmly on the side that insists that, as played, this is a happy ending, maybe the happiest possible one.

THAT IS MY SIDE ALSO

wait, there’s another side? this ending is the most fucking beautiful thing ever set to film.

(Source: clementineandjoel)

7:50 pm • 23 January 2012 • 6,353 notes • view comments

I’m having a Madonna moment.

Sometimes you get yourself into those situations where you think “Only Madonna would understand how hilariously stupid this is and still be able to pull it off with a swagger.”

At least if you are a girl who grew up in the 80s, and thus is really no longer a girl but insists on calling yourself one anyway, just as any male creature who is a possible romantic interest in your life becomes “the boy” though you have refused since sometime in the early 2000’s to use the term “boyfriend.” (Nor, if truth be told, have you had a “boyfriend” since sometime in the early 2000’s. You’ve had lots of other things, including a fiancee, but no boyfriend. Which is, nakedly, a good thing.)

So, Madonna. Many times this week I’ve found myself singing this song, above, or the one below, both off “Ray of Light” which came out when I was a senior in high school and soundtracked a bunch of dumb experiences. I was in high school then, though, right, so it was OK?

Ha. We don’t get wiser as we grow up. We learn which screwups have consequences and then sometimes we go right on ahead and do them anyways.

Other times we do things that lots of people would tell us to regret and we march through them, grinning, with that swagger. Madonna taught us that.

I just read this, from Susannah Breslin, about getting married on the fourth date and then getting breast cancer (thanks Isabel) and it made me laugh a bit because my own stupid situations in love have been epic, but they’ve also been so cautious in their way. I always know where my escape door is.

(An ex-boyfriend of mine from a few years after these songs came out told me a story of his New Orleans apartment from well before we’d met, when a teenaged-or-barely-out-of-them him had a door in his bedroom that led to a little staircase and outdoors, and he in his ever-so-classy way jokingly referred to it as the “ho hatch”, as in, the girls could go straight out without having to speak to his roommates. He was being crass but I think I’ve designed my love life like that apartment.)

I mean, the real risk is deciding to stay, and whether you do that after four days or four years, it doesn’t change that any day now that person can break your heart.

Yes, I’m being fucking cryptic, Tumblr, because though I long ago stopped hiding my feelings from the world I do try to give their subjects a little bit of privacy.

So: Madonna. “Why do all the things I say sound like the stupid things I’ve said before?”

Probably because they are. And yet they are also new each time, a little bit different in each context, loaded with meaning and space and time and fucking breath, sometimes they come from your gut and sometimes from your head and sometimes from your heart.

So you shake your head and smile and feel good anyway and walk with a bit of a swagger, because Madonna taught us girls right.