crazies.

Today I touched Orlan's face. She was visiting artist this week in the art department at my school, and spoke about her life's work so far. She's most well known for pioneering the use of plastic surgery as art, making herself look less like the popular Western-cultural ideal of feminine beauty. This explains it better. She stood in front of the audience wearing giraffe-print hose, her hair standing almost straight up half-black half-white divided down the middle of her head, her horns were glittery and she wore huge circular glasses that audaciously matched the hair, shiny white eyeliner and bulbous plum lips. She read about her work from a piece of paper in English in such a thick French accent that I am convinced she didn't understand a word of it. I could understand better when she would occasionally slip into French to speak to the translator. I think she was doing it on purpose. At one point she asked the audience, "how many males don't consider themselves feminists?" after which, one of the worst half-hours of discussion I've ever experienced ensued. One fellow insisted it wasn't fair to exclude men and how he thought the recent feminism show at MOCA should have been supplemented with a "masculinism" show. Masculinism in critical jargon means the favoring of gender inequality, as opposed to feminism which advocates gender equality. So finally someone explained to him that what he wanted was essentially male feminism. Anyhow, I'm telling you this for a reason. After the event ended, I went up to Orlan and said, "Je peux parler français un peu. Je suis un masculinist parce que je prefere la femme." I meant to say, I'm masculinist because I think all women are superior. But instead I accidentally confessed that I'm straight. She laughed anyway. And she let me touch her glitter-covered horns.

The other day, I went out with Tod and his family. At the Goodwill on Vine, much loved by me and Tod for its frequenting crazies, I saw an expensively dressed woman emphatically declare that she would buy used clothes there because she read in Time Magazine that it was one of fifty-one ways to help the environment. I had also read that article, and although I think it's fine and swell to do that, I found it ridiculously funny that she had to be told that by an article in order to do it, not to mention the fact that these clothes must not have had any appeal to her outside of that reason. Americans (, etc.) are so specialised to their jobs nowadays that they leave simple mathematics to a tax helper, fashion and style to mass designers, opinions to talk show hosts, cooking to Trader Joe's, and at the core of it all, thinking to thinkers. The best you can do to help the environment is to kill yourself, the sooner the better. After that, don't have kids, don't eat much, don't buy things, share things, inhabit less space.

The biggest tragedy of the Virginia Tech event is the media's portrayal of the murderer. The most that's written in news articles is how the fellow students perceive the killer, in headlines like "Students Angered by Manifesto." He wrote violent plays; he had no friends; his mental health had been examined. All this does to the public is reaffirm that these are the symptoms of a killer. It reifies the concept of "abnormal," and if people weren't so scared to deviate from it, maybe we could erase normalcy completely and consider a discussion of "weird" things for what they are. The media is so biased towards emotions and away from consideration. Seung-Hui Cho was more than just crazy if he went through the conscious labor of twenty-seven videos and many rolls of film in advance of his massacre. He had a point, albeit murky, and I wish people would at least hear it. "Jesus loved crucifying me," he says in a video. "He loved inducing cancer in my head, terrorizing my heart and ripping my soul all this time." At least NBC defended themselves for airing some of the tapes, "We believe it provides some answers to the critical question, 'Why did this man carry out these awful murders?'" He also wrote some nasty plays; I plan to put on one of them.