the "shower meme," is it?

I was interviewed by mysteryfood

1) When did you live in Chicago and in what neighborhood? When did you
move to NY and why?

I actually lived in the weird suburbs that were close to the nice suburbs, but weren't nice themselves, sort of stuck between places like Niles and the icky industrial flatland. I lived in Des Plaines, and my high school was technically in Park Ridge, right off the Northwest Highway. It's close enough to the city itself that I usually say that I am from Chicago, while being a little weirded out by people who are, say, from Rockford, but say they are from Chicago. After I went to college my parents continued their upward mobility journey into the middle class and got a house in a subdivision in Glenview, where they now reside. I moved to NYC a year after I graduated from college, after spending a year in Los Angeles and hating it. I had always wanted to live in new york, all my friends were there, I hated UCLA, and I had this very strong feeling that if I did not move to New York then my life would go into a wrong direction and i would never be able to rectify it. It was like a juncture point, and I just left LA and moved here.

2) I remember telling Jeremy how much I hate girls, giving him reasons
that were insolent (but true) i.e. most girls are dumb. He assured me
that he has awesome female friends. After reading your journal and
corresponding with J. Ro. I must admit that Jeremy was right, but you're
not a stereotypical girl. I'm curious, how do you feel about women, or
actually the general public, well, in general?

i think in general most people are stupid. not inherently stupid, but stupidified by socialization, which is then reinforced in culture. basically people don't acquire the skills of deuterolearning (learning how to learn) which has a lot to do with the fact that they completely buy into the dominant grand narrative, which presupposes a certain uncritical unquestioning stupidity on the part of the majority of its constituants. i get along with girls in general, although there are certain subsets of girls i HATE--the fake girls that all the guys think are really sweet, but who are always catty and competitive with other girls, and the girls who "save" all their interesting thoughts for impressing guys, while their interactions with other girls consist solely of analyzing the aforementioned guys. i would say my closest friends are 50-50 guys and girls. having said that, jeremy is sometimes a little too equal-opportunity laissez-fair about people, he will look at you with those big blue eyes and say "people are people" as some sort of non-judgemental mantra. so while jeremy does have some cool female friends, and i really really like jessie, he has not been able to curb my misanthropic inclinations; he knows plenty of annoying girls, too, he just "doesn't think of people that way."

3) I am kind of interested in your upbringing. For example, how and when
did you become so passionate about politics? Are your parents
(politically speaking) conservative or liberal?

i've always followed politics to some extent, but the obsessive tracking of information did not start until after the country went to hell after 9-11. before that, i would maybe read Newsweek or Time once a week, and i was subscribed to NYT online where i would scan headlines every day, but afterwards i immersed myself in the process of finding the best media sources, first just foreign press as an alternative to mainstream media, then discovering alternet and indymedia and democracy now, then guerilla news sites, and eventually my current default information site, democraticunderground.com. in some ways i feel like someone who has been unplugged from the matrix, as in i can see what is really going on, something that most people including my parents can't see, and my passion comes from having a need to convince everyone to at least take a look. i don't even want to convince people of my opinions, i just want to present information in a diachronic way, so that everyone can see that the grand narrative being fed to us is ahistorical and internally inconsistent. so i guess i was always interested in politics, but in high school and college it was more about specific issues--like gay right, or Amnesty International, but now i feel like my cause is confronting the crimes committed with information against truth, and i can't do much aside from going to demos and writing letters, but i can have my say on the livejournal, so i do.
my parents are a weird case; they were "liberal"/"progressive"/"dissident" in the USSR, which definitely required critical thinking and abstraction from the system on their part, and they were part of the countercultural artsy/intellectual scene in Moscow, but the binary of that system was: USSR=bad and repressive, US=good and free. so it's hard for them to be critical about the US, since it was their dream their whole life to live here, and there is some metonymy in their brain through which US MUST BE democratic and humanist, even if its actions don't substantiate it. where they automatically distrusted Soviet press, they trust the American press. but i have been working really hard at trying to expose them to historical facts that prove otherwise, and sharing information with them, so i think they are coming around...before the war my mom was convinced that the US reasons for the war were genuine; now they are no longer surprised that the weapons of mass destruction are-whoops-nowhere to be found.

4) What's the deal with Buffy?

Ha. Well, I am actually writing a kind of coda essay about the last episode of Buffy and the series in general, that answers that question extensively, but the preliminary short answer is, it was the most consistently deep, well-written, brilliant show on TV that was insightful, subversive, had good politics and worked in this amazing way of taking metaphors and making them literal, which i find to be really neat. in the meantime, if you are curious, here is a link to a really good article called "Rebels without a God" by a Yale anthropology prof. that he wrote a couple of years into the series that hits the nail on the head about a lot of things that i appreciate about the show. http://members.tripod.com/~MikeHolt/buffy.html

5) Why are you taking Sight and Sound? Do you enjoy it despite the
editing?

it's required for the Culture and Media program that I am doing as a part of my anthropology Ph.D. program. it's a three-year course sequence dealing with theoretical and practical aspects of making ethnographic documentaries; two years of theory courses, summer of sight and sound and a year-long video production seminar. i do enjoy it, but i think i am not passionate enough about it to be zen about the early mornings and lugging around the equipment. like, i like playing with gadgets, and it's fun, and if someone was like "i'll teach you how to shoot film," i would be really into that, but it's probably not something i would have chosen to devote six 50-hour weeks to, considering that from now on all my work will probably be on video.

if you would like to be interviewed by anthrochica let me know.