A Journal for Walking Over Fallen Fences

In my interest of staying current with the latest diseases, I have stumbled across Tanorexia Nervosa: The disease of never being able to tan enough.

Whereas Anorexia Nervosa creates the fear of gaining weight, tanorexia creates the fear of losing the tan and becoming white.

Tanorexics will feel anxiety if a day of tanning is missed, or from the harsh competition with friends in seeing who can have the darkest skin. In worse case scenarios, a tanorexic will withdraw from society in fear that others will only see them for the color they don’t believe they are.

As with Restless Leg Syndrome, I imagine that prescription drug companies are anxious to start creating pills specifically for Tanorexia Nervosa. In fact, a Wake Forest study already jumped on the research, finding that UV rays in tanning beds cause people to produce extra endorphins. Patients were given a drug to block endorphin production, and those who tanned too much felt symptoms of withdrawal similar to a nicotine addict.

I understand that there can be new biological illnesses and virii, but I wonder: Can there be any new mental illnesses?

To me it seems that the trend would actually be to reduce the number of illnesses as opposed to adding more. For example, homosexuality used to be a mental illness, now it is fine.

Further to this, we already have general medical conditions relating to afflictions and obsessions. At what point does a specific infliction—such as tanorexia or even anorexia for that matter—become separately identified as its own illness? And extending that, when do prescription drug companies market for the specific as opposed to the general? Somehow drugs like aspirin fix everything; and drugs like Requip can fix only Restless Leg Syndrome.

I respect language, and understand that sometimes you need to favor specificity and other times you need to indicate generally… but at what point does the medical community switch from general terms to specific terms? I can see that there is benefit in addressing someone’s specific condition (talking to your daughter about her desire to tan too much), but shouldn’t treatment involve addressing the big general mental picture as opposed to the specific condition?

In the short run, you need to do whatever is minimally needed to treat an emergency. In the long run, I think treating mental illnesses at the highly specific level creates compartmentalization, which furthers mental illnesses, benefitting only the pharmaceutical industry.

One thing about the future of Tanorexia Nervosa treatment is certain: It is not all sunshine and clear skies.

The oldest known lock (about 4000 years old) was found by archeologists in the Khorsabad palace ruins near Nineveh (eastern bank of the Tigris river, in Assyria, modern day Iraq).

The giant lock worked via a large wooden bolt to secure a door. It had a slot with several holes in its upper surface. The holes were filled with wooden pegs to prevent the door from opening. These were predecessors to the locks prevalent in ancient Egypt at around 2000 BC.

In order to have a lock, one must first have property.

*John Adams: “Property is surely a right of mankind as real as liberty.”

*John Lennon: “Imagine no possessions/I wonder if you can/No need for greed or hunger/A brotherhood of man/Imagine all the people/Sharing all the world.”

*E.E. Cummins: “Private property began the instant somebody had a mind of his own.”

*Susan McDonough: “When your cat rubs the side of its face along your leg, it’s affectionately marking you with its scent, identifying you as its private property, saying, in effect, ‘You belong to me.’”

What necessitated the invention of the first lock? In the case of Khorsabad, the oldest known lock protected the doors of a royal palace.

But if my understanding of history is remotely accurate, and had the first locks been smaller in size, I believe it would have been created for the chastity belt.

Cherokees tell a story about the origin of strawberries:

In the beginning, the first man was created and a wife was assigned to him. Soon they quarreled, and the wife ran to the Sun Land in the East. The husband did not want to lose his wife, and while chasing her, the Sun asked if he wanted her back. The husband said yes.

First the Sun planted a clump of blackberries in the wife’s path. The wife did not notice. Many other fruits followed, but still the woman did not notice. Finally, the Sun invented strawberries. The wife was compelled to stop at the strange new berry. She ate, and the more she ate, the more she missed her husband. Eventually, he caught up with her just as she was turning back to feed him strawberries.

Scientists describe strawberries differently. From Wikipedia:

The strawberry (Fragaria) is a genus of plants in the family Rosaceae, and the fruit of such plants. There are more than 20 different Fragaria species worldwide. Key to the growth of strawberry species is recognizing that they vary in the number of chromosomes.

There are seven basic types of chromosomes that they all have in common. However, they exhibit different polyploidy. Some species are diploid, having two sets of the seven chromosomes (14 chromosomes total). Others are tetraploid (four sets, 28 chromosomes total), hexaploid (six sets, 42 chromosomes total), octoploid (eight sets, 56 chromosomes total), or decaploid (ten sets, 70 chromosomes total). As a rough rule (with exceptions), strawberry species with more chromosomes tend to be more robust and produce larger plants with larger berries.

My friend Lun*na Menoh performed her rendition of Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece at LACE last night. I was there last week with the Toxic Titties.

With her band Jean Paul Yamamoto, Lun*na sang the song “Walking on Thin Ice” seven times in a row. She sang while “nude,” wearing a bra and flesh colored spandex with fake pubic hair:

In Yoko’s original piece, Yoko began by wearing black clothing, which the audience cut away. Lun*Na did the reverse, wearing “nothing” while the audience dressed her in one of the many articles on the floor. These included a box, a monkey, a sewn ball of socks, various wigs, spiked shirts, and other well-sewn madness.

Lun*na shunned the clothing, or perhaps tried it on for size; yet time and again throwing it off, casting away costumes that the crowd so dearly wanted her to wear. But by the last song, she fell to the floor, buried in a pile of white cloth.

http://www.myspace.com/jeanpaulyamamoto

Saw Penny Arcade perform her Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! show at the REDCAT gallery last night.

Tumbling a history from the 1960s to now, she related her direct experience of the major movements of sexuality. Political rants, existential epiphanies, and rough times were cut with interludes of rock music and her score of sexually fluid dancers, which included legendary New York drag queen Kevin Aviance (still recovering from his near death experience of a month prior when four teenage boys gay-bashed him).

Her theatre infuses community and the imminent need to create a community. It blasts the “politically correct” in both the left and the right for its righteous, seperatist, and elitist tendencies.

In the show, Penny Arcade turned off the lights and spoke in the dark from the audience, criticizing the stage/audience nature of theatre. The theatre ended with the audience dancing on stage with her dancers… dancing in belief that all beings are sexual beings, all energies are sexual energies, the purest sexual energy comes from a two-year old. The themes are familiar territory, but when put in practice with importance and grace nothing makes more sense. Tapped into the heart, answers to problems cannot be more clear.

Her theatre enacts what the fluxus-inspired artists get: Art crosses boundaries, creates real connections, creates real breakthroughs, and smacks narrow-mindedness. When I see people who do Get It, it becomes so clear the people who don’t Get It.  Getting it begins with the two-year old who can’t keep its mouth shut.

Reading the July 8th blog of Tosh of Tam Tam Books. He ended briefly with a mention that he must read more poetry. It’s easier to attend to more public forms of experience (films, music, events, World Cup, revolution) and neglect the private realm of poetry.

Perhaps a starter might be to read the poem of the day at Poems.com. It lists fresh work from contemporary poets. Perhaps we could also try to incorporate poetry into more public forms of experience. Slam poetry achieves a bit of this. Will you read poetry to your boyfriend tonight? Your cat?

Lately I’ve been returning to Robert Frost’s poem The Road Not Taken. The poem interests me largely due to the irony of misinterpretation. We often hear people boast and brag that “Two roads diverged upon the path, and I took the road less traveled!” The road less traveled is something to feel good about. It is proof of your independent streak. It is a sign of refusing to be slaughtered with the rest of the herd. It is given at High School graduation speeches to bright eyed students. But as is often the case, the poem has a different message.

The traveler in Frost’s poem looks down two roads: One goes in the undergrowth, whereas the other is grassy. Both roads are filled with leaves that no step had trodden black. But the traveler takes the grassier path–the so-called road less traveled–supposedly because it wanted wear. The traveler was too afraid to take the more ominous path that bent into the undergrowth, leaving it for some other day.

The Road Not Taken revels how people come to take the easier choice, but rationalize it as the harder choice. It is also about looking back and regretting the easier path with a sigh… a choice that has made all the difference.

I must read more poetry!

Join me this weekend for some summertime subversion:

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Friday July 7th 7:30 PM - LACE

In 1965 Yoko Ono staged a performance at Carnegie Hall. She invited the audience to take scissors and cut off pieces of her clothing. The performance ended when a final snip caused her blouse to fall off–she caught the fabric at the crucial moment preventing her chest from being revealed.

http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/cut-piece

I will be performing at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE) as a Toxic Tittie. We will organize and stitch ourself into one body politic in which you can be there to cut our clothing from us.

http://www.artleak.org/summer06_jul.html

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Saturday July 8th 9:30 PM - Outfest Film Festival

Strangely, two films I’ve appeared will both appeared in one program: The Perfect Ones (2006) and At Home with Toxic Titties (2004). Come watch and stay up late for the boisterous afterhours party.
http://www.outfest.org/tixSYS/2006/filmguide/prognote.php?FCode=ENDOF

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With the long awaited punk rock Perfect Ones debut and 2 TT events in one weekend, how can your weekend go wrong?

In the desert: Joshua Tree National Park, named so for all the Joshua trees growing and stretching their arms to the sky.

The desert has always been a place of searching. Escape to the desert, enter its rhythms, enter self rhythms.

Here the world looks same as it did for ages. Humans mark the passage of generations through storytelling and technology; neither markers are evident here. Only thing to see is the gold blossoming from the ground yucca. The green Joshua tree leaves with a hint of gold in the limbs. Sands, rock, and dirt. Lizards camouflaged in gold, green, and brown.

The goal now is to find Lost Horse Mine, an abandoned mine from the late 1800s. The story goes that the owner was looking for his lost horse when he discovered the claim. I always like the names of locations in the desert. Lost Horse Mine. Death Valley. Wrong Way Gulch. Two Amigos. The stories are all we have once the lights go out.

The mine stood at the end of an uphill hike. A ghost of when miners flocked to extract the gold. Left behind are piles of rocks and steel cables.