tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-111939642024-03-13T18:01:31.700-04:00mimi in NYMimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comBlogger624125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-27631306316250939872023-08-15T00:54:00.003-04:002023-08-15T00:54:37.049-04:00Have the Day That You Deserve Hey friends
I'm crowdfunding for a short I'll be directing in a few short weeks. I'm only 960 bucks away from my goal. But if I don't reach it, I'll get nothing!
Please help!
https://seedandspark.com/fund/have-the-day-that-you-deserve#story
Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-57515787036034629482022-09-20T01:22:00.001-04:002022-09-20T01:22:08.703-04:00Hi. It's been a while.You can find me writing <a href="https://theworldbreakseveryone.substack.com/" target="_blank">over here</a> these days.
You can buy my book(s)<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Girl-Undressed-Stripping-York-City/dp/0143115650" target="_blank"> here</a>.
You can watch the BBC1 / Hulu show I wrote (although I personally wasn't overly happy with the direction and schlocky thriller vibe the BBC foisted on me during production) <a href="https://www.hulu.com/series/rules-of-the-game-2aac33ea-8fba-443f-ba69-41c97b3185c5" target="_blank">here.</a>
You can read my articles, contact my reps and check out my photography <a href="ruthiorio.com" target="_blank">here.</a>
You can find me on insta <a href="https://www.instagram.com/ruth_iorio/?hl=en" target="_blank">here</a>, but don't bother with twitter as I'm not on it.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-63957608197712981882016-07-26T13:44:00.001-04:002022-09-18T22:53:58.307-04:00Patreon.<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0KpZV1WvpOI/V5ehbDu9vmI/AAAAAAAAANU/HjufomC3EIc2z2QvvWpyKZrbtwpg_Q0cgCLcB/s1600/Nye-WaterBoarding-7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0KpZV1WvpOI/V5ehbDu9vmI/AAAAAAAAANU/HjufomC3EIc2z2QvvWpyKZrbtwpg_Q0cgCLcB/s320/Nye-WaterBoarding-7.jpg" width="320" height="213" /></a></div>Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-73831515712303818352015-07-28T12:54:00.001-04:002015-07-28T12:54:21.868-04:00IRMO - Crowdfunding my way back to creativityHey guys. It's been a hella long time since I updated this blog. Long enough that I have morphed into a Californian, speech wise, got married, had a baby, become a screenwriter and journalist, left behind the days of satiating my writing thirst with daily Mimi updates.... Mimi and New York seems like a very long time ago, almost as if it happened to someone else.
Almost.
I guess I have a propensity for getting into trouble, because despite having a calm few years, I'm embroiled in legal hell right now. My husband left me and our son when he was eight months old, and has been trying to increase his custody to 50/50, a move I'm blocking because - well, I lived with this man for three years. He's not ready to be a full time father with overnights, and I doubt he ever will be until he gets a lot of help and faces a lot of demons. The details are not really suitable for this blog - talking about stuff can often bite you in the ass during a court case - but suffice to say, the last year has been devastating, crippling and exhausting. I'm facing financial hell.
So I'm swallowing my pride, and asking you guys for help so that I can do what I do best - write about this shit. Turn it into art. Write and direct my first movie. Not let it crush me completely. Here's a link to my <a href="https://www.indiegogo.com/project/irmo-an-ending-a-beginning-a-movie-a-memoir/embedded/10886903">Indiegogo campaign</a>. Please consider giving what you can, or sharing my link and following my journey.
Thanks xoxox
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DI5LwFWd5lI/VbextxJeXUI/AAAAAAAAALo/j-Mb1Rb01AA/s1600/screenshot_135.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-DI5LwFWd5lI/VbextxJeXUI/AAAAAAAAALo/j-Mb1Rb01AA/s400/screenshot_135.jpg" /></a></div>Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-77267463414720201652012-12-21T18:24:00.000-05:002012-12-21T18:25:59.462-05:00Goodbye
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XtqoXn9iAIc/UNTvC6-BIHI/AAAAAAAAAKw/r3KLVRe-TXw/s1600/Why%2BFun.jpg" imageanchor="1" style=""><img border="0" height="265" width="400" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-XtqoXn9iAIc/UNTvC6-BIHI/AAAAAAAAAKw/r3KLVRe-TXw/s400/Why%2BFun.jpg" /></a>
</p>
After I left stripping and New York, got a book deal and turned to screenwriting, I didn't want to write a blog about my life and opinions any more. I was tired of the trolls and the criticism, and tired of the attention, and tired of sharing parts of my life which should, by rights, have been private. When I moved to LA and started dating a guy who loathed being written about, it was the perfect excuse to ignore the blog, throw myself into writing scripts, and take a break from prose and journalism for a blissful while. I have to admit life also took over, and not in a good way. There were some hairy moments out there before it all settled down. Doubtless you'll get to hear about them some day.
</p>
It seems all the hard work eventually paid off. I signed with a Manager this week, <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm3112887/news">Missy Malkin</a>, I'm adapting a book called <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Last_Samurai_%28novel%29">The Last Samurai</a> by Helen DeWitt for David Yates, and life is pretty good. And so I started a blog again, this time part <a href="http://theworldbreakseveryone.com/life/">journal</a>, part <a href="http://theworldbreakseveryone.com/thought/">essays and articles</a>. I'm unsure why, psychologically, I couldn't just revamp Mimi, make it look pretty, but it seemed appropriate to finally lay this blog and this time to rest. I love a lot of the words I wrote during this time - particularly in <a href="http://miminewyork.blogspot.com/2005/11/in-emerald-city.html">2005</a> and <a href="http://miminewyork.blogspot.com/2006/09/me-me.html">2006</a>, and that odd time in 2008 <a href="http://miminewyork.blogspot.com/2008/08/never-my-love.html">when I first landed in LA</a>. I'm proud of the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Girl-Undressed-Stripping-York-City/dp/0143115650">creative non-fiction book</a> that came out of the blog. But it's time to move on <a href="http://theworldbreakseveryone.com/">someplace new</a>. Please come join me. I will be updating regularly and asking for other female poets, fiction and non-fiction writers, essayists and others to contribute as well. I can't promise it'll be as devastating a journey as I had in New York, but it might show that even in the darkest times, there's a little hope for us all.
Thanks for reading. Goodbye.
xo
Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-26905750280874057092012-06-21T21:53:00.001-04:002012-06-21T23:01:44.656-04:00Star of Tomorrow<p>
The running joke in my little family right now is that I'm a Screen International <a href="http://www.screendaily.com/news/uk-ireland/screen-unveils-2012-uk-stars-of-tomorrow/5043396.article?blocktitle=Latest-news&contentID=1846">Star of Tomorrow</a> - "But not today!" as my husband keeps saying, laughing at his own joke. Click on the pdf link at the <a href="http://www.screendaily.com/news/uk-ireland/screen-unveils-2012-uk-stars-of-tomorrow/5043396.article?blocktitle=Latest-news&contentID=1846">bottom of the article</a> for the whole piece - or here's a sneak preview.
</p>
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0toG67XrH9M/T-PMhHM8wZI/AAAAAAAAAKc/vjszfhPawaI/s1600/Star%2BTomorrow.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="400" width="342" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-0toG67XrH9M/T-PMhHM8wZI/AAAAAAAAAKc/vjszfhPawaI/s400/Star%2BTomorrow.jpg" /></a>
<p>
I was calling accountants all last month trying to find one who dealt with UK / US Tax and writers contracts, and I was referred to a company called <a href="http://thomasstjohn.com">Thomas St John</a> who deal predominantly with showbiz folks and our weird methods of payment.
</P>
An extremely posh Chelsea-Ladies-College-type young woman, Mimi (ha ha), called me from the company to talk to me about their services, and mentioned they are "very selective" about their clientele, that they "don't advertise" and rely on "word of mouth" so that they maintain a "special kind of client". It was a little frightening - she sounded like she believed in the Master Race, let's put it that way - but she knew her stuff, so I emailed her a few days later and asked her to start doing my accounting. Then I went to NY to visit my in-laws and my husband's wonderful enormous, Sopranos-like Long-Island based Italian-Irish-American mafia family, and suddenly it was three weeks later, and I realized I'd never heard from her.
</p>
<p>
This seemed odd as she was extremely attentive after my agent recommended her. I sent her another email - maybe the bitch was playing hard to get - but... <i>nothing</i>. Now either Mimi has had a major personal tragedy and is completely unable to get it together because her husband has just been diagnosed with a nasty STD or her womb has dropped out or something is keeping her from her first love of international accounting... or she's decided that I'm not a "special kind of client".
</p>
<p>
I can't help thinking it must be the latter. I find this horrific and incredibly insulting. <i>I'm not good enough for an accountant</i>.
</P>
<p>
<i>But I'm a Star of Tomorrow, you cunt!</i> I wanted to cry. In fact, I did cry that, to my husband. It's become my default squawl of late. He asks me to get the laundry out of the dryer, or go get Milk from Wholefoods, or fill our shitty beat-up Ford Escort with gas, and I'll assume an expression of contemptuous disdain and say, in a tone of voice which implies I'm far too important for the real world, "But I'm a <i>Star</i> of <i>Tomorrow</i>".
</p>
<p>
So far, it's achieved fuck all in terms of my personal relationships and hasn't been enough to convince Thomas St John that I'm good enough to pay them to do my taxes, so really, I don't get what the big fucking fuss is about.
</p>
<p>
Back to dealing with some cantankerous old bastard Director. Fuck this for a lark. I need to direct my stuff, not just be a writer. Then maybe I'll get THE RESPECT I DESERVE AS A STAR OF TOMORROW!! And then maybe I'll be good enough for Thomas St John - International Accounting.
</p>
<p>
One can only aspire.
</p>
</p>Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-11078854563332997662012-05-12T22:46:00.000-04:002012-05-12T23:09:11.368-04:00Playa Love<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PaIE5tXET30/T68d6Dm2l1I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/dAjiqRqB_7M/s1600/Burning%2BMan%2B.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left:1em; margin-right:1em"><img border="0" height="300" width="400" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PaIE5tXET30/T68d6Dm2l1I/AAAAAAAAAJ8/dAjiqRqB_7M/s400/Burning%2BMan%2B.jpg" /></a></div>
There’s a man in the corner of the bar, slugging his beer, quiet and remote. He doesn’t fit in here. He’s not a queen, a pimp or a Post Office worker, so I can only guess that he is, like me, a tourist on the back of life's fucking beach cruiser, along for the ride. It’s 2005 and I have fake blonde stripper hair down to my waist, panda rimmed eyes, a Bronx twang that I picked up because the bartender could never understand me when I asked for water. I put some money in the jukebox, and the old Cuban momma sitting in a booth cusses at a bum, and the blond hooker sits quietly with a sucker in her mouth, as her black boyfriend, who just graduated from the Projects, (“he ain’t my pimp”) pots the black and lets his pants slip down a little further, before hooking them with one finger down his crack, chalking the cue, letting them slip back down. The man who doesn’t fit in stands behind me, and takes my hand, and gently keys in the number of a song with my index finger. Goodbye Yellow Brick Road comes on, and the man buys me a beer, and my friend stands hopping from one foot to the other <i>Mi-mi come <b>on,</b> he’s a stran-ger</i>, and I ignore her and talk to the stranger, and he tells me a strange story, over shitty beer growing quickly warmer in the balm of a New York night. He tells me a strange story about a secret place in the desert, a city which springs up in eight days and then disappears without trace once a man has been burned and a temple goes back to dust. A city peopled by thinkers and artists and musicians and writers and people like him, who came along for the ride. I remember saying, “I’m a writer,” and me half-doubting it because I’d sold my soul by that point and knew I couldn’t get it back, but the man said I couldn’t go to this place anyhow, not yet. Not yet. What’s it called? I asked, and he nodded to Billy, or it might have been Mark, or maybe Billy - he nodded and pointed to his empty glass, and then mine. “Burning Man,” he says, with a beautiful smile, his eyes alight. And when we leave Billy-Marks later that night, I don’t think too much about him, but I do think about those eyes and what was in them, and I wonder about this Burning Man. I wonder.<br/><br/>
It’s not for six years that I find my way home.<br/><br/>
“Can’t wait to smell that goddam dust,” says Sipri, but I don’t know what she means because I’m a Burn Virgin, crammed sweatily into an old school bus that claims to be from San Dieguito, though none of us know where San Dieguito is. There’s Fresh, J-Bang, Genius, Sipri - and then two Craigslist will-o-the-wisps Fresh found to alleviate the gas costs from Glendale, CA to Black Rock City, Nevada. A slight, elfin waif from Mississippi, Faline, who claims - we suspect erroneously - to be 21, and a snoring, slobbering, middle-aged, overweight self-proclaimed “Orange County Republican”, Steve, who seems uncertain whether this is a journalistic pursuit, a dangerous foray into liberal land, an exercise in self-knowledge, or all three. <br/><br/>
So the bus crawls on, 45 miles-per-hour, swaying and teetering dangerously on the 395 as we’re buffeted by winds, and the night begins to fall and the ruthless burn of the day gives way to the soft, cloying blanket heat of night, and Steve talks on and on. <br/><br/>
“You know they have an app? It’s called iburn. Dude, you gotta check out this freakin’ app. Did you know that Black Rock City is the third largest city in Nevada? Did you know that the whole thing started back in 1986 with, like, six dudes on a beach? Did you know that if you go deep playa....?” <br/><br/>
Fresh does know. Sipri does too. They’re old Burners who’ve been touched by something us virgins can’t quite grasp, though Steve tries to, with his apps and his internet printouts and his insatiable pursuit of knowledge and facts and concrete, material, quantifiable things. Steve has this habit of nudging us with three fingers extended, a sharp jab to the arm, demanding of attention. “Do an American accent,” he demands. <i>But I don’t want to...</i> “Do an American accent!” The bus sways and nurses us to sleep, and Steve jams us awake with his fingers, his incessant drone, until eventually, around midnight, after nine hours of driving, he, too sleeps, and melts like butter across water bottles and sun lotion and bags and bikes and pillows and bungees and tent poles and backpacks and blankets, oozing sweatily onto Sipri. Sipri - sharp, slim, takes no shit - eyes him with disgust and periodically kicks him when his sprawling limbs slobber too far onto her slim frame.<br/><br/>
We drive on. <br/><br/>
“Can’t wait to smell that goddamn dust,” mutters Sipri, and Genius takes the wheel so Fresh can sleep, and we hit wind so hard Sipri that starts to mutter Hail Mary’s, and Steve awakes with a disgusting jolt and starts screaming, panicked: “Genius! Dude! Are you sleepin’ at the wheel? Are you awake? Someone talk to him, talk to Genius, we’re gonna die, slow down dude, we’re gonna die...!” <br/><br/>
Someone might well die on this bus, but I’d hazard a guess that someone is Steve, and at the hands of a sentient human rather than the indiscriminate reaches of nature. <br/><br/>
We drive on.<br/><br/>
What to expect before you reach Black Rock City? Something familiar, I guess. The same social structures and expectations, common courtesies and learned, default responses - all those reflexes engrained in our soul, responsive as a kicked knee. Sure, I glimpsed something different, distant, deep in meditation in Kathmandu, high above the world on the Annapurna circuit, lost in satsang on the banks of the Ganges, healed in Chiang Mai by women who used to be boys. I glimpsed it, tasted it, smelled it, and it slipped away before I could even properly distinguish it, and that’s why I kept traveling, and eventually that drive, that thirst - it becomes so much a part of who you are, that you don’t notice it anymore, and you stop paying it attention. It doesn’t get extinguished, but it’s held at bay by the more urgent needs of the default world setting in. The drive for a career, for love, for a mortgage, for dreams, prestige, something, some things. Dreams put on ice, for just a few years, merely while you sort out enough money to live, because you’re nearing thirty, hearing the doors quietly slam and the music fade away, wondering where the party is, not bothering to check but walking on, not even caring that someone, somewhere, is dancing, while you’re not. It takes over - life, the default world - and, shamefaced, you remember a time when you said it never would, when canned tuna and zero in your bank account stood for uncompromising ideals and fierce beliefs and passionate adherences, and then suddenly you were the last one standing, lonely and lost, whilst your compadres insidiously graduated to something which felt to them like adulthood, but looks to you like a betrayal. You start searching, and you stop finding.<br/><br/>
We drive on.<br/><br/>
Somewhere in the middle of the night, after ten hours of driving, sipping warm water and chewing leathery jerky, RV’s and painted buses and beat-up station wagons piled high with bikes and crammed with tarps and rebar and rope and elwire and fur start to overtake us. They honk as they go past, wave, and something stirs in our soul. It’s 5am when we pull up at the first Burner gas station, three hours outside Black Rock City, and sleepy Carnival figures seep out of beat-up vehicles, sip coffee pensively, smile at each other, but still look away without expecting a response, because we smile and look away in the default world. We buy glittery tat and hours-old coffee, cheap straw hats and Mexican blankets, gallons of water just in case what we already had, wasn’t enough. <i>Walmart - the official sponsor of Burning Man. </i>We don’t yet laugh at this, because the Burn Virgins don’t know it’s OK to do so. We don’t know, yet, that there are no rules.<br/><br/>
Sunrise on ochre and slate gray and potter’s brown and the desert, transformed from inky shadows to warm spice as the sun rises higher and higher. <i>Is that the turn off?</i> No, follow the RV’s. Follow the dust. The dust whirling into devils’ whorls and climbing into your throat, that dust with a peculiar, distinct, earthy warm smell which can choke you or caress you, and will always cling to you. The dust which quickly turns our hair and lashes white, but softens faces, so we seem almost like desert angels in our gawping goggles, dust mask, the tentacles of a camelbak waving around behind us, the mouthpiece not yet caked in dirt, the water not yet warm and alkali.<br/><br/>
“Smell that goddamn dust,” sighs Sipri, finally content, and some kind of hush comes over us all - sweaty, dusty, dry - and it stays as we follow the signs, follow the RV’s, follow the dust, and find ourselves in the line up as the sun starts to hit it’s midday ascent - and then we party. Music, painted bodies, smiles, yoga on the roof of a bus, a group of guys hanging out of a VW van singing Thundercats - the air’s quivering and even old Burners don’t know what to expect, because every Burn has a different flavor, a different lesson. Our initiator inspects the van and makes us Virgins roll in the dust to embrace the desert, and then we circle the clock face, trying to find Hajj and 8 o’ clock. We roll into Camp Jackpot smarting and hot, and the Burners who arrived only 12 hours before already look like they belong, while we feel pale and itchy.<br/><br/>
We unpack the van, pull out rotting bananas from leaking coolers, lament the pillow we forgot, the seven pairs of shoes we didn’t. We’re sent away while Fresh and Genius and J-Bang put up the yurt. I set off alone on my bike. A group of limp beautiful girls watch, sucking on Parliament Lights with artfully dreadlocked hair looking remote and caned. The streets are not yet as full as they’ll become. Dust mask on, I cycle past a giant, sleeping, metal Octopus, a pink Cheshire cat nestling in the shade of a tarp. I don’t know what the Art Cars are, weird, malformed, mutant vehicles, the product of some wonderfully warped Burner mind, lying dozing, dormant outside tents. The desert is vast and hazy, white and unwelcoming. I hit the playa and there’s silence, only a few Burners shimmering in the distant heat. I cycle slowly past a metal and crystal tree, a giant LOVE sign, head towards the white temple, barely even noticing The Man standing, overseeing it all. Stragglers bike past, pointing fingers, hushed voices. Sound of wheels, regular creak of the bike. I stop at the temple and can’t breathe. For some reason I don’t want to go inside, I just want to stand there being cooked by the sun. I want to drink it in from a safe distance, knowing it’s not time to step in yet. I turn back to Center Camp, where dreadlocked hippies and limp bare breasted women twirl hoops and fire, and I sip lemonade and exchange tentative smiles with some hipsters from The Mission. Tired and hot, on the edge of something, tips of fingers brushing something, a reminder, a memory, something - gone. I can’t feel it. I think something might happen, but I think equally it might not, and all I’ll find in the desert is garish lights and jangling music, thudding bass and people who don’t wash or shave.<br/><br/>
I can’t tell you when it changed. That’s what Burning Man does to you. Assaults you with 107 degrees of heat, burns up the doubts into a chalky carbon lump which explodes into harmless powder, is carried away by a desert breeze. You gulp water, sweat evaporates within seconds, you become dry and crispy, eyelashes fringed with dust, face younger, hair frosted with wise desert. What we think we know is sizzling, the default world unfurling, unraveling, and then suddenly I’m in Ashram Galactica in a tutu and a teeny bikini brandishing a juice cocktail that tastes like nectar dancing with a Polar bear and a magician, and that night effortlessly melds into the next when I’ve spent the day in workshops learning about Polyamory from a man with a speech impediment, eaten Chilli cooked on a primus stove by the Canadians I didn’t know an hour ago but are now my family. Someone hands me MDMA, and we bike to a ski party someplace far across the playa - me, the Canuck, two kiwis and a Brit - and by the time we arrive the joy and the love and the infinite possibilities we only dared to dream of welled up, prodded on by the chemicals but not woken by them, and we’re deep playa, wearing 3D glasses, wandering through a tunnel of light, walking through the beautiful white temple handling aching tomes and letters and diaries, the casualties of the default world laid to rest in our utopia. We’re in Bat Country, Hunter S. Thompson land, dancing to drum and bass, massaging each other lying underneath a blinking dome of trippy colored lights, and I kiss everyone because I love them all, but I love most of all the silent, dark-eyed hippy-kid with the beautiful smile, and I hold his hand as we lie on top of the schoolbus, feigning sleep, soothing the Canadian who found the desert swept through him and left him solitary and alone, whereas it lapped up our worries and left us dry, shining, bright, powerful.<br/><br/>
The hippy is called Phoenix and he likes fire. I can’t remember when I find out these things. The Canadian is called Jesse and he’s in love with Joy, the tiny polyamorous girl who wants to connect with everyone, and there are so many people and so much time she might not have time for those she touched who want her back, or want more, not realizing that her touch already has someone else’s name on it. I bring into the desert the values of the default world and our desire to possess and hoard, and the dust, too takes that, gets into the cogs and the mechanics of learned responses until they seize right up, and we find they don’t work out here. On the playa we have everything we need, given to us, pushed into our hand. Coffee at Scarbutts in exchange for a spank, flip-flops at the side of the road, hats and sunscreen, beers and weed, bacon and eggs one morning, watermelon and mint juice the next. Massages and orgies, bad advice and honest advice, fairy wings and ketamine. It’s all there so we take what we need, never more, move on. I’m with Kimi, drinking orange flavored water flowing from between the legs of a mannequin at Period Bar, and my hair’s in a mohawk, or does that happen tomorrow? <br/><br/>
I wish I could tell you how it happened, that Burning Man became more than lights and music, and that the hippies I so desperately wanted to join when I was sixteen and wasn’t cool enough - they became all of us, and cool never entered the goddam equation. I wish I could tell you how it happened. I wish I could tell you. Sometimes I think it was the Phoenix, who held my hand when I needed it, tolerated it when I roamed alone, still testing the strength of the unfamiliar warmth and security and unwavering belief that everything would be OK. Nexus? <i>Come over, hang out!</i> The French Quarter - <i>We have french bread and Gumbo, eat.</i> I’m with Phoenix, Jesse, a lawyer called Steve, a tall, beautiful Brit, a tiny girl who calls herself a fairy. We wander through midday heat to find food, eat milk and cookies, cool ourselves in the Jewish Camp, miss the Secret Feast, instead swallow LSD and find ourselves at Fractal Nation with Ganga Giri, where the music crawls deep into our bones and fuses with them, and our kinetic souls start shining, and somehow it’s me and the Phoenix in deep Playa and we can’t move because we’re cold and awed, wonderfully creepy Art Cars looming out of the dark mist, and we should get on them, ride somewhere, but where else is there to be but here? the drugs separate us but sharpen the edges so we see it all specifically, at once participant and observer. We stop for popcorn, and then kiss, and the kiss, like the music, curls up, flips over and crawls inside our soul so it’s part of us, and I know that I’m falling in love with something, or someone, and it could be the desert, the Man, the temple, love itself, all 50,00 people here or the Phoenix. Maybe they’re all the same. <br/><br/>
Some people find the vastness, the intricacy, the madness, the exhilarating, unashamed joy, forces them into solipsistic reflection, a feeling of separateness, the reminder that they are merely one more speck of dust in this complex, hungry, consuming world. And some, like me, find that this feeling of difference disappears, and what happens instead is a beautiful, wondrous sense of interconnectedness, of mutuality, a recognition of our innate human frailty, and the smiling, knowing glance which says it won’t ever hold us back. If you glance at a Burner they’ll hold your gaze, confident, non-judgmental, full of love, kind, humble. In that glance, that smile, we share a million memories we might have had, might not have had, and that person becomes another person you touched, who touched you. I stopped searching, and found. <br/><br/>
In the midst of this the default world showed up in a Hawaiian shirt, a borrowed skirt. It huffed and puffed its way into camp, crawled into my tent, and prodded me awake from a mid-afternoon slumber. Its face was slack, sour and discontent, suspicious, hunched and disgusted. I invited it to sit with us, have a drink, come dancing, and its eyes flickered angrily at Sipri and Jesse and dust covered bodies gathered around a primus stove drinking booze from enamel mugs. It refused, called them hippies, and a week ago, swallowing a flicker of indignation, I would have sat and soothed and calmed and assuaged misplaced ego, because it was my role in that world. To put up with shit. Now, in this world, there’s no time for what we left behind. There’s no time for what we don’t need. You can sniff out sourness, and you just walk away from it. I walked away from it as its slack, overweight body, dressed in a Hawaiian shirt and an Old Navy skirt, trembled and erupted into a tantrum. I kept walking back to camp, and I smiled at the Phoenix and took his hand, and I don’t know who this kid is, all I know is he keeps me safe and warm and alive. He’s a Burner, like Jesse, like the others, and I gravitate to them, because I know when I go back, when I leave the desert, I’ll need their spirit as much as my own.<br/><br/>
It’s a decade in eight days, the intensity of the extremities acting as a catalyst for love and friendship and lessons we should have learned in the default world, but only now become easy to practice. I forgot to sleep, in Black Rock City. I think most of us did, or maybe we were too scared that if we slept we might miss a second of this, and it was only eight days out of 365 and we needed all we could get to make it through that wilderness in between. You party until your legs clam up, and you limp home, freezing, watching the sun rise, doze fitfully, wake up drenched in sweat, stumble out of your tent, disrobe, glug water, grab a cigarette, sit on top of the bus, reflect. You talk about things so deep and shameful you spent most of your adult life avoiding them, but here they come out at 9am on top of a schoolbus when Steve’s eating branflakes and Jesse’s rolling a joint, and Sipri’s talking about getting banged hard and you have all these emotions which you vaguely remember from the default world, but they were never this calm, this remote. They were never clinical specimens you could snip out of your gut calmly and painlessly, hold them up high, covered in blood and squawling, while you and the rest of the crew regarded it with detached interest, decided this drama, this squabble, this confusion, was not worth the goddam energy or the time. You think you’d be tired, but you’re not. Your energy comes from someplace else, whether that’s the desert, the dust, the drugs, doesn’t matter. You think you can’t take anymore, you have to stop, your heart might break or your soul implode, but then the music starts up, louder, closer, someone passes by and smiles, you gift something so close to your heart that it might be love itself, your tired limbs are invigorated. <br/><br/>
I was relieved when the man burned. When he burned, all that fizzing energy, that instinctive howl running wild in all of us, was unleashed, and we were calmer, spent. We spent the day healing fractures in Nectar Village, and dredge one final last resource of energy from within some deep, primeval place, and that night we party away the primal shit. In the flickering lights and the heave of the crowd as they lurch forward to singe themselves on the burning Man, there’s a naked tattooed man in front of me with metal bits in his nipples, nose and penis, next to a middle-aged, plump couple with kind, gentle, happy smiles, a much younger girlfriend they share. There’s an artist, watching his installation, marveling at how it fits into the desert like it’s been there for a thousand years. There’s an old Burner, who’s been coming since 1992, camps with the Lamp-Lighters, the guardians of the temple who wear white robes and process quietly through the playa at 5pm every night to light up the path to the Temple of Transition. There are the hippy kids, the clubby kids, the young revolutionaries, the tourists, the ones who found this just in time before the dreadful clutches of disillusionment sent them on a path to middle-aged bitterness. There’s a dude from Laurel Canyon, but here he’s a skunk with huge pupils, and we’re in his house as his parents have gone away, and he offers us dates, and we chew on them, the high from the 2-CB that a stranger had given us on a pirate ship coasting along deep playa, starting to wear off. Jesse grabs a coconut he finds on the skunk’s table and starts to hack into it, eyes wide and mad, biting hard on his tongue, and we’re laughing, and outside a girl stands on a roof wielding a megaphone yelling, “Pick up that moop! Where the hell are your lights? Turn ‘em on. You want an artcar to run you over? Yeah? Tell me a joke, asshole”. The skunk sighs, and says “I want to marry her,” and Cloud, the Phoenix’s friend, drifts in from somewhere giggling madly, and then we’re off, dancing from fire to fire, smiling and talking and chatting, drinking it all in, giving what we can, which isn’t much, but it’s our first burn, and now we know. Now we know what parts of ourselves belong here, what parts we leave standing talking to the sulking scowler in the Hawaiian shirt, who’s on the hunt for naked chicks, and a “good angle” for some glossy Hurst publication. Now we know what we have to give, and it’s not the Sour Patch Kids, but what’s behind them in that smile, that look, your heart.<br/><br/>
I fall asleep in Center Camp, squashed between the Phoenix and Jesse in the coldest part of the night, and they wake me up when the sun starts to rise, and we follow the lamps across the desert, across the hot embers of the man and the soft, sad eyes of the dissolute, and onto the cool, quiet of the Temple. The pace changes and the air hums and maybe it’s the only place in Black Rock City where the bass softens into an indiscernible hum, and there’s a beautiful girl with a shaved head and a feathered headdress resting her head and tears on another, and birds dancing gracefully in grateful warmth, and cold, sweet souls chanting softly as they say goodbye to something, someone, some pain. The Phoenix, Jesse and I wander away from each other, and I experience a strange feeling that keeps surfacing in Black Rock City, a sense that proximity is at once painful, and essential. I want to submerge myself in anonymity and hide even from these friends and loved ones who I’ve known for only a week. I want to plunge right into the middle of these frail, wonderfully flawed, beautifully broken human emotions and fears. I want to bathe in them, swim in them, I want to lose myself in it and swim deeply, dilute myself, touch all of it. To do this, I have to leave everyone who knows my name and my identity, become anonymous, nameless, faceless, one more tear shed. I fell out with a friend prior to Black Rock City as I had to admit to her that I couldn’t bear anyone close to me in our world, to come into this. At the time I puzzled over this gut reaction, but on the Temple’s last morning, it made perfect sense. To be me was so incredibly painful and sweet, that I had to become one part of a whole, not an individual anymore. And that felt right.<br/><br/>
When the Man burns, we cheer. When The Temple burns, we cry. <br/><br/>
I can’t remember the last day. I can’t remember it. All I know is that I can feel the real world climbing in, like ghosts and goblins clawing me back to something, and I have to leave our camp and the desert, and it panics me. I sleep, grumpy, mewling and fitful, wake at 3am, hurtle into his van, and he’s warm, asleep and covered in dust, and I kiss him urgently like that kiss will have to get me through the next 360 days and keep me from falling away. I want to keep walking in that liminal place, that deep playa, that dusty desert, the point when the I disappears, and we become nothing and everything.<br/><br/>
I left the desert the moment I stepped off the schoolbus, onto Angeleno soil. I can’t sleep, so I unpack, smooth my dusty tent onto the hot, wet lawn in front of my guesthouse, and drink coffee, and listen to music which has lyrics and a melody.<br/><br/><br/>
I want to somehow describe Burning Man more than I have done, but it keeps eluding me, slipping out of sight of my words, hiding somewhere in a place I can’t find it. The dark human me wants to capture what happened, harpoon it, gut it, stuff it, display it proudly like some kind of trophy, some kind of t-shirt, some proof I lived it, I got out. I want to chart it, go from a-z, tell you all that happened, shape it with words, hammer it into a conclusion, edit it into something tidy, neat digestible. I want to encapsulate some mystical essence, maybe turn eight days into a convoluted narrative, a worthy literary story. The human side wants this, but the truth knows that in the end all I aspire to is just to brush the last strands of something that changed the way my soul hummed, before it disappears, leaves me bereft. To pay homage, touch the tips of my fingers to lips and press them to glass in an imitation of a kiss, because in the end all I have are words, which are imitations of something, always.<br/><br/>
Happiness is only complicated, after the fact.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-65013403270865089392012-05-11T03:06:00.003-04:002012-05-11T03:28:07.746-04:00SilenceThe helicopters circling - droning, lazy mosquitoes - the sirens shrieking past in a tantrum. I can't tell if I was merely unobservant before, but one day I noticed them, and since that time they've rarely paused. I used to live in comfortable silence, and then I fell and scraped my skin raw through the abrasion of the police state, and found the wound never quite heals.<br/><br/>
When I stripped in Manhattan I wrote urgently and feverishly, because the words were the only company I had. I was drunk and angry and lonely, most of the time, and saturated with the intimacy of other people's failed marriages and fucked up desires. I wasn't meant to write, because then it meant they could find me and throw me out of this country I wasn't meant to be in. I wrote anyway. The hierarchies of authority always bring out my susceptibility to reverse psychology. At some point I wrote: <i>I live in permanent nostalgia for things I have not yet lost.</i> Even living, I was already translating the words onto the page as I saw them laid out before me, for fear that the moment would be lost, or inadequately captured if I left it a minute too late.<br/><br/>
I stopped to write the book, to move countries several times (India - America - England - America - India - Egypt - America) to write screenplays and plays, as if they mattered, because something had to. I tried really, really hard to make a living through years when everyone was starving, and somehow, when I stopped caring about making a living, I started to earn money. I started to earn money and I grew into someone I didn't recognize, with no past, certainly not the past that had plagued me for so long. Having a normal life was boring as fuck. Having 'success' was boring. I suppose I didn't know what I wanted or needed, but writing has never been enough. I write because life inspires me, not the other way around.<br/><br/>
In October 1st, 2011, I went to report on a bunch of earnest protestors in a park in downtown Los Angeles. I spoke to a few of them. It was a hot day and I was wearing a thin jersey dress that stuck to my starkly white body, and I was angry because I'd given up smoking and the protestors struck me as a group of annoying middle class Liberals with ridiculous signs. I asked one for a cigarette, and they lied and said they'd run out.<br/><br/>
<i>
the sirens are shrieking</i><br/><br/>
I went back. I wasn't lonely or angry, but I was bored. Bored of LA and films and endless meetings with producers in London and tawdry little scripts about imaginary people I despised. I was bored of men: indolent, arrogant unmarried thirty-somethings bemoaning their careers which nearly took off and didn't, so they ended up with me (and I left). I went back to the park. I went back day after day, when I should have been working on a Sky TV pilot. On my third day I sat in a park past midnight on a grassy bank with a bunch of dirty, bug-eyed, paranoid radicals who were talking about the illuminati, and the police state, and the FBI, passing a soggy blunt back and forth, and somewhere in the distance, the sirens started up, slicing through that kush haze, and a helicopter circling overhead kept coming back around, and around, and we drew closer together and decided the Democrats and the Republicans were the same damn thing.<br/><br/>
Four weeks later, the big-eyed radicals were still there, and so was I. <br/><br/>
I still kept up the pretense of being a journalist, though I was no longer reporting on the protestors, and the experience was irrelevant to a script for primetime British TV (females 18-36) about girls in Newcastle. I fell in love with someone who didn't love me back, or so I thought. I went back to London, and while I was in London, he fell in love with me, and when I came back we drove up to Oakland together. A week before I was sitting in a production office in Covent Garden, and now I'm standing with 2,000 dancing people on an abandoned lot on 15th and Telegraph, my face turned up to catch stinging spatters of rain, because the cold was the only thing that slapped me into remembering me I was surrounded by 300 cops with guns and batons and teargas. My man turned round, his camera poised, and caught that moment, mascara running, knotted hair sneaking out from under a beanie, two scarfs, the coat I'd bought for fifteen bucks in Egypt, fingerless gloves, a half smoked cigarette, curls of smoke snaking through mists of rain, encapsulated forever in digital black and white.<br/><br/>
<i>
the helicopters circle</i><br/><br/>
I want to dance but my body, creaking from Air New Zealand and cold, canvas nights, moved soupily, thick and dazed. The police have disappeared but the sound truck stays, and kranks up the volume, and I walk around the corner, and a <br/><br/>
<i>
the sirens wail</i> <br/><br/>
cop with riot gear steps out of his car, followed by another, followed by another, and I run back and over the noise of the music babble into a strangers ear, and he grabs the mic...<br/><br/>
It happened again and again. I never documented any of it. I never wrote about the internal arguments and the squabbles, the paranoia, the sirens and the lazy drone of helicopters that were always there, an insidious fucked up soundtrack to a life lived on caffeine, cigarettes, cold pizza, no sleep and <i>Modelo Especial</i> in the backroom of the downtown tranny bar. Sure, I wrote stuff, here and there, angry, spiky articles for the cause. When you become an activist and an organizer, writing for yourself becomes a capitalist indulgence, and I suppose that's what this long seven year diary was, even when I refused to listen to the editors and the publishers who asked me to become 'more commercial'. I became subsumed with a new family, all of us sporting FBI profiles because we may turn into the Weather Underground, in our desire to occupy public space and get battered to shit by the cops. Public space is the new molotov cocktail. Two weeks after Oakland, the camp got raided, and I'm standing outside City Hall hyperventilating with guns pointing at me, and he's skipping over sprawling, panicked limbs and scattered camp debri, taking pictures, and from somewhere a remote, smug voice on a megaphone informs the 2,000 people protecting this small portion of what stands for liberty, that they are an unlawful assembly, and have five minutes to leave before arrests are made. My man, the photographer, pauses, kisses me, and a cop pushes me out, into another cop, into another, jabbing me with batons and angry elbows, and as I'm pushed behind police lines I watch even more black-robed riot gear pigs spill out, disgorged from the bowels of an underground lot underneath City Hall, DTLA.<br/><br/>
A month later, we got married. He'd moved in the night we first kissed, the night I got back from London. It was no big deal. We drove to Ventura, stayed the night in his '78 Dodge Ram, drank coffee and bitched at each other, went in and said 'I do' to a smiling stranger underneath a plastic altar illuminated by buzzing strip lights. He took pictures the whole way through. I wanted to make notes, but didn't. We were in love, and still are, but sometimes it's hard to distinguish, underneath the adrenalin, the tiredness and the fear.<br/><br/>
<i>
the sirens are crying</i><br/><br/>
I nearly cried, but didn't. I imagine most women would be distraught at that kind of wedding. Most women like pretty dresses and tedious drunk relatives and a 25k bill for their day to remember. We went for sushi in the Valley afterwards, and husband was broke (he did pay the 150 bucks at the courthouse) so I bought it. The sushi cost more than our wedding. It was, however, exceptional sushi.<br/><br/>
I find it strange, this new life. I was sober for two years. I got up at 6am every day, took the dog for a walk, sat down to write, procrastinated on the internet, pushed down the nausea of life passing me by as I churned out shit for money. In a week the normality I'd worked towards for thirty years became subsumed by that fucking wail crawling down my throat and into my soul, that pervasive fucking fear. It helps that I have Husband, and he feels and hears it too, although sometimes I long for the solipsism of being simply angry and lonely, alone. We have our immigration interview in two months, to determine whether ours is a real marriage or a sham. I wonder if USCIS talk to the FBI, and vice versa. I wonder what's in my file. Angry. Is that enough to incriminate? Perhaps. All I do is organize, in between screenplays. Call up The Black Riders, get them money when they need it, hook them up with the Brown Berets, rant at other people in the same movement as me. I get tired and frustrated, and it's only been six months. But I can't imagine not living like this. I booked a flight to England to do something different, anything, craving some selfish, solo time, even if it did cost 1200 bucks and Husband was pissed I was leaving him for a week. He went off to work tonight, and I industriously clicked through his facebook until I found evidence of past relationships that were serious enough to make me feel something. I sat and I read through Husband's intimacies until my heart fucking hurt as much as it did when it was my job, and the sirens stopped, and this small measure of selfish human frailty managed to obliterate the weight of all the pain I carry from those movie scenes flashing through my head in a continual, bitter, taunting loop.<br/><br/>
<i> Treyvon Martin - Kendrec McDade - Kelly Thomas</i><br/><br/>
For a second, I can't even hear the helicopters.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-50030434654725919172011-12-16T05:59:00.003-05:002011-12-16T06:06:57.084-05:00WE ARE ALL SARAH MASONAs a child, I used to read about the ANC, about Feminists, about the Civil Rights Movement, The Black Panthers - without ever dreaming that I would see something as powerful in my lifetime, obsessed as our generation is with generic, mass produced crap like Us Weekly and Keeping up With The Kardashians. As Occupiers, however, we were all universally pleased - if skeptical and surprised - that <a href="http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2101745_2102132_2102373,00.html">'The Protestor'</a> was recognized as <a href="http://today.msnbc.msn.com/id/45657166/ns/today-today_celebrates_2011/t/time-magazine-reveals-its-person-year/#.Tuskk0oVxJN">Time's Person of the Year.</a> Many of us have put our family lives, our personal agendas, free time, careers and what little comfort we had left in this recession-ridden world, on hold in order to Occupy. Others were at rock bottom, didn't have any of these luxuries, and yet chose to dredge up what last resources, strength and emotions they had, to join the movement. Across the world, our brothers and sisters faced greater adversities and forged the way for us - in Greece, Argentina, in Tahrir Square, Madrid, and more.<br /><br />As commercial, consumer-based and bullshit as the Mainstream Media may be, and whatever underhand agenda Time magazine might have for recognizing The Protester as the face of 2011, we appreciate the accolade - even more so, perhaps, because <a href="http://www.laobserved.com/archive/2011/12/times_protester_cover_an.php">one of our own</a> was the face upon which Shepherd Fairey's picture was based. But as the <a href="http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/2011/12/protester-on-time-cover-is-occupy-las-own.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+lanowblog+%28L.A.+Now%29">news</a> <a href="http://www.redlandsdailyfacts.com/news/ci_19558549">leaked</a> across the internet that the faceless protester had <a href="http://www.metro.us/newyork/NewYork/article/1051319--sarah-mason-meet-the-woman-behind-time-s-person-of-the-year-cover">a face</a> and <a href="http://laist.com/2011/12/15/more_info_about_sarah_mason_face_of.php">a name</a> and was, in fact, <a href="http://blogs.laweekly.com/informer/2011/12/sarah_mason_time_protester_photos_occupy_la.php">a real person from Occupy LA</a>, the faceless protester became a hunted figure - even more so because Sarah Mason, the 25 year-old girl upon whom Shepherd's TIME cover was based, neither wanted, expected, nor had any interest in becoming, the media spokesperson and covergirl for a worldwide movement of many faces demanding, simply, change. Sarah was unaware that her picture was being used for the cover of TIME magazine, has not received financial compensation or other material benefits for that fact, and wishes to preserve her privacy at this moment.<br /><br />In deference to, and solidarity with, our brothers and sisters across the world, we 'protesters' reject the attempts of the mainstream media to seek out and put our sister Sarah Mason in the spotlight. We are disgusted by the fact some 'journalists' have <a href="http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/time-person-year-protester-sarah-mason-occupy-la_b48143#more-48143">deliberately misquoted</a> our sister by taking an <a href="http://360magazine.org/2011/12/chained-up/">early interview out of context</a>, or claiming 'ownership' of Sarah, as with KPFK's unfounded claim that she worked for them.<br /><br />Tonight, in reaction to a tabloid journalist attempting to interview Sarah, who has expressed a desire to be left in peace, many of us 'protesters' called the journalist with a message which encapsulates the essence of our leaderless, faceless, movement: WE ARE SARAH MASON.<br /><br />We will repeat this action to all journalists who attempt to intrude upon our sister's privacy. If you would like to join us, call this number below and say you are Sarah:<br /><br />Yalda Sadiq<br />Assignment Editor<br />Inside Edition<br />310-642-4176 Direct<br />310-642-4161 News Desk<br />Yalda.Sadiq@Cbs.com<br /><br />I will update this piece with other contact details if and when they become available.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-44313824886349583572011-12-14T01:26:00.003-05:002011-12-14T03:56:13.562-05:00MIC CHECK! Skid Row Allstars Vs. LAPD Young Gunz<iframe width="560" height="315" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/RaIKJYyC7l8" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen></iframe><br /><br /><br />This afternoon, eight protestors connected with Occupy LA (including myself) took up the <a href="http://www.lapdonline.org/newsroom/news_view/49698">LAPD's invitation to a basketball game</a> aimed "To bring together the public, law enforcement and homeless communities in an effort to strengthen relationships and bring awareness to those in need." The game was between <a href="http://www.lapdonline.org/lapd_sports/content_basic_view/44631">"The LAPD Young Gunz"</a> - a basketball team from the LAPD that trains all year round - and "The Skid Row Allstars" - a group of players from various missions across downtown LA, who do not have a consistent presence as a team due to time, space and money constraints. This carefully staged PR-event featured a dinner for 500 homeless people, served by (gun-carrying) LAPD at the Midnight Mission on San Pedro in Downtown Los Angeles.<br /><br />We spoke beforehand to Community Organizer Bilal Ali who works with <a href="http://www.cangress.org/rights.htm">LA CAN</a> (Los Angeles Community Action Network), an organization that is actively fighting the Failed <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/03/14/AR2007031402271.html">'Safer Cities Initiative'</a> established in <a href="http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=103289221">September 2006</a> by the Los Angeles Police Department, Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, and City Attorney Rocky Delgadillo in the Skid Row community. Although SCI was promoted as a means to improve public safety and bring additional homeless services to the community, police enforcement and a crackdown on petty offenses has been the most significant and consistent element of the initiative, and no additional homeless services have ever materialized. <br /><br />At the cost of six million dollars, 50 LAPD officers were deployed to a 50-square block area surrounding Skid Row (0.85 square miles) -- the equivalent of adding 470 new officers to the Rampart Division or 700 officers to the 77th Street Division in South Los Angeles, and bringing the numbers of police officers in Skid Row second only to that of Iraq, according to Ali. In addition, dozens of undercover narcotics officers were deployed to the same area, resulting in an unprecedented concentration of police resources in a neighborhood with relatively low rates of serious and violent crime.<br /><br />This has resulted in a massive increase in arrests around the Skid Row area for relatively 'minor' everyday activities which are the natural result of homelessness: sitting on the sidewalk, sleeping in a car, public urination, throwing a cigarette butt on the floor, spitting out gum. An ignored ticket, however minor, results in a warrant for arrest, and the removal of the perpetrator from the street and into jail. Despite the <a href="http://lapdblog.typepad.com/lapd_blog/2009/03/why-safer-cities-initiative.html">LAPD's saccharine and insincere claim</a> that SCI is "to create an environment conducive to change so that those without hope today may find it tomorrow.", it seems clear that homelessness has effectively been criminalized by the Safer Cities Initiative at the cost of 6 million dollars a year. 6 million dollars the City seems willing to spend in order to remove the homeless from Skid Row, and continue upon its single-minded path of gentrifying Downtown Los Angeles without adequately addressing the homeless problem and finding solutions for those 15,000 people - 75% of whom are African-American - resident on Skid Row. This is further evidenced by the outrageous behavior of City Council and Mayor Villaraigosa in <a href="http://www.laweekly.com/2011-11-03/news/skid-row-vs-gensler/">reassigning 1 million dollars in Federal Funding earmarked for Skid Row </a>- to the multi-million dollar NFL-contracted <a href="http://www.gensler.com/">global architecture firm Gensler</a>, in order to entice them to move their offices downtown.<br /><br />While the action today was not specifically targeting the <a href="http://www.midnightmission.org/">Midnight Mission</a>, who have done some excellent work in rehabilitating many of the homeless suffering from alcoholism, drug addiction and mental illness, it must be noted that only Missions and Shelters who support the Safer Cities Initiative receive Federal and State Funding, and are graced with the presence of the LAPD, who have a long and outstanding history of being anything but willing to "strengthen relations" and "bring awareness" to the plight of those resident on Skid Row.<br /><br />Here is the text of the Protestors Mic Check (video to follow):<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">We, the 99%, do not accept the criminalization of the 15,000 homeless people on Skid Row. Shelter is a human right, an by shelter we do NOT mean jail cells under the so-called Safer Cities Initiative. The police presence on Skid Row is highest in the world, with a greater deployment of law enforcement than anywhere but Iraq. We want real community change, not empty public relations efforts. We are here in support of the RESIDENTS of Skid Row, and all those who are doing what they can despite the violent selective targeting of City Council and the LAPD. </span><br /><br />After mic-checking Chief of Police Beck as he stood in his basketball shorts ready to start the game, we protestors read out the text above, and were joined by the audience, one of whom gave us the finger, the majority of whom cheered us on with chants of "Skid Row! Skid Row!", and helped us mic check our statement - before we were told to leave or face arrest.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-11780756454146687012011-11-11T20:21:00.000-05:002011-11-11T20:25:19.527-05:00Bored in Wales<a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yqwQnZZqptA/Tr3K3F-iAcI/AAAAAAAAAJw/ql7ngyNwHp4/s1600/Photo%2Bon%2B11-11-11%2Bat%2B6.51%2BAM.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;width: 400px; height: 266px;" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-yqwQnZZqptA/Tr3K3F-iAcI/AAAAAAAAAJw/ql7ngyNwHp4/s400/Photo%2Bon%2B11-11-11%2Bat%2B6.51%2BAM.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5673914153402761666" /></a><br /><br />When bored, put on too much makeup.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-88024610267441150722011-11-06T09:51:00.000-05:002011-11-06T09:53:07.423-05:00Occupy the London Stock ExchangeI'm waaaaay behind on updating you guys. There's a lot of <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=blog/764">new writing over here</a>.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-32754229877663060332011-10-16T03:40:00.001-04:002011-10-16T03:41:25.090-04:00First They Ignore You....My <a href="http://www.occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/670">new blog post</a> at <a href="http://www.occupylosangeles.org">Occupy LA</a>Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-91093423187101996692011-10-10T22:30:00.002-04:002011-10-10T22:31:29.060-04:00You Just Don't Get It Yet....But you will.<br /><br />Here's a <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node/417">blog post I wrote</a> about the misconceptions people are having about the scale of this movement.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-15798415296927844722011-10-06T03:15:00.004-04:002011-10-06T04:39:50.326-04:00My Solidarity Blog (below for link)It's just after midnight and my head's whirling. I drove up to Topanga in torrential rain, rivers running past me on the PCH, mists rising up off the sea and cloaking my shitty little Ford Escort, blanket-like. I was en-route to <a href="http://www.csacalifornia.org/">CSA California</a> to pick up fruit and vegetable donations from the kind folks up there. CSA, for you folks who don't know (and I had no fucking clue until this morning), stands for Community Sustainable Agriculture, and is basically a bunch of individuals just like you who want to support our local farmers, being pushed out by corporations and increasing land taxes. Those individuals band together to form a collective which shares the risks and benefits of food production. I won't bore you, but here's the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community-supported_agriculture">wiki</a> explanation. Essentially, it means local people helping local farmers and businesses stay afloat, and providing the community with good, organic produce which is far, far cheaper and tastier than the shiny, waxed, genetically engineered crap you buy at Ralphs, Trader Joe's and Wholefoods. I'm sorry, but apples just don't have that fucking sheen on them, Wholefoods. They don't. Nor do they cost the price of a small condo. I fucking hate Wholefoods. But I still go there, because it's easy, it's recognizable, it has all my hippy shit in one convenient location. I do, however, frequent farmers markets for all my fresh produce, and after meeting the folks at CSA, I'm now one of their customers. <br /><br />I loved that early morning rainy drive through Topanga Canyon, my car smelling of apples and oranges and Kale. Los Angeles just rained and rained today like the heavens had had enough, they'd just burst. It felt cathartic, in some way. I got home to my rose-covered cottage in West Hollywood soaked to the bone, tired and happy. I mooched around getting dry with Mr Chips, cooked up some winter soup with parsnips and carrots and beans and sweet potatoes, and then went to meet a fellow screenwriter for coffee at <a href="http://www.thegrovela.com/">The Grove</a>.<br /><br />I fucking hate The Grove, and though I love movies and writing them, I hate the screenwriting industry. It was an interesting coffee as this screenwriter professed to be the same way, but it was all we spoke about, and my mind kept drifting back to Topanga and the hippies, Burning Man, and <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/">Occupy LA</a>. I was at the March Saturday, and since then have kept up to date by following it closely on Twitter, talking to the organizers and checking in with them, and trying to hustle up donations. I finally got an evening off work, and so scooted over with Chips and boxes of organic goodies about 6pm this evening.<br /><br />I'm pretty tired, so 'scuse the prose. I'm going for brevity, not style here.<br /><br />Firstly, it's friendly, it's warm, it's open, and it's full of debate. You walk by - maybe it seems intimidating. A bunch of dirty, wet, unemployed people in tents, holding signs. But look at them, and they're smiling at you. Smile back, hold out your hand, ask them questions. They'll sit you down and answer them, fetch you a cup of coffee, introduce you to people. Sure, there's hardcore activists here - the type who hop from protest to protest, cause to cause. And they're working alongside mothers, fathers, the unemployed, the blue collar worker, the middle class dude who just valet-parked his Audi down the street. Everyone's here not to press an agenda, a specific cause. They're here to express their discontent, and to come together to form a conscious movement which simply expresses the desire for change. They want America to change: not to rewrite the constitution, oust the President. Nothing crazy like that. They want America to be the land it was always promised to be: the land of the free, with liberty and justice for all. What is their main complaint? Their main complaint is that corporations - the 1% - have too much power. They wield political power, as recently proven beyond doubt with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_United_v._Federal_Election_Commission">Citizens United</a>. They wield global power, as demonstrated with the absolute autonomy of the Federal Reserve and the repercussions of this un-audited institution upon the world's economy. Their CEO's advise the President and affect policy decisions. And when they gamble with our money and they lose, they are given more, while we lose homes, and jobs, and our health, and self-respect. And nothing changes even when this comes to light. No one audits or shuts down the Federal Reserve. The CEO's right at the top continue to reap massive salaries and bonuses. They still advise the President. <br /><br />Occupy Wall Street, and by extension, LA is not 'anti' capitalist, 'anti' globalization, 'anti' government. It's a movement, it's a voice, and that voice is saying 'this is no longer good enough. We demand representation. We demand a change. We demand that this system where massive corporations wield unlimited political, social and economic power - end'.<br /><br />This is not a march, nor is it a protest, nor is it a mere 'occupation'. What I scorned a few weeks ago as a few trustafarians in a park, what I saw on Saturday, what I've read on twitter and facebook, seen blogged about on liberal media (fucking hate The Guardian) - has evolved rapidly into becoming a truly representative, democratic movement. Outside City Hall has become a camp for Revolutionaries, and I mean that not in the lefty, hemp-wearing, kombucha-swigging, trustafarian blind faith way. I mean Revolutionary in its purest form: as a fundamental change in power. This is the people claiming back their power and their inviting you to join in. There will be the crazies, the nutters and the loonies - and they will be listened to, and their views will be heard by the General Assembly. And as I saw tonight, Mad Vegan who hates meat-eaters will be told politely to deal with them and value her opinions, but not press them on anyone. Crazy group of over-zealous anarchists who hate the LAPD and decided to start a facebook rumor suggesting they'd used violence and pepper spray, will be told this will not be tolerated in a democratic group. Cop-hater will attack me on twitter because I tweeted that LAPD have been great to Occupy LA - as if their kindness somehow undermines or condones the police brutality in New York. This is not the case. We report as we find, and so far, LAPD and the City Council have been exceptionally well behaved, communicative, even supportive and open with us. Boundaries are clearly enforced only with the agreement of the group. Finances are completely transparent, and open for anyone to see. The group is growing everyday. <br /><br />It's nearly 2am and I need to sleep - have a big day rewriting tomorrow. After tonight's General Assembly I sat and talked for a long time with a Farmer from Northern California. We spoke about pretty much everything under the sun. I told him my reservations about the movement, and he made me feel better by saying faith shouldn't be blind, I should be realistic, and not blindly follow. Mr Organic Farmer was the first person I'd spoken to since Burning Man who made sense to me, and then it struck me, this whole set up was like Burning Man without the art, the drugs, the desert and the costumes. It was Burning Man being put to the test: self-reliance to the core. Those two years I was dying and unemployed, god how I would have loved to have had Occupy LA to keep me alive, to have given me hope and solidarity, to have made me feel I wasn't alone. <br /><br />Mr Chips, by now. was fast asleep in my arms, and I was exhausted and buzzing and happy, and Mr Farmer had to work, and I had to drive home.<br /><br />I'm crawling into bed barely sentient, so I'm posting this without editing. But I will be at the Occupation every single day I can manage (bar this weekend, when I'm being sent to the desert to work). OK, so I'm going to Joshua Tree Music Festival, but it is for work!<br /><br />I have a few plans on how to work with Occupy LA to get more people joining from what I think are under-represented classes: the employed, solvent, affluent, educated 10% with decent jobs and cars, and the very fucking poor and uneducated, <a href="http://www.occupylosangeles.org/?q=blog/764">so please join me over here </a>where I shall be blogging for the duration of the movement, in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street and Occupy LA. I will be updating much more regularly than I normally do as I write about the growth of the movement, and I also plan to interview as many people as possible and tell their stories on the blog in order to show all the cynical fuckers out there who (like me) think this ain't for them, that they're wrong. This is for you. It's your movement. Join it. Walk up, don't think about appearances, put out your hand, and ask questions. Come down to Occupy LA and hell, I'll even buy you a cup of coffee. Or a kombucha.<br /><br />(For the final time, I didn't edit this. I'm tired. I apologize for shit writing)Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-25615863175538538832011-10-05T00:52:00.006-04:002011-10-05T01:39:38.698-04:00Questions AnsweredPeople keep asking me why I don't write the blog so much these days. There are numerous reasons for this.<br /><br />1. I now get paid to write, so I write all day long. I wake up at 6am every morning, drive out to Santa Monica to take a yoga class with Jerome, take Chips hiking up Runyon Canyon for an hour, and by midday I'm at my desk, ready for a stretch of writing which will usually end at 10pm. I'm working on a mix of projects: some are literally soul-sucking money projects - but even those are pretty interesting. Some are passion projects, and they're amazing. I earn money through screenwriting, but I keep dabbling in journalism as well as I enjoy it. My first love is, and always will be, prose. I don't know when I'll have time to write the second book. Having said that, two unfinished manuscripts, both 60k words each, are idling on my desktop, waiting for attention right now.<br /><br />2. Now I get paid to write, I have more to lose. I bitch like hell about producers in private, but on here I can't get away with it so much. I look forward to the day when I can unleash my fury back upon the blogosphere again - probably after my first Oscar win.<br /><br />3. From about September 2008 until January 2011, I made barely a cent and was heavily in debt. The recession hit me hard. I survived by going into human hibernation mode: I shut down pretty much everything, including my opinions. I didn't even write for a year after Obama got elected. The last few years have been the hardest of my entire existence, and I'm still, curiously, poking my soul, and examining it to see what I make of it all. It wasn't right to write about it then. It was too raw and real. <br /><br />4. I got sick of letting people have a direct route into my head. For some reason I'm far more socially eloquent in person than I am on the page. This translates as: far better at concealing what I think or feel. I liked having my privacy back, so I kept stuff in. I don't really like people knowing what I think or feel. Oddly enough, it creeps me out when people - strangers - talk about the book. It creeps me out when boyfriends pretend it doesn't exist, but everyone else has to pretend it doesn't exist, aside from boyfriends. Huh?! I prefer the book to exist independently of me, and for us all to pretend it has nothing to do with me.<br /><br />5. When I write in the first person, I'm as subtle as a sledgehammer, and I offend people, and it got quite exhausting - being a pariah. The last few years I didn't really exist, simply because I didn't write about me. It was peaceful. I'm not sure why I started writing this thing again. Writing the first draft of a screenplay is basically like hosting a four week party in your head, full of pretty obnoxious people having the same conversation over and over in slightly varying forms. So perhaps I'm tired of facilitating all these other voices, some of whom I love, some I loathe. <br /><br />6. Another question I get asked is: if you write so many screenplays, how come you don't have IMDB credits? - I started writing screenplays in 2008. As in, I wrote a spec script, it got picked up by an agent, and then she sent my script around, and organized meetings, and for a year, I was unemployed but "taking meetings". After a year, people started asking me to do stuff - write treatments, come up with ideas, pitch them - a lot of it unpaid. And in the second year, I did two scripts on commission, and I got paid. One sucked - because the producers were crap. The second one was brilliant, even though the producers were crap. Now - I work with awesome producers, and I've lost count of how many scripts I've written, and I can't tell if they're crap or not. All my scripts are lounging around 'in development', which means a production company is in the middle of the arduous process of getting funding and a director / cast attached. Sometimes this can happen quickly, sometimes slowly, sometimes not at all. As a writer you have to just brutally detach from the process and the script. Apart from with those one or two scripts you really, really love, and those you can't ever forget. I have one of those scripts written, and two on the boil right now. It's the best feeling ever. Although you're always dependent on someone to channel your words: a publisher, an editor, a press, a magazine - ultimately, a reader. If all else fails - hell, you can find a reader someplace. But screenplays - you really <span style="font-style:italic;">are</span> fucked if no one makes your movie. Screenplays need a director, a producer, a cast, money, love - they need to have everyone converge on the same point, with the same vision, the same aim. Even if it gets made, a shit director will make a great script suck.<br /><br />For an opinionated prose writer, adopting out your kids to strangers is pretty terrifying. Life is interesting these days.<br /><br />Detachment. The key to all life's problems. Sigh.<br /><br />Back to work....Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-16674676667184131232011-10-03T14:32:00.003-04:002011-10-03T14:44:10.711-04:00They Took The Bridge<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2011/oct/03/occupy-wall-street-brooklyn-bridge-arrests">This</a> is interesting. It appears a very small number "took the bridge" - and then a bunch more followed, without being stopped by cops. There's claims police led them - this may be true. If there was congestion, and the cops are getting yelled at, I can completely imagine a couple of people walked on the bridge, and then the cops just allowing the rest through so they could arrest them. I think the cops have a pretty hard job in this scenario though - I can't imagine it's much fun being there and putting up with the inevitable abuse. It seems more likely a few people took the bridge either to piss off cops, or to make a statement, or maybe even because they were getting crushed. It's pretty ridiculous to arrest people for standing on a bridge - but rules are rules, and to be honest, it's increased media coverage no end, so whether the cops, or the protestors are responsible - does it matter? I just hope this doesn't descend into an LA riots type scenario: hatred between cops and protestors. I think the cops should send men in uniform to join the march - I heard a rumor some military guys intended to do that. Anyway. Back to screenplay.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-89948433415420274412011-10-02T23:50:00.008-04:002011-10-03T17:57:18.880-04:00Occupy LA<a href="http://twitpic.com/6tkh1o" title="#occupyla milling around outside city hall. Everyone lookin.g... on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tkh1o.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="#occupyla milling around outside city hall. Everyone lookin.g... on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><br />I'm pretty exhausted, so excuse the shit writing. <br /><br />Yesterday I went down to <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/">Occupy LA</a>, and marched with them from Pershing Square to City Hall. I went to show support, although I'm still nursing a (un)healthy skepticism about the movement. I think movement, at a point of stalemate, is good. It has to be. But this 'leaderless' movement quickly needs to get <a href="http://miminewyork.blogspot.com/2008/09/camp-obama.html">motivated</a> in a similar manner to the unprecedented <a href="http://miminewyork.blogspot.com/2008_10_01_archive.html">grassroots support</a> for Obama's campaign in 2008. Like that campaign, there's going to be morons, assholes and pricks on our side. There will be the cool kids, who like the drama and the arrests, but scorn the boring shit (ever canvassed? It will kill your soul). There'll also be the ones with passion and drive and fire and intelligence, who truly believe that this movement can evolve to make a difference. Put me with them, please, I'd like to learn. <br /><br />In the meantime, I read one of the recent facebook status updates of the protestor who got maced by NYPD. This is what Damian Crisp wrote:<br /><span style="font-style:italic;"><br />Last weekend I was peppersprayed by the nypd on a sidewalk while protesting. Yesterday I was part of a group nearly pushed off the Brooklyn Bridge because of the violent crowd control tactics of the nypd. I was surrounded by high level officers in white shirts who are beyond prosecution and enact the will of new york's most powerful and wealthiest citizen, Mayor Bloomberg. I was handcuffed for 6 hours, then detained in a small cell with eight people four more hours, given stale bread and a cup of water. A vocal writer and critic of corporations, the nypd, my name and face became known to the nypd after I was peppersprayed and of course I was the last person released. Other protesters were released ten at a time until they got down to myself and two others in my cell. One guy was released... the another... then I waited until I was finally given what amounts to a traffic ticket and released. I was alone with a precinct full of cops at 3 in the morning. These attacks are not a diversion from the cause. They are instances of a power structure revealling its disregard of our human rights.</span><br /><br />I do not like cops on a power trip. Cops are assholes at the best of times. But so are regular people. And surely this demonstration, like the Obama campaign, is meant to be about erasing divisions and joining together? Are cops excluded from 'the 99%'? I'd say they epitomize what it is to be an average American: they're doing a shitty job for a boss they probably hate, and getting massive contempt from everyone around them for having to suck it up in order to pay their mortgage. <span style="font-style:italic;">If they were better people, surely they'd have a better job. </span>C'mon kids, we know America doesn't work like that.<br /><br />While we're at it, Bloomberg - yes, another rich, (ex)Republican asshole - but he does support abortion rights and same sex marriage, and oppose the death penalty. His stance on immigration is realistic - "We're not going to deport 12 million people, so let's give them permanent resident status". He has tried to get through a number of measures to protect the environment, and been defeated several times. Bloomberg's big problem is his support of the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_PATRIOT_Act">Patriot Act</a> and Homeland Security - and the fact he's a mega-rich (ex) Republican. This hating on mega-rich people, by upper-middle class rich people - it's kind of annoying. A woman at the march said yesterday, "I like it when they say 'Tax the super-rich', but when they say, 'Tax the rich' - that's kind of everyone I know'". Hello Los Angeles! Welcome to the throng, and thanks for your honesty! The cities in which the people are mobilizing - they're rich, liberal hubs. It's rich against mega rich, purporting to care about the poor and the "working poor", which have replaced the middle class. I massively oppose the corporations and big business - but let's be honest about ourselves, hey? Nothing wrong with being rich, if honestly earned, so don't lets start having rich people walk around in rags, hiding their PPO Blue Shield Health Insurance cards for fear of reprisal... <br /><br />Also - hell, I do not like cops. I hate authority figures in general. But if they're confronted with 600 of you sitting in the middle of the Brooklyn Bridge, causing chaos to traffic and bystanders - they're going to take action. <span style="font-style:italic;">That's why you all sat down. You sat down in order to provoke the cops into making arrests, in order to gain more publicity for the movement. To then slag the cops off for doing exactly what you wanted them to do, seems more than a little disingenuous and ungrateful.</span> The mace - no, that was idiotic, brutal and pointless. The cop who did that is a schmuck, a moron, and needs his bottom smacked. But the arrests? Come on, kids. Own it.<br /><br />I'm still not sure how I feel about the mass Brooklyn Bridge arrests - I mean, in relation to its effectiveness as a form of protest. I can't get arrested or I'll get deported, which scuppers my First Amendment rights (or do only citizens get them?). So I always have to be super careful in protests. Of course the point of protest is that your very existence becomes an act of quiet rebellion - but despite being the most angry person I know, (I accept paypal if you'd like to contribute to the anger management course I should be on) I can't help thinking that Gandhi got it right with <span style="font-style:italic;">satyagraha</span> (mass civil disobedience) - and its accompanying philosophy, <span style="font-style:italic;">ahimsa</span> (non-violence). <br /><br />Brooklyn Bridge was simple provocation. I think there's a time and a place to take this protest from marches and occupations, to direct action, to the more 'fingers up' approach of deliberately stepping into the middle of the road as an invitation to be arrested and manhandled - but is it <span style="font-style:italic;">now</span>? When they haven't clarified their aims, protestors are still stumbling to articulate, Trade Unions and uniforms are starting to join, the movement is growing and changing? I suppose if the arrests get more supporters and increase its diversity, then it can't fail to be a good thing - although ironically, sitting in the middle of the Bridge was itself against direct orders from the 'leaders' of this leaderless movement, which might want to get protestors thinking about what the definition of democracy is. However, I was already proved wrong by dismissing the protestors as annoying white, anti-capitalist, over-educated teens - actually, maybe I wasn't - but they did quickly evolve into something else. Thanks annoying, white, over-educated teens. I hope the movement evolves again, and starts to agree on its aims.<br /><br />I turned up at the LA occupation with my friend Donovan, who's a very Liberal schoolteacher, in that Liberal "I'm concerned about world affairs and the economy - I regularly tut about them," way, which is probably most people's general attitude. He, like me, felt slightly uncomfortable with the middle class nature of the protest and its definitive lack of aim - we passed, at one point, a homeless bum sleeping with a handwritten sign next to him, "It's OK. Continue shopping", while the march to City Hall led us passed a bunch of Asian and Hispanic store-owners touting cheap plastic crap. It made me starkly aware that this protest is not yet representative of the 99% - but it could be, if it grows into something more than light civil disobedience and becomes mobilized into a political force that speaks for the people and demands government attention. <br /><br />About 1,500 people showed up to the LA march, and 328 pitched their tents for the first time last night. No arrests, it all went smoothly, a local councilman I spoke to, Richard Alarcón, has been liaising with the LAPD to ensure the protestors could exercise their freedom of speech, and pitch their tents, without arrests. Although if Saturday is any indication, maybe he shouldn't have bothered and everyone should have pitched their tents in the middle of Spring Street to get a bit more press. I sent my report off to The Guardian, and said I'd take them some food this week after I get paid. Next week I'll pitch my tent for a few days. <br /><br />I wish I didn't have the kind of mind that examines everything minutely. To be a good protestor you either have to be an excitable sheep: not think too deep and just follow the herd, or be truly, wholeheartedly passionate, realistic and educated about the issues. When I worked for Obama I was passionate and realistic, and I became more knowledgeable, and learned from everyone around me - which got me through truly mind-numbing tasks like endless canvassing, and living off KFC for six weeks, with 0 dollars in my bank account (I survived off blog donations - thanks guys!). I'm not truly, wholeheartedly passionate yet about this protest, because there's no leadership, and it annoys me when The Guardian pops up with a sweet, well written, but <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/oct/02/occupy-wall-street-99-per-cent">patronizing Op-Ed</a> from a sexy <a href="http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/occupy-wall-street-michael-moore-roseanne-barr-242975">Hollywood actor</a>. There needs to be some leadership (Yes, I am aware that's not the point) - because right now it's not enough for me to be passionate about the message, which I am. I need to know that passion is going to be utilized in an effective way for real, true change, not just arrests, bitching about the cops, and repeating discontent without knowing what to ask for.<br /><br />I've been working with my old Obama group on this. Unlike most people I know, I haven't lost faith in Obama, and people who don't understand the separation of power and how that affects Presidential rule need to go back to fifth grade. We're coming up with ways to help mobilize, train and educate the LA protestors into using local action to gain political traction and make demands which will affect the bigger picture, using all the crap we learned working on '08 - dealing with the assholes on your own side is a big, big part of this. Yes, I count myself an asshole. <br /><br />Interestingly, after having a day of protests and seeing all the gaps and flaws in the movement, and identifying ways we, as over-educated, politically-conscious liberals can help, I ended up volunteering at <a href="http://laburningman.com/">LA Decom</a> that evening, sitting next to a wonderful, mad, brilliant Persian-American woman in her thirties who had come to this country as a child refugee from Iran. Her uncle, who sponsored her family, was killed by the Iranian mafia (I use the term mafia loosely here) and her entire family then became illegal, because their sponsor had died. Eventually after years battling the system, being denied a college education because of her undocumented status, and having to be a nanny for eight years, this woman was granted resident alien status based upon asylum. She told me about her interview with immigration:<br /><br />"They sat me in this room, and this woman goes, 'Do you think it will affect your life negatively if we send you back to Iran?' I was like, 'Lady! I'm a bisexual, loud-mouthed, opinionated woman with a nose stud and a tongue ring and a tattoo down my back, who can't speak Farsi and has never worn a headscarf. They're going to kill me if I go back. They'll stone me to death'. And then I start crying, and this woman's like, 'There's no need to get emotional,' and I'm like, 'This is my life! This is my country! I don't know anything or anywhere else. I can be whoever I want to be in America'."<br /><br />Unless you're gay and in the military, or you're Islamic and your last name is similar to a 911 bomber or... but for the most part, we do have human rights which are enviable here. They're being covertly challenged and tested right now, and the people are responding to that. This country, for all its flaws, for all that it favors the richest 1% over anyone else, for all its healthcare issues, and expensive education, and Guantanamo, and the stupid goddamn Patriot Act - we still believe in it, we still keep believing in it. We have to.<br /><br />That's why I won't stop criticizing my protestors even thought we're on the same side, because, like them, I believe in my <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution">First Amendment</a> rights. But it's also why I will join them, because I believe in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution">Fourth</a>, and our rights have been violated. I believe in the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fifth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution">Fifth</a> - and I wrote an entire screenplay about how Reagan screwed that one up and no one ever notice. I still believe in this country I criticize, fear, love and loathe. I still believe it can be great. I'm British and I love this country more than my own. The first time I said the pledge of allegiance was during the Obama campaign and I stand by it. I was born British and I swear I'll die an American. <br /><br />A condescending, annoying, patronizing American. I'm going to bed. Here are some crappy twitter pics I took - click on them to get them bigger. If you'd like to help Occupy LA, check out <a href="http://occupylosangeles.org/?q=node%2F203">this page</a> and get your butt to City Hall. If you're an ideas person, I guess you should contact me and get together with my old Precinct Obama group and start plotting.<br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tjnaq" title="#occupyla on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tjnaq.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="#occupyla on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tjk59" title="#occupyla on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tjk59.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="#occupyla on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tk9we" title="City hall! Please remain on the sidewalk #occupyla on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tk9we.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="City hall! Please remain on the sidewalk #occupyla on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tkcn2" title="#occupyla definitely over 1k people in crowd and more arriving on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tkcn2.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="#occupyla definitely over 1k people in crowd and more arriving on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tken2" title="Uncle Sam #occupyla on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tken2.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="Uncle Sam #occupyla on Twitpic"></a><br /><br /><a href="http://twitpic.com/6tknll" title="Here's the plan kids #occupyla on Twitpic"><img src="http://twitpic.com/show/thumb/6tknll.jpg" width="150" height="150" alt="Here's the plan kids #occupyla on Twitpic"></a>Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-70625502644057707432011-09-30T03:43:00.005-04:002011-09-30T05:20:30.853-04:00Occupying the OutsideI got back to Los Angeles after two weeks in London where I literally wrote every damn day until at least midnight every night. The weird thing about writing is you end up with massive holes in your life - September 2010 is completely missing, because of the political drama I wrote about Freddie Laker. January is gone because I was working for Channel 4. April - completely fucked. June? In Scotland researching the mining industry. So I frequently end up with huge gaps where I've disappeared into my own weird little isolated writing world for 4-8 weeks, and I pop up again and find out that Egypt's gone into uprising, or Katrina's destroyed New Orleans, and I'm like WOW! SHIT! while everyone else is bemused by the fact I only just discovered we had a new President or something (I was exaggerating on that one: I did manage to stay abreast of a campaign I worked on).<br /><br />So anyway. City of Angels. I arrived late on Saturday night after a loooong flight (Justin Bieber movie and four episodes of The Killing). I lined up, stinking of old lady farts from the flatulent Polish bird sat next to me for ten hours, and shuffled up to immigration for my customary crap photo and fingerprint check. The guy at the desk looked at me suspiciously (mohawks tend to make authorities suspicious) and then decided to question me for half an hour, drilling me on every detail of my life. <span style="font-style:italic;">Why was I a chef on boats? Why was I on a B1 visa in 2003? How long did I stay in Florida in 2004?</span> It rattled me to my core, and reminded me of how fragile my time in America is, how dependent on some twat in immigration who might just be in a really bad mood one day, or not like my nose or something. They could decide to throw me out any second, and they wouldn't need a reason. For some reason, my seven years of going back and forth without question gave me complacency, made me feel a sense of entitlement - and the United States does not condone entitlement. You have to earn everything here, sell your soul, act grateful all the time. The only thing they can't take away from you is citizenship. Did you know that? Once an American, always one. I'd quite like my US passport, because I love this country as much as I loathe it. My run-in with USCIS, however, really shook me up, to the extent that I went to see a new immigration lawyer, some guy way out in Encino, first thing on Monday morning. It took me bloody ages to get there, and I later discovered it was because Obama was in town. I'd wondered why everyone was on the streets demonstrating. <span style="font-style:italic;">Yep, missed that one on the last two week blackout.</span> I also completely missed the start of Occupation Wall Street - I discovered <span style="font-style:italic;">that</span> from a bunch of grainy youtube vids featuring earnest, inarticulate teenagers. <br /><br />I'm glad it's getting more mainstream media attention, because I was really put off by their website, bad videos of kids who had no idea why they were there, online comments like 'the streets of America will burn', and stupid shit like "let's go march on this street and look at the cars we'll never be able to afford which THE RICH own" - probably written by kids skiving off their 40k a year schools. That kind of stuff is alienating, destructive and harmful to the cause. I'm all for anarchy and causing trouble - hell, give me a law, and I have an almost pathological need to break it - but I do <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> want to join a protest which is a bunch of trustafarians in a park with a well meaning, but vague claim to be 'the 99%' and an inability to clearly state what their aims are. One, the 99%? I think the nutters in middle-America who still believe in big business and hawk American flags on their (soon to be repo-ed) house might not want you to represent them, because they're quite happy in cloud cuckoo-land. Two - the poor, the uninsured, the unacceptable sections of society existed well before Wall St got really dodgy and deregulated, and you didn't represent them <span style="font-style:italic;">then</span>. They're still gonna be there when you middle classes get your credit lines up and running and your savings accounts rosy and flush. What then? Are you still gonna represent the other 80%? Or are you going to be too busy, say, campaigning for undocumented citizens' rights or watching Joey play baseball at his private school at the weekend? And what about the rest of the world, America? Nice to see you get a bit motivated, but you didn't seem too concerned until <span style="font-style:italic;">your</span> comfort got affected, oh middle classes. It's OK, we're all selfish - we're human beings. But don't pat yourself on the back <span style="font-style:italic;">quite</span> yet. Get yourself back on your feet and reserve a little bit of passion for someone else....<br /><br />Having said all this, I'm totally into the Occupation now the unions are getting involved, it's becoming more mainstream and representative, (yeah, I'm a sucker for Michael Moore, Susan Sarandon and Postal Workers) and that kind of earnest, youthful zeal is being taken up, and metamorphosing into something tangible, something we can all taste and recognize. To a beat-up cynic with recession war scars all over my twisted soul, being lectured at by the over-educated, under-employed and relatively life-unscathed just comes across as sanctimonious BS. That's probably my blatant ageism and it's definitely the massive chip I have on my shoulder against the wealthy middle classes who claim poverty, or continually profess not to be rich but seem to live these amazing lives which to a poor person - it looks like <span style="font-style:italic;">rich</span>, dude. But there it is. We need really young passionate people to provide fire and passion and get the ball rolling - the rest of us are struggling daily with 18% APRs, car repos, jobs falling through and mortgage repayments, and I guess we're still shell shocked that this shit all happened, and doesn't seem to get better. I know dragging my ass through the Obama campaign when I was still reeling from an enormous medical bill for MRSA (uninsured) and losing every single freelance gig I had practically killed me, to the extent that it took me two years of intermittent homelessness and absolute hell before I was finally able to regain some kind of even keel in around March of this year (after I gave up my car for repossession, incidentally). <br /><br />So we need the yoof for sure, but we also need age, experience and a wise, guiding hand to stop the Occupation toppling over into some kind of London-type riot, or simply becoming a bunch of kids banging bongos, eating pizza and posting on their twitter accounts. I kind of like riots, but the idea of white, middle class kids rollicking through New York throwing Kombucha bottles at McDonalds doesn't appeal. I think that's probably why most liberals were pretty unenthusiastic at the start, as <a href="http://www.salon.com/news/opinion/glenn_greenwald/2011/09/28/protests">Glenn Greenwald writes in Salon</a> - and let's face it, naked chicks have their place in Burning Man, but on the streets of New York... I just don't want to see your tits, excited girl. It's not going to make me join your cause, it's going to make me think you're an exhibitionist fool and join the GOP. <br /><br />Just kidding.<br /><br />So now I'm pretty excited about this whole thing, although reservations still linger. When you've marched for a whole bunch of shit and seen anti-war movements spring up and be ignored by governments professing to be left wing, when you've had Hope and seen it crushed in the onslaught of a GOP which controls the House, when you've watched the horrendous Tea Party crawl out from under a rock and gain political traction, when you've tried in vain to get the media to cover issues like the DREAM act years before it had a chance of getting to the Senate - you have caution, and you have circumspection, and you don't want to join a movement only for it to turn into a bunch of sixteen year old anti-capitalists preaching to you about shit you already know, and joining forces with - I dunno, PETA, who are all fucking mad. (Disclaimer: I bought a second hand rabbit fur coat in London two weeks ago, and I am scared of being sprayed by animal activists who don't distinguish between new dead and old dead. Despite the shopkeeper's reassurances that the rabbit did not die in vain just for the coat, "it was eaten" she said, without irony - I still worry)<br /><br />So I wonder what will happen now. The government and big business are so deeply intertwined that I personally can't see how you can untangle this mess without massively reforming a White House that's enormously corrupt, that condones Wall St and its excesses, and that feeds off them. I think governmental reform, transparency and bank regulation is the only way to safeguard our future. But then we're still taking for granted that once the enormous tasks of restoring the middle classes, taxing the rich, dismantling Big Corporations, and making government more accountable and transparent - once this is achieved, we kind of assume all the other problems: severe poverty, under-funded public schools, rising costs of healthcare, racism, global warming, communicable diseases, animal cruelty and morons who buy fur coats - are going to follow and become magically solved. <br /><br />That's obviously not the case. <br /><br />I can't help thinking that once the middle classes are OK again, they'll go back to being the complacent, selfish assholes that people are - and I include myself in that assumption. I'm fortunate in that being an alcoholic, neurotic mad person, if I lapse even for a second, my life collapses around me. It's pretty exhausting, always policing yourself and paying for minute lapses with minor tragedy and chaos. But in a sense it's pretty lucky, because it means I have to stay on the ball all the time. I don't get to be too complacent. Even on a good day I'm highly aware that I'm a deeply unpleasant person, which...<br /><br />I forgot the point.<br /><br />But now - now we're in a situation now where we're teetering on change, on some kind of revolution, and we can't be complacent, we have to be the best, we have to keep learning and evolving, and we have to resolve not to look back, because there was no golden era pre-crash, pre-banks, pre-Bush, pre-Obama, pre-Wall Street. <span style="font-style:italic;">Which means we still have the opportunity to make it happen. </span><br /><br />This could be that opportunity, if it's played right.<br /><br />That's pretty fucking cool.<br /><br />I still refuse to wear hemp and bang bongos though.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-61851196938789124242011-09-17T07:31:00.016-04:002011-09-17T13:30:54.491-04:00Post Burning Man (Not Decompression)I'm still struggling to write about Burning Man. It's probably the most difficult event I've ever tried to put into words. I have such an unusual job: turning real life into unearthly prose, or recreating the frailty and foibles of the human condition in a screenplay. And I'm schtumped by eight days in the desert which were incredible: both grounded in the suffering of what it is to be human, and somehow transcendent of it. <br /><br />When I write screenplays, producers are always combing through the script, asking whether every action or word attributed to a character is truthful. It annoys me because we never lose the ability for change in life. A person never loses the potential to surprize themselves. I learned to detach and to walk away in Burning Man. I learned to acknowledge a fiery, burning emotion, without feeding it and creating drama. I learned that sometimes, for whatever reason, people put expectations upon you that are driven primarily by their own selfish needs (we're all selfish, it's just a part of being human) - and that you don't have to live up to these expectations if it's not true for you, if it's going to make <span style="font-style:italic;">you</span> unhappy. You don't need to make a big deal about it. You simply set down your boundaries and move on, ignoring their reaction because you're confident you've dealt with the situation wisely and kindly.<br /><br />The first expectation a friend put upon me was inviting herself along to Burning Man. I had not invited this friend, nor intimated I would like her to come - in fact, I had talked extensively of how happy I was to experience Burning Man alone, and to plunge into meeting strangers. And then she informed me that she was coming with me. This is a friend who has always been loving, generous and kind, and whom I owe a lot to. I was quite happy for her to go to Burning Man, but I didn't want her to come to Burning Man <span style="font-style:italic;">with me</span>. Had I wanted her to come with me to Burning Man, I would have asked her, so I found her behavior odd, threatening and a little claustrophobic. I wanted to go to Burning Man without anyone "knowing" me, or transposing their image of me from the real world into this completely separate reality. Instead of telling my friend "Please come, but not with me" or maybe setting boundaries for ourselves, I felt anxious and trapped, held hostage by her self-invite. I felt like I owed it to her to swallow my annoyance. I was unable to articulate what I really felt.<br /><br />In the end, the situation was resolved when my camp said they didn't have any room for one extra person. I don't think my friend <span style="font-style:italic;">quite</span> understands that in the end, the camp made the call (because I was too cowardly to!) and she was welcome to have found her own way there without relying on me or my contacts. However, I still think she feels resentful towards me for "blocking" her Burning Man trip - or for being tacitly unwilling to let her come along on mine, as if I unconsciously manifested a too-full camp (I wonder if I did?!).<br /><br />This was one of those situations where I knew in my heart that I needed those eight days in the desert to be eight days <span style="font-style:italic;">with Burners</span>, not people from my separate work-reality, not people who brought dramas and issues onto the Playa that I wanted to leave behind for eight short days. I will return to Black Rock City next year, and again, there are very few people I would want in my camp for the same overtly selfish reason. I'm quite happy for my friends and acquaintances to go to Burning Man, but I don't want them to go <span style="font-style:italic;">with</span> me, to camp with me, or to be in any way reliant on me. <br /><br />This is because like most of us, in the real world, I spend a lot of time doing what other people want, being considerate of others feelings, tailoring my own behavior to suit the demands of others. I'm a nanny of broken people - losers are my specialty ; ) these are great qualities. But I did not want to put others first at Burning Man, to wake up and worry about whether X had fun last night, or feel anxious because Y wanted to spend time alone with me, or feel concerned that Z didn't get on with Y and so I should schedule in them before X.... Fuck that. I wanted to roam alone. I intuitively knew that my Burning Man experience must start off a solitary one, even if that sounded selfish and incomprehensible to those closest to me in my separate default-world reality. And it's not that Burning Man is selfish. Precisely the opposite. Burning Man is the most selfless experience I've had for a long time. It's about community and giving - but if you can't throw yourself into that community, and if you can't gift because someone is holding you back, it impedes your experience, impacts negatively upon your stay on the playa. I needed to <span style="font-style:italic;">not</span> give to one or two people who were leaning on me, using me as a crutch because they didn't feel confident walking alone, so that I could give to many instead. Crutches are great, btw. But if both legs are working, you need to have the courage to leave your crutch at home.<br /><br />The second person with unreasonable expectations was a man I knew from LA. I had been extremely close to this man for a few weeks - he was another casualty, a bird with a broken wing I picked up and nursed - but I was becoming increasingly alienated from him due to his self-destructive tendencies, and his curious blindness to the needs and wants of those around him. This man suffered from "center of the universe" syndrome. He was a queen of misery, the protagonist in a perpetual, pathetic tragedy. His ego, his pain, his suffering, his victimhood, dominated everything and everyone around him, and prevented him from seeing the hurtful affects of his behavior and words on others. He had a vicious, self-loathing streak I probably tolerated back in LA more than I should. <br /><br />I wanted him to come to Burning Man initially because he epitomized someone who needed it: he was a man who had literally lost all hope, whose self-hatred was actually palpable. You stand close to this guy, and you feel the hate coming off him in waves. It sucker-punches you, and you instinctively want to take the pain away - and then you realize that just makes it worse. His hate actually feeds off attention, off others' desire to help and to soothe. Acknowledging and pandering to his pain actually enabled him to manifest it even more, and generate more negative attention, in a self-destructive, self-perpetuating cycle. <br /><br />I thought Burning Man would teach him self-reliance and radical acceptance and community - the most important elements he seemed to lack in his private, selfish, self-constructed hellworld where the population was One. Naively, I thought this man would respect my need and desire to "roam alone", and be generous and undemanding of me, because I had spent so much time in LA treading carefully around his broken feelings. When it became obvious that this wasn't the case, and that Man had expectations I did not and could not fulfill, that Man had either not listened to what I said, or was blithely ignoring it and instead shrieking "bitch!" because I refused to change my plans for him, I had to walk away - from the situation, and eventually, from our friendship and acquaintance. <br /><br />My experience with him was extremely unpleasant, but it taught me a lot about not reacting. As a fiery, passionate Aries, non-reaction is something I will struggle with for the rest of my life, with varying degrees of success. <br /><br />And so I am back in London, still reeling from Black Rock City. Your heart and your mind and your soul is cracked wide open in Burning Man, and one of the challenges of reintegrating into regular society is trying to maintain this openness, while adopting the necessary shield you need to move and function in the default world, because the default world doesn't understand or appreciate - perhaps a better thing to say is that it regards with <span style="font-style:italic;">suspicion</span> - what fuels us on the Playa. It takes a lot of time and care to sink back in - and then I was thrust into London 36 hours after getting home. <br /><br />I feel like I spent the last ten days plastering a big, fake smile on my face, my soul shrieking in pain as I sat through meetings, avoided drunk people dressed in Primark animal costumes at Bestival, striving to maintain some semblance of functionality when all I wanted to do was lock myself away in a cabin, alone with my dog and nature, and slowly slide back into life gently. <br /><br />Thanks to Jimmy and Sophie for looking after me in Dalston, introducing me to the best kebabs in England and making me laugh and find color in a shockingly gray world, and thanks to Tristan and Thomas for early morning philosophy rants and long talks about love and emotion and polyamory, and what jealousy and possession means. These are huge issues for me post-BM, as I've never dated a man who hasn't 'cheated' or 'strayed' or 'lied to me', and I strive now to comprehend whether this is evidence of my unreasonable expectations, whether I need to think about connecting to people in a different way, whether I want a traditional monogamous relationship, or whether questioning monogamy is actually the result of disappointment and disillusionment and a loss of faith. So many questions. Lots of time. Deliberately choosing solitude and reflection right now feels healthy and appropriate. I'm not in the space for sharing, and that's perfectly OK.<br /><br />This weekend I'm on deadline for a pilot episode outline. I can't wait to fly back home to California and get out of London. I'm obviously here for a reason, but I'm craving my dog, my yoga, my best mate, and my Angeleno Burners.<br /><br />I love you Burners. Thank you for opening my eyes on the Playa, Camp Jackpot.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-46144561948953697942011-09-11T18:38:00.001-04:002011-09-11T18:39:34.923-04:00Default WorldBack from Burning Man. Flew to London barely 36 hours after I landed back in LA. The default world will never look the same again. I'm a Burner.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-41027802757160800352011-08-03T23:14:00.001-04:002011-08-03T23:14:19.768-04:00I live in permanent nostalgia for things I have not yet lost.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-17980098536162513282011-05-23T05:22:00.004-04:002011-05-23T05:46:21.254-04:00Paul's New BookForgot to say, Paul's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Kings-Road-Club-Paul-Carr/dp/0297859293/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1306142619&sr=8-3">new book</a> came out. There's an extract in <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/travel/2011/may/22/travel-living-in-hotels-paul-carr">The Guardian</a> here. But you should buy it, 'cause I'm in it. I'm also in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Nothing-Party-Confessions-ebook/dp/B002U94SIO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306142619&sr=8-1">first book</a>. And while we're on this road (ie the subject of me) there's a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bringing-Nothing-Party-Confessions-ebook/dp/B002U94SIO/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1306142619&sr=8-1">whole book about me</a> out there knocking around, and this book has me in the <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Boys-Dolores-Schoolmates-Revolution-Departures/dp/1400076447/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1306142982&sr=8-2">special thanks</a> section.<br /><br />I did have a bit of a barney with Paul when I read what he'd written. Without ruining the book, he recounts an incident when he'd called me from San Francisco to say he needed help stopping drinking. I remember this. It was October 2009. I told him to go to AA. He looked up the Twelve Steps online and balked. But instead of going 'Hmm, it doesn't sound like it's for me', he then proceeds to slag off AA as a quasi-religious cult - <span style="font-style:italic;">without ever going to a meeting</span>.<br /><br />Now, AA helped me get sober, then I stopped going about a year ago. I check in every so often, but what keeps me sober is simply enjoying life without needing to see it differently other than how it is. I don't - and never did - buy into the Higher Power / God bullshit. I did the Twelve Steps, it was kind of a fun task, bit time consuming, and by step twelve, it was fucking boring. But it didn't matter, because by then not drinking was normal to me. And even though there are a few nutters in AA who'll waffle on about God, you can just ignore them, and take from it what you want, as I did. And AA saves lives. All you need is an open mind. I went in with an open mind, decided the god shit and endless step 4 / 10's weren't for me, so I just quit doing the steps and started living my life instead, ignoring the blatantly wrong myth that members advocate - that "people who don't do the steps are going to relapse" (that's bullshit). So I was a little pissed with Paul's AA bashing. It was a bit immature and petulant and reductive. So I told him.<br /><br />God, we are gonna have FUN living together!Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-48913949761054589252011-05-18T07:43:00.006-04:002011-09-11T18:36:44.968-04:00ClassIn between writing for other people on their projects - ie getting employed to adapt a book into a screenplay, or write an article for a newspaper - I'm working on a bunch of my own stuff right now. One of them is very close to my heart, as it's all about class, politics and unusual friendships. <br /><br />I'm a 'genuine' product of a meritocracy. My grandfather on my Dad's side was a lorry driver in Liverpool, and my maternal granddad was some engineering factory worker type thing. My mum was a nurse after going to Secondary Modern. My dad, who lived in a two-up, two-down with three sisters and his mum (his father died when he was young - dodgy heart after being gassed aged 14 in the trenches in WW1) - won a scholarship to grammar school, and from there went to Liverpool University to study medicine. <br /><br />Dad became a doctor and moved to North Wales for a job with his three kids, and when my twin sister and I were born, the family moved from a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mold,_Flintshire">house</a> which was too small to accommodate seven, to a beautiful, rambling old vicarage in a tiny little village called <a href="http://www.cilcaintoday.org.uk/">Cilcain</a>. I grew up straddling two worlds though - because while my Dad's occupation and his decent salary meant we had risen to Middle Class, we were not the same as the other doctors' and dentists' kids, whose parents were born into the class my parents had <span style="font-style:italic;">worked</span> their way into. We had a firm foot in that 'other' space: we were English in Wales, we were northern, we were not rich, we were not privately educated, we were not - and could never be - 'posh'.<br /><br />As the fourth child, I was the first kid in the family to go to 'proper' university. Actually, my older sister and I went at the same time, when she returned to Liverpool, aged 31, as a mature student to study dentistry. We all had our degrees paid for by the government, and receive maintenance grants for living costs from the county council because we were a large family, and because Dad had retired early due to ill health, as a consequence of which we lost our home. I went from a comp school called <a href="http://www.alunschool.co.uk/">Mold Alun</a> to an <a href="http://www.murrayedwards.cam.ac.uk/">all girls college</a> in <a href="http://www.cam.ac.uk/">Cambridge</a>. <br /><br />And I suppose it's then that difference really kicked in.<br /><br />I loved Cambridge and still do, but what happened to me there and afterwards is complex. People from my background rarely go to Cambridge. If they're comp-school educated, they're probably <span style="font-style:italic;">born</span> southern middle class and went to a good comp in a good area - which is radically different to northern middle class risen from working class. What happened to me in Cambridge was that I became hugely aware that money and family and class were just as important as intelligence, and talent, and skill. I got a chip on my shoulder because I didn't have money and class, but the chip meant I had to swallow a little ball of unfairness all day long. Inequality. Life's fucking unfair. I never played the class card, despite the fact I had a bunch of jobs all through university and during the holidays, which made life quite difficult at times. You're hanging with a bunch of people who <span style="font-style:italic;">do not know what it is to be poor</span>, and yet you don't eat at <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Formal_%28university%29">formal halls</a> because you can't afford it on your college bill, you don't even eat in the college canteen because it's too expensive. You don't buy new clothes and you support your smoking habit by cadging off richer friends. You never go to a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_Ball">May Ball</a> because it's a hundred quid plus a ticket, and even if you got a ticket you couldn't afford a dress and the shoes, you work in <a href="http://thecastleinncambridge.com/">a pub </a>three nights a week, and you work in the college kitchens serving your peers as it gives you discounted rent. <br /><br />But in the eyes of those you left in Mold Alun, you already moved up a class. In the eyes of the people you're hanging out with, you're a clever kid with a funny accent who never has any money and is different. Not bad, not wrong, just different.<br /><br />I never played the class card because it's not really something I think I should play. I have everything they have, apart from money, a family home in London, and connections. I didn't have the posh private school, but I still went to a good university and got a first. I can get all the rest myself. But trying to get that has sometimes nearly killed me. Being completely self-sufficient has nearly killed me. And I've wept and wept and wept over someone saying something as simple to me as: "Why don't you just eat?" when I've been too poor to even afford a 2 dollar bagel. I've cried over people saying, "Well I don't understand why you had to move to New York. Why did you feel you were entitled to work there just because you had a Cambridge degree?"<br /><br />Why am I entitled to be a writer, to live in New York and California, to have a dream and to get that dream, when thousands of people aren't? Because I'd turned into a toff?<br /><br />I never really figured it out in my head, until I started working on my screenplay about class. I hung out with very rich Conservatives and I schmoozed with staunch Socialists, miners, Labour party insiders, and questioned them. I'm not a Socialist and I don't believe in it. But after I spent a day in Parliament with <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennis_Skinner">Dennis Skinner</a> last week - a mad, lovely, wonderful man who I admire and have so much affection for - it hit me. Me, trying to clamber and hold on for dear life to my poncey life as a writer, jetting all over the world, losing my car, losing my apartment, never having security, biting hard on pride to borrow money and humiliate myself on a regular basis, suffering from mini-breakdowns every two years as a result - my idea of being left wing, my idea of liberalism, my idea, I suppose, of socialism, is that what 'they' have through birth, I can, should, and will, have - by hard work. We already start off the same: with a mind and a body. Yes, some are disabled, some are stupid, some are clever, some rich. But we come into this world the same way: with nothing. We go out the same way. It never occurred to me how far I'd come until I sat and spoke to Dennis by the Thames in the sun that afternoon, and he said to me, "You went to Cambridge? With your background? You must be clever."<br /><br />I spoke to my old A-level Politics teacher a little about it, and he talked about the difficulties of working in a comp school like mine - teachers are part social workers, part guidance counsellors. We spoke about the problems of battling to get bright kids into Oxbridge - kids who'd never had the luxuries of Eton, and the infallible, bright, burning confidence instilled in them by money, birth, connections and private school. <br /><br />Despite the fact I despise both Conservative and Labour policies, when dealing with people like Jonathan Aitken and Dennis Skinner, I don't bring that to the table. They're just people to me. People from radically different sides of the political spectrum that I can talk to as equals because I know, after my time at Cambridge, to pass the port to the left, and ask for a top-up with my distinctly northern vowels. <br /><br />All the miners I spoke to, including Dennis, said we shared something. We knew what it was to lack a safety net, and to stare into the abyss and know that for us, there's no bottom. That's what New York and California taught me, and I will never forget it. I don't think many people living in Britain can comprehend it these days - certainly none of my peers. It's a strange thing to be able to brag about, but I consider those hard times as a blessing, because I can write about it. I can write about it not just as some well-off Oxbridge Liberal tutting over the Welfare Reform Act and worrying about the 'poor people'. I <span style="font-style:italic;">was</span> that poor person, with nowhere to live, no money for rent, no health insurance, no one to turn to - least of all a government who would put me back on my feet. For five long painful, terrifying years. Punitive and ill-thought out cuts now are being made by people who do not, and cannot comprehend the abyss. But welfare and benefits and education policies before it were designed by people who had no comprehension of this fact either, and didn't know how to make the system one that would let no one go hungry, cold or sick, but help them find a way to be proud, self sufficient and mobile. <br /><br />I don't share much with the Tories, aside from an Oxbridge education, but I get on well with them, the same as I do my radical Union Miners. I understand when they talk about reducing the deficit, but I don't agree with the way they're doing it. I blame both Labour and Conservative for pricing out university and taking it away from people like me. That process started in 1997 when Labour moved universities to the Department of Business, Trade and Innovation and charged people to go, so they could expand higher education in other areas. It's now been made horrendously worse, but I hold both parties at fault for this. <br /><br />And ironically, though Jonathan and Dennis would be horrified to hear me say it, I see many similarities between them both.<br /><br />At the end of the day we're all deeply, beautifully, wonderfully flawed humans. I'm so lucky that I'm part poor, part posh in an age where few will have the opportunities I had. I'm so lucky that a poor kid from a comp school in Wales gets to have dinner in Earl's Court with a Tory one night, and tea with a Socialist in Parliament the next day.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-11193964.post-13318803762505138772011-05-12T06:55:00.000-04:002011-05-15T21:56:03.114-04:00Burning ManI'm going to <a href="http://burningman.com/">Burning Man</a>!<br /><br />I have the best job in the whole world.Mimi NYhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14521917221150732904noreply@blogger.com