Enthusiastically Ambiverted Hopepunk
The stuff about me and my life. The “diary” side of blogging.
So this guy wants to go into a nightclub, but the bouncer says, “Sorry, bud, you need a tie for this place.”
He goes back to his car and rummages around, but there’s no necktie to be found.
Finally, in desperation, he takes his jumper cables, wraps them around his neck, ties a nice knot, and lets the ends dangle free. He then returns to the nightclub.
The bouncer says “Well, OK, I guess you can come in. But don’t start anything.”
(Thanks to Etan)
It’s good to know that even if it doesn’t have quite the status that it used to, in some ways, VINL is still definitely the center of Anchorage. I spent years hanging out at this diner in midtown Anchorage, and met quite a few friends there over the years. So, when tooling around Anchorage on a slow Sunday night, what to do but stop by?
It didn’t take me long to run into someone I knew there. In fact, I was still walking up to the door when I spotted Aaron coming in the other door — doubly amusing, since he and I have both been living in Seattle for quite a while now, but we ran into each other at VINL last Christmas season, too. We grabbed table 1, were joined in a bit by a friend of Aarons (who’s name I, unfortunately, can’t remember right now, but she knew me, and I’d met her from time to time over the years), and the three of us talked and caught up for a couple hours.
Later on, Erica showed up with her friend Eric, and when it got to be time to head off, I followed the two of them back to her apartment, and spent another few hours catching up with old friends. Was a lot of fun to see her and her son Deven again, as I’d not been able to catch up with her the last couple times I’d been through town.
Today, I think I’m about ready to head off and brave the Anchorage malls in some last-minute Christmas shopping. What better time to go shopping than Dec. 23rd, right?
Why I’m glad I don’t have to rely on bars in Alaska to go clubbing: three words —
Over the years, from time to time, I’ve surprised people when they find out that not only was I raised in a Christian family, but I still count many of my core beliefs as Christian. Apparently, I don’t “come across that way,” as one friend put it in high school. My primary color scheme is generally black. I listen to a lot of dark music. I’ve always run around with the alternative/gothic crowd. One of my favorite artists is H. R. Giger who’s work is extremely dark and disturbing. I have never had any problems with people believing in ghosts, magic (or majick), Gaea, or any form of “paganism” (popularly described as anything that’s not one of the major forms of religion).
On top of it all, I count my beliefs as mine, and other people’s beliefs as theirs. If they want to talk about it fine — but I’m not about to attempt to convince them that I’m “right” and they’re “wrong”, and I expect the same respect from them.
At the same time, while the base of my personal belief system is rooted in the Christian church (specifically, the Episcopal church), I certainly have my times when I struggle with it. The existance of any type of god is not always something that’s easy to hold on to, when faced with the things that go on in the world all the time. Some days I see sunbeams cutting through trees and making the golds and reds of the fallen leaves glow against the mossy ground, and it’s hard not to believe in God. I have a friend studying massage therapy and kinesthesiology, and for her, the more she learns about how the body works, how all the systems interact with each other to keep us moving, it convinces her more and more that there must be an intelligence behind it all, and helps to keep her faith in God intact. At other times, I see the atrocities committed by man upon other men, upon the world we live on, and find it very hard to believe that there can be anything “keeping an eye on us.”
It’s all part. It happens. It’s how you deal with it, and what decisions you come to, that help make up who you are — and I personally think that there aren’t necessarily any “right” or “wrong” answers to any of it.
Trains of thought like that are part of what makes finding a weblog like Real Live Preacher such a joy. Written by a Protestant minister in Texas, it’s not what most people would come to expect when reading something written from a religious point of view — funny, sometimes profane, full of both faith and doubt, very honest, and a joy to read.
I received an email from someone puzzled about the grief I experienced when I gave up on God. This person felt liberated when she left Christianity.
I understand how some would feel that way. Many of you only know Christianity from bad books, TV preachers, and the people who watch them. If that were all I knew of Christianity I would celebrate my liberation from it all the days of my life.
But I was exposed early to the real stuff — Top Shelf Christianity — Deep and Old Christianity. This kind is practiced by people who work until they stink and take life in great draughts. Their hands are as rough as their hides, and they DO their faith in secret, hiding their good works in obedience to Christ. They know how to love and be loved in return. Their laughter is loud and has its roots in joy.
These Christians don’t want your money and they don’t advertise. You will only find them if you MUST find them. These are the ones who took me to Mexico as a boy and showed me pain and joy. They hid nothing from me.
I was also blessed by being exposed to the right kind of Christian thinkers. C.S Lewis and his friend J.R.R. Tolkein. Frederick Buechner, Carlyle Marney, and Thomas Merton. Will Campbell who wrote “Brother to a Dragonfly” and Eberhard Arnold. Frederick Dale Bruner and Martin Luther King Jr.
You did understand there was more to this than religious TV and the drivel they sell in those awful Christian bookstores, right? After all, Christianity didn’t sustain itself for twenty centuries by shitting Hallmark cards before a live studio audience.
Many thanks to Boing Boing for the link.
Well, I made it up. Very thankfully, no repeat of the near-death experience I had last time I flew up. A bit of turbulence, but now that I’m in the habit of popping a couple Sominex before the flight takes off, I was tranquilized enough that I didn’t start to panic.
Officially, it’s 21 degrees here in Anchorage. Unfortunately, the side of town that my parents live on is always colder than the “official” record — and their thermometer in the front yard is reading 8 degrees below zero at the moment. Yikes.
In just about an hour, I’ll be catching a bus to the airport, and heading up to Alaska to spend the next week with my family in Anchorage! Should be a lot of fun. No clue how much I’ll be tossing stuff up onto the page here while I’m there, so if things are a bit slow for the next week…well, that’s why.
In case I’m not back before then — have a good Christmas season, everyone!
Scripting languages have more options than bisexuals….
— John Lim, in “Developing Reliable Software with Scripting Languages”
The article itself is a bit over my head, but that wonderfully choice quote had to be saved. Via The Fuzzyblog.
An excellent article from Anil Dash on some of the side effects of Google’s ability to find anything — and anyone.
Every time there’s a resurgence in general-audience (non-techie) interest in Google, as after Newsweek’s recent Google fawning, the issue of privacy in a presence of a pervasive and permanent record rears its ugly head. People who aren’t technologically savvy don’t realize that statements don’t fade away or remain in confidence on the web; The things we say only get louder and more widely known, unless they’re completely trivial.
We’re all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. And everything that’s on the record is recorded for posterity, and indexed far better than any file photo or PR bio ever was. It used to be that only those who chose career paths that resulted in notoriety or celebrity would face having to censor themselves or be forced to consciously control the image that they project. But this faded as celebrity culture grew and as individuals are increasingly marketed as brands, even products.
Google’s ability to track people down often can be truly amazing, though admittedly, it does pretty much require you to have a somewhat unusual name or e-mail address to use for the search. For instance, Googling for ‘michael hanscom‘ does find me, but not until the sixth link, and even then it’s just my name buried within Phil‘s FOAF file. However, Googling for my online pseudonym of ‘djwudi‘ brings up link after link related to me, either posts here on my site, or comments I’ve left in various other places around the web.
What to do about this ability to be ‘found’ on the ‘net? Well, the best things to do may just be to accept that nothing you put on the web is truly private, and become active in taking control of what information is out there, as much as possible.
I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.
One of the biggest benefits of that reality is that I now have control. The information I choose to reveal on my site sets the biggest boundaries for my privacy on the web. Granted, I’ll never have total control. But look at most people, especially novice Internet users, who are concerned with privacy. They’re fighting a losing battle, trying to prevent their personal information from being available on the web at all. If you recognize that it’s going to happen, your best bet is to choose how, when, and where it shows up.
That’s the future. Own your name. Buy the domain name, get yourself linked to, and put up a page. Make it a blank page, if you want. Fill it with disinformation or gibberish. Plug in other random people’s names into Googlism and paste their realities into your own. Or, just reveal the parts of your life that you feel represent you most effectively on the web. Publish things that advance your career or your love life or that document your travels around the world. But if you care about your privacy, and you care about your identity, take the steps to control it now.
To that end, I think I’ll be picking up www.michaelhanscom.com soon, most likely pointing it here. Comments to other sites, where previously I’d use ‘djwudi’, I’ll probably start using my real name now. As long as I’m me, in a world where incredible amounts of information can be found with just a few clicks of a mouse, I might as well take control of who I am.
“We reject the false doctrine that the church could have permission to hand over the form of its message and of its order to whatever it itself might wish or to the vicissitudes of the prevailing ideological and political convictions of the day.”
You are Karl Barth!
You like your freedom, and are pretty stubborn against authority! You don’t care much for other people’s opinions either. You can come up with your own fun, and often enough you have too much fun. You are pretty popular because you let people have their way, even when you have things figured out better than them.
What theologian of the Christian Church are you?
(Via Doc Searls [who also came out as Karl Barth])
The ¡TchKunG! show last night was flat-out incredible! So glad I made it out there.
After relaxing for most of the day yesterday, I grabbed a bus and started heading out to find the FUNC. I wasn’t really too sure where I was going, but as the bus got closer, I saw a few other people that I thought looked like they might be heading to the show. Sure enough, I heard a couple of them talking about trying to figure out where the FUNC was, and we all ended up banding together. Luckily enough, one of the girls had been there before and knew where to go, so we all followed her for a couple blocks once we got off the bus. Sure enough, after rounding a corner, the sound of tribal drumming greeted us, and we were pretty sure that we’d found the place.
The FUNC reminded me a lot of some of the old warehouse parties I used to go to in Anchorage — it’s an old storage warehouse that’s been gutted and turned into a big empty performance space. Perfect for the kind of anarchistic revelry that ¡TchKung! generally creates. Outside the FUNC was a large draped area that seemed to be serving as something of a “chill room”, with blankets, pillows, and tribal/trance music playing on a stereo. I was never sure whether it was open to the general public or if it was for the performers, so I never went in to check, instead wandering around the lot outside the warehouse and peoplewatching. There were a lot of other people doing the same, talking with friends, and standing around a few burn barrels to keep warm until the show started.
The first half-hour or so of the night was just music over the speakers as everything got set up, then the actual show opened with a demonstration from Quilombo do Queimado Capoeira. Developed as a blend between martial arts and dance when the slaves in Brazil were not allowed to have their own martial art, Capoeira is one of the most amazing and beautiful dance/fighting styles I’ve ever seen. I’ve had something of an interest in it for a few years, so getting to see these people perform was a real treat. Even better, it turns out that while most of their classes locally are during evenings when I’m at work, they do have “all skill level” classes on Saturday afternoons, so I’m thinking about heading down there some weekend in the near future to check it out.
After the Capoeira demonstration, the Infernal Noise Brigade set up off to the side of the main stage. They were a bit too much pure noise for me at that point, so I spent most of their set bouncing back and forth between the bar area, where I grabbed a couple rum and cokes, and outside. There was a fair amount of spur-of-the-moment stuff going on outside, too — everything from firedancing to impromptu and improvised shadow plays using a floodlight aimed against the large white wall of a building next door.
Eventually I headed back into the FUNC and worked my way into the crowd gathering in front of the stage. A few people were wandering through the crowd, attempting to buy crude oil from anyone they spoke to, and passing out “money” in the form of copied dollar bills. Rather quickly after getting the bills, lighters would start to come out, and soon most of the crowd was holding up flaming $1, $5, $10, and $20 bills. Eventually we were told to stop, just in case the fire department came through and declared things a fire hazard, but every so often for the rest of the evening, you’d see the occasional bill go up somewhere in the audience.
After a few minutes of this, Uncle Sam came out on stage to welcome everyone to the show, and started pouring oil out over anyone within arms reach. I hadn’t seen the mudman that’s typical of ¡TchKunG! shows yet, but a ¡TchKung! show just isn’t a ¡TchKunG! show if you don’t get nice and filthy at some point in the evening! This is actually one of the parts of their shows that I’ve always enjoyed — it’s kind of hard to break into groups or think that anyone looks like they “don’t belong” when everyone’s slathered in mud, oil, or anything of the sort. It’s a little hard to describe, but it fits very well with the general air of the shows.
After Uncle Sam was done, ¡TchKunG! took the stage, and launched into the first half of their set. It’s so difficult to convey in words the energy that is present during one of their shows, but they’re by far one of my favorite bands to see live. The best word I can think of to describe any show by them is “tribal”, in the truest sense of the word — the crowd gets so wrapped up in things, that it becomes something more than a collection of individuals, and something closer to a “tribe”, I suppose…oh, whatever. You get the point. Or you don’t.
Midway through ¡TchKunG!’s set, they broke for a few minutes to bring out the Battle of the Dictators. In came George W. Bush, and then Saddam, held up on litters, with Bush brandishing boxing gloves, and Saddam holding a saber in one hand and an oil can in the other (which he used to pour more oil over the crowd as he passed by). Uncle Sam returned to the stage, and the lead singer for ¡TchKunG! donned an Osama bin Laden mask, and the two of them acted as commentators as Bush and Saddam proceeded to battle it out in the middle of the floor. The battle eventually got a bit derailed, though, when Bush and Saddam became so enamored over each others love of money, oil, and totalitarian control that they ended up molesting each other in the middle of the fighting ring, and the match was called to a halt for “unnecessary fornication!”
After the Battle of the Dictators fell apart, ¡TchKung! took the stage again to do the last half of their set. As they whipped the crowd back up into a frenzy, the mud finally came through, with both a Mudman and a Mudgirl working their way around, making sure that anyone who hadn’t gotten hit by the oil got a good amount of mud on them instead. Later on, the Mudgirl also came through with a gas can full of water, dousing people and giving them drinks out of the spout — a really nice touch, as few people really wanted to wander out to get a drink.
As the set started drawing to a close, another of the standards came out — their firebreather. He came out with two firebrands and cleared a good-sized area of space around him, then sent four or five absolutely huge fireballs towards the ceiling. Those are incredibly difficult to get a good picture of, but I’m rather pleased with the one I did get!
Eventually the set came to a close, and ¡TchKunG! left the stage…only to come back a few minutes later to do an encore set, something I’d never seen them do before! They did a great version of “Dijamy/Crashing the System” from their ‘Post World Handbook’ album, then left the stage again, closing out their part of the night, and after wandering around for a few more minutes, I took a cab home, showered to get the mud off, and fell into bed.
All in all, an awesome night. Hopefully it’s not too long before they resurface again!
More pictures of the night can be found in this photoalbum, and I’ve also found one other small writeup of the night on patr0ck’s LiveJournal. If I find any more, I’ll post them later on.