Showing posts with label Activism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Activism. Show all posts

2.5.10

¡Viva La Raza! or Why Stuart Antonio Rey-González didn't attend yesterday's marches

See, I have this thing. She's called a "girlfriend." Friday night was her birthday. I spent every penny I had from my tax return on a swanky hotel room in VP. There was Evan Williams. There was cocaine. We drank, inhaled, and watched the NBA playoffs on an HDTV, blaspheming overpaid assholes the whole night. Just me and her. It was sweet. Romantic.

I told her that I had to be more conservative with my excess because May Day (this year) is an important day for us Mexican-Americans. Of course, she's of the blonde-Swiss variety, so she just stared blankly at LeBron James or whoever. I don't know. I started cutting a coupla lines on the glass coffee table when there was a knock on the door. Housekeeping? Can't be. There's a DO NOT DISTURB tag on the doornob. Roomservice? We never called for any. Fuck. The room was like, $450 for a night!

My girlfriend, in a paranoid panic, swept the two lines that I'd been painstakingly molding with my long expired, maxed-out credit card off the table. After some choice expletives, I went to the door, stuck my face to the peep-hole, and saw a strung-out looking hipster and his-- I had presumed-- morenalicious girlfriend. I shrugged, turned to my girlfriend, who was snorting grains from the carpet, and decided to let them in.

They claimed to be part of a big wedding party and were inviting the entire floor down to the bar for the festivities. After prying my Swiss beauty from the carpet, we made way downstairs. We did some shots with complete strangers, and then the hipster dude and morenalicious (they said their names were Homer and Gracie) came back to our room where we played drinking games and did lines of coke off the girls's asses.

The whole time I was thinking, "man... I've written a story that was kind of like this." The last thing I remember is that we swapped partners. At least I thought we did. Because Homer and I woke up naked, spooning on the balcony; finding that we'd been locked out. After the initial, "holy shit, we're gay" scare, we tried to see if the girls were in the room. Neither of us had our phones, so we had to scream for them. Nothing.

Hours later, we were let out and asked to explain ourselves. The girls were gone and the room was fucked. The glass coffee table: broken. The HDTV: the object used to break it. The handle of Evan Williams, tipped on its side. Its contents: soaked into the carpet. Thousands of dollars of damage. Homer and I claimed that we were fucked up and that we didn't know what the hell had happened. I tried to deny that the room was in my name, but was unable to avoid it as I "looked more like a González" than Homer.

In short, I was profiled!

I'll also be hearing from their lawyer.

28.6.09

Some pontifications. Some poems. Some prose. Short.

From my Twitter account:

-- The Beauty of the English Language is in its ambiguity.

-- English lesson: Anyway is not now nor has it ever been plural.

-- Note: "ANYWAYS, suck my dick" is not an acceptable retort to that last tweet.

Blaring self importance aside,

I just want to make a couple of statements regarding the world at large.

1. Democracy as word and ideal has been bandied about and misused and abused for ages.

2. Activism is selective in its methods, talking points, and execution. Most recent examples: Iran election/Racism in Northern Ireland. Soon to come: Honduran military coup d'état.

Poems/Prose:

"Drunk Punch Slovenly Bunch"

We didn't meet in seclusion, our hearts were open in hopeless homes wrecks and depressive stretches, the dregs and empty bottles, but normally we spoke of the loneliness that abides the sauce, the empty bottles an effect.

Sometimes the monitor is my only friend. The 'we' in question being my assumption of togetherness quite abstracted from an idea of indistinctiveness-- I never cared for detail, for those tiniest of ifs and buts that trailed an ellipsis in every deduction.
Glass to glass, I drink to thee, for thee shall never make utterance of a love for me.

I prefer this.

You and I, we think alike.
You and I, we carry a huge ego.

I can drink you under the table, however.

(2007)

--

“Bitchslapping the Muse”

If she stops singing
and starts nagging
get to bitchslapping.

No.

I am not promoting violence toward women.
I am not promoting violence toward effeminate men.
I am not promoting violence.
I am promoting creative revolution.

The concept of the bitchslap in and of itself is humorous.
It evokes a comedic image.
If she stops singing
and starts flagging
...
wake her up with the beautiful words she used to wake you.

(2009)

--

"I like it because it hurts you"

In Soho, London you can get any kind of girl you want for a price. The girl I got liked slapping the shit out of me. Her English was terrible. I only understood a scant few lines. She said, "I like it because it hurts you" a lot.

(2009)

--

"The Photographer"

I hate posing for pictures. From the awkward positions, to the fake smiles, to pretending like I'm having a good time, the phoniness of event photography that drips slowly, annoyingly from nearly every photo makes me nauseous. The point of "capturing a moment" is as plain as the language used to describe it. You are "capturing a moment." There is no metaphor lurking between the letters or the words. When you "capture a moment," you don't choreograph it, you point and hit the shutter. If it looks like shit; having no symmetry or piss poor lighting, what you do with that photo is at your own discretion.

I have never discarded a single picture in all my years of photographing. So what (!) if someone laughs or looks away. They are communicating what most people communicate when being made to stand still in an unnatural position for a photo: "Don't you have enough pictures of people doing nothing?"

(2008)

All writing by Patrick Patterson-Carroll