Baby Wurzbach: Revisited

In May of 2008, San Antonio-based band Baby Wurzbach (duh: me and Kristin's avant-garde music machine) released its hit song "Girls Who Masturbate" on YouTube. This song, which is about the liberation of womyn's bodies, quickly became the most popular video on my YouTube channel and has since been viewed by over 68,000 people worldwide.

Due to its popularity, YouTube has given me the option to "monetize" the video. This is an exciting moment for Baby Wurzbach, because it means we might finally be able to afford a tambourine and/or ukelele!!!

For those of you who are still unfamiliar with "Girls Who Masturbate," I have included the video below:

Q & A (Dear Bradley)

Q: Why haven't you updated in so long?

A: Because I'm taking a class with an insane reading load.

Q: What's next?

A: I made a little video, but I'm supposed to keep it offline. Maybe I will post some pictures once this semester ends.

Q: It's almost 4:00 am. Are you a party boy?

A: No, I'm a middle-of-the-day-nap boy.

Q: I am in a funk?

A: It's not funky.

Peripheral Produce

I ordered a DVD of the "All Time Greatest Hits" from Peripheral Produce, a group that distributes experimental films. One of the films is "Getting Stronger Everyday" by Miranda July. After watching it, I want to amend the part of my last post where I wrote "I love everything she does." It's not that I hated it. But I didn't love it either. There was a shape in the air and a woman in unflattering pants, but it just wasn't enough.

My favorite thing about this DVD is the liner notes. This is what it says:

THIS IS NOT THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY. This is a channel that is not on your remote control. This is folk art for a high tech society and a challenge to the cinematic status quo. Truly independent cinema is not a cinema bound by the needs to please a target audience or earn millions of dollars the box office. It is a cinema that is made by individuals who use the movie camera as a tool of self-expression [Note: I accidentally wrote "sex expression, but I erased it because that isn't what the liner notes actually say]. Every time an artist picks up a camera and makes a movie, it is a small victory over the monopoly that Hollywood and the corporate media have on our culture. Peripheral Produce is here to amplify those victories, complete with slow-motion-replay.

Who needs the rusty Hollywood robot when all along your next-door neighbor has been making the best movies in the world? THIS IS THE INTERNATIONAL CINEMATIC UNDERGROUND. The movie is over but the lights aren't coming on. It's a shooting star; catch it on your tongue like a snowflake.

Isn't that nice? So come on, everybody-- make some little films! You don't need much. You can make them with a $15 webcam if you want. You can show them on YouTube. It doesn't even matter if someone else likes it-- you're all set!

Miranda July - A Shape Called Horse

I have been a huge Miranda July fan since I was in

high school, when I downloaded a track from her

spoken word album off the Kill Rock Stars website.

I love everything she does.

Cat Massage

Remember that old Simon and Garfunkle song?

"Slow down, you're movin' too fast..."

That says a lot about life, and about cat massage.

I don't see what the big deal is. My boyfriend has been doing this to our cat for YEARS.

Pictures of Michael Sleeping

Goals

Step 1: Get famous.

Step 2: Get rich.

Step 3: Die young.

Yr Dildo = Yr Liberation

"There's no mistaking that the lesbian assimilation of the sex-toy industry is reterritorializing the culturally constructed aura of the phallic signifier. By appropriating the phallus/penis for themselves, lesbians have turned technoculture's semiotic regime of simulation and the political economy of consumer culture back against the naturalization of masculinist hegemony. Once the penis is mass-reproduced, any illusion of a natural link between the cultural power organized under the sign of the phallus and the penis as biological organ is exposed as artificial. The reproduction of the penis as dildo exposes the male organ as signifier of the phallus, and not vice versa-- that is, the dildo exposes the cultural organ of the phallus as a simulacrum. The dildo is an artificial penis, an appropriated phallus, and a material signifier of the imaginary ground for a historically manifest phallic regime of power."

-Cathy Griggers in "Lesbian Bodies in the Age of (Post)mechanical Reproduction"

Thursday Confessional!

I'D RATHER BE CUTE THAN SMART.

Who's Afraid of Kathy Acker?

The students who come to my class are very closely related to all the evil girls who are very interested in their bodies and sex and pleasure. I learn a lot from them about how to have pleasure and how cool the female body is. One of my students had a piercing through her labia. And she told me about how when you ride on a motorcycle, the little bead on the ring acts like a vibrator. Her story turned me on so I did it. I got two. It was very cool.

I'm very staid compared to my students, actually. I come from a generation where you've got the PC dykes and confused heterosexuals. No one ever told me that you could walk around with a strap-on, having orgasms.

-from an interview with Kathy Acker

Slavoj Žižek: Love is Evil.

Indifference to the universe and a non-specific kind of love-- it sounds Buddhist, right?

'Pilgrim At Tinker Creek'

"We have not yet encountered any god who is as merciful as a man who flicks a beetle over on its feet."

Last month I read Annie Dillard's Pilgrim At Tinker Creek. It was about the universe (the big one and the small one), and terror, and biophilia. It was a spiritual experience.

Aside from the quote given further up (which makes me feel satisfyingly smug and powerful), here are two others that I love. They might seem odd since they're taken out of context.

"I sip my coffee. I look at the mountain, which is still doing its tricks, as you look at a still-beautiful face belonging to a person who was once your lover in another country years ago: with fond nostalgia, and recognition, but no real feelings save a secret astonishment that you are now strangers. Thanks. For the memories. It is ironic that the one thing that all religions recognize as separating us from our creator--our very self-consciousness--is also the one thing that divides us from our fellow creatures. It was a bitter birthday present from evolution, cutting us off at both ends. [80]

"All the green in the planted world consists of these whole, rounded chloroplasts wending their ways in water. If you analyze a molecule of chlorophyll itself, what you get is one hundred thirty-six atoms of hydrogen, carbon, oxygen, and nitrogen arranged in an exact and complex relationship around a central ring. At the ring's center is a single atom of magnesium. Now: If you remove the atom of magnesium and in its exact place put an atom of iron, you get a molecule of hemoglobin. The iron atom combines with all the other atoms to make red blood, the streaming red dots in the goldfish's tail. [128]