Thursday, August 31, 2006

Walking along in the Powell Street BART station this morning, I was walking along a series of ads that said, "Skinny Black Pants" and showed the same, looking great on great looking women.

Skinny black pants with a bulky sweater on top. Skinny black pants with a skimpy white top. Skinny black pants with a long white blouse and shorter black leather jacket. On and on. Black and white photos which stand out in a mega-color time.

It's working. I'm feeling, "I don't know what the question is but skinny black pants are the answer."

Fortunately, I have no money so I can't march up to the GAP store right there by the Powell Street Station and experience what these skinny black pants would look like in color and 3-d on me instead of on hipless wonder models.

I am an enhipped wonder and there for a while my appropriately loose pants are feeling shamefully baggy.

I come up out of the BART station and the trance and remember that I haven't seen fabulous skinny black pants. I've seen fabulous advertising photographs.

Once I met a woman at a party job was doing model's hair on advertising shoots. She told me that she felt that being part of the process of making shoddy clothes look good was evil. (She wasn't talking GAP, but several cuts below.) I wouldn't have thought of hair combing in the context as being evil. I was passing out some peacenik thing I'd written at the party. I think she told me, confessed, because I was presenting myself as a moral human being. Maybe also because I presented myself as someone who doesn't think a lot about clothes.

Combing hair as part of a lie. Evil? Could be.

For one thing she could have been doing something she liked more. It wouldn't take much for her to like what she did more than she was liking her current gig -- which paid well, I guess.

Noam Chomskey talks about manufacturing consent, a phrase coined by one of the inventors of public relations.

He says in the US you have eighty per cent of the people who have to be fooled for things to continue as they are, the very top people who decide, and the 20 per cent, 19 per cent, whatever, whose job it is to manufacture consent. To sell the 80 per cent that all this is a good idea, and that new wrinkles on all this, new wars, new people to be scared of, is all a job idea.

I'm clearly in the twenty per cent, good with words. In olden days when the guys who ran things, or thought they did, looked at me, they saw someone young enough to be their daughter who was, they thought, smart enough to understand what they were saying.

They assumed I was interested in what they were saying. Chuckle. No so humble opinion--I was too smart to be interested in what they were saying.

I'm interested in what is actually going on, which is hard to figure out. Listening to guys twenty years older than me talk and talk has rarely been helpful in figuring out what's going on because they don't want to know. Thing one that's going on is they aren't as important as they'd like to be--it's a big world, and getting bigger and more potentially democratic.

Skinny black pants can be pretty good. Loose beige pants like I'm wearing now can be pretty good. Whatever the question is, skinny loose black beige pants or not the answer.

Once women didn't have so very much time to think about what is the question? what should the set-up be? because they were busy taking care of kids and often died in childbirth young, or what would now be considered young.

Now some of us have more time, more space than that. Having fun is good. Having a big mind is good. Getting away from the ads and noticing--what does you body think is the question? What does you mind think is the question? Your soul? Your heart?

Early days in personal computers, Teresa Carpenter wrote a story about a computer program that let a person talk to themselves and find out what they deeply knew.

In its first editon, it was called the prayer program. A person talking to themselves and God about what was best.

The creator tweaked it a little, and called it the hunch program for men and the intuition program for women

What do you know?