My essay, “Dead Seas: The Psychogeography of Southern California,” appears in the new Cabinet. This is the latest in a series of essays I’ve been writing about growing up in the San Diegan suburb of Chula Vista, in the late ’60s and ’70s.
Recently, while submitting to the fond attentions of a dental surgeon, I found myself musing idly, in an opiated haze, about the symbolic weight of teeth—musings disturbed only by the surgeon’s resolute yanking on the offending tooth, a yanking that came to me only distantly, as a not entirely unpleasant tugging, punctuated by the occasional squeak, reminiscent of the sound of a nail being pried out of a floorboard. Maybe it was the Novocain, but I found myself wondering if the widespread fear of dentists is at least in part a subconscious, perhaps even archetypal, fear of teeth, or if that’s just the perspective of someone whose dental history is written in anxiety and agony (and all the requisite drama-queen hysterics that go with them).
Why blog? First problem: the word, second only to org in its mortifying dorkiness. (Speaking of which, isn’t an “org” one of those seafaring enclaves formerly headed by Scientology founder L. Ron Hubbard, who hightailed it to the high seas “to continue his research into the upper levels of spiritual awareness and ability,” far from […]
Technopagans! Brain-jackers! Amok robots! An African-American cleaning woman reincarnated as an all-powerful cyborg! Before Wired, before the Web, there was Flame Wars, the mind-ripping anthology of essays on digital culture that launched the discourses of Afro-Futurism, cyberfeminism, and cybersex studies.