The Old School Lunch

The day I moved in, about 5 other folks did. That day, I found 6 or so wireless signals all locked up. The only service you can get here is Comcast which, from what i’ve read, isn’t such a great company. It would’ve been pretty expensive to sign up for their internet unless I wanted to get the voice and cable package, both of which I don’t need. I thought I was out of luck. I tried looking into wireless cards and such but those are just as expensive. Then (this is where it begins to sound like an infomercial) a friend turned me on to ClearWire which is just about the easiest thing to set up. Supposedly my max speed is 1.5 mps which I thought was going to be ok. Then my other friend with Comcast says he gets 15 on average. Oh well. I really didn’t want to line the pockets of Comcast and i’m glad I found an alternative, a slower one it may be.

So I moved into The New Place and am getting settled. It’s just me which means no sharing of costs so things are costing some but this is what I signed up for. There’s a nice restaurant right next door with a nice view and the parking has been great so I can’t complain.

There are two parks nearby, one with a trail/picnic area and another with tennis courts. It should make for a good summer combined with my latest effort to actually sit down and try and get into school.

If you’re in the neighborhood, do drop on by.

Saturday at long last i’ll be moving down to Seattle and I imagine starting tomorrow i’ll be offline for a while unless I can leech a signal from a neighbor. And I cancelled the SK data package so no emails either. Pretty much just the phone.

I’ll write about the moving process and going to different apartments and meeting shady characters later. One story involves a landlord telling me: “you can cook with your wok on the stove!”

In two words, he’s right.

Other Black athletes have been saying this to varying degrees but none of them have been the darling of the public eye like Griffey. When hot-heads like Sheffield and Milton Bradley say it, people just think they’re batshit crazy. It’s like if Carmelo Anthony started talking about racism in the NBA. Nobody believes you unless you have a spotless record. And while Griffey has had his moments, for most people he’s still The Kid. Maybe it’ll get people to start talking. Will it affect change? I doubt it. We did see, after all, the Houston Astros trot out in #42s while having no Black players on their squad. Which makes the Oakland A’s seem like the UN.

Close to home there is a coffee stand, station, hut, whatever you call it across the street from a gas station and next to some car window retailer. The coffee joint is called “Bikini Hut” and it brags that the women, err, “girls” in there are wearing bikinis. Baristas in bikinis, basically. I get gas at the local station and I always see a parade of trucks and stereotypically macho beat up cars driving up to the window. I thought the embarrassment of actually going to a place that advertises that their female workers are working in two-pieces would be enough but apparently not for these gentlemen. I got a glimpse of one of the women working there and she looked like she was in high school. And judging by the time of day, she probably was in high school. And to skeptics, when I was in high school I remember a classmate who was a senior working at Hooters so yes, those places are staffed by people that still have to have their parents’ permission when missing school. Now people tell me I look like i’m in high school but the point is that you have a place of business where you pay for coffee and slobbering all over some woman with your eyes. I wonder if the women working there, when nobody’s at the window, cover up and wear a bathrobe only to take it off when a customer drives in. If you think about it that way, it is very literally, like a coin-operated strip club. Except with this you get something to drink.

As I was telling my co-worker this, she, from Chile, tells me that there is a place there called “Coffee and Legs” where women are dressed in a similar manner. She said that originally the owner only hired stereotypically attractive women and made them wear shorter and shorter skirts to promote the “image” of the restaurant. As time went on, they wore less and less and it didn’t hide what it was selling.

I know we have our Hooters, our Cowgirls Inc. bars (a local bar that, after the success of the film Coyote Ugly, hired women to not wear a whole lot and do choreographed dances on the bar tables) and our “Daisy Dukes” restaurants but seriously, is this getting even worse? Proponents of these places say that they’re safe and harmless because everyone knows these are for “adults” (read: men) and that it’s Ok to have certain things that are for adults only. Critics of these types of places usually talk about having a “family friendly” place to which the proponents again say “I already told you, we aren’t trying to bring in the Johnson Family here, go eat at the Olive Garden.” And while i’d agree that there are some places that are and should be kept “adult only” like bars and upscale restaurants for obvious reasons, the existence of these invading the space of restaurants and other services under the guise of being “just a nice smile to look at as you get your coffee” is just bullshit. If you want to look at a naked woman or a near naked woman, go to a strip club (and the issues there with sex-work and strip clubs is an entire different issue which I won’t get into here). The idea that this type hiring and business practice is in any way acceptable in our society I think indicates just how used to the idea we are of associating women’s bodies and viewing women’s bodies with commodity, with sale and consumption hinged on the almighty dollar (and tip money, as tip money places the buyer in a position of authority over the worker, the “performer” in that sense).

My cousin works at a Barista at the giant coffee corporation. Most people would say she’s an attractive person and as such, she tells me “I always have the most in tips” while her male co-workers do not get much. Now, unlike the Bikini Hut, she actually keeps her clothes on and she has no interaction with the customer beyond saying the name of the drink and then handing it to them. The point is that she’s good looking so she gets tips from dudes that think tipping her more than they usually would (if at all) is going to get them a date or impress her. She does her job and her getting more tip money by virtue of people taking an eye to her is a comment on how we reward beauty with money and attention. She isn’t, however, put into a position by her workplace to blatantly use her body and herself to get more in tips and to attract customers. Are there some who would go out of their way to buy a coffee at the place my cousin works at? I’m sure it’s happened. But unlike the Bikini Hut (where, let’s be real, you’re only going there to look at a woman), she is second fiddle to the company and the product, not the other way around.

She said there was no love in her heart,
Cause one day a rapist attacked her and broke that all apart,
She said there was no way to fix it or to cover her scars,
Then one day a guy came along and probably could help her start,
He was sincere, made her believe it was safe, for her to trust again,
Before long she was cool with giving hugs to him,
Knew that it was right, cause something was wrong,
The alarms in her mind didn’t tell her he didn’t belong,
There was no..

This is the first, I don’t know what you call it, stanza or something from Lupe Fiasco’s song “Intruder Alert” on his sophomore album, The Cool. I’ve listened to the whole song (and if you listen to it, the entire song is not about the above story) and i’m still not sure how I feel. It seems like women song-writers and artists talk about domestic violence and even sexual assault from time to time but you almost never hear a man go into that area. Even if this comes off as lacking some sort of authenticity, I think it’s pretty consistent to his general style of music writing. Whether he’s successful in getting his point across, is up to you. In his debut album, he talked about sex-workers, white supremacists, drug dealers and tries to get the listener to sympathize with everyone on some level. In any case, I guess it takes some guts for him to write these kinds of lyrics, include these kinds of stories on such a popular album.

Is like this.

I like Mahalo Daily and though I haven’t been watching as regularly (if you can’t tell as this episode is a bit old) I like what they cover. Veronica Belmont wont be at the helm and if this guy’s turn at the mic is any indication, it doesn’t look good.

If you don’t watch the video, i’ll summarize his douchebaggery. He’s at the Wizard World convention and he walks around interviewing folks, making jokes, etc about comic books and the like. Now if there’s one thing about comic books that’s similar to the world of video/computer games, it’s the idea that women and girls, you know, don’t belong. The story goes that women don’t read comic books nor they do write, draw or play any part in the creative process. This jackass does a good job of reinforcing that in his casual sort of way by first remarking how there are no women or girls there and when he finally stumbles upon one, he jokes that she must be lost and instead was probably looking to go to the Staples center. To cheerlead or watch the basketball game right?

Though it’s a short clip, he then manages to find some woman in a bikini so he can offer her his robe and ask if she’s cold. And that’s it. I guess I should be happy that he didn’t hound some woman there and ask her all sorts of questions about “what’s it like to be a woman comic book reader?” but maybe they just left that on the cutting room floor.

[I wrote this originally as a “test piece” for a blogging job I applied for. It’s been a while and I haven’t heard back so I’m guessing they didn’t like it. Which, with hindsight, shouldn’t be surprising because as I take a lot of shots on a so-called “progressive” cause and their blog is meant to be, in all ways, “progressive.” Anyways, here it is because writing about those 8 teens beating up that one girl is just too much to write right now.]

If there are two things that generate mass numbers of page-views and trackbacks on the internet, it’s naked women and, well, naked women using their bodies as a form of protest. A recent New York Times article on a vegan strip club in Oregon suggests that the performers there are indeed protesting against animal cruelty and promoting a vegan (or vegetarian) lifestyle (only vegetarian food is served to the largely male patrons and the performers are asked to abandon their leather chaps and feather scarves).

As their owner, Johnny Diablo, told the times, “My sole purpose in this universe is to save every possible creature from pain and suffering.” Except Diablo, shockingly enough, isn’t the one naked and dancing for singles at Casa Diablo’s Gentlemen’s Club which also happens to not be doing so well in business.

So instead of just flat out paying to objectify a woman, you can now pay to gawk at a woman while scarfing a meatless snack and knowing that she’s wearing (or not wearing) only 100% pure cotton.

But for what the vegan strip club doesn’t attract in business, it pushes the public conversation (or at least the Oregon conversation) yet again to what animal rights groups like PETA have made famous for so long. When it comes to drawing attention to animal abuse or promoting a vegan or vegetarian diet, naked female bodies draw attention and apparently it’s worth the price admission. And by “admission” I mean putting to reality the Penthouse’s idea of women.

Take, for instance, some of the most “dugg” Digg.com links regarding anything “PETA.” It should be no shock that pages like “Eva Mendez Nude PETA Campaign ad, WOW!” garner massive hits while a general image search on Google for “PETA” would have you thinking that you accidentally typed in “Playboy.”

You could say the way PETA advertises it’s message is “unusual” or even “controversial” but then again, is it? The formula: Strip women naked or nearly naked, have them parade around or sometimes sit in cages (like the animals they say are suffering) to attract attention. Sound familiar? It should. After all, it’s the male-dominated mass marketing of everything from alcohol to TV shows and popular “horror” films that wrote the book on how to use women’s bodies and the image of women in pain or captivity to sell, sell, sell.

But wait, don’t PETA’s ads also feature naked men? And don’t they also advertise in other ways? Yes, but if the debacle that is naked sushi taught us anything, it’s that having a few naked men getting spicy tuna rolls plucked off their bodies doesn’t exactly make it less degrading that so called “naked sushi models” are almost exclusively women. In other words, in the context of our culture which objectifies women like one’s salary depends on it, having men involved (sushi), trying to recruit men for the cause (general vegetarianism or veganism) or getting men to notice that the women baring it all are beautiful despite what Hollywood says (Suicide Girls), isn’t enough. And as anyone who has promoted any sort of event on any college campus will tell you, if you’re getting most attention from a bullhorn and loud music at the local square, your handing out of flyers at the southeast wing of the Sciences library doesn’t make the bullhorn (and music) any less irritating.

And until animals rights activists drop the act and not their clothes, the conversation will, unfortunately, continue to be largely about how Eva Mendes posed nude (WOW!) and not about how Eva Mendes is speaking out against cruelty to animals.