Marijuana Advocates Point to Signs of Change

from:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/20/us/20marijuana.html?em

What's the Catch?

the catch means:

"i'm going i'm going
...

"oh there's a catch- like if something gets caught on your clothes and snags you."


OR

"If you're running the bases in baseball, and you're going until... they catch the ball. Then, it doesn't matter how fast or long you ran, cause there's the catch--Yoooooou're OUT!"

Common Sense-ational & Re-[a]v[o/e]al[u]-ational

2009: Our Time for Soulshine

Practicing Truth
A Transparency of Me
Illuminating What Reflection We See
The Royal Nous
Star Light Star Bright
Every Star is Ours
if We Be Us How we Feel Right
Lets Wish Together So Our Dreams Follow the stars,
following us, into the Night
and it's true...
We know we:
DUH
We=Me+You
2--> Infinity and Beyond
Weeeee Heeeee Heeeee

2009: Time to Shine

Wait for it...
the chance to be
HUGE
We asked to see how
Now we're here in the now

* * *

I believe in Honesty
Practice TRUTH!
Starlight Star Bright
For All the Stars that Light our hearts Soulshines Bright
I wish I May I Wish I Might Give and Find What You guys have and Deserve Now and Forever, so soul bright

a new wave for feminism...By the bye

[post script, postmodern]/
[contemporary critical realization]


once upon a time someone started a wave

"HELLO!!"

she said

"I AM WOMAN!!!"

The tides turned,

The skies opened,

and from the heavens,

Hell broke loose!



Simone de Beauvoir raised her hand.

bell hooks raised her voice.



Then came the 2nd wave.

"I"

and

"I"

and

"I"

and

"I"

"want " "want" "want" "want"

"to be me,"

said she,
and she,
and she.

"My body is my temple."

"Embodied, I am free to be me."

"And now that I can know,

You will-

Because I will you to the knowledge of all our embodied beauties,

Our Femininities."

"We will inscribe ourselves upon your pasts and your presents and we will be gifts you desire in your futures.
In your wildest fantasies and of course:
in your nightly- and day-dreams."

"We are all your queens."

The Kingdom of Patriarchy
bows at the feet of those who lead the March
of this
Subversive
Disciplinary
Regime

overwhelmed and under the radar

want
to tell everyone everything
can't say enough
or
anything
to anyone

Europeanizing Spaces: Proposing I can Save Face?

Research Question: Why will I Publish this here? Whose Opinions Matter to me? Why do I Always Duck Out to Save Face (Goffman...):
A Glimpse at my latest PhD. Proposal designed specifically for the ASCA/ICH Europeanizing Spaces Project:

08-3025 Europeanizing Spaces Project Proposal
Broad Questions Organizing this Project:

•  When does the public turn to the media for knowledge and truth through visual images or textual representations of events that are constructed as social realities?
•  How is the public informed about current social issues within their own society and how is a source deemed reliable?
•  Who is responsible for/ accountable to [or capable of] determining what is included in the narratives that are told in specific representations and how do these become incorporated (or conflict) with other social myths or larger narratives that construct conceptualizations of the broader social world?
•  How do certain individuals or groups become situated within a network of unequal power relations that is organized by the truths that are produced by dominant discourses that have authority over and through the knowledge they construct?

Introduction to Space Study 1
Throughout Amsterdam, the exposed body is frequently visible in various displays and styles. In a stroll along the canals that form the heart of Holland’s capital city, one is confronted with numerous displays of the human form. Tourists, who typically travel to central Amsterdam for only a few days, often describe the city as imbued with sex. On the other hand, Amsterdammers are not so intrigued by the displays of erotica, pornography and the sex workers that stick in “outsiders’” minds. The divergent experiences of the human body, as it is visually connoted in Amsterdam’s social environment, speaks to a stark contrast in how social actors from the outside, and those from the inside, Amsterdam’s natives, differ drastically in their a priori “common senses,” which inform their subjective practices of observing, interpreting, reproducing and interacting with this social world and its social reality.

Representations that Construct the “Tourists’ Gaze”…
or is there more that everyone has missed?

This project begins with representations, images and texts used in constructing “outsiders’” conceptualizations of Amsterdam’s culture of sexuality. It begins from John Urry’s widely deployed notion of the “tourists’ gaze” which is somewhat ironic and almost cynical, in this space that is public, yet seems shrouded in stigmas and requisite anonymity. Furthermore, as Urry explained in reference to the globalization and movement throughout transitional boundaries that spatially organize Europe, the identities in a city will change as the inevitable result of the images that are constructed for tourists. This project begins by addressing the signs and symbols that have become attached to specific images that have solidified a representation of Amsterdam in narratives and have certainly provided images of the Red Light District that are part and parcel of Amsterdam tourists’ quintessential gaze.
The goal, thereafter, is to abstract and isolate the ideological components that are overt in these constructed representations and those that may be less explicit- or may prove unintentional- within these narratives. Advertisements created for tourists reveal a Red Light District that might seem virtually removed from the viewers’ senses of reality. At the same time, however, it will appear at the tips of their fingers- within their reach-at least conceptually through recognition, and, tangibly, in the enticing message that draws potential visitors to the city with myths of exotic, erotic or forbidden delights that exist within this alternate reality. As such, the images welcome an array of generalizations and assumptions that are intended in the specific constructions of the “gazes” to seek in the Red Light District.

•  What happens with the closing of 1/3 of the windows and the stricter policies?
•  Will the institutionalized ideologies begin to surface, as their subversion is no longer needed?
•  Will the tourists’ gaze shift upon new images that will emerge in the city’s media make over?
•  Will the World outside of Amsterdam receive the current update on the changes that have forced some women out of work so that other people could shop or live in nicer apartments with nicer clothing, perhaps?
•  Will the sex workers express resistance the changes and challenge the dominant ideological enforcement that is re-defining the boundaries and meanings around the spaces that were once specifically for the sex workers and their industry?

Space Study 2: Observing Institutionalized Ideological Conditioning Embodied in Everyday Social Practices

Once knowledge can be analyzed in terms of region, domain, implantation, displacement, transposition, one is able to capture the process by which knowledge functions as a form of power which disseminates the effects of power. There is an administration of knowledge, a politics of knowledge, relations of power which pass via knowledge and which, if one tries to transcribe them, lead one to consider forms of domination designated by such notions of field, region and territory (Foucault, 1976)

This case study will ultimately strive towards legitimating a claim about the collective socialization that can be deduced through observing performed patterns of behaviors that have become structured within the institutionalized environment of Amsterdam’s fitness clubs. The focus is on a specific set of “interaction rituals” that are observable within the distinct kinds of practices that can be identified in the normal routines occurring in the naked spaces within this environment. The goal throughout the observations will be to rewrite a narrative from a perspective within the context that is being described, while simultaneously a maintaining a distance that allows for observations that concern practices that Amsterdammers consider ‘natural.’ The observations will be conducted from a perspective that is between the “outsiders’” gaze and the natives self-evident rituals, which will allow for a recognition of the detailed performances which might be indices of ideological conditioning and vertices of institutionalization that are internalized within the social body and individuals’ everyday practices (Goffman, 1959).

The fitness club is a social environment where individuals are able to focus on their corporeal- or natural selves. At the same time, this context is unique in presenting the naked body as completely devoid of any sexual connotations. This has become self-evident in practice, so that individuals who are frequently in close contact while unclothed are sometimes- in a certain kind of ‘naked space’- expected to engage in casual conversation. Research will address the boundaries that define gendered and un-gendered spaces within the institutional environment. Gender and sexuality are expected to emerge, ideologically linked through codes that condition members to understand that, naturally, men and women will not converse when their bodies are exposed.

Ultimately, the aim will be to ascertain the ideological underpinnings beneath the institutionalization of these codes of conduct. Through critically questioning the normative processes of socialization that fitness club members take for granted, the analytical goal is to reveal a new narrative that describes the process through which institutions and then individuals become the vehicles through which dominant hegemonic ideologies are enforced, self-sustaining and self-perpetuating and then question what this reveals. In other words, to what or whom does Amsterdam owe this neo-conservative institutionalism that appears in policy, in the Red Light District, and in normative practices, at the level of collective consciousness. Could the answer be found in a consistent ideology that can be elucidated in a time of historical institutionalism?