:: heartattackmachine ::

:: Tuesday, November 26, 2002 ::

john left on an aeroplane this morning and all he left me was a burned copy of bright eyes' last album. (kidding about the second independent clause)
I find myself bored, a little sad, and restless. maybe, I could slip down to camco for some orange dry, but maybe I'll just wait until my mom provides me with nourishment.

:: judy nguyen 2:47 PM [+] ::
...

well, I know I've changed it, but I still want you to see what it said:

wake up the dying, don't wake up the dead, change what you're saying, don't change what you said (the eels)

:: judy nguyen 3:59 PM [+] ::
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did a good deed today and helped a pigeon out of the davis sq. t. however, it turned out that there was no film in my camera. doh.

:: judy nguyen 12:09 PM [+] ::
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something I wrote this morning:

when I think of advice my mother tried to instill in us as children, I don't know if it is the fault of my own memory (I've consulted with siblings whose childhood memories now apparently are vaguer than my own) or if didacticism simply wasn't within her nature. the fact of the matter is I can only remember her warning me of the fragile and tortured complexes of barren women: "child, those unfortuanate souls, though not evil incarnate, are capable of very strange things. the trouble of their bad luck is a force to be reckoned with."
perhaps it was because we never heard any horror stories about old ms. fine kidnapping neighborhood children and chaining them to the radiator that my mother's warning never made much sense. at least not until mona's third miscarriage.
when on the phone with my mother, who herself had given birth to and raised three children with none of the complications my wife attempted to endure, she would fall silent with what I imagined a slow shaking of her head when conversation inevitably turned to mona.
"does she love you?"
"I think so."
"do you love her?"
"I'm sure."
"Then maybe that's enough."
I knew it only took me a little longer before I could see the beginning of the end.

:: judy nguyen 2:55 PM [+] ::
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I'm not entirely sure if I'm really someone who uses that word totally that often. though maybe I should.

:: judy nguyen 7:42 PM [+] ::
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turns out...

...that my leto photo likely didn't come out. bleh, should be more careful about these types of things. oh, and if it did, my flash was set to 1000 iso. blah.
...the threading on my lens is busted. I now know what to tell mommy and daddy what to get their darling (right) for christmas when they ask.
...keith has a livejournal and that he's far cooler than I ever remember taking him for granted for. kind of makes me want to get in his pants though john is way mine.
...professor yeager is one of those crazy bleeding heart liberals that still yet refuse to look at the underlying, really vicious circles of cause and effect of society. but I guess I probably should have at least known that when he had that totally didactic speaker come in who almost made me feel completely guilty for not signing up for his organization. geez. maybe earlier than that even.
...shel silverstein is probably the heaviest influence on my writing and that he was totally killer and that it totally sucked when he died.
...there's something like trivial pursuit:the last 20 years and I totally want that. totally.

:: judy nguyen 7:41 PM [+] ::
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in a fairly uninteresting chain of events, today I met once-teen-heartthrob jared leto. I wonder if his nonplussed, jaded attitude is common to has-beens and perhaps never-mores or if it was a fixture even in the heyday of my so-called life.
however looking at imdb.com, that jared hasn't been faring too badly lately. possibly a better time than with ms. danes.

:: judy nguyen 3:46 PM [+] ::
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"how robin would have loved this!" the aunts used to say fondly. "how robin would've laughed!" in truth, robin had been a giddy, fickle child--somber at odd moments, practically hysterical at others--and, in life, this unpredicatability had been a great part of his charm. but his younger sisters, who had never in any proper sense known him at all, nonetheless grew up certain of their dead brother's favorite color (red); his favorite book (the wind in the willows) and his favorite character in it (mr. toad); his favorite flavor of ice cream (chocolate) and his favorite baseball team (the cardinals) and a thousand other things which they--being living children, and preferring chocolate ice cream one week and peach the next--were not ever sure they knew about themselves. consequently their relationship with their dead brother wa of the most intimate sort, his strong, bright, immutable character shining changelessly against the vagueness and vacillation of their own characters, and the characters of people that they knew; and they grew up believing that this was due to some rare, angelic incandescence of nature on robin's part, and not at all to the fact that he was dead. (the little friend, tartt)

:: judy nguyen 8:52 AM [+] ::
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john's party last night was cool.
because it was an hour drive home and he didn't exactly want to stay at work until nine or ten, steve, whose fledgling band john was a member of for some of the summer, arrived early. eventually having warmed up to him, I lost track of things once kama arrived (milcah's guests [a staggering majority of the overall], with little fuss, filed up the stairs), and it really wasn't until dave arrived before I settled in again.
for john, I felt a blend of distance and desire. or was it desire with clouds of distance? it was little I could do to drag him out of there and have him to my own. I don't think I've before felt that way so pointedly. hmm. hesitant and a little intimidated, I bowed out of a lot of socializing with this strange, new group of people.
I felt oddly and distinctly attracted to one of the first few of milcah's friends that arrived. it wasn't until later that this tom and his friends moved downstairs. it was a very weird feeling, one of the very few times where I've ever so overtly flirted with anyone in my life. I tried to maintain the role of girlfriend of the host, and I think I was substantially sucessful. my feelings of thrill and dirtiness were inextricable. though john denies this, I find it difficult to believe that he didn't notice.
almost all of john's guests were related in one way or another to hbs. they all really did seem pleasant enough, but kat, I think, was the only one that really reminded me of the close friends of his that I have met. I mentioned this to him, and he said that she was difficult to get to committing to hanging out. I suggested that her invitation that she should hang out with us both at some point could be an excuse.
ian and mari were at the party for a little while, though john was convinced that they would not come. our collective opinion of them is waning.
though I did drink considerably more than I ever do, I'm in a pretty good state this morning and I didn't even moan and groan myself out of bed that much either. I finished the box man earlier this morning (nico, if you read this, tell ryan that woman of the dune was missing from the bookstore I frequent), and I've begun to read tartt's the little friend. I'm only a few pages in, but the little I gathered from there and then rereading the jacket summary is harrowing.

:: judy nguyen 8:04 AM [+] ::
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she got hers, but tonight, he'll get his:
fish, birds, animals--all engage in strange courtship rituals before mating. according to specialists, it's apparently a modified form of attack and threat. all living things have their individual level of influence, and they demonstrate an instinctive reaction in attacking any encroaching invader. but mating would never come about if you based yourself on the single principle of attack no matter what. since coupling is the contact of epiderms, it will never take place unless somewhere the boundary lines are broken or some door is opened. therefore, in mating, by a modified movement or gesture that at first glance resembles attack but that somehow is different, a technique is born by which the protective instinct of the other party is scrambled or made to relax. it's the same for humans. we talk about romance, but this is after all merely aggressive instinct camouflaged with makeup and feathers. whichever it is, it doesn't change the fact that the ultimate purpose lies in breaking down and disregarding the lines of demarcation of a given area. from my own experience the line in the case of humans seems to be located at a radius about two and a half yards. courting is good, making the other part hesitate with sparkling beads and all that is good; anyway when you get through that line of demarcation you have already taken possession. at this very close proximity it is difficult rather than easy, as one would expect, to distinguish the true character of the enemy. only touch and smell are of use. (kobo abe, the box man)

:: judy nguyen 12:15 PM [+] ::
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looking for how to write utopia in greek. cuz I plan on getting inked again next weekend.

:: judy nguyen 12:06 PM [+] ::
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well, yeah, now I'm completely convinced I can't be a lawyer. and if I was before, now I know what to say why.

:: judy nguyen 12:04 PM [+] ::
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a little raving marxist (not really) name dan feder sent me this:
This War Brought to You by Rendon Group By Ian Urbina
Asia Times Online
WASHINGTON, Nov 12, 2002 -- "Word got around the department that I was a good Arabic translator who did a great Saddam imitation," recalls the Harvard grad student. "Eventually, someone phoned me, asking if I wanted to help change the course of Iraq policy."
So twice a week, for US$3,000 a month, the Iraqi student says, under condition of anonymity, that he took a taxi from his campus apartment to a Boston-area recording studio rented by the Rendon Group, a DC-based public relations firm with close ties to the US government. His job: translate and dub spoofed Saddam Hussein speeches and tongue-in-cheek newscasts for broadcast throughout Iraq.
"I never got a straight answer on whether the Iraqi resistance, the CIA or policy makers on the Hill were actually the ones calling the shots," says the student, "but ultimately I realized that the guys doing spin were very well and completely cut loose." And that's how Baghdad's best-known opposition radio personality was born six years ago - during the Clinton administration. It was one of many disinformation schemes cooked up by the Rendon Group, which has worked for both Democratic and Republican administrations fighting the psy-op war in the Middle East.
"The point was to discredit Saddam, but the stuff was complete slapstick," the student says. "We did skits where Saddam would get mixed up in his own lies, or where [Saddam's son] Qusay would stumble over his own delusions of grandeur." Transmissions were once a week from stations in northern Iraq and Kuwait. "The only thing that was even remotely funny," says the student, "were the mockeries of the royal guard and the government's clumsy attempts to deceive arms inspectors."
The Saddam impersonator says he left Rendon not long ago out of frustration with what he calls the lack of expertise and oversight in the project. It was doubly frustrating, he says, because he despises Saddam, although he adds that he never has been involved with any political party or opposition group. "No one in-house spoke a word of Arabic," he says. "They thought I was mocking Saddam, but for all they knew I could have been lambasting the US government." The scripts, he adds, were often ill conceived. "Who in Iraq is going to think it's funny to poke fun at Saddam's mustache," the student notes, "when the vast majority of Iraqi men themselves have mustaches?"
There were other basic problems, too. Some of the announcers hired for the radio broadcasts, he says, were Egyptians and Jordanians, whose Arabic accents couldn't be understood by Iraqis. "Friends in Baghdad said that the radio broadcasts were a complete mumble," the student says. One CIA agent familiar with the project calls the project's problem a lack of "due diligence", and adds that "the scripts were put together by 23-year-olds with connections to the Democratic National Committee."
Despite the fumbling naivete of some of its operations, the Rendon Group is no novice in the field. For decades, when US bombs have dropped or foreign leaders have been felled, the public relations shop has been on the scene, just far enough to stay out of harm's way, but just close enough to keep the spin cycle going.
As Franklin Foer reported in the New Republic, during the campaign against Panama's Manuel Noriega in 1989, Rendon's command post sat downtown in a high-rise. In 1991, during the Gulf War, Rendon operatives hunkered down in Taif, Saudi Arabia, clocking billable hours on a Kuwaiti emir's dole. In Afghanistan, group founder John Rendon joined a 9:30am conference call every morning with top-level Pentagon officials to set the day's war message. Rendon operatives haven't missed a trip yet - Haiti, Kosovo, Zimbabwe, Colombia.
The firm is tight-lipped, however, about its current projects. A spokesperson refuses to say whether Rendon is doing any work in preparation for the potential upcoming invasion of Iraq. But a current Rendon Arabic translator commented, "All I can say is that nothing has changed - the work is still an expensive waste of time, mostly with taxpayer funds." However, Rendon may just prove to be one step ahead of the game. If Saddam is toppled, a Rendon creation is standing by to try to take his place. The Iraqi National Congress (INC), a disparate coalition of Iraqi dissidents touted by the US government as the best hope for an anti-Saddam coup, has gotten the go-ahead from US officials to arm and train a military force for invasion. The INC is one of the few names you'll hear if reporters bother to press government officials on what would come after Saddam.
At the helm of the INC is Ahmed Chalabi, a US-trained mathematician who fled from Jordan in 1989 in the trunk of a car after the collapse of a bank he owned. He was subsequently charged and sentenced in absentia to 22 years in prison for embezzlement. Back home in Iraq, he's referred to by some as the so-called limousine insurgent and is said to hold little actual standing with the Iraqi public. Shuttling between London and DC, Chalabi hasn't been in Iraq for over years, and draws "more support on the Potomac than the Euphrates," says Iraq specialist Andrew Parasiliti of the Middle East Institute in Washington DC.
"Were it not for Rendon," a State Department official remarked, "the Chalabi group wouldn't even be on the map."
With funding first from the CIA throughout the 1990s and more recently the Pentagon, Rendon managed the INC's every move, an INC spokesperson acknowledges, even choosing its name, coordinating its annual strategy conferences, and orchestrating its meetings with diplomatic heavy hitters, such as James Baker and Brent Scowcroft. Not that the Rendon Group was the first purveyor of psy-op tactics for promoting US foreign policy in the region. In fact, some of the most impressive spin maneuvers and disinformation campaigns occurred during the Gulf War in 1991, the lessons of which are particularly pertinent as the US again gears up.
Most notorious was the work of PR giant Hill & Knowlton (H&K) (for which current Pentagon spokesperson Torie Clarke worked after she was an aide to John McCain and Bush's dad). Subsidized by the Kuwaiti royal family, H&K dedicated 119 executives in 12 offices across the country to the job of drumming up support within the United States for the 1991 war. It was an all-out grassroots blitz: distributing tens of thousands of "Free Kuwait" T-shirts and bumper stickers at colleges across the US and setting up observances such as National Kuwait Day and National Student Information Day. H&K also mailed 200,000 copies of a book titled The Rape of Kuwait to American troops stationed in the Middle East. The firm also massaged reporters, arranging interviews with handpicked Kuwaiti emissaries and dispatching reams of footage of burning wells and oil-slicked birds washed ashore.
But nothing quite compared to H&K's now infamous "baby atrocities" campaign. After convening a number of focus groups to try to figure out which buttons to press to make the public respond, H&K determined that presentations involving the mistreatment of infants, a tactic drawn straight from W R Hearst's playbook of the Spanish-American War, received the best reaction.
So on October 10, 1990, the Congressional Human Rights Caucus held a hearing on Capitol Hill at which H&K, in coordination with California Democrat Tom Lantos and Illinois Republican John Porter, introduced a 15-year-old Kuwaiti girl named Nayirah. (Purportedly to safeguard against Iraqi reprisals, Nayirah's full name was not disclosed.) Weeping and shaking, the girl described a horrifying scene in Kuwait City. "I volunteered at the al-Addan hospital," she testified. "While I was there I saw the Iraqi soldiers come into the hospital with guns and go into the room where babies were in incubators. They took the babies out of the incubators, took the incubators, and left the babies on the cold floor to die." Allegedly, 312 infants were removed.
The tale got wide circulation, even winding up on the floor of the United Nations Security Council. Before Congress gave the green light to go to war, seven of the main pro-war senators brought up the baby-incubator allegations as a major component of their argument for passing the resolution to unleash the bombers. Ultimately, the motion for war passed by a narrow five-vote margin.
Only later was it discovered that the testimony was untrue. H&K had failed to reveal that Nayirah was not only a member of the Kuwaiti royal family, but also that her father, Saud Nasir al-Sabah, was Kuwait's ambassador to the US. H&K had prepped Nayirah in her presentation, according to Harper's publisher John R MacArthur, in his book Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War. Of the seven other witnesses who stepped to the podium that day, five had been prepped by H&K and had used false names. When human rights organizations investigated later, they could not find that Nayirah had any connection to the hospital. Amnesty International, among those originally duped, eventually issued an embarrassing retraction.
When asked if it acknowledges the incubator story as a deception, H&K's media liaison, Suzanne Laurita, only responded: "The company has nothing to say on this matter." Pushed further on whether such deception was considered part of the public relations industry, she reiterated, "Please know again that this falls into the realm that the agency has no wish to confirm, deny or comment on." Years later, Scowcroft, the national security adviser at the time, concluded that the tale was surely "useful in mobilizing public opinion".
H&K's baby-atrocity routine really won over the hearts, but for the minds of realpolitik skeptics the Pentagon had other methods. To sway them, the Pentagon flooded the major media outlets with reports of a top-secret satellite image that allegedly showed 250,000 Iraqi troops and 1,500 tanks amassed at the Iraqi-Saudi border.
Once again, this was misinformation. When the US military refused to hand the satellite image over to the press, several investigative journalists opted to purchase commercially available, but equally detailed, satellite images on the open market. Shots of the exact same region, during the same time frame, revealed no Iraqi soldiers anywhere near the border. The journalists hired a coterie of experts, including a former Defense Intelligence Agency analyst who specialized in desert warfare imagery, and the verdict was the same: no Iraqis, just desert and a lot of US jet fighters sitting wing-tip to wing-tip at nearby Saudi bases.
But by the time those questions began circulating about the Pentagon's supposed satellite image and the web of decisions being spun around it, the US military was already set on course. Once again, a similar mobilization is in high gear, with skeptical questions lagging behind.

© Asia Times Online, 2002. Distributed in partnership with Globalvision News Network (www.gvnews.net). All rights reserved.

:: judy nguyen 12:02 PM [+] ::
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according to john's "forgotten english" daily calendar today is the feast day of st. emillion, the patron saint of those who have misplaced a possession.
I just mention this because I know I tend to harp about things and people. people, I know, can be found, even though I don't always have the courage to acknowledge that.

:: judy nguyen 6:46 PM [+] ::
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oh, baby, where are the fireworks!
iraq said yes! no war!

:: judy nguyen 9:32 AM [+] ::
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quotable notables? right:

I turned to look but it was gone
-scrawled on the corner of a desk in college of arts and sciences 211

from kobo abe's the box man:

when anyone comes into contact with the scenery around him, he tends to see selectively only those elements necessary. for example, though one remembers a bus stop, one can have absolutely no recollection of a large willow tree nearby. one's attention is caught willy-nilly by the hundred-yen piece dropped on the road, but the bent and rusty nail and the weeds by the wayside may just as well not be there. on the average road one usually manages not to go astray. however, as soon as one looks out of the box's observation window, things appear to be quite different. the various details of the scenery become homogenous, have equal significance. cigarette butts...the sticky secretion in a dog's eye...the windows of a two-story house with the curtains waving...the creases in a flattened drum...rings biting into flabby fingers...railroad tracks leading into the distance...sacks of cement hardened because of moisture...dirt under the fingers...loose mahole covers...but I am very fond of such scenery. the distance in it is fluid and the contours vague, and thus perhaps it resembles my own position. the scenery has the gentleness of a garbage dump. one never wearies of looking at such a view as long as one is peering out from a box.

when you're thirsty you can't help running in the direction of illusory water, even though you realize it's a mirage.

:: judy nguyen 3:36 PM [+] ::
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hey kids, I know I don't wear a 34c. so what is this doing on my desk?
and so the story of the absent roommate goes. first my chair. then my bedframe. and now this.

:: judy nguyen 8:18 AM [+] ::
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there are too many times when I can't help but have classic love songs stuck in my head.
the usual suspects: dindi and l-o-v-e

:: judy nguyen 1:19 PM [+] ::
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anyone know how erotic warming oil works? I suspect it's some kind of weird superconductor.

:: judy nguyen 12:54 PM [+] ::
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jones and john are out:

I knew it was only a matter of time before I heard buskers performing coldplay.
this morning was the first time I heard wonderwall too: backbeat the word is on the street that the fire in your heart is out I know that you've heard it all before but you never really had a doubt

:: judy nguyen 12:51 PM [+] ::
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well. there's a majority in the house, and romney won by a landslide here. there seems like there's nothing we really could've done. I guess the only thing we could do is hold on tight.

:: judy nguyen 7:31 AM [+] ::
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I get emails like this and wonder if there's something really wrong. with me:

i really am sorry about bugging you with touching and stuff. as much as you don't like it, i think i do like it, especially in the morning...makes me feel safe and warm and close to you; but i understand that it just keeps you from sleeping, so i won't do it anymore. sometimes with as much as you joke about other things -- making fun of me, telling me how much i suck and whatnot -- i make the mistake of thinking you're less than serious about other things [like tickling and now this touching in the morning]. i'll be more careful.
i'm gonna wait a couple hours before i work the plan out with ian and mari, make sure i still feel up for it for tonight. i'll probably try to get in touch with them early afternoon...do you have any preference on the dinner plan?
john

:: judy nguyen 7:29 AM [+] ::
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relatively new stuff:

fuck it, he cried and he stormed out the lot.
she could not stamp out a dropped cigarette. (partially inspired by a tindersticks show)

-do you know what I would want a tattoo of?
-what?
-a green rose
I slowly started to lose faith. -a rose?
-a green rose
-does that have any specific reference?
-yeah, do you know the portrait of the artist as a young man?
-I haven't read that book since I was in high school
-it means utopia
-yeah I know. I wrote papers on it
-most people have no idea what I'm talking about (more or less, except for you know, a transcription of a conversation with joe)

:: judy nguyen 9:52 AM [+] ::
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yeats, to be honest, kind of bothered me a little:

for some reason, dan had once tried to argue to me the irrationality of the word okay.

:: judy nguyen 9:49 AM [+] ::
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melissa arrived late thursday night, and by last night, it already seemed like she had been around for weeks.
I know it didn't take me too long after I came back and was hanging out with john to feel as if I had never really left. but this is something new.
dave: please, I care, you're causing yourself unnecessary pain. I thought you told me you were getting past it. I still really find it haunting, though, when I hang out with any of them.

:: judy nguyen 9:33 AM [+] ::
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something old: or because, hell, it's the same basic concept, but who's being more rational:

I love you though you're horrible, she said.
Am I really that bad?
He was answered with a nod and laughter.
But it doesn't matter.
I know.
They paused and she asked, Where do you see us in twenty years?
Dead. Under a pile of rubble of a post-apocalyptic-
See! You are horrible!
But in each others arms.
Oh.
Where do you see us?
Apart.

:: judy nguyen 9:26 AM [+] ::
...