Hotsy Totsy members: Juliet Clark - Ray Davis - Anselm Dovetonsils - Christina La Sala
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The Hotsy Totsy Club

1999-10-07. . . Cholly Kokonino reporting

Science News: Whenever I hear the word "culture," I reach for my petri dish.

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Steven Elliott, who once told Hotsy Totsy charter member Christina La Sala, "You can have the trains, I'm just going to cut out the sky," is currently sharing a gallery with our good friends Joseph Cornell and Marcel Duchamp at the Berkeley Art Museum.

As if that wasn't enough excitement, Christina and Steven just last night opened up an installation at the San Francisco State University Art Gallery -- a little number they like to call "Invisible Practices." Cholly hopes to host an exclusive interview on the project in the next day or two....

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. . . 1999-10-08

Special Gossip Crossover with the Tuesday Weld pages

Pinchas Zukerman is divorcing Tuesday Weld, officially for lack of interest in his career.

He quotes her as saying: "Why do I need to go to another concert when I've heard the piece before?"
Going Steady A reasonable question. One possible answer is, "To meet new people." And after all these years of musical disinterest, proceedings seem to have followed fairly quickly upon the dual appointments to the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Zukerman as director and Amanda Forsyth as "sexy blond cellist." Ontario sources have commented before on Zukerman's attachment to the upper-crusty Forsyth, acclaimed as a "leggy 29-year-old with luxurious blonde hair" who "adds a touch of glamour to the stage."

Bonus Robot Wisdom Crossover

In his Robert Stone page, Jorn Barger advances the theory that Children of Light "is based on Tuesday Weld, who was in the Dog Soldiers movie. It's about a talented starlet whose glittering surface barely hides her serious schizophrenia...."

And so, if you need any more evidence of Weld's skill for driving writers mad....

. . . 1999-10-10

Honestly? I loved the idea of the Dysfunctional Family Circus, but I rarely looked at it. There were always one or two funny captions -- which is darned good -- but the reader would have to machete through dozens of weedy witlessicisms to find them. And the reader gets tired after a while.

What the DFC needed, more than anything else, was a strong editorial presence... an expert professional... someone like... like....

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Who says the vast arbitrary not-my-responsibility bureaucracy of UC has no heart? Certainly not those of us who are eagerly looking forward to "Death at UC Berkeley: Communication and Community":

This workshop reviews the work of the Chancellor's Workgroup on Deaths, towards the goal of building a coordinated, cohesive response to deaths in a decentralized environment.

. . . 1999-10-12

Chip Morningstar's Postmodern Adventure (via Cardhouse) is the best geeks-look-at-gobbledegook piece I've seen. But the peculiarities of the contemporary American academy have confused his take on the French origins of poststructuralist style: Derrida, for example, is a professional philosopher, not a critic; his work is interesting as philosophy (and, depending on one's taste, as literature), not as lit-crit. And Morningstar doesn't go far enough in his paralleling of the two communities. If I may demonstrate:

Academic Post-Structuralists Computer Programmers
Supposed Goal Improved understanding of artifacts Improved efficiency of tasks
Actual Goal Career in kinship group Career in kinship group
Problem-Solving Approach Jargon-constricted language with unnatural syntax Jargon-constricted language with unnatural syntax
Water-Muddying Foreign Disciplines of Record Philosophy, psychology Engineering, mathematics
Real Water-Muddiers Obsessive-compulsive egocentricity Obsessive-compulsive egocentricity
Destructive Kinship Rite Crossreferencing Long hours
Result of Kinship Rite Smugness / paranoia about obviously unfinished work Smugness / paranoia about obviously unfinished work
Most Hilariously Unfulfilled Promise Social justice Ease of use

. . . 1999-10-14

Our Motto: Fifteen minutes of blowing my top.

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"How can I save the ruse?" It's true that Warriors of Virtue, with its dead in the water-air-earth-etc. Bride-with-White-Hair-isms, demonstrates the difference between a studio system that works and one that doesn't. But it also demonstrates the differences between a lucky product of a broken studio system and an unlucky one: if yon fey Scot had played the spritual leader instead of the bad guy -- keeping all his original lines -- they could've had another Willy Wonka.

And speaking of misused Scots....

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This week, Constance Kandle's Nonprofit Chronicles leaves Bossy the Clown aside for a look at The Big Boss and The New Diversity:

There's a new Big Boss at the nonprofit, and he wants his staff to know he's culturally sensitive. At a recent staff breakfast, he introduced himself to his new employees by telling them a little about himself:

"My personal style has sometimes been described as aggressive and hostile. I think that's because I come from a heritage of embattled minority cultures. My grandfather was Catalan; in fact my name is an anglicized version of the Catalan word for 'lawyer.' And my grandma was Scottish. So you might see how we would have an underdog mentality."

Constance has a few questions about this. To begin with, how did the Big Boss manage to have only two grandparents?

Let's all share a moment of silence in memory of those beleaguered Catalans and Scots (not to mention lawyers) who've never been granted the dignity of an official US holiday. Perhaps only the English aristocracy has been treated so shabbily on our shores....

. . . 1999-10-15

I guess it's been worth living here for over eight goddamn years just so's I could reap full enjoyment from this week's San Francisco Bay Guardian.... I can practical guarantee it!

... an' anotha thing ...... then again ...

Copyright to contributed work and quoted correspondence remains with the original authors.
All other material: Copyright 1999 Ray Davis.