Indiana Hardy

Shit. Should be writing up the latest notes here, but I just can’t get Indiana Jones out of my head.

Get down to the rehearsal space last night and it’s all the guys can talk about. Darryl and Claudio went to see the movie before coming down, and wouldn’t stop going on about how rad it was, how awesome Indy is. I can’t fucking stand it. I hate Indiana Jones.

My dad was an anthropologist, and a total fieldwork whore. He’d take anybody’s money to go anywhere, study anything as long as it got him out in some god-forsaken bit of world. Not the best dad in the world, but he just seemed so fucking cool to me, larger-than-life, always in the middle of the action somewhere. He’s the reason I kept on in school, and the reason, too, that I work the way I do, on my own in scuzzy warehouses rather than locked in an office somewhere. And without my dad, I am convinced, there’d be no Indiana Jones.

This is all before I could even fucking write my name, so I can’t promise it’s all gospel, and I sure can’t cite it to academic-satisfaction, but here’s my dad’s story.

So dad’s working sometime in the early 70s in northern Africa, doing a thing on the shift from matrilinial to patrilineal geneologies among some group. God knows why, but it was the 70s, and everybody from the United Nations to armpit college was into this shit. So, dad’s in some bar chatting with a movie producer who’s scoping out desert locales for some science fiction flick. Thinks nothing more of it for a while. But the guy was George fucking Lucas. The movie was Star Wars.

Dad tells Lucas everything. And probably a bit more than everything – he’s been drinking, and even stone-cold sober he likes a good embellishment. But just another chat at the bar, right? Nothing to it. Well, until a few years later when Indiana Jones hits the theatres, and dad hits the fucking roof.

That’s my fucking life, right down to the student with “I love you” written on her eyelids!

What the hell did he do turning me into a relics-hunter?!

Chased by Indians in loincloths? What the fuck is that? They were coke smugglers in some CIA op!

Snakes? I’m not afraid of any fucking snakes!

Yeah. he was pretty pissed – not that his story got ripped off, but that he didn’t get to decide how.

Me, I hate Indiana Jones for another, equally selfish reason – dad’s so fucking dirt-poor, blowing everything he’s ever made on travel and booze and whatever girl he’s shacked up with this week, and this movie thing coulda made him enough fucking money that I might actually stand to get something one of these days. Everytime I see a poster or a clip I watch those fucking dollars roll on by. 

 

Volcanologist Ass

Breaking for a shit and a sandwich before heading back down to the warehouse for a jam with the band. Fuck, I’m beat. This routine I’ve been in for the last couple of weeks is taking its toll – try to get down around noon to see what’s up, have some drinks with the residents, then cover go-fer duty, garbage pick-up, some lighting for the pornographers…take an hour or two for myself and then on heavy metal duty til late. Not gonna be able to keep this up for long, let alone get any of this shit writ up.

Starting to get some stories out of the border-geezers. One old guy today telling me about growing up in Northern Ontario. His dad was some government worker type, but Carl went bush pretty early on, trapping, fishing, fighting, fucking and a whole lot of drinking – rye, he says, that’s his preference, though these days he takes what he can get. Carl hints at lots of dirt on the Canadian government in the north, but not volunteering details. Waiting for the questions, I’m sure, but I’m a bit worried that if I’m too eager I’ll either scare him off or he’ll start making stuff up – neither of which is gonna be helpful for my research. Having that kind of problem with the anarchist kids – they’re all bluster about direct action, fights with cops, shit they stole, people they know, and I can’t buy a fucking word of it. Trying to sift out the real stories from the crap has been a hell of a challenge here, so I’m hoping I can get something going easier with a different subject-group.

Prize of the day was one of the porn chicks. D. comes up for a bottle of water after shooting, tells me she heard from Jeremy, the camera guy, that I had some academic training, asking me what I did. I gave the basics – yeah, sociologist, no, not working in that, didn’t like the environment, blah blah blah. D.’s turn. She’s a doctoral candidate at a local university, doing volcanology – something about new techniques for assessing levels of volcanic gases in relation to sub-marine volcanos. I won’t pretend to understand it, but that’s not the point anyway. Thing is, D. is a true believer in the academic game, shooting for big grant money, publications in Nature and tenure at one of the big American private universities. But here she is on a Monday afternoon getting her ass fucked for money. She’s promised me the full story over drinks next week sometime, and for the first time since I started this project I’ve got that buzz that comes from being right up against a great personal history and some potentially-insightful observation on the scene from an active participant.

Re-reading Street Corner Society slowly – thank god for William Foote Whyte and participant-observation or I’d be stuck at a fucking desk somewhere day in and day out. D. clearly going to give me a feminist spin on the porn-for-school-money thing, so I’ll need to track down some sources on that next trip to the library. There’s a prof somewhere doing strippers in Canada that might be helpful as well. Gotta google her name and see what I can find.

Academic-mind off, Manowar-mind on. Jam-time.

It’ll Do

It’s 2:45 am, and I’m just on the melancholy-edge of loaded. Another working day, another 26 of J&B scotch, another old warehouse that smells like piss and pussy. I’ve been working on a new project – an ethnography of the urban latenight warehouse.

Part 1 - the rock’n'roll bands who make their rehearsal space here. Some kids, but overwhelmingly broke white guys, 30-40 years old, who no longer believe they’re gonna make it so content themselves with making it with teenage girls halfway between home and the street. Part two  –  the unspecified ‘import-export’ office. Officially bringing in crappy electronics and knick-knacks from Thailand, Laos, sometimes China. Mostly it seems to be human smuggling for sex work, sweatshops, domestic labour – or a combination of the three - and dime-store variety drugs. Part three - the borders of the warehouse. The street culture that develops in doorways and un-rented rooms, from what I can tell made up of punk rock kids, anarchists, addicts, and the flotsam and jetsam of psychiatric hospitals. And part four – the on-line porn industry.  Which in this building is mostly shit that gets sold as “amateur” and “hidden-camera” stuff to fifteen-year-olds too dorky to get laid and forty-year-olds too scared to get laid.

For this project, I’m doing what in the sociology biz we call ‘participant-observation’. Basically, it means you write about something you’re directly involved in rather than pretending to be an objective observer. So here, I jam with a band occassionally and use the hallway conversations to get myself in with the porn crew as party-neighbour and occassional doer of odd jobs. I can spin a story about how this is the only why to get the real scoop on a place, to get people at their most natural. More honestly, though, it’s just a good way for me to get some ass in the line of duty - something that always makes the research that much more interesting.

I’m a sociologist. Free-lance. Old-school. I do shit, I learn shit, I write about it. This whole blog thing is getting put together as a way for me to keep my notes organized. I have a tendency to just jot things on scraps of paper, or get too caught up in whatever’s going on to sit down and make any analytical sense of what I’m seeing and doing on a daily basis. So I figure this medium provides that. It’s on-line, so I can access the whole archive wherever I happen to be. It’s open, so I can give info to and get info from friends and colleagues. And it provides a record, so if I get locked up or lost or killed somewhere along the way, at least some of what I’ve been working on can get saved somehow – folks who do work like I do are pretty fucking hard to come by, and we don’t get published a whole lot, so we kinda got to make our own way. Guess all those are reasons why I’m sitting here now.

So. That’s what I’m here for. My little on-line research storage system. It ain’t much, but it’ll do.