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[cblj_backup]

So apparently a lot of people don't know about the Pillowcase Trick? Allow me to share.

When cleaning an overhead fan, the best technique is to find a pillowcase you don't care about too much. What you do is open the end of the pillowcase, slide the pillowcase over the fan blade, tighten the end around the fan blade at the far end, and pull it back towards yourself. The dust gets wiped into the pillowcase, which you can shake out and wash later. Easy peasy. And kind of funny to watch.

In other, less domestic news...

One of my favourite parts of writing novels (or fic, for that matter) is the research. I am research-oriented by nature; I love learning and I do a lot of it. When I was writing Felinecor's Land I had quite a time researching how tiger meat tastes (oh, the scandals in Japan over tiger meat!) and the average size and weight of an African elephant, so that I could calculate how many soldiers it would feed for how many days.

I've mentioned I'm reading up on prison life, tattoos, and assorted related issues, which has led me afield to Iraq and Afghanistan, where Chicago gang graffiti is turning up in occupied areas (primarily on tanks and military buildings). I don't know why I find this so intriguing; it's not like I was unaware that we have bangers in our military, especially since recruitment often focuses on low-income neighborhoods and disproportionately on African-American and Latino communities.

Part of it, true, is probably because the graffiti comes from what seems to be predominantly Chicago sources, or at any rate they're the ones getting the attention. This may be because the man who broke the story, Jeffrey Stoleson, is an Army reservist who hails from around these parts. He began documenting the graffiti independent of any news source or military orders, and you can see a photograph of him with some of it here. (Relatedly, his article with the Sun Times, which is now not accessible on their website, stirred up some serious racism in Kuwait when Latino soldiers were forced to strip down and searched for gang tatts.)

I know, intellectually, that there are plenty of what we think of as "American" artefacts on overseas military bases -- I know there are Pizza Huts in Afghanistan, for example -- but graffiti is such an organic thing, corporatised in a different way. There is plenty of indigenous graffiti in these regions, but a gang tag in Afghanistan is an unmistakable marker of presence. The only way a Gangster Disciple tag shows up in Iraq is if a Gangster Disciple out of Chicago puts it there, and the only way a Gangster Disciple makes it to Iraq is on a military transport.

Hidden worlds, the secret cities that live within the surface cities, the coded signs that represent them and cross the boundary, all of this is endlessly interesting to me. Tagging, which can be lovely, is also vandalism and I know that -- but it is a secret and symbolic language and to see it so far from where it arose is fascinating.

Comments

[ysabet.livejournal.com]

I am a total graffiti fan. There was a lovely book back in my old college library (which I wish I'd noted the title/author down) that had photos of Elizabethan graffiti, scratched into old pub windows with diamond rings; there were also pics of gladiator's graffiti from Pompei and Herculanum and all sorts of stuff. WONDERFUL book! I kinda wish I'd stolen it, but I didn't, and now I'm racking my brains to recall the title. Oh well...

One thing you see out here in the Wide, Wide West (i.e., Sonoran Desert just above Nogales) is a kind of 3-D graffiti that relates to Hispanic folk-saints. There're all sorts of oddities-- glyphs spray-painted on walls that look remarkably like voodoo veves, odd 'markers' for safe passage like the foil-wrapped bricks dedicated to Jesus Malverde, the patron of drug smugglers (yes, really. No, really), roadside crosses and wreathes marking the places where people died in traffic-accidents... I remember an impromptu shrine popping up in the apartment complex that I lived in back in Las Vegas years ago following the murder of a 6-year-old girl; her body had been found in a dumpster, and within hours there were candles and a piece of plywood painted with the Virgin Mary propped against the dumpster. When sanitation workers tried to remove it, somebody took a shot at them from a nearby balcony, so the shrine was shifted over a few feet away from the dumpster and left in peace. Eventually it got taken down, but the dumpster acquired some interesting scenes painted on it.

It's interesting stuff; mostly the shrines and markers are left alone and eventually weather and fade, but there're a few non-church folk-shrines here in Tucson that've been around for a long time, like the one to La Tiradito downtown (it means 'little outcast'-- he was a guy who committed adultery with his mother-in-law, was murdered and then was buried outside church boundaries for his sins.)

[copperbadge.livejournal.com]

I've actually been to the Tiradito shrine -- when I was passing through Tucson a few years back it was the one thing I INSISTED on seeing. It's a sad, beautiful little place, rather like the story :)

[ysabet.livejournal.com]

**nods** Yeah, that describes it pretty perfectly-- sad and beautiful. Lots of stuff like that around here, and some damn good ghost stories too-- you know about La Llorona? Now THAT gives me the major creeps. I know it's multinational and so forth, but still. Feels local, is treated local, and people definitely believe it.