Check the Cali voter guide, y'all.

In a voluntary open-sourcing of the great tradition of secret balloting, here's how I voted:

• Dem Primary: Obama. It's an easy call w/Edwards out. I won't feel terrible if Sen. Clinton pulls it out, but I dislike the dynastic aspects of her campaign, and have more peer-weight pulling me towards Barack. California is a showdown state for the two of them, so I'm happy to lend my weight to the cause of a Black President.
• Prop 91 (Transportation Funding): No. This is apparently a vestigital ballot measure with it's original supporters saysing it's no longer necessary as law.
• Prop 92 (Community College Funding): Yes. The upcoming demographics for California project rising college-age population. Keeping community colleges both well-funded and affordable is especially important over the next 10 to 20 years. They fill a really important part in the educational spectrum, and frankly I'd like to see more ambitious uses of CC facilities and institutions.
• Prop 93 ("Term Limits"): No. As the quotes indicate, I don't believe this is about term limits. It's a technical change to existing term-limit law that on the surface makes them tougher, but in practice would expand the terms of many incumbent state assembly/senate members, who are the ones who put it on the ballot.
• Props 94 - 97 (Indian Gaming Agreements): Yes. I believe there is spiritual irony and justice in the ability for Native peoples to swindle the white man with the benefit of the one-armed bandit. More power to them.

The little election office over in Eureka is a pretty quaint and friendly little place, and the workers there are very nice and accommodating. As a first-time early-voter, I have to say the whole thing was pretty swell.

Those were what I called our "salad days."

As one commentator for this Mike Lux post put it, "soaring rhetoric, like most anything else Bush touched, is dead for me for a while." And lately it hasn't even been soaring.

George W. Bush is headed to history's footlocker as possibly the most unpopular president since measuring popularity was invented. He doesn't even have a "Nixon goes to China" to pin on his legacy, just a shitty debt-based economy, a brutal and senseless war/occupation, and a wave of fraud, indictments, and political malpractice that's only going to smell worse as time ripens the pile.

So I didn't really have any interest in watching the State of the Union. G-dubs is haggard and on the defensive. His popularity has been so low for so long, he can't even help out his peeps except by steering clear and trying to keep his stink off 'em. There would be no substantive announcements, and with his lack of political zazz, no entertaining shout outs warning us of "Human-Animal Hybrids" or the like.

Indeed, overall the reviews are tepid and our first-drafters of history seem eager to pass on by this guy, get back to covering the race to replace. People just don't care anymore, not even those of us who many thought were "haters." The Bush administration seems ready to fold up shop with a whimper, which is better than a bang given their predilections, I suppose.

I've been reading more lately, which is good. In addition to dumping my Netflix subscription in favor of The New Yorker and Harper's, I've digested a few books, which I'll talk about briefly and (ahah!) interconnectedly.

Air Guitar
A collection of short pieces by Dave Hickey, subtitled "Essays on Art & Democracy," this book is just fantastic reading if you like $5 and even $10 words, distrust academia and other elite discourses, and enjoy thinking about art and culture with a political bent. The text occasionally diverges into minutia of fine art that lost me (I don't know from painting) but in almost all cases the thread returned to terra firma, and I didn't really feel like I missed out on the true meaning of Hickey's prose because I have no idea what Cézanne was really all about.

Harper's recently had a great excerpt from an upcoming book by Slavoj Zizek in which the Slovenian guru (who I encountered because a really pretty girl making a documentary wanted to talk to me about Music For America once) chides various leftist tactics around the world, in particular the "retreat into criticism" and the "politics of infinite demands." It made me wonder if Zizek has ever read Hickey, who's an art critic and not a "Critical Theorist," but whose writings as such contain, to me, some of the most insightful and generalizable observations about politics I've ever read.

It's been a good weekend, with lots of sleeping in and no drudgework at all. Absent the pressure-cooker mentality I tend to find myself a little listless and bored, especially in the recent aftermath.

When you're a small child, the most boring day in your life is the day after you go to Disneyland. It's a very high high, tons of stimulation, really kind of incredible if you think about all the psychic energy that gets built up by the whole Disney cultural complex. Anyway, the next day you're one strung-out six year old, and you don't even really understand what's happening.

The trajectory of my adult life has grown up around projects. Productions, plays, parties, road trips, websites, campaigns... all variations on the general theme of engaging in an ostensibly focused effort to Get Something Done. At their best, they're like little births; creative miracles born in the spastic passion of inspiration and carried to term with love, craft and care.

At their best or worst though, projects tend to leave me with that same Disneyland hangover. The stress and attention called for to see things through the last mile are (ideally) some of the highest functioning times we experience as human beings. Afterwards, our metaphysitcal children born, grown, gone, and possibly even dead, we wonder what to do with our lives.