August 19, 2012

  • Put Another Nickel In...

    "Put Another Nickel In,

    In the Nickelodeon,

    But make sure behind the coin slot bin,

    There ain't a Karl Rovian chin,

    Or crouched along aside of him,

    His Minions, Minions, Minions"

    antony

    Antony of Antony and the Johnsons

    Okay- I'm taking liberties with an old tune. I'm also knocking it out of it's pleasing cadence in the process- but, hey, it's been decades since I used to sign everybody's yearbook with a limerick made up on the spot.

    Hey- I used to be kinda smart. You know, kinda.

    Last few weeks or so I've been loving, as I mentioned a post or two ago, Lana Del Rey.

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bag1gUxuU0g   

    She may be, for me, one of the more accessible representatives of the fragility, spark and, perhaps, slightly accelerated disillusionment that some young people feel especially intensely.

    (After having been through a few episodes of ultimate despair of my own I've found these scenes in foggy memory to have the glow of a gorgeous sunset that the colors continue to wash out bit by bit in and then increasingly they come to me in cartoon form as my joints ache first thing in the morning and there aren't as many of the "us" I knew as there used to be. Then those aching moments and times seem a luxury of the radiating beauty, health and naivety that may as well be a scene from someone on another planet.)

    Other musical loves of mine have been two artists I have appreciated through PLC's alertness to new talent. One of them, Antony, from Antony and the Johnsons some may have already heard of. Antony, et. al. seem to have had a big impact a few years back and Antony is still creating new work. One of the masterstrokes from their/his/her much acclaimed album "I Am A Bird Now" is a duet with Boy George called "You Are My Sister"  that has become a touchstone between me and PLC for the delicacy of its feeling and a mythic and nostalgic pathos. (Alternate live version of Boy George and Antony).

    Reuben_Butchart_pic_medium

    Ex-boyfriend Reuben Butchart (just kidding)

    The other singer is named Reuben Butchart. Butchart is a musical prodigy from northern California who has also done a stunning duet with Antony, "All There Is To Tell" off Buchart's album "Golden Boy".

    Another of Butchart's other songs I love is called "Come and Play".

    The other day I wondered out loud to PLC if some of our appreciation of Butchart wasn't from thinking he seemed like a creative boyfriend from either of our pasts. Of course he left us both to go onto to bigger things- not that our "things" are that small, mind you.

    ***************

    GQ-2009-barack-obama-9059947-720-979

    Barack Obama.

    I was thrilled- as so many were- when he was elected.

    But...

    1. Have I said anything positive about this guy since he was elected?

    2. Have I had any verifiable reason to remain so after he was in office and then backtracked on what I perceived as his assessment of the wastefulness of our War on Terror?

    3. Did I have reason to remain encouraged when he failed to close down the Guantanamo prison as a Nazi-like example of extrajudicial law that answered to no one and threatened to expand into the latest parody of "due process" for the next demagogue in office?

    The transparency of Obama's Executive branch fails to stand in crystalline contrast to the probably stolen U.S. Presidential elections of Florida in 2000 or Ohio in and Florida in 2004. Nor does it stand in pleasing contrast to the mounting disregard for even the brazen appearance of impropriety between multi-national corporations and the laws of the United States that were renderered indistinguishable through fiat of legal maneuvering during the Bushevik Regime .

    The Big O's own regime fails, furthermore, by prosecuting more so-called "whistlebolwers" in government and military circles than all presidencies combined before. These people who are unquestionably brave, regardless of one's political persuasion, are also the most natural defenders any citizens have against corruption and the consolidation of power by non-democratic means. They appear to be the only sources left to nourish a "free press" and they are being extinguished by what in legal rhetoric would be called a "chilling" manner.

    But we are facing a current and potentially even more dominantly Repugnacious Congress as well as a alleged "constructionist" Supreme Court that appears poised to increase tax cuts for the uber-wealthy whose primary mode of trickle down "job creation" has thus far been to foster more offshore positions for the citizens of China, Malaysia, India and ports and countrysides beyond without adding to the utility of the un- and under-employed American middle class now withering away at the beginning of this millenium faster than the ice caps of Greenland.

    Thanks to that court- with the rare exception to their rule from time to time- the victory of the Robber Barons over the masses and Dred Scott decisions over our better natures seems to be progressing- or regressing- at the typically alarming rate we've, many of us of the Republics Citizens' Ununited, come to loathe and fear.

    ***

    All of which is one of my typically long-winded manners of approaching the question:

    How wasted would my vote be for a third party candidate that hasn't a chance in Hell of winning or getting beyond single digits in a best case scenario?

    It's a scenario that would certainly cement Mittens Romney and his newly-minted Boy Wonder Congressman Paul Ryan as the leaders of the party that seeks to dissolve what was left of a less-than-perfect-union into the afterbirth of a dunked Alka Seltzer dose swimming in the amorphous mixture that is our Feudal Corporate World of the Future.

    Really, we got the Magna Carta signed for this???????????

    magna carta

     

    Magna Carta

    Thanks to Richard Nixon (- though let me make this perfectly clear- I am not blaming Nixon or his boyfirend Bebe for the ninnies we have collectively allowed ourselves to become-) ,who created a food stamps program, the EPA and, most importantly, got rid of the draft which had the effect of taking everyone who was approaching their late teen years out of the political equation and furthering the severance of the United States of America from it's "prosperity for all and a rising middle class" to a mercenary military- divorced from public concern and input and furthured it's penchant for being neurotically involved with the bowel movements of the economic trappings as well as traps of realpolitik in opposition to it's commitment to it's more original charter goals as a nation continuously enrapt to "form a more perfect union".

    We are now faced with a world in which our heroes are political prisoners and potential martyrs Bradley Manning, Julian Assange and Pussy Riot (the latter is an especially useful instruction on resurrecting a Csarist guv'mint for all of us Johnny-Come-Latelies) and anyone else who had the audacity (that word again- but this time it's actually personal and political) to challenge the authority-du-jour.

    You could swing the proverbial dead cat over your head and let it land anywhere only to find you've soiled the cashmere sweater of someone who also thinks democracy is going to Hell in a handbasket.

    ***

    RE-ELECT OBAMA!!!!!!

     

    Although it's depressing to say it I am leaning to voting for Obama again. More importantly it would be useful for the House to be won by the Democratic party. If the House increases it's GOP percentage and the U.S. Senate falls as well it will be the darkest day for Liberals and the radicals who villanize them in many moons. And we've seen some pretty dark moons lately.

    The only real solution to any of this is to vote for the Democrats and then coalesce around building a third party movement in between elections while kicking the Dems in the ass to fix a few things while they're still in office.

    Of all the people I have come to admire most I think none of them would agree that "we" should be voting for Obama.

    But that's how bad this all is seeming to me right now- and for some time now.

    　

    ***********

    Beasts%20of%20the%20Southern%20Wild%20kids

     beasts of southern wild 1

    "Hushpuppy" and friends (upper)  "Hushpuppy" and Dad (lower)

     

    Just to leaven this latest heartfelt yet depressing screed from me there's a movie I want to recommend.

    PLC and I both had the same reaction that it is the best film we've seen in some time.

    It's called "Beasts of the Southern Wild" .

    It take's place in a watery outpost of an island in danger of flooding south of New Orleans. On the island are a makeshift community of the island's traditional residents, multiracial and funky, funky, funky as well. The hero of the story is a 6-year-old girl who lives with her alcoholic father who seems to have health issues of his own as well. The little girl is played by a non-professional actor who is stunning nonetheless. The actor playing her father is also excellent. I leave you with a couple of review sites that fills in the gaps I'm too verklempt, politically, to continue with. Talk amongst 'yaselfs.

    http://www.metacritic.com/movie/beasts-of-the-southern-wild

    http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/beasts_of_the_southern_wild/

August 14, 2012

August 12, 2012

August 4, 2012

  • A Dangling Conversation

    About Aurora, Colorado's "Batman" murders and other random cultural bubbles popped in it's wake:
     
     Of course violence is amplified. There is an old saying in journalism- the  yellow variety and other shades more pastel- that states, "If it bleeds, it leads.". The core idea here is that this might stem from, and I'm being very generous here, those events that strike fear into our hearts and suggest a threat to survival are  part of a so-called "hardwired" results steeped in the bath of evolutionary genetics for all of humanity that has succeeded in allowing as many of us to exist as continue to.
     I would think the feeling that we're being watched, for an example, may suggest this is a perception that would seem to have grown out of enhanced peripheral vision born from the need to detect animal predators. The descendant of that  type of intelligence might be symbolically represented with much more frequency by the flashy television bulletin, a heavily "hit" or searched site on the net or a banner in one of our quaintly surviving newspapers than it is likely to be the result of a physical encounter with a hungry mountain lion or  bear.
    Obviously as people continue to encroach on what paltry remains there are of actual habitats for wild animals we may yet have an opportunity to be torn to shreds by a displaced bear whose favorite haunt was razed and foaled a Home Depot in it's place. In this sense at least the likelihood of any of us walking out to doom at the hands of a frustrated, sociopathic fellow citizen at a shopping mall, theater, fireworks display or the opening of said Home Depot may yet, again,  be superseded by an unfavorable date with a species facing a messy and morbid extinction- and by that I mean a mammalian species besides us.
    The United States of America's refreshingly unique form of "herd individualism" masks an almost continuous series of ills that continue on unimpeded with nary a politically effective thought that the notion of a  "public good" has any currency. 
    Oh sure, you and I, my friends, may think of this societal dilemma quite clearly from time to  time and wonder why. But it doesn't take a lot to see how cowed, insecure, unheeded and superfluous many of us are led to believe we are to the greater engines of our destiny.
    At times the religious right in all of it's fierce, unrelenting, evangelical Protestant and hidebound selective Bible-thumping, along with doctrinaire Catholic hardliners each of who have been leading their respective charges since the early 1970s seem poised to merge with their comparatively newly minted Chinese Corporate Pseudo Capitalist Manufacturing Dogmatists and the latter's Western globalists enablers to build the final boobie hatch by which we may all fall from this screwed up world into a Brave New Fascism that will solve all of our ills. 
    It's tempting to say that we are doomed. But of course it is.
     
    I had a friend, and I still do, it's just that he died a few years back, who believed that government movers and shakers pushed the notion of fearfulness between individuals as a method of controlling people. I think that's right and the older I get the less I think it's a result of ignorance.  It's the result of a paranoid manifestation of avarice that emerges from the amount of unlived life an individual soul has to bear.
    That's not an excuse- just an arguably shaky diagnosis.
    It behooves us to wonder if their are preeminent among us who control us and for what end and why?
    My friend called himself an anarchist and a radical Christian. By anarchist he truly felt and thought- because this guy was anything but a non-thinker- that people left to their own devices among one another at this point in our history would opt for that which was fair, nonviolent  and mutually agreeable. Even if we are gay or of a "minority" race (only measurable by one's relative setting) or simply hungry and/or sick- his thought was that the best path would be obvious. And that path encompassed, implied he, sharing resources that yet allowed people their true individuality on the premise that from these freedoms we aspire to life would naturally allow the widest rather than the narrowest of latitude in what we allow in others as a reflection of what we want the chance to experience ourselves- and that leads to people living serious, actual lives out with others doing the same.
     Sadly I think this all amounts to one ideal outcome of the famous "enlightened self interest" the Libertarians used to be so fond of  speaking of and which is also an undeniable stripe of the modern world's assurance about the progression of Man from beast to an ideally considerate renter of property owned by someone else.
     Alas, we appear to be awash in the next Not So Big Idea which is that we'll all have to find the best path to tiptoe through during an especially intense era of UN-enlightened self interest. And, as it seems to me, this unenlightened self interest is based on a minimum of ideas, simmered very briefly, with no serious thought of improving the recipe in the raw onrush of the acquisition of capital, property, and, above all, essential resources- water, air, outdated fuel, arable land and the attendant intellectual property rights to give this modern, sad stew of inhumanity some feigned legitimacy as an idea whose time has come.
    Somewhere along the line the era of the Green Revolution, Globalization and technology-as-our-savior has seemed to have hit a serious snag. And while I think many peoples' need to feel reassured about our collection of quaking cultures and individual dilemmas in life through the agency of a religion that perhaps was otherwise on the verge of losing its remaining relevance is understandable it still seems like the wrong manner of celebrating the spirit animating our humanity.
    It seems pretty much true that the Founding Fathers of the United States died in relative despair about a resurgence in traditional religious doctrines as the new country entered it's third decade or thereabouts and as they were looking at their own passing from this world.

    The United States, though you may not have noticed this mentioned very much, was actually an offspring from the so-called "Age of Reason" rather than the consensus of the founding of Heaven-On-Earth. 
    In fairness, the original Puritan settlers DID try to create their Heaven On Earth but their experiment failed. The same Indians that saved them from starving and freezing to death in their first severe winters were later exterminated as agents of Evil for their comparative lack of clothing and other coverings that, to the European eye, were unthinkable affronts - at least once those early Old World dwellers had managed to survive with a little help from Satan's friends.
    Perhaps those early settlers began the process of making it through the night only through the aid of others to then realize that their success had "actually" been selfmade all along.
    Hence our primal delusions about our debt to one another continues to this day.
    That's a grossly oversimplified history I imagine but it will do in order to drop a few hints.
    The next wave of settlers that did survive appear to have been the ancestors of the US manner of law and government that made it rockily through the first couple of decades surrounding the American war of independence. But for all of it's virtues - including a renewed appreciation of some of the Indian cultures' horizontally oriented democratic organization and tradition that was exciting and inspiring to the Franklins and Adams and Jeffersons- the new American culture continued to founder in the face of its ideals as seen from the point of view of it's victims that would end with blankets laced with tuberculosis for  our red-skinned inspirations, the confiscation of native lands to be exchanged for smallish barren tracts and the issue of the abolition of slavery taking centuries to gain traction even after dramatic shifts in the country's trials and fortunes.
    **********************************
    Okay, I should have an ending to this but I am trying to adhere to the "publish or perish" mode in honor of my fluctuating readership of 2 to 7 people, some of whom I actually know.
    **********************************

    I am, in other news, enjoying snippets of the Olympics, mostly to ogle Michael Phelps and those stunning looking divers. The British and Mexican entrants have especially caught my eye in the platform and springboard duet series. But I have also been especially enjoying that Mr. Phelps was all but written off as a has-been who was present based on his residual virtuosity  and his historical impact. He has proved harder to ignore than any of that even as his chief rival- who genuinely appears to be his friend as well- has faltered in his bid to become Phelp's successor. I imagine that Ryan Lochte has been the pre-Olympics poster boy for the U.S. largely due to the machinations of others rather than through his own energies or hubris. It all highlights how remarkable Mr. Phelp's accomplishments have been as we watch others fall far short of those marks or consistency.
    I still have no desire to be an Olympic athlete but I do rather wish I could've taken showers with Michael Phelps in 10th grade P.E. classes. But then again I had plenty of fantasies with the boys I did take showers with- and many of them had moments when they won the gold in my feverish teenage imagination.

    ********************************

    I've been listening to "Spotify" a music site on the net. It was born in Sweden and has spread worldwide I suppose. I listen to the free version which means you have to hear a lot of advertising ABOUT Spotify from young sounding people who sound pleasantly drugged (for them perhaps) with a combo of some sort of psychiatric assuager along with a mild stimulant that, evidently, absolves them of any care about the vapidity of their resulting performance. I'm sure there are focus groups to adjust the vapidity to "just so" as Goldilocks would've said.
    Anyway, in one of the few discoveries I've made on my own I find that I've become a fan of a young woman   named Lana Del Rey.
     
    Miss Del Rey has a wonderful range and intonation in her singing and is accompanied by very accomplished orchestration in her music which has a heavily cinematic sound to my ears. Unfortunately, a performance on Saturday Night Live earlier this year has made her an object of some derision regarding her live performing abilities. I endured watching a clip of this performance and found that her manner was a rather limp hands at her side while singing that reminded me a lot of the Nouveau Blandishments of the Velvet Underground's Nico. I thought she was awesome.
     What DO people want? Eeezze a puzzlement.
     In any event she sang superbly and radiates a fatalistically-mannered intelligence that yet exudes an exaggerated femme fatale persona that I might find very offputting in many other performers but oddly captivating coming from her. She is also quite a beautiful woman. She is also elegantly funky just to further confuse the issue. While no one would ever confuse me as being a lady's man- this is one young woman I can understand men having reactions beyond their control about. 
    The album I have been listening to is called, happily (as Gore Vidal used to say in jest), "Born To Die".
    Sing it girlfriend! 
    Just make sure to live first. And from the sound of it Miss Del Rey is holding up her end of the deal quite well. 
    Not every song is a gem on the album but they are all competent and some of them are truly extraordinary to my Pop-marinated eardrums.
    It is only fair to warn you that I've listened to quite a bit of Fred Astaire, a sampling of Bing Crosby and some of Frank Sinatra's best songs the last couple of weeks at work with me little headphones while I do tasks that would otherwise challenge my ability to remain awake during work hours. It has been time well spent. 

     
    (It should be obvious the "world's most interesting man" was not the one who proof-read this little send-up.)

August 1, 2012

July 29, 2012

  • For My Next Trick, uh........

     I'm just putting this in here as a place-saver. My two or three readers may have noticed it's really been hard for me to post with any frequency.

     In short order I want to say whatever my probs with Obama I have a great many more with the Anti-Obama faction from the right that loves to post in comment sections. Romney may be scary in his own mundane, opportunistic and ungraceful way but sadly many of the people who will provide him with a possibly bigger House majority and possible control of the Senate after early November are much scarier.
     The critics from the left- of whom I am one- have perfectly sensible reasons for feeling betrayed.
     The essential problem is that the Democrats are no longer able to tell a story of what they would do to make the country and the (shudder) world a better place.
     It is fairly obvious at this point that Global Warming is not a hoax and also that starving the middle class with a lack of funding to provide jobs will not stimulate the economy.
     America seems deeply committed to the end game of capitalism in which the engines of capital are content to feed off the flesh of labor that made them possible and then dispassionately discard the husks while searching for the next killing field. That's called suicide. But as the theme song of "MASH" used to posit- perhaps it is painless... for a while to those who have enough insulation to pad themselves till the last moments of a war that cannot be won.
     
    The problem with all of that is that the war can be won.

     But wrestling the means of putting up a good fight from the current nihilistic framers of the discussions will be most of the battle. Someone will have to take a chance and delineate exactly what is wrong with bad faith-based religions, xenophobia and the encouragement of the consolidation of anything not already corporatized. It may have to be a new political party after the looming disaster that may arrive next November with disenfranchised voters, dispirited Liberals and the general despair this will amplify after it becomes obvious we are continuing to go down the path that leads to nowhere faster.
     
    Single payer healthcare, a foreign policy and a military that are both scaled back to levels closer to the pre-World War eras, a massive government subsidized jobs creation program that drags the USA forcibly into a green era of 21st century technology and anti-trust/anti-monopoly policies that reverse the consolidation of media and banking and break them up to localized entities, the new media companies must only exist with the understanding that as part of a "free press" they must offer free time to electoral politics and take the money completely out of the equation.

    I actually believe there are many people who would hear all this and take readily to these ideas. Our mass media has been so efficiently hijacked that it might take some time for people to get that there is a future that simply hasn't been televised yet. But there are a lot of talented writers out here who could be ready with some very persuasive scripts.

     It's time to change the channel from the two sad, compromised ones that are about as informative as the old test patterns that used to show on the screen when regular television programming ended its day and turned into a single note song until the next days programs began hours later.
    *****
    Next time I'll try to weigh in on something sexier than mere survival- I've been seeing bits and pieces of the Olympics- and yes, like most sports televised it represents a circus in lands in which bread may yet become more of an issue.

July 20, 2012

  • The Dark Knight Rises...Again

    From the New York Times comments section for the story about the mass shootings and murders in Aurora, Colorado at the midnight premiere of the new "Batman" film.
    Toivo Halvorsen
    "As a Norwegian Living in NYC, this brings back horrifying memories of 22 July last year when Anders Breivik killed about 90 People alone in one day, many of them very young people at a summer youth camp. I believe the biggest problem with these guys and these events are that there is no quick fix. They are just the peak, a sign and symptom of a culture where we have much violence every where. We even entertain ourselves with violence to a large extent. 
    The president of America, the guy who should be a role model and a leader of good example is part of that culture and by allowing massive use of drone strikes and war as a common mean to achieve political goals, he is indirectly supporting such a violent culture. They do it in the name of freedom.
    He is also supporting this culture by not challenging the NRA much more. His passive behavior can only be seen as a fear of loosing votes or not getting elected again, because we all know where he really stands. But he is not doing what he should and not fighting the fight because he is afraid. But he will not see that, he will not accept any of the claims I know, but that does not make it less of a truth. This is why this is such hard fix. The violent culture is supported indirectly by the economic and political system and leaders in the culture itself, in fact it is so embedded we can not even see it most of us."            July 20, 2012 at 7:04 a.m.

July 17, 2012

  • Gore the Beautiful

    Just a short note now; I may add to this later (after work) or start a newer blog.
    But I've been reading Gore Vidal's "Point to Point Navigation", the second leg of his memoirs after "Palimpsest".
    I'm always struck by his writing, which is among the clearest and concise in all of its manifestations. I love Vidal's essays and his take on the history of his native land as do many others who have an interest in the American experiment here on earth.
    But as an extra added treat and while he has remained a handsome man his entire life I am posting/stealing a few photos I've been looking at lately because it seems important to know that along with a big brain, and possibly other outsized features he was fabulously babealiscious:

                                                                                                       

     Gore on the right in the beach photo above with a friend.

July 16, 2012

  • Fixing A Hole

     Internets Noodles (rigid variety) and Condoleeza Rice (slightly less rigid variety) below


    internets noodles condi%20rice-thumb-200x279-113130

     A couple of days ago I was perusing a newspaper site, or something much like it, on the Noodle, which, as Mr. Biggles reminds us, is what the very "Internets" itself looks like when one takes a really, like closeup picture of it; a buncha noodles weaving sinuously through and waving presumptuously and, perhaps snottily, at the distracted and tattered overworked yet underemployed consciousness of myself and my fellow citizens these days. And I stumbled upon a blog or an article- hey I stopped taking score of exactly where I'm a-gittin' my current gossip some years ago- speculatin' on who the Once and Future President Romney might choose to make his bid a reality as his Vice Presidential choice. The correct result for this time could result into the President who makes decisions for the next 4, 8 or possibly 32 years in office- depending on where our current Supremacist Court comes down on this issue. The length of an American president's term had been an issue set in stone in the founding days of the American republic- at least until the non-Democratic Party of our Empire realized the only way it could defeat FDR was through death-- the ballot box had continued to elude them as a cure back in those good olde days you see.
    And while I'm, okay, no Republican, in fact, now that I'm thinking of it, is Gus Hall still alive?- even little ole' I can certainly see a marriage made in Hollywood-style Heaven if Mitt chose Ms. Condi Rice for Veep.

    great-pumpkin-lg 

    Halloween Job Report (we ran out of barrels)


    For one thing, especially if in tandem with an ongoingly grim job report 'round next Halloween and assuming the likely amassing of, oh-I dunno, about 1,950,032 trillion dollars from the 4th Reich SuperPac Corp., it would provide the Grand Ole Potty someone seasoned in diplomacy, a Stanford grad (and one not even financed by "Poppy" Bush), well-spoken and would bring a leveling influence to the Cafe Au Lait diversity sweepstakes.


    As for Condi being a "war criminal"- yes- and, well, "duh!?!?"- for those of you folks not paying attention the last decade or so this puts her on equal footing with most of the survivors of the last few House and Senate incarnations as well as our current Commander in Chief who couldn't seem to stop issuing political "walks" to the Rethuglican fascists during those crucial early innings when what we- the desperately dumb-assed folks who voted for him- really needed him to do was to send a few flamingly fast,fervent notes of chin music past their collectively gob-smacked jowls during the Obama glory years of his first two in office before he lost Congress to Grover Norquist's bathtub renovation trust fund.
    As for the " 'gay' thing"- it seems to be attached to about every other celebrity in the world...and that's possibly about the right percentage in my book. Of course my book is very Gay. But I digress- I used to digest- but my stomach's been too crappy for that lately so I just try to take solace in the fact that for a great many of us the world as it is is making us sick and for all the rest of you that'll likely come later. But then I've always been an optimist.


    Plus, don't know how many of you 'member this but when the Big O(bama) wus runnin' in '08 there was this demi-drag queen from Meh-hee-Co who claimed he was sure it was young Barrack he gave a BJ to on Spring Break way back when Mr. Prez was allegedly a polymath student as well as a polymorphous stud muffin in his undergrad daze loosed in Cancun or somewhere like that.
    For some reason I can't find a link to any site that featured this 'story". A fellow poster who worked in publishing in NYC and wrote a brilliantly witty Xanga blog linked to the story as well...and I can't find any link to him, either. Hmmm, funny.
    Anyway, as I was saying-----oh, pardon me, there's a knock at the door.******"pssst! PLC, kill the lights. Shhhhhhhhhh!!!!!!!"******

    <><>><<><><>><<<>><<>><<>><<>><><>>><<>><<><<><>><<><><>><><><<><>><<><><>><<<>><<>><<>><<>><><>>><<>><<><<><>><<><><>><><><<><>><<><><>><<<>><<>><<>><<>><><>>><<>><<><<><>><<><><>><><><<><>><<><><>><<<>><<>><<>><<>><><>>><<>><<><<><>><<><><>><><><<><>><<><><>><<<>><<>><<>><<>><><>>><<>><<><<><>><<><>


    Xangans, it's now...several days later........
    Ooh, that was close. Now, uh, where were we?
    The funny part about that is that it almost sounds plausible to me tho' the picture in the paper made it appear that the now middle-aged guy allegedly providing services back in the day may have had more teeth and looked more drag-appropriate so that maybe his victims may have been no wiser about the precise sexing of the medium for their cheap thrill- at least until they run for US President.
    In a tangentially related subject, not to say tangenitally related one, there was a spot on Stephen Colbert's show a few weeks ago. Though any excuse to watch just about any moment of the "Colbert Report" is time well spent , at least once you get past the obnoxious commercial before the clip, at about 4:25 into this segment Mr. Colbert reveals a possible insight to how Karl (still not dead) Rove's Fourth-Reichian-Meritocracy-of-the-Conscienceless-Rich agenda is taking advantage of the "Citizens United" Supreme (still not dead) Court decision:
    http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/413970/may-08-2012/corporate-campaign-players---super-secret--spooky-pacs-

    I'm tellin' ya kids glory holes are to current cultural discussions what drag queens were to the 90's hipster parties I used to hear about but never went to. I was too busily engaged in the polishing of my underachieving lack of a career to a high gloss and the gnashing my teeth to a high, uncomfortable decibel level for both me and those suffering humans in the immediate vicinity. And gurls, let's face it; teeth gnashing is strictly declasse at drag parties unless it's part of someone's gender-liberational shtick and, need I add, obviously a "No-No" at glory holes- I mean unless the guy on the other side has a special request.

    Gloryhole Rec Area 9aa93649-00cf-4fa4-bf5b-3ec50acef834


    Somewhere in between these two particular phenomena children became the de rigueur accessory for today's uber-assimilationist gay couple. Even my first lover and his current husband were building families for the 21st century.
    I wish him only the best. By the power invested in me by my faithful readership of Dan Savage's columns and assorted essays or blog thingies, I meant that.
    But, fergawdsakes- don't ever tell him that. He doesn't deserve it. The cad. By "him" I mean my first, fated boyfriend not Dan Savage. Mr. Savage does deserve kudos. Though in all humility my reaction to his "It Gets Better" campaign to be a force against gay teen suicide is to start a dark counter campaign about nursing our accumulated infirmities into our Golden Years for unwitting gay guys and call it "It Gets Worse". My second choice is to call it, "Smile, It Gets Worse".
    Does anyone else suspect I have regrets about the resultant psychic tartar from my life? But, then again, too few to mention. Except where I mention them.

    bruno4

     Bruno accessorizing

     I have never had a desire to have kids. I missed the generational impulse that was triggered somewhere between Gen X, Y, Z or AA (no pun intended) possibly as a byproduct of the need for non-circulating, committed relationships after AIDS found us dropping in mass numbers from attempting to drag the Summer of Love all the way to the Mid-Winter of Craven Lust. Love, obviously, is essential but damn I misses me some craven lust. Anyway after emerging from the total pariah-hood of the late 80s to the Look-At-Us-We're-Just-Like-You Civil Rights era of the Aughts (2000-2009) it was probably only natural many of us thought, "Day-yum! Could I possibly be a worse parent than the many I've seen who possibly needed an entrance exam and several aptitude tests as well as a mere marriage license?" But I, in my old school way, think of raising children as sort of along the same lines as needing to climb Mt. Everest, jumping from a bungee cord off the Goodyear blimp over Burning Man, seizing the CEO position of a major company or corporation or creating a definitive list of airport tearooms as a energetic member in turgid standing of the Larry Craig Memorial Foundation.
    Whaddaya mean Larry Craig's not dead?
    Well, um, okay but I STILL need that list. I'm fresh out of drag queens and chilluns I can strap into my New Age papoose to crash parties with.

June 23, 2012

  • Back in Black- But with Turquoise and Magenta highlights

    I've recently read Jonathan Franzen's latest book of essays and reviews, called "Farther Away". PLC and I had a chance to see him last week on Saturday night at Santa Cruz's oldest independent bookstore "Bookshop Santa Cruz".
    Franzen is a very good writer and his first book of essays, "How To Be Alone" was interesting and enjoyable for me. I also finally got around to his much lauded novel of a dysfunctional Midwest family "The Corrections" and last year his latest novel "Freedom".
    He has a good mind with a good writing style and one of the themes in his latest essay collection deals with the author's integrity as a writer and an honest chronicler of our mutual humanity even at the risk of alienating family and friends. Frankly, that last idea is one that has hampered me most of my life.
    Mr. Franzen has also inspired one web wag to opine that the photo of him on the jacket of his third novel, "The Corrections", makes him look pretty hot whereas another more recent on does not. My verdict is that he's a handsome guy who would have appeal in any of his ages but it's probably his intelligence that presents his most galvanizing appeal.

    Jonathan Franzen circa "The Corrections" (left)            Franzen High school circa 1970's (middle)        Michael Chabon,  Franzen, Tom Wolfe,  Gore Vidal on "The Simpsons" (right)

     But as luck would have it his only book reading for his latest offering fell on our "off diet" day. As I was trying to piece together the logistics of what was practical to do I opted to make "pulled pork" for dinner and spend the afternoon, after coffee and a breakfast going to our favorite nursery, "Far Western" to enhance our somewhat scrawny container garden that occupies the space in front of our humble modular abode as well as under the carport off to the side of it. Actually, our place is fairly pleasant as rentals go though there is an indication of mold in both bathrooms. Apparently someone cut some costs in insulating water inlets from neighboring walls. On the other hand we've lived in a lot worse situations.

    Sadly, my "pulled pork" attempt- and I know there's a potentially unlimited supply of jokes in there somewhere for that mind that just cannot leave tacky enough alone (hint-that would be me)- turned out too spicy for either PLC or me to eat and the rest of our "off diet" evening meal was more dim-dim than din-din. Dim-Minus perhaps.
    At least the nursery was enjoyable and we had some passable passive entertainment but I can't 'member what it was we watched. Looking back on it , it might have been worth it to brave the, no doubt, standing-room-only crowd at the downtown bookshop and restamp my passport to author-based groupiehood.
    Oh well, the only way to do that now would be to have a time machine. And let's face it if I had a time machine I'd probably be tempted to waste time in pleasure at some scene I'd failed at but might now succeed with given what I know today. And that scene would not very likely be at a bookstore- maybe a beach, a bathhouse or with a friend I failed to be bold enough with. However, I do believe that the fate I have arrived at is as worthy as any I might envision. And, afterall, I did choose what I chose. No use crying over unspilt semen or any other relevant liquid.
    I live with very few regrets. But I used to live with almost none.
    I guess that's progress.

     

    *******

     

    Today I turn 61. I keep thinking about my sisters and brother and my niece and nephews. And I think about them more than even usual because I think about my Mom.
    I have yet to go back to Hayward in the San Francisco East Bay since my youngest sister brought home our Mom's ashes from the Neptune Society. I had thought of being there today but , thanks to PLC who took the liberty of talking to a friend and my oldest sister yesterday, I will go up next week instead. That will be easier for all of us. I want to do a barbeque or something for my sibs at what I still think of as "my Mom and Dad's place".
    My Mom really loved sitting in their modest backyard reading, with a glass or two -or more- of wine and either smoking- or not smoking (she tried to quit but probably caved to my Dad puffing ahead like a maniac and her grandson who, unfortunately, is part of the recent trend of young people who appear to have taking back the smoking thing after a generation or so of tobacco having declining appeal and adherants)- when the sun was shining.
    We lived there starting in 1960 because my Mom, especially, found San Francisco's fog depressing and the sun was more prominent in the East Bay. The last couple of decades she'd sit at a table next to an enclosed add-on room my dad built in the backyard on a cement pad next to what were a very long series of failing lawns that has been a rectangle of so-called "Astroturf" the last handful of years. The astrofurf seems like an insult to the living green- okay, actually a little green and a lot of yellow from dog pee- that my parents tried for years to get to take hold there. And on the other hand the astrofurf is actually soft to walk on and a garden hose , a couple of days waiting, and a rake make cleaning up the dog doo easy as well.
    There's a retaining wall that houses about a yard or so wide by the length of our backyard , maybe 30 to 40 feet?, an upper garden where aloe veras have grown to almost take over a whole half of that space. Along with two Monterey pines I planted when we first moved there all of these, quick, luxuriant growers are all gone now in order to plant more of a variety of things. Planted under the earth in the retaining wall garden are generations of family pets we've had over the last 50 years.
    I used to tease my Mom and Dad that when they died I was either gonna plant them amongst the pets or have the two of them taxidermied so I could continue to introduce them to friends who came over to the house as they sat in suspended but well-preserved animation in the front room.
    The enclosed add-on and the surrounding porch my Dad built and some of the yard is a bit frayed around the edges but I only have to walk out the back door of that house in the middle of that East Bay suburb that somehow seems more crowded- and yet emptier as well- to be cheered. My parents must have done something right.
    And, thank God!- I've heard the "wine fairy" is back in town... and not a moment too soon.
    On that note- "cheers" everyone!

     

    P.S.- Oh I forgot to mention I got my right ear pierced today. Only took 61 years to do that; maybe if I make it to 100 I'll get a tattoo also. Gotta try to keep up you know.silly