I’m afraid to click on this video. I’m afraid to download the audio. I feel like there’s no way it could ever be as amazing and revolutionary and fucking brilliant as I imagine it to be. But I’m very very very excited about it
Sometimes I’m just totally apathetic about the fight against “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell.” Sometimes I think about queer friends who have served in the military, or are serving, or would want to, and the shit they’ve gotta deal with, and I think “sure, whatever, if that’s what folks wanna fight for.” And while I definitely feel that any discriminatory policy is wrong, my own antagonism to militarism/imperialism/the size of the Defense budget would keep me from fighting to change the policy.
But then I read stuff like this transcript of a Democracy Now! episode where my hero/ine Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore debated Dan Choi, Does opposing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” bolster U.S. Imperialism?
And I remember - oh yeah, right, this is not just one of those cases of “it’s not my issue but whatever,” where folks are fighting for something progressive positive but I don’t do much on it because it’s not where my expertise or passion lie. This is a fundamentally conservative fight, which has ensnared a lot of progressives because it involves attacking homophobic institutions.
Mattilda, as always, is amazingly lucid and clear and compelling. And she does a great job of taking Dan Choi, who is such a poster boy and gets praised to the skies in the blogosphere and Kathy Griffin’s show, and needling Dan until he sheds all the equal-rights/GO-GAY fancy clothes to get at the brutal American imperialism at the heart of what Dan is asking for. Here’s a quote from Dan:
“War is a force that gives us meaning. War is a force that teaches us lessons of humanity and allows us to realize something about our society and teaches us the lessons that we probably should have learned before we went to war.”
Wait, what?
War “teaches us lessons of humanity and allows us to realize something about our society”????!? Lessons like how hard you need to press down with your boot before someone’s arm breaks? Teaches us something about our society, like, educating children and providing health care and housing are less of a priority than developing new and atrocious ways to kill people?
Mattilda says it best. I won’t even try to summarize or paraphrase or riff on it:
“We need to be fighting for universal access to basic needs, things like housing and healthcare and the right to stay in this country or leave if you want to. We need to be fighting for comprehensive sex education, for AIDS healthcare, for senior care, for safe houses for queer youth to escape abusive families. And the problem with all this attention on the war machine, all this support for, you know, soldiers to serve openly in unjust wars, the problem is that the military is what’s taking away the ability to fund everything in this country that would actually benefit, you know, the people who need the most. You know, the war budget—if we could just, you know, take half the US war budget, we’d be able to have everything that we want in this country, whether it’s renewable energy, whether it’s, you know, housing for everyone, whether it’s healthcare, whether it’s food on the table. I mean, we need to get back to a struggle for basic needs.”
I am the happiest man on the planet right now.
Well, maybe not, but I just found the awesomest Korean buffet, and that made me incredibly happy. In Koreatown, on 31st Street. It’s called Woorijip, and they have VEGETARIAN (SHRIMPLESS) KIM CHEE and KIM CHEE PANCAKES and KIM CHEE EGG ROLLS and OMG A MILLION OTHER AMAZING THINGS.
And very reasonably priced… So… Go there.
Lots of folks are reporting that Syfy has just greenlit a new Battlestar Galactica series, a prequel that takes places in the middle ground between Caprica (which is occasionally solid but consistently underwhelming) and the re-imagined 2003-2009 Battlestar Galactica that I firmly believe to be the greatest thing ever put on television.
From the press release:
“Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome takes place in the 10th year of the first Cylon war. As the battle between humans and their creation, a sentient robotic race, rages across the 12 colonial worlds, a brash rookie viper pilot enters the fray. Ensign William Adama, barely in his 20’s and a recent Academy graduate, finds himself assigned to the newest battlestar in the Colonial fleet… the Galactica.”
“While maintaining the themes of politics, social propaganda, and the timeless question: what does it mean to be human? – ‘Blood & Chrome’ will also return us to the authentic, relentless depiction of combat and the agony and ecstasy of human-Cylon war, which was the hallmark of ‘Battlestar Galactica’s’ early seasons.”
This is exciting to me. I like these things: politics, social propaganda, the timeless question: what does it mean to be human, authentic & relentless depicions of combat, the agony and ecstasy of human-Cylon war.
I wonder if this was Syfy cutting Caprica loose - preparing the way for a cancellation by throwing a bone to the (already discontented) legions of BSG fans who still watch it.
Because in the course of writing this post, I learned that Caprica just got canceled, according to EW’s PopWatch, who says of Blood and Chrome: “[it] might as well be calledBattlestar Galactica: All the Space Battles and Killer Robots You Missed on Caprica.”
So… I’ll collect my thoughts and do a post about that soon enough.
Does everything the zombiepocalypse genre demands, then does more. Him going back to kill the legless zombie convinced me they’re trying something new, and deep.
This year, for Halloween, I decided to be the Last Airbender.
That’s TELEVISION Aang, not MOVIE Aang, because MOVIE Aang was terrible.
I don’t dress up every year, but I take my costumes seriously. I don’t want it to look like a costume. So… no ridiculous extravagant make-up or cardboard clothes or anything like that. I’m not against that, it’s just not what I dig.
It took me a month to assemble my costume. I bought a white Mandarin-collar shirt from Pearl River, and then dyed it the precise shade of yellow. I bought a pair of loose fitting simple cotton kung fu pants, and dyed them brown. I bought some martial arts slippers from Mott Street… the sixth store I went into. I shaved my head. I bought three shades of blue-grey eye pencil, to find the perfect color for the arrow tattoos:
And J. helped me cut and sew together a gorgeous orange cowl, and long strips of orange cloth to bind my wrists and ankles. And Saffie did my head arrow, a long and involved process involving lots of baby powder and back-and-forth about how far down my forehead the arrow should go. Here’s the finished product:
“Many great and wise Air Nomads have detached themselved and achived spiritual enlightenment. But the Avatar can *never* do it. Because your sole duty is to the world. Here is my wisdom to you: selfless duty calls you to sacrifice your spiritual needs and do whatever it takes to protect the world.” - Avatar Yangchen
And yes, it’s true that I’m not Asian, so in that sense I’m closer to Movie Aang than Television Aang, but in wardrobe and spirit I was (hopefully) more aligned with Television Aang.
There’s an impressive Flickr Archive of funny signs from this weekend’s Rally/ies to Restore Fear/Sanity.
And I think they’re amazing, hilarious, awesome, etc. ”Up With the Mild-Mannered Majority.” “Impeach Churchill.” “OMG SNAKE!” “I’m With That Guy of Probably Average Intelligence.” “I have a really big sign.” “This is a sign.”
And I think action is always a good thing, any time people get away from their computers and hit the streets and start making noise.
But the noise itself is a separate question. There’s good (”effective”) noise, and then there’s noise. Part of me is worried that the content of these rallies is EXACTLY why the political spectrum has been moved so far to the right that we’re talking about selling off state highways to corporations to solve budget crises, instead of raising taxes on the rich, and the most progressive conversation we can possibly have is over allowing LGBT folks to serve as international ambassadors of US violence and military supremacy and corporate hegemony (from my queer perspective a deeply problematic and conservative conversation). Because the left - “the left that wants a reasonable health care system, fair taxation, the end of wars of occupation and aid to war criminals in Israel,” as my friend Josh describes us - is too busy being smart and ironic.
I’m all for countering rage with intelligence and wit and maybe even irony. And yes, it’s a fact that the populist rage that Glenn Beck etc are whipping up is hypocritical - that it’ll be used precisely to fuck over the very folks who are attending their rallies - the seniors whose Social Security will be privatized and then slowly hacked away - the working class folks whose jobs will evaporate faster, as corporations get more and more incentive to lay people off and further exploit workers and resources in developing nations. But all of that doesn’t mean the anger isn’t real. To quote Josh again: “people on the “left” have reason to be angry- reason to join together for common purpose- reason to be pissed off. Stewart, as much as I love him, lumps together leftist anger and right wing anger, and casts both as equally irrational and dangerous, which I don’t think is the case. “Left” anger is based in reality.”
One sign said: “I Prefer Facts and Nuance and Intellectual Debate.”
Yeah, sure, me too. But how well do you think it will go, when you say to the folks beating us with sticks “I prefer facts and nuance”? Political discourse is miles away from intellectual debate, and as long as we keep on thinking we’re smarter than everybody, as long as we believe that we can focus on countering the idiocy of Right Wing pundits instead of really developing a radical alternative, we’re going to be scratching our heads wondering why laid-off workers aren’t on our side.
And to quote Chris Hedges, as he was quoted by my amazing friend Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz: “As long as the liberal class speaks in the dead voice of moderation it will continue to fuel the right-wing backlash. Only when it appropriates this rage as its own, only when it stands up to established systems of power, including the Democratic Party, will we have any hope of holding off the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party.”
The right is still setting the tone. And we’re responding to the tone and the lies, instead of saying what we want and need.
(photo rights reserved under a Creative Commons License, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/thekellyscope/)
Yesterday, we went to see the Matthew Bourne production of Swan Lake, which is in NYC at City Center for just one more week. And while the production was not flawless - the dancing overall was exceedingly sloppy - I found myself really really moved, to the point where I got pretty depressed thinking about queerness and suicide and Tchaikovsky and 1890 and 2010.
I’ve always loved the music for Swan Lake. And in a way that’s hard to describe, I’ve always felt like that music - and most of Tchaikovsky’s music - is very queer. How music can be queer when it doesn’t have any words is a good question, and one I’ll be trying to articulate in a blog post later this week - so - stay tuned. But for now I’ll just say that there’s something about the beauty and the melancholy in his music that really resonates with my experience of queerness. Tchaikovsky’s most beautiful pieces have always seemed to me to be expressions of queer desire or queer identity (his brother and biographer said that “Romeo and Juliet could not have been written” without his agonizing and unrequited love for a classmate named Vladimir Gerard (thanks, Mark, for the tip on that story!)), but because of the repression and hostility of his age, they had to be written in code - translated into an achingly beautiful format that nevertheless obscured and hid away their true meaning. So it’s easy to hear and feel and love the music while missing what their composer was trying to say.
And then - in 1998 - this production comes along. I don’t know a lot about Matthew Bourne or the history or creation of this piece - whether it was all him or another unsung artist or a whole lot of awesome brilliant folks collaborating - but to me it’s something of a miracle: the time and the place and the people were finally right for this message to be deciphered, for the layers or code to be peeled back to reveal the gorgeous tragic queerness at the center of the story Tchaikovsky was trying to tell.
And whether the actual story of this production is specifically the story that Tchaikovsky wanted to tell is not the point (remember, he did not write the scenario for the original). For me, the essence of the story gets to the profound truth of Tchaikovsky’s life as a gay man who felt that he could not live openly, whose whole life was an attempt at cryptography, a way to take the real message of who he was and distort it so no one could see the truth (Leo Tolstoy said “I am very sorry for Tchaikovsky… sorry as for a man about whom something is not quite clear”). This Swan Lake is about trying to embrace who you really are, even if it kills you, because to live without embracing it will kill you too.
P.S. - The depression lasted until I was in my costume and about to head out for Halloween partying. Stay tuned for a much more upbeat blog post about that.
The Dyckman Street stop on the 1 train, which is a block from my house, has been shut down until… I don’t know… AUGUST 2011!!!!!!!!!! Which pisses off a lot of people. Including me. J. took this photograph on the uptown 1 train platform at 168th Street. It eloquently gives voice to our whole community.
Steve Almond, who I’m starting to share Stephen Elliott’s crush on even though I’ve never met or seen a picture of him, has an amazing article on The Rumpus that does a pretty solid job of making me feel like I can understand some of the shit I just can’t understand in political discourse these days.
I have nothing productive to add. I just wanted to repeat some gems:
“People enjoy feeling wronged. This is why Republicans refuse to believe (for instance) that Obama has cut their taxes, even when presented evidence. They need to preserve their sense of victimhood, so as to experience their aggression as self-defense.”
“The Germans… didn’t think of themselves as mass murderers. They were victims of the Jews, the Communists, the Allies. They projected their darkest impulses onto their adversaries and victims so they could feel heroic. They traded the sound of moral surety for a genuine morality.”
“Most Americans have no sense of genuine heroism. We live in a cloud of entitlement. The government provides us cheap food, clean water, electricity, medication, roads, everything. We still feel helpless. We don’t know how to fix our cars or grow food or find enduring love. We wander giant emporiums like children, full of wonder and jittery need. Corporations fleece us, then convince us to blame the government for our problems. ”
“When I ask political reporters why they write about polls and fake scandals, rather than real crises and policy solutions, they say because it’s expected of them. Ask a Wall Street trader why he flouts regulations, or a soldier why he shoots at strangers.”
“The undercurrent of violence in this election doesn’t feel political to me. It feels moral.”
“I suspect… that the very expression of such vulnerable emotions – whether hope or desire or mercy – has become somehow too painful or frightening for you to bear, and that you find it easier therefore to retreat into ancient grievances, to regard the world as a cold, hateful place, full of violent strangers with dirty bombs, or naïve nincompoops like me, who have the Communist Manifesto tattooed on our genitalia.”
Where’d they get this Phaedra lady? They found the tackiest woman in all of Atlanta, for the rest to tear apart. And it’s AMAZING.
Last night I went to a candelight vigil for another amazing inspiring strong powerful queer youth who took her own life. Mosey Diaz was an active member of Picture the Homeless - the first young person who ever attended one of our Youth Organizing meetings, an incredible woman who was always full of positivity and always smiling.
The vigil was at twilight, on Pier 45 on the Hudson River, which has such deep resonance for queer youth but also for all queer New Yorkers - it’s where the Pride Parade terminates, tens of thousands of us disgorged onto the waterfront, exhausted and loud and drunk and naked and proud and happy - or some, or none of those things, and a whole lot more besides. Global Action Project had organized the event - Mosey was active there, as well as with the Bronx Community Pride Center and the LGBT Center’s YES Program. Arriving at the event, it was clear from the size of the crowd that Mosey had been an important part of a lot of communities, and that a lot of people loved her a lot.
I arrived with a lot of anger, and a lot of sadness. Specific sadness, about Mosey being gone from this earth, about whatever she had going on around her that led her to such a terrifying decision; and more general sadness, about the world we live in, and the rash of queer suicides and what that means for us, what it means about our society, how it’s more evidence of the injustices that are fundamental to the structure of our world, how race plays into our sense of self, how homelessness and poverty exacerbate all these other issues.
But after just a few minutes, that sadness and anger turned into something else. Hearing so many inspiring queer youth tell stories about how they knew Mosey, how they loved her, how they feel terribly guilty about failing to respond to a text message or a Facebook status update “Like,” how they remember her non-stop smile, how this should be a wake-up call to stop the shade and love one another and really really really love them, and tell them they’re loved, and tell them they’re amazing and inspiring (there’s that word again, but what other one is there?), because you really truly honest-to-Jebus never know (because, of the queer youth that I know, Mosey was pretty much the last one I would have expected to take her own life)… standing there with our candles pressed together, watching the sky over the river turn purple and then darken, watching the spire of the Empire State Building appear and disappear through low-drifting clouds, feeling another October come to an end, another year over, all of us that much closer to the dark, my sadness and anger became something else. Something still melancholy and mournful, but also stronger and more resolved, more - yes - inspired, reminded of why I’m a community organizer, determined to support folks coming together to figure out ways we can fend off the forces of hate and oppression.
One young woman was pretty frank about the ups and downs of her relationship with Mosey, but she used that to make the point that we all need to do a better job of loving each other. Concretely, physically, through specific acts, through saying how we feel. “Look around you,” she said, “because at the end of the day, this is all you have.”
And that, to me, summarizes what was most empowering about last night’s vigil. We are all we have. The stuff doesn’t matter. I half-agree with the Buddha, about the world being illusion, about all things being false, about suffering coming from clinging to false things, attachments to illusions. But as I understand it, Buddhism includes other people in that - that much of our suffering comes from our relationships with others, from the lust and desire and fear and longing and grief and anger that come from our attachments to people. It makes sense to me, to think of the universe as illusion, to think of the cold and the hostile and the cruel elements in this world as components of that. But people are real. People are not illusions. We need each other. This is all you have.*
I had planned to take photos, but of course once I got there I could not. Our grief was for us, for the folks standing in the cold clutching Styrofoam cups that kept our candles from blowing out. For our community; not for anyone else. So this blog post is submitted without imagery.
* - I’m not a Buddhist, and it’s entirely possible that I’m completely misunderstanding this central concept. I apologize. As the Dalai Lama says, if there’s a Buddhist equivalent to the Christian concept of original sin, it’s fundamental ignorance.
Interesting new directions. Especially the angel/cylon in Zoe’s head (a la Baltar’s in BSG). This show needs to tap into its incredible Battlestar DNA/heritage more!
There is Weight Loss Happening
Jealousy Abounds
Drop ‘Em Like You Drop The Pounds
[my hero Saffie Kallon is on a VERY IMPRESSIVE weight loss winning streak. She wrote this haiku to celebrate. I think it's brilliant. I'm blogging it with her permission]
This cat hates haters.
For two years, in my hometown of Hudson, I worked as a dishwasher at a mid-to-low-quality restaurant. On Mondays, after work, I’d go to the bowling alley and buy a pitcher of beer and bowl alone until the ratio of gutter balls became inordinately high, usually after three games, either because I was exhausted or because of the beer. The place was invariably empty except for me, and the guys who hung out at the bar; within a year, it would close down altogether.
Now, on the spot where it once stood, there’s a big chain drug store whose name does not merit mentioning. Directly across the street is another big chain drug store.
In spite of all that practice - and in spite of the fact that my punk rock band used to go to the now-deceased Hudson Lanes all the time when we should have been practicing, which is maybe part of why we don’t exist anymore - I’m a terrible bowler. It was more of a meditative thing, a way to tune the world out, or some working-class gene kicking in and compelling me to bowl the way those zombies got compelled to visit the mall in Dawn of the Dead, obeying instincts and socialized norms that no longer had any real meaning for them.
Bowling alleys are following dinosaurs down the path to extinction. Or maybe Panda Bears is a better analogy. Because there will always be a few, kept alive in glitzy expensive places for people to gawk at. Last weekend we went bowling in Williamsburg, or Hipster Ground Zero, and the act is still every bit as fun… it’s just gotten to be so much work. There’s not a lot of places, you gotta make reservations, it’s expensive, you’re surrounded by twats, etc. The pictures posted below are from that evening.
WebUrbanist has an interesting photo collection, of abandoned bowling alleys from around the world. Oddly enough, I can’t find any solid current statistics on the number of bowling alleys in the country, and how that’s changed in the past ten-twenty-fifty-sixty years. All the industry reports I can find are things you gotta pay for. But maybe I’m just not a very good Googler.
