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.”

So………………..

I’ve loved Nick Swardson for a while. His character on Reno 911 is one of the best, and his stand-up specials have been funny too. Even when I found out he was straight, I still liked him.

So I was super excited to see he’s got a show.

Until I watched it.

Two episodes in, I’d say the overall quality level of the skits is a 5.5 out of 10, with some as high as 7.5, but none that are amazing, and quite a few that are 2.0.

He’s said in an interview “I have this memo thing on my phone that’s packed with horrible ideas, immature jokes.”

And it feels like a lot of these came straight outta that phone memo.

I’ll keep watching, but not forever.

(in that same interview, he was asked about how come he plays gay so much, and said: “It literally just snowballed. It was just a random choice for the Reno 911 character… then Art School Confidential all of a sudden got greenlit, and I was doing Scotty Kangaroojus on The Showbiz Show—but you’ll never see him again… I don’t want to do any more gay characters. I just don’t want to repeat myself. I don’t want my MySpace clips to all be like, “Heeey, guuuys!” … it’s really just a personal, creative choice. None of my characters are gay anymore…except for in Chuck and Larry, where I’ll be playing Jessica Biel’s gay brother”).

The first season of Rubicon is almost over, and I’ve been meaning to write up my thoughts. I’m glad I waited, because my thoughts after three episodes were a lot less positive than my thoughts now, after ten episodes. Solid from the start, but the first few episodes were not as strong as the recent ones. Here’s my high- and low-lights…

HIGHS.

1.Katherine Rhumor (Miranda Richardson): I’m such a sucker for a character who’s 40+ woman who is having to re-create her life. Especially when they’replayed by someone as amazing as Le Miranda.

2.Will Travers (James Badge Dale): HOT AS F*CK, in a weird way I keep trying and failing to put my finger on. I think it’s his lips. There’s something sullen and childish about them.

3. With a couple of exceptions (Grant Test (Christopher Evan Welch)), most of these characters are interesting and appealing in a broken damaged kind of way.

4. Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer): I just like this guy. I’m scared of him, but I like him.

LOWS.

1. For the first few weeks they were trying a little too hard to substitute breathy silence and meaningful stares and weird pauses for real tension… they still do it from time to time, but not as much.

2. Atlas MacDowell.  I’m sorry, but as a big evil corporation, this doesn’t cut it. We know barely anything about it. We’ve gotten no actual evidence that they’re bad… just that a bunch of roads lead back to them, but so what? They’ve got offices in Tribeca, for crying out loud. Of course they’re evil. But I need to see some more development of this.

Next Magazine has a great interview with my friend Tom Cardamone, and Tom’s brilliant as he always is, but the real eye-opener here was something the writer tossed off as an aside at the very beginning… the fact that Chuck Palahniuk is gay.

Wait, what?

So I went and researched it, and sure enough, it’s true.

Shit. Now I have to go read that crap again, and see if maybe I was dismissive of it because of all the hetero-testosterone love for Fight Club that fueled all the boys around me in college. I projected his fans onto him - and maybe not even his fans, but the fans of a movie made of one of his books, which we all know can be light years apart from the book itself. Maybe his writing is mimicking patriarchy so as to brilliantly dismantle it? I didn’t get a glimmer of that from actually *reading* him, but hey, books are half in the mind of the writer and half in the mind of the reader.

(photo by Christina Steel)

Last night I had a fabulous reading with Alexander Chee and Lee Houck. They’re both such amazingly talented writers, and it was a joy and honor to be reading some gay shit with them (the title of this post comes from the excerpt Lee read; it’s in his BOOK, the one you should go buy) If you’re on Facebook, you can click HERE for the full photo album from last night.

I read a truncated version of my story “The Last Sleepover,” which was published in the latest issue of Gargoyle. Here’s a teaser… you can buy the whole issue HERE.

The Last Sleepover

by Sam J. Miller

By the time I got to Hettie’s house, most of the blood in the seat of my briefs had dried. My watch said midnight. I crouched on her porch, hands in pockets, ear against the door. A pane of ribbed glass rang alongside it, so you could see inside but only make out light and shapes.

“Temperatures will continue to fall as the storm moves east,” said Hettie’s television. “Record snowfall tonight, so plan on staying home tomorrow. And don’t venture out unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

Snow covered me. I rang the doorbell and the weather man went dead. Soon Hettie came towards the door, ghostlike, a bright glob.

“Hello?” Fear smeared her voice.

“Hettie, it’s me,” I said. “Shane. Timmy’s friend?”

No one makes dolls that look like old ladies. Babies and toddlers and buxom Barbie businesswomen, but never the aged. Yet the woman who opened the door was a doll—a tenth the size of the Hettie I remembered. Could Alzheimer’s erase body mass along with brain function? Cold wind hit her face, and she flinched. “Hello,” she said, and smiled. “What an ugly night!”

“Can I come in?” I asked. “Timmy’s still at work. He’ll be along soon.”

“Of course,” she said, and reached out to touch my shoulder. Maybe to make sure I was solid. Coming to her door at midnight and covered in snow, weeping, hooded, my face bright red from windburn and weeping, scarecrow skinny, I could have been the Angel of Death. I’d never have let me in.

Hettie shut the door behind me. Her home still had the scent of onions frying in butter, like ten thousand pots of goulash across fifty years, but that smell had grown faint. Pine-Sol and baby powder and shit held sway. I sat down on the bottom step of the staircase leading to the second floor. I’d never realized what a miracle it was, that human beings can build homes that hold heat. I’d never realized how hostile the world really was, how those pretty twinkling stars can smirk at your agony. My mouth was full of blood. My throat ached from running. I tried to take a deep breath and collapsed into coughing.

“Are you okay, honey?” she asked from the couch.

“Sure am. I just talked to Timmy. He’s working late at McDonald’s. He said he’ll be home in a couple hours.”

“Okay,” she said. Her head nodded gratefully. People with Alzheimer’s are constantly confused by new information. They’ll believe whatever you tell them. “Why don’t you wait here for him?”

“I think I will,” I said. “Do you mind if I go upstairs and freshen up?”

“Go right ahead,” she said.

She listened to me climb the stairs, then turned the TV back on.

Hettie’s husband was three months dead. Her Alzheimer’s was so advanced she really should have been in a home somewhere, but no one in her family seemed to be in a hurry to come make all the arrangements. They lived in other cities; they had problems of their own. So Hettie was held in limbo, haunting her own house, kept from complete collapse by a half-assed home health attendant. She’d live like that until a stroke or a tumble down the stairs took away her last shred of autonomy. Timmy lived in Providence, or possibly New Haven, and I hadn’t talked to him in months.

(Photo by Marco Rafala)

You have proof that Babe Ruth was Black.

And a bunch of vicious goons, possibly hired by the Yankees, are hunting you down and trying to kill you before you can make this information public.

And it’s 1948, so you can’t just post this proof to your blog or Facebook page. And you’re a sex worker, so no one takes you seriously. And you were a little bit in love with Babe, who has been dead for less than a week.

That’s the premise in my new story, “Black Babe,” which will be published in the new issue of Slice magazine. Back when they sent me my acceptance notice, I blogged about it - this story had been rejected by 65 literary journals! It’s also one of the ones I’m proudest of, which is probably why I had the fortitude to keep on sending it out so many times.

The release event is September 30th, in Manhattan. Come hear me attempt to condense this big story into five glorious minutes!

The Center for Fiction

17 East 47th St. in NYC

4/5/6/7/S train to 42nd Street

Looking south from an I-87 and Metro-North railroad overpass, Bronx NY. Photo by me.

Killing time in Barnes & Noble, looking halfheartedly through New Fiction, glancing up suddenly, seeing the cover, thinking My God, feeling my pulse thicken like when you see a friend you weren’t expecting to see, realizing what it is, chuckling, suddenly startlingly happy: because it’s Lee’s book. And it’s out in the world.

I love True Blood, God help me, I do. But the latest episode did something that I’ve gotten really sick of: Sookie getting mad at Bill because he’s being dishonest or he’s up to something and won’t tell her what it is.

For real, y’all? AGAIN? I’m sure someone out there has already done the breakdown on how many times this has happened, and it’s gotta be a huge number.

I get it - they’re so different, it creates so many problems for them, they’re from different worlds and there are inevitable clashes. But a smart show will find new and exciting ways for their differences to create problems! Not the TEN THOUSANDTH TIME that Bill’s lying to protect Sookie, and she gets mad. What about - I dunno - him getting mad at her? Hello? Or what about their tensions/differences being PRODUCTIVE, INTERESTING, leading them on exciting adventures where for once they’re on the same page?

The American version of The Office did a great job of managing the relationship tension between Jim and Pam. The gestures were so little - a lingering look that only the camera caught, a friendly conversation turned uncomfortable because of everything that’s not being said. The on-again/off-again, will they/won’t they dynamic was really underplayed, and it worked.

And now that they’ve gotten together, and the audience is clearly on board with them, the show knows better than to constantly jeopardize the situation by making one get mad at the other. The one real time it’s happened since they finally got together… I was in agony throughout the entire episode! Because I care about these people! And the show respects them and me enough to not keep jerking me around (aside: it was really brilliantly done - Jim talked to Pam’s dad to try to get him back with Pam’s mom, and instead Pam’s dad filed for divorce, and Pam was really angry and wondered “what did he say to him? And how long until he says it to me?” (GREAT WRITING) and in the end Pam finds out that WHAT HAD HAPPENED WAS when Jim told Pam’s dad how much he loved Pam, Pam’s dad realized he had never felt that way about Pam’s mom, and that their relationship - unlike Jim and Pam’s - was based on a lot of things besides love… like fear, like loneliness, like the kids).

At this point I don’t even care about whether Sookie and Bill’s relationship works, because I’ve totally checked out on it. Which is a shame. Because it should be the bedrock of the show. Instead it annoys me - mostly - and most of the time when one of them comes on screen I think… GOD… when will we be getting back to LAFAYETTE? OR RUSSELL? OR ERIC? OR JESSICA? OR ARLENE? OR PAM?

Has anyone else noticed the complete and utter ridiculousness of the ad campaign for “Eat Pray Love”?

Basically, it’s just Julia Roberts, sitting on a bench, eating some ice cream. With a look on her face that could mean anything from “I am on a magical life-altering soul-searching journey of transformative redemption” to “I farted” (see below for the pic).

I’m not sure what movie this ad is selling. What kind of film will it put into people’s heads, when they see it? A movie about the simple pleasures of ice cream? A movie about being a grown woman unashamed of enjoying something normally associated with childhood? A movie with Julia Roberts, and therefore there’s no need to convey any additional information?

I have no doubt that it works, in that cynical advertising kind of way where even the dumbest concepts get into people’s brains and replicate and then before you know it people are plopping down money. It’s just baffling to me. And that’s why I’m not making any money.

There’s a brilliant article in Bitch Magazine about the book, situating it within the bigger context of “books, blogs, and articles saturated with fantastical wellness schemes for women,” the credit for much of which gets laid at Oprah’s feet. The article coins the term “priv-lit,” which I love, and am gonna start using obsessively, because it so perfectly describes the glut of books that “could easily have been called Wealthy, Whiny, White.”

To whit: “Eat, Pray, Love is not the first book of its kind, but it is a perfect example of the genre of priv-lit: literature or media whose expressed goal is one of spiritual, existential, or philosophical enlightenment contingent upon women’s hard work, commitment, and patience, but whose actual barriers to entry are primarily financial. Should its consumers fail, the genre holds them accountable for not being ready to get serious, not “wanting it” enough, or not putting themselves first, while offering no real solutions for the astronomically high tariffs—both financial and social—that exclude all but the most fortunate among us from participating.”

I find this sh*t infuriating. But it’s where the money is. Tell people it’s easy to have a perfect life, all their dreams can come true, God loves you, your inner goodness will be rewarded. People want to hear that. Most of all, they want to hear that the system is set up for them to succeed.  That we don’t live in a world that’s actively f*cking them over. That the oppression they face (because they’re female, or of color, or queer, or differently abled, or poor) is somehow INTERNAL TO THEM, because if it’s INTERNAL TO THEM it means all they need to do is change themselves… (which Oprah and her ilk say is so easy… just buy yourself something nice once in a while)…

When in fact what needs to change is the patriarchal and poverty-based underpinnings of our society. That’s the real source of our oppression. And all the ice cream in the world won’t make it go away.

This afternoon I read some Facebook shit-talking about Lady GaGa refusing to join the Arizona boycott, and got this sinking feeling in my stomach… as in: oh no, another artist who I kinda like is punking out, refusing to confront the terrible problems in this country, trying to pretend like as an artist she’s somehow above politics…

But… after I read what Lady actually said and did, I think she’s a lot more courageous than the artists who stayed home instead of marching onto conflicted territory. And more than that: I think she sees her role as an artist to be inherently political. Which it is. And she’s ready to use it.

She went to Arizona. She played her sold-out show. And she was able to speak directly to 14,000 Arizonans, all of whom like her enough to shell out big bucks to see her. Some of those people (or at least their parents) probably voted for SB1070. Some of those people will be profiled under it.

“I will not cancel my show. I will hold you, and we will hold each other, and we will protest this state,” she said, stepping out with STOP SB0170 scrawled on her forearm.

“You really think us dumb fucking pop stars are gonna collapse the economy in Arizona? I’ll tell you what we have to do about SB 1070. We have to be active. We have to actively protest.”

“Do not be afraid,” she told the crowd. “Because if it wasn’t for all of you immigrants, this country wouldn’t have shit. And I mean it. I mean it so deeply in my soul.”

This is actually really exciting to me. I’m not anti-boycott. A boycott is like any other action strategy - one more tool in the toolkit, and we have to use whatever we can in the most intelligent, consistent, and active manner possible. But sometimes a boycott, especially if it’s done half-assed, as they often are, is just plain liberal bullshit. “Let me feel better about myself because I don’t shop at Wal-Mart, like my $9.99 is going to break the company’s back.” “Let me issue a public call for a boycott of Target, because that’s easy enough to do from my laptop, because Facebook spreads that shit so fast I can feel like I’m actually making a difference, instead of getting up out of my chair and really building something.”

Mao Zedong, who for all his, er, “complexity,” was a damn good political writer, said that one of the eleven main types of liberalism was this: “To work half-heartedly without a definite plan or direction; to work perfunctorily and muddle along.” From this I would extrapolate: To do random things and expect them to make a difference is a form of liberalism, because the truly revolutionary response - to engage in a systematic organized collective campaign of action - is a lot of fricking work. Because actually going to talk to the people who voted for a racist law, and try to get them to see reason, is really hard. Because talking to the people who are directly affected by that law, and showing them that you stand with them and support them, takes a lot more guts and courage and time and effort than staying home and looking down your nose at the people who are actually living it.

Who would have thought that Lady GaGa would be the one to remind us of this?

The go-go boy walks by and leaves a cloud of bowling-alley wax smell; his body, lubed up for the lights and turned blue-and-then-red by flashing strobes, looks sticky and insubstantial.

Hungry men of all ages stare up at stuffed crotches and marble thighs. They curve dollar bills into underwear that cost as much as the boy’s weekly food budget. They leer; they stare; they feel economically superior and physically inferior all at once.

And it occurs to me: go-go boys are just naked panhandlers. They are engaging in the same basic activity: a bare-bones display of themselves, in the hopes that it will move someone to give them a dollar. And people give for a lot of reasons, with pity being right up by the top. Pity and the momentary relief of feeling like no matter how poorly you might be doing economically, there’s someone worse off - there’s a desperate human being literally begging for one of those crinkled damp singles in your pocket.

I’m not saying this to be mean to go-go boys. I work closely with and consider myself friends with a lot of people who are panhandlers, so I recognize the courage and the sense of self that are necessary for both forms of soliciting the public.

But I do find it ironic/offensive that the fine upstanding Chelsea men who are so happy to ogle a gym-addicted go-go stud will then turn around and lobby hard to oppose the opening of a homeless shelter in their neighborhood, using deeply problematic fear-mongering language about “those people” taking over “our streets,” all with a heavy, hard-to-miss racist subtext when you consider what a disproportionate percentage of the homeless community is African-American.

The club was lame. The party was lame. The go-go boys and the bad music and the anti-homeless hostility of the property-owners and “community leaders” in the city’s foremost queer neighborhood had me depressed.

At the gym I break my own rule about never ever watching any cable news programs, not on purpose, but because the least bad thing on the wall of televisions (The Two Towers) is on a commercial break, and my eyes move from monitor to monitor while I push and pull the elliptical trainer back and forth, and on Telemundo it’s some Spanish-language Survivor equivalent, with impossibly-tanned men sweating and scheming deliciously, and on TBS it’s Michael Douglas doing stupid things because he’s anxious about getting old, moving his hand through thinning hair…

… and then on CNN it’s a series of business-suited men talking about Afghanistan, a new report or handful of casualties requiring the talking heads to start spinning again.

These three, they could be the same white man at 30 and then at 45 and then at 60. They work for the Wall Street Journal or the Council on Foreign Relations; they went to Harvard and West Point. They disagree on little things and agree on the big ones. Like we need to be in Afghanistan.

Before commercial we cut to the handsomest man at the table, who says that yes, sure, of course, there are lots of reasons why the war is a big terrible mess, but that if we pull out of Afghanistan, “there will be human rights abuses that will shame us.”

From this, we cut immediately to the sharp blue star logo of Lockheed Martin, and the words WE NEVER FORGET WHO WE’RE WORKING FOR.

Who are they working for, exactly? And who is CNN working for? And who is that handsome man, who by virtue of his handsomeness becomes the one whose words matter most, working for?

This is the same day that Wikileaks makes what it is calling the “largest intelligence leak in history,” six years/91,000 documents/200,000 pages worth of reports and documents by soldiers and analysts. These pompous grave-faced men on CNN are telling us how pulling out of Afghanistan would undo all the hard work that our deal beleaguered vital ally Pakistan is doing… even though, according to these astonishing leaked documents, “Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service guides the Afghan insurgency that fights American troops, even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion in U.S. aid.”

To me, this is perfect evidence of how hard mainstream media works to keep you from understanding the realities behind the war. But then again, I already believe that this is the case, so it’s easy for me to see it. I wonder what someone who didn’t would see. They would probably see handsome confident men saying things they desperately want to believe are true.