I am fullest by the ocean. The churning the muck and the mess.
A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us
“I think we ought to read only the kind of books
that wound or stab us. If the book we’re reading doesn’t wake us up with
a blow to the head, what are we reading for? So that it will make us
happy, as you write? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no
books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could
write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a
disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more
than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone,
like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
— Franz Kafka, letter to Oskar Pollak, 27-January-1904
Now female nipples are okay around Timberlake?
Justin Timberlake’s new video for “Tunnel Vision” has a jillion moments of female nudity, boobs with nipples included. YouTube/Google has given it a pass and posted an explicit version, saying: “We make exceptions when [nudity] is presented in an educational,
documentary or artistic context, and take care to add appropriate
warnings and age-restrictions.”
(Video below is probably NSFW, but if it IS Safe For Work where you are I totally want to know more!}
Recall that on February 1, 2004 the nation lost its mind (or the media did and CBS had to deal with fines) as we were exposed to a mammary gland from a fellow mammal during the Super Bowl halftime show with Timberlake and Janet Jackson. The top of her bustier was pawed at on the line “I’m gonna have you naked by the end of this song” so some kind of exposure was planned. The “wardrobe malfunction” excuse never, well, covered it.
This is progress, I guess?
Why does same-sex marriage get me emotional?
A few times in recent years I’ve been asked why I get emotional about marriage equality. There’s typically a zest gap: the other person is rational, I’m on the verge of berserker rage. For my part, it’s a mix of religion and accrued anecdotes. Let’s start with anecdotes:
1985 – The Times of Harvey Milk
Saw this documentary when it aired on PBS. The existence of gay people was still a foreign concept to me (so was going outside, or a city with more than 100,000 people in it). But Harvey Milk’s story was a moving one. This film stuck in my head, although it did not save me from being a dipshit (see below).
High school & college
In high school I had a close friend who had a strong gay vibe. Yet he was dating girls. Our 16-18 year-old brains thought it was so funny that people kept thinking he was gay. This was an ongoing joke for years. “Ha ha, you are so not gay, yet people keep calling you gay. Isn’t that hilarious?” You can see where this is going.
In college I had another friend who had a strong gay vibe. Yet he also dated girls. Similar thing, but with the extra smarm that early college years can bring. Whispering/hissing cattily to my friend things like: “Ha! I feel so gay around you” during errands in the grocery store. This was the pinnacle of wit, as he was not gay, right?
In both cases, both friends eventually came out as gay in their late teens or early twenties. Thankfully. Knowing that for years I was a close friend to each yet part of an environment that reinforced that gayness was wrong, that I was part of the sense of oppression, still has me ill at ease decades later.
Eugene, Oregon – Kinko’s, 1992
On the Oregon ballot in 1992 was Measure 9, a vile piece of hateful shit from the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA). For openers:
This state shall not recognize any categorical provision such as “sexual
orientation,” “sexual preference,” and similar phrases that include
homosexuality, pedophilia, sadism or masochism. Quotas, minority status,
affirmative action, or any similar concepts, shall not apply to these
forms of conduct, nor shall government promote these behaviors.
The two point people, Lon Mabon and Scott Lively, were pervy-looking dudes. As you can guess, there was propaganda equating homosexuality to dog fucking, child molesters, and an intense preoccupation with other people’s sexual activities. These hate-mongering ding-a-lings mentioned “water sports” in the Oregon Voters Guide as something homosexuals like to do. I had to ask around what that meant. Thanks for making the Voters Guide into pornography, guys!
The Kinko’s store I worked in was chock full of smarty pantses struggling to find jobs because of those Reagan and Bush sonsofbitches. Taking a tally of staff members, more than half were homosexual or bisexual. A socially awkward guy, this made my dating prospects dim.
We were fired up about Measure 9. Some of us started wearing buttons at
work. The manager, a lesbian, initially and sensibly disapproved. Why
should a copy shop get involved in politics? The Kinko’s store was one
of the few left in the U.S. still owned by an individual. We had decent
relations with the owner. The Anti-Measure 9 campaign was a significant
store customer. The vibe reached a point where we asked the manager if
we could make buttons for free for that campaign. Finally, happily, she said yes.
That was a triumphant feeling.
Measure 9 failed (Fuck off, OCA!). As did the
similar Measure 13 years after (double fuck off, OCA!). Then when the ballot measure numbers
cycled around, a new anti-gay Measure 9 failed yet again (many people
still had their ’92 anti-Measure 9 bumper stickers – handy! Also: triple fuck-off, OCA!).
Disappointingly, in 2004 Oregon voters passed a “one man, one woman” definition of marriage still in Oregon’s books. Scott Lively is now part of anti-gay hate
fomenting in Uganda the last few years, and people are dying because of
it. No doubt Lively travels with a Bible.
Religion & embarrassment in history
The
Bible is not a good source of morality. Both the Old and New Testaments are cited by anti-gay groups bashers as why homosexuals are
sinners. The Bible was used to justify anti-miscegenation (mixed-race)
laws. Both the Old and New Testament justify slavery. If that shoddy
book cannot get right the easiest moral issue we have: whether we
can own another human as property, what moral authority can it claim?
Yet
the Bible is also used to justify ignorance more broadly. Those denying climate
change likely rely on the Bible for their views. The Bible gets so much wrong
about science and the nature of reality it’s stupefying. It doesn’t
even reference lands beyond the middle east. Or understand diseases,
thinking them curses instead or caused by demon possession. It’s so embarrassing on these matters that
most Christians have learned to largely ignore the bulk of its
assertions on almost everything, focusing on a few lapidary phrases that reality hasn’t entirely laughed away yet. Bible-thumpers are behind the misogyny trying to legislate what women
should and should not be able to do with their own bodies. Women-as-chattel
is throughout the Bible and the Koran.
Believing
in magic books, magic institutions, or magic people always leads to
trouble. It is a grave embarrassment to our species to take ultimate
moral and scientific authority from an Iron Age compendium of
shoddy writing repeatedly tampered with and clearly written by
primate (not holy) hands. As we laugh at the ignorance of previous generations, so the future will
laugh at us.
History
never looks kindly on restricting the civil rights of citizens. We will eventually grant the right to marriage to all
adult citizens, why delay it? Banning same-sex marriage is anti-family. Anti-gay laws block family hospital visits, family medical decisions, child custody,
inheritance. Those laws hurt people. For no reason. “Marriage is about making
babies!” Bible-thumpers yell. Then take away marriage from
childless couples and old people. “Marriage is a sacred rite!” Sorry,
but marriage carries federal and state rights and privileges.
What
has happened in states and countries that have marriage equality?
Other than an occasional bigoted flip-out at the start: nothing. Gay marriage is boring there. Why? Because gay people are boring, like we straight people are boring. It is no fucking big deal to have it around!
So,
along with the case against marriage equality being morally and
metaphysically so fucking stupid, I get angry because we all will get
there, the end result is within sight. Let’s get it done and chill
out! I feel embarrassment for our country and our species that it hasn’t
happened yet. I want to stop having to explain to my kids why some of our
neighbors and friends can’t get married.
The time I (didn’t really) pass out at a bookstore
The first paragraph below is real. The other paragraphs are largely made-up.
Upstairs in the Poetry & Beat Literature room in the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco it was muggy, musty, but calm and infused with history. Beats! I knew little about them other than what could be gleaned from movies and television. I’ve not read any Kerouac and only a little Ginsberg. Gore Vidal in his memoir Palimpsest boasted of buggering Kerouac. Always the buggerer, never the buggeree. I stipulation I now know was common among homosexuals. Then, it seemed an odd and selfish admission from Vidal given his libertine reputation but typically offered few personal details.
Maybe he placed a silver dollar on Kerouac’s back, who, when he caught his breath exclaimed: “I can use this!”
Above the bookshelves, posters ran round the room of poets that listed the year of the photo. Walt Whitman. Edna St. Vincent Millay. Anne Sexton.
A trigger was pulled and I stomped downstairs and yelled at the slight blond young man at the register with an earnest soft meticulous beard. “How can this place have a poster of Anne Sexton and not one of Sylvia Plath?” A pause. My loudness increased. “They’re both American. I revere Anne Sexton. She’s a personal favorite and I talk with her in dreams. But Plath is the better, stronger poet. What are the standards here? Is Plath thought of as too precious? Too much the purview of cloistered Women’s Studies departments and sensitive teenage souls to be brought out for display? Break Plath free!” I stumbled over my tongue on the last sentence and repeated is more slowly and loudly. “Break Plath free! Bring her to the Pantheon upstairs! Set her among the stars!”
I blacked out. Then I came to. I was still in the City Lights Bookstore, seated at a corner table, my head resting against a bookshelf. A paper cup of water was in front of me and I sipped from it. My courier bag was set at my feet. I dragged the main zipper open to extract my large Moleskine journal. I fetched a pen, and opened my journal to see a series of blue and red marks and edits across the 30 or so pages I had already written up.
Violated, I looked closely and found myself agreeing with almost all the suggestions. I made faces at the excess of added commas. I am a devotee of the Oxford comma, but loathe when commas are added to indicate a pause as if in a speech. Not necessary. Ruins the flow.
I took myself, the cup of water, my bag, my pen, and my emended journal and exited the bookstore, placing a dollar in the tip jar for art, shame, and karma.
My dead dog doggerel – “Who goes with Argus?”
I hate the grim calculations and budgeting that comes with an ailing pet – slim and expensive chances to maintain that pet’s health but that may also increase its distress to no benefit. I hate, once euthanasia is done, how it changes the rhythms and routines of the home, even if it means less clean-up. I hate knowing if I killed my own meat for food I’d still be sad at times like these, but more pragmatic.
Due to her bladder cancer, diminishing energy, and messy external symptoms – I euthanized our dog of 14 and a half years this afternoon. I got her a cheeseburger for lunch today (Burgerville), because, fuck it.
Who goes with Argus?
You are now a fuzzy hide over meat.
You used to be a wheezing farting bag
Of love and company and eating and shame
And delight.
Now inert. No, gone.
You are only in our memories.
We are no longer in yours.
“Lazy on a Saturday Morning” by James Wright
Lazy on a Saturday Morning
By James Wright
Gulls poise on the wet arms
Of the woman who is in love with the sea.
She floats away from the shore on an oak leaf, calling
me
By a strange name.
Linda Perry: cawing, har-hawing harridan
Linda Perry, a songwriter behind hits like “Beautiful” by Christina Aguilera and “Get The Party Started” by P!nk, is approaching lifelong nemesis status for me. She’s the singer-songwriter behind 4 Non-Blondes and their epically shitty “What’s Up?”.
4 Non-Blondes is a band you could look at, know they were annoying as people, and sense what they smelled like. And Linda Perry continues that to this day. Here’s a recent clip of her talking about how she loves beaver (ha! ha! she’s a lesbian! get it?) and how Justin Bieber looks like a girl. HAW HAW HAW!
I’m not above remarking on Justin Bieber’s epicence quality, but I put some effort into it. There’s something about a tanned, tatted-up raccoon-eyed Skeletor making a lowball joke about a boy who looks like a girl (a joke that would have KILLED in 1982) with an acrid, molting bowler that’s – ugh! And the interviewer laughs, as he is obliged to, while Perry pretends to be the new Fran Liebowitz! No, Oscar Levant! Oh, you raconteuse, you!
When the A.V. Club’s ongoing “Hatesong” series (it’s hit & miss) got to “What’s Up?” it felt soooo good. Mickey Melchiondo from Ween goes deep:
I remember hearing it and thinking, “This is the most obnoxious fucking
hollering I’ve ever heard in my life.” I could envision the horrible,
horrible female that was singing it, and I knew that it was gonna be a
hit, just by how bad I hated it. I knew that it was going to be played
for years by every fucking bad girl band that came through my local bar,
and sung on every karaoke night for the rest of time.
Aaah. Hate can be soothing. I’ve read the article twice now, each time brings solace. The world feels less empty. A friend and I have been howling and barking about “What’s Up?” for about 20 years. Knowing others loathe it is good, we as a species may still get shit done. When the apocalypse comes (zombies, Jesus regulating, Shiva feeling done, Ragnarok, whatever) it’s pleasing to know that instead of hoarding food, weapons, finding shelter – there will be a few of us who have our priorities straight. While the swine are squealing about, we the elite aesthete force, hearts full of pride in humanity and art and civilization, that will destroy all record of “What’s Up?”
Red Lion over-catering to gays?
Red Lion has this ad directed at same-sex couples. “We look forward to
playing an important part of your life and future.” Sweet!
“Let’s make history together.” Very nice. We’ve all been in that spot, asking ourselves or our group of revolutionaries: “How’re we gonna get some justice up in here?” The answer, always, is to call the Red Lion. When thinking of the front
lines of civil rights, Red Lion is always there, picket signs and
bullhorns blaring. Look in photos in history books – from the American Revolution to Selma to Occupy Wall Street you will always find Red Lion, po-faced and glorious mane flowing, pushing for social justice.
This ad is in a Portland alternative newspaper, Willamette Week. Sadly,
our bigoted state of Oregon bans same-sex marriage. Washington doesn’t,
and its city Vancouver just over the Columbia River has a Red Lion
staring back at us, a sentinel with its new open mindedness and legal
pot. The Red Lion in Portland, literally across the river along the same
longitude, looks northward in meek shame, knowing its state is on the wrong
side of history.
All demographics deserve the right to
be pandered to. But this line made me wince: “We offer on-site event
specialists, group room rates and tasteful culinary experiences.”
Red Lion as a destination for fussy foodies? Doubtful. As a privileged,
white, probably straight male (I’ll probably never know for sure – men are
fucking boring and I lack the physical courage required of normal homosexual
acts. How those fellas endure it is a marvel) I feel this ad
somehow implies MY group doesn’t give a shit about tasteful food or event details.
We don’t, but STILL having that coarse stereotype shoved right into my
face is darned offensive. I’m taking my rage to a Del Taco where I shall dine without using a napkin!
Timberlake’s “Mirrors” – Addressed to anyone else?
Justin Timberlake’s song “Mirrors” drones like a leaf blower that changes the pitch by waving the nozzle up and down. Most of the time when it comes up, I change the channel or jump to another track.
Mirrors are overdone as a metaphor or object of contemplation. Or, they’re perfectly natural things to regard but it’s tough to come up with anything new. But while enduring a few minutes of “Mirrors” and listening to the words, a thought emerged: “What if it isn’t addressed to another person, at all?“
I doubt that is an original thought about this song. Glamorous people have to look at themselves the normal amount PLUS as a matter of commerce. “What’s new/the same about my appearance? Will it maintain/build/detract from my marketability?”
Attractiveness can be a burden. “It’s hard for people to take me seriously!” attractive people claim, with merit. We nod, thinking inwardly “How many traffic tickets have I ended up with compared to what you were able to talk your way out of?”
Attractive people: “No one ever asks me out. They’re too intimidated by my looks.” We laugh with compassion, thinking inwardly: “When we hang out, we can’t even go to the grocery store without you getting looks and hit on a half dozen times. Your lack of dates comes from something else. Or you’re measuring loneliness in hours and days, not weeks, months, years.”
(Yes, it is a brooding, complex experience running errands with me. Seething, cutting resentments and anthropological assessments makes the time pass faster.)
Some lyrics to ponder:
You were right here all along.
It’s like you’re my mirror,
My mirror staring back at me.
I couldn’t get any bigger
With anyone else beside of me.
And:
I can’t ever change without you, you reflect me, I love that about you
And if I could, I would look at us all the time.
The whole song, should you listen/endure it, is full of psychological gems of this sort.
Then as a tonic listen to Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain”, wearing your apricot scarf. One eye in the mirror as you watch yourself go by…