A Sense Apart

2011-10-20T12:46:00.003-07:00

Still haven't gotten back to writing on this blog, but I think I am going to keep trying. Don't give up on me blogger!

2011-06-28T21:14:00.000-07:00

My New Best Friend

Last September I accepted, on a temporary basis, a small, white poodle mix who was recovering from hip surgery. Well, now it is July, and she is still here. I don't think she is going anywhere. Here's a picture.

2010-05-16T20:44:00.000-07:00

Hamster Widget

2010-05-16T20:22:00.000-07:00

Hamster Widget

2010-04-10T08:08:00.000-07:00

Neglected Blog

I wonder how many blogs there are floating around in cyberspace, abandoned, because of Twitter and Facebook. I know that, since I started Facebook, my attention to this blog has waned considerably. I need to think of new ways to use this blog creatively.

2010-01-03T04:12:00.000-08:00

Three weird Christmas traditions....(not sensible ones like Reindeer with glowing red-noses)

Black Pete

In the folklore and legends of the Netherlands and Flanders, Zwarte Piet ( pronunciation (help·info)) (meaning Black Pete) is a companion of Saint Nicholas (Dutch: Sinterklaas) whose yearly feast in the Netherlands is usually on the evening of 5 December (Sinterklaas-avond, that is St. Nicolas Eve) and 6 December in Flanders, when they distribute presents to all good children.

The character of Zwarte Piet appears only in the weeks before Saint Nicholas's feast, first when the saint is welcomed with a parade as he arrives in the country (in the Netherlands by steam boat, from Spain), and is mainly targeted at children, who come to meet the saint as he visits stores, schools etc.

2010-01-03T04:09:00.000-08:00

La Befana

La Befana
Christian legend has it that La Befana was approached by the magi (the biblical three kings) a few days before Christ's birth. They asked for directions to where the baby Jesus was, but she did not know. She provided them with shelter for a night, as she was considered the best housekeeper in the village with the most pleasant home. They invited her to join them on the journey to find the baby Jesus, but she declined, stating she was too busy with her housework. Later, La Befana had a change of heart, and tried to search out the astrologers and Jesus. That night she was not able to find them, so to this day, La Befana is searching for the baby Jesus. She leaves all the good children toys and candy, while the bad children get coal or bags of ashes.

Another Christian legend takes a slightly darker tone as La Befana was an ordinary woman with a child whom she greatly loved. However, her child died, and her resulting grief maddened her. Upon hearing news of Jesus being born, she set out to see him, delusional that he was her son. She eventually met Jesus and presented him with gifts to make him happy. The infant Jesus was delighted, and he gave La Befana a gift in return; she would be the mother of every child in Italy.

Also, popular tradition avers that if one sees La Befana one will receive a thump from her broomstick, as she doesn't wish to be seen. This aspect of the tradition may be designed to keep children in their beds while parents are distributing candy (or coal) and sweeping the floor on Epiphany Eve.

Also, another commonly heard Christian legend of la Befana starts at the time of the birth of baby Jesus.[6] Befana spends her days cleaning and sweeping. One day the magi, also known as the three wise men, came to her door in search of baby Jesus. Befana turned them away because she was too busy cleaning. Befana notices a bright light in the sky; she thinks this is the way to baby Jesus. She brought some baked goods and gifts for baby Jesus in her bag and took her broom to help the new mother clean and began her search for baby Jesus. She searched and searched for Baby Jesus, but never found him. Befana still searches today, after all these centuries. On the eve of the Epiphany, Befana comes to a house where there is a child and leaves a gift. Although she has been unsuccessful in her search, she still leaves gifts for good young children because the Christ Child can be found in all children

2010-01-03T04:06:00.000-08:00

Krampus

Krampus is a mythical creature. In various regions of the world – especially Austria and Hungary – it is believed that Krampus accompanies St. Nicholas during the Christmas season, warning and punishing bad children, in contrast to St. Nicholas, who gives gifts to good children. Due to German and Austrian influence, the myth of Krampus is also prevalent in Croatia, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Slovenia and northern Italy.

The word Krampus originates from the Old High German word for claw (Krampen). In the Alpine regions, Krampus is represented by an incubus-like creature. Traditionally, young men dress up as the Krampus in the first two weeks of December, particularly on the evening of December 5, and roam the streets frightening children and women with rusty chains and bells.[1] In some rural areas the tradition also includes birching – corporal punishment with a birch rod – by Krampus, especially of young girls. Images of Krampus usually show him with a basket on his back used to carry away bad children and dump them into the pits of Hell.

Modern Krampus costumes consist of Larve (wooden masks), sheep's skin, and horns. Considerable effort goes into the manufacture of the hand-crafted masks, and many younger adults in rural communities compete in the Krampus events.

In Oberstdorf, in the alpine southwestern part of Bavaria, the tradition of der Wilde Mann ("the wild man") is kept alive. He is like Krampus, but has no horns, is dressed in fur, and frightens children (and adults) with rusty chains and bells, but is not an assistant of Saint Nicholas.

In the aftermath of the Austrian Civil War the Krampus tradition was a target of Austrian Fascists allied with Nazi Germany.[2]

2009-12-08T21:46:00.000-08:00

Facebook

Facebook has stolen my attention for quite awhile now, but I think I will try to get back in the habit of posting to this blog. Facebook does have some limitations this blog does not. Hope to write more soon!

not the same...

2009-08-15T18:18:00.001-07:00

Very cool dance by Bennyroyce Royon.

2009-07-30T00:09:00.000-07:00

William Finn-Composer of Falsettos

Life
William Finn grew up in Natick, Massachusetts with his parents and siblings, Michael and Nancy. He majored in music at Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He lives with his life partner in New York City and Pittsfield, MA, where he is an independent composer and writer. He is also "Adjunct Faculty Composer/Lyricist" at NYU.

[edit] Work
Finn is a heavily autobiographical textwriter (he always writes his own lyrics); his topics are the gay and Jewish experiences in contemporary America, and very often conflict, loyalty, family, belonging, sickness, healing, and loss.
Finn is especially well noted for his work on what was to become a trilogy of short musical shows off Broadway. In Trousers, March of the Falsettos, and Falsettoland all chronicle the lives of the character Marvin, his ex-wife Trina, his boyfriend, Whizzer, his psychiatrist, Mendel, and his son, Jason.
Falsettos, the combination of the latter two parts of his Marvin Trilogy (March of the Falsettos and Falsettoland), opened on Broadway at the John Golden Theater on April 29, 1992, and ran for 486 performances. It won the 1992 Tony Awards for Best Music and Lyrics and for Best Book, the latter shared with James Lapine.
With Lapine, Finn penned a musical loosely based on his near-death experience following brain surgery, exploring the role of music in his life and recovery. The musical's main character is a man who has what may be terminal brain cancer. The show, A New Brain, starred Malcolm Gets, Kristin Chenoweth and Chip Zien, and premiered at Lincoln Center. The UK premiere was at the 2005 Edinburgh Festival Fringe.
At the 2006 Elliot Norton Awards Ceremony, Finn brought his High School drama teacher, Gerald Dyer, onstage with him to present an award. ``He imbued us with a ridiculous sense of our self worth and taught us how to shape scenes and songs," Finn said of Dyer. Another student of Gerald Dyer, Alison Fraser, found fame on Broadway, collaborating with Finn in the original casts of In Trousers and March of the Falsettos.
More recently, Finn scored another Broadway success with The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee, for which he wrote both music and lyrics. The show won two Tony Awards in 2005; one for Best Book of a Musical, and another for the Best Performance by a Featured Actor in a Musical, and toured the United States in 2006. The show was first workshopped and produced at Barrington Stage Company (BSC) in Pittsfield, MA, where Finn later created The Musical Theatre Lab (MTL) with BSC Artistic Director Julianne Boyd. The MTL is an annual summer lab where emerging musical theatre artists are supported and new musical works are created, fine-tuned and produced under the curatorship of Finn and Boyd.
Three musical revues of Finn's music have been produced:
Infinite Joy, in which the composer played the piano and sang along with an all-star cast, contained several songs from shows that were unfinished, and some that were cut from previous shows.
Elegies: A Song Cycle is a series of songs the composer wrote in memoriam of loved ones now gone, and in response to the September 11, 2001 attacks.
Make Me a Song, which was conceived and directed by Rob Ruggiero, premiered at Hartford's Theaterworks in the summer of 2006, opened off-Broadway in November 2007, and closed in December 2007 after 54 performances. A live recording of Make Me a Song was released by Sh-K-Boom Records on April 29, 2008.
His long-in-development show, The Royal Family of Broadway, with a book by Richard Greenberg, was based on the play by George S. Kaufman and Edna Ferber, which tells the story of a girl from a family of great Broadway actors who contemplates leaving show business and getting married. It has apparently been shelved, according to William Finn's personal notes for Make Me A Song and Playbill magazine. [1].
Finn's most frequent collaborators include librettist James Lapine, director Graciela Daniele and singers Stephen Bogardus, Carolee Carmello, Stephen DeRosa, Alison Fraser, Keith Byron Kirk, Norm Lewis, Michael Rupert, Mary Testa, and Chip Zien.

Fight With Love - What Would I Do, Falsettos

2009-07-30T00:03:00.001-07:00

Falsettos

2009-07-29T23:58:00.001-07:00

Falsettoland from the Tony Awards...

Falsettos : What Would I Do

2009-07-29T23:54:00.001-07:00

One of the only love duets between two men that I can think of. Can you think of any?

'Gotta Die Sometime' "Falsettos" New Orleans Premiere Production

2009-07-29T23:49:00.001-07:00

From the musical Falsettos....

2009-05-27T20:47:00.000-07:00

Blogging, or "Life on Line"...

A young acquaintence of mine recently shared with me his blog on Tumblr. Apparently, tumblr is a cross between blogging and tweeting. It is a short-form blog with an emphasis on the visual. Many of the pages I looked at were nothing but images...striking..but without context or explanation. I noticed that my friend had accounts of Facebook, Myspace, Livejournal, and Twitter. But he said virtually nothing on any of them. Which leads me to wonder...1,000 years from now, how will future archeologists examine what we are doing now on the internet? How will they examine what the everyday person does on the internet? There's nothing solid to examine! Is there some grand repository containing billions of twitter messages saying things like.."Star Trek Rocks" or "Meet me at Starbucks"? Or will blogging and social networks places be footnotes in the history books recorded like episodes of St. Vitus dance from the middle ages?

2009-04-15T20:46:00.000-07:00

Poem I Like

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

2009-03-26T12:47:00.000-07:00

2009-03-12T20:39:00.000-07:00

Mural

The pictures below are details from a very impressive wall mural in my town.

2009-03-12T20:29:00.000-07:00

2009-03-12T20:27:00.000-07:00

2009-03-12T20:25:00.000-07:00

2009-03-12T20:23:00.000-07:00

2009-02-17T09:12:00.000-08:00

Coraline

I saw the movie Coraline last week. It was the first movie for which the 3D process worked for me. You know how some people have posters up that look like random squiggles and if you stare at them long enough a 3D image emerges? Well, I've never been able to see that image, and I've been to a few movies where the 3D process was supposed to be working, but either the glasses were too small for my massive head, or I was sitting in the wrong spot, or something. When I bought my ticket for Coraline, I was given a pair of very cool looking 3D glasses, which looked more like Raybans than anything else. I put them on doubtfully, and I think the previews were also in 3D, but it didn't seem any different to me. I was thinking that I needed to have my depth perception checked when Coraline started. Suddenly, it looked like someone had placed an old Victorian lace frame around the screen. I had to look twice before I realized it was not real. At last, I was seeing a movie in true 3D. The depth of field in the movie is amazing,and it helps to create the illusion that this is truly a real and complete world we are watching. I also appreciated that the filmakers didn't try to jab things at the audience just to make us wince.

The details and creativity in this movie is amazing. However, in my mind, the story falls a little flat. Neil Gaiman is very creative and his book American Gods is one of my favorites, but the story is stretched too far, and the humor seems targeted more at adults. The movie isn't targeted at the same type of audience who would go see Finding Nemo or Cars. It's really going to be appreciated more by teenage goth kids and urban hipsters who will understand the effort the incredible stop-motion animation must have required. I think that watching this movie was, for me, a perfect example of the difference between appreciating a movie and enjoying a movie. I think it was amazing to watch and I loved it, but I am having a difficult time imagining to whom I would recommend it. I think an eight year old child might become restless, and I think it is too scary for a five-year old. After all, Coraline's big decision, the engine of the movie's plot, is whether or not to remove her eyes and replace them with buttons.

Ewww.......

2009-02-08T00:25:00.000-08:00

Watching Milk

I went to see the movie Milk this evening. It only played in Harlingen one week, and I missed it. The only other theater it is playing in, or has played in for that matter, is in McAllen for two shows a day. I'd say there were about twenty people in the audience. During the first ten minutes of the movie, eight of them walked out when Sean Penn and James Defranco kissed. The only other time I have seen that many people walk out of a movie was during American Psycho . It is interesting to me that two men kissing gets the same reaction as a psycho killer chainsawing two women to death. I guess they thought they were at a movie about the history of the dairy industry? It's too bad they left because the movie is powerful, and Sean Penn as Harvey Milk is astonishing. I can understand someone having the skill to portray emotions like sad or happy, but to somehow recreate the sheer charisma of an individual requires real artistry. Go see it.

2009-02-06T08:24:00.000-08:00

Slumdog Millionaire

Last Monday I went to the movies immediately after work. I've been very busy, so I haven't made time for movies. I was very glad I went. One of the great things about movies is their ability to show us worlds we woudln't normally see. Slumdog Millionaire does so by taking us into the changing world of modern day Mumbai. I'm sure the movie was shot on a digital camera because of the way it grabs and traps images, espcially if the figures on screen are moving quickly. Digital cameras have a type of visual stutter that makes them look different from film. Also, Danny Boyle used this technique in 28 Days Later. It gives his movies a sort of documentary feel while keeping them visually pleasing.

The performances by the children in the movie are amazing, and the frame story is a clever and novel way to tell the story. The music is great also. And be sure you stay for the Bollywood style dance number during the end credits.

2009-01-28T20:38:00.000-08:00

Racist or Not?

I received the above photo in an e-mail recently with a caption that read....

An investigation by the NTSB in conjunction with the FBI has determined the cause of what brought down the plane in the Hudson River .

I'm curious about people's reaction to this joke. It's amazing the connotations a simple article of clothing can carry. So, I ask you. Is it racist or not? Or is it making fun of people who think anyone who wears a turban is a terrorist?

Discuss.

2009-01-25T00:06:00.000-08:00

Inauguration Day

I'm not really an enthusiastic follower of politics. My default mode is Democrat, and for the last eight years I've been voting Democratic in a Republican state. However, something about this past week's inauguration ceremonies got me really interested. There seems to be so much energy in the air that it's actually become a cliche to comment on it. I realize there are huge problems facing our country, but for some reason, I am most excited by the idea of having a president who can use the English language again. You can't solve a problem if you can't articulate it, and Obama has exhibited great capabilities in the speeches I have read so far.
On Tuesday evening, I attended a party at a friend's house and it was pretty fun. We watched the inaugural balls on her huge flat screen TV, and she made great Indonesian food in honor of the years Obama spent there. She had fireworks and we shot them off at the end of her cul-de-sac. She also had a life-size cut out of Obama, so we all got to have our pictures taken with him. It was a great deal of fun.
I'm encouraged so far by the moves he has made. I think there are a great many social issues he needs to move on, but the economy has to come first. He will have a period of goodwill, which I hope he exploits to the fullest. He's a smart man, and I think a basically good man, but he is also a politician who has to operate in the real world. Time will tell.

2009-01-07T20:05:00.000-08:00

My Good Deed

Today, after I attended Bible study, I stopped at a gas station to buy some cigarettes. Inside the station was an elderly woman wielding a business card in her hand. She insisted she needed to get to the insurance agency, but she didn't seem to realize it was unlikely that the office was open at 8:38 PM. The clerk was trying to give her directions, and I began helping also. After awhile, it was clear the lady was confused, probably suffering from some bit of dementia or Alzheimers. I asked her what her name was and she tried to tell me by pulling a bunch of cards out of her wallet. Eventually, I discovered her name and realized the insurance agent whose card she was holding was her son. I called the cell number on the card, and he sounded relieved to know where she was. I chatted with her for awhile until he showed up with his teenage son to take her home. Although she was confused, her manners were never less than gracious, and it was clear to me that she was a lovely lady.

My point in telling this story is not to glorify my good deed, but to comment on the cruelty of slowly losing one's mind. She was retired military, as was her husband, who may or may not have been alive, and she was driving a big, white Lincoln Continental. Clearly, she had led a rich and varied life, and now she was lost in a town she had probably lived in for 60 years.

I hope her family is able to keep her safe and close to home from now on.

Straight No Chaser - 12 Days

2008-12-18T22:22:00.001-08:00

Only nine and a half million people beat me to this video. It's pretty funny. And they're pretty talented.

2008-12-13T06:33:00.000-08:00

Year of the Dog

I watched an interesting movie last night called Year of the Dog. It was written and directed by Mike White of Chuck and Buck fame and it starred Molly Shannon as a woman whose beloved dog, Pencil, dies. The loss of her dog sets this woman on an emotional tailspin, and she gradually becomes more and more involved in animal rights issues while alienating her family, friends, and neighbors. Molly has some funny moments, but it's not really a comedy. It's more an exploration of love and the necessity of having a love by which to define oneself. Molly Shannon gives a great perormance. It's worth watching if you come across it on cable, or see it on the DVD rack.

2008-12-12T21:24:00.000-08:00

Problem Solved

I went to Sprint today, and almost miraculously, they found me a spare stencil. Crisis averted!

2008-12-12T09:15:00.000-08:00

A Lost Item

Very few things bother me more than losing something. For people who know me, this may seem strange. I am a very cluttered person with no apparent order for my desk at work, or my files at home. However, one of the reasons I am so cluttered is because I don't want to lose anything by inadvertently throwing it away. If something is lost, I simply must find it, no matter the effort.

Yesterday, I lost the tiny stencil with which I operate the touch screen of my phone. Usually it clicks right into the side of the phone. I distinctly remember yesterday setting it on my desk and thinking to myself, "Michael, be sure to put that back." Of course, I must not have done so because the stencil is gone.

Several of my students have the same phone, and I think I will offer to buy their stencils if I can't find mine.

2008-11-28T00:59:00.000-08:00

How I Saved Thanksgiving

So I'm at my local grocery store at 6:00 p.m. the evening before Thanksgiving. I've decided that if I do not make green bean casserole for Thanksgiving the "Great Chain of Being" which holds the universe together will collapse. The grocery store is a mad house. The checkout lines extend way down the aisles. Everyone has put off their Thanksgiving shopping till after work on Wednesday, and two clerks are opening great big boxes of frozen pumpkin pies and just handing them out to customers waiting in line. First, I head to the Oriental food section because my secret ingredient in my green bean cassarole is water chestnuts, which is a pretty cool secret ingredient since they are essentially flavorless. However, they do add texture, as they would say on the food network. The entire shelf where the water chesnuts would be (if you roast them on an open fire would they boil?) is empty. I get down on my knees and find one lonely can way up against the wall. It may have been there three or four years, but I grab it and my first ingredient is safe in my cart. I head to the vegetable aisle for French cut green beans, and once again I see an empty space. However, I know the shoppers in my town. I know that no one ever puts anything back where it belongs, and I begin to scan the aisles for random, misplaced cans. Surely, someone has picked one up and put it down in the wrong place! Sure enough, I find one can in the corn section and another behind two cans of okra. The second ingredient is found. Next I need mushrooms. Suspiciously, they are right where they are suppposed to be and there are plenty of them. Cocky from my string of successes, I proceed to the soup aisle for one can of condensed cream of mushroom and one can of condensed cream of chicken. The Campbell's soup dispenser is empty. The Hill country fare section is empty. There is no cream of mushroom or cream of chicken soup! Only cream of celery! Who wants their green beans flavored like celery? Why not just eat celery?

This is the part where I save thanksgiving. I notice there are five abuelita (Spanish for grandmother) looking ladies, and one harassed looking middle-aged man standing in the aisle in front of where the soup should be with their faces turned to the heavens as if they where praying to the gods for cans of soup to fall from the sky. I follow their gaze and see that they are looking at two cases of soup, still in their cases, still shrink wrapped, on the uppermost, toppermost, shelf. One is cream of mushroom and one is cream of chicken. I elbow my way through the half-circle they have made and, reaching up, standing on my tippy toes, manage to bring down both cases of soup. Gnarled old hands are already snatching for the cans before I even have them completely down. I lay the cases on the floor and, grabbing one can each, and leave them fighting, like vultures over a dead water buffalo carcass, for the rest of the cans.

The rest was simply standing in line and swiping my debit card. Thanksgiving was saved.

The Little Girl Who Was Forgotten

2008-11-13T21:45:00.001-08:00

Katy Towell has made several videos in this style. Reminds me of Tim Burton, but she is perhaps even darker.

2008-11-12T09:13:00.000-08:00

Proposition 8

I used to be pretty ambivalent about the idea of gay marriage. To me, marriage was a heterosexual institution and the idea of two men or two woman actually having a marriage ceremony seemed almost satirical. At the time, I thought it was making a mockery of both the heterosexual idea of marriage, and that the thought that gays needed to get married at all failed to recognize the possibilities of a committed gay relationship without the support of the state. Who needs cake, tuxedos, and a piece of paper to show they are partners in life? Let the breeders have their gift registries, their photographers, their bachelor parties! I'm going to spend that money on something important like....well, apparently, Big Gulps at the local convenience store.

I was also a little hung up on the idea of marriage being a sacrament. In this country, despite our insistence that we separate church and state, we frequently combine a civil ceremony with a religious ceremony. In Mexico, people have one ceremony with the state, and a separate ceremony with the church. They are separate and distinct. I thought, "How can we force a church to accept people to participate in a sacrament when that church disagrees?"

So for a long time I was fine with the idea of civil unions. I thought it would answer all of our needs without inspiring a backlash from social conservatives. It would be a separate, but equal solution. However, when I began to realize that people were spending enormous amounts of time and energy to deny me the rights that they themselves enjoy, I started to think of things differently.

If segregation in the American South in the first half of this century can serve as a guide, then it is pretty clear that separate is never equal. As long as one group is excluded from what the mainstream enjoys, then the excluded group will never be considered equal. I can't think of a single exception in history to this simple assertion. If someone can, please comment.

I have been thinking hard about why straight people would deny gay people the right to marry. And I don't just mean disagree with the idea privately, but be so vehemently opposed as to launch state campaigns costing millions of dollars. Currently, 27 states have passed laws forbidding people of the same sex to marry. Even as the country was voting in its first African-America president, voters in Florida and Arizona decided to change their state constitutions to deny same-sex couples the right to marry, and on the same day Arkansas voted to forbid single, or same-sex couples from adopting.

The only reasons to take the trouble to vote in favor of denying someone else a basic human right are hate and fear. I cannot imagine, and I have tried, how the two gay guys living down the street getting married affects anyone but themselves. I know there are some lame arguments about health care going up if insurance is extended to same-sex couples, but wait.....a nine month pregnancy and hospital birth are pretty expensive also! The simple fact is that people see marriage as between a man and a woman because marriage is supposed to ensure that there are two parents around to take care of the kids. If that is the real argument here, why aren't couples who are infertile, or who choose not to have kids, forced to absolve their marriages after a suitable waiting period. No kids=no marriage license. My brother has married three times and has five kids with four different women. And he can get married three more times if he wants to do so. If marriage is so sacred, shouldn't there be a limit? Two per lifetime?

Recently, a woman named Linda who went to my church died. She had been living with another woman for the past four years as her partner and lover and they shared a house. She died unexpectedly of a heart attack one morning and in just a few days Linda's family had come in from California and her girlfriend was out of the house. She wasn't mentioned in the obituary, she didn't sit in the front row of the funeral home with the rest of the family, she wasn't consulted in Linda's business affairs-nothing. She had none of the rights a legally married spouse would have. You may ask "Well, why didn't she make a will?" The answer is "I don't know", but how many married couples are there without wills? Many, I would suspect. Yet they do not have to leave their homes when their partners' die.

This entry isn't the cogent argument I would have liked to have presented. I can take comfort in the idea that there are others on the Internet and in the media who are presenting the careful, logical, argument I feel I should have presented here. I have always felt, as a gay man, a certain pressure from society. I have always felt I was swimming upstream, as it were. But this is the first time, even though I live in a state where gay marriage is not permitted due to a vote taken two years ago, that I have really felt the impact of having the majority of people, however slim that majority may have been, in a state vote to make me a second class person. I never dreamt that the right to marry, once having been granted, would ever be taken away. I thought it would be a gradual process and the states would fall like dominoes, one-by-one, until one of the last state sanctioned discriminatory policies in this country would be gone forever. I am so disappointed to be proven wrong.

2008-11-12T07:22:00.000-08:00

WALL-E and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

I recently watched two films whose excellence reminded me once again of the possibilities of movies. One was a big budget Disney/Pixar production and one was a low budget French movie. Both were excellent.

Andrew Stanton's WALL-E didn't interest me when it came out this summer. To me it looked like a remake of Short Circuit. Remember "Number 5 is alive!"? How many movies have we already seen about robots falling in love? Remember Heartbeeps with Andy Kauffman and Bernadette Peters? Blegh! So I didn't go see the movie during it's initial run this summer. However, I began to notice that many of the reviews I read were saying it was the best movie of the summer and even that it should be nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars this spring. I became intrigued, and I went to see it at the dollar movies. My seat was uncomfortable, the screaming baby in front of me needed his diaper changed, and I sat, entranced, by this movie. It is a delightful, sophisticated, blend of romance and satire with allusions to the science fiction movies of the seventies, to Hello Dolly, to 2001: A Space Odyssey and to Charlie Chaplin. The first half of the movie is virtually silent, but the clever filmmakers give us visual clues to fill us in on what has happened to WALL-E and his world. I won't waste time and space here with a plot summary, but let me tell you that WALL-E is endlessly inventive, deeply romantic, and well worth your time.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells the true story of Jean Bauby, the editor of French Elle magazine, who suffers a catastrophic stroke and becomes the victim of "locked-in syndrome" meaning he is totally paralyzed with the exception of one eye which he blinks in response to a speech therapist who reads him the letters of the alphabet. Using this painstaking, tortuous method, he writes a book about his experiences called The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. The movie beautifully represents the world from the view of a man who can only use one eye, and the director, 80s painter and tireless self-promoter, Julian Schnabel uses images (butterflies, glaciers melting) that should seem like cliches, but that are somehow made new and beautiful through his vision. Or is it his? It is hard for the average film goer to know how much of the movie is Schnabel's vision, or how much is Janusz Kaminski's, the great cinematographer, who has photographed of all of Speilberg's movies since the early nineties. I haven't seen such effective use of lighting and editing since Traffic. The movie is in French, which is probably one reason it only made $5 million dollars in its theatrical release. I'm sure the movie is out now on DVD, and it would be a great rental or even better purchase. Seek it out!

2008-11-03T08:38:00.000-08:00

Sleepy Time

The end of daylight savings time always messes up my sleep schedule. My problem is that I always equate one extra hour of sleep with some sort of "divine" permission to stay up an extra six hours. I realize it doesn't add up, but I am a master at fooling myself.

2008-10-18T12:12:00.000-07:00

It's Time for Dia de los Muertos again!

We are approaching the end of October, and you know what that means! More poorly taken photos from the local museum's Day of the Dead exhibit!

2008-10-18T12:10:00.000-07:00

A detail from an altar that incorporated a mound of dirt in its design. I love the tiny heart clutched in his little boney hand.

2008-10-18T12:07:00.000-07:00

I really liked this carnival painting done on an old piece of wood, probably from some barn or shack. The carnival theme reminds me of the Carnival of Souls idea, and it seems to honor the folk art tradition of the Dia de Los Muertos art. It seems pretty primitive until you notice the careful use of perspective on the Ferris wheel and the carousel.

2008-10-18T12:06:00.000-07:00

Why do the dead never have necks?

2008-10-18T12:05:00.000-07:00

This artist has seen too many Tim Burton movies.

2008-10-18T12:03:00.000-07:00

This altar was in memory of Captain America who died, at least in comic book world, earlier this year.

2008-10-18T12:02:00.000-07:00

This jolly fellow was painted by the artist in memory of his father who was a doctor who loved being physically active.

2008-10-18T12:00:00.000-07:00

This year many of the altars were in memory of pets. These people created little tombstones for all of their departed furry friends.

2008-10-18T11:59:00.000-07:00

Here's a skeleton cat chewing on a skeleton mouse.

2008-10-06T20:59:00.000-07:00

Scampers

I had a cat for over seventeen years named Moxie. She passed away about five years ago, and ever since I've made do with poor substitutes for pets. I've had mice, betta fish, and brine shrimp. However, I haven't had the type of pet you can play and cuddle with for a very long time. I grew up with animals, and I've always had a pet, and I miss not having one.

A few weeks ago I was following a couple of friends of mine as they drove in a van towards a local school where one of my friends had just started a new job. I was in my own car. Suddenly, they swerved to the side of the road, and one of my friends jumped out of the car and began to run back the way we had just come. I couldn't see what she was pursuing, but when she returned I saw that she had a small orange and white kitten. "Oh no," I said to myself. "That cat is not coming home with me."

Of course, in the end, he did.

I think I knew all along in the back of my mind that I wouldn't be keeping him. But he was seriously cute, and I wasn't about to leave him by the side of the road. He came home with me that night and promptly hid in a hole in my baseboard I never knew was there. He spent most of Friday night hiding in my wall, and I spent most of Friday night stretched out on the floor of my kitchen trying to coax him out. I was finally able to lure him out, and we soon became friends. After a quick visit to the vet on a Saturday morning for shots and a check-up, Scampers was officially mine-at least for the moment.

My primary concern with keeping Scampers was the size of my apartment, and the fact that I am gone most of the day. This soon proved to be a problem because Scampers was a kitten with an extraordinary amount of energy. When I would finally come home in the evenings, he was ready to play. I was ready for bed. I knew this was a situation that wasn't going to work for either of us.

Fortunately, a friend of mine knew of a woman who already had two kittens. She welcomed the idea of having a third, and I thought it would be good for Scampers to have playmates. So far, it has been working out well. I miss him, but I know he has a better home than the one I could provide for him.

2008-10-06T20:57:00.000-07:00

Scampers at his most adorable. This photo was taken the day after he began his stay with me.

2008-10-06T20:55:00.000-07:00

Desperate for fun, Scampers took to hiding in my laundry basket.

2008-10-06T20:54:00.000-07:00

Scampers taking his first trip outside at his new home.

2008-10-06T20:51:00.000-07:00

Scampers enjoying the outdoors at his new home.

2008-08-17T21:38:00.000-07:00

Google Gadget

I'm in love with Google Gadgets. They are the lazy blogger's friend.

2008-08-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

Hurricane Dolly, South Padre Island

2008-08-15T19:07:00.003-07:00

HURRICANE DOLLY TEARING ROOF OFF!!!!

2008-08-15T19:07:00.001-07:00

Charles City Flood 2008

2008-06-09T21:31:00.001-07:00

Main street bridge in my hometown. I've never seen the water even come close to the bridge.

Charles City Flood 2008 Gilbert Street Bridge

2008-06-09T21:30:00.001-07:00

More video of the flooding in my hometown.

Charles City Flood 2008 pt2

2008-06-09T21:29:00.001-07:00

There's usually about 50 feet between the river and the bridge.

Flood charles City iowa Bayou Bend 2008

2008-06-09T21:26:00.001-07:00

The bridge he mentions was 106 years old. I used to ride my bike across it to get to the swimming pool.

2008-04-05T12:27:00.000-07:00

My First Bear Run

I attended by first bear run this past Easter weekend. Now some people may ask, "What is a bear-run?" I'm still not exactly sure, even though I've just been to one.

A "bear" in the gay community is typically an overweight gay man with a lot of body hair. However, it is also an attitude of sorts, a way presenting oneself. In the post immediately below, I've included an article by Andrew Sullivan, a man who wears many labels himself (he's a neo-conservative, gay, Catholic, English, political pundit, gay activist who self-identifies as a bear) and who describes the cultural phenomenon better than I ever could.

The event I attended was sponsored by the Dallas Bears and was called the Texas Bear-Roundup. This year's theme was Cirque des Ours (Circus of Bears in French). My first indication that I was in for an unusual weekend was when I arrived at the hotel. After checking in, my friend and I proceeded to the elevators where we saw the sign posted above. The hotel had been the host for the event for the past several years and knew what a large group of large men could do to an elevator.

We arrived on a Thursday with plans to stay till Sunday. As the evening wore on, more and more bears started to arrive at the hotel. These were large, friendly men, who were quick to say hello and shake your hand and introduce themselves. Some were fat, some were stocky, quite a view were big and muscular in a football playing way, and some, not as many, were of average build or even small. These were the "chasers". A chaser is a man of average or small build who is attracted to large, even obese men. Nearly everyone had facial hair of some kind, and it occurred to me as I watched the crowd gather in the lobby to begin the registration process that to a stranger we would look, at least at first glance at least, like a a gang of extremely laid-back bikers, or a convention of high school football coaches. The entire hotel was booked by bears that weekend as were the two hotels immediately adjacent to the Crowne Plaza. Eventually, the crowd of registrants would grow to nearly 850 men (and about six women).

My friend was an old hand at these gatherings and immediately began to recognize people he knew from previous runs. There are runs all across the country of various sizes, and he had been to several. I used to tease him about them by saying, "What do ya'll do at a run anyways? Fight for equal rights for the hairy?"

However, as the weekend wore on I began to see the appeal of the event. They had shuttles running every thirty minutes or so between the hotel and the gay area of Dallas, and every evening they had a party at the hotel with free beer. ( I almost typed bear. The event does that to you-anytime someone can work the word bear into something, they do.)

There were vendors selling T-Shirts, and kilts, and jewlry and porn. There was a candlemaker whose candles were made from "woofwax". "Woof" or "woofy" means sexy, and if someone "woofs" at you it's like they said, "Hey good looking, what's happening?"

People at a bear run are very casual about personal space. People who have just met reach out and stroke one another's bears or pat each other on the stomach. It takes a little while to get used to, but after awhile you get used to hugging everyone you meet. It can also lead to some funny situations, like when I was standing outside the hotel smoking a cigarette. A man, probaby in his early forties, came up to me and said:

"I need a fuzzy bear."

"Excuse me?" I replied.

He repeated, "I need a fuzzy bear."

I thought, "Awe, how cute, I'll give him a hug."

So when I reached over to hug him, he pushed me back firmly and said,

"I need bus fare!"

Obviously, I had misheard him.

I think many people who have heard of a bear-run think it is one big hairy orgy. And I think for some people it can be. However, as I watched people talk and mingle, it occurred to me that this was a place for a group of people who are twice-over outsiders. They are gay, but they are not like the gays you see on television, those men who look like they belong on a daytime soap opera. Most of them would probably be ignored at any gay disco in the country, and they don't conform to the gym bunny aesthetic many gay men strive towards. They were more like the neighbor you might borrow tools from, or the little league coach for you son's T-ball team. They were a group of people who had decided to make a place for themselves, even if it was just for one weekend. I noticed that an inordinate number of the men I met worked in software development or I.T. support, and I think it is no coincidence that the rise of the bear movement has coincided with the rise of the Internet. There were people at this run from Brazil, England, and Australia. I don't think this would have been possible without an easy, cheap, and fast way to communicate.

I really enjoyed the weekend, even though finding love turned out to not be in the cards. I wasn't really looking for it, and even though the condensation on the "bear" bottles at the hotel parties was probably 50% testosterone, I was content to watch the crowd and talk with my friends, both old and new.

2008-04-05T12:13:00.000-07:00

I am bear, hear me roar!
By Andrew Sullivan in Salon.com.
August 1, 2003

I was flattered at first. A burly, stubbled, broad-shouldered man, who could barely keep tufts of hair from sprouting from under his T-shirt corners, leered at me across the bar. He was drunk, alas. But it was five minutes to closing and this was Provincetown in July. "You know what I think is so fucking hot about you?" he ventured. I batted my eyelashes. "Your pot-belly, man," he went on. "It's so fucking hot." Then he reached over and rubbed.

It was Bear Week in Ptown. Bear Week? Well, where do I begin? Every time I try and write a semi-serious sociological assessment of the phenomenon, I find myself erasing large amounts of text. Part of being a bear is not taking being a bear too seriously. And almost every bear and bear-admirer I asked during the festivities came up with different analyses of what it is or might be to be a "bear." But no one can deny that bears are one of the fastest growing new subcultures in gay America -- and that their emergence from the forests into the sunlight is culturally fascinating. Quite what it means for the future of gay America is another thing entirely. But my, er, gut tells me it's, er, a big deal. So here's my own idiosyncratic, CIA-unapproved take on what this new and obviously growing phenomenon in the gay sub-subculture amounts to.
Bearism grew up in San Francisco at places like the revived Lone Star bar in the early 1990s and has metastasized since. From a bunch of heavy, hairy fellas getting together casually, it's now a full-scale phenom, with "American Bear" magazine, a "bear flag," bear conferences, a "Bear Book," "Bearotica," and on and on. Perhaps the most obvious place to start is physical appearance. "Bears" almost all have facial hair -- the more the better. Of all the various characteristics of Beardom, this seems to be one of the most essential. The Ur-bears have bushy beards that meander down their necks and merge with a large forest of chest and back-hair to provide a sort of all-hair body environment. Bears are also big guys. Yes, I know that might come off as a bit of a euphemism. A townie friend of mine suggested making T-shirts for the week, with the slogan "Fat Is The New Black." But obesity, while not unknown, is not that widespread. Bears at their most typical look like regular, beer-drinking, unkempt men in their 30s, 40s and 50s. They have guts. They have furry backs. They don't know what cologne is and they tend not to wear deodorant. One mode of interaction is the occasional sniff of each others' armpits. Nature's narcotic.
Bears are known secondly for their attitude. They're friendly -- more Yogi than "Bears Gone Wild." They're mellow. They're flirtatious in a non-imposing kind of way. If a bear sees another hot-looking bear, his most likely expression will be the one word: "Woof." (Yes, I know that sounds like a dog. But somehow it makes sense.) The sexual tension isn't that tense, because the sexual imperative is less present than in other gay subcultures. This came home to me this year in Provincetown, because in a gay resort town in the summer, you get to see the various sub-subcultures intermingle or follow one another. The contrasts can be quite severe.
To give one example: We have what the locals call "Circuit Week" over July 4 when all the party boys and drug addicts show up to take drugs, dance and drink bottled water for days on end. I have no problem with that. But the perfect torsos, testosteroned rivalry, crystal-nerves and endless egg-whites all make for a somewhat overwrought time. When the bears arrive, all that unease evaporates. They're cheerful; they don't give a shit what others think of them; they're more overtly social than sexual; they drink rather than do drugs; they seem, on the whole, older and far more grown-up than their party-boy cousins. They eat and drink and joke and cuddle and stroke and generally have a great time. And their mellowness is wonderfully infectious.
Whence the name? Well, it's obvious in a way. They kinda look like bears. Big and burly and friendly, they are legions of Yogis, followed by quite a few Boo-boos. The smaller, younger ones tend to be known as "cubs." The more muscular ones go by the name of "muscle-bears." Some leaner types who aren't that hairy but enjoy the atmosphere that follows the bears are known as "otters." There are other nuances. Bears like to enjoy the outdoors and organize joint camping trips and festivals in the forests. They tend not to have kids; and they avoid politics. To the outside world, they are largely invisible, because they don't fit the obvious stereotype of gay men, the kind that is featured prominently, and somewhat offensively, on "Queer Eye For The Straight Guy" and "Boy Meets Boy." These bears look more like the straight guys than the queer eyes.
But their masculinity is of a casual, unstrained type. One of the least reported but significant cultural shifts among gay men in recent years has been a greater ease with the notion of being men and a refusal to acquiesce in the notion that gayness is somehow in conflict with masculinity. In the past, gay manifestations of masculinity have taken a somewhat extreme or caricatured form -- from the leathermen to the huge bodybuilders. Bears, to my mind, represent a welcome calming down of this trend. They are unabashedly masculine but undemonstrative about it. They are attractive precisely because they don't try so hard. And they add to their outdoorsy gruffness an appealing interior softness. They have eschewed the rock-hard muscle torso for the round and soft and hairy belly.
As always, Camille Paglia gets it just about right, when she writes: "In their defiant hirsutism, gay bears are more virile than the generic bubble-butt junior stud, since body hair is stimulated by testosterone. But the bears' fatness resembles not the warlike Viking mass of a Hell's angel but the capacious bosom of the earth mother. They gay Bear is simultaneously animalistic and nurturing, a romp in the wild followed by nap time on a comfy cushion."
That captures something of their unforced maleness. But Paglia underestimates, I think, a rebellion among many gay men against both the feminizing impulses of the broader culture on the right and left and against prevailing norms in gay culture as a whole. In recent years, after all, men have come under withering attack -- not just from the p.c. pomo left, which tends to view all forms of unabashed maleness as oppressive, but also from the nannying right, which views men as socially irresponsible sexual miscreants.
Bears are simply saying that they're men first and unashamed of it. More, in fact. What they're saying is that central to the gay male experience is an actual love of men. And men are not "boys," they're not feminized, hairless, fatless icons on a dance floor. They're grumpy and kind and responsible, and also happy to be themselves. There is no contradiction between being a gay man and being a man as traditionally understood. And if that includes cracking open a six-pack and watching the game; or developing a beer-and-nachos belly; or working in a blue-collar job; or having the clothes sense of the average check-out guy; or preferring the company of men to women, so be it.
But what bears also do, of course, is take this frumpy, ordinary image of undemonstrative masculinity and eroticize it. Instead of sexualizing the perfect abs or the biggest bicep, bears look at a mature man's belly and see in it the essence of maleness and the motherlode of their sexual attraction. What women (and, now, the gay men on "Queer Eye") often do to their men -- clean them up, domesticate them, clothe them properly, groom them, tame them -- is exactly what bears resist. Go to the Dug-Out at the edge of the West Side highway in New York on a Sunday afternoon, and you'll find a den of cheerful, frisky, thick and hairy guys, all enjoying a few beers and their own gender. Or check out the club "XL" in London and find hundreds of big, fat, hairy blokes dancing to their hearts' content until the early hours of the morning, without the slightest sense of self-awareness or embarrassment. In London, even the "pot-belly" is becoming formally eroticized.
Bears also resist the squeaky clean and feminized version of manhood that appears in most gay magazines and even pornography. Take a look at the Advocate and Out and you will barely find a man over 30 with a gut or a hairy chest anywhere. But that's what most men -- including gay men -- end up like! Bears in this sense represent the maturation of gay male culture. For the first time, we have a critical mass of older generations of gay men who have always been out but who don't identify with the boyishness and effeminacy of the old-school gay subculture. And they're not looking to replicate or mimic the male-female relationship in any way. Yes. There are "bears" and "cubs." But you are just as likely to find two mature, big guys who are simply into each other. As equals. As men.
Some of this aesthetic, of course, is rooted in class. Upper middle class and middle class bears tend to idealize the working class stiff; and working class bears, for the first time perhaps, find their natural state of physical being publicly celebrated rather than ignored. I made a point of asking multiple bears during Bear Week what they did for a living. Yes, there were architects and designers and writers. But there were also computer technicians, delivery truck drivers, construction workers, salesmen, and so on. Again, what we're seeing, I think, is another manifestation of the growth and breadth of gay culture in the new millennium. As the gay world recovers from AIDS, and as the closet continues to collapse, the numbers of gay men keep growing and the diversity of what was once called the gay experience is exploding.

At some point, in fact, it might be asked if bears are a subset of gay culture or simply a culture to themselves. From Ptown, it's pretty clear to me that the "circuit" set, for example, has next to nothing in common with bears and vice versa. Even the leather bars recognize bears as a discrete subculture. The impression of gayness that you get from, say, the New York Times' "Sunday Styles" section, or the excrescent tripe in "Queer As Folk," is light years away from what the bear subculture represents. In this sense, bears might be "post-gay" inasmuch as their fundamental identity is far more complex than any simple expression of their same-sex attraction.
And, as with most developments in gay culture, they could well influence straight culture as well. Bears, after all, are the straight guys in gay culture. Their very ordinariness makes them both more at ease with regular straight guys; but their very ordinariness in some ways is also extremely culturally subversive. Drag queens, after all, are hardly the cutting edge any more. Straight people love their gay people flaming, or easily cordoned off from the straight experience. Bears reveal how increasingly difficult this is. Their masculinity is indistinguishable in many ways from straight male masculinity -- which accounts, in some ways, for their broader invisibility in the culture. They are both more integrated; and yet, by their very equation of regular masculinity with gayness, one of the more radical and transformative gay phenomena out there right now.
But perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. There's a lovely exchange in the invaluable book “Bears on Bears” that captures some of the weirdness of trying to explain such a natural and cheerful development too abstractly. Rex Wockner, furry gay journalist, is talking to Wayne Hoffman, another Bear follower:
"REX WOCKNER: A few intellectual eastern bears may think it's about subverting the dominant paradigm. Here on the West Coast, it's about sex.
WAYNE HOFFMAN: It's more about ignoring the dominant paradigm than rejecting it actively, in my humble opinion.
REX WOCKNER: It's more about not using words like 'dominant paradigm.'"
I take Rex's point. In some ways, bears represent gay men's long delayed embrace of their own masculinity in its simplest and sexiest form. In other ways, they represent gay men's desire for normalcy, for a world in which their natural state of being men is neither constrained nor tortured nor contrived. In a strange and undemonstrative way, it's therefore a sign of the extraordinary fluidity of a gay male culture that is changing out of all recognition before, perhaps, with accelerating integration, it disappears for good.

2008-04-05T10:07:00.000-07:00

Once

I've complained recently about the lack of magic and excitement I used to feel when I watched movies. Fortunately, I had a very pleasant experience with a little movie I watched last Saturday on pay-per-view. It's a small movie, very low-budget, and it is also unusually short, only 85 minutes. It is called Once, and it stars Glen Hansard and Martina Irglova. Hansard is a member of the rock group The Frames, and is apparently pretty well-known in Ireland. Irglova is from Czechoslovakia and met Hansard while he was on tour, and became one of his collaborators on an album called The Swell Season. The movie was originally to star Cillian Murphy, but Murphy decided he couldn't sing the songs, and the movie was shot in seventeen days with Hansard and Irglova playing the leads. The cool thing about the movie is you get to watch to great musicians create and perform music together and fall in love while they do it. The movie doesn't go where you expect it to go, and the performances are so fresh and natural they make you think you're watching a documentary. Hansard has eyes that seem to be perpetually widened in surprise and Irglova, while nearly half Hansard's age, has eyes that seem older than she is and that have obviously seen a great deal. As, you watch the movie, you love both these people, and you really care about what happens to them. The ending is sweet, unexpected, and just right. This is a refreshing, spring breeze of a movie.

2008-03-18T22:03:00.000-07:00

Two Film Adaptations

“Of course, the book was better than the movie.”
This pop culture cliché can be heard in the lobbies of movie theaters across the country as theater goers exit the latest cinematic adaptation of some literary masterpiece or bestseller. However, this is often not true. Coppola’s film of The Godfather far surpasses Mario Puzo’s seventies potboiler. Gone With the Wind lives on as a movie, while the novel has gone the way of other massive bestsellers which proved to be blips on the cultural radar like Forever Amber, or Once is Not Enough. Have you actually read Ben-Hur, or have you just seen the movie?

Making a novel into a movie must be a tricky business. What do you include and what do you leave out? How do you make the transition between the interactive activity that is reading and the mostly passive activity of watching the movie? How do you capture the tone of a written work, which is created by the author with words, using visual imagery? Recently, I watched two movies based on novels I’ve read and loved-The Kite Runner and No Country For Old Men.

I loved the novel version of The Kite Runner. I loved the evocation of pre-Soviet Kabul and the relationship between two Afghan boys named Amir and Hassan. The inciting incident occurs when Hassan is raped by some thugs and his friend Amir does nothing to help him. In the book, it is clear that Hassan has seen Amir witnessing his humiliation and he knows his friend has let him down. Hassan forgives Amir, but Amir cannot handle the guilt of not doing anything to help his friend, and it ruins the boys’ friendship. The movie stays true to the plot of the book, but it leaves out the key details of Hassan’s gaze falling on Amir as Hassan is raped. Since the rest of the story is basically Amir trying to pay penance for failing to help his friend, the loss of this key detail is significant. This film feels like a Hallmark Hall of Fame presentation. What we are seeing is basically sections of the novel brought to life rather than a work of art that can stand on its own. The movie is thoughtful and well-made (except for some truly cheesy CGI kites), but it lack the sense of passion and outrage that should have shown up in nearly every scene of this movie. It is a pale shadow of the novel.

Joel and Ethan Coen’s No Country for Old Men, an adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s novel of the same name, is a work of art that stands on its own terms. The film’s directors have managed the minor miracle of approximating, through the use of dialogue and spare, nearly elegant, camera movements, the sense of foreboding and inevitability that pervades the novel. The Coen brothers have abandoned the tricky camera work they used in Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, and Miller’s Crossing. They are not making fun of the rural, west Texas characters, as they did the Minnesotans in Fargo. The visual language they use matches the famously spare language of McCarthy’s novels. They are also assisted by some very strong performances from Kelly Macdonald, Josh Brolin, Javier Barden and Tommy Lee Jones. Jones is especially good. His Sheriff Tom Bell seems the embodiment of a lost time and place, and makes the title meaningful. The movie refuses to explain things. The viewer is never really clear as to the role all of characters play in the plot. The villain is not caught, and there is no explanation of why exactly the principal characters act the way they do. The viewer leaves the theater with his mind still deciphering what he as seen, but with no sense of having been cheated, and that to me is the sign of a good movie.

2008-03-14T22:00:00.000-07:00

When we were young....

I recently started scanning some old family photos and putting them on CDs, mainly to avoid that always hypothetical fire that destroys an entire family's history. This is my favorite picture. It is of me and my sister. It seems impossible that I was ever that age, or that I was ever so stylish! Check out the sweater!

Style commentary aside, I love this picture because I love my sister, and I think this shows us at our purest, least complicated stage of life.

2008-02-02T10:51:00.000-08:00

Disappointments

I've always loved movies, and I still become excited by the prospect of seeing a really great film in a theater with a like-minded audience. I remember how much fun it felt to see a movie like Raiders of the Lost Ark with an audience laughing and cheering with you, or a movie like Blue Velvet where you could exchange "aren't we cool because we get this" looks with your fellow audience members as you left the theater. Part of what made me think those movies were so great may have been my youth at the time, but I always go to the movies seeking to see something new, to recapture that old excitement. However, lately I've been find that experience very hard to come by.

I saw Cloverfield a couple of weeks ago, and I feel like a victim. The movie was the subject of a huge online "viral" video promotion. I was sucked into the air of mystery surrounding the movie like everyone else. (Well, not everyone else-actually probably just me and a bunch of sci-fi-freaks who live in their parent's basement.) The entire premise of the movie's promotion was that something mysterious was attacking New York and you had to watch the movie to find out what it was. I knew the characters in the movie were a bunch of attractive twenty-somethings, so I was prepared for that, and I knew that the conceit of the movie was that it would be told through the lens of a digital recorder manned by someone at a going away party, and I knew that there was a monster involved. What I wasn't prepared for was the fact that I was never, ever, even after watching the movie, going to know anything else! Technically, the movie is impressive. If New York is ever attacked by a sky-scraper high monster, this is what it is going to look like. The herky-jerky camera movements didn't bother me, although my friend with whom I saw the movie leaned over to me and said, "Is the Blair Witch attacking New York?"
I understand that the conceit of the movie is that this is found footage, and real people in a real attack wouldn't know all the answers, but come on! If we are to believe that a monster is attacking New York, why can't we believe that the main characters would at least over hear a soldier saying something like, "They say it came out of an iceberg broken of from the North Atlantic floe by global warming" or "Someone overfed his iguana" or something. The monster, which we do see a couple of times in all its glory, still looks like someone's overgrown pet lizard. It even looks kinda cute in its one close-up. Why couldn't the filmakers have looked at the incredible diversity of life on planet earth and have been more original? Haven't they ever seen pictures of the strange forms of life at the bottom of the ocean? Even the creatures in The Mist had a strange other-worldly quality, and that movie didn't get nearly the publicity it deserved, unlike Cloverfield, which turned out to be all publicity.

With his TV show Lost, and now with Cloverfield, JJ Abrams has become of a master of the high concept hype with very little follow through. I was intrigued by Lost until I realized it was just Gillgan's Island with special effects. If you continue to break the promises you make to your audience, you soon will be left without one.

Last night I saw, There Will Be Blood. Actually, I was so anticipating seeing this movie that I snuck out of work early to catch a late afternoon matinee. I loved Boogie Nights, Magnolia, and Punch-Drunk Love, so I was really looking forward to this move. Also, the film has been receiving incredible reviews from critics who are comparing it to Citizen Kane and other epic classic movies. First, let me say that Daniel Day Lewis is incredible and deserves whatever awards he may win for this part. The same goes for Paul Dano, who consistently makes unexpected choices in his performance as a sort of male Aimee Semple Macpherson. However, the movie as a whole for me is a great disappointment. Lewis plays a character named Plainview (hmm, a symbolic name do you think?) who is driven to drill for oil, basically so he can make enough money to shut himself off from the rest of humanity in a mansion that includes a bowling alley. (It's an important detail-you'll see.) We watch him swindle people out of their land, and the movie is full of accidental deaths and intentional deaths, and scenes of oil pumping out of the earth like blood. Eventually, both religion and money are shown to be false gods. Gee, never heard that before. Daniel Day Lewis is onscreen constantly, but the viewer never makes a connection with this evil madman, and we have no idea why he acts the way he does. Again, as in Cloverfield we are reminded that real-life doesn't give us the answers we need to understand people. However, a story needs that sense of completion. We need a window into the soul of this madman, or we are left pondering Lewis's performance...we listen to his voice which he lowers until he sounds like Baboo the bear with not a trace of an English accent, we watch him limp and remember, oh yea, that character broke his leg earlier, we watch his face as he realizes a close confederate is about to betray him. The performance is there. I just wish the script had made him more human.

There are scenes of great power. An oil fire sequence is very cool for awhile, but once again the filmaker decides he has to show us the main character cavorting in front of the fire like he's some devil. Okay, we get it!

Another problem area for me in the movie is the score. The score itself is receiving great reviews, and this week's New Yorker devotes two pages to a revent discussion of the score, which is by Jonny Greenwood from the band Radiohead. To me, the score jolted me out of what little emotional involvement I was able to achieve with this movie. If I were to make a satire about avant-garde music, this is the music I would choose to satirize. Plus, I felt like I had heard it all before, especially the gigantic opening chords at the start of the film which sound like those old THX sound commercials they used to play in theaters during the previews.

Sometimes, I wonder if movies have lost some their luster for me because I am older. Have I just seen so much, I'm hard to impress? But then I think of recent (well, recent to me) movies that I have loved like Lost in Translation, Hero, and Year of the Dog, and I decide it's not just me....

really...it's not.

2008-01-16T20:44:00.000-08:00

Juno

I saw Juno this evening. I have to say I loved it. It's a movie about people who are quirky, but still, for the most part, believable. Ellen Page is getting most of the kudos for her performance as the title character, and she deserves them, but I also really liked Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. The only thing that bugged me, just a little, about the movie is that Ellen Page's Juno constantly references things that she is far to young to know. I can understand a sixteen-year old who likes Iggy Pop, but a sixteen-year old who references Soupy Sales? These quick little snarky jokes were funny, but they momentarily jolted me out of the cozy little world the movie creates.

2007-12-11T20:29:00.000-08:00

Two Movies

I recently saw two movies that I really enjoyed, "3:10 to Yuma" and "The Mist."

"3:10 to Yuma" was a good solid western. It followed all the conventions of a typical western movie, but it didn't feel cliched. Christian Bale and Russell Crowe gave solid, even impressive performance, and the direction was crisp. It was just good, old- fashioned movie making. I really enjoyed it.

The other movie was "The Mist" based on a Stephen King novella. It was much better than it had any right to be considering its premise. The conceit behind the story is that the army has opened a dimension to another world, and the mist that creeps into our world from the other dimension contains a variety of hideous monsters. A group of people are trapped together in a grocery store and are soon split into two camps, a rational, reasonable group led by Thomas Jane's character, and an irrational, religious group led by Marcia Gay Harden, who gives a terrific performance. The movie has one of those Twilight Zone endings that you will either find haunting or silly. Personally, I found it to be haunting.

It occurred to me that these are the types of movies Hollywood should be making and promoting, rather than the huge event movies of which they are so fond. They'e trained their audience to only attend "event" movies. People used to go to the movies regardless of what was playing on the off chance that it might just be good. Now you can buy a movie and have it forever for nearly the same price as seeing it just once in a theater. Movie tickets are so expensive now that people only want to spend the money on sure things that they've seen advertised to death on TV. It's no longer feasible to spend $10 to take a chance on a smaller movie that you may either like or dislike. It's safer to go to see "Spiderman vs. Predator III". Maybe they should have a two-tier pricing system, so people could hae a chance to go see smaller, well-made movies, like the ones I've just discussed.

Toothpaste Kisses new video

2007-11-23T23:53:00.001-08:00

Interesting video!

Shirley Bassey - GET THE PARTY STARTED - Music Video

2007-11-18T01:49:00.001-08:00

Proof that cool is ageless. She's seventy!

2007-11-04T21:45:00.000-08:00

More Dias de los Muertos Pictures

After I went to the Harlingen museum and took the pictures featured in the previous post, I went to the South Texas Museum of History and took the pictures you can see immediatley below.

2007-11-04T21:42:00.000-08:00

Here are some "Catrinas" on display. They were first created in the early 1900s by a Mexican cartoonist called Posada. They were meant satirize the wealthy, frivoulus class. A catrin is a dandy, and a catrina is a female dandy.

2007-11-04T21:40:00.000-08:00

Some details from an altar done in remembrance of a local art student.

2007-11-04T21:38:00.000-08:00

This was a painting done on butcher paper and mounted on one of the walls next to an altar.

2007-11-04T21:31:00.000-08:00

This was a wall drawing in the display at the Museum of South Texas History.

2007-10-20T11:02:00.001-07:00

Dia de los Muertos Exhibit

2007-10-20T10:55:00.000-07:00

Today I went to the Dia De Los Meurtos Altars Exhibit at the Harlingen Arts and Heritage Museum. They've invited local community leaders and artists to create ofrendas or altars in memory of the dead. The sign at the door to the exhibit explains that some Hispanic folk teachers say that there are three ways to be dead. You can be dead physically, you can be dead spiritually, and you can be dead in the memory of those who continue to live. The altars are a way to keep someone alive in memory.

2007-10-20T10:52:00.000-07:00

One of several calaveras used in the exhibit. I don't know if she is laughing, yawning or just plain hungry.

2007-10-20T10:46:00.000-07:00

Some of the ofrendas on display.

2007-10-20T10:45:00.000-07:00

I so wanted to steal these two!

2007-10-20T10:43:00.000-07:00

This was one of the most spectacular altars.

2007-10-20T10:40:00.000-07:00

This altar featured a quilted representation of a heart and lungs. It was called "Respiro". Maybe it had to do with the "breath of life"?

2007-10-20T10:38:00.000-07:00

I really liked this altar. I believe it was called "Chiclets para Los Ninos". The imagery, the commercial message and the repetition all remind me of Andy Warhol.

2007-10-20T10:34:00.000-07:00

Details of the woodcut images surrounding "Chiclets para Los Ninos".

2007-10-20T10:30:00.000-07:00

Here you can see many of the elements of the ofrenda. The cempauchcitl, or Mexican Marigolds, the food, the relics, and the representation of death as something strange, maybe even amusing, but definitely not scary.

2007-10-20T10:26:00.000-07:00

I've decided that because these two life-size calaveras are wearing red sashes they must be ambassadors from the land of the dead.

2007-10-20T10:12:00.000-07:00

Part of the exhibit were these three paintings of skulls. I liked them because they reminded me of graffiti art with a definite link to much older traditions.

2007-10-16T20:31:00.000-07:00

What is it with these Republicans?

GOP Leader Faces Charges for Sexual Encounters With Minor
A noted Wisconsin Republican leader could face up to 52 years in prison if found guilty of enticing a minor with drugs and alcohol last year. Donald Fleischman, chairman of the Brown County Republican Party, is accused of fondling a 16-year-old runaway from a juvenile facility, according to the Green Bay Press-Gazette. The preliminary hearing is set for October 29.
The teen told authorities that Fleischman took him to a hotel and then a cabin in 2006. When he tried to sleep, he said, Fleischman would fondle him. On one occasion, according to the youth, he awoke to find Fleischman masturbating on the edge of the bed.
Police went to Fleischman's home on November 19, 2006, where they found the boy hiding in a closet, wearing nothing but a T-shirt and underwear.
The GOP leader appeared in court on September 28 and is free on a signature bond. He faces three misdemeanor charges and two felony ones, including contributing to the delinquency of a child. Fleischman's attorney, Jeff Jazgar, said his client is innocent.
"Our plan is to get some witnesses to testify and present enough information to dismiss the case," he said in the article.
Fleischman has stepped down from his post as the county's GOP chair. (The Advocate)

2007-10-08T21:01:00.000-07:00

Elderly Care for Gays

Here's an interesting and thought-provoking article in how many elderly people are forced to go back into the closet as they enter nursing homes and assisted care facilities.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/09/us/09aged.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

2007-09-30T20:02:00.000-07:00

My Day Away

Let me tell you about my Saturday. I agreed to spend the day in Reynosa with my friend to help him keep his mind off of his recent break-up. Reynosa is a city of about a million people seven miles south of McAllen, Texas. There is a big parking lot next to the bridge and that is where we met and parked our cars. We walked across the bridge and took a taxi to the Mercado, which is a big shopping district in the Zona Centro of the city. It's really like a big cobblestone street where there are dozens, if not hundreds, of stores all selling basically the same thing-backpacks for kids with unauthorized Disney and Sesame Street images(Goofy and Miss Piggy holding hands on the same tote bag) counterfeited DVD's, clothes that Calvin Klein never even dreamed of, much less designed, dulcerias selling dulce de leche and pulpos de tamarindo covered in chili powder. There was a man with a crowd gathered around him and statues of Santissima Muerte (Saint Death) at his feet explaining how for 50 pesos he could cast a spell that would keep your lover faithful, and another man playing a version of three-card-monte using a ball of felt and bottle caps. I was standing behind him and could see him palm the felt ball before people picked the wrong bottle cap. We bought churros- delicious, hollow, tube-like pastries filled with strawberries and dusted with cinnamon and sugar. In Mexico, everyone is out on the street on a Sunday afternoon.
We made our way to our first stop on our little expedition. The Banos Colon is a bath house in the old sense of the word. You pay $7 to enter and you are given a ratty old towel and a bed sheet ripped in half length-wise to cover yourself. You proceed up one flight of stair to the changing room where you exchange a little numbered poker chip you have been given for a key, attached to a stretchy type cord which you wear around your wrist, to a wooden locker where you store you personal belongings. The bath area is lined with blue tiles and there is a dry sauna (Sauna Turko is written on the glass walls) and a steam sauna (Sauna Ruso). There were a dozen men milling around. Nobody talks (except me, and my English voice sounded so very loud) and there is a lot of pointed and deliberate eye contact made, but no one seems to ever follow up on anything. As I have often noticed when I am in Mexico, my foreignness, my Angloness, seems to cloak me in an invisible force field where I am free to observe, but am not required to interact with, whatever crowd in which I find myself. It's not a bad feeling, but it would be intolerable for a long period of time.
The main reason, for me at least, to go there is to get a massage. For $15 you can get the best massage anywhere. The masseuse takes you to a private room where you he covers you in a layer of soapy water. You are nude-it is sensual, but not sexual. He then massages, taps, and stretches every part of your body from the crown of your head to the tips of your toes. I was as pliable as a piece of warm taffy when he was done. Marvelous.
After our massages, we went to a restaurant specializing in Mexican seafood. I had Camarones de Mojo de Ajo-Shrimp with roasted bits of garlic. It was delicious. We sat by the window in the restaurant for nearly two hours watching the crowds go by. I counted three men dressed as clowns. There were plenty of older men wearing cowboy hats, pointy shoes and big belt buckles. There were younger people dressed like the goths you would see in an American mall, their Spanish seemingly out of place coming from their black lip-sticked mouths. There were abuelas dragging grandchildren home, and young men and women walking in groups just heading out for the night. It was very good people watching.
After we left the restaurant, we went to Farolito. Farolito (the little lamp) isn't so much a gay bar as it is a hustler bar. Most middle-class to upper-class gay Mexicans wouldn't be caught dead there. Drag queens, who were probably asked to leave home when they were twelve, go there, old men who seem to be content to buy beer for the three or four young men who sit with them and mock them behind their backs go there, people who can't afford the $10 cover at the upper class bar because that is what they make in a day, if they are lucky, go there. My friend and I sat at a table and drank Topo Chico, a brand of mineral water. A drag queen sat with us at the table for a moment and asked me in flawless English if I want to "be introduced" to someone and then whispered in my ear "he's cheap". When I declined, she fanned seven fingers in front of my face and said, "I have seven boys. When you come back, ask for Gemgirl." She then tottered off in her platform heels. At Farolito, my Angloness ceases to be a force field and becomes beacon attracting moth-like wisps of young men, street hustlers. It is then that my pidgin Spanish becomes useful. As they approach, like thin stilettos out of the disco lights, a big smile of greeting on their faces, I murmur, "No tengo dinero. Soy pobre." ("I have no money. I am poor.") They usually smile and move on. Sometimes they are more aggressive and my friend has to put on a stern face and act as if he is a jealous lover.
As the night wore on, the crowd became more animated and aggressive and we decided to go while the going was good. We walked back to the bridge, which is about 25 blocks (at least that is how it felt). When we got to the bridge, we had to take the pedestrian crossing, which involves climbing a ramp like structure to a height equal to a six-story building, walking over the automobile traffic crossing into Mexico and then walking back down. When we had finally crossed, I was exhausted and covered in sweat. It was a memorable day though, something out of the ordinary.

2007-09-23T19:33:00.000-07:00

Cursed by Buddha

Today I had lunch with a friend at a restaurant named Dai Tung. Even though they weren't especially busy, our waitress appeared to be in a frantic rush. Often, she would not even allow us to finish our sentences before rushing off to place our order. In the right circumstances it could have been cute, even endearing, but I was very tired and found her to be very annoying. I had been seized by one of my compulsions the night before. I decided that I had to do all of my laundry and wash all of my clothes that night! I didn't get started until about 10:30 P.M. I was up until 4:00 A.M. finishing everything. I went to church this morning, and headed to McAllen to eat Chinese with my friend. To make the visit to Dai Tung even worse, as we paid our check, I noticed a plate of very white muffins next to the register in shrink-wrapped plastic. I held one up and asked the cashier what it was. She became very offended, and told me that it was an "offering to the Buddha" and that I shouldn't touch it. It was then that I noticed the little plastic fountain next to the plate, complete with water spurting from the Buddha's navel. Obviously, some venerable ancestor had purchased it at Big Lots. I was very sorry, and said that I thought it was for sale. She replied, "If it were for sale, it would a sign saying the price." I guess I was wrong to assume a plate of shrink-wrapped muffins in a restuarant was for sale. And why were they shrink-wrapped? I guess the Buddha likes his muffins moist.

The day perked up though when we went to JJ's party house, and I was able to purchase a pair of white angel wings for Halloween.

2007-09-16T21:14:00.000-07:00

Roosters

Because of my participation in a community play, I've recently come to know more than I ever really wanted to about "fighting cocks." The two fellows pictured above were my co-stars in the production. The brown rooster is you typical barnyard rooster. He has a proud red comb and the red, droopy wattles typical of his kind. The white-feathered rooster is a fighting rooster. His comb and wattles were removed when he was about 10 months old to give him an advantage in fighting. While it is difficult to see in these pictures, roosters (and hens) have naturally occurring spurs a couple of inches above where their feet hit the ground. The owners of fighting rooster attach blades, razors, and gaffs to the fighting rooster's spurs so that their kicks become deadly to their opponents. The spurs are sometimes sharpened, and sometime the gaffs are sealed on using wax. It seems very cruel, but I also think that as a society we are very hypocritical in our treatment of animals. The Michael Vick case is in the news and everybody is ready to jump on the bandwagon and label him a crazy killer. I'm not defending him, and I think he deserves whatever penalty the law decides for him. However, I often wonder "Where is the media outcry about the huge, multi-corporation hog farming and poultry farming operations?" Are all of those people who condemn Michael Vick so relentlessly in the media not eating their Christmas hams and their chicken nuggets? Unless you are a vegetarian, or have committed to eating free range beef, pork and chicken, you have no right to throw stones at Michael Vick. I attended a bull fight once in Mexico, and while I appreciated the pageantry, I didn't think the matadors were particulalry brave, and I sure didn't think the bull had even a 1 in 100 chance against the literally dozens of men and horses in the ring. What bothered me the most was that the meat of the animal was wasted (and it would probably be very tough) in a country where so many go hungry. We react emotionally to animals based on their cuteness. People who pamper their dogs with treats and clothes and special beds have no problem with laying out rat poison. If rats had big brown eyes, and could sit on their hind legs and beg, we would have no problem with them.

2007-09-10T10:50:00.001-07:00

Roosters

I recently took leave of my senses and agreed to play a part in a recent community theater production of a play called "Roosters". I play a Mexican-American ex-convict who raises fighting roosters. He's has just been released from jail and is coming home to reclain a particularly promising rooster from his son. It's full of symbolism and magical realism. I don't know why I do these community plays. I'm not an especially good actor, even for community theater, and I suffer quite a bit from stage fright. It must me the remnants of some teenage dream of superstardom.

2007-09-04T21:05:00.000-07:00

Interesting Article

Thinking about Gay Male Brains.
Todd Murphy, 1999
There is one brain part, called the anterior commisure, that's bigger in gay men's brains than in those of heterosexual males. Most of my thoughts here are about looking at what that might mean, and how it might appear. ( Reference)
So, what's it do?
It connects two structures together. The amygdala on each side of the brain.
So, what does the amygdala do?
Its a very, very emotional structure. And it's fast. If you suddenly notice a bus heading toward you, and you feel a 'burst' of fear, that's your amygdala; the one on the right. If you feel a burst of elation when someone looks at you with attraction in their eyes, that's your amygdala, too; the one on the left.
A gay man's brain has more connections between the opposite emotional centers than other brains.
The amygdala does an important kind of recognition, too. It recognizes other people, or more importantly, how they're feeling. It responds to facial expressions, tones of voice, and, I'd guess, body language as well.
My guess is that its important in seeing potential mates, and so, its the part that knows who you're attracted to, gay, straight, transsexual, bisexual or whatever.
The gay male brain uses the same parts to be attracted to a man that I use to be attracted to a woman.
I cannot help but wonder if the extra connections might allow extra recognition skills, and a wider sense of what a person's meaning might be. When a male brain selects people of the same gender as the focus for sexual feelings, it gives its owner a set of concerns and needs in common with women. Men become the people they want to be with, forcing them to pay attention to men's needs, and women become the object of identification, at least in some ways. At the same time they ARE men, so they still have to identify there, too. As a straight man, an attractive woman 'means' something very different to me than she does to a gay man. And guess what? The amygdala mediates our experience of 'meaningfulness'.
Such a person would be able to empathize with a very large portion of the total population; larger than heterosexuals of either gender.
Most evolutionary biologists will agree that if a species preserves a trait, its because that trait helps that species survive, or at least did so when it first emerged.
One of the traits of the human species is that close 10 percent (the number changes according to who does the counting) of our populations are gay. If Darwin (and some others) are right, the our species needed gay males when we first appeared, and we might need them now.
What for?
Well, gay men do not compete with straight men for one thing, but they understand many, if not most, uniquely male concerns, because they are men.
And they share enough in common with women that they understand women's concerns, too. Many lesbians are a bit taken aback by how indifferent many gay men are to feminist political concerns, but those aren't the women's concerns I mean. I'm talking about such things as 'cognitive style', 'linguistic patterns' and other things that you need a special dictionary to get.
Gay males might have enhanced their tribe's ability to respond to danger quickly. Their voice in the councils of the first human tribes could have been a profound advantage.
There are two things that help an individual be heard in human cultures. One is to be the boss, and the other is to have as few conflicts with others as possible.
Gay males, being less interested in war than other males, do not conflict with their tribal neighbors.
They do not compete with straight males for sexual opportunities,
And, they do not compete with women over the resources for their young. A hundred thousand years ago, this was probably VERY important. It takes a decade to raise a child, at least. In a ten-year period, most of our young probably had to live through at least one lean season. When it was going on, the gay man only had to find food for one. But he was quite strong and intelligent to find food for several, just like anyone else, if it was to be had at all.
Our species arose 100,000 years ago, and we were hunters and gatherers. Most of these societies today are a loose kind of democracy, and the chiefs don't really have the power to command obedience from anybody. Decisions were and are made in councils. In our earliest history, these decisions were sometimes a matter of life and death. Making sure that our populations produced some individuals who had extra empathetic skills might have given us more intelligent leadership than otherwise. The larger anterior commisure implies that gay males might be more able to perceive meaningfulness, too. "Meaningfulness" is an amygdaloid function - innocuous things become omens, possibly selected because the event taken as the omen has some association with a concern among one's people. (Stimulate your amygdala - learn more here)
One example might be what a storm cloud means when its windy outside. The extra left/right connectivity in gay males would give them a greater sense of the nuances and subtle implications of events in their world. Being men, however, they would have a greater ability to articulate their subtler perceptions, because the male brain is more 'single-tasking' than the female brain; it is more likely to use one or two areas at a time - including the language centers.
Because gay males have more communication between the hemispheres, they percieve non-verbal information (including the sort we call intuitive) more readily then straight males. Because they still possess male brains, their cognitive processes are more focused (less multitasking) than they would be in women, allowing them an advantage in getting non-verbal information into words, where it can be shared with others. An intuition becomes a channeled voice. A dream contains spoken instructions. A gay male, all other conditions being equal, was more able to go from a sense-that-something-is-wrong to seeing and describing a specific danger. They might also be better able to find ways to improve things, be more comfortable, and stay healthy.
Consider the stereotype that gay men are 'esthete' - they are gourmets when eating, film critics when seeing movies, interior designers at home, and fashion and grooming experts in front of mirrors. Nothing but the best. Now, imagine that same trait 100,000 years ago, and add to it the caveat that people acted for their tribe as much as for themselves, there being little one could claim as one's own. Nothing but the best and most sheltered campsite. Nothing but the clearest water. Everyone should be clean and attrective (by whatever standard his nation held) - as much as possible. With their extra emotional sensitivity, they would encourage people to be nice to one another. Further, freedom from many of the usual social obligations - like the need to let others save face - could allow gay males to be more vocal than other males might be. Someone demanding the best for himself in those days would have had to demand the best for the whole tribe.
I know I'm making many generalizations here, and many gay men do not fit the stereotype, but my point is that gay male traits, though held by only a few, can benefit many.
When a gay male had an opinion, a hundred thousand years ago, his people probably listened.
In our earliest evolutionary history, as hunter/gatherers, we were better able to survive our crises, and to avoid them when we could, by having a group with a different set of cognitive skills who tended to avoid the conflicts that were most pressing to everybody else. They probably were important peacemakers in our first cultures. And peace is one thing that we need to survive, and to raise our young.
One study found that women who were pregnant in Berlin at the end of World War Two delivered a slightly higher percentage of gay male children than others. Perhaps the response to war is to try and deliver more peacemakers.
That may be why our gene pool contains instructions for making our populations include 10 percent gay males.
So why should this man, and not that man, be gay?
There is a process that could create this difference. The emergence of a recessive, neotanous trait.
Neotany is the name used when an adult in a species retains a childhood trait. The best-know example is human curiosity. Other primate species are as curious as our children, but it stops with puberty. Our adults are capable of retaining the trait their whole lives.
Brains don't grow uniformly. They grow in steps. First one part grows outstrips the others, then another gets bigger. Then another. Then another.
My guess (speculation) is that there is a phase in the growth of every male brain when the anterior commisure has outstripped its neighboring structures. I also guess that there is a trigger that signals when its time for the anterior commisure to stop growing.
And that, in gay males, this trigger is absent. This kind of adaptation is called "Neoteny"
Some gay men say that they've 'always known' they were gay. Others have said that there was a single decisive sexual experience that brought it out.
Its possible that the anterior commisure has two growth spurts when it might be able to shed its 'stop growing' trigger. One during in the womb, and another after birth, but before puberty. Perhaps there are several such 'windows of opportunity' in the development of a man's brain. There isn't enough evidence at this point to prove or disprove the case. The simplest thing I can imagine is an environmental 'cue' of some sort, either in the womb or in the environment.
One more thing about the anterior commisure. Its in the limbic system, and the limbic system is now the strongest contender as the source, within the brain, of religious and mystic experiences. There are scores of studies to support this, most of them published in medical journals, and are still unknown in spiritual teachings.
Nevertheless, a conclusion appears: Gay men were probably our first spiritual leaders. Our Shamans. In that social position, they would have been free to expect that their words would be heard, they would have been able to exploit their cognitive skills to the maximum, and they would have been able to access many altered states of consciousness that would've been unavailable to others.
The trust and respect that a skilled gay shaman might have been able to command might allow him to induce the placebo effect in other during times of illness, too.
Gay men may once have healed their people, led them spirituality, soothed interpersonal conflicts, and help them anticipate and avoid threats to their survival.
Who knows? Perhaps gay male sexual preference is a by-product of a specific group of cognitive and emotional skills that helped us survive - skills that may be expensive for the individual gay man, but were essential for the population as a whole.
A 100 percent heterosexual population might have gone extinct.
But then, we don't have a 100 percent straight population, do we?

Allen & Gorski, "Sexual Orientation and the size of the Anterior Commisure in the Human Brain"
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 89, 7199-7202, August 1992"

2007-09-02T22:59:00.001-07:00

Gay Republican Hypocrisy

Tap-tap- You're Busted! A Brief History of the Hypocrisy of Republican Gay-Bashers
By Tracy Dove, Ph.DEditor, The Russia News Service
August 30, 2007
America loves a sex scandal, especially when the victim deserves it. This week yet another gay-bashing Republican has turned out to be a toilet pervert, giving homosexuality a bad name by associating his dirty men's room habits with the honorable choice of sexual preference. This time it was Larry Edwin Craig- an Idaho congressmen who- when not harassing men in bathroom stalls- stood behind the Christian Republicans in fighting to ban gay marriage, gay rights and homosexuality in the military. We commonly call such people hypocrites, and the origin of the word says a lot of what is really going on in some circles of the Republican party. It comes to us from far-away Greek- and it means literally "stage actor", which is a fitting label for exactly the way these politicians have publicly claimed to champion the moral high ground while reaching an all-time low of criminal behavior in their own sordid private lives.It is particularly disturbing to listen to the right-wing preachers of moral certitude crow about the evils of homosexuality in fire-and-brimstone Technicolor, only to catch them with their pants down in lavatories while tapping impatiently in $200 loafers to get some attention from the guy next door in a public restroom. The blogosphere is naturally having a ball with this one- but how many gay Republican sex scandals have their really been? The answer is quite a few, and they are all entertaining for their hypocritical nature of how the Republican Party has mutated over the years.And the best part is that we don't need to look back any later than 2006 for some ugly examples; we can start with Glenn Murphy Jr., who was the rising star in the Republican Party and headed the Young Republicans' morality division in drumming up support for anti-homosexual legislation. This facade quickly shattered when it was revealed that Murphy had an unusual fetish for masturbating while giving sleeping men oral sex against their will. Then there is Bob Allen, who could be considered a card-carrying member of the toilet creep genre, since he was busted for offering to pay an undercover policeman $20 to give him oral sex. Mark Foley is another, and on the surface he was a crusader against child pornography and wore his morality on his sleeve in Congress until 2006, when it was discovered that he was sending young boys SMS requests to see them naked. Naturally Foley denied the charges, but he also made pains to mention that he had been abused by a gay priest as a child, which of course excuses his desire- in his own words- to "caress" other men in saunas, although for him there was nothing sexual about this whatsoever. But the perverts aren't limited to the beltway elite at all; there is James E. West- the former mayor of Spokane Washington- who, as a Boy Scout leader, is accused of molesting young boys and later surfing on websites to coax high school boys into taking special political assignments in his office. He certainly comes in as runner-up in the Republican hypocrisy awards, since he had voted against gay rights and favored forbidding homosexuals from working in high schools and other public sector positions. But the prize winner of today's contest goes to Ted Arthur Haggard, the reverend who misled 30 million fundamental Christians into following him on a deluded family values crusade in sync with the Bush administration. Preaching against homosexuality as a crime against God, it turned out that "Reverend Ted" had been employing a male prostitute for 3 years and preferred having sex with him after snorting crystal meth. And the list goes on...Haggard finally admitted to his failures and entered drug rehabilitation under the supervision of 4 ministers. Like in an exorcism, Haggard went through hell and back- returning as a cured heterosexual and is now trying to earn a degree in psychology. He was eventually forgiven by his obedient flock, since to forgive is a Christian value, but these Christians never considered forgiving Bill Clinton.This is hypocrisy at its most absurd height; it is true that Clinton's extra-marital affair may not have been becoming of a president, but at least toilets, boy scouts and sleeping men weren't part of his digression. Bill Clinton is guilty of lying under oath; the question as to whether it was ethical behavior requires a brief look back at how other presidents enjoyed their privileges of office. The biggest playboy of this century to reside at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue was certainly John F. Kennedy- who was incidentally Clinton's hero- and his Secret Service detail had a special clause in their job description that required sneaking girls in and out of the White House while Jackie re-designed the First Bedroom. Lyndon Johnson, his Vice President and later successor to the presidency- didn't especially like living in the shadow of Kennedy's rooster-like reputation. The anecdote goes that during a White House dinner Johnson was asked about Kennedy's numerous indiscretions and what the president thought about it, but Johnson felt the remark was an attack at his own sexuality. Already tipsy on bourbon, he responded that "I've fucked more women by accident than Kennedy ever did on purpose," which was unfortunate, because Ladybird Johnson happened to be in earshot of the remark.Homosexuality is first and foremost a private affair and people have the right to engage in whatever sexual activity they want as long as no one's rights are being abused. And that goes for heterosexuals too, but the Christian Republicans don't see it this way. The best explanation for this would be to look back at the Communist Party of the Soviet Union as it existed under Stalin; as long as you towed the "party line", all mediocrity in political life was excusable. And so it is today in the Republican party, where party loyalty takes precedence over service, common sense and real family values.

Gay GOP misery.
Crossfireby Michael Crowley Post date 10.13.06 Issue date 10.23.06

In the bars and clubs frequented by Washington's gay men, a new character has recently cropped up: the hammered gay Republican. Until recently, says one gay Republican lobbyist, his counterparts on the Hill "had reached a point where you come to your work, you do a good job, you don't cause problems for your boss, and you go home." But then along came the Mark Foley scandal, with its rightwing anti-gay moralizing, liberal snickers about closeted hypocrisy, and a merciless wave of Internet gossip and "outings." The lobbyist says he assumes every gay Republican staffer is "terrified right now." And that has been enough to drive some of them to the bottle. One gay Washingtonian recalls running into an aide to a senior House Republican at a gay bar soon after FoleyGate broke: "He went out to get shitfaced, because he was so stressed out." Chris Crain, a blogger and former editor of the Washington Blade, a gay weekly in Washington, D.C., also says such encounters have become typical. "This weekend, I noticed that the gay Republicans I saw were notably more inebriated than usual. I think they were self-medicating--and I can't blame them."
Not at all. You'd probably drink hard, too, were you in such a socially and politically impossible position. For the dozens of gay Republicans on Capitol Hill--including senior aides to some of the most powerful and moralistic members of the House and Senate--the past few weeks have been a nightmare. On the right, gay Republicans face the likes of Tony Perkins and Pat Buchanan implying that the so-called "velvet mafia" enabled Foley's depredations and claiming linkage between pedophilia and homosexuality. On the left, meanwhile, are gay liberals furious over the Bush-era GOP's gay-baiting and increasingly willing to "out" the Republican regime's closeted enablers--with the help of their tell-all blogs. (Gay political circles have recently been abuzz with talk about "The List," a roster of allegedly gay GOP staffers that has circulated among political journalists and activists.) "These people feel under siege in their own party and also under siege in the gay community," says Crain. The Foley story will blow over eventually, but, given the de facto left-right alliance against them, gay Republicans might be knocking them back for a while to come.

Not that gay Republicans have ever had it easy, of course. For decades, they tended to be closeted entirely--some in the tragically warped model of Joseph McCarthy's henchman, Roy Cohn, who bashed deviants by day and slept with them at night. Or Terry Dolan, co-founder of the vituperative National Conservative Political Action Committee, who, like Cohn, died of aids. By the 1990s, gay Republicans had evolved into a defined party interest group, complete with their own lobbying arm in the Log Cabin Republicans. But the GOP establishment was slow to accept the change. In 1995, Republican presidential nominee Bob Dole actually returned a $1,000 contribution to his campaign from the Log Cabin Republicans. During a debate over gay marriage the following year, then-Representative (and now Senator) Tom Coburn of Oklahoma seemed to speak for his party's religious-conservative wing when he said that homosexuality is "immoral ... based on perversion ... based on lust."
Even if conservatives never quite embraced the gay politicos within their ranks, however, they rarely turned the screws on them. Rather than eat their own, conservatives smeared Democrats, as when the GOP spread baseless rumors that then-Democratic House Speaker Tom Foley was gay. "We hear it's little boys," an aide to Newt Gingrich whispered to the New York Daily News. (Sorry, wrong Foley!) Instead, "outing" became the pastime of a gay left furious over the aids epidemic. One early victim was the closeted Wisconsin Republican Representative Steve Gunderson, whose voting record drew the aids activists' ire. At a bar one night in 1991, Gunderson was confronted by the activist Michael Petrelis, who furiously demanded, "When are you going to come out?" Petrelis then dumped a Coke on Gunderson before being dragged away. Under relentless pressure from other gay activists (and a few pile-ons from Republicans like Bob Dornan), Gunderson eventually outed himself. Likewise, Jim Kolbe, a gay representative from Arizona who is retiring this year, outed himself in 1996 to preempt the gay newsmagazine Advocate from doing it for him. And, when Arthur Finkelstein--a GOP consultant who produced savage ads for anti-gay candidates like Jesse Helms--was outed the same year, the deed was done by Boston magazine, hardly a right-wing outlet.
After a lull, the liberal outing machine sprang back into action a couple of years ago, as the Bush-DeLay GOP whipped its base into a frenzy over the specter of gay marriage. By then, the outing technology had surpassed dumping drinks on an offender's head; one gay activist with a blog could single-handedly out dozens of Republicans. That's just what a D.C.-based blogger named Michael Rogers began doing around the time of the 2004 congressional gay marriage debate. One early casualty was Virginia GOP Representative Ed Schrock, a rock-ribbed Navy veteran who had co-sponsored the Federal Marriage Amendment. Days after Rogers, working from his apartment in Washington's gay-friendly Adams Morgan neighborhood, posted messages allegedly recorded on a gay phone-sex line by the representative, Schrock retired. Rogers also targeted a slew of congressional staffers, including Robert Traynham, communications director to Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum, who had bizarrely lumped gay marriage with "man-on-dog" sex. Santorum was ultimately forced to release a statement saying he stands by Traynham, whom he described as a target of partisan-based bigotry.
Rogers also zeroed in on a staffer for Oklahoma right-winger Jim Inhofe, who has said he does not hire openly gay or lesbian staffers and once declared himself "really proud" that his recorded family history included no gay relationships. But, as Rogers gleefully revealed, the staffer had posed for a fleshy photo spread in a local gay weekly in which he mused about finding a man with "six-pack abs you could eat chip and dip off of." (In response, Inhofe's office drew a distinction between the senator's personal staff and his committee staff, on which the man worked.) Another senior party operative, Rogers revealed, had posted an online personal ad declaring him to be "just looking for good sex, whether with one or several." Rogers and other gay media outlets had also chronicled Mark Foley's sexuality, a likely reason Foley never tried to run for Senate in Florida.

ven without the likes of Rogers, gay Republicans had been ostracized in Washington's mostly liberal gay community. "After the marriage amendment, that changed everything," a liberal gay activist explains. He recounts a recent night when a stranger began chatting up his friend in a bar. The ensuing conversation went something like this:
"Where do you work?"
"In the government."
"Where in the government?"
"In the Senate."
"Oh. Who do you work for?"
The answer came: a highly conservative senator who had championed the 2004 Federal Marriage Amendment. "You gotta be kidding me!" the activist snapped in disgust, breaking off the encounter.
Still, it's not likely that this poor scorned Republican is in danger of an outing. In the wake of the Foley scandal, even some gay Democratic partisans think it's best to ease up the public pressure on their GOP counterparts. "Politically, I think [outing] is a stupid idea right now," says John Aravosis, a prominent D.C.-based gay blogger who has supported outing in the past. "The Republicans are imploding--we don't need to draw attention to ourselves. And this story is already in enough danger of becoming a 'gay story.' We don't need to help it." Crain adds that, whatever frustrations gay liberals might have with their GOP counterparts, their cause benefits if senators like Santorum have regular contact with gays and lesbians--coming to know them as real people and not the perverted caricatures of James Dobson books.
But gay Republicans are hardly off the hook. In the private sphere, their lives are more perilous than ever. For pure vitriol, it would be hard to top an episode that occurred late last month at a Washington dinner party. The gathering included both well-connected Bush administration and congressional GOP staffers and several Democrats--all gay. Inevitably, politics came up. One Democrat in attendance, a former Clinton White House aide, couldn't contain his revulsion at the gay men working in the service of the enemy. "I ripped into this one guy" who works for the Bush administration, the Democrat says. "I said, 'What you do for a living is hurting me, and my family, and my daughter I have with two lesbians. I personally view Bush as the most corrupt, vile politician in the world, and if you're working for him, to me you're one and the same.' People were horrified." But, he adds, "I refuse to be cordial or friendly or polite to these people. I think they are our mortal enemy. They ask the gay community to indulge them when they want a social life, but when they punch the clock they are trying to tear apart our families. They want it both ways." Even a few weeks later, says another gay Washingtonian who was not present at the dinner, the former Clinton aide's "little screed is legendary."
And there are still lone liberal gunmen like Michael Rogers. His goal is to touch off an internal war within the GOP that ultimately brings down the party. He has vowed to out several more GOP staffers between now and Election Day, and says at least one influential conservative leader has cheered him on via e-mail. When I spoke to him this week, he boasted that he had just gotten off the phone with an official at a leading conservative organization, one of whose other senior officials he was about to out. "I think the Foley story ultimately brings to light the fact that the far right wing in America has been duped by the leadership of the GOP," he says, noting that he's communicated directly on the subject with some Christian conservative leaders. With bizarre bedfellows like that, you can't blame a gay Capitol Hill Republican for hitting the bars--and making it a double.
Michael Crowley is a senior editor at The New Republic.

2007-08-29T21:04:00.000-07:00

Here's more proof that one can find just about anything on the Internet. Apparently there is a Condiment package museum. Click here to see:

http://www.clearfour.com/condiment/