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The Public Blogging of Pomosexuality, Homotextuality, Homophobiaphilia, and Drear Theory (aka Career Theory) [aka Gay4Pay]. We also read the Corner and OpJournal so the right buttock will be punished as well.
All comments subject to publication. Or dismissal. Or Both.
Colby Cosh, goddessmacked by Gloria Grahame, gives the pro view and God O' Machine goes all anti on Wonderful Life's ass. I'm more on Colby's side but I do love God OM's ref of the idea that fallen Bedford Falls looks like more fun than New Jerusalem Bedford Falls. In Colby's piece I especially like that he points out the foreshadowing touches that are easily overlooked in the movie. I also hadn't known that Republic Pictures had managed to pull the movie out of public domain with music rights claims, a very interesting maneuver with a lot of potential in the copyright wars--infinite protected content battles waged around competing copyright claims over sub-content embedded in the finished product. You know, sue because you copyrighted the font used in the credits.
Colby's post got me thinking about the David Thomson's novel Suspects. Thomson is the brit expat movie junkie mostly known as a critic and for his Biographical Dictionary of Film. I'd come across a couple references to Suspects as a worthy curiosity or possibly even a buried caesar lost wonder so I picked it up a few years ago. And then I put it down a few years ago, half read.
So I'm not exactly recommending Suspects since I couldn't finish it even though I kept telling myself I should like this. It weaves the backstories of 50 (a 100?) movies together in a shaggy dog tableau that reveals the secret dark heart of Hollywood, America, British expat movie fiends etc. I kind of think that Hollywood, America, Brit flickcrits etc. wear their secret dark hearts on their sleeves so maybe I was too out of sync with the premise from the start.
I finally gave up when I couldn't trick myself into giving the book any more time. But I did flip to the end expecting there was a gimmick at its core, a surprise ending payoff at least. There was and it seemed to me a good one and one I would have liked if I could have held on. Probably shouldn't say anything more than that the Wonderful Life posts are germane. I'm still not sure if the book is crap, or if it's good but I was just not in the mood for it, or if the gimmick is the only great thing a about it.
So please someone read it all the way through with the promise of a frisson at the end and tell me if the shiver was worth the long ride.
4:14 PM
Friday, December 06, 2002
A Sign of the Season
The naked-guys-wearing-Santa-hats porn is beginning to show up in Yahoo Groups. The doing-bad-things-with-candy-canes pics will be arriving shortly. The fooled-ya!-they-only-look-like-Christmas-tree-ornaments pics don't get posted till closer to Christmas eve.
The beautiful thing is I know that the naked-chicks-wearing-Santa-hats pics are starting to appear in the straight groups too. Are we really so different? Isn't there a Hallmark Christmas Special message in this?
Eve Tushnet linked a site a week or so ago by a Catholic gay man who is part of the Courage movement. I had only heard of Courage a few days before from one of Rod Dreher's gaycentric Corner posts, so reading this guy's page was my first exposure to Courage in action. I found the site so weird I couldn't even think of a way in, couldn't come up with a hook to write about it. I mentioned it in an email to Arthur Silber who has now posted his own thoughts about the site. Arthur gets a big part of what bugged me but it just occurred to me what the other part was.
Arthur describes the psychological monstrosity of the site which is undeniable. Give me open hatred of gays from all the main religious and ideological directions over the intricate self-flagellation and elaborate testimonies of sexual-denial Courage apparently encourages. It strikes me though that there is a tawdry aspect to this that hides behind the supposedly ultra-orthodox ritualism. The site seems dirty to me, endlessly prurient, sex-obsessed in a way that tries to involve everyone else in the sexual lives of the self-proclaimed self-deniers and homosexual ascetics.
No wonder the priests in some of the stories let down the Courageists by counseling more common sense and less encyclical cross-referencing and clerical mania. My guess is the priests either aren't on the same ecclesiastical S&M wavelength and so don't understand the part they are supposed to play or they understand it very well and are creeped the fuck out by it.
To put it simply Courage seems to me to be a cover for its own brand of sexual hijinks, it's a specialization of homosexual desire that plays at being the denial of it, a masochism built around feverish asceticism and high mass stage props. In the same way Satanism is so inextricably bound to it's putative nemesis, Roman Catholicism, that it only really exists as its inverted shadow-- is really just the backdoor entrance to the same place.
Marcelo Rodriguez, the cop who was the bait in the George Michael tearoom takedown, can sue G.M. for slander. Marecelo (rhymes with 'ello!) feels Michael's various comments to the press after the incident paint the good officer as a criminal dick wagger and a tease. Among other things George M. said that Rodriguez "waved his genitals" at him and was playing a game of "I'll show you mine, you show me yours" with Michael before he busted him. Apparently Officer R. was really miming I'll show you MY LAWYER if you show me YOUR LAWYER. Crotch semaphore can be very tricky in its nuances and there are of course local dialects and variations that Mr. Michael might have misinterpreted as a newcomer to our land.
We can only pray that Marcelo will somehow be made whole again and that the payday that looms will ease his pain and anguish. Maybe George can give him the royalties to this record to help Officer Friendly rebuild his shattered self. It's the one track from George that's ever really held my interest. I have a great remix of it on some dance compilation. Don't know if it's on the single I linked to but even if it isn't every George Michael purchase you make brings Officer Rodriguez that much closer to healing.
2:49 AM
Wednesday, December 04, 2002
New From Agenda Bender: The GHOSTHAMMER
I like spam. But then I like junk mail in general. Two interesting specimens from today's emailbox.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
#1. THE LIFEHAMMER Grab LifeHammer when the doors are jammed, the seat belt stuck, and the only way out is through the window!
Don't get trapped in your car! The original car escape tool! Cut unreleased seat belts with the razor-sharp knife blade. Safety Orange LifeHammer. Smash the window with the quality double-tipped safety escape hammer. Escape!
ORDER NOW AND RECEIVE 1 FREE CHROME LIFEHAMMER + 2 GIFT BOXES
This innovative tool shatters side windows and slices through a jammed seatbelt with a single motion. Illuminated and easy to find in the dark, the lifehammer is standard safety equipment.
Dear Parents:
Ever wonder what your kids are doing online? Who they are communicating with and what they are saying?
Did you know that by monitoring your children's computer activities, you could make the online and computing world safer for them? And that there is a product that allows you to do this, showing you every single word that your children type on their computer? There is - it's called KeyGhost and it sells for only $49.95.
KeyGhost captures and records everything your children type, whether in an email, in a chat room, in instant messages or even in a word processing document. Then at any later time, you can view what they've typed.
And unlike software that can be switched off or have its data erased, KeyGhost is an unobtrusive hardware device and only you can read the data inside.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
I always pause and reflect on the watery demise of the golden girl who liked the white stuff, Jessica Savitch, whenever I'm driving through New Hope. So I occasionally consider the possibility of being trapped in a car. But the thoughts are fleeting. Do many people give it a lot of thought? Enough to buy the tool they'll need just in case?
All parents can rest easy knowing that the chance their kids are typing some outrageous stuff at the computer is a DEAD CERTAINTY. Do they really want the details? And since most parents will probably need their kid's help to install the Keyghost (simple as it might be), and even those who don't can expect their kids to notice the damn thing, who's spooking who Mr Keyghost? Especially since kids will get this spam too. The helpful email header reads See what your kids do online which means any kid who didn't open it up and read about Keyghost, then go to the website and see what it looked like and where to find it, would shame the entire kid race. Probably end up with mostly kids buying it to keep tabs on the folks.
1:17 PM
Tuesday, December 03, 2002
The House Of Saud Hot 1300
I think we might have been the first blog to publicize the Chinese Firewall testing site devised by two Harvard Law School profs. Well now they have published their findings. In the email I got from the project announcing their China results they mentioned their earlier report on net censorship in Saudi Arabia. I hadn't looked at that before so I checked that out first. This thing promises hours of infidelish laughs. Here are some highlights from just the first page of sites blocked in SA. (I've only linked a few--go to the report for the rest.)
Absolute Swimwear, Mix & Match Bikinis
Angling Fishing Articles, Advice, Steelhead, Trout, Travel, Pictures Free Coffee
Arab American Roman Catholic Community
No more tan lines with Cooltan Tan Through Swimwear!
Amigo international (czech gay site)
Amnesty International: Saudi Arabia campaign website
Queer Muslims Home Page Anonymizer.com -- Online Privacy Services
VATICAN CITY - Pontifical Millennium Time Capsule - Jubilee Year 3000
Scrutinizing Rumors And Exposing Hoaxes
Testimonies of Muslims who became Christians
Comparative Index to Islam : SHI'A; SHI'ITE; SHIITE; SHI'IS
Altar of Unholy Blasphemy American Nihilist Underground Society (note the acronymn)
Blasphemy Bookmarks: Unholy Links
Adams poop page
The Van Dyke Arabic Bible in PDF Format
Art on the Net
Popular Suicide
Antifart.com(Daily fart cartoon, farting advice column, sounds of farts, videos, chat and more.)
I might just import all 1300 banned urls into my favorite places bookmarks. Big shout out and thanks for the headsup to the House of Saud!
Evan writes that I switched the order of the names in the earlier USSC sodomy case. It should be Bowers V Hardwick, in my version I gave the gay guy first billing. I'd noticed that in all the other coverage of the case the names were reversed but I figured everyone else had it wrong. No self-esteem problems here.
And Evan reminded me of Bowers' illustrious second act which had slipped my mind. "Bowers, recall, was the AG of Georgia (who refused to hire a lesbian I went to law school with to work in his office on moral grounds, just a few years before his messy affair and divorce destroyed his campaign for governor and career)."
The charming devil. But really Bowers is in the great tradition of Attorneys General both at the state and national level. What a scurvy lot they are. Any hall of portraits of AGs pretty much does double duty as a rogues gallery and as a object lesson to visiting school children in the toll of ruined honor and the pitfalls of lives misled. And then at Halloween they turn off the lights stick a few pumpkins in, spray cobwebs on the portraits and charge admission to the house of horrors. The profits go into the bail fund for the current AG.
1:36 PM
Monday, December 02, 2002
The Gay Dingos Raised My Baby
Julian Sanchez pleasures himself (and us) to Agenda Bender's perennial centerfold, Stanley Kurtz.
Frankly, I feel a little cheated on. There's more than a pang of jealousy seeing Julian give Stanley a whirl around the dancefloor. I consider Stan my date. But truth is I missed this latest piece from S.K., so I can hardly blame Julian for saving Stanley, abandoned as I left him to the wallflower brigade keeping the folding chairs company at the outer edge of the rec center. What a cad I am, what a gentleman is Julian.
Julian points to one novel refinement on S.K.'s standby slippery slope arguments. Stan speculates that gay marriage will lead to wanton procreation by shiftless heterosexuals with no thought to consequences because they'll know that the kid can always get a soft landing with homos who live on the hill. "If it's tough to raise him, you can always give him to a wealthy gay couple for adoption." Actually Stanley must be so subconsciously ashamed of this rhetorical construct that he only posits it as the seeming thoughts of the Gores--Al and Tipper, not Leslie and Martin. Stanley puts those words in their collective mouth and then writes them down and puts them in quotes as what they seem to him to be saying. Stanley Kurtz, the Gore Whisperer.
I wonder if he can hear this whisper, if he can pick up on this seeming thought: "p u t z" 7:52 PM
Porn Etiquette
hmmm I actually find this offensive. I mean sex has its own logic and porn has its own semantics so I don't look to either for any guidance beyond themselves but I got this pic of a nice looking guy from one of the yahoo porn groups I'm on and then I notice the watermark of the site the pic was lifted from. There's this cute smiling dude and in the corner of the pic it reads street-trash.com. Maybe it was the contrast of the guy's open smile and the harshness of the epithet that got me but I think it would have bothered me if he was glowering too. Maybe even more.
There is no end to demeaning terminology in porn site names or in actual sex for that matter. And hell you gotta have some hook that gets you noticed amidst all the sites promising sluts, whores and gottahaveitpigs of both sexes and all preferences. But street trash? I think it fails the buzzkill test. Does anyone want to be called street trash? Is that anybody's hot button, short circuit to orgasm secret word?
Trash by itself is such a great word. So is Street. Bad combination though, as a turn on anyway. It is of course a powerful putdown and very effective in the right circumstances. Fighting words par excellence.
The US Supreme Court is going to take up sodomy again. The mystery is who will join them in it.
So anyway they're going to revisit the 1986 decision that put the USSC's imprimatur on discrimination against gays. Current and former USSC justices have been making noises for years that the '86 was a mistake, an embarrassment to the Court. Now they can stop squeaking like mice about it and stand up on their hind legs and squeak like the venerable high muckety mucks they are.
The Hardwick decision really did include one of the more shameful lines in legal history, namely that the argument suggesting gay sex deserved any constitutional protection or gay people had any valid privacy claims was "at best, facetious". Forget the vicious disdain of that line and meditate on its dishonesty instead. The writer of those words knows the claims aren't facetious, though in his eyes they may not be substantive, but he senses that he is on the losing side in the long run so he has to cast the arguments in the most negative language possible to gain advantage for the moment. Thus he lies and says the arguments are facetious. AT BEST. But I'd wager that his gambit was a large part of the reason for the probable reversal of Hardwick 16 years later. Hardwick would have been much less of an embarrassment for the court but for those three words and for the tone of the decision that they epitomize. The words were Whizzer White's and he was joined in his malice by Warren Burger who wrote a concurring opinion of equal derision.
If those two had managed to keep their whizzers in their robes and write dry, measured opinions dismissing the claims only with regards to the law and not referencing millennia of moral teaching and the like I doubt the Supreme Court would be assuming the position so shortly after after the Hardwick ruling. And 16 years is but the blink of an eye to that crusty bunch.
One thing will certainly be lost with the new decision. Sadly, this case lacks the romance and poetry of Hardwick V. Bowers. There is no allure at all to Lawrence and Garner v. Texas. Where is the antique musk of Victorian public school raillery and euphemism so redolent in Hardwick V. Bowers? Couldn't Lambda Legal have found plaintiffs with names a little more evocative? There probably aren't a lot of Stiffjoint and Kneelers out there but they could have done better than Lawrence and Garner which have exactly zero cheap joke potential in these circumstances. Texas of course is immortalized in Never Buy Texas From A Cowboy (questionable advice by the way) but it's a stretch to think that most people are like Agenda Bender in always recalling that phrase to mind every time they read or hear that magic word.
A pic of the sodomites, Lawrence and Garner. Did I mention that this is a forbidden love with a double whammy? Go look. This might make up for the deficit in their names.
1:11 PM
Sunday, December 01, 2002
Your Computer is Bored By You
Your assignment for today, download the FightAIDS@HOME program and show your lazyass computer who's boss. Or go here and pick another project. It is World AIDS Day though, not World Encryption Day or World Folding Protein Week so keep that in mind when choosing. You can crack that code and fold that sticky stuff another day. The Aliens can wait too.
A recent success story of bored computers churning away in their collective idiocy to do something great. While yours just hummed to itself. Would you buy a beautiful pet and keep it in a box with only airholes and a slot to throw in food, wallowing in it's own filth, whimpering in it's caged hopelessness? DUDE, It's starting to SMELL. Free that boxed beast. Let it hum with a purpose.
Think of it as a 1 GHz prayerwheel spinning like an atomic mofo 24 hrs a day and earning you valuable karma points while you sleep. How many metaphors is that? I'll stop now.
