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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.
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The DEA's website isn't nearly as fun as the rave apotheosis site I linked below, but it has its moments. Check out this anti-E logo I first found on the blog of the guy who owns the DNA Lounge in S.F. Wish there was a bigger version but I think you can still make out the grim raver with his glow sticks and pacifier.
In my fruitless search for a bigger, better copy of this bureaucratic artwork I found this. Which was a pretty good payoff for my effort.
Will some please animate the DEA logo and the gay Mac logo so that the grim raver attacks the half eaten rainbow apple. It is my belief that animated gif logo voodoo will help precipitate the singularity. Call it a ravelation.
BUREAUCRATIC LOGO BLACK MAGIC NOW!--our shield and our faith.
11:57 PM
RR.I.P.
After church organists there's probably no calling more gay than PSYCHIC. Gay dudes just love to divine the future. Must be the divine part that grabs them. Now comes word that one of the greats, Sydney Omarr, has passed. Yes, note that double rr on the end. He trail-blazed that long before Nelly realized it was getting Hot in Herrre. Was Sydney gayy? (I can trail- blaze too.) Oh, hell I don't know but here are some selections from seer Omarr's obit.
JANUARY 03, 2003
Astrologer Sydney Omarr, 76, Is Dead
His Syndicated Column to Live On
LOS ANGELES -- (AP) Sydney Omarr, the astrologer to the stars who came to write horoscopes that appear in more than 200 newspapers, has died. He was 76.
Omarr, who was blinded and paralyzed from the neck down by multiple sclerosis, died Thursday at St. John's Health Center in Santa Monica of complications from a heart attack, the Los Angeles Times reported. His ex-wife, assistants, and several close friends were by his side.
Born Sidney Kimmelman in Philadelphia, Omarr decided to change his name at age 15 after watching a movie called "Shanghai Gesture," starring Victor Mature as a character named Omar. He changed the spelling of his first name and adopted Omar as his last name, but added a second "r," in accordance with certain numerological formulas
His career began to take off after he enlisted in the Army at 17. Omarr was sent to Okinawa during World War II, where his weekly Armed Forces Radio program, "Sydney Omarr's Almanac," predicted the outcomes of professional boxing matches and horse races.
After the war he took journalism courses at Mexico City College.
His column, which is owned by the Tribune Co., appears in more than 200 daily newspapers. Arrangements are being made for his assistants to continue producing the column under Omarr's name, the Times reported.
Omarr is survived by his sister, Leah Lederhandler.
Dig the sis, they don't make monikers like that anymore.
Seems to me like the assistants must have been "producing the column under Omarr's name" for quite a while now. My assistants have likewise vowed to keep producing Agenda Bender beyond my allotted time and I in return have vowed to kill them all before I go.
Sydney O's demise reminds me of an interesting little book I read over Thanksgiving, Numerology by E.T. Bell. Bell was a mathematician who moonlighted as a sci-fi author under the pen name John Taine. Numerology is an odd book, an entertaining artifact of Hollywood radio spiritualism of the 30's. Bell who was a professor at the Caltech was steeped in the vogue for numerology because of his maid's passion for listening to radio psychics while cleaning his house. The book she inspired isn't the straight-forward debunking you might expect, it's much slyer and stranger than that. Here's Bell's obit and the synopsis of a book about him that is tantalizing. It appears that the mathematician might have been more mysterious than even Sydney Omarr.
2:24 AM
Friday, January 03, 2003
Rave Logic
Found this bit of occult homo history on a rave consciousness ascendant site called fusionanomaly. Trippy as an old school hippie. Flippy as a new style moto. Zippy as, well, Zippy. I think it's properly spelled FUsion(A)n0ma1y or something like that. Hey, turns out everything is related to everything. Or at least everything cool is related to everything cool. Anyway, check out this bit of gaybbalah lore:
According to Sadie Plant, in her book "Zeros And Ones", Alan Turing commited suicide by eating an apple that was laced with cyanide (but this might have been unintentional as apparently he was notioriously bad at washing his hands after scientific experiments) and, he was found dead with an apple with a couple of "bytes" taken out of it, and since the rainbow is the symbol for homosexuality, which is why he was harrassed into suicide, the rainbow apple with bytes missing for the Apple Mac symbol is actually an homage to Turing.
Here's the logo. We link you decide! By the way, worse things have happened than, say, the secret gay history of the Mac logo propagating, replicating out of bounds and otherwise exploding into the mainstream. I mean it could be true. Would Sadie Plant mislead us? She's practically a sacred shrub herself, hardly the kind of life form given to deception and artifice. So let's call it true and talk it up.
CORPORATE LOGO MYSTICISM NOW! --our banner and our battlecry.
5:29 PM
The Obituary's Obituary
Andrew Sullivan finds the lack of specifics, the absence of any mention of HIV in the coverage of Herb Ritts' death bizarre. Andrew first wrote:
So the question is: was the openly gay Ritt's pneumonia a freak and dangerous strain that is newsworthy in its own right (like Jim Henson's) or was it HIV-related? And do newspapers have some responsibility to tell us which? It seems to me that when an openly gay guy dies at 50 of pneumonia, any decent editor would ask a simple follow-up. Or are they still colluding in the shame that some still attach to an HIV diagnosis?
And then when he found the Advocate article that's been online since last weekend (and which doesn't say what Andrew says it does) he wrote:
He died because his immune system was severely compromised by HIV. And here's a German version of the same story. Odd that this should be restricted to the gay press. Or are we now headed back to the early 1980s?
I find Sullivan's comments here as bizarre as he finds the press coverage. Ritts, though openly gay, was apparently not open about his HIV status beyond his close circle. How is it the press's responsibility to speculate on the cause of death of a man who dies privately and suddenly? Ritts was not THAT famous. There was no public death watch over his final days, no time and nowhere near the mass interest to fuel the kind of dying-while-famous publicity rites that accompanied the deaths of Liberace, Rock Hudson, Freddie Mercury.
Of that relatively small number who knew who Ritts was, I imagine nearly all of them had the same reaction I did when I first heard of his death, oh shit HIV. But then again I had exactly that same response when I heard of Jim Henson's death. So many people had this response to Henson's death (and Henson as well was much more famous than Ritts) that the rumours about the cause of his death were publicly addressed in follow-up news stories and the HIV speculation put to rest. There was not enough initial awareness of Ritts to justify rebound stories to set the record straight. What else does this show but a reasonable restraint on the part of the media to report the only the facts of Ritts' death that were immediately known to them? They certainly learned from Henson's shocking death that a fairly young man can die of unchecked pneumonia. They must certainly know that even fairly young gay men can die of illnesses not related to HIV. And I hope they know that even the HIV+ can die of something else than complications from HIV.
So I think the "colluding in shame" charge is reckless, and an insult as well to Rifts who is implicated in the collusion. And I think the broader point, that all this shows the re-emergence of AIDS shame, is psychologically tone deaf. A public death from HIV takes place in a far different context than even Freddie Mercury's early 90's death. There is still shame and secrecy surrounding HIV, but there is as well surrounding cancer and any other life-threatening condition you can mention.
We're probably hard wired for it, imperiled health is not naturally or easily shared with the tribe. Which is why the kind of candor Andrew Sullivan and so many others have displayed is so admirable, heroic even. The natural tendency to protect the imperiled self with secrecy is overcome by a reasoned decision that publicity will serve both a private and public purpose. That one's life is more likely to be saved if publicity for the disease that threatens it helps build public interest in finding and funding treatments and a cure. And that others might be spared the trials of the disease if that same publicity serves to slow its spread.
I would guess the reasons for whatever dissembling there might have been in the aftermath of Ritts death are a mix of shock and confusion at the unexpectedness of it and of an understandable hesitation to broadcast news that would result in discouraging people living with HIV. I think it's hard to underestimate this second motivation, the urge not to discourage, there is a shame in letting down that's also pretty basic to human beings but it's a form of shame that is usually cast as noble. With good reason. There is certainly an element of denial in it, but it's of a different order than the denial that surrounded some earlier famous deaths.
But that's just my guess. It too would have belonged nowhere in the initial press coverage of Herb Ritts' death. The facts of his final days will emerge soon enough, and while they won't get the burst of publicity his death prompted neither will the record be littered with pseudofacts or speculation.
Miss Ross in chains. Wish this was the mug shot. According to all the news reports she was "polite and cooperative". Man, she must have been drunk.
11:52 AM
A brief story about Harpo Marx's sideline as US intelligence op charted on blogdex over the weekend. Here's a bit:
The 165cm-tall comedian was inducted into the dark corridors of espionage in the winter of 1933 when - after the commercial failure of the slapstick comedy Duck Soup - the brothers agreed temporarily to go their separate ways. Joseph Stalin, who was a fan, authorised a six-week tour of the Soviet Union for Harpo, a skilled harpist and mime who played with comedians across the country.
At the end of the tour, Harpo told his family, he was asked by the US ambassador in Moscow to take home some "diplomatic mail", which he was instructed to conceal in his socks. The nature of the documents remains classified.
Harpo Vs. Uncle Joe. Hardly a fair fight. And I think we all know which way that disproportion in guile and wile leans. If you don't, leave this page immediately.
The story indicates more information about Harpo's undercover career will be revealed in soon to be released documents. I wonder who else he did battle with. Harpo Vs. Castro has a nice ring. Now if only Garbo was in on the action too. She and Harpo would have been genius as an espionage couple. They both knew how to keep their mouths shut. A silent movie Nick and Nora Charles.
Harpo had several secret lives going (everybody should). His screen persona was pansexual. Deadpan sexual. Offscreen too the guity was very ambi, the id was very flu. His most famous real life flirtation was with Alexander Woollcott. Pretty clear that Woollcott was head over heels for Harpo from the moment he first saw him. Harpo was playing a deeper game but he loved Woollcott in his own way. Excellent article about the pair here. Literary journalism of a high order. This is what gay scholars could be doing if they weren't spelunking their own asses in search of gender tenure and queer studies gold. You know, actually writing interesting, accessible, informative essays about artists whose lives and work are worthy of rescue and re-evaluation. Harpo's star still burns but Woolcott could use a spark pointed in his direction. Highly flammable stuff there, be nice to see it catch fire again.
The article's author, St Lawrence University professor Ned StuckeyFrench, is Agenda Bender's dude of the day.
And Harpo Marx is the Agenda Bender dude of the year. For 1933
10:53 AM
THE CLASSIC MIDDLE NAME (ALL-NEW!) Executed for murder in 2002: Stephen Wayne Anderson (inmate, San Quentin, Calif.), Randall Wayne Hafdahl (inmate, Huntsville, Tex.)
• Sentenced for murder: Darren Wayne Campbell (Coquille, Ore.), Mark Wayne Campmire (Litchfield, Conn.), Michael Wayne Cole (Goldsboro, N.C.), Gary Wayne Davis (Louisville, Ky.), Jeffrey Wayne Gorton (Flint, Mich.), Mark Wayne Silvers (Anderson, S.C.)
• Charged with murder: Timothy Wayne Adams (Houston), Joshua Wayne Andrews (Woodbridge, Va.), Seth Wayne Campbell (Houston), Douglas Wayne Clark (Austin), David Wayne Crews (Knoxville, Tenn.), Ralph Wayne Grimes (Russell Springs, Ky.), Anthony Wayne Grimm (Springfield, Ill.), Kenneth Wayne Hall Sr. (Gaffney, S.C.), Mark Wayne Lomax (Houston), Shelly Wayne Martin (Randallstown, Md.), Jeffery Wayne Paschall (Draper, Utah), Jason Wayne Petershagen (La Marque, Tex.), David Wayne Satterfield (Mesquite, Tex.)
• Murder conviction overturned after 18 years and new trial ordered: Michael Wayne Jennings (Concord, Calif.)
Just back from Dreamsville with this souvenir. The other day I made some comment about the information supertollroad. I kind of liked that line. It must have been still bubbling around in my head since last night I awoke convinced I had thought of something very important which I resolved to remember till this morning. The dream gods must have intervened to save this astral treasure for waking humanity, for against the odds I did remember. I had come up with two more variations on information superhighway! Oh lucky world, here they are:
Information Supermax Prison!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
AND (I think this one is inspired by copyright litigation and all the other legal stuff I read about on Politech, actually that's probably what inspired the first one too. I have to stop reading those DMCA panic stories):
Information Hyper Sue Way!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
In my dreams I'm a genius. Dreams: your low cost short cut to cocaine (amphetamine or whatever) greatness! Dreams: they have a lot to answer for!
9:26 AM
