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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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Andrew Sullivan quotes today from an anti-war poem "by one Marilyn Hacker", which I take to mean he's never heard of her before. Understandable since the poesysphere is even more insular, incestuous and cross-referencing than the blogosphere. It's asskiss utopia, backscratch valhalla (notice how Marilyn name checks another poet in the frigging title of her poem--the modus operandi of the poetry Mob, they only quote each other). But if you're not in it you hardly know of it. I'm not in it either but I do know of Hacker, if only through association. She was the long ago child bride of the gay novelist Samuel Delany. Delany is known mostly for his science fiction but in recent years he's been publishing gay fiction, criticism and autobiography. Most notably his very explicit memoir, The Motion of Light in Water. As sexy as that book is it was also much censored before US publication and I've read that there is a raunchier UK version. His recent fiction is even more extreme. I wrote somewhere below that Alfred Chester's pseudonomynous novel Chariot of Flesh is possibly the dirtiest book ever written. Samuel gives Alfred some serious competition for the stinkweed laurel.
Especially as Delany really exults in putting the dirt back in filth. As in his novel the Mad Man which is a mystery story about the disappearance and death of an academic prodigy. I don't want to give anything away, so let's just say there's a lot of sex with Manhattan homeless involved. A lot. Actually, I think I just gave everything away, though I bet you'll still be surprised by the details.
His novel Hogg is supposed to be even more brutal. I haven't read it. I'm not sure how I feel about Delany. I think the memoir is mostly excellent, full of great stories even beyond the sexual description (which is great too). But there are traces of the almost indecipherable pedant Delany turns into when he does his pomo critic thing. He apparently cranks out whole books of this derrida deribble too, maybe to make up for the shame of being mostly famous as a science fictioneer and a high concept pornographer. That would be an excuse anyway.
The Family Research Council has been falling down on the job, so Agenda Bender takes up the slack. With a little push we could make this bigger than Proctor and Gamble's satanic heiroglyphs.
Michael's absurdity is a given, but I felt more compassion for him than I usually do watching that Ferris wheel wreck of a show last night. He is so poorly spoken, his grammar is so shaky that it's clear that not only was he terrorized by that evil sonofabitch, papa Joe, but none of the people around him even cared enough to see that the kid earning them millions received a passable education. Sure he is off the scale delusional (you'd be too if you looked to Elizabeth Taylor, Marlon Brando and Liza Minnelli for guidance and emotional grounding), but his life has been off the scale weird since he was 10 years old. I guess what I'm really saying is that you have to remember that Michael isn't only insane, he's also pretty dumb. And I don't think either of those things is his fault.
We are the World? Now that was his fault.
The best songs Michael ever recorded were Rock With You and Human Nature both far in the past but both still powerful. Rock with You is pure joy and Human Nature forever beautiful. I do like two songs he recorded in the last decade. Stranger in Moscow from History and Whatever Happens (Don't Let Go of My Hand) from the most recent album. Especially this last song. As false, fucked up and musically insipid as Michael is, he tapped into something real here, the song is genuinely moving.
6:29 AM
Update: More seriously S.F.Gate has been covering the story of a photo taken by an amateur astronomer showing a strange purple bolt of light seemingly striking Columbia at the same moment the diagnostics went haywire. The story takes a space-ghost gothic turn with the revelation in the last sentence I copy:
Should the photograph prove significant, it would open the inquiry into a strange world of high-altitude electro-physics. The field studies a place in the skies once described by physicists as the "ignorasphere," because so little is know about it. It is populated by ghostly electromagnetic effects that the same wags named "blue jets, elves and sprites."
These mysterious electrical events -- once part of airline pilot lore -- are now extensively documented. In fact, one of the experiments conducted during Columbia's ill-fated mission by Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon involved observations of the sprite phenomenon.
Calstuff pointed me to an article in the Berkeley conservative paper, The Patriot, titled Students Seek Sex in Campus Bathrooms. The story's biggest news hook is that the university funded UC Berkeley Queer Alliance hosts a website (on university servers) that includes a message board where the bathroom sex has been promoted. Calstuff found this message on the board:
there is a map to the holes - e mail me for the facts -- i just have to make sure you are NOT a 40 yo and please be a Cal student. The maps to the Cal Holes are the best map you can get this term. Full of fun and yum yum and good time.. we have the best holes in the UC system.!!
The mercator of glory holes. The Amerigo Vespucci of yum yum good times. I get a definite trainspotting vibe from this guy.
I can't say I'm shocked by revelations of bathroom sex on a college campus (I can say I will always read any article about the same.) The story is more interesting to me for its incidental descriptions of the perks and incentives available to campus queers with an eye on the prize. Honestly.
Selections from the Patriot exposé:
The students partake in anonymous sex in campus bathroom stalls, where they use “glory holes” to peer into the stall next door to see if it is occupied by a man interested in sex. If it is, the student will cross into the stall and engage with him sexually, usually without any mutual acquaintance
That usually without any mutual acqauintance is, well, glorious. Partake in anonymous sex is an exceptionally polite construct. Peer as well, is an odd choice in verbs. Jarringly punctilious stylists these Berkeley conservatives. I blame Buckley.
UCLGBTIA, a subcommittee of the alliance and the Queer Resource Center, also received university money for the controversial Queer Conference, held on campus February 2002. The conference featured such workshop topics as: A New Generation of BDSM; Safer Sex: What to Know Before You Blow; Buzz Off: Sex Toys for All Genders; and Dykes Doin’ Photo.
UCLGBTIA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'd hate to be a letterman on that team. Or a cheerleader for it. And who thinks up these smarmy workshop topics? Why is it that all such attempts to cuten sex up with pep squad non-chalance make it seem wholly disgusting? Subcommittees, Resource Centers and workhops, somehow they've managed to turn gay sex into a state subsidized bureaucracy.
But John Mendoza, co-chair of the UC Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender and Intersex Association, described the Web site as “a great place for people to express themselves.”
Ah! UCLGBTIA decoded. Intersex must be the new state of the art jargon add-on for acronymn conscious queers.
Police have received notice of glory holes on campus, and they usually respond by “trying to deconstruct” them, said UC police Capt. Bill Cooper.
Isn't that the English departments job, Cap'n?
The Queer Resource Center, located in the Eshleman Hall front office for the UC Berkeley Queer Alliance, receives free office space and over $9,000 a year for activities from the student government. Numerous other queer-themed groups beneath the overarching Queer Council also receive monies totaling in the thousands.
By contrast, both the Cal Berkeley Democrats and Berkeley College Republicans received $4,500 from the ASUC for the 2001-2002 academic year, and the Campus Crusade for Christ received $200.
A new tentacle for the queeroctopus: The overarching Queer Council. The Campus Crusade for Christ should consider a name change. The Qampus Qrusade for Qurist might get a little more cash action.
Oh, Queer Students of the California State University System, oh, please, oh, jeez, I dunno, just please, go away. Disband the alliance, adjourn the subcommittees, unconvene the council, sell the Resource Center. Your institutionalized transgressiveness, your subsidized grievance; so gullible, so pliable, so easily led by your silver and gold nose rings--you depress the holy hell out of me. God only knows the despair and shame you must engender among gay students.
Maybe everybody else knows this but it's news to me that Virgin Airlines calls its first class section Upper Class. At least it's called that in all the stories of Courtney Love's arrest for being her nasty, skanked-out self on a flight to London. As here:
Police at London's Heathrow airport arrested Courtney Love this morning after she allegedly verbally abused the crew of a Virgin Atlantic flight from Los Angeles.
Love, 38, was traveling in the airliner's Upper Class cabin on her way to a London benefit hosted by Elton John and Kevin Spacey.
Yeah, I just checked at the Virgin Air site and your booking choices are economy, premium economy and upper class. How thoroughly undroll to bail out on the joke like that. Economy and premium economy? They not only bailed on the joke they threw it out of the emergency exit with no parachute. No wonder Courtney was pissed.
Update: It occurs to me that my line They not only bailed on the joke they threw it out of the emergency exit with no parachute is a real innovation in mixed metaphors. Well that's the wrong term, the metaphor isn't mixed it's countervailing. I have them bailing out on the joke at the same time I accuse them of throwing the joke off the plane. It's some sort of wormhole metaphor. Bravo me.
6:35 PM
Monday, February 03, 2003
Gimme Mymoneyback
I'd rather be a skinny black dude at Altamont waving my gun at cranked up Hell's Angels than a skybox gawker at this. But then I feel that way about any Stones concert from the last 25 years or so.
1:10 PM
A Rose Flower and a Rice Flower
Still in a space romantic mood, wonder why. This is a better version of a story that was on blogdex last week. It's about the experiment on Columbia to create new scents by growing flowers in zero g. They had some success with this on a previous mission and the scents discovered on that mission were used later in the creation of a new perfume, Zen by Shiseido, and Unilever's Impulse body spray. I meant to link this story when I first read it, as you can see from my links I've got a thing for perfumes. And their names, which seem to me the shortest poetic form in existence. They make haiku seem like Norse sagas. (Just as perfume bottles are an under-appreciated miniature sculptural form--follow the Zen link).
I had almost used Shiseido's Zen as the title for my latest block of links but Liz Taylor won in the end. She always does. So I almost linked the space flowers perfume farming story last week and I almost referenced Zen last month. Can you feel the romance of almost adding up? And now of course the greatest almost of all. The lost scents from the mission. Agenda Bender's Science, Kansas City and Christianity correspondent, Jay Manifold, had a contest on his page a while back in which he invited readers to name a lost artifact from human history they would retrieve if they could. This is about the most romantic question imaginable and I played the game by answering with the most romantic vanished thing I could think of: the lost music of the ancient world. I think there is now a more romantic answer than that.
12:38 PM
Sunday, February 02, 2003
The Stars Will Be Neighbours
This record is space obsessed, it's drowning in stars. I've mentioned it here before but it is so great, it wears its lovely heart on the sleeve of its tattered spacesuit. A bad, but beautiful, case of nostalgia for the future, this is real space age bachelor pad music. One song's chorus is a valentine to Yuri Gagarin. Even the earthbound songs float (Swans). Paddy McAloon is the reigning melody king of the known universe. And yeah, 5 years later and it's still only available as an import in the US. Now that's a cosmic joke. Cheaper copies available here. I'm not the only fanatic.
Andromeda Heights
We're building a home on the side of a mountain
Above the clouds, next to the sky
And after our labours the stars will be neighbours
We'll take our place with them in space
We're not using concrete or plaster or wood -
They'd lower the tone of our new neighbourhood
And mortar will crumble with age and neglect
We're building our home upon love and respect
And when we've built it we'll call it Andromeda Heights
When we've built it we'll call it Andromeda Heights
When we've built it we'll call it Andromeda Heights
We're building a home on the side of a mountain
Above the clouds, next to the sky
Our plans are ambitious - a blueprint of wishes
That will come true and when they do...
Folks in the valley will look up and say
"You've finally built it can we come and stay ?";
And cynics will marvel and say "we confess -
There were times when we thought it was just an address !
But now that we've seen it we know it's Andromeda Heights
Now we've seen it we know it's Andromeda Heights
Now we've seen it we know it's Andromeda Heights.";
We're building a home on the side of a mountain
Above the clouds, next to the sky
And after our labours the stars will be neighbours
We'll take our place with them in space
Update: I forgot to mention that McAloon also sings the cheeriest line of media criticism I know (except maybe for Lou Reed's towering joke, I need a mistrial to clear my name):
We were songbirds, we were Greek Gods
We were singled out by fate
We were quoted out of context - it was great.
