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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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Children are particularly prone to dehydration, because they have a greater surface area to volume ratio than adults...
Brings back memories of childhood summers. Mom standing on the back porch, her surface area enclosing her volume at a more sensible ratio than my own, she'd yell , "Bender, come in outta that heat, boy. And put some clothes on, you little apache. Landsakes chile, your surface area is sucking up sun and giving up water like a riverbank snake in a pissing contest. Get in here right now and eat your supper. It'll put some volume on ya. You want to match your daddy's ratio someday, dontcha?" Then she'd laugh. A crazy kind of laugh.
And at nights we'd gather around the Victrola and do the calculus. An unlocked screen door was all that stood between us and the world. A simpler, softer world, its surface area enclosing its volume in a pretty much perfect way. But for the oblateness of the spheroid.
PAGLIA: Yeah, I used to narrate my life in headlines. I still do. When I was a kid, if I'd fall off a chair I'd announce, "Girl Falls off Chair," like that. I love those blaring, brazen headlines in old-time newspapers. They also had a great impact on Andy Warhol.
DRUDGE: Well, clearly I like them too. They make life seem fun and dramatic and hysterical in the extreme. "Man Faints." "No Change on Rates." "Twisters in Kansas." There is just a drama to every second on earth. There are never any down moments for me.
The best part of the Gay City News interview with Maer Roshan--the gay, Jewish, Iranian-born former fragrance model who edits and publishes Radar. (Damn, I should have made Polly Amory a philosophical fragrance model.)
How would you describe your childhood?
MR: It was nice, I guess. It was fine. It was very diverse I would say. From Iran to Jewish religious school to Boy Bar. Identity is weird to me. Being gay, Jewish… I’m sure it all affects different things but it’s all this weird stew that comes together.
When did you come out?
MR: At seventeen.
When did you get busy with boys?
MR: Is this a Playguy interview? I kind of eased into my adult sexual life.
What did mom say?
MR: She thought it was because I worked in Bloomingdales. I worked in the front on the first floor as a fragrance model. I had to walk around wearing these robes—they were “gifts with your purchase”—it was completely insane. People are very hostile to you as a fragrance model, which is actually good training for journalism. 9:20 AM
Friday, June 20, 2003
Wearing the Slip
Over the coming months we will be baptizing everyone over at the Corner with a drag name. First up is Stanley Kurtz. Stanley's Sister Hyde handle shall henceforth be Polly Amory.
Her backstory: born of a TV Guide Christmas party tryst between Cleveland Amory and Polly Bergen, Miss Amory makes her living as philosophical shoe model, but she is most passionate about her activism in the Movement Against Marriage Between Laboratory Animals (MAMBLA). Polly sees the battle for marriage rights for laboratory test animals, who have won wide-spread sympathy as particularly vulnerable and put-upon creatures, as the opening engagement in a campaign to win marriage rights for all non-human species. This is Polly's celebrated "slippery stoat" argument. Polly is an avid public speaker, though she has yet to find an audience that shares her avidity as she delivers her set-piece speech, When Alsatians Go to the Chapel (or Rover Has Five Possible Daddies.)
Stanley, who in reality is even more of a drag than Polly, had this to say the other day.
WHEN LESBIANS GO TO THE CHAPEL [Stanley Kurtz ]
Sullivan also argues that the relative monogamy of lesbian marriage will help to increase marital monogamy overall. I rebutted that argument in “Code of Honor.” More recently, however, in “Heather Has 3 Parents,” and “Seeing the Slip,” I showed how lesbian marriage has even more potential to undermine monogamy than gay marriage. That’s because many lesbian married couples who mother create de facto three parent families (which include biological fathers). That creates the potential for legal recognition of three parent families, which in turn will eventually lead to legalized polyamory. That, in turn, would remove social support for monogamy, which would have just the sort of negative consequences for heterosexual marriage that Andrew Sullivan warns of.
Funny, I know of all sorts of non-gay marriages that have resulted, after breakup and remarriage (repeat as necessary), in kids with multiple moms and dads. I have even been to social events where various permutations of the previously and presently wed, along with the progeny of these assorted unions, have been in close proximity. There is often an interesting vibe that attaches to these occasions, but I have never gotten the impression that polyamory was about to break out. Except perhaps among the demi-siblings. I'd be interested in Stanley's take on this.
Update: I heard a rumor once that David Frum was Canadian and bright. So far my researches have only been able to confirm that he is, in fact, Canadian. His recent reactions to the upheavals in the Gay White North have been particularly hysterical and confused even by Nationl Review standards. Colby Cosh purports to be Canadian as well. And since I seem to recall that the bass player for Loverboy was named Colby Cosh--or something very like that--I will call Cosh's Canadianinity likewise verified. But unlike Frum, Cosh's brightness must also stand as proven--by the exactitude of the correspondence between his pop music tastes and my own. And as well by his response to Frum's eulogy for heterosexual civilization.
Is it only me or do you often misread ourobouros as outerboroughs at first glance? It's only me? Fine, then.
It's ourobouros argybargy day here as this blog's teeth snap at the tail of ouroblogous. A little summertime circular jerkery, in other words.
Lileks and Steyn are probably the best writers that the blogopticon has descried. Though one is not a blogger at all and the other is a blogger only of sorts. They were both already working journalists when they were raised up by the blogtide as firsts among equals. Their talents are undeniable, but there politics were not standard issue, which kept them in the trailing ranks of opinionstas. Their politics are much closer to the mainstream of the blog shipping channel , so their literary talents came to be recognized by an audience that wasn't distracted (horrified) by the incorrect views they expressed with such brilliance.
Are they perhaps too glib sometimes? Do the rushing waters of their prose occasionally reach floodtide and wipe out onlookers on the shore, and any premises in their path? Yeah, maybe. But don't ask me for examples. No wait, I do have one. There's a Lilek's riff about Michael Moore in his death throes on the bathroom floor which I recall as too, too, too--facile and harsh. I was born to be Lilek's editor. When will humanity produce the golden child meant to be mine?
Lileks and Steyn share another quality. Given their leading passions and pastimes (musical theater for Steyn, camp ephemera, architecture and cooking for Lileks) they should both be gay. But apparently they aren't. It's a world of wonders in a time of miracles.
Instapundit already quoted this, but Lilek's punchline to his piece about that duo at the head of the fifth column in the US agitating for a new deal , a fair deal , a surreal deal for La France is so good I really wish I'd thought of it. I hadn't even known that George Plimpton had joined Woody Allen on that fool's errand. Sure, we all gasped and gagged at Woody's wish to return to french kissing his para-step-daughter. Any joke beyond the mere fact of what Woody said was impossible, but with Plimpton joining Monsieur Allen in the good fight, a new and great joke became possible, and Lileks, alone among men, saw it.
Eewww. You might recall that Allen is 391 years older than his wife, and that his wife was his previous girlfriend's adopted daughter. Why him? Roman Polanski wasn't available?
They also got George Plimpton to appear in an ad, making it official: French understanding of American culture is taken entirely from a 1968 issue of Playboy.
There was a brief moment when Woody Allen was capable of such an insight. I believe it was mid-afternoon on the Tuesday of the week he secured the rights to the chop-kung-fooey flick movie he redubbed as What's up Tiger Lilly. Some day in 1966, in any event.
And then there is Colby Cosh who has creeped me out with a doppelganger vibe on more than one occasion. There's the Richard Thompson thing which I find too scary to even elaborate on. And now there are his beautiful flaming lips. Well, his comments on the Flaming Lips record, I should say (yes, record should survive as THE word for recorded music, no matter the format). Really they are my comments, and so I reclaim them here. Mr. Cosh somehow typed up what I've been meaning to say for weeks. On the matter of Steely Dan his trickery is even more advanced. He has, I'm betting, anticipated exactly what I would be thinking if the roommate had bought the Steely Dan record last week like he said he was going to do.
I spent the evening listening to music--most notably, ascertaining after all this time that Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots lives up to the hype and, incidentally, makes it just that little bit more respectable to have had a heavily prog-skewed musical self-upbringing. (The Flaming Lips' Michael Ivins owns a cat named Tarkus: consider this, and tremble.) Everything comes back into vogue eventually--everything--although some people will probably have to wait two hundred years instead of fifteen (sorry, acid-wash fans!).
I also listened to some of Steely Dan's Everything Must Go, while we're on the subject of explosive cultural recrudescences. I only learned a few weeks ago that the Dans were favouring the 21st century with a second album. It's nice to have them back for reasons of jammies-'n'-duvet-type comfort, but isn't this music a little minimalist? And "Pixeleen" struck me as an uncharacteristically transparent billet-doux: I thought the decoding was supposed to be half the fun with this band. A line like "Dream deep, my three times perfect ultrateen" leaves room for approximately none of Empson's seven types of ambiguity.
I ask for unanimous consent to extend and revise my remarks......... Thanks. I find the Lips' coda on this record just heartbreakingly moving. Which is to say it cheers me and charges me up like nobody's business. I guess the pink robots are destined to vanquish the pink and brown biots somewhere down the millennial road. Hey, it was a nice ride but facts is manufacts:
As logic stands you couldn't meet a man
Who's from the future
But logic broke as he appeared he spoke
About the Future
"We're not gonna make it" He explained how
the end will come - you and me were never meant
to be part of the future -
All we have is now -
All we've ever had was now
All we have is now
All we'll ever have is now
As for the StD's, I think that I can see the evolution of my own feelings for Everything Must Go in Colby's crib of my soon-to-be first thoughts. Pixeleen, you say? Minimal, is it? I'm getting a Kamakiriad inkling here, a Snowbound premonition, and that is a very good thing. There are drum and bass remixes (not drum 'n bass, but stripped down rhythm track remixes) of tracks from Kamakiri that seemed to me revelations at the time. So, as icy as Kamakiri was, it was a flash freezing meant to keep the heart alive for future reanimation. I was expecting that Two Against Nature was going to be the resolution of the Kamakiri questions. So clever of the Dans to first resolve the box set issues with Two Against N. before returning to the Kamakirillian methods and concerns.
Update: In an attempt to head off Colby Cosh, let me add that Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has also fulfilled its critical promise of what? 8 months ago? I listened to it first a couple weeks back. On a midnight ride into town on one of the few soft nights this spring/summer has seen in the Northeast. So maybe it was the night, but I don't think so. It was the best debut of a bikeride soundtrack in my extensive experience. It hooked me from the very first, very funny line:
I am an American aquarium drinker
I didn't even mind the Kiss references. And Kiss refs are getting as tiresome as genuflections to that previous pop-cultural, shout-out cliché-king, Elvis.
I do love that Wilco dude's voice. And I do recognize that the secret to the charm of Yankee H. F-trot. is just good songs punched up with some cool noise. But that happens to be my favorite trick. (see Flaming Lips above)
8:19 AM
Update: Sean, Agendabender's roundeyes in the far east, was reminded of this joke:
Q: What's the difference between Madonna and the Panama Canal?
A: The Panama Canal's a busy ditch.
A joke, I have a feeling, that has been working overtime for decades. I wonder who the placeholder for Madonna was in previous incarnations.
Tony, a voice from Agendabender's past, hosts a page that included a link to a picture of the meddle school's proprietress. That lipstick makes her look like a strumpet and a trollop. A pander's plaything. A pimp's consort, and a whore's cohort. I like it.
When riding your bike late at night in the city in the rain while listening to music on your walkman, I would advise against electronica. Especially techno tracks that feature dopplering white noise which mimics the sound of car tires on a wet road. Really especially when the flanging hiss seems to ping pong through the center of your brain as it bounces from left to right on your headphones. It will give you the peculiar and not pleasant feeling that your about to be run over. From every direction.
And it will impair your judgment as you try to accommodate the real cars whiiiishing by you on the wet streets, an arms length away.
High profile guy quits the civilian review board investigating the Catholic Church sex scandals. He is unrepentant:
...Frank Keating, former governor of Oklahoma, resigned yesterday as chairman of the church-appointed panel that is seeking to resolve the sexual abuse scandal involving priests and minors.
"I make no apology," said Mr. Keating, who compared some bishops to "La Cosa Nostra" last week, suggesting that they were continuing to cover up the extent of molestation by members of the clergy.
...The church, he said in the letter, is a "home to Christ's people."
"It is not a criminal enterprise," Mr. Keating said. "It does not condone and cover up criminal activity. It does not follow a code of silence. My remarks, which some bishops found offensive, were deadly accurate. I make no apology.
"To resist grand jury subpoenas, to suppress the names of offending clerics, to deny, to obfuscate, to explain away; that is the model of a criminal organization, not my church."
Frank in name and nature it appears. But others on the panel were startled by Frank's frankness. Others on the panel were in a perpetual state of startlement I would wager:
"Wow!" said Dr. Paul McHugh, the psychiatrist on the board. "O.K., well, I don't see that behavior on the part of bishops at the moment. They're a chastened group."
A Paul-ed in name and nature it appears. You can always trust that the psychiatrist on the board will be the biggest pushover on the board. I wonder if this shrink shrank even further when he read the evening's papers. Probably not:
Phoenix Bishop Held In Deadly Hit-and-Run
PHOENIX — The Roman Catholic bishop of Phoenix was arrested yesterday in a deadly hit-and-run accident after police traced a license plate number to his car and found the windshield caved in.
Bishop Thomas O'Brien, 67, was jailed last night. Police said he would be booked on a charge of leaving the scene of a fatal accident.
...Earlier this month, it was announced that Bishop O'Brien relinquished some of his authority in an unprecedented agreement with prosecutors that spared him from indictment on obstruction charges for protecting child-molesting priests.
In the hit-and-run case, 43-year-old Jim Reed died after he was struck by two cars Saturday while crossing a street in the middle of the block. Both cars drove off.
Bonus gif. punchline payoff: I think Dr. McHugh meant the bishops are a Chasen's group.
Bonus blogcest maybe-they'll-link-me-ruse: They are, of course, besides themselves over at Hit and Run with all the free publicity.
4:36 AM
Monday, June 16, 2003
Gulag Cool
Listening to Anita O'Day--everybody's favorite lightly swinging, sweetly singing, junkie jazzbird--I heard these lines in her heroes of bop name-check version of Cole Porter's You're the Tops
You're a Moscow view
You're oh so cool
You're Lester Young
Stalin was dead a year or so when Anita sang those words, but the Soviet Socialist Republic was still in full effect. And it was the height of oh-so-cool to give toddlin' Moscow town a wink and a nod.
Of course the original version of the tune listed Mussolini among the brand name tip-toppers, so there is some precedent for giving props to tyrannies in the song. Cole took the Musso ref out later. Don't know who wrote Anita's specialty version and snuck Moscow in. I do know that it's the kind of blithe, hipster support for the Soviet dictatorship that the left indulged in for decades. I haven't read Martin Amis's attempt at calling them out on this and summoning some of these memories up, but William O'Neill was there long before him and his great book on the subject, A Better World: Stalinism and the American Intellectuals , had a big impact on me.
And Cole, what were you thinking? But baby if I'm the bottom, you're the top.
Bonus synchronicity frisson: I picked up a first edition copy of Walter Duranty's 1937 novel One Life, One Kopeck for a quarter at a church bazaar last week. It might even be signed by Duranty. There's a handwritten inscription in the front the reads To Moe, Good Luck Will D. Does Will D. equal Walter D.? And if it does will the value of my book increase or decrease if they repossess Duranty's Pulitzer prize?
Update: I forgot that while I was looking for the Amazon link to William O'Neill's book I found another one with almost the same title, though this time unironic--or so Kofi Annan must think anyway. A definite camp graphics classic for generations unborn.
9:44 PM
Sunday, June 15, 2003
Accessorize Like Beckham
This man is British soccer superstar David Beckham before he married this woman, British formerstar Posh Spice. Here is Mr. Beckham after Posh spiced him up. In a subversive blow for girl power she has remade him as a transgendered samurai. Zatoichi, the bent swordsman.
12:10 AM
