It Is Not Political Rhetoric To Call For An Assassination. It Is A Crime.




News like this makes me feel so angry and so, so sad. It seems to just get worse and worse and they have no boundaries. And the worst thing is that nobody but Rachel Maddow and a handful of bloggers are reporting this stuff.

These lunatics ... y'know it's easy to call them crazy and dismiss them, but these are people we move among every day, they are the relatives of friends, they are family and co-workers, they are teaching your children, they are local businesspeople, elected representatives, public servants. Maybe I feel it more here in Texas because they're a little more vocal here, but there are certainly lots of Republicans in the Midwest, Northeast, California. They may be a shrinking minority, but they are still a significant percentage of the population of every state in the union.

The only thing that keeps me from utter despair at the state of the world that I am leaving to my nephews, the children of my friends, the kids I want to teach -- the only thing that gives me any small bit of hope is the wish, please, that this homicidal insanity is the dying breath of these God-people, these Jesus freaks, these ugly ugly hate-filled stupid stupid people. Sarah Palin? Will you and your clan ever finally melt into a black puddle and leave us alone? Will it be in my lifetime?

Emmylou.

I was feeling guilty about my little snotty remark about Emmylou Harris in my last post. If I make fun of Emmylou, it's only because sometimes I'm afraid of just how much I worship her. Here she is singing one of my favorite Dolly Parton songs on the Grand Ole Opry. Perfect example of how Dolly's songs can be so simple and sort of hackneyed and then take your breath away. Long live Dolly and Emmylou.

Rufus and Family.

I was listening to Rufus Wainwright on KUT this morning. He's playing two shows at the Paramount theater here in Austin, yesterday and today. The tickets were a little steep for my current state of brokeness, so I had to settle for a live set on the radio, which was short but intimate, and totally satisfying.

I've been a fan of Rufus's mother and aunt, Kate and Anna McGarrigle, for much longer than Rufus, since college I guess, and I was remembering Songs of the Civil War, an album somehow loosely associated with the Ken Burns Civil War series. I bought it on cassette because my turntable had stopped working and I didn't want to buy a new one because CDs were clearly on the ascendant, but I hadn't bought a CD player yet because I could play cassette tapes at home or on my Walkman. That would be like 1990, I guess?

Anyway, I wore that tape out, literally. As I remember, that and the Bristol Sessions reissue came out around the same time and were responsible for my big nosedive into country music in the early 90s.

And I didn't know it at the time, of course, but Rufus was singing on a couple of those songs with his family. I don't know what it is about these songs, this style of singing, these harmonies, that transport me more than any other music. I feel it deep in my bones.

(And, big surprise, there's Emmylou Harris. Back then, you could hardly buy a record that didn't have Emmylou on it, bless her heart.)

My One-Year-Later Thoughts About Obama.

I stopped reading Americablog a while back because it was too shrill and marriagey and anti-Obama, so I missed the beginning of this boycott, but I have to say I support the sentiment. So many liberal or progressive-minded people assume the Democratic party represents their views, and it just ain't so.

And I stopped reading what used to be my favorite gay blog, JoeMyGod, because of an ongoing series of posts called This Week in Holy Crimes, in which he publicly shames any and every small-town clergyperson who is arrested for a sex crime, convicted or not. And just the general tone of the blog got so anti-everything, I couldn't stomach it any more.

But I need my fix of queer politics, so recently I started reading and enjoying this blog. As far as I can tell, its positions on issues are close to Americablog, but it's not quite as whiney:

For the record, the President’s position in same-sex marriage is this: "I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

While that is a position, it is not an argument. Rather, it is indistinguishable from the positions (not arguments) adopted by the Vatican and NOM – which is to say, it is unchallengeable in any civic forum. And it is intended to be unchallengeable in any civic forum. References to tradition and particularly sanctification have little purpose other than to short circuit any opposition – certainly any secular opposition, which is what the President was being asked about.

Though I'm not a supporter of same-sex marriage, I feel this frustration, too. It's the same frustration I felt back when J and I brought R into our relationship and my mother so fiercely refused to acknowledge or discuss it. Being anti-religion, she wouldn't ascribe her opposition to the Bible or religious tradition, but somehow that made it even more infuriating to me. "This is a committed, supportive relationship. What is bad about that?" "That's just not how people are made," she said. In the end, her argument and Obama's is "I believe it because it's what I believe." It shuts down the conversation, and there's nothing more maddening than that.

It's not so much that I'm angry that Obama opposes gay marriage, it's that I thought he was smarter than this. One of the top reasons I supported Obama and was so thrilled to see him elected is that he is so intelligent. But his stance on this issue, like my mother's on my three-way relationship, is intellectually incoherent. In both cases, it is deeply disappointing.

When he talks about race, I'm dazzled and moved and edified. Racial politics in America is such an overwhelmingly complex issue to tackle -- history, urban policy, biology, sexuality, education, and on and on -- but he connects the dots in ways that let us begin to make sense of it and entertain some hope that things may get better if we try to listen and understand each other. I have never thought of any president as a teacher before Obama, and he makes it clear over and over how powerful that is. I still think we are incredibly privileged to have a president who can do that. I think the American population, if nothing else, will be smarter at the end of Obama's tenure.

So ... equally complex is the issue of the place or function or role of homosexuality in our society. What a trove of ideas to chew on. And all he has to say is, "I'm a Christian."

My Excuse Is I'm Not Fully Awake Yet.

A little Sunday morning wisdom from the Platters:



I posted the Platters version first, not just because I love it but because I know some people have a lower Judy Garland threshold than I -- I should say just about everyone has a lower Judy Garland threshold than I, because I don't have one at all. I could watch Presenting Lily Mars all day long and still want more. It's a sickness, I know.

Well, I looked all over youtube and can't find the Judy Garland version. I know it's there somewhere because I posted it here a while back. But I found this! How could you not love this? (Shut up, it's a rhetorical question.)

How We Eat.

It's think it's been a while since I sang the praises of our CSA, Johnson's Backyard Garden. Sometimes I take for granted how well we eat. Not that I'm not completely aware of how much joy I get from cooking and eating, but I forget that it didn't used to be as easy as it is now that we get a box of perfect produce every week, around which I base all our meals.

This week we got a bunch of small white Japanese salad turnips (I think they call them). They're best eaten raw -- they have a sort of radishy but sweeter and milder taste. I sliced them and threw them in a salad of mizuma, arugula, and various cut lettuces, with my standard vinaigrette (lemon, red wine vinegar, a little garlic, salt and pepper, Dijon mustard, and olive oil). I also threw in some shredded cabbage that was still crispy and fresh from last week's box, and a big handful of grated parmesan.

A few days ago I stewed some okra with tomatoes (we have a second tomato season in November, which, because I grew up in Indiana where waiting for the August tomatoes was practically a religion in my family, always seems like some kind of miracle to me), garlic, a chopped serrano pepper and a couple bigger sweet red chilies. We get tons of chilies of all kinds. Really almost too many -- they're supplemented by more jalapeños and serranos from M's garden in the yard, which is still producing on plants that went in last spring. I roast some of them, and peel and freeze them. Others I just throw right in the freezer raw.

We've also been getting a lot of okra, and the okra in M's garden also did very well this year, so I've learned how to make okra pickles (they're easy). We haven't had fried okra in a while, but that's a nice summer treat, too.

Tonight I stir-fried the greens from the turnips (they're very tender, so they really only need to be cooked till they wilt and turn bright green -- they're delicious, with a mild peppery flavor), a few kohlrabi bulbs peeled and sliced, a handful of raw peanuts toasted in the cooking oil, garlic and ginger, and we ate it over brown rice with tamari.

We've also been getting a handful of green beans the last few weeks, which I blanch and shock and freeze to use in various ways later: thawed and sliced in salads, or I might throw some in a minestrone I'm planning for later this week.

And kale. The season of winter greens is starting. By January, we'll be getting piles and piles of mustard greens, turnip greens, collards, lettuce, and kale. I usually blanch and freeze all the greens on the day we get them -- then they're ready to use in just about anything later, and we can have greens all year round. Once it gets a little cooler -- if it ever gets a little cooler, it was 83 today -- I'll start making big pots of Southern-style greens cooked until they're very soft with lots of garlic, and instead of the traditional ham hock I use chipotle to get that smokiness which complements greens so well. And hopefully by the time it gets cooler and I'm making those big pots of greens, our oven will be fixed so I can make some cornbread to go with.

We buy very little produce outside of what we get from our CSA. I usually need more onions than they grow, though this year we got a lot more onions than last year. And garlic. And we buy fresh ginger and lemons. That's about it. Oh, we buy some canned tomatoes. We get a lot of tomatoes from the CSA, so many that I seeded and froze a bunch this year to use for sauce. But it takes a shitload of tomatoes to make one quart of tomato sauce, so we end up buying a few cans to supplement, if I make soup or chili or pasta sauce.

One of my favorite things about belonging to the farm is that I don't have to make a lot of decisions about what to buy and cook. We don't have to keep track of what's in season, what's local, what's fresh. We cook and eat what they harvest every week.

Kids Today.

I hope that if and when I become an actual teacher, I will have at least some small bit of say in what materials I use in class. If I'm required to use approved materials, I hope I'll be allowed to supplement them with materials I choose.

The worksheets and workbooks and overhead transparencies and other pre-packaged lessons that I've been asked to teach from during my few days of subbing bring back all the feelings I had about these materials back when I was in school. They are either deadly boring or completely opaque, with very little in between. Oh yeah, and also infuriating because they're riddled with typos, mistakes, and unacknowledged ambiguities. That nagging feeling: does this not make sense because I'm not getting it, or is it because the book is wrong?

Yesterday's lesson plan for 6th grade ESL English included a 9-part phonics lesson on prefixes and diphthongs. I had 6 classes. When I would find a typo or mistake or something that didn't make sense to me, I would skip that part of the lesson with the next class. By the end of the day, I was only teaching 3 of the parts.

The bright kids look at this stuff and think, "I know what you're talking about, but why are you putting it in such abstruse terms?" (Okay, sixth-graders are not thinking "abstruse" but you know what I mean.) And the kids who are struggling with a concept or idea are pushed even further into the weeds.

Then I had to wade through a short reading selection about stress. Apparently, people of all cultures experience stress, and there's good and bad stress. Excuse me, where is the teacher's bathroom? And do you have a razor blade I can borrow for a couple minutes? Assuming 6th graders need to learn about stress -- and I'm sure someone with better credentials than I had good reasons for deciding that they do -- with all the great literature written in English at your disposal, you couldn't find an interesting, well-written passage about stress for a reading comprehension exercise for 6th graders?

Why are kids not learning? Take a look at the pedagogical materials.

(By the way, crappy workbooks aside, I had a great day yesterday with some very smart and fun middle school kids. It was the first time since subbing that I felt like I could see some way into it. I could see myself teaching. The first part of the lesson was vocabulary. We discussed the spelling and definition of 10 words, we put them in sentences, came up with examples of how they're used. It was kind of a heady experience witnessing kids' faces suddenly illuminated by the meaning of a word or the recognition of a concept. After the discussion, I gave them a spelling quiz on the 10 words, and almost all the kids in every class spelled all or most of the words correctly. Seriously, I was close to tears.)

Pick Something.

I've been thinking about that post from last Saturday with the list of things I want to do. It helps me to make a list like that because the ideas accumulate and get hard to sort out mentally. Mainly what a list helps me do is cross stuff off. There are always too many ideas, too many bits of inspiration to follow. And that can be paralyzing. I spend a long time doing nothing because I can't decide, can't pick. I want to draw and paint, I want to sing and write songs, I want to write plays and stories and essays and a memoir and a novel, make movies, music videos, and a Broadway musical, write screenplays, and illustrate children's books. I want to study history and become fluent in Spanish. I want to play the piano. My latest thing is that I think I should write poetry because I think I'd be good at it.

Most people pick something at some time in their life don't they? Sometimes before they even go to college. I always planned to be an artist, from the age of 5 or 6, but I didn't narrow it down.

When I do one thing for a while I always know that there are dozens of things I am not doing. It's as if there's a missing connection in my brain, that part of the brain that picks something to do is deformed or missing. I could never pick. It's my fatal flaw. It drives me crazy.

I Used To Be Innocent Enough.

My parents were strict about bedtime, so if I was watching the Midnight Special it was on the TV in the basement with the lights off and the sound low. Other things I associate with that secret late-night pre-teen TV time are Love American Style ("Please let it be an episode about a nudist colony! Please!!") and The Late Late Show with Tom Snyder, who absolutely mesmerized me no matter who he was interviewing, but I especially remember when his guest was a transexual woman (whose name escapes me now -- I think she was Scandinavian but I'm pretty sure it wasn't Christine Jorgensen because she was too young) which blew my world apart in a good way in the early seventies.

It's hard to reconcile the feeling of danger that washes over me while watching this clip now. It's so gentle and innocent. But many of the artists I loved then, who were making such sweet, lovely music, were also activists of one kind or another, first anti-war, then environment causes.

I loved John Denver when I was 12 or 13. Of course, he was very uncool for a number of years, but now I love him again, the child-like generosity and effortless love in his songs, and that crystalline voice. And more recently, John Denver makes me think with longing of my friend R who is a big fan and who I haven't seen in years and miss terribly.

And I'm crazy about Cass Elliot, not just because she has rick-rack on her muumuu, but that doesn't hurt.

Aaargh.

I'm not sure what forum is best for expressing my thoughts about this facebook group called, "Against Gay Marriage? Then Don't Get One and Shut the Fuck Up." Every time a friend of mine joins it and it pops up in my Live Feed, I feel angry and frustrated. It's a serious bummer to have friends of mine -- for the most part, my facebook friends are really my friends -- tell me to shut the fuck up. I would guess that the people who are joining this group, supporting this sentiment, are the same people who roll their eyes at the Fox News crowd constantly calling Obama supporters communists, fascists, and Nazis. So take a look at your rhetoric. Is it seriously your position that people who disagree with you (for instance, me) should "Shut the Fuck Up"?

I've pontificated plenty here on my views regarding marriage, so I'll give that old tune a rest. It's too much for me to boil down into a pithy few words for a status update. I feel like starting a facebook group called "Don't Tell Me To Shut the Fuck Up. You Shut the Fuck Up!"

Lizzie Borden Update, Not.

Friends keep asking me what's up with Lizzie Borden, because I haven't said or written anything since the New York run closed a few weeks ago. Sorry that I've left everyone hanging, but I don't have anywhere but hanging to leave you right now. I'm hanging, too. There's some rumbling, there's some people talking, there's "interest," but it's way too early to say anything. Because there are so many ifs. Because toes get stepped on. Because the more public one's excitement, the more public the disappointment later. Sad to say, I've been doing this long enough to know that it's always much more likely nothing will happen than something.

The take home: Cross your fingers; I'll let you know when there's something to know. Call me pathetic, but somewhere in that big shithole of disappointment and pessimism my big dreams still bob their little heads up.

One Is Only Poor Only If They Choose To Be.

Maybe it's just that it's 6 in the morning and I haven't slept a wink because I've been coughing all night, or maybe it's because I was pondering last night that I am still where I was 8 years ago -- no home, no job, no career, no plans -- in a hole that I can't seem to climb out of, or maybe it's because there is so much love in my life every day, but this clip (which, I know, is bizarre in many, many ways) just made me bawl:

Stuff I Want To Do.

1. A book called Gay Uncle, semi-scholarly but free-wheeling exploration of gay uncles and their nephews (inspired by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's notion of the "avunculate"). Including memoir, history, criticism, oral history. This is a big project, involving lots of research.

2. A series of short video pieces based on some of my new songs. Music videos, essentially.

3. A longer, but still short, film called Wall of Angels, about a woman who burns her house down and goes on a trip during which geography, duration, and chronology are unmoored. I have a script of this partially written. Surreal, dreamy, low-tech special effects.

4. A short film called Men & Boys, centering around an encounter between a teenage boy and a middle-aged man on a beach. One setting, two person cast, natural light. Could be very low budget.

5. Two feature films for which I have completed screenplays: Room for Jerry (about a middle-aged couple who begin an affair with a younger woman and the effect that it has on their relationships with their adult children) and Public Sex (a sexually-explicit, polemical story about sex among a group of urban gay men).

4. Series of nude portraits of men in my life. Drawings.

5. Four-man vocal quartet to sing barbershop, a capella arrangements of my songs.

In Praise of Andrew Sullivan. (duck and cover!)

I get flack from the Andrew Sullivan haters all the time. Gay people and liberals have a long history of grievance with Sullivan, centering around, as far as I know, three things:

1) In the mid-nineties, he wrote an essay, published in The New York Times Magazine, called "When Plagues End", which was about how the new HIV drugs were radically changing the AIDS epidemic in the United States. Lots of people thought it was irresponsible to be so upbeat.

2) He supported Bush's invasion of Iraq. Big time. When the war turned into a huge disaster, he changed his mind, very publicly.

3) I can't remember exactly when it happened, maybe 5-7 years ago?, but his profile on a gay sex cruising web site, on which he was soliciting unprotected anal sex, was made public. Sullivan is HIV positive.

I read his blog, The Daily Dish, every morning. I don't know of another journalist who blogs daily who is as consistently interesting, wide-ranging, and smart as Sullivan. His blog is a conversation; people who disagree with him get lots of airtime. I disagree with him as often as I agree with him, in fact probably more, but I learn a whole lot more reading him than I ever get by reading Huffington Post (which I stopped reading because, even though the general bias of the blog is maybe closer to my own politics, the writing there is just a lot of knee-jerk shouting by people who usually have a pretty shallow understanding of the issues). Sullivan is a thinker. He can be strident, but he listens and he enjoys the debate. That's why I like him.

I get really exasperated when I read most liberal blogs because they usually assume the correctness of their point of view on issues; they assume that if you call yourself a liberal or progressive, then of course you must believe this, this, and this. (For instance, if you don't support gay marriage, you must be a Nazi.) Sullivan gives me different things to be exasperated about. For instance, I disagree with him about gay marriage, but I agree with him about hate-crimes laws.

Anyway, all that to say that I really enjoyed this little clip this morning. It made me ponder how bizarre the world has become when thoughtful, informed commentary on the issues of our day more often than not is found on comedy shows. Of course, that's not a novel observation.

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c
Andrew Sullivan
www.colbertnation.com
Colbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorU.S. Speedskating


If anyone is curious as to my opinions on 1, 2, and 3 above:

1) I think the essay is great and I think it holds up all these years later. I find Sullivan's writing about the experience of being a homosexual man in these times moving and deeply perceptive.

2) Hard to forgive. But I think his support of the war and his embarrassment and shame about it is part of what motivates his vigilance now about Bush and Cheney, war crimes, torture, etc. Also mitigating was his relentless support of Obama's campaign, which I would guess was a factor in convincing lots of conservatives to vote for him.

3) I have a hard time judging anyone's behavior when they're looking for sex.

Oh Maine, Why Do You Hate Me So??

I got an email this morning from a friend:
I'm looking at my facebook updates this morning and not one of my gay friends has said anything about the inclusion of gays under the discrimination law in Kalamazoo or the fact that in the 23rd district of New York, a democrat upset a Palin-sponsored conservative, indicative of the general positive sentiment toward Obama.

All they have written is "Fuck Maine," "Everyone in Maine can go to hell," "devastating news about Maine," etc. etc. etc. They have totally lost touch with the entire gay rights movement. Infuriating.
I completely agree and had a similar response to all the venting about Maine last night and this morning. No surprise, I guess. Anyone who reads this or knows me knows that marriage is not my thing.

But I did have one thought that was slightly encouraging and worth pondering. I suspect lots of people are very vocal about gay marriage who would previously -- before the movement was hijacked by conservatives -- been apathetic. The virtue of marriage as a rights issue is that it has been galvanizing. People know what marriage is -- they think they do, anyway. Almost everyone, even the crustiest among us, has a happily-ever-after fantasy just waiting to be shocked like Frankenstein's monster to new life. Marriage is a lot more emotionally potent and easier to get the average mind around than anti-discrimination legislation or local electoral politics.

I suspect the people who care about the more practical advances in equality for sexual minorities are still doing the real work, are still vocal, still care, but their voices are drowned out by all the activist wannabes shrieking that they deserve to marry the one they love, blah blah.

My Day at the Dog Park.

I came so close to walking out today. Just grabbing my backpack and going home. It was at the beginning of the last period. About 5 minutes into the period, the kids were still running all over the room and throwing things at each other. One boy, probably about 6'1" and 250 pounds had a girl about half his size in a bear hug and she was screaming, no screeching. Another boy was pounding on the wall with his feet and hands. I told him to stop and he said to me, "Seriously, you better shut up, I'm getting tired of you." Except for one student who had his head down on his desk, sleeping, and two others who were sitting quietly, the whole class was up and running around, laughing, yelling, throwing things across the room. One kid left and didn't come back. I thought about calling security, but wondered what I would say. "Help!"?

A few minutes later, things calmed down enough that I decided I could make it through the rest of the day. When I say "calmed down," I mean that nobody was trying to kill anyone. At no point in the day were more than a couple or three kids doing the work that was assigned. I might just as well have not been there. I'm not sure what difference it would have made.

I guess since the job pays babysitting wages, I shouldn't be surprised that I'm babysitting. I didn't have any illusions that I would be doing much teaching as a substitute, but I'm not interested in being a prison warden. On average there have been about 3 or 4 kids in every class who actually try to do the assigned work, try to engage with the material. The rest just flat out don't do it. They refuse.

The advice I keep getting from other teachers is, "Don't let it faze you. Don't let them get to you. Don't let them make you angry." It's well-meant advice, but somehow unhelpful. I don't feel in danger of getting angry at the kids. The ones who misbehave are too ridiculous to be angry with. The kids I had today were a bunch of brats who've clearly never had any effective discipline in their lives, but they're 12. It's their parents I'm mad at.

Substitute teaching is like spending the day in a pen full of feral cats. Or dogs. Or both -- feral cats and feral dogs. But sadder, because cats and dogs are not the future.

Call Me Party-Pooper.

Sorry, but I can't get too excited about what people are calling the first-ever national pro-LGBT rights legislation being a law that enshrines our status as victims.

The bill is named for Matthew Shepard, whose murderers, as I understand it, got the maximum penalty possible. This hate-crimes (thought-crimes) law would not have made any difference in their sentences. Is this really the right time to be drumming up reasons to put more people in prison? Does anyone really think making prejudice a crime is going to prevent gay-bashing?

I Don't Know, It's Some TV Show.

I just this moment realized that for years I've been confusing Arrested Development with Curb Your Enthusiasm. When people would ask me if I'd seen Arrested Development, I'd say I had watched part of one episode and had to turn it off because a man and a woman were shouting at each other for like 10 minutes straight and I couldn't take any more.

But that was Curb Your Enthusiasm. I had never actually seen Arrested Development, until very recently. A couple friends insisted insistently that J and I watch it because they love it and thought we would love it too. We rented the first season on DVD and watched the first two episodes. I sort of wondered while watching when the yelling was going to start, but I figured it must have been a later episode I'd seen.



So Arrested Development wasn't the unbearable yelling show after all, but it was boring and forced, and we didn't watch more than the first two episodes.