The Four Fivers Will Make Up For That.
I knew there was something missing in contemporary porn. Where are the book deal negotiations? Everything was better in the 1880s.
From The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.
I knew there was something missing in contemporary porn. Where are the book deal negotiations? Everything was better in the 1880s.
From The Sins of the Cities of the Plain.
Is anyone else following Kevin Drum’s blog posts about climate change?
I’ve been thinking along these lines for a while now, which is disorienting, unsettling for a person who grew up internalizing the three R’s (reduce, reuse, recycle). I think these ideas, in my family, were more about thrift than about the environment, at least to begin with, because my parents believed this, lived like this, and demanded it of their kids, before the environmental (or ecology, as they used to call it) movement was a thing.
And as an adult I never really questioned the wisdom of this ethos. I was always scraping by on not much money, so planning meals so that nothing was thrown away or, say, cutting up my worn-out t-shirts to use for rags so I didn’t have to buy paper towels was just necessary. Not that I didn’t see the big picture and believe that reducing consumption and waste was good for the earth. And of course being a lifelong liberal Democrat — well, pro-environment policy was just one of the things I believed in and supported.
But more and more I wonder (for instance, when I take my recycling, which I’ve rinsed and obsessively separated) downstairs and throw it in the bin that my neighbors have filled with dirty takeout containers, plastic bags, and pretty much whatever the fuck else they feel like throwing in there, knowing that even if there were a market for all that “recyclable” plastic — there isn’t: most of it ends up in a landfill — recycling plants will reject it because it’s “contaminated” with non-recyclables) I wonder, “why do I take this so seriously when most people can’t be bothered?” I mean, I’ve always assumed I’m helping, but am I helping?” And this is New York, a supposedly enlightened, liberal place. Good luck even trying to make an effort in Mississippi.
And then there’s the bigger idea that Kevin Drum writes about, which is that even if we pass all these GND laws here, get everyone’s behavior here, get everyone on board here (which, let’s be honest, will never happen), most of the world is not trying, not interested, in making the same changes. So if we really believe that this is an emergency, why are we so focused on these things that so clearly are not going to help at the massive scale required to save the world? Is it just because those are the things we’ve been relentlessly pounding away at for decades. Is it because we’re locked in a battle with a bunch of fucking idiots (that is, 1/2 the population) who still deny basic proven facts like evolution and global warming and the age of the planet and getting them to listen to reason has become the goal?
I don’t know. Like I said, pondering this stuff lately is disorienting. But I can’t find anything to disagree with in Drum’s assertion that if we actually truly believe we only have a few decades to reverse emissions drastically if we want to save the earth and its human population, shouldn’t we be laser-focused on finding something that stands a chance of doing that, instead of expending all our energy trying to implement green building and municipal composting programs?
Is anyone else watching this series, A Discovery of Witches? It’s SO good. I keep comparing it to Dark Shadows, the horror soap from the 70s that haunted by tween dreams. It’s hard to say that, esthetically speaking, it’s anything like Dark Shadows except that it tickles the same itch. It’s super creepy, sexy, soapy, very fun and full of creatures of all stripes living in our world. We’re watching it on Sundance but I think it’s available on Amazon too.
BUT, over the ending sequence of one episode, this cover of Go Your Own Way crept in. Not only was it a case of brilliant dramaturgy it’s just a gorgeous cover of one of the best pop songs ever written. Who is this Lissie whose voice kind of evokes Stevie Nicks and whose video is a more than a bit L.A. witchy? I will find out!
Okay, so the thing I’ve been working on for at least a couple years now (how long? I’ve lost track), the musical based on my high school diary — incidentally, how happy am I to have that tight little description at hand when people ask me what I’m working on: it’s evocative, terse, and it resonates with shows (Dear Evan Hanson, Be More Chill, which are not substantively much if anything like my show, except in the broadest general way but “I’m writing a musical based on my high school diary” gives people’s brains a place to land) that are getting a lot of attention right now in the musical theater world? — which started as a bio-musical of Horatio Alger, became a mashup of Horatio Alger and my high school diary, and then shed the Alger story — is now 13 songs and 95 pages long.
I sent the songs and draft to a trusted friend and colleague for feedback. He’s the first and only one to read it. They (they?) always say that when you finish your first draft you should put it aside and let your brain settle a bit before going back to re-write. So that’s where I am.
The obvious next choice would have been to take up the Horatio Alger musical, which spun off on its own, and I envision it as a more conventional book musical, because I’ve already written 3 songs for it. But I think I’d like to wait on that one. I think I might want to just write the songs and find someone else to write the book, someone with experience writing a conventional book.
I’d like to start something further afield. For a long time I’ve wanted to make a musical set in the Gold Rush. There’s tons of great queer stuff in there. But something in me is resistant to another piece requiring a lot of historical research. That muscle is still sore from the Hester Prynne musical. And I feel drawn to create a story out of thin air.
The first really sad Christmas I remember was when I was I guess 21, my first year not in school, I made very little money and couldn’t afford the airfare. I don’t remember what I did that year, but it was not sitting around the tree for hours with my family listening to the Nutcracker, drinking egg nog and eating shrimp cocktail, and opening presents. My memory is fading, but I think there were two Christmases around that time in my life when I didn’t go home to Indiana.
“Home for Christmas” is not an expression I use anymore. The house where my parents lived since the mid-80s is not any of the houses I grew up in, but I thought of it in some sense as home, or it was one of the places I thought of as home — there have been many and sometimes none — but now that my mother is gone, every year it’s less home and more the house where my father lives alone. We’ll spend most of our visit at my sister’s family’s home, where I feel very much “at home,” but not “home.”
Not that any of these feelings are inappropriate to the season. The weeks leading up to the end of December are marked in different ways in different traditions, but the common thread is as ancient as humanity: we watch with dread and mourning the days grow shorter, the nights get longer. We are alone, abandoned by the sun, and we hope against hope that it will come back. When it does, we celebrate. Everything turns around. No more sadness. A new beginning. Of course we always knew it would come back, but the world still feels so empty, so bleak, until it does.
The trouble with all the other losses — your childhood house, Santa Claus, my mother — is that they are not so temporary. So the Christmas season has become less a vigil for the return of the sun than a reminder of everything that's gone long gone.
I want to say first that I have very mixed and hard to pin down feelings about men joining the #metoo movement. Sexual harassment and assault obviously don’t happen exclusively to women. But there’s something in this moment that I think is about women’s experience, about revealing to us all a particular experience that women have in common, as a gender. So something rubs me the wrong way about so many men sharing their #metoo stories. Still, it’s complicated, and, like I said, I’m not at all confident about my feelings here.
But I want to write about homophobia and how I think there’s room for a great deal more subtlety and depth in examining how it is at work in the reactions to Anthony Rapp’s story and Kevin Spacey’s reaction to it. I am heartbroken for them both.
The thrust of the reaction in the LGBT media and community has been immediate condemnation along the lines of “We’ve been struggling forever to convince straight people that gay men are not child molesters, and you come along and tell them that in fact we are.”
But from where I sit, it looks like it is the LGBT community and media who are telling people that, not Spacey.
— Zachary Quinto (@ZacharyQuinto) October 30, 2017
Nope to Kevin Spacey's statement. Nope. There's no amount of drunk or closeted that excuses or explains away assaulting a 14-year-old child.
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) October 30, 2017
As recounted by Rapp, Spacey’s behavior that night was harassment, exploitation, and — depending on how you interpret the whole lying on top of him part of the story — possibly even assault. But Rapp was 14. He was not a child. Though this view is hardly universal, I personally think that an adult having sex with a 14-year-old, even with consent, is wrong for all kinds of reasons, but it is not pedophilia. If we don’t want straight people to think gay men are pedophiles, don’t say we are when we’re not.
On one level, this is an object lesson in the danger of respectability politics. It’s understandable how gun shy we are around the issue of children. When you’re called a child molester your whole life, you become incredibly self-conscious about it and you want to dig as wide a moat around it as you can to be sure you don’t get near it, you want to define it as broadly as possible to make sure you're the first and loudest to condemn it.
Of course, much of the LGBT community have resented Kevin Spacey for decades because he refused to publicly reveal his queerness, and, as so often happens when a closeted famous person is outed, the community is howling with gleeful derision. One thing, maybe the only thing, LGBT people share is the psychologically, emotionally, spiritually damaging experience of the closet. Yet there is so little empathy shown in these cases. I’ve always wondered about the causes of this ugly gay mob behavior: is it just that human trait of loving to see a successful person knocked off their pedestal?
I wish stories like these could be moments to teach straight people about how the closet distorts everything, for life. How shame corrodes our spirits. How scarred we are. Kevin Spacey is a man dealing badly, and very publicly, with the explosion of an aspect of his life that was out of control and which now seems to threaten every other part of his life. The closet is cancer. I feel deeply for him.
"I'm sorry, Mr. Spacey, but your application to join the gay community at this time has been denied."
— Dan Savage (@fakedansavage) October 30, 2017
If this is a community that doesn’t have room for the most damaged among us, then I’m ashamed of my community.
Now we are in touch again, and she’s commissioned me to write some text, an essay?, for a chapbook that she will print and publish to accompany an exhibit of her prints in Chicago where she lives and teaches now this fall. The text is to resonate with, respond to though not necessarily explicitly with the work she is showing. (She still makes visual art. I, you know, do not.) The prints span her career. One set is a series of drawings she made in 1984 in the process of working out a large installation. One set is a series of drawings in response to a large installation she made in the mid-90s.(I call them drawings -- they are monoprints.) A third set is current work.
This thing I’m writing, which I hesitate to call an essay because it is impressionistic, episodic, takes the shape of a review of our friendship (so of course it is meandering and disjointed). I’ve pulled out her letters to me spanning the mid-80s through the early 90s, half a lifelong conversation about what’s important, what we yearn for our lives to be, what we want our work to be about, the shape we want our lives to take, and I compare those hopes with how our lives actually look now. We are both still artists. That in itself is remarkable to me and something to be proud of regardless of whatever other dreams I’ve fallen short of. It was certainly never the most likely outcome, statistically speaking, but I never had any doubt and I doubt J did either.
So.
Between this project and my high school diary musical, which are the two big things on my desk right now, my writing life is thick with memory. Late 70s in Indiana, 80s in New York. It feels like judgement day up in here. When I dive into the past — I shouldn’t say dive because I more or less live there — my favorite game seems to be finding things I feel uneasy or guilty about or ashamed of and to pick them apart, to confess, and try to, if not absolve myself, understand. But, yes, absolve myself of.
It all, all of it, has the slightly queasy-making quality of a retrospective, which I supposed I should embrace. I am not done, but I am on the cusp of a new phase, I really believe. The work I am doing now is stronger, more vivid, more truthful, more true, than ever. I am 56 years old and have, as they say, zero fucks to give. A look back is appropriate. And then forward.
Look I made a hatI couldn't breathe for a second. From that moment till the end I was either weeping or on the verge of it. This show that I always said I didn't know what it was about was suddenly about everything I've ever cared about in my life. I knew it was about art, but I never felt how it was about art till last night.
Where there never was a hat
"In the old days, they had Jesus and them guys. His words don't shake through us anymore. We created rock 'n' roll in our image -- it's our child -- a new savior, rockin' toward Bethlehem to be born. God was selfish. He kept himself hidden. You gotta be a performer."Here's a beautiful recent clip of Patti Smith:
I installed a Chrome plugin that blocks Facebook from 9:30 to 5. It had to be done. The election last year and the chaos unleashed since had me on Facebook all the time, compulsively scrolling, reading articles, linking to stuff, poring over everyone else's fear, over and over and over. On one hand, I was reading a lot of good stuff, keeping hyper-informed, learning about new things in detail, figuring out my own stances on important issues, answers to important questions. I don't regret any of that. But it was too much, way too much. I can get more information than it is possible to digest in a couple hours Internet time in the morning, and then I can catch up in the evening. More than adequate.
It's been one full week now, and in that time I've returned to my many years neglected meditation practice, I've written in my journal at length every day, I'm reading much more than I had been able to for some time, and I've made measurable progress on the musical piece I'm writing based on my high school diary. I had been doing all these things (except meditating) all along, but now I do them with a clearer mind, more focus, and for longer periods of time, every day.
It feels like a good balance. I toyed with the idea of a total Facebook break, but I didn't want to give up contact with the many friends and family I don't keep in touch with in other ways, the flow of news and information from various sources that keeps me engaged and informed. I don't want to lose touch. But I also don't want to lose my mind.
My favorite so far (I know that’s really impolitic to say that, but I’m just being honest) is not even a full production. We made an exception to the standard and pretty much non-negotiable terms of our license agreement and gave permission to a high school theater department in Iowa for 4 girls to sing a cutting from the show in competition in a speech meet. Today the instructor emailed us to ask for permission for one more performance because the group of girls placed high and has been selected to perform at the state competition in Ames, Iowa.
I can’t think of anything in my whole career that has made me more proud. I am not joking. Maybe it’s because I’m so immersed right now in my own adolescence because I’m writing a show about it and a big part of my high school years was theater and speech, or maybe it's because the election last year made crystal clear how deeply woman-hating our culture and politics are and I'm obsessed with the way that distorts women's voices and obsessed with the possibility of finally changing that, but the thought of high school girls singing LIZZIE, our little smash-the-patriarchy musical, in a state-level speech competition in Iowa is beyond moving. Beyond.
Everyone I know is so sad and angry.
It’s the same feeling that I had as a kid that when someone in the room was in a bad mood (well, I say “someone,” but what I mean is my mother), that it was my fault. The fact that American democracy is in peril is maybe not my fault, but it certainly is, if the word democracy has any meaning, my responsibility, and what actually is the difference?
I am sad and angry, too. Sometimes I feel like I can hardly breathe. I remember days after 9/11, I was on the phone with a dear friend in New York and she was saying that she had the TV on all day watching video of the planes crash into the towers over and over and she couldn't stop crying. I said, "Turn the TV off!" (I was, thankfully, living off the grid at the time.) But now I find myself compulsively checking Facebook, reading the same dismal news over and over and getting more and more scared and tense. Facebook for years for me has been the way I keep in touch with friends, the news, politics yes but in some kind of proportion until last year's election got underway. Now it's all bad shit 24/7, it just feels like wallowing in despair. I feel the urge to unplug from it, but then I'd lose touch with people I love and I'd miss the building community of resistance that I think is crucial right now. I'm afraid of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
In my most angry moments I think, “Who the fuck cares? I’m going to be gone in 20 or 30 years. I gave it my best and now everything is completely fucked and I’m tired and fed up with the whole shit show.” But then I imagine the faces of my beautiful nephews and my beautiful niece and my heart splits wide open. What will their lives be like? The feeling that I have no confidence it will not be unimaginably horrific is nearly unbearable.
I think I’d been sort of bopping along for a while believing I was leaving a world for them better than the one I found. Maybe I’d relaxed into thinking that since I had spent decades protesting, complaining, resisting, and dissenting, and my efforts had had some kind of effect, some measurable success, that maybe it was safe to not be quite so angry all the time, to not always have to be quite so vigilant, to not always have to swim against the current, that maybe the status quo wasn’t perfect but I could live with it because it had so noticeably improved in my lifetime, and was obviously on a path to continue in that direction.
Not so obvious now.
So many people I love are grief-stricken, not sleeping, disoriented, afraid, crying a lot. It feels almost unbearable.
I've been trying to recall how long it was before the 2001 terrorist attacks came to be known as "9/11." Because I haven't know what to call what happened on Tuesday. For now, I'll just call it "Tuesday." Tuesday shares with 9/11 a sudden sense of immediate danger, uncertainty, a reminder that we are targets, that we are not safe. Within the space of a few minutes, the world changed irrevocably and we are traumatized.
It occurs to me that maybe Tuesday was such a blow because we had grown to have unreasonable expectations. Things were going so well. After electing Obama 8 years ago and having in the White House someone who resembled
us
, someone who imagined a better world like the better world
we
imagined, who, though he couldn't make everything better in 8 years, at least understood the questions, expressed easy sympathy with our struggles, we thought the world was changing faster than it actually was. Working for a more just world turned into expecting a more just world in our lifetimes. How selfish we were.
I wonder if the only way out of this awful sadness it to recommit to the work of making a better world, not because it's possible to make things better for us, but because a better world is possible.
Mom raised me to know that we were the kind of people who read the newspaper every day. Or, I should say, we were not the kind of people who did not read the newspaper every day. |
Dinner menu will have just 15 dishes, each of which will cost no more than $16. They won’t be full entree-sized, but they won’t be super small either. People should expect to order between three and five of them, depending on how hungry they are.I'm not such a fan of the "small plates" thing. One, you have no idea what small means. And two, it's great if everyone you're dining with is as adventurous as you, wants to have a communal experience, and likes ordering a bunch of stuff, especially the weird thing on the menu "just to try it." But if you're not with that group, it means you either have to figure out how to share some things with some people, or not, or default to the choices of the pickiest eater in the group.