Toe tappin', foot stompin', gag reflex inducin'

Screen capture from CBC News

Well, look at it this way, Dawson City. With all the feet that keep washing ashore in British Columbia, you'll have a steady supply of free toes for years to come.

A new day . . . of Twitter reckoning

Clearly Canadian . . . and guaranteed to rot your gut faster than poutine encased in a pastry made from Tim Horton's doughnuts, deep-fat fried, coated in Oka cheese, then soaked in maple syrup and the residue of a thousand melted Coffee Crisps.

Tuff love

Screen capture from CNN

It's true! A good woman without a gun is the only thing that stop a bad guy with a gun.

From now on, whenever anyone uses the word "hero" in my presence, I'll just smile to myself and think of Antoinette Tuff.

Here's a woman who actually did it, saved people, put her life on the line, and didn't make it all about her. She made it about the kids, her colleagues, and yes, even the guy who would do all of them harm.
I'm no real fan of organized religion, but Ms. Tuff gains my praise and appreciation for putting her beliefs in action, making a difference, and contributing something good to humankind.

May we all be able to say that at the end of the day, at the end of our days.

Let the civil disobedience begin

Long may it wave: Rainbow flag flapping in the wind
with blue skies and sun by Ludovic Bertron
(CC BY 2.0 [Original available here])

I'm glad at least the Canadians agree with me (one of them, at least).

Whether subtle or loud, I still support showing up and settling in for a long winter's fight in Sochi.

The pause that regresses

If this article doesn't give you pause about how out there things have gotten (or been for a while, perhaps since the end of World War II), I don't know what will.

I still have mixed feelings about Edward Snowden. I don't consider him a hero. Nor do I consider him a villain. Mainly I think he's more of a narcissist with dodgy judgment. IT professional/aspiring male model? Sorry, anybody that pulled in that much money doing what he did for so long and apparently gave some of it to the Ron Paul presidential campaign shouldn't be considered that credible.

But this article . . . with its revelations about turned off cell phones being used as listening devices, the "extraterritorial" detentions at international border crossings, the need to encrypt private communications and the increasing inability to do so, the geolocation, the concern over physical safety and the psychological pressure to cease and desist . . . . This is extraordinary.

Please read for yourself and be more aware than I have been these last few years. I won't say that I agree with everything stated, every conclusion reached. I have at least one friend who thinks that the destruction of the World Trade Center was a "false flag" event. I still think that and every conspiracy about the JFK assassination are just that, conspiracies. So no, not going there. Nevertheless, this article does open my consciousness and make me think more is possible than impossible in this world we've created in the name of national security.

* * *

I remember visiting the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s and was perplexed and amused by the fact that the government reportedly kept people busy by listening into hotel rooms, telephones, conversations, and more. I remember not being able to talk on the street in English in a private conversation with others around for fear of tipping off the secret police that a local was associating with a foreigner. I remember things being "forbidden" but "still possible."

But I didn't have to live in that. I could go home. First to Finland, then to Sweden, then to the U.S., feeling a great sense of relief when the plane took off from Moscow and landed in Helsinki. Feeling sad and lost for what I was leaving behind--the wonderful people, the personal connections--in the Soviet Union as I took the ferry from Helsinki to Stockholm. Feeling unwelcome, uninteresting, and alone in Stockholm. And, finally, feeling grateful to be home in Washington after nearly a month away.

Nearly thirty years later, I wonder if I ended up coming home to some form of the same weirdness, paranoia, and cruelty. With better consumer goods, true, but also somehow with a depressing lack of authenticity.

I expect more from us.

I'm not saying that I would have been happier staying in Leningrad in 1985. I think not. I don't think Sweden offers all the answers either, despite Twitter pressure to believe otherwise. However, once again, I find myself questioning whether we, the "West," have the answers and the happiness we tout and we seek.

What is this beautiful house? Where does that highway lead to? Am I right? Am I wrong? My god, what have we done?

A Red Army of lovers cannot fail

"Moose and squirrel are making great trouble for us"

I do love how we gay folk can make a nation "afraid." Much in the way we caused the downfall of the Soviet Union way back when.

(Joking, joking . . .)

I'm actually unsure of how to feel about or proceed on the Great Soviet Boycott of 2014, aka We're Here, We're Queer, Just Not at the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia.

It's not that what's happening to gay/lesbian/bisexual/transgendered + people in Russia isn't significant or important. I think it most definitely is. It's awful enough that "homosexual propaganda"--the right to talk about one's gayness in public or do any sort of advocacy or acknowledgement of homosexuality--is now suppressed under Russian law, apparently for political reasons. As well as because of good, ol'-fashioned ignorance and hate.

But if pictures and first-person accounts are to be believed--and I see no reason not to believe them--it's more than just "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" à la russe. Much more. It's violence, it's hatred, it's killing, it's threatening by the uniformed and the uninformed. It's a serious, terrible business that should be addressed with various forms of protest and pressure. We should show our support to all of the world's oppressed, whether gay or not. And we can show that support and action in many different ways, including boycotting the Sochi Olympics--or by attending and participating and performing many, many, many acts of civil disobedience on site.

* * *

For a couple of reasons, my preferred approach is the latter. I'm all about embarrassing Vladimir Putin and his crony fascist cohorts. He does Russia its citizens no favors by controlling the country year after year. Unlike Edward Snowden and a host of other opinionated folk I know on Twitter, I don't consider the current Russian government or the current Chinese one better options for freedom and fairness than the United States.

Then again, I hardly think the U.S. is perfect or innocent. Furthermore, I'm not in the middle of the Edward Snowden maelstrom either. Nor would I want to be.

Really, I know I should give a shit more about Eddie and the issues he brought out into the light, but again, too much of the Twitterati has told me how I must feel and think. Despite my more urban American trappings, I'm a mistrusting cracker at heart. You can't make me do something or believe in someone that I don't want to, no matter how loudly you yell at me, no matter how sure of yourself you seem.

And that mistrusting crackerdom and resistance to proscribing my thoughts and feelings by the Twitterborg, that invades my thinking about the so-called "gay agenda" and the response to Sochi. Yes, I'm still bitter over the gay marriage debate in the U.S. Not that the U.S. Supreme Court decisions didn't go far enough--all in all, they were pretty impressive, if limited, actions from a fairly conservative court. No, I'm more bothered by the focus for the last several years solely on gay marriage, an important right (if we want to call it that) but one that ultimately will affect and benefit a select group of people.

I agree that having institutional respect for our relationships might go some distance in helping nurture and sustain those relationships and the freedom-fighters in our army of lovers. But! What if I never have a solid, long-term relationship?  Goodness knows, I've tried and still continue to. But what if? How do my civil rights stand outside of the framework of a relationship and marriage?

Not very tall, not very proud, I'm afraid. I'm barely tuned into the mainstream newsfeed, let alone the alternative, activist, progressive, yadda yadda yadda press, but so far, this is the only article I've seen from Big Media in which activists discuss the fact that essentially most of us LGBTQI+ peeps in the U.S.--including in Pennsylvania--have no legal standing when it comes to fair housing, employment discrimination, freedom of assembly, or a host of other civil rights that many Americans take for granted.

I do believe we have the right to bear arms, though. Just not the right to be held in a big bear's arms.

I don't know that I'm actively complaining about this situation, at least not in any sort of screechy, strident way. However, it is an unfair situation and can be a frightening one as well. Really, many of us have to depend on the kindness of strangers and friends to co-exist safely and securely in this world, whether in the shadows or out in public. 

But there are many other people in America that must feel the same--women, African Americans, Latinos, persons in wheelchairs, those suffering from mental illnesses or intellectual challenges, the working class, the middle class, Muslims, Jews, Mormons . . . the list goes on. Heck, there are even a number of upper class whites that feel disenfranchised in this land of opportunity. Obviously. They've been highly vocal about this since November 2008.

I think I'm more irritated (rightly or wrongly) about how gay civil rights have been totally co-opted by pro-gay marriage supporters. It's as if the other rights aren't significant. It's as if everyone can feel good about themselves by saying they are pro-gay marriage without thinking about or supporting any of the other issues that confront us. It's as if everyone can wrap their heads around a bourgeois concept like marriage and family but still demonize single people, solitude, a less tidy approach to sexuality, not being parents, and apartment dwellers. To name but a few.

Why is this? Was there a concerted effort by activists to appeal to people's emotions and experiences with the focus on a shared commonality of marriage and children? Was the goal to turn off the harsh spotlight on gay men's "unsavory" sexual behavior that had shown too brightly during the 1980s and '90s? Is it that so many of those "unsavory" men died during the '80s and '90s and aren't around to see their issues brought to the forefront? Instead, our marriage-loving, child-rearing queer folk are the bearer of our standards? Is the right to marriage somehow not a "special" right compared with the right to fair housing and a ban on employment discrimination?

It just galls me that after all this time, some activists are waking up to the idea (or finally acknowledging in public) that we have not overcome. Rather we've just gained the ability to marry in a select group of states--or perhaps, better stated, the right to have the state's right to grant Adam and Steve/Mandy and Sandy a marriage license not left to be undone by the federal government.

Seems like a narrow victory at best.

* * *

So, to the point, this is why I can't get behind the big call-out for a boycott of the Sochi Winter Olympics by huge swaths of the Twitterverse and Stephen Fry. (And while I'm at it, can I just say I find I am increasingly at odds with what appears to interest said universe? Including cat pics, bad gifs, Neil Gaiman, Star Trek references, Star Wars references, Firefly, "cis" versus "trans," and various strident forms of opinion and activism I am becoming too afraid to address in writing for fear of being boycotted myself?)

I do enjoy the Olympics, mind you, and I know the athletes and planners have worked diligently to make the games a successful event. However, I also don't think the need to snowboard or ice dance overrules the right to walk down the street near a person of the same sex and not get bashed in the head for it.

Nonetheless, I'm not convinced a boycott is the best approach for any of the parties involved, not for the athletes or the Olympics or Russia or LGBTQI+ individuals in Russia. Will gay people be scapegoated even more if no one shows up to the big event? Will they be punished for the civil disobedience of others? And what about other dissidents in Russia and the world over? If we couldn't boycott Berlin in 1936 or Beijing in 2008 (or Atlanta in 1996--the lack of gun control, our prison system, our economic and social disparity, our penchant for the death penalty are all human rights issues, are they not? All worthy of boycotting it would seem), how can we or why should we boycott Sochi in 2014?

I feel liked we're being pushed toward something in a you're-either-for-us-or-against-us way by an protected class of activists who know no fear nor any consequences. Russia is not the UK. Uganda is not the U.S. I can't help but mistrust the judgment of the pushers, however well-meaning, however passionate they may be.

Personally, I prefer civil disobedience. Maybe it's the softer approach, but it would draw attention and hopefully the right kind of attention. I love the idea, as expressed by my Twitter friend Pam, of rainbow-colored bobsleds zooming toward the finish line. I imagine pink-beclad speed-skaters and envision cross-country skier/sharpshooters aiming for triangle targets instead of regulation round ones. Let a few sports figures take a stand and get arrested for the freedom to play, rather than our leading the charge to do nothing, to be unseen, to sit this one out. It will be great winter sport to watch the opponents of freedom and human rights on display to the entire world, shields and swords in hand. But then again, I always did prefer the San Francisco marriage-ins of a few years ago, when happy gay couples decided to marry en masse as a way to make their wishes and their civil disobedience known.

However, to each his or her own. And that may be my ultimate concern: I don't want the world to be told how to feel about this, how to behave and react, especially by a group of activists who have poorly managed the attainment of gay rights in our own countries. Maybe there's a long goal that I'm missing--circuses today, bread tomorrow--but I've seen no evidence otherwise, just a steely resilience in the face of ignorance and obstinacy with an aim to achieve something that is ultimately rather middle-class, narrowly focused, and, above all, self-serving to the elites. Please. Even the Cheneys support marriage rights for that sleeping-with-the-enemy daughter of theirs.

Again, cracker, curmudgeon, whatevs. I'm not that radical, I'll admit. Just tired and perturbed. The older I get, the more I embrace the crank role oftener than not. Hopefully these days I see through the bullshit spewed forth from all sides. Including my own.

There are a lot of emperors out there and a lot of them have the worst fashion sense imaginable. I'm on my way to being the Suri's Burn Book of LGBTQI+ rights.

And more power to me.

Sooner rather than later

One of the many reasons I should seek employment elsewhere.

This woman's work

A break from my Thicke-hatin' and un-Wanted Rihanna attention-paying. Let's get to some music that matters: "Wow" by Kate Bush. Released in 1979 as the second single from her underrated album, Lionheart (one of my personal favorites, however). Gorgeous. In song and symbol.

OK, so the video and the interpretive dance are a tad precious perhaps and Kate's voice may be an acquired taste. (There is a cheesy parody out there, Pamela Stephenson from Not the 9 O'Clock News, knocking on Kate's artistic foibles in "Oh, England, My Leotard." I'll let you discover that on your own.) Nonetheless, the creativity and the fortitude it took to make this work of art! To be this incredibly intelligent, colorful, iconoclastic, nonconfirmist, sexy performer, singing her own work for the world to hear! All at the tender age of 20-something! For a major label in 1979 no less! With a backing track consisting of real horns and woodwinds!

I hope Katy Perry and Lady GaGa see this video and weep every night for what they are not and for what they cannot do - although I'm sure La GaGa would just co-opt the concept and clothes and Katy Perry would rip off most of the imagery from Kate's videos and call it her own.

There are so many things to comment on about this video and this song. I love the fact that when I finally discovered the video it confirmed my speculation about the line

He'll never make the screen
He'll never make The Sweeney
Or be that movie queen
He's too busy hitting the Vaseline

Wow. Indeed. That would be a very provocative line for 2013. Imagine it in 1979. Add to it that very suggestive bum pat Kate gives to underscore the meaning, and I'm quite surprised this video wasn't banned for life from the Beeb.

Before you get offended by Kate's tantalizing reference to gay male sexual expression pre-HIV/AIDS, do keep in mind that on the same album, she also included a song called "Kashka from Baghdad," which starts off with this line--

Kashka from Baghdad
Lives in sin, they say
With another man
But no one knows who

And continues with the chorus--

At night
They're seen
Laughing
Loving
They know
The way
To be
Happy

It took me some time to get that reference to "another man," meaning one member of the couple is a man and so is the other. Despite being released in Britain in 1978 a mere nine months after her debut, The Kick Inside, was launched, I didn't find Lionheart in a local record store until 1979 or 1980, as I recall. I finally acknowledged my same-sex attraction in the fall of 1980, "came out" as it were. So imagine the import of that song, of both songs, in conveying some understanding of gay existence, at least to me, during those formative years.

Here you had a respected songwriter telling tales about "us," openly, not in euphemism, at least in the case of "Kashka."

Anyway, "Wow." And "Hammer Horror" and "Wuthering Heights" for that matter. Oh, to be in England, to live in a country where songs like these could get played on the radio, make it on to the pop charts, into the Top Twenty, even number 1.

One of life's regrets? I didn't make my first trip to Europe until 1985, and then to the former Soviet Union, Estonia, Finland, and Sweden. All cool and memorable in their own right, but the UK circa 1977-1982 was where it was at. I'm sorry I missed it. I'm sorry I didn't buy more records and listen to BBC World Service and that the internet didn't exist as we know it then. I'm sorry that I didn't have the money and the good sense to say "fuck responsibility," "screw everybody who knows me," and "death to what's expected of me" and just go, live, love, explore.

Maybe next life. However, I'd probably have been way out of my depths -  life seems such much better from far away, especially when it's so boring at home. And I'd probably be dead now. Or not. I never have done very well among the British in terms of affairs of the heart or other, Vaseline-lacquered body parts.

It's no secret that I love the music from the '70s and '80s. The '80s everyone loves, but the '70s sewed the seeds for the '80s, good and bad. The '70s got it all started with punk, disco, singer-songwriters, Philadelphia soul, glam, new wave, electronica, rap, reggae, and a whole lot more.

So yeah, after 1985 or so, maybe even after 1983 or so, it all started to turn to crap. Clever synth riffs and thundering beats, all of which seemed novel a few years before, quickly became standard and then predictable. Even I tuned out Kate Bush after 1985's Hounds of Love, practically ignoring 1989's The Sensual World until a decade or more after its release.

I'm not sure we've ever recovered from what the classes and the masses did to the world in the 1980s. I'd be hard-pressed to come up with a more recent "golden age" of popular music, culture, or awareness (because there were issues too, ideas being addressed and tossed around, however casually). I certainly have enjoyed musical moments since - early '90s rave culture, late '90s drum-and-bass and Cool Britannia. There's plenty of world pop, stuff in other languages, and "pop with jagged edges" (like Annie) to have appreciated over time. Yet it doesn't feel as though there's been any groundswell of good music, great culture, or sustaining thought since then.

I'm old. Perhaps I just missed it or didn't get it (for example, grunge and hip-hop, neither of which I ever warmed up to, neither of which were aimed at me).

Nowadays, despite the technological and media advantages, I would imagine it would be tough to be a pop star. Too much capitalism. Too much conformity. When the possibilities for DIY pop should be even more spectacular and doable.

Kate Bush then for me represents a last, great era of yes-we-can popular music. I hope to convey in this and future posts how important in the pop panoply I think she is and why I just generally think she's "ooh, yeah . . . amazing."

One Directionless

File this under The Un-Wanted.

"She can't sing, she can't dance, but who cares? She walks like Rihanna."

Hate to tell you, boys, but it probably is Rihanna then. She's awful. She hasn't had a decent song since "S.O.S."--and the only good thing about that song was Soft Cell's "Tainted Love" as the underpinnings. And she hasn't had a hit in which she didn't sing through her nose since . . . forever.

I had such high hopes for you guys with "Glad You Came." You were like a more musical, slightly melancholy, over-18, hair-on-your-Balzac version of One Direction at best, perhaps, but I could work with that. But "Walks like Rihanna"? You might as well be One Direction doing product placement for Kentucky Fried Chicken.

And while Rihanna is tasteless and overcooked at best, you lot are looking extra cripsy yourselves these days.

Friends and lovers (Oh, why the heck not?)

I hate pop schlock for the most part, and one of the worst moments in modern musical history for me was the dreadful ballad phase of mid-'90s American popular musical entertainment. Just thinking about it makes me want to buy up every VHS copy of The Bodyguard, dump them into the middle of the Atlanta Olympics stadium, and mulch them into a fine, shimmery powder using a souped-up roto-tiller. Then force Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, and, yes, even Madonna ("This Used to be My Playground" indeed) to snort that powder through an orifice to be determined by judicial decree.

However, my diatribe about Robin Thicke got me to thinking about his mother, Gloria Loring, and her hit duet with Carl Anderson, "Friends and Lovers."



This isn't from the mid-'90s but the mid-'80s, proof that the '80s weren't always as glorious musically as everyone recalls. It's about as schlocky as it gets, but hey, I'm getting older by the second, it's a nice memory of a bygone era in pop culture, and I think Ms. Loring needs some love and respect that her son obviously isn't capable of giving.

Viva la Gloria!