arod in san francisco

How to Remember 9/11: Blasphemy is a Civic Duty

2011-09-12T04:11:00.004+02:00

Any historian knows that there are moments upon which everything turns. Leftists have a problem with that because it reeks of anti-Marxism, though that shows only how poorly Marx's thought has propagated into modern leftoid thinking. I think liberals like the notion of the turning point for the same reason that reactionaries like it - they figure it will finally prove that they have been right all along.

Historians know that in turning points are many horrors prefigured.

The right successfully seized the interpretation of 9/11 and liberal responses have not been to the event but to the reactionary interpretation of the event. So, on the one hand, liberals try to out-do the right wing in sympathy for victims, and then further extend victimhood as far as the eye can wander. On the other hand, liberals have tried to defend the vast array of the stigmatized that the right has created.

Liberals are wrong on both counts. Instead of being reactive to our opponents we need to understand what this turning point exposed about society, and what it portends for the future.

What 9/11 exposed is that the worldwide religious revival of the last 50 years remains a grave threat to freedom and democracy. What it portends for the future is that humanity will face the greatest crises of our existence with religious fantasy on the ascendant and scientific rationalism under its thumb.

And that means that now more than ever, blasphemy is a civic duty.

Among liberals these days one finds an astonishing failure of reason in its defense of religion. There is a confusion between the defense of the right to believe and the defense of belief. I like to put it this way: you are free to believe any nonsense that you want to believe, but keep that nonsense out of the public sphere. Do not invade the corridors of governance or the public debate with bronze age fantasies that have never died the airless death they so richly deserve.

The corollary of this error is this curious form of bad thinking: you can't condemn a religion for its published point of view because there is one member of that religion who doesn't agree with that point of view. That opinion is often expresses thus: I know this muslim, and he's really nice and he has gay friends, so you can't say that Islam is virulently homophobic.

This is a thin form of know-nothingism. Think of it this way: you can't say that the Catholic Church is not opposed to abortion because I know this nice Catholic lady who had an abortion. Or, you can't say that Mormonism isn't homophobic because I know this nice Mormon guy who went to a gay bar once.

The individual does not count in religion because any religion is a system. The system by its nature is composed of contradictory parts - let's call this the dialectical nature of religion. I could snidely remark at how little dialectical thinking one finds on the left, but that would not be nice. And leftism nowadays seems to consist mostly of supererogatory appeals to niceness rather than hard analysis of social conditions. But I digress ...

Any religion is a system composed of contradictory parts. A religion has to be valid for all conditions. In war and in peace, in love and hate, in richness and poverty, at home and abroad, among believers and infidels, for the past and for the future. Killing is wrong, and you must kill. Love is supreme, but you must not love. Share with your brethren, but poverty is divine. Speak not to the infidel, but spread the word of god among the unwashed.

We cannot understand religion without admitting its essentially contradictory nature. When liberals - again seeking appeal to niceness rather than deriving response from analysis - make arguments based on "true" religion, they fall prey to the most pernicious form of religious thinking. We see all the time appeals to the notion that such and such a religious fanatic has betrayed his religion which is at bottom about peace and love. People repeat this blather as if they did not have the opportunity to read the holy books and see how violent and bloodthirsty they actually are.

That most pernicious form of religious thinking is this: that being contradictory is the inner truth of religion which is understandable only by god. "God works in mysterious ways", that sort of nonsense. So when one points out a contradiction, that proves your misunderstanding. When one bemoans the vicious actual actions of the religious - beheadings, suicide bombings, hangings, honor killings - we are chided that we cannot see that these perpetrators are not representative of the "true" religion which is all goodness and niceness.

As long as liberals accept that religion is divine, we have no argument against that. But once we accept that religion is a human social system, we can call things by their true names.

It comes down to this: there is no god. 5,000 years later, there is still not one jot of proof anywhere that there is a divine plan or divine planner. We know that the sun did not stand still at the walls of Jericho. We know that Noah did not cram a pair of every living thing into a small wooden boat. We know that there was no angel whose saliva transmitted truth into the mouth of Mohammed. We know that Mohammed was not magically transported from Medina to Jerusalem. We know that no one who was later called Jesus rose from the dead or walked on water.

We know that religion is nonsense.

And now more than ever we are challenged to speak truth to these terrible death-dealing powers.

After 9/11 many of our reactionary neighbors sought to villainize individual Muslims. This was stupid and mean and wrong. But that does not mean that I cannot argue that al-Quaeda represents an ancient and prominent mode of thought and action in Islam that has operated in numerous and varied contexts throughout Islamic history. That does not mean that I cannot see the connection between the bloodthirsty operations of the theocratic Iranian state and the party of Islam that seeks to impose theocracy everywhere. That does not mean that I cannot aver that Islam is irreducibly antagonistic to genuine democracy and individual freedom. That does not mean that I cannot call upon Muslims to provide answers for the crimes committed by their co-religionists.

I apply to Islam the same standards that I apply to holy mother church. I think it is a pile of nonsense, and I say it is a pile of nonsense. I respect the civil rights of the believers to believe, but I do not respect the beliefs which are dangerous and anti-social.

Religion is a curse, and some curses are worse than others at different times in history. Today, Islam is the most powerful reactionary political force operating on the planet, unbowed as its Christian brethren are by a history of defeat at the hands of an Enlightenment. Islam freely does all over the planet what the papists did to Giordano Bruno in 1600, what the Inquisition did to heretics in Spain. Our freedom is a result of those countless courageous men and women who over the centuries took away the power of Christianity in the West to murder and torment those who disagree.

Islam needs an Enlightenment. It needs to be defeated by its own in its own home.

And our duty as secularists and liberals is to aid that in a relentless blasphemy, calling out religion - all religions without exception - exposing its lies and its depredations.

So let's start right now.

There is no god. Period. Arguments based on god are false. Without exception.

Roma, final post

2011-04-17T05:10:00.003+02:00

I've been sitting on this final post that I wrote over several days as my trip to Rome drew to a close because I thought I might create a number of posts out of it. Hasn't happened, so here it is, as is. BTW, starting to mount photos on my Flick site ... many more to come in the next week or so.

April 6: So, it's my birthday. And I am sitting on a train to Florence at 7:15 a.m. per long-standing plan. I keep reminding myself that it is my birthday because it just feels like my last day in Italy. I keep my trips short deliberately because I want to be hungry for more when I leave ... and I have succeeded in that on this trip. Definitely not looking forward to leaving tomorrow.

The train is, as you'd expect, smooth and comfortable. The chairs are firm and contoured with fixed foldout tables at every seat. Lots of leg room. A brown and tan decor. Very tasteful.

Two elderly and refined gentleman sit opposite me in similarly styled tan windbreakers. They moved back and forth several times before taking their seats, evidently trying to ascertain that they indeed had the right place. A quick pleasantry to me which I did not understand, but it was clear that they did not expect a reply so I nodded and smiled.

Across the aisle are what I can only describe as two vulgar young Americans. They have brought along a huge bag full of McDonalds which they are loudly crunching. The entire car is filled with the stench of the food. A young Italian man got up and changed seats without hesitation once they dropped their sorry behinds into their assigned slots next to him. The man is dressed like a slob showing all manner of hairy parts that we do not want to see, including at one point his misshapen stomach when he returned his ticket to his traveler's belt. No wonder Europeans think of us as the fat slobs of the world.

Oh well, they will probably fall asleep shortly ... that is my plan, as it were.

Twelve minutes out of the station and we are in the green countryside. No point in taking photos as the window is streaked and dirty, and the sun is low in the sky and glaring at me.

I love trains, and this quick Roma/Florence/Rome trip is itself a present. The capper will be the Ufizzi, and a quick tour of the sites. I have already stood at the spot where holy mother church burned Giordano Bruno to ashes because of his intelligent reflections that did not coincide with their then-operant theocracy. I shall shortly stand at the spot where holy mother church burned Fra Savonarola to ashes after gruesome torture because his insane fundamentalism came to represent a threat to them. He made quick, once in power, to condemn homosexuals to death ... fundies are that. They just can't stand other people having fun. But his virulent opposition to pleasure was not what got him condemned.

Our vulgar American fellow travelers have now turned their iPad into a gaming device, sound on, so that we all get to listen to various explosions and death chortles in low static-y volume. Italy is a loud place, that is certain, but it is voices and music and, horrors, screaming radio and TV that form the ambient sound. So I resent these little creeps for invading my sound space. The old gentleman across from me is looking down his nose at them as they giggle and play.

Deploy the earplugs!

I am going to turn to the International Herald Tribune for a few moments.

....

Dozed a bit, and so did the vulgars across the aisle per prediction.

The Herald Tribune has a story about French secularism. Western societies must defend secularism at all costs or we slide back into the hell of theocracy. The left likes to pretend that Islam is some kind of religion of peace, as it were. Nonsense. Across the globe, it is Islam that is practicing the ancient art of auto da fe with virulence and abandon. I don't trust holy mother church, but I can live next door because we have them under control. I don't trust Islam, but if we have to live next door to it, we need to control it too. Religion is a private matter, and its apperance in public space is always an immanent threat to freedom.

....

April 7: I am now on the 11-hour flight to San Francisco, and it is the day after my birthday. I thought I might just pretend that I was still on the train, but that makes no sense.

So to continue my thoughts on the secular and the sacred, everywhere we are reminded of the conflict. In most places in the globe, the threat of the religious to freedom is on the ascendant. The only hold-outs are Europe (minus Poland and such parts of the former Soviet Union as we might consider European), the English-speaking countries (minus the United States), and China and Japan. Did I forget anywhere? Perhaps most of South America.

Visiting Europe engages this personal conversation because the memory of religion is everywhere, and the evidence of the victory of the Enlightenment over it surrounds and smothers it. Even the bizarrely phrased message from the Ratzinger Pope on the back cover of the guide to the Vatican Museum notes that even though some of the visitors may not even be believers, they should recognize the value of the church for having preserved so much. Pretty cynical that, considering the vastly greater quantities of lives and relics that the church has systematically destroyed over the centuries.

We face that threat now again paradoxically precisely because the technological advances have lengthened and brought into brighter light the unsupportable distances between the bottom and the top. Religion exploits that and when it is victorious it hardens those social separations and makes them unbreachable. That is the curiosity, or more properly the recognizability, of the current reactionary impulse in America. In the name of all that is holy combined with a illogical populism, a bunch of purple faced morons will drive millions into poverty and ensure the steady separation of the rich from the rest of us.

This is a theme in what I think, and I will return to it. Now I want to think about my recent trip.

....

Random episodes:

As I was leave the Termini train station in Rome on my birthday, an orchestra apparently celebrating the second anniversary of something was giving a free concert in the entryway. I stayed for their Bolero which, in my inexpert opinion, seemed competent and moving if not sublime. It appeared to be mostly a youth orchestra with a few gray beards sprinkled in for what I imagine was mentoring. I listened to several speeches because I love the sound of Italian. It seems like a language that would not take me a lot of trouble to achieve some semblance of competence. I've always said that if I had a second lifetime, I would include Italian in it. Perhaps I should move that project one lifetime forward.

After the free concert, I wandered to the Via Gaeta to have dinner at the Ristorante La Famiglia per my twitter friend @jonvox's suggestion. I sat on the sidewalk and had an excellent vegetable soup and a risotto pescatora that featured two complete unshelled shrimp, heads and all, that I was not white sure how to handle. I squeezed and chewed on them as best I could and got some meat and flavor. I didn't want the staff to see my struggles. Why should I care; they see tourists once and then never again, and they will hardly remember a fortnight hence. But we all have a certain pride in the moment that others will respect us, think that we are something more than the run of the mill.

It's a vain conceit, unsupported by any evidence in life. When I look at tourists in San Francisco, I am not judging their authenticity in any sense. I admit I am looking for the good-looking ones, just because it's nice to look at nice things. And there it is, as a tourist, you let yourself become a thing for a while, a pampered thing, but a forgettable, disposable thing. Travel for me is this see saw between admitting that and hating it. Regardless, I find it hard to embrace my touristy thingness, and so I stumble from confidence to ineptitude by turns.

Traveling alone also mean that there is a lot of silence. Something I seek, again for the reflective character in it. But that too is maddening, and further underwrites this stumbling from ineptitude to confidence. I had hoped on this trip that I would turn that tension into writing, but I was not aggressive enough with myself until the end. That wil be first on my list of pointers I make for further reference. Just slap down the iPad in some cafe and write hello 15 minutes after you hit the ground running.

....

This plane flight itself changes a few patterns. I ended up with an aisle seat, and I admit that it is a real pleasure. I normally conspire to sit by the window so I can gaze out, but the downside, as one well knows, is that getting up involves moving inert humanity.

Also, the reading light in my seat does not work, and this part of the cabin is actually a little too dark for comfortable reading. So I watched a movie. I never do that. The movie was The King's Speech, which has been roundly and repeatedly recommended by all my friends. Certainly an excellent movie that at several points had me welling up. Beautiful colors and fine portrayals.

The movie is about charisma, and it is a flaw of secularism that we have lost touch with the power that charisma has and still exerts. Charisma inheres in authority, not in authenticity, and the modern secular world prefers to focus on authenticity rather than authority. That is why religion feels so pallid and farcical to us ... it may be authentic in some contexts, but it is no longer authentic in ours, so it is a drama, a performance, a spectacle to be turned off, as we douse the television before we go to bed.

I have no complaint with this. It makes for a life that is less ecstatic, where meaning is always contingent and ambivalent. But it makes for a world of discovery and reality, where everything human is part of us, where we do not need to pick one highly articulated truth to the exclusion of any other.

So the charisma in the film inhered in the position of the king, even as he confronted the modern realities of a new kind of performance. George VI certainly understood that his lack of personal charisma was irrelevant to his bearing the charisma of monarchy. The film is about a very personal, banal battle over that contradiction. His daughter, of course, has the royal charisma bug just right. One moment that struck me as very real was when the young Elizabeth gives a refined critique of Dad's big speech, that he has stumbled at first but got better toward the end. Queen Bess understands "the firm."

....

more quick hits:

The angelic beauty of the, I think, Danish boys who ate across from me at La Famiglia. They were evidently part of a much larger group of boys and girls - we are talking 16-ish - as various small mobs of them passed on the sidewalk between us and interlocuted. Again, I have to note how adult and self-possessed European youth seem. Sure they were kids, giggling and gaggling, but without the imposition and indiscipline that we have to put up with. Every time I come to Europe, I am impressed by how our revisionist approach to parenting does not stand up to comparison. Given that I have essentially nothing to do with children, and only encounter them as they misbehave in public, I suppose I am shooting hot air through a hole in my hat. But that's the way I see it.

Twice I was asked what I thought of Berlusconi, first by the driver from the airport, and then by a 20-something waiter in the pizza place on Via dei Guidari on, I think, Monday night. Both of them laughed at my response and said "bunga bunga." I guess that means something like "nooky nooky", and it is commonly used in the Italian papers when referring to the old fascist's dalliances. The phrase in Indonesian, for what it is worth, means flowers, and that has a certain referentiality given the deflowering and all that. The young waiter asked me first if I liked Obama, and I said I did. Then he asked me if I liked Berlusconi, and I shrugged my shoulders. That's when he laughed and said "bunga bunga." We later talked a little about football - he is an Inter fan and they were playing on the TV - and i told him about how my team had won the world series. Either he did not understand or was unimpressed.

On coffee: it is going to be hard to return to the pitiful excuse for espresso that we have to put up with in America after the delights of Italian espresso. I had a cappuccino at the Caffe Farnese across the piazza from the Palaccio Farnese that was a revelation, so smooth and frothy. Even the offbeat places had good coffee. I came to prefer cafe doppio lungo, or a long double espresso. In the States, you just cannot get them to make a long espresso ... they just don't know what it is. This again illustrates a difference between Europe and the States, one that lies, I think, at the core of the special loathing that the right wing has for for Europe. It has to do with greed and apportionment. Everybody always wants more for themselves, but it is possible to balance that with restraint. But restraint in the States seems like it is giving something to somebody else - it is the zero-sum game fear that haunts the American soul. If you are doing well, than that must mean something is going wrong for me. The vast double soy lattes with whipped cream that we order is a way getting more and more. I have long argued with American baristas that cappuccino is a question of proportion not amount when they ask if I want a large, ultra-large, or stinkin' extra effin' huge. So I order a macchiato and tell them to put 2 teaspoons of foam in; I still normally have to scoop out 4 or 5 tablespoons of foam only to find that the espresso is really a cafe au lait.

More, folks, is more. More is only better sometimes. Other times it is worse.

Coffee teaches us this.

Roma, Day 5, evening

2011-04-05T21:12:00.000+02:00

Sitting in Voglia di Pizza on Via dei Guibbonari near the hotel ... and writing! Just getting the hang of this place, and then off I go. That is the way with short trips. I promise to make a lot of notes to myself on the airplane to get going faster next time.

The curiosity of this trip is the failure of my laptop which forced me to change the way I photograph. That's been a good thing. I have become so used to three exposures a shot, and then all the endless, crazy-making file management. With limited chip space, I have been more careful, and it will probably mean I get a viewable result more quickly and with less time spent. In the modern world, if not always, time is the irreplaceable piece, especially for a working stiff like me.

I ended up retracing the steps of my first day to some degree. Before that, I stopped in the modern glassy container building that houses the remnants of Augustus' Ara Pacis, his "Altar of Peace" temple to his own conceits, frankly. That said, history, at least in the current age, gives too much credit to Julius Caesar and not enough to Augustus. Just as Napoleon rescued the French Revolution by creating an empire on its grave, so Augustus rescued the Republic by remaking it to his own image. In the sense of being a sporting fan of history, I root for him. As a diehard democrat, I have to formally question the victory of the imperial, but it was that victory that provided the broad middle, such as it was, whereby Roman civilization became the founder not only of the Europe we know, and the Christianity we endure, but also the science and literature and thought that has endured.

All that said, inexpertly I admit, I was bored by the interminable audio tour of the Ara Pacis, and my fatigue caught up with me. Had to get back on the road before I fell asleep while pretending to rest.

I picked my way through this maze of a city to the inimitable Giolitti gelato parlor, per my twitter friend @jonvox - I hope his head does not swell, but he has been a fine interlocutor and guide. Again, per my tweet of some time back, I owe you a dinner and drinks whenever you land in San Francisco! I chose to press my way to the second clerk because he was ... o well, I admit it ... really hot. But I think he thought I had jumped the line which was, as is the manner of these things, more a crush than anything else. So he served 4 or 5 folks in front of me, but then graciously took my order for crema and amoretto. And, @jonvox, you are right, after this there is no other gelato that will ever measure up. I took good care not to splooge any of the ambrosia on my nice pressed shirt.

And then I headed back first to the Pantheon, then to San Luigi de Francese to re-review the Caravaggio's, and then to Piazza Navona. I did not actually go into the Pantheon again, but rather wrote the three postcards that I always send from any trip. This viewing of Caravaggio was much more pleasant than the last in the same locale given heightened attention to the imbecilic flash-photo behavior by the custodians. I lingered long. He is an amazing painter whom I have admired from afar for many decades. That said, given all I have experienced here, I have to say that one may come to Rome to worship Caravaggio, but he's have to stay to worship Bernini! That's another story.

The Piazza Navona this time was in its full splendor. The scaffolding that piqued me in my jet lag was gone, and it was wide open this time, filled with throngs. I tarried among the art-sellers, and ended up buying a few souvenir ink drawings - 8 euros each, clearly touristy ... but, jeez, I gotta get some kind of souvenir. I am such a ludicrously bad shopper - I had dawdled in the entrances to several men's shops, my intention being that I would buy a belt if I found one. Notwithstanding my dapper dress - pressed wool slacks and button-down shirt - they paid no attention to me. The camera is a dead giveaway, I guess. I even went into a tourist shop to try to buy T-shirts, but eventually fled in confusion despite the practiced entreaties of the seller.

But I did manage to buy something after all that in the Piazza Navona ... and then bull-headed back to the Campodoglio to complete an interrupted purchase of the massive Italian language catalog of the Faces of Power exhibit I had seen on day 2. It is quite possible that this massive tome will put me over some weight limit on the way back but I just know that I will never forget the book if I do not get it, so get it I did. My fetishism of the book really knows only the bounds of my purse, and then only just barely.

On the way I ventured into (name to be filled in) ookstore in search of relevant works of theater thinking of my great theater pal back home. But since he reads this blog, I must leave my discoveries a mystery.

Speaking of which, earlier today I ventured into an antique booksstore. A 1912 Arthur Rackham illustrated Shakespreare's Tempest went for 300 euros - it was like velvet in my fingers. I craved it, and I could spend 300 euros if I chose to, but I could not afford it. The tempation was only virtual; I never would have pulled the switch. Later I held in my hands a massive 17th century collection of the works of Plautus. Imagine, I thought, having that as warm comfort after I retire. I did not ask the price. She probably would have laughed, and whatever figure she gave would be only what wandered into her head to humiliate me.

My gorgonzola and zucchini pizza has arrived. Roman pizza is quite fine, not the fat paean to the bottomless pit of consumerism that American pizza is. I will pay it the full attention it deserves, and then return to my digs to post this. Well, one quick promised stop at Bar Farnese to sample their finest bourbon on the rocks, if my exhausted feet, further encumbered by a pair of beers here, will allow it.

Roma: Day 5, in a Bistro

2011-04-05T14:11:00.001+02:00

Sitting in a little cafe, Bar Bistro Centurion at the very end of the Via Corso facIng the Piazza del Popolo with a trio of strings playing Italianate popular tunes behind me. They are quite good and I think I will buy the cd if they are still here when I stand up. One problem with travel is that you are bogged down by your stuff and not very nimble at conjunctures like this.

I managed to undermine myself at Santa Maria del Popolo which has a bunch of Caravaggio's, including his St. Peter and the upside down crucifixion. As I passed, a horde of schoolchildren were entering, and I thought, ok, photograph the Piazza first since then light is perfect, and then hit the chiesa after the horde is gone. I see them exiting 30 minutes late and head over. A kindly older priest apologizes, "Chiusa la chiesa ... alle quarto." Pardon the fractured Italian, but that is how I remember it: the church is closed until 4 o'clock.

This too will have to await the next trip.

I figure that, if I apply myself as I want to, I have about 10 European trips before I am 70. I could scatter my interests, or I could focus on two or three countries. If the latter, Italy gets to be one of them.

My tagliatelli con funghi has arrived ... not bad for an obvious tourist place.

This is the first time I have actually written outside the hotel. I meant to do a lot more of that. That is illustrative of the fact that I have not traveled in Europe since 2006, and things, not to mention I, have changed. I've had to re-learn how it is that I want to travel. The key is: Faster start on the first day or two and, as is my wont, I have reduced that to a simple tactic. Bring a damned tab of Ambien and make sure that I get a proper night's sleep at the end of the first day.

My trio has become a quartet with the addition of an accordion. After long tuning up, they finally get back into it. Very La Dolce Vita, at this point.

I photograph all day and into the night but what I cannot photograph is the exquisite natural masculinity of the men here. From the carabinieri who strut around in their razor sharp uniforms seemingly paying attention exclusively to each other, to pairs of like-aged men striding and gesticulating, to the hordes of young men passionately entertaining each other. Romanticizing here, but it is a great show ... and I think Italians like the great show. The women are no slouch either, but they are, frankly, not as elegant as the Parisian women. They are too brusque for that ... and I like them the more for it.

All that said, this is one of the most abidingly heterosexual places I have ever visited. I may find the men achingly sexy, but they give no indication that they find each other sexy, unlike the Germans or Americans whose latent homosexuality seems always the order of the day.

Enough for now. I now confront the single most difficult part of travel ... finding a souvenir. In Berlin it was a glass from a second-hand market, in Paris it was a hairbrush. I buy books all along the way, mostly museum catalogs, but actually coughing up dough for a memento is impossibly difficult. Wish me luck

Roma: Day 4, the Vatican

2011-04-04T23:02:00.006+02:00

I am so bombed tired after over 12 hour of tromping about that I have been on my hotel bed for two hours unable to muster the energy to pick up the iPad, as it were, and blog. But best I commit at least my itinerary here for purposes of thinking about it later.

I had a 10:30 appointment with the ticketeers of the Vatican Museum, so I headed off with plenty of time to spare. I stopped at the Caffe Farnese which I believe the to be the same as the Bar Farnese recommended by my Twitter friend @jonvox. I had a cappuccino, my first in Rome, and it is as if I just had my first cappuccino ever. The Cafe Flore in San Francisco used to make a good one before the ownership chagned reduced them to the standards, such as they are, that "guide" every other espresso place in America. But this cappuccino was frothy and composed and at one with the palate. The coffee is Rome is incomparable.

I walked along the Tevere, and descended to its banks where I was the sole denizen. Made me a little nervous since I would be perfectly set jup for a robbery. But I saw not a soul. As I approached the Ponte Sant' Angelo, alas, the first thing I saw was a giant yellow crane in front of Hadrian's tomb, what the faithful call Castel Sant' Angelo. Hadrian is my favorite emperor by a long stretch, and not only be cause he was the most unabashed and exclusive homosexual to hold the post. His travels and the broadness of his vision marked the height of the Pax Romana. I do not have the time to go to his villa, but that will be a good excuse for a second trip to Rome.

On that point, I have loved every city I have visited in Europe. I used to struggle as to whether Berlin or Paris was my favorite. But none have affected me the way Rome has. I love the people, the way of life, the majesty of its past. I feel like I will come here again even if it means crossing some other capital off my list.

I arrived at St. Peter's as the morning light was bathing the cathedral, so I had no choice but to photograph it quickly if I wanted proper photos and also make my appointment with the museum. The square is so filled with crowd control devices, seating, scattered scaffolding, and modern lights and audio equipment, that a lot of the magic is sacrificed. Good enough. My love of history does not permit me to forget what this institution did to human freedom over the centuries. Even so, it is a really cool looking church. And Bernini's colonnade certainly lives up to billing.

I made my way to the entrance to the Vatican Museum, and managed to be a half hour early. No problem, they let me in anyway. The difference between an online reservation and waiting in the line appeared to be over an hour, so gawd noze why anybody would decide to wing it. But plenty did.

I spent seven hours in the museum, and even so managed to miss the Pinacoteca, or painting gallery. So I did not see their Caravaggio's. But the enormous collection of ancient sculpture itself would be more than enough for a full day's work. Predictably it was the numerous Bacchus, Hermes/Mercury, and other athletic visions that drew me. Most significantly, it was several depictions of Antinous, the ill-fated lover of Hadrian who was either drowned in the Nile as a sacrifice for Hadrian's desire for longevity, or did the deed to himself to the same end. He became the center of a substantial cult which, frankly, might have been a damned sight better than the semitic death cult that actually ended up winning the west.

Two things about that: one, jeeeezus keeerist, does Christianity love death or torment or what? And what do they have against penises? Most of them are broken off, some of them with a neat drill hole in place of what was once a modest uncut projection. And most of the rest are covered with tacky plaster fig leaves. We all know about both of these madnesses, but witnessing them in this incredible collection makes it all the more absurd.

New appreciation for Raphael. And then the Sistine Chapel.

First off, the madding hordes. Notwithstanding the strict prohibition on cameras in the chapel, flashes were going off all over the place. Ludicrous. And people yammering away as if they were standing in line at a supermarket. I am an atheist with nothing but contempt for the conceits of religion. But in a sacred space, for crying loud, shut the eff up!! People banging into me as I craned to view the ceiling. It truly is an amazing room, I wish they had special viewings for people who promised to be quiet and respect the rules.

After that, I squeezed St. Peter's into an hour. Again with the bloody flashes at the Pieta!! Nice cathedral, as I've said. But everything about it betokens power more than spirituality. The vast size of everything seemed to call it more than "we can" than that "we see." The Baldocchio, certainly magnificent, seems to get in the way of the altar. I saw only a few people at devotions, and the larger number in front of a truly ghoulish crypt-ic representation of the dead John XXIII. Two young priests with very clean soles kneeling at a side altar. The odd nun. It is a secular age, at least in Europe, and the church has to put up with it.

An aside re children. In every case since I have been here, whenever I see misbehaving children, they turn out to be English speaking, either American or Australian. The very worst today were two Australian boys who should have been beaten on the spot, and I mean that with no irony whatsoever. American parenting, not something that has impressed me very much for some decades, shows is deficiencies in the whining and rudeness and general inability to behave with any kind of respect for others. Nuff said ... for now.

I took a quick tour of the Vatican Museum of treasures, mostly catholic paraphernalia distinguished more by its gaudiness than any subtly of composition. And then I ambled out into the square where I sat for 15 minutes to try to get some of the pain out of my feet. I forced myself to fulfill my vow to head to the Trastevere, and a good thing that was. Ended up at Bar Poeta, per Rick Steves' excellent suggestion and had an excellent salmon and arugula pizza in an ancient alley. Two young gay guys walked past holding hands - the first openly gay behavior I have seen in Rome, other than the waiter at the gay restaurant mentioned yesterday. And from there, via some night photography, i walked home, erringly, finally knowing the alleys around here well enough to walk pretty directly to where I am now abed.

Again, to my proofreading friends, bear with me. Editing to follow when I return home.

Roma: Day 3

2011-04-03T23:00:00.003+02:00

Just got back and did all the maintenance. A little tipsy as a rsult of a Negroni and a rather large Maker's Mark in the the pizzeria at the corner. Got out of there for 20 euros including tip, and the two drinks, so that's pretty good.

So this is a blast away itinerary for the day, mostly as a mnemonic when I start looking at photos.

I intended ot start out by hightailing it to the Piazza del Popolo to take in the Caravaggios at santa Maria del Populo, but Rick Steves says that they close at 12:30 on Sunday, Got a deliberate late start that ended up being a little too late. So instead I headed for the Colisseum per original plan. Stumbled across the Theater of Marcus (if I remember correctly, and may yet correct this), and then the main synagogue. The traveled that length of the circus Maximus which is more a hint than a statement at this point. Some locals beating drums at the bottom of a set of steps. Sunday is for drummers the world over.

And thence to the Colisseum, via the Arch of Constantine, which is nine boggling. His is a career that a constantly investigate. Everybody wants him for hero or villain. He was just a good emperor who picked the wrong religion, and ended up picking the wrong creed, and then only in extremes actually succumbed to its dark magic. And then to the Colosseum which is mammoth. The swarms of tourists try to engulf it in their obliviousness. So I pretend they are not there, or that they are the descendants of those who, alas, were not victims of the horrors. I suppose I should't say that ... but I did think it. I am pretty good at getting pictures without the surrounding loing crowd, and I hope to prove that when I finally can download and view my pix,

I left and went searching for the Metro which is strangely hardly marked at all. I stumbled across one of the gay bars I had marked as possible night eateries or dinrkeries. But I did not tarry because they do not have coffee on the menu. Say what? Get an espresso machine, queens.

The train to Spagna station where I tailed an impossibly sexy and skinny Italian boy and his girlfriend through the long tunnels that end up depositing you in the Borghese gardens. Wonderful urban parkm filled with lovers and families and cranky old dudes and expressionless old women on a fine April Sunday afternoon. Had an espresso and a quick sandwich at an outdoor cafe with a smoking hot but painfully rude young waiter ... I guess he could feel the burn of my eyes on his hindquarters. And then to the Borghese galleries where I had yet another espresso and sandwich. Doing well in the food department.

If you go to Rome, don't miss the Borghese. If you are a culture nut, book two viewings, both at the end of the day. The allotted two hours is not enough to languish. Perhaps four hours is too much. The 30 minute limit in the Pictatura upstairs is ludicrously short, although I went for the second to last slot and they let me stay a full hour.

Thence wended my way via the Via Veneto to the Fontana Tritone, and then to the Trevi Fountain whose majesty is such that it is not belittled by its misfortune of being the default tourist hangout. Played photo and video games there, and was asked by a doll of a young French guy to take his pic ... and he returned the favor.

Night photos as I maneuvered down the Vai Corso and ultimately to the Pizzeria where I started this post. I almost back-tracked to the aforementioned gay bar, but when I did the math, it would have put my back here just a little too late.

Gotta crash - early call at the Vatican.

Roma, Day 2: The Ancients

2011-04-03T11:02:00.004+02:00

I have a lot to say here, and perhaps will at some point. But I will restrict myself to the two moments that gave me the most pause.

The bust of Elagabulus, an "attractive and hormonally charged teenager" as the linked article states of this Severan emperor; there's a pic of the bust at the link also. He looked so modern that I kept staring at it and wondering at how absolute was absolutism in the ancient world. He tried to establish a religion but he had neither the luck nor the charisma of the 10 or so men who actually did establish long-lasting religions. The bust was eerie. NOt the best piece by a long shot in a Museum filled with wonders. I stopped long at the Dying Gaul, and was transfixed by the giant head of COnstantine. Somehow I missed the boy picking the thorn from his foot. I loved all the nude divine youth. But it was Elagabulus who made me pause to consider the transcendence of being human.

The second moment was occasioned by the extant frescoes in Augustus' house on the Palatine. It brought home the notion that he ate dinner there, he mused, he paced, he ordered and he cajoled. The colors were alive, and so like ghosts of a past where people lived and breathed. I tarried so long that the young female guard dogged me a bit. Not the most spectacular place in an area filled with glories. But, again, it gave me pause. And that is what we are looking for.

The seagulls are starting to buzz me ... I suppose wondering why I am here so long with no food. That means it is time to go. I probably will not set foot back here until 10 tonight.

Roma, Day 2: Travel Notes, Observing

2011-04-03T10:27:00.003+02:00

The Musei Capitolini atop Capitloline Hill is now one of my favorite places in the world. It lacks the universality of the Louvre, but Italy has not been imperial for about 1700 years. To have a Louvre, a country needs the means to thieve, and that means empire. Wht this museum has is as much pride of place as any I have ever been in.

The place was generally less crowded than I expected except for the three or four traveling bands of visiting youth. I arrived in the midst of one and the guards asked me to step aside for a moment ... then they gave up and pushed the students aside so I could get in.They scanned my bag without looking at the monitor. This particular band of youth dogged me throughout ... they were a gallery ahead or a gallery behind most of the time.

Italisn youth, and this seems broadly true of continental European youth in general, are so much more adult in their behavior than American youth. They are certainly skinnier, and I mean that in a healthy sense. They look after themselves, they do not seem to need constant adult supervision. But even so, in a group like this, they marched along and stuck to the program. The tour guide lectured in a strong voice, uninterrupted by queries or complaints. It was always a dense patter, and I noticed this again and again in numerous languages all day long.

I get the sense that Europe has not invested in the culture of parenting as indulgence and service. Children are expected to be and do and to take some responsibility for themselves. Youth swarm all over the place here. On the Piazza de' Fiore by night, on the Piazza Navona by day, in gender separated clumps of 3 to 20, they cackle and gaggle and move about. But hey do not interfere or litter or demand. They are, as I said, rather adult about it all. I'd rather be alone, but that option is not available. So I would much rather be surrounded by a bunch of European youth than American ones.

Suddenly in the Forum there is a young boy and girl running and screaming and getting underfoot. They speak ... ah, yes, they are American. I saw an Italian mother smack her son on the rump. He looked up with a smirk. She said something, his eyes widened and he shrugged. Whatever it was, he was in the wrong, he knew it, he took the hint, and life moved on. In America, it would be a Judge Judy episode that might end up with the child being taken by Child Protective Services.

This is all very general, and informed by a day's observation. But it is the same impression I have had in Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, and Prague, and largely in London.

The other note on Italians I might make is that they all seem rather mannish ... that is something shy of masculine but certainly not feminine. The men are unabashedly masculine in their demeanor, and so are the boys. But the women are distinctly mannish in the sense of blunt and forward and self-possessed. I like it. I can see why it would be difficult to be gay here. But I like the forward and unadorned character of being. I will try to write more about that anon.

Aside: two Americans with Southern accents have arrived on the rooftop garden where I write ... the woman staopped to talk to me and told me the story of her Italian grandparents and how they made their way by growing and selling vegetables from the back of a truck in Florida. Very friendly. That said, despite being from FLorida, she was unable to identify a seagull and wondered what kind of big bird it was.

A note on eating: I did a lot better than yesterday. I suppose my ranting about it in yesterday's post may have inspired some "adult" approaches. I picked a restaurant for dinner in the morning as I left. I had lunch in the Musei Capitolini cafeteria, eating on the rooftop patio. When I arrived at my dinner place, Ristorante Santa Ana, I believe, the place was still empty since it was a little shy of 7 p.m. The waiter replied to my "per uno" with a big questioning "adesso?" Sure enough, he gestured to a good table with a bemused shrug. Big personality, again, unadorned by a false meekness or submission. I had a sublime linguini with porcini mushrooms ... and they know exactly what al dente means ... and a grilled fish that they described as sea bass but looked an awful lot like trout to me, and a giant salata mista, mixed salad. with a beer. Again, 40 euros, but this time worth it. The fish was sublime.

I picked out a spot for dinner tonight that is close by in case I do not find anything on my "La Dolce Vita" night walk home, thanks be to Rick Steves. It is an inexpensive spaghetti pizza place. 40 euros a night is a little sleep for the likes of me.

Roma, Day 2: Travel Notes, the Mundane

2011-04-03T09:58:00.006+02:00

We'll get to the ancients in a bit. They can wait ... to paraphrase a well known Roman quote, then were what we are and we will become what they are, but in the meanwhile we still have this business of living to get after.

I am sitting in the rooftop garden of the Hotel Smeraldo. After yesterday's grueling pace, the prior's night's inadequate sleep, and a last minute nasty surprise, I did manage 8 full hours of deep sleep. Notwithstanding that the mattress is so hard that a Prussian soldier would find it challenging, and that my rib cage aches as a result, I am filled with the optimism of feeling rested. So I have decided to tarry a bit this morning, and reflect on travel, the ancients, and, of course, myself. Because traveling alone is really designed to foreground the dialectic of introspection and reflection. In other words, no matter how vast the experience, you can't quite stop wondering what it all means in terms of the life that you live.

The little disaster is that my laptop's power cable suddenly stopped working. I am pretty sure that it is just a broken wire inside the cable because there was the tiniest little sound at the moment it occurred. But there is also the possibility that the internal power supply to the laptop is gone. In any event, it means I have 91% of a battery that drains like a cracked sink. I do not want to download photos onto a machine that might die; it is four year's old and it would be a challenge to find someone else with a similar laptop in order to power up my battery for future work. I'll just have to wait until I get home to determine if I am suddenly, after the "big trip" in the market for a new laptop. In the meanwhile, than gawd for the iPad, and photographs wil have to stay on their chips until I return.

This forces another accommodation. I normally burst shoot three exposures of anything, with an auto brackete of plus and minus a third of a stop. Mostly the minus 1/3 tends to work out, even for low light shots, partly for the saturation value, and partly because the second exposure tends to have less camera shake. Yesterday I shot over 1600 exposures!! But even on an 8 gig card, that will be too many for 4 days shooting. I have three cameras with me ... o the joys of 21st century middle-class consumerism ... so I am going to retire the middle camera, and hope to get by with 2 8-gig chips for the rest of the ride. I'll make a call on Tuesday as to whether or not I can get through the Wednesday trip to Florence with merely 7,000 exposures!!

So, notes to self ... remember the polarizing filter next time. The time for a new laptop may not coincide with my carefully arranging spending plans. Splurge on extra ships. You didn't need the middle camera anyway.

A little not to my fellow editor friends: given that I writing this on an iPad and that the interface is challenging and that I am sitting in the last little bit of shade before mean mother sun makes it impossible to see the screen, I am not going to do a lot of copy editing. I will re-read and correct in the safety and langour of home.

No photos, per above!

Roma, Day 1. Notes, and Eating

2011-04-02T06:36:00.005+02:00

A guy could easily fall in love with Rome, and this guy pretty much has.

This first day on the ground was dedicated to the area near the Hotel Smeraldo where I am staying. Nice little place, recommended by a good friend, and ten minutes from the Piazza Navona and the Pantheon, and under five if I hurried from the Piazza de' Fiore where holy mother church infamously burned Giordano Bruno alive and nude in 1600.

The highlight of the day was gazing at Caravaggio's David with the Head of Goliath, normally in the Borghese, but relocated to the _____ as part of a show of contemporary records that touched on the painter's life. The painting is so raw and unromantic; this is no hallowed figure, but a mean boy who has risen to a challenge. The same show also had his portrait of Paul VI, the Borghese pope, who looked like some kind of modern gay leather guy duded up in fancy red and lace robes for a drag show that he didn't really want to do.

It was hard to enjoy the Caravaggio's in the San Luigi dei Francesi becasue of the incessant, albeit banned, flashing of cameras in aid of what must certainly end up as bad photography. Buy the postcards, you morons, and just shut up while you look at the art.

Ooops, cranky.

While we're at it, though, it still drives me nuts that people don't know that flash reflects off glass.

So as my wanderings began, I curiously could not find the Piazza Navona. That's a bit like missing the ocean at the beach because you are turned facing inland. But the good side of that was that the first site I saw ended up being the Pantheon. Christianity is all around in the Pantheon, but I kept looking at the stones, and the marble, and imagining how long it has been there. Swept up in reverence for time and ancientness.

Frankly, the Piazza Navona was tacky - not the fault of the architecture, but a vast amount of scaffolding in aid of what appears to be an upcoming concert. It was hard to see the majesty except up close. It was there that I decided that I would confine my video efforts to running water. I think I am a creditable photographer, but I do not have the patience for video, at least yet. SO if I get a bunch of footage maybe I can play around. There was a bit of a farce when I tried to shoot the Fontana el Moro. Every time I turned on the camera, a jackhammer started up behind me, and would only stop when I walked away. I did manage to get about 20 seconds in the end.

I watched the swarming youth in the Piazza Navona, but I think I will defer my notes on that to a later post.

When I travel, I am a terrible eater. As I write this, it is 6:30 in the morning, and I have been awake since 4. I am starving hungry in one of the world's capitals of cuisine. When I look for a place to eat, I am like an insect in a spider's web, strung up between mutually exclusive options, the stickiness of my situation entirely internal to my psyche. I fear that I will be stuck in a place with lousy food, and I don't want to go to a place that is oriented to tourists. But I deeply feel that most better places probably don't really want a single diner, and besides there is the language problem ... although that did not stop me from the same behavior in London or Paris where I speak the relevant language. I do not want to spend too much money, but I am afraid of seeming cheap. I loathe being approached by shills or friendly maitre d's so I never tarry long perusing a menu lest I have to say no or even just maybe. I feel as if I am required to go in if they say hello to me.

So when I look for food, I circle, and circle, and stop for photos, and circle back. I pick failsafes and then get lost and can't find my way back. I don't want to go into crowded places both because of the racket and because I, again, figure they don't want to waste a table on lone eater. But I don't want to go into empty places because I figure they can't be good. I don't want to go into popular places because I might feel cheap. But I don't want to go into intimate places because I feel like a voyeur.

All this is nonsense, of course. But it makes eating a nightmare. It took me about half an hour to find a place to buy a slice of pizza mid-day. The guy was actually really rude, but the pizza was sublime ... salmon and herbs, I would call it. That said, it was 6 euros and I was still hungry. I forced myself into some place for an espresso just for practice. They were nice, but I was so shy that they actually had a chat about who should rescue me. Later, filled with overconfidence, I went into another espresso place and stood by the counter. Three clerks studiously ignored me until one finally pointed to the cashier ... o, thought I, pay first. I watched others put their tickets down on the counter, and so did I. But still they ignored me. Finally, the middle-aged and haughty waiter picked up my ticket and said long and languidly, "Shuuugaaar?" ... i.e., sugar. "no" quoth I and I think that got me a little cred. The espresso was sublime.

So when I set out at 8 to find a place to eat dinner ... this is Rome, mind you, where food is everywhere ... it took me 90 minutes and I finally ended up in an outdoor place in the Piazza de' Fiore. when I said "uno", the lady nodded and disappeared. A party of six crowded in front of me, so I retreated, and came bloody close to leaving. But I was starving at this point. So I stuck it out and finally the lady re-appeared, seeming annoyed that I was still there. She wanted to stick me in a back table, but I pointed to one up front, so she shrugged and nodded. The waiter was a fine older man who sensed my discomfort and warmed to me. I had gnocchi with black mushrooms and a Roman salad with anchovy dressing. And some wine. Delicious, not filling, and 40 euros. At that rate, I could be bankrupt on Sunday ... but it wouldn't matter because I would be passed out from hunger in some piazza no more than 60 metres from a feast.

So travel for me is a combination of fabulous days of seeing and walking and experiencing, and nightmarish nights of searching, searching, searching for something to eat.

Enough for now.

All photos by arod, taken today. More on my Flick site once I figure out how to upload stuff - for some reason it is being cranky and refusing!

After the Deluge

2010-11-04T04:27:00.000+01:00

On the morning after the deluge of an election we just suffered, I dragged myself out of bed at 5, only a half hour earlier than usual, and walked the dog through the silent cool morning. I have been enjoying seeing Orion peer over the trees of late. Orion's appearance is a sign that Christmas is soon to be upon us. I was up early so I could make my way down Highway 1 to California State University Monterey Bay for an all-day Registrars meeting.

The drive down Highway 1 is one of the sweetest highway drives on the planet I am quite sure. This morning the mist lay low on the water and in the cliffs. The surf has been outrageously high, so even in the dim morning light, the side of the road was graced by smoking hot surfers struggling with their wet suits. I saw a bevy of red-tailed hawks, and any number of silhouetted herons and egrets.

The drive was about a hundred miles to Seaside which is just shy of Monterey, the town made famous by John Steinbeck. And as I got past Santa Cruz, the great agricultural fields of that part of the world hove into view, replete with their armies of migrant farm workers.

The election just past is about a population that rejects the notion of a world that changes. You need only drive by fields of artichokes to know that this is not the world that they imagine. This is not the world which has made their infernal greed and self-absorption possible. But no matter, they are stamping their feet, and they are demanding that tough politicians call a halt to it all and remake their world into what they fantasize that it once was.
The proof of their lie is certainly visible at the austerely modern and almost vacant campus of CSU Monterey Bay. Don't get me wrong ... this is a noble experiment staffed by people who are dedicated to its expansive mission. That mission is evident all over its web presence. The experiment talks a lot about quality education, small classes, dedicated professors, and especially diversity. What was readily apparent, even in vastness and absence of humanity, was that the student population here is disproportionately Latino and Black. The long and the short of it, tea baggers be damned, is that the children of the exploited laborers who pick the tea baggers' artichokes and mow their lawns and change their discarded elders diapers are the future of California. Their education is the highest calling, higher indeed than the gold standard stuff that is the mission of the sainted and essential Major Research University (MRU) that keeps my lowly lifestyle supplied with shekels. The CSU Monterey Bay's 2008-2018 Strategic Plan (pdf) has a telling graphic that states its entire case.
Look at the middle figure in each of the two graphs. A perfect example of a picture being worth a thousand words. Anyone who needs this explained is not paying attention.

My purpose here is not to argue the obvious good of a society educating its residents, be they "legal" or "illegal". And my purpose is only partially to note that ineluctable and eternal rule of history that "people move" ... yes they do. More so, my point is the enormous good that is done by rational and sensible government. CSU Monterey Bay is built on the decommissioned Fort Ord; its spare architectural quality is a combination of its newness, the flat local geography, and the fruits of resurrecting decommissioned concrete bunkers, as it were. And it is an enormous contribution to the possibility of a fruitful and prosperous future, funded entirely by government money.

More than anything, though, my point here is what I turned over in my mind as I drove north on Highway 1 after the meeting. The afternoon was unseasonably hot, there was more traffic, and the mist and mystery was overlain by the haze of traffic and human invention. I did see another smoking hot surfer, and a white-chested raptor that I could not identify. But mostly I thought about how the Democrats cannot defend a place like CSU Monterey Bay, how they cannot use it as an example of how rational government raises all.

The madness that has swept this country did not come from nowhere. It came from that perpetually frothing 20% who are just mad at everything and so overwhelmed by the simplicity of their own obviousness that they gurgle when they are not frothing. But moreso it came from the Democrats who insist on acting like Jimmy Carter. For that is what Obama instantly became the moment that his heels were rested from dancing the inaugural night away. He forgot that the failure of the previous two Democratic presidents was written by their pandering to their enemies, their failure to motivate their own followers, the fear of using their own power.

I am utterly pessimistic about this country, my adopted refuge. The home of the greatest scientific inventions in human history, its politics immune to reason.

There will be plenty of time to think about this as the Republicans go about systematically ruining our future in the next two years, and as Obama finds ever greater depths of craven apology.

But for today, I at least enjoyed a long drive on this spectacular coast, and was able to amuse myself with speculation.

All photos, except the graphs, by Arod, taken today at California State University Monterey Bay

Place

2010-08-20T06:13:00.000+02:00

Frank Rich's piece on the little mosque in Manhattan today, as is the norm with Rich's writing, cleared the haze so as to better focus on the key determinants. He argues that the hysterical right opposition to the mosque betrays their hero General Petraeus and his efforts in the Afghanistan war which increasingly only the far right supports. In other words, the right wing, if it were true to its principles, should favor Park51, as the wee mosque is often agnostically labeled.

It has been some time since the American right wing has been true to any principle other than naked cynicism, and this is Rich's underlying point. But the corollary of this argument to me is that a principled opposition to a cynical religious project by secularists should not be stymied by the fact that the far right is in its usual purple rage about everything and anything. I oppose the project because I believe that civil society has the right to defend itself against religion and its lies and depredations, and its cynical sleight of hand and misdirection. I don't see Islam as a religion of peace any more than I see Catholicism as a defender of life or an educator of youth. New York has the right to determine zoning, and it should determine that no further religious structures should be built near the former twin towers.

All the current ratatat-tat-tat about the aforementioned little mosque in Manhattan has got me thinking in a larger sense about place. And the place of place. It is a curious contradiction in secular society that religion places so much emphasis on place, and then, their faces plain with unctuous honesty, asks us to forget about it when it suits their ends. In other words, religion proposes that certain places are more holy than others, and demands that everyone respect their determination of which places are to be so deemed. But then it backs up and says that it has the right to change the meaning of any given place without reference to any thoughts or opposition that secular society and secular individuals might have about it. They always insist that they be recognized as holding all the cards and that we submit to them.

Christian churches have argued that zoning does not apply to them, that environmental legislation does not apply to them. They run tax-free businesses that compete with their non-religious neighbors. They demand special access to education and the public purse. I am against all of that for all religions. I think secular society should always be righteously suspicious about religion in all its endeavors.

Liberal thought betrays itself when it adopts without critique the prejudices and demands of religious thought. And nowhere is the conceit of religion more evident than in its demands about place.

Various senses of place. We all enjoy what I will call the Walt Whitman sense of place: the numinous refraction of the calm majesty of life in the quiet and solitude of nature, in the waves of sensation created by wind and light and weather. As the trees bend and the grain undulates, as the birds soar and the insects hover, so our souls move in syncopation, stirring our being in harmony and in contrast to the land, water, and sky which are our home.

We liberals seek to hold on to that beauty through parks and reserves and respect for nature. I say it is precisely our secularism that opens us to the necessity of preserving nature ... those who have bought into some gawd or other can cheaply and egotistically dispense with nature in favor of the supernatural. They abandon the presence of place for the immanence of the divine. It is this "zero-sum divider" that permits the religious to adopt all manner of positions that are inimical to the expressed spirit of their own imaginary system. Yes we may be stewards of the earth, they say, but given the greatness of gawd, we still want our Hummers. When they experience the Walt Whitman sense of place, they pin it on their gawd, and thereby are vastly more likely to miss the responsibility of civil society to protect the beauty, to guard nature against our baser instincts.

Then there is the architectural sense of place. Staring up at the Empire State Building in amazement. Contemplating the Golden Gate Bridge. Indeed, marveling at Saint Chappelle in Paris. I find great comfort in the still majesty of great cathedrals and I loathe with an abiding passion the unwashed tourists who have no sense of place. I love to contemplate the ancient stones and wonder at the horrors and the pageants that they have witnessed.

It is a curiosity of modern secular life that we can imbibe place without being its victim, that we can appreciate the whispers of ancient and outmoded thought without giving up our intellect to it. The religious hate this. To this day, muslims carefully guard access to their holy places and are deeply suspicious of the presence of blasphemers and those think it is all a bunch of piffle. christians in the West put up with it because they are such an endangered species, except in this font of religious idiocy, these good old United States of America. Johann Hari's recent piece "The Slow, Whining Death of British Christianity" amply captures the political contradictions.

There is another sense of place which the religious loathe, and that is the sense of private place. At the end of long day, after the dog walk when I close the front door for the last time, I am wrapped in my personal space, the private realm where my objects and my "family" and my animals and most importantly my books warm my being and give me for those few short hours before sleep a sense that I am whole and free and, frankly, safe. The sense of private place is the great invention of modern life. It is what allows us in a practicable sense to be autonomous individuals, to choose how we live and with whom we live. Without private place, the forces of social conformity, religion chief among them, have vastly greater pull upon our lives.

When I used to hang out in Indonesia, I frequently had the experience of my host checking in on me or sending some offspring to intervene with me when I had been locked alone in my room for too long. There is a cultural predilection in Indonesia that the person alone is lonely and abandoned. They sought only to make me happy, not realizing that my happiness at the moment when the door was closed was predicated precisely upon my being in solitude.

I love Indonesia. I am fascinated by religion. I live for the exquisite whispers of place and context. But I am a free person, and I live in a free society. I am, and we should be, suspicious of those who seek to predetermine place and context, who seek to tell us who to love, what to think, and how to act. No part of me forgets that threat ever. And when I think of the horror of 9/11, I realize that it was an imposition, still broadly unrepented in the muslim world, upon a free society of exactly that idea that something, a religion, is greater than freedom. The idea that such an idea can build a temple to itself in the very shadow of the horrors of what it means is anathema to me. It should be anathema to anyone who loves our freedom from religion and its bloody trail of misery.

That is because place does matter. We, the lovers of freedom, must demand and secure our own sense of place and not surrender it to those who loathe everything we stand for.

All photos from my 2006 photo essay on Paris.

Secularism and the Bane of Religion

2010-08-11T04:09:00.000+02:00

My post on the little mosque in Manhattan caused a minor dividing among those I know. About half of those who commented upon it loved it and half hated it. I lost a long-time Facebook/Twitter friend whom I have never met because of it. I suppose I am actually pleased that the vast noise of public life is such that it has precious little possibility that I will have to defend this beyond the circle of my near and dear.

The most cogent and extended critique was from an old friend on Facebook, but alas his critique in my view simply exposed the degree to which liberal thought has devolved into sentiment and wishful thinking. (If he wishes, I will be happy to quote his entire reply as a comment to this post.) The right wing is given entirely to hysteria and lies, and the left wing adjudges its positioning almost exclusively as counterpoise to those it opposes. So the reactionary christians hate the muslims, so the muslims must be okay. Not my view. I do not determine what I think by reference to a bunch of whack job christians who think that Einstein is a liberal plot.

I am interested in figuring out how secularists should defend a free society against religion. I make no bones about it: I think that religion ... all religion ... is a proximate threat to a free society and the autonomous individual who seeks to exercise his or her rights within that free society. Frankly, private religious belief is harmless, if silly. But the public practice of religion is inimical to a free society, no matter the assorted niceties, because its underlying and motivating ideology is about the reduction of the free individual to the demands of an irrefutable truth. All the falderal about communities of faith and dialog and respect among the believers is a frank and open lie; they're winking at us. Those who believe without the possibility of contradiction that there is only one truth and their group has it, then ultimately that is the source from which they will act once they get the chance. The liberal religious, pretending that things are nice, will have no impact upon the ideological religious should the latter have the power to enforce their views. On this, see Iran ... see Saudi Arabia ... see Russia for that matter, or Nigeria.

The religious only ever pretend, fooling even themselves a lot of the time, that they are tolerant. Their tolerance is the product of their impotence. And they always seek to reverse that impotence. With the power to act the tolerance vanishes.

I don't trust religion, I don't have to, and no amount of billing and cooing among the believers and the sycophants will change my mind. They have slaughtered too many. And fags are always at the top of their bloodstained lists. Call me parochial, but I keep a running count of which religion slaughters the most fags. You know, and I know, that the trail of blood is long and horrible. I have some pictures of teenagers being hanged in Iran for those whose experience of the horrors of religion is less visceral than it is for me.

So back to the wee innocent harmless mosque in the shadow of those towers that no longer cast a shadow.

The New York Times reports that the hapless sponsors to he project were unprepared for the storm. That was foolish ... but their innocence, like the much ballyhooed innocence of religion ... has the ring of a convenient stance. Evidently they will need to raise a $100 million. The innocent don't do that. So we secularists, seeking to defend our society against a religion which openly states that we should be forced to believe their ideology and practice their religion, surely have the right to ask where that money will come from. How much of that money are we prepared to accept as coming from Saudi Arabia? Remember, now, that Saudi money has played an enormous role in the recrudescence of the most reactionary forms of Islam throughout the world; it has built and financed countless madrassas that preach a virulent hatred of the secular.

And what happens even if the mosque is built with clean money? What prevents its sponsors from being overwhelmed by a tidal wave from the vast right wing of the Muslim world? A mosque is a vastly easier place to infiltrate and take over than a church. What plans do these people have in place to prevent the hatreds that besmirch mosques all around the world? Do they have a plan to prevent it from becoming a cesspit of homophobia? Will they set up a shelter for women seeking refuge from the reactionary views of Islam on the place of women and the routine and accepted violence that is visited upon them? Are they willing to discuss these issues openly?

We have the right, indeed the duty, to ask these questions. Just as we have the right and the duty to ask them of the Roman persuasion with its history of hatred and bloodlust. But the same liberals who cackle and shriek when another priest is exposed with his hands down some skinny boy's pants choose to give a pass to a religion that actively and currently executes juveniles for the act of loving each other.

Liberal muslims, such few as they are, act as apologists for the unthinkable. We do not need to apologize with them.

And liberals at the very least should apply to islam the same standards they apply to the papists.

Some argue that this is a private property issue, that those who own the land can do what they want. Not exactly a liberal position we would want to apply to your next door neighbor's desire to turn his home into a strip club or the desire of some right wing whack job to dump toxic chemicals into the water supply. As I argued in my previous post, because religion demands of the state special tax privileges, the state has the right to examine the motivation and appropriateness of any temple that comes along. Certainly those of us who are the victims of religion have the right to question as we choose whether this abuse of tax privileges is warranted in one or another circumstance.

Ah, but surely that is a breach of the freedom of religion. But just as my freedom does not mean that I can piss on your lawn, so their freedom does not mean that they can use their tax privileges to oppose my liberty or life. The freedom of religion is the freedom to choose what you want to believe. It is not the freedom of organized religion to do whatever it damned well pleases.

So we come to the heart of the matter. There are lots of mosques ... too damned many in my view, but I have that same view of churches and temples and altars of all manner ... so why not a mosque two blocks from the scene of the Twin Towers massacre? There are two reasons why rational secularists can reasonably disagree with this locating: firstly, because it is an offense to a free society that an ideology that actively opposes it can dance on a battleground and, secondly, because this has the potential to be seen and used as proof to the believers that they were right and that the massacre of innocents was a blow in their favor.

As I said before, they have no shame. And we who oppose religious tyranny are free ... so far ... to call that shame down upon them.

My good friend wrote, "Religion does not cause such attacks, it merely excuses them." Sorry but that is nonsense on the one hand and a specious distinction on the other. If it excuses them in advance: if religious ratiocination is the agar on which the germs of murder grew, then what is the actual distinction between cause and prior excuse? This is what is relevant: what the 9/11 murderers did is another episode in a dominant theme in Islamic history certainly since the earliest post-prophet conflicts, the era of the so-called rashidûn, the "rightly-guided" caliphs who followed Muhammad, three of whom were murdered by fellow believers. Only old Abu Bakr managed to die in his bed. More than one observer, myself included, notes the direct lineage of the 9/11 murderers in the Khawârij, or kharijites, of the early islamic period. These were the fanatics who took the prophet at his word and thought that the faithful in community should actually control government. That strain of islamic thought has never died despite occasional bloody repressions. So ... and I am prepared to argue this at considerable, even intolerable, length ... the 9/11 murderers are thoroughly islamic. Moreover, the protest against their slaughter was muted at best in the muslim world, and to this day remains a heroic episode for vastly more muslims than are ashamed at it.

Liberals may think that muslims bear no responsibility for 9/11, but that is not the view of the muslim world. Remember, they are corporatists; we are the individualists. We excuse their religion where they broadly accept that the murderers acted in the name of their religion even when they do not agree with the act.

My friend objected that I was adopting the Huntington thesis. The curiosity here is that I believe that that the Muslim world generally does adopt the Huntington thesis. They do accept that there is a clash of civilizations. Some account needs to be taken of that.

Now, let me retrench a little. I do not think that there is any realistic hope that islam will moderate or develop a wing of genuine secularist accommodation. But I do think that economic forces will eventually carve out some areas in the muslim world that will pay less and less real attention to the demands of religion. Some have argued that the articulation of islam in the western world will create a ground upon which such a rational incursion into the medieval structure of the religion might occur. I don't see it, and current evidence does not support it, but if that is to occur, it will do so only in the context of a deliberate and pointed challenge. To paraphrase Mao, ideologies do not change because of tea parties. They change because of struggle.

We have to have to guts to challenge the reactionary and bloodthirsty character of islam, to call it to account. Caving in to it, treating it like a neighborhood Italian-American Culture Club of sorts, will only pave the way to further calumnies.

The religious are more panicked at being exposed than ever because their nonsense is more exposed than ever. That the rising tide of religiosity is able to dominate so much of the globe reflects not a return to religion but the bloodthirsty demand of religion that it, and it alone, has great and deep and ultimate truth. We have to say, "No."

And that is what I am saying. No! Build your temple somewhere else. We are a free society. We do not accept the reactionary demands of any religion. And we do not have to. Yet.

Ground Zero and the Much Ballyhooed Religion of Peace

2010-08-09T04:28:00.000+02:00

A few weeks back a young socialist friend of the gay family was in town, and we got into a rollicking argument about "islamophobia". His position, reduced by his opponent, was that there are nice Muslims and the bad ones are rare and contrary to the spirit of the thing. My position was that in matters of religion no matter how large the pile of nice believers, you must always look to the leaders. It was, as I say, a rollicking argument, and my young friend eventually was exhausted by my intansigence, pronounced me an islamophobe, and terminated the discussion.

Before I go on, lest my young friend read this, I have to add that I enjoyed the discussion, admire his commitment, crave his respect, and desperately want him not to not like me.

But his representations on islamophobia fill me with dread. When socialists, let alone liberals, defend religion, they tread on very thin ice. Even more egregious is the theft of the application of the suffix -phobia to a religious point of view. We can never forget that religion is an implacable enemy of freedom, and that when it pretends to be a friend to anyone who seeks freedom, it is lying in order later to show its true intentions.

So first, the -phobia nonsense. It was an innovation of the gay movement to understand that the loathing of gay people by our enemies had the characteristics of a mental disease. The red-faced, palpitating rage and the visceral revulsion suggested that those who hated us could not see our humanity through the twisted lens of their own disturbed psyches. We called that a phobia in the same sense that an irrational fear can propel a person to irrational acts.

But to label as a phobia the entirely rational opposition to a religion which has a 1300 year history of murder, repression, torment, and, yes, terrorism ... well, that is a retreat from reason. I am not afraid of Islam in some irrational sense like some people are afraid of open spaces or homosexuals. I have studied it, I wrote a dissertation about it, I have travelled in Muslim countries and have counted Muslims among my friends. But no amount of familiarity has blinded me to this indisputable fact: Islam is an enemy of freedom; it demands not merely of its adherents but of everyone that they surrender their individual rights to its demands.

Defense of the freedom of religion does not require the endorsement of religion. I support your right to believe any nonsense you want, to elevate any fairy tale you want to the status of life-determining philosophy. But I demand that the state protect the rest of us from religion's incessant need to force others into that idiocy.

There is presently a lot of liberal angst about the conservative opposition to a mosque proposed for land close by the former Twin Towers. Liberals need to think again. I'll get back to that. In the meanwhile, imagine this: what if Fred Phelps bought the yawning empty pit next door to the San Francisco Gay Community Center on market Street and proposed to build a church there which would house a God Hates Fags Research Center. would we oppose that? What if the Dutch Muslims wanted to build a shrine on the same street where some of their co-religionists bloodthirstily murdered Theo Van Gogh? What if the Catholics wanted to build a cathedral outside Auschwitz called the Cathedral of Pius XII?

The religious always say that certain places are more holy than others. This too is a fantasy, but we are forced to accept it. So I accept that I can never wander into the Kaaba unless I believe their nonsense. I accept that I should adopt an attitude of reverence when I am in Notre Dame de Paris. But they don't accept the corollary that they have to stay out of my places, keep their moralizing demonology to themselves outside of their little perquisites.

So I think the notion that a mosque be built next to Ground Zero is an offense to freedom-loving people. Have these people no shame? Their religion was the proximate cause of a foul murder. That many of their number do not endorse murder is irrelevant. Most Germans probably didn't want Jews exterminated under the Nazis, but that was of no consequence in the event. Most Iranian Muslims are against the bloody executions carried out in their names, but it does not stop their leaders.

Secular society thrives because we have established that religion and the state are separate. Islam has not quite learned the lesson, and certainly Christianity is doing its best to unlearn the lesson. Religion seeks its special privileges, including tax holidays, special spaces, and public respect which it does not merit. But when we cash in the other side of the deal by telling religion to keep away from the sites of its particular horrors, they cry out phobia phobia phobia.

Individuals should be free. But religion must always remain under suspicion. For it is always ready to reclaim its blood right to destroy the society which tolerates it.

The mosque at Ground Zero would become an international Muslim tourist mecca. Secularists are right to demand that it never be built. As a gay man, I know what that religion has in store for me should it assume power. What if some fanatic wanted to build a mosque on Castro Street in San Francisco? No way.

That's what we have to say to religion ... no way. Keep your bigotry to yourselves. Respect the spaces where your religion has created horror, just as you demand that we respect your special spaces. And show some shame for the horrors committed in your name.

Notes on Avatar

2010-06-01T06:08:00.001+02:00

Always a little late the party, I managed to bring myself to see Avatar over two nights this long weekend. Each viewing was accompanied by a pair of martinis, and chicken on spinach or cauliflower. When the roommate leaves, me eating habits become elemental, and my drinking habits alternate among martinis, bourbon on the rocks, and Liberty Ale. It;s a reduced life, but the solitude is pleasant. In that mood, I climbed the stairs to take advantage of my upstairs neighbor's absence to use his Hi-Def TV for my Avatar experience.

I don't like adventure films, and I define the genre broadly. They seem contrived, and because they rarely are based on genuine psychological portraits, they tend to employ cheap plot tricks whose only point is to induce thrills in those who enjoy the suspension of disbelief. I have no problem with that ... I am not trying to be a snob. I just don't enjoy this particular set of cheap thrills. Of course, my reductions here are informed more by extrapolation than by filmic experience. I have probably choked my way through fewer than a dozen "adventure" films in my life. I couldn't force myself to watch the third Lord of the Ring after almost ripping my hair out watching the second ... "will this never end" I quacked. I did enjoy The Shining, but you know how long ago that was.

So I came to Avatar a skeptic.

And I left a skeptic also. That said, I quite enjoyed it.

But first the good part. The special effects, even without 3D,were fabulous. But what I would want ... and I recognize that I am in a tiny minority here ... would be a steady state, plotless, anthropology-style excursus on life on an alien planet. All the drama and the cheap plot just get in the way of a perfectly lovely fantasy.

So to the cheap plot. One wonders why Mr. Cameron employs such a thin kitbag of character stereotypes. Tuf and gruf, goofy but likeable, balsy female pilot, hero with a heart of gold but confused. Of course such banalities of character loom as Einsteinian relativity beside the single-digit algebra of the native population. It is a curiosity that liberalism prefers to depict primordial or universal religion in terms so reminiscent of the popular representation of Native American religion that I expect a pow wow to break out. And indeed, eventually one did.

Notwithstanding the central action of an improbable battle in which arrow-firing cavalry brings down a massive modern air force, and notwithstanding the underlying theme of the struggle of nature against technology and the fight of primary extractors against the military/industrial complex, I think this is fundamentally a religious film. The society of the natives is riven with religion, and indeed nature itself on Pandora is religious in its geo-biology. Not too much intelligence is spilled in constructing this pantheon ... there is a simple pantheistic god and lots of mystical communicating via trees and dandelion seeds and what not.

I am sure that most people came for the adventure and the special effects. I wonder what they make of the pantheism. Is it just that this sort of religious prattling is common in scifi? Or do they just not care.

A recent states that fully 18% of Americans no longer profess a religion. I suspect the figure is actually radically higher, but most people like to pretend they have a religion because it is generally thought to be expected. That Avatar's religious message exacted so little chatter is a sign to me that the religious debate in this country is controlled by that tiny array of fanatics who strike fear into those who would say the emperor is nude. Many more Americans are actually pantheistic quasi-animists than would admit or even know it. I think that is why the religious content of this movie provokes so little discussion.

Religion and war go together of course, and so too in the movie. But while the religion presented at least had some intellectual pretenses, the military stuff was a joke. I mean, cavalry in a jungle. 2,000 troops are all they could muster? And suddenly firearms appear without apparent explanation.

But that too, I suppose, is part of the adventure genre. It is not about the sense of it, nor is it about the factors or the psychology. It is about setting up the action and then riding it.

I enjoyed the ride, but I could not suspend disbelief. I'm waiting for the documentary.

Photos by Arod, from Quane Alley, I believe.

Gutpela gaden mekim gutpela kaikai

2010-05-31T04:54:00.001+02:00

In 1983, my best friend Ian ... sometimes referred to as Frobisher in these scribblings ... suggested that I accompany him on a trip to Papua New Guinea where he planned to observe and photograph an total eclipse of the Sun. We tacked on to those 6 weeks an additional 4 weeks of travel in Indonesia. That trip was a turning point in my life in every sense.

The most difficult part of the trip was an excursion in the highlands. We walked for five days from Lake Kopiago, where the road ends, to Oksapmin. Many stories to tell about that trip and I promise to get to that at some point. Todays post is in aid of a promise made to a new friend on Twitter who wants to see the T-shirt I got in Oksapmin. There was a recently started gardening project that supplied food for cash to mining operations. We each bought the T-shirt. It reads:

Gutpela gaden mekim gutpela kaikai

Which means

Good gardens make good food

A lesson that any steward of the earth might profitably learn. Imagine if BP had taken such words to heart.

Anyway, here are the T-shirts, front and back. The other one was from the Port Moresby Sing Sing that we attended and photographed. All my photographs are in slide form, and it is in my stack of projects to rip those to a hard drive.

Chattels, Personal Change, and Chugging Along

2010-05-23T03:55:00.000+02:00

I have not been blogging, and so I bought myself a "Western Digital My Book Studio Edition II 4TB Quad Interface Dual-drive Storage System with RAID".

That's not a non-sequitur. And nor is any of this.

My roommate who longed eschewed social media has taken up blogging with a vengeance in aid of his great hobby, fine cocktails. As I write this first blog that I have attempted since March, he is busily photographing tonight's offering, the Singapore Sling. His still life photography is very fine indeed, as I think anyone perusing his blog will agree. But tonight's photograph presented a problem. He uses objects from around this madhouse of my numerous collections and accretions for his still lifes. He asked me if I had an idea for objects that might evoke Singapore. Well, alas, Singapore's national identity is pretty much wrapped up with squelching anything with character or difference in favor of a landscape of towering apartment blocks unhindered by vegetation or affectation. He settled on some fresh bamboo from the garden.

Photography is at the root of my own blogging behavior, and a few months back I made an error in regard to its electronic piece. I switched from iPhoto to Aperture without spending the time to master Aperture, and meanwhile my storage capacity slowly got close to maxing out. That's where the RAID drive comes in. If I stretch my space, maybe I can settle back into it.

I did a similar thing with a 60-gallon tank in the living room. I've always had water problems in that tank, so I moved the last of the fish into a 40-gallon tank that had some space due to the final demise of an ancient Rottkeil. This opened up a vast surface that permits me to play and move stuff around and create a new installation. I bumped into some wayangs today ... shadow puppets from Java for those not as anchored in the Indonesian reality as I am. I figure I will make some bases and stand up a bunch of my wayangs on that surface, and then for good measure make add back in a 10-gallon tank with some plants and fancy goldfish.

You see, I have always used chattels to burst through personal blocks.

I am a thing person. I like things. And things are attracted to me. Things seek me out magnetically and stick to me. Eventually things and I make a deal: I give them a little spot and they stay there, nice and pert. I dust them off twice annually ... for the Christmas Party and the July first or fourth party, depending on the year. And once in a while I move them around. I like to fondle things and, to be frank, I talk to them as if they live.

So it is not such a stretch to use these bloody things to burst through my personal blocks.

Of course my inability to re-seize my photography life from the not-so-difficult embrace of Aperture is really an excuse. Here's another excuse. Twitter has seized control of me. I'll write a post about its sublime joys in due course, but suffice to say that I spend the time I used to spend blogging composing 140 character koans. And it provides the same little blast of 'lectric sociality. I like to say ... If Facebook is the broad Mississippi, then Twitter is a fast-rushing mountain stream. In that paradigm, blogging is the open ocean. In another vein, if Facebook is marijuana, Twitter is crack, and blogging is old-fashioned alcoholism.

So, I'm evidently not a crack addict and pointedly not a stoner, as if there is anything pointed about pot. But I like my booze, and I like blogging.

So I bought a RAID drive, I emptied my 60-gallon tank, and I sat down and wrote this post. There.

Photos by Arod from my trip to Toronto, my old hometown, in April. First time I have looked at them. Feeling ok.

Dan Choi

2010-03-19T05:03:00.000+01:00

There is a bit of glee in online gay lib circles tonight because Dan Choi, the gay military hero, handcuffed himself to the White House fence. He was arrested and he will be charged.

This was a terrible mistake. It is, as we used to call it in the 70s, adventurism. Lt. Choi has placed himself above the movement, requiring that the movement adjust to his personal decisions. Obviously, sometimes that is the right thing to do. When he came out on Rachel Maddow, he took a personal decision that gave a face to a social movement. He knew he stood to suffer, and he bravely faced the consequences of his actions. Recently, in the wake of the Obama administration finally stirring ever so slightly to life on the DADT question, he returned to active duty to the warm embrace of his comrades.

Now he has made himself ineligible for military service. He committed a crime ... albeit one of civil disobedience ... in front of the Commander-in Chief's official residence. This is beyond courage and into the realm of recklessness. When he came out, he gave voice to his closeted and hidden comrades. When he chained himself to the fence, he forced them to seek shelter.

The curiosity of the current phase in gay liberation stems from two contradictions.

Firstly, with gay marriage and DADT, we have finally come to a point where our movement is clearly and unambiguously demanding normalization, admission to the ordinary and the expected. This is why some on the left have belittled gay marriage, and bizarrely why some gave ultraleft cover to Obama's embrace of the bigoted pastor Warren because he tries to save children in Africa ... in other words, why worry about silly old marriage when children are dying. Back in my day in the gay movement, the ultralefts denounced Leonard Matlovich, the Dan Choi of era, because they were against the military.

The ultralefts are wrong ... and they are few, so I have to confess that this is a bit of a straw man argument. The point of it, though, is that now is a moment when we are clearly showing the middle middle of American life that homosexuality is not a threat to anyone, that it is normal, that we just want in. The decorated military man, stiff-spined, clean-cut, clear-voiced, speaks those words into the living rooms of millions. But he throws all that out when he chains himself to that fence.

The second contradiction is the yet-again recrudescence of the bizarre ultra-right just as America finds itself broadly turning a corner. I think the ultrarights are also few, though not as few as the ultralefts. But the media makes them into many. I think that creates a frustration on the left. There were comments today about how slim was the media coverage of the occupation of Nancy Pelosi's office by a crew of ENDA supports; if teabaggers had occupied an office it would be the biggest story of the week. Certainly true, but it again misses the point. The teabaggers are extremists; they call for executions, tax evasion, secession, armed resistance. We have the opportunity of showing ourselves as sane in a moment of mass political insanity. How dare my brothers and sisters occupy the office of one our supporters in the very days when she is desperately trying to gather votes to pass health care reform? Are they nuts; do they not have any sense of timing? If I did not know better, I would say they were in the pay of the teabaggers because these friends of ours are in the bizarre position of playing into the hands of the reactionaries at a moment of the highest political drama.

There is something a little infantile in these two mistimed actions today, as if they could not bear being out of the spotlight while the entire nation is gripped by the fight over health care.

Dan Choi made an error today. He lost his sense of timing, his strategic vision, and his iconic status. It will be for naught; it will not help the fight against DADT. I doubt it will hurt, but it will not help. It will certainly hurt him. He threw a lot of "cred" away for nothing, and he did it independently, without consultation, on his own. There is a fine line between the heroic and foolhardy, and that line is motly about an excess of ego. I think this is a case in point.

Adventurism is always an error. Lt. Choi is a military man. He ought to know that. Sad.

Figure Skating and Masculinity

2010-02-22T02:08:00.000+01:00

A little context: I am writing this as I watch the Canada/U.S. hockey game ... nothing lacking in the masculinity department there. I am a huge Winter Olympics fan, and this year has been the best because I a working a DVR for the first time. I love figure skating ... men's, dance, pairs, women's, pretty much in that order. I watched pretty much every minute of the men's short and free programs. I thought Lycacek clearly won, Plushenko deserved the silver, but Takahashi was lucky to get the bronze. Lambiel, whom I have long admired, needed one more clean jump to move up; Takahashi free skate was athletic, fun, and lively, but hardly the classic grace and beauty of either Lambiel or Weir. Patrick Chan of Canada was overscored as a home ice kind of thing. I thought Johnny Weir was robbed of 5 points on the short and 10 on the free; if that's true, he should have the bronze. He certainly skated more cleanly than any of those in the 3, 4, and 5 spots, and he clearly beat Lambiel and Chan. All the results are here.

So that out of the way ... what is it with all the whining about masculinity and the quad. If Plushenko figures a quad equals the gold, then why don't they have a quad contest, sort of like ski jumping. Everybody gets two shots with marks and the best combined score wins.

But that is not what figure skating is. Rather, it is a combination of athleticism and aesthetics that is judged based on that. We all know that skating judging is notoriously corrupt ... and that in my view is why Weir placed as low as he did. efforts have been made to clean up the scoring, and I think those efforts are only half complete. Lots of people think that way, and some have taken this conjuncture as an opportunity to challenge, again, the basic nature of men's figure skating. Most famous is the great Canadian skater Elvis Stojko.

Stojko was a stirring skater, a short fireplug with a muscular athleticism combined with just enough grace to make him a champion. I never particularly favored his form of skating though. I always thought his arms slapped around like swords. But short guys have that problem in skating ... they lack those long lines that we equate with grace.

Stojko and others have argued that figure skating needs to be more masculine. A curious notion that accepts an unexamined notion of what constitutes masculine. Perhaps it would be more masculine if they wore work boots and skidded along the ice before jumping. Is that what they mean? More seriously, at least part of what they mean is that something should be taken away ... the grace, the artistry, those gestures associated with the feminine, certain kinds of costumes.

It's all nonsense. Evan Lycacek is consummately graceful and I see nothing about him that is not masculine. I'm convinced he is gay ... if there were a girlfriend or a wife, NBC would have been all over her like fur on Johnny Weir. He sounds gay to me too, but I confess that my gaydar is notoriously given to false positives and false negatives.

Johnny Weir is a big old queen, but again I do not see why his skating is not masculine just because it favors the graceful and the articulated.

Masculinity is always metaphoric. That is, the concept stands in for something else. That something else is a socially projected notion of what a man should be. For the Greeks and Romans, a man was someone who went to war; killing made the man. That has been true in military societies for millennia. It was true in our society within my lifetime. Increasingly there is a move to include some form of family-style sensitivity in the masculine ... how often do we have to listen to butch film stars ramble on about how fatherhood made them into a better person. The older form of masculinity didn't waste much time on becoming a better person through love and feeling. Nor does the Stojko school of figure skating.

The unspoken, and now oddly unspeakable, side of the masculinity trope is that gay is not seen as masculine. Nobody admits that Johnny Weir is gay, not even Johhny Weir. They call him "controversial". He is certainly, as I said, a big queen. And in his personal demeanor it would be hard to find something that we would ordinarily call masculine. Except he works out like a fiend, he suffers through pain, he marches past ridicule, he calls his own shots, and he doesn't give the time of day to those who revile him. Tough, strong, self-reliant.

Tough, strong, self-reliant. What's not masculine about that. But, of course, there are plenty of female athletes who are tough, strong, and self-reliant, and they'd punch you in the nose if you called them masculine.

Masculine as a concept is also always relative. There is no masculine without feminine; from another angle, there is no masculine without the effeminate. Curious that there is no masculine equivalent of effeminate ... and that goes to another issue in masculinity. In conventional sex roles, the crime of a woman is not to be subservient to a man; the crime of a man is not to dominate either women or men. Much, of course, was made of this during the sexual revolution, but a point was missed. So many men, I would argue the vast majority of men, live masculine lives of ethics and fairness and humanity. The flaw in the feminist view of the masculine was its glib acceptance of the stereotype proffered by the most extreme advocates of chauvinism. That is a flaw which the Stojkos repeat.

I am a gay man who like masculine gay men. I like the queens too, gawd noze. But I am filled with admiration for my brothers who pursue "masculine lives of ethics and fairness and humanity". What has that got to do with figure skating? Does Stephane Lambiel's well turned hand in mid-spin bespeak a lack of masculine ethics and fairness and humanity? On the contrary, I think it speaks to the fluidity of masculinity, to its possibilities, its limitlessness.

So many of the sports we consider masculine are made of grace and beauty. The ski jumping has these scrawny youth striking glorious poses against the wind. The long strides of a speed skater evoke ballet more than football. Why are these masculine, and not figure skating.

It all goes back to the metaphor, the relativity. If your masculine is John Wayne, skip the skating. If your masculine is Dan Choi or Evan Lycacek, enjoy it all.

Photos by Arod of signage around town. This post is not all I want it to be, but I have to get back to blogging. I have become quite a tweeter, and I enjoy the form enormously. But I have to carve out the time again to blog. So choke it out, spit it down ... is that too masculine?

Obama, Haiti, Oracle

2010-01-18T05:30:00.000+01:00

On the eve of what is shaping up to be a disastrous loss in the Massachusetts Senate race, and in the wake of the still patchy relief effort in disastrous Haiti, and in celebration of pretty near exactly a year of the Obama presidency, my mind wanders to that central question in modern life, the database. That is what I mean by Oracle in the title, though there are more ways to parse data than Oracle, as we know.

Every major disaster seems to follow the same script, and five days in there is a lot of confusion on the ground, those in need are not getting relief, and the international effort is bogged down. Chaos among the afflicted begins to mount as the initial shock recedes. I know I am in danger of appearing callous, and given that my only experience of disaster was the 89 earthquake here in San Francisco, I do not want to make light of the challenges faced by those who bravely go where no one wants to be.

But in this instance, as in so many, it seems to me that we are not making effective use of the new tools at our disposal. No doubt that failure is conditioned by the inertia that marks most politics at most times. But there are times in human history where entropy gives way to revolution, and this ought to be one such time, the more so given the revolutionary impact that electronic life has had on everything else.

Because what we have here is a database problem. There are evidently initial response and rescue teams scattered around the globe. They rapidly converge, but not rapidly enough, and once they are on the round, the means to move them to the actual hot spots are sadly lacking. Roads are always impassable after disasters; the afflicted always get in the way; there is always a fog surrounding information and communication. SO what those rescuers need are helicopters. In the case of Haiti, it is simply shocking that we did not have a hundred, two hundred helicopters in situ within 24 hours. That should always be the goal. And the instrument to deliver that goal should be the US Navy and Air Force.

We know people will need water and food. The world community should be stockpiling emergency supplies not where disasters happen, but where there are large concentrations of airplanes and runways. In other words, every major international airport should have a supply of water that can be rapidly airlifted to the nearest landing strip to the disaster from where those helicopters previously mentioned should move it to the site of the disaster. That coordination is all about a modern system database.

I work every day with a system database that runs one of the world's most remarkable major research universities. From my central seat, I can tell you that the database is like a teenager ... beautiful, powerful, unruly, prone to bad decisions, needs a lot of sleep (bug fixes), and always promising to be more tomorrow. But regardless of the madness that surrounds administering such a Borg, it actually works remarkably well given the immense human complexity that it endeavors to manage.

Another example of a database is the Obama campaign. The press talks about his Internet outreach and fundraising, but behind all of that was a database operation that tracked people, kept statistics, managed communication, updated and ran a web site, and evidently did a pretty good job of security also. My problem is this: notwithstanding Obama's promise to run his Presidency as he ran his campaign, why did he abandon success and repair to the tried and true? Where was that database when it was time to mobilize mass events in favor of health care reform? Where was that database when it came time to retain Edward Kennedy's Senate seat?

When I first arrived at MRU (that is the name that I give to the major research university where I hand-count bits and bytes in exchange for a few shekels delivered twice monthly), I tended to share the attitude that the database was the enemy, the great impersonal beast that wanted only to devour our individuality and reduce all variation to flat form. But I was professionally required to sell the database to the reluctant, and in doing so I came to understand that human variosity always survives the systems that are designed to contain it ... those systems strive to keep up. But persnickety abstinence is no strategy to deal with technological change, notwithstanding the Andy-Rooney common sense that is so au courant among my dear friends who like to mock social media. I have seen every excuse to resist the database. The issue is not to resist it, but to harness it to our oldest and most persistent problems.

Like disaster. And social change.

The greatest idiocy of the self-styled conservatives of the present era is their failure to see that American military might can be turned into a worldwide force for betterment and disaster relief and implied threats to the assorted ancien regimes that still haunt the planet. But this is a re-imagining. And at the heart of that re-imagining is to understand just how powerful the modern database has become. Unleash Google on disaster relief. Or unleash the amazing students who constructed the course catalog that MRU released and that I manage ... they saw in an entirely different light a problem that I understood thoroughly ... and they changed my way of understanding my own information.

So this becomes the question: when will government and international relations catch up with the technology that runs Amazon and eBay and Facebook? When it does, the Haiti earthquakes of the future will entail much less suffering.

Photos by Arod, from around town. From my ongoing series that I call "Flat Faces".

War and Liberalism

2010-01-10T04:36:00.000+01:00

I watched much of the new National Geographic documentary reprise of the Vietnam War the other night. Wonderful footage, but bad history. More importantly, it represents the larger liberal retreat from its position on the war at the time to a warm and fuzzy embrace of the "soldiers." The documentary was not really about the war so much as it was about how Americans who were soldiers at the time reflect now on what they felt and experienced then. That's lovely and everything, but it is not history.

This certainly derives from the current liberal ambivalence about the assorted Middle Eastern wars. While there is without doubt an isolated if principled party of across-the-board opponents to any of these wars, broadly liberalism has accommodated itself to this era by focusing on supporting our troops and defending the nation against the threat of Islamic extremism even as it affirms that Islam is a religion of peace which we all respect. So the National Geographic documentary cast this attitude backwards even while noting the sometimes hostile welcome that some soldiers experienced on returning from Vietnam and while crediting the enemy with no good traits whatsoever.

I like my historical thinking to be clear. Notwithstanding the moral and ethical dimensions of war, whenever we look at history primarily from a moral perspective we are bound to end up where we started, that is with our own unchallengeable point-of-view. History in that sense, and perhaps that sense alone, is like science: all points of view must be subject to disproof. In general, a moral view of war resists disproof.

My own view of Vietnam has certainly changed. Back then, I viewed it first and foremost as a crime, and the fact of its being a mistake I saw as the just deserts of an imperialist nation. I was a radical youth of the 70s and I could not understand how an honest person could embrace the war. I certainly had no sense of nuance about it. For me, the possibility that the North Vietnamese Army or the Viet Cong might commit atrocities or ultimately be opposed to freedom was inconceivable. Life is simpler when your youth is spent in an era of ideological clarity.

Fortunately ideological clarity muddies up pretty quickly, and aging certainly has the fortunate tendency of driving liberals away from ideology. My case is one in point. I think what is clear now is that the war was primarily a mistake, on in which decision after decision concatenated to drag the nation into a quagmire in precisely the era which started with an opportunity to become a champion of freedom. The opportunity was quickly lost - swept away in the ineluctable circumstances of Korea and the entirely avoidable circumstances of Vietnam. The opportunity was short-lived, and the failure to embrace it led to a decades long triumph of the right in foreign policy. That to me is the American contribution to the Cold War.

The most tragic American figure is, of course, Johnson who could not imagine himself a president who lost a war. He tried every different strategy, but the enemy's strategy simply did not admit of failure. It is key to realize that that too was an opportunity that had a finite window. They could not do it now. I'll come back to that in a moment.

Now as if to contradict my opening thesis, there is no doubt that the American soldiers were the biggest chumps in the war. They had no stake in it other than to survive. They could neither win nor lose. This was an era in between the "greatest generation" and "post-9/11 hero" idea of soldiery. A lot of that has to do with the draft - in a society whose institutions were in the grip of conservatism while its sociality was ripping tradition to shreds, being drafted was like being tossed through a time warp. One day "do your own thing", the next day "die is a paddy". We on the left in that era were wrong to eschew the soldiers. I remember that especially among the Trotskyists there was much reference to Trotsky and Lenin's championing of the soldiers, but those bookish and democratic centralist ideas did not have wide application. The soldiers were an embarrassment to people who saw the war as a "drag" and they were fodder for people who saw the war as evil.

But the war was neither a drag nor evil. It was a struggle for supremacy that was lost before we began.

I saw none of that in the National Geographic piece.

I also saw no analysis of the military aspects of the war. This is of a piece with one of the great failings of liberal thought. Let me put it this way: I think military history should be a part of the curriculum of every high school and college in the country. There is no history without war, and understanding war both in general and in its specifics is the sine qua non of understanding history. Love 'em or hate 'em, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Frederick, Napoleon, Rommel, and Giap are great teachers whose lessons transcend the particulars of their era and their purposes. they understand strategy and tactics, the interplay of the large and the small. They understand psychology. They understand the long-lived and the ephemeral. But most importantly, given that virtually every social structure we have was forged in war, refusing to study it out of moral superiority to it is an arrogance that we cannot afford.

Bizarrely, the modern right has abandoned the study of war also. We know that they have abandoned pretty much any principle with which they might have formerly been associated. They liked Iraq and Afghanistan when dubya was in charge; now they're "agin it". They want to bomb anybody who vaguely resembles anybody who might not like us. They have no strategy; they just oppose anything we support.

But Obama has no strategy either, and he is being merely responsive. Just like Johnson, even though I think he more plays the role of Nixon than Johnson. Just as with the Viet Cong, there is no way to defeat the enemy; all we can do is outflank them and make them irrelevant in historic terms. So a strategy looks to do that. But this, frankly, is an easier enemy than the North Vietnamese because they have no state, they have precious few followers, and the societies which they haunt yearn to join in the era of obscene riches that is the postmodern free-trade mania. That is the sense in which the Viet Cong strategy will not work for the jihadis. Where the issue in Vietnam was to find a way stem the rising influence of the Soviet Union by defeating their proxies in a war in which they were not involved, the issue in the war on terrorism is to invest the Muslim world in the larger world and its issues over and against their millennia-old cultural and political inversion. We have more tools for that fight than we did in the 50s and 60s.

So the National Geographic documentary did us a disservice. Not merely did it misrepresent and muddy the history of the war, but it infused our view of it with current moral attitudes founded not on insight but on self-absorption. That is a metaphor for what ails liberalism at a time when we should be looking to be triumphant.

Photos by Arod from the Canadian National War Museum in Ottawa.

A New Year

2010-01-01T05:07:00.000+01:00

I decided to have a look at my last post from 2008, a year ago, and it is entitled Loss. And then my first post of 2009, and it starts with "I just cannot get a "write" on. Back to work this week after three weeks off, and the mind reels from idea to idea."

I'm kind of morose right now, and I am still having difficulty getting a write on.

But none of that should obscure that 2009 was an excellent year in my life. Notwithstanding the stress and the inevitable fits and starts, the job has advanced in precisely the direction I seek, and I am more or less in the position that I hoped to be when I thought about it a year ago. I cannot say that I am bubbling over with glee at facing the office again on Monday, but what confronts me is not drudgery but rather a set of opportunities just waiting for my energy to transform them.

The job was the proximate driver of the most significant personal changes that I made in 2009. I got my first set of full-time glasses ... extremely fashionable German mykita frames. Curiously and serendipitously, the model name of the frames is Richard ... the Germans go in for this sort of cloying naming, evidently ... and Richard is my sainted ex. So, all bedecked in the new glasses, I importuned Richard to accompany me to Macys Union Square Men's Store in order to upgrade my appearance. I was looking for newer khakis, frankly; Richard suggested I look at some dress pants. "There is no way that I am going to ..." I sputtered, and as I looked up from my protest, there approaching was broadly-smiling, nattily dressed Leland, as I later learned. "I heard that, and I think I can help."

Leland is a young middle-aged, evidently gay, black guy, and I think he will have to be my 2009 Man of the Year. Since that fortuitous and, at least from my point of view, unplanned meeting, Leland has transformed me into the sort of middle middle aged guy who is not comfortable under-dressed in public. I virtually never go to work now without a tie, and I always wear dress pants, and a fine shirt. That's a change, and it is more than cosmetic. It is accepting that I am 56, that the job is critical to my happiness, and that 56 year-olds look better tarted up than slumming it. The simple choice: elegant elder or schlumpy old goat. I choose the former.

Ooops ... friends have arrived for a little local new Year's celebrating, so I shall return to this tomorrow.

Turned out that we had a perfect Traditional Kielbasa New Year's Eve Party. Perhaps I will explain the origin of this "new tradition" at some point ... what you need to know is that it is all tongue in cheek ... but the end result last night was that the five inmates of the two-flat building in which I live noshed on cheese and sausages, drank elegant champagne cocktails, and toasted each other at the fated hour. The two rather more "pop" of our company had a momentary panic when it became clear that there was no local TV coverage of the moment ... they almost fled in horror ... but we held on to them long enough for a toast and a hug. Then off they went to the roof to watch the fireworks on the Embarcadero from afar.

Back to my earlier ruminations.

Last year was a reimagining of the image and my quotidian modus operandi. That was good. I have no resolutions for this year other than to continue the reimagining. If I am as advanced in my job a year from now as I am now advanced over a year ago, then it will have been a good year. That's the queen's message at this point.

The break is always a little difficult because the free time comes with the commitments and mania of the season, and it also and contrarily affords a respite into which to pour the exhaustion of a year of constant running. In the days after Christmas, I fought off a sore throat by lalley-gagging about in bed for a few days. Eventually I forced myself into some action beyond reading and ruminating, and the immediate result was a trip to Mama's, pictured above, in Mill Valley. If riches suddenly descended upon me, I would probably spend a month or two doing nothing but eating breakfast out, reading my book, walking the dog, and staring into space ... and the week after Christmas is just like that. Mama's is a great little place, and they are genuinely glad to see you.

So I luxuriated there a while, then rolled on to Berkeley via the Richmond/San Rafael Bridge, and made my way home for some more indolence and reading and puttering.

And so the days went ... until the Monday looming when I will strap on one of my new ties and get back at it. Bound and determined not to bracket myself in the gloom which I quoted above from last year. Bound and determined to soldier on and be grateful for the good position in which I find myself, notwithstanding the banal horrors which so many more face.

There's a post, friends ... and here's to another new year. May yours be wonderful and bright and better yet than any before.

Photos, top and bottom, of me by Tony Fox at the War Memorial Opera House when we attended the Nutcracker on December 27; photo in the middle of Mama's in Mill Valley by Arod.

Sleighbells Sing While We Jingle ...

2009-12-26T01:01:00.000+01:00

It's Christmas Day! I took my Christmas walk all bedecked in crazy Christmas hat and scarf, and said Merry Christmas to any one I passed. Again, it is Russians and African Americans who seem to best know how to respond to a Merry Christmas with a warm and jovial "And A Merry Christmas to YOU too!" I forgive the yuppies, in the spirit of the day, for their bland "uh-huh's" and "you too's". A very aged and tiny and frail Chinese woman being pushed in a wheelchair fairly lit up at the greeting, though she was too weak to reply. That was very sweet.

We had our Christmas party last Saturday night. I have pictures on Facebook of the good folks who graced us with their warmth and good cheer. We caroled too, though that lacked a certain something because our old friend Solin was absent due to illness; her crystal soprano lights up the room. Thanks to Steve, our resident baritone, whose booming honey tones lead the merriment. His is half the audible voice, and given that the rest of us would make ice crack in full winter with our tones, it is a good thing that Steve drowns us out.

We had food galore. The company polished off three turkeys (thanks to Ian and Dave), a ham (thanks to June and Dolores), and three loves of bread (thanks to Roy and Jim), not to mention innumerable deserts and savory dishes. Such a joy to watch friends eat!

Christmas is nostalgia. A large part of the annual party is nostalgia for all the lost friends, especially Kurt who invented the party with whom Tom and I first joined in being hosts in 1989. The photos above and below are of the tree in the AIDS Memorial Grove. I'll put up some pix of my own tree later, but for today, let us ruminate on that tree and think of those gone, those we loved and love. I think of my nephew Kris who died at 26 last summer; my sister's family is alone together this season in the shadow of his loss. Christmas is hard that way. It is both the sublimely beautiful and the sublimely unforgettable.

Ahhh ... but Christmas is not just for nostalgia. It is also the pure joy of pure joy. It is remembering that from the deepest, darkest depths of winter we rebound to spring and summer again. It is making light out of the dark. It is hearing songs out of silence.

It is also about Santa Claus ... for me at bottom it is the festival of Santa Claus. He knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness sake. He brings presents for all, but he has a stick in his back pocket to chasten those who have been unwisely bad. Whether giving or chastening, he smiles and chuckles. A lonely man whose solitude resounds in the waves of joy reflected back upon him. He is an elf and trickster in a world that has banished elves in favor of angry paternal gods who maim and torment. He is satisfied to give of himself on bu tone day and leave the rest of the year for us to be ourselves and make of what we have what we can. O Santa, thank you for being so good to me!

Well, I have to choo-choo off to the second and third of my three Christmas parties ... to see Kerry with whom I have celebrated the sesaon since 1989, and to see Solin and Winfield with whom we have had Christmas dinner for over a decade now.

My favorite day, too soon over.

With that, let me wish a very Merry Christmas to all!

So I haven't been blogging, and now I am going to start again. That's all I plan to say at least for the time being about this accidental incidental hiatus. For those who know me, everything is fine, nothing is the matter. Onward and upward.

All photos by Arod, taken today in the AIDS Memorial Grove.

I Picked Up Two Monks Today

2009-10-25T14:30:00.000+01:00

I picked up two monks today as I was driving back from my Sunday morning dog walk through Fisherman's Wharf and North Beach. It was at Scott and Eddy; they were standing there all a-crimson and orange be-robed. Late-middled-aged white guys, one had a guitar case. The intersection was slow and as I waited, the seeming leader of the pair put out his thumb and gave me a little smile. I waved them in on a whim, and off we went. They needed to go to 22nd Avenue and Fulton, an entrance to Golden Gate Park most proximate to the day-long concert in celebration of the 40th anniversary of Woodstock.

The guitar-laden of the two got into the back. These were big fellas, and I have a tiny car with a large dog of occasionally dubious temperament in the back seat. So there was some maneuvering. The transplanted suburban yuppie Frau-mit-Kindern in the giganto SUV behind me, impatient, pissily swung around to pass and gave me that little lippy look that really deserves a good slap if said slap would not sully the hand that delivered it. But, whoops, I have two Tibetan monks climbing into the car, so I stilled my pique and calmed my heart and diffused into the joy of the sublime.

The guy in the back kept chatting away as if I were not there, so I interrupted and focused entirely on the guy in the front seat. He explained their particular devotions which are ecumenical in the Buddhistic sense, though it seems that the central affiliation is with the Kagi sect of Tibetan Buddhism.

It turns out that the Moody Blues is playing the park today. I told him that the first concert I ever attended was the Moody Blues at Massey Hall in Toronto. According to their web site, "Massey Hall was a gift from the Massey family to the city of Toronto in 1894. For over 115 years, its famous red doors have welcomed audiences to a stunning array of events, personalities and artists. It has earned a unique place in Canadian music history." It's a cranky old building, but famous for its sublime acoustics. We broke in that night ... it was November 29, 1969. Perhaps I should do a 40th anniversary celebration. I do not remember the concert very well, but I remember breaking in with my friend Sara who was expert at it. We managed to get into the Mariposa Folk Festival for free once also. I was very nervous in both cases ... I do not have the constitution that would be required for criminal activity, even back in those days when I participated in the notion that everything ought to be free. That notion is still around, but only CEOs actually practice it legally.

Back to the monks. I told them that my friend Michael Merrill, dead these 20 years, was a co-founder of the Hartford Street Zen Center, and that I had been a guarantor on the initial real estate purchase. Their web site says it was founded by Issan Dorsey, but that is a long-standing myth. Issan was a distant adviser as I remember, but he was such a larger than life character that the tale is juicier when he is founder. But it didn't happen that way. I must have all that paperwork around somewhere since I never throw anything out. Perhaps I willl send it to them some day in favor of historical accuracy.

The front seat monk thanked me for my efforts given that he lived at Hartford Street for a while.

I told him that Michael had died at the hospice at Hartford Street, and then quickly corrected myself as Michael actually died in a hospice on Geary Street. He tried to die on Hartford Street, but in extremis he was moved to Pacific Presbyterian Hospital and pumped up with fluids. They have their own hospice on Geary Street, and Michael clung there to life for two more weeks. He died as I drove south to the Pac-10 tournament in 1989 with my friend Jack Green, who is also now gone.

But I didn't tell that to the monks. We kept it light. I didn't want to be proselytized; one has to be "catholic" in the rejection of religion. Swanning around in red and orange is certainly less damaging to human life than being a papist or a fundie or a mahometan ... what's in a name ... but it is still delusion. Warm fuzzy delusion, but delusion. Of course, one does not want to be put into a position where it would be necessary to bring up the bloodthirsty history of the Tibetan lamas as they actually ruled. They were rather fond of extractive torture ... eye-gouging, tongue snipping, amputation ... in aid of their hegemony. And that's the point with religion: it's all cutesy when people are blessing each other and wandering around in a haze. But religion in power, even near power, is always brutal.

I figure if I ever were to find myself in a prison, though, I would be a Buddhist. Perfect religion for atheists, they have a rich literature unlike the literature-starved post-Sumerian monotheisms that dominate the world, and the meditation would pass the time nicely.

None of this came up with my monks. I liked the guy in the front seat. The fellow in the back seemed non-plussed that his conversational dominance had been usurped by the driver of the ancient Honda Civic. Maybe he was just grumpy ... I can grok that.

I pulled around the corner at 22nd and Fulton and they piled out. The front seat monk gave me his card and invited me to drop him an email if I needed a blessing or anything. I admit I was tempted ... that is how religion gets to you. I smiled, but did not proffer my hand. I don't think monks like ot be touched.

No pics yet. I am still channeling my inner Aperture, and I should be able to make it a more worldly effort shortly.

Metablog

2009-10-23T04:56:00.004+02:00

I appear to have sailed on to a bit of shoal in my psyche. I am prone to these things, and once I am sufficiently convinced of the problem, I apply what my great friend Michael Merrill, deceased these twenty years, used to call "main force". So I am in the process of gathering main force.

One thing I have done is to force myself to spend a half hour at lunch reading the manual for Aperture, the more advanced of the Mac products for photo processing. iPhoto was so bloody easy, but I had to decide to upgrade and I have lost control of where anything is. And I hate creating posts without photos. So that is one of those effective ways of stymieing oneself in the modern era. A tight little circle of pointless self-undermining.

I think maybe I will buy a little more memory for my laptop ... that'll surely jog something.

I'm also planning to buy one of those horrible earpieces to improve the cell phone life. I loathe phones, and double-triple loathe cell phones. But that is like a baby loathing mother's milk or a Bostonian loathing the Red Sox. Amusing but ineffectual.

When one is on the shoals in the present era, one spends more time on Facebook than is sensible. Facebook is like a pile of gravel where Twitter is like a pile of sand. Doesn't matter in either case the shape of your shovel, you're still gonna miss more than you observe. But dig away, dig away. That's the spirit.

So trying to buck up - perhaps I should feel fine that Congress attached our right not to be beaten to a bloody pulp to some military expropriations bill ... ooops, that's appropriations ... and now we will soon have the majesty of federal law on our side when some gaggle of thugs take out their frustrations at not being able to ball each other without shame.

In that vein, catch this ... no homo ... for crying out loud ...

Of course, protecting people from hate offends religious sensibility. I mean, what would religion be without hatred.

Crappers ... trying to buck up, here. Maybe the Manhattan that sainted roommate and bartender RL just handed me will help.

I'll go with that ... and the fact that I have posted something, anything. More anon.

Brief Encounter

2009-10-11T04:52:00.004+02:00

This is what the San Francisco Chronicle wrote about the American Conservatory Theater/Kneehigh Theatre production of Noël Coward's Brief Encounter: "Every so often a theater piece comes to town that is so brilliantly conceived and executed, so entertaining on every level, that you want everyone you love or even like just a bit to see it. Brief Encounter ... is that kind of experience."

Couldn't have said it better. It's on until October 17. There is a really cool site including a trailer that doesn't do the piece justice here.

The work is based on Coward's well-known 1939 play Still Life, and there is a better known movie, which of course I haven't seen, called Brief Encounter. The present production melds film, stage, railway, song, movement, and audience into a new, and yet old, retake.

It's about love. There are three love affairs: the central one in which two middle class folks come to the edge of losing their good sense, and two background love affairs among the railroad station cafe staff. The latter are bawdy and humorous; the former is dark and heavy, ultimately unrequited.

All that fun on the stage and I came to want some fulfillment. Coward, of course, would never end the thing in death ... perhaps someone can correct me if I am off-base here ... but there is a little death in the soul-destroying return to the sensible. All the fulfillment is in the bawdy joy of the other two relationships.

The essay in the program pointed out the poignancy of one of the songs ... Room with a View ... because of what it would have represented to the then marginally closeted Coward. He could not have true love because that was denied to homos. He could only have the bawdy slap and tickle stuff, and that only when he kept it quiet enough that it did not "scare the horses." So the contrast between the two bawdy relationships and the furtive and ultimately unfulfilled middle class liaison reverses itself ... the homosexual author lusts after a formal relationship without all the middle class nausea about the sensible.

Enough said. Very enjoyable.

Heading Home from the Gold Coast

2009-09-28T09:27:00.000+02:00

I'm starting this post in the Auckland airport, this time at dusk ... six in the evening ... finishing it as we take off over the dark South Pacific heading home to San Francisco. The bright modern architecture of Auckland's new international area is suffused with low sunlight. There are four big goofy teenage boys in some kind of all black uniform at the next table, giggling and glancing at me as I have obviously noticed them, as hard as I try to pretend I have not. New Zealander youth, from my brief experience, seem to wear a lot of black. These black T-shirts are emblazoned with "Oceania Penrith 2009" on the back and New Zealand Canoe Polo on one sleeve, and i-4 on the other. The good life.

Sad moments as we said our several goodbye's earlier in the Brisbane airport. Not just the departure from family half a world away from everyday life. But the underlying tragedy that struck us a month ago; see my post xxx for those details.

But life moves on. Mother's 80th birthday is tomorrow, and that was the proximate cause of this trip. My sister brought mother here as a birthday present, and I decided it was the ideal time to make my first pilgrimage to the country my sister adopted as her own three decades ago. Life has always been too packed with immediacy to spur me to make the trip before and, besides, I saw her every couple of years in Ontario. I feel bad about that, the more so because of how much I enjoyed Australia.

Except for the one day in Brisbane, I spent the entire time on the Gold Coast and its immediate hinterland in the Great Barrier Range. Again, not the plan, but the great dust storm had its way. I spent all of every day except one with sister, brother-in-law, and nephew, and also visiting mother.

The Gold Coast where my sister's family has lived for nearly two decades is decidedly new. Explosively new. Not just the skyscrapers of Surfers' Paradise, but the sprawling suburbs that wrap around the canals and manmade lakes. That said, it really does feel like the good life ... the sun, the g-day mates, the broad visible happy middle class, the lack of any discernible poverty or misery. A tiny slice of the land down under, mind you, and the failed trip to Sydney is the more unsettling because the slice is broader and bigger and more troubling there, I am quite sure.

But this thing slice of the good life kept me thinking about my own good life. The pros and the cons. I'm not going to go through a laundry list, and indeed I have not been going through a laundry list. I've just been thinking that this is the time in life when I need to husband the pros and nudge the cons out of view. As those immediacies become less inistent, the broad generals need more attention.

Early in the week, we visited Tamborine Mountain, and I have been humming Hey Mr. Tambourine man, sing a song for me ever since. The Bob Dylan version is a song from my youth, when there was a lot of immediacy to everything, where every tiny slight or setback felt like an avalanche in my face. Notwithstanding that, and notwithstanding that I was a decided hothead politically and intellectually, I thought of myself as on some level cool, and music was the locus of the cool. So it was ironic to be humming Mr. Tambourine Man as an old guy who cannot help but be a lot cooler than he ever was if only by reason of how much energy it takes to get worked up. Not that I don't get worked up; I just don't like it any more.

The trip was very Mr. Tambourine Man, laidback, contemplative, sing-a-song-for-me, in the warm embrace of famly that endures and hugs.

I always want to learn something when I travel, and that's what I learned ... sing a song for me. I thought of it as tearful mother disappeared up the ramp in Brisbane ... a day shy of 80, hardly a gray hair on her head, remarkably spry and sharp. I thought of it as I hugged my sister and brother-in-law goodbye, feeling the pain of their loss, and vowing that our ancient connection needs all the attention it deserves, vowing to sing a song for each other, warm and laidback.

What else to make of Australia? I watched a couple of "footie" games, a Rugby League semi-final and the Grand Final of Australian Rules Football. In both cases the team that we were rooting for lost. In neither case do I remember the name of a single player. Both were excellent games, but the AFL Grand Final was gripping. It's a great sport ... wide-open, fast, athletic, spectacular men, both speed and pure force. A lot like hockey in that the game just keeps going, although the coaches have even less direct control over the actual game than hockey. I love AFL, and I wish we could see more of it in the States

But isn't it curious that the Australians have invented two complete games pretty much just for themselves, their own version of rugby and AFL? They call them, as well as Rugby Union which is rugby played by the universal rules, "footie." I'm a footie fan! And footie, it seems to me, expresses something about Australia ... old games made new.

Australia is a new land built on the most ancient continent facing the new challenges for which the known answers will not be enough. Even so, they enjoy the surf and sun, they dig the footie, they groove to their own language.

So, not to put too fine a point on it, what I learned from travel in Australia is that my own life is a new life, insofar as I have marched to my own drummer, but yet it is still built on those ancient dynamics of surviving and finessing the challenges for which no known answer can be ultimately enough as time drones on. I kept thinking about how isolated Australia seems when one is not there, and yet it is fully "here" and not at all isolated when you are there. Just like one's own life. Just like wherever you happen to be. So as I ruminated on the good life ... and that in the context of the personal pain we felt at our family tragedy ... the easy life amid the universal dross, I vowed to redouble my own commitment to those parts of my life that are good.

One more point, and then I'll put this computer away and lean back into the enjoyment of a 12-hour flight ... no sarcasm there at all ... and my current re-re-read of the Persian Wars. My nephew just came back to Australia after a half-year trip around the world, including to family in Canada. Aussies travel. But when they come back home, they settle into where they belong, back to the good life of the special secret Aussie joke on the rst of the world ... the one we all know about but don't quite grok.

Again ... we all have a little secret conspiracy, and the world doesn't quite get it. We smirk back at the world, knowingly, laughing, hoping that in some way our personal conspiracy is funny enough to carry us on in some kind of comfort and personal joy.

How odd. From this trip, from my communing with the Aussies, I found again a new urging to the quiet joys that are available to me, that are there for simply basking in them, sunning myself. Not what I expected; not what was on the agenda. But that was good.

Photos by Arod.

Homeward Bound

2009-09-27T20:25:00.002+02:00

Flight leaves in 7 hours ... vacation over. ... back to the good life on the Bay.

Getting All Short

2009-09-25T21:46:00.008+02:00

Saturday morning ... only today and tomorrow left in Australia before the long trip home. Work on Tuesday.

As with most vacations, I have read and sent email pretty much daily. That's the way work is. It is also the way that vacations are ... no matter how far away you go, you are still there. Nothing remarkable in my thoughts on this. There's a piece on Salon today, Is the Internet melting our brains?, that again and once again tells everybody to chill out and recognize that change happens and the species does not disappear. On the other hand, a nice piece by San Francisco's Mark Morford about the impossibility of communicating with dedicated morons.

So yesterday was a trip to the sylvan mysteries of Springbrook including a sweet long waterfall. Today is garage sales with Gordon and Diane, old friends of the Australian family, both Americans who have been resident here for many decades. They live in a little house right on Palm Beach, retired and enjoying it ... truly the good life!

We had a couple of beers on the patio at the Palm Beach Surf Club last night. Cool scene. A fetching young waiter was mightily impressed that I lived in San Francisco ... he was almost tongue tied, wanted to know about baseball. One of the nice things remaining about our fair city, notwithstanding that it is getting rather dowdy and unexceptional in so many ways, is that it is still view as a fable elsewhere. I shouldn't be too cranky about San Francisco's new-found inner frump, though, as I am looking forward to being home. Like everyone, I hate when vacations come to an end. But this has been a rather long one for me, and there is an itchiness to reconnect with my life. I still feel a little let down by the Sydney mishap ... I'll probably be within shouting distance of 60 when I do finally see the city. But there it is ... I will return to my fabled city with my eyes still innocent of Australia's fabled city.

After our beers by the beach, we went to the little casino in the Surf Club. I bet a dollar and won a dollar. My nephew bet 10 and ended up with 165!

Let's call that a metaphor.

Photos by Arod: Purlingbrook Falls, the family on Palm Beach, north of Byron Bay from the lighthouse.

The Good Life

2009-09-24T22:19:00.006+02:00

I just realized that I have been posting these Australia travel notes with San Francisco times ... I will have to go back and adjust the previous ones, and this note will disappear when I have done that.

When one travels, it is hard not to imagine that things are inherently better or worse somewhere else. Certainly things are different, but I would like to operate from the notion that notwithstanding vast differences in practice and expectation, not to mention material well being and circumstance, that most groups of people average the same amount of laughter and sorrow. I would like to operate that way, but not sure if it is right.

The most "exotic" places I have traveled ... and that probably means the place the furthest from my life experience ... are Haiti and Papua New Guinea. In the latter, people laughed a lot and life seemed good notwithstanding the rather restricted range of foodstuffs available to the highlanders. There is a good life in Papua New Guinea that would not seem very bloody good to me if I were compelled to live it. In this sense, Australia is probably the least "exotic" place I have ever traveled because the foodstuff range is pretty comparable to here I come from, the people speak English, and the expectations seem broadly similar.

Even so, the good life in Australia has a different timbre than the good life in San Francisco.

It's quite chilly this morning ... I even have a "jumper" on. A few days back it was warm in the morning, and the TV news was reporting that the weather was nice. The morning heat filled me with a certain foreboding because I fear the insufferably hot days for which this place is famous. The real foreboding should have been that the heat was a predictor for the dust storm of the century.

My point here, as attenuated as it apparently may be, is that the good life here is bloody hot. Most people go about their lives, working and doing, but the tiny strip where sand meets surf is where the good life abounds. The famous swagger of the semi-clad Australian youth points to and derives from that strip, and from the blazing heat and the quenching waves.

Some years ago on the island of Nias, Ian and I were walking through Gunungsitoli to a boat that would carry us back to Sumatra. Blazing hot. A bunch of Aussie surfer guys loudly declaiming as they strutted along, their accompanying women trailing behind, pouting, clearly not having quite the time of it that their males were having. We were cranky about them because they had interfered with our idyll at Teluk Dalam, on the south coast. The Aussie's claimed the western point of the bay on which we were staying because the surf was good there. As we sought inner peace and solitudinous reflection in the evening, they drunkenly whooped it up and made asses of themselves.

This is the favored fable of Aussie surfers. Life has moved on, of course, and Aussie women are as liberated as women anywhere else. But the actual swagger I witness here is not loud and aggressive, but sleek and self-assured. Notwithstanding that there is something cloying and annoying about people who are beautiful, athletic, unemployed and fancy free, yet evidently still with sufficient means to enjoy the good stuff ... the beach bums are the proximate definition of the good life here. They don't seem to need to rub it in or lord it over. They just strut along the street secure on the corner of the good life that has accrued to them. Of course, this notion would be considerably disabused were I to venture to the notorious nocturnal drinking binges where alcohol and youth conspire to turn the good into its opposite ... but I am not looking at the dialectic of sublime and crass here. Rather, I am trying to put my finger on what passes as the middle middle Australian sublime.

Yesterday Shane and I toured Byron Bay, surely one of the most exquisite places anywhere in the world. Natural beauty, beautiful people, leisure ... alas, artless architecture obscuring the few traces of an older more genteel world, crappy souvenirs, cars everywhere. Exquisite these days is not what it once was.

And there's a point ... worldwide, exquisite used to be reserved for the rich, and now there is increasingly an exquisite that crassly goes well down the social ladder. Australia is a particularly pointed argument for this, because it is a place founded broadly on a principle of elevating the working class. There is a leveling force here that brings the very broad middle up. The good life here is for everyone if they make the right choices ... work hard all year and go to the beach on your holidays; that's the meme.

Shane complains about the louts who live on the dole, clog up the streets, do nothing, get drunk and stoned, and view the good life as entitling them to a lifetime of free stuff and fun. Cranky, me too. When you work for a living, you resent those who game your taxes for leisure and indolence. Of course, long-term those who ply this thin trade find diminishing returns; we saw a few of those, skinny, leathered skin, shoeless, ambling. I think most of the beautiful surfer types do it until they marry up and family down.

This is just not a society which believes that the ordinary life is a trap or a failure ... this is not a society that sees Michael Jordan as success and everything else as not good enough. This is not a society that runs by the moronic motto that "you can be anything you want to be if you just try hard enough." The American mythology of excess is tempered here. They have three "footie" leagues that are very successful and barely known off the continent. No athlete in Australian society is making 20 million a year. But they are successful nonetheless.

The night of my dust-induced discomfiture, I asked of the family that we do something out there, something other than the warm embrace of togetherness and familiarity. I was disappointed that my excursion to Sydney was drowned in that now infamous red dawn. Let me wax a little personal on that ... this has been one of those middle-aged voyages of self-discovery in which settling in with my intimates provides an inner warmth and recovery that I probably could not have managed so freely when I was younger. That said, I did want to have my indefatigable wild streak massaged as well. The 24 hours in Sydney was my chance to be a fag, that is a self-actualized, self-defined individual, unknown in the big city, observing, being observed, haunting and strutting in such a strut as I still manage. It was my mid-50s version of the good life, formed up and pared down to a single day and night of forced-march tourism, as I like to call it. It's really all I needed. And the fact that it was stolen by nature's sudden descent did not reduce the humbling that it induced. I am over the humbling now, and back to smirking about how little our little conceits matter in the larger frame. The memory of what I missed is not part of my inner self-mockery, and that will be my mental souvenir. That, and the vow that the next time I come to Australia (in three years for my nephew's promised graduation) I fly into Sydney and do it first.

So back to the family's night out. We went to the Currumbin Surf Club ... an Australian style institution which supports the good life by plowing the profits back to supporting the surf patrol. Leslie and Shane are members; Scott, my nephew, came along as well. Mother was enjoying a Happy Hour with my sister's mother-in-law at the seniors' development. And, to set the scene, Currumbin is surely the coolest town on the coast here, seemingly least developed, most like it ought to be, low rise, long beach, laidback.

We didn't get a table right away, but drank our beers on the balcony ... the air was still filled with dust, though we could see the moon and one start. The In The Bin Film Festival "Board Shorts" were showing on the flat panels when we got our table which was right next to where a bunch of dreadlocked musicians were setting up for what promised to be a bloody loud set of music. Hmmm, we nervously, middle-agedly, fretted. Can we thrust these burgers down fast enough to get out of here before the racket interrupts. Mother was waiting to be picked up at 8, we got our table after 7 ... so this was the big night out on a foreshortened schedule.

And then the band started. They were incredible ... called a FRENCH BUTLER called SMITH. They say of themselves that they are a world music band that plays "high energy Latin, funk, instrumental fusion" ... a little Chick Corea, a little didgereedoo, lots of funk, jumping and jiving. The guitarist, Scott French, was a wave, and the bassist, Jake Martin, was a babe and a force of nature. There was a sax and a trumpet. Wow.

So that was my little sight of the good life on that dusty evening. The Surf Club, the world funk jive grooves, the crowd mixed of middle aged and youth. A skinny kid in a German hunting hat, as I call it, tapping his foot and watching to see who watched him. Huge burgers. And the roiling sky outside, still plugged with the dust that is the harbinger of the ultimate end of it all.

I did buy the CD, and had a sweet chat and a tap of the arm with the sexy bassist pictured below. Ah, the good life.

Photos by Arod. 1. The Lighthouse at the easternmost point in Australia. 2 and 3. Byron Bay. 4 and 5. a French Butler called Smith in performance at the Currumbin Surf Club.

Global Warming Bites: No Way to Sydney

2009-09-23T22:47:00.000+02:00

Somehow, nature hit me in the bulls eye yesterday. If I had chosen a flight 3 hours earlier or 3 hours later, I would probably be in Sydney right now and I would not be writing this post. I would be emerging from the Wattle Hotel on Oxford Street, heading to a long purposeful march through a city I have hankered to visit for decades.

But no! The dust storm of the century hit me ... and pretty much the entire East Coast of Australia ... between the eyes. Sydney was the land of the red horror. Meanwhile, I was trapped in the Gold Coast airport figuring that luck would not abandon me, and I'd still make it out. After four hours, they canceled my flight. I'm probably out about 200 bucks, but I might end up getting some of that back if I pursue it diligently.

But that, of course, is not the story.

The not so big secret of Australia is that it is the driest continent. It also is sustaining one of the most rapid population growth rates in the world. And, speaking of bulls eyes, it is feeling the earliest and most devastating effects of global warming. The causes of this unusual dust storm are drought, warm spring, and denuded farmland. The red dawn in Sydney was the sight of people waving goodbye to the topsoil that has fed them for a century.

Even so, there we were stuffing fast food garbage into the bins at the airport which serves this explosively expanding tourist spot with nary a care other than our shattered plans to photograph Sydney Harbor from the Manley ferry, or whatever equivalent mattered by person. I actually grabbed a water bottle from a girl's tray as she dumped it into the garbage and told her that was recyclable ... the recycling bin was 6 inches away, so perhaps it was too much trouble for her. She gave me a pissy look.

I sat for a while across from a large happy Chinese family ... speaking Chinese, but I thought they were Australians. The older boy, obviously the family's apple-eye, pouted and pushed away the boxed individual pizza that Auntie brought him; the pizza went straight into the garbage. The boy later stretched and yawned in front of daddy who took a moment from his interminable cell phoning to rub his scion's fat belly. Meanwhile, the considerably skinnier and younger girl was left to her own devices.

On the upside of the people watching in the terminal where no one left, a surfer dude unconsciously pushed his T-shirt up and picked at his navel.

In the course of my slow resignation to the aborted Sydney trip, I ordered two coffees from the same place ... we established that the correct order is double-shot, short pull espresso, half full in a small cup ... and was charged a different amount for each order. They botched the second one, but I downed it anyway while looking out the window (photo above), peering into the gloom in hope of catching a few rays of hope from above. I tried to read my book ... a fevered popularization of the Greek/Persian Wars of the fifth century B.C.E. called Persian Fire. But even the cavortings of Darius could not distract me from my disappointment.

Later, I had a nice night out with the family instead of cruising The Oxford. I will report on that shortly. But right now, I want to feel sorry for myself ... which, as the Republicans will point out, is so much more important than doing something about the headlong dive into disaster into which our accumulated selfishnesses is pitching our planet.

Photos by Arod. Top one of the runways at the Gold Coast airport, bottom one of mannequins inside the airport ... one of a long series of mannequin photos.

First Day of Spring

2009-09-22T21:50:00.000+02:00

Yesterday was blazing hot in Brisbane. We walked around downtown ... sister, brother-in-law, mother, and me; nephew went off with his cousin. This is a very family trip, and I have been the happy recipient of all-in travel planning. Everyone has been very patient with my shutterbug-itis. I have been less patient with my own inability to keep up with the photo processing.

The second to last stop in Brisbane was a wonderful bookshop called Archives that advertises itself as having over a million books; it inhabits the building pictured above. Almost worth moving to Brisbane for. They claim to have a web site, but it is broken right now. It did seem a little pricey, and one of the online reviews had the same opinion. Not sure how much used books cost in Australia. I ended up buying two souvenir tomes, one a 1925 geography of the world with an old school library checkout form pasted in the front page, the other a small 1941 book of reminiscences on Australia intended for servicemen on duty. The title is Australia: My Country, and the author is Charles Barrett. A very sentimental volume. I was fretting over whether to buy it until I saw that one of its short pieces is an essay on climbing Mount Tamborine before the road was put in.

It turns out that I am a day ahead of myself in this report. Because two days ago we went up to Mount Tamborine which looks out over the Gold Coast as it shelters a national park and a little tourist town of artsy shops. Just before the town, though, we were witness to three young men who through themselves off the mountain, albeit attached to gliding devices that lofted them high. The guy with the sail device ... alas, I do not know the terms ... was ghoulishly wrapped head-to-toe; I assume that it must get cold at the heights which he quickly attained. The fixed wings guys drifted downward until they found a thermal over which they spiraled back upwards. I do not have the risk/thrill personality type, but even so I could not help but fantasize at how exhilarating the ride of the first fellow must be. It seemed like he was in airliner country up there. How peaceful how serene, how utterly terrifying.

After that we settled into the little town of Tamborine with its crafts and tourist gee-gaws. I bought a bar of convict soap that said "Gentle after 50 lashes". Now it is stinking up my bag. I also bought a couple of non-local pieces of colorful glass that will go in the garden. And we settled in for some chocolates and coffee at a nice little place where the espresso machine was out of doors. The young woman confessed that she never guessed where people were from because they would invariably be offended if she guessed wrong. People are such twits.

From Tamborine to the Knoll, a part of Tamborine National Park. My sister is a high muckamuck in the Queensland government land use administration. She has moved through the ranks, and knows so much about land use, climate change, endangered and invasive species. Always a delight to tour with an expert. We had lunch in the Knoll, and the Brush Turkeys and Magpies harassed us. Speaking of birds, Ibis are as common as muck ... they flocked in great numbers in the cooling pools of water surrounding the power plant next to Swanbank where we took the steam train yesterday.

Leslie and I took a brief jaunt down a trail to see the rainforest ... some unidentifiable brown birds about the size of robin were mucking into the mulch, actually burying themselves, and paying little attention to our approach. We left them to what we presumed was their worming. We would have taken a much longer stroll ... rainforest is unendingly repetitive, and thereby meditative ... but my game and hearty near 80-year-old mother does not hike with quite the vigor of years gone by. She is game, and interested. But the body does place a limit.

On the way down the mountain, we were witness to some ancient car, overfilled with humanity, that was blowing smoke and bout to collapse, its last mission cut short by overly optimistic modern drivers who decline to admit that there is, in fact, a limit to everything.

So back to Brisbane. Quite a city, and one, by my sister's report, that has exploded from sleepy town to urban giant in the space of a couple of decades. The ancient buildings were nestled into the mushrooming modernity. Leslie is moving from a middle-aged skyscraper to one of the latest shortly ... I want a photo of her new office from where she will reign over Queensland's exceptionally rich land resources.

Mother struck up a conversation with another old lady in the food court. She was a bushwhacker, one of 10 children, raised and resident in the outback. In Brisbane on some errand. I did not hear the conversation, alas, but Mother was fascinated and the two hit it off like old friends while I dug into a massive Japanese rice bowl.

We did a little public transit in Brisbane ... a catamaran ferry down the river, and later a bus back from downtown to the car park in South Bank, a beautifully developed park and play land. Public transit is the best cheap way to know a place.

My only regret in our five hours of rapid deployment is that I did not get much of a chance to photograph the fabulous bridges of the Brisbane River. I'll look for post cards instead.

Heading to Sydney today despite its being in the middle of a red dust storm. Domestic flights seem to be still on track. If for any reason I get bumped, there are no refunds, so I am going to hang on until they chase me out of the airport if it comes to that. I have about 26 hours on the ground in Sydney, and I want to make use of every second.

Photos by Arod. Falling behind on Flickr, but will keep after it. Not likely to upload anything until after I return from Sydney.

Rain and Steam

2009-09-21T21:54:00.000+02:00

Not necessarily in any order.

Before I get to our trip to Swanbank ... It rained briefly last night. Tropical rains are so sensual. The big drops, the loud patter, the sweet odor. It reminds me of the best tropical rain I ever felt. On the Trobriand Islands in 1983 with my friend Ian. We had just arrived and set out for a walk. The rain arrived suddenly, heavy, warm, inundating. We just kept walking as children laughed an pointed from under banana leaves. We ended up in the closest thing to a town ... Losuia, I think ... drenched to the skin. But by the time we were back at the hotel, we were only damp ... as damp as you might be in the tropics if there hadn't been a rain.

That hotel in the Trobriands was owned by an Aussie ex-pat who had his ear glued most of the time to a short-wave radio with the footy on. Footy would be football, and my nephew Scott informed me today that it is spelled with a 'y' not an 'ie' as I had assumed. I enjoy Australian English ands train to hear its varieties as we wander about.

Wandering included a trip to Swanbank where we boarded a classic, restored steam train on Sunday, the Queensland Pioneer Steam Railway. A total hoot! The billowing black steam was the most 19th century part of the deal, but the cramped cabins, the beautiful wood, the unannounced stoppages ... it all made it so easy to imagine rail travel in another time when distance meant so much more than now. We waited in the torpid heat in our car, the Bonnie Dundee, on a siding as the crew prepared to offload one car and connect up to another ... reasons were not provided. This was in the middle of a bit of a railway graveyard, and all the slow decaying metal made me shutter-happy.

At some point we got talking about how much further away Australia was in the mid-70s when my sister first moved here. For good or ill, the world is contracting. That said, I still send three postcards wherever I go, and those are ready for the post some time today.

Gonna take a break and make some coffee ... no matter that I am half a world away from home, I am still bolt awake at 5!

As I say, we sat in the Bonnie Dundee, and we were the only group without wee children. One said children was a messy looking little girl who was not squirm-free for more than a flash the entire journey. She particularly liked hanging out of the window, and her father, a hale-fellow-well-met lad of a man, only occasionally saw fit to haul her back in. Mother and I, sitting together right behind, cringed in unison. I mentally timed my leap across the seat in front of me to see if I could retrieve her from disaster. Her accompanying young brother, in the care of what appeared to be the grandfather was more the muttering type whose excursions were limited to purposeful trips up and down the aisle. Even so, he was more than once perilously close to tumbling off the balcony. What a grump I am ... I wish there were options for child-free outings ... or at least outings where the children where sworn to the seen-not-heard standard of yesteryear for which I loudly hanker.

So after the train ride, we went into Ipswitch, an old mountain working class town that is feeling the pressure of gentrification. It is a straight-shot train ride to downtown Brisbane, but it still has that old small-city charm. I can see why people would want to live here, notwithstanding that the lack of ocean breezes makes it hotter by day and colder by night than the coast.

We went to the Ipswitch RSL ... Returned Servicemen's League, I think ... for lunch. It seemed such a characteristically Australian place. A club, with membership and special rules for non-member entrance. A bar, a buffet, food to order, entertainment, and slots. The club funnels its profits to assorted community ventures. There was an enormous old guy propped up on a stool at the bar, and it was obvious that here was his spot which he guards with dull alacrity day in and day out. The underlying socialism of this decidedly capitalist country is part of that secret conspiracy of which I spoke a day or two ago. All the Aussies get it, and you have to admire it ... but I'm not quite in on the punchline. Back to the prosaic ... enormous feed, hearty food. I erred in having a bourbon on the rocks as I was ready for bed for the rest of the day.

Photos by Arod. I am uploading a whole lot of them to Flickr as I write this, and will add the link here when the upload is done.

Ay Currumbin, Redux

2009-09-20T22:22:00.000+02:00

So there we are walking along the beach with the art in the Swell Sculpture Festival. Nice stuff ... some of it compelling. The crowd was laidback, children hither and yon, sometimes climbing on the sculpture. I could not get a picture of some helicopter-themed piece because the young-uns swarmed so much about it. I like my pix of art, and architecture, human free. Human beings are fun to photograph, but mostly I am looking to pull something out of context, to isolate in aid of drawing the mind to the less obvious view, the mental path not yet taken. That's the goal.

There's a paradise aspect to it all ... watching the surfer dudes grabbing the last bit of the underwhelming waves as the sun set. Anything to get wet and stay wet.

After the Swell festival, it was on the In the Bin Film Festival, an annual affair of a single night of shorts under the stars on 2 screens in the park. We brought lawn chairs and a meal and plenty of beer. The A/V folks were having a hard time of it, but nary a complaint from an audience that was perfectly happy to chill and be and drink in the evening air. At long last, it all started, though we did have to watch the sponsor commercials a grand total of three times over the course of the evening.

I enjoyed the Not so Green Eugene Green piece by Michael Hill, an animation piece about an unusually socially alienated man and his encounter with a woman, equally socially inept but in a different and incompatible way. And also a completely sacrilegious Last SupperAngus Ml Sampson in which a rowdy drunken dozen apostles ridiculed the savior portrayed by an aged aboriginal with false teeth. Judas Iscariot got stuck with the bill and tried to do a dash and dine.

There were a couple of pieces that dealt with life and death, and in the dark that made for some reflective and sad moments for our family in light of our recent loss referred to in an earlier post. I am always amazed at human capacity for soldering on, and I especially impressed by the strength of character my sister's family shows. Hard to find words.

So Currumbin is quite a little town, blissful by the sea, using its good fortune for art and conservation and creativity.

Photos by Arod from the Swell Sculpture Festival, More photos on my Flickr site, and more to come as I get time to upload them.

Ay Currumbin

2009-09-20T09:46:00.000+02:00

After we came back from the Gold Coast, there was only the briefest pit stop at home before Shane and I headed out to buy some groceries via a circuitous route through sundry communities south of here, specifically Coolangatta, Tugun, and especially Currumbin.

The story in Coolangatta is a low bore Surfers' Paradise ... the financial value of development bit by bit squeezing out the old and characteristic in favor of vast cookie cutter high rises. Not entirely ugly or unappealing or without justification. But the value of moderation or diversity is lost in the face of seemingly permanently escalating property values. I looked about for signs of the old, the faded beach shacks and cool low-rise wooden structures. Few to be found except in Currumbin.

Still, it is paradise. Apparently there is a saying that 60% of the days here are great, and the rest are perfect. It is especially perfect for the semi-amphibious, and as I mentioned this morning, they abound.

Plenty of public art about, most of it apparently having caused controversy. The piece above is atop a hill in Coolangatta. I had to lie on the ground to get some of the photos, and then get the bejeezus outta there as a crowd of young drunks was on the verge of a punch-up ... still in the happy phase of abject inebriation, but we all know how quickly that devolves into smash mouth.

There is still a lot of what makes living on the beach a sweet life in Currumbin. Later in the evening we returned for a two-fold arts festival. First there was the Swell Sculpture Festival, an annual competition that attracts a swell of visitors ambling along the beach at dusk taking quickly composed photos and contemplating the art. I'll have more pix on Flickr soon enough ... the problem with travel blogging is that it takes time, and I am supposed to be having a good time, not being a self-employed three-dot lounger.

I have to admit that I am tuckered out and broiling hot ... and dinner is shortly on the way. "Tea" as they call it. So I am signing off from this pedestrian post, and will try to cach up as soon as I can.

Photos by Arod.

Up and Down the Gold Coast

2009-09-19T21:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday: a poetic day by any measure. The sweetest poetry on the Gold Coast is the riot of bird song that greets in the morning. I am sleeping in a little alcove in Leslie and Shane's rambling and idiosyncratic wood frame home at the pinnacle of Elanora, and beside my head is a screen door that allows the sounds and the sweet early spring air to caress me as I sleep. And because sleeping on vacation is one of its best arguments, this arrangement is, well, poetic.

So yesterday was a focused trip up and down the Gold Coast. Elanora, where I am staying with family, is slightly inland and at the southern end of the Gold Coast, Queensland's sun, sand, water tourism mecca. We set out northbound, a snug five in the family Hyundai, heading to Surfer's Paradise and ultimately the Spit. I was vaguely expecting a slowly modernizing beach resort with a bunch of strip malls and old haunts. Was I in for a surprise.

The Gold Coast is an explosion of high rise haunts for the rich and proud and those who like to hang around them. You can readily see by the age of the buildings how rapidly the development has occurred. Bright and white-washed and modern as if there never was anything old. Not entirely unpleasant ... there is a breeziness and unaggressive self-assurance to Australian that makes is forward character so much more palatable than, say, the forward character of the aggressive American self-absorption. Not, of course, that any world traveler has not at some point or another had to move spritely to avoid a gaggle of Australian drunks. But the underlying warmth of Australia makes a place like Surfers' Paradise easier to handle than its Miami analogue.

Oh, yeah, and then there are all the bods ... man ... living the life of surf, sun, and water makes the dudes damnably pretty ... head-turners all about. I didn't have time for the candid people shot thing ... that takes patience, stealth, and solitude. So I only managed this one shot of the beach crowd. You get the idea.

We ended up on a still natural sand peninsula called the Spit. Hot. Seemed like the sort of place I would want to bring the dog at dawn for a long walk before mad Mr. Sun would start to burn a hole in my good mood. Two young guys pulled up in a rant-a-skiff and we watch as one of them anchored it to the sand. He walked up the rise and kept looking at us ... evidently he wanted a greeting and Shane gave him one. Again, a national sort of consciousness ... I have always felt that Aussies act as if they are all involved in a big happy conspiracy that they know about and everyone suspects ... but everyone else just doesn't get the punch line. Good natured, open to a good time.

Later, wandering around Surfers' Paradise was a lot more like the world-o-glam-tourism that leaves all of our clan cold. We were on a collective anthropological expedition, and we had a nice time doing it.

Gotta fly ... off to the Ipswitch classical steam engine train. Will try to catch up later this afternoon.

Photos by Arod ... plenty more when I get time to process them. I'll upload a big batch to Flickr and let you know.

Auckland

2009-09-18T12:50:00.000+02:00

I'm in the Auckland airport, feeling nostalgic for a place I have never visited but have long adored. Everyone is speaking English here, but in a variety of patois, mostly Australian. There's a rugby game on one television, the BBC international news on the other. Short men with treetrunk legs and cannonball buttocks on the one screen and skinny black youth in a garbage dump in Africa on the other ... I'm not sure what the story is.

I tried to pay for the Internet here, but it couldn't handle the transaction ... not sure why. I did manage to pay for a double espresso with a credit card, and I plan to pay for another one once I get up from my labors here. (I'll post this when I get to Australia, but adjust the date accordingly.)

I love long flights, and this one was uneventful. 12 plus hours, around 7 of which were spent uncomfortably in the arms of Morpheus. I have a bum left shoulder which responds to Ibuprofen, but only for so long. And speaking of buttocks ... not the cannonball sort ... why can we not invent an airline seat that handles the buttockal demands of reclining contorted in a chair for hours without putting the pitied pair to sleep. We've all got butts ... let's let science get a grip on this!

Reminds me of my old friend, turned enemy, now deceased, Maurice Flood, the driven pioneer of Canadian gay liberation who was, characteristically for Canada, an American exile. After he first met me, he reported to a mutual friend that I had the cutest ass but a face that would stop a clock. My friend relayed this to me, and Maurice was embarrassed and apologetic. He should not have been ... I laughed about it and still do. I know my face would stop a clock ... it probably has.

What am I rambling on about? O yeah, buttocks and beggars on the TV. The buttocks get the best of it, and that, my friends, is the way it goes in history.

For this recently closed flight, NZ 7, I brought along a 4 month supply of New York Times Review of Books which my good friend Roy gives me week by week. He attaches a stickie on the front with page references to the relevant articles ... useful given that Roy and I are likely to read the same ones. The press of everyday life is such that it takes me a while to read these things, and I often do it in concentrated sessions. So this is what I got, inter alia: God is not dead, but he might as well be since he doesn't exisst. Whores tell interesting, pithy, but literally flawed stories, and ... shock ... people have sex. Donald Rumsfeld is a force of nature whose one good idea eventually set an empire to ruin. And academics should not devise financial strategies.

All of these stories illustrate that third principle that adorns the top of this blg: any force given long enough turns into its opposite. Religion may have been the proximate attendant upon the founding of civilization, but it is the root of all modern evil. Sex is good unless it is bad ... or se is bad until you admit that it is good. Beware the smiling ideologue for surely he will lead you to hell. And god save us from experts and know-it-alls.

Gotta fly ... literally. I plan to mount this ramble without editing ... except for the sake of my own pride, I will fix any spelling errors.

Out and up for Down Under

2009-09-17T03:56:00.000+02:00

So I am heading to Australia. And I have not been blogging. The things are vaguely connected. I didn't mean things to go this way, but there it is.

The trip to Australia was planned months ago ... a long-delayed visit to my sister's adopted homeland of over 30 years. Summer is always exhausting for me, as the conscientious reader of my poultry scratch will know. And I was just pulling out the miasma when ... well, when tragedy struck. I want to be delicate and not name precise names for the sake of the peace of mind of those closest to the tragedy.

My 27 year-old nephew, who suffered for more than a decade from a debilitating case of chronic fatigue syndrome, took his own life. He would be my Australian sister and brother-in-law's older son; he has a younger brother who is hale and hearty, and crushed by the loss of his brother, as were his parents.

So the trip to Australia has a deeper, more sober, undoubtedly more reflective tone than was promised by the original plans. It turned out this way, and it turns out that I can be there for those I love, grieve with them, look to the past and future together with them.

Kris was the first descendant of my parents to pass from this vale. Counting my parents, there were ten of us across three generations. Now there are nine. It's been a rough passage.

His death knocked the last bit of wind out of my sails, and eventually I gave in to my writer's block and let the blog go on hiatus. But that will be over now ... I plan to blog furiously on this trip which will last until September 28. I even forked over $7.99 to tmobile for a 24-hour airport pass that I will use for one hour to get this post written.

I enjoy travel blogging ... wish I traveled more so I could do more of it. This one will be mixed ... the joy of reunion, the fascination of the new, and the irreducible sorrow of a young man gone before his time and by his own hand.

So to wrap it up for now, here is what I wrote to be read at his funeral; I will post over the next week or so the writings of all of us that were read as his family and friends said good-bye.

Remembering Kris

I am Kris's uncle in San Francisco. I last saw him when the whole family came to my annual gala Christmas party in 1998. All my friends still remember my fabulous Australian family, and they all remember the quiet teenage boy who smiled and did not say a lot.

That Christmas in San Francisco and later in Winchester was the last time I saw Kris. I wish I knew him better ... but I feel that what I do know is that he was one of us, the brave son of my sister and the love of her life, the boy who did not say a lot, but who persevered as long as he could.

His passing has given all of us here great pause. My friends have given me their time to reflect on life and choices and the difficulty of imagining what it is to be in someone's else's place. We must learn even from tragedy, and Kris's moment now strives to teach us not to judge what others find necessary no matter how much pain we feel.

Even so, nothing reduces the quiet, the hollowness of loss. I am reminded of a Malay poem I have long loved:

The angel’s trumpet blooms flowery white
oysters lie stranded along the beach
I want to embrace the mountain, its might
what’s the use, the hands don’t reach

Our lives and loves and learning are founded in striving. But there are some things we cannot touch, we cannot reach, we cannot understand. In remembering Kris, I think of that. I think of what he understood about what he could and could not do. I wish he had made another choice. But who am I to say. Who are we to say.

May he rest in our memory, beloved, so long as we have memory.

Saturday Night is Ear Cleaning Night

2009-08-20T13:31:00.000+02:00

I got a laugh out of that line at work. I keep 'em laughing at work ... I try to keep 'em laughing wherever I go. To make 'em laugh, you have to play the fool a bit, the cynic a bit, the wry observer. You have to be aware of your own tomfoolery. Yes, mostly you have to play the fool a bit.

I can keep 'em laughing almost all the time, but occasionally the stress load gets sufficient that I crumble a little and the response time is down. Notwithstanding that I got a laugh out of ear cleaning night, that is how I have been feeling. The annual course catalog ... regular readers will remember that I string type together for a major research university (MRU) in exchange for a twice-monthly supply of alphabet soup ... gets to be a grind as it nears the end. This year, we are entirely online, and so we went live on August 1. But live and online is bloody different than going to press. Since go-live, we have been tweaking the courses site daily, and cleaning up the degrees site regularly. I am in the final, final phase, where I make a giant pdf of the thing. In other words, I still make a book; I just don't send it to a printer.

The pdf production is where my lifetime as a copy editor drives me crazy. "Nuts!", to quote Inspector Kramer of Nero Wolfe fame. Nuts. The technology is cranky and backward, and I come face to face with the thousands of prose discourtesies that emerge from the mouths of the careless and the overweening. I won't say the ignorant because most of this prose is written by people with PhDs. So one has to wonder where they imbibed the notion that prose is about slapping a few dashes hither and yon, and capitalizing any word that makes them burp with satisfaction, and stringing puffy adjectives before and after the noun so as to hide the meaning.

All of this is to say that I will be free to return to my more airy being as incipient curmudgeon this weekend.

And I will get back to photography, most of which is not the shooting of the photos but the manipulating of the stream of resultant files.

I didn't mean for this post to go this way. It is the fifth hour in the morning; I went to sleep at 10, so that condemned me to be awake before 4. I just heard the coffee pot chirp ... so brb, as we say in chat ... be right back ...

Coffee in hand at 4:47. So you're wondering about ear-cleaning. That would be the dog's ears. I have committed to dog and vet that I will clean his ears weekly in aid of preventing the hidden fungal infection that was the proximate cause of the head shaking that was the proximate cause of the hematoma which sucked down 2 weeks and $800 of my affection for the great beast. He is all snuggled up beside me on my pillow-bestrewn "Chinese wedding bed". That is what we have long called this Malaysian-manufactured, cast-iron, mother-of-pearl inlaid, canopy bed (sans canopy at this point) where I nightly sleep and play with my laptop, not necessarily in that order. My old friend, now gone, Kurt bought it when he was a Peace Corps dialysis technician in Malaysia in the very early 70s. The shopkeepers told him it was a Chinese wedding bed, and notwithstanding that I do not know of a Chinese wedding bed tradition, that's what I call it.

Dog with ear midst pillows. That's where we are. The vet shaved his ear, drained the hematoma, sewed it up, wrapped his head in a bandage, and told me to make sure he didn't make a mess of himself. For two weeks. During the busiest time of my year. And, by the way, my 86 Honda Civic asked for and received a brake job in the middle of all this.

So it's been a cranky period, and the result is that I have dedicated Saturday evening ... leastwise 5 minutes of same ... to cleaning the dog's ears.

How Saturday has changed. I never go out on Saturday evening. Many were the decades that Saturday evening was a fright of activity. Let's not be bashful ... it always ended up with cruising in whatever was my favorite bar of the moment. All that will be a fond fond memory as I swab dear Loki's wet and quivering ears.

I meant to talk about my new hobby ... gardening ... and leave this on a positive note. That'll have to wait. Feeling my warm inner cranky. Besides ... it's 4:57 now. Feet on the floor by 5:29 ... that's the rule. So I have a half hour to catch up on the news.

Can You Row?

2009-08-10T06:08:00.000+02:00

Notwithstanding that my web sites are live ... see previous post ... and that the period of my annual course-catalog-related discomfiture is formally ended, I am still under the gun. One more week of that ... I could bore you with the details, but let this suffice ... pdf! Yes, the pdf ... in other words, even if you no longer have to print the damned thing, you still have to make a pdf so that the hangers-on can print something like what used to be printed and handed to them. So the only part of out-of-the-print business that I can really embrace is that I no longer have to spend a day with sweaty truck drivers tking delivery of 40 tones of books.

Ah, the pdf ... this week's torment.

But that is not the story. On Friday, I worked from home and that involved a vast amount of walking. Have I noted that the dog, my sainted Loki, took the opportunity of my annual deadline insanity to sprout a hematoma on his left ear. That bloody left ear has cost me a couple of thousand dollars over the course of dear Loki's life. We're into this episode to the tune of $800 and counting.

So on Friday, I took him to the vet's in the morning to have the bandage changed, and to board him there so that my assistant and I could spend the rest of the on Dreamweaver and our annual celebratory lunch. But that had to wait for breakfast ... so I left the vet's and walked along Fillmore heading to the Sidewalk Cafe on California.

The Fillmore is an historically Black district that was Japanese before WW II. Like everything in San Francisco, it's historic character is crumbling in the face of the cheap money of the rich that is infecting our world. But it is still Black at its core. So there I am walking along Fillmore in the early morning, and a dapper man, dressed to the nine's, looking every bit a Black church deacon, calls out to me as I pass, "Do you row?" Say what, I said. "Do you row?" he repeated. I made a gesture in the style of a man rowing. And then I looked a little more closely. The dapper old man proffered a bag of marijuana and some papers in an obviously arthritic hand. He was saying, "Do you roll?" But for middle age, a job, and a decided preference for whiskey and martinis in the evening, I could have turned my non-arthritic fingers into an early morning toke. I made some awkward excuse and rolled on, as it were.

When I were a young fart ... "as it were" ... I got a job at a place in Windsor called Canadian Bridge where we manufactured hydro-electric transmission towers. What we did was to manipulate steel "angles" that would be combined into the aforementioned towers. At one point, early in my short career, I was assigned to assist an ancient Polish man famous for his raging anger and quick temper. My job was to feed angles into a device which cleaned then with some sort of metal shot prior to their being galvanized. My Polish workmate ... his name has long since vanished form my memory ... starts yelling at me "Sha - een". I was befuddles, and he yelled it again. "Sha - een". This went on for a while and my Polish workmate worked himself into such a froth that I finally called the shop steward to protect myself. It turned out that "Sha - een" is the Polish-Canadian pronunciation of "chain". The man wanted a chain.

The can-you-row thing reminded me of the Sha - een episode. And it reminded me of the madness of work where words matter no matter how weird the moments may be.

Sunday evening ... haven't been blogging enough ... the week looming ahead will be the last nasty week of this season ... that's where I am hanging my hat ... that's where I'm rolling my chain.

Live!

2009-08-01T15:48:00.001+02:00

Both sites went live on time: Explore Degrees and Explore Courses. Gawd, I'm ecstatic, relieved, gonna take Sunday off.

We now return to a regular blogging schedule.

Note on how it is

2009-07-25T06:44:00.000+02:00

It's almost 10 and I am still working ... editing course descriptions, which is something I can do in my sleep, and often do before I sleep. I loathe sloppiness in prose ... loathe .. and the closer one comes to the humanistic core, the sloppier the prose. So I am growling now from having to correct infantile errors made by humanist scholars who ought to care more about the quality of their words. I rarely have to spend much time on scientific or engineering prose; those folks produce lists of terms that occasionally demand Googling, but not much else. But the humanists seem to think that excesses of froth equal better content. Yech.

I am a week from going live with the course catalog for MRU, the major research university where I clip verbiage for a living.

Worked from home today, as I often do in the period. Instead of lunch, I went into the back yard and yanked great strings of trumpet vine from the bushes. It was the proximate meme for yanking BS from humanist course descriptions ... not to mention other prose obscenities. I could ramble on.

I loathe sloppy prose, and I utterly fail to understand how any educated humanist could sleep with a puddle of such filth on their conscience.

Still, only a week to go.

The dog has developed a hematoma on his ear. Not critical or an emergency ... but why now, my sweet friend? Why now? We have an appointment for a draining and possible sutures on Tuesday ... that would be four days to go-live. I am obsessed at his discomfort ... notwithstanding that he is sound asleep, dog-like, three feet from me.

Better prose on this blog, at least as I see it, shortly ... specifically after August 1. And more photos.

For the moment, one more slurp of bourbon and then sweet, sweet Morpheus.

And wondering ... a life with deadlines ... they torment me. Who would I be without them?

And that's the way it is.

2009-07-20T05:01:00.000+02:00

The CBS retrospective on Walter Cronkite combined the best and the worst. Cronkite as the best, and the worst which is television news today. I wonder if Cronkite cringed as much as the rest of us do when Katie Couric mouths her oily platitudinous reductions.

The best was also the footage, and the worst was the endless narrating of how wonderful he was. Wouldn't a solid hour of nothing but clips be so much more a tribute?

Like all news junkie 50-somethings, I remember Walter Cronkite ... and given that I lived in Canada until the very tail end of his career as anchor to the nation, that's saying something. But I have to admit that the news he covered made more of an impression than he did. That's the way it should be. No Ashley Banfields, no Anderson Coopers, no Keith Olbermanns ... and certainly none of those babbling babboons on Fox ... No. News tells itself; the reporter's genius is in letting it do that.

The man led an amazing life. One of the greats.

This is the time of year when my entire life becomes focused upon the production of the course catalog for the Major Research University where I sharpen red pencils for wages. This year, we are not printing the thing, and the changes we made last year have created a production schedule that is vastly less stressful than every before. But still bloody stressful. So my posts may be a little reserved for another couple of weeks ... notwithstanding that I have a burning desire to answer the uninformed, narrow-minded, historically ignorant and bigoted nonsense of LZ Granderson on CNN. As I watched the Cronkite piece on CBS, I thought of combining the two. If I can get a solid day's work in on the course catalog tomorrow, I may devote a few hours to this pursuit tomorrow evening.

And I want to add, for those of my readers who follow my photography, that I am hanging on my own petard. I upgraded from iPhoto to Aperture in the middle of the busiest work period of my year ... and I can't find anything, my tags don't work, and the photos are like sand in my fingers. Give me a week or two.

Just a little note

2009-07-17T07:25:00.000+02:00

Just watched the American Idol finale on reprise with my friend of two decades, Tony. What a show! I am a smidge drunk, but surely that does not make me more sentimental than usual. Loved Alison and Cindy. Blown away by Kris and Keith. Poor Rod Stewart ... give it up dude. And blown out of the water by Kris and Adam and Queen. Those Queen guys must have been blown out of their minds by Adam.

It takes guts to sing ... never forget that. Sing!

Blogging the All-Star Game

2009-07-15T02:06:00.000+02:00

So I worked from home today ... it is that busy time of year in course catalog production ... and I "stiffed the dog" ... that is I did not walk him. So I am free to lay back at 5 p.m. and watch the All-Star Game from St. Louis. Just going to blog a little without a particular purpose and certainly with no intent to be complete.

The President will throw out the first pitch, and they showed him visiting both locker rooms. I may be pissed off at him, but he is certainly a cool dude, unflappable. I think the ball players were genuinely star-struck, and that is saying something.

Now Obama narrates a laudatory video ... the first of all five living presidents. He sure knows how to grab the bully pulpit ... I just want him to use it, to push it, to change the parameters. I had the Sotomayor hearings on today as I worked, and I thought she did well. Just as he does well. But doing well is no longer enough. We have to break sound barriers. Hmmm. They talk about volunteering, and points of light, and doing good. Sure. But not enough. We have to break the rules.

Very touching, still.

So Missouri's own Sheryl Crow sings the National Anthem. I may be a Canadian, but the Star Spangled Banner sends chills through me. One of the great joys of being a sports fan is that you get to hear it sung so often. Here it goes ... WOW ... a capella, there is nothing that makes a great voice more honest than that song. She belted it out, as it should be. I can't stand it when people turn it into a ballad. Her voice was raw-edged but, again, honest.

The fly-over by the stealth bomber was pretty spooky ... sorry I didn't get a pic.

Five Cardinal Hall of Famers ... including Ozzie Smith who has, so far as I know, boycotted the Cards until Tony La Russa no longer manages them. Strange. I think he has to get over it. Not a mention on the show.

Wow! Obama ballsily wears a White Sox jacket, jogs athletically to the mound, and throws a strike to the mound. What a stud.

And now the supremely annoying Buck boy, who openly prefers football to baseball. Yech. I grew to appreciate Tim McCarver a little more in the one year that he worked for the Giants. He does repeat himself ... oy, does he repeat himself? Yes, he does repeat himself, repeatedly. And when he's done, he says it again. Better than the Buck boy.

So let's go NL ... losers since 1996. How can that be? (has a lot to do with the pernicious impact of the DH ... designated hitter ... the most hated rule in pro sports.)

Timmie takes the mound ... yeah ... and Ichiro gets a doink hit with two strikes. Lincecum to Ichiro looks like high school baseball.

Ooops ... hits Jeter ... looking like trouble.

Damn ... double play ball with one out, and Pujols boots it, so there's an earned run.

Now bases loaded, double play ball and Lincecum doesn't cover first properly. Another run, though probably not earned.

Out of it with 2 runs. Jeez. Three botched double plays.

Baseball is so weird ... the AL gets two runs on a bunch of junk, but the NL gets nothing on three very hard-hit balls, two of them "rockets".

Timmie's second inning is 3 up 3 down. The way it should be.

Bottom of the second, 2 out, nobody on, three consecutive hits and an error, and the score is tied. Timmie's out of trouble!! Prince fielder pinch hits for him, so his evening is over ... 1-run ground rule double. 3-2 NL.

Meanwhile, Obama doing a good job as color commentator, guest.

RL, my roommate, just handed me an old-fashioned ... much appreciated. Life is good. Meanwhile, that Ryan Braun is awful cute. I don't get much time for baseball nowadays. Part of that is that I do not have a baseball buddy; more important is that I just don't have the time. A life that is lock-step from 5 a.m. until 7 p.m. does not leave a lot of room. Not that the 14 hours is not without its charms ... I love the dog walks, the train trip and the reading. And my job, no matter the stress, is endlessly fascinating and constantly changing. I am an easily bored person, and a static job would slowly kill me. I claim that I could live without the stress, but that has not been proven.

So an unlikely Giant, Jonathan Sanchez, pitched a no-hitter on Friday, and I did not see a single pitch of it. Normally, I try to watch a game on Friday night, but RL and I got talking and drinking and eating, and I had a blog post to squeeze out which I did as I sat at the counter watching him cook.

This ump doesn't like the low pitch ... phooey.

When I arrive din the States in 1981, I had left sports behind ... my childhood loves were hockey and the CFL (Canadian Football League). But I slowly got back into sports via college basketball until a co-worker at the late Omnicomp corrected some bilious errors I presented as fact about baseball. My first game was a Giants playoff game against the Cards in 1987 where Jeffrey Leonard hit a screaming homer down the left field line right past our seats which came courtesy of the mayor's office via several stops. I think it was game 2 because I remember us winning.

It's been a love affair ver since .. .especially with pitching. Yes, it is pitching that turns my crank. Nothing so sweet as a 1-0 complete game.

Bottom of the 4th, and young Zack Greinke of the Kansas City Royals steps up to pitch, and I have never heard of him. Turns out he has some kind of social anxiety disorder. Filthy slider, low outside, that the ump calls a strike. That's the way it should be ... make 'em swing.

It's getting to be a boring game ... and I can't stand Joe Buck ... and suddenly the obnoxious new habit of singing God Bless America, the most maudlin and uninspiring of the national songs. Why not America the beautiful whose poetry, while hardly a Star Spangled Banner, is moving and its language exquisite. No, the broad masses like unoffensive taste ... God Bless America is the Budweiser of songs.

Speaking of which, I need another beer.

Bottom of the 8th, 4-3 Al now. 2 on, 2 out, 0-2, Joe Nathan pitching to Ryan Howard. Wow. So the NL steals second, and Howard can be walked. Keee-rist ... but strikes out on a checked sing on a ball in the dirt. Ouch.

Nathan used to be a Giant, and we all still curse the day they traded him.

So we go to the bottom of the ninth, AL leading 4-3. It's gonna be Mariano Rivera, and I am one of those Yankee haters. Love New York, hate the Yankees. Go figure. Let's send Rivera into his richly deserved retirement with an old-fashioned spanking.

Oy ... 1 out, ground out to short.

2 out ... called third strike on the outside.

Suddenly the ump calls the low bloody strike, way low ... I guess Mariano gets whatever he wants.

3rd out ... flare fly ball.

The stadium is silent. Everybody is bummed.

Enough for me ... gotta get these pix out of the camera ... and I am totally sick of Joe Buck's voice.

Pics by Arod of his boob tube.

Wet

2009-07-13T06:04:00.000+02:00

Every morning, after the dog walk but before I put on my tie, I grab a handful of koi pellets, go to the pond in the back yard, and thrust my arm almost to my elbow into the cold water. I let the pellets slowly float free to the surface from between my fingers, but keep enough in my down-turned palm that one or another of the koi find it worth their while to nibble directly from my hand.

Th water is cold, and it has an unmistakable odor. It is one of the most sensual moments of my far too lock-step day. Each day a different memory of water floats into my head as I resist the urge to get my hand out of the frigid wet.

The koi water and the water of my numerous aquaria are the only regular associations with water in my life, and I regret that. When I am feeling stress, I often think of water ... the open ocean at night, great rivers, and, most of all, the endless streams and lakes of northern Canada.

I remember when i was a teenager and a bunch of us were on some sort of camping expedition ... the details are foggy. My friend Peter, with whom I was secretly in love, and I filched a rowboat from some other campers. We paddled around in overgrown waterways. Suddenly, Peter dropped his glasses into a muddy byway. He stripped to his underwear and dove in. When he was gone, I was frozen in lust ... his all but naked body revealed. He surfaced, wet and pale white, gathered his breath, and plunged down again. He never found his glasses, and I have never recovered from that association of wet and the object of my ardent, teenage desires.

I thought of that today when the Washington Post published this photo:

Water is the other medium, other than air, where we vacation but where we do not live. Many are those whose lives are entirely bound into water. But they still live in air.

I hanker for water. My sainted ex, Richard, had a kayaking hobby for some time, and I vicariously kayaked with him. I still treasure the photos he took when surrounded entirely by water in Alaskan fjords.

Water drives history, of course, and it will drive the torments that await us in the next centuries. I have been reading Mesopotamian history, and we know that hydraulics lie underneath the economics that created empire and power and majesty. But, curiously, the Mesopotamians set water to the side of their cosmological views, and worshiped instead air and sky in the "persons" of Enlil and Marduk. Water surrounded and undergirded. But it was never the center.

Last evening, it rained just a little ... enough that I took the cushions off the yard chairs.

The first time I visited Berlin, I sat by the fountain in Kufurstendamm one morning, transfixed simultaneously by the fountain itself and some passing beauty seated on the other side of me. I had no camera, so I have no record. But the fountain took on that extra meaning of unrequited lust. The last time I visited Berlin, I tried to find that moment again. Instead, I found a great fountain.

Water is like that. We trace our passions in it, and it washes them away.

We never touch the same water twice. Though we try.

Top photo by Arod of fountain at the Major Research University where I wet wash for wages; middle photo from the news today; bottom photo from by Arod from Berlin.

The Ancients Whisper: Further Notes on Mesopotamian Religion

2009-07-11T04:34:00.000+02:00

I have moved on from Mesopotamia to a campy "popular" history of Egypt, Barbara Mertz's Temples, Tombs and Hieroglyphs. But I did not express to my own satisfaction in my last post the underlying dialectics of ancient Mesopotamian religion. So here goes ...

The fact of the Mesopotamian additive, accumulative, and mechanical listing and doubling approach to imagining the influence of the divine upon everyday life does not mean that there was not a dialectic going on. Mechanical thinking is, I would assert, only a rhetorical means of approaching the expression of the irreducible dialectics of being and living. What that means in the concrete is that the pragmatic side of Mesopotamian religion was not burdened with a supervening transcendence which could obscure its practicality and tolerance as opposed to what came later ... religion as repression and exclusive monomania.

This was the contribution of the ancient Hebrews. I hasten to pre-credential myself ... that is to cover my derrière ... by noting that my speculations on ancient Hebrew religion express nothing of my lifelong love of the Jewish cultural influence on Western society. I have never written about that here, and I will have to do so at some point. But the ancient Hebrews effected a revolution in thought that transformed the ambient pan-cultural and accumulative religious system into a "national," exclusive, and substitutive one. Where any individual or community could choose from a pantheon which divinity they preferred as their intercessor and defender, the Hebrews required allegiance to one god. By that move, they had to create a god who transcended the mechanical relationship between the divine and the real ... in other words, no longer was each event or moment the result of a narrative or an approachable decision maker, but now all reality was transcendentally controlled ex nihilo by one supervening and enveloping totality.

Monotheism ... what a curse. And a fraud ... because the high level notion of the great oneness never quite matches up with the on-the-ground practical need for intercession, exorcism, and help. That ultimately is where Christianity with its Jesus myth and Islam with its countless Sufi and Shia cults came in to "liberate" Hebrew religion from its ethnic cubbyhole and remake it into popular, boundary-less, and transmissible religious systems. The persistence of Hebrew religion among Jews over the millennia as the most pure of monotheisms is one of the most remarkable stories in human history. There's no go-between for the Jews and their god.

But that is not what I want to address right now.

Hebrew religion served as the transmission belt for the worst aspects of Mesopotamian religion ... its at-bottom nihilism, the dialectic of blinding brilliance and dispiriting terror. Its hopeless view of human life as coming from nowhere and ending in nothingness.

As I have been re-reading ancient history, I am simultaneously obsessed with wondering what it was like to live then, and ensnared by the horror that their obsessions with hopelessness and terror infected all of human history ... the venom that Fred Phelps and, today sadly, the SCLC spew against those they revile is the transmogrified religious system of Uruk in the fourth millennium B.C.E.

Transmogrified ... in other words, it is not that Mesopotamian religion was filled with hatred, for it did not seem to be. It was filled with dread. But dread plus monotheism equals hatred.

It's reasonably easy to assign reasons for the small steps in history ... why Prussia beat France in 1870, or why Octavian won at Actium. But it is difficult to understand what the particular impetuses are behind the huge earthquakes. As the aforementioned Barbara Mertz speculates, why did Egypt rapidly move from a millennia-old string of villages splayed down a river to a great, unified kingdom that would last for millennia? And why after 3500 years did Mesopotamian religion go into an occlusion, only to re-emerge with a vengeance in the era of Constantine and conquer the as yet unimagined Western world? Why was faith, the successor to the fatalism of the Mesopotamians, able not just to conquer reason, the concomitant and anointed successor to Greco-Roman religion, but to harness reason to its own purposes? Why was reason not able to crush the last stingy upwelling of the Mesopotamian miasma?

Of course, I pose these things from my own perspective. Plenty are those, blithely ignorant of the Babylonian genesis of the christ myth, who shudder in ecstasy at having that special intercessor ... just as the Mesopotamians shivered as they performed their rituals to whatever intercessor they might choose.

So this is not felicitous prose ... I know it ... but I leave you with this question: what determines which ancient historical dynamics turn out to be unextinguishable? I think that is why I read history.

The Ancients Whisper: Mesopotamian Religion

2009-07-09T04:15:00.000+02:00

I have been reading the superb Jean Bottéro's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia (1998; tr from French to English 2001). So these are notes about what I take away from the last couple of months of reading about ancient Mesopotamia, focused on religion; I will stick in a few page references so I can get back to the source when I re-read this down the road.

I want to make five points:

1. Lists

The ancient civilization that we can describe came into view because of scribes and writing and the need to keep track of the accumulation of goods at temples. I do not want to try to describe the flux and reflux of religion and state, or priest and king, and I do not want to make too broad an assertion about the role of religion in the rise of civilization. But writers ... without the scribes, there is no civilization. And they started with lists. Once they made lists, other scribes coped the lists. Whenever Sumerian gave way to Akkadian and became a classical, liturgical language, scribes made translation lists. There were lists of gods, lists of omens, lists of goods.

The listing behavior is evidence of a society whose thinking is mechanical and additive. Indeed, it is easy for us in the modern world to forget that the vast majority of people throughout time have lived in societies which describe their life world in additive, mechanical ways. The careful reader of my scratch-post will recollect that my own academic work concerned the nature of writing in a radically oral society in which a caste of scribes and writers produced writing to be recited to the non-literate and owned by the powerful. The three millennia of Mesopotamia fits precisely in this zone.

So think of that caste of writers. They spent their lives learning the complexities of cuneiform. By the time they became "journeymen" they had copied hundreds of texts and immersed themselves in a long past that was constant, in which change was a terrifying irruption that had no basic impact on how lives were led or how the universe was imagined.

We do not know the lines between scribes and priests. Indeed, we know that there are sundry types of priests, but we are not sure what each type did or how one type related to another. But we do know that the lists upon lists were he closest thing to what we would call scripture, and that the lists were mnemonic devices to remind people how to encounter the divine, how to influence the forces, ow to make the best of what all admitted was a dark and foreboding reality.

Now lists can have more than one element, and this is key. They had lists that gave the Sumerian name followed by the Akkadian name of a god. They had lists that described an event followed by what the event portended. But once you have a list, why not get more lists, and so ...

2. The ancients in the near East favored accumulation over substitution (82). In other words, they liked to add gods, but they never fully discarded a god even if he fell from centrality. An gave way to Enlil who gave way to Marduk. But none of them was banished.

The dialectical frame of mind always sees in the confrontation of elements the immanent possibility of the destruction of one, or both, and the transformation of a counterposed pair into a new, "higher" singularity, itself subject to further contradiction. That is not the way of the ancients. They were compound, not complex, in their explanation of reality. Again, additive ... one explanation did not preclude another. One set of gods did not preclude another. Indeed, for much of time, one king did not preclude another, notwithstanding the periodic impulses to empire.

The additive or accumulating mindset is coincident with the religious notion that the divine world and the material world are roughly parallel if not thereby equivalent. Which leads to ...

3. Doubling the visible world (44). The fundamental conception of the divine among the ancient Mesopotamians was to see in the divine world a parallel structure to the experienced world. Every item or force in the real world had a corresponding and decisive force in the divine world. Nothing happened in the real world without the impetus of the divine world. This is the source, obviously of the accumulating tendency.

We know, of course, that reality is a bitch. And we must assume that, prior to penicillin and modern dentistry, the bitchiness of life was the more acute. So the ancients saw a divine world in which the gods created human beings in order to feed them and so that they did not have to work. This is the source of the elaborate feeding the gods ceremonies of which we have textual evidence. But the ancients didnot feed the gods just because they felt a duty to do so. They fed them because they feared their wrath if they were not fed.

This doubling of the material world was grounded in a conception of the gods as fearful, evoking brilliance and terror (39). If the divine world doubled our own, then what happened in our own world was beyond our direct control. We are the victims of the whims of the gods, alive only to serve them.

Of course, people always want to negotiate with fate, and Bottéro makes a brilliant argument about how exorcism supplanted magic as the primary way in which people approached the gods. In his argument, magic is just a technique intervention. But exorcism relies on the notion that a person by failing to perform a required duty to the gods has sinned, and therefore been punished by some divine flick of the wrist. So if the supplicant can only find the right way to approach the god and mollify and compensate him, then perhaps the god will reverse the punishment. Just as one would approach an angry monarch, or an angry landlord, or an angry judge.

The doubling concept of heaven and earth reflected, then, being trapped in a concept of society and hierarchy. "Reverence, admiration, and self-effacement with respect dominate in the texts." (40) And just as in society one could not deal with everything, so it was in the divine. One had to choose, based upon one's place.

Interlude: allow me to quote a text just for the purpose of tasting how the ancients wrote, albeit the odors faint and elusive.

How long has the river risen and brought the overflowing waters,
so that the dragonflies drift down the river?
The face that could gaze upon the face of the Sun
has never existed ever.
How alike are the sleeping and the dead. (105-6)

Or how about:

I will praise the lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Marduk! lord of wisdom, solicitous god,
Furious in the night, growing calm in the day:
Whose anger is like a raging tempest, a desolation,
But whose breeze is sweet as the breath of morn.
In his fury not to be withstood, his rage the deluge,
Merciful in his feelings, his emotions relenting.
The skies cannot sustain the weight of his hand,
His gentle palm rescues the moribund. (190)

Ah, Semitic religion. Then, as now, filled with terror and darkness, where the solicitude of the god is not expected but rejoiced upon should it make its occasional entry.

4. The Personal God. Bottéro argues that Mesopotamian religion was not precisely polytheism, but rather henotheism which "admits the plurality of the gods but is interested in and attached at least hic et nunc, to only one of them" (41).

First of all hic et nunc ... Latin, here and now ... how obnoxious is it that a 2001 translation into English chooses to assume that most of its readership will have enough Latin to know hic et nunc ... now, I am proud that I do, but it is s silly pride given that I am old and one of a tiny minority of folks who plans to take up Latin again when I retire so I can read Catullus and chuckle.

But more to the point, hic et nunc: here and now. Notwithstanding that ancient Mesopotamian civilization lasted longer than the period of time that separates us from Homer ... think about that ... their religion was always focused on the hic et nunc.

Onward ... the personal god ... in a divine world that is a doubled and powerful mirror of the real world, there is a madness of gods. Just as the individual in society has a particular life, so he should have a particular god. I think you see this in India nowadays as well. The individual picks a god who shares, on the other side, roughly his position in the hierarchy. And he goes to that god for help and for mitigation of the problems and miseries of life.

What goes on in the central temples and near royalty are far from the average person. And this accumulating and doubling religion provides him with this answer, a personal god. It is worth noting that we know about this aspect of Mesopotamian religion because of lists of personal names that celebrate the relationship of a given person to a particular god.

But lest we get too euphoric, we have to remember that this religion was gloomy and dark, with no release from fate for the individual. Your personal god, or your relationship with an exorcist priest, might mitigate the miseries of the moment. Butnothing could save you from deth ... that is the lesson of the first great epic, the Epic of Gilgamesh. We are all doomed to die, and thereafter to inhabit a dark world of shadwos with the future or past, not prospects, no activities, no change, no joy.

5. Hell, evil, fate. We have little indication of the exact nature of the cosmology in which our forefathers believed for three millennia. The reason for that is that the scribes did not write treatises on religion or the structure of the universe. They made lists.

But we know that there was a place "under" where the departed went. They did not have a notion of the soul per se. And there does not appear to be a separation between the good and the evil. There does appear to be some sort of hierarchical differentiation ... one cold hardly expect kings to live forever in the "under" with peasants.

But this was a gloomy notion of the end of life. Remember that the gods created human beings so that they could be fed without working. So the reward, such as it was, for a long life spent feeding the gods was a shadowing eternity in this frozen nowhere.

Evil was the result of the gods being angered at the failure of human beings. The Mesopotamians did not have demons per se. But the gods were capable, idiosyncratically, of terrible moods, vengeful actions particularly directed against hose who neglected them. That said, even in the ancient world, there were skeptics who wondered why the pious might get sick while the wicked might get rich.

The brilliance and the terror of the divine. The joys and the fears of life. Parallels.

Photos by Arod of the rather few Mesopotamian relics in local museums. I hope to add the descriptions soon enough.

Sarah and Sonia

2009-07-04T05:01:00.001+02:00

Is there no limit to the soulless stupidity of the 'publican extremists? Did you watch the bizarre performance of soon-to-be-ex-governor of Alaska Sarah Palin today? How any rational commentator could actually think that this was a strategy to win the presidency is hard to fathom.

Both right and left like to pander to the masses while actually insulting such intelligence as the public, whatever that may be, actually exhibits. But the public would have to be criminally moronic to believe that today's free association madness merited anything more than a quick trip to the loony bin. The nonsensical, non-syntactic stringing of right-wing cliche, the winks and nods, the bizarre thought structures, the grating syncopations of voice ... well ... at this point, anyone who still credits John McCain with a lick of sense is simply not paying attention.

I am one of those who believe that there is a massive scandal licking at her heels. The fact that she has an eternal diabolic optimism should not hide the fact that she is a liar, a thief, a self-centered bitch ... that's a technical term, folks, and we know what it means. She'd eat her children for breakfast if they weren't so unappetizing.

But then again, perhaps she is marginally brighter, at least in the exercise, than the slobbering 'publican-heel-licking median "pundints" ... the "n" is deliberate ... she knows she has no political future, and she also knows that she can make a pot of money from the cynics at Fox. So why wait. Strike while the bones are still warm.

Levi Johnson is looking better all the time ... check out his shirt-free pics at GQ ... you have to watch the slideshow.

Meanwhile, the professional gasbags of 'publican prevarication have unleashed another wave of immodest, feigned-innocent horror at the Nazi-Stalinist, racist-anti-American Justice-in-waiting Sotomayor. Good lord. The real terror is that she, like many liberals, covers her sharp angles with a crypto-conservatism that eventually becomes a lifestyle. What happens if she and Scalia get buddy-buddy and decide that they have a novel "founders'-intent" theory on homosexuality ... something like the recently floated Obama line that the ban on gay marriage is actually the grant of the unboundaried civil right to marry anyone of the opposite sex that you want to. Her conservatism on crime is of the the infamous type that grants that the law, in its majesty, forbids the theft of bread by rich and poor alike.

She doesn't impress me. Obviously she is better than the other of-color Justice who recently opined that there is no constitutional protection against strip-searching 13-year-olds on less than the grounds of reasonable suspicion. But that is not saying much.

Don't get me wrong; I want her confirmed. But we have to face the fact that the 'publicans are so bereft of civic consciousness let alone intelligence in the face of threats to the Republic that they will suicide-bomb every single step taken by any opponent.

Alas, this is the state of the Republic on the eve of the Glorious Fourth.

On that unhappy note ... on to that Glorious Fourth. In our home, we plan to celebrate the revolution against kings and authoritarianism with seared flesh, unusual ales, and Fish-House Punch.

Photos by Arod ... top photo of a San Francisco sidewalk, and bottom photo of a display from last year's July 4 BBQ chez moi; we won't have those flags this year as my wonderful friend June, who supplied them, is unable to attend.

Love in the Era of Obama - and O Canada!

2009-07-02T05:04:00.000+02:00

It's July 1, a big day in my life. It marks the 142nd anniversary of Canada's semi-independence. It is the 16th anniversary of the death of my first lover and not-coincidentally the 16th anniversary of when my now sainted ex and I decided to yoke our fates as one.

So love of country, love of my lost beloved, and love of my extant but now only sainted beloved ... this one is for love.

If gay people have anything to teach, it is that the conquering power of love ennobles and enables. Love makes no sense, but there is no sense in not loving. The loathing of the loathers is our lot ... and there is certainly some satisfaction in the present era when at long last the plurality if not yet the majority understand that we are about loving.

In that sense, I think the liberal glee at the fall of Mark Sanford, fundamentalist governor of South Carolina caught in a mad and unlikely love affair with an Argentine, is rather unseemly. What we ought to be saying is not that he is a hypocrite ... hypocrisy in love, dear friends, is as old as prostitution, that oldest of "vices". No, we ought to be pointing out that inconvenient love is as ancient as humanity. So his wife of 20 years is left in the dust ... you know what, this too is an old story. The man fell in love, and it was all so wrong. But love conquers all.

If only he were not a religious bigot who looks to Bathsheba and David to justify his more unseemly grip on power, then perhaps he might just stand up and say, I understand that love is not something that state or religion should seek to control or undermine. What I found on a dance floor in Argentina is just the same as what two awkward dudes found in each other one night in an old Chevy.

But, alas, he is a religious bigot. And, alas, the liberal bloviators love to hold religious bigots to the hypocrisy of their religious bigotry. I say "no" ... tell him that love is its own justice. Tell him to give unto others the respect for love that he asks be given to him. Ask him to learn from his lesson in love.

We might also ask Obama to learn a little. His speech to the quickly assembled gay Appropriati (think Illuminati who have been handed a little badge of appropriateness) was nothing less than nauseating. In his audience, in the White House, was an officer with 18 years of service who is soon to face an administrative proceeding that will inevitably turf him out of the military to which he has dedicated his life. Because he is gay. And to add insult to injury, he was ordered not to wear his uniform, notwithstanding that he is currently an active officer in good standing, lest someone think it political. Obama's message: trust me and wait. Sure ... should the 266 men and women thrown out of the military under Obama's watch wait. What are they waiting for? Someone needs to tell this s.o.b. that he is the Commander-in-Chief. What is he afraid of?

But this is about love. It is obvious that the love affair between Barack and Michelle has been transformative ... more so, obviously, for Barack than Michelle, it seems to me. I always wonder how it can be that someone who encounters a transformative experience fails to translate that into understanding the impact of transformation on others. In other words, when someone is in love, how can they not acknowledge the love of others. I do not think Barack Obama is President without the influence of Michelle. One iota of that realization should be enough for him to realize that he should acknowledge the love that others feel.

It is harder to imagine a man like Sanford projecting his experience in inconvenient love to others. But we should not eschew him for loving.

So back to July 1. In 1993, my first lover, then my first ex, died on Canada Day in Vancouver of the plague. I spent 10 days with him as he lay dying. Bad Subjects published a reminiscence on his death that I wrote in 1993. He was unconscious when I left and died a few days later. Richard moved in to my apartment on July 1. We called ourselves sidekicks, but that night we got drunk in grief and we decided to be lovers, and that lasted for a decade. So July 1 is the death of my first lover and the anniversary of my third.

My love life does not fit into the convenience of gay marriage. It is not the narrative that goes on billboards. But it is mine and it still fills me with emotion and thrill. The truth is that many love lives do not fit the billboard model. Sanford's doesn't. Obama's does.

The job of the state is to stay out of the bedroom. The job of the state is to facilitate the civil nature of human relationships. Canadians of my generation will remember Justice Minister, later Prime Minister, Trudeau announcing that the state had no business in the bedrooms of the nation. That declaration was part of what led to Trudeaumania and his election as Prime Minister. But here, on Canada Day, it is a lesson that Obama, in love with his wife, still does not grok.

So Happy Birthday Canada. I still love you, Gaetano, and think of you every day. And I still love you, Richard, even though I know how much better we are for being friends and not mates.

Photos by Arod from Gay Day in San Francisco, 2009. All my photos from Gay Day are on Flickr.

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Gay Day

2009-06-29T02:53:00.000+02:00

I spent the day at the Gay Pride Parade on Market Street and Celebration in Civic Center. As last year, I focused on taking photos, mostly candid people shots, but I spent more time with friends ... bumped into a bunch of people, and spent some time with old and new friends at the Faerie tent. (For those of you who do not know who the Radical Faeries are, google it or wait until I explain some time ... one of the advantages of vowing to post thrice weekly is that I have to keep a bunch of easy topics that I have pre-prepared in my mind at ready hand.)

Gay Day is at bottom a lonely and nostalgic time for me ... I think it's that for a lot of old gay activists, although perhaps I am on the tedious, self-involved end of the maudlin/giddy continuum.

But I don't want this to be about my moping around snapping pix of hot guys and odd beings and the occasional out-there dyke. So ...

It was my impression that this year was bigger and more enthused than last year. It also felt less political. All this is decidedly impressionistic, and the evidence is only my own observations as I wandered up Market Street and then around Civic Center for five hours.

Last year we had a victory that was exhilarating but felt ephemeral. Couples were married on the square, and the celebration seemed to focus on that. We did not yet know that Obama would be President, and we had not yet experienced the crushing defeat in the Prop campaign. But we had also not experienced the palpable juggernaut that the last months have been. The mass acceptance of gay people is moving forward at a staggering rate after four decades of glacially slow increments in polled percentages.

We are at a tipping point, and the celebration reflected that.

I noticed many more young gay men than last year. In fact, Civic Center was crawling with them. It was broiling hot today, and so many were semi clad. I do not know why there were so many more ... perhaps the celebration has become the place to be and be seen. The young dykes were there in force as they were last year. They are tribal and defiant and out there. The young gay guys notice my camera with a little disdain, but the young dykes don't seem to even see me. Maybe some time I will try to discuss the generation gap among gay folks, but I increasingly do not think it is very important. Because young gay people accept their rights as given and undeniable. They did not originate in an era when we were hidden and rightly afraid. I love their native defiance.

But beyond the young gay folks, the most obvious phenomenon is how broadly diverse the audience is. Drag queens, folks in wheelchairs, families of every descriptions, countless young straight folks digging a festival tht is as native to them as it is to us. And there are faeries, leather folks, nude people and lots of folks in nothing but briefs. Diesel dykes by the boatload ... I still get chills hearing the Dykes on Bikes roar up Market Street leading off the parade as they have for many years.

Our movement is at a tipping point. We are on the verge of a cascading set of victories. There are no guarantees, and the condition of our brothers and sisters in other places ... Iran and Iraq and the rest of the muslim world, Russia and Poland, Africa ... is something we cannot forget. But in the rational part of the western world, our humanity is increasingly the property of everyone ... religious bigots and troglodytes excepted.

I did not hear a lot of the speeches today. I do not even know if there were any because the umpteen musical performances scattered at all corners drowned everything out. But, what was lacking today anywhere ... in the parade, the signs, the buttons, the mood ... was acknowledgment that the biggest proximate obstacle we face in these United States in taking advantage of this historical tipping point is Barack Obama. His old-fashioned low-bore anti-gay revanchism provides comfort to our enemies and it impedes the break out. Everybody wants it to be a feel good era, a feel good day. But reality intervenes. DOMA and DADT should be blown up. Post haste. Get it over with. But with the powerful, whenever it is gay people at issue, suddenly everything gets quiet. Gay and quiet never mesh.

So it was a great day, a loud day. But we missed an opportunity. Our great day, no matter how broad and diverse it as become, is a day when we speak to power. We did not do that. So here's my bit

Obama, get in the game!

Gay Rights Now!

Photos by Arod, all taken today. More to come on Flickr, and I will let you know.

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Notes on Iran

2009-06-27T04:29:00.000+02:00

The New York Times spit it right out, albeit only at the bottom of the article - Iran has been the victim of a slow moving coup in which a coterie of quasi-Islamo-military-fascists have taken over the key institutions of the state. I note that they do not mention the army, and given the role of the armed forced in abandoning the Shah in 1979, that is a key omission.

The best take would be that a small coterie around Ahmadinejad, which increasingly isolates itself by its intransigence and extremism, is setting itself up for a cataclysmic fail. That would take a long while and many, many lost lives and horrible torments. The worst take is that that coterie consolidates its grip on power by a sustained campaign of torture. heard on TV news today that the scabrous Khatami has called for extreme punishments, and specifically capital punishments for the leaders of the opposition.

The Iranians have held mass executions before ... it only takes a little googling to find some horrific images. They will do it again. They lust after blood. They have no shame. There are not words to describe how horrifying is a theocratic regime, especially in its military-fascist phase.

But maybe, just maybe, these obscene excuses for human beings are themselves on the way to a gallows of their own construction, much as the hapless and venemous Saddam.

But to get back to my point ... this is about the state. The state is decrepit, and eventually it must fail spectacularly. But eventually can be a month or a year or a decade. If it is years, the cost will be staggering.

It is all up to the army. That's the way I see it.

Dizzy by Daylight

2009-06-25T05:27:00.000+02:00

What does one do when the mind is awash .. awash with what will have to wait for subsequent recollection.

That's what I feel like.

On the train this morning as we arc-ed down that same well-streaked path, I glanced up from Bottero's Religion in Ancient Mesopotamia to notice a tallish, dirty blond middle aged man in dumpster-diver couture pissing into the bushes some 20 feet from the tracks. Imagine if you can ... the entire right side of a train full of office workers on their way to still extant if not secure employment gazes briefly in passing as you piss in public. Some people do not have the sense to step 5 feet into the bush so that no one sees them.

Perhaps he thinks like this ... I'll give all those office workers a little thrill of self-satisfied disgust and piss for them in plain view. Maybe this was the highlight of his week.

See ... I want to blog something meaningful, but all I can think about is folks like me ...in the broadest sense ... who live in Tehran. So all the meanderings and observations pale when we know in our guts that there are people just like us being cut up and tortured and killed for merely suggesting that they ought to have the simple freedom of saying that I do not agree.

I loathe religious bigotry ... and all of religion is a sort of immanent bigotry ... but contemplating it in the context of lives lost and the terror of even waking up in a society like Iran. Wow.

Remember folks that the hell of Iran is what the fundies have in mind for us. No ... not remember ... never forget that religion in power kills and maims and tortures.

Meanwhile, the pisser referenced above will live on oblivious. Trains will still run, derelicts will urinate on bushes. But things happen, and lives are destroyed.

Perhaps that is why I prefer to spend my commute time in ages past. The pain of the present, unlike the pain of the past, is that it does not need to be this way. Even so, it still is.

The Mullahs and the Machine Guns

2009-06-20T21:37:00.001+02:00

As I write this, the sun has set in Iran. Chants of "Allahu Akbar" ring out across the rooftops in conscious imitation of the 1979 revolution. The bloodlusting basij re dragging people from their homes, beating them, killing some, kidnapping others to prisons and dungeons. it is not yet clear if the climactic moment has passed, if the protests has been subdued, or if tomorrow promises further action. The thugs apparently were fought to a standstill today, but that is not predictive of how it will turn out.

Of course, I do not actually know what is happening. To do a little pos and neg credentialing ... I am not an expert on Iran. I have read extensively about the Elamites, the Achaemenids, the Sasanids, the Safavids, and the coursing of Islam across Persia in the first Islamic centuries. My doctoral (Cal, 1998) research concerned premodern Malay Muslim manuscripture, and I have read widely in Islamic and Central Asian history. But not an expert in the modern Iranian state.

We hear little from actual experts. We hear a lot of self-credentialing from Twitter, and certainly Twitter has been a key source of information from inside Iran. I see no evidence that it has played a role in the events other than, perhaps, to embolden people to action knowing that the whole world knows. Most of the Twitter posts simply repeat in one form or another how important Twitter is; some of the posts propound rumors, and these posts are often retweeted; a few of the posts point to web footage or photos or analysis.

But nowhere have I seen a lot of analysis of the key issue at stake ... what is the state of the Iranian state, and how does its present composition portend for current events and future possibilities?

So, let me start by proposing a series of deductions, assumptions, and evident or apparent facts; I will try to credential them as I go along.

I would propose that there are five broad categories of actors in the current state, two in power, one contested, and two out of power. Those are the mullahs, the military and paramilitary forces, the Presidency, the legislative branch, and the people. None of these are simple or without contradiction.

The mullahs are actually a broad layer of society that crosses class, region, economics, ethnicity, political outlook, and involvement. It is an error to assume that the mullahs are supportive of or even corporately linked to the Guardian Council. I believe it is also an error to assume without proof in the events that the Guardian Council or Khamanei is in control of events.

The military, or as I will call them, the agencies of repression, are actually at least four forces: the army, the police, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. How they cooperate and by whom each are led is not clear to any of us on the outside. I think the key issues all come back to these facts.

The Presidency is obviously what is at issue. But we should note that Ahmadinejad is evidently not a toady of the mullahs. I do no think that is proven. There is good evidence that he represents a turn in the state towards the primacy of the repressive instruments and away from the primacy of the clerics, notwithstanding that often all of them at least on the surface appear to have the same interests.

The legislative branch is impotent and deeply divided and, if history is a guide, cowardly. But at any ripe moment it could begin to play a role.

The people, as always in history, are a cipher, everything and nothing by turns.

I believe that the state is increasingly dominated by a competition among agencies of repression acting largely independently, if also interdependently ... in other words they have some kind of communication and coordination of action, but their interests are not identical and they each reserve the right to independent initiative.

The one thing that mullahs, agencies of repression, and presidency share is that in this situation they want a return to the status quo ante, even though the status quo is obviously in flux irrespective of the popular movement that challenges all of them.

Who runs the army, and who makes the decisions? I suspect that the army is the most afraid of the current movement because its soldiery is representative of the population that is getting very tired of the slow militarization of society. There are numerous reports of troops refusing to fire, none confirmed. But in any revolutionary situation, the attitude of the troops is key ... look at how the troops slaughtered their innocent brothers and sisters in Burma and the movement was crushed.

Does Khamenei actually control the Revolutionary Guard, or is he slowly becoming a monarch in palace captivity? If Ahmadinejad indeed represents a turn to the military organizations, then curiously Khamenei could actually benefit from championing Moussavi who is an old ally; if he managed to trump the agencies of repression, he could establish himself as a Caesar figure, transcending and overshadowing competing class and political forces. But his pitiful speech at Friday prayers showed no inkling of any independent basis of action. He almost begged for everybody to return to the Iran of a week previous, and to forget all the unfortunate stuff. Sure, he threatened repercussions, but what specifically did he threaten? Which of the agencies of repression can he actually command? He can certainly order any of them to do what they already want to do. But can he rein any of them in? Can he coordinate them? Can he expertly craft a middle path? I don't think so.

I think he is a captive of the Revolutionary Guard and the Guard's more extremist supporters among the high-ranking mullahs, and I think they could topple him in a thrice. I have no actual evidence ... but history is filled with late dynasty monarchs who live at the pleasure of their imperial guard and the guard's allies in the bureau. Theocracy is always short lived ... the guys with the swords, or in the modern world the machine guns, eventually assume power for themselves.

Think of the Revolutionary Guard as the SS (from Nazi times) and think of the basij as the SA, the brownshirts, the semi-organized, anarchistic thugs, young underemployed males lusting to break heads in favor of an idea greater than them but beyond their ability to fully grok. Who actually controls the basij? More to the point, does anyone have the ability to rein them in? In the case of the Nazis, when it came time for the state to be in indubitable central control, Hitler unleashed the Night of the Long Knives, and slaughtered the SA without mercy.

No one in Iran, I would assert, has the power to slaughter the basij. And yet they are capable of independently determining the course of events right now. What is the coordination between the Revolutionary Guard and the basij? Who determines where they strike and who they beat up or kill and who they bust? Will it occur at some point that the Revolutionary Guard will have had their fill of these thugs?

Most importantly, if the popular movement overcomes the brutality now being unleashed, and if they manage to overturn the election, how does a revitalized legislative side deal with a self-entitled militia of thugs and killers?

Just to close the circle, I think the police are followers and not leaders. The dynamics of repressions play out among the army, the Revolutionary Guard, and the basij. The cops can hurt people, but I do not think they decide the issue.

The next days will probably see a lot of blood. But if the movement presses forward in a mass and peaceful manner, I think there is a possibility that the army pulls back from the brink. That is the only way that this does not turn into a colossal bloodbath. At that point, however, the captive palace (Khamenei and his band of mullah toadies) and the captors (the Revolutionary Guard and the overtly fascist wing of the mullahs) are threatened, and they have common cause with the basij. In that event, there is a real challenge to the status quo.

Remember that Moussavi is not a revolutionary. If Ahmadinejad represents a movement in the direction of a consolidated, statified militarism, Moussavi represents only a state which seeks to rule in its own name. The goals of the popular movement appear to be nothing more than the promise of the state as described by the constitution. But such a movement presents intolerable contradictions among the agencies of repression who operate with impunity and apparently independently of the authorized state agencies. So defeat will occur only in an epochal bloodbath, but victory promises another bloodbath of uncertain characteristics.

It is not a pretty picture. None of it portends the end of the world's most notorious theocracy. None of it portends freedom of the individual. Iran has decades of suffering to free itself from the curse of its modern history and ancient, martyr-obsessed and bloody religion.

All that said, every lover of freedom the world around admires and yearns for the success of these noble men and women who have stared vicious brutality in the face and said no to repression, yes to freedom.

Photos from around the web, but especially the Tehran Bureau which has excellent coverage, and boston.com which has an excellent collection of truly heart-rending photos.

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Notes on the News

2009-06-19T04:22:00.000+02:00

Iran

My good friend Ian, back from Borneo and documentary film making, notes an excellent analysis that increasingly it is apparent that the theological rule is a cover for a society run by the military and the militia. This would hardly be the first time in history that the palace has been seized by its soldiery. Khamenei never particularly struck me as a man whose command is law, but rather as a perfunctory monarch who nods and waves and issues obvious orders. Ahmadinejad, notwithstanding his little contretemps with the mullahs, represents a new step in the development of a tinpot fascism, one that is ahead of the clerical wave.

So, if that is true, the question for the revolution is how to prevent the incipiently fascist regime and its official and unofficial muscle from unleashing an epochal massacre. It's hard to imagine that the whole thing does not end up that way. But I do not believe that the initiative is in the hands of Khamenei. It is possible that the leadership of the military/militia is insufficiently unitary, and that a move is made that fails by reason of its breaking ranks withe other sectors. In other words, it is not always he who moves first who wins. Sometimes, the first one out of the trenches takes the first bullet.

Obviously impossible to predict. But we are not hearing any speculation on the moves of the actual power-holders who can move or restrain the forces that have the ability to kill a million people. Because in any theology, or leastwise any regime which draws it authority from gawd, it is always a matter of how many die and how and by whose hand.

But if the military/militia analysis of the state is valid, then agian and once again it comes down to whether soldiers obey orders to kill civilians. Assume that the militia can never be won over. But soldiers are form the same strata as the protesters, and they can be turned.

Nonetheless, this will end in blood. The question is whose blood. I am not optimistic. But I know only what I read on Twitter. Perhaps the underlying forces are ripe.

Twitter

What can I say. I love Twitter. Follow me at arodsf. Being so close to the literary action in Iran via Twitter has been compelling. The role of social media in out world in the future is still to be written ... but given the ominous signs and the forces at work, will Twitter become the obituary column for human hopes ... ooops, don't mean to be a downer.

Obama and the Gays

Funny how the DOJ brief to the court on DOMA seems to have been a tipping point for understanding that the Obama administration is a disappointment at this point. Bill Maher, MSNBC's Ed, and chorus of the blogosphere ... everybody is suddenly wiling to say it out loud. This guy's soft shoe is now a sellout. We're not convinced any more.

What an obscene dog and pony show when Obama, his body language exuding annoyance, signed the ludicrously limited and untested benefits for federal employee domestic partners. Talk about crumbs from the table ... leftovers for the uninvited guests who just wouldn't leave no matter all the not-so-subtle hints. I don't buy it ... not for one second.

But say this much ... the wave of revulsion at that DOJ brief forced the White House to put that dog and pony show together mighty fast. Remember the law of unintended consequences. Obama's little flick of the wrist in our direction may be a tipping point. I detect virtually no public outrage ... the 'publicans, of course, are busy clamming up about the latest family-values-fascist caught with his penis out of his pants. SO when legislation comes up for votes, I think it becomes increasingly obvious that the penalty for a pro-gay vote may be nothing.

Still the stink of complacency hangs about the White House. I do not want to think that it is too late for him to become a game changer. But the present evidence is not inspiring.

I Love Animals

But the notion that PETA is mad because Obama expertly killed a fly is beyond ludicrous. We are a society where any fixation devolves into madness instantly. But defending the rights of house flies ... isn't that the last straw?

No pics today ... just want to bang out a post and chill ... work is building up ... four major web sites to go live before classes start in September. Wow. Kinda thrilling; I guess I actually get some kind of charge out of deadlines.

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Why the Obama Administration is Anti-Gay

2009-06-16T16:24:00.001+02:00

There are two questions here: Why do I think that the Obama administration is anti-gay, and what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions?

I like to make a clear distinction between the homophobic and the anti-gay. Homophobia is psychological, social, cultural, personal. Anti-gay refers to the realm of politics, policy, and action. Either can refer to attitudes or notions. In most instances, the homophobic and the anti-gay overlap, but not in every instance. In arguing that the Obama administration is anti-gay, I do not argue that it or any of its members are homophobic ... there is no evidence on that, though lots of us are starting to have some suspicions.

The term anti-gay was common parlance in the gay liberation circles in which I traveled in the 70s. We commonly used it to describe the politics, policies, and actions of the majority of liberal and left groups who were at best openly embarrassed by us and thought that we provided fodder to their enemies. They most assuredly didn't like the loud, swarming, irreverent, open fags that we were.

The Obama administration shares this attitude: they want gay people to sit down, shut up, and wait. "It's not time, yet." "We support you, but there are bigger issues now that we have to attack." Just leave it to us, we will do the right thing when the time is right.” The one difference is that our liberal opponents in the 70s were not quite as nice about it as that. But nice and a DOJ brief will get you a DOJ brief. We don't care about nice.

The success of gay liberation arose wholly because we did not sit down, shut up, or wait. We viewed those who told us to do so then as enemies of our movement, and we should have the same attitude now. (That includes the HRC whose leader complained to Obama in a recent letter of the "pain" the DOJ brief caused ... hey, dude, it's not about some vague feeling of discomfort. It's about the blatant breach of our civil rights.)

That is why the Obama administration is anti-gay.

So, question number 2: what are the reasons behind the Obama administration's anti-gay politics, policies, and actions? I think the answer is obvious, and it is deeply disturbing. Just as Obama's failure to lead on gay rights at this tipping point for our movement is a signal of his now undeniable general reluctance to lead, so the reasons behind the anti-gay politics of his administration signal a larger and depressing fall back to the most retrograde characteristics of American politics.

So let's start with the anti-gay attitudes that we should just wait, that Obama is a "fierce" (yawn) defender of gay civil rights, that he is wisely picking the right time. This sort of argument relies on a zero-sum game political arithmetic. Obama only has so much political capital, and he needs to spend that on the big priorities.

This is reactionary and defeatist.

Political capital is not some storehouse in which gray-complected minions tote up the points scored and spend them parsimoniously; political capital exists only in its exercise. Obama shows in his political arithmetic an almost exclusive orientation to his right. Notwithstanding that the Republicans have given him nothing, nada, zip, he continues to court them. In the meanwhile, as many note, the public political dialogue centers almost exclusively on the madness of the far right against cool hand Luke Obama.

This attitude of engaging his opponents as friends and ignoring his friends as if they were opponents reveals a mechanical calculation rather than a dialectical approach ... arithmetic over calculus ... counting up rather than mobilizing ... electoralism against social change. Obama is looking to the next election, and that is the manner in which he most apparently resembles his predecessor.

In that context, think this through: Obama announces that he has ordered the military to suspend all activities surrounding DADT. The policy will remain in place as the brass figures out how to move forward; but not a single wooden nickel is to be spent on enforcing it. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy ... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of military Arabic translators, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the intelligence of the soldiery. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

Imagine this, if you will: instead of slobbering like a sycophant about DOMA, the administration issues an opinion that DOMA raises the issue of the breadth of the 14th Amendment. We invite the court to comment. Rush Limbaugh goes into a frenzy .... and Obama makes a joke about it and invites a group of foster parents, two of whom are gay, to the White House and praises the commitment of ordinary Americans to do the right thing and raise children to be good citizens. The whole thing would be over in a flash.

So why doesn't he do it?

I think he doesn't do it because his political calculations are already focused on winning the next election. That is to say, Obama does not actually believe that he can be a paradigm changer like Roosevelt; he does not actually believe that a decade from now we could have a society in which as many accepted commonplaces changed as did from, say, 1930 to 1940, or 1940 to 1950. Obama is an incrementalist, not a radical.

His approach to gay civil rights in this seems to be a very exact calculation. Self-identified gays represent perhaps 3% of the electorate, and Obama gets 90% of those votes come hell or high water. But if evangelicals represent 20% of the electorate, and if he aspires to lock down 40% of them, then we are looking at 8% of the electorate. I figure that Obama figures that the 40% of evangelicals he can lock down are not fixated on the old culture war nonsense, that they are more focused on the activist side of christianity including a rising commitment to social justice especially among young evangelicals. But sin is still sin for them, so there is no upside from this arithmetic in goading them by openly supporting gay civil rights. This is why we are now hearing the highest ranking gay toadies on the Democratic side (including, sadly, Barney Frank) refer us to the second term in office!

So Obama is anti-gay because the arithmetic is bad, and he does arithmetic not calculus in his inner circles of political calculation. If that is the case, then the lie of his presidency is deeper than most of us thought, and the chances that this is a turning point in US history are dashed.

Depressing. The only answer is opposition. This president needs to feel the heat from his left flank. Gay people should lead the way.

Photos by Arod of the San Francisco City Hall demonstrations after Prop 8 passed, November 15, 2008.

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On Heterosexuality

2009-06-15T05:39:00.000+02:00

This has ended up being a very long ramble. I take a risk here because I engage in what I like to call "pure speculation" about heterosexuality ... by "pure speculation", I mean speculation unencumbered by fact or reference or proof, and founded upon the ramblings of my own mind. I do not want to offend anyone. But dynamics that we all experience deserve playing out and talking about. I believe in transparency, and I believe in making mistakes, especially of interpretation, in aid of finding your way forward. So here goes.

I spent the afternoon with my excellent friend Roy Ortopan at the American Conservatory Theater's production of Edward Albee's new and not so new At Home at the Zoo. So, spoiler alert, I plan to reveal anything I feel like, so those of you who might want to see this exquisite production should consider bookmarking these scribblings for future reference.

The play is a combination of two acts: the first act is new writing and concerns a discussion about matters of relationship and sex between a long-married couple Peter (Anthony Fusco) and Ann (René Augesen), both long-time regulars at ACT. It has the form of a prequel to the second act which is Albee's iconic first playThe Zoo Story, written in 1958. So a little criticism to start ... the first act exhibited the exquisite writing of a , each line crafted and yet natural. Augesen and Fusco oozed the comfortable relationship whose very smoothness is its own threat. The second act, Pinteresque in writing and in staging, is rougher, even coarser, with a long monologue in which Jerry (Manoel Feliciano) recounts to Peter a murderous story about a dog and works himself from accidental interlocutor to incarnate violence.

The unsettling nature of this production is in its interconnected but stylistically and emotionally distinct one-act plays. The challenge is to find the resistances that flow from the one to the other.

In the first act, set in an exquisite modernistic living room, white and sterile and clean, the exchanges between these comfortably married middle-aged Manhattanites expresses what I would call the inner dynamic of heterosexuality. That is, the dominance of the female irrespective of the power relationship, and therefore the alternating current of resistance and attraction to the female that is the dynamo of male heterosexuality. Let's lead by noting that there's a lot in that that is probably bullshit ... I mean that. But as a lifelong gay guy (notwithstanding an earnest and meaningful heterosexual relationship of 18 months at the end of my teenage years) I observe male heterosexuality as a sort-of alien force in the kitchen of my being. It is there, it is clearly real, and yet it is hard to quantify. It is passing difficult to quantify how the female principle drives straight men even as they alternately dominate it and submit to it.

I never fully accepted the inside game of feminism's more abstruse ideological perambulations. The obvious and ineluctable force of women demanding equality is not feminism ... I call that women's liberation, and I separate it from the ideological prescriptions of the high priestesses of feminism, especially in the 70s and 80s before they slowly faded from relevance in the face of rising female equality. So, a play like this throws light on our present post-feminist era. Women and men may continue to spar as they have done for centuries, but women have a better block from which to jump off than ever before, leastwise in Western society.

Ann presses her complacent husband to be dangerous. It is he who resists, who tells a story of the one time in his youth he was dangerous, and how it was terrifying and almost destroyed his life. This is a flip from stereotypes, because it is the female who is supposed to crave the secure and the predictable. But it is Peter who argues that he thought that they had agreed before marriage that theirs would be a peaceful and predictable journey where excitement was not at issue, but the pleasures of the long and the assured were in the fore.

There is no one heterosexuality, of course, any more than there is only one homosexuality. But one thing that distinguishes heterosexual men from exclusively homosexual men is that one way or another they must encounter the female principle in all its permutations. Gay men ... and this describes me to a T ... love women for the intelligence and wit and, most emphatically, their non-maleness. But the female principle "in all its permutations" we can take or leave. We don't live with it and we don't go home with it. Straight men do. The notion of the traditional chauvinist is that he pedestalizes women in order to wall himself off from those permutations; in other words, chauvinism is a way of isolating and crystalizing femaleness so that it can be used without interfering in the more fundamental and more powerful maleness which the chauvinist prefers.

There is another kind of chauvinist ... I call them "true heterosexuals." These are the men who are focused exclusively on women, and who hardly notice men at all. There are curiously few of these men. I had a lecturer in college who was a great influence on me and with whom I had many excellent conversations. But if there was a single woman present, I ceased to exist for him. I invited him once to my home for a slide show of a recent trip to Indonesia and we were having a rollicking conversation until a then temporary roommate, female and young and pretty, stopped by. He was gone; I never got him back.

But nowadays, notice how most coupled men ... and the more so the more urban or younger or more middle class they are ... foreground the female. Things as simple as walking a half step behind while girlfriend wife gabs on the cell phone (this drives me nuts), or as complex and laudable as the immersion in childcare or domesticity. It is that new convergence that Albee was expressing in his first act. But he is not afraid, as so many commentators are, to express the discomforts of the new prominence of the female in heterosexuality.

Peter found in his female approach to his marriage the comfort of taking the sting out of his masculinity. He complains at length ... and this gets plenty good laughs from the audience ... that his circumcision is retreating. Not that his foreskin is growing back, but that the glans of his penis is ever so infinitesimally disappearing under what foreskin was left by the surgeon's long-ago snip. Meanwhile, Ann complains that from time to time she wants Peter, whom she describes as a great lover and lousy fuck, to be dangerous, in essence to rape her with consent ... though she does not put it exactly that way.

So here we have the male principle slowly shrinking simultaneously happily and nervously, and the female principle casting around looking for the excitement that its very dominance precludes. Nice dialectics ... I love conundra like these. And as with the real world, there is no denouement, there is resolution. Life goes on, uneasily. You wonder if after this conversation they can return to the sweet satisfying lovemaking that Ann both accepted and rejected and that was all that Peter cared to do.

"Cared to do" ... because in the most violent portion of the conversation, Peter relates the one time when he was dangerous, when he had anally penetrated a woman and injured her, caused her to bleed sufficiently to send her to hospital, during a fraternity-sponsored initiation orgy long beforehand. Just that one brush with danger was enough for him, and the idea of role-playing violence with his gentle-voyage wife was thereby abhorrent.

Remember this ... it was blood and penetration forced upon Peter by the other that haunted him.

So the act wraps up with Peter leaving awkwardly to go for a walk with his book, to take a read in Central Park

Remember that the second act was written in 1958, and the language and staging is coarser. I would argue that this is both by reason of Albee's youth and by reason of the writing occurring before the rise of women's liberation. Jerry, a drifter, strikes up a conversation with Peter. From its inception, this conversation bristles with the implied violence of male-to-male heterosexual relations. That Jerry reveals in the course of the conversation that he has sexually hustled men only adds to that unexpressed violence. While in the first act, the audience is satisfied in a conversation that starts and ends essentially nowhere and travels from one indeterminate to another, in the second act, the audience knows that this cannot end well. Blood will be spilled; someone will die.

When straight men are together, they always bristle a little. It can be nice bristling, it can be humorous, vigorous, laidback. It can be any kind of bristling you want, but there is always at least a tiny charge. Perhaps it is almost as if everyone wants to put out a positive electrical charge to make sure that they all equally repel if they get too close. I think this is what explains the tendency to violence under the influence of alcohol, because the tiny positive electrical charge fades and suddenly, unexpectedly and most unwelcome, two men may find themselves too close.

I think that most men actually prefer the company of men ... notwithstanding my notion that the modern defusing of the male/female relationship leads to greater comfort between men and women. Because when men are together, the female principle no longer threatens or demands; it becomes a kind of icon for waving or saluting or acknowledging or, mostly, ignoring. That is why gay men, and I include myself in this, are always vaguely unnerved by being the lone gay guy with a bunch of straight guys. Again, this is meant to express underlying subcurrents, not some supervening agenda. Keep that in mind. Gay guys are unnerved because we do not output that tiny positive electrical charge. To turn the metaphor on its head, we are more AC with each other than DC ... we play by flipping from positive to negative charge, pushing and pulling, alluring and demanding. So the electrical pressure of all those positive charges we experience around a bunch of straight guys is demanding.

It is in this sense that Albee's depiction of the confrontation between Peter and Jerry is so successful. He plays with what I would describe as the AC/DC thing ... alternately repelling each other and attracting each other. But each submission, each attraction makes the subsequent repulsion the stronger. At one point as the denouement approaches, Jerry starts to tickle Peter who laughs and enjoys himself. That rapidly devolves into a fight over territory that leads quickly to Peter picking up the knife that Jerry threw to him, and Jerry impaling himself on the knife as Peter holds it as warning that Jerry must not approach further. The knife which Jerry provided is like the penis which the sorority girl had demanded in Peter's previous encounter with the dangerous. But where his youthful danger was male/female, and ultimately resolved itself, his adult danger was male/male, and death was the result.

Albee's genius here is in the way he flips back and forth. Remember that the earlier part of Peter's life was written recently, where this terminal encounter was written 50 years ago. I wonder how long Albee has been thinking of the prequel.

So I have rambled on as is my wont. These are irresolvable questions, in constant flux. The names of the principles may be eternal, but the practice of them is always changing. Whenever you hear of an eternal principle, keep that in mind. The name may be eternal, but nothing human is eternal. Nothing is solid.

Photos by Arod from a lengthy series I call "Flat Faces" ... pix of men on billboards or posters out and about.

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Obama: You Lied To Gay People, and Now We Know For Sure

2009-06-13T04:17:00.000+02:00

You know the old saying: Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. The more the change, the more the same thing.

I do not like that saying because it is more than pessimistic, it despairs. That this express some underlying truth ... that there is something grim and gloomy about human existence no matter the age or the conjuncture ... does not excuse its refusal to look at the dynamics of change.

But when one is confronted by the intolerable, the intolerable that has an ancient history, one is tempted to retreat into it ... Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

As I write, this, a commercial for EA Sports on the boob-tubery that uses Beethoven's Ode to Joy ... where are the ultra-expanded copyright laws when you need them. That's change you can believe in, albeit with cynicism ... change where everything, no matter how sublime, turns to crap soon enough.

Obama's turn to crap has been far too fast. His Department of Justice submission to a federal court in favor of DOMA yesterday is the last straw. It is an obscenity. They used all the most reactionary arguments against us ... comparing gay love to incest, squealing that it would cost money, refusing to acknowledge that the Loving decision that ended bans on interracial marriage has anything to do with the civil rights of the last minority that is officially, institutionally, and legally proscribed.

The Bush administration could not have been more vicious. So we are left with this: should we thank the bastards for smiling while they stab us in the back just because they are not the same old scowling bastards who knifed us in the stomach before.

Screw you, Obama. We are pissed right off.

There is rising rage in the gay community, and we are only two weeks from Gay Pride in San Francisco. We should change the slogan right now: Obama, Are You For Us or Against Us.

What a weasel ... more to the point, this is a naked betrayal. When he said that he was a "fierce" supporter of our rights, he lied.

For those of our brothers and sisters who gave him comfort when he appointed a virulent homophobe, the Warren bigot, to give his little prayer at that inauguration that I gushed over ... you were wrong, and we know that now. He appointed Warren because he does not give a flying fuck about gay rights. He used us and he dumped us. We should have protested loud and long on Inauguration Day, and I regret that we did not. He was winking then, but he is lying now.

The more I write, the more boiled I get.

We have to face it: on other fronts, Obama has been as flat as the vision of the earth of the Christians to whom he panders. We are no closer to closing Guantanamo, he seems like a muddle in the face the attacks on health care, there is no timetable in Iraq, new financial regulations are the stuff of fairy tales, and who has heard anything about climate change.

But absolutely nowhere has his failure to lead been more clear than in the case of gay rights.

We are pissed, Obama, and we blame it on you.

To my good friends who never took the koolaid, and who stuck with Hillary right to the end of that colossal primary season - you were right. He is a homophobe.

Or at least he is anti-gay. I promise to write on the distinction between homophobe and anti-gay shortly.

Tonight I am wondering how to express my rage on Gay Day.

What a weasel ... no offense to weasels who at least do not lie about who they are or what they do.

Photos by Arod: the first one is a woodshed which is where Obama and his tawdry advisers belong; the second is my Lesser Siren ... I don't have a picture of a weasel. BTW, AmericaBlog has had excellent coverage on all of this.

Twittering the Drupallers

2009-06-10T04:46:00.000+02:00

I spent all day Saturday at BADCamp ... the bay Area Drupallers periodic big meeting of code. I am not actually a techie, I just play one on TV. They held an all-day introduction to Drupal about half of which I already knew, half of which was indeed new, and half of which was seemingly pointless credentialing. That's three halves, but then again it was a long day. Enjoyable, but long.

When techies get together, the two biggest issues are power outlets and wifi. My colleague Eric arrived with a backload of video and audio recording equipment which he proceeded to set up very professionally ... I should know because I was married for a decade to my sainted ex who is a lighting and video pro. More importantly, Eric arrived with a massive power bar which made him instantly popular. I will never go to a conference again without a power bar. I want to be popular too.

As for the wifi ... well, the SFSU MBA program where the event was held had a very efficient wifi situation, and all was peaceful in the kingdom of geeks.

Good thing there was wifi because four long sessions had their slow moments. The first session was a little unorganized, and that led to peppered questions from those in the audience impatient for the truth. Any good presenter knows that every audience is littered with those whose greatest enjoyment is hearing themselves interrupt the good flow of information. The second and third sessions were excellent and informative, but the fourth and final session concerned matters not relevant to my own need to master this medium.

So I slid into Twitter world. When you are in a room full of geeks, replete with power bars and wifi, you are never more than a micro-second from the new universe of social media. And I have begun to Twitter.

On one hand, Twitter is a wonderful and rather enigmatic aggregator of links to information. I have three accounts, one associated roughly with this blog, another associated with work, and a third rather more unfocused one that follows feeds as my fancy strikes. I don't really look at the third one very often, but the other two are constant friends. You have to garden and prune your Twitter feed both actively and passively if you want to get the most out of it. On the professional level, I am looking for resources, contacts, and perspectives. So I am pretty brutal about who I follow.

But my personal Twitter feed, arodsf, is for the more expansive purpose of being involved in the galaxy of social media, so I can be free and fanciful. In the fourth Drupal session, I started checking out the #FollowFriday tweets. FollowFriday is a convention whereby people advertise Twitter feeds that they like or find useful. You can click on the feeds and find people you want to follow. I read the bio and check the most recent tweets. Two much mindless nonsense about shoes or where you are having lunch, and I ignore it. But some pith and some references get me to follow.

And so I found @arjunbasu. And he changed my whole approach to Twitter. He writes Twisters, 140 character short stories. And he does it really well.

The water tasted bad. He was thirsty but not desperate. So he opened the drawer and found his emergency flask and began the day with bourbon

And the car came straight at them, pulled in by their gravity, and in the moment before it hit, he thought of all the porn on his computer..

I couldn't wait to get home and start writing a few myself. It is harder than you think, but I just relaxed and let it come.

Tweeting on the front steps when the neighbor walked by and glanced. A little smile. They still ignore each other at the bus stop.

That was the first one. I stick to 130 characters so that anyone can retweet them and not cut off the end. The following was the first one I really like:

Two men at the intersection, one facing west, the other south. They see the flash and start. One reaches the far side, looks back.

I think these Twisters are essentially syllogisms, and occasionally enthymemes. There are two premises, though one can be unspoken, and then there is a conclusion. The success is in invoking an unexpressed emotion, or a doubt as to meaning or import and consequence. They can express an unformed bitterness ...

He lay awake night after night trying to figure it out. His lover slept through it all. They kissed in the morning, left for work.

... or the banality of everyday life ...

The soup was cold on delivery. The waiter said they do not have a microwave. He left a short tip but returned a week later anyway.

... or a vague and unexplored sexiness ...

Toto's Africa plays as he coffees, watches the waiter. Later, they cross paths at the opening, agree that they like ephemera best.

ArjunBasu gets downright sexual from time to time. I may go there sooner or later. But what I really want to do is play with history. So this one I have not yet tweeted, but I am actually proud of it:

Antoinette mounted the scaffold with scorn. My head in a basket is finer than all of you. She sighed at the basket's coarse weave.

After the final session at BADCamp, I went down to the food court with the other attendees on the promise of free booze from Sun Microsystems. But I had to wait too long and grew impatient. I wanted to get home and start writing my Twisters. I think I have found a new hobby.

Is that the waiter? Heads turned without a moment's pause in the conversation. No, not the waiter. What are we still doing here?

Photo by Arod, from a storefront on Haight Street. Twisters by @arodsf except for the first two by @arjunbasu.

Death Throes of the Gourami

2009-06-07T04:32:00.000+02:00

I live with a bunch of animals. One dog, Loki, and a bunch of fish and amphibians. Many fewer than in years past, but still there are a lot more frogs and salamanders in this house than most people have.

The last few days have seen the slow demise of a very old gold gourami. It is the last of three that I got over five years ago ... I never keep any records of my critters, so I am never quite certain how old they are. I thought I had two females and a male, which works out much better than two males and female. But sexing gouramis, especially young ones, is a bit of an art. I think we made a mistake, because one of the three rapidly declined under pretty steady assault by the one that is now in its death throes. Once the third one was gone the remaining pair quickly mated and produced three or four crops of fry. I took those that I could net to my vendor, a fine Burmese/Chinese couple who have a hole in the wall place off Polk Street that is a temple of the aquarium arts. It's called Ocean Aquarium, and any aquarist in San Francisco would be well-advised to check them out. Tell them Stephen sent you.

I don't really care to breed fish, and I was happy to know that some of the fry made it to adulthood. But the effort appeared to exhaust the female, and she only lasted a few years. I figured the other guy would soon follow, but he has hung on for years and years. Now he is at the end. I want him to die soon; I do have a method for euthanizing fish when it is necessary, which is when their incurable disease could harm others in the tank ... I put them in a container of their own water in the freezer and let them slowly fade away. But how can I take this creature from the home it has graced for so long and make its last few moments on earth a trauma. I know, it's only a fish. But it has been a sweet presence in my life. It has been looking at me every day for many years in the vestibule as I arrive and as I leave.

I started keeping fish and 'phibs in the late 80s. I love being around animals ... I would have many more if I could. I do not have cats because I am allergic, and that is a big bummer. I started keeping fish and amphibians under the influence of my great friend Kurt who died on May 10, 1992. I remember the date of his death by looking at the first page of any of the books he willed me because I marked each one with that day. To check again today ... I always forget the day ... I pulled Marvels of Insect Life, edited by Edward Step, F.L.S., with no publication date, but with a signature on the front page "Ethel Eaton, December 1945." The book is a treasure.

I revel in the old. I love living surrounded by thousands of volumes of books, many of them old and cranky, not used as much as they might prefer, but waiting for the moment when they are cracked anew. I am their guardian, ensuring that when I, like the gourami, pass on, they will be ready for another stage in their longer than my life. Book should outlive us, just as we should outlive our animals.

Yes, this is maudlin. But I have a pass on indulging my inner-maudlin. I am at the end of the first day of a three-day weekend, one in a series designed to slake some of the tension of the upcoming two and a half months of stress in my job, notwithstanding that I spent this first day off at an all-day Drupal training session. I have three major web sites to go live between now and September 1. The first two will be a new course and class search site and the course catalog for which MRU the major research university where I stack shekels in aid of higher education and my own sustenance; the last of the three will be a new Drupal-powered replacement for the Registrar's site for which I am webmaster. I have worked my whole life to hard deadlines, and I do enjoy the electric stress more than is healthy. But facing the looming period of madness ... I pause.

The big boss, whom I admire, set up a little half hour meeting with me for Tuesday. I asked him what it would be about. He said with a laugh he did not want to tell me because it might give me a heart attack. Now I write this knowing that he might, or at least could, read my blog. I do not think that he does read my blog, not because he is uninterested, but because I keep him apprised in person of my latest speculations on history and happenstance and the ludicrousness of life. But if you do read this, dear T, remember that I say it fondly and drolly. It did give me a heart attack. I truly, honestly hope that the announcement is more work ... I can always handle more work and more responsibility. What I dread is the notion that I might be reconfigured to somewhere less felicitous. Given all the water under the bridge, and my assessment of the situation, I have come to the conclusion that the announcement will be more work, of a very specific sort which it would pointless to adumbrate here. If so, I am ecstatic, because the key to mastering work is to know how to take on more work and make it work. I am game for that.

Aside ... I always misuse the word "adumbrate" but this time I do not care. I am not even going to look it up as I do 4 or 5 times a year.

So this is the three-day weekend so far ... dying gourami, day-long session at a Drupal conference in downtown San Francisco, wondering what it is that the big boss thinks would give me a heart attack. And a re-encounter with the Marvels of Insect Life.

I could ramble on, and I intended to do just that. But this is surely enough.

For those of my dear friends who keep accounts, this is the Friday post; I owe you a Sunday post, and I will repay your diligence with yet another excursus into old Sumer. Given that I have Monday off, and that I am late with the Friday post, the Sunday post may not happen until Monday. I checked with my internal oversight committee and got an okay. FWIW, we have no Internet in the house, so that explains my lateness on the Friday post. I finally managed to connect up via an unprotected WIFI from next door ... but I do not want them to know about it since their inattention has saved me more than once from the horror of being offline.

Photos by Arod of my sweet friend, Loki. I do not have the heart for photos of the dying gourami.

The Ancients Whisper: Heroes, and Clay and Silicon

2009-06-04T05:01:00.000+02:00

So I promise to end up at some point with the Internet. In my professional web 2.0 cruising ... or social media work as the Tweeters would have it ... I learn that mblog will be more popular if I use buzz words like Twitter and Internet and Flip camera. But I keep thinking about the men who for three thousand years made wedge marks in clay in what we call the Near East.

I've finished the rather quirky History Begins at Sumer by the quirky scholar Samuel Noah Kramer ... I say quirky because his fastidious self-credentialing becomes almost comic after a while. Kramer is the paragon of dedication to his arcane but essential specialty, and he is the sort of scholar that I admire without reservation. But he must have been quite a crazy guy.

All that said, I cannot agree with his take on heroes and heroic ages. Kramer delineates three accepted heroic ages ... the Homeric, the Indian, and the Teutonic ... and then argues that Gilgamesh and Enmerkar and Lugalbanda are a fourth and the earliest heroic age. Kramer posits a number of common elements in heroic ages ... a concern for individual heroes, and the tendency of the poets who celebrate the heroes to embellish the historical with the mythical. It is here that Kramer brushes against the truth of the heroic, but marches on. For the heroic ages are not in the eye of history but in the eye of the writer.

What is so amazing about re-reading ancient history at this point in my life is the degree to which all my thinking focuses on the scribes. Since I last read The Epic of Gilgamesh as a 30-something freshman at Cal in the mid-80s, I have written a doctoral dissertation that attempted to extract the consciousness of the writer from 15th-century Malay manuscripts which obscured as a matter of course the hands that created them.

So too with the clay tablets, the thousands upon thousands of them, which inform us of the life and times of some portion of life in the millennia before the Greeks transformed writing once again. We have to remember a few things about these writers. To begin with, we remember them, while we do not remember the story-tellers and neighborhood wags who have been the purveyors of traditions and knowledge in societies around the globe since before Sumer and into our own times. We also have to remember that the scribes were not a flat class of equals, but that they must have embodied hierarchy and structure in parallel with the society that they both served and created. In a chirographic society (that is, a society in which the most people both high and low were not literate, but in which literacy was the craft of a caste of trained specialists), writing was a precious object, indeed a fetish object, the possession of which marked power and charisma. So the scribes, both high and low, were in contact with power even if they did not hold it. And they no doubt sought to influence power, both secular and religious, sometimes at risk to their own safety.

Kramer makes the mistake of failing to understand that the "minstrels" and the scribes co-existed, and that they had a reflexive relationship, albeit one which we can only infer given that the sources we have are almost exclusively in the form of cuneiform. So when we think of the first great epic, that of Gilgamesh, we have to assume that there were popular versions, recited by bards in fire-lit villages far from the hubbub and glamor of urban Uruk. But those bards were influenced by the existence of writing. And I would aver that the chief influence is to focus the mind on the question of supervening authority.

Everyone enjoys a good yarn. And good yarns come with a moral, more often than not. The moral tells you something not just about how you should act but more so about the structure and meaning of the society in which you live. When I read Gilgamesh ... and remember that the main source for the popular version that most of us read is a Babylonian interpretation that largely but not exactly mirrors the Sumerian version that predated it by a millennium of more ... when I read Gilgamesh, I see the construction of a worldview that is deeply pessimistic, but that still posits the necessity of a king who is in contact with the divine. The Gilgamesh epic is thrilling, certainly. It is dramatic, and it seemingly contravenes expectation. But this is what modern people miss when we read the highly redacted version that most of us experience: no one who heard this text 3,000 years ago would doubt its authenticity. What they would feel from it is a re-affirmation of the real, not only the visible, but the ethereal which envelopes and contains and determines everyday life.

So I come back to this dialectic that bothers me all the time ... authority versus authenticity. We moderns are bedeviled by our legitimate concern with authenticity. We want to know if the story is real, if the scribes got it right, if the tablets are whole, if the translation is valid. But we forget at our peril that the concern for the authentic was not primary in the minds of the ancients. They wanted to understand the basis for being, for society. That something was authentic was guaranteed by its being there ... that is what I mean by arguing the primacy of immediacy in the pre-modern mind. But did the thing that was there reveal something about the structure of reality? Was it authoritative?

That was the job of the scribe: he was charged to produce authoritative texts, and these primarily went into the collections of monarchs and temples where the act of possessing them conferred the authority of the text to the owner.

Writing is so different now. It is no longer the province of a caste of the highly trained. The Internet, paradoxically for a time in which television had been threatening to create the first post-literate society, has created the greatest explosion in widespread writing in the history of humanity. You do not need wet clay, or a lifetime of training, or a kiln. Anyone can write. When we think of the impact on social relations of a society of active writers, we should also think of the impact on ancient social relations of a society in which writing was the most specialized activity.

People loved then, and they love now. People ate and drank then and now. People lived and died just as we do. But it is not the commonalities that reveal. It is in difference that we find out who they were and who we were, even if it is arguable that we are more similar than different. And the differences in the meaning and role of writing are an excellent place to start.

Photo by Arod from the Louvre, generally believed to be a representation of Gilgamesh, but also called "The Hero Overpowering a Lion", Neo-Assyrian period, reign of Sargon II (721-705 BC)

The Ancients Whisper: Enlil and the Wind

2009-06-01T00:14:00.000+02:00

I've been reading Samuel Noah Kramer's History Begins at Sumer, published in 1956. My edition was the first Doubleday Anchor paperback published in 1959, sold for $1.95, and one of those classic old paperbacks that the bibliophile loves to fondle. Alas, like so many old paperbacks, the spine did break despite my best efforts. None of the folios have slipped out, though.

Preserving an old book is what Kramer did, of course, though his books were in the form of tens of thousand of broken clay tablets. Kramer does not lack for pride in his work, but he did put together many previously separated chunks of fable and myth. I am not sure what his reputation is now in the field; the Wikipedia article is certainly laudatory.

What I know about Sumerian religion entirely derives from Kramer, and something like six readings over the course of my life of the Babylonian epic about the Sumerian Gilgamesh; I am going to tackle that again once I am done with Kramer. So what I write here is pretty impressionistic, meant more to illustrate where my mind is going in trying to imagine for myself the nature of consciousness in the earliest civilization about which we have written evidence.

Written evidence, of course, is what defines civilization if only because we know a great deal of what we know from written evidence. Cuneiform was a remarkably long-lived and relatively stable form of writing; it was in active use for a longer period of time than the time that separates us from Homer! And, of course, because its medium was clay, we have an enormous resource of fragments and remnants.

I am interested in the scribes; I am always interested in the classes to which I might have belonged had I been born into another era. The earliest writings about Sumerian civilization in Uruk (in modern southern Iraq), the biblical Erech, include descriptions of the intense curriculum and strict corporal punishment provided to prospective scribes. The graduates stood to inherit high position in society, at the cusp between the religious establishment and the political power. Most of what they wrote was bureaucratic, and this provides us with a deep look into economics and social relationships at the dawn of history. But there is enough writing on myth and attitude to give us great insight into the mind.

Kramer points out that the Sumerians did not write what we might call meta-prose ... speculative supervening prose that situates and explains. I would say that this reflects what I called the immediacy of myth and speculation when I discussed Herodotus. The Sumerians were very good at lists, as were their inheritors, and those lists have provided not just enumerations and chronology but also great sources for translation and deciphering. Lists and the immediacy or unmediated quality of reflection are characteristic of chirographic society ... that is a society in which writing is produced by experts for consumption by a society which remains radically oral.

So in the case of the myths which Kramer outlines, we see the repetitive style and textual chunks typical of oral texts, but we see them in written form. By chunks, I refer to stock phrases ready at hand for an oral storyteller; the most famous is the Homeric "wine-dark sea". The storyteller has these elements, preformed with rhythms and measure appropriate to the genre, at ready hand so as to make easier the task of putting a story together in performance. BTW, Kramer makes an error typical of his era (see page 137) when he says that the scribes are the "heirs and descendants of the illiterate minstrels of much earlier days" ... first of all, I prefer "non-literate" rather than "illiterate" because you can only be illiterate in a society which is radically literate, in other words in a society in which the vast majority of people read and write. This was not the case in Sumer, or indeed in any society until much later. But more importantly, we can have little doubt that the "minstrels" were contemporaries of the scribes, as evidenced by the oral techniques with which they wrote, but also by induction since storytellers have been characteristic of all radically oral societies. The "minstrels" and the scribes lived in the same lifeworld and they had exchanges and interchanges which we can only imagine since they apparently are rarely if ever depicted in the sources.

So the scribal arts, notwithstanding the literate caste that produced them, reflect the oral society in which the life world is immediate and unmediated. The gods are viewed as ever present, constantly going about their work, and living their lives, but invisible to humankind except in the effects that they produce. The four major gods are An (heaven), Enlil (the air god), Enki (god of the abyss and wisdom, and the organizer god), and Ninhursag (the mother goddess). But there are also hundreds of gods in charge of more or less everything and anything. It becomes a rather impersonal system, one fitting for a people unprotected against ill-fortune and bad fate, so they developed a system of the personal god who could serve as an intermediary to petition for or act on behalf of the individual with the other gods who, seemingly, were unconcerned with the fate of one person or another.

It is noteworthy that in a thought system where there is no evident conceptual mediation (i.e., where cause and event and consequence are seen as immediate and connected and inseparable), a mechanical form of mediation is invented in the ethereal realm to represent the possibility that cause and effect can be split apart. Compare that to our personal god ... Jesus ... who mediates between the very distant, unerring, and unchanging god the father, but in doing that, he himself is distant, unerring, and unchanged despite his dabble in history 2,000 years ago. There is something deeply revealing about this structure of divine portrayal, and the evident necessity to invite a mechanical means in the form of the personal god of breaching the divide between the immortals and us.

The unchangeability that we project to the immanent but distant god, the Sumerians found in their everyday life. It was a lifeworld that appeared as stable and immutable, and change was something that had to be entreated. Kramer writes, "The main thesis of our poet [of the first version of the Job myth] is that in cases of adversity and suffering, no matter how seemingly unjustified, the victim has but one valid and effective recourse, and that is to glorify his god continually, and keep wailing and lamenting before him until he turns a favorable ear to his prayers." That god is the personal god of the individual supplicant who, by this means, had some recourse against the immediacy of fate ... but a recourse of little effect and much wailing and bemoaning.

Again, this is pretty broad speculation based on a limited set of facts known by the writer, but it is how I try to imagine consciousness when people are in possession of a different set of not only notions but also explanations and facts.

I think this idea also explains why Enlil appears over time to have displaced An, the heaven god, as the primary god. Again, for us, the primary god is always in heaven, and heaven which is above us, unknowable and unimaginable, unreachable except through death and redemption. For the muslims, it is a layered above, albeit rather fully explained in their much more mechanical textual approach to religion, but admission is at the behest of the god who is without intermediary.

But for the Sumerians, the action was not in heaven. Enki, the god of wisdom and organization, ran the world. But Enlil was the wind, the air ... that is, Enlil was what mediated between heaven and earth, what caused change, what brought good and evil, what moved. Enki established the rules of culture and living, and ultimately ordered people as they died and went to the underworld. But Enlil, the wind, was the great god, most in need of sacrifice and appeasement. He was the divine representation of mediation, and thus appeasing him was of central importance in undoing the terible effects of change upon a world where immediacy was the coin of the realm.

Again, this is a mechanical way of representing mediation in a world in which mediation was not the default position.

I hope that this is not too obscure ... and I really hope that it is not utterly wrong. I'll try to return to this when I have re-read Gilgamesh.

Photos by Arod of the sky. Top photo taken at MRU, the major research university where I hold out my hands expecting a rain of heavenly delights; second photo is of the hill in the park behind my house in San Francisco. the third is the sky reflected in a window which, as I recollect, is on Haight Street in San Francisco.

Shame Redux

2009-05-29T05:32:00.000+02:00

So sundry official gay organizations have their knickers in a knot because the Olson/Boies legal challenge to anti-gay marriage laws appears, in their august considerations, premature and incautious. Allow me to be blunt ... screw 'em. You guys blew it; you are the ones who put on the ridiculously weak campaign that lost us an election that we should have won. So your moral high dudgeon is pitiful. You pissed away the initiative, and everything that is going on is ahead of you.

I like the Olson/Boies challenge because it blasts the issue into a new zone. He who does not compete always loses. These guys stepped up and decided to compete. They represent two gay couples who have the right to sue in federal court for their rights. Did our fattened bureaucrats .... I mean the ones who lost the Prop 8 campaign ... did they take into account that Americans have the right to sue for their rights? Are they telling two couples that they should shut up?

Disgusting.

Whenever I hear people tell gay people that we should be cautious, that we should wait, that the time is not opportune, that gay people should shut up, it turns my stomach. The time was not opportune when I came out of the closet publicly and joined gay liberation as a 19-year-old in 1972. Everybody told me that. The time was not opportune when we won civil rights victories in the 70s, and then had to fight the vicious bigotry of Anita Bryant, who is the moral precursor of the pretend-to-be-nice fulminating, pustulant, hate-filled bigots who bankrolled the campaign against our rights last fall. The time was not opportune when Gavin Newsom supported us and raised the gay marriage issue to another level.

The time is never opportune for gay rights. But we have marched forward by ignoring the wagging fingers and knocking knees. Now the cowards are "our leaders". I say screw 'em. And I don't mean in that "nice, spanky way".

That major gay organizations discourage this bold step only proves how much they belong in the trash can of history.

Bravo to boldness. Bravo to the courageous couples who engaged Olson/Boies. Bravo to anyone who fights for our rights. Bravo to being open and out and forward and uncompromising.

Photo by Arod, recently, of the window of a muscle supplement store on Market a block and a half from Castro.

Shame

2009-05-28T05:05:00.001+02:00

So it's disgusting ... the wee 6 on the California Supreme Court could not bring themselves to understand that civil rights are not subject to a vote. There is much talk today that the decision is actually very narrow ... that it states that all rights of marriage are guaranteed to gays except that gay people cannot use the word "marriage." Some will say that that is an essential victory, and that the religious fanatics are left only with a word. One way (sorry, but I can't find the reference again) suggested that we should just take the word "mariage" ... one R, and cooler because it the French spelling.

All this is lovely, and everything, but it misses the point. The California supremes have made a classic "separate but equal" argument. And separate but equal is anathema not just to American law but more so to the concept of civil rights. It is not the place of judges to rule on theological questions, and the question of whether marriage is sacred or whether the Sodom myth actually has anything to say about homosexuality have no place in law or government. The issue is civil rights. No one is saying that religious bigots should be forced not to hate us. We are saying that this is about our civil rights.

The supremes did not see this. They cowered behind the idiotic argument that popular opinion defines civil rights.

I had a little excitement yesterday. I attended the largely student demonstration at MRU (the major research university that laid off my friend Kurt today), and marched with them as far the head of the circle on Palm Drive. They went on to a sit down in downtown Palo Alto, as I headed back to my duties. It was an exuberant, very lefto feeling event. Two professors whom I knew, and a few staffers. Perhaps a 100 or so people in total.

Later I had a silly exchange with some right winger on Twitter. Someone retweeted my tweet "It's a new Dred Scott decision - think how it will look in history - the 'justices' will be so ashamed". And then some evident right winger novelist wrote me to ask if I knew what the Dred Scott decision was. Of course, I do .. it was a decision that stated that a negro was not a person and therefore had not status to sue for his freedom. I think it is very a propos, but more importantly it is a decision that has come to define judicial cynicism. So a little later, this rightwinger tweeted "Yeah, imagine, they made a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy." Never would have expected it." So I replied to him "Dred Scott - 'a ruling based on the law and not on "empathy."'"

That's the way they are crowing ... they are seeing this as lawful, as opposed to empatheticc. They are wrong. This was a failure to see the larger principle of the law that all persons are equal. The decision substituted a specious and discredited theory that approximately similar accommodation is equality. That is bunk. One day the ludicrousness of this decision will earn the same derision we now shower on Dred Scott.

Another fascinating development ... Ted Olson and David Boies, opponents in the Supreme Court case of Bush v Gore, have joined forces to take gay marriage equality to the federal courts. This would have been unimaginable even a year or two ago. We have moved rapidly forward. But it is no time for complacency. Let us applaud and praise Olson and Boies. But let us also organize and prepare for the next battle against the bigots.

Photos by Arod of San Francisco art. Top photo a mural on Harrison (I think) around 20th; bottom photo is a sculpture on the Embarcadero at the foot of Market.