Loss

This is a terribly sad post with which to end the year ... I have been avoiding finishing it for days. But it has been a hell of year ... a year of enormous loss. So with that ...

I spent the day wandering today ... I wanted to spend some time thinking about the film that my oldest friend, Ian Mackenzie, showed us last night. The film is called The Last of the Nomads, and it is part of a CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) series called The Adventurers. (Bizarrely, the full version of the film is only available in Canada; if you are in Canada, see it here.) The film won the Grand Prize at the Banff Mountain Film Festival.

The film is about Ian's 15-year work with the Penan people of Sarawak; Ian has some further material on the Penan and his work here.

The essence of the film is about loss ... in this case, the loss of language, heritage, and way of life of a people who practiced harmony in a land of plenty for countless generations. The loss is cruel, and heartless, the result of the immoral greed of the ruling caste of Malaysia that enables the rape of the primeval rain forest which is the ancestral home of the Penan. They tried to stop the bulldozers in the 80s with their bodies, but they were carted away. The film documents the moment when Ian discovers that the last of the nomadic Penan have settled and sowed crops.

There is no doubt that this was "inevitable" in the sense of the conflict between industrial power and greed against a people armed with sticks and time. Social structures morph and change, and they can come to an end. Countless nomadic societies have settled ... not only now but for thousands of years. But the inevitable aspect of this cannot mask that it did not have to be such a guillotining ... that a rational approach to forest resources could have allowed sustainable extraction and continued forest-living for the peoples who, by any standard of dispassionate justice, "own" that forest.

But this film is about loss ... about an execution ... about the terminal act in the assault of a government on one of its people who were in the way of greed.


So I took a large part of the day to think about loss both in the broad, historical context of what Ian showed us about the Penan and in a more personal sense. I went to Three Wells in Mill Valley, a place where a seasonal stream cascades through a forested gully. My old friend June grew up in Mill Valley and played there as a child in the 30s long before Mill Valley became the preserve of a rich liberal caste who seem to shun you as you walk the back roads ... perhaps a projection of my imagination since I have long observed how the rich look askance at those who invade their preserves without invitation. June showed Three Wells to our mutual friend Kurt, who was a mentor and best friend, and who perished of the plague in 1992. Kurt and I went to Three wells on several occasions to sit by its cascading waters and examine the Universe, as he would call our discussions.

Loss is everywhere in human existence ... it is the sine qua non of progress and change and both personal and social development. That is not praise for loss, nor does it equate one loss with another. We cannot hold back the hands of time, as it were, and the hands of time are driven by loss. My education in loss, as I have addressed from time to time in these scribblings, was AIDS ... "the Deaths", I have called it ever since ... and I had to come to grips with the unendurable. Not unique ... and I not so much comforted myself as assuaged my fears by thinking of other more horrible losses that at least someone survives.

Remember the 2004 tsunami. Ian was in San Francisco when it happened, and together we consumed the news insatiably. We had traveled together in Aceh, and knew some of the scenes. Watching the footage was addictive, not only because of the sheer horror or it, but also because of the vicarious participation in loss ... trying to fathom the unimaginable, trying to settle your mind on top of something that cannot be endured.

But, of course, it is endured. As one reads history, that is the remarkable thing about our species, that we endure against all odds. The results, let alone the causes, are not always pretty ... and there is endurance against that which cannot be controlled and endurance against that which ought never to have been.

There is also the less panoramic but more personal loss. Three local institutions emblematic of an earlier period in the history of the Castro (the San Francisco neighborhood where I live and where the defining early events of gay liberation occurred) ... Welcome Home, a hippyish greasy spoon that was a haven for gay clones in the 70s and 80s; All American Boy, a long-time clothier who supplied the clones with plaid shirts and jeans back in the day; and Gay Cleaners, the Chinese laundry run by the strangely cinematic and curiously named Gay family, apparently kicked out with a month's notice after 30 years by a greedy landlord who evidently does not read the Wall Street Journal. I am cranky about these losses because they signal the yuppification of our gentrified neighborhood, and I loathe all the cell-phone toting yuppies with their dumb-struck boyfriends in tow. I fear the loss of my neighborhood.

What sort of a loss is that by comparison with a people who lose their homeland or their way of life. Our society turns over at a furious pace ... an unsustainable pace, one might argue, but we still wait for the final proof on that. One has to be careful to balance one's sense of outrage at loss against the greater losses that we witness daily in the New York Times.

Loss. No future without it. Indeed, there is not past without it. One cannot address lass without thinking of one of my guiding aphorisms ... to whit, that there is no such thing as a zero sum game.

I won't spend a lot of time thinking of a loss from which greater gain was had ... do we have modern Europe without the guillotine, Napoleon, the Franco-Prussian War, the two great wars? Probably not, although that is not to say that all the horrors were the sine qua non. Could it not have gone another way? It turns out that there is not a lot of support in history for a flower child notion that history would have been much better if only everyone just got along.

But that is never a justification for the horrors of the moment. It is no argument that we cannot "at this moment, at this time" (paraphrasing Obama) apply reason and find ways for all sides to benefit. I think of Gaza in that sense.

And I think of those poor last nomads, Ian's friends, living in a forest hut yards from their more settled cousins, wistfully and sadly, if not bitterly, contemplating a loss whose contours even they cannot fully measure. There is no good reason for it; only greed ... a well-known historical reason. I quibble with Ian about how he records the oral texts of this people before they disappear. But I admire his courage in being willing to witness up close the agony of people unjustly stripped of their heritage, and to be willing to bear witness so that people in the future may remember these last nomads.


As I thought about this and watched the water in Three Wells, I remembered old Kurt, dead these 15 years. I remembered talking with him about issues just like this as we together watched the water swirl at Three Wells. Loss, and the future, and the unimaginable that comes true no matter what.

Photos by Arod of Three Wells, Mill Valley, California.

Murder and Mayhem

It is the eve of a big day which I am more looking forward to than I have for many years ... more on that later. The big day is Gay Day, as I still prefer to call it. It is particularly big this year because of the signal victory we have had on the right to marry. The mood tomorrow will be unrestrained joy.

I cannot help but brood, though, that we may be like the German Jews of 1920. We count our gains even as our enemies gather and darkly plot, and even as they vainly preen and prepare for the day when their implacable and ancient hatred for us can be put to dark mendacious use. I said to RB today that the horrifying notion that there may be open water at the North Pole today portends disaster for gay men. He needed some convincing ... perhaps you do too. I will try.

But before that, I proffer that I am just meaning here only to catch up a little on the meanderings of my mind over the last little bit. I have been thinking a lot about the Prussian and German states, and I have something to say, but I keep retreating from the nuanced view that I have been angling to adopt to precisely the view that I had in my decidedly more doctrinaire 20s. We shall see how that turns out ... suffice here to note that it has kept me from writing.

In the meanwhile there has been a startling coincidence of omens in this city that thinks itself above all that. It inspires a dread ... not a panic or a dismay ... dismay is so the affect of those who retreat before history and affect their iPods and disdain in the place of knowledge and implication. You have to look, you have to see what stands in front of you, you have to draw the conclusions and understand that we are not immune from the history that has proven itself again and again and once again.

I went to Berkeley yesterday. Actually, the border of Berkeley and Oakland, on Alcatraz Avenue, for those of you who have some intimate knowledge of the peculiarities of that neck of the woods. I went to the home of a good friend of mine who works for me annually for a few months in catalog production time at MRU, where I labor for my sustenance. Perhaps on the occasion of another trip I will describe how American the so-called East Bay feels to a San Francisco boy who ventures beyond the 'friscan bounds only via train to his labors at MRU. What I noted was that I could not see Oakland from the Bay Bridge and on my return I could not see San Francisco. This fog not the celebrations of fog on kitty kat feet of Carl Sandburg fame, but the fog born of smoke from a thousand fires burning north and south and east of here. They would be burning west of here too if it were not endless ocean.

My throat burned, and the sun sat vague and shrouded. If it were not real, it would be a National Geographic special on some projected disaster of the far future or purported of the ancient past.

But it is real. Just as the North Pole is melting, California is burning. And our leaders and denoters fulminate about oil speculators.

Meanwhile, as I drove in the urban noise and clutter of Oakland, I was trying to apply my new policy of undercutting my easy anger at the idiocy of others ... as in viewing bad driving as humorous rather than a threat worthy of response. Why? Because I have been deeply affected, and frightened, by some Salvadoran gang member who slaughtered three innocent men apparently because of traffic anger but more likely because of mistaken identity. Read the story ... the sorrow is staggering. This kind of violence in the context of the cynical Scalia-court decision on handguns sends chills through anyone not infected with the ideology of self and scorn that is at the root of the American dilemma ... how do we make freedom without empowering the baseness of greed.

This is not Detroit ... this is not Philadelphia. This is San Francisco, liberal heartland, and some 40-something driving home from a BBQ is shot dead with his two near adult sons because he looks Hispanic ... get it ... some Salvadoran asshole offed this guy as a gangland duty.

The planet is burning and murder is crowding in.

But my little life has a burst in store. I bought a new camera ... a Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ50K ... and I am going to shoot cute boys at Gay Day tomorrow. You know, shoot, not shoot ... shoot, man, don't shoot.

That is modern life for the awake. We know we are screwed. We want to have our fun anyway. How do you do that without compromising your ethics? All those monster vehicle drivers, all those cell-phone assholes, all the guzzling CEOs and their wannabe henchmen, all the jackasses who litter the planet with their thoughtless garbage, and the gangsters big and small who kill and intimidate and strut around all proud and self-esteeming ... they do not contemplate ethics. They take what they want and they damn the future.

We are the damned. We are the ones who will choke on their smoke, and who will embody their bullets. We are the Jews of German 1920 who thought things were getting better.

So that is what Gay Day makes me fear. Even so I will take my new camera and try to make of my pessimism a day of bright photography. Perhaps the sun will break through the smoke of a thousand fires. Perhaps no bullets will fly. Perhaps one more day will pass before the North Pole melts. Perhaps.

Perhaps.

Global Cooling

RL just handed me a Manhattan ... that was my first favorite drink when RL converted me from wine sipper to what I would call a spirits guy. Probably my favorite now is a chilled dry martini, but RL's cocktails are always so exquisite that it does not matter which of the drinks he proffers from his broad and expanding repertoire.

I changed my sig line at work today ... simplified, really, but added this line: One planet. Think global warming with every action we take.

I thought about the line a long time ... it is not particularly felicitous, but I did not want it in the second person as that seems so accusatory.

To set the scene ... the Giants are in a nice game with the D-backs, and Kevin Correia ... who seems like the nasty, dirty boy next door from the one family held lowest in regard by the peacock proud neighbors ... is pitching well, but is down 3-2 in the 6th.

Anyway ... I have meant for a while to speculate thusly (am I allowed to say thusly?) ... what if it were global cooling? What if Texas were threatened with August blizzards?

In other words, what if the physics of carbon dioxide were such that it blocked solar energy, and we were facing not a warmer but a cooler planet. The low-bore immoralists who continue to suck up giant obscene SUVs do so either because they don't care or because they rationalize that a warmer planet will provide for more summer vacations on the beach. But what if they were confronted with an imminent ice sheet crossing Lake Ontario and taking out Ohio.

Global cooling would have inspired faster action. I'm sure of it. Global warming seems like a boon, and it is easy for the blinkered to imagine that the scientists are doom-and-gloomers ... they just just buy some sunscreen and a new pair of speedos and head to the beach. It's summer party time, all year long.

One more thing on global cooling ... am I the only atheist who is puking at all the fawning over pope Rat? Talk about global warming. This is a guy who is from the most reactionary wing of the church ... he'd light the pyres, baby, if only he could. The New York Times has a blog on the pope with lots of commentators ... all Christians plus one Jew. No atheists, though. Atheists see through the charade. Atheists are not impressed by a fascist spewing hatred borne of a fourth-century self-loather whose doleful influence has been the proximate cause of death and misery beyond counting.

One skeptic I know well, my good friend Jim, noted with ribaldry that it is the pope who has the ruby slippers ... see my immediately previous post for context ... now, more than ever, we need Judy to rescue the ruby slippers from the evil witch from the East.

Global cooling, the pope with ruby slippers, Giants losing. What a wretched evening.

Photo by Arod, looking up in the National Gallery, Ottawa, Canada

Blogging Winchester: Birds and Tulips

I have not finished last night's screed ... I crashed out in the middle of the third period of the second hockey game, and when I awoke just in time for Malcolm in the Middle at 12:30, I did not have the writerly urge. So that post, which will probably be below this one when I finally finish it, will have to wait a bit.

Mother, Father, and I are at the round breakfast table with little Hershey on the pillow watching the birds and squirrels at the feeder outside the window. It has been off-and-on light snowing or raining, but the birds are busy at work, of course. There is a small black bird that looks like a Junco to me, and Mother and I get out the bird book. Sure enough, it is a Dark-Eyed Junco .. and there is another one and another one. We are swarmed by the little things. There are plenty of grackles, and the robins are back, the odd mourning dove. We've seen a few Downy Woodpeckers as well. And lots of Common Redpolls.

I am sure that anyone with aging parents can empathize with this ... I am so happy that Mother and Father are in a secure little complex with a bunch of sweet old ladies and men who are friends and support. And I love their picture window on the little parklette. Father gets tired as the days waxes and wanes, so the long breakfast is the best time. A care worker comes daily, always at a different time, to bathe Father, and Mother gets to read the paper and clean up.

Father says that he once spoke about tulips at Carnegie Hall and made what amounts to a minor faux pas by forgetting to thank one of the organizers. He still remembers that moment. He was speaking on behalf of the Ottawa Tourism Board of which he was three times President, and which had rented Carnegie as part of a tourism marketing push. Father addressed the idea of a Friendship Garden which he says, went from country to country. After Ottawa, its next country was Greece and the Greek Ambassador was present. One of Father's friends and colleagues had huge paintings of tulips in honor of Ottawa's famous Tulip Festival.

This discussion arose because of those tulips. The Tulip Festival is in a donnybrook with the Ottawa International Writers' Festival because the former, under the rubric of its Celebridée program, invited Salman Rushdie to speak and because they "stole" the writers' tagline which is "This is Where Ideas Live", as opposed to the new Tulips' tagline "Where Ideas Bloom". A nasty cat fight in a tight corner. I tend to side with the writers because writers are not getting the financial benefits of the busloads of little old ladies who like the spring flowers. But this is certainly a case of "surely we can all get along."

Dad was once very involved in all those sorts of things in Ottawa, and he still follows its every in and out very closely. I think it is hard for him not be in the thick of things ... I can feel that.

I wish he could let it go and watch the birds a little more. But the drive that makes a mind like his go is not something that can be discarded. Stroke or not, he is still a sharp observer of the human condition. In that, he is my model and the one who sparked my mind to be whatever it is.

Shortly after breakfast and bath are over, Father puts the House of Commons on the television when it is in session. He listens to it closely ... he has the personal and political history of most of the members down pat. Old Canadian that I am, I find a spirited Question Period more fascinating by a long shot than virtually any aspect of American politics. I doubt that 5% of American politicians could handle Question Period. Ooops, being a Canadian snob, an occupational hazard, here deep in Ontario.

Photo by Arod, the view from the parental picture window in January 2007. The view today is so gray and messy that I cannot bring myself to photograph it.

Fag-Baited in the Castro

Yes, fag-baited in the Castro in front of my house by a pert pretty early-20s-something female school teacher leaning out the window of her vast SUV planet killer bought for her by her parents in Kansas.

Back in the early 80s, I was fag baited a few times in the Castro. I remember a bunch of christians driving by and scraping their fingers in the "shame on you" symbol as Gaetano and I walked hand-in-hand ... this was at a time when the christians were routinely invading the neighborhood and staging little performance autos-da-fe, as it were. I was once threatened, and scared, by a group of cholo dudes yelling "fag" from a fast car screaming around the corner at 16th and Market late at night. And some kid once showed me a knife ad gave me the finger through the window of a bus at Castro and Market. All those were in the 80s. Once in the 90s a decrepit foul homeless guy screamed "fag" at me at Castro and Market.

But tonight was the most unsettling I have ever experienced in this neighborhood.


I really do not like SUVs ... and I especially can't bear the really big ones. Cities are drowning in brain-dead, me-me-me, SUV driving. I hate it when they buzz you, I hate it when they run stop signs, I hate it when they conspire to destroy our planet. So, Wednesday last, I arrive home from the dog walk, blissful from the oxygen notwithstanding the fatigue from a long day of labor in the modern work force ... and there in the driveway is this enormous blood-sucking SUV with those blinding "screw-you" lights flooding the front of the house, idling, and this tiny little missy blabbing away on the cell phone. You know, I would have let it slide if the thing hadn't been idling. But it stuck in my craw. I tried to get her attention, but she turned so she wouldn't have to look at me. Well that did it.

I have a voice that can crack concrete. I can project right through the president-for-life black-tinted windows of the most armored gargantuan SUV ever made ... and so I let fly with a "Hey" just slightly below the decibel level of a 747 preparing to take off. Little missy snottily powers down the window, and I told her ... let me not quote exactly ... to get her friggin planet-killer out of the driveway. She bleated something about how she didn't tell me how to live so ... I cut her off and said to get her planet killer out of the driveway. This went back and forth, and at some point she tried to excuse her behavior by proclaiming "I'm a school teacher" and "my parents bought me the car." It had Kansas license plates. And when I still insisted that she park somewhere else, she stated, "You're a homosexual so you're being mean to me." I'm pretty sure that is exactly what she said. I know I heard "homosexual." I suppose part of my problem was that that she had no more wit in her tiny gray matter than to fag-bait as repartee.

Little missy, on the dole from her Kansas-bound parents, can afford to invade the heartland of gay liberation and fag-bait her neighbors who express their considered opinion that it is an obscenity to drive an SUV larger than the houses in which 75% of the world's population live. I figured that she was raised religious given the snake-spitting manner in which she recited the word "homosexual". I called her on the fag-baiting, at which point she looked at me pissy, and backed out and went away.

Unsettling ... this neighborhood is going straight, and that is the result of the real estate crisis and 'publican favoring of the rich in public policy. Not much one can do. People can go where they want, and that is the way it should be. But it raises two issues for those of us who were around before and during gay liberation. Firstly, roughly 99.99% of all neighborhoods in the world are straight. There are perhaps a half dozen, maybe 10, gay neighborhoods in the United States, and in a decade, there will be none. We've already seen the self-righteous new helicopter parents in this neighborhood demand that gay bookstores not display erotic images, and we'll see more of that. And we'll see coddled little missies gay-bait their neighbors casually and out of that special haughty preciousness that is the gift of over-protective parenting to everyday life.

But secondly, and more significantly, when we came out publicly during the high days of the gay movement, we did so not just as individuals and groups of individuals ... we also did so as people, primarily men, who had relocated and collected ourselves in neighborhoods. We had behind us a place ... really two places, the neighborhood and the bars. In Vancouver, we used to call the bars "the ghetto" ... a lot of gays guys used that language ... you'd say, "what are you doing tonight," and the reply would be "I'm going to the ghetto," which meant going to the bars. So the neighborhoods were then and have been a source of strength and organization and creativity. I know everybody likes to assume that the intermingling of open gays into other neighborhoods presages the "happy" elimination of a distinction between gays and straights, but only those ignorant of history, whether coyly or foolishly, would deprive us of the ability to fight back should our militant enemies seek to move against us. Not having neighborhoods will make us more vulnerable.

And that is what is so unsettling. The little shit in her monster SUV felt perfectly comfortable gay-baiting, just as comfortable as she feels in driving a planet-killer in a crowded city for which she has no native feel. The history and edge and charm of our city were built by its rebels and misfits and free-thinkers, and not by the rich or by the coddled ... and we are increasingly at danger of becoming just another suburban hellhole drowning in SUVs and prams and plastic packaging and the self-centered.

Gay liberation consciously took as its models women's liberation and the black movement. But the truth is that we are more like Jews, minus the genealogical and religious angles, than women or blacks. Just as with the Jews, for millennia we have been the ever-present other, always available for a timely pogrom should the powerful or the ideological or the sanctimonious feel the need for it. It is hard to imagine a full-scale attack on Jews in America, but when you think of the social dislocation of the decline of the empire over the next decades, it is not hard to imagine gays taking the brunt of some misplaced rage. We are, after all, the target of the single most virulent religious and ideological hatred in America today. One of the two main political parties has come to power in large part by attacking us.

I have been reading Tom Reiss' The Orientalist: Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life, the story of a Jew born in Azerbaijan who masqueraded as a Muslim prince in the gathering gloom of Nazi Germany. The Jews of the 20s in Germany played huge roles in society, as do gays today. They had been supporters of the war, they were nationalists, they were integrated into the economic engine as it by turns sputtered and roared. They lived and worked side by side with everyone else ... but none of that saved them.

Would the Kansan school teacher in Papa's SUV come to our aid if we are attacked? Or would she view it as a real estate opportunity?

I fulminated over this post for a long time ... and when I fulminate, I do not write. I am sitting in the garden on a beautiful day as my ex pulls out the winter's weeds. I will try to write something happy soon. Photo by Arod of some street art that appeared in an abandoned gas station at Sanchez and Market in the Castro. They plan to build condos there now; perhaps there will be room for a few more Kansan remittance babies.

Good News

A couple of pieces of heartwarming news in the New York Times. First off, it seems that fewer and fewer 16-year-olds are getting licenses. I've long held that we have the age of consent laws all backwards ... it should be free to have sex at 16, free to drink at 18, free to drive at 21 ... and free to have a cell phone at 30 ... ooops, too cranky. Demographics may be looking after the first three.

And more Americans are giving up golf, the world's most environmentally destructive game. If golf were played more as it was when it was invented ... unmanicured fairways, everybody has to walk and carry their own clubs ... it would not be such a blight, stealing parkland for the few and shedding toxic runoff.

So the planet may be heading for a broiling hell, but in the meanwhile a couple of happy indicators. La de da.