My Winnipeg

Went with Christopher and Paulo to the San Francisco opening of a new film by Guy Maddin called My Winnipeg. It's a dreamy introspection worked around what the narrator describes as yet another attempt to flee the town in which he has lived for his entire life. He is on a train and much of what we see is projected through the window as the train rolls endlessly along. The cinematography is rough, black and white, choppy, raw, new footage mixed with old. Certainly avant garde, but compelling and demanding rather than aloof and evasive. I wrote a few quotes down as we accompanied Maddin on his flight, as we tried to flee with him.

How can one live without one's ghosts?

This is a film about memory, and its vagueness, and how it deceives and traps us. How you can only try to run away, but even in flight you are already heading back. Even at the end of the film, we do not know if he escaped, or if he really tried to escape. We know that he doubled back on himself and found a way to release himself from his self-made vow. But we do not know what happened, or indeed if anything happened.

Whatever happened only took 80 minutes to happen ... I appreciate a film that says what it has to say promptly ... but it was a long, drawn out 80 minutes. It seemed like two hours ... and I say that not with fatigue but with the entrancement of fixation. He didn't even lose me with his long riff on the travails of hockey rinks and hockey teams in town. He let go for a moment of the dreamy quality of his narration and got a little fevered ... though the dreaminess returned with the phantom hockey teams of aging stars.

The breath freezes in front of your face and falls to your feet with a tinkle.

You have to feel for a place like Winnipeg. It is truly lost in the middle of the continent. From a distance it is a haze of winter breath, vague, unknown, not on the agenda. But it is, more than any other city in the Canadian prairies, a real place with a history that mattered, with enduring cultural institutions. As the world collapses on itself, and as everything turns into suburbs and commodities and the latest thing, Winnipeg gets even vaguer, even less there. And this film accepts that vagueness. It lives entirely in the chill of the winter where, and I can attest to this, the crunch you hear as you walk is as much your breath as it is the snow under your feet.

I lived in Winnipeg from the summer of 66 to the summer of 68; I was in grades 9 and 10. I knew about this film only because Christopher told me when I told him that I have been planning a vacation that starts and ends in Winnipeg. When I lived there, I loved the winter. I rose early, even though I was in my young teens, to walk my dog Laddie in the dark and snow and freezing cold. I still dream about Winnipeg. And my dreams too are about being trapped there, even though I am not trapped there any longer.

Who gets to vivisect his own childhood?

Maddin took this film as an opportunity to revisit his childhood by reconstructing its key events. He got Ann Savage to play his mother, and he rented part of the house in which he grew up. Who gets to do that? He states in the film that Winnipeg has a law that everyone must carry a key to every house they have ever lived in ... were that the case, I would have quite a weight of keys. When we left Winnipeg in 1968, we were in a car on our way to the train ... not sure if it was a taxi or what, but my Father had left earlier and was already in Toronto. Mother asked where was the dog ... we looked around, and he wasn't there. So we had to head back to the house ... 181 Oak ... to get him, and the new tenants had already arrived and were examining this great placid beast who would not budge. We didn't need keys. Imagine, though, being able to stage that scene again, to pick the actors who play your family as it appears through the fog of years.

A little indulgent, perhaps, in the wrong hands. But in Maddin's hands, the scenes are haunting and elusive, foggy and alluring.


Everything that happens in this city is a euphemism.

Early in the journey, the film turns on sleepwalking ... Maddin asserts that Winnipeg is the sleepwalking capital of the world. Sleepwalking is a purposive vagueness, adroitly performing actions without knowing what you are doing. Zombie-like. Sleepwalking, I suppose, is the euphemism for enduring the torments of life, for growing up when we are so conscious and yet so out of control ... so totally in a situation that we do not know how large or small it is. The Maddin character is vaguely sleeping or dozing on the train ... here he is in full flight form everything he has known, but he cannot rouse himself to attention. Sleepwalking into freedom. Does he ever arrive?

Maddin is a classic unreliable narrator. Down the street and around the corner from where he lived is the Sherbrook Pool. Maddin claims that it is the only pool in the world where there are three pools built one on top of the other, that the bottom two were closed in 1966. I bolted up when he showed the pool ... because I had my bicycle stolen from in front of that building in the summer of 1967. A terrible day that pierced my innocent sense of right and wrong. I never got the bike back, but I did get trip to the police station to look at recovered bikes.

I didn't know about the three pools for the very good reason that there never were three pools; it's pretty clear he uses the stacked pools as referent for the Indian belief that there is another confluence of rivers beneath the confluence of the Red and the Assiniboine which is at the heart of Winnipeg. You never can know what to believe in this film, so it is the easier, and more fun, to give up at least as long as you are in his snare. The frozen horse heads are true ... and as I search the backrooms of my mind, I seem to recall that I knew about them. It's a great Winnipeg story ... a bunch of horses bolt from a fire in early winter, fall through the ice on the river, and are trapped, frozen to death, their heads projecting through the ice for the rest of the winter. The stuff about the gay mayors and the hot dude shows at the Golden Boy Club are at least partly true. But homeless people are not confined to rooftops in Winnipeg.

I guess all the rambling ends up with this: Guy Maddin is still confined, and so are we all. Confined not to memory but to memory's tricks, its deceits, the way in which it undermines truth and leaves us vulnerable. Confined to where we know who we are sufficiently that we can sleepwalk through the every day ... and confined sufficiently that even when we try to escape, we fool ourselves into not quite making it. Home is where memories are frozen in the ice, and yet where they sublime into an ether in whcih we are doomed to sleepwalk. That My Winnipeg for ya.



I do plan to return to Winnipeg, and I expect to use viewing this film as a goad. This is the plan: fly into Winnipeg in October, rent a Prius, drive to Ottawa, stay for five days to visit with my sister who is making one of her periodic pilgrimages from her home in Queensland, then drive back via the northern route (Hwy. 11) and spend another couple of days in Winnipeg. Lots of photos and blogging.

Nice interview with Guy Maddin here. Cleaner copy of the trailer here An intelligent reflection on the film here.

Watch Yer Mood, Dood

So, I've been in something of a black mood, as anyone who has suffered through my last few posts will know. Not unusual for me to be in a bad mood in July because this is the month before I go to press with the course catalog at the major research university (MRU) which pays my bills. The stress level gets titanic ... it is not just the pressure of chasing down all the myriad details and confirming that everything is true and grammatical and spelled correctly. It's more the maddening blizzard of email ... the dozens of requests for information that I have securely stored on my web site. For crying out loud, some people send me email asking me the location of a building where I am holding a meeting. Duh ... look at a map. I edit about 2500 course descriptions ... when I am done they are like little materialist koans, all tight and intertwined and thick with content. I cannot bear flabby prose, and in this job I get to root it out.

So I get a little crazy.

I am a little less stressed because, for perfectly rational reasons that are too particular to worry about here, my big boss decided that the book can arrive 2 weeks later than in previous years because we are going live with a web site the day that class registration opens. That means a 10-day press-date reprieve ... I kept saying it was like having a death sentence commuted to life no parole. I was giddy. 10 extra days makes the whole thing a piece of cake. So I am taking tonight off .. .really, an evening off in July is pretty rare in this journey.

And I am a little lighter of mood. Light enough to muse that blackness of mood appears to the natively pessimistic as simply absence of the dross of happiness ... the absence of the illusion that things are on some level okay. So I am not withdrawing from the bleakness of some of these last few posts, but rather affirming that there is something to be said for finding a little joy despite knowing.

So to find a little joy, yesterday I took my lunch hour to watch the first half of The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill (I am working mostly at home) and watched the rest of it before I fell asleep. It is about a remarkable man, Mark Bittner whose gentle intelligence is the other motif of the film ... i.e., other than the spectacular images of the parrots. The film is about Mark the drifter who found a temporary home, more like a squat, in a ramshackle cottage on Telegraph Hill after a couple of decades of bumping around North Beach like lots of other over-the-hill after-the-fact beatnik types. (For those not from San Francisco, North Beach is only slightly north and not a beach at all. It is in the shadow of Telegraph Hill where the parrots roost and feed, and it is the fabled home of the beatniks of the 50s.) From this shack he established a relationship with a flock of Cherry-headed Conures, and later wrote a book and was the subject of a film by Judy Irving who he later married and with whom he is now living in the gardens of Telegraph Hill.

So things turned out well. Notwithstanding that there is a chilling interlude in the film where this frigid middle class married pair slowly manages to choke out that they are tossing this unique man out of the little shack where he had been living rent-free. The pair is so slimy, so assured of their privilege. What ensues is heart-wrenching. Mark has to give up the wounded parrots he has rescued and nurtured to a rescue group. He has to say good bye to his avian friends including the unique Connor (I think) who is of a different related species for the rest. He has to move in with human friends in the East Bay ... San Franciscans shudder when someone has to move to the East Bay. We watch as his shack is demolished, and then we see the suburban "architectural" monstrosity that replaced it and the for rent sign.

What would it have taken for those peacock-proud middle class homeowners ... obviously rich enough to buy the most prime real estate in San Francisco and then renovate it from top to bottom ... what would it have cost them to make a little space of Bittner, to be the patrons of this kooky San Francisco legend? Would it have in any way substantially reduced the vast excesses that are theirs? Of course they don't have to. But that is the difference between the San Francisco of memory and the increasingly suburban greed that crowds in and destroys the very reason these people came in the first place.

At least those creeps get to live the rest of their pampered lives in the shadow of that ignominious exposure of how shallow run their souls.

It makes me think of the middle class again ... another sampling of the same middle class whose passivity and satisfaction and indulgence enabled the extended livelihood of the Junkers who led Germany and Europe to disaster in 1914. Now we all want to be middle class ... by "we all" I mean the entire species except for the infinitesimally tiny minority of the super-rich ... and I am lucky enough to be one of those who are middle class. Great work if you can get it. But we are no more than ostriches if we do not examine the unresolved contradictions of the middle class ... the tendency to equate their own comfort with good, the failure to use the gifts they are given, the casual rationalizations. In the modern American context, reduce it to this: the planet is going to hell because middle class Americans figure they must drive monster SUVs or their children's lives will be forfeit.

But prices must be paid. And the dread of those prices is hard bedrock of pessimism.

See how easy it is to work back from a little glimmer of happiness to underlying despair. But it should also be easy to work the other direction. If you look at Mark Bittner's site now, he is a happy man ... married, writing, living on the same Telegraph Hill from which he was so callously evicted. He has been a vocal defender of the wildness of the flock which only he tamed and then only for the few moments that the flock granted him.

This post has been written in three sittings, and by that it is probably a little disjointed. If some respite from my present travails presents itself, I will search for some photos from Telegraph Hill. Even better, I will walk the dog there on Sunday morning and take some new pix.

Art and Hanging Out

I am in the midst of my annual MRU course catalog production madness ... this year we are implementing a new software called Author-it and that is challenging and exciting and daunting. Have been working a lot from home which is very efficient, but also has the curious effect of failing to shield me from the immediacy of my emotions. Today I had a little meltdown that would not have occurred if I had been at work. So I took an early lunch, watched an hour of 48 Hours and then returned to the fray refreshed if not actually happy. By the by, that 48 Hours featured the sad story of a 16-year-old who slaughtered two friends in a drug-induced haze with a shotgun. He got double life. Meanwhile, in Canada, the Globe and Mail reports that Canada released a 42-time hit man killer and child molester on compassionate parole because he is dying.

Saturday Night: Found myself at an art opening for a fascinating young gay and deaf painter by the name of Philip Chanin, a friend of mine. There's a strange YouTube experience here. I am a skeptical art opening ingenue ... by proclivity if not by reason of any depth in the art critical genre ... but Philip won me over in the course of three or four meanders through his work. He favors a certain amount of glitter in the combination of bright and glowering colors ... I think his greater success is when he uses it in moderation. Many of his paintings are large heads, frequently earless, that confront the viewer starkly and opaquely, notwithstanding the vivacity of the rendering. It was the eyes, I think, that drew me in ... staring and demanding, windows into meaning and moment, the emotion apparent but not decipherable. His faces are demanding, not inviting. My encounter with them required that I give in to them, and perhaps that is how they came to grow on me as I submitted to their silent imposition.

The best of the head paintings were in his bedroom, the private collection of his lover Bob Ostertag, a musician, composer, and performance artist of long acquaintance. I snuck a photo of one of them, but I am loathe to upload it here without permission.

But it was another painting that came to represent the evening for me ... I noticed it right away in the hall because it had a sticky beside it ..."SOLD". But that clue to its uniqueness did not cause me to stop and examine it. I am afraid that sometimes I am too beholden to unexamined prejudices in matters in which I am not expert ... o what a terrible confession, and one that exposes me as not as unique as I might prefer in my phantasmagorical and internal perorations ... and I just missed what had made this at-that-point anonymous buyer stop by that painting. Later he told me that his mother, who is by his description a successful buyer of unknown artists, advised that when he buys young artists, he should look for the pieces that are different from the others for they will be the ones sought after if the unlucky young artist becomes a lucky old artist.


I felt that taking a pic of the bought painting would be wrong and I did not do it. Later I wished that I had because it became such a moment.

My roommate RL brought his friend Daniel ... also a painter ... and it was he who turned out to be the buyer. I was as impressed by his thoughtfulness about art as I was by his evident bitterness. Take "impressed" to mean "made an impression upon me" rather than "favorably impressed." Notwithstanding the bitterness and my own tendency to scowl at bitterness, I liked Daniel, and made a point not to indulge myself in any fury if our discussion turned confrontational. A good plan, as it turned out.

RL, Daniel and I decided to leave after a couple of hours of the meander described above. Bob asked me to stay because a musician friend of his planned to perform, but hunger stemming from a delayed dinner drove me out. I am such an emotional sop ... I still feel bad that I left early. Oh well. The three of us wandered along Valencia looking for eateries that were open, not crowded, not loud, and not yuppie. Ended up at a sushi place on Church near Market.

It's been a while since that discussion, and I should have written the details down a little sooner. I wanted to cue Daniel into telling me why he paints, but we ended up talking about the state of the gay movement. I said above that Daniel was bitter, but I would prefer to say the more precise notion that he proffered a bitter stance. I should not really comment about whether or not he actually "is" bitter ... and I do mean that in the Clintonian sense of it depending upon what the meaning of "is" is. At one point he complained that he didn't like Gay Day because he doesn't see why people should have sex in public ... I told him I thought that was a profoundly conservative approach to looking at gay politics. He didn't like that, but we continued the discussion ... in fact he pressed to continue it up to the moment where we parted company with him at the foot of our hill to home. Then he told me that he appreciated our discussion because I had not caved to him as many evidently do.

I like the guy and I hope he becomes more a part of our circle. I describe the discussion briefly, and perhaps not as favorably to him as I should, because it got me to thinking about youth and age, in particular gay youth and gay age. I remember in my much more activist youth that I was very bugged by old guys who countered my steadfast and frequently un-nuanced political views ... more than bugged, it enraged me and I would get yell-y and obnoxious. I got the more enraged when they proffered a sage stance, as it were, treating me benignly. So I was playing a game on my old self and not being fair, I guess ... perhaps I should have argued more passionately.

But Daniel is a young gay man in an era when the movement is something that has been taken away from them, something alien to them, in the form of an establishment even if it does not have the power of an establishment. I think the gay rebels of this era mistake that establishment-like behavior as having actual social power over them, and they associate the only gay community that exists in a physical with that political establishment. So if the gay guys in the Castro are an aging bunch of householders, and the political movement is a bunch of Democrats slicing up a tiny pie, then gay life and gay community is illegitimate. In my, alas, angry way, I think that is a lot of what I was trying to say in the my piece on Gay Day. Young gay men live lives, increasingly, that have nothing to do with gay community ... they can easily come to straight friends as community, and see the Castro-gay-guy-Demo-establishment as alien, and by back formation fail to remember that the fight for gay liberation is still very young. So, as I noticed at Gay Day, the young gay guys who came tended to be coupled ... perhaps they see in the current movement the advantage of marriage rights. (And, as I noted, the young lesbians hung with themselves in more exuberant modern rendition of the separatism that has always haunted our movement.)

These are generalizations based on observation but not study. I want the Daniels of our world to be modern gay liberationists. Not my choice, and the forces at work on them seem to press in another direction.

So back to where we started in this post. There did not seem to be any ideological content in Philip's work, but there was a straining to see and to project. Notwithstanding the seeming horrors of distorted and wrenching figures, this work is not dark and it presents an optimism and vivacity and screaming for life. I'd like to see Daniel's work ... I rather suspect that it features a darkness, but one that might also be deconstructed into life and urging ... just a guess. He prefers large canvases, and the painting of Philip's that he bought was one of the most narrative of the works on display, so I suspect that they have a narrative quality. I am permanently fascinated by active minds ... and this evening of art and hanging out was a rather too rare excursus into two new fascinating minds in my life.

Top photo by Arod of Philip Chanin and one of his pieces. Middle photo from Philip's web site; click on the photo to go to a slide show of his work. This piece actually was written in several sittings, not a good idea for blogging. The pressure of this year's course catalog work is sitting heavy, and I go back to my labors soon after I hit "Publish Post".

Iron Kingdom

Out of weakness comes strength. Out of strength, weakness.

Not necessarily now, but eventually ... sometimes very eventually. But history is in many events the story of the unraveling of unresolved contradictions, and those that come from the weakness/strength dialectic have a particular ferocity.

Prussia arose in weakness ... underendowed in natural resources, central to its enemies, remote from natural allies, surrounded by great empires yearning to undermine each other. Prussia had the good fortune to have a sequence of great kings ... well electors and kings ... the Great Elector Frederick William, Frederick I, Frederick William I, Frederick the Great. They managed to consolidate a power that entered the great power system of Europe and remained a force in Europe until 1945.

What happened? We know how it turned out. Why did it end so badly? That is one of the enduring questions of European history. Even as Europe rose to dominate the planet and to impose its terms of civilization worldwide, it could not solve the fundamental undermining contradictions of its political life until it had consumed the entire world in the two most monstrous man-made catastrophes of history.

So let's start with a list of figures:

1648 • 1763 • 1806 • 1870 • 1918

weak • strong • weak • strong • weak

1648: The 30 Years Wars, one of the most cynical in history until WW I took the prize, in which sundry armies slaughtered and raped their way across what is now Germany for, yes, three decades. The weakness of division and merely being barely alive

But then Prussia had those four great kings, and they ended by securing their place in the power system of Europe with Frederick's great victory in 1763 by way of not losing the Seven Years War ... which many refer to as the real first world war. The strength of surviving with a state that would outlast the absolutisms that threatened it

Frederick was followed by the first in a long line of Hohenzollern imbeciles on the throne, and they ended up being humiliated by Napoleon in 1806 at Jena and Auerstadt. So weak again.

But that weakness on the throne found its complement in the strength of Bismarck who led Prussia/Germany to a series of victories in three wars from 1863-1870. It is not an accident that the crowning moment of this strength was the elevation of Wilhelm I as Kaiser happened at Versailles in France.

Wilhelm's successor, the huffing and puffing bombast Wilhelm II, Kaiser Bill, presided over the suicide of empire that also ended in France, in a railway car, in 1918. Weak again.

SO I have been obsessed with revisiting these questions for several months now, reading first Christopher Clark's delicious Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947, followed by the magisterial Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany, and most recently a re-reading of the iconic Liddell Hart's History of the First World War, not so much because I want to depress myself ... the careful reader of recent posts will realize that I did that all on my only ... but because I wanted to keep Germany on my mind long enough to get this post out. So, start again with Clark on page 431, speaking generally but referring to the period after the fall of Napoleon ...

The one institution that all Prussians had in common was the state. It is no coincidence that this period witnessed an unprecedented discursive escalation around the idea of the state. Its majesty resonated more compellingly than ever before ...

Frederick famously saw himself not as monarch but as the first servant of the state ... and given that it was he who put the finishing touches on the construction of the notion of Prussianness as nation, we can say that Prussia was born not of ethnicity but of an idea, the idea of the state as organizing principle superior to all other organizing principles. It is worth noting that those of us ... and we are legion ... raised on the neo-marxisms of the 70s, and the crypto-hegelian detours of one kind or another that were so fleetingly popular in the milieu, owe to Frederick much of the way that we still think in our skeptical if comfortable post-post-marxism.

Clark had earlier referred to Prussianness as "a curiously abstract and fragmented sense of identity." But the Prussianness that rocked the world in the early 19th century (which started in 1815) was more noted for its romanticism and art than for its military prowess which took a long back seat notwithstanding all the posturing and strutting around. So even as Prussianness rose from the ashes of 1806 to become the core of the unified German nation by way of the defeat of the French in 1870, it reproduced in its national definition the unresolvable contradiction between authority and creativity, between the regimentation of the military model and the liberty of free thinkers and artists. This was not, of course, only Prussia ... it was all of Europe with the curious exception of Britain, I would argue. But in Prussia the unresolvable nature of the contradiction found its most enduring and explosive form.

The strength of this contradiction was between two social weaknesses ... the Junker class whose material underpinning, that is land and authority over peasants, was drip-drip-dripping away, and the bourgeoisie who whorishly and repeatedly caved to every foot-stomping fit of the Junker class and their representative fawning at the side of a series of feeble monarchs. It was through the gap between these two forces of fulminating weakness that the personal project of Bismarck found its opening.

The state delivered to Bismarck in 1862 was bursting with its sense of mission, derived from the enthusiasms of these wounded social classes, a sense that endured in one form or another for almost a century. That sense of mission itself derived form the long Prussian dialectic of strength deriving from weakness, and the frustration of that sense of mission combined with the weakness/strength dialectic to become one of the driving forces in European history.

The Prussians figured, "hey, why not us?" Why don't we have colonies, why don't we have a navy, why can't we dominate? France was a shadow of itself, Austria a gaunt spectre, and Russia a vast misery which imposed its will by itself seemingly endless willingness to suffer and die. Prussia and later Germany was exploding with creative and industrial energy, and the commmonplaces of Europe which still reproduced the power system that emerged from the Seven Years War, still hamstrung by the indelible shadows of the ancien regime, found no place for this energy.

Europe made no place, and Germany could not make itself modern, and eventually it blew up in everyone's face.

Accident in history: why was Germany saddled with that incomparable blowhard, Wilhelm I. He fired Bismarck in 1890 because he figured he knew better. Bismarck had made Germany, had secured its strength, and sought by his policies to maintain his creation. His weak-minded successors botched the job.

Liddell Hart, the incomparable historian of war ... and let me note as a sidebar that one terrible failure of liberalism is its failure to understand the absolute necessity of studying military history ... notes that the 18th-century (i.e., through 1815) had great generalship, but the 19th-century (i.e., through 1918) was saddled with pompous, self-satisfied morons, and it was they who brought down the apocalypse. So here was Germany, flush with is false consciousness of mission and its industrial virility, but led by the representatives of its weakest most historically transcended, and then there was France and England, bound to defend a commonplace of order in Europe that bore no relation to the development of forces. I still rage at the madness of rulershiop that allowed WW I. The depth of the catastrophe is difficult to fathom, the more so by reason either of accepting the heroic myths or because of the terrible ignorance of history that is the stock-in-trade of modern consumerism.

And so to today. Are we not i the grip of a decades old unresolved contradiction between our preening strength and the weakness of the national institutions that underlie it? Is our national sense of mission not a fraud invented by a self-satisfaction that looks only at ourselves? Are we not overdue, in the sense of historical counting, for a comeuppance?

Imagine being born in Germany in 1870. A life in the strong Germany, the rising Germany, where every year saw growth and creation, where an empire seemed finally to find itself after centuries of pointless, almost inexplicable division. As the new year dawned in 1914 ... you are 44 now and life is sweet and pleasant, the cafes full, the arts alluring ... notwithstanding the seemingly eternal international tensions, could you have imagined the horrors that would be unleashed before another new year?

I do not blame Germany for 1914. I blame all the rulers for the madness, but it is not Germany's alone. All were operating on the same principles by explicit agreement with each other. No, ther is no blame to assign. The history of Europe in the 20th century was born of the failure of the 19th century to move on from what it inherited.

History demanded a price. Never forget the price it demanded. That is the lesson of Prussian.

I'll try for some photos tomorrow ... anyone who made it this far gets an Iron Cross.

Walking with Loki: July 4 and all that

We had our annual Independence Day BBQ on Friday ... we hold it on July 1 or July 4 depending upon which falls on the weekend. 26 good friends, loads of food and drink, and hearty conversation. Still warm two days afterward. The long weekend has otherwise been composed only of working ... it is course catalog time again at MRU ... and walking the old pooch, Loki.

On Saturday morning, blissful and muscle weary from the BBQ, Loki and I headed on our usual walk up through Golden Gate Park with a pass through the National AIDS Memorial Grove where I habitually pick up garbage in memory of my many lost friends. The grove is a broad modified ravine, with three stone enclosed circles ... one at the foot, another in the middle, the third at the head. I start at the foot where Thom Gunn's words are engraved on the stone:

Walker within this circle pause
Although they all died of one cause
Remember who their lives were dense
With fine compacted difference

I pause every week in that circle and recite those words silently three times while thining of those I have lost. But this weeks curious action was not there ... it was in the head circle.

I had cleaned up the usual scattering of cigarette butts and wrappers ... no bottle and can orgies this week ... when I espied a curious purple gnome on a rock outsie the circle. I wondered over, and there was this little seated nude man in plaster with a rock hiding his genitals. Beside him was a a pink heart-shaped piece of paper with a note in florid cursive: "Keep me if I make you joyful!" I laughed when I saw him, and he bounced me out of a subverting gloom that was threatening the sunniness consequent upon the Glorious 4th celebration with which I started this post. I photographed my new gnome friend, and then I placed him in a plastic bag and bore him to his new home ... my home.

Gloom and doom, warmth and friendship. Like a pinwheel, the mind flies from one to the other, the succession rapid or slow by reason of the force of the particular wind in which one finds oneself, the blur under pressure sometimes so great that distinguishing is an exercise in futility. The pinwheel in effect for me during the July 4 BBQ was by reason of a conversation about my Gay Day blog post among four of us ... myself and the sainted ex RB, my roommate RL, and my old friend the world-traveler DH who stopped by for an evening between planes. RB thought my remarks on Gay Day were sour, and that bugged me ... stopped my pinwheel short, as it were. I protested, and no doubt took liberties in protesting as one is wont to do with an ex, sainted or otherwise. I claimed it was glum, not sour ... to no avail. I think DH agreed, or at least felt that my present pessimism about the future of the species is at least shallow if not entirely wrong-headed.

I do not want to be sour, or bitter. I cannot help but to be glum on occasion, and I have dark fears about the future. DH asked if I genuinely felt that gays would be hauled off to concentration camps in 2020 ... remember that I have argued that gays today are the like Jews of Germany in 1920. I think I would be a fool to suggest that with any certainty. But gays are, in essence, under the threat of concentration camps as we speak in Iran and Russia and China and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and Egypt, and in myriad other places we could face such immanence within a few years at most if conditions were to deteriorate. Der Spiegel had a chilling report only a few days ago about rising homophobia in Germany, fueled not so much by nativist new-nazis as by viciously intolerant muslim youth and bloody-minded Russians. There is some little creep rapper, Bushido, who is of mixed Tunisian-German background notwithstanding the too-cool-for-school Japanese name, who actually sang lyrics calling for gays to be gassed at an anti-violence concert. Gay protesters were flipped off and booed.

But the immanence of violence against gays is not the root of my glumness about the future ... it is immanence of social breakdown by reason of the catastrophe that global warming and its consequences. But even that is not what gets under my skin when the pressure, at work especially, rises.

It's this: how do you plot your own happiness when you find yourself in a society where so many social factors trend in the wrong ethical direction? That's what got me going at Gay Day ... it's what pisses me off when I walk Loki and am jolted out of my reveries by some fool in the middle of the morning park barking rage into a cell phone, or some dimwit in a planet killer sailing a stop sign and putting the fear of gawd into me. That's the me-me-me-ness I referred to, the obesity of American life where all consumption must be defended and all restraint is an evil of otherness.

So it feels sour ... you can see how that bugs me ... but I argue that it is a rational and thoughtful response to a society hamstrung by its joyous oblivion in the face of its unresolved contradictions.

So whadda you do? Activism, of course. Activism requires at least some form of optimism, whether real or feigned. It also requires the means to do it ... whether that be a movement or the leisure or proclivity to operate independently and heroically. Retired activist here, I do not want to hear myself bemoan the lack of opportunity, the more so given the shot of at least feigned optimism that is still attached to Obama notwithstanding his McAuliffe-like pandering and retreating of recent days. But it is not an answer on the personal level to the anxieties of living in a society bound upon eating itself alive.

So one seeks some solace in friends and warmth, in walking the dog, in happenstance, in taking photos and speculating, in reading the past, and especially in trying to do the right thing in your own life. Others see movies, revel to music, renovate the house. And there are those, of course, who sink their sorrows under various excesses. I'm past the party stage, and the solace of retreat is always feigned no matter that it is sometimes fruitful.

I have vowed of late to undercut my own overly responsive anger to the constant little insults ... the bad driving especially, and the ignorance of the cell-addicted who flip you off one way or another all day long. I have to keep at that, especially when the external pressures rise.

This post hasn't gone like I intended it to ... vastly too self-referential and bleak. I feel like a night heron on a rail with a bunch of seagulls! Funny thing about blogging as a genre of writing ... no matter how you plan, you gotta spit it out reasonably fast, and it might not follow the script that seemed so clear as you were wandering around Fisherman's Wharf with the dog.

I wanted to say that life goes on when society is in the grip of its own indissoluble failures, when the casual but fatal decisions taken decades ago are nearing the moment when they explode. The night before the Archduke was shot, merry revelers got drunk in Sarajevo. Imagine Baghdad in 1257 when Hulagu was a rumor ... merchants came and went, lovers sought out-of-the-way hay bales, people washed and dressed and comported as if the sun would keep on rising. It did not save them from the firestorm that wiped their world from the planet ... but they did not know for sure. Life goes on.

I figure the next apocalypse is decades off, maybe I will not see it. But it fills me with gloom when I am not quick enough to think otherwise.

I'm going to work extra hard this week ... I've got to ... and try to get my book, which goes to press on August 4, into a shape such that I can feel lighter. And I will try to write something nice, notwithstanding that I still owe you a post on the Prusso-German state.

So let's be happy ... party while you can! Even if you gotta fake it. And find some joy in the odd purple gnome who crosses your path!


Photos from walks yesterday and today: top photo from Golden Gate Park, the second from the big tourist commercial pier at Fisherman's Wharf, the third from a still accessible working fishing pier, and the last from a storefront on Haight Street.

Jesse Helms

Another old bigot bites the dust, and the world is a vastly better place for it. I cannot as a humanist wish for suffering ... I only wish the man had died 50 years ago instead of stinking up the planet and filling countless millions of lives with hatred and bile.

AP produced a nauseating collection of bons mots about the old fascist that the Chronicle printed. For once, Jesse Jackson was the only one to get it right: "At the height of his power, he fought for the values of the old confederacy. He resisted the new South. He resisted the opportunity to fight for a more perfect union." Well, half right, anyway. Typical of Jackson, he pointedly ignores the blistering, virulent homophobia. Helms actually argued that fags should die of AIDS ... no money, no research, just let 'em die.

That he is dead is a boon for the Republic. That he ever lived is a shame. Good riddance.

Gay Day, 2008

So I went to Gay Day yesterday. Bought the camera, aforementioned, the Panasonic Lumix DMC FZ-50K with Leica 35-420 mm equivalent lens. I jest a little, but the strategy was exactly that ... when one finds himself in the status of "immanent agoraphobia", well, you gotta do something to get your royal Canadian rear end out of the house.

I left with high hopes and returned low and a little disappointed. I am not particularly happy with the photos, and I only met one person whom I knew notwithstanding a set-up with a group that had, objectively, no possibility of working. All that said, the day was a great success for me personally, and I am glad that I challenged myself to revisit old haunts that have been occupied somewhat inelegantly, I would aver, by uncomely newcomers.

I will try to make that last statement the summit of sanctimoniousness for this post as I promised myself honesty here and a refraining from pontification or ponderous rumination. So off my pedestal and into the street ...

... or leastwise onto the curb. Over the course of four and half hours of wondering around, I sat twice on the curb, the first time to eat a ponderous twelve-inch Polish with fried onions and peppers. I did not add any mustard in deference to the freakishly white German soccer jersey I chose as my fashion statement. The other curb sitting was in aid of a "Cape Cod" which is a large amount of cranberry juice, a bunch of ice, and undetectable Smirnoff vodka. In each of the curb sittings, I was next to a gaggle of young dykes, cooing and jumping around and showing off and trumpeting their presence to any other young dykes that passed ... where does this tribe of young dykes come from? They hardly make an impression on everyday living in San Francisco, but they are a mighty and frankly vivacious presence at the fair. The femmy ones seem to affect a rather Latina style, and the butch ones are, well, butch. They clearly have a communal affect, and they look inwards to it. I see them as a modern counterpart to the much more angry lesbian separatism of the 70s that had such a deleterious effect on the relationship between gay liberation and the very hostile feminism of the period. This unadvertised separatism is more of the de facto type ... they have codes and signs and ways of being, and they just do it as a unity, not seeing their apparent separatism negatively as against the other, but positively as in their own name. I liked it, albeit forming my impression from not a lot of evidence ... the perquisite of a blogger, I suppose.

I did not see as many young gay guys in gaggles at the fair ... most of the young gay guys I saw were in couples. I think the unattached who might in previous years have tribed around nowadays just go straight to the big parties of sundry descriptions and skip the celebration on the mall. Lots of middle-aged gay guys and dykes in all manner of groupings. Young guys, though, don't seem to get the need to be seen on the square.

But the most salient visual impression of the celebration part of the day was this: where are all the attractive people? Now it is true that the younger one is the easier it is to be attractive. But adjusting for age, the dominant impression is a long dragging conga line of self-absorbed slobs who mark themselves with visages of flat unconcern and too-cool boredom. (Again, the young dykes were the most salient counterpoise to that.) The sackcloth and ashes male fashion du jour does nothing to undercut that impression. The "celebration" had the moral cast of a shopping mall rather than some collective exercise in statement and presence and unity. The underlying me-me-me-ness of our society in these Weimarish days was just too visible. Self-absorption puckers the face, and the face of our society is contorted. We have given up, we have surrendered to the pleasures of consuming and greed. You see it everywhere, you expect it all the time, you cannot be surprised. But when you bathe in it on Gay Day at Civic Center, it is deflating.

Parenthetically, I do not consider that view sanctimonious. I had to remind myself to smile and beam "having a good time" as well. It is hard to admit that one has given up, but the old activist, the self-consciously retired activist, made himself go to Gay Day through the device of consuming a new camera. I want to break into solidarity, but I am trapped in the culture of the me-me-me too, and perhaps just as innocently or connivingly as most people are. That got me thinking a lot about that particular tribe of gay men, the gay fairies, and how they resist collectively, and yet are fundamentally separatists just as the young dykes appear to be. Their de facto separatist communalism seems the only way not to be trapped into plainness by our ideological greed. It is attractive, but it is dangerous.

Back to the fair. When I shoot candid people photos, I like to find a pole or some other immobile object, lean against it with the sun at my back, and pick out faces. It helps if there is clot of people nearby as it tends to disguise the ghoulishnss of the photographer out to steal souls, as it were. At one point, as I sat on the stone edge of a dry fountain, a group of amply fed black youth, obviously straight, performed this function for me. They milled about and crowded in on me. The key term of the day seemed to be "nasty". Everything was nasty this, nasty that. At one point, the largest of the boys asked one of the girls to take his picture, and she refused loudly saying that would be "nasty." So he turned to the only white kid among them and handed him the camera silently, and the picture was made. I heard one kid say, "Don't let him touch you, he's gay." The only homophobic comment of the afternoon ... although I think they meant "gay" in the same way they meant "nasty" ... just another in a long string of words with which they can express their overweening posture of contempt for everything, their own company included. I was happy when they vanished into the mob.

The parade itself was considerably more moving. Next year, I must get down to the staging area early as that is where the enthusiasm is concentrated. The parade folks really do a good job of getting the thing up and moving. I ambled the length of the parade route on the Market Street sidewalk behind the cheering and involved crowds lined 3 to 10 deep, and the float that entered the route at the time when I started exited the route at the time when I finished. That's moving along. Probably the best place to photograph the actual parade would either be as they enter Market Street or as they leave it at 8th Street.

There were the bands and the floats of semi-naked men dancing, and the cable cars and politician-mobiles. Lots of Latino guys and gals in feathers and balloons. Leather strutting, and friends of gays, and entreaties for support especially for marriage. But no particular overarching theme, which is strange considering te marriage politics. The speeches from the main stage were mostly endless recitals of the names of committee members. The audience applauded by rote.

But the overwhelming impression of the celebration remains the uncommitted boisterousness and the underlying sullenness. O, lots of exceptions ... the plump middle-aged men being married, obviously transported in their tent-sized matching Hawaiian shirts. I felt a tear too. And the proud demonstrations of the various enthusiasts ... the get-vaccinate-for-hep folks, the SM practitioners, every manner of religious we're-for-you-too types. But these particular enthusiasms were like little islands bobbing up and down in a sea of unconcern.

Of course, I am being a bastard ... people were partying. Who am I to grump it up. I kept trying to smile.

But the end result for me was the feeling of no way out. That is what I referred to in my immediately previous post when I said that I feel like our best historical referent is the German Jews of 1920 (not to mention the German homos of the same epoch). Things look good, people are having a good time. Things are getting better all the time. But the forces gathering, the unspent energies, the unresolved contradictions are gathering too. One is left with the sinking feeling of the darkness ahead. One wonders why we have let go of the urgency of working together, why we have passed to others the responsibility for our fate. One wonders if all the "Obama Pride" stickers being handed out ... I actually sported one ... meant anything, if they might save us in a pinch.

One wonders, wonders, when one walks home up Market Street, pleased with oneself but deflated. Not sure what to make of it all. Wondering.

Photos by Arod. More here. Here's what I wrote last year.

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.

Obama

Notable article in the New York Times today that points out that the Obama campaign plans to compete in all 50 states ... this consequent upon the feedback relationship between their ability to raise money in all states, and the fact that they will thereby have lots of money. The article notes that even in states such as Georgia that they are not going to win, such activity will help Democrats in other elections. I should add that it will help build the party's base structure and create further opportunities as history and its horrors unfold.

Of course, this strategy has been obvious for a decade and more. But the yesterday's-wisdom regurgitators who have dominated the Democratic Party, not to mention the nattering classes, constantly blabbed about the Southern strategy that has been dead since Humphrey or suburban soccer moms or the hastily re-invented white working class male of this cycle. Hillary believed it, and look where she is. The Obama campaign understood the new world from day one, and they are determined to carry that forward. Bravo!

I heard a sinking-stomach rumor that Sam Nunn is under consideration for veep. If Obama does that, he will lose and he will deserve to lose. That is the sort of thinking that got us the Lieberman creature as one of the holes in the dinghy that sunk Al Gore before he found the light of environmental activism. Obama needs a veep who would have the same dynamism in office as he will have, someone in his age range, someone who can campaign to Democrats in Georgia to inspire them for the future not the sordid past that Nunn represents. I need hardly add that Nunn is a blazing homophobe of the first water, and we homos do not forget such bigotry easily ... leastwise I hope so. (RO and JG will no doubt point out to me that I am forgetting Obama's snub of Newsom and San Francisco for what amounts to anti-gay self-preservation ... I do not forget, but I think of it as low bore tactics and leave it at that in the face of the greater exigencies. BTW, the Firefox spell checker does not recognize homophobe as a word!)

This election is about confronting the future as it is, not as it appears to be in the mendacious constructions of the 'publicans or the idiotic self-servicing of the pundits. That future has staggering challenges and will involve loss and retreat. Hardly anyone wants to admit it, but the flooding in the central U.S. right now is a harbinger ... it is irrelevant whether this flooding or that flooding can specifically be laid at the doorstep of global earning. The extreme weather of the future is going to make large parts of the planet uninhabitable, and those parts, including the poetic white-picket fence small towns so vivid in the imagination of CNN, are going to be drowned or burned out. We need a politics that confronts that, and Obama is laying that groundwork.

No point in piddling around ... that's what Obama is saying ... they are going after the whole country. No point in us piddling either ... he is the only choice, and the only shot at mitigating the disasters that the 'publicans have foisted upon the nation and the world.


A note on poor Tim Russert: Look, I feel sorry for the guy, and his rise from the dumpsters of Buffalo is certainly Horatio Alger stuff. It was moving all the endless praise and chattering, and his son, eerily resembling him, has a shot at being a force in journalism. You have to root for the kid. But let's be real: Russert was the poster boy for the crap TV journalism that litters the political landscape. He didn't ask tough questions ... he framed the day's conventional wisdom into a question and then asked it with a scowl. That passes for toughness. Like all the in-crowd in Washington, he was dependent upon the favors and good graces of politicians. So he started as a Democratic aide de camp ... so what. The phony balance angle meant that he swallowed the talking points du jour whole, and the result is scowling and posturing, and an electorate who decides things based on somebody's pastor or somebody else's emotion or somebody else's absolutely invented-from-whole-cloth self-image as a maverick. Phony journalism. Au revoir, poor Mr. Russert ... now we wait in trepidation as they bring on the next scowling poseur.

Keith Olbermann, who appears to be angling for the new poseur role, ended his segment on Russert with a pointed reference to the rainbow outside the cathedral and the coincidence that the service had been closed with a ukulele version of Over the Rainbow. I wrote about that here. My point was that the ukulele version to which I refer, and which is likely the one to which Olbermann referred, had reduced Judy Garland's version (which I see as an appeal to reason against the pointless cruelties of life) to a kind of pure sentimentality. What a perfect metaphor for the phony political journalism that Russert represented. We are looking for reason and thoughtfulness, not an appeal to unexamined sentiments. The significance of the rainbow coincidence was lost on Olbermann.

Photos by Arod: the top one, dawn in San Francisco, the bottom is San Francisco street art as close to a rainbow as I could find in iPhoto on a short search.

National Martini Day

Big day at MRU (work) today, so I got up at 5 which is only 20 minutes earlier than usual. I left the dog-walking chores to RB, my sainted ex, and actually drove my ancient '86 Honda Civic the 38 miles through the dawning day, NPR my only companion. And it was via NPR that I learned that today is National Martini Day. Now, if you google "National Martini Day", you will find sites that variously proffer June 19, June 17, November 7, and June 1 as National Martini Day. I say that the nation would be better off if every other day were National Martini Day, but that would be o so not-PC. O, the hell with it, I say it anyway.

I'm going with today as NMD because it has broad support and it is convenient to my purposes.

Under the influence of my good friend and bartender, I have given up other inebriants of my life, by which I mean most particularly beer, in favor of fine spirits expertly prepared ... it is a privilege of being half way to the big 110. When I started this experiment turned lifestyle, I could barely finish a martini. Now a pair of them is an occasional treat consequent upon good behavior and a deserving attitude, and I have no trouble therein. (My cute young doctor, whom I like to call Doogie, tells me that an adult male is entitled to three drinks a night, that being any combination totaling three of 1.5 ounces of liquor, a bottle of beer, or 5 ounces of wine ... he is an oenophile, so I assume that he means fine wine, although I just go for the cheap French and Italian Trader Joe's varieties. I try to stick to his limits.)

Not all martinis are equal ... if you want some truly horrifying recipes, check our Hungry Girl or Home Baked Memories. Both of these sites illustrate the regrettable modern tendency to forget that you can't improve on a classic!

I prefer the gin martini. I had quite a time making myself a nightly Tanqueray martini last time I visited my parents in Ontario. For a while, I preferred the Vesper martini, also known as the James Bond martini.

Of course, in fact, I strictly speaking prefer any martini that RL makes since his attention to detail is so precise that his martinis always have the extra 2 percent that distinguishes the good from the great. But tonight, RL is not here, and I must make my own martinis ... the first a Tanqueray and the second based on Plymouth Gin.

Before I wax philosophical, I do have one less-than-edifying martini story ... when I was a mere stripling, perhaps 24, I was invited to a party thrown by a bunch of socialists in a ramshackle old building that I had formerly inhabited. I invited my friend TG who was an 'fb' ... i.e., a person with whom I both played and dallied, as it were ... even though he didn't know a socialist from a hornswoggler. I suppose I invited him because he was fun and sexy and I had ideas for a tryst after all the ideology and enforced dancing. I stopped by his apartment in the West End of Vancouver ... nowadays a hard scrabble working stiff like TG could not possibly afford to live in the West End, but this was in the 70s and life was still possible, as it were, unencumbered by cell phones, SUVs, and the arrogance of the overstuffed ... but I digress. TG had some friends there and they inveigled me into drinking not one but two martinis. For a "stripling" unaccustomed to the quotidian quintagenarian habits he would ultimately affect, two martinis was like a couple of grenades in a powder keg. Boom! TG's friends came to the socialist party, after pouring me into their auto. Gawd noze what happened to them, but I was quickly a quivering ball of drunken idiocy, and there are those who did not allow me to forget my discomfiture for years thereafter ... and of course my plans to waylay the comely TG came to naught ... at least on that night.

So as to the philosophical waxing ... life is a bitch ... or as one whispers in the office, a beeyatch. You do yer damnable best, and you are still back on the bloody train the next morning at 7:19 sharp, with the same cast as the day before, each quickly sinking into their habits be it sleeping, or tappity-tapping on their iPhones and computers, or reading the newspaper, or, as in my case, pointedly stuffing my ears with plugs and yanking out whatever monster tome of ancient times presently has my fancy. When it is all over ... and that involves another train trip ... and the dog is walked and I have made my nightly calls to my sundry old lady friends ... well, then it is time for a martini or whatever other fine spirits are on offer. I enjoy that part of life. I often sit, as I am now, at the counter and watch RL cook and prepare our libation. Tonight I am watching the sainted ex, RB, who has consented to cook for me in RL's absence. But it is the same routine ... I am fatigued from work, filled with speculations, and earnestly desiring the little layback, the tiny release, the satisfaction of that perfect martini.

So ... with due respect to those whose freely choose to refrain ... damn the puritans, screw the sanctimonious ... have a martini ... lift your glass to me or thee or to whomever you choose. And smirk and smile and call out, Long Live National Martini Day!
Photos by Arod of bar windows on Columbus and Polk street respectively in San Francisco.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Roy and I attended the American Conservatory Theater production of John Ford's 'Tis Pity She's a Whore on Saturday. So a couple of quick notes ...

'Tis Pity She's a Whore is a 1630-something revenge play, a sort of combination of Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet with an incest theme. I enjoyed the fast interweaving of scenes and subplots, the comic relief, the skulduggery and dark corners. Not to put to fine a point on it, but classic drama incorporates techniques of oral performance because its audiences were schooled in the oral text. The audience wants to be told when someone is hiding, when someone is thinking something other than what he says; they expect it.

The performance at ACT was sublime, notwithstanding the rather pissy review in the Chron. Two points, external to the action. "Walt Spangler's industrial-baroque cathedral set" served both to invoke the period by reason of how its barren complexity motivates the complexity of action and interplay of choreography. They made plays with fewer gee-gaws back then, and audiences were better trained in suspension of disbelief. The set invoked that history. But the most striking aspect of the set was composer, cellist and vocalist Bonfire Madigan Shive situated like an angel amidst a riot of seeming organ pipes. Her haunting, electrifying music, both instrumental and vocal, punctuated the fear and the dread and ultimately the horror. The audience rewarded her with the most heartfelt of the ovations. Hers is a striking talent that must have greater play as life winds on.

This is a gruesome play, too gruesome, frankly, to have been written in our more squeamish century. Perloff, the director, led at least me to believe in the climactic moment that it was the fetus that was slaughtered, but all the references are to the murdered sister and lover having her heart ripped out bodily. The notion of the slaughter of the unborn seems a nod to modern sensibilities ... the Aztec-ish heart extraction seems blunt to us.

The audience laughed at a few things out of key ... several references to the inferior position of women, and pointedly to a line where Vazquez trumpets that a Spaniard out-revenged his dead Italian master. As an audience, I prefer to pretend that I am somewhere else ... more's the pity that the yappy old bags behind couldn't shut up long enough to pretend anything that their tiny, perfume-addled minds might imagine. Ooops, too cranky.

I guess what I want to say is this ... I do not think that there is any specific that is eternal in this play. We shouldn't force this kind of thing into a tyranny of relevance. Incest may be more prevalent than we prefer to imagine, and it is probably less fraught with slaughter than this play imagines. But the joy in a performance like this is to cast oneself back and imagine sitting in a crowded odoriferous and noisy throng in 1630 watching all the action ... to imagine being in a world where any entertainment is always available, but rather a world in which entertainment is rare and scarce and treasured. To imagine the vicarious thrill of bloody revenge performed, and the thrill of clerics represented as cheats and scum.

In that sense, this performance was sublime. It proffered the antique in the performance, and the modern in the set and the music. Two and half hours plussed passed as a mere moment, and I wanted more notwithstanding the littering of bodies as curtain dropped.

One note to Carey Perloff, ACT's superlative Artistic Director ... your web site should not be so stingy with photos. All these magnificent sets should be memorialized. And many would be the happy to see DVDs of production made available for purchase after the show has closed. I am for the transparency that the Internet era promises, and places like ACT should be in the lead making their fabulous entertainments available broadly.

A few photos from the web tomorrow if I get a moment. Tonight's cocktail, by the way, a Sazerac ... sublime.

My Poor Giants

Tight Richie Harden beat the Giants today, making it an A's sweep over the weekend. The big boss went ot the Friday game with his son ... he is from Chicago, so he must be used to pitiful lost causes ... but I have been hoping that he will not fall prey to the temptation to endorse the poor sisters of San Francisco baseball, the distinctivelymor suburban A's. A freezing night of a lackluster Barry Zito not finding the strike zone again, and a bunch of hitters who can't buy a key knock at home. Ouch.

Tomorrow night is Time Lincecum against Justin Verlander. I plan to lash my self to the boob tube and enjoy baseball at its best. I figure we lose 1-0 in the top of the ninth.

Photo of Rich Harden, fellow Canadian.

Picking Winners

Giants win! Swept the hopeless Nats in Washington. Baseball is a zero-sum game (see principle number 1 in the header to this blog) ... I get one, you lose 1. No other way around it. Wins count, losses don't.

Now, of course, there is a lot more to baseball than wins and losses, and the joy of the game is precisely in that non-zero-sum game aspect. But at the end of the day, as the wee Scott McClellan likes to say, it's all about winning. And losing doesn't count.

I assert, contrarily, that in human affairs there is no such thing as a zero-sum game. Sometimes a difficult idea to defend. Look at the Obama-McCain race ... one wins, the other loses, and if McCain wins, we are in big trouble. But even in something as cut and dried as an election, there are so many factors at play that reducing it to one result loses the observer all perspective.

In my personal reading, I am now at the end of Christopher Clark's Iron Kingdom: The Rise and Downfall of Prussia, 1600-1947), and as we all know, Prussia comes to a terrible end. It is hard not to look at Prussia in 1945 as the losing end of a horrible zero-sum game. Indeed, historiography has long held a singularly black/white view of Prussia.

Clark's strength as a historian is that he resists the black/white, off/on, winner/loser view. In that, he curiously represents another social contradiction often falsely seen, even here, as a zero-sum game. And that contradiction would be the rise of the theory-mongers in the academe and the terrible damage that they have done to thought and research. At least, that is the narrative preferred by many, again myself included in most contexts.

But it is a narrative that fails the moment it becomes universal. Take this as a proof. In looking to fill in a few of the date-type details about which a "social historian" such as Clark is sometimes lax, I managed to pick up 2 of the 3 volumes of a well-regarded and authoritative 60s history of Germany, Hajo Holborn's A History of Modern Germany; the Wikipedia page points out that the incomparable modern historian and biographer of ideas and thinkers, Peter Gay, was his student. This connection is a little ironic in the context which I will argue.

Holborn's book is hard core history for date lovers. It is clipped and chopped, neatly separated by subheads. It is authoritative and reliable, and this sort of reference work is valuable on the shelf of any history-buff. But one does not feel compelled to read the thing from cover to cover because ... and this in itself is an artifact in the changes in intellect over the last several decades ... the constitutive unity of enduring contradiction seems absent from the work. Holborn wants to pick winners and losers.

More to my taste is Clark who lives perpetually in the unresolved contradiction. One does want, from time to time in these social histories, a chapter that delineates the events in order. But this lack is more than amply repaid by the subtlety with which an author like Clark ... or Tim Blanning about whom I have written before ... brings the contours of an era to life. It is not just his persistent focus on the state and the contradictions that underlay it and from which it could never separate itself; it is also the way in which he describes the interplay among forces forged in that contradiction, and yet seemingly immune to the sorts of developments, obvious in hindsight, that might have saved their supporters.

I am going to try to return to the Prussian state in the next few days. What I want to address today is that the theory game that ravaged the humanities over the last three decades is itself also not a zero-sum game. It has, as I argue here, been the proximate cause of the rise of what I am broadly calling social history, and this has been very productive of new understandings. It might drive those who prefer winners and losers to drink because this is history that sees good in evil, and that sees redemption in defeat. But it is history that demands deeper reflection on what it is to be human.

In the literary zone, the "depredations of theory" are a little more difficult to champion, the more so because they had the tendency to draw attention away from the text. That is an unfair statement, as any graduate student will aver, because the new literary movement was precisely the force that opened up the notion of the text, such that genre conventionally defined could burst its boundaries. Literary theory has troubled genre and text, and notwithstanding the pointless obfuscations of the Julia Kristva's of the world, it raised challenges to parsed out traditional criticism that have enriched our ideas of what constitutes work and influence and meaning. As with Holborn, this is not to toss old critics into the trash bin, but rather to note that intellectual dialectic can never stop, even when it backs itself into a corner.

More than anything, my graduate student battles with the theory ninnies made me a part of an eternal evolution ... a punctuated evolution ... in which ideas about ideas, or tellings about tellings, always fall back into themselves the better to reconstitute themselves on the next level whatever that may turn out to be. My best graduate student friend, JS, who has drifted out of my life, called me a conservative formalist at one point. I took that as a high honor, but I think it is wrong now. I think I am a half-breed chameleon ... I want to be present and involved even as I grouse about it all. But you can't be present if nothing is happening, and whatever is happening is that at which you must choose to be present.

A little circular, I guess.

From such struggles we get the revolutionary work of my adviser at Cal, Amin Sweeney especially in his A Full Hearing: Orality and Literacy in the Malay World ... about which I really must write something at some point ... and the pleasurable works of Clark and Blanning.

So much intellectual discourse is between the Weltanschauung ... one of my favorite words when I was 19 ... of those who want to pick winners and losers and those who want to live in unresolved contradiction. I am of the latter type, notwithstanding that I always pick the beloved Giants to win any given game.

Photo by Arod of a window on Castro Street.

Hanging City-side

Martini in hand, pizza on the way, Friday night, feeling loose. Spent the day in San Francisco, going to the doctor, having a nice breakfast, and then working from home. All good, notwithstanding how annoying the modern interlopers into the urban zone can be. Tailgated by some young woman in a huge SUV ... panting at the switch, doing everything to get by me in heavy traffic. Who needs a private bus to get around a tight city? Later, some idiot behind black-tinted windows in a large car, and sporting an Obama sign in the front windshield, got all furious because I honked at her because she was blocking a couple of lanes of traffic. Kept honking for three blocks ... what, she wanted to fight? Some drivers are such jackasses.

So the traffic annoyances are my excuse for heading this post with an awesome pic of Rafal Nadal ... the ugliness of modern life versus the beauty of the athlete at the moment of impact. That's why I watch sports. My good friend LB watches tennis and will no doubt fill me in about whom I should be rooting for in this and sundry other matches. But all agree, I would suggest, that this man is a babe.

Popped on the boob tube ... Lincecum is beating the Nats 9-1 in the 7th. Sweet. In other sports news, did you see the Pittsburgh goalie push the ultimate Stanley Cup winning goal into his own net with his butt? Strangest goal I've ever seen ... and hockey goals are a strange lot. If I ever return to Canada, I have a lot of hockey to look forward to ... meanwhile, it is a baseball lifestyle.

So to the day ... I call my doctor at Kaiser "Doogie Howser", leastwise behind his back. He seems so young, and he is certainly earnest. He told me mock-stern that I owed him a sigmoidal colonoscopy. I blushed, really, and admitted that I am a health-care avoider. He's such a sweet guy that I hardly know why I avoid him. I managed to forget to ask for a Cialis scrip. But the real subject of our conversation was my persistently high LDL levels ... moderately high, I must add, though high nonetheless ... notwithstanding that all the other indications are excellent. He set out a plan ... I have 10 weeks to get it under control or he is going to put me on Zocor. Oy. Lectured by Doogie, embarrassed into being a good citizen. I even have a reading assignment. Still, one cannot complain. The quality of care at Kaiser, at least so far as I know as someone without a significant physical complaint, is high.

I'd marry Doogie in a flash.

Doogie sent me to gastroenterology to schedule the colonoscopy. The charming older Filipino lady with a gold cross laid out in front of her keyboard carefully explained to me how to perform a solo enema on myself prior to the procedure. I don't think I should use the terminology she used if only to spare my readers an embarrassing reflection on the humiliations of being human. But I could barely keep myself from laughing out loud as she went through her paces. I mean kneeling doggy style for crying out loud. Anyway, all for a good cause. And I will finally be able to write my dear friend Dodge and tell her that I have filled my part of a bargain made some years ago.

Fresh from gastroenterology, I headed to the Curbside Cafe on California near Fillmore. This has become my auto-retreat from Kaiser whenever I have a medical experience. I had a perfect omelette with spinach, brie, and sun-dried tomatoes ... I decline to comment on whether or not that contributes to my 10-week challenge to cut the LDL. The waiter is a French dude, 20-something, with the face of a horse and tight bod shoe-horned into shiny black duds. He has that stern and welcoming attitude of the French waiter, and he also has the amazing hand-eye coordination ... a joy to watch him put a glass of water before me.

I spent the rest of the afternoon "working from home". Mostly I was attempting to establish a connection to a server that will rule my life for the next 8 weeks. Server connections are fraught with firewalls and authorizations and that great modern curse, the virtual private network or VPN. Our IT guy is working gamely, but there are offices and offices to move to action, and IT is more often than is healthy mired in the defugalties of bureaucracy. We are still not quite there ... even though I am sitting on an email that appears to answer the issues and only waits upon my finishing this post before I return to the fray.

So the pizza has come and gone and so has the martini, and I am ready for bed. I had great plans for this post, but they must remain subject to what I have actually written. Some time over the weekend, I project further perorations on the development of the German state in the late 19th century ... and what that illustrates about the present breathlessness here and in China. I hope that will fascinate more than my virtual encounter with gastroenterology.