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QueryLily"...I would never have thought of askingHow you'd got that peculiar name..." |
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QueryLily"...I would never have thought of askingHow you'd got that peculiar name..." |
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So Justice Scalia has "nothing against homosexuals". And obviously nothing against their persecution as well. Well, that's just fine. Thankfully, there are six people on the Supreme Court who are unwilling to rigidly follow the Heterosexual Agenda.
[26 June 2003] link?
Worth noting that the Village Voice has their annual Queer Issue on-line.
[26 June 2003] link?
I have several books by Michelle Tea that I keep meaning to get around to reading. Lo and behold here she is in today's Sunday Chronicle as the girl friend of an FTM. It's an interesting tale, certainly not the only one, of the ramifications of today's fluidity in gender identity.
Several years ago at the Film Festival I saw a particularly poignant documentary on just that subject. The story of one woman's journey to manhood and the impact it had on her as she transitioned to he and on her girlfriend who was very much rooted in her lesbian identity. What I really appreciated about the film was that it didn't minimise the dilemmas faced by either partner and it showed in the respect and sensitivity it gave to both. I just wish I could remember the film's name...oh yes...A Boy Named Sue.
I do remember the first time I attended the MTF group at the Pacific Center. My hair was blonde then and cut short, although I thought the way I wore it quite femme. I wore my slinky black pants and my girly black oxfords and had just a hint of makeup. Walking out the door after the end of the meeting one of the girls turned to me and said that she had thought I was an FTM when I first came in. I thought, "Oh cool", said thank you and went out into the night.
[22 June 2003] link?
More links for Michelle Tea. This. This. And this.
[22 June 2003] link?
As if it wasn't provocative enough that our Canadian neighbours have been showing some good sense in their approach to cannabis, now they appear to be becoming a North American beachhead for the 21st Century by recognising marriages between persons of like gender.
All this is giving great displeasure to those among us who wish hellfire and damnation on anyone not in tune with their family values. So if the crops fail, and pestilence rules the land, er, blame Canada.
Not.
[21 June 2003] link?
I have been letting my fingernails grow long. I like the femme appearance of long nails although longer nails require more care. Fortunately, I have a nice little nail kit and a bottle of clear nail polish I borrowed from the grand-daughter.
From my previous experiments with growing out my nails, I've found that this can significantly impact your use of your hands. The first time I experimented with longer nails I was amazed at how many things had to change. Typing, for instance. Reaching for coffee cups. Buttoning my then favoured button-fly jeans became ever more difficult. Luckily I now wear slinky black pants with an elastic waistband, so that is not an issue.
[15 June 2003] link?
sharp edges no. 1I finally got around to seeing Dog Day Afternoon last night. No doubt inspired by my recent viewing of A Decade Under the Influence. Who knows why I waited so long.
[15 June 2003] link?
Goodbye Mr. Atticus Finch and General Frank Savage along with all the many other characters brought to life by Gregory Peck. Another legendary film actor gone.
[12 June 2003] link?
The fabulous Drew pointed out to me that I haven't been link-friendly. Point taken. Ouch!
[10 June 2003] link?
only your friends can sell you out
A the close of an appropiately cautionary review of the current state of the relationship between gays and lesbians and the Republican Party, Richard Goldstein makes an important point:
"How ironic it would be if the Democrats make Bush look gay-friendly even as he carries out a backlash against gay rights. Stranger things have happened in American politics. In fact, they happen all the time."
[10 June 2003] link?
Mark Woods has a most wonderful web-site, always chock full with treasures, both new and old. I visit almost every day. So should you. From his site comes this link to a piece on Buddhism and Social Justice.
[10 June 2003] link?
I was sixteen years old when the movie The Queen came to play at a theatre in Atlanta. The theatre was run by a local actor named George Ellis who had earlier started a theatre, the Film Forum, to expose Atlantans to the wider world of cinema. It was there where I first saw Citizen Kane and my very first Warhol film, My Hustler.
I had read about The Queen in Evergreen Review and I was excited to be able to actually see it. At last I would have the opportunity to see on the screen a vision of the world that I could actually see myself in.
The audience was sparse and near the end one of the audience moved over to the seat next to me. I felt his hand on my leg and I vaguely remember looking into his eyes. To coin a cliche, I felt a surge of electricity pass through my body. The rest of the movie was a blur. Afterwards, we walked out together towards his car.
He was a drag queen at a bar on Peachtree Street and he drove us over to the house he shared with several other guys. He also turned out to be the cousin of someone I knew in high school, a grade or two ahead of me. I recall being fascinated by his wigs and gowns and makeup all set out in his bedroom, not hidden in the back of the closet like my collection of queer-themed books and the scant makeup I had been able to procure.
Despite his noble efforts and mine, my first encounter turned out to be an abject failure and I left still a virgin. He drove me back downtown and sweetly suggested that when I turned eighteen I should give him a call. Eighteen seemed a universe away.
[9 June 2003] link?
Sometimes you dread the very thing you want because you might not be able to hide your pleasure in it, because it might reveal more about you to others than you'd like them to know.
When I was in sixth grade, I faced just such a dilemma. My sixth grade teacher, who was a pleasant enough sort, and the attractive teacher across the hall, must have made a punishment pact. Both of them had the same punishment for boys who talked out in class or who otherwise aroused their displeasure. I don't remember if they enforced a similar fate for girls. It was the one they had in store for the miscreant boys that set my heart aflutter with a mixture of dread and desire.
Each of the boys selected for exampling were made to don an article of girl's clothing. A sweater here, a pair of shoes there. I remember that sweater in particular, belonging as it did to the flirtatious, bouffant-coiffed girl who sat behind me in class, how I longed to be the one chosen for that sweater and how much I dreaded it at the same time. To cross gender lines was forbidden, thus powerful as a punishment. Even as I wanted to embrace such punishment, I ran from the consequences of such an act. Mmmmm. How many others did the same?
[8 June 2003] link?
I have to say that I enjoyed Finding Nemo. It seems that each new Pixar creation brings a richer and warmer palette of colours to their digital animation. The theatre was full of little ones and their parentals and everyone except one little child in the back seemed to have a good time. I'm hardly a prude, but I do think that the preview for Pirates of the Caribbean was just a tad too scary for the many tykes present in the audience. Still, I am looking forward to seeing Johnny Depp in that one when it arrives in July.
Last night S and I watched a couple of movies, The Limey with Terence Stamp and those beautiful eyes and Robert Altman's The Long Goodbye with Elliot Gould. I had never seen the latter until last night. One of those oversights, now corrected.
[8 June 2003] link?
For most of the past month I've been on-call for jury service at Federal District Court in San Francisco. Thus far I have not been called in and this week is my last week, so I would imagine that the odds are increasing that I'll have to make the trek over to the City to the Federal Building. I am not opposed to jury service but it is unlikely that I would actually get chosen for a jury. I am in favour of the rights of juries, what is often called "jury nullification" and recent events such as this, and this, and this, leave me somewhat biased against the federal juidiciary and the "justice" department.
[8 June 2003] link?
So I am not doing anything this morning to improve my recent track record in getting myself to the various meditation opportunties available. But I am getting a great deal of work done this morning while listening to Jefferson Airplane: Live at the Fillmore East.
This afternoon, I'm due to take the grandson to see Finding Nemo which I am eagerly anticipating. Yesterday, I took a little break from my basement drudgery and went upstairs and saw A Decade Under the Influence, an enjoyable documentary about American movies of the 1970's. I found much to enjoy and like any good backseat driver or backrow director, found much to take issue with. I enjoyed listening to the talking heads and what a distinguished bunch they are: Scorcese, Pollack, Friedkin, Coppola, etc. For myself, I would enjoyed more about Arthur Penn, the director of the wildly subversive western, Little Big Man and with whom I share a birthday.
[8 June 2003] link?
A so far peaceful Saturday morning at work, listening to one of my all time favourites, the Orlando Consort's recording of the music of John Dunstaple. I haven't listened to it in a long time but it seems somehow appropriate right now, as I am rushing to the finish of Norman F. Cantor's excellent In the Wake of the Plague, which mostly covers a period of English and Western European history slightly more than a hundred years before Dunstaple's death in 1453.
[7 June 2003] link?
I'd go in for some radical cheerleading. But I do need my own Pom Poms!
[7 June 2003] link?
I have not been spending any time at the zendo in recent weeks. I've had plenty of intention, but no follow through. This might change this weekend. It might not.
[6 June 2003] link?
In my early years of high school I was still a tall boy. That's before I stopped growing vertically. One day a certain boy in one of my classes, a bit taller than me, climbed up on a desk to open a window. I clearly remember looking up at him, his lissome body stretching upwards to reach the top latch on the window, and getting an erection, accompanied by the gentle fluttering of butterflies in my stomach. I wish I could relate that this crush went somewhere, but it didn't. He was tall, cute and he wore glasses. Well, I guess you could say it did go somewhere, ever since then I've been attracted to cute boys (men) who wear glasses.
I do know where all this sex thought is coming from though. Why, I had a nice chat with the therapist about it just yesterday. She's not telling and neither am I. I can say this: She said it was okay for me to bring up my personal feelings regarding oral sex. I was a little abashed in raising the subject. It made me realize that inside my Blanche DuBois sensibilities lurks the Tralala of Last Exit to Brooklyn.
[6 June 2003] link?
When the Atlanta airport expanded in the early 1960's, it took over the post-World War II neighborhood where we lived. My father had used his GI loan to purchase a house and we lived at 666 Lakeside Drive, the neighborhood being built adjacent to the bed of a drained lake. For a long time, my father prided himself on irritating the smaller minds by painting our house a bright fire engine red, but with the turn of the new decade, he got tired of fighting the tiny brained ones and repainted the house an off-white. In that house, I first discovered the attraction to my mother's clothes and her makeup, especially the little tubes of fifties red lipstick, conveniently accessible on the bedroom dresser. I also enjoyed exploring the mysteries of fashion via the Sears catalog, although I was careful not to linger in the "women's apparel" section unless I was alone. Instinctively I knew that these were pleasures that must be kept to myself.
We had a chinaberry tree in the backyard which I loved to climb. At first, it was just for the joy of climbing...er, later on, as puberty came on, I discovered certain feelings could be evoked by my shimmying up the tree. For the longest time this was the only way I knew to masturbate. Whenever I think of the Lawrence Ferlinghetti poem that begins, "The pennycandystore beyond the el..." I am reminded of that chinaberry tree.
Thanks to the airport expansion, I learned about "eminent domain". The impact of that concept on my life then certainly helped shaped my later personal-political philosophy. We moved north of Atlanta, leaving the chinaberry tree behind, to my mom's home town, where I had the same Latin teacher that my mom had had back in the 1930's.
In high school, I became friends with the daughter of the local librarian, at least one grade ahead of me. She would often give me rides to and from high school and I admired - secretly - the way she had her shortish hair poofed up in a mini-bouffant style. A style I tried to approximate in the semi-dark privacy of my own room, wearing a tight v-necked sweater and a smear of pink lipstick, spending a lost hour or so staring languidly into a mirror, desiring what?
In the early seventies, riding the Greyhound bus into town, I read in the local paper that the librarian's daughter had been convicted of the murder - or attempted murder - of her in-laws. As Kurt Vonnegut has written elsewhere, "So it goes."
[5 June 2003] link?
My mother was a country girl. How can anyone not be, someone born in a place called Flowery Branch, who was named Ruby after one of her aunts, and whose own mother was a foot-washin' Baptist?
My mother played the guitar and piano. Country music was her passion from what I've been told and from what I remember. Saturday evenings we watched the Grand Ole Opry on the television.
Atlanta was a big country music town back in the nineteen-thirties. I've heard that my mother was in a country music band and even appeared on the radio. When she was in her late teens, it's been said, my mother ran away from home with a musician. Somehow or the other, the affair was abandoned. My mother returned home. I feel kind of like that with country music. That I have been running away from it all my life, yet remain powerfully drawn to it. Like family, like a fever in the blood.
Lately, I have been listening quite a bit to the album, Carryin' On With Johnny Cash and June Carter. Hearing June Carter's clear, strong, country voice, invokes memories of voices long stilled.
Just some random thoughts about mothers, country music and the passing of June Carter.
[17 May 2003] link?
R.I.P. Felice Bryant, one half of the songwriting duo of Boudleaux Bryant/Felice Bryant and the lyricist of Wake Up Little Susie, Bye-Bye Love, and other silken sounds from my youth. And goodbye to the great Nina Simone, whose songs burned their way into my heart.
[26 April 2003] link?
So these last four weeks or so have been busy at work. Miss Stacey Jean is still in Texas and Mister Drew has been to Florida and back.
During this time, I've managed to pay half my taxes, show up at the wrong time for a half-day sit at the Berkeley Zen Center and sit on my fanny for a whole day at Hartford Street.
Last night, I attended the monthly memorial for the late abbot of Hartford Street, Zenshin Philip Whalen. I've also found myself reading his poetry recently:
"Silence in the middle of traffic
Men's heads explode in Beirut
Men's hearts explode in the zendo
Who's going to pick up the pieces?
Your Finger's on the detonator button."
--- from Canoeing Up Cabarga Creek
I also like this quote from him, in a piece about writing and meditation:
"I like the idea somebody mentioned of erratic practice. It immediately reminded me of rocks that were left around when the glaciers receded. A lot of times setting out in a field there are no other rocks. It's a very strange appearance. You can't account for the rock's position unless you remember the glacier that carried the rock there and then went away. Zazen is slow but leaves erratic boulders."
On another, albeit related, note, I'm almost finished reading Peter Matthiessen's Nine-Headed Dragon River which I have found to be a very rewarding read, and Red Pine's translation of The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma, which I have been finding to be a daily source for inspiration and reflection.
[26 April 2003] link?
Farewell Stan Brakhage, magician of the cinema.
12 March 2003] link?
Cry me a river...this month has begun on a personal downer, with the awesome Miss Stacey Jean headed eastwards. Yesterday, Mister Drew, the awesome twin sister, David, and myself, collaborated on a pack-up-the-truck project. Later on that day the fabulous twins were due to leave on their road trip...sooo I imagine they are well on their way by now. Alas!
I miss you already, Stacey Jean!
[2 March 2003] link?
Work has been a little insane for me recently. Last week I didn't sit a bit. So this week, I'm trying to get back in the groove, starting off today with a half-day sit at the Berkeley Zen Center.
Of course, then it was off to work to tie up a few loose ends from the previous week...
[2 March 2003] link?
Rev. Myo's been busy keeping his monkBlog updated. I couldn't help but notice there's an all-day sit at Hartford Street Zen Center this coming Saturday, March 8.
[2 March 2003] link?