LeftCoastBreakdown

Requiem in wax.

2007-05-15T03:25:00.000-07:00

My friend Rod Poole was murdered Sunday night.

I see him standing at the counter in the jazz room at the record store. His love was bootleg vinyl, and he would stand there with his stack while I opened them one by one, slicing the plastic bags with a box cutter. Out would come each plain black or white sleeve, often with the artist and concert written in cursive pen on the otherwise blank label. Rod would lift each one, and rotate them to find the best light, looking for any imperfection. He would find it, and his face would turn sour for a second. I would look and see nothing. He'd see the scepticism on my brow and would hold the vinyl up at just the right angle, until like an apparition the scratch or bump would appear.

"That'll make it pop."

Rod had the peculiar easy cynicism and sense of order that is only due the British. When I first knew him he had this long hair that fell in tight curls, that gave him the slightly ridiculous air of a member of Spinal Tap. Don't think he didn't know it. When he shaved it all off, it was a relief to see his face, but also a kind of defeat, like some long ago thing had given way in him. It took a while to adjust.

You would go to his apartment and he would make you tea and show you his records. He was a savant, a man of deep knowledge. His specialty was John Coltrane and Sun Ra and rare Led Zep bootlegs. At least that's what I talked about with him.

I didn't know Rod enough. I didn't know about his childhood, his school days, his long gone parents. I didn't know if he believed in god, though he didn't strike me as the type. I didn't know how he supported himself as a musician in Los Angeles, putting out an occasional rare vinyl pressing that might merit a small review in Wire, teaching others to manipulate a guitar with less talent then him. I didn't know what he really thought about America.

But I did know he loved his wife. And I did know his love of music. I saw him in his environment, in his temple, in the tabernacle of sound. I saw the way he held a record, and what it told me about his character. It takes a certain kind of character to love a vinyl record, a compulsion to love a thing that is destroyed a little bit every time you play it. The record collector is always looking for that one disc, that one perfect form of a disk, beyond even unplayed. Untouched by human hands, unsullied by this world. A record collector is looking for perfection.

Here's what the dusty words of the paper of record had to say:

Police have arrested a husband and wife on suspicion of stabbing a 45-year-old man to death in the parking lot of a well-known Hollywood eatery.

The incident occurred about 9:45 p.m. Sunday in the parking lot of Mel's Drive-In in the 1600 block of Highland Avenue. Officers answered a call of an assault with a deadly weapon and found Roderick Poole, 45, with multiple stab wounds. He was taken to Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, where he died at 10:06 p.m.

Poole, of Hollywood, was walking with his wife when he got into an argument with a woman in a car, said Los Angeles Police Det. Larry Cameron. Witnesses told police the woman, with her husband, nearly ran over Poole.

They exchanged words and the couple allegedly attacked Poole, police said. Michael Sheridan, 25, allegedly stabbed Poole several times before the pair drove off, investigators said.

"This was incredibly dumb," said Cameron, referring to how a minor disagreement turned into a killing.

Detectives later arrested Sheridan and his wife, Angela Sheridan, 24, both of Los Angeles. They were being held in lieu of $1-million bail each.

Hollywood, among the city's safer areas, has seen a 5% increase in violent crime so far in 2007. Poole's killing was the sixth in the district this year.

Something tells me that Michael Sheridan doesn't own any vinyl records at all.

No Coincedence.

2007-05-12T11:19:00.000-07:00

Random headlines from today's NYTimes:

5 Dead and 3 Missing After Attack on U.S. Patrol in Iraq

Billions in Oil Missing in Iraq, U.S. Study Says

Ex-General Speaks Out Against Bush on Iraq

Majority of Iraq Lawmakers Seek Timetable for U.S. Exit

Crisis in Pakistan Over Judge Turns Violent

Civilian Deaths Undermine War on Taliban

So, how's that globalwaronterror going again?

You ponder the incompetence, you consider the abject history of failure, and you try to figure out how our nation went so very wrong. Then you see one additional headline:

Religious Groups Granted Millions for Pet Projects

Your Average Republican Voter.

2007-05-07T17:26:00.000-07:00

This made me laugh and feel sick to my stomach at the same time. I love it when fascism is so damned cute!

The Last Remaining Superpower.

2007-05-07T14:20:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan points to this posting by a blogger from Baghdad who recently visited the United States. Where did he go?

New Orleans.

What shocked me the most in this trip was how the city looked like Baghdad. New Orleans looked like Baghdad after the war in 1991; I swear I kid you not. The devastation, empty houses, the people returning to their life in the city, the “rituals” people practice before they completely come back, the bumps in the streets and the smell of destruction [it has a distinctive smell people. Yes it does.]

I arrived to New Orleans Thursday. On the way to the hotel, I saw the same thing I saw on tv two years ago, destroyed buildings. I couldn’t believe my eyes. Two years later and the scene is the same? Where are we? A government that spent hundreds of billions of dollars on wars overseas is not capable of dealing with a crisis on its own soil! A crisis that all what it needed was money! (...)

In 1991, Iraq was destroyed, mainly Baghdad and other big cities like Mosul, Basra. The Americans made sure that the average Iraqis didn’t get water, electricity, or food. And they made sure to also bomb the communication buildings so the average Iraqis didn’t have a way to know about each other and what was going on. Within three months after the end of the war, most of the government building and services, including potable water, sewer system, paving bombed streets, phones and electricity. That was under the rule of Saddam Hussein, whom Bush’s administration accused of depriving his people from their share of oil revenues!

What about people in New Orleans. They don’t have a dictator to rebuild their city. They have a democracy that is fighting its way to spend 100 billion more dollars on wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Who will help the people of New Orleans?

The Pythagorean Secret.

2007-05-03T15:48:00.000-07:00

I’ve never been especially good at math. Numbers get lost in my head sometimes, and I’ve always had trouble grasping much beyond the most simple of formulas. Calculus was always a mystery, and I never felt any particular interest in exploring mathematical language and concepts in any length. That is, until I learned about the Pythagorean secret.
St. John’s College, where I spent my freshman and sophomore years, requires a full mathematics course every year. I feared it, but I was surprised to find that because of the way that math was taught, I was actually able to grasp concepts more deeply then before. Because the college used no textbooks, we would read original texts, say Euclid or Ptolemy, and work over and argue over the proofs at the blackboard. It was a method of learning that eschewed rote formulas and valued placing everything that we learned in the larger context of knowledge.
It was in the course of this liberal arts approach to math that I came across the idea of irrational ratios. The Pythagorean school of philosophy was famous throughout ancient Greece for the skill of its mathematicians. They believed in, one might almost say worshiped, numbers, holding that the mysteries of life could be explained by understanding the ratios that existed between whole numbers. But then something happened to them when one of their own, Hippasus of Metapontum,. stumbled across a devastating secret. He realized that there was simply no ratio to √2. Or if you will, take a square and divide it diagonally:

The Pythagoreans believed that it would normally be possible to come up with a ratio that identified the relation of the diagonal to the side of the square. But in fact, there is no such ratio. The ratio between the diagonal and the side will always change according to the length of the side of the square, thus creating an “irrational ratio”, an infinite number like π that has no stable end. It goes on forever.
This shook the Pythagorean worldview. It also shook mine. My first semester at St. John’s I had read Plato and been impressed by his idea of the perfect form, the belief that Socrates articulates that for everything in the material world there exists somewhere the perfect form, or εἶδος, and that all material manifestations are but copies of this form. As a consequence, decisions in life are simple. How do we most closely manifest the perfect form in what we do?
But contemplating an irrational ratio sent a shiver through me. I had always assumed math to be absolute. Like the Pythagoreans, I trusted in the idea that all math could be resolved into a perfect form. But if it wasn’t so, what consequences did such an idea have? I thought of the square, and how we measure it. We say the side is one inch, but if there is no perfect inch, then how can we know for sure what an inch is? We might eventually round off, we might come to a general agreement and design a model inch at some government bureau, and such estimations may be useful in building bridges, but in the end, the inch was an arbitrary idea. In the end, the solid foundation I had once assumed wasn’t there, just what we collectively agreed to believe based on the evidence we had.
It was an epiphany that fundamentally changed my understanding of ideas of science, evidence and proof. I understood for the first time the provisional nature of all proof, how explanations can evolve. I felt a new admiration for the scientific method. Instead of pursuing some perfect form, science claimed only to have a theory, supported by observed information. Sure, there were theories, like the idea that 2 plus 2 equals 4, for which there was a great deal of evidence in favor and little in opposition. But a true scientist would always accept the possibility that, with new data, 2 plus 2 might indeed someday be proven to be something other then 4.
That is, if the scientist really understood and believed in the limits of his knowledge, and was truly dedicated to always advancing those limits. The Pythagoreans did not. They reacted to their discovery out of fear, and in one of the famous episodes of scientific history, they murdered Hippasus of Metapontum for discovering the irrational ratio.
The question then came to me this way. How would I react when faced with evidence that contradicted something I held to be an absolute truth? Would I respond with a defensive reactionary posture, or with an open mind? One of the great misunderstandings about the nature of science is that imperfections in a particular scientific theory somehow devalue science. They don’t. Point out a flaw in a theory to a true scientist and he will react not with dismay, but with the excitement of new data, new knowledge to expand his understanding. The dogmatist might cry “your theory has gaps!”. The scientist will respond by saying “I know. Let’s fill them in.”
I am not a scientist in the traditional sense. But I have come to believe in the skeptical and rational evaluation that lies behind the scientific method. I try to apply this skepticism to whatever new information comes my way, to weigh and understand it in the context of all the evidence. This is what studying math in a liberal arts program taught me. My calculus isn’t any stronger yet, but my mind is more open then before.

Fighting Words.

2007-04-27T14:21:00.001-07:00

Christopher Hitchens is a frequently cruel alcoholic Brit who foolishly fell in love with the Kurds and thus ruined his reputation by supporting the Iraq war. He is also, in this solipsistic age one of the few biting critics of bullshit left. I wish he had a bit more humility in calling out his own foolishness sometimes (for his sophistry on the war, I'd like to see him march across Dupont Circle wearing a cilice and mortifying his flesh with a bullwhip) but there is no doubt that he is fearless in vivisecting the intellectual bodies of others, even those held in conventional esteem. This is after all a man who wrote a scathing book about Mother Teresa. He's the kind of guy who probably thinks he's doing his job well when someone calls him an asshole. Such is the contrarians lot.

He's picked the biggest fight of his career in his new book though. He's taking on God. God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything is the title, and like all good essayists, he sticks tightly to the point, or at least he does in the three parts excerpted this week in Slate. In the first bit, he attacks belief in general and lays out his ideal of the non-believer:

Most important of all, perhaps, we infidels do not need any machinery of reinforcement. We are those who Blaise Pascal took into account when he wrote to the one who says, "I am so made that I cannot believe."
There is no need for us to gather every day, or every seven days, or on any high and auspicious day, to proclaim our rectitude or to grovel and wallow in our unworthiness. We atheists do not require any priests, or any hierarchy above them, to police our doctrine. Sacrifices and ceremonies are abhorrent to us, as are relics and the worship of any images or objects (even including objects in the form of one of man's most useful innovations: the bound book). To us no spot on earth is or could be "holier" than another: to the ostentatious absurdity of the pilgrimage, or the plain horror of killing civilians in the name of some sacred wall or cave or shrine or rock, we can counterpose a leisurely or urgent walk from one side of the library or the gallery to another, or to lunch with an agreeable friend, in pursuit of truth or beauty. Some of these excursions to the bookshelf or the lunch or the gallery will obviously, if they are serious, bring us into contact with belief and believers, from the great devotional painters and composers to the works of Augustine, Aquinas, Maimonides, and Newman. These mighty scholars may have written many evil things or many foolish things, and been laughably ignorant of the germ theory of disease or the place of the terrestrial globe in the solar system, let alone the universe, and this is the plain reason why there are no more of them today, and why there will be no more of them tomorrow. Religion spoke its last intelligible or noble or inspiring words a long time ago: either that or it mutated into an admirable but nebulous humanism, as did, say, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a brave Lutheran pastor hanged by the Nazis for his refusal to collude with them. We shall have no more prophets or sages from the ancient quarter, which is why the devotions of today are only the echoing repetitions of yesterday, sometimes ratcheted up to screaming point so as to ward off the terrible emptiness.

Ouch.

Part Two is a disection of the inconsistancies in the foundation of Islam and the production of the Koran. Part Three, I must warn you if you are one of my old Mormon friends or family members, is entitled Mormonism: A Racket Becomes a Religion. Prepare to be offended, and don't say I didn't warn you.

I can't hardly wait to read the whole thing. Hitchens is great on almost any subject; when he's writing about George Eliot, when he's writing about the moral failings of Bill Clinton, when he's writing about his love of drink. I can only imagine the lather he works himself up into on this one.

Kiss and tell.

2007-04-27T11:09:00.000-07:00

I love the term "six pack homo". A six pack homo is a ostensibly straight guy who, after a six pack of beer, will become flirtatious, and sometimes even more, with his gay male friends. Maybe he's a two or three on the Kinsey scale, or maybe he just loves all the flattery and attention. Whatever the reason, load the boy up with a little inhibition-lowering alcohol, and his inner fag comes right on out.

Rudy Giuliani is a six pack homo. And apparently he just went on the wagon.

After years of playing coy with the queers in the good-time happy hour of contemporary New York City, where even the outer-borough slobs love them some gays, Rudy is feeling a little hung over and regretful. Like any straight boy who maybe went a little too far, he's decided to re-affirm his masculinity with a new round of gay-bashing, reviving the whole "queers destroying straight marriages" canard. After all, aren't the gays ultimately responsible for his two messy divorces and public adultery?

Um, no.

And guess what Rudy? The thumpers ain't gonna be impressed. They know a whiff of faggy when they smell it. John Aravosis channels the church lady for ya:

Sorry, Rudy. You're an adulterer. You cheated on your wife - which wife was that? - blatantly, flagrantly, publicly. And now you want us to believe that you're the great defender of marriage. You don't get the right to defend other people's marriages when you can't defend your own. How serious a moral crime is adultery, Rudy? Well, since you're doing this flip-flop in order to curry favor with America's Taliban, let's check the Bible, the King James version, to be precise (it's the version my people use), and see what God has to say about adultery:
Leviticus 20:10 And the man that committeth adultery with another man's wife, even he that committeth adultery with his neighbour's wife, the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.
Hmmm... surely put to death - now, no one is suggesting that you and your lover need to be put to death, Rudy, but the Bible makes it pretty clear that adultery is a big no-no. The kind of no-no that disqualifies you from suddenly, a few years after that adultery, becoming the great moral defender of marriage.

Signposts to Hell.

2007-04-25T10:55:00.000-07:00

So Naomi Wolf makes the "slippery slope to fascism" argument in the Guardian. She identifies ten behaviors that are the hallmarks of tyranny:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens' groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

She points out ways in which all these behaviors are being carried on by the administration.

To her list I would add one other:
11. Purge the doubters from the movement

As the conservative movement becomes meaner and more narrowly focused on power, it has been throwing off those in the movement who are true believers in actual conservative principles, as opposed to hacks dedicated to authority. You see this in the Bush doctrine of rewarding loyalty over competence, in the alienation of true actual committed conservatives like Dick Armey, Patrick Buchanan, and Bob Barr, and the purging of the Republican U.S. attorneys who refused to politicize justice and attack the election system. These multiple mini "Night of the Long Knives" are yet another sign that the conservative movement is morphing from a large populist political program gatherered around ideals of limited government and traditional morality into a power-obsessed pseudo-faith of fake victimology and imagined devils. It also explains the antipathy amongst conservatives to John McCain. He's one of those silly conservatives who still tries to apply conservative principles (however flawed), instead of the pure instinct to power, to the issues of the day.

Tyranny is always about tribe, clan, and the will to power. Those who actually believe the propaganda are useful for a while, but in the end they are an impediment to that agenda.

Back in black.

2007-04-24T17:17:00.000-07:00

Ok, I took a hiatus. No explanations, I had my reasons. If you are still checking in on this blog, I thank you, and find you a bit scary as well. I've decided to pick it up again though, and I hope that someone cares, but it was always about therapy anyway.

As for my mood the past few months, it's best summed up in this Lucinda Williams song. You just know that she can go to Slidell and look for her joy all she wants, but she'll never, ever get it back:

Don't worry though, I've started finding my joy again. It's just taking on some strange new forms.

Okie truth.

2007-01-27T09:25:00.000-08:00

Fifty years ago there was as much freedom in San Quentin as there is in the streets of New York today, with obvious exceptions. You’re just as likely to have a police officer throw down on you with a .30-30 [rifle] in New York as you are in San Quentin.
Merle Haggard, who went to prison fifty years ago this year.

The new Chevrolet Adobe.

2007-01-20T01:39:00.000-08:00

Dammit, the environmentalists have just gone too far this time!

Thanks to the NYTimes.

Paying the piper.

2007-01-18T10:29:00.000-08:00

Here's a lovely little chart for ya:

Another one bites the dust.

2007-01-08T15:44:00.000-08:00

A Googie masterpiece in an L.A. suburb gets torn down on a Sunday afternoon without a permit.

Someone should do jail time for this. A demolition with no permits, no asbestos abatement, not even a proper fence in place. What fucking lawless place is this, Baghdad?
I'm so goddamned sick of this city being treated like a movie backlot.

Truth in advertising.

2007-01-04T14:36:00.000-08:00

A Plan For Victory

2006-12-22T12:42:00.000-08:00

In Iraq, from the Republican Congressman Robin Hayes, just narrowly re-elected by a few hundred votes:

“Stability in Iraq ultimately depends on spreading the message of Jesus Christ, the message of peace on earth, good will towards men. Everything depends on everyone learning about the birth of the Savior.”

United We Stand

2006-12-20T12:39:00.000-08:00

A letter to a constituent, from Republican Representative Virgil Goode:

Dear Mr. Cruickshank:

Thank you for your recent communication. When I raise my hand to take the oath on Swearing In Day, I will have the Bible in my other hand. I do not subscribe to using the Koran in any way. The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran. We need to stop illegal immigration totally and reduce legal immigration and end the diversity visas policy pushed hard by President Clinton and allowing many persons from the Middle East to come to this country. I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.

The Ten Commandments and “In God We Trust” are on the wall in my office. A Muslim student came by the office and asked why I did not have anything on my wall about the Koran. My response was clear, “As long as I have the honor of representing the citizens of the 5th District of Virginia in the United States House of Representatives, The Koran is not going to be on the wall of my office.” Thank you again for your email and thoughts.

Sincerely yours,
Virgil H. Goode, Jr.

For some of these assholes, United We Stand always came with an asterick.

Why I don't live in New York.

2006-12-08T23:29:00.000-08:00

I love the NYC, and I've long thought of moving there.

Then I go on Craigslist.

This apartment is way the hell out in Bushwick. I won't tell you the price. But what I really loved was this picture, captioned with the headline:

STUNNING BRAND NEW KITCHEM!

Stunning indeed.

B.S. Detector

2006-11-30T16:48:00.000-08:00

From Dan Froomkin, on bullshit:

Mainstream-media political journalism is in danger of becoming increasingly irrelevant, but not because of the Internet, or even Comedy Central. The threat comes from inside. It comes from journalists being afraid to do what journalists were put on this green earth to do.

What is it about Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert that makes them so refreshing and attractive to a wide variety of viewers (including those so-important younger ones)? I would argue that, more than anything else, it is that they enthusiastically call bullshit.

Calling bullshit, of course, used to be central to journalism as well as to comedy. And we happen to be in a period in our history in which the substance in question is running particularly deep. The relentless spinning is enough to make anyone dizzy, and some of our most important political battles are about competing views of reality more than they are about policy choices. Calling bullshit has never been more vital to our democracy.

It also resonates with readers and viewers a lot more than passionless stenography. I’m convinced that my enthusiasm for calling bullshit is the main reason for the considerable success of my White House Briefing column, which has turned into a significant traffic-driver for The Washington Post’s Web site.

I’m not sure why calling bullshit has gone out of vogue in so many newsrooms — why, in fact, it’s so often consciously avoided. There are lots of possible reasons. There’s the increased corporate stultification of our industry, to the point where rocking the boat is seen as threatening rather than invigorating. There’s the intense pressure to maintain access to insider sources, even as those sources become ridiculously unrevealing and oversensitive. There’s the fear of being labeled partisan if one’s bullshit-calling isn’t meted out in precisely equal increments along the political spectrum.

The return of Democrats to political power and relevancy gives us the opportunity to call bullshit in a more bipartisan manner, which is certainly healthy. But there are different kinds of bullshit. Republican political leaders these past six years have built up a massive, unprecedented credibility deficit, such that even their most straightforward assertions invite close bullshit inspection. By contrast, Democratic bullshit tends to center more around hypocrisy and political cowardice. Trying to find equivalency between the two would still be a mistake – and could lead to catty, inside-baseball gotcha journalism rather than genuine bullshit-calling.

If mainstream-media political journalists don’t start calling bullshit more often, then we do risk losing our primacy — if not to the comedians then to the bloggers.

But here’s the good news for you newsroom managers wringing your hands over new technologies and the loss of younger audiences: Because the Internet so values calling bullshit, you are sitting on an as-yet largely untapped gold mine. I still believe that no one is fundamentally more capable of first-rate bullshit-calling than a well-informed beat reporter - whatever their beat. We just need to get the editors, or the corporate culture, or the self-censorship – or whatever it is – out of the way.

Dictionary Definition

2006-11-13T11:48:00.000-08:00

Gay Republican: N A person who loves the sin and hates the sinner. e.g. Foley, Mark; Haggard, Ted.

Give Til It Hurts Baby

2006-10-27T16:32:00.000-07:00

Hey guys,
I hate to bug people about politics, I know that it is a personal issue for many folks, and that it isn’t always an appropriate conversation for work, but I’m going to take this one moment to talk to some of my friends here and ask you for a favor.

Marilyn Musgrave from Colorado is one of the most reprehensible members of Congress. The original author of the Constitutional amendment against gay marriage, Musgrave is a smug, raving bible-thumper who holds an exaggerated importance in national politics. The darling of the religious right, she is an endless campaigner against equal rights for gays and lesbians, a reflexive defender of the hideously incompetent leadership in Congress, and was recently named by C.R.E.W. as one of the thirteen most corrupt members of the House. I’ve no love for lots of politicians, but Musgrave is as bad as it gets, a deeply stupid, self-righteous and petty woman who, amongst other crimes, spearheaded the Republican intervention into the case of Terry Schiavo and spoke lovingly and longingly of Tom Delay after he was indicted for money laundering. Musgrave was asked recently at a forum of the religious right in Washington what the greatest threat to America was, and her response was gay marriage. That’s right, forget terrorism, forget Iraq, forget economic insecurity or the deficit or corporate corruption, what matters to her more then anything is the sex life of queers.

She’s got to go.

Fortunately, unlike most of the truly bad actors in Washington, Musgrave does not have a secure seat. Her mostly rural Colorado seat has been drifting somewhat more Democratic, and with the forming tidal wave against the Republicans this year, she might be knocked off. Luckily, she has a great opponent, a woman by the name of Angie Paccione. Angie is a former pro basketball player from the South Bronx and a public school teacher who is the Democratic leader in the Colorado House. She’s not as liberal as I might be (hell, she is from Colorado) but she is a true progressive leader in that state, with a proven record of support for everything from better education to environmental protection to minority rights. How can you not love a woman who dresses like a high school basketball coach?

The really good news is that she can win. A poll was released yesterday showing her up three points against Musgrave, and every recent poll in the district has shown this to be a dead heat. So here’s where the hard pitch comes in. Today is the last day that you can effectively give money to a campaign. Campaigns across the nation will be making their final ad buying decisions this weekend, so money after today will not be helpful before the election. The Republican National Committee has dumped 1.5 million bucks into this district, because they are so worried about Musgrave losing. Please consider making a donation to Angie’s campaign. I don’t care if it’s five bucks, or five hundred. This is something you can do, a direct action that will positively impact the direction of this nation. Musgrave’s loss would carry huge symbolic importance. This is a woman who carved out her name on gay bashing. Sending her back to Colorado in disgrace would send the message loud and clear that thumping queers as a political strategy no longer works. Here’s the link:
http://www.actblue.com/page/americapaccione

And remember, early voting has already started! You can vote at the L.A. Central Library from now until the Sunday before the election. It only takes a few minutes, and you get a sticker!
Cheers,

Spencer Windes
P.S. Please feel free to forward this message to anyone you think might care about it.
P.P.S. I promise not to bug you for at least two more years.

Amen.

2006-10-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Kevin Tillman, who, like his brother Pat, famously left pro sports to join the army after 9/11 (Pat died from friendly fire in Afghanistan) says it all:

It is Pat’s birthday on November 6, and elections are the day after. It gets me thinking about a conversation I had with Pat before we joined the military. He spoke about the risks with signing the papers. How once we committed, we were at the mercy of the American leadership and the American people. How we could be thrown in a direction not of our volition. How fighting as a soldier would leave us without a voice… until we get out.

Much has happened since we handed over our voice:

Somehow we were sent to invade a nation because it was a direct threat to the American people, or to the world, or harbored terrorists, or was involved in the September 11 attacks, or received weapons-grade uranium from Niger, or had mobile weapons labs, or WMD, or had a need to be liberated, or we needed to establish a democracy, or stop an insurgency, or stop a civil war we created that can’t be called a civil war even though it is. Something like that.

Somehow our elected leaders were subverting international law and humanity by setting up secret prisons around the world, secretly kidnapping people, secretly holding them indefinitely, secretly not charging them with anything, secretly torturing them. Somehow that overt policy of torture became the fault of a few “bad apples” in the military.

Somehow back at home, support for the soldiers meant having a five-year-old kindergartener scribble a picture with crayons and send it overseas, or slapping stickers on cars, or lobbying Congress for an extra pad in a helmet. It’s interesting that a soldier on his third or fourth tour should care about a drawing from a five-year-old; or a faded sticker on a car as his friends die around him; or an extra pad in a helmet, as if it will protect him when an IED throws his vehicle 50 feet into the air as his body comes apart and his skin melts to the seat.

Somehow the more soldiers that die, the more legitimate the illegal invasion becomes.

Somehow American leadership, whose only credit is lying to its people and illegally invading a nation, has been allowed to steal the courage, virtue and honor of its soldiers on the ground.

Somehow those afraid to fight an illegal invasion decades ago are allowed to send soldiers to die for an illegal invasion they started.

Somehow faking character, virtue and strength is tolerated.

Somehow profiting from tragedy and horror is tolerated.

Somehow the death of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of people is tolerated.

Somehow subversion of the Bill of Rights and The Constitution is tolerated.

Somehow suspension of Habeas Corpus is supposed to keep this country safe.

Somehow torture is tolerated.

Somehow lying is tolerated.

Somehow reason is being discarded for faith, dogma, and nonsense.

Somehow American leadership managed to create a more dangerous world.

Somehow a narrative is more important than reality.

Somehow America has become a country that projects everything that it is not and condemns everything that it is.

Somehow the most reasonable, trusted and respected country in the world has become one of the most irrational, belligerent, feared, and distrusted countries in the world.

Somehow being politically informed, diligent, and skeptical has been replaced by apathy through active ignorance.

Somehow the same incompetent, narcissistic, virtueless, vacuous, malicious criminals are still in charge of this country.

Somehow this is tolerated.

Somehow nobody is accountable for this.

In a democracy, the policy of the leaders is the policy of the people. So don’t be shocked when our grandkids bury much of this generation as traitors to the nation, to the world and to humanity. Most likely, they will come to know that “somehow” was nurtured by fear, insecurity and indifference, leaving the country vulnerable to unchecked, unchallenged parasites.

Luckily this country is still a democracy. People still have a voice. People still can take action. It can start after Pat’s birthday.

Brother and Friend of Pat Tillman,

Kevin Tillman

Terrifying.

2006-10-18T12:26:00.000-07:00

Yes, I know, I've been neglecting my blog. I've been swamped with work lately. But I just couldn't pass up this editorial from the New York Times. I find it terrifying to know that I'm more well informed then the people in Washington who are overseeing our war with Islam. Not knowing that Iran in Shiite, and what that means for stability in, say, Lebanon or Saudi Arabia, is just goddamn criminal. Here ya go:

FOR the past several months, I’ve been wrapping up lengthy interviews with Washington counterterrorism officials with a fundamental question: “Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?”

A “gotcha” question? Perhaps. But if knowing your enemy is the most basic rule of war, I don’t think it’s out of bounds. And as I quickly explain to my subjects, I’m not looking for theological explanations, just the basics: Who’s on what side today, and what does each want?

After all, wouldn’t British counterterrorism officials responsible for Northern Ireland know the difference between Catholics and Protestants? In a remotely similar but far more lethal vein, the 1,400-year Sunni-Shiite rivalry is playing out in the streets of Baghdad, raising the specter of a breakup of Iraq into antagonistic states, one backed by Shiite Iran and the other by Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states.

A complete collapse in Iraq could provide a haven for Al Qaeda operatives within striking distance of Israel, even Europe. And the nature of the threat from Iran, a potential nuclear power with protégés in the Gulf states, northern Saudi Arabia, Lebanon and the Palestinian territories, is entirely different from that of Al Qaeda. It seems silly to have to argue that officials responsible for counterterrorism should be able to recognize opportunities for pitting these rivals against each other.

But so far, most American officials I’ve interviewed don’t have a clue. That includes not just intelligence and law enforcement officials, but also members of Congress who have important roles overseeing our spy agencies. How can they do their jobs without knowing the basics?

My curiosity about our policymakers’ grasp of Islam’s two major branches was piqued in 2005, when Jon Stewart and other TV comedians made hash out of depositions, taken in a whistleblower case, in which top F.B.I. officials drew blanks when asked basic questions about Islam. One of the bemused officials was Gary Bald, then the bureau’s counterterrorism chief. Such expertise, Mr. Bald maintained, wasn’t as important as being a good manager.

A few months later, I asked the F.B.I.’s spokesman, John Miller, about Mr. Bald’s comments. “A leader needs to drive the organization forward,” Mr. Miller told me. “If he is the executive in a counterterrorism operation in the post-9/11 world, he does not need to memorize the collected statements of Osama bin Laden, or be able to read Urdu to be effective. ... Playing ‘Islamic Trivial Pursuit’ was a cheap shot for the lawyers and a cheaper shot for the journalist. It’s just a gimmick.”

Of course, I hadn’t asked about reading Urdu or Mr. bin Laden’s writings.

A few weeks ago, I took the F.B.I.’s temperature again. At the end of a long interview, I asked Willie Hulon, chief of the bureau’s new national security branch, whether he thought that it was important for a man in his position to know the difference between Sunnis and Shiites. “Yes, sure, it’s right to know the difference,” he said. “It’s important to know who your targets are.”

That was a big advance over 2005. So next I asked him if he could tell me the difference. He was flummoxed. “The basics goes back to their beliefs and who they were following,” he said. “And the conflicts between the Sunnis and the Shia and the difference between who they were following.”

O.K., I asked, trying to help, what about today? Which one is Iran — Sunni or Shiite? He thought for a second. “Iran and Hezbollah,” I prompted. “Which are they?”

He took a stab: “Sunni.”

Wrong.

Al Qaeda? “Sunni.”

Right.

AND to his credit, Mr. Hulon, a distinguished agent who is up nights worrying about Al Qaeda while we safely sleep, did at least know that the vicious struggle between Islam’s Abel and Cain was driving Iraq into civil war. But then we pay him to know things like that, the same as some members of Congress.

Take Representative Terry Everett, a seven-term Alabama Republican who is vice chairman of the House intelligence subcommittee on technical and tactical intelligence.

“Do you know the difference between a Sunni and a Shiite?” I asked him a few weeks ago.

Mr. Everett responded with a low chuckle. He thought for a moment: “One’s in one location, another’s in another location. No, to be honest with you, I don’t know. I thought it was differences in their religion, different families or something.”

To his credit, he asked me to explain the differences. I told him briefly about the schism that developed after the death of the Prophet Muhammad, and how Iraq and Iran are majority Shiite nations while the rest of the Muslim world is mostly Sunni. “Now that you’ve explained it to me,” he replied, “what occurs to me is that it makes what we’re doing over there extremely difficult, not only in Iraq but that whole area.”

Representative Jo Ann Davis, a Virginia Republican who heads a House intelligence subcommittee charged with overseeing the C.I.A.’s performance in recruiting Islamic spies and analyzing information, was similarly dumbfounded when I asked her if she knew the difference between Sunnis and Shiites.

“Do I?” she asked me. A look of concentration came over her face. “You know, I should.” She took a stab at it: “It’s a difference in their fundamental religious beliefs. The Sunni are more radical than the Shia. Or vice versa. But I think it’s the Sunnis who’re more radical than the Shia.”

Did she know which branch Al Qaeda’s leaders follow?

“Al Qaeda is the one that’s most radical, so I think they’re Sunni,” she replied. “I may be wrong, but I think that’s right.”

Did she think that it was important, I asked, for members of Congress charged with oversight of the intelligence agencies, to know the answer to such questions, so they can cut through officials’ puffery when they came up to the Hill?

“Oh, I think it’s very important,” said Ms. Davis, “because Al Qaeda’s whole reason for being is based on their beliefs. And you’ve got to understand, and to know your enemy.”

It’s not all so grimly humorous. Some agency officials and members of Congress have easily handled my “gotcha” question. But as I keep asking it around Capitol Hill and the agencies, I get more and more blank stares. Too many officials in charge of the war on terrorism just don’t care to learn much, if anything, about the enemy we’re fighting. And that’s enough to keep anybody up at night.

Clusterfuck.

2006-10-04T11:41:00.000-07:00

Brownie. Bushie. Foley. Yikes.

Ewwwwwww

2006-09-29T15:00:00.000-07:00

Florida Republican Congressman Mark Foley, chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children, in an IM exchange with a sixteen year old boy:

Do I make you a little horny?

Boy: A little.

Good.

Bertrand Russell

2006-09-29T11:16:00.000-07:00

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.

If I Can Talk About Myself For A Minute

2006-09-21T13:04:00.000-07:00

At the risk of falling into a pool of narcissism, I must say that I love this photo. It was taken last month when I was down in Austin for my friend Cody's birthday. I love this photo because it isn't a "good" photo. Oh, it's beautifully shot, but it also is an image that shows many things about my appearance that have long made me insecure. The thick chin, the receding hairline, the crooked teeth, the bulbous nose, the deepening lines around my eyes, all are things that I would often try to avoid in a picture where I was trying to impress.

I'm a single gay man who works in the fashion industry, for god's sake! Aren't I supposed to be striving towards a low-body-fat, firm-jawed, tight-bodied, perpetually youthful image? In this picture, my age, my weight, my round-faced thickness, all the things that since puberty have alienated me from my own body and made me awkward with my physical nature, all the shortcomings that made me jealous of my peers and horribly shy about my own flesh, all the things that drove me as an adolescent and young man away from sports and leisure and sex and into a cocoon of books and a Cartesian rejection of the body for the life of the mind, a false dichotomy that continued without interruption until I was almost thirty, all these elements are on display here.

But in this photo, I'm blissfully happy.

I'm blissfully happy because I am with real friends. I'm blissfully happy because I am in a beautiful place. I'm blissfully happy because I'm healthy. I'm blissfully happy because at a certain point in my life those insecurities started to fall off.

It started with sex. Or rather, with the desire for sex. When I decided to come out, I knew that I couldn't continue to neglect my body. At first, I tried to radically change my self, losing weight and spending a lot of spare time in the gym. After a few years, it was evident to me that I would never be that cliche of fit that floated above Los Angeles like an imaginary god. I was stuck with my white trash/native American gene pool, with the kind of body that an axe-wielding Saxon foot soldier would be proud to own. So I played to my strengths and started playing rugby.

I'm not a great rugby player. I didn't take up the game until I was 31, after all. But I loved instantly the sheer, almost drug-like physical bliss that rose from using my body at it's limit. Out on the pitch was the first time that the fake wall between my mind and my body tumbled, and I felt my two sides come together. That analogy that Socrates created about human beings searching for the other half we had before the gods split us with their lightning? It was like I had found my other half.

I still have some of the old ghosts haunting me. I don't like taking off my shirt at the beach at Laguna. I'm not yet happy with my weight (though I'm getting there, thanks Cedars-Sinai!) and I still feel like a defendant in the dock every time I step within the city bounds of West Hollywood.

But I don't go to West Hollywood that much anymore. Instead, I go to Texas and float down a river with my friends. Instead, I hang out with the Australians at bars that we pick for the music. Instead, I accept that this is the only body I will ever have. Lots of burly gay men embrace the label of "bear" as a way of defining themselves and creating a tribe. I don't. Yeah, I'm a bear, in that I fit the physical requirements. I use the term sometimes as shorthand, but I also find it incredibly silly. I don't need to be part of an exclusionary culture based on fitting a physical type, even one that I happen to meet to the T. I may be the beariest bear in beartown, but in the end, I'm just me, Spence, the guy in this snapshot. Either you get it or you don't.

Either way, I love this photo.

Circling The Bowl

2006-09-15T16:40:00.000-07:00

A letter posted to Andrew Sullivan that describes how America is now perceived in the world, from a grunts-eye perspective:

I was deployed in my reserve unit (USMCR) as part of operation Desert Storm and Desert Shield. Marine infantry, and we were on the front lines, supposedly to guard a gunship base, but really, though, the gunships guarded us.

Not too much later, it was time to take prisoners. One of the platoons went north, and when they came back, there were stories about how Iraqi soldiers lined the roads, trying to surrender. I spent a week guarding Iraqi men in a makeshift prison camp, a way-station really, and more than I could count. They didn't look like they were starving or dehydrated. Apparently, once the ground war began, they just pitched their weapons and headed south at first opportunity. The more I've thought about it, the more I realize that they knew bone deep that they'd get fair treatment. We gave them MREs (with the pork entree's removed) but almost immediately some Special Forces guys arrived and set up a real chow line for them. We gave each man a blanket, (I kept an extra as a souvie) and I think I saw a Special Forces doc giving some of them a once over.

Once, only once, one of them got all irritated and tried to get in one of the Corporal's faces, loud. (I was a lance-corporal). He wouldn't back down, so the Corporal gave him an adjustment, a rifle butt-stroke to his gut, not hard, but he went down. The Corporal sent me for the medic. The guy was ok, and now calm (or at least understanding the situation), and hand-signed that he was out of smokes and really, really needed one... Not a bad guy, just stressed-dumb and needing a smoke. None of the others prisoners in the camp even registered it.

We went north to mop up not long after that. I saw the Iraqi weapons: rocket launchers a little smaller than semi-trailers, hidden in buildings, AKs in piles, big Soviet mortars and anti-tank mines, everywhere but unarmed. They had food too. Pasteurized milk to drink, but most gone bad by then. Some of the mortar rounds were still in crates. They had long trenches that were hard to see in the dunes, bunkers with maps, fire-plans laid out, and blankets, all placed with decent vantage for command and control. They even had wire laid for land-line communications. The point is, they could have fought. Not won, no they couldn't have won, but they could have fought. Instead, they chose to surrender.

Looking back, I think that one of the main drivers in these men's heads was that they knew, absolutely, that they'd get fair treatment from us, the Americans. We were the good guys. The Iraqis on the line knew they had an out, they had hope, so they could just walk away. (A few did piss themselves when someone told them we were Marines. Go figure.) Still, they knew Americans would be fair, and we were.

Thinking hard on what I now know of history, psychology, and the meanness of politics, that reputation for fairness was damn near unique in world history. Can you tell me of any major military power that had it? Ever? France? No. Think Algeria. The UK? Sorry, Northern Ireland, the Boxer Rebellion in China... China or Russia. I don't think so. But America had it. If those men had even put up token resistance, some of us would not have come back. But they didn't even bother, and surrendered at least in part because of our reputation. Our two hundred year old reputation for being fair and humane and decent. All the way back to George Washington, and from President George H.W. Bush all the way down to a lance-corporal jarhead at the front.

Its gone now, even from me. I can't get past that image of the Iraqi, in the hood with the wires and I'm not what you'd call a sensitive type. You know the picture. And now we have a total bust-out in the White House, and a bunch of rubber-stamps in the House, trying to make it so that half-drowning people isn't torture. That hypothermia isn't torture. That degradation isn't torture. We don't have that reputation for fairness anymore. Just the opposite, I think. And the next real enemy we face will fight like only the cornered and desperate fight. How many Marines' lives will be lost in the war ahead just because of this asshole who never once risked anything for this country?

Is That A Mustache?

2006-09-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

So surging Democratic Senatorial Candidate Jim Webb of Virginia is being haunted by a comment he made 27 years ago, referring to female Midshipmen at the Naval Academy as "thunder thighs". In his defense, I used to live in Annapolis. Imagine a steroidal Russian power lifter dressed up like an ice cream man, and you get a pretty good idea of the average female Middie.

But that's a good thing, no? Who wouldn't want a battle-ax like that next to you in a fox hole?

Google Hearts Republicans

2006-09-15T13:59:00.000-07:00

Guess who's standing up for endangered New Mexico Republican Congresswoman Heather Wilson? Why, it's the company whose motto is "Don't Be Evil".
Ehem.

Homo-Schaudenfreude

2006-09-13T18:16:00.000-07:00

Stephen Laffey, writing in a Bowdoin College paper in the 80's:

"I have never once seen a happy homosexual. This is not to say there aren't any; I simply haven't seen one in my lifetime. Maybe they are all in the closet. All the homosexuals I've seen are sickly and decrepit, their eyes devoid of life."

Stephen Laffey, failed wingnut Senate candidate, yesterday:

Um, happy much Stevie?

Henry Rollins Hearts Ann Coulter

2006-09-12T14:39:00.000-07:00

As much as I love this, I still want to kick Henry Rollins' Ass.

The Olbermann Commentary

2006-09-12T11:37:00.000-07:00

Seven Things Democrats Should Love About The Path to 9/11

2006-09-11T23:57:00.000-07:00

Ok, I'm gonna play devil's advocate here. I caught a lot of inaccuracies in this controversial show, and I generally agree that it was a hatchet job, but here's a few points about it that, to the filmmakers credit, Democrats could love:

1) Terrorists hate Bill Clinton. I mean, they call him Satan and mock-execute him. If he was so soft on terrorists, why did they hate him so much?

2) Bush's T-shirt. Bush is shown on the morning of September 11th, having just finished a run, standing in a dorky yellow sweat-stained t-shirt talking about how "this whole day is about education". He looks hopelessly out of touch.

3) Richard Clarke is a badass. This Clinton Administration holdover seemed to be about the only dude in the Bush Administration who had any balls. Whether it's giving orders on his front porch or rushing to the White House the morning of the attack, he certainly comes off better then Condi, George, or Dick (who appears to be a senile 90 year old in the film)

4) Colleen Rowley is a badass. The current Democratic congressional candidate from Minnesota is the Cassandra of terror, ringing the bell over Moussaoui.

5) The Bush administration sits on it's hands. This is the major theme of the second half of the movie, and White House higher-ups ignore warnings from the Northern Alliance and from their own FBI agents, doing nothing but infighting while the attack approaches. Generally, the second half is almost as hard on the Bushes as the first was on the Clintons. Not quite, of course, but almost.

6) The shot of Condi Rice holding a report entitled "Bin Laden determined to attack within the United States" and sitting at her desk doing nothing.

7)Probably most damaging of all, the coda at the end. Text at the very end announces that of the 44 recommendations of the 9/11 Commission, the government, i.e. the Bush Administration, received almost all failing grades last year in the Commission's follow-up. This is a point that Democratic politicians have been hammering home, and that last bit of text that closed the film could have been written by Howard Dean's office.

I bring these points up only because, while I generally found the film disingenuous and downright mendacious at points (Bush didn't give his "moment of silence" speech until after all the planes had crashed, to cite just one example from the last five minutes) I also didn't find it to be the blunt instrument of propaganda that I expected it to be. I can't stand the Administration, and I loved Olbermann tonight, but the greatest sin I saw in Path to 9/11 was the cheap cynicism of melodrama.

Oh, and the way that ABC made it's own reporters out to be heroes. That must have been the hook in the pitch meeting for sure.

Kieth Olbermann, Tonight From Ground Zero

2006-09-11T23:21:00.000-07:00

Half a lifetime ago, I worked in this now-empty space. And for 40 days after the attacks, I worked here again, trying to make sense of what happened, and was yet to happen, as a reporter.

All the time, I knew that the very air I breathed contained the remains of thousands of people, including four of my friends, two in the planes and -- as I discovered from those "missing posters" seared still into my soul -- two more in the Towers.

And I knew too, that this was the pyre for hundreds of New York policemen and firemen, of whom my family can claim half a dozen or more, as our ancestors.

I belabor this to emphasize that, for me this was, and is, and always shall be, personal.

And anyone who claims that I and others like me are "soft,"or have "forgotten" the lessons of what happened here is at best a grasping, opportunistic, dilettante and at worst, an idiot whether he is a commentator, or a Vice President, or a President.

However, of all the things those of us who were here five years ago could have forecast -- of all the nightmares that unfolded before our eyes, and the others that unfolded only in our minds -- none of us could have predicted this.

Five years later this space is still empty.

Five years later there is no memorial to the dead.

Five years later there is no building rising to show with proud defiance that we would not have our America wrung from us, by cowards and criminals.

Five years later this country's wound is still open.

Five years later this country's mass grave is still unmarked.

Five years later this is still just a background for a photo-op.

It is beyond shameful.

At the dedication of the Gettysburg Memorial -- barely four months after the last soldier staggered from another Pennsylvania field -- Mr. Lincoln said, "we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract."

Lincoln used those words to immortalize their sacrifice.

Today our leaders could use those same words to rationalize their reprehensible inaction. "We cannot dedicate, we can not consecrate, we can not hallow this ground." So we won't.

Instead they bicker and buck pass. They thwart private efforts, and jostle to claim credit for initiatives that go nowhere. They spend the money on irrelevant wars, and elaborate self-congratulations, and buying off columnists to write how good a job they're doing instead of doing any job at all.

Five years later, Mr. Bush, we are still fighting the terrorists on these streets. And look carefully, sir, on these 16 empty acres. The terrorists are clearly, still winning.

And, in a crime against every victim here and every patriotic sentiment you mouthed but did not enact, you have done nothing about it.

And there is something worse still than this vast gaping hole in this city, and in the fabric of our nation. There is its symbolism of the promise unfulfilled, the urgent oath, reduced to lazy execution.

The only positive on 9/11 and the days and weeks that so slowly and painfully followed it was the unanimous humanity, here, and throughout the country. The government, the President in particular, was given every possible measure of support.

Those who did not belong to his party -- tabled that.

Those who doubted the mechanics of his election -- ignored that.

Those who wondered of his qualifications -- forgot that.

History teaches us that nearly unanimous support of a government cannot be taken away from that government by its critics. It can only be squandered by those who use it not to heal a nation's wounds, but to take political advantage.

Terrorists did not come and steal our newly-regained sense of being American first, and political, fiftieth. Nor did the Democrats. Nor did the media. Nor did the people.

The President -- and those around him -- did that.

They promised bi-partisanship, and then showed that to them, "bi-partisanship" meant that their party would rule and the rest would have to follow, or be branded, with ever-escalating hysteria, as morally or intellectually confused, as appeasers, as those who, in the Vice President's words yesterday, "validate the strategy of the terrorists."

They promised protection, and then showed that to them "protection" meant going to war against a despot whose hand they had once shaken, a despot who we now learn from our own Senate Intelligence Committee, hated al-Qaida as much as we did.

The polite phrase for how so many of us were duped into supporting a war, on the false premise that it had 'something to do' with 9/11 is "lying by implication."

The impolite phrase is "impeachable offense."

Not once in now five years has this President ever offered to assume responsibility for the failures that led to this empty space, and to this, the current, curdled, version of our beloved country.

Still, there is a last snapping flame from a final candle of respect and fairness: even his most virulent critics have never suggested he alone bears the full brunt of the blame for 9/11.

Half the time, in fact, this President has been so gently treated, that he has seemed not even to be the man most responsible for anything in his own administration.

Yet what is happening this very night?

A mini-series, created, influenced -- possibly financed by -- the most radical and cold of domestic political Machiavellis, continues to be televised into our homes.

The documented truths of the last fifteen years are replaced by bald-faced lies; the talking points of the current regime parroted; the whole sorry story blurred, by spin, to make the party out of office seem vacillating and impotent, and the party in office, seem like the only option.

How dare you, Mr. President, after taking cynical advantage of the unanimity and love, and transmuting it into fraudulent war and needless death, after monstrously transforming it into fear and suspicion and turning that fear into the campaign slogan of three elections? How dare you -- or those around you -- ever "spin" 9/11?

Just as the terrorists have succeeded -- are still succeeding -- as long as there is no memorial and no construction here at Ground Zero.

So, too, have they succeeded, and are still succeeding as long as this government uses 9/11 as a wedge to pit Americans against Americans.

This is an odd point to cite a television program, especially one from March of 1960. But as Disney's continuing sell-out of the truth (and this country) suggests, even television programs can be powerful things.

And long ago, a series called "The Twilight Zone" broadcast a riveting episode entitled "The Monsters Are Due On Maple Street."

In brief: a meteor sparks rumors of an invasion by extra-terrestrials disguised as humans. The electricity goes out. A neighbor pleads for calm. Suddenly his car -- and only his car -- starts. Someone suggests he must be the alien. Then another man's lights go on. As charges and suspicion and panic overtake the street, guns are inevitably produced. An "alien" is shot -- but he turns out to be just another neighbor, returning from going for help. The camera pulls back to a near-by hill, where two extra-terrestrials are seen manipulating a small device that can jam electricity. The veteran tells his novice that there's no need to actually attack, that you just turn off a few of the human machines and then, "they pick the most dangerous enemy they can find, and it's themselves."

And then, in perhaps his finest piece of writing, Rod Serling sums it up with words of remarkable prescience, given where we find ourselves tonight: "The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs and explosions and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men.

"For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own -- for the children, and the children yet unborn."

When those who dissent are told time and time again -- as we will be, if not tonight by the President, then tomorrow by his portable public chorus -- that he is preserving our freedom, but that if we use any of it, we are somehow un-American...When we are scolded, that if we merely question, we have "forgotten the lessons of 9/11"... look into this empty space behind me and the bi-partisanship upon which this administration also did not build, and tell me:

Who has left this hole in the ground?

We have not forgotten, Mr. President.

You have.

May this country forgive you.

Oye, Bubeshko!

2006-09-07T14:25:00.000-07:00

So. Damn. Jealous.
One of my favorite buildings, the 1941 Schindler-designed Bubesko apartments in Silverlake, is renting out the grandest top floor unit. Private backyard and terrace included, only $3650 a month. All those bad things I've said about being rich? I take them all back.

So Much For The Dialectic

2006-08-31T14:09:00.000-07:00

I've actually met Hugh Hewitt, the right-wing radio host, after a lecture at my college. He seemed to be a nice enough guy, a bit long-winded and given to a creepy sentimentality in regards to Richard Nixon, but hardly a moron. Like with so many true ideologues, the main thing that struck you about him was the way that, when launching into a spiel, he already seemed to have it in the can; he got that blank look that people sometimes have when they are trying to remember everything on their grocery list, except in his case it wasn't mustard and shampoo but talking points he was dredging up from the shadier recesses of his mind. I think the word for this is didactic.

But like so many other conservative academics who used to pay lip service to ideas and conversation over naked power partisanship, Hewitt seems to have been driven around the bend by his fear after September 11th. Or maybe his ascension to the blunt instrument of the radio forced him to new unpleasant extremes. Whatever the reason, he has, in the ensuing years, devolved into the worst sort of apologist, a stiffnecked and clumsy cheerleader for a political movement that has little to do anymore with the ideas that once supposedly animated it. He is a kitten-strangler, the kind of true believer for whom no act carried out by his liege would be beyond the pale (including the aforementioned cat asphyxiation).

So it's not at all shocking that he was actually asking his listeners to call into his show yesterday to repeat on air and verbatim this trite, boring, worn-out little piece of wet noodle sophistry:

"Any vote for any House or Senate Democrat is a vote against victory and a vote for vulnerability. Vote for Victory. Vote Republican."

This is what it's come to for the bitter enders. We need to remember that when Tricky Dick himself (whom Hewitt once served in his post-Presidential days) left office in disgrace, a full quarter of the electorate still had his back. There are always those who will believe no matter what, like the Jehovah's Witness I once spoke with who, after admitting to me that I had soundly refuted an erroneous biblical claim he had made, repeated the exact same point word for word just ten minutes later. Reason was impervious to his catechism.

The tragedy is that, from what I little I have witnessed of Hewitt, he isn't that stupid.

I guess that's why we have the phrase "willing tool".

Whistlin' Dixie

2006-08-31T12:02:00.000-07:00

Gee, it must be an election year, cuz the code words are flying. First, fake GOB George Allen lets loose with an ethnic slur he must have learned on his mother's Pied-noir knee, an incident that reminds people of his good old days hangin' with the back-of-the-bus crowd and remembering Dixie at Palos Verdes High School. Then some cracker in Florida informs us that blacks can't swim. And now we get Conrad Burns, second-most-endangered member of the Senate, doing his best to make sure that we are pissing ourselves whenever the need arises to hail a taxi:

At the campaign event with [First Lady Laura] Bush, Burns talked about the war on terrorism, saying a "faceless enemy" of terrorists "drive taxi cabs in the daytime and kill at night."

Mind you, while hailing taxis at 2am, I've frequently been about ready to piss myself, but not because I'm afraid of teh terr'ists!

A Series Of Rubes

2006-08-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

Poor Ted Stevens. First, the Ted Stevens Memorial Bridge To Nowhere becomes the shining symbol of pork-driven Washington corruption. Second, well, teh internets turn out to be a series of tubes. And now, he's been revealed to be the lone senator holding up a bill that would actually make the government post a list on said series of tubes explaining where, exactly, all our tax money is spent. Don't want folks knowing that, now do we?

Small. Government. Conservative.
Words Ted Stevens should never be able to say without a laugh track playing in the background.

Whisky, Women, and Song

2006-08-25T15:29:00.000-07:00

This year Sunset Junction has been reading my I-pod. Unlike last year's suckiness (was it The Donnas?) this year we got our bad-ass country on, with Hank III, Drive By Truckers, Dave Alvin, Mike Stinson, etc. I'll be there working the Rebellion Rugby booth on Sunday afternoon and taking in the show Sunday evening. I might even wear my boots. Cowboy, not rugby.

Something In Common

2006-08-24T10:42:00.000-07:00

Matt Bors nails it. Thanks to Dave Weigel, guest-blogging at Andrew Sullivan.

American Taliban Redux

2006-08-23T13:20:00.000-07:00

Read this. It's the last two sentences that really fill you with horror. The theocon project takes another baby step forward:

WATERTOWN, N.Y. (AP) — The reverend of a church that dismissed a female Sunday School teacher this month after adopting what it called a literal interpretation of the Bible said a woman can perform any job — outside of the church.

Rev. Timothy LaBouf and the board of the First Baptist Church issued statements Saturday.

The church dismissed Mary Lambert, who had taught at the church for 54 years, on Aug. 9 with a letter explaining the church had adopted an interpretation that prohibits women from teaching men.

The letter quoted the first epistle to Timothy: "I do not permit a woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she must be silent."

Lambert has publicly criticized the decision, but the church did not publicly address the matter until Saturday, a day after the church board met.

The board's statement said other issues were behind Lambert's dismissal, but it did not say what they were.

LaBouf's statement said his stance against women teaching men in Sunday school would not affect his decisions as a member of the Watertown City Council.

"I believe that a woman can perform any job and fulfill any responsibility that she desires to" outside of the church, he wrote.

Thanks to Americablog for the heads-up.

Urban Pioneer?

2006-08-23T13:14:00.000-07:00

I laughed when I read this, then I realized, heh, that's kinda me there. Damn.

Still Blue

2006-08-21T17:24:00.000-07:00

Andy Towle reminds us over at Towleroad that one year on, New Orleans still sits in ruins.

Today I was discussing with a friend who lives here in downtown L.A. my recent contretemps with Professor Tom Slater over what to do about Los Angeles's homeless problem, the nation's largest (though that may change when the government cuts off the housing vouchers for Katrina refugees). We were discussing ways that government resources could be used more effectively to help the sick and addicted on the streets of my city, when a weariness overtook me. I said to my friend, look, we watched a major American city destroyed last year, and the government is leaving it to rot. How can we expect them to do anything right, when it comes to the poor?

In the long gaze of history, New Orleans will be seen as one of those natural disasters that reveals great weaknesses of man-made origin. It will be a flash-frame moment of truth about America today.

Misplaced Priorities

2006-08-21T15:23:00.000-07:00

Thanks to John de Rosier for a timely reminder of how the press, and we its consumers, get it wrong. Or, as this poster on Dailykos put it:

Allow me to introduce to you to Staff Sgt. Michael "Chad" Lloyd. His name is not John Mark Karr. He died recently while on foot patrol in Baghdad. His flight to the United States won't be in business class, and reporters won't scramble to sit next to him. His body's journey across the Atlantic won't be traced with flashy graphics or estimated time of arrivals. Flag-drapped coffins, you see, aren't as sexy as murder suspects...

Meet Sgt. Steven P. Mennemeyer. His name is not John Mark Karr. He joined the armed forces after 9/11, and was killed in Iraq in August. He was 26 years old and is survived by his young son. He earned 13 military honors, including a bronze star that was given to his girlfriend at his funeral. There's 19,100 Google hits for this fallen soldier. There's 9,530,000 for John Mark Karr.

Meet Pfc. Javier Chavez Junior. His name is not John Mark Karr. At just 19 years old, he married days before shipping off to Iraq, where he was killed. Seven others from his division were also killed, including Staff Sgt. Raymond Plouhar, who "left behind a poem for his family in the event of his death: 'I have given up many things for you to be free/Do not feel pity for me, for this is my choice.' I guess only ransom notes, not death notes, are worthy of wall-to-wall coverage.

Texas River Song

2006-08-21T11:09:00.000-07:00

So I spent three days in one of my favorite parts or America, central Texas. Austin is a great town, the hill country is beautiful, and other then being way too hot in August, it's about as comfortable a place as you are likely to find. But the best part of Texas is the people I know down there. Especially the gay men.

Straight folks have a lot of silly notions about gay guys. Some of them are based in fact, for sure, but many of them, as I show in my movie, are wide off the mark for most of us. Maybe the strangest notion is that gay men are inherently different from straight men in ways other then their sex lives, that they are more like women in their behaviors and preoccupations. Certainly there are gay men who are like that, and it is these men who are often put up in the media as avatars of homosexuality, gay men who are not threatening to straight guys because they are seen as essentially female.

This notion is insulting to both women and gay men, of course, but there are reasons why straight people think this. A straight friend I grew up with recently asked me, with honest curiosity, what was up with the lisp? I knew what he meant. There is a gay way of speaking, a kind of linguistic radar ping that gay guys send out in the tone and tenor of their voices. For many men, this is probably the way they were born speaking (and I've known some straight guys who had very effeminate voices as well), but we've also all known guys who were in the closet, and as soon as they came out, the squeal-notch suddenly went up to eleven. The lisp is both a natural speech pattern, but also an affectation, a way of signaling who you are, a mating call of sorts. It is a form of artifice.

One of the great things about my friends in Texas though, is that they are pretty much over the artifice of being gay. Oh, they have their own symbolic shorthand (military haircuts, facial hair) but mostly, they are guys who have accepted their guyness, their essential masculinity, which in Texas means toobing down the river, drinking too much, being a bit too loud and obnoxious, sitting up until 5am bullshitting about guns and boats and hot ass and run-ins with the law, and generally acting like the piggies that men are. Oh, and not giving a flying fuck about fulfilling straight folk's desire to have, in the immortal words of Homer Simpson, their beer cold and their homosexuals flaming. These boys don't need to squeal. They do, however, drawl like you wouldn't believe.

So here's to my Texas bubbas. Every time I go down there, it's a little harder to leave. I could see myself getting a little piece of land in Austin with a creek in the back, where I could build an off-the-grid straw bale house and take up the steel guitar. That would be livin' indeed.

And yeah, I'd vote for Kinky.

The Yellow Rose

2006-08-17T22:21:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Austin to float down the Guadalupe River in an inner tube to celebrate my friend Cody's birthday. It'll be me and a bunch of big, gay Texas bubbas. Beer, Barbeque, and beefy boys. Cheers.

Lawyers In Love

2006-08-14T18:43:00.000-07:00

Here's some new pics, courtesy of my friend Dave, of my beloved Goldie. She's a barely-legal eighteen year old Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.6, who just saw her odometer hit thirty thousand original miles. Yes, the perfect condition granny car is not just a myth, I actually found one. I don't know who that goofy guy is pawing my totally stock baby...

Patriotism At Wholesale Prices

2006-08-14T17:46:00.000-07:00

When discussing the controversy that frequently swirls around my employer American Apparel, I like to say that I think I work for one of the most ethical companies in America, it's just that our ethics aren't necessarily America's. What I mean is that in this country, a world of selfish behavior will be excused in the name of making a buck, while people waste their moral approbation over the far less important matter of sex. Money is far more powerful in people's lives then sex. Just think, how much of your time this week will go towards earning, spending, or managing money, and how much will go towards trying to or actually having sex?

I love working for a company that treats its blue-collar workers better then anyone in the garment industry. On the other hand, I don't mind at all working for a company that makes hot shorts.

One of the most disturbing aspects of our poor economic ethics is the cheap way that we will sell out even our national heritage, and turn a collective blind eye towards the monetary exploitation of what in other nations would be considered sacred events. It's not just that the Administration has abused 9/11 as a brass ring to unprecedented political power, or that a crass man like Oliver Stone is trying to revive his career using that day of all days. If you have walked along the streets surrounding the WTC site in New York, you have seen the tchotchke vendors, a sight that always reminds me of Jesus wielding the lash in the temple. Yet what could top actually transforming a symbol of our shared tribal grief into real, cold, hard, cash? Gold and silver, recovered from the ruins, and now turned into the perfect token of a nation willing to put its soul on the block for a quick buck. Tell, me, which of these images offends you more?

Bang The Drum Loudly

2006-08-14T15:40:00.000-07:00

I've been reading Andrew Sullivan since the first week he started a blog, back in, I think, 2000. Despite his embrace of conservative conventional wisdom and his reflexive contrarianism, he's always been an interesting and occasionally novel thinker, and it's through him that I keep track of what the neo-cons are saying. He had enough integrity to admit the failure of the war and regret his support for it, or at least his support of this Administration, but his humility was short-lived. He's been attacking the "liberal blogosphere", specifically DailyKos, for not sufficiently addressing the Israeli-Lebanese war, while being just as bellicose about that current situation as he was in the Iraq run-up. He refuses to contemplate that Israel's actions, just like America's since 9/11, are both short-sided and conterproductive to their own safety. I support the right of Israel to exist in peace, but practicing retaliatory collective punishment works about as well in Lebanon as it does in Baghdad. I wrote to Andrew about how this current issue brings up for me all my doubts about American empire. He didn't respond, as he has in the past, so I'm going to go ahead and make it an open letter. Andrew likes to think of himself as a "conservative of doubt". I just think that when it comes to wars of convenience, his doubt doesn't extend nearly far enough:

Andrew,

I had hoped, reading your blog over the last few months, that you had learned the lesson from the Iraq debacle that we’ve all surely had to take to heart, the lesson that Thucydides wrote about in regards to the Athenians, the lesson we should have learned thirty years ago, which is that there are few greater dangers to democracy than the chest-thumping foolishness of unjust warfare.

But reading you the last few days, I really feel like its Déjà vu all over again. You accuse the liberal blogs of ignoring the war on terror (I’ll refrain for your sake from employing quotes) yet you have yet to show the desire to grapple yourself with the complexities of the nasty and short-sided little war that Israel is currently waging. Instead, you make an argument that Israel is justified in whatever they are doing because their morals are more like ours. Tell that to the hundreds of civilian dead in Lebanon. All the torture practiced under the Rumsfeld doctrine doesn’t even begin to weigh on the scales of evil with the collective punishment being dished out in that sad country. But for you, arsenal delivered on the tip of a missile is vastly morally superior then that delivered in the trunk of a Mercedes. I don’t speak for any particular group or mindset, but I do know that I just don’t buy it anymore. Asymmetrical warfare, conventional warfare, civil war, terrorism, they all seem to have the same consequences these days, where increasingly the dead are counted in noncombatants. I have a hard time grappling with what my country is doing in the Middle East because I’m overwhelmed with the shame I feel when I consider it. I had hoped that seeing the debacle in Iraq might have made you question more then just the abysmal leadership of this particular administration, but to ask a far more difficult question. How is it that we can say that we lead the world when we practice atrocity daily?

I’m not speaking for the “liberal blogosphere” or for anyone else, just for myself, so I will say this. I love my country. I never, ever want to see Americans harmed. But when George Bush says, like he did this morning, that our enemies want to attack us because we love freedom, I feel a knot in the pit of my stomach. Our enemies want to attack us, Andrew, because for years we have attacked and humiliated them. We have manipulated their affairs and supported their oppressors. We have, in the name of fighting communism, or protecting American interests, or oil, or fighting terror, or whatever excuse we found convenient, become the bully boy of the world. Yes, it is blowback, the endless circle of violence in which Israel also sadly finds itself. Maybe there are people who agree with me, and maybe there are not, but I know that primarily I’m ashamed of my government, I don’t trust my government to do the right thing, and so yes, I want us to pull out, to pull back, to retreat behind our oceans, and try and salvage what tattered remnants of our ideals are left here at home. We just can’t do what we’re doing anymore without utterly abandoning what we were supposed to be, a nation governed by an informed and democratic populace. The permanent national security state is a cancer upon us, Andrew, and I just don’t see any other way to save anything of our original principles but to shut it down, which may be the most conservative action of all. There are fights worth fighting, but for too long, we have fought fights not worth fighting. We have squandered our moral capital, and now we frequently don’t even know what we are fighting for.

Our fathers saw a nation of limited government, a nation governed differently then the petty monarchies of Europe. A nation where a man was to turn his energies towards building his own future, and the state was to serve him, not the other way around. That has been lost, and we have become the empire we were warned against. You rail against what “conservatives” have become, but the essence of what they have become is cheerleaders for empire. When I read some of your recent posts, ranting about Islamic fascists, cheaply invoking of the 9/11 dead, refusing to see the complexity in the recent Israeli war, excoriating those who refuse to puff up their chests alongside you in the endless and secretive war on a state of mind that is the GWOT, I fear that I see what I saw in the run-up to the Iraq war, just another cheerleader. I don’t want to be a part of an empire, Andrew. It’s not a righteous cause. I love my country, but I can’t support any more foreign adventures. I love my country these days like I love someone with an addiction that is eating them up. Our addiction is our sense of moral self-righteousness and our casual use of violence, and our addiction had distorted our judgment something fierce. The terrorist sees a marketplace and straps a bomb to his chest. We see the terrorist in the marketplace and drop a bomb on his head. The results are pretty much the same, either way. You consider the difference to be crucial, but every time we do this, a thousand new enemies are born out of the violence. I fear that you are grasping at distinctions that long ago ceased to exist. It’s terrifying to me, but I really believe that the only way to salvage our Republic is to turn off our war machine and hope for a bit of peace to put ourselves back together. We might not get it, but we have to try. Technology eventually destroys empires, so in the long run, only republics will have a chance. We must indeed cut and run, not from our enemies, but from our own hysterical overreactions and the temptations of easy power that we face. It’s our only real future. Otherwise, our enemies do win in the end, no matter how many bombs we drop on them. You better believe that they know that.

Cheers,
Spence

Speaking Of Monkeys Again...

2006-08-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

This DailyKos contributor has nailed how I feel about the Conservative Whiners Of Doom that dominate right-wing media. They seem to forget that in the little 24/7 drama that they are creating in their own heads, their own starring character is really just that of a coward:

I know there are millions of brave, decent conservatives. My apologies to those folks for the following. But good grief, when did the Republican Party become infested with what sound like so many loud, whining cowardly pundits? One second Reagan is up there standing toe-to-toe with the Rooskis, negotiating cool as a cucumber with 20,000 nukes pointed at him, and the next thing I know, the likes of Limbaugh or the crew at Powerwhine and Freeperland, are all shrieking like a class full of tweaked-out, neurotic fifth-graders having a panic attack every time OBL pops up in a grainy video with a rusty AK in the background. What the hell happened to the GOP I once knew?...

The Cold-war is just one of many threats we've faced that exceed the danger posed to America from Osama bin Laden by orders of magnitude. We also survived Hitler, Imperial Japan, the Kaiser, a Civil War, and the British Empire--the latter one twice by the way--just to name a few.

In that historical context, reading or hearing a bunch of yelping GOP crybabies incessantly screeching in craven horror that Al Qaeda is the worst, gosh-darn biggest bad-ass threat we've ever faced is, frankly, an act that has grown tired and embarrassing. And when they yammer, time and time again, that it's not enough for them to be quivering under their beds, they insist the entire country crawl under there and obsess along with them, while they lay in fetal position swaddled in their faded George Bush security blanket squawking in fear, it's enough to make Burt the Turtle duck and cover in disgust.

I'm vaguely recalling some Jefferson quote about those who desire both liberty and security deserving neither...

Speaking Of Monkeys...

2006-08-14T13:49:00.000-07:00

No photo recently has quite captured my loathing of the media as well as this picture of Boy George, being followed around by 25 photographers while fulfilling his community service sentence for cocaine possession.

So, what's really going on in the world today? Who knows?

Dance! Monkey! Dance!

2006-08-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

Damned if we aren't just a bunch of Monkeys. Tip and image thanks to Towleroad.

An Actual Dialogue!

2006-08-10T13:04:00.000-07:00

OK, I owe Tom Slater an apology. I sent him the letter in the post below without telling him that I was also publishing it to my blog. This was a violation of basic netiquette. I should have waited to see if he responded and asked him before I put my critique up. This is especially true in light of the fact that he responded thoughtfully to my criticisms. So, with his permission, I will publish his response to me, and our subsequent back and forth. It's important to remember that, even on the internet, we shouldn't always talk past each other and drop bombs, but try and engage in an actual dialogue. That's how we move the ball forward, folks.

Here's Tom's response to my first letter:

Dear Spencer (if I may),

Thank you for your message, and interesting comments on the op-ed. I have been receiving all kinds of messages from people in downtown, from people in and around Skid Row, and far beyond LA - some supporting the general argument, others like yours criticising it, which is typical of the divisive nature of gentrification. It is good to learn that many people are talking about the broader issues contained in my piece - clearly this is an important debate, but one which I do feel should be constructive rather than dismissive.

I was not invited to write the piece because of any in-depth knowledge of LA. I was invited by the LA Times to place recent downtown events they wrote to me about in the broader context of gentrification, a topic I have researched and written about in North America. You are entirely correct in pointing out the one factual error in the piece. The information re:
street cleaning given to me by the newspaper turned out to be incorrect.
The mistake was due to a miscommunication and an editing error: it has since been duly noted and corrected, and apologies have been made by both the LA Times and myself to CCEA for misrepresenting their actions, which CCEA have accepted.

I stand by the arguments made in the piece except for that error. I absolutely agree with you that change must happen. I never said it shouldn't. The question is what kind of change, and in whose interests is change happening, and that is what I was *warning* about. If you read the piece carefully, there are no factual errors about LA bar the one mentioned above, but instead a message about gentrification which is something I know is surrounding Skid Row. For instance, I talked about deinstitutionalization in the broader US (not LA) context, and the loft conversion cap thing was again a general message, which your local SRO ban is following - but for how long? There are huge pressures on this moratorium. Plus, the responses I have been receiving confirm that my worries are somewhere near the mark.

My point for years now is that either the unliveable disinvestment and neglect that you mention or gentrification and displacement is a *false
choice* for low-income/homeless areas, and once this is recognised (it so often isn't), then desititute people are not just shifted elsewhere.

This is an important debate (your e-mail is indicative of that), but one I do feel is more productive with less adversarial patrolling of one's own territory.

With very best wishes,

Tom.

Here's how I responded:

Dear Tom,

Thanks for responding. I agree that the choice between “neglect and disinvestment” and “gentrification and displacement” is a false one; however, it is a false choice that is a first postulate of your op-ed argument, not one generated by the reality on the ground. I know that there are places where the kind of gentrification you speak of is happening. I briefly lived in one, in Camberwell in South London, where an ethnically mixed and income mixed neighborhood was being made over by the arrival of upper-middle class folks buying up and restoring row houses. This is not however what is happening in Los Angeles. Anyone unfamiliar with L.A. would think upon reading your piece that low income housing was being turned into lofts, but this isn’t supported by the facts. Over 98% of loft conversions in downtown Los Angeles have been to industrial and office buildings. I know of only one hotel that has succumbed to loft conversion, and even this singular building is not now condos, but market-rate apartments occupied mostly by middle class residents, such as a grad-student friend of mine. In fact, the newest hotel in downtown Los Angeles used to be the headquarters of an oil company, and another prominent conversion is now going into a former vegetable warehouse. My former loft was in a building that was once a garment sweatshop. As light manufacturing, especially garment manufacturing, has moved overseas, these empty spaces have become housing, and for the first time that I can remember, there is actually signs of life on the streets of downtown after 6pm. This growth will cause more people to care what happens downtown, and I have seen first hand the positive benefits to this newfound interest in what was otherwise a public policy cipher.

I apologize if I came across as trying to kick you out of my sandbox, but we’ve had our fair share of armchair quarterbacking out here. The problem with large themes is that they are so often unequally applied. Your argument might do well in San Francisco or Brooklyn, but in a city with a downtown as blighted and ignored as that of L.A., it can only hurt. It was misguided activists who petitioned and sued Governor Reagan and Governor Rockefeller in New York to release the mentally ill from institutions without adequately considering the unintended consequences, and I fear that the same may again happen here, that activists will sweep all the complex change now happening downtown under the rubric of “gentrification”, and that to be opposed. Our downtown revival is still a weak patient, Tom, and I fear anything, however well-intentioned, that will smother it. If it were up to me, every elected official, wealthy civic booster, and city planning academic in L.A. would be required to live in the twenty blocks of Skid Row. Only then can we really address the massive problem of homelessness, only when the powerful people of this famously disconnected city really see it every day. The new residents are raising their voices in a way no one else ever has here. It’s not just about real estate, it’s about seeing before our eyes the toll of poor mental health and addiction in a country that pays too little attention to either. If it takes the lure of exposed brick and nightclubs to make people care, well, I’m willing to pay that price. Your objections may one day actually be a problem here. Would that we someday have only such more esoteric issues to confront.

Cheers,
Spencer Windes
Downtown Los Angeles

P.S.
Tom,
You might also be interested in today's piece on Skid Row in the Times.

This is something we see regularly down here, the revolving door from treatment center to open-air drug market. These are the kinds of challenges we face. I've lived in some pretty gentrified places (Williamsburg, Dupont Circle, The Mission) but I've never had to literally turn down half a dozen dealers in one block. It's just overwhelming. We've got a ways to go before gentrification really sets in, I'm afraid.

Spencer Windes

And finally, Tom's response back to me.

Thanks for the reply. I wish I had the time to respond in depth to your
fascinating observations, which I really do appreciate you sharing with me.
One immediate response is that the conversion of empty industrial and office buildings into lofts that house middle class residents is in fact a form of gentrification (among others, Sharon Zukin's classic book 'Loft Living' deals with this very well - and a colleague of mine recently researched this in your old neighbourhood of Williamsburg). Gentrification is much much more than the middle classes buying up and restoring houses.

Displacement does not necessarily define gentrification: the erosion or prevention of affordable housing in favour of middle class interests does.
Decades of research illustrate that if the mentally ill/drug addicted are adequately housed, their symptoms will be at the very least more manageable. I can't help but imagine the progress for the homeless if garment sweatshops and vegetable warehouses were not appropriated by profit-seeking real estate interests. This is not to reduce everything to real estate capital, but rather to point out that it is a significant piece of the puzzle. I have researched and written about these issues in Toronto, and similar things are happening in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver, a neighbourhood with more than its fair share of drug addicted, mentally ill people (being pressed on all sides by gentrification, and now resisting it vigorously). I have also written about the need for a 'geography of gentrification', to understand how different places experience the process in different ways - if downtown LA is as unique as you explain, then it is a primary research site.

I wish I shared your optimism over the potential for change if every elected official, wealthy civic booster, and city planning academic in L.A.
would be required to live in the twenty blocks of Skid Row. For me, the problem is that the enormous profits and taxes that can be extracted from the built environment are too often irresistible, and I would be amazed if such people in tandem with large developement corporations are not licking their chops at the Skid Row street cleaning as a sign of a future clean-up in the form of gentrification. Plus the fact that Bill Bratton is the LAPD police chief - a man with a track record of expelling homeless people from Manhattan in order to pave the way for massive profit-seeking capital investment, without considering the consequences for the homeless - does suggest that it would not be sensible to assume that change is going to happen with any compassion.

I thank you again for contacting me directly, and I very much hope you will prove me wrong and gentrification will not affect Skid Row any time soon!

best,

Tom.

Academic Postering

2006-08-09T13:20:00.000-07:00

Professor Slater,
I’m writing you in response to your ill-informed op-ed on gentrification in downtown Los Angeles. I’m sure by now that you’ve heard from others about the factual errors in your article, such as the wrong assumption that loft conversions are happening to SRO hotels (almost every loft conversion downtown has been of underutilized office space, and there is currently a ban on SRO conversions) and even more egregiously, your description of the homeless being “literally swept and hosed out” of their encampments. I witnessed the cleaning of the skid row sidewalks first hand, and in no way was it as you described. It was instead the kind of orderly street maintenance that one usually sees in cities, and that one rarely sees on Skid Row. No homeless were hosed out, as you so vividly wrote. That you would use such a simple act as hosing down sidewalks as the entrée into your argument tells me that your argument was decided upon long before you happened upon this particular “fact”. If you had gone looking for evidence about the sidewalk cleaning, you would have learned a different story that did not fit your pre-conceived thesis. Since I both work in Skid Row and until recently lived in the neighborhood, I can tell you that regular cleaning the streets would be just a basic start to reversing the historic neglect of this neighborhood. Professor, I’ve lived in the “third world”, in some real poverty-struck places, but I’ve never seen the kind of physical filth one sees on the streets of Los Angeles. To leave people lying amongst human waste, used syringes, used condoms and discarded colostomy bags is doing no one a service. Sweeping and cleaning the streets is the minimum of what this city should be doing.

But then again, your whole article was a lovely bit of theory at odds with the facts on the ground. Skid Row in Los Angeles comprises the epicenter for the largest homeless population in North America, a statement that has been true since the 1970’s, long before the very recent and still rather tenuous renewed interest in downtown living. Los Angeles County has a homeless population of over 90,000 that dwarfs the small population of loft-dwelling downtown residents. Most of these homeless folks are there for two reasons, drug addiction and mental illness. We’re not talking about the kind of transitional homeless that one sees often in other parts of the country, people who have lost their housing through economic circumstance and who are struggling to find a new home. These are the long term, people incapable of fulfilling even the base requirements of caring for themselves. Cut the rents by 75% in Los Angeles, and you would still have this population on the streets. Gentrification is affecting a small corner of downtown Los Angeles, and has done little to change the larger dynamic of downtown as both a warm weather beacon for transients and a regional dumping ground for the homeless from throughout the area. If you wanted to actually address the real issues that create the homeless problem in L.A. maybe you could have talked about the severe under-policing of downtown, the dumping of medical patients, the blind eye turned to an open-air drug market, and the long-term unofficial policy of shipping the addicted and mentally ill to this neighborhood; instead you use your precious bullhorn on the Times editorial page to bring up the factually erroneous idea that a few loft conversions have forced people out of their homes, people that I would remind you are simply incapable of living on their own without real help.

Your one stab at an actual explanation even missed its mark, professor. It wasn’t the Reagan Presidential Administration that adopted the disastrous policy of “deinstitutionalization”. It was the Reagan governorship of California in the late 60’s-early 70’s that started this trend, abetted by advocates of the mentally ill who didn’t bother to plan out what would happen to the deinstitutionalized. The mentally ill are almost totally a state responsibility in the U.S., and it was Ronald Reagan’s actions as governor, which were widely followed across the country, that precipitated the wholesale release of the mentally ill onto the streets. By the time Reagan became President, Skid Row in L.A. was already in its deplorable state. I know because I’m a lifelong resident of the city, which you seem to have visited a few times.

But then again, what are facts and experience when held up against a good gestalt theory? Unfortunately professor, your theory is one that will do damage. Downtown Los Angeles is just starting to revive; it’s still largely a ghost town on evenings and weekends, populated only by the sad figures of the wandering neglected. As more attention comes to downtown, as more people connect with it, move here, come here for entertainment, participate in the neighborhood, increasing awareness of the problems of Skid Row is happening. This is what downtown really needs, more people who feel an actual stake in the neighborhood and what happens here. I’ve witnessed in the last five years the death of the old neglectful business establishment in downtown and the birth of a resident-driven neighborhood council that is worried about far more then real estate values. Yes, our neighborhood is changing, but this is still the most disgracefully neglected neighborhood in America. Change must happen. It cannot continue as it was. Downtown’s problem is not I-Pod’s and latte’s. Downtown’s problem is hardcore drug addiction and mental illness. We’re fighting that fight as best we can. The last thing we need is an academic with a grand theory stepping in and lecturing us. As my nation has learned most recently in its foreign adventuring, big theories are no replacement of actual facts, knowledge, and experience on the ground. As a downtown L.A. resident with just such experience, all I can say about your article is that you are not.

Then again, what do I know about Bristol? Nothing, really. So I’ll refrain from writing op-ed’s in the Bristol Evening Post.
Cheers,

Spencer Windes
Downtown Los Angeles

The Bird

2006-08-04T14:25:00.000-07:00

FUH2 comes to video!

Last Night's Wankers

2006-08-03T15:08:00.000-07:00

About a week ago American Apparel came out with new Gold Lame hot pants. I knew it was a bad idea. Here's the proof, NSFW.

A Series Of Tubes

2006-08-02T11:55:00.000-07:00

For You Jalopnik Readers

2006-08-01T16:28:00.000-07:00

In case you were wondering, I think this picture pretty well explains why I was included in Davey's "bear" posting. I do not, however, own a Masarati.

There's No Place Like Homophobia

2006-07-31T17:08:00.000-07:00

I love this story. A nice couple opens a bed and breakfast in a small town in Kansas. On a trip to Dorothy's House, a museum in nearby Liberal, Kansas dedicated to the Wizard Of Oz, their twelve-year-old son buys them a rainbow flag. They put it up outside their inn.

The yawning gates of hell proceed to open beneath them.

The local newspaper runs an article on the "gay" flag. They never even bother to contact the inn's owners, a lovely couple named J.R. and Robin Knight. The local radio station threatens to pull the ads for their restaurant. A town preacher confronts them over the flag, proclaiming that the flag is the equivalent of flying women's underwear from their flagpole. When J.R. Knight jokes that maybe he will do that next, the preacher threatens to have him arrested.

And then there is this moron:

Local resident, Keith Klassen says the flag is a slap in the face to the conservative community of Meade. “To me it's just like running up a Nazi flag in a Jewish neighborhood. I can't walk into that establishment with that flag flying because to me that's saying that I support what the flag stands for and I don't," says Klassen.

As this commenter on the Stranger blog sarcastically put it:

My conservative aunt and uncles survived the "Great Kansas Purge" of 1974, when gay thugs rounded up the decent, God-fearing Americans, and sent them to the camps.
We Will Never Forget!

Of course, this all ended as you suspected, when someone cut the flag down. But never fear. The Knights, though breeders, are cool as hell. They ain't backing down:

Said Knight: Any gay or lesbian people that do stop by will be treated with the best service I can give you. When this rainbow flag shreds, I will buy another one, and another one, and another one - just like my American flag, I'll buy another one."

Queers who heard about this over the blogs are rushing to support them by booking rooms at their inn, rooms they may never use, to thank them for what thay are doing, standing up for others, even though it's not "their" fight.

Finally, something that's not the matter with Kansas.

Thanks to Towleroad for the heads-up.

Hot Enuf Fer Ya?

2006-07-27T14:26:00.000-07:00

A rather bland piece in the New York Times today discussed the numerous heat-related deaths in California in the last week. But this was by far the stand-out gem of a paragraph:

Actress Lindsay Lohan, 20, was overcome by the heat while filming a movie in 105-degree weather on Tuesday and treated at a hospital for overheating and dehydration, publicist Leslie Sloan Zelnick told ''The Insider'' entertainment show.

I guess that's what happens when it gets hot enough to freebase off the sidewalk.

Don't Ask Don't WHAT THE FUCK!?!

2006-07-27T13:25:00.000-07:00

You know what America doesn't need? It doesn't need decorated Army sargents who speak fluent Arabic. Yeah, that's what America doesn't need. I know that because the Army just spent eight months investigating a soldier with the 82nd Airborne, with the melodic name of Bleu Copas, to see if he was gay, based on the sole evidence of a few anonymous e-mails from some spiteful soul. When they determined that he was indeed a fag(he refused, as is his right, to answer the questions) they threw him out. They've spent almost 370 million dollars throwing gays out of the military since 1993, including a number with expensive specialty training like Sargent Copas, as well as a few decorated Iraq war veterans. Your tax dollars busy at work, folks.

Damn, I fell like waving a flag right about now. I just don't know which one.

Listening At My Desk

2006-07-26T12:03:00.000-07:00

I've had Rabbit Fur Coat by Jenny Lewis (late of Rilo Kiley) and the Watson Twins for a while now, but listening to it this morning I was hit hard by what a fine record it is. Melodic, alt-country influenced songs with sharp, funny, sad and political lyrics serve to make it a sweetly timed look into our current state of national and personal disrepair. Rise Up With Fists!!! is now the default on my Myspace page. Jenny mixes large and small themes together like one of those people you know who has something smart and a bit silly to say about everything. Here's the lyrics from Born Secular:

I was born secular
and inconsolable
I heard that he walked
he walked the earth

God goes
where he wants
and who knows
where he is not

Not in me

It's the way
mothers greet their sons
when it's a moment too late
It's the law of the land
But sometimes the dam just breaks

God works in mysterious ways
And God gives
and then he takes away

From me

Lack Of Faith

2006-07-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

George Michael was caught by a tabloid photographer having sex in the bushes at Hampstead Heath with this good sport:

A 58 year old unemployed truck driver from Brighton.

Here's what Georgie had to say when he stumbled out of the bushes:

"Are you gay? No? Then fuck off! This is my culture!"

That is so wrong, on so many levels, I hardly know where to start.

From time to time, I suffer from what my black friend (like Steven Colbert, I only have one) Anson and I call Model Minority Syndrome. That's the tendency to suffer embarrassment when others in the minority group in which you find yourself do or say stupid things. Did I really want Rosie O'Donnell riding the bus with me? Did I really want Carson Kressley doing color commentary at the Miss Universe pagent? Model Minority Syndrome may be terribly unfair, yet I still cringe when a public homo like this train wreck

uses our common identity to excuse his bad behavior. Being a queer in no way excuses Lesbian Mullets, Madonna worship, and cottaging in Hampstead Heath. I mean, come on George, if you were that hard-up, you could have at least just gone off to The Hoist.

Thanks to Joe.My.God. for the heads-up.

BTW, Hampstead Heath is also where Kevin Spacey was "mugged".

Behold The Atheist's Nightmare

2006-07-25T11:36:00.000-07:00

Indeed. This may be the greatest example of bad logic I've seen in ages.

By the way, I once accidently knocked Kirk Cameron on his ass in a ski lodge in Park City. It must have shaken something loose.

Child Soldiers

2006-07-19T11:15:00.000-07:00

Here's a photo of a lovely young Israeli schoolgirl signing a bomb to be sent to Lebanon, to, you know, kill people.

Man, talk about acting like children. In the past, I've been highly sympathetic to Israel. The hatred evinced against the Jews in the Muslim world only makes you want to stand up for them. But this is getting ridiculous. They may be the only functioning democracy in the Middle East, but they are acting more and more every day like a rogue state. Israel has a right to exist, but they have kept a captive population imprisoned for generations now, and this latest round of attacks on civilian targets in Lebanon stinks of nothing so much as collective punishment. If there are any supporters of Israel out there, please tell me how Israel's current course of behavior is making the world safer for Jews? That's what most of the Jews that I know want, a safer world. That is a reasonable goal that Israelis can agree on, except if you are one of those crazy-eyed orthodox settlers with the mandate direct from Jahweh, in which case, have at it. Just don't expect me to care what happens to you. So if the goal is a safer world for Jews, how are we getting there from here?

I've joked in the past that Israelis need to realize that the real promised land is the Fairfax District, but I'm starting to think that if I were an Israeli, I might believe the same thing. When you are a minority, it is always necessary to maintain at least some sympathy from the majority to survive. That's a sad fact of life. Israel is spoiling the goodwill of the world towards their state and their people, making it easier to dismiss them, as the French ambassador to the U.S. famously did a few years ago, as "that shitty little state". I don't want this to happen to Israel, but it seems ever more likely, one dead civilian at a time. Pretty soon only the crazy-eyed evangelicals who misread Revelations will support them. And unless they are planning on moving their entire nation to Alabama, well...

Then again, it's not like we are a lot better in that whole "missile message" department...

Thanks to Joe.My.God for the photo.

Slouching Towards Jerusalem

2006-07-17T13:18:00.000-07:00

Holy Crap, you know that little war over there in the Middle East, no not that one that's feeding good Oklahoma boys to Gog and Magog, I mean the one with those suspiciously well-armed Hebrews and their nasty neighbors (I tried to warn them about that neighborhood, but no...). Well anyway, we finally have the mystery of this particular little dustup fixed. Don't blame it on Hezbollah. It's all because Jeebus is mad at teh gay again. Lordy.

Blood From A Turnip

2006-07-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

So, here we go onto Round Three. If you are just joining us, please read the first two parts below.

Anon wrote:

Oh Spenny, I am sorry that you have spent soo much of your time trying to defend your actions to those who really know you (as do I). You forgot to mention that you felt the warmth of the spirit while wearing your Mickey Mouse Shirt. The problem that you have and can't escape (because of your upbringing and serving a mission) is that you know and have felt the truth, but you have to make a million excuses to validate why you chose your path.

Well, Anon, I don't own a Mickey Mouse shirt, so I can't really make that claim, although it is called the Magic Kingdom!

Nor can I know if you really know me or not, because I don't know who you are. You continue to provoke without the courage to stand behind your words, to speak with an assumed authority that cannot be tested or validated through the veil of the internet. Not surprising, that.

Really, Anon. You don't "feel" the truth. You learn the truth, by putting it to the test. You choose to reject the the things I have learned in my life and presented to you out of hand, because they do not conform with your own unchallenged beliefs. That is the definition of a closed mind. Not once have you asked me "how do you know these things" or "why do you believe this". In fact, you haven't addressed anything I've said at all, choosing instead to simply reject and attack me, because what I say is not convenient to you. This is exactly the kind of arrogance I was speaking about before.

While I'm on the topic of arrogance, let's deal with your assumption that you know me at all. You may have known me once, that is true. But people change. Hopefully, we grow wiser as we grow older. I certainly feel like I've learned a few things along the way, and I've got a lot more to learn. You, on the other hand, don't seem to evince any interest in learning anything at all. Of course not. You already know the whole truth, right? Lucky you.

This is the self-righteous mindset that destroys people. This is the mindset that leads to fundamentalism. This is the mindset, that when followed to it's natural end, leads to suicide bombings and Sharia law and lynchings and witch hunts and crusades and Oklahoma City and my friend Alice Hoglan's son going to his death on 9/11 and the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It is the mindset of closed knowledge, a hermetically sealed world where all questions are already answered before they are asked, and unanswered questions are rejected out of hand.

I'm not the one who needs excuses, Anon, because unlike you, I am comfortable with ambiguity. I accept that there are things that I don't know, questions that have not been answered, facts that are inherently contradictory. Read the Bible, brother. I mean really read it, not simply the passages that they highlight for you in Gospel Doctrine Class. Sit down and devour the book from end to end, like I had to my Sophomore year in college. If you do, then maybe you will see that contradiction and conflict and ambiguity and confusion and struggle and criticism are all there in the fundamental foundation block of Christianity.

But do you really want to do so? Do you really want to try and think objectively about the things you are told by others to believe? Where could that lead? What if that makes you actually, you know, reject something you come to see as wrong? Isn't that scary?

Look, you may actually care about me, or you may not, I don't know. What I do know is that you are acting like a coward. You refuse to reveal yourself, which is cowardly. But far more importantly, you refuse to listen to me, which is an action based on fear. You won't engage my ideas, you are afraid to engage my ideas, so instead you will only attack me by trying to tell me what I "really" must believe.

Why, Anon, are you so afraid?

BTW, I've taken the time to respond to you because I care about you, not because I feel any need to justify my life. It's a cheap rhetorical trick to to start a dialogue with someone and then criticize them when they care enough to carefully and thoughtfully respond. Would you have felt better if I had just told you to sod off? I didn't, because I believe it's important that we share our wisdom with each other, that we share the things we learn. That's why I keep the blog. You just gave me an opportunity to explain some of the lessons I've learned along the way. The fact that I took the time to do so should not be held against me, Anon. It's called giving a shit, brother.

I guess the next step is when you tell me that you'll be praying for me, right?

Anon Part Two

2006-07-14T11:13:00.000-07:00

The discussion continues. I apologize to my non-Mormon readers, as some of this might fly past you, but I hope you get why this matters. Skip down and read the previous post if you haven't already to get the context.

Anon wrote:

Spencer, talk as you will, it looks like college got to your thinking and that you had a bad incident in the church, and I know who your referring to......sorry

(the "bad incident" he refers to was one I mentioned in the comments section of the posting below)

Anon,
Wow, right away with the ad hominem attack. Come on man, you could have at least addressed a little bit what I was arguing, instead of just attacking my education.

Bizarrely, though, you didn't follow the normal ad hominem route by attacking me as uneducated. Instead, if I understand you correctly, you are attacking me as too educated.

Think about that for a minute.

First of all, let me clear up a misperception you may have about my college experience. If you listen to a lot of talk radio, you might get the impression that college is full of religion-hating left wing secular professors whose only goal is to break down the faith of impressionable young students. My own experience is that that is a load of hogwash. Yeah, I may have had teachers who fit that bill but my professors also included a devout Jesuit priest, a famous Neo-con philosopher who'd been in the Reagan Administration, and a committed Aristotelian who had some serious doubts about whether the earth really revolved around the sun! In other words, it was a diverse bunch. I learned lots of things in college, but there was really only one important thing I learned. That was the importance of applying reasoned critical analysis to any claim.

In other words, they taught me to think objectively about things. To ask why, how, what evidence supported a claim. It didn't matter if it was a math proof or a political theory or a claim about the nature of God, you put it to the test as best you could, struggling to see all the consequences of the claim, all its weaknesses and strengths.

Yes, I did this in regards to the values I was taught growing up. Many of those values came through this process stronger and clearer to me. This was especially true when reading the four gospels. I felt that in Jesus teachings there were many ideas that were incredibly wise and reasoned.

However, I will admit, some of the things I learned in church failed even the most basic questioning. They just didn't stand up to reason. At that point, I was faced with a dilemma. Do you know the allegory of Plato's Cave? Once you've come into a little bit of light, it's pretty well near impossible to retreat back into the darkness. The Good Lord had blessed me, just like he has blessed you, with a spirit of discernment. By applying that spirit, I realized that while there were many valuable things in the gospel I'd been taught as a young man, there were also many bad ideas, and those bad ideas had consequences.

Which brings me to your second point. You say that you know of the incident to which I made reference. Supposing it is indeed the same incident (and I actually heard rumors that there had been more then one) I'm really surprised that you would just blow it off. Let me be clear. A man in authority in our ward molested several young girls. The mother of at least one of the girls went to the bishop. The bishop, using his authority over the woman as her spiritual leader, threatened this mother with disfellowship if she made this claim public knowledge. To this date, the man who did this, and the bishop who entered into a criminal conspiracy to cover it up, have never been brought to justice. The Stake President who found out about this incident, while sympathetic to the mother, also did not step forward to bring this to justice, thus continuing the conspiracy. As a result, this man continued to be a free and respected member of the community and may very well have gone on to repeat the behavior. Justice was denied. Justice to children.

So, yeah, I'd say that's a bit of an incident. But rather then just writing it off, you should think for a second about the consequences. A church, claiming divine inspiration and authority from God, uses that authority to cover up a heinous crime and protect one of its own. Doesn't this call into question the source of the church's authority for you? Doesn't it make you wonder what kind of an organization would put the avoidance of scandal above justice to a harmed child?

Anon, if you are my age, you are into your mid-thirties. You are an adult. Adults have to be responsible for their actions. You have been living in a bubble, and that bubble needs to be burst, brother. If you can justify the covering up of a crime because of your faith, if your faith makes you believe that education is a bad and dangerous thing, then your faith is asking you to be both passive and ignorant. You were not put on this planet to be either.

Look, I know how wonderful faith can be. I know the amazing feelings of warmth and security that comes with taking part in the rituals that you have known since childhood. I too have felt the spirit, the warm glow of the still, small voice. But here's a little secret that I've also learned, and it doesn't have anything to do with college "getting to my thinking". The truth is, the spirit is in you. It is part of you. It doesn't come from some distant planet, it doesn't come from a man in Salt Lake City, it doesn't come from a particular building or ritual. Rather, you can find it in many different places. Personally, I have experienced the warmth of the spirit in a museum, at a concert, and in the wilderness. I've experienced it standing on a Manhattan sidewalk and in an Anglican church in Santa Fe. I've experienced it listening to records, reading books, and while sitting at my desk. We are programmed from a young age in the church to believe that the only source of the spirit is through the church, through it's institutions and rituals and prayers, so we automatically associate it with these things. But we don't have to. You can feel the spirit throughout you wherever you go in this life. Many of my deepest spiritual experiences have come at moments when I realized how narrow and constricting the faith of my childhood had been. The spirit is in us, Anon, it is our birthright. My guess is that it is in every sentient human being on the planet, whether or not they have heard of Joseph Smith. When I think of the claims of exclusivity that I heard growing up, that ours was the one true church and the only one chosen by God, it just boggles my mind. The spirit lives in all of us, Anon, all six billion of us. You won't ever lose it if you choose seek it out in your life.

I'm not saying that you can't seek it out through the faith into which you were born. You can. I cannot, because of the bigotry of the men who lead the church. Because of this bias, I am in a position analogous to a black person prior to 1978; I can only be a Mormon if I choose to be a second-class Mormon. My inherent dignity won't let me make that choice. You are lucky that you don't have to make it Anon, and that you can still receive nourishment from your communion with this particular church. But I am also lucky, Anon. By forcing me out of the church through their own narrow mindedness, the leaders of the church have forced me to find my spiritual nourishment elsewhere. And guess what? I have. I very much have, and I think I am a better person for it. Realizing that I wasn't one of the "chosen few", or that rather, everyone is chosen, has been both humbling and enlightening. It's filled me with more love for my fellow human beings, and broken down the false walls that were built up in me by the prideful teaching of exclusive power and authority that is a big part of Mormonism. Rather, I've had to learn that Mormons are not unique, that like all people, we want to find solace and peace and belonging in this life. Sometimes though, we get carried away and claim power and authority as well. That's where the trouble starts, where the long road to fundamentalism and tyranny lies. It lies in thinking that you are the only people with the whole truth.

You are not. Neither am I. But I am searching, Anon. I am keeping my mind open and striving, yes, to educate myself, to learn and grow in knowledge. Any religion that asks me not to do so, that asks me to be willfully ignorant of all there is to know, is really of little use to me these days.

There is one more truch I'd like to claim, Anon. That spirit I was talking about earlier? That spirit is love. Love of ourselves, love of others, love of life. I try to find that love every day.
Cheers,
Spence

Values.

2006-07-13T13:27:00.000-07:00

Dearest Anon,
You have written me a couple of missives recently. Normally, I would not bother to respond to anonymous flames, since I usually assume that someone who doesn’t sign their name lacks the courage of their convictions. But it seems with you that you actually know me, or knew me, back in my adolescence and young adulthood. Because of this connection, I believe that you deserve at least the minimum courtesy of a good Fisking. So here goes. You wrote:

Spenny, it sure is weird to see you acting like a crazy looney(sic) gay guy. Did you erase your CTR ( Choose The Right ) Tattoo that you have on your ankle? Have you completely forgotten about all the girls you danced with at the Church Dances. I am sure that in time all your values will come back and you will bring out the nice old CTR Tattoo.

Let’s start with that first line.

Spenny, it sure is weird to see you acting like a crazy looney(sic) gay guy.

Wow, no one has called me Spenny in years! It’s kinda nice. First off, I’m not acting. What I write on my blog, in my freelance work and my filmmaking, is what I truly believe. Unlike the bravado performance I was putting on back in my youth when I was pretending to be a person I was not, this is not an act. Let me also assure you that I am not, indeed, crazy. I have a full bill of mental health. Back when I was still a church-going Mormon, I did have some problems in that regard. I struggled mightily with depression for a time, even using prescription drugs to treat it. Since I left the church behind though, I’ve been in a robust state of emotional health. Sure, like everyone, I have to deal with the stresses of life, but the depression that once haunted me has dissipated like a fog. Does that have anything to do with my former religious convictions? I can’t say definitively, though I would point out that Utah has the highest rate of anti-depressant perscription in the nation. Just sayin’.

On the other hand, I do cop to being occasionally loony. As well as zany, wacky, and even madcap. You know, like the next door neighbor in a bad sitcom.

As for the gay guy part, well, let’s skip forward a bit in your letter.

Have you completely forgotten about all the girls you danced with at the Church Dances.(?)

Nope, I certainly haven’t forgotten those lovely girls I danced with. I remember them. I remember the “No Pelvic Thrusting” rule. I remember that Modern English song they always played. And I very much remember dancing with these pretty girls and feeling nothing for them, while gazing over their shoulders at the guys I secretly wanted to be with instead. It’s a pretty universal experience for people like me. I also remember that I really liked to cut a rug. Yeah, I was a total solid gold dancer. That, dear Anon, is what we call a clue.

Did you erase your CTR ( Choose The Right ) Tattoo that you have on your ankle?

Angelina Jolie aside, erasing tattoos is a tricky business. So you will be pleased to know that it still resides there above my left ankle bone. Even more so, it still reminds me to do the right, a little talisman of caution to act carefully and always consider the consequences.

However, it’s not alone, that tattoo. It’s been joined by others. There is the flag of the California Republic, to remind me of where I come from, no matter where I go in the world. There is the Gadsden Flag, the famous “Don’t Tread On Me” with a coiled rattlesnake. That one serves to remind me to always be suspicious of organized power, especially that of the state. Then there is the seal of the Muscogee Nation, my father’s Indian Tribe, to remind me of my blood ties to this land, and the price my ancestors paid during the colonization of America. Along with my Mormon ancestry, that particular symbol helps me to recall that there are two sides to every story. Next up in the cue will be the symbol of my Alma Mater, St. John's College, with the Latin inscription I love, which roughly translates into "Through books and science we make boys into men".

But the tattoo that is dearest to me is a small one only a few inches from the “CTR”. I got it on an impulse a few years ago in Natchitoches, Louisiana. I’d been thinking about my “CTR” tat, and what it meant. I decided to get a new tattoo that symbolized the lessons I’d learned since I’d gotten that first ink, back when I still believed that the “Right” was whatever they taught us in Sunday School. My new tattoo instead spoke to what I have learned in the long journey since. It’s one word, that runs in black letters down my Achilles Tendon, that famous weak spot of ancient mythology. The word?

"Think."

I am sure that in time all your values will come back

The logical fallacy here is presupposition. You assume that my values have somehow ‘left” me. But they have not. Indeed, I feel that I am living in closer adherence to my true values then at any time in my life.

One of my values is honesty. It is a value that I frequently abused when I was younger. I lied to you, Anon. For that I am sorry, and I apologize. I lied, by not sharing with you the deep doubts I had about our far-fetched religion. I lied to you by suppressing my anger at the arrogance and abuses of power I saw in the leadership of that very church. I lied to you about my own makeup, who I am, the critical mindset that has been a part of me since I was a child, even something as basic as who I am attracted to and with whom I fall in love. I lied, although I will say in my defense, I lied for a good reason. I lied because I loved you, and I feared you would reject me. You see, another of my values, Anon, is unconditional love. It’s a hard value, maybe the hardest, but it was a value that I was taught was a fundamental part of the gospel. Yet it was not a value that I frequently saw put into practice. Now Anon, because you are anon, I don’t really know who you are. But there is a good chance that you are someone I loved. If that is the case, let me assure you. I still do love you. I love you no matter what you’ve done with your life. I love you even if you have done things I believe to be morally wrong, even if you have given support to organizations or people I detest, even if you no longer love me. I love you if you drive an S.U.V. and shop at Wal-Mart! What I do know, Anon, is that if I had been honest back then, if I had told you and those others around me who I really was, the reaction would have been one of rejection, revulsion, and maybe even hatred. I know, because I saw just that directed at those unforunate souls who, for one reason or another, failed to fit in. Rather then unconditional love, I saw over and over the practice of disfellowship, an idea that is anethema to Christianity.

Nothing saddens me in my life as much as the friends I have lost, the people once dear to me who are no longer part of my life. I would want nothing more then to still carry those friendships and ties to my past. But I could not do so at the price of lying about who I am. I tried, and it was far too much to bare. It almost killed me. So I live with this small hole in my heart, where I keep the memory of all those whom I once loved, but who turned their backs on me. Oh, and before you say to me that you would love me again if only I would just change into something that I am not, let me assure you. That is not love. That is self-righteousness.

OK Anon, I’ve given it to you pretty good here! I know how much Mormons usually shy away from dissent, and so I hope I haven’t stuck my blade in too deep. I only hoped to draw a little blood, not to hit any major veins or arteries. I realize that if you were just to read my responses above to you, you might get the impression that I am bitter about my upbringing. Yet I am not! I knew many wonderful people in my youth, and they shared with me plenty of wisdom about life. I would never renounce those whom I loved, nor am I specifically targeting the faith we shared, which I find no more or less guilty then any number of other faith-based belief systems (I’ll spare you the lecture on my doubts and fears about faith in the unseen in general, because that’s not what I think you were asking for when you wrote me). I would like to think that your words, no matter that they came off to me as a bit condescending, were spoken out of genuine care for me. It’s interesting that you bring up values. The word, of course, refers to what we value, what brings us happiness and joy in this life. I don’t have any lasting measure of bitterness about the things, right and wrong, that I learned in my Mormon community, because my life is far too occupied with things that I value now to be concerned with the past. Here is a list of things that I value. They are in no particular order, and of course some of them are more valuable to be then others. I’ll leave you to guess. This is what my life is about now:

Good country music. The Perfect T-Shirt. 15 a side Union Rugby. My Mom, always. Dim Sum. Mt. Washington. Patrick O’Brien novels. The Daily Show. Nieces and nephews that are sweeter then sugar. My Australians. Oklahoma. Vintage Mercedes. Making fun of the modern-day Pharisees. Luke, the Basset Beagle. Anti-war protests. The American Red Cross. Road trips with my dad. The upstairs room at Old Compton’s Pub in London. Emmy Lou Harris. Good dark beer. The Phoenix, in the East Village. The Hegalian dialectic. Charles Mingus. Anson King, my best black friend. Haitian food. Chinatown. Sex. Music biographies. Bach’s St. Mathew’s Passion, the most spiritual piece of music ever written. The Windes Brothers. Austin. Standing up for the legal rights of queers, oddballs, and brown people. Screwdrivers. Bruce Springsteen. The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin. Shows at The Echo. Fixing the broken election system. The Silverlake dog park. My amazing sisters and their solid husbands. The Isiah Berlin fox and hedgehog analogy. The island of Manhattan. Dan Savage. The ACLU. The Arroyo Parkway. Film Festivals. Left-wing Jewish politicians. Cowboy boots. Aristotle and the catagorization of things. Public radio. Sushi. The Utah mountains. Immigration rallies. Elliot Smith. Richard Neutra. Santa Fe. The End Of Faith, by Sam Harris. Big Love. Human Rights Watch. Concilience, by Edward Wilson. My ex-boyfriend. Butt Magazine. San Francisco on a cold day. My producer Amy. The four Gospels of the New Testament. Thai food. The Stonewall Democratic Club. Running on the elliptical trainer. The Bingham Cup. Knowing that while my life may not matter much over the long course of history, I am unique, and I have the responsibility do the right thing towards others and to try and keep those I love safe and well. Euclid 1:47. Gillian Welch.

These are some of my values, Anon. They have never left me, and they never will. I hope you can find it in your heart and mind to stretch a little, and consider some of the things I love. Who knows, maybe you’ll discover some values of your own that you’ve kept hidden under a bushel, like I did for so long.
Cheers,
Spence

Queer Cars?

2006-07-12T17:25:00.000-07:00

The web site Gaywheels.com has compiled this list of the ten most researched cars by the Friends of Dorothy who visit their site:

1. Saturn Sky
2. Toyota Yaris
3. Dodge Caliber
4. Volkswagen Jetta
5. Toyota Camry
6. Audi A3
7. Toyota Prius
8. Saab 9-3 (sedan and convertible)
9. Pontiac G6 (sedan, coupe and convertible)
10. Mazda MX-5

OK, I'm calling bullshit on this list. Here's my reasons:

1) The words "gay" and "Pontiac" should never appear in the same paragraph. Except as a derogatory, or course.

2) Excuse me, no Mini Cooper? Have ya been to San Francisco? They're like designer-colored cockroaches.

3) Just as how Jesse Jackson speaks for all black folks and Jerry Falwell represents each and every follower of Jeebus, I personally speak for all the 'mos, and I see no mention of any sweet 1989 190E 2.6 liter Mercedes-Benz on this list.

As for the Caliber, that is easily explained. It comes equiped with a CVT, and if there is any phrase in the automotive lexicon that is gayer then an easter parade, it has to be "Continuously Variable Transmission".

Or at least they say that they are "continuously variable" when you're checking them out online. Then you get them home to the garage and you realize that they are really just a butched-up manual, and as usual you still have to do all the hard work yourself.

Thanks to Jalopnik for the heads-up. Davey knows how to feed us fegelah gearheads!

P.S. What about this sled:

It don't get no gayer then that.

Why I Love L.A., Reason #341285

2006-07-12T16:26:00.000-07:00

From Craigslist:

Unique Touristic Experience for People Visiting Los Angeles. Are you visiting Los Angeles this summer with friends and family and looking for a totally unique LA Experience? Well I think I just might have it.
I'd like to invite you to come clean my apartment. Yes thats right a real Los Angeles apartment, in the heart of old Hollywood. Whats even better is that while you work tidying up my tasteful 20's era space you will be regaled with stories of hollywood old and new, as told by a real working Director(me) and my Screenwriter roommate. Wow! But it gets even better. While you and your family clean my place (once occupied by Johnny Depp in his 21 Jump Street days) I'll be photographing the whole thing. Big Beautiful professional photos that you'll be able to take home and show friends. Just think of it, large 8x10 photos of you and the kids cleaning and deodorizing my stainless steel refrigerator.

Who knows what else could happen, maybe one of my up & coming actor friends will stop by for a chat and some autographs. We're talking real b-c list celebrities here people, up close and personal(but no touching beyond a polite handshake).

Thanks to Defamer for reminding me how batshit-insane my city is.

The Notorious J.C.

2006-07-12T14:30:00.000-07:00

What happens when OC white boys rap 4 Jesus? Here's the answer.

Actually, I think he's kinda hot.

Short Bus Blogging

2006-07-11T18:18:00.000-07:00

You know the urban myth about someone actually taking an article from The Onion seriously? It happened a few years back when a Chinese newspaper published this story they wrote, about Congress demanding a new "luxury" Capitol building, as fact. Well, now this moron named Pete has managed to take a satire about abortion seriously. Then, rather then cop to it when he gets his shit called into question, he tries to justify himself, then insult the education level of the literally thousands of commenters who have been laughing it up at his expense.

Pete, keep it up. You are fast becoming a star of teh internets!

Sexy? Yes?

2006-07-10T17:14:00.000-07:00

Visitors to my Myspace will recognize this. As will readers of hip alternative papers, billboard viewers in NY and LA, and fashion-whores the world over. What is sexy, you ask?

CITY TO GAYS:

2006-07-06T10:53:00.000-07:00

DROP DEAD

Who Says There's No Gays In The Military...

2006-07-05T11:37:00.000-07:00

Pic courtesy of Wonkette.

The Last Refuge...

2006-07-05T11:04:00.000-07:00

Man, I wish I had been at this Fourth of July celebration:

That old lady in the back looks like she could bite the head off a bat.

Overheard In Laguna:

2006-07-05T10:43:00.000-07:00

"I've got sooo much sand in my Speedo!"

"I don't care if you say that I'm a thick bitch."

"It was like this spandex stuff, and it kept riding up and making a bubble on my ass."

"Are you going to the Boom?"

"Ohmygodawave!"

"Girl. Girl. Girl! Girl? Girl... Girl."

I love my queer peeps, despite their hideous taste in swimwear.

National Security Gnostics

2006-07-03T10:36:00.000-07:00

My personal 3rd Rule Of American Politics is this:

Losers blame the press.

Over and over we see this pattern of politicians who couldn't cut it piling onto the fourth estate. From The Big Dick's drunken "You won't have Nixon to kick around anymore" speech after he lost the California Governor's race, to Spiro Agnew's "nattering nabobs of negativity" attack when the press inconveniently dug up the brown paper bags of cash he's been receiving through the back door of the Governor's Mansion in Annapolis, to the bitching of my Kerry-supporting friends when the press went to town with the swift-boat accusations, as if those attacks would have lasted one day if John Kerry had had the authenticity to confront them head-on.

Losers blame the press.

And what better opportunity to do so then as you manage to lose a war?

The recent attacks on the press for the crime of doing their job is the symptom of a larger dysfunction. Our founders explicitly recognized the role of the press as a check on government power, and that is what reporters are doing when they bring to light the ugly things the Administration is doing in the Endless Struggle Against A State Of Mind that they love to call teh war on terra.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan wrote a book shortly before he died called Secrecy to warn us that the expanding secrecy of the national security state was a grave threat to democracy. Reading the book now eight years after it was published, it is possible to see exactly how the ever-expanding regime of "classified" information is threatening the basic functioning of our system, as decisions are increasingly made by those with "clearance" working in a vacuum free of criticism or even open feedback, and not by the citizens who fund this increasingly secretive hegemon. The hacks and lackeys of the right-blogosphere and media who publicly support this ever-hungry beast must see themselves as priests guarding the secrets of the Holiest of Holies without ever actually knowing the knowlege within; they count their own ignorance as a blessing and ask for more. It's just these kind of blindfold reactionaries who demanded physical retribution against the staff of the New York Times over the weekend.

Happy Independence Day.

Wanker Of The Week

2006-06-29T13:54:00.000-07:00

This is what happens when a preacher's kid tries to be a rebel without, you know, actually rebelling against anything. Enter Ryan Dobson, the Gen-X-skateboarding-and-surfing-to-the-max son of that bile-filled, queer-obsessed, latter-day Anthony Comstock, Dr. James Dobson. I mean, Ryan isn't one of those stuffy "church" types. No, he's totally street, giving all the cred to J.C. He has a soul-patch-featuring web site, named Kor, which is apparently hip contemporary slang for "core" (Ryan doesn't let those uptight grammer police tell him what to do!) where he preaches the gospel of the Extreme Sports Jesus:

But the best part of Ryan's shtick is that he has written a book with the beautifully forthright title Be Intolerant! Here's a sample:

"I'm totally intolerant. Totally, radically intolerant. Some people call me a narrow-minded, Bible-thumping, backward-thinking, fundamentalist white male bigot. In fact, it happens every day."

"I'm intolerant. I'm not ignorant, but I am intolerant. I'm not a racist or a bigot, but I am intolerant. I don't hate people; I disagree with ideas. Make no mistake, I am intolerant. I am intolerant because I love. The world hates me because I love in this way, but I cannot stop. I dare not stop. I serve a Lord who loved enough to be intolerant. No more trying to please the world and please God at the same time. Get your armor on, take up your cross, and come on out to where the adventure beings. Go out and be intolerant--in love."

Yeah, that's just what Jesus was. Intolerant. Actually, you know, he was. He was intolerant of the Pharisees, the religious leaders of his day that were obsessed with petty rules and puffed-up political causes, and who tried to limit grace to the select few whom they considered righteous.

Oh, and they frequently handed their rabbanical positions onto their sons as well.

So let me add Ryan Dobson to my long list of men who could really do with life handing them a good, old-fashioned ass-kicking before they ever open their mouths again. Humility is a bummer, man.

And since he apparently gets called a "narrow-minded, Bible-thumping, backward-thinking, fundamentalist white male bigot" every day (where the hell is this guy hanging out?) I guess today is my turn. Ryan Dobson, you are a bigot. And a cringe-inducingly uncool one at that, soul patch or not.

Dude. Harsh.

P.S. I won't even get into the fact that he used the line "The world hates me because I love in this way, but I cannot stop."
They've got counseling for that kind of thing.

Questionable Provenance

2006-06-29T13:07:00.000-07:00

If this is an authentic Rudolf Schindler, then my garage must have been designed by Richard Neutra.

Besides, it's all about Eddie Fickett these days.

New Kicks

2006-06-29T12:46:00.000-07:00

Ladies and gentlemen, the Jean-Micheal Basquiat Reeboks. I know, I'm a total art fag. This is why I must avoid SportieLA at all costs.

Potty Mouth

2006-06-29T12:37:00.000-07:00

My boss Dov, walking through my office, with a camera crew from the Today Show.

Dov: Hey Spence!

Spence: Hey Dov!

Dov: (To Reporter) Spence receives the e-mails that people send into the company through our web site.

Spence: Yup.

Dov: How often do we get people asking us about buying stock in the company?

Spence. Every fucking day. Oh shit, I guess I shouldn't be cursing while you're filming.

Reporter: Give that man a raise.

Auto-Erotica

2006-06-27T14:53:00.000-07:00

We all know the Urban Myth of the Granny Car.

Old woman, possibly from Pasadena, buys a car destined one day to be a classic. She drives it to church. She drives it to the store. She drives it to the doctor. Year after year, it accumulates minimal mileage while mostly occupying the garage. Finally, granny gets too old to drive and puts the car up for sale.

That's when you happen along.

After years of bad car karma, years of old BMWs that smelt like rotten eggs, Karmann Ghias that you can punch a whole through due to rust, Wranglers blowing their engines in middle of Indiana, claptrap Mercedes losing their transmissions on a pass in the Rockies, Wranglers being destroyed by drunk drivers in Koreatown, Toyotas blowing their engines on the 57 freeway, and most recently, a hapless Chevy Cavalier losing its life to a drunk on Marmion Way who managed to drive off six blocks and pass out in the street, my luck has changed.

1989 Mercedes-Benz 190E 2.6 Liter Sedan. 28,588 original miles.

Really.

Driven by an 85 year old lady who went into a home. Not a ding. Not a scratch. Not a tear. You know the road tar that cars get behind the front wheels? None of that. Everything works. Everything is perfect. A stock time capsule.

You're damn right it's going in the garage.

I'll put up some pics as soon as I have them.

Immigration Agonistes

2006-06-27T11:25:00.000-07:00

SO I was standing in an Indian Casino in Okmulgee Oklahoma. Or rather, the "Casino Room" of a truck stop, run by my tribe, the Muskogee Creek Nation. I'd just won thirty bucks off the slots and was wisely calling it quits. I'm standing in line to cash out, and to my left there are four young Latino guys. It's late Saturday afternoon, and these dudes are dressed up for a night on the town, spit-polished boots, perfect white cowboy hats, pressed jeans and western-cut shirts. They are dropping a few coins in the machines and talking animatedly to each other in Spanish. They've worked all week and they are blowing off some steam. They look good.

Next to me in line is a wrinkled, brokedown-looking white man. He has the sloped shoulders of a guy who's been on disability for a long time. I notice him because I see in him shooting the evil eye, a dog-shooting ugliness, a sour grimace of hatred. He's watching the Latino guys. He sees me next to him, a big pale-skinned bearded bubba, assumes I'm a safe bet, and hisses from his thin set lips "You should have to speak English if you're gonna gamble here".

What the fuck pulling a lever on a slot machine has to do with speaking English is the question I don't ask him.

In all the silly, blown-up, manipulated debate about immigration, there are many voices. There are honest people who don't agree with me that immigrants to this country should be welcomed and helped to succeed, and that we should open up our nation to a much higher level of legal immigration, thus reducing the need for illegal border crossings and lives lived in the margins. Many of these people make cogent arguments based on reasoned, thoughtful principles. They see as much as I do a broken system, but offer a different way to fix it.

But then there's this. Raw, knife-slice tribalism. Ugly insecurities fanned by megalomaniacs. Bitter sad people who are desperate for any available scapegoat that will stave off a critical self-evaluation, and make them begin the painful questioning of an American economic system that has fucked them over all their lives.

I'm not saying that the conservative leaders who are railing about immigration are driven by the same base emotions as this pitiful old man. They are smarter then that. I am saying that they are relying on him, and people like him, to fuel the right-wing political machine with their blind rage and race-bating hatred.

Which is worse in a degree of magnitude I can't even calculate. I didn't feel angry at the old man, out there on the wide-open plain with his poverty and struggles, being lured by the AM sirens of unrighteous indignation. No, I felt sorry for him. It's those who have fed him that lie, the lie that four hard-working clean-cut young men speaking in their soft rolling tongue were the cause of his world of problems, they are the ones that made me angry.

Lazarus.

2006-06-27T11:16:00.000-07:00

If anyone is still reading this blog, thank you. I shall resume posting. It's been a weird few weeks. I lost my car to a drunk driver, discovered the Miracle Car (tm) to replace it, went to Oklahoma, and volunteered for the Red Cross. More about these developments later. Let me just say that I apologize for my lengthy delay, and shall produce yummy content forthwith.

Weegee

2006-06-12T17:51:00.000-07:00

Sodomy Monday

2006-06-05T13:06:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan kindly published the e-mail I sent him after watching the White House press conference pushing for gay marriage:

Having just watched George Bush speaking in his desultory way about gay marriage, I felt a secret glee rise up within me. I think we just watched the death of the opposition to gay marriage.

When a hugely unpopular President rises and speaks with the megaphone of the Presidency about an issue that most consider to be deeply personal, he drags this issue from the realm of family, morals, and religious tradition, into the crass world of politics. By tying gay marriage to the fading star of contemporary 'conservatism', the President has given many people who may otherwise be uncomfortable with the idea of same-sex relationships the concrete reason they need to change their minds. 'If these guys are so hard against it,' millions of Americans without a direct stake in this debate must be thinking, 'it may be a good thing'.

Just as George Wallace's extremism nailed shut the sarcophagus of Jim Crow, so this George will be trotted out as the personification of the bigotry of an era passed. Sometimes, a man's reputation rings louder then his arguments. George Bush's failed Presidency will drag this issue down as does a drowning man a healthy swimmer.

Here's what I put in the last unpublished part of the letter, which went off on a bit of a tangent:

Oh, the conservative political machine will continue to trot out this red cape with regularity, to rise up the baying amongst the Christian Pharisees and whip them into an angry mob, but no matter how many times they cry Barabbas and seek the blood of another queer scapegoat, they will never have their lust satisfied. To actually pass this law would be the worst possible outcome for the conservative manipulators. The dog must never catch the rabbit, lest it never race again.

Hot Osmond Bi-sexual Teens!

2006-05-27T22:21:00.000-07:00

I reader kindly tipped my to this lovely story about Marie Osmond's two daughters, who both have posted sexually explicit info on their Myspace profiles. Her oldest daughter says that she is bisexual and craves sex "as many times as possible". Her sixteen year old talks about doing David Bowie (I didn't know that the kids these days were that cool) and refers to herself as a slut. Marie is up in arms. Typically, despite being the person in the world most responsible for how her daughters are raised, she chooses to cast aspersions the that source of all prevailing evil in the modern world, the internet:

"The insidious potential for harm from adolescent Internet sites like MySpace.com only exacerbates these kinds of problems."

Like her daughter is only a slut in cyberspace?

Semper Idiotus

2006-05-25T16:02:00.000-07:00

The AMC movie theatre in Bridgewater, New Jersey, recently fired a ticket taker for sporting tattoos on his forearms. The employee? 80 year old William Smith, who got the tattoos as a 17 year old Marine fighting in World War 2.

Happy Memorial Day.

Kenneth Lay, Good Christian

2006-05-25T15:37:00.000-07:00

"I firmly believe I'm innocent of the charges against me," Lay said following the hearing. "We believe that God in fact is in control and indeed he does work all things for good for those who love the lord."

And the thousands of employees and investors who lost everything because of your greed? Did they love the Lord less?

Nothing pisses me off more then those who use their piety as a cover for their sins. Apparently the President's good friend Kenny-boy has never heard the story of the moneychangers in the temple, or the rich man and the eye of the needle. Jesus hates a C.E.O., brother.

Hipster Death

2006-05-24T18:30:00.000-07:00

I can't say I totally agree, and there is nothing more hipster then condemning hipsters, but he's got a point:

Dude, it's time. Girls, you too. Time to pack up the whole in-your-face, raw, hyper-sexualized, porno, skater, white trash, open wounds, self-effacing, Jackass, loose ethics, 80's bar mitzvah disco, and party-till-you vomit movement, aesthetic and attitude. Go on, scram. Beat it. We don't want you hanging around anymore. For those of us that saw this Larry Clark inspired tsunami coming, we all thought Terry Richardson was on to something fun (in 2000) and we all laughed our asses off at Vice's fashion do's and don'ts (in 2002... ok, ok... they're still pretty funny). Ed Templeton represented on the West Coast. And for a nanosecond it seemed like that colosal wanker Dov Charney was going to breathe some eros into the deadly boring billboards and newspaper back covers of our nation's cities. Ya Ya Ya... we thought.

But it's all over now you beautiful losers. The schtick just comes off as stupid and done. Your hip, modern, rough-hewn, brainless, urban nihilism has been handed over to marketers and sold to the suburbs. Tired. Tired. Ti-erd. Like disco in the 70's you never had any substance to begin with, and you thought that would make you safe. But it hasn't. Your fashion clock has stopped ticking. And don't try to pretty things up with your pastels and your five sizes too small dandy suits either. Just take your little terrycloth short shorts, your limited edition Ryan Mcginley skateboard, your two months at Parsons (before you got kicked out), your ketamine, your tube socks, and your three legged cat, and just go. Try to have the decency to fade into the night and be remembered by your own kids in twenty years. God knows you took enough pictures. They'll be yawning at yet another flash-saturated shot of you getting your boobs sucked by strangers in a crowded Brooklyn bar.

Please. Go. Stop clinging on. Make way for something new. Evolve.
OK, you can keep the hot pants.

Give In To The Myorg

2006-05-23T15:53:00.000-07:00

I finally broke down and joined Myspace. I already feel hipper.

Here's what I put under whom I'd like to meet:

I dig guys my age or younger, from slim to beefy. I especially love country boys, big ears, short hair, big smooth chests, useless liberal arts educations, a good singing voice, and those little round dimples some guys have right above their butt. We'll get along well if you love a good book and a good beer, Emmylou Harris is your idea of a gay icon, you have no more than three hair care products, you despise bullies of all stripes (especially elected ones), and you'd like a big brother but don't need a daddy. Extra points given to queer punks, red-cheeked Irishmen, Johnnies, jack Mormons, fans of Charles Ives, West Indians, half-breeds, owners of air-cooled Volkswagens, Patrick O'Brian readers, alt-country heroes, Kierkegaardian existentalists, ex-wrestlers, Oklahomans, hookers of the rugby kind, the pure of heart and the polymorphously perverse.

Profiles In Courage

2006-05-19T14:43:00.000-07:00

Some choice quotes lifted from Americablog:

GOP Senator Jeff Sessions referring to the rightness of Bush's domestic spying after 9/11 declared melodramatically:

"Over 3,000 Americans have no civil rights because they are no longer with us."

On February 3rd, Kansas Senator Pat Roberts similarly claimed:

"You really don't have any civil liberties if you're dead."

Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican, said on December 20, 2005:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Patrick Henry:
Give me liberty or give me death.

An American Second Act

2006-05-14T23:13:00.000-07:00

Andrew Sullivan jumps on the Al Gore buzz bandwagon. Gore is being propelled forward by a wonderful combination of Hillary ennui, the deep desire for a do-over on Bush, and the American love of a redemption song.

Al Gore. Liberal, electable, rested and ready. Now only one suggestion.

Bring back the beard!

Communist Manifesto

2006-05-12T16:39:00.000-07:00

Jeff "The Snowman" Monson is an up-and-coming Ultimate Fighter champion. He's also a rabid leftist, with a anarcho-syndicalist star tattoo on his back:

Standing 5' 9" tall, weighing 240 pounds and sporting a shaved head, Jeff "The Snowman" Monson looks like a cartoon ready to pop, a compressed giant of crazy shoulders, massive biceps and meaty forearms. When he sneers, people shudder. When he sweats, they turn away. When he's angry, your best bet is to run.

He's angry right now, even though his combat career in the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) -- an often-bloody tournament that combines martial arts disciplines like Brazilian Jujitsu and Muay Thai Kickboxing -- is taking off. In February's pay-per-view event, Monson easily beat his opponent with a chokehold in the first round. If things keep going this way, he could have a title shot in the heavyweight division, against the explosive Andrei "The Pit Bull" Arlovski. So no, it's not his future career prospects that have him pissed. It's the state of the world.

"I'm not some sort of conspiracy theorist," Monson says of his political leanings. "I'm not talking about how the government is trying to hide UFOs. I just want to do away with hierarchy. I'm saying that our economic system, capitalism, is structured so that it only benefits a small percentage of very wealthy people. When I was traveling in Brazil, they had us staying at a really posh hotel. Outside the hotel there was a mom sleeping on the sidewalk with her two kids. That's when reality hits you. What did that woman ever do? Who did she ever hurt?"

There are few things hotter then a lefty who can throw a punch.

We The People

2006-05-04T18:10:00.000-07:00

Check out this amazing photo from last Monday's rally on Wilshire Boulevard:

Hard Times Come Again No More

2006-05-04T16:51:00.000-07:00

Watch this video of Bruce Springsteen at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, singing his re-worked version of Blind Alfred Reed's classic blues song, How Can A Poor Man Stand Stand Such Times And Live?

Sample new lyrics:
There's bodies floating on Canal and the Levee's gone to hell,
Martha get me my sixteen gage and some dry shells,
Them who got out of town and them who ain't got left to drown,
Tell me, how can a poor man stand such times and live?

Rough times demand solace in old songs.

Listen In

2006-05-03T10:45:00.000-07:00

Heads up. I'll be appearing Friday at 10:15 on the Frank DeCaro Show on Sirius Satellite Radio, ot discuss my documentary movie, Straight Acting. I used to love Frank when he was the movie reviewer on the Daily Show, and hopefully he'll be kinder on me then he was while reviewing The Perfect Storm, which he once described as "a waste of some perfectly good seamen".

PTL

2006-05-03T10:16:00.000-07:00

In Washington last week, there was a very special gathering of good Christians, gathered to pray. The pray for what, prey tell?

Lower. Gas. Prices.

Hallelujah!

Thanks to Joe.My.God for the heads-up.