The best way I can think of to respond to Rep. Foxx, and to celebrate (if that's the proper term) passage of the hate crimes bill in the house, is to Netflix The Laramie Project. It's a beautiful, heartbreaking film that never whitewashes bigotry but also never reduces people to caricatures--that recognizes the surprising capacity for basic decency in people whose values are otherwise unsympathetic. Who are, in fact, exactly the people we'll need to win over to achieve marriage equality in our time.
Thursday, April 30, 2009
American Robin
Caught red-beaked (I beg forgiveness of the male Cardinal). Additional evidence here.
You Can't Make This Sh*t Up
The co-executive director of the Miss California Organization has confirmed that the organization paid for Carrie Prejean's breast implants just weeks before the Miss USA pageant. Yes, that's this Carrie Prejean. Miss Prejean, who believes in "opposite marriage", is all about following what she sees as God's will in that regard. So why would she flout God's will for her body by getting breast implants?
And now the ungrateful child is ducking her funders...
Carrie is still involved in a media frenzy, sparked by her controversial response at the Miss USA pageant, and Shanna [Moakler] claims the young woman has been avoiding responding to her Miss California bosses. “We’ve tried really hard [to get in contact] and she keeps referring us to her mother and her PR person,” Shanna claimed.
...while apparently shilling for NOM (yeah, that NOM). At least the producers of this ad were able to edit down her rambling response to something resembling a sound bite. Maybe they should have hired an actress to play the part of the poor, oppressed beauty queen forced to choose between the crown and her convictions (conveniently ignoring the part where Miss North Carolina -- the new Miss USA -- also won the swimsuit and evening gown competitions). We know how well that worked for them last time.
h/t Pam
Apocalpyse Baby Shower Now
Barbin MD has a great Kos diary up about how the GOP is doubling down on their anti-gay marriage rhetoric. Meanwhile, in the real world, the suburban mom favorite magazine "Real Simple"--home of great quickie meal ideas, wonderful home craft projects, advice on what to do about toxic friends and all around cozy mommy world runs a straight up, no comment, picture rich photo essay and journal about the double pregnancy and happy delivery of "twins" by a sweet young lesbian couple. Its not available yet online--its the May 2009 issue--but nothing could be more ordinary, heartwarming, aesthetically pleasing and utterly non threatening than the text and images in this article celebrating the arrival of the "twins" born three weeks apart to these young women. The ship in homophobia has sailed, and as far as I can see it is sinking with all hands on deck just over the horizon.
Guess Obama has Driven them Right 'Round the Bend
I understand Echidne of the Snakes drew our attention to this astonishing moment of “Exit, stage right” from a libertarian. I admit that for a very long time I thought libertarians, as such, didn't exist—that they were a kind of made up foil, an internet myth, used by leftist mommies to explain to their children why the farthest right form of social organization would lead, via libertarian anarchy, to corporate fascism and then social death. At least that's how I used it. But here, apparently, is the real deal. I apologize to everyone I ever derided. These people exist, they are stuck in some early teenage hell of solipsism and death anxiety, and they are going galt to boot. At least emotionally. What else are we to make of Peter Thiel's opening paragraph:
“I remain committed to the faith of my teenage years: to authentic human freedom as a precondition for the highest good. I stand against confiscatory taxes, totalitarian collectives, and the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual. For all these reasons, I still call myself “libertarian.””He “stands against...the ideology of the inevitability of the death of every individual?” Straight outta The Life of Brian. But now we have the answer to who learns at the knee of Glenn Reynolds. I take it that this is a tip o' the hat to either cryogenics or robotology. Still, good luck with that. Me, I was standing against “the ideology of the inevitability of death” too until I realized that I had crossed the threshold from non cancerous to “pre-cancerous.” I tried calling myself a lot of things—a member of the “loony party” or the "its not really happening to me party” or, in my five year old's felicitious phrase a member of the “but the real people don't die party” but although many of them would accept money to join it turned out that none of them had a real plan for beating that darned ideology at the polls.
** edited to add--apologies to Amanda at Pandagon. I think it was she, apparently, and not Echidne (whose post I couldn't find) who took down Paul Thiel. Now she's scrapping with Andrew Sullivan over it. Who knew that Stingray had such an illustrious following?
Tuesday, April 28, 2009
Fleet Those Fleeting Fleeters
The Supreme Court majority, that is:
By 5-4, the [U.S. Supreme] court upheld the Federal Communications Commission's authority to regulate "fleeting expletives." These can be passing uses of what the court's conservative majority delicately termed "the F- and S-words," among other things.So those motherfleeters want to take away my fleeting expletives? Just let them fleeting try.
Do Not Want
Fuck Specter and fuck the DSCC if they treat this as a case of an "incumbent" Democrat running for his own seat in 2010. But no doubt they will suppress any Lamont like run from the center/left and go with the devil they know. I was explaining to my children the meaning of "Quid Pro Quo" recently and I'm damned if I can understand why a ten year old gets it but the entire Democratic Party does not. If Specter won't caucus with the dems as a certain vote *until* 2010 he should not be treated as anything more than a g-damned wart on our body politic. Schumer and Obama can say all the nice things they want but if Specter is planning to be a blue dog let's force the fucker out in the primary and get us some more and *better* Dems in the Senate. No sloppy seconds.
aimai
Monday, April 27, 2009
Monday Movie Review: Cadillac Records
Cadillac Records (2008) 8/10
Leonard Chess (Adrien Brody) meets Muddy Waters (Jeffrey Wright) and forms Chess Records.
The movie opens in a field. It looks like it may be one of those idyllic Kansas wheat field kind of things, and then you see it's sharecroppers, breaking their backs and singing. The scene is definitely not idyllic, but the music is beautiful.
The movie opens in another field. Again you wonder: Kansas? Something beautiful? This time it's a junkyard, where Leonard Chess is making love with his girlfriend. Soon her father will show up and express his disapproval.
More...
These opening sequences embody everything that's right and wrong about Cadillac Records. On the right side, of course, is the music, which just gets better and better and better with each scene. The music plus the earthy quality, a grittiness, make this a very watchable movie. You feel present in every moment, and as we move to Chicago and the mixed bag of success in the blues and early rock and roll, that immediacy and grit carry you through.
Also right is the terrific cast. Jeffrey Wright, from sharecropper to blues god, is magnificent, mumbling and preening and living deeply inside his music. Adrien Brody is one of my favorite young actors, and here he's doing not just his usual great work, but also working his voice into a hustling Chicago immigrant, without mucking around with an accent. He's sure and good-hearted and also kind of a prick. There's an extensive supporting cast. Beyoncé as Etta James is surprisingly good; her work in Dreamgirls didn't indicate to me that she could do this kind of physical role. Eamon Walker, unknown to me, blew my mind in a small role as Howlin' Wolf.
The movie has been criticized for being too shallow, touching lightly on too many little bits of this moment in history without ever landing. And again, back to the two fields: We fly over a lot of spots, and it is kind of shallow. But it's also a musical, not just because it's a movie where a lot of people sing, but because its story is told through the music. These are people whose lived experience resides inside performance. Muddy Waters is the guy with the guitar, Howlin' Wolf is that big voice. While a deeper story can certainly be told, a rich, textured, deeply musical overview is not at all unwelcome.
Okay, sure, it's a little all over the place. There's no clear main character, and the women (as usual) are a little invisible (Etta James isn't introduced until fairly late). Chess's wife is barely a presence at all, and while Gabrielle Union does the best she can as Muddy's wife, Geneva, she's nothing that can't be summed up by "Muddy's wife, Geneva." Chess himself remains a cipher.
But then I'm back to that great cast. Brody pumps life force into a slight bit of scripting and makes the character seem rich, just as almost every actor in this fine ensemble does.
(Mannish Cross-post)
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Friday, April 24, 2009
Friday Random Ten
Pan and Regaliz - Waiting in the Monsters' Garden
Au Pairs - It's Obvious
Rufus Thomas - Walking the Dog
Dengue Fever - March of the Balloon Animals
Big Youth - Hit the Road, Jack
Shonen Knife - Ah, Singapore
Scientist - Plague of the Zombies
Shriekback - Devil's Onions
Karl Hector & the Malcouns - Mystical Brotherhood
Los 5-U-4 - Baila, Ven y Baila
What are y'all listening to this morning?
Party Like It's 1999
There were potential benefits in a change in leadership, one being that the Democrats would now share authority and responsibility for the age and its difficulties. They'd get the daily raw threat file, they'd apply their view of the world and do their best. A primary virtue of that: On the day something bad happened—and that day will come, and no one in the entire U.S. intelligence community will tell you otherwise—we would as a nation be spared, as we got through it, the added burden of the terrible, cleaving, partisan divisiveness of 2000-08. This would help hold us together in a hard time.Yes, Peggy, that day will be a real tea party.
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
Wednesday Wildflowerblogging
Blue Dicks (Dichelostemma capitatum) in Rockville Hills Park, Fairfield. More below the fold.
More... 
In the Marin Headlands. 
In Edgewood County Park, San Mateo County. 
Along the Matt Davis Trail on Mount Tamalpais.
Tuesday, April 21, 2009
A Gaythering Storm
Uh, No. Dan. When Poor People Do that Shit they Get Locked Up For It
Jeezus christ on a two toast points but Dan Savage's white male privilege is showing. I guess its all Mrs. Spitzer's fault, the humorless bitch, for not wanting to be choked during sex. Ladeez, pleez, don't bother the rich white guy. He *had* to act out a common fantasy of *choking his sexual partner*--everybody wants to choke their sexual partner and if their wives are not amenable (maybe he couldn't tell her! Its the saddest story of all!) then they just "go elsewhere." And everybody does the same thing. It has never happened, in the history of the world, that people who dont' get what they want just sit on their desires and think of England? And when poor people do this shit they don't get any notice at all! Poor Elliot. On top of being publicly humiliated because he was so sexually dull and uninteresting and ungenerous that he had to pay for sex instead of getting it for free from his wife he's publicly humiliated because he's a rich guy! In short, Spitzer was horny for something he wasn't getting at home—perhaps he was refused, perhaps he never asked—and he did what most men (and women) do when they're not getting something they desperately need at home. He went elsewhere. Which doesn't excuse his hypocrisy—as NY's attorney general, Spitzer prosecuted people for running the kind of prostitution services he patronized himself—and, yeah, he was taking enormous risks... something the rich and powerful and the poor and penniless have been doing for tens of thousands of years. The big difference: We don't hear about it when the poor and penniless get caught.
How stupid is Dan, really? More... When poor people (lets pretend for the sake of argument that lots of women have violent fantasies they want to play out on their husbands. Just for a second. Lets try to do this in a non gendered way) can't get their husband or wife to agree for sex with torture I'm sure they also go "outside" to get what they need. But if they can't afford Spitzer's out--to actually pay a prostitute to *let* them choke them during sex choke their sex partners we call it uh...wait...lemme see...its on the tip of my tongue. Oh yeah. We call it assault with intent to murder. Maybe we add "by a horny guy who was strapped for cash" but we don't think its "just the natural order of things." Because whatever the natural order for animals is, humans live in a social order. Yeah. You heard it here first, apparently. We have a social order that prescribes some behavior and proscribes others. One of the things it proscribes is inflicting harm on another person for mere sexual pleasure. And it double dog proscribes paying a prostitute to consent to physical harm. And one of the people who used to know that, because he made a living prosecuting prostitutes, was Eliot Spitzer himself. Rich guys can buy temporary consent. That may make it inevitable. But it doesn't make it moral. And it certainly doesn't make it anything other than the usual privilige accorded to rich white men. But that doesn't mean that their wives, or other women, or poor men are permitted to enjoy the same luxury. When ordinary, poor people, can't get sexual or other satisfaction in their private lives they have to suppress their desires.
Here's the offending paragraphs:Spitzer was horny. And like a lot men out there, he had the means to hire someone to act out a "difficult" fantasy—choking, apparently—that either his wife wasn't willing to indulge or that he was too ashamed to ask the wife to indulge. And, like many men who go to pros, when Spitzer weighed the benefits—getting off—against the risks—getting caught—he miscalculated. And lots of men are terrible at monogamy (women aren't much better), and it's possible that Spitzer's wasn't just after choking action, but a little variety as well. And about the choking action: Many men have sexual fantasies that involve ritualized sexual violence, and it's often difficult for these men to incorporate their fantasies into their marital sex lives—their own madonna/whore hangups; their wives' inability to see incorporating kinks as a kind of lovemaking—and many of these men seek the services of pros. And in most cases, the services of pros aren't a threat to these men's marriages, but rather the thing that makes it possible for these men to remain content in their marriages.
San Francisco Chronicle: Wrong Again
What with the record high temperatures and all, today's Chron has a front-page article headlined "An early taste of summer".
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
When the marine layer moves in, maybe today, maybe tomorrow--that's an early taste of summer. What we've got right now is an early taste of mid-May, or maybe a very early taste of late September. Summer--not so much.
Get it right, people.
Monday, April 20, 2009
Hurry Up and Show Some Long-Term Results Already!
WaPo Deputy Editorial Page Editor Jackson Diehl:
Obama sent a conciliatory public message to Iranians, and the United States joined in a multilateral proposal for new negotiations on its nuclear program. The regime responded by announcing another expansion of its uranium enrichment facility and placing an American journalist on trial for espionage....The President, in his March 24 press conference:
Obama is not the first president to discover that facile changes in U.S. policy don't crack long-standing problems.
Q: Mr. President, you came to office pledging to work for peace between Israel and the Palestinians. How realistic do you think those hopes are now, given the likelihood of a prime minister who is not fully signed up to a two-state solution and a foreign minister who has been accused of insulting Arabs?If only the President had as much patience and persistence as the nation's editorial page editors.
OBAMA: It's not easier than it was, but I think it's just as necessary....
How effective these negotiations may be, I think we're going to have to wait and see....
You know, leaders from the two sides of Northern Ireland that, you know, a couple of decades ago -- or even a decade ago -- people would have said could never achieve peace, and here they were, jointly appearing and talking about their commitment, even in the face of violent provocation.
And what that tells me is that, if you stick to it, if you are persistent, then, then these problems can be dealt with.
That whole philosophy of persistence, by the way, is one that I'm going to be emphasizing again and again in the months and years to come as long as I'm in this office. I'm a big believer in persistence....
When it comes to Iran, you know, we did a video, sending a message to the Iranian people and the leadership of the Islamic Republic of Iran. And some people said, well, they did not immediately say that we're eliminating nuclear weapons and stop funding terrorism. Well, we didn't expect that. We expect that we're going to make steady progress on this front.
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