Nothing like camping at the beach. I’m sunburned, and I drove the car a whole bunch.
I guess Mr. Outdoors likes it in the winter. In a tent, which is over on the far side of macho for my tastes, but, like, whatever floats your boat, eh? Er, I mean, rips your tent to shreds, sorry!
See you soon! As I recently signed an email at work:
Kissy-kissy to each and every one of you beautiful people!
It’s, I have to say, a complete shame not to be on the Hill this weekend: I think, in some ways, this year’s pride parade will partake of the nature of a victory celebration, even if the victory is not precisely what Lenin would embrace as politically meaningful.
Gay marriage in Canada, virtually guaranteeing legal recognition for gay domestic partnerships everywhere but the enlightened (not) precincts of my birthplace, Arizona. Yhe profoundly amazing Supreme Court decision of this week, essentially capitulating to the central demand of gay rights campaigners since the Stonewall riots that Pride Day commemorates.
I looked through the pictures of my visit to Ken in NYC in February, 2001, hoping I would find a pair f images that, apparently I did not take. Ken will confirm this, however.
We were walking around in the Village and passed by a low-slung dive featuring a fifties-style rusticated limestone front. As we walked by, I glanced at the bar’s facade, thinking of Indiana limestone, and realized that the stone front, the locale, and the pride-rainbow neon and pink triangle in the window – plus the sign saying “Stonewall” – pretty persuasively argued that we were standing in front of the gay community’s ground zero in the quest for political recognition.
I stopped and ranted for a moment to Ken about how important this place we’d just walked by was, how it represented a landmark of human struggle and in a way a new approach to thinking about political constituencies, and so on. I don’t recall that Ken had heard about the role of Stonewall in the history of the gay rights movement and I flatter myself that he was interested in my fractured and ignorant recounting.
We resumed our peregrinations, through the cold, snow dusted streets. I was really liking the Village, with the tiny streets and below-sidewalk entrances to ancient buildings still in use. Without having walked over a block, we came upon a particularly charming section of row houses, all apparently converted to serve the various needs of an entertainingly imperialist institution known as Marie’s Crisis.
As we walked by one of the sub-bars of the establishment (the Marie’s Crisis Piano Bar) a plaque on the wall caught my eye as the snow swirled down from the night above me.
born 1737
died 1809
on this site
The world is my country
All mankind are my brethren
To do good is my religion
I believe in one God and no more”
it said.
I more-or-less freaked out on the spot. The red-headed prophet of American liberty, of the way that you and I, fellow Americans, conceptualize the boundaries and responsibilities of liberty in the person and in the state, had died about across the street (as I recall it – YMMV) from the site that would become Stonewall.
Although I can’t recall if you could turn around ad see the bar, I certainly see his spirit in the events of that night in 1969. Today, I choose to imagine him in pride parades across the nation, although personally I do not visualize him in buttcut leather chaps.
The Donk breaks new ground in blogworld personality journalism, bringing us an exclusive interview with Anthony ‘The Moo’ Moussa, the genius behind the web-side reality show that is NJGUIDO.COM.
The Moo goes into some depth, bringing us a detailed look at the philosopy behind the lifestyle.
Guido to us is living the good life and completely enjoying our youth, it is prolonging our youth and being free of all the things that make uptight people soo damn uptight.
So, don’t forget, party like a rockstar, and I understood The Moo to be inviting us all to his pad later.
How can I put this? I don’t mean a word of this ironically – I think the interview is wonderfully interesting and funny. The Moo is bringing us a slice of his life – or, more accurately, bringing his peers a slice of their lives. It’s like the old black and white club photos we’ve all found in our elder’s shoeboxes.
Well, these things come in threes, right?
A few days ago I responded to a musicians wanted ad.
Accordion, Banjo, Mandolin, fiddle for punk rock sea shanties & Appalachian death polka. Pogues, Tom Waits, Hank Sr., Bad Livers, Clash, (123) 555-1212 or thewages@placeholder.com
Well, that more or less describes my musical amibtions and tastes, so, I kinda had to. That Bad Livers is key, too, and anyone who understands why the Clash and Hank Sr. need to be mentioned in the same paragraph has my vote.
As it happens, Jesse and Austin and I have plenty of shared acquaintances, and I think, closer musical tastes than we can really finger in detail yet. They have played the punk circuit for years, most recently as Thee Spectres.
Anyway, it went promisingly Friday night. They were sweethearts, Austin is into oddball instruments, there was no smoking in sight (!) and they have pro gear and tons of experience. So we’ll see where we go with it.
The material they were bringing was very rocky, and my mando lead style is pretty well suited to rock structure songs. But I’m painfully undedeveloed as a lead player still. Additionally, there’s a strong use of cartoon, high-color imagery – genre tropes, if you will – in the material that seems odd to me after years of straight trad material.
It’s funny, innit? I want to write about genre stuff – SF, comics, noir, what-all – but I’ve grown stick-in-the mud folkie boundaries. Gotta think a bit about this. Some of the stuff was pretty promising, though.
At any rate it was great fun, they have another mando guy on the line, which I encouraged them to check out, and I feel like I at the least have the chance to make new friends.
One of the interesting things about our apartment is that the building was landscaped when it was constructed with fruit trees. We have blueberries, strawberries, golden plums and Rainier cherries.
I’ve been watching the cherries ripen on the tree for the past few weeks, and today as the temperature neared 80, I decided it was time to harvest a few. I was concerned that the birds had beat me to all the good ones, but I need not have worried. The tree’s branches were weighed down with fruit.
At first I was pulling them off of their stems but quickly figured out that it was better to grasp them by the stem and twist away from the tree. As I did this, muscle memory took over. I’d completely forgotten, as I am wont to do, that as a child my grandfather had showed me how to harvest cherries. He had been, among other things, a fruit farmer in the Yakima Valley.
It was an unsettling experience, and also a moving one. I could feel his hand guiding mine.
Ran Prieur runs material on pitas.com reglar like, and it’s a mix of funny, scathing, and maybe a bit over in the too-smart category. Me, I likey the too-smart. THis week, he interviews: [reverb=10 reference=butthole surfers]SATAN satan satan.
Among other things, forget about that Osama guy, never mind looking for the Bush connections: the Prince of Darkness has been pulling the strings all along, just like the fundies always suspected…
RP: And what are you trying to get done? What’s your goal?
S: What do you think? The total extermination of all life. Hate it!
RP: Life.
S: Stinking, breeding, blubbering, wallowing blob of wormy pus, squirming around, making noise, spreading everywhere. You can’t control it. You never know what it’s going to do. Life! I hate it! The only thing to do is wipe it out, everywhere, forever.
RP: So nothing left but rocks and sand–
S: No! Are you deaf? Even rocks are screaming with life. Messy edges, atoms bouncing around singing. What I want is absolute perfect eternal nothing.
RP: Suppose you get it. Then what?
S: (long pause) OK, you’re right. It’s not the having — it’s the getting. What I enjoy is the act of hating and destroying. Or no, what I enjoy is the feeling of it, that cold fiery tightness, your heart shrinking in on itself like a black sun of raging indifference. Ah, yes. Every time someone feels like that I’m there too, like a giant invisible mosquito perched on their shoulder sucking their blood. If you look close you can see me.
So, I’m getting a little bit of traction at work. I am working a mildly ill-defined gig at a former employer, a DVD and CD-ROM company that I worked for a few years ago.
I was going to write about how much fun it is to write marketing copy. It’s like poetry, but without depth or feeling! I have been finding myself laughing out loud as I write it.
Oh, but the website they have sucks. I did a great deal of the original work on it, and it’s not been overhauled since, just, kind of… picked to death.
But that job is so far from what I’m doing now that I’d be a fool to raise the issue. I think that probably a website is the last thing they need – and if I raise the issue, it would be in that direction.
Fifteen Minutes and Counting Down: The New York Daily News body-slams the Post off Frankenstein’s assist off the ropes over his noting that something was awry with a story on Ang Lee’s new Hulk flick.
Sadly, an incoming phone call here disrupted my AIM chat with Frankenstein on the subject. He was there one moment, and then the chat window went dead.
He’d signed off as spoke with a local acquaintance via the telephone… I’m sorry Paul! I wasn’t ignoring you.
I AM ignoring my howling cat, who feels it simply unforgivable that he’s confined within the apartment since developing intense flea allergies.
It is I, I who am the stocker of the liquor stall!
Viv and I spent most of Saturday night celebrating the solstice at Gravelvoice audio wizard Scott Colburn and his lovely wife Jaye Barr’s new church home, on the deep fringe of Ballard.
I’ve known Scott since we were juvenile delinquent punk rockers back in the southern wilds of Indiana, and had the pleasure of working with Scott for several years at the Frank Doolittle Company, about ten years ago now.
I had a great time, caught up with the doins of all manner of folk, including the man that welded the Broadway’s Jimi Hendrix statue together, Jeff and Brad from Wall of Sound and Confounded Books (who was unaware that his website was down… ), and the always amusing and positively puzzlin’ likes of Rick and Alan of the Sun City Girls.
Their latest hijinks involve the potential tenancy of a former theater near Ballard formerly occupied by a local wildman who once tended bar at the Blue Moon, ran for Mayor, and generally was involved in all manner of crazy public surrealism.
It is good to know that SCG will be picking up that particular mystical torch. I’ve known the ladies since they arrived here in Wetsville and it’s always a pleasure to catch up with them. One fine day, about ten years ago, I journeyed to darkest Tacoma with Alan, Charlie, and my pal Chuck on an expedition which included a pit stop at the pride of Tacoma, Bob’s “World Famous” Java Jive.
The visit culminated in an escape by a monkey from a back room, whereupon the aged proprietress chased him about the appropriately named Jungle Room, wielding a furious broom while scolding him by name to “Get back in there!”
It was without a doubt the finest Pabst Blue Ribbon I have ever tasted.
This afternoon, I amused myself by paying a call on the Asian Art Museum, near my home, and taking in the sights and sounds of the new music quartet Sorelle. They played a piece that included flute transcriptions of whalesong, and damn if it didn’t work.
Later, there was glass-breakage, mirror busting, and violin smashing. Who says long-skirted classical players don’t know how to tear it up?
As I left, I saw the pleasantly ironic sight of a restored B-17 buzzing the Space Needle over the front-and-center view of Noguchi’s Black Hole Sun sculpture, which sits in front of the museum.
All that and a 12,000-word transcription of the Lasky-Stump interview. It’s been a round, firm, fully packed weekend.