"Heaven has a road, but no one travels it; Hell has no gate, but men will bore through to get there."

Saturday, April 30, 2011

"When religion loses vision, that's how every empire falls. When no one asks and no one answers, that's how every empire falls."

M. Faithfull

New Normal

Possibly one of the horriblest of phrases,
Methinks the "New Normal" protests much a bit.
As economy of emotions and psyche go,
Tis really the drollest of shit.
But the jokes on us all,
Cause nothin here's normal or new.
Just a tragic repeat as all happens again-
Repeating the history of you.

METHAVISION!

Just try and not become an addict...
I will be having Mr. Profiler Spencer Reid analyze my bizness!
Pardon but enjoy the Matthew Gray Gubler-a-thon! grrrowl












Fucking Your Friends... or the gentle art of Sublimation

Been thinking a lot about your words about loving your friends. Just watched Milk and really wondering why, after all our progress and gains of freedom, equality, prosperity and better health, I have few if not none of those men in my life who can meld the emotional agape of friendship with the eros of passionate romantic and physical love!?

I wonder if that is gone or somehow trying to be reborn- or happening in some other places in the world. In American democracy, the more freedom usually equals a lowering of standards... sad but true. Honestly, when gay men had to hide in corners, closets, dark cafes- a la Oscar Wilde and the "deviants" in Wiemar Germany, they had to be so very smart to survive and I think that made them much more interesting and emotionally and intellectually diverse- more fun- and possessed of more substance. Perhaps this is a backward-looking fantasy. Oh for deviancy- with a tinge of conscience. And oh for what Richard Weaver calls "direct awareness" of others- being in relationship as you say- feeling that mysterious but powerful personal connection!

This why I think we need to keep the historical thread of transformation always in our minds as we do the more tangible and mundane work of film-making.

Happy day & much love- C

READ IT



“Much of the later growth of life may look at first like loss, just as much of the earlier growth appears to be gain. But that is no more true than the sense that spring is a season of gain and fall a season of loss. Each is essential to the full cycle, and the cycle is the only context in which the specific changes along the way have real meaning. Most people create new situations in the present, new hopes for the future, and new ways to realize them. The image for such a life is not an upward-trending diagonal of increasing achievement, but a spiral of linked circles- the completion of each leading to a new cycle of experience and activity based upon a new dream. People who have discounted and blocked out the inner callings from the future have cut themselves off from the very signals that really vital people use to stay on the paths of their own development. And unless you disrupt it by trying to rush through your ‘neutral zone’ quickly, you are slowly being transformed into the person you need to be to move forward in your life.”

Friday, April 29, 2011

Tuesday, April 26, 2011

#23 aka the best in a decade

You absolutely must download the whole 13 songs of loveliness which is Marianne Faithfull's "Horses and High Heels!" Took one listen to absorb it and it's already headed to being on a loop in my dreams. Been a while since I could feel an album reorganizing my molecules. I feel a listening party w some cocktail accompaniment- hugz



The Stations
Why Did We Have To Part
That's How Every Empire Falls
No Reason
Prussian Blue
Love Song
Gee Baby
Goin' Back
Past Present Future
Horses And High Heels
Back In Baby's Arms
Eternity
Dance for joy, shake with fear-
This is an everlasting year

The Old House

BRIT BUB

Gimme!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/world/europe/23pour.html?hp

Thanks Pirates!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/23/arts/television/doctor-who-us-premiere-will-not-be-delayed.html?_r=1

Stephen Moffat...




Different

"Heresy is the truth gone mad from loneliness..."

G.K. Chesterton

"Madness is simply what genius looks like to a tiny mind."


Stephen Moffat

Sad

http://www.therestisnoise.com/2011/04/for-peter-lieberson.html

Funny

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B2oziFfGQZo&feature=youtube_gdata_player

Monday, April 25, 2011

Sunday, April 17, 2011

Revisiting- Zena's "Bitter Suite"



http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xex9v3_xena-the-bitter-suite-war-and-peace_shortfilms

http://thetorchonline.com/latest/which-musical-episode-was-better-buffys-or-xenas/

Too Much Angry Jesus

An Easter Homage to Pearl N. Young on her 102nd birthday-

Looking past the astounding open blossom of Creation,
Past the clear crystal unbounded living Soul,
While silent fall all the pretty churches...
Failing speech to reclaim the Joyous Faith!
The snarking, clench-jawed others
Wondering always "what is wrong today?"
Talk into their mics- hollering out to hollow-out our world.
They are not talking to you- to me-
Angry, ferocious, destructive and non-conserving
Their passions make the Passion tragic.
They look to their Jesus- anti-christ-like,
Their deepest, judging, sniping wish-
For Him to be angry too- comforting their discomfort.
Ironic muddled thoughts devaluing redemption,
They want their Angry Jesus...
Haunting and confirming their missed lost love-
Trapped in their system.
Unintelligent design defies Universal Spirit,
Creating a parade of robotic walks,
Demanding too our Deist Fathers
Drug down to their side and size
Becoming now broken, false guides
Permitting them to walk down the Path- backwards,
Offering excuse for excess and violence,
In sad exchange for the Gift of Freedom-
Now strange, unrecognizable-
Even to those who preach it.

Wednesday, April 6, 2011

Saturday, April 2, 2011

Death and the Powers



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=el2ReAJhMLA&feature=related

http://operagasm.com/2010/06/a-robots-opera/


Meat wants Meat, Meat wants Sweet, Meat sweats for the Sweets, Meat wants who it meets- It kills to eat. Now there's no help but evolving Out of the Meat, and into the System. It isn't the many and the few- It's yourself- it's you! Come! Into the world of light!

From Robert Pinsky-

Why write about robots? Not because I am interested in gadgets. And why a man whose body is failing? Not because I am interested in death.

Rather, I think it is the nature of work, and the human need to make things, that led me to imagine Simon Powers, a bullying, charismatic lover of money and poetry, power and family.

When we strive, in the characteristic human way, to make a business or a garden or a poem or a collection or a piece of music, we try to give what we make certain qualities of life. The made thing, if we succeed, has something resembling a soul. In English, we say that it is a "work of art" or simply "it works."

The word "robot," I am told, comes from a Czech word meaning "one who works." The things we make- if they are all we hope them to be- imitate something of ourselves. A poem, says the great American poet William Carlos Williams, is a "machine made out of words"; that is, a poem is a robot that performs the work of meaning and emotion. The garden, the business, etc. are robots that perform versions of that same work.

The robots who perform the opera-within-the-opera are the creatures or descendants or avatars of Simon Powers and his family. In trying to re-create the Powers family and their reality, the robots are in a sense returning the favor of creation... as our works may sometimes do.

Faith, Freedom and Faggotry

Jean Cocteau says it best in Le Livre Blanc in the 1920s- one of my
favorites-

"I refuse merely to be tolerated for it damages both my love of love and my love of liberty!"

Vive la France!! :-)

Understand too that with his age and consciousness, R IS the example of the kind of "radical" activism that in large part made it possible for all the queers to sip lattes, drink martinis, talk about shoes and watch Glee today... honestly- we are completely assimilated and that is a whole other topic. There is no artsy intellectual avant garde anywhere which I wanted to be apart of my entire life. Just baseball and beer which have replaced any chance of the community of rebel friends bound by difference. Tis the ultimate quality of democratic freedom that with every increase in freedom, there is a decrease in quality- the Great Leveling- or more prescient- the Pet Shop Boys "Being (Totally) Boring!"

As most of the Chicago gay folk of both sexes I know are having brunch, buying condos and having and adopting children- most of whom nobody in our overly self-righteous society wants, and becoming more and more "heterosexualized" esp. in more urban areas, I see the gay lifestyle actually starting to buttress the established familial order- family is like love- indivisible.

I think the larger and more macro politically correct solutions you are concerned about are a very different and separate issue.

Gay aside, the overwhelmingly destructive component of my upbringing was what one conservative thinker Frank Meyer- another favorite- notes in that "we don't suffer from a lack of community, but rather from an excess of religious and political state-enforced community." This scourge of fundamentalism is what is wracking our world at home and abroad. There simply must be freedom to be an individual person and make choices in exploring the world- including sexuality- without the presupposition of "sin" or some type of wrongdoing. There is no power on earth that can protect your children from the bad things in the world so that is a failed mission from the start and a cause of a lot of unnecessary parental and societal stress in my opinion. Aside from Trust, all you can do is teach them to access their own souls and conscience, find the Divinity within and make good choices from that place. And speak openly and honestly to them about sex- removing the temptation to experiment unhealthily by dragging it all out on the dining room table and into the light. It's not like sexual desire is ever going to leave the scene so why not communicate it in the proper loving context? As John Milton said (an ultimate Christian) in his Areopagitica, "That which purifies us is trial, and trial is by what is Contrary." And Jesus saw the obstacles for people and removed them with love offering transcendence not judgment. There is no protection in Fortress America- compelling though that may be- and despite it being a powerful ancient miserable castrating hold-over from our youth- that pleasure in lonely righteousness of our mother's version of the circled (wagon) which only which gives support to Nietzsche's (the greatest anti-Christian of all time but whom every Christian should read every word of) contention that the power of Christianity lies in its transfiguration of the victim into the victor. No Self-overcoming. I believe we need both divine guideance and the ability to allow it to work through free will. I think they must be inseperable for human survival- physical and spiritual! You already know what I think of the either or scenario. Being taught you are bad but then saved so then better than everybody else is an insideous alchemy which produces a mild sociopathic state. No wonder I had no friends growing up and people shunned your courderoys- that was not about fashion- that was a reaction to the version of holiness we were taught. Being better, separate, apart and ultimately ALONE. It's impossible to keep it all out and maintain a morality bubble in our interconnected world- and it precludes a role for outside and competing influences which push us to growth. We used to talk about this during Star Trek- how will be ever get out to the stars when we take such extreme and self-satisfying comfort in tribalism?

With regard to any fears of gay people taking away non-gay rights (a troublesome thesis given that rights of equality and freedom should not differ based on the group or we have nothing), I just think that's a red herring who can't swim an an albatross that won't fly! Again, love only increases the pot- all this nonsense about family values (which is the most non-Christian, new age, politically correct and impotent verbiage I ever heard- Jesus Christ had knowledge, belief and Faith- values are for making change in the temple!) makes me reel. No family right that GLBT people claim- family, children, marriage, equal taxes, insurance, property rights- if secured- takes one single molecule of what str8 families have away, and not extending those rights and basic privileges and blessings of the state is a violation of the Declaration, Constitution, the laws of human freedom and conscience. As our outrageously liberal founding Father said- "and the pursuit of happiness"- individually and not collectively defined. Gay people have family values- they are families and they have values. There is zero evidence in history of gay discrimination against non-gays occuring- save for sometimes shallowly oppressing ourselves! Those who have been taught from birth that their inner souls are evil and that they are not of value as people and who endure decades of condoned familial and societal psychological warfare against which they have no defense until they can access others with their experience rarely have the strength after crawling out of that Socratic cave to turn to oppressing others. Nope on that.

CAL







http://www.gaymerzngeek.com/2009/06/chad-allen.html