The Temptation of St. Anthony

"Well, we don't think much of your painting. I've seen better pictures done by a five-year-old."

Karabekian slid off his barstool so he could face all those enemies standing up.... "Listen--" he said so calmly, "I have read the editorials against my painting in your wonderful newspaper. I have read every word of the hate mail you have been thoughtful enough to send to New York."

"The painting did not exist until I made it," Karebekian went on. "Now that it does exist, nothing would make me happier than to have it reproduced again and again, and vastly improved upon, by all the five-year-olds in town. I would love for your children to find pleasantly and playfully what it took me many angry years to find.

"I now give you my word of honor," he went on, "that the picture your city owns shows everything about life which truly matters, with nothing left out. It is a picture of the awareness of every animal--the 'I am' to which all messages are sent. It is all that is alive in any of us--in a mouse, in a deer, in a cocktail waitress. It is unwavering and pure, no matter what preposterous adventure may befall us. A sacred picture of Saint Anthony alone is one vertical, unwavering band of light. If a cockroach were near him, or a cocktail waitress, the picture would show two such bands of light. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery."

-- from Breakfast of Champions by Kurt Vonnegut

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I Got A Name

I was in a nostalgic mood this morning and played Jim Croce's Greatest Hits album. It carried me back to my childhood, and the thought occurred to me that one of the strongest connections I have with my parents is the music of the 70s. Given how much their playing loud music bothered me as a kid, it's pretty ironic that now few things make me feel closer to them.

I've also been thinking back to Labor Day weekend four years ago. I was in Portland for a good friend's wedding, and during the trip I made the decision to move back. Given my situation, it seemed like the best possible plan. I had so much hope.

Alas, things didn't go smoothly at all. Hard to believe that four years have passed since that moment. But I've still got Jim Croce. :-)

President Obama at the memorial in Newtown

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Obama's thank you

Here's an amazing video of President Obama thanking a group of young campaign workers. There's nothing I can add to what he has to say.


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Cher says... VOTE!

A public service announcement from Cher and Kathy Griffin:



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The gays speak out for Obama

Wow. Just wow.



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Farewell, my friend...

For Wanda.


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With friends like these...

Republican commentator and former Reagan assistant Peggy Noonan had tons of advice for Mitt Romney today. From her "Time for an Intervention" post:

The central problem revealed by the tape is Romney’s theory of the 2012 election. It is that a high percentage of the electorate receives government checks and therefore won’t vote for him, another high percentage is supplying the tax revenues and will vote for him, and almost half the people don’t pay taxes and presumably won’t vote for him.

My goodness, that’s a lot of people who won’t vote for you. You wonder how he gets up in the morning.

This is not how big leaders talk, it’s how shallow campaign operatives talk: They slice and dice the electorate like that, they see everything as determined by this interest or that. They’re usually young enough and dumb enough that nobody holds it against them, but they don’t know anything. They don’t know much about America....

And his tone is fatalistic. I can’t win these guys who will only vote their economic interests, but I can win these guys who will vote their economic interests, plus some guys in the middle, whoever they are.

That’s too small and pinched and narrow. That’s not how Republicans emerge victorious—”I can’t win these guys.” You have to have more respect than that, and more affection, you don’t write anyone off, you invite everyone in. Reagan in 1984 used to put out his hand: “Come too, come walk with me.” Come join, come help, whatever is happening in your life.

You know what Romney sounded like? Like a kid new to politics who thinks he got the inside lowdown on how it works from some operative.

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With less than seven weeks to go, there's still time for Romney to come out of his political coma and make a stronger showing. Which means there is still work to be done to re-elect President Obama. If you haven't contributed to his campaign, what are you waiting for? You can start right here.

Leadership quote of the day

Speaking on the prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace:

... You recognize this is going to remain an unsolved problem.... We have a potentially volatile situation, but we sort of live with it. And we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately somehow, something will happen and resolve it.

-- Mitt Romney

Inspiring!

Here are the full videos of Romney speaking candidly to fundraisers at a $50,000 a plate dinner a few months ago. Thank you, Mother Jones!


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The full transcript of the video is here. And a great commentary on all of this from David Brooks:

Forty-seven percent of the country, [Romney] said, are people “who are dependent upon government, who believe they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to take care of them, who believe they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it.”

This comment suggests a few things. First, it suggests that he really doesn’t know much about the country he inhabits. Who are these freeloaders? Is it the Iraq war veteran who goes to the V.A.? Is it the student getting a loan to go to college? Is it the retiree on Social Security or Medicare?

It suggests that Romney doesn’t know much about the culture of America. Yes, the entitlement state has expanded, but America remains one of the hardest-working nations on earth. Americans work longer hours than just about anyone else. Americans believe in work more than almost any other people. Ninety-two percent say that hard work is the key to success, according to a 2009 Pew Research Survey.

It says that Romney doesn’t know much about the political culture. Americans haven’t become childlike worshipers of big government. On the contrary, trust in government has declined. The number of people who think government spending promotes social mobility has fallen.

The people who receive the disproportionate share of government spending are not big-government lovers. They are Republicans. They are senior citizens. They are white men with high school degrees. As Bill Galston of the Brookings Institution has noted, the people who have benefited from the entitlements explosion are middle-class workers, more so than the dependent poor.

Are you better off?

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Awesome speeches tonight at the Democratic National Convention

Elizabeth Warren:


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And Bill Clinton, wow! He's still got it... no one communicates the way he does.


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It's Doris Fish Day

Twenty-five years ago I made the drive from Stanford to San Francisco on a warm Thursday night. After parking and a few anxious moments of convincing myself to get out of the car, I walked into a gay bar for the first time. My life changed in the next moment when I saw men dancing together.

The emcee for my evening--and the End Up's Wet Jockey Shorts contest--was the incomparable Doris Fish: the first drag queen I had seen in person. To this day she remains my favorite.

Four years later on June 22, 1991, Doris aka Philip Mills died of AIDS, the same month that I moved to San Francisco.

The last time I saw Doris was two years before that. My friend Gerard and I had gone to a fundraiser at the Victoria Theater to help pay her medical expenses. I recently ran across this video of Doris performing that night. It's a memory that has always remained so clear for me because of how the energy in the theater changed when Doris came on stage. The show had been entertaining enough up to that point, but there was the "before Doris" part of the show, and then there was Doris. She had such a powerful presence; even as she was thanking the crowd for turning out, her acidic wit ensured that no one got too weepy.

Somehow that evening was half my life ago.

I miss you, Doris. And I miss what it was like to be young and gay and free in San Francisco. This was your life. And it is mine.

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Funny how a lonely day, can make a person say
What good is my life
Funny how a breaking heart, can make me start to say
What good is my life
Funny how I often seem, to think I'll find never another dream
In my life
Till I look around and see, this great big world is part of me
And my life
This is my life
Today, tomorrow, love will come and find me
But that's the way that I was born to be
This is me

RIP, Donna Summer

Who knows why certain songs set up home within us? Who knows why anything, or anyone, does?

This is one of those songs that is magic for me, one that is going to have to be played at some point during my wake. I remember listening to this song one perfect day after a long and eventful canoe trip, sitting next to someone I loved as the sun shone overhead. I've long imagined what it would have been like to have been on the dance floor when Donna's disco version of "Macarthur Park" was first played.


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Obama's evolution

While the potential impact on the election concerns me, I can't deny that I got chills when I heard that President Obama announced his support for same sex marriage.


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Frank Bruni at the New York Times wrote a pair of blog posts before and after the Obama announcement about the confusing gay landscape we're now inhabiting and the historic significance of the president's announcement. And Richard Socarides has a great response at the New Yorker.

Once again I'm reminded how much the world has changed in my lifetime...

Song of the day

My friend Romaine are going to see Bonnie Raitt at the Edgefield on September 7th... which just happens to the 25th anniversary of my coming out. And that makes Bonnie's new video of "Right Down the Line" very timely. :-)

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Wicked with Wanda

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And thanks to Broadway Cares for caring all these years... it made a difference. It makes a difference.

Spring has sprung

And I listened to Boston's "More Than a Feeling" about ten times at the gym today. :-)

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Danger, Will Robinson!

Romney now has the physics community worried:

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Endings

It's strange how endings work, especially when what's preceded them hasn't.

When I read E.M. Forster's Maurice as a young man, I wanted to like it, of course. But it didn't move me, at least not until the final pages when the petals of an evening primrose came to symbolize something that had quietly, permanently slipped away. There was something in this passage that penetrated as the rest of the novel had not:

'Next Wednesday, say at 7.45. Dinner jacket's enough, as you know'.

They were [Clive's] last words, because Maurice had disappeared thereabouts, leaving no trace of his presence except a little pile of the petals of the evening primrose, which mourned from the ground like an expiring fire. To the end of his life, Clive was not sure of the exact moment of departure, and with the approach of old age he grew uncertain whether the moment had yet occurred. The Blue Room would glimmer, ferns undulate. Out of some eternal Cambridge, his friend began beckoning to him, clothed in the sun, and shaking out the scents and sounds of the May term.

But at the time, he was merely offended at a discourtesy, and compared it with similar lapses in the past. He did not realise that this was the end, without twilight or compromise, that he should never come across Maurice's track again, nor speak to those who had seen him.

When I finished the book, I read that page again and again. And now, more than two decades later, I searched the internet for those words and found them on another blog... they'd been someone else's favorite part of the book as well.

I HAD REMEMBERED MAURICE because I'd just watched Louis Malle's Damage, and once again the ending connected in a way that the rest of the movie did not. Somehow the incomparable voice of Jeremy Irons speaking these words made the whole two hours well spent:

It's takes a remarkably short time to withdraw from the world. I traveled, until I arrived at a life of my own.

What really makes us is beyond grasping. It's way beyond knowing. We give into love because it gives us some sense of what is unknowable. Nothing else matters... not at the end.

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Song of the day

I watched the live stream of GusGus performing at EVE Online's FanFest in Iceland this afternoon. Here's "Arabian Horse" from their album of the same name.

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