Guess How Many Licks It Takes to Get to the Center

Oh, my.  Mollie Sugden has passed on.

Happy Tranny B-Day to my favorite Np/Tuck-er whose ass I haven’t seen in HDTV (yet), Cherry Peck AKA Willam Belli AKA noextrai.  May he stay off the pole/street corner for another year and still be able to pay SAG/AFTRA dues.

Happy happy to Larry (lfkbear)!

(We won't say how old.)

William “Billy” D. Mays, Jr.
July 20, 1958 — June 28, 2009

Straight, loud, perhaps even obnoxious, but it must be said, the man was damn nice to look at.

Because I am a whore for dirty old full-blown postmodernists:

I am GAY.  Sometimes embarrassingly so.  (Still not J-Setting, though.)

Existentialism is kicking my ass lately.  I can’t even exert control over my car.  Had the distributor assembly replaced three weeks ago when the engine just stopped running.  Apparently that wasn’t the problem, and the car died in exactly the same way at damn near exactly the same time, under almost identical circumstances, although at least about two miles closer to home this time.

Okay, to be fair, today was 104° where three weeks ago it was only in the mid-90s.

I feel like death.  I fully expect that I will die of heat stroke tomorrow — and I’m not kidding around with that.  I am sucking back water and sitting over a bank of fans with the A/C turned all the way down to 55°, and after about 4½ hours I’m still profoundly fatigued, nauseous, and sweating my tits off.

I don’t feel like Job.  That would be way-over-the-line narcissistic.  I am, however, seriously re-examining my therapist. Every car problem I’ve had this year has been within an hour of leaving my Thursday afternoon session.

About that: I’m trying to re-frame my self-perception to the point where I can actually believe the whole“It’s not me, it’s them” thing.  It’s not working any better now than it was in the nineties, which is beyond pathetic (being that I started therapy in 1987).  I’m trying to reconnect my inner self through Cynthia Heimel.  It’s good for a giggle now, but I think living crippled in the middle with no real upward momentum or motivation has completely disfigured something in my psyche past the point of recovery.

Maybe if I throw up soon, everything will purge all at once somehow.  Something will end. Perhaps not as decisively as death, but something might give, and I’ll be able to stumble across some kind of signpost that makes sense.

Irony of the moment: my gardenia is dying of root rot from being overwatered.  lHow stupid is that?

(No size queen jokes, please, we’re busy being indignant.)

Oh, good gods, this shit is just getting stupid.

How about this? I’ll just end it all now.

Here’s what I need: a Segway, a reality show camera crew, and kneepads.  I’'ll start with Rick Perry, and chase down every family values Republican self-righteous politician at the state level or higher.  Blowjobs on camera after I chase the bastards to the point of exhaustion.

It takes vision, people.

Oh, it’s just that cheesy, alright…

And then I saw her…
she was a bright red '64 GTO with fins and gills like some giant piranha fish, some obscene phallic symbol on wheels…
little rivers of anticipation ran down my inseam as I kicked those five hundred Italian horses into life and left reality behind me:
fifty, sixty, seventy miles an hour…
my hand slipped inside the belt of my trousers as we hit eighty, ninety miles an hour…
and as we passed the magic100 my love exploded all over her bright pink leather interior…
And at that moment, I thought of my mother.

— “The Key To Her Ferrari”

According to some of my older friends, it’s not the best work, not that I couldn’t figure that one out on my own.  Just mindless fun for geeks, really.

This is actually a second replacement; the first two copies were on (significantly well-worn) vinyl.

I am gay and I love Zach Galifianakis.
(Not going to see The Hangover, though.)

I also love me some Flo.

This is pretty widespread knowledge by now, but I had to find the bitchiest, and yet somehow most civil, recounting of the “State of Affairs,” as it were.

Naturally, it was at The Daily Beast.

The Sex Scandal Hypocrite

Max Blumenthal

Isaac Brekken / AP Photo

In the wake of Sen. John Ensign’s adultery confession, his ruthless attacks on Bill Clinton and Larry Craig — and his strident defense of the “sanctity of marriage” — are coming back to haunt him, says Max Blumenthal.

Republican Sen. John Ensign of Nevada didn’t tap his foot in a bathroom stall like Larry Craig or spirit away to pricey bordellos like David Vitter, but like Newt Gingrich, he had an extramarital affair with a young staffer on his payroll.

Ensign admitted his affair Tuesday, declaring, “I deeply regret and am very sorry for my actions.” According to Politico, Ensign only revealed the affair when the husband of the woman involved demanded “a substantial sum of money” to keep quiet.

Confessed just two weeks after a visit to the Republican presidential-primary state of Iowa, Ensign’s affair effectively ends his apparent presidential ambitions. It also undermines his carefully cultivated image as a stalwart against the machinations of liberal judges, feminists, and homosexual activists.

Beginning with his call from the House floor for President Bill Clinton to resign after having an affair — “He has no credibility left,” Ensign said — and continuing through his tenure in the Senate with a hard-right voting record that earned a 100 percent rating from the Christian Coalition, Ensign has earned a reputation as one of Congress’ most active and ardent social conservatives. In 2008, he was rewarded with the chairmanship of the Republican Policy Committee, making him the No. 4 Republican in the Senate, a rising star at age 51 in a party with few strong presidential prospects. The future looked bright.

Before admitting his affair, Ensign last addressed the issue of marriage on July 13, 2004, during the congressional debate over amending the Constitution with a ban on same-sex marriage.

“Marriage is the cornerstone on which our society was founded,” Ensign proclaimed from the Senate floor. “For those who say that the Constitution is so sacred that we cannot or should not adopt the Federal Marriage Amendment, I would simply point out that marriage, and the sanctity of that institution, predates the American Constitution and the founding of our nation. It predates the founding of our nation and even the landing at Plymouth Rock. Marriage, as a social institution, predates every other institution on which ordered society in America and the world as a whole, has relied, including even the church itself.”

Ensign concluded, “It is not right to mold marriage to fit the desires of a few, against the wishes of so many, and to ignore the important role of marriage.”

( Read more... )

As so many others have mused today, I guess Ensign has to quit Promise Keepers and join Heathen Scum Promise Breakers now.

This gay man is more than willing to personally take responsibility for the ultimate collapse of Senator Ensign’s marriage.  Taking one for the team, they say.

What’s the sin count that allows one to cast stones these days?

Okay, I’m really old.  Somehow I managed to get all the way from November of last year to this week without seeing even part of the actual video for Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” (parodies thereof notwithstanding).

Dance mashup that it is, I’m actually surprised at how well the choreographer was able to mesh Bob Fosse’s Broadway style (down to the actual segments from two 1960s pieces Fosse created for then-muse Gwen Verdon) with show-style southern marching band choreography.  (And don’t think I’m unaware of the irony inherent in conflating the names Beyoncé Knowles and Gwen Verdon.)

But, ye gods, if this is the kind of thing the children have been doing up in the clubs for the last three or four years, I think I’m a little mortified.  Clearly I only thought I was over the hill when vogueing hit in the 80s.

Old enough for urban extinction, that’s me…

I don’t usually like to be so messy with food, but then, I’m usually eating alone…

(Oh, and if you’re at work, think twice…)

I’m never 100% certain how to feel about Stanley Crouch’s positions, but this situation definitely bugs.

From The Daily Beast:

A College, a Gun — and a Big Injustice

Stanley Crouch

After a Morehouse College student shot a classmate three times, he was sentenced to… graduation. Inside an outrageous case that shows that the old boys’ network is color-blind.

This story is about a violent incident and a legal response so outrageous that a President who taught constitutional law and his Attorney General should both look up from their servings of Washington blues and take notice: A tempest of blues is also blowing another way.  Obama’s judicial warriors must do justice to the victim of a man who got an unconscionable break in a time that is not supposed to be so good for bad guys.

Central to this tale is the question of equal treatment under the law.  Every important perspective on this issue is opposed to justice being hobbled by “unwritten laws” of prejudicial entitlement.  That vision of entitlement — shared by law enforcement, prosecutors, those on the bench, juries, and influential members of the community — does dirt in a way so indifferent to fairness that its stench shrills up the nostrils on the way to high heaven.  In our time, it is much harder to get equal justice if the victim of a crime finds himself in the color-coded world where prejudicial entitlement is extended to black criminals, and black victims are treated unsympathetically, even indifferently.

After being thrown out of an Atlanta club for unruly behavior on Halloween night in 2007, a Morehouse College student named Joshua Brandon Norris bumped into fellow student Rashad Johnson, had words, went to his car, and returned to the club, screeching to a halt before getting out and pushing a gun into Johnson’s face.  They struggled, and Johnson was shot three times in the leg before Norris fled.  Charged with aggravated assault and possession of a firearm, Norris faced a possible sentence of 20 years.  Instead, he was offered a plea bargain under which he would serve no time but had to graduate from Morehouse.  Norris graduated a few weeks ago, and the Johnson family, which was not notified of the deal, was shocked, not surprisingly.

( It doesn’t stop there… )

To say that I am stunned — particularly with the acquittal of the New Orleans serial rapist — is far beyond all sense of understatement.  In the Morehouse case, I’m a little less surprised, because that’s more like O.J. Simpson all over again, and with any luck, the kid will likely screw up again, out of that same sense of entitlement, and get put in check — also like O.J. Simpson.

I ♥ the class system.  It just makes me wish I could have gone Jack and Jill as a kid, because I’d be set for life.

Kidding.

So with the car dead until Monday (I still can’t fathom exactly how a distributor works, much less why one would fail while I’m driving the car on the freeway), I am trying to figure out whether or not to make this salmon brandade I’ve been contemplating all week and contemplating more of the music I got.

That second Rorem album I got because it emerged with a fixation I’ve had for years, even since I picked up the Dances for Cello and Piano from the cello rack at some sheet music store or other, back before anyone had recorded it.  I’m gradually warming up to the broader Rorem canon, though I still haven’t worked up to reading his diaries yet.  Reading the sexual escapades of the Previous Gay Generations make me intensely and wistfully jealous — not to suggest that I didn’t get around in my day, but I had a difficult time sitting through even that Don Bachardy/Christopher Isherwood documentary with all its discussion of intellectual and artistic semi-decadence that seem so very much before my time and in some higher realm someplace far above Texas.

That’s a little classist of me on a certain level, but I’m not often as adequately ashamed of it as I probably should be.  Truly, though, the only time I had a reasonably intelligent well-off older gentleman pursuing me with any serious intent, it was the (Republican) mayor’s older brother, and he still shared a townhouse with his mother.  Not quite what I had in mind in terms of a social-climbing meeting of the minds, as tacky as that sounds when said.

As far as Miss Dana Owens goes, I’m still having difficulty reconciling the solid singer who cranks out all these surprisingly competent pop standards throwbacks with the socially conscious feminist rapper she was in what seems to be a previous life.  You figure that the rapper/actress thing was almost part of a natural progression (save for a couple of films like Taxi and Bringing Down the House that were embarrassing for Black people all over the nation), but that she has the chops to turn around and sing truckloads of jazz standards for Living Out Loud still blows me away.

(And then it turned into an very special episode called Riding the Bus with mezaway.  Gays on the bus.  Who’da thunk it?)

What is it with stupid white women in Philadelphia?

Amusing, yes, but on some level, it makes me afraid to ever leave the house.

For the three of you who haven’t seen it, the Return Second Coming of Betty Bowers.

No new material here, just hilarious presentation that is somehow superior to Funny or Die.  Just a certain je ne sais quoi.

Week of 4 June 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): When I was 19 years old, a so-called psychic predicted I would die when I was 24.  As much as I scoffed at his careless quackery, his words subliminally worried me for years.  On the day I turned 25 I celebrated extra hard.  Partly because of that experience, I’ve always tried to be impeccably conscientious about how I conduct myself as a fortune-teller.  I’ve vowed never to manipulate you with melodramatic prophecies that could distort your free will.  So it’s with a cautious sense of responsibility that I offer the following augury: The weeks ahead could be one of the most illuminating and successful times of the last five years.

Thanks so much, Mr. Brezsny.

Hmm…

My two great loves: computers and music.  Computers that make music are a major turn-on, in fact.

And then some fairly obscure chamber music that I found doing a bit of my obsessive research:

I’m considering putting a group together to pretend to play this piece, but the sheet music is a $100 parts-and-score import, and the piano part is fairly freaking difficult in either the left-hand-only or two-hands version from the sound of things, and I’m not sure I know any pianists who are up to it.  Who am I kidding?  I don’t know many pianists here at all.  Why not aim high, though, right?

Sex Magic outlook June 2009:

Thanks so much, Ms. Lovelace.

I can’t even find my list of skills right now, so I can’t very well add to it.

Week of 28 May 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Most of you Virgos have built-in safeguards that ensure you won’t abuse power.  That’s why I feel uninhibited about advising you to grab all the new authority and influence you can get in the next few weeks.  It’s one of those phases in your astrological cycle when you’re more likely to be in line for promotions, new privileges, and increased clout.  I hope you won’t be shy.  You may have to be uncharacteristically aggressive as you claim your rightful potency and rewards.

Thanks so much, Mr. Brezsny.

I’ll have to recount some stories about this later.

Because old-school 80s Alternative Rock effing RULES.

Everyone knows that I am a BIG QUEEN, but really.

Vanessa Williams.  Christine Baranski.

“The Man That Got Away” as a duet.

Too Effing Gay.

That’s gayer than gay porn.  In fact, having two gym queens going at it on the lid of the grand piano couldn’t have made that scene even a little bit gayer.  It was total gay saturation.  If Judy Garland had come out of the grave and joined them, it still couldn’t have been any gayer.  So gay, in fact, that including a Rachel Maddow appearance — to say nothing of cameos from Billie Jean King and Robert Verdi — seemed like a superfluous afterthought

Best girl finally snaps and goes all bloody Lucia.

Crystal Light On The Go makes Cholestyramine palatable.

That is all.

Best girl, on a break from singing, is yet another kind of geek, it appears.

Week of 21 May 2009:

VIRGO (Aug. 23-Sept. 22): Up to one-tenth of the population is left-handed.  Yet for centuries, even as late as the 1950s, there were social stigmas against left-handers — similar in some ways to the perverse prejudice that has been directed toward homosexuals.  So strong was the taboo that many parents tried to convert their naturally left-handed children into righties.  Thankfully, this absurd form of repression is now defunct.  (Five of the last seven American presidents have been left-handed.)  But it’s a good reminder that there are countless other ways in which our culture still attempts to coax us or force us into not being who we really are.  But here’s the good news: It’s an excellent time for you Virgos to reject the pressure to be someone else and get back to where you once belonged.  Reunite with the person you were destined to be!

Thanks so much, Mr. Brezsny.

This would have been great advice about twenty-eight (or even twenty) years ago.  Now it just seems patronizing.

Because I am a desperate attention whore of a slut who will let positively anyone use his photos — among other things, though not so much in the present situation — just for the tiniest scraps of personal validation, I have now made my way onto the mailing list for something called the Texas Testosterone Festival.  Alas, it’s not as fun as the name might suggest, at least for me; it’s a weekend of Mixed Martial Arts competition in downtown Austin; apparently the the participants may want to partake of some not-the-best sushi in town (for my money, Korea House in the Village near the Alamo North is much better) before engaging in silly acts of deeply homoerotic violence.

So an old-school semi-stereotypical homo who could not be less inclined towards such things is providing one small bit of artwork for the promotion of a semi-sport that couldn’t be more willfully heteronormative without the use of steroids.

I couldn’t make this up if I thought about it for years.