Small-arms celebration
Category: News and Politics

Maybe now I can get that .22 semi-automatic Beretta I've always wanted … 'cause Roberts, Alito et al are now telling me that, as a resident of the District of Columbia, I have that right. Dears in Rock Creek Park, beware!

Currently reading : I Was Told There'd Be Cake By Sloane Crosley

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Announcing my candidacy
Current mood: amused
Category: News and Politics

Someone sent this to me. Very ingenious.

Currently reading : When You Are Engulfed in Flames By David Sedaris Release date: 2008-06-03

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Like I really wanted to know how you’re coping...
Current mood: annoyed
Category: News and Politics

Ugh, far be it for me to complain about the only news outlet I choose during my work day and beyond (that being NPR in case you chose not to follow the link). I mean it's not Fox News or CSPAN, which is boring, people — I don't care how informative it's supposed to be. Does listening to NPR make me akin to a latte-drinking liberal? Even if it did, I have my limit, and I just reached it.

NPR's All Things Considered just aired the most pretentious bullshit I could imagine for an NPR segment … at least at this moment. It was a compilation of recorded conversations and e-mail messages from listeners describing their specific methods of coping with the rising costs of energy, mainly gasoline.

We all know that higher gas prices bring with them higher costs for just about everything. It takes a truck driver spending, like, a thousand dollars a day on gas to bring you those apples you bite into on a daily basis … or Hershey's bars or whatever. So what's a cash-reduced suburban family making six figures a year to do? Apparently move, if that's what it takes.

This story came about because All Things Considered asked its listeners to go online and to send in their feedback. Yeah, a chance for several thousand self-important, supposedly "empowered" Joe Schmoes to chime in. Some bragged about their already "luddite" lifestyles. Others sounded crestfallen as they described the horrors of walking to work or turning off lights in rooms where they weren't spending any time in their house. One woman said her family moved in order to reduce commuting time. One woman, a 21-year-old, described how her family had stopped going out to eat at restaurants and how she was taking cheap mini-meals to work.

So you can tell, I'm sure, that I have no sympathy for these people or for just about anyone else, certainly no one in the NPR sphere of our universe. The fact that these goddamn stories are being printed and broadcast at this rate describing the catastrophic effects of rising fuel prices, going on daily and talking about our current "energy crisis," it's enough to make you think we're about to have a rolling blackout. Maybe we will. Certainly those of you in California go through that a lot. But it's not all because of rising fuel prices.

Is it just me, or hasn't anyone else noticed that the fucking prices have been going up constantly for years, even before 2005, when our attention shifted temporarily to this topic after the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico regions of Mississippi and Louisiana? My dear, $2.50 a gallon is too high, but now we talk as if the days of this price were a generation ago. Does five years count as a generation? I could've told you once gas hit $3 a gallon that, even if it went back down, ultimately — and quickly — it would go back up … and stay up.

Of course I don't like paying nearly $5 for a gallon of gas, but in the 10 years I've worked for my current employer, I've never had to drive to work, so it's not like I'm filling my car's tank constantly. My partner John, on the other hand, drives 26 miles to work every day … and 26 miles back. I can only imagine how much longer that situation will last.

Who's to blame? Whatever. It's a stupid question. George Bush? Duh. He and his administration didn't give a rat's ass back in the day and, really, still don't. The American petroleum companies? No shit, Sherlock. They've been out for a larger share of the American economic pie since before I was born. Gas stations? Fuck yeah! They like to use the excuse that it's beyond their control as their individual prices go up daily.

The oil-producing countries, namely Saudi Arabia? Na'am, jiddan (Arabic for "yes, very much so"). They had to deal with English, French and American greed for so long that once they got a hold of their own natural resources, they were dying to keep prices elevated. They've learned the valuable lesson of sticking it to everyone else. What are we going to go? Take our business elsewhere? All this talk about competition from an increasingly urbanized China and India is really just filler, like in a rancid pork pie. It doesn't take that much more money all of a sudden to drill for oil, nor has China all of a sudden increased its demand … as if Shanghai had just sprung up like a Chia garden.

I think everyone is to blame, including me. Especially here in the States, we're so damn complacent about our lifestyles that nothing else, including politics, matters. Why are we so suddenly fascinated by the rising price of gas? Have we reached our breaking point? Considering that in Scandinavia gas prices are at $11 a gallon, we've got nothing to complain about. Sometimes I think we're like rotten, spoiled little children who just don't care about how much we get gouged for things as long as we can still afford to buy them whenever we want. Instant gratification, that's what our culture is all about these days.

Look, I don't mean to be so unpleasant as to suggest that I hate this country or this culture. I don't. I'm just sick of bandwagon mentality, and that's what I think we live by here. News media tell you that gas prices are rising frantically, so we react frantically. Why? Really, each because the other is doing so. It's not smart or healthy, nor does it help us solve the problem of our being gouged for oil, Norwegians even more so.

You think it's bad? Try living in Germany and having to drive for your commute. Oh, that's right: those nations have public transit infrastructure, something even today your average American politician would scoff at. They keep fighting transit spending initiatives in Virginia, mainly because the small-town I'm-from-where-the-simple-people-come-from political attitude confuses such investment with bloated spending. How sorry that lawmaker will be when he realizes he can no longer afford to drive every day from outer Henrico County into Richmond to go to work. How fervently he'll wish Richmond had a train system.

Jesus, stop complaining and do something! And for God's sake, don't add to the sonic mess that is NPR's clamoring to hear your voice. Please keep your less-is-more-in-my-$500,000-home perspective to yourself.

Currently reading : When You Are Engulfed in Flames By David Sedaris Release date: 2008-06-03

9:35 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Mea Culpa on Mass Avenue
Current mood: thoughtful
Category: Religion and Philosophy

This week, the former Cardinal Joseph Alois Ratzinger of Marktl am Inn, Bavaria — now Benedictus PP. XVI; or Pope Benedict XVI — visits the United States, spending most of the work week here in Washington. He has visited with President Bush, paraded down Massachusetts Avenue NW (near where I live) and Pennsylvania Avenue NW (near the White House, not near where I live), and, as I type this, is saying mass at the newly-opened Nationals Stadium in southeast D.C.

There's been pageantry to fulfill even the most fervent Catholic's fantasies. Bush, Laura and (I think) Jenna parted from their presidential tradition and greeted the pontiff not at the White House but at Andrew's Air Force Base in Maryland. All along his route, from there to his papal residence at the Embassy of the Apostolic Nunciature of the Holy See (on Massachusetts Avenue, again near where I live), Benedict XVI has been greeted by cheering crowds carrying elaborately-printed banners of welcome and greetings for his 81^st birthday. His mass, a carefully-planned and heavily-secured event, is to about 47,000 people, not to mention however many will be listening or watching it on TV or streaming it online.
 

(It takes me a while to finish these blog postings, so perhaps by the time I finish, so will he.)
 

All the while, the press, as it did when Pope John Paul II visited New York in 1995, points out the Holy See's differences with American Catholics and, because Benedict will speak later today about Catholic higher education, with Catholic-run colleges and universities. Too much dissent, too much cherry-picking of ideas and moral attributes, not enough total acceptance of the canon of church doctrine. Too much … secularism.

Secularism: the separation of society and government from the influence and control of religion or the act thereof. Merriam-Webster defines it as "indifference to or rejection or exclusion of religion and religious considerations."

The word makes some people flinch, others squirm, some squall, others retch. I mean we're talking The Vagina Monologues on American Catholic college campuses here. It's got to be something to fear.

In his speech alongside the pontiff yesterday, Bush brought up another word that makes Catholic hierarchy especially upset. He said that we — Americans, better still his constituency — need the pope's message of truth (or whatever) "to reject this dictatorship of relativism and embrace a culture of justice and truth." He went on: "In a world where some see freedom as simply the right to do as they wish, we need your message that true liberty requires us to live our freedom not just for ourselves, but in a spirit of mutual support."

Relativism: defined by Merriam-Webster as "a theory that knowledge is relative to the limited nature of the mind and the conditions of knowing" and a "view that ethical truths depend on the individuals and groups holding them." Not to be confused, of course, with Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity, though I don't know much about that either.

Before I go on about Catholicism, let me make something clear. Spiritual or not, devoted or not, Bush I find to be nothing more than a mouthpiece for people with more powerful personalities and a more pressing message than he possible could have on his own. Like many a "conservative" Republican or "neo-con," Bush represents the use of conservative speech for the purpose of power alone, not for any utopian imagery associated with an America where people thrive solely on their own merits while, at the same time, following an ethos raised almost solely from the scripture of the Gospels. I'm sure he thinks of relativism as often as he thinks these days of how many "weapons of mass destruction" Saddam Hussein was stockpiling underground in Iraq prior to our 2003 invasion.
 

My father — an ardent, pre-Vatican II Catholic who still prefers masses said in Latin — has spoken disapprovingly of relativism and has even sent me in the mail articles about it, about what Pope John Paul II said about it, and about how Hollywood not only revels in it but seeks to proselytize on its behalf as exemplified in its most popular films, TV shows and such. Never mind Mel Gibson's Catholic and anti-Semitic rants and the Republican Party memberships of Bruce Willis, Harrison Ford and, of course, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Relativism, my father has said, eliminates the strength of the bottom line. The shades of grey it illuminates ignore what he says are the black-and-white realities. As Harrison Ford once elaborated in a film, not even so much the black and white but the right and wrong.

Because liberals don't believe in such trivialities, right? That's why they argue for social justice causes like welfare that actually aids people in need and drug policies that address both the ills associated with addiction and the rights individuals have to their own private lives. Talk about cherry-picking. In politics, it doesn't matter how wholly consistent your philosophy is, John McCain, but rather how consistently it agrees with those whose money you need to run your campaign and whose votes (and vote-getting) you need to win.

If you're conservative and believe that the government has no place in your private life but then say you agreed with and wish we still had anti-same-sex-sodomy laws that have been overturned throughout the states in the past generation, how consistent can you be? If you say you don't want any central institution forcing your hand at anything you believe to be a matter of personal liberty, why are you tithing at church and taking in the sometimes beleaguering (and sometimes inaccurate) protestations and dramatics of a pastor you've been following since childhood (or, in some cases, young adulthood)? Only because you choose to?

What if I don't make the same choice? Does that mean somehow that I am not entitled to my own right of privately-held spiritual or ethical expression? Because you and I don't go to the same church? Because you and I have a (normally only slightly) different origin of moral opinion on which we base our decisions and judgments?

And by the way, isn't spiritual strength enhanced by tests of faith, by the struggle (the true meaning of the word jihad in Islamic tradition) that one should have reconciling spiritual and theological belief with the trappings of modern society? If you can come back around the circle to where you started, isn't that what bolsters you as a member of a church, mosque, synagogue or temple? How strong can your faith truly be if nothing has ever forced you or even just encouraged you to ask questions?

What is God? Why do we believe in God? What does it mean to say God always existed? How can we be sure of the meanings of eternity, heaven, damnation, purgatory, indulgence? Does it really matter if there are seven or 700 virgins awaiting a holy warrior in the paradise? Is it worth waiting for eternal bliss if the earthen existence is so trying?

Why would any God who is referred to by any religious leader as "loving" allow for such terrible tragedies to occur in the world, even to people who don't believe in God or in one god? If God, as Christian tradition emphasizes, is fatherly and forgiving, why are so many people of so many different faiths forced to suffer indignities and injustices for no better reason than that they happened to live under the wrong dictator or along the wrong coastline?

Why do we default to God as "He" and not "She" or something gender-neutral? Where does sex fall in line with being spiritual? If we are sexual beings, how natural can it be for a man or woman to deny the act and release of sex in favor of undistracted service to God? If we are to believe that humanity is at heart imperfect — some would say inherently sinful, others inherently evil — how can any devotion to God matter or service to God make a difference if it in and of itself is not perfect?

Why is "blind faith" so good for anyone? What is the difference, in a church's context, between a good education and a proper education? When can one's bad experiences with a church or a religious community be attributed to the particular members of the community who contributed to those experiences, and when can they be (or can they be at all) attributed to the church and its teachings, to its foundation? How can one not look with avarice at a clerical hierarchy that seeks to protect people who commit foul crimes against the most vulnerable of their parishioners?

And how are they going to place more than 400 children taken (some would say rescued) from that religious community in Texas?

I won't answer those questions. I can't. I ask, but really I don't care enough.

---------------------

I was baptized and raised in the church. That photo shows me in Istanbul in September 1973. I was 3 months old. In the years to follow, no matter what else I did, said or thought, my father ensured that the church and its teachings weren't pushed far into the background. My fondest memories of growing up are not, or mostly not, church-related. But it's hard to detach pretty much any milieu I was in from the influence of the church since it was always there. I did go to kindergartens and daycare places that weren't run by the church. But once I was in the grade system, from then 'til high school graduation, it was Catholic all the way.

It took some time, but by mid-high school, I was about as involved as one could be with the church short of spending every morning praying in chapel before first period. I did do that sometimes, just not always. I won't disavow those days, when I volunteered for Habitat for Humanity, wrote "friendship letters" to people I knew who were "making" their Search retreats (Search was short-hand for Search for Christian Maturity, a church-sponsored program of monthly retreats for teenagers), and served as a Eucharistic minister. I won't say I regret or have forgotten those days. If I have, it's only because I have forgotten a lot of things in the 20 years since I was in high school.

Here I am, at age 17, in a photo from a special mass that was said in honor of my graduating class at Father Ryan High School in Nashville. I am administering the Eucharistic wine — from the presiding priest's own regal chalice, no less — to Julie Pasquinelli. This mass was said on the evening of May 18, 1991, as a precursor to graduation. Service awards were given to the most humanistic, involved students, and I was one of them. That senior year, I went on a vocational retreat to St. Meinrad Seminary in Indiana and actually felt a serenity in the silence. More than anything else, I enjoyed praying. Enjoy's a weird verb for it, perhaps, but that's what I did. I'm not even sure, then or now, if my prayer was a communion with God or something more intellectual and confessional but less spiritual. Even a priest, or at least one with enough experience dealing with the pluralistic society that is any suburban or urban parish, would say that as much as you need to be able to confess your feelings (not necessarily your sins alone) to God, you need to be able to confess them to yourself. If the idea of an omniscient god is to be believed, then it's fair to say that God already knows your shit. It's you who has to come to terms with it.

Not that I can tell you about St. Augustine or any of the post-Gospel theologians. I studied comparative monotheistic religion in college mainly as a way to get in touch with Islam, the dominant religion of the land where my father's maternal forebears were born. If I can claim a pride, at least historically, in being a Catholic, I can also claim a pride in being raised with a large, extended Lebanese family. At the time, I wanted to get in deeper touch with that and studied Arabic and Islam in depth. I probably know more about its tenants than about my own church's, though learning about Islam did help me appreciate my own faith more, at least for a while.

So I can't take back what was my past. I can't say that it was a bad thing that I was raised in a church community, educated by nuns like these, confessing to priests, praying repeated "Our Father"s and "Hail Mary"s while holding a rosary, praying novenas for friends, putting money in the basket every week as it was passed around, feeling that tinge of excitement and guilt when the host that was said to be the true body of Christ touched my tongue. I was sheltered, for sure, and I certainly wasn't given the space to explore my sexuality the way I probably should have. Being gay, it's not as if I could not have found opportunities or even a sympathetic ear to bend. I just didn't think to look. That community and my commitment to it made me purposefully turned away. To this day, I can't so much as fantasize about any of the boys I grew up with, even if any of them had been conventionally or specifically attractive. I didn't then, and I can't now.

And being gay isn't necessarily what drove me away from my faith. I had opportunities even after coming out to explore a definitively alternative expression of Christianity, even of Catholicism. I just didn't like what I saw. I went to a Dignity mass once in 1995, covering it for a project as a student journalist while at Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I couldn't stand it. It was so… not me. In those years between high school and now, especially when I was still in school, the only joy I got out of expressing my Catholicism was when I went to a big, Gothic or Victorian church and sat alone, amidst the gargantuan statues, frescoes, mosaics and stained-glass windows, thinking. Not necessarily praying. Not sure at all.

If anything's pulled me away, it's the secularism of my life as it is today. Some would say that's sad, that it seems as if I had a good, deep understanding of where I was and should've been back then. But I was awkward and young, like most people. There was barely a time, even in the middle of mass, when I was sure of what I was doing or how I looked doing it. In fact, the only time I was sure of how I felt and what I thought was right was when I grimaced while at a mass in 1997 when a man stood up in the congregation wearing a felt-scrap-lettered green shirt reading "Homosexuality is a sin." And this was in an urban church with a gay choir conductor and, I'm sure, a gay priest or two. All I could think as I looked at him was fuck you and your self-righteous bullshit. Perhaps today, a little older, I'd have more gumption to go up to the man and ask him what he thought he was accomplishing, at least on an outward level, by wearing such blasphemy.

I was going to write a tirade here about how being Catholic skewed me for too long away from the fulfillment of adulthood, how it sheltered me from the realities of secular life around me. When I did go to college, beginning in 1991, the awkwardness was instant, and the fear palpable. I hated New York City because it was so big and frightening. It wasn't nurturing. It wasn't scalable. In the years I spent there, I had to learn as if I'd never learned anything before. I learned how not to scare people with talk of spiritual devotion. I learned how an alternative view of something I thought I already had an expertise in could illuminate it rather than insult it.

I remember a classmate telling me that he'd read a study that compared Catholicism on a multi-point scale that was used to denote a cult, saying the church community's characteristics fitted with the majority of the points. I dispelled the idea at the time, a little hurt that it would be brought up to me at all. But over time, as I looked back through that prism, I saw the similarities in my own experiences. I mean those Search retreats did force us to stay up late and eat a lot of sugar.

Instead of a tirade, I write a reflection and not necessarily a well-organized one. I'm happy as I am today. In a way, my spirituality is revealed in the way I live and love with my partner, John. There's a love here that feels somewhat like the kind of love I learned about in high school classes about scripture, church history, morality and the sacraments. There's a sensation beyond sexual, a comfort and perhaps even a developing "blind faith" that permeates into everything else in my life. Perhaps, in fact, a struggle is needed to shore up what we have, but we struggle as it is. Nothing's perfect, and it never will be. I don't care.

In the meantime, I will not discount any good that comes with a relativistic outlook. In a way, government is relativistic. As much as we talk about constitutional ethics and adherence to the law, we also apply standards individually and tend as a people to ask for individual consideration. There's always someone with the view of being, or being affected by, an exception. Even conservatives take relativistic outlooks on matters. Again, perfection: it isn't there, not among us humans.

Also, I will continue in my walk away from a decisively Catholic way of life. If I am to believe that the foundation of a good life can be laid in the way mine was — in places like St. Leo the Great Catholic Elementary School and Father Ryan High School, in Search and vocational retreats, in masses and at memorial services, in the doctrines I studied — then I don't find it difficult to discern that the life I am living is worthwhile, whether in the church or not. I can add one more point of pride: Catholic, Lebanese, gay … and secular.

9:20 AM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Is there anything Monica Goodling does that’s actually ethical?
Current mood: angry
Category: News and Politics

Well, Monica Goodling is in the news again, and once again she’s proven that Jesus’ followers are sometimes more twisted, reactionary and dangerous than the Romans who crucified him all those generations ago. Or something like that. Fables are not always easy to remember.

First our favorite little Christian attorney general’s assistant twirls around the congressional hearings refusing to clarify her partisan cherry-picking of job applicants. Now we find out that she (likely, I’m thinking most definitely) played a role in the dismissal of a career attorney who was rumored to be a lesbian. NPR has a story about it here.

No doubt Monica’s already working and living a fine life since some Christian fundamentalist with money admires her tenacity and doesn’t mind her breaking the law on behalf of Jesus and America’s right to do whatever the hell it wants with whatever resources it wants to exploit, both environmental and human. Monica’s probably relishing what she accomplished and sending her tidings of joy over to her pal Sally Kern. At least she can’t thank the Lord-of-Falwell-Robertson-and-Jim-and-Tammy-Faye that the PR mess is over.

If it were up to me, Monica would never get a moment’s peace until she ’fessed up and atoned. Isn’t that what Christianity teaches, contrition? That’s what was crammed down my throat while I was growing up in Catholic school. I was too oblivious to notice the drug use and teenage pregnancy going on around me. I guess Monica never had to worry about such secular (= evil) things like that while praying at Messiah College and learning about applying all things god to the American legal code while at Regent University Law School.

Onward, Christian soldier. Your crusade marches on. Better hide your gays, Muslims and (lord help us) gun-control advocates.

2:35 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Do you really care about $4 a gallon?
Current mood: dumbfounded
Category: dumbfounded News and Politics

In a quick lead-up to what I'm sure will be much more pressing coverage of Eliot Spitzer's marital issues, I was listening to a piece on NPR's All Things Considered about the rising cost of gas and how that will impact our economy, namely the price of groceries. A reporter interviewed a young woman at a gas station. She was talking about her newly-purchased SUV and how she was paying up to $80 a week on gas. Here's the thing: she didn't sound all that upset. She meekly laughed and said that if the prices kept elevating, she'd ultimately have to start taking the bus to work. Poor SUV.

Is it me, or does it seem that most people just don't give a shit about the rising cost of gasoline? Why the hell would you buy something you know doesn't make for good gas mileage but has size? Are we really that distracted by the "quotidian awfulness of things"? (I really am into the language of that film Notes on a Scandal.)

I suppose some call it apathy or disillusionment. I call it materialism, and I'm not better than anyone else. If you are one to believe that corporate America has it in for you, wanting to control your life with nefarious practices and a lack of choice, look no farther than your refrigerator, your cool new sedan, your PS3 or your new iPhone. We as a consumer class will defend our right to own those things — even if doing so puts you deeper into consumer debt — without any concern, really, for the environment or the livelihoods of people who make less money than we do. And we'll call it a matter of choice. I mean I can always choose to pay $200 for a Creative brand Vision:M MP3 player over a $200 iPod.

In recent years, people refinanced their homes not merely for a lower interest rate or for savings or investment or to hasten mortgage payments, but rather to add a deck or an addition or to buy a new car or to go on some luxury vacation overseas. Smart. About as smart as agreeing to take a variable-interest mortgage loan in the first place despite having poor credit and no ability to stomach an upturn in your rate.

I suppose the only factor to change our behavior on a macroeconomic level will have to be catastrophic: gas prices higher than in even Europe, more home foreclosures, the latest doodad so expensive that you'd have to take out a loan to get it the same way you would for a car. Isn't that what some environmentalists say needs to happen, a catastrophe? Maybe they're right.

I just didn't feel anything even sort of resembling sympathy for that SUV owner interviewed for All Things Considered. Um, yeah, (hiccup) I guess you will have to start taking the bus, ya know?

1:30 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Oscars, Masterpieces and Gold Stars
Current mood: electric
Category: Movies, TV, Celebrities

Like many a gay man my age, I sat and watched the entire nearly 4-hour-long Academy Awards ceremony … and actually paid attention throughout. Much to my delight, all the major, high-profile winners — in the two screenplay categories, for cinematography, for directing, for producing and for acting — were films that I had seen. If, say, Cate Blanchett had won Best Supporting Actress for I'm Not There, I wouldn't be able to say that.

As I hoped, No Country for Old Men won Best Picture, cementing the Coen Brothers' reputation as award-worthy filmmakers, a reputation first brought to our attention in 1997 when Fargo received a bunch of award nominations and won them the original screenplay award (it should've won Best Picture, if you ask me). Daniel Day-Lewis' win for There Will Be Blood was no surprise, though I didn't expect it to win Best Cinematography too.

Every Best Picture nominee won something, even Atonement, which almost walked away with nothing 'til the original score award was announced. Juno made the case for a strong story about women (quite young, in fact) and gave us an interesting moment when the tattooed former stripper Diablo Cody picked up her Oscar for original screenplay.

Most of all, I dug the surprises … well, surprises to me, at least. Perhaps Marion Cotillard's victory wasn't such a shocker since at least some Hollywood press were calling her a front-runner. Still, she's only the third French winner of the Best Actress Oscar in 80 years and the only one to win for a role that's actually in French. She really was transformative in La Môme … or, as we say here because we can't appreciate a title referring to a sparrow, La Vie en Rose. Honestly, the two titles couldn't be more different. One refers to Édith Piaf's most storied song, and the other refers to what the French called her, a name that is both ironic in light of Piaf's tragic story but also quite apt. I didn't realize just how transformative Cotillard's performance was 'til I saw her on TV at the ceremony. Lord, she looked almost nothing like the petite, bug-eyed, pasty thing who emaciated in a short 47 years due to hard living and heavy drug use. Oh, those French and their irony.

Considering how much Oscar seems to like women's transformation, I guess it shouldn't have been a surprise that Cotillard won. Halle Berry, though not changing physically, did have to find inspiration playing a poor waitress seeing her husband executed and her son killed in an accident, and I actually found the performance inspiring and worthy of the Best Actress win in 2002. Nicole Kidman put on a prosthetic nose, played a dour Virginia Woolf and won the Oscar in 2003.

Charlize Theron, in what I can only imagine as being a truly singular objective, not something put upon her by agents or studio execs, gained weight and darned enough stringy hair and skin-blotching make-up to create the illusion of an aging, sun-dried, road-side prostitute who discovers that if she kills her clients, she can take their cars and work her way out of her central Florida hell-hole. She won the Oscar in 2004.

Not that Hilary Swank isn't one for major transformations (um, Boys Don't Cry) — as an actress, she comes off as a chameleon, so her win in 2005 for Million Dollar Baby I consider part of this trend.

Reese Witherspoon wasn't so transformative as June Carter Cash — she certainly didn't look different, and something tells me that the former Nashvillian's accent wasn't all that concocted — but I didn't think she should've won. Felicity Huffman should've won for a truly transformative role as a pre- and post-op transsexual in Transamerica (not a great movie title, but whatever). Then there was Helen Mirren, who did as good an imitation of Queen Elizabeth II as I can imagine and deservedly won her prize last year.

But the surprise that stopped me this time around was Tilda Swinton's vanquishing of Cate and Ruby Dee, the front-runners according to the press, for Best Supporting Actress. I couldn't have been the only one who really liked the film Michael Clayton, though the only people I've talked to about it couldn't stand it. I thought Swinton was the best part of the film, so neurotic, level-headed only on the surface. The scene in which she has to make the decision to rub off Arthur Edens is acting mastery. Maybe it was the profuse sweating. Maybe it's that she kind of resembles Cate Blanchett, though she's been around longer (Orlando, her signature role, was in 1992, and Cate didn't come to prominence until five years later, in Oscar and Lucinda). Maybe it's that her character factored heavily into the film's plot. Who knows what led to the academy voters' ultimate decision? I just appreciated seeing someone I thought truly deserving win an award like that.

(She was better than Jennifer Hudson, last year's winner for Dreamgirls. Yeah, the Big Bad Song in the movie is incredible to hear and watch, but where else in the film did you see great acting? Did no one see Cate in Notes on a Scandal?)

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We in the Gay Men's Chorus of Washington did a solid job last weekend performing in our first concert of 2008 (second of the 2007-2008 season), American Masterpieces, a celebration of classical choral compositions (and alliteration). The concert was a double-billing with the chorus' chamber ensemble, Rock Creek Singers, of which Yours Truly is a member and for whom Yours Truly got to solo in the concert's opening number, "Streets of Laredo." I got to sing the lament of a cowboy dying in the street, wrapped up in white linen, begging my brethren as they walk by to take me to the green valley and lay the sod o'er me. We also performed "Riders in the Sky" ("yippeeyiyaay yippeeyiooooh"), "Colorado Trail" and selections from Aaron Copland's collection Old American Songs, including "At the River" and "Zion's Walls."

The entire concert was an earnest, dignified affair . The full chorus performed some melancholic numbers such as a beautiful musical arrangement of the Robert Frost poem "Choose Something Like a Star" and a veeeerrrrryyyy slow arrangement of Stephen Sondheim's "Send in the Clowns." The centerpiece of the concert, however, was the chorus' performance of Leonard Bernstein's three-movement choral masterpiece, Chichester Psalms, sung entirely in Hebrew and featuring a 12-year-old boy soprano. Not that we were perfect at the work, far from it, but we spent so many weeks going over it in such detail that the result was worthwhile, at least in my humble opinion. As Judi Dench's character Barbara Covett would write in Notes on a Scandal, it was a "gold-star" performance.

Next up for the chorus: a dedication to the '80s, full of medleys and all kinds of fun. We'll sing praises to Olivia Newton-John, Eurythmics, Michael Jackson, Styx, Cyndi Lauper, Flashdance, the Human League, Kim Carnes and other hit-makers. It's a really fun repertoire, and if you're in D.C. the weekend of March 15–16, don't miss it!

3:15 PM - 0 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

One more thing...
Current mood: bored
Category: Romance and Relationships

Notice I didn't wish you all a Happy Valentine's Day.

12:50 PM - 1 Comments - 0 Kudos - Add Comment

Political theater today
Current mood: bored
Category: News and Politics

Like a mildly entertaining film, the House of Representatives and our fearless W have engaged in what I'm sure some eloquent columnist will refer to as a Shakespearean battle of wills concerning an update to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the half-year-old Protect America Act.

While House Speaker Nancy Pelosi et all argue over a contempt-of-Congress citation against former White House Counsel Harriet Miers and Chief of Staff Josh Bolten, Ohio Rep. and minority leader John Boehner has staged a walk-out in protest. Backed by his white man posse, Boehner addressed the press, saying our ability to protect America will be compromised because of the majority Democrats' preference for playing political games. W has said he's willing to postpone his long-planned trip to Africa, which he's visited only once before in the seven years he's been president, in order to help get the FISA update passed.

Meanwhile, the Democratic majority has planned a week-long recess. If the update to the Protect America Act is not completed by the end of this week, it will expire. When asked why the contempt-of-Congress citation matter was coming up now, after having been out of discussion for months, Pelosi said that there was space in the schedule for it right now. The majority in the House have supported an extension of the current Protect America Act, keeping it running while they work on a bicameral compromise with the Senate, which has already passed an update to the act with W's backing. But W has threatened to veto any extension. It's either all or nothing.

What does Bush actually think he's going to do in order to "help"? Long, philosophical discussions with hundreds of Democratic House members who either can't stand him or otherwise don't care about his position?

I think that, for the most part, Republicans like to talk using the simplest language possible without coming off to all but a few intellectuals and literati as supercilious. In fact, they rarely go into the kind of detail that actually helps a non-lawmaker or non-lawyer understand the details of a political conflict, not with the public. They, and especially W, like to make big statements with no explanation.

To me, the idea they follow seems to go like this: if I say it, it's true, and you don't need to ask me anything further about it because the only thing that matters is that I've said it, and that's that. Not that Democratic lawmakers on the whole are above bloated rhetoric, boiling down what sometimes are truly subtle matters into sound bytes and grand gestures. They just don't normally tend to carry the reputation of wearing that hubris, disguised as authority and concern for our safety, for all to see.

I find Republicans to be particularly adept at exuding the daddy paradigm. Your dad tells you to do something. You ask him why. He glares at you, raises his voice (maybe even his open hand or fist) and says in a low, controlled pitch, "Because I told you to. Go ahead and ask me another question." If he is weak enough to feel compelled to give a reason (or if you've outsmarted him enough to trip him up and he ends up giving you one), he goes for one that he thinks will drive you, even if it doesn't mean anything concrete and if it's actually a lie disguised as an exaggeration: "Because you will die if this doesn't happen. Because you are not safe unless you do what I've told you."

Isn't this how we fell into the mess in Iraq?

Pelosi isn't above reproach. In her own press conference earlier today, she excoriated the Republicans and W for not being willing to compromise and to at least consider what the Democratic majority are asking for in an update to the Protect America Act. We're talking things like not indemnifying telecom companies from lawsuits for having given personal, assumed to be protected, private information about their customers during our government's supposed investigation of terrorist activities. That's all well and good. It's when Pelosi touched on a possible veto of the extension of the act as it stands right now, saying that America would hold W and the Republicans responsible for any challenges that came as a result. She also said this and then says that the president has everything he needs to do his job as it is. You can't have glasses of both the white and the red wine if only one is being offered.

Not that I have a suggested solution to this mess other than perhaps for the House to not take off next week and for W to stick to his Africa schedule. Not that they need him over there. They've done just fine until now without him visiting. I guess one nation's blood wars and loss of innocent lives can be weighed in priority over another's.

I live in this town, Washington, but I rarely keep close track of any proceedings like this. I just happen to be listening to C-SPAN Radio right now because the station I normally listen to in my office, WAMU-FM (the station of American University), is in the midst of a membership campaign drive, which means broadcasters shorten all the NPR-provided and even local news and talk content and spend more than half of each hour pleading with us to become members and contribute money. They always talk as if their very lives depend on our generosity, as if they can't really rely on those wealthy backers offering matching funds (matching or doubling what ordinary people offer to donate collectively, such as "if we can collect $2,000 by the end of the hour, our backer will double that"). Not that I don't believe in supporting these things. I just can't stand listening to those people supplicate what seems like endlessly, and I hate to hear Terry Gross for 15 minutes before she gets interrupted, never to be heard again that day.

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Meanwhile, my partner John is on a Carnival cruise this week, traveling through the western Caribbean. His grandma turned 90 last week, and as a birthday gift, he bought a ticket for her, and there's no other family with them. Today they're docked in Ocho Rios, Jamaica. They return to Fort Lauderdale on Saturday, and John flies back here on Monday.

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On another note, after putting it off, last night I saw the last of the five nominees for the Best Picture Oscar. In order, I've seen No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Atonement, Juno and Michael Clayton. The one that made me feel the most — not to mention laugh — was, obviously, Juno. I thought the acting in Michael Clayton was excellent (especially Tilda Swinton). I liked the introspective quality of There Will Be Blood. I loved Vanessa Redgrave's one scene at the end of Atonement and was sincerely impressed by Saoirse Ronan, who played 13-year-old Briony Tallis. But most of all, I fancied No Country for Old Men and hope it wins Best Picture. For once, I think my favorite is the same as the odds'.

Something about the intimacy of a lot of the scenes in No Country and its ability to give the audience a lot of detail and perspective without a lot of talk kept me engaged even toward the strange, plain end of the film. Michael Clayton has a karmic resolution, and Atonement has closure even though it does not end happily. Juno ends in an upbeat way but offers something alternative emotionally to what I think most people, at least older people, would consider an ethically proper or understandable perspective. There Will Be Blood is pure cynicism, but buried underneath that I felt a profound sobriety and understanding of one's doom, an idea that, no matter how successful Daniel Plainview became, he was always aware of his reckoning with sin and even at his most alive and passionate at the very end felt barely more than a lingering death coming.

No Country was the most realistic and ended in a way that I think most of us would see, if not expect. It was so plain and straightforward that it confounded a lot of people in the audience, but I knew it was there as it occurred. I even knew when the screen would cut (not fade) to black. Maybe you could call it the most cynical of the stories too. Who knows? What I liked is that, even if there was acknowledging and accepting of fate, no one in the film was above the naturally human desire to challenge and manipulate it. Everyone from Sheriff Bell to Carla Jean, even the seemingly evil Anton Chigurh, had a force of will that at times superseded whatever moral structure they'd already chosen to live inside. That made the film worth sitting through, that and the attention to every dusty detail. Not that I'd want to live in western Texas, mind you.

11:45 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment

Megan, MySpace, youth and Hannah Montana
Current mood: quiet
Category: MySpace

I'm sure many of you have heard of and read about the so-called MySpace Suicide Hoax scandal. There's a great article by Lauren Collins in this week's New Yorker about it.

There are some universal themes to this story: bitterness, peer pressure, questions of self-esteem, mistaken and false identities, teenage angst, revenge and retribution, parental instincts and protection. Despite Collins' attempts to provide an in-depth review of the proceedings and how they have been interpreted, despite her attempts to dignify the story, the whole thing strikes me as terribly nasty and tragic.

But here's something that surprised me as I was reading the article's accounts of Megan's postings and communications online: who the hell has taught these kids how to write online?! Not that I don't appreciate the artistry of a name spelled $h@ne (Shane) or an expression like "ya theres really hott guys at my school they are fine!!!" My friend Jimbo loves the expression "OMG" ("Oh my God," for those of you who actually don't know). But one of the things the now-departed Megan Meier wrote in her correspondence with the fake Josh Evans was "Ok how bout no tell me who they are and ya so w/e u know u ant to nice ur self!!!!!"

?

I'm not one to moan about aging since I never really liked being all that young to begin with — I was one of those kids who didn't have as many friends as Megan thought she was losing right before she committed suicide — but I also spent a lot of young adult years not realizing how separated I was growing from youth culture. I didn't care, really, but now that I'm reading these postings from teenagers involved in this story (well, actually, most of them are from only Megan), it seems so much clearer to me that I'm just not there, that youth culture seems almost like a foreign one to me.

That said, I also don't feel the way I used to interpret adults feeling when they were my age while I was a kid. I used to see them as settled, tired and old, always complaining about aches or bills or the stress of having children. Most of my memories of my grandfather involve discussions about how sick he was, how he couldn't walk on his own, about his cancer and his Parkinson's disease. Years after he died, I asked my grandmother if she'd consider dating again, and she turned to me, embarrassed looking, and said, "At my age?"

Even my parents seemed older acting to me at ages that I see friends of mine at now, and my friends just don't seem the same way. I remember, in 1978, when my dad turned 40 (I had just turned 5), and he talked about it like a milestone, as if he'd already exceeded his life expectancy. I remember the surprise birthday party my brother and I were part of for my mother's 50th in 1992 (we were part of the surprise — we were in Nashville and drove to her home in Burke, Va., when she didn't expect us). Something about reaching that age seemed to click with all the other similarly-aged people in the room, as if you were at a new level of old.

Not that the gay community is a good example, or so the popular criticism holds. As a market or "community," gay men are talked about as vain and looks-obsessed, thus youth-obsessed. Supposedly we value youth — some assholes in "heartland" America have the idiot notion that we all chase after youths, preying on them as if gay = child molester —  and emotionally and socially discard our elders like milk that's gone sour in the refrigerator.

Honey, most young people have prejudices about those who are older, whether in a GLBT community or not. I had them. My friends had them. We encouraged them in each other. Individually, we may have had long, personal, emotional conversations with teachers, coaches and other people's parents as if they were our counselors, but we always felt that invisible wall separating us from them. The truth is the GLBT communities are vast and varied, and they encompass groupings of people at all ages. Hell, I get more positive attention and get hit on more now in my 30s than I ever did in my 20s.

We always had a notion of our individuality, and many of us in college were made aware of this by the definition of generations:
• Baby Boomers, our parents, though both my parents precede the Baby Boom generation — this group includes the hippies and anti-war protesters of the '60s and the "thirtysomethings" of the '80s, and I'm pretty sure they're the ones who decided to endorse "classic rock" and Southern California country-rock in the '70s, though I can't vouch for who made disco famous;
• Generation X, my generation, though I'm toward the younger end of it; my almost-39-year-old partner John is more in the middle of this one — the post-Watergate, Reagan presidency youth who were fixated on consumerism and supposedly grew up with no real hope of promise or whatever, kind of rebellious but in a conforming sort of way;
• Generation Y, my little brother's generation, though he's at the absolutely oldest end of the spectrum — the first children of the internet, the ones who brought grunge and hip-hop into the mainstream, who figured out technology and new communications tools to the point of routing authority, who have been known to come into industries demanding high pay and big job titles that previous generations would've worked years to achieve;
• Generation Z, referred to by some as the "Neo-Disney Generation," beginning with Britney and continuing with Hannah Montana. You know: Mickey Mouse club, Nickelodeon shows like iCarly and Drake & Josh and that ever-present TV movie-musical series High School Musical, the music from which I hate to say is actually infectious.

I guess the fact that I know some of this information is enough to claim that I'm not completely ambivalent or at least not oblivious. I don't watch Nickelodeon or Disney, so I've never seen an episode of Hannah Montana or Drake & Josh. And I'm sure, as relevant and influential as these pieces of entertainment are, they don't speak to, or on behalf of, the entirety of their intended market. Shia LaBeouf is 21 years old, not high-school aged but not far removed from those years and still considered young, so he can play teenagers in movies like Transformers. Zac Efron is 20 and played a teenager in the two High School Musicals and in Hairspray. Really, MySpace is far more in tuned with an ordinary youngster, or at least one who's online.

One way or another, though, I think it's wrong to allow nostalgia to become painful or a source of regret. Not being young(er) is no reason to fret or feel unworthy. Even these successful, wealthy and sought-out young people like Vanessa Anne Hudgens and Ashley Tisdale (both also of High School Musical fame) have growing up to do and very likely may reach the same conclusion that many a middle-aged or elderly person has come to: youth is wasted on the young. The saying is a cliché for sure, but a lot of clichés come from truthful and long-standing observation. They wouldn't be clichés if they hadn't been used repeatedly to the point of being believed without question.

Of course many may not agree with that assessment, that youth is wasted on the young. They may believe that you're not supposed to know better when you're young, no matter what your circumstances are, and that the result is there is no such thing as a wasted experience. I do believe that your experiences make you a fuller human being over time, and perhaps except for the most dramatic of circumstances (certainly Megan Meier's suicide), you serve yourself better by not regretting anything. But there's something to be said for wanting that taught, younger, more nimble body, that sense of the unknown being exciting rather than suspect, and that lack of social responsibility that comes with youth, whether it's in childhood or adolescence. I know a lot of us think to ourselves that if we could just go back to those younger times, knowing what we know now about ourselves, we'd do things differently to take advantage of what we had that we didn't realize to its fullest extent. There's a beauty to being able to think that and to the fact that you cannot go back. It's better to appreciate something at some point in your life, even if the timing is considered late, than to never do so, don't you think? That said, I don't think even now I'm going to catch an episode of iCarly.

Nonetheless, what happened to Megan Meier was a terrible tragedy, and what was done to her on MySpace, if even one of the many accusations is true, was unconscionable. That truly is a case of youth being wasted on the young.

11:20 AM - 1 Comments - 2 Kudos - Add Comment