Hump Day Happenings

No more Iraq war. And people are less than grateful with their response.

Of course there’s still violence there.

Hurricane Earl, don’t you get near the airports on Monday, please.

Hot enough in New York? I’m so use to it. Strange.

I don’t understand the expression use-to-it.

I still have trouble with garlic.

I still like cults and serial killers. The plasticity of the monkey mind, you know…

Big news---today is S’s birthday.

And K arrives in New York tomorrow for three months of TV toil. Fun!

Isn’t it awful when people use initials only?

I’m reading Eat, Pray, Love. Don’t ask me why.

I should write the shadow version: Hog, Beg, Fuck.

Has anyone else besides me had enough viewing time of Grandin Temple online?

Where DO the children play?

September 1 is still summer. Don’t let the “ber” part fool you.

Dogs. People love their dogs. And they should.

I have no problem with Spanish---I just wish people wanted to speak English at my gym.

It’s only because I get sweaty and lonely there.

If horses were beggars, riders would wish.

Remember geometry proofs? I was always bad at them. Shook my confidence.

Puppets are something we should know more about.

TIME

Strange thing, time. You want to feel like you have a mountain of it so you can be relaxed when you are doing something.

But you want to feel the pressure of it, too, so you feel motivated.

We have figured it out, sort of, as a group of animals. Though, lately I have been experiencing that old adage, TIME IS MONEY. Which, of course, it is not, but can be.

Time can also be Love.

Or Time is well spent sleeping.

Or

Time for dinner

Time is on our side

Time for a new fence

Time machine

It’s a commodity, it seems. You get older and you feel you have less of it, which makes you speed up, which then lessens the time you have.

So what is the answer?

I feel like, collectively, we middle aged people are happy to count things, to mark it up, to register all of it. I do not believe this helps creativity.

But without the pulse of time, there would be no creativity at all.

If I ever figure out the balance, I will let you know. In the mean time…

ALL ABOUT EVIL

This is mostly for my LA friends for the near future.

Go see ALL ABOUT EVIL on October 8 at Landmark’s Nuart Theatre. I just saw it this weekend in Baltimore, introduced by and including my funny Mink Stole.

Party!

It’s intelligent horror camp. Hilarious. Starring Natasha Lyonne (Welcome back from the drugs, girl! You did a great job.) And Cassandra Peterson (Elvira), Thomas Dekker and of course, Mink Stole.

Peaches Christ is a midnight horror queen drag performance staple in San Francisco and has made a bunch of shorts. This is her (his—Joshua Grannell) first full length feature that (s)he has directed. It’s pretty amazing. This crazed killer, well----I don’t want to spoil it because it’s all so surprising and funny. Even the set up. So you’re just going to have to go see it.

There are other dates: September 4 in Atlanta, September 17 in Phoenix, October 8 in LA as above, October 21-24 in San Francisco. And November 13 in Minneapolis. Yay!

You’ll laugh a lot if you go see it. Great spirit. And very funny. I wish I could tell you more. But, well---Boo!

The Writing Question

Why do I try to write like I’m from France when I’m from Rockland County?

There is ego. There is a reach. Why the reach?

I just finished a big rewrite of a screenplay that I felt had the promise of Rohmer complexity-simplicity-tone. But really, it’s a mall thing that I wrote, hopefully a fun one.

Why do we ape when we are mere gibbons?

Has Everyone Gone Gay?

Another Republican Homosexual

You guys, you can smell the musky crotches coming together.

Gays want to get married, even conservative ones.

The time is here, nigh, now, and well, happening.

"Less government, more gay marriage?"

Or, “Don’t tread on me, but please sanction Bill and Bob with their love for each other?”

Or, “No future V.A.T. on the shiny new bikes that those dykes just rode in on.”

Something like that.

I give it a year…

Dollars Out

As I was walking along Roosevelt Boulevard I realized that so much of the money from small businesses that is made in the United States is sent overseas.

And so many of the corporations make their money overseas.

The United States is SUCH A GREAT BUSINESS country. Set up for that.

But the money goes outside its borders. And the rest of the developed world has the cash for national health care and education.

And us? We want our pizza pockets.

Addiction: An Oversimplification

Though I have been lucky enough to have never been a true addict (other than to cigarettes) I have seen it in full force around me and I have felt myself heading in that direction at times (pot and wine) but never really got there because I have a weak system and cannot develop tolerance to almost anything…

Luckily, this means that after three glasses of wine, I am tanked.

But then, if I am tanked after three why wouldn’t I just stop at two?

And this is my oversimplification of addiction (or at least the edge of addiction):

Addiction to simple things (like wine, food, sex, pot) is really nothing more than the normal appetite being allowed satiation with abandon, without controls.

Now, I know my 12 stepper friends have a much more evolved understanding of this. And perhaps because I never became a full fledged drunk or pothead, I do not really understand these things. And perhaps I am only speaking for myself as it relates to, “Sure did get too tanked at that party last month,” or, “Yeah, no one smokes cigarettes, until someone shows up with a pack of them,” etc., as I see myself behaving not much differently than most people on a Saturday night.

So the big question is---why do some people have control and others simply do not? People with food and sex addictions learn how to dial it back with effort.

I believe, with awareness, one could dial back almost anything. I also believe, with awareness, one could sense the drugs that are basically going to kill you if you get too involved with them.

I’ve plowed into cocaine about a dozen times. The stuff just feels like it will kill you. So, no need for that. (And so, no need ever to try Meth.)

Had a terrible trip on hallucinogens in college. Well, strike that off the list. Once that happened, I never saw any reason for any strong substance in that category.

And there it is.

Perhaps some people have exceptionally strong constitutions and they can take the abuse. I have trouble with cheese and beans.

Addiction was once probably a monkey saver. Evolutionarily, if you are insatiable, you probably got your hands on a lot more bananas than anyone else.

Being aware of that grabbiness---could that not be enough to stop the grab?

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (Men Who Hate Women)

Go see The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Lucky for me, I have an insistent and good tasted Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic-Partner-sister-in-law, who chided us into attendance.

Good that she chided!

Friends, it’s so interesting, this Swedish movie. And I didn’t even read those books.

Noomi Rapace as Lisbeth Salinger, COME ON! She’s fantastic and no American gum chomper will ever come close.

Why won’t Americans sit through subtitles?

I understand. They’re annoying. It isn’t as enjoyable.

Go see this before it leaves the theatres. Or netfilx it, etc. Completely worth it.

Sure, it’s a whodunit at the end of the day, so we’re not looking at a new kind of story. But at least there’s a push into good characters.

Friends, these are trying times for entertainment. Catch this one.

Fried Chicken and Shallowness

I need to write about two very different things.

First of all, fried chicken. We ate in a big noisy box of a restaurant tonight in Chelsea, okay, Cafeteria. Seventh Avenue. The whole thing.

I went ahead and ordered the fried chicken because why shouldn’t I, right? I’m not afraid of a bunch of greasy bird pieces.

It’s a killer. Don’t ever do it. It’s not worth it. I don’t know how people survive these things.

Next, on the subject of being shallow, I have come to this conclusion. I think the reason why people are so upset when they perceive someone to be shallow is not so much that this perceived person is wrong or morally in the basement, it’s more because there is a loss of potential love. Someone who is shallow, who is committed to their own pleasures and vices above all else, does not have the space or time to love you. And people feel this. Even if they do not admit it.

Target Ain't People

Look at the Comments.

I Feel Peaceful, Join Me

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES

The Muslims in the Middle
By William Dalrymple

Published: August 16, 2010

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

Most of us are perfectly capable of making distinctions within the Christian world. The fact that someone is a Boston Roman Catholic doesn’t mean he’s in league with Irish Republican Army bomb makers, just as not all Orthodox Christians have ties to Serbian war criminals or Southern Baptists to the murderers of abortion doctors.
Yet many of our leaders have a tendency to see the Islamic world as a single, terrifying monolith. Had the George W. Bush administration been more aware of the irreconcilable differences between the Salafist jihadists of Al Qaeda and the secular Baathists of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, the United States might never have blundered into a disastrous war, and instead kept its focus on rebuilding post-Taliban Afghanistan while the hearts and minds of the Afghans were still open to persuasion.

Feisal Abdul Rauf of the Cordoba Initiative is one of America’s leading thinkers of Sufism, the mystical form of Islam, which in terms of goals and outlook couldn’t be farther from the violent Wahhabism of the jihadists. His videos and sermons preach love, the remembrance of God (or “zikr”) and reconciliation. His slightly New Agey rhetoric makes him sound, for better or worse, like a Muslim Deepak Chopra. But in the eyes of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, he is an infidel-loving, grave-worshiping apostate; they no doubt regard him as a legitimate target for assassination.

For such moderate, pluralistic Sufi imams are the front line against the most violent forms of Islam. In the most radical parts of the Muslim world, Sufi leaders risk their lives for their tolerant beliefs, every bit as bravely as American troops on the ground in Baghdad and Kabul do. Sufism is the most pluralistic incarnation of Islam — accessible to the learned and the ignorant, the faithful and nonbelievers — and is thus a uniquely valuable bridge between East and West.

The great Sufi saints like the 13th-century Persian poet Rumi held that all existence and all religions were one, all manifestations of the same divine reality. What was important was not the empty ritual of the mosque, church, synagogue or temple, but the striving to understand that divinity can best be reached through the gateway of the human heart: that we all can find paradise within us, if we know where to look. In some ways Sufism, with its emphasis on love rather than judgment, represents the New Testament of Islam.

While the West remains blind to the divisions and distinctions within Islam, the challenge posed by the Sufi vision of the faith is not lost on the extremists. This was shown most violently on July 2, when the Pakistani Taliban organized a double-suicide bombing of the Data Darbar, the largest Sufi shrine in Lahore, Pakistan’s second-largest city. The attack took place on a Thursday night, when the shrine was at its busiest; 42 people were killed and 175 were injured.

This was only the latest in a series of assaults against Pakistan’s Sufis. In May, Peeru’s Cafe in Lahore, a cultural center where I had recently performed with a troupe of Sufi musicians, was bombed in the middle of its annual festival. An important site in a tribal area of the northwest — the tomb of Haji Sahib of Turangzai, a Sufi persecuted under British colonial rule for his social work — has been forcibly turned into a Taliban headquarters. Two shrines near Peshawar, the mausoleum of Bahadar Baba and the shrine of Abu Saeed Baba, have been destroyed by rocket fire.

Symbolically, however, the most devastating Taliban attack occurred last spring at the shrine of the 17th-century poet-saint Rahman Baba, at the foot of the Khyber Pass in northwest Pakistan. For centuries, the complex has been a place for musicians and poets to gather, and Rahman Baba’s Sufi verses had long made him the national poet of the Pashtuns living on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. “I am a lover, and I deal in love,” wrote the saint. “Sow flowers,/ so your surroundings become a garden./ Don’t sow thorns; for they will prick your feet./ We are all one body./ Whoever tortures another, wounds himself.”

THEN, about a decade ago, a Saudi-financed religious school, or madrasa, was built at the end of the path leading to the shrine. Soon its students took it upon themselves to halt what they see as the un-Islamic practices of Rahman Baba’s admirers. When I last visited it in 2003, the shrine-keeper, Tila Mohammed, described how young students were coming regularly to complain that his shrine was a center of idolatry and immorality.

“My family have been singing here for generations,” he told me. “But now these madrasa students come and tell us that what we do is wrong. They tell women to stay at home. This used to be a place where people came to get peace of mind. Now when they come here they just encounter more problems.”

Then, one morning in early March 2009, a group of Pakistani Taliban arrived at the shrine before dawn and placed dynamite packages around the squinches supporting the shrine’s dome. In the ensuing explosion, the mausoleum was destroyed, but at least nobody was killed. The Pakistani Taliban quickly took credit, blaming the shrine’s administrators for allowing women to pray and seek healing there.

The good news is that Sufis, though mild, are also resilient. While the Wahhabis have become dominant in northern Pakistan ever since we chose to finance their fight against the Soviets in Afghanistan, things are different in Sindh Province in southern Pakistan. Sufis are putting up a strong resistance on behalf of the pluralist, composite culture that emerged in the course of a thousand years of cohabitation between Hinduism and Islam.

Last year, when I visited a shrine of the saint Lal Shahbaz Qalandar in the town of Sehwan, I was astonished by the strength and the openness of the feelings against those puritan mullahs who criticize as heresy all homage to Sufi saints.
“I feel that it is my duty to protect both the Sufi saints, just as they have protected me,” one woman told me. “Today in our Pakistan there are so many of these mullahs and Wahhabis who say that to pay respect to the saints in their shrines is heresy. Those hypocrites! They sit there reading their law books and arguing about how long their beards should be, and fail to listen to the true message of the prophet.”

There are many like her; indeed, until recently Sufism was the dominant form of Islam in South Asia. And her point of view shows why the West would do well to view Sufis as natural allies against the extremists. A 2007 study by the RAND Corporation found that Sufis’ open, intellectual interpretation of Islam makes them ideal “partners in the effort to combat Islamist extremism.”

Sufism is an entirely indigenous, deeply rooted resistance movement against violent Islamic radicalism. Whether it can be harnessed to a political end is not clear. But the least we can do is to encourage the Sufis in our own societies. Men like Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf should be embraced as vital allies, and we should have only contempt for those who, through ignorance or political calculation, attempt to conflate them with the extremists.

William Dalrymple is the author, most recently, of “Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India.”

Berkshires and Buckley

We took my aged but healthy parents to Lenox and had “A weekend.”

Completely enjoyable with cool temperatures and fine restaurants and to top it all off, a great play at Williamstown called THE LAST GOODBYE.

What is it, you ask?

This is a mash-up of Romeo and Juliet, yes, the one by Shakespeare, with the music of the late and extremely talented and one of my all time favorite guys, Jeff Buckley.

At first, I was all, “Come on! This Pride and Prejudice and Zombies shit has gone too far.” Then, well, it grew on me. And by the end, I swear, I have never seen or heard a better Romeo and Juliet and when it comes to New York, you really should see it, or better yet, get thee to the mountains.

The adaptor-director is Michael Kimmel. He was listening to a Jeff Buckley song on his iPod while in rehearsals for Othello and had Shakespeare on his mind and he felt the song fit into a conversation Benvolio has with Romeo. Okay, so maybe a stretch---and one could say this sort of thing about lots of songs. For instance, “I was listening to All the Gold in California by the Gatlin Brothers and I thought, Shit, that would fit perfectly into The Merchant of Venice…”
But, it doesn’t matter where it comes from (and I wish people would not talk so much about where things come from. And can all liner notes be against the law, in general?)---in the end, it was fantastic. Mostly because of the music, arranged by Kris Kukul.

Great cast, with Damon Daunno as Romeo and Kelli Barrett as Juliet. Amazing singers. Young, hot, all of that.

Everyone else, too, sang very well and the harmonies were close and hard and lovely. Plus, the added bonus of Chloe Webb as the Nurse. ‘Cause, why not?

If you are in Williamstown, go check it out. It doesn’t run very long. These summer things never do. But I wanted to share my enthusiasm.

Long rainy drive back on the Taconic. That road needs some shoulders. And I need some new wipers.

We Are Current, Continue

Goodbye to the Stay. How fascinating.

What saved us are the 18,000 same sex marriages that have been in full force in California for years. Oh, hm, how did that harm marriage in any way?

Hilarious time to be on the wrong side of history.

The horse is out of the barn.

Democracy always moves forward. Always.

And once California has 100,000 same sex marriages and all the almonds will not have rotted off the trees and all the wine will have continued to be sold at a fine clip and Hollywood will have kept producing its chuffastuff and straight people will have kept marrying or not and having babies or not and it will have all just chugged along and nothing really was ever a problem…well, I mean, come on.

Does it even need to go to the Supreme Court ever? I guess so South Carolina, Alabama and Utah will one day join the modern era—

Quit knuckle dragging, you bigoted hypocritically religious phobes.

The times they have a-changed.

And some kid in school, in 2110, will read about American history and how back in the day his laser-transsexual mother and her lady love at one time would hot have been given the same rights as a man and woman of another sexual identity and preference, and he will wonder how it could have ever been that way at all, ever. It does not make sense. He scratches his head. Goes outside to play. Because there will still be an outside.

If it’s in California, it’s forever.

I have always loved Schwarzenegger.

But I’m really mad, because now, I really want to marry three people or an animal. Or maybe a child or a plant.

For my Writer Friends

You know how you keep a calendar and you put great things in there? Like Go-to-Southampton and Dinner-with-Caitlin and Pick-up-the-Chicken? Well, you can do the same thing with your writing.

Next week: Act 3.
The week after: Act 4.
The week after that: Polish it up

Stuff like that. Why not? If you can keep to your calendar when it comes to chicken, you can certainly keep to it when it comes to your projects.

Okay, this blog entry is for me.

Healthmare

While we do not have a single payer system, the rest of the civilized world and parts of what used to be the uncivilized world do have such things.

Let us talk about real value and competition, because I would like my Right-side friends to hear this one thing---and only this one thing---and comment on this ONE point, so please don’t go off on Obama or the threat of Socialism or why there should not be a mosque at the World Trade Center Site (though, I do not believe there should be ANY religious architecture at the World Trade Center Site.)

Okay, this is my opinion: WE DO NOT HAVE AN EFFICIENT MOBILE WORKING FORCE because people are stuck in jobs that suck (if they are working at all) for the health benefits. This is such an arcane way of running a society.

It can easily take a month to adjust to a new job and to have benefits kick in. Or, one can move to another state looking for work (because, say, a teacher hears that they really need teachers in North Dakota) and while on the hunt, where does one get health insurance? And don’t say COBRA because it often is so expensive and has such problems when you cross state lines, that the only thing you can guarantee yourself is catastrophic, sort of. I have been through this.

So, you get a timid work force, a bunch of people who do not take risks, because they are afraid to be without health insurance. This creates anxiety. Thus, workers are enslaved to THE PAST.

Meanwhile, in France, China, Germany, etc., you can just up and go wherever you need to work. And your health care goes with you because it’s “the cloud”. This is so easy. And it creates a nimble culture. Why would we not want this?

So, my friends on the Right, in terms of pure math, and spare me the anger and the diatribes about Obama being born on Mars and wanting to turn your dog into a Muslim, but using math, tell me what is the upside of being able to compete globally with the work forces of other great countries when we are not as mobile, when our working people are slow, cautious, afraid to take risks and, well, as it turns out, fat and diabetic from their sessile, barker lounger, non-robust existences?

Blog City

There is something about the past that draws you in because you can rewrite it. You can make it better than it was.

Since joy is not guaranteed on earth, and pain certainly is plentiful, we mentally redo the past to make it like it was golden and wonderful in order to survive.

It’s a delusion. But it works.

Like so many of our constructs.

My Big Fat Gay Weekend

In celebration of deep summer humidity, and random plans coming together, as they will, we spent twenty-four hours on Fire Island with great friends on a beach side deck with a pool in Cherry Grove.

Look, it’s just a fifty mile drive out there and a twenty minute ferry. And you get there and it’s about 100% gay, no cars, beautiful beach, cute shacks and lots of good will. First time I’ve ever been. The Pines are right there, too. And if you are so inclined, you can take off all your clothes and no one really cares. Or at least in my case no one did.

I highly recommend it. Plus, the breakfast sandwich at Floyd’s is a great deal and very welcome after a night of booze-ahol and carousing. Plus, there’s all the drama of people-on-a-barrier-island with their love dreams coming or not coming true. Like Junior High without that pesky part where you have to learn all about the Iroquois Native Americans. What were the five tribes? Mohawk, Onondaga, Oneida, Seneca and ---oh yes, Cayuga (had to Wikki that one). Okay, so a Junior High education was worth it. Plus, wasn’t it fun to make that long house diorama?

But I digress. If you’re gay, go to Cherry Grove/The Pines. You won’t be disappointed. If you’re not gay, please don’t try to buy in. We have like three spots left on earth.

But do go see La Cage aux Folles on Broadway, gay or not. With the incredible Douglas Hodge (Tony Winner and really, he should have gotten two Tony’s) and Kelsey Grammer (who once read an Auden poem at a wedding I attended in Malibu and out-cried the bride), directed by Terry Johnson (fantastic and true) and won the Tony for best Broadway revival, why would you want to miss this? Plus, my friend Tony works on the show as the resident director and he is making sure those Cagelles keep up their splits, aerials and other shenanigans to the standards of the original staging (first produced at the London Menier Chocolate Factory---it’s a theatre, not a candy store.) And with all that tangential name-ish dropping I am doing, just because I have ego problems, what I am really saying is---go see this damn show. You’ll flip your wig. Unless, of course, you find joyful, loving gay men and drag queens somehow not worth your time. But they actually are. Additionally, I attended with my parents, sister, her family, and my Recognized-by-the-State-of-California-Domestic Partner followed by dinner. All very affirming and worth the discounted price of admission (see my post about Broadway Box). La Cage aux Folles, a total pleasure. It’s funny. It’s smart. And it’s incredibly well done. Plus, they kick beach balls into the crowd.

Sometimes, you just have to get your gay on. And then, it’s back to regular life. Which includes planning trips, writing plays, singing and cavorting late hours in Hells Kitchen. So I guess, really, it never stops.

Happy are those who are members of a subculture. It does simplify the journey. However, it’s all an illusion.

Have a great summer.

Let's Make a List

1. This gay marriage thing. Come on Walker. Tear down that STAY. It’s not right. Tear it down, I say, like that Gorbachev wall.

2. It’s so hot and humid in New York, I actually feel like I am being born again.

3. So we have decided to go to Iceland.

4. Go to iTunes and buy Henry Wolfe’s SOMEONE ELSE. It’s great. And write a wonderful review.

5. Do not eat caramelized onions and expect an easy night.

6. My hair is turning gray. I probably need to eat more vegetables. Or get a time machine.

7. The recession is over. But the corporations are not spending any money on developing anything new. It’s their Fuck-You to the Democratic leadership of this country. And no one sees this as unpatriotic?

8. Loosen your coffers, Fortune 500’s, and hire some people and create some new things. It can’t all be about your little lives with its lush status quo, the polo ponies and the private jet trips to Cap d’Antibes. Can it?

9. Isn’t it more fun to be creative, anyway? Like, isn’t it more fun to make a papier maché bunny than it is to check your portfolio?

10. I could eat linguini with clam sauce every day. Gotta get some spinach.

Let's Make a List

Let’s make a list.

1. This gay marriage thing. Come on Walker. Tear down that STAY. It’s not right. Tear it down, I say, like that Gorbachev wall.

2. It’s so hot and humid in New York, I actually fell like I am being born again.

3. So we have decided to go to Iceland.

4. Go to iTunes and buy Henry Wolfe’s SOMEONE ELSE. It’s great. And write a wonderful review.

5. Do not eat caramelized onions and expect an easy night.

6. My hair is turning gray. I probably need to eat more vegetables. Or get a time machine.

7. The recession is over. But the corporations are not spending any money on developing anything new. It’s their Fuck-You to the Democratic leadership of this country. And no one sees this as unpatriotic?

8. Loosen your coffers, Fortune 500’s, and hire some people and create some new things. It can’t all be about your little lives with its lush status quo, the polo ponies and the private jet trips to Cap d’Antibes. Can it?

9. Isn’t it more fun to be creative, anyway? Like, isn’t it more fun to make a papier maché bunny than it is to check your portfolio?

10. I could eat linguini with clam sauce every day. Gotta get some spinach.

Justice Kennedy, Can You Do It?

Yeah, Prop 8, that hateful prop, was overturned today. But there’s a stay.

This thing is going to the Supreme Court.

And now it’s up to Kennedy, our Supreme swinger, to uphold the lower court’s decision to keep down Prop 8 in the garbage where it belongs.

Tricky thing is, the logic used by the lower court might be eviscerated by the upper court. Blech.

Strange thing, this happening in my lifetime. I guess strange things happen in everyone’s lifetime that very personally pertains to their specific circumstances. I just do not feel that I have the nerves for all this. At least not right now. Okay, I do. Who am I? Mashed potatoes Marvin?

I was at a dinner tonight and to my surprise, someone there did not believe in evolution. How could I know such a person? I mean, I do not know this person by choice…but still, just two degrees of separation and someone is throwing Adam and Eve stuff at me?

And how could we live in a world where Prop. 8 could happen at all?

You hate to be all, “How stupid can people be?”

But shit, I’m feeling arrogant and pissed off. I do not feel celebratory. Call me a gloomy Gus. But do call me.

Come on Kennedy. (You know today he knows that his entire career is going to be remembered for the decision he is going to have to make. And he’s excited.)
Do the thing that helps. We are not Saudi Arabia.

One Does Want to Be Kind to Schmucks

One wants to be kind to all living creatures. So here it goes.

Dinner for Schmucks wasn’t great.

Paul Rudd is forever attractive and grounded.

Everyone else dialed it up to a wobbly 12.5.

But I liked some of the business. You know, I like comedies.

Better luck next time. I mean it.

Let's Talk About the Mall that is Soho

When I was in my twenties, back in the day when Matthew Broderick was also in his twenties, one would go down to Soho to see art, hook up with an NBC executive, do some blow, have crazy loft sex, go to the SNL after party at Rockefeller Center and then wonder what the hell you were doing with your life. Of course, what you were doing with your life made total sense and if you could do it all over again, well, you would.

These days, you go to Ben Sherman and you buy a load of cotton from the sale rack. Look, I’m a bit beefy, which is a nice way of saying I could lose fifteen pounds and the world would be better off. But still, those Ben Sherman cuts, all 1960’s and British, give me a happy feeling.

Soho is a mall. A frigging Paramus-Beverly Center Redo below Houston.

Corporations made me quake today. First the artists, then the galleries, then the cafés and shops, then the corporate stores. This is the natural progression. Like bog to woods. Read about the bog to field to woods progression. It’s so fun.

And I go, with everyone else, downtown to buy my mall clothes and pretend I’m having a cutting edge experience. I mean, shit, I ate frozen yogurt.

I hate clothes shopping. Something about all that fire retardant stench in the stores. Some people associate it with optimism, fresh new times. I associate it with strange cancer odor.

But I like new clothes. And thank goodness Adam, my recognized by the State of California Domestic Partner, completely takes over when we shop. He’s a total clothing top.

Cut off the tags, wash them well.