Damn, How We Lose Our Teeth

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_Day

Wasn't Labor interesting? Back when it meant something?

You know, I'm all nostalgic about the workers.  But, like, who are they, really?  Retail people now, burger flippers, corporate slaves. I was a worker once.

What is left of the unions?

Look, I'm a lucky bitch who doesn't have to work. But shit, for all those workers, I want to do something. Something. Give those slaves some serious cash. I personally don't care if my hamburger doubles in price. Double the entrance fee for that poison and pay these fucking people.

Pay these fucking people.

Give them as much money as we can. Give it to them. What's wrong with you? Give it!

Need a Web Designer?

My Designer is the 3 F's and a C.

Fast, Fun, Fair and Creative.

And for a bonus---Sleek.

http://www.jeffstacy.com

My website, par example:

http://www.doncummings.net/

I recommend him highly. And when he has to update your site he doesn't hem and haw. He just does it.

Sure, there are all these do-it-yourself website apps.  But let someone who does it better than you do it.
Frees you up for other things. And you'll get to have fun with Jeff.

Al Gore's Interwebs: They really did take off.

Certain Things About Today, With Some Questions

The big news: The New York Times site is DOWN. A Syrian group claims responsibility. I think it may have been a jealous cat from one of the You Tube cat videos. All in all, if people can hack into big media sites and take their asses down, I think it may be time to wonder...exactly...how...the...media...company...did...not...protect...itself.

Very humid in New York. It is starting to sting the nervous system. Autumn, we're ready.

Nissan is coming out with driverless cars. I can't wait. And if this becomes common, then one of the greatest side benefits could be much smaller cars or large cars that pick up many people.

I saw hawks hovering over Northern Manhattan yesterday. Animals. More animals. Please.

Half a Benadryl can do the job of getting you to sleep before midnight.

Though no one died when Clinton lied, a little part of me died from watching and learning how nasty the torch and pitchfork people can be.

I am going to Toronto. I visited once when I was a kid. All I remember is orange carpet type upholstery on trolley car seats.

Quinn will most likely win...but there are others worth noting. Keep an eye out.

I still maintain that I would love, entirely, a single payer healthcare system. I do not have the exact math to say it would be more efficient. I don't believe the U.S. has great health care as it stands now. I do believe a single payer system would cause some problems while alleviating others. What's up, Canada?

When is the next season of Orange is the New Black? And why is it so good?

My husband was nominated for an Emmy. For Second Screen Experience for Homeland for Showtime. I keep calling him Emmy Lou Harris. Bad puns make strong partners.

OId Timey Gay Video Night. Don't Judge. Enjoy.

Goddamn Sexual Orientation Advantages!

It’s so unfair to be gay.

You have all these choices. You don’t have to have children. Your partner understands you, generally, because you are the same sex.

You have extra cash lying around because you aren’t worrying about kids in college (if you, easily, didn’t have any) and you can eat things.

You don’t really have to behave in any tight way because people expect you to be a little off.

And if you are a gay male, well, you know, no one’s going to divorce you because you got a blow job in Vegas.

The legal screaming about marriage was important.  D.O.M.A.---eat my pussy.

But now that we are totally sidling up to parity, isn’t it rather unfair that we get all the perks of marriage while retaining all the quirks of old timey gaydom?

Lucky bitches.

BOX: September 7 at THE TORONTO INDEPENDENT FILM FESTIVAL

http://boxthemovie.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/box-at-torotonto-independent-film-festival-september-7/

Read about it here:
http://boxthemovie.wordpress.com/2013/08/22/box-at-torotonto-independent-film-festival-september-7/

I'm Blogging This and We All Have to Get Over It

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOZjaqHioro#t=154

Christie in a Side Car

Every time I look at Christie, I see a large unintelligent slob.

Of course, he is not unintelligent.

But this is the problem with each side of the political debate. It seems so easy to think that the other people, the ones in the other group, are stupid. When really, of course, intelligence is not the variable here. It's world view.

But worse than my prejudice against Republican thinking is how easy it is to quickly dismiss someone, using some sort of nasty put down.

I don't care how much someone weighs, unless they're on top of me. I don't care what someone looks like, in general.  So why, when I get riled, do I go right to, "That fat fuck!"

It really is a low character trait. Yet--that's what I want to do. I want to dismiss with an insult.

It's good to notice this. From now on, I will ignore his corpulence. I will only listen to what he says.

After all, he is a mushy Catholic underneath the extra flesh---he even admits that sexual orientation alteration programs don't work. He softens. People soften.

(Which makes me question...why all the fighting to begin with, since over time you end up softening?)

I do hope Christie runs. I do believe, though, that people aren't going to vote for the fat guy.

Shit, I slipped.

Okay, the backward guy.

Or a loud mouth from Jersey.

Plus...as Right as he is, I cannot imagine he is Right enough for the base.

They could try to push him over there---but that would take so many, right?

Oh, man, I did it again.

Two Questions

1. Is it possible to achieve a state of non-aggression without using aggression?

2. Is all communication nothing but projection?

Fruitvale Station (This year's Sundance Grand Jury and Audience Award Winner)

After watching this movie, I thought two things.

1) It was a bit slow and foreboding but balanced and kind.

2) I must give up my life to the welfare, amelioration, well being, dignity and love for the place African-American Men (Black Ones) hold in this society.

Bonus Point:

Movies, I have always maintained, do NOT have the ability to inspire or change people. At the end of this movie, I felt inspired to change. I was greatly moved. I was horrified. Furthermore, you get to know anyone, closely, and then watch them get gunned down for no reason, you just feel awful.  And so at that moment of feeling awful, I was transformed.  But after I ate, read the paper, switched my attention, I did not feel the great need to make my life about helping anyone.

Conclusions:

You should see this movie. In fact, everyone could benefit from this movie. It is very effective, though, it is a piece of fiction (closely sticking to fact), one that has some tonal up-sweep mixed with a plodding march toward death.

Big emotions for an audience member don't hold. One wants to homeostate back to normal.

But if everyone was just a tiny bit changed by seeing this film, the world would change, true.

So, perhaps movies do have the ability to alter points of view. But it depends who is watching and how many of them there are.

Near-Glam Chondrichthyes for Five Thousand, Please

Royal Young’s ‘Fame Shark’

Published by Heliotrope Books

As the subject and possibly the propellant, chasing the adulation of others is the goal of Royal Young’s sharp and sad memoir, Fame Shark.

Shamelessly bold, this young writer has enough insight into his own character to find its most treacherous flaws and then flays them out for everyone to gawk and sniff, though not in full daylight. Sexual and drunk, sometimes in white mink, mostly desiring women but angling for the attention from anyone with genitalia, young Hazak grows up wanting to become some sort of movie star/rock star/ artist/ dancer/ actor/ writer/kitchen sink. His lust for fame heartily nudges him into a little bit of footwork, but mostly into the arms of people who may be able to help him get ahead. Without discipline for craft or any workaday understanding of what it takes to learn how to do a few things or even one thing well, this rough and tumble Jewish kid from the Lower East Side stumbles out from the shadow of his judgmental, narcissistic penis-sculpting father and his warm but ineffective mother to murk his way through the canyons, slums, opening parties and the occasional low end performance gig in New York City. MySpace figures in greatly as a so-recent flame-out of lost hopes. 

As an indictment of the unbalanced appetite for self aggrandizement in the individual and then society, Royal Young, ne Hazak Brozgold (the moniker one begs he reinstates),  smashes his face into ours, with those pale blue-gray eyes of sadness over having his dick worshipped, often in the most incorrect mouths. A guy without a grounded purpose, who found Bennington so boring he never saw a second year, Hazak wastes his youth chasing the star fuckers of star fuckers, sliding his way down the social pole to the lowest crowd of drug dealers in Bushwick, before Bushwick was Bushwick, until he wakes up one day and agrees—Okay, I’ll go to Illinois on that train and hang with my solid, White Jewish  homeys since nothing else has really worked out. Pretty eyes and generational bitterness does not a life make. Hazak was smart to board that Amtrak.

Intended or not, this highly readable, energized rocket shot through louche terror has the great chance of striking any reader cold and dead. But even better, furious. Who does not want to jump on their treadmill time machine to run back to this youngin’ swilling booze and chaining Marlboro Reds to yell, supportively, “You’re drinking too much! You are toying with people who are then toying with you, all dishonestly! Your parents only sort of care about you, it seems, but really, they just can’t believe how the hell you are choosing to live! You really might be garden variety addicted, sexually compulsive, without an ability to focus and you just haven’t figured that out yet! Meditate! Or learn a trade!”

Hazak is infuriating. But thankfully for us, he infuriates himself. He was raised better than this and deep down he knows it. It is no surprise he finds strength in his family, the last option, to pull himself out of what appears to be the Daddy addiction of them all in our lonely, atomized, self sucking society of angry, traumatized souls: the search for spirit crushing fame.

The book is best when things get very rough. When all is going hunky dory as a kid, landing extras jobs in movies, and when the story rolls out in the end with a warm fuzzy family feeling, you wish the middle story would have had big and brave enough shoulders to shrug off the extra pads around it.

Empty, empty, empty. Self loathing for a reason never fully revealed. A family that produces addiction and hustling. A perplexing downfall that never felt fully down. Writing at times just flatly listing events (in the best way), other times, approaching lyricism through numb sadness. All this and more. And it will not be found in any dazzling aquarium gift shop. Indie, available, pulsing and fetid, Fame Shark, will make you jones for the popping of old fashioned flash bulbs, a guilt-free blow job (ladies, too), a shit load of money or maybe a nice bowl of soup.

Buy this book. Future pods of literary achievements will swim toward you from the always moving Royal Young. Keep your eye out for his sharp eyed fin above the zeitgeist water line. What a perfect chordate Royal chose to emulate. The shark is a non-boney fish. All cartilage and teeth. Soft and powerful, a jumble of predation. As with any enlivening memoir, and even more so with this partially revealing salty tale, you will want to know what will become of this person, this bottom feeding Chondrichthyes called Hazak/Royal/but not late for the star studded awards dinner. We wait for Fame Shark II. The You Tube Series?

http://www.amazon.com/Fame-Shark-ebook/dp/B00D1ECDO8/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1369712016&sr=8-2&keywords=fame+shark

Completely Support the Idea, but Man...this Vid

Violence against gays is up in New York. This is no surprise. Millions of people crammed onto a few islands that were really meant to be beaver swamps...things get tense.

I am glad, of course, that The New York Times is reporting this. However, this reenactment video reminds me of a show I appeared on in the '90s called Citizen's Arrest where I played a mugger in a San Fernando Valley supermarket (Directed by Anson Williams, Happy Days' Potsie). The style was cheesy then, and today, because that sort of food ages sharply, it's even cheesier.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/08/07/opinion/an-attack-on-equality.html?nl=opinion&emc=edit_ty_20130807&_r=0

These two victimized men were curated. Time would be better spent finding the dudes in the Knicks* duds.
Ford Foundation Grant? Lovely. How about a grant to fight crime, you know, better?

Lastly, and call me a Right wing lunatic (though most people on the Right call me a Left wing lunatic) I think having everyone's face photographed once every two years and put into a database...would do a lot to slow down crime. Along with a snatch of DNA recorded at birth. Yeah, everyone. Privacy? There's no privacy.
And freedom isn't freedom if people can't hold hands in the streets.

But of course, I was the only guy in my Socialist Country Club set who dared to say, "Just drop a few nukes in those Taliban mountains. I'm busy."
--of course, I know I was being idiotic. But sometimes, I get sick of the non-solution solutions.

Thank goodness no one checks in with me for procedural advice.

Let's just squirt our Jesus love all over the young attackers in their Knicks* shirts. Sure. That'll do it.
Or arm every homosexual with a big ol' gun.

Less video, more action.

*The whole bit about sports dudes beating up designer guys is a forever story. I remember the cast party after a play in high school my senior year---and these cast parties were where the freaks and fags and other drama/music hobos could let their hair down---was crashed by a bunch of guys in their football jerseys. All sorts of jokes about fags and the jocks romped around like they were fags, etc., making squealing noises--though, none of us in the play ever publicly squealed or behaved that way. They were doing it for each other. I guess the thing about sports is...someone has to lose. Hard. They harshed the party and it broke up soon after. The worst part about it was the feeling of being violated. No one was hit. No one bled. No one had anything torn or broken. I was always surprised by the hatred. Some of these guys, alone, were fine. I was sort of friends with them. But as a group, there was gay anxiety. And they were ruthless with doling out the punishment in retaliation for their own discomfort. I am so surprised, years later, that not even one has ever apologized. Strangely, I don't think people remember much. Their egos, certainly, make huge attempts to erase shameful memories.  Moving on. I should have had a gun.

Two Gay Minds

I had to spend a little time reading about Russian history to understand all this gay hatred. With Al Gore's Interweb in hand and the Wikipedia it provided, I have come to understand that I have no understanding why these people hate gay people so much.

Of course, there was the huge Mongol invasion in the 13th century, something that makes Russians hate outsiders, in general. They never got over it. They never got over being Tsarist. In fact, they seem to collect their endless traumas into a stew of discontent and misery that adds up to a culture of, well, I-simply-don't-know-and-clearly-I'm-just-typing-shit.

With all that being said, we must accept that there is a gay-hating-baiting hysteria going on in Russia right now and for the sake of safety, if I were a gay Olympiad or even an occasional bottom, I would highly recommend staying far away from that hateful empire.

On the other hand, it would be a brave thing to sally forth, same sex genitalia in hand, to the winter sports. Though, I do believe there is going to be a whole frigging load of hell going on. It's not like Russia is the only homophobic nation displaying gay hatred on the planet. Been to Uganda lately?  Me neither. The gorillas aren't worth it.

My support to all the gay athletes who are quaking right now. "Gay is the new Hebe," or something like that.

When I was a child, I was non-aggressive. Entirely. (Things changed as I got older.)  But as a kid, with no aggression, I used to watch all the aggression around me in fear and in complete disbelief.

This disbelief still lives in me. Why would you want to torture people for being different than you? I believe that many people enjoy the chemicals in their brain when they fully hate. It's a form of rapture for them. This gay hating, on balance, is a form of pleasure for the perpetrators. And who are we to stop people from their pleasure?

It makes you have to stop to think about what you are doing for your own pleasure that is killing other people. Wearing a diamond? Using an iPhone or anything made in an Asian factory? Listening to Limbaugh, thus keeping him employed?

People love to dominate, cause pain, and kill.  I saw it clearly as a child. I read it clearly as an adult. And the only fix I can come up with for this problem? All those kind of people should be killed.

There's no answer.

Or maybe there is. Isolate them. Final answer.

Orange is the New Black is the New T.V.

I, like so many people who think lesbians are hot, love Orange is the New Black.

I do hope this show brings down the entire cable industry.

Why the hell should I be paying all this monthly money for all the sports that I don’t watch?

Cable T.V. is a tax on all of us so people can watch people manipulate a moving ball.

No interest.

Die, cable, die. It’s a wretched regional monopoly.

I look forward to the fun start-ups that become curators of content that is available online. So I start a company called, “My T.V.”  and you subscribe for, say, 9.99/month. I have you fill out a huge questionnaire or have you do a Pandora-like thumbs up or down and lo’ and behold, your channels are built.

Most everyone will end up having Showtime and HBO. And many of us will not have one single sports channel. Some people will have all those nature shows and some people will be full-blown Kardashian-channel watchers.

Give me my “My T.V.” now. Please.

I wish I could start this company—but my experience has been by the time I think of something, someone has already pulled together the venture capital and is working 150 hours a week to make it happen.  Pass me the remote…

A Rare Night

Walking through Central Park for a quick stroll at 7:00, one of the nicest nights of 2013, temperature in the mid-70’s and dry, we came upon a couple. The man in distress. He’s on the ground in terrible pain. The wife, calm, standing next to a wheely bag piece of luggage, is talking to her husband—about getting an ambulance.

So, we call 911 and the ambulance came. It was tricky to get them down to the path we were on, below the road. It took a few random strangers. Question: Why don’t they use my cell phone, once I call in, as a homing device?

It all worked out. Interesting how many people were willing to stop and offer aid.

The man was on his way to detox. The wife admitted he was intoxicated and was taking blood pressure medication which can also be a problem. She told her husband how they were just getting to the place, sooner. The man, barely able to talk, said only one thing. “We can’t afford an ambulance.”  I asked if they had insurance. She said he didn’t.

And I am thinking—sure, let people shop around for health care. What better time to go shopping for one of life’s essentials than when you are detoxing, publicly.

It was enlivening to be involved with a net of people that cared about a man, down on the pavement. He was surely saved. It felt like he would live.

People want to help other people live. Good for us. It was this very thing that formed so much that is good for us.

So what I am really trying to say is: Socialism. For the downed man. Be Libertarian everywhere else if that’s what it costs to be a Socialist here.