Pontifica's Parlor

This makes me happy.

2010-08-02T12:24:00.000-07:00

I can practically feel the soft east-coast summer dusk. It makes me think of happy weddings I've attended, the smell of rose gardens, how vividly green east-coast summers are. Cool grass underfoot, kids playing tag. The clink of wineglasses, the temporary release of all cares. Cake.

It would make me happier if New York were one of the states where same-sex marriage is legal. I appreciate it when hetero couples don't get married, in solidarity with their homo sisters and brothers who cannot. I don't begrudge them their weddings when they do get married. Not much. Not when there's so much happiness and family solidarity and hope. But it would be nice if Chelsea and her new hubby acknowledged publicly that they're taking advantage of a right that most same-sex couples do not have.

Get it together, Lindsay Lohan.

2010-08-02T07:57:00.000-07:00

Take one sparkly, smart, talented kid with an adorable giggle. Add frequent infusions of alcohol, drugs, out-of-control parents and god knows what other demons. Wait a few years and weep.

I know people love a train wreck, but this one makes me sad. I know the smart and talented and awesome are still in there, but what seems to be missing is the self-esteem. (Note to LiLo: no one as beautiful as you needs plastic surgery!) I don't know if jail time is really the answer. I just hope this amazingly gifted woman finds what she needs to get strong, happy, and back on track.

Disgusting lesbians.

2009-12-11T20:12:00.000-08:00

The year I moved to Los Angeles, I went to the lesbian bar du jour and met Lisa, the woman who would become my girlfriend. The bar was called something like “Muse” or “Fishbowl” or “Minx,” and it was full of hot women, half of them execudykes with shiny hair and the other half scruffy Joan Jett lookalikes. I was having a fine old time making eye contact with Ellen DeGeneres and her coterie of sultry young butches, when this pretty woman with a Swedish accent walked toward me and held out a glass of wine. “You’re really beautiful,” she said. Note to shy lesbians: directness works. We chatted. We laughed. We left the bar and made out in the bushes near my car. When I got home that night I had twigs in my hair.

On my first official date with Lisa, we drove up on Mulholland to watch the Leonid meteor shower. We parked along the side of the road and hiked up a hill to watch the sky, then we went back to my car and starting making out again. We were deep into it, oblivious to anything else, when we gradually became aware of a blinding light shining into the car. At first I thought it was a spaceship landing. It was that bright. “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” bright. We blinked and squinted and saw two guys in uniform coming toward us. They had parked their giant off-road vehicle directly in front of us and had left on the headlights – the brights, not the regulars.

I could hear them expostulating at each other as they approached. One fragment rang out loud and clear: “...the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen. Isn’t that the most disgusting thing you’ve ever seen?” They were talking about us. Us, kissing. I thought straight men liked seeing pretty girls kissing. Clearly they weren’t used to seeing full-on genuine lesbian mackage.

Anyway. They shined a flashlight at us, knocked on my window and told us in no uncertain terms to get out of the car. Lisa reached for the door handle, but I told her not to open it. She gazed at me with wide-eyed alarm. I locked the doors and rolled down my window an inch. “What’s the problem?” I wanted to know. “What have we done wrong?”

Evidently we were parked in a no-parking zone. That’s no reason for us to have to get out of the car, I argued. Plus some part of my brain registered that they weren’t real cops, just park rangers. Beige uniforms. They started verbally abusing us again, walking around the car, commenting on my New Mexico license plates. “Are you from the rez?” they kept demanding, their voices getting shriller. “Did you just come from the REZ?” They saw my dog’s striped Indian blanket on the back seat and repeated the knee-slapper about the rez, cackling at each other’s wit. Then they ordered us out of the car again.

We were alone in the middle of nowhere, and except for their headlights, it was pitch dark. I was unnerved, but pissed. “The way you’re treating us is completely unprofessional and inappropriate,” I enunciated loudly. I picked up my cell phone. “I’m calling my dad. He’s a cop,” I said, “and I’m going to report you for harassing us.” My dad was, in fact, a police detective, but in New Mexico, not in Los Angeles. There was nothing he could have done to help us in that moment.

But invoking his name did the trick. Just like that, the inquisition was over. The puffed-up rangers shrank down to size, slunk away, slithered into their ATV and disappeared.

Lisa sat staring at me. “You’re my hero,” she said, or something to that effect. We laughed about it, a little shakily, and went back down to West Hollywood where all the other queers were. But it threw a shadow over the first sunny days of our relationship. “That’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen.” The words echoed for years.

This is how it feels to live in the pseudo-religious quasi-theocratic Puritanical brothel of American culture. This is why we need gay pride parades. So many heteros mouth the tired old canard “I support the gays, as long as they don’t flaunt their lifestyle in my face,” as if we all don’t spend our lives muffled in the bland suffocating embrace of heteronormativity.

When I first was coming out, I was afraid. Although I knew no lesbians in particular and very little about lesbianism in general (this was pre-Ellen and way pre-Ellen and Portia), I was afraid that my feelings made me monstrous, unlovable, a social outcast who would never have a family of my own or be able to keep a job. Nebulous fears of workbooted hairy women in tool belts, of growing old alone and abandoned, made me stifle and hide my feelings from the age of 13.

The lumbering beast of monolithic tribal culture wants us to be afraid. It posts warnings like so many flashing red hazard lights or the glaring headlights of park ranger trucks, like the signs on antique maps warning “Here be monsters.” To be fair, the tribe originally policed its boundaries for reasons of safety: against outsiders, marauders, saber-toothed tigers. But those monsters don’t exist anymore, so the culture has cast its own children as alien. Some cultures have embraced their outsiders and boundary-crossers: the native Americans with their berdache and two-spirited ones, for instance, but American culture doesn’t love its freaks.

At my high school of 2,000 kids, there was one out gay boy. He was flamboyant and dramatic. He tried to bring another boy to prom, but the school said no. Those were the days when schools could say no and not be slapped with lawsuits. It was the talk of the lunchroom, and we cool art kids agreed that he was brave. I didn’t dare reveal to even my closest friends, though, that I was prone to intense feelings about girls as well as boys. I was lucky to go to a college inhabited by lots of gay men, and more importantly, beautiful, entrancing lesbians. The scales fell away from my eyes. Once I broke down one boundary, it opened my eyes to the falsity of them all. And they fell like dominoes: female inferiority, male standards of female beauty, and so on and so forth, ad nauseam.

And that’s what the keepers of the tribe do not want, what they fear the most: that its wayward children will discover that it’s all a sham, put in place by people (read: straight white men) who like their power imbalance just as it is. The man behind the curtain is just an acne-pocked little dude with a combover.

For years Lisa and I asked each other “Are you from the REZ?” and burst into giggles. But I’m just glad we never had to find out what would have happened if we’d gotten out of the car.

Good news from New Hampshire!

2009-06-03T23:05:00.000-07:00

Welcome, #6! You woulda been #7, if a bare majority of Californians hadn't passed Prop. H8. But still, #6 is pretty good. New Jersey and New York look pretty certain to follow. One small step for a governor, one giant leap for same-sex couples and their allies.

Sometimes the back-and-forth skirmishes in the battle between good and evil are downright dizzying. This has been one of those weeks.

Could gun control have saved Dr. Tiller?

2009-06-03T22:31:00.000-07:00

There are so many urgent political, social and environmental crises demanding my time, mental energy and dollars that gun control, while really important, doesn't usually make it to the very top of my list. But I wanted to append to my post about the murder of Dr. George Tiller the observation that stricter gun control is an intrinsic part of quashing anti-abortion, anti-women terrorism. For such a small proportion of our population, the NRA still has an absolute stranglehold on politicians, including Democrats. Way too few of our cowardly elected officials are willing to risk their jobs by taking a strong stand against semi-automatic weapons and assault rifles, whose raison d'etre, after all, is not target practice with squirrels but mowing people down in large numbers and penetrating cops' body armor.

Not that we needed any further evidence that Dr. Tiller's murderer is unhinged (affiliation with fringe anti-government groups, supergluing the clinic's locks, assassinating the good doctor in his church), but a family member of the shooter said that the guy has had mental problems for years. Putting aside for a moment whether Roeder's relative is just trying to make a case for insanity, temporary or otherwise, in an attempt to lessen Roeder's sentence, I have to ask, how and why was this nut job allowed to get his hands on a gun?

It's a great country, with bigotry and ammo for all.

Thank you, Dr. Tiller.

2009-06-02T23:07:00.000-07:00

I grieve and rage at the assassination of this hero for women’s health, autonomy and lives. George Tiller cared about women and girls, and did what he could to help them in desperate circumstances. Despite years, decades, of intimidation and violence, he wouldn’t abandon the patients who needed him. He was incredibly brave.

I read a short story a few years ago that chilled and sickened me (I wish I could remember its title and author – I’ll go look on my bookshelves). A woman living in a totalitarian regime where abortion was illegal had attempted to obtain one anyway, was caught, and was punished with something like thirty years of forced, back-to-back pregnancies. A bleak, dystopic vision, yes. But there are parts of the world – Latin America, parts of the Middle East – where this story, and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, are terrifyingly close to reality. Where pregnant women are jailed for trying to get an abortion, forced to carry fetuses to term, even when it threatens their own lives.

Pregnancy and childbirth are risky propositions, not the walk in the park that some adoption advocates would have you think. Every baby should be a wanted baby. And even sometimes the wanted babies have fatal abnormalities that are not diagnosed until the second or third trimester. Or a woman is diagnosed with cancer and must have an abortion in order to undergo chemotherapy. These are the cases that Dr. Tiller, almost singlehandedly, tackled. Only one or two other doctors in the country are willing, for reasons of fear and intimidation, to perform late-term abortions. Of course Dr. Tiller also was a regular Ob/Gyn who delivered hundreds, if not thousands of babies in his career.

“Pro-life” is a sickeningly propagandist term that the anti-choicers have successfully co-opted. Insinuating, of course, that the opposing contingent is “anti-life.” When it’s the pro-choice people who are actually “pro-life”: pro-women, pro-family, pro-wanted children. Recently it was trumpeted in the media that something like 51% of people now consider themselves “pro-life.” (Who knows if all of them even know what the term means?) But if you asked many of those people what legal penalty a woman should face if abortion were recriminalized and she broke the law to get one, they would look at you blankly. They don’t really want to see their friends and sisters go to jail. But it is sheer blind laziness not to think about what the legal consequences would be.

This anti-choice intellectual laziness, and the rabid frothing-at-the-mouth that too frequently accompanies it, obscures for anti-choicers the fact that they are free to hold whatever beliefs they want, but they don’t have the right to decide what happens inside someone else’s body. That’s fascism, and worse (see The Handmaid’s Tale, above). They conveniently don’t think about the slippery slope – about which of their own rights other people might decide to legislate away (as catchy slogans go, I like “Protect traditional marriage: Ban divorce.”). We live in a democracy, and a woman’s body cannot be subject to anyone else’s opinion, majority or otherwise. Women will not be content to remain second-class citizens; we can and must be trusted to make the best decisions for our own lives about when and whether to bear children.

The second reality that the rabid anti-choicers can’t or won’t comprehend is that women and girls will have abortions whether they’re safe and legal or not. Better, for the sake of women and the people who love them, that they be safe and legal.

No woman should ever be forced to carry a pregnancy she does not want or cannot sustain. The consequences to women of compulsory gestation and childbirth can be devastating. Bringing a human being into the world is a tremendous responsibility. When you are not equipped or willing, it can be a nightmare. We see the consequences of unwanted children in the foster care system, where abuse and neglect are endemic, on our streets and in our prisons. Do the anti-choicers care about those lost kids, take them into their homes, provide for them financially and spiritually? Yeah, right.

Ultimately the anti-abortion crusade is not about saving babies, but about controlling women – our sexuality and autonomy. The solid citizens who harass women at clinics and from Republican wingnut bully pulpits are usually the same ones who rail against contraception and sex education. Women shouldn’t be sexual, the twisted logic goes, but if they are, they’re sluts and they should be punished with pregnancy. It is no accident that the cultures in which women and their reproductive lives are controlled most repressively are also the cultures in which girls are not allowed to go to school, and women are not allowed to work outside the home. The anti-abortion forces know that overturning Roe v. Wade would be difficult, if not impossible. But if they can’t make abortion illegal, they can make it almost impossible to obtain. 87% of American counties do not have an abortion provider.

Somewhere around 35-40% of American women have had abortions. They, and their husbands and boyfriends and family members, need to stand up and say no to the campaign of domestic anti-choice terrorism that has made George Tiller its latest victim. (And Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly, for years an on-air fomenter of hysterical violence toward Dr. Tiller "the Baby Killer," has blood on his hands.)

To honor Dr. Tiller’s memory, you can donate to Medical Students for Choice, Planned Parenthood, NARAL. You can volunteer at your local women’s health center. You can stand up and be counted as a voice for sanity, for the equal citizenship of women, for the kind of care that Dr. George Tiller stood for. We will really miss him.

You have to read this book!

2009-05-31T20:15:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since Pontifica has officially recommended a book, but the hour has arrived. I've just finished Fingersmith, a smashing, jaw-dropping 548-page Victorian Gothic mystery. I snatched it up yesterday and just put it down with the utmost reluctance, having re-read the last few pages in a desperate attempt to will another couple of chapters onto the end. Charming Girlfriend read it before me (it was from her hand that I snatched it), during which time there was much gasping and exclaiming. Naturally I would peer over her shoulder to see what all the fuss was about, only to have her slam the book shut so that I couldn't inadvertently pick up any clues. "You can't read ahead," she hissed when she finally handed the book over. "Promise me you won't read ahead." (She knows I am a reader-aheader.) I kept my promise, though sometimes I had to cover the part of the page I hadn't yet read so my untrustworthy eyes couldn't jump forward.

I envy those fortunate book-lovers who haven't read this gem yet. Sarah Waters. Have you heard of her? She also wrote Tipping the Velvet and Affinity (both adapted into miniseries for the BBC), but Fingersmith surpasses them and just about everything else I've ever read. Ever! Go get this book. Then clear your schedule.

Whatever, California.

2009-05-26T21:03:00.000-07:00

I'm not a legal scholar, so I can't dissect the California Supreme Court's decision to uphold Prop. 8 to figure out if it contains the seeds of Prop. 8's undoing. Some of my friends and Facebook acquaintances are sure that the Supremes found for the haters with a very narrow interpretation of the law, leaving room for future challenges, because they (the aforementioned Supremes) are actually supportive of equal protection under the Constitution for same-sex couples in reality. After all, thousands of queers are still legally married. The whole thing just makes me tired and confused. Why do we have a legal system that allows murderers to walk free when everyone knows they're guilty, and that reinforces bigotry and fear even though that's not what the justices believe in personally?

Whatever.

I do believe we'll reverse Prop. 8 in the near future (the margin was so narrow, after all – just a few percentage points – and has been steadily narrowing in recent years). I'm just really sick of being a second-class citizen. Lots of my friends are marching in protest tonight, but I'm going to bed.

It’s bigger than marriage.

2009-05-07T22:54:00.000-07:00

Gay marriage is a worthy goal, and I have rejoiced to see Vermont, Iowa and Maine join Connecticut and Massachusetts on the righteous side of the civil-rights aisle. But wedlock for same-sex couples, while essential to giving lesbians and gay men the 1,000+ federal benefits that hetero marrieds (often obliviously) enjoy, is not the whole picture. Lack of marriage rights is a symptom of a cultural malady, not the disease itself.

The disease is second-class citizenship for queers. As long as we can’t get legally married, it’s easier to justify denying us jobs, housing, shared custody of children, hospital visitation rights. It’s easier to make the leap from “weird and different,” to “ungodly and abhorrent,” to “must wipe off the face of the planet” when society at large supports the premise that queers are subhuman. It gives gay-bashers and homophobes a free pass to bask in bigotry and violence. “Hey, President Obama doesn’t think they should be able to get married, so why should I?”

Culturally sanctioned hatred of gayness (which for males translates as femininity, weakness) enables the sick, poisonous so-called “boy culture” at the root of the recent suicides of two eleven-year-old kids, Carl Walker-Hoover and Jaheem Herrera, boys who were taunted as “gay,” “faggot,” “queer” by their schoolmates. Who knows if those boys were, or would turn out to be, actually gay? When even the perception, the possibility of gayness is frightening and ghastly enough to cause kids to hang themselves, we know gay people are not equal citizens. And President Obama, you’re not helping.

Imagine that instead of “gay,” the insult tossed around in playgrounds and locker rooms were “nigger” or “kike.” But those days are over, right? Teachers, not to mention the rest of our society, wouldn’t stand for it. Black and Jewish people and their allies have fought to make this a country where those ugly slurs are unacceptable. Why is it still okay to denigrate a sexual minority? Well, let’s see. Anxiety about sexuality runs very deep in our neo-Puritanical, machismo culture. Female sexuality is policed in outrageous ways (see: the right wing’s nonsensical, punishing attitudes toward contraception and abortion), but the keepers of male sexuality exercise equally insidious means of control. God help the boy who doesn’t hew to the he-man mold. Recently I overheard a woman telling her little boy in a store that he couldn’t have the purple sparkly bucket, because “that color is for girls.” This massive culture-wide anxiety has mothers policing their little boys about what color buckets they are allowed to like, for god’s sake.

What a society says from the top down is very powerful. Some folks might not agree with it, but they know that they can’t lawfully discriminate on the basis of race anymore. When our leaders at every level of government (I’m talking to you, President Obama) make it clear that lesbians, gay men and every other shade of queer are protected by robust anti-discrimination laws and are included under the big colorful diversity umbrella as the recipients of every right that everybody else enjoys (consciously or not), the bigots will be forced to tone down their rhetoric. And if some are too set in their ways to change, their kids will.

Why are so many people afraid of same-sex marriage? Why do they insist that it threatens their own marriages? Because when lesbians and gay men are free to marry, straights won’t belong to a privileged class anymore. They won’t be able to teach their children that they’re better than those other people. Their kids will be less likely to believe what they're taught in Sunday school when they can see for themselves that their friend's two dads or two moms are perfectly nice (if a little strict). It’s nice to belong to a privileged class, isn’t it? A lot like living in a gated community, where you can keep out the Mexicans except for when they come, bowing and scraping, to clean up your house and garden for a pittance. The homeowners association will have to get together to figure out what else they can lord over the peons. Once the pesky PC patrol has taken away race, religion, gender and sexual orientation as blunt objects with which to knock lesser mortals on the head, by gum, what’s left? Never mind, Mr. and Mrs. Thurston Howell III, there’s always class.

So, same-sex marriage isn’t the be-all and end-all, but when it is made legal at the federal level for same-sex couples, we will be that much closer to a time when anti-gay epithets will draw the universal gasp that “kike” and “nigger” do today. A time when 11-year-old boys like Carl and Jaheem might not resort to killing themselves. An era when parents won’t have to disown their gay kids, while buying their hetero kids condos. And we’ll throw in the confetti for free.

Arlen Specter switches teams!

2009-04-28T18:32:00.000-07:00

Because he just couldn’t stomach anymore the lying corrupt craven murderous right-wing mess the Republican party has become? Or a craven, desperate ploy for reelection, facing an unwinnable Republican primary? Who cares?

Hello, Democratic Senate filibuster-proof majority (once Al Franken gets the okay from the Minnesota recount, as he is likely to do). Smug? Hell yeah, we’re smug.

Another boy wearing makeup.

2009-04-27T21:13:00.000-07:00

I take Adam Lambert’s popularity as a sign, despite apocalyptic indications to the contrary – a shrinking economy, melting polar ice caps, Sharia law, Republicans who say that waterboarding doesn’t hurt, Republicans giving Obama’s first 100 days a failing grade, as if somehow Shrub’s nearly 3,000 disastrous days NEVER HAPPENED – a sign that all is not lost. Sure, the fact that Adam is talented is a contributing factor – if Mr. Eyeliner were a no-good wannabe, he’d have been, if not booed off the American Idol stage, at least damned with the faint praise of lackluster votes. His boy-next-door wholesome cuteness and emo haircut, and those flattering blue lights, make fourteen-year-old hearts flutter all across the nation. Then he opens his mouth and pours out that melting voice and heck, a certain Charming Girlfriend is brought to tears every time. And she is no fourteen-year-old.

Adam wears makeup unapologetically and I guess there are pictures of him on the Internet in drag and with his tongue down some guy’s throat. And in drag. That’s why I love America a little more right now – because no one seems to care that Adam is gay. There are comments online like “Too bad he’s not into girls cuz he’s so cute!” and “He is my favorite!!!!!!!! He's not just good, he is so aammaazziinngg!!!!!!!!!!!!!” That’s thirteen exclamation points. Hey, Charming Girlfriend, is that you? The girls are still holding up the hand-painted “Adam Lambert is my Idol” signs and shrieking those so-high-only-dogs-can-hear-them shrieks.

I also got my love on for Allison Iraheta and her candy-apple-red hair – I mean, that spunky lil sixteen-year-old can SANG! But then Adam comes on all pompadoured and powdered within an inch of his life and, Clay Aiken notwithstanding, I would love to see an openly gay or bi American Idol, one who doesn’t take eleventeen years to come out. Just think of how many fourteen-year-old girls are gonna vote for same-sex marriage in four years when they get legal, because of mascara-wearing, high-hair-having, voice-like-you-died-and-went-to-heaven Adam Lambert.

Iowa...Vermont...

2009-04-07T21:51:00.000-07:00

...like I said, dominoes.

Two boys wearing makeup.

2009-02-06T07:16:00.000-08:00

Have you seen the hysterical web series on thewb.com called A Boy Wearing Makeup?

If you’re not a fifteen-year-old girl or an industry queer like me, I will tell you that it stars a charming flamer named Mathieu who gives tips on, yes, how to wear makeup. Who doesn’t want advice on applying blush to best advantage or disguising dark undereye circles from a young guy wearing foundation? Well, I don’t, but that’s beside the point. My point is simply that thewb.com is savvy enough to realize that all fifteen-year-old girls are budding fag hags and, unless they’re being raised on a polygamist compound, those girls know that gender-bending of the sort embodied by Mathieu of the plucked eyebrows is hip and hot, very post-binary oppositions 21st-century yes-we-can, and kinda ’80s retro too.

I am afraid you will not be surprised to find that unhip-itude extends beyond polygamist compounds to the doldrums of mainstream America. We have only to look as far as Matt Allsup, a 13-year-old boy in that middlest of middles – Hamilton, Ohio – who has been harassed and intimidated by administrators at his middle school for wearing makeup – the kind of makeup that 13-year-old girls get away with wearing every day (unless their parents are as strict as mine, since it’s kind of Gothy and I wouldn’t have been allowed to wear black nail polish). And that’s the supercool thing about Matt’s mom – she is totally supportive of her son’s iconoclasm. She claims quite rightly that Matt is experiencing gender discrimination, that in being forbidden to wear makeup to school he is the victim of a sexual double standard. Isn't it ironic that the "Character Badge" that all Hamilton Middle School students must wear says "Do you value the uniqueness of others?"

Ironic, too, that the same culture that brings forth, on one hand, a boy whose makeup-wearing skills score him a web series deal from an entertainment mega-corporation (a fabulous platform from which to give us all lessons in a good smoky eye) also spawns a bunch of gender-conforming goose-steppers who do everything in their power to squash the boy who is brave enough to strike a pose for the freedom to rock his own smoky-eyed, black-lipsticked Robert Smith look amidst the cornfields of Ohio.

Hamilton Middle School administrators’ makeup-phobia is the Twinkie defense all over again – homophobia, pure and simple. A collective panic at the idea that a boy might be gay. But at the root of homophobia lurks the real villain: misogyny. The oh-my-god-this-boy-is-acting-like-a-girl panic, the reason why gay men and trans women are hated and bashed and murdered: they are voluntarily giving up their male supremacy and power, voluntarily assuming a subservient position, voluntarily becoming Like Women. And lots of good ol’ boys with a fragile hold on their own masculinity just can’t handle the gender anxiety.

We’ve forgotten (if we ever grasped it) Freud’s assertion that all neurosis is based on our ultimately futile attempts to be “real men” and “real women,” when no such essentialist identities exist. It’s all a spectrum…some women are more “masculine” than some men…lots of men are nurturing…blah blah blah. No. Instead, whole regiments of society get in line to police men (and 13-year-old boys) who won’t act like Men. It’s not a new concept; we all know why tomboys and women who renounce their femininity to become trans men have a slightly easier time of it (relatively speaking – I’m not forgetting Brandon Teena) – because they are gravitating toward the gender role with more power, and everyone can understand that, even if only on an unconscious level.

(I’m not even going to get into American macho culture’s ridiculous love affair with fake lesbianism. If I have to see one more video of college girls kissing each other while their boyfriends roar with drunken approval, I will have to head over to AfterEllen.com to cleanse my palate.)

“I’m not like most other people,” says young Matt Allsup. You go, boy!

California morning.

2009-02-04T17:07:00.000-08:00

Early this morning I took my Lawless Hound on a walk past my Dream Home (the one in Los Feliz, not the one in the English countryside). It was another cloudless brilliant morning, a brisk, vivid 55 degrees. I pulled an orange off a branch that hung over a fence, and its scent on my fingers and when I punctured the rind with my fingernail was the sharp, sunny tang that is the very essence of optimism, the Platonic ideal of citrus. Nothing like those neutered plastic perfectly uniform orbs in the chilly produce section. This orange blushed tangerine on one side and faded to lemon on the other and just smelling its wild tartness made me salivate. I thought of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her sister Mary in their house on Plum Creek, when neighborly Mr. Edwards risked his life crossing a raging winter river to bring them Christmas trinkets and one orange each. Maybe this is what those prelapsarian oranges smelled like.

Before I got in my car to go to work, I looked up to the end of my street and saw, above the waving palms, the Griffith Observatory blindingly white in the intensely blue sky, beneath an insouciant little horsetail cloud.

I confess that I think of it as my own personal Observatory. I felt a protective panic on its behalf during the Griffith Park fire two springs ago – we stood in the street and watched the raging wall of flame leap high behind its domes.

The next morning I nearly cried with relief to see that it was still there. It’s my beacon – when I’ve been away from home, and I see it with its Art Deco pilasters there on its hillside getting closer, it gives me a thrill of happiness. I bet there are a lot of us who feel that way, people who can look up from their driveways and see it squatting placid and glorious just above us on the hill.

I was jealous to see news and pictures of the snowstorm that blanketed London earlier this week – I miss the muffled hush of snow, how it shuts adult life down, business and transportation, and gives people license to play. I miss the cold that makes being indoors and drinking tea by a fire so delicious. But on a morning like this, southern California has its charms.

Photo credits: Shutterberry; AP/Matt Sayles.

Some notes on how to make a short film, Part 1.

2009-02-03T14:02:00.000-08:00

If you’re renting costumes from the wardrobe department of a major studio, take pictures of the costumes with your cameraphone so that, if they decide they’re too busy to accommodate your request, you can go to Jet Rag and find something pretty close. (If, however, you want them to rent you that indescribably divine handmade violet silk satin embroidered Marie Antoinette gown worth about $50,000, save your breath and go buy a cheap costume for fifty bucks.)

Work with the best, most experienced and professional people you can find. This is especially good if they’re your friends and they’re willing to work for free. Professionals are prepared to work hard. This applies to production assistants, too. Believe me, you don’t want your PAs flaking after the first day.

Find someone who’s willing to “rent” you their production insurance. You will save hundreds, if not thousands of dollars.

If one of your actors gets a paying gig and drops out the day before your shoot starts, you can actually find good actors on craigslist.

Get all your location releases signed before you shoot in those locations. I don’t care if it’s your best friend’s house. Make her sign.

Make sure you have hot coffee available the moment your crew arrives each morning.

Double-check that your DP transferred every single file from the P2 cards before said P2 cards get sent to the Middle East.

Alan Weisman, meet the Duggars.

2009-01-04T22:57:00.000-08:00

I recently read Alan Weisman’s The World Without Us. It’s a fascinating exploration of what would happen to our planet if humans suddenly disappeared. Like, completely. Of course, almost immediately, every single nuclear reactor around the globe, without people to maintain it, would melt down, causing if not nuclear winter then at least a real bummer of a nuclear autumn. What’s really heartening is that our denuded forests and the irradiated wildlife around Chernobyl would eventually come back (albeit with a few extra legs), and, sooner or later, our poisoned oceans would heal themselves. Sort of. It’s pretty cool to read Weisman’s description of how nature would swiftly reclaim a typical house.

He talks about the efforts of some scientists to create a durable record of ourselves and our doings (an actual record, made of gold-plated copper and designed to last a billion years) containing sounds (human greetings in 54 languages, plus whales and birds) and images (buildings, babies, bagels). They sent it into space along with glyphs explaining how to play it back, should it ever found by some life form with eyes and opposable thumbs. What struck me with almost unbearable poignancy was the realization that someday, maybe far off, maybe a thousand generations from now but still, some actual day, everything will be gone. Not just Britney Spears CDs and plastic tampon applicators, but all of humanity’s most sublime achievements: Bach’s sonatas and partitas, Shakespeare’s plays, Caravaggios and Rothkos and Calders, jazz and fishnet stockings and love letters, everything ever created by a human brain that makes life exquisitely beautiful and meaningful.

It makes me lonely to think about a time when every human accomplishment, conversation and passionate striving, every simple pleasure and phenomenal triumph will be but an echo traveling through the void of space.

Which brings me to those Duggars of Arkansas. You know, the Duggars. The family with 18 kids? There’s a whole show devoted to them. TLC parades this family around as if they’re a spectacle to be celebrated, instead of stigmatized. Clearly the Duggars feel no shame, but rather a surfeit of pride in their dubious accomplishment. Are we supposed to see them as role models? I will grant you that caring for your children is far preferable to abusing and neglecting them; I have no doubt that the Duggars love their children. That’s not the issue. For Mrs. and Mr. Duggar to propagate themselves so extravagantly, heedless of the population explosion and diminishing world resources, is irresponsible and selfish. Moreover, it smacks of hubris. What makes Jim Bob and Michelle think their genes are so special?

If a healthy proportion of their kids goes on to beget kids of their own, in just one or two generations the Duggars will have an overwhelmingly disproportionate impact on the gene pool. Then again, maybe some of the Duggar kids, conscripted into raising their younger siblings, will be so fed up with changing diapers that they will swear off reproduction altogether. And let’s face it: statistically speaking, at least two of them are gay.

Have Michelle and Jim Bob stopped to consider the environmental impact of just one or two generations of grandchildren and great-grandchildren? In her book Small Wonder, Barbara Kingsolver tells us that Americans, who make up 5% of the world’s population, use 25% of its fuel. And there go hundreds of Duggars buying cars, all while blithely outstripping the 2.6 replacement average with which most people content themselves (which itself, according to Alan Weisman, is 1.6 too many).

Weisman argues convincingly that starting NOW, every woman needs to limit herself to one offspring. One. Otherwise, in 100 years, we will have destroyed life as we know it on our small planet.

Newsflash, Jim Bob and Michelle: many people actually agonize over whether it is responsible to bring even one child onto this groaningly overpopulated planet. In your home-schooling classes, surely you've learned more than just how God wants you to “be fruitful and multiply.” If you haven’t noticed, being fruitful and multiplying has really screwed up our poor beleaguered planet. How would you like it if everybody else had 18 kids? That’d clog up the carpool lane pretty damn quick.

The Duggars say that each child is a gift from God. Guess what? There are other kinds of gifts. Condoms are a gift from God too. And how about the gift of regular undivided attention from one’s parents?

Anyway, the Duggar kids are more than just gifts from God – they're cash cows. This family needs to take some of that green and start buying some serious carbon credits.

Trying for a merry little Christmas.

2008-12-17T21:11:00.000-08:00

Walking my spotted hound tonight, I counted about a dozen Christmas trees twinkling inside houses and apartments, and lots of houses and trees festooned with lights. This is a good neighborhood for decorations, starting at Halloween. I thought about all the friends I've made in my nearly two years on this street. We share news, gossip, power tools, parties and, last week, the joy of the new downstairs baby.

Up on Los Feliz boulevard there are two side-by-side houses so gorgeously, brazenly blinking with multi-colored lights – Santa in a sleigh on the roof, reindeer, snowmen, candy canes – that they must be visible from outer space. Something like this:

Those sparkling Christmas trees glimpsed through windows (such a cozy, friendly tradition, to leave your curtains open so the neighbors can enjoy the view) evoke a primal joy and comfort, triggering memories of childhood anticipation, magic, security, happiness.

This will be the first Christmas of my life without a card from my Grandma, in the handwriting that grew shakier every year but whose expression of love never faded. She was the last of my grandparents. My dear great-aunt and uncle passed away this year too. Now that generation is gone. It’s been a difficult season so far, clouded by family squabbles and hurt feelings, and I’ve had to dig deep to try and feel the holiday spirit for brief moments. I brought home a little tree, four feet high, and a piney-scented wreath, and unpacked the ornaments and put the Christmas music on. I bought cards and stood in line for stamps, though I haven’t had the heart to write any cards yet. I made my list and checked it twice. Fake it till you make it, like the twelve-steppers say. I think this is a hard year for a lot of people, based on my unscientific survey of friends. The economy, the dying (but still surprisingly damaging) gasps of the Bush era. The weary world, indeed. I never understood till now why people complained about this time of year. Christmas has always been my favorite holiday, and except for a brief bout in my twenties with cynicism about its inescapable hegemony, its cultural imperialism even, I’ve embraced the Christmas messages of love, miraculous and thrilling; birth and hope in the midst of darkness.

That’s what those lights do for us – remind us of the ageless celebration of light in midwinter. They bring the starry sky close, even here in Los Angeles where tonight no stars can be seen through the clouds. No matter; there’s spicy woodsmoke and a clear damp freshness after three days of rain. My thirteen-year-old dog rapturously sniffed hedges, her tail jerkily wagging. O night divine. I’ll keep singing Christmas carols in my car and I’ll keep plugging in my little tree every night when I get home. I’ll see some of my loved ones on Christmas Day, and there will be others I’ll miss deeply. Grief, hope. Endings, renewal. A time when even we jaded city-dwellers find reason to soften, to celebrate, and find it in ourselves to be a little more generous than we are the rest of the year. It may not be perfect, but I’ll take what I can get.

Glory hallelujah!

2008-11-05T00:18:00.000-08:00

And the whole world rejoices.

My Alaska vs. Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

2008-10-20T19:55:00.000-07:00

I lived in Alaska for about four years when I was little. It was an idyllic place to be a child. All winter long we cross-country skied, skated on the dark ice that covered the unpaved roads, built snow forts and tooled around on kid-sized snowmobiles. (My poor mom hated those winters, because she had to drive). On Halloween, in snowsuits and face paint, we’d pile into an Eskimo sled like a shallow bathtub behind our dad’s snowmobile and he’d buzz around to the neighbors in the dark.

There was no such thing as a “snow day” at school, since it snowed all the time. Kids who lived near enough to school were expected to walk, and the rest of us got dropped off and picked up by snowmobile. We’d walk home from the bus stop at 3:15 and a blue twilight would already be stealing across the snow. It was heartbreakingly lovely. On weekends, we’d spend all day outside playing in the snow. At lunchtime we’d tramp inside and peel out of our soaking-wet one-piece snowsuits, and while they hung drying near the wood-burning stove we’d guzzle tomato soup and hot chocolate.

I remember the utter stillness of the winter woods, black branches against drifts of snow, my breath hanging in the air, the hush pierced by a dropping pine needle or a faraway shout. I would lie on my back, alone in the forest near our house, staring up into the drifting whiteness, feeling the cold seeping through my snowsuit as the silence rang in my ears.

In the summer there was fireweed along the roads and berries to pick: raspberries along the river (where moose liked to bathe), cranberries on the forest floor and blueberries on the mountains (where we would avoid the bears, who liked the berries too). Moose mamas would bring their babies to our garden to poach brussels sprouts and broccoli. During those long summer days I would lie on my bed reading for hours, and at night my parents would call us inside at nine or ten, when it was still light out, and pull heavy blankets over our windows to block out the midnight sun.

Downstairs in the garage there was a freezer full of salmon, courtesy of my dad the fisherman, and also paper-wrapped packages of weird-tasting caribou sausage, caribou steak and caribou hot dogs, evidence of a successful hunting trip. One caribou lasted a hell of a long time, even in a family of six. Our neighbors across the road had their own salmon smoker, an old converted refrigerator. Fresh smoked salmon, warm and juicy from the smoker – ambrosia. They also had a cache, a box high up in a tree to keep food away from bears. Like the spooky, marvelous Northern Lights, to me these things were uniquely Alaskan. Life was different here.

I loved going to school in Alaska. We had Rendezvous Day, where we learned about the fur trappers and gold prospectors of yore and cooked sourdough pancakes right there in the classroom. The whole school sang patriotic songs in the auditorium every Friday: the national anthem, America the Beautiful, My Country ’tis of Thee, and also songs that were peculiar to Alaska, like the catchy Eskimo ditty “A Oony Coony Chuck A Oony.” When we moved back to the Lower 48, I was perplexed to find out that my new classmates did not know these patriotic songs, much less bellow them unself-consciously in the auditorium.

It was in school in Alaska that I began to learn what it meant that we were a democracy, to feel pride in our founding principles: freedom of speech and religion, liberty, the shrugging off of the yoke of tyranny. It was thrilling to learn of the early Americans’ revolutionary fervor in the face of oppression and injustice. Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Paul Revere – these were freedom fighters, embodying a high kind of honor, truth and courage that reached down through the centuries and resonated with me, an elementary school kid in rubber breakup boots. (Breakup: the slushy, icy-puddled weeks when a winter’s worth of snow began to give way to spring.) It was then that I began to understand why dissent – speaking truth to power – is patriotic, that those who love their country the most are the ones who will stand up, despite intimidation and name-calling, when its founding tenets are desecrated. It was later that I learned about the genocide of the Native Americans and the many other stains on our country’s honor, but I also found that it is possible to execrate our country’s failings and still love its immense potential, the core values for which it stands. We denounce its failings precisely because they undermine those ideals.

There are certain similarities between Sarah Palin’s Alaska and mine. The snowmobiles, the caribou in the freezer, even the patriotism. I learned to love my country there, its blue-shadowed, bear-haunted beauty as well as the ideals that had formed it. From every mountainside let freedom ring, and crown thy good with sisterhood from sea to shining sea. But for Palin, a kind of stunted xenophobic parochialism parades as patriotism. For Palin and her cronies, it is “unpatriotic” to question the tyrants who’ve been shredding our Constitution with gleeful abandon for the past eight years. If the authors of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence were around today, Sarah Palin would accuse them of “palling around with terrorists,” because they would certainly decry unfettered Executive power, a citizen-funded $700-billion corporate bailout, state-sanctioned torture, preemptive war in support of oil profiteering, the Orwellian “Patriot Act” and Cheney-flavored fascism.

For Palin, the glorious, irreplaceable, ancient tundra exists to be tapped like a glorified gas station, and the cherished tenets of our democracy are to be mocked and twisted beyond recognition. Yes, my dad hunted caribou – something I would shudder to do – to help feed his family on an Air Force salary, but he is as horrified as I at Palin’s enthusiastic championing of aerial wolf-hunting, and the bloodthirsty bounty she proposes to offer for each chopped-off left wolf foreleg.

I hear my Alaska has been paved over with WalMarts and Targets. From the photos I’ve seen of the down-on-its-luck strip mall known as Wasilla, you’d never know just what a beautiful place it is. Unlike my dad and brothers, I have never been back. I know you can’t go home again, and people say that things were never kinder and gentler the way we like to remember them – although perhaps a happy childhood is an exception, creating memories of peace and wholeness and idealism before divorce and loss and disillusionment can establish their toeholds. I take heart from the anti-Palin Alaskans who are coming out in droves; her brand of jingoistic Americanism doesn’t entirely hold sway in the Last Frontier. But still, now more than ever, I choose to remember Alaska the way it was.

Blog envy.

2008-10-17T19:58:00.000-07:00

Sometimes I am so impressed with some other blogger's wit and savoir faire that I think "I really couldn't have done that any better myself" (an embarrassingly rare sentiment, perhaps).

Exhibit A: this stupefyingly bizarre photo.

Exhibit B: Wonkette's fucking high-larious field day with said photo, published the next morning. The next morning! Don't these people have day jobs?

Vote No on Prop. 4

2008-10-14T08:35:00.000-07:00

Proposition 4, for those who might not be aware, is about parental consent. It is about amending the California constitution to force pregnant teens to obtain said consent before obtaining an abortion. There's a mandatory waiting period of 48 hours, too – just enough time for your parents to beat you up or send you to a convent or both. Or else, in another breathtaking breach of your privacy, you could run the gauntlet of the law and try to prove to a judge why you shouldn't have to inform your parents. Whee!

Allow smart-assed little Kaitlyn to make up her own mind about her body, her life, her future? Heavens, no! Never mind that most teens who get pregnant do involve their parents. Never mind, moreover, that the ones who don’t probably have damn good reasons for it.

Would the knuckle-draggers behind this ballot initiative really prefer that teenage girls go get illegal abortions? Oh...right...of course they would. Most of them don’t give a flying fuck about real teenage girls. They are grimly determined to strip them – and us older girls too – of our constitutional rights. The right to determine our reproductive destinies makes us equal citizens. Without it we are slaves.

It all brings to mind those heady days when we marched on Washington for reproductive freedom, busloads of college students and senior citizens and sensitive men shouting "U.S. out of my uterus!" I made a ton of money on "Dykes for Reproductive Rights" t-shirts. We waved signs with wire hangers that said "Never again!" That was before the internet. Now I do all these slightly more grown-up (read: lazy) things like writing emails to my Senators and signing a dozen progressive petitions a week and sending donations online.

California voters have defeated this sort of ballot initiative before – twice. It just keeps coming back, like a nasty fungus under the bathroom carpet. Go here for a good Los Angeles Times op-ed on the subject.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again: no one has any business telling a woman what to do with her body. You can believe what you want, but your rights end where her body begins. You cannot control someone else’s sovereign self – and no, a fetus is not sovereign, at least not before it is viable outside its mother’s body, not while it requires her consent and her blood vessels to fulfill its potential. It may have rights, but its rights do not trump those of the girl or woman carrying it. She is the one with the SAT test, the orchestra rehearsals, the abusive dad. Or maybe the four other children, the meager paycheck, the violent boyfriend, the partner-track job or the diabetes. The point is, she’s the one who gets to make the decision. Not you.

No matter what the Just Say No abstinence-only-teaching spittle-flecked bible thumpers think, people – including teenagers – are Going To Have Sex. And the reality is, women and girls with unwanted pregnancies Will Have Abortions, whether they are safe and legal or not. If my college boyfriend had gotten me pregnant, you can bet your boots I would have done whatever it took to get an abortion, legal or otherwise. Wouldn’t we prefer, since it’s gonna happen, that it’s done legally, with sterilized instruments, by a trained, caring doctor? Because the doctors who perform abortions, by and large, genuinely care about women and girls, their families, their lives and their futures. They are principled and, in this dark era of death threats and clinic bombings, truly heroic. Pick up This Common Secret: My Journey as an Abortion Doctor by Susan Wicklund and I guarantee you won’t be able to put it down.

The people who want to outlaw abortion are too often the same people who oppose paid parental leave and social services for poor women and their babies, and slouch mutely on their couches while the Roves and Rumsfelds of the world send tens of thousands of young Americans off to war to bomb the arms off Iraqi children, before coming home in festive flag-draped coffins.

Every child should be a wanted child. That old bumper sticker sentiment from the patchouli-scented flowering of the women’s movement still rings true. When women get to decide when and whether to give birth, families and communities get healthier. (Don’t even get me started about the Shrub administration’s ritual denial of funding to organizations that provide family planning in developing countries.) No woman or girl should be held hostage to a being inside her body that she does not want to bring into the world – with all the accompanying sickness, pain and risk of death – for any and all of the reasons that she might list on those forms at the courthouse. Every child born should be a blessing, the answer to fervent prayer. And lord knows that in these days of global overpopulation and dwindling resources, every child not born is a blessing too.

So, Californians, please give your sisters credit for being full human beings and vote No on Prop. 4. Thank you.

Holy matrimony!

2008-10-11T20:38:00.000-07:00

Yay for the Connecticut Supreme Court, which ruled yesterday that queers can get legally married and enjoy all the rights, responsibilities and wreckage of wedlock. The Constitution State actually flexed its constitution, getting in line behind Massachusetts and California as a flower girl for equal protection under the law. Don't you ladies look lovely!

Can I just say, when you look for "gay wedding" pictures online, you get lots of sweet family shots of two handsome grooms and their photogenic children and dogs. When you search for "lesbian wedding" pictures, you get lots of porn.

Anyway, Connecticut. Three's a charm. They're dominoes, I'm telling you. Dominoes!

No more separate but equal in Connecticut. Bring on the wedding planners, with prenups, liberty and justice for all. Mazel tov!

Cinderella, your coach is ready.

2008-10-04T20:29:00.000-07:00

Just something fun for fall. Add one fairy godmother and have a ball.

Sarah Palin “debates.”

2008-10-03T11:27:00.000-07:00

Courtesy of Adennak over at the Daily Kos:

’Nuf said.

Scotch vincit omnia.

2008-10-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

That’s what I had engraved on a silver flask for my friend Lane a few years ago. It was technically her birthday, but it was really just another excuse for us to bond over our shared love of the single malt. We pondered the virtues of Balvenie (12-year-old) and the smoky Lagavulin, debated whether adding ice or water was permissible (I voted for water, on those nights when we wanted to prolong our warm and pleasant intoxication). Even better, Scotch didn’t give me a hangover.

It was always good for impressing the girls, ordering Scotch. (It impressed the boys, too.) It somehow held onto a reputation as a man’s drink – a dad’s drink. I remember my dad swirling the tawny liquid in his thick square glass when I was a kid. It was a mystery to me back then. It had definitely been an acquired taste – but once acquired, enthusiastically indulged. It had something to do with that time in college when an older woman (she a junior, I a trembling sophomore) bought me a bourbon in a smoky bar with the clear intention of seducing me. I was duly impressed, not to mention stricken with terror.

Eventually I was the older woman, or at least the one ordering Scotch when everyone else was still sipping Cosmos. There was a brief fling with Mojitos and one or two icy Martinis, but Scotch was reliable, comforting, powerful, refreshingly not sweet. Drinking Scotch, I was serious. In a family of Scotch-loving Finns (my brothers and my dad were always swapping bottles at Christmas), I was finally one of the boys.

I can’t tell exactly when or how the occasional glass of Cabernet started to drift in. It may have been somehow tied to the fact that Lane and I were drifting apart. I got into a serious relationship, which meant more romantic dinners (ergo, more red wine) and fewer nights with my friends at the bar (ergo, fewer chicks to pick up). I suppose that, after all, there were new worlds to conquer.

I wonder if Lane still has the flask. I have a bottle of Balvenie in my cupboard, but I only break it out when I’m entertaining, in case someone else wants a nip. Oh hell, I’ve gotten old.

Why I love Rachel Maddow, part 2.

2008-10-01T08:39:00.000-07:00

On last night’s Rachel Maddow Show, the eponymous Maddow was interviewing Republican Congressman John Culberson of Texas about the bailout, or credit contraction, or whatever they’re calling it today. He was actually quite coherent and persuasive for a Republican. At the end of his interview, when Rachel thanked him for coming on her show, he said “Yes sir.” Quickly recovering, he added “Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”

With great good humor Rachel came back with “That’s all right. Hey, happens all the time!”

According to the stunted semiotics of American culture, short hair = male. I remember being called “sir” myself when my hair was as short as Rachel’s (funnily enough, with that short cut, courtesy of a little divey barber shop on St. Mark’s Place in the Village, I also turned more female heads than I ever had before). I would glance down at my not insignificant chest and then shoot the offender a raised eyebrow, triggering blushes and stammered apologies, which I would shrug off much as La Maddow did.

Maybe I just haven’t been watching enough television news, but I have never before seen a pundit on a mainstream news program inhabit her glorious androgyny with such insouciance and charm. (Rachel's butchness is toned down for television, and those sweeping eyelashes are enough to set anyone’s heart aflutter, so maybe John Culberson was so bowled over by her brilliance that he was momentarily blinded to her gender. Perhaps somewhere in his reptile brain that brilliance registered as, by definition, male.) Ellen DeGeneres doesn’t count (well, okay, she does count, especially with those adorable wedding pictures, Portia at her side, winning hearts and minds in blithe repudiation of the anti-gay marriage ballot initiative trolls).

It’s awesome to watch Rachel’s disarming friendliness, acerbic wit and sardonic facial expressions winning fans and establishing her as a heartthrob for women and men, hets and queers alike. She’s striking a blow for hot, brainy, funny dykes everywhere – though few on the national stage are as hot, brainy and funny as our Rachel. She’s a groundbreaker, and she’s making it look fun.

111°

2008-09-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

That’s what my car’s outdoor temperature gauge claims, and it’s dark, 8 in the evening. It feels like a Palm Springs night here in L.A. It’s stiflingly hot and windy and there is a strange menace in the air, a threatening heaviness. Earthquake weather, maybe. Fire weather. Four or five years ago at this time, the Santa Ana winds blew Southern California wildfires out of control for weeks. Damn, just when I thought the summer heat was finally behind us. We’ve had a few of the cool, foggy mornings that bring joy to my soul (me an East Coast/England transplant who loves rain and wearing layers). I’ve been sitting here in front of the AC, but when I got up to get the nectarine sorbet out of the freezer, the heat in the kitchen surrounded me like a blanket. We need a thunderstorm, a real gully-washer, to dissipate this tension, but there are no clouds in the sky.

Vote Yes on Prop. 2

2008-09-30T12:48:00.000-07:00

It’s a cartoon, but it’s still horrifying. If we treated human beings like this – confining them in cages so small they can’t even turn around – we would call it torture.

It is torture, plain and simple. Pigs are as smart as dogs or human toddlers, and it is well-known that they are highly emotionally sensitive. Those cages don’t bear thinking about, but we must think about them. The barbarism of factory farming practices is an enormous karmic stain on humanity.

Even more horrifying than the video above is the one shot undercover by PETA at a factory farm in Iowa exposing unspeakable abuse of hogs and piglets. Why did this story receive so little national attention when it broke two weeks ago? Most of the coverage was from local midwestern papers, though here's an excellent piece from The Huffington Post. It’s enough to – quite rightly – put people off bacon for life. Don’t these atrocities deserve to be front-page news?

Here in California, Prop. 2 would ensure that veal calves, pregnant pigs and egg-laying hens have enough room to turn around or stretch their limbs. The proposition is supported by the Humane Society of the United States; the California Veterinary Medical Association; family farmers; numerous environmental, food safety and religious organizations – and us! People are going to keep eating meat, so we have a responsibility to make sure that animals raised to be eaten live and die in humane conditions (how’s that for an absurdity to make your head spin?).

My fellow Californians, please vote yes on Prop. 2 when you vote in November – you are voting, right? And tell your friends and family to vote yes on Prop. 2 to reduce animal suffering.

Zelda update

2008-09-30T07:00:00.000-07:00

Here’s Zelda standing guard over her egg sac. Isn’t it a bizarre alien thing, with its circlet of spiky knobs? (Click the photo for optimum effect.) A few days ago I watched as she crouched motionless with her head to its surface, as if listening for tiny rustlings, for any news from within. I doubt she’s eaten a thing since her vigil began. I think it’ll be another week or so before they hatch, god and gardeners willing.

And…action.

2008-09-29T20:23:00.000-07:00

Took a fantastic directing seminar this weekend that ran more or less from 6 pm on Friday non-stop until 7 pm on Sunday. (Then had to put out fires at work today.) Am totally bone-tired exhausted but exhilarated with everything I have learned, all afire to direct my first short next month (not counting the short I directed this weekend). Yeehaw!

One of the fun facts I learned is that sometimes when directors hire beautiful models who can't act, and they want their stars to convey the impression of thinking on camera, they instruct them to count backward (silently!) from 100 by threes while the other actors are speaking. And you thought Denise Richards was reacting to Pierce Brosnan's irresistible charisma.

I will leave you with something Jean Renoir said (according to my instructor this weekend): "We have not to be perfect but to be great."

Words to live by. Going to bed now.

Owls in Griffith Park

2008-09-28T20:21:00.000-07:00

Tonight, walking with my Lawless Hound through Griffith Park, I heard the hoo-hooing of two owls in the woods by the golf course. I’ve been hearing the owls for the past few weeks on my twilight hikes, and have seen them two or three times: dark silhouettes, one slightly larger than the other, limned against the pink sunset on high bare branches, swooping across the road or arrowing down for some small scared thing on the ground.

I heard them before I saw them this evening, the low burbling call of the first and the second’s reply, a minor third higher. Hoo-hoo-hoo hoo hoooo. Hoo-hoo-hoo hoo hoooo. And another answering hoot from far away. The only other sounds were the insistent chirruping of crickets, the wind in the trees and shrilly yapping coyotes venturing out for a night of play and plunder. This is why I love Los Angeles.

Then I saw it – a dark owl shape at the very top of a tall pine, bobbing as it hooted. I stood for long moments, watching and listening, and then it flapped its enormous wings and took flight, and craning my neck, amazed, I watched it sail directly over me to the top of another pine. Suddenly I realized it was totally dark, and I took off under the tunnel of pines with Lawless Hound at my heels.

Meet Zelda.

2008-09-25T01:06:00.001-07:00

I first noticed this astonishing translucent green spider with her dramatic red and white markings a month or two ago. (Go ahead – click the photo. Freak yourself out.) Check out the head-to-head mortal combat. The bee didn’t stand a chance.

Fascinated with this gorgeous creature who stared boldly back at me, I went online and typed in “green red spider,” and there she was – or rather, there were her many cousins. Turns out Zelda is a green lynx spider. Identified by their charming surprised eyes, exotic markings and spiny legs, lynx spiders jump great distances onto their prey, and some claim their bite is toxic to humans. Beautiful and dangerous…but so much more appealing than the black widow, that spinner of nightmares. Scientists have studied the possibility of deploying green lynx spiders as agricultural agents of “green” farming (pun reluctantly acknowledged), because of their penchant for devouring harmful pests. It’s too bad about the bees, though.

Zelda’s rose hangs at the end of a long thorny stem that flops over the neighbor’s fence. Like an anxious aunt, I started to worry that some over-zealous and under-observant gardener might dead-head the rose, not noticing its gaudy occupant – or worse, noticing, and dispatching her anyway.

One day I saw a smaller green spider hanging out cautiously nearby, no doubt drawn to the regal Zelda, yet perhaps dimly aware of his peril. The next day the hapless suitor was gone. As the weeks progressed Zelda grew fat and glossy. She was eating well – I figured she must be eating for two. Two hundred, that is. Sure enough, last week I noticed that Zelda was looking downright skinny, even a little peaked. And she was hovering protectively over a large, round, spiky, dusty grey object. Nice work, Zelda! I was reminded of Charlotte’s Web and the reverence we all learned to feel for Charlotte’s beloved eggs – how protective Wilbur was until all those tiny baby spiders with their tiny soprano voices drifted safely away on their silken filaments.

I am Zelda’s Wilbur. Twice a day, walking my dog, I peer at Zelda’s withered rose, first relieved to see it’s still there, then admiring (not without a certain creepy shiver) the strange unlovely egg sac she guards so jealously. I hope no oblivious gardener interferes. I hope I’m there to see those dozens and hundreds of tiny Zeldas work their way out of their cocoon, to spread their weird beauty far and wide. In a world poisoned by pesticides, heavy metals and artificial hormones, where extinction threatens everything from honeybees to polar bears – a planet so polluted that we routinely sicken along with our air and water and soil – each fragile creature’s survival is a tiny victory.

Small Wonder.

2008-09-22T13:54:00.000-07:00

Barbara Kingsolver’s book of essays is making me cry in my car (see audiobook tribute below). It is a searing love letter to wilderness, an indictment of unbridled consumerism and war, an earnest argument that our love for our lives and each other is the only thing that might redeem us. With her inimitable mix of compassion and steel, she exposes the hypocrisy and hubris of American imperialism, gently but resolutely skewering the greed and blindness of our bloated erstwhile democracy. Kingsolver captures the grief we feel for the country we love – for what it used to be, and the pale shadow of its founding ideals it parades on the world stage today.

Small Wonder, published in 2002, was written largely in response to the September 11 attacks, in an attempt to make sense of the unfathomable. In it, Kingsolver tells us that according to the United Nations, it would only take an extra $13 billion above and beyond then-current expenditures to provide every person in the world with basic healthcare and nutrition.

$13 billion. Even though today it would doubtless be more, it’s still a tiny fraction of the $700 billion the Treasury Secretary has demanded that we, the American taxpayers, hand over, double quick, no questions asked, to bail out Wall Street – with no oversight, no help for homeowners and no equity stake for us investors. $700 billion is roughly the same amount that has been spent on the catastrophically wrong-headed Iraq war – the war that has bankrupted our defense coffers and crippled our standing in the world. The entire bailout proposal, pushed with such breathless urgency by President Paulson and Co., is so outrageous as to beggar belief. Fortunately it’s getting some push-back from both sides of the aisle – Democratics and Republicans alike are nixing the blank check idea – but chances are Congress will pass it in some form. What an inheritance for our children and grandchildren. The U.S. was already staggering under a record burden of debt, but now, unbelievably, future generations will suffer even more for the unbridled corruption and greed of a relative few.

The idea that the entire world’s hunger and illness could be alleviated for an almost negligible portion of the bailout money is both sobering and infuriating. Says Kingsolver, “We have the resources to behave more generously than we do.” Extolling our amber waves of grain and our purple mountain majesties, she contends, “We could crown this good with brotherhood…what a vast inheritance for our children that would be…if we were to become a nation humble before our rich birthright, whose graciousness makes us beloved.”

If, indeed.

Swoon, part 2.

2008-09-18T14:42:00.000-07:00

Remember those thousand points of light? Brad Pitt is one of them.

Back in 2006 Brangelina announced that they would not marry until their queer sisters and brothers had that right. This week Brad donated $100,000* to fight Proposition 8, the right-wing-supported ballot initiative that would overturn the legal right, enshrined in California's constitution earlier this year, of same-sex couples to marry.

For our part, Charming Girlfriend and I volunteered this year with Equality for All. We accosted people coming out of supermarkets (CG thrives on this kind of confrontation, but I do not), gathering signatures, donations and allies. A lot of people were surprisingly nice (it's true that you can't judge by appearances) but we also had to deal with a lot of sneers and turned backs. During Pride weekend it was easier – pretty much everyone was gay, but then again they were sweaty and drunk. We learned that the folks behind the ballot initiative (Grinches, Slytherins – take your pick) were bringing in paid signature gatherers from out of state – presumably because they couldn’t find enough volunteers for their nefarious work in California.

Marriage used to be about property (see: land ownership, women and children as chattel). These days people like to think it’s about love, and plenty claim it’s about religion. But in our supposedly secular society, marriage is fundamentally about civil rights. When you deny two consenting, tax-paying adults the right to commit legally to each other – and benefit thereby in a thousand federally sanctioned ways – you are denying them full citizenship.

Californians, talk to your friends, family and co-workers. Stand up for your fellow citizens and your constitution. Vote No on Prop. 8.

*Just to show you the difference between me and Charming Girlfriend: when I told her about this, she said "$100,000? That's it?"

The crush-worthy Rachel Maddow.

2008-09-16T12:11:00.000-07:00

You say you are overwhelmed by the calumny and viciousness of the Pain – McPain campaign? Struggling in the throes of despair at the decline of Western civilization perpetrated by the Shrub/Cheney imperial administration, aka the Fall of Rome v.2? Choked with grief at the destruction of our oceans, polar bears, wolves and old-growth forests? Outraged by the evils perpetrated on rape victims, pregnant women and queers who just want an ecru wedding?

My fellow Americans, I give you Rachel Maddow.

Oh Rachel, you who have burst upon the media landscape (scoring top ratings on MSNBC in your few days on the air, no less) in the nick of time to reach out a lifesaving hand, a sympathetic grimace, a knowing smirk! (Yes, I realize I'm jumping on the Rachel wagon late in the game – she's had a show on Air America for quite some time – but radio is not television.)

It is on television that we can appreciate the expressive eyebrows, the subtle butch makeup, the twinkle. Yes, she has a twinkle!

Rhodes Scholar Rachel, with her poli sci PhD, her direct, articulate manner and her sly and trenchant commentary exposing the hypocrisy, lies and sheer ridiculousness of the Republicans.

Sure, we've had the inimitable Jon Stewart, the dryly fabulous Keith Olbermann, the indispensable Bill Maher (to wit: "the underlying problem we have in this country is that the people are too stupid to be governed. The public is like a dog...it can’t understand any sort of rational argument").

But Rachel is way hotter – and she is an out lesbian. Yeehaw! Rachel, this is an open invitation: bring the wife and I'll bring the cocktails.

My new obsession.

2008-08-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

For years my aunt has waxed enthusiastic about her “books on tape” from the library, but it wasn’t until I happened to notice a CD version of The Lord of the Rings trilogy at my own public library this spring that I too got sucked into the sisterhood. It took about ten minutes. Seduced by Rob Inglis’s masterful narration, I became an instant audiobook-ophile. I devoured all three Tolkien books in quick succession, rushing to my car on my lunch breaks and sitting too long in the driveway at home, loath to turn off the stereo before Legolas and Aragorn or Frodo and his devoted Sam extricated themselves from whatever fresh predicament had befallen them. I haven’t listened to NPR in months!

I’ve just finished listening to a fantastic book called The Golden Ocean, a swashbuckling fictional account of Commodore Anson’s historic circumnavigation of the globe back in the early 1740s – complete with scurvy, shipwrecks and pieces of eight – told from the point of view of a young Irishman (and narrated brilliantly by a John Franklyn-Robbins). Avast, ahoy, ye swabbies! I ejected the last disc with the greatest reluctance and immediately went in search of more nautical books by Patrick O’Brian. Fortunately there are a lot.

I love when reading, or in this case listening to a book ignites a hunger for new knowledge. After reading Delta Wedding this summer, I ransacked Wikipedia and Google for everything I could find about Eudora Welty. Same thing with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters, an entrancing comedy of manners from a direct (literary) descendant of Jane Austen. As soon as I finished the book I had to watch the BBC miniseries, because I just wasn’t ready to let go. Movies will do it, too. After I saw Cate Blanchett in Elizabeth, I brought home a pile of books about the Elizabethan era.

And a whole new obsession was launched earlier this year when Chandler Burr’s The Perfect Scent, a book about perfume (previously a topic of only passing interest), led me to The Emperor of Scent, about fragrance master Luca Turin and his revolutionary theory of smell, and then in turn to Turin’s own vastly entertaining Perfumes: The Guide, and then inexorably to the perfume counters of Nordstrom and Sephora, where I proceeded to spend lots of money.

Hot gal of the day?

2008-08-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

So, Out magazine's website has this “Hot Guy of the Day” feature and I was getting all bent out of shape about this brazen gender parity deficiency – I mean, would it be so hard to have a “Hot Gal of the Day”? Does Out think that there just aren’t enough hot women out there and they'd have to post different shots of Angelina Jolie (everyone’s favorite bisexual knife-wielder) every other day, after they’d run through the cast of The L Word? Everyone knows how phallocentric the national gay mags have always been, but I thought things had maybe changed in the fifteen years since the Lesbian Avengers were protesting this sort of thing. Was I wrong!

Then I click on the “Hot Guy of the Day” link and damn, if I thought my knickers were already in a twist – mercy! This bare-chested rippling hunk slits his eyes at me with his prominent package and trimmed pubes barely contained by skimpy skivvies – NSFW alert! (“Not Suitable for Work,” not "Not Suitable for Women” – though an argument could be made). And someone’s heading straight for my desk, and I’m hitting my “Back” button frantically, because I don’t want anyone at work to know I’m a perv.

All these thoughts cascading through my mind, and I’m wondering if I really want Out to flaunt a “Hot Babe of the Day” after all, because feminists shouldn't objectify other women, plus the kind of thing lesbians find hot is quantifiably different from what men – gay or straight – like to leer at. Right? Contrary to everything the Dinah Shore would have us believe. I mean, the Dinah Snore. (Did you see those naked women with painfully fake tits, teetering around the pool covered in Bud Lite body paint? I’m not opposed to body paint per se [see: Burning Man], but when the tits are emblazoned with a cheesy corporate logo, it just doesn’t say artistic or sexual freedom to me. And since when do lesbians like obviously fake tennis ball tits?)

I guess maybe the lesbian version of “Hot Babe of the Day” might look just like any other Page Six hottie (and lord knows the media-saturated world we live in is a veritable explosion of Hot Babes of the Day). It didn’t used to be like this. Didn’t dykes used to like shaved heads and unshaved armpits, pixie haircuts and no makeup? Lesbians have upheld a different standard of beauty than straight men – than Cosmo and the CW and beer commercials have foisted on our collective impressionable consciousness. Often the women declared by men to be “hot” have left lesbians decidedly cold.

But is it a brave new world? Did feminism and its insistence on women’s worth not being contingent on our looks careen headlong through sex-positive empowerment and arrive right back at brazen self-objectification?

Now, of course, having taken a firm grip on myself, I have scouted over to AfterEllen.com, dykedom’s answer to all things Out, and – lo and behold! AfterEllen’s “Hot 100,” in all their glory. L Word cast (Jennifer Beals, Leisha Hailey, Kate Moennig – check, check, check). And the delectable, I mean talented Mary-Louise Parker, my girlfriend Cate Blanchett, Gillian Anderson (be still my heart), Blake Lively and, clocking in at #11 (down from #2 last year), Angelina Jolie.*

Okay, so there’s some overlap. And a lot of hair and lipstick. I guess the straight world and lesbians are in agreement about some things. There are, unsurprisingly, icons and role models like Ellen (avowed) and Jodie (not so avowed). But there are some cuties on AfterEllen's list who would never appear on Maxim’s Hot 100 –

and, mercifully, the reverse is also true.

*Notably missing is the so-smart-it-hurts Rachel Maddow, who will unquestionably appear on next year’s list. If Lindsay Lohan and Samantha Ronson are still together, they will too.

The hoarder.

2008-07-17T15:26:00.000-07:00

In the year and a half that I’ve lived in my Los Feliz apartment, I never saw the woman who lived across the street, downstairs from my friends the flamboyant Southern boys. The shades were always drawn. It was like Willy Wonka’s factory: nobody ever went in, and nobody ever went out. The only indication, indeed, that anyone even lived there was a sign tacked to the front door a few months ago, when the landlady was remodeling another apartment in the building (which is, by the way, one of those cute olde-Hollywood Spanish-style suckers with a red tiled roof and whitewashed walls). The sign basically said, “If you’re not a cop with a warrant in your grubby little mitts, stay the FUCK out of my apartment!”

I guess someone had infringed on her privacy.

Well, last week I found out why. The first sign that anything was amiss was the week-long yard sale, tended by...no one. The invisible tenant was holding a yard sale! But she was nowhere around. For days I gazed across the street, puzzled – that the stuff (books, dishes, fax machine, computer, stereo, a broken couch, a mountain of odds and ends) was still there, and that people weren’t just carting it off wholesale. I’d never experienced a weeklong yard sale before, moreover one that wasn’t presided over by somebody.

Then my neighbors filled me in on the gossip. The tenant had been evicted. She was, it turns out, a hoarder. I feel like I should put it in capitals. A HOARDER. Now, I’ve heard about the crazy people with stacks of newspapers up to the ceiling, but I’ve never seen a real hoarder’s nest. I figured it was only old crotchety men in lightless tenements who practiced that particular brand of weirdness, not middle-aged, seemingly intelligent (if a bit short-tempered) women in high-end neighborhoods. Well, two days into the sale, going in search of someone to sell me a couple of books, I got a glimpse inside this woman’s apartment, and my jaw dropped. Filthy carpet covered in gunk, stacks of old pizza and takeout boxes and empty gallon cat litter containers, STUFF piled up underfoot and against the walls in a disorderly jumble. Stuff everywhere. And it stank.

Turns out, too, that the tenant had successfully fended off the landlady for three or four years, despite being taken to court more than once and causing the landlady a stiff fine by the fire department last year. It took a lot of time, effort and dogged determination to uproot this woman from the apartment she had taken over so thoroughly, like a a crop of mushrooms, all connected at the root.

Later, after the sheriff had locked Ms. Hoarder out, after she’d driven off with two U-Hauls full of stuff, and the landlady had brought in a fleet of Got Junk? trucks to haul off her junk, I walked through the apartment gingerly, under the guise of maybe being interested in it myself – after it had been fully fumigated, smudged with sage, and exorcised by an Orthodox priest. The front bedroom was still – now this is after filling four Got Junk? trucks – still so full of stuff that there was no way of getting to the bed. Evidently this poor woman had, by default, been sleeping on the living room sofa. There were still mirrors, pictures and a dozen handbags hanging from the wall of the other bedroom, a filthy bathroom full of bath products, a filthy kitchen full of stuff, and all over the stained carpet miscellaneous piles of framed pictures, wire organizer containers (the irony!), clothes and tchotchkes and furniture. And an entire garage filled to the door and ceiling with more junk.

It’s creepy. It’s disturbing. I couldn’t help but understand the disgust of my gossiping neighbors. Their whispers were thrilled and horrified. We raised eybrows with the Got Junk? guys. We made sympathetic faces to the landlady. There was a general “thank god she’s gone” sentiment. Sweep the dirt somewhere else. It – she – doesn’t belong in our upper-middle-class enclave of Pottery Barn-perfect homes.

It's awful and sad. I know hoarding is a symptom of mental illness. I can’t imagine the burden of being this woman (I came home, glanced around my own messy apartment nervously and set to work cleaning it with zeal). Although her former apartment is being slowly, laboriously cleared out, remodeled and steam-cleaned to within an inch of its life, she took her illness with her. How soon will those two U-Haul loads of stuff morph into another two-bedroom apartment so jam-packed that she won’t be able to forge a trail from the kitchen to the bathroom? Is she in treatment? Is she ever going to be okay? I thought how scary it must have been to be locked out by the cops while there was still so much of her STUFF inside. She’d been given plenty of notice, but, I suppose predictably for someone in her condition, she hadn’t swung into action until it was too late.

And you want to know the capper, the thing that makes the whole situation just shimmer with weirdness?

The woman is a MAID.

I'm not ashamed to say it.

2008-06-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

I wanted Hillary.

I didn’t love everything about her (I didn’t love any of the Democratic candidates, for that matter – they were all flawed, though each a thousand times better than the dangerous fool we’ve suffered for seven years). I came to my decision after a lot of soul-searching. I can never forgive Hillary for voting for the Iraq war – and then not apologizing for it. I think her campaign advisors failed to portray her as a true candidate of change, at a time when our country desperately needs it.

But to me her decades of experience – fighting the good fight for women and children, establishing herself as a non-partisan team player in the U.S. Senate, and yes, her experience in the White House, plus her blazing intelligence (named one of the Top 100 lawyers in America, twice) made her the stronger candidate. More Presidential. I believed she would beat McCain more easily than Obama would. I cheered her dogged refusal to give up despite the outrageous misogyny she faced – and just because screeching, irrational pundits said she should (despite her stunning wins in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Texas and all the rest).

But perhaps most importantly, I imagined the psychological difference it would make to every little girl in this country – and around the world. American women only gained the vote in 1920, after decades of struggle. Feminism has made our lives better and easier in so many ways. We fought for Title IX, and girls’ sports are no longer ignored and under-funded. We face fewer obstacles in education and the workplace (but are making slow progress in changing the mostly male bastions of commerce and government). It is less common for “man,” “he” and “his” to stand in for all of humanity – male and female – in textbooks, journalism and even in church. But women are still the disproportionate targets of sexual violence, and girls still absorb the message that it is better to be hot than smart.

A woman in the White House – a strong, brainy, experienced, Democratic woman – would have been a beacon of hope and a role model unlike any other, to girls and women everywhere.

Obama, for all his inspirational speechifying, his promises of change, his good looks and charm and undeniable intelligence, and not least his skin color, is just another man. And that doesn’t feel like much of a change at all.

Performance anxiety.

2008-01-05T21:26:00.000-08:00

I have a few writer friends who regularly give readings in public. I used to do this a lot when I was involved in the performance poetry scene (though, as a matter of principle, I refused to adopt that over-the-top, self-important, I-am-a-serious-artist, I-am-DOWN-with-the-revolution, syncopated performance poetry cadence. You KNOW what I'm talkin' about). Yes, believe it or not, Pontifica is a poet. Or, rather, was. I've found that television and poetry do not mix. They inhabit entirely separate corners of the culture; they hang out in mutually exclusive parts of the brain and guard their turf jealously. There's only so much writing time, juice, territory. At least when you're holding down (however tenuously) a full-time job (what we like to refer to as a "support job.").

I do still write the occasional essay, and I think I should get out there again and read in public. Sometime. Some nice, free night when I have no writing class, no writing to do, no dinner to prepare with my girlfriend, no reading, no TV to watch (hey, it's work. I take notes).

Once I was at a lesbian holiday party at The Gauntlet (back when it catered to dykes one night a week, before it became The Eagle, which caters to the fags 24-7) and there was a whole slate of performance scheduled for the evening. Some of it went over well (the kissing contest was a real crowd pleaser). But I'll never forget the poor earnest writer gal who got up on stage to read an earnest essay about what it felt like to be Jewish at Christmastime.

The bar was packed. Hundreds of super-hot east-side art-school chicks were buying each other drinks and screaming into each other's ears above the din. The woman onstage was fighting an uphill battle. Nevertheless, I felt a glow of sisterhood. I wanted to support her. I wanted her to look out into the melee and meet at least one pair of understanding eyes.

But unfortunately, right in front of me there was a gay porn video playing on a giant TV screen, in which a man was being fisted, and peed on, by a whole posse of leather daddies.

I had never seen a man being fisted before. I was unable to drag my eyes away.

The writer kept reading doggedly, getting more and more flustered, more and more verklempt. Finally she screamed, "You all need to pay attention! I worked hard on this! I'm sharing something meaningful with you!"

Everyone ignored her. The racket continued unabated. Oh, the guilt. And yet she kept reading. I wanted to tell her, "just let it go. Get down off the stage and Be Here Now."

But I was too distracted.

Amo el Dia de los Muertos

2007-10-30T18:49:00.000-07:00

My girlfriend and I went to the Day of the Dead celebration at the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Saturday. It's the coolest cultural event in Los Angeles, if you ask me. I love the clouds of copal incense drifting through the darkness, the tall skinny palm trees leaning in rows below the half-moon, the festive live music, the tacos and margaritas, the hipsters and kids and regular folks in amazing costumes, and most of all the phenomenal altars. People invest so much effort and creativity in these memorials with their sugar skulls, loaves of bread, marigolds, flickering candles, photos and personal effects. They're beautiful, fantastical, sobering. What's not to love about grinning skeletons dressed as brides and grooms, friendly skeleton dogs, cats and even fish? Everyone's having a gay old time, treating death with humor as well as reverence. Yet there were angry political monuments too, shrines to the dead in Iraq, the murdered, and Mexico's desaparecidos – the disappeared. Who knew an appreciation of death could be so life-affirming? And who knew making out in a crypt could be so hot?

I finally did it: I got up the gumption to bang the door-knocker on the giant tomb in the middle of the lake. Then hightailed it across the bridge to safety. Better safe than clutched by ghostly, skeletal hands.

Newsflash!

2007-02-21T00:49:00.000-08:00

"Sexualized images in media may harm girls, young women"

This is one of those headlines, trumpeted all over the media today, that merits a resounding "Duh!" The American Psychological Association has released a study decrying our culture’s overt sexual fetishization of females, pointing out that sexualization occurs when "a person’s value comes only from his or her sexual appeal or behavior, to the exclusion of other characteristics" and when "a person is sexually objectified—that is, made into a thing for others' sexual use, rather than seen as a person with the capacity for independent action and decision making." Look for earnest coverage next week in Time and Newsweek (always on journalism’s receding edge).

I mean, really. A full generation after the women’s movement? Three and a half decades since feminists started calling our attention to the effects of sexual objectification on tender female psyches? Even Reviving Ophelia came out, like, ten years ago, people!

This is on a par with other "duh!" news headlines like "Study Indicates Smoking is Bad For You" and "Everybody Loves Money." (Come to think of it, I'm as guilty of sexualizing money as the next guy – I mean, gal.)

Still, I’m grateful that we’re having the conversation. The APA study lists some “Positive Alternatives to the Sexualization of Girls,” and blogging is applauded as a means of girl empowerment. Kewl!

Overall, I’m glad that this exceptionally self-evident concept is being hammered home to a new generation. I guess if you’re not a girl, or a parent, friend, husband, teacher, coach, or brother of girls, you might actually not have been aware.

Turncoat!

2007-02-20T23:27:00.000-08:00

So now John McCain thinks Roe v. Wade should be overturned?

I always find it entertaining when men make sweeping declarations about whether women should be permitted to make decisions about their own bodies. I say, when men start rushing out en masse to buy pregnancy tests, enduring morning sickness and third-degree tears, and thrusting their cracked nipples into screaming infant mouths (while risking their lives, their promotions and their college scholarships), that’s when they can opine about abortion. Till then, they should shut their traps.

It’s really a shame. McCain until now represented that rarity, a quasi-cool Republican (I know, I know, a contradiction in terms) thanks to his "maverick" views and semi-Libertarian leanings (though his support for the Iraq debacle pretty much landed him in the enemy camp). Now, on the campaign trail, this grizzled vet has decided, late in the game, that the moment has finally come to pander to our great nation's illest common denominator: the charming folks who, gosh darn it, honestly don’t believe women deserve equal rights, agency, and full citizenship. All while fervently believing that if abortions are illegal, women will Just Stop Having Them! Hey, give ‘em a break – they’re probably too young or too drunk to remember back alleys, wire hangers, and dead sorority sisters.

It's the same kooky wingnut logic, willfully blind to human nature, that insists that withholding condoms and sex education will stop kids from getting it on and contracting HIV, and that Just Saying No will prevent kids from experimenting with pot. It ignores the fundamental fact that People Are Gonna Do It Anyway. As soon as you leave the room.

Wasn’t the GOP supposed to be all about individual liberties? But hey, this is the party that colluded with the right-leaning Supreme Court to appoint the current White House resident, in defiance of the popular vote. Hey, yeah, remember that, my fellow Americans? (Not to distract you from your nonstop Anna Nicole Smith-fest – may she strut her stuff in peace.)

Well, Senator McCain. Not that you were going to get my vote anyway, but I’m ashamed of you.

BFF!

2007-02-08T17:23:00.000-08:00

I am loving Katherine Heigl, a member of the dizzyingly large, Golden Globe-winning cast of Grey's Anatomy, who is very publicly throwing down in defense of her gay best friend. As everyone with the slightest celebrity obsession (or a TV, or an internet connection) knows, the cuddly T.R. Knight, another member of said cast, was the target of not one, but two homophobic slurs from Isaiah Washington, yet another member of said cast. To wit (and I paraphrase): "I'm not a faggot like T.R." (off camera) and then (at the Golden Globes, no less) "Hell, no, I didn't call that faggot a faggot."

I'm so proud of how fiercely and courageously Katherine is defending her best friend, who has since come out (i.e., made the best of being outed). (Props to you, too, T.R.) "I will beat you up," Katherine vowed, if you mess with her boy. Not many people would go out on a limb, risking disapproval from her bosses and her network for publicly calling Washington out on his homophobia, when they would surely have preferred to just sweep everything under the red carpet. We all know how outraged Mr. Washington – and everyone else – would be if someone had used the "N" word disparagingly about him.

You go, Katherine. You're putting the fabulous back in f*g hag.

Me & Angelina, sittin' in a tree.

2007-02-07T07:28:00.000-08:00

Last night I dreamed that I was Angelina Jolie's girlfriend. Sadly, in real life her mother just passed away. Evidently they were very close. In my dream, though, her mother was alive and delightful, and I played my violin for her. It occurred to me that I'd better get ready for an onslaught of paparazzi photos because I was going to be plastered all over Us magazine like Jenny Shimizu (only taller). Wow, maybe I should lose ten pounds, I thought, and get my hair done.

It was fun being Angelina's girlfriend. She seemed warm, smart and down-to-earth, and we would've made quite an entrance on the red carpet. Of course, I have an actual girlfriend who is Angelina's equal in every way, except for the paparazzi photos, and so I was not terribly disappointed when I woke up. I'm sure Brad and the kids were relieved.

Speaking of Charming Girlfriend, I am disconcerted to find out that her porn name (an amalgam of your first pet's name and your first street) is Tawny Blossom. How apt! Mine, however, is Tom Tom Wicopee.

That is just not fair.

Bye-bye, Tivo.

2007-01-23T17:19:00.000-08:00

When I moved to my new hood, I decided to cancel my Tivo service. Don't get me wrong, I assured the customer service rep who was desperately trying to change my mind, I love my Tivo! I'm one of those freaky-ass Tivo-philes who gushes about my Tivo-love with my Tivo-having friends. But an upstart competitor who shall remain nameless* was offering me a FREE 100-hour DVR, with the ability to record two shows at once (always a bone of contention with my old-skool 40-hour Tivo box), plus FREE service for a year, and only $5.99 a month after that instead of Tivo's $12.95, plus $10 off my bill for 15 months, PLUS a free portable DVD player. In the battle between brand loyalty and the bottom line, filthy lucre won out.

So what am I recording on my shiny new DVR? What merits a season pass? What counts as no-appointment-necessary television?

Rome: I am totally hooked. Titus Pullo, Lucius Vorenus, Servilia, Brutus, Octavia and Octavian: these people and their world are utterly real and compelling to me. Someone said this second season will be the last. Please, say it ain't so!
House and Bones: old, good friends.
the L word: I talk back to my TV more during this show than any other. I jeer, I groan, I roll my eyes – and then there's a hilarious, hot, scandalous and gorgeously shot episode like this week's, which redeems it all.
Heroes: don't tell me, don't tell me – I haven't seen this week's episode yet.
American Idol: they're back and better than ever.
The Closer and Saved: when they come back, they'll be at the top of the list.

I'm looking forward to seeing more of Brothers & Sisters, a show I really want to love. I'm checking out Rescue Me and Criminal Minds, Grey's Anatomy and Medium, and a little Everybody Hates Chris because one of my new neighbors is on it.

To my shock and horror, for the first time in umpteen years I missed the Golden Globes – even after telling my dad how it's the best awards show because everyone's totally wasted – but the glorious Kyra Sedgwick won for The Closer, so all is (briefly, politics and global warming aside) right with the world.

*Unless you need me to hook you up, in which case I'll tell you.

I love Los Feliz.

2007-01-19T15:19:00.000-08:00

Today I went home at lunch and lay on our new brown and cream zebra-striped rug, with its new woolly smell, in fat stripes of sunlight. I love being on the second floor with its views of sky, trees and rooftops, nothing to block the light streaming through the windows. The neighborhood was silent. Silent! No screaming, no horns playing La Cuca-fucking-racha. Only birds and breezes. My dog sighed and settled down beside me, and my cat rolled on her back and stretched in the sun on the porch outside the open door.

New year, new apartment.

2007-01-04T17:41:00.000-08:00

Mere minutes after arriving home from my vacation, I resumed a frantic box-packing marathon that lasted late into the next night (despite all my pre-holiday efforts – dang!), and then for a few more hours the following morning before I absolutely had to go pick up my U-Haul truck or lose my reservation. Last time I moved, I hired three guys, day workers, to help with the heavy lifting, and my plan was to do the same this time around. I’d had a heinous experience with a professional moving company the time before that (they’d held my piano hostage in the pelting rain while extorting more money out of me; I later looked them up in the Better Business Bureau and found that they had a long history of consumer complaints. Lesson learned.)

So on my way to pick up the truck, I thought I’d swing by Home Depot, where I’d heard the day laborers were to be found. A block away, I noticed dozens of guys, who surged toward me in a body as soon as they noticed – almost before I noticed – that I was slowing down. They swarmed around my car, yanking the doors open and sliding in before I could even think. Here I’d thought it would be a sane, measured procedure: I’d find out who knew how to drive, who was experienced at moving. But there they were, three grinning guys in my car and more struggling to squeeze in, knocking on my window with pleading faces. I held up three fingers and shrugged helplessly: Solamente tres.

Hours of delays, frustration, and back-breaking labor ensued (though there were also a couple of angels who swooped in to help in my hour of panic). I valiantly resisted shrill screams of utter desperation. Sweat flew freely, especially when all three Guatemalan guys – and me – wrestled my giant sofabed up a steep, narrow flight of steps, almost toppling it over the railing to the pavement below.

Today I’m bone-tired and I ache in every muscle, including my hands and feet, and I have hundreds of boxes to unpack. But when I opened my door this morning in my beautiful new Los Feliz neighborhood, I heard birdsong and smelled the delicate fragance of the flowers that twine up that very same railing.

Moving takes forever. I went back to the old place at lunch to clean and deal with all the leftover stuff: framed pictures, curtains, curtain rods, all the random detritus that we abandoned yesterday when the truck got full. I’ll be back there tonight loading my car and doing one last, nostalgic load of laundry in my trusty old washer and dryer. (There’s nowhere to put them at the new place. Hello, laundromat.)

P.S. The water pressure in my new shower is amazing.

Visions of resort vacations dancing in my head.

2006-12-14T17:34:00.002-08:00

At my company holiday party last night, on top of delicately nibbling coconut shrimp and imbibing bad Chardonnay (why does everyone in California insist on drinking Chardonnay? Ugh. They were also serving bad Merlot. Californians and Merlot! What is everyone thinking?), I also won a prize in the gift raffle. I'm sure my proximity to the big tree decorated with little penguins had something to do with it.

Oh, the thrill of hearing my ticket number called. (From the shrieks and hollers when people's numbers were called, and the boos and hisses from everyone else, you'd think they were giving away glamorous resort vacations! They did give away a PSP, whatever that is. Everyone else thought it was pretty cool.)

And what did I win? Two nights at a hotel. Pretty sweet, you may be thinking. I see a romantic weekend getaway in your future.

But...the hotel is the Holiday Inn.

In Burbank.

When I told this to my coworker this morning, he burst out laughing. He thought I was telling a joke.

In other news, I have no credible explanation for my long, long, long-ass absence from my own blog. Something about moving and packing and stressing about leaving my huge apartment for a tiny garret, albeit in a better neighborhood. It's pretty cute, as garrets go. And it's all in service of my longterm goal, which is to buy a house next year. My girlfriend has whispered the word "condo" to me a couple of times, but so far I have shuddered at the very thought. She says it could be the first step toward being a real-estate mogul. Does that mean I could quit my job?

Frogtown.

2006-11-17T21:08:00.000-08:00

Tonight I came closer than I ever have to the LA River. I went to the Frogtown Artwalk (Frogtown: something to do with a plague of frogs many years ago; a little snip of land between the 5 and the river). Tonight is one of those nights when all LA has an overlay of magic. I love LA in the winter. It's 64 degrees and almost chilly. I walked along the LA River footpath and followed glowing green balloons through the dark down to the sandy water's edge. The river was probably 50 feet across, the widest I've ever seen it. Fringed by bamboo and other leafy things, gurgling and flowing like any river should.

I really love connecting with the LA art scene. All of us wandering around looking at art and architecture, and each other, could have been in Brooklyn, Chicago, San Francisco, anyplace where people put out cheese and crackers and sangria in their fabulous beamed lofts where the smell of oil paint, dust and turpentine mingle most bewitchingly. I met an elderly dalmatian the same age as mine and a large white pit bull with brown spots. I saw some transcendent oversize color photographs of the Mexico/U.S. border. I looked longingly into people's spare industrial loft living spaces. I drove back through Silverlake and Los Feliz. I've been househunting lately and I'm getting the feeling that my house is out there, much like the feeling that one's true love is out there in the world before that fateful meeting occurs. My house-to-be, I believe, is in the 90026 area code.

Romance is so not dead.

2006-11-16T17:17:00.000-08:00

OMG!

Trolling craigslist today for writing gigs, I came across this gem:

NEED AN ONLINE DATING PERSONAL ASSISTANT

Reply to: i'mtoosexy@craigslist.org
Date: 2006-10-30, 5:09AM PST

I'm seeking an individualo to work about 12 hours/wk primarily from home w/ flexible hours at $10/hr to manage my online dating accounts, send out emails, reply to emails, etc. this is steady ongoing work with cash pay.

Perfer mid 20's to 30's man or woman with significant experience dating online. Email us your resume with a brief cover letter describing extent of knowledge of teh various popular dating websites.

Preferred also: College degree

Compensation: $10/hr, Performance-based bonus

Could I be the “individualo” to take on this unique challenge? I mean, this poor guy clearly needs help. Swamped, overwhelmed by so many online dating accounts that he needs to hire me, a total stranger, to manage his social life. (No more dangerous double bookings!) Get paid to email sweet nothings, innuendos and brazen propositions to chicks? (Hell, I know a thing or two about that.) And on a “steady ongoing” basis too. Doesn’t sound like he’s looking for true love, does it?

But what if all this college-educated, vicarious online flirting leads to a Cyrano-esque mistaken-identity crisis? What if the guy (or gal) he hires just happens to fall for that saucy redhead who was lucky enough to get sucked in by one of those multiple ghostwritten profiles? Oops!

But hey, courtship and marriage and fatherhood are so freaking labor-intensive. Maybe our busy Mr. Outsource-My-Love-Life would dig this time-saving way to outsource the whole shebang! At very reasonable rates!

And how ‘bout that “performance-based bonus"? I love that. I guess that’s in case, against all odds, our Lothario ends up actually falling in love – or even tying the knot. Thanks to my – MY – online wooing! The nerve!

Now I'm going to think about other areas of my life that deserve a performance-based bonus.

Serendipity in Los Feliz.

2006-11-15T21:49:00.000-08:00

Tonight after work, I took my watch to get fixed at the home of a charming, grandfatherly Bulgarian/Armenian watchmaker. He was kicked out of his shop after 23 years, along with all the other tenants (to make room for a giant new Hollywood nightclub, I suspect), and is mending watches on his balcony in Los Feliz while he looks around for a new shop.

As soon as I stepped into his cozy apartment, his wife Mary asked if I'd had dinner. Whatever was cooking smelled divine. I sat down, their grandson brought me a cold Corona, and I ate Lebanese flatbreads covered in ground meat, tomatoes and parsley, drizzled with fresh-squeezed lemon juice. Never mind that I don't usually eat meat. My new friends were kind and hospitable and I wasn't about to say no. (Was it lamb? Don't ask, don't tell! Anyway, it was yummy.) We talked about our travels as we ate, then we went out onto the balcony and Mr. Haig took apart my watch.

While he tinkered, he talked about how lucky he is to live so close to his kids and grandkids, and what it was like to leave his country during the Communist era and make a new life somewhere else. Then he looked straight at me and said, "It's very hard to build your life. You have to have power. You need to have someone behind you."

Wow. It was as if suddenly a celestial messenger were speaking directly to my own roiling personal angst. I felt a blinding awareness, like connecting with the source of all wisdom and compassion. Did he have any idea how much I needed to hear those words?

Then he offered me Turkish Delight, rose and orange-flavored, and Mary brought out strong, sweet Armenian coffee and her own homemade pastry. So much for my sugar fast! But if there was ever a reason to break it, this was it.

A woman's place.

2006-11-14T12:04:00.000-08:00

In keeping with yesterday's theme of making time for the important stuff, and with a nod to Nancy Pelosi's new job, here's another shout out to a NY Times OpEd columnist, this time Judith Warner, who in her memorial to Texas governor and all-around hell-raiser Ann Richards writes:

You can’t clean house and make it to “the dome” too. You can’t bake cookies and make it to the Senate. And that’s not just because there isn’t enough time. More profoundly, it’s because it just isn’t human to do all that. With all of our spouting off these days about the glorious variety of women’s Choice, there is one basic choice that we are not humanly able to make: we cannot choose what kind of people we are or what we are driven, drawn, destined to do. The best we can do is be ourselves – and stand up for what it takes to bring our self into being.

It's hard enough trying to find time and energy for writing while holding down a full-time job. Cleaning house on top of it? Always good for bad procrastination, as any writer will attest. I recently decided to just run all the errands on my list (Paul Graham's "small stuff") and get it over with: buy a printer cable and ink, get the dog's nails clipped, buy groceries at Whole Foods, Trader Joe's and Ralphs, restock my hair products, get a haircut, change the oil in my car and get it washed, get the sim card in my cell phone replaced, go to the post office, pay bills, sort a mountain of papers, blah blah blah. Factor in West Hollywood traffic, and it took me almost TWO DAYS.

Last weekend I bought flour and yeast so I could try this recipe for super-easy, supposedly amazing bread that doesn't require kneading. The only problem is, it has to sit for 18 hours. Then two more hours before it goes in the oven. Plus it turns out I have to find, then buy, a special lidded container in which to bake it. Figuring out how to fit all this into my schedule requires a complex mathematical formula that still eludes me.

A final word on Ann Richards: she was a hero of mine, and I'm sad she's gone.

Procrastination can be fun.

2006-11-13T15:48:00.000-08:00

My friend Ron turned me on to this fabulous essay by writer and computer genius Paul Graham, about finding and doing the work that you love:

Whichever route you take, expect a struggle. Finding work you love is very difficult. Most people fail. Even if you succeed, it's rare to be free to work on what you want till your thirties or forties. But if you have the destination in sight you'll be more likely to arrive at it. If you know you can love work, you're in the home stretch, and if you know what work you love, you're practically there.

Another of Mr. Graham's essays, which talks about good and bad procrastination, should be required reading for writers, artists, scientists and all kinds of ambitious folk who are trying to Accomplish Big Things:

The most impressive people I know are all procrastinators...they put off working on small stuff to work on big stuff. What's "small stuff?" Roughly, work that has zero chance of being mentioned in your obituary.

Which reminds me of an exercise I did once in one of those self-actualization workshops: writing my own obituary. It was fun! Kind of like starting to write a script at the end, and working backward to find out how it all happened. Go on: list all your accomplishments, awards, and significant relationships as of the day you die.

Hallelujah!

2006-11-10T17:11:00.000-08:00

This feeling of joy and disbelief reminds me of waking up the morning that Bill Clinton had first been elected President. A Democratic House and Senate! A female Speaker of the House! All this glory and righteousness takes a little getting used to.

I really saw the election and the weeks leading up to it as an epic battle in the clash of good vs. evil. I thought about all the ways we can be freedom fighters: by being artists, musicians, politicians with integrity, good parents, philanthropists, teachers, environmental activists, child advocates, civil rights workers. I feel a renewed sense of community with my countrymen and women.

Bob Herbert, my new hero.

2006-11-09T17:47:00.000-08:00

Who's Bob Herbert? He’s a contributor to the New York Times’ OpEd page. I just discovered Bob because of his recent kickass feminist columns about the mass murder of little girls in an Amish schoolhouse, which should be called what it was – a hate crime – and the UN report on worldwide violence against women. Then I read his archives and was floored at such a brave, trenchant voice coming from, not The Nation or the HuffingtonPost, but the venerable Grey Lady herself (though let’s face it, the NYT is pretty liberal for a mainstream paper).

A Pontificator after my own heart, Bob Herbert writes passionately, angrily and articulately about racism, poverty, political corruption, and misogyny in all its forms, including certain Abercrombie t-shirts, genital mutilation, mass rape as a weapon of war, bride burnings, honor killings, female infanticide, etc. ad nauseam. Here’s a sample:

“The disrespectful, degrading, contemptuous treatment of women is so pervasive and so mainstream that it has just about lost its ability to shock.

“In a misogynistic culture, it's never too early to drill into the minds of girls that what really matters is their appearance and their ability to please men sexually.”

“We're all implicated in this carnage because the relentless violence against women and girls is linked at its core to the wider society's casual willingness to dehumanize women and girls, to see them first and foremost as sexual vessels – objects – and never, ever as the equals of men.” 10/16/06

He’s bracingly, outspokenly anti-Bush:

“His breathtaking arrogance is exceeded only by his incompetence…he is the worst president in memory, and one of the worst of all time.” (1/26/06)

Testify!

He’s a voice crying out in the wilderness, calling for an end to the Iraq war and for making our entire nation bear the burden, not just the troops.

“You never want to say that brave troops in Iraq died for the mindless fantasies spun by a gang of inept politicians. But what else did they die for?” 10/3/05

He reminds us what patriotism really is:

“A lot of Americans are like spoiled rich kids who take their wealth for granted. Too many of us have forgotten – or never learned – the real value of the great American ideals. Too many are standing silently by as Mr. Bush and his cronies engage in the kind of tyrannical and uncivilized behavior that has brought so much misery – and ultimately ruin – to previous societies.” 7/17/06

Bob has a new column today about Nancy Pelosi, the first female Speaker of the House (second in line to the presidency after the VP! Just in case something were to mysteriously happen to Public Enemies #1 and #2!) Most of Bob’s columns are only accessible if you’re a TimesSelect member – in other words, you have to pay a fee. But you can sign up for a 2-week free trial and read all his columns, then cancel your membership if you must. Do it!

Come into my parlor, said the spider to the fly.

2006-10-31T16:49:00.000-08:00

How do readers find my blog? Let me count the ways. Here are some of the recent web searches that have led hapless victims to my parlor:

• daring cleavage
• john lennon bed peace hair peace
• berlin art hipster (my blog was #1!)
• dozens of “Fields of Gold/Sting/Studio 60/lute” combinations (my blog often came up #1. Go figure!)

Perhaps the creepiest discovery was that my blog was quoted at length, and disapprovingly, by someone who objected to my "silver-tongued" scofflaw-itis regarding my Alleged Lawless Hound. Sheesh.

The fun part of sleuthing out these searches is finding other bloggers with similar interests, like David E., who also blogged about Susan Sontag's journals. It's cool to find community in unexpected places.

Don’t tread on me!

2006-10-26T18:09:00.001-07:00

Hurray for the New Jersey Supreme Court, which ruled that same-sex couples and their families are constitutionally entitled to the benefits and protections offered by marriage (although queer couples still don’t have access to over 1,000 federal marriage benefits). For the New York Times’ account of this historic move (don’t miss the audio slide show), go here.

The Times also posted a comments blog. (Unfortunately they don’t seem to be taking any more comments, but what’s there is plenty entertaining.) I loved reading these comments. I skimmed over the bigoted, stupid ones and was so heartened by the funny, thoughtful, heartfelt ones. It made me feel...actually...hopeful. And part of a fabulous community. To wit:

Joshua says: “I’m really tired of being treated as a second-rate American, especially because i’m totally first rate.”

Sarah Junker notes: “Interracial marriages were banned in some states up to as late as the 1980’s. I harken to this when I’m discouraged by the slow rate of social change in this country. It may take decades before state bans on homosexual marriages are viewed as morally outrageous and historically outdated, but the wall is falling one brick at a time.”

And my favorite, from Javier Galitó-Cava: “I have been with my partner for 12 years. I have helped him raise his bilogical son who just turned 23. My step-son is straight and a wonderful and well adjusted young man by the way. He never had any homosexual tendencies and, although he loves musical theatre, he is hopelessly straight. He doesn’t own one pair of Prada shoes and can leave the house without any product on his hair as if nothing was wrong.

“Maybe the statue of Liberty should have a new engraving, “Give me your tired, your poor, but keep your faggots and your other weirdoes, PLEASE!” Oh Javier, you are officially my new BFF.

From EAC_ Esq.: “Shame on all three branches of the federal government for passing and upholding the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA). Never have I seen such a flagrant and embarrassing display of political pandering to the wealthy, conservative religious groups that helped buy the Oval Office for President Bush. I cannot fathom how such an act of legislated bigotry can withstand scrutiny in light of the full faith and credit clause of the U.S. Constitution.”

Daniel Cole asks: “Is having children a prerequisite to marry? Did I miss the “I promise to have children” form straight couples have to sign? Do heterosexual couples who choose not to have children have fakey, weirdo marriages?...First it’s the gays, then it’s the household furniture. As much as I’d love to marry my couch, I don’t think it’s gonna happen. My couch can’t even make a proper signature. It’s alright, Couchy – I still love you. The “slippery slope” argument gets a lot of play, maybe because it’s so funny. Marrying my cat? It’s just funny. Marrying all three of my cats? Now that’s just wrong.

“There are many wonderful gay and straight couples, and I’d love to have them all over for dinner and cocktails.” Call me – I'm in!

And from someone named Mark: “Basic, fundamental rights accrue to each of us by the very fact of our being. They are not “granted” by the government. They are inherently ours from the moment of birth. If, as a society, we pretend that those of us in the majority have the right to deny such rights to any minority segment of that society, then we deny those rights to ourselves as well. The Bill of Rights, in addition to protecting each of us from “the government”, is also designed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the majority - and vice versa.”

Don't people rock? Lest you think I’m letting total strangers hog today’s post, I wanted to add that I think it takes bravery to call one’s corporate employer, or spa, or cell phone company (all things that I or my Charming Girlfriend did today) and talk to a faceless customer service rep about one’s same-sex partner. These people might be big homophobes. They might be falling over themselves to be gay-friendly. We can't know. We just do it. Coming out is a continual process.

Finally, to see a totally adorable studio portrait of a young lesbian couple in 1967 (check out the beehive hair!), go here.

Fall TV Season Part 2.

2006-10-24T17:55:00.000-07:00

More supremely biased primetime Pontification:

Heroes: Still smashing! The heroes are beginning to meet each other. Claire the cheerleader's nefarious "father" is showing his evil stripes – but it was pretty cool how he got revenge on her attacker. Hiro’s subtitled argument with his friend? A hoot. Hiro’s glee at watching Nathan fly? Hysterical. “Very nice to meet you, Flying Man. It’s okay, I keep secret. I bend time and space.” Wasn’t Nathan’s escape by zooming up into the clouds the Coolest Thing Ever? This show might, just possibly, be the next X-Files.

Dexter: I’m loving Dex’s eager, frustrated, downtrodden foster sister and his sly attempts to help her get promoted. That and the flashbacks with his foster dad display a mighty peculiar, yet somehow still believable set of family values.

And not forgetting our Sexiest Sophomore, Weeds: Consistently brilliant, disturbing and high-larious.

In development news, a shout-out to brave little 8-year-old Bindi "Crocodile Hunter" Irwin, who is going ahead with the nature series that she would have starred in with her dad Steve, before his bizarre, untimely sting-ray-to-the-heart death. I for one will be watching.

Even candy corn?

2006-10-24T16:58:00.000-07:00

A long time ago, I stopped eating sugar for a whole month. This was because I was told I was hypoglycemic and needed to regulate my blood sugar. At first it was pure torment, but after the first hellish week or two I started to feel good. At the end of the month, I felt better than I ever had in my life. I had tons of energy, I woke up refreshed, I had amazing mental clarity. I felt so good that one day, I went to a bakery with my girlfriend and recklessly ate a delicious confection. The sugar hit suddenly, as if I’d shot up into a vein. (Not that I've ever shot up into a vein. What do I know?) Colors were brighter, all my senses were heightened. And it was all downhill from there. I haven't been able to fully cut out sugar again.

But I must. I’ve been eating sugar like there’s no tomorrow. In the office where I work, it’s everywhere! Halloween candy, cookies, brownies, birthday cakes with buttercream icing that (prepare yourself: full disclosure) becomes even more decadent after 15 seconds in the microwave. I’ve been eating so much sugar that I feel ill. Yet I can’t stop. I look at that KitKat and know that I will feel yucky after I eat it, but I eat it anyway. This must be how it feels to be addicted to alcohol or crack or cigarettes. That rush of simultaneous pleasure and disgust.

I remember when it was all pleasure: inhaling the intoxicating smell of a pillowcase bulging with Halloween plunder. Dumping it on my bedroom floor and organizing it by category, preparing for complicated barter negotiations with my sister and brothers: Smarties, DumDums, Tootsie Pops, SweetTarts, Bit-O-Honey, Necco wafers, M&Ms, Jolly Ranchers, Laffy Taffy, Lemonheads, Baby Ruth, Butterfinger, 3 Musketeers, Mike & Ike, Red Hots, Dubble Bubble, Pixy Stix, waxy vampire teeth, candy necklaces, candy corn. Oh, candy corn!

It’s wack to contemplate going cold-turkey on sugar a week before Halloween.

Power to the writers.

2006-10-19T16:04:00.000-07:00

I’m irked. I was listening to KCRW, our local super-cool public radio station, when an annoying screenwriter named Rob Long came on to complain about the Writers Guild. He kvetched about his 16 years of Writers Guild membership and pooh-poohed the recent "unity rally" – the very notion of writers’ unity, even – "as if we writers don’t really secretly loathe each other," he drawled. He actually whined that the Guild provided good health insurance for him when he was so well-paid that he didn’t need it. Ingrate!

I can’t WAIT to be a member of the Writers Guild. I will happily pay my dues, wave signs at rallies, run for fucking treasurer. Whatever. Not just because it will mean that I’m making a living at what I love more than anything else, alongside people I respect, which is like winning the fucking lottery. Also because organized labor has done really important things for workers, like forcing employers to stop discriminating against women, ending child labor, and bringing us the 40-hour week (and, hello, the weekend). (Although the weekend is a misty, nostalgic concept for many of the TV writers I know.)

What would this Long guy have writers do? Keep our heads down at our insular laptops, submitting meekly to the studios’ "no-residuals-for-DVD-and-online-sales" larceny? Lest we forget, without the writer There Is No Story. No characters, no actors to hire (not to mention costume designers, composers, set decorators, editors, Teamsters, gaffers, grips, Best Boys and craft services people). No locations to scout, no DVDs to sell, no online episodes to stream. Even most so-called reality series need storytellers. And we need to band together, like members of proud guilds have done since medieval times. (Listen to me – as if I’m already a card-carrying member. The hubris!) Well, writers are my people. And they’re yours too, Rob Long.

Parlor vs. Salon

2006-10-18T23:11:00.000-07:00

I've always wanted my own salon. Not the beauty-school-dropout kind, no, the witty-and-urbane-expatriate-living-in-Paris kind. Salons are edgy! Salons are smart! But I was firmly cautioned against using the word "salon" anywhere near my blog by the ever-perspicacious Leslie Lange, on the grounds that it would be pretentious.

Hence, Pontifica's Parlor. Alliterative, school-marmish, genteel, some might even say quaint.

Yes, I'm bitter.

Just call me Lady of the Manor of Tallantire.

2006-10-18T17:25:00.000-07:00

This is where I want to live. I ache, I burn to live in this 27-bedroom estate (I'd be happy with just a wing, really), complete with walled garden and "mature woodland." Check out that front lawn. Now that's a front lawn, my friends. Frisbee heaven! And all for a mere $4.6 million! Hell, you could spend that on a 3-bedroom McMansion in Los Feliz. And get this: "the Manor of Tallantire was granted in 1080 by Waldeof, whose descendants took the name of Tallantire until 1578, when the seat transferred to the Fletchers of Cockermouth." You don't say.

I blame my formative teen years at music school in England, a school that was really two old stone mansions side by side, complete with tea break at 11 (hot milky tea and homemade shortbread, mmm), rose garden, orchard, sweeping lawns and...mature woodland...it's etched into my soul. I...must...go...back...

Krazee Baby Names, Part 2

2006-10-17T16:40:00.000-07:00

Ever have one of those days when you’re not feeling particularly creative, when you couldn't write a line of zingy dialogue to save your ass? Yeah, me too. Fortunately other people’s kre8ivity fills the sucking void with guaranteed entertainment. Herewith, another neatly categorized installment of New Parents Gone Wild:

Just Plain Awd:
Awdly Junior Stanley
Shcolvick
Shafungus (you read that right)
Shun R. Bonds (someone's bitter)
Trendarious
Stryder Entropy
Ja'Larry

Yes, We Get It:
Pashients
Cylence
Xistenz
Syxx
Marvelis
Earnest Lee

WYSIWYG:
Coal
Cola
Strait Cash
Free

Thanks, Gramps:
Alpha Betty (klever!)
Hunny Angel
Classie Mae
Fancy Mae
Dunkn
Little Miss

Say What?:
Kourtlyn-Neglorious
N'Ascent Mi'Princess D'Zyre Heavenly
Vandayvion Vandale
Zuh'Quaryon Ty'Rail
Xsavoiryawn
Onchorynchus Horatio (come again?)

(Disclaimer: These are all honest-to-god names. Really. This is the kind of dry, unproductive day I’d probably name my kid Female.)

Watch Bleak House!

2006-10-14T14:22:00.000-07:00

I resisted the impulse to call it "a Dickens of a show." Whew. That would've been too precious, even for me. But in case you missed Part 1 last Saturday night, it's not too late to get sucked into this dark (I'm not kidding; you can barely see anything) yet compelling saga about the wealthy, the would-be wealthy and the ne'er-to-be-wealthy in 19th-century England.

I'm always a sucker for costume drama. Masterpiece Theatre, take me away! Yet this isn't your typical period piece. Full of inventive editing and percussive sound effects, it's as packed with nefarious scheming, ill-advised romance, youthful folly, crazy stalkers, country manors, untimely death, graveyard rendezvous and amusing facial hair as one might wish. There's even that mainstay of costume drama, a penniless girl with a heart of gold whose birth is shrouded in mystery. Plus, Gillian Anderson. Need I say more?

Watch it! Tonight on PBS.

Imagine the difference 20 million women would make.

2006-10-13T17:14:00.000-07:00

I was living in Paris. I made an effort to get to the American Embassy and stand in line with the other expatriates. It was one of the few times during that year abroad that I felt proud to be American. Not so long ago, women fought hard, risked everything, and went to jail to win the right to vote. We can't take it for granted.

Come on down!

2006-10-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

Inspired by the divine Leslie Lange, and with her gracious permission, I present Pontifica’s own Wacky Search of the Week. My site meter allows me to see how visitors found my blog, plus other cool stuff like what cities they’re from (but not who they are – curses!). Some of the intriguing Google searches that have led my gentle readers to this site include:

• chinese state circus contortionists (Sorry to disappoint!)
• "park ranger" ticket (My blog was at the very top of the list!)
• what is a moon metaphor (Uh-oh – plagiarism alert!)
• hipster alternative bowl cut hair (Please write back and let me know how it went!)

This week’s winner, though, is “orgasm blogger.” I’m mystified. I feel a little dirty. I swear, I’ve never used the word “orgasm” in this blog. Or have I?

Liar, liar...

2006-10-06T14:51:00.000-07:00

Separate but equal, my ass.

2006-10-06T03:33:00.000-07:00

From today’s New York Times: “A state appeals court ruled Thursday that California's ban on gay marriage does not violate the constitutional rights of gays and lesbians.”

My blood pressure just SKYROCKETED. But wait, there’s more.

“‘We conclude California's historical definition of marriage does not deprive individuals of a vested fundamental right or discriminate against a suspect class,’ the court said.”

Just like the “historical definition of marriage" used to bar blacks and whites from tying the knot, huh? Just like the “historical definition of citizen with voting rights" didn’t used to include “person of color” or “woman.” Haven’t we realized that hiding behind historical precedent is notoriously wrongheaded? That a pernicious imbalance of power is fond of masquerading as the status quo?

So it’s not discrimination to withhold from me and my girlfriend the legal rights and protections enjoyed by, say, my brother and his wife? I’m really less worthy? Huh. Tell that to my mom.

Hearteningly, the strongly worded dissent argued that "the inescapable effect of the analysis the majority adopts is to diminish the humanity of the lesbians and gay men whose rights are defeated. The right to marry is of fundamental importance for all individuals."

Last year, a Superior Court judge in San Francisco got this whole glittery gay disco ball rolling by saying the same thing, that denying marriage to same-sex couples violates a fundamental right and amounts to unconstitutional gender-based discrimination. (A judge in Hawaii said the same thing ten years ago. Remember?)

Polls show that a majority of young people agree. So it's only a matter of time before the dinosaurs die off. (If we manage to survive that long. Have you seen An Inconvenient Truth? Better sell that beachfront property. And buy a hybrid, for the love of god!)

The entire raging gay marriage debate hinges on binary oppositions that are specious to begin with: male and female, hetero and homo. Sex and gender – not to mention religion, politics and law – are constructions, after all. It’s hard, though, not to get sucked into this sort of polarized thinking in our current red vs. blue color wars. And ultimately, even if gay marriage is a normative idea that doesn't disrupt false binary oppositions underpinning constructed identities, I still want one, thank you very much.

From my early days agitating with Queer Nation and the Lesbian Avengers (I bet there’s an FBI file with my name on it), I’ve believed that gay rights, like any civil rights, are won via the grass-roots: workplaces and kitchen tables (and, yes, living rooms – unbiased TV portrayals matter). The more people realize that they know and love queers, trannies and dog-crazy dykes, the more they will join the good fight. Hence the importance of coming out. Hence the political significance of walking down the street holding my lover’s hand, displaying her picture in my office, taking her home for the holidays. I categorically refuse to be a second-class citizen.

California Supreme Court, here we come.

Fall TV Season: Part 1

2006-10-05T15:03:00.000-07:00

Since I am a TV writer, even if Not Quite Yet Employed As Such, it's high time I opined – Pontificated, even – about the new television season. My observations, forthwith:

(Well, not quite forthwith: lest anyone reading this be of the "I don't own a TV; TV is a waste of my valuable time" ilk, you've come to the wrong blog. TV is Art. A glorious mongrel fusion of the high and the lowbrow. Some of the smartest people alive today are making great TV – TV for the ages. I bow down before them. Fear Factor, I'm not talking about you.)

Best New Series: Ugly Betty. An utter delight for the senses and the sensibilities.

Grossest New Series: Dexter. Gore aplenty. I wonder, though, how the audience can invest emotionally in a guy with no emotions. His plucky foster sister deserves better. And I know they call it "acting," but it'll take a minute to buy Michael C. Hall as a straight man after he rocked 6FU's tormented David for years.

Coolest New Series: Heroes. An impending nuclear apocalypse. A bunch of unlikely superheroes in a race against the clock. I must admit, I can't wait for the next episode.

Best Returning Series: Weeds (also wins for Most Babelicious Leading Lady – that skin! those eyes!). Honorable Mentions: House and Bones.

Oh, how I miss Six Feet Under. That, my friends, was Appointment Television. As was the dearly departed Huff, often for the over-the-top Oliver Platt alone. Is it too late for a Save Huff campaign? I await with bated breath the return of the brilliant The Closer and Saved. I’m even kind of looking forward to a new bout of dyke drama on The L Word. Excuse me, I mean the l word. Let’s just hope that they’ve ditched the World’s Worst Theme Song.

And to take a leaf from Jane Espenson's estimable book, I will now digress and talk about my lunch. I was all set to force down a frozen Lean Cuisine, but something in me rebelled. As Lisa memorably exclaimed in an episode of Six Feet Under, "My humanity just rose up!" Instead I ate a juicy turkey burger oozing with ketchup, mayo, pickles and avocado, with a side of giant, hot steak fries and a large, icy diet coke. A four-napkin lunch. I'm telling ya. Human beings will never settle for swallowing pellets, no matter what those sci-fi freaks say.

D'oh!

2006-10-05T09:55:00.000-07:00

I should've known better than to brag on my mojo. Pride goeth before a fall and all that. I left work yesterday to find two (two!) parking tickets on my car. In the glow of the mojo, I forgot that I'd parked in a 2-hour zone and left the wheels there all day.

Can they even do that? You can bet I'm going to find out.

Got my mojo workin’.

2006-10-04T13:33:00.000-07:00

There’s almost nothing I hate more than unyielding bureaucratic authority. Blame it on early childhood trauma, or maybe the fact that I am accustomed to Always Getting My Way (to the point that when I don’t, I am usually Reduced To Tears). It’s an inherited character flaw: my dad is affectionately known as the Billdozer and my brothers and I were schooled in Bending Rules at his knee. (But I’m pretty sure I’m the only one who sheds vexed tears when thwarted.)

In any case, last month I got a ticket for not having my dog on a leash in Griffith Park. I was on a favorite hike with Charming Girlfriend and said Lawless Hound, when said CG spied a Park Ranger up ahead in his Ranger Vehicle. Despite my quick sleight-of-hand, despite my wide-eyed protestations of innocence, said Heartless Ranger issued me a citation and told me to show up in court. I guess sending a check is not enough penance; they feel we scofflaws need a talking-to in person.

The last time I ignored such a summons (same dog, same lack of leash, different park) I got slapped with a fine exceeding one thousand dollars (which the Understanding Judge reduced to a mere $300). So this morning I was first in line at the Hollywood courthouse.

There is something about courthouses that is designed to demoralize people. First the metal detectors with their unsmiling guards, then the long lines of similarly intimidated lawbreakers. Even the courtrooms themselves, which (even if nicely wood-paneled) are set up like classrooms with swinging doors to keep the great unwashed away from the judge and the lawyers.

And hoo boy, do those lawyers have some skanky-ass fashion sense! Today, for instance, I couldn’t help staring at a ruddy, pockmarked attorney with an out-of-control Ronald McDonald ‘do (which failed to hide his bald spot), giant smoky blue Paris Hilton sunglasses, a startlingly loud tie and snakeskin cowboy boots.

I know something about the inside of courthouses because I have successfully used my mojo to get out of two Very Expensive speeding tickets (and avoid the dread Traffic School) in the past six months. Also a few parking tickets. Did I mention I really hate authority?

After a short but instructive wait in the courtroom this morning, I spoke with a pleasant young City Attorney, who gave me the expected talking-to but then – presto – dismissed my ticket and sent me on my way. Viva la mojo!*

Okay, I lied a little. I said the Ranger was too far away to see whether my dog was leashed, and babbled on about how responsible I am after eleven years of dog-ownership. I might have even said that She Is Always On A Leash In The Park. Which is a big lie. She is Very (er, mostly) Well-Behaved and gets to run free whenever possible, especially at the beach. (That sound you hear is me knocking on wood).

(*To give credit where credit is due, on at least two occasions the mojo was directly attributable to Beloved Girlfriend.)

Susan Sontag, blogger manquée.

2006-09-27T17:27:00.001-07:00

I’m fascinated by Susan Sontag’s journals (and not just because she was a big ol’ dyke). Her thoughts resonate for writers, er, bloggers decades later: "In the journal [read: blog] I do not just express myself more openly than I could to any person; I create myself...One of the main (social) functions of a journal or diary is precisely to be read furtively by other people." Spoken like a true blogger, a woman ahead of her time.

She also said "Nothing prevents me from being a writer except laziness." Susan Sontag, intellectual eminence – lazy? Now I don’t feel quite so guilty about staying home sick two days in a row and barely getting any real work done. And like many a Hollywood writer, she suffered from self-doubt: "With a little ego-building – such as the fait accompli this journal provides – I shall win through to the confidence that I (I) have something to say, that should be said." I think all bloggers (even the avowed narcissists) can relate.

She believed in taking lovers willy-nilly, but she suffered from romance: "Poor little ego, how did you feel today? Not very well, I fear – rather bruised, sore, traumatized. Hot waves of shame, and all that. I never had any illusion that she was in love with me, but I did assume she liked me." Ouch! Veterans of the LA dating scene feel your pain.

She was conflicted about being gay: "My desire to write is connected with my homosexuality. I need the identity as a weapon, to match the weapon that society has against me." One hopes that as she matured intellectually and sexually, she learned to embrace her fierce 'mo self.

She conflated writing with sex: "The orgasm focuses. I lust to write. The coming of the orgasm is not the salvation but, more, the birth of my ego...The only kind of writer I could be is the kind who exposes himself. I write to define myself – an act of self-creation – part of process of becoming – in a dialogue with myself, with writers I admire living and dead, with ideal readers." If only she'd lived long enough to discover the dialogue of the blog.

I am reminded of Twyla Tharp’s fabulous book The Creative Habit, in which she argues that creativity is not so much about the divine spark, but the dogged daily practice of one's work. Once a wonderful poet I gave a reading with, when asked how she coped with the inevitable dull, even blocked periods between flashes of inspiration, said that she believed in two things: the muse and the mule.

One of my favorite ways of preparing for creativity is to play the piano – but I gave up my piano when I moved to this new apartment. Instead I play FreeCell on my computer. Immersion in that mindless game allows for the most extraordinary thought processes.

Now back to writing the outline for my The Closer spec. I don’t like writing outlines, but it must be done. Twyla Tharp talks about the importance of making a plan, then letting it go: "once the shell is in place and you start work on the interior, the scaffolding disappears."

Massively genius.

2006-09-26T16:44:00.000-07:00

On Sunday I took Charming Girlfriend to see Massive Attack at the Hollywood Bowl. The opening band sucked (really – who let them onstage?) but Massive Attack put on a brilliant show, even though one of the frontmen was away on paternity leave. They played most of my favorite songs and rawked the Bowl as it has never been rawked.

At one point they introduced an unbilled guest artist with, simply, “Her name is Elizabeth,” and out drifted Elizabeth Fraser, in a Yohji Yamamoto-like muumuu. “Elizabeth Fraser!” I squawked to Fetching Girlfriend. A legend in her own time, the doyenne of a hundred bands that modeled their sound on the Cocteau Twins. I thought back to my college days in Paris, endlessly riding the Métro and walking the streets with my (pre-iPod) Walkman’s headphones blasting the Cocteau Twins into my eardrums, my inner landscape profoundly coloring the outer one.

The only possible improvement to Sunday’s show would have been a guest appearance by Tracey Thorn, singing her songs from Protection. It was the best concert I’ve seen in LA since Dead Can Dance last year, also at the Bowl (though Hilary Hahn playing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto, an entirely different kind of genius, deserves special mention).

It’s time for an intervention.

2006-09-25T16:22:00.000-07:00

This self-expression craze is spinning dangerously out of control. Parents are bestowing names upon their defenseless offspring in reckless defiance of the Name Police, aka Down with Insane Monikers (DIM). How else to explain such infractions as Female, Usnavy, Flushette, Pink January, Morronica (Morronica?!) and Larvell?

Oh yes. These are all real names, not urban legends. Speaking of urban legends, there really was an Ima Hogg (but she did NOT have a sister named Ura). And a college friend of mine swore he knew a girl named Smegma Bengwater. Smegma, are you out there?

As a dedicated culture maven, I have observed several trends in modern baby-naming. One popular ploy is to use Real Live Words, Kleverly Disguised: Sincer Lee, Eunik (Unique or Eunuch? Risky!), Pherever, Ideaz’, Silouette, Au’nesty, Ph’Ness, Wispur, and Mizarey (if you think you’re miserable now, kid, just wait till elementary school).

Then there are the names that are Just Plain Kre8tiv: Wahkeenyah-Wastedaka Windblow, Ni'Treasure O'moria, A'Vri-Seanae McKnz, Vyctoryan, and Kwincee.

Some names reveal Too Much Information about the mother’s postnatal state of mind: Acidalia, Amnastie, Mona Pain, Joy Anguish, Naughtia, and Shunasti. (“Meet the twins – she’s Shunasti, but she’s Naughtia.”)

Some lazy parents simply resort to adjectives: Clever, Tuff, Fancy, Righteous, Handsome, Notorious, and Furious. (But please, not all at once!)

Then there are the names that mean just what they say: Lumber, Squirrel, Brick, Soda, and Chalk. Nothing like the direct approach, I guess. Also in this group are Opera, Cicada, Michelob, Nazarene Savage, Summer Jelly, and Texas Casanova.

Again, I remind you that these are ALL REAL NAMES.

And finally, there are the parents for whom Baby Mozart CDs are not enough; no, their kids are destined to have Supernatural Powers: Almighty Rab, Supreme Infinite, Supreme Knowledge, Czarina, Kingdom Heave'n, Eumajesty, and, as evidence that Great Minds Think Alike, YorMajesti (whose sibling, to forestall any unseemly rivalry, is known as Yorhynace).

Difficult as it is to choose a favorite from these gems, I’d have to say that I’m partial to Female – so unambiguous, so breathtaking in its simplicity. So helpful, too, if you have a son named Male – they go together like salt and pepper shakers. If you’re unlucky enough to have a second daughter, you could call her Female Too (Female 2 for short). I also think that Morronica, Lumber, and Michelob trip musically from the tongue when yelled from the porch at the end of the day.

But really, when it comes to my kids, I look forward to hollering “Supreme Infinite! YorMajesti! Get in here and wash these dishes!”

Wherefore art thou, Baby Suri?

2006-09-22T17:33:00.000-07:00

Some might say that a 22-page spread in Vanity Fair ought to sate the Suri-curious for another four or five months, but “some” are not celebrity-infant-obsessed. I need, nay, I crave more Suri! And I know I’m not alone. I need more pictures, more opportunities to study those suspiciously non-Cruise-like eyelids, to decipher their subtle Morse-code messages of hope or despair for humankind. More chances to ponder the timeless question: wig or toupee?

But in the interim, I thought I would try and track down the even-more-elusive and as-yet-unphotographed Baby Uri, Suri’s conjoined twin, who, it has been darkly rumored, has been whisked away to be raised by a grim phalanx of Scientology wet-nurses. Poor, giant, concave-skulled Uri – Suri got the brain, and he was left with the brawn.

Though the Uri search-and-rescue mission has so far been fruitless, I did uncover evidence of a scandal of even greater proportions. I’m here to tell you that not two, not four, not even six, but seven infants resulted from the nefarious Cruise/Holmes offspring-spawning contract, I mean union of hearts and souls. Yes, Suri is a septuplet. Why was she alone selected to assume the tiny sparkly Scientology-scion coronet? Sadly, when we examine the other hatchlings, it becomes all too obvious:

1) First, the aforementioned Baby Uri, rejected for his giantism, flat head and Russian accent.
2) Baby Murray, cast off because of his faux-croc briefcase stuffed with Brooke Shields depositions. He knew too much.
3) Baby Curry. Wrong ethnicity. Way wrong. Blame the Scientology lab techs for this one.
4) Baby Blurri. Faster than a speeding Thetan. Wouldn’t sit still for the photo shoot.
5) Baby Surly. Unattractive perpetual frown. Wouldn’t smile for the birdie (doesn’t she know who Annie Leibovitz is?).
6) Baby Furri. Nuff said.

But there is still hope for Suri’s sub-par siblings. One day they will all be sent to summer camp, will they not? And they will trip over a canoe and collide with one another, and gaze upon each other’s strangely familiar countenances, and become sworn enemies, and cause a riot in the dining hall and be banished to the isolation cabin, and in a thunderstorm will come to realize that they were all born, er, hatched on the same day. And in classic Parent Trap fashion, they will all switch places after camp, resulting in hilarious mistaken-identity hijinks, until in an emotional climax they will all be reunited in the circle of TomKat’s arms.

Before I quit the subject of cruelly withheld celebrity infant photos, I must express my fond hopes for another sighting of The Chosen One. Where, oh where is Shiloh?

Fields of Gold.

2006-09-21T17:27:00.000-07:00

One of the perks of working at a major studio/global cultural steamroller is getting to sit in a fake studio audience to see a very real performance by Sting, for an upcoming episode of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. (I saw the pilot at a special on-lot screening this week hosted by the creators, and it was pretty good, except for the hopelessly miscast Amanda Peet. She’s supposed to be portraying a tough-as-nails, smarter-than-thou network savior, but the chronic lips-parted, doe-in-headlights half-smile is not working for me. There are surely many kick-ass actresses who can believably convey both hotness and fierce intelligence. Why, oh why?)

Anyway, they say that show business is all about hurry-up-and-wait, and today was no different. Two hours after our call time, we were still milling around the craft services table, debating the relative merits of Rice Krispy treats and cold breakfast sandwiches. Finally we were herded into our seats (that’s me in the second row) while the cameramen (why are they always men? I would say camerapeople, but really, they’re always men) discussed shots and lighting. Aaron Sorkin, prodigal showrunner, mingled regally, contentedly pondering the vicissitudes of power in Hollywood.

Sting loitered behind the stage, fingering his lute (yes, lute). Lauren Graham (perhaps better known as Lorelai Gilmore), sporting a clingy little black dress, daring cleavage and flip-flops, introduced him and he took the stage with a fellow lutist.

What can I say about Sting? He’s a sexy blond Leprechaun. He’s tan and lithe and he did yoga-contortionist moves to stretch his leg, while helpless thoughts of “Tantric Sex! Tantric Sex With Trudie Styler!" danced through my head. Then I remembered that The Police’s “Every Breath You Take” was the very first music video I ever saw. For a cultural icon, Sting was relaxed and gracious. Watching him noodle away on his lute, singing softly to himself, it struck me that he is a musician first and a personage second, that rare and lucky creature completely at one with his work. (You may imagine, gentle reader, my turbulent emotions upon returning to my corporate workplace afterward.)

Then Sting and his troubadour (who hid his face behind his lute and caressed it with his bowl-cut hair – so that’s what troubadours do) tenderly sang “Fields of Gold” a couple of times. We listened, spellbound, to this moving song about fleeting youth and a love that lasts for many years. Though ostensibly about a man and a woman, it transcends gender as all good love songs do, speaking equally to everyone who has invested hopes and dreams in another mortal. All the while, the massive tapestries behind them rippled gently in the smoke from the smoke machine.

Brangelina & Kissing Bobbies!

2006-09-20T16:45:00.000-07:00

Went to the Silverlake/Los Feliz/Echo Park Artcrawl last weekend. What’s not to like about looking at art (some of it pretty decent), mingling with hipsters, eavesdropping on Intense Conversations among hipsters, meeting new hipster friends, free wine (although one cheapskate gallery actually served Two-Buck Chuck – shame!) and jaywalking across Sunset at sunset? The after-party at the Echo wasn't bad either.

Meanwhile, further downtown, über-hipster "art terrorist" Banksy's warehouse installation was a hipster/celebrity magnet. Even Brangelina showed up! O, Brangelina, whither thou goest, I will go.

Some wacky animal-rights protesters forced the "art renegade" (except how renegade are you when Brad and Angie grace your supposedly underground exhibit?) to scrub the paint off the live elephant (a 38-year-old female named Tai) that Banksy was pimping to make a heavy-handed point about the "elephant in the room," namely world poverty and injustice.

Despite the media circus (ouch), I've been a fan of good street art since I lived in Paris lo those many years ago, where street stenciling is a respected, if still subversive art form. Later I participated in lots of gleefully illicit stenciling and wheatpasting with assorted queer activist groups (hmmm...where are those photos?).

Banksy on Palestine and Israel: "The security barrier separating the occupied territories from Israel is over 450 miles long and 38 feet high."

The Berlin Wall was only 96 miles long and 12 feet high.

Even the Great Wall of China is only 26 feet high (but, okay, in its heyday it was more than 3,500 miles long – longer than the distance between New York and Paris!). My friend Mark and I tried to find this out at our favorite all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet (sesame balls! crab legs!), where a giant glossy mural of the Wall snakes above the vinyl booths. No one could tell us. Well, now we know.

Green power and gas prices.

2006-09-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

A long weekend away from the internet (blame windstorms in Desert Hot Springs, hereafter known as Desperate Hot Springs, according to the gay desert mafia) has acquainted me with the growing phenomenon known as Blogger's Guilt.

As I drive to visit Lovely Girlfriend in said DHS, the windmills start sprouting out of the desert, marching in rows, tall and gangly, skeletal, bleached, like a waving field of crosses against the sunset. Phalanxes of windmills, benign or menacing, I can’t decide – proud green alternative to fossil fuels, or aliens straight out of a B movie?

MadLibs quiz: A) California’s windmills provide enough non-polluting energy to power [name of city]. B) Although we lead other states in renewable energy development, we lag behind countries like Germany and [name of nation], which leads the world in solar power. C) The U.S., of course, refuses to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, which aims to [increase/decrease?] global warming by reducing emissions of greenhouse gases. Many American states and cities, however, do participate in Kyoto-like emissions reduction programs. Including Los Angeles. Um, right.

Speaking of emissions, I was getting all excited about the falling price of gas, until Charming Girlfriend, ever the conspiracy theorist, reminded me of the nefarious relationship between lower gas prices and the upcoming midterm elections. D’oh!

(She’s so smart. And pretty.)

Answers:
A) San Francisco.
B) Japan. Japan! Who knew?
C) Made you look.

Gaily Forward!

2006-09-19T11:59:00.000-07:00

It's happened to all of us: you're being a delightful, helpful backseat driver and the real, road-ragey driver is freaking out about whether to turn left or go straight at the next intersection, and you need a handy phrase that doesn't send you self-hatingly back in the closet and simultaneously stall the progress of civil rights. I give you "Gaily Forward!"

It is the universal Lesbian-Approved (and for all I know, Daddy/Bear/Twink-approved) alternative to the ever-so-slightly soul-bruising "Go Straight."

So next time your mother/husband/Republican coworker is dithering about which direction to take after the light changes, you'll be ready.

All together now: Gaily Forward!

Bed-In for Peace.

2006-09-18T16:33:00.000-07:00

Yes, John and Yoko actually staged a "Bed-In" for peace. I swear the handmade sign above their heads reads "Hair Peace." Those crazy kids! Wielding the brave, absurd flame of love (and sex – come on, those were some sexy hippies) against another senseless, increasingly unpopular war. That was before the ACT UP era of die-ins, when angry queers made headlines by staging mass street funerals and chaining ourselves to the White House gates to protest Bush père's murderous inaction on AIDS.

Shrub's (read: the President-select's) administration is spending $8 billion a month on the war – I mean "democracy-building mission" – in Iraq (including those sweet no-bid Halliburton "reconstruction" contracts). That's $2 billion a week, $267 million per day, $11 million every hour.

Every hour. Let's think for a minute about how many college educations, affordable homes, diapers, library books, life-saving medical prescriptions, acres of protected rainforest, urban parks, and public school music teachers that would cover. (Just call me Bleeding Heart, baby.)

Where are today's moral giants? In these terrifying times, we could use a few more celebrities taking to their beds.

Unsolicited rave.

2006-09-18T15:32:00.000-07:00

I’m listening obsessively, I mean OBSESSIVELY, to this song called Have You Heard Them Talking by Carrie Clark and the Lonesome Lovers. Carrie is a friend of my brother’s and apparently I met her at his wedding, though all those new faces are mostly a blur, obscured by my overarching memory of the Greatest Freeform Frisbee Game Of All Time. We must’ve had six frisbees, plus a soccer ball and a football at various points, and about twenty players, on this huge lawn by a lake. It went on for hours. But anyway, what I do know about Carrie is that she writes amazing country/blues songs, and I can't get over the twanging guitar and her haunting voice in this achingly bittersweet song about (as far as I can tell) miners who with their backbreaking labor are “no longer part of this time, no longer part of this daydream.” It lilts along in ¾ time and I can just picture the smoky dance hall and the couples waltzing in their cowboy boots.

I’ve tried to stop playing this song – I’m afraid of that thing that happens when you over-play a piece of music: eventually you achieve Song Overload and the song must be retired for a respectable period of time until you happen to hear it again a year later, and then you remember with excruciating clarity what it felt like to be living your life at that time. The only other thing that grabs hold of memory and emotion like music is the sense of smell: my mother, young and glamorous, wearing White Shoulders, leaning in to kiss me goodnight before going out with my dad. The dust and oil paint and turpentine of the arts center where I went to college, socking me in the solar plexus when I go back to visit. The heady mix of perfume and leather seats in an ex-lover's Mercedes.

Other songs that have had this hold on me: These Girls by Rachael Yamagata, Unfinished Sympathy by Massive Attack, the Eurythmics' For the Love of Big Brother, New Year's Prayer by Jeff Buckley...the list goes on.

79°

2006-09-13T16:41:00.000-07:00

Every day on my way to work I drive over the LA River, that pathetic ribbon snaking through its narrow, shallow concrete channel. Hemmed in, graffitied, emasculated, helpless to determine its own course, yet bravely reflecting the glitter of the Pacific, just a few impassable strip malls away.

I can't adequately express my relief that is is 79° outside, not 103°. The oppressive heat of the LA summer saps my energy and motivation. Everyone said it would be better when I moved to Hollywood from the Valley, and maybe it is – marginally – but I work at a studio in Burbank, where venturing outside the air-conditioned building means instant suffocation, and even with my AC blasting at home these last few months, I couldn't sleep, and it was too hot and bright already at 7 a.m. to run with my dog in the hills. Next summer I swear I'm getting a place at the beach, a pied-à-plage.

I love the creative serendipity that happens when I start getting into writing mode: suddenly my ears are pricked for snatches of dialogue, relevant stories jump out at me from the news, seemingly random ideas connect in unpredictable ways. Today my therapist uttered a line that is perfect for my new The Closer spec script. To his amusement, I wrote it down – I've learned that if I don't jot stuff down immediately, it's lost. I hate waking up the next morning and wondering what I thought was so brilliant. I got a tiny little voice recorder and I do use it sometimes, but mostly I still scribble near-illegible notes on whatever scrap of paper happens to be lying around. Oh, the mountain of paper on my writing desk!

So in addition to my essays and poems and now this blog, I have my Closer spec to write, and my pilot and feature scripts to overhaul before the end of the year (self-imposed deadlines: not as effective as externally imposed ones, but better than no deadlines at all). The better to prepare for next staffing season.

I drove back from therapy through the hills under the Hollywood sign, that beautiful near-Mediterranean vista with its sage and yucca and storybook villas, slowing as I passed the Hollywood reservoir with my windows open and the sound of dry leaves skittering and the barest hint of an LA autumn in the air.

Full moon over Hollywood.

2006-09-12T14:12:00.000-07:00

Driving home to Hollywood from Topanga, I'm startled by the rising moon over the 101: yellow, bloated and pendulous like an overripe grapefruit; a mottled, blotchy, lopsided water balloon; a paunchy, pockmarked, leering uncle hovering ominous on the horizon.

Movin' on up.

2006-09-12T13:57:00.000-07:00

I hear that the city is spending a lot of money to gentrify my neighborhood. Every week there are new restaurants (Hungry Cat – try the heirloom tomato/watermelon salad!), clubs (Les Deux is back!), new throngs of club kids (Lindsay Lohan drinking bottled water at Hyde!), and nowhere to park.

Last month when my building was being retrofitted for earthquakes, the workmen kept parking their trucks in the driveway. Hey, I’m paying for that parking space in the back. “You can’t park there,” I said. “But there’s no parking in the street,” the foreman complained. “You can’t block the driveway,” I insisted. He threw me a surly look and went to move his truck.

Hollywood is still a barrio bordered by prettified Larchmont and picturesque Hancock Park, but we have the best farmers’ market in the city, and the sweat and stink and smog evaporate in the pines and eucalyptus of the hills, where red-tailed hawks circle lazily on warm currents of air.

In Griffith Park this morning I saw a movement, three coyotes through the mist: scrawny, rangy critters fixing me with that wary, resigned, flitting stare before loping up the path I was going to take with my dog.

Tuesday morning, five years ago.

2006-09-11T13:55:00.000-07:00

Everyone remembers where they were. I’ll never forget my friend Mark’s phone call, rousing me from a dazed sleep with the surreal cry, “We’re under attack!” Running to turn on the TV. Watching in real time as the second plane hit. The shock and terror and grief, the chills and pride as we learned of the heroism of the passengers on Flight 93.

I stayed home that day. I was working at a major studio – a factory assembly line, you might say, for the global creep of Western culture – that, sure enough, ended up on the FBI’s list of targets receiving credible terrorist threats. I went to the Japanese teahouse in the park and fell on my knees in the grass in tears, asking god aloud how we and our beautiful planet could survive the hatred and brutish stupidity and avarice, the cycle of violence and vengeance, the world’s blind howl of suffering. I thought about the power and the absolute necessity of art to remind us of humanity’s highest strivings. I added a quote from Leonard Bernstein to my email signature: “This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

It was the beginning of the heated bumper sticker debate that waged across the nation. You could frame it, broadly, as red state vs. blue: on one side, “God Bless America,” “Power of Pride” and the Stars and Stripes waving in dizzying profusion. On the other, fewer but brave, “Peace is Patriotic,” “War Is Not the Answer,” and a peace sign superimposed on the earth. “Why do they hate us?” everyone wanted to know. “Because of our freedoms” was the disgracefully trite answer lobbed as a smokescreen for the poverty, inequity and despair in so much of the world, fueling fundamentalism and colliding inevitably with the arrogant fist of imperialism.

September 11th burst our protective bubble. It forced us all to contemplate bewildering questions of evil, safety and security, injustice and ignorance, what it’s like to live in fear, the double-edged sword of free will, the atrocities committed in the name of religion, the challenge of choosing compassion and forgiveness, the incredible gift and responsibility of our lives on earth. I wish I felt like things were better, five years on.

Hollywood Babel.

2006-09-11T10:46:00.000-07:00

When I lived in the Burbank foothills, I used to stare from my writing desk through the windows to the mountains – sometimes a green bulk, sometimes shrouded in mist. Here the view from my desk is of a wall. I wonder if this lack of a tranquil vista blocks my creative feng shui. But far more detrimental to my creative progress is the noise of Hollywood.

The poodle upstairs yaps incessantly, as shrill as if he were in my own apartment. Add the bass woof of the boxer and the clicking thud of their paws as they run back and forth, back and forth overhead; the treble shrieks of the kids next door; the sharp voices of their parents: I’d never sleep in Hollywood if it weren’t for my ear plugs.

I recently came home early from work, sick and spent from a week of coughing, and dropped off from sheer exhaustion. Then, waking at the noise, I had to stuff my ears. It’s not the quiet Valley neighborhood I’m used to. The next-door neighbors fight, the upstairs neighbors argue, and when they’re not arguing, they laugh drunkenly till all hours. Helicopters throb overhead – I mean directly overhead, shining a spotlight on the friendly gangstas next door. Horns honk to the tune of “La Cucaracha” till I want to slit my wrists. Music blares at all-day, all-night shindigs. I had to call the cops to complain about a children’s birthday party – it was midnight and they’d been going strong for ten hours. I was tempted to run over and jump in the bouncy palace – I bet that would've scared those shrill little f**kers straight.

It’s Suri Holmes, people!

2006-09-10T13:22:00.000-07:00

Last I checked, Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise are not married. That makes Suri a Holmes, not a Cruise. It drives me crazy that the media have slavishly, knee-jerkily kowtowed to this, dare I say, patriarchal construct – the one that some prominent postmodern theorist (Lacan? Limbaugh?) dubs the “Name of the Father” – which implies that women and children are, after all the pretty bouquets have been tossed, mere chattel. Y’know, property. Oh god, I hear you thinking, I thought this post was about adorable, reclusive little Baby Suri or maybe Pontifica's celebrity obsession, but it's turning into some crazy rant about the patriarchy. Yes, people, I’m ranting about the patriarchy! Booya!

(She is pretty cute, huh? Just look at that hair.)

Father = pater = patriarchy = male dominance in surnames. I’ll grant that when and if TomKat actually ties the (oh-so-bearded) knot, Katie – I’m sorry, Kate – will take her hubby’s last name, and because a woman giving her child her own last name is so not done in Hollywood, much less anywhere else in this post-feminist landscape, Suri will officially, legally become a Cruise.

Why does this happen, you ask, this wholesale feminine shedding of names? Partly because, historically, it’s been important for a man to establish that he, and not some cryogenically preserved Scientology founder, is the real father of his hired consort’s – I mean ladyfriend’s – child. Friend Lacan would add that it’s because the woman lacks a phallus – not a real phallus, you understand, but a symbolic one. Oh jeez, there’s a reason I dropped out of grad school.

My friend Emily, that dazzling iconoclast, defiantly gave her son her own last name even though she was married – and even though her daughter carries her father’s last name. But won’t it be confusing once they’re in school? asked well-meaning passers-by. Who the hell cares? was her tart reply. Love her.

Anyway. It’s all part and parcel of this return to traditionalism (some might call it a backlash) that has young women taking their husbands’ names. I always gently ask my soon-to-be-married straight friends why she won’t be keeping her own name – or why he won’t be taking hers – or why they won’t (both) be hyphenating. You know exactly the kind of blank stare I get. Then the women get sheepish or defensive, as if they secretly know what I’m talking about, but they’re just not willing to blaze that particular trail. It’s romantic to take his name, they protest. Somehow it’s not so romantic for him to take hers, unless they’re wacky outsider hippie artists. It creates a family unit – it’s easier on the children – blah blah blah. Let’s just admit it – feminism is still stigmatized and misunderstood. Anyone bold or foolish enough to claim the feminist mantle is still a man-hater, a lesbian, a bra-burner (though it’s been well-established, gentle reader, that no bras actually ever got burned).

Aw hell, what’s so bad about it, after all? Women aren’t really second-class citizens anymore, right? Don’t you fret, adorable little Suri of the suspiciously Thetan-looking eyes. It’s just tradition.

Swoon.

2006-09-09T00:39:00.000-07:00

I read today that Brad Pitt refuses to marry Angelina until everyone who wants to has the right to marry. That means queers, which means me – and my girlfriend. I’ve always wished that more of my hetero friends and loved ones would take this principled stand when it comes to the privilege of matrimony. Sure, a straight wedding is a happy event, and I was thrilled when my brother recently embarked on this commitment with his wonderful longtime girlfriend. Yet too often, I think, straight people’s embrace of marriage bespeaks at best a happy cluelessness about the legal rights denied to gay citizens, and at worst a smug, selfish conformity. I wanted my sister and brothers and friends, people who profess to care about equality and democracy – and me – to resist the hegemony in solidarity. Sadly, it’s all too rare.

That’s why Brad’s statement is so powerful, why my gay friend Mason and I sighed and fluttered our eyelashes at each other today when we heard the news. I’ve found it hard to resist Brad ever since he burned up the screen as a dangerous boy toy in Thelma and Louise (we'll tactfully avoid any mention of Troy), and lately, with his photogenic, humanitarian globetrotting at Angelina’s side, frolicking with their rescued rainbow brood, it’s hard to find fault. Now this: spokesmodel for tolerance and inclusion and civil rights. Dreamy.

Not only do my girlfriend and I want to get married, we want to do all those crazy, mainstream things like share a house and have kids. Everything’s a little more complicated since we don’t have the rights that married couples take for granted, but hey, we’re plucky. We’ll make it work. So far, where children are concerned, we’re still weighing our options, in all their bewildering variety: adoption (domestic or international? open or closed?), foster children, carrying my own baby, harvesting my eggs so my partner can carry my biological child. These last two require the participation of a third party, someone cool enough to take a back seat while lesbians raise his child, someone smart and good-looking and compassionate, a humanitarian, a…wait a second...

I bet Angie would be cool with it. She’s all “we are the world, we are the children,” right? So, Brad, how about it? Will you be our baby daddy?