There Is Beauty in the World

Original Image from Billboard.com

Macy Gray has a new album coming out. You can stream it live here (as of 6/16/2010).

As I right this, the earth is spewing oil due to the BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. It's important in times like this to stay focused on what's important. There is beauty in the world. Now, I don't want to minimize the disaster inflicted by our own greed. I want to think of this as an opportunity to move on. The President said something or rather last night, but it's vastly important that we blame not only the oil companies, but ourselves.

We have a responsibility. We need to make sure there is still beauty in the world for the people who come after us. We do not have dominion over this realm. We have to be stewards of it for future generations.

Here Lies Love

Eat your heart out, Evita, there's a new crazy dictator's wife to lionize: Imelda Marcos.

Of course, I am talking about the concept-album, song cycle, whatver you call it, "Here Lies Love" by David Byrne and Fatboy Slim.

I heard one of the tracks, "Why Don't You Love Me" by Cyndi Lauper and Tori Amos, but I didn't care for it out of context. As the final track of the album, it brings it all together. Marcos was completely out of touch by the end of it all.

Of course, the whole album is itself out of context in a way. Byrne was recently interviewed on NPR and he said he specifically omitted the part about the shoes, the most notorious punchline to the fallen dictator story. I agree with Byrne though. The shoes anecdote minimize all of the great and terrible things that Imelda Marcos did. The album uses a disco milieu to bring life to the fascinating story of Imelda, who was herself a fan of discos, and all the decadence that went along with them.

There are eerie parallels to Imelda and Eva Peron, however, where Juan Peron survived Evita, making her a more tragic figure, Imelda lives on today. She's running for office in the Phillippenes, if you can believe that. This album kind of plays on the public's obsession with power and fame. It reminds us that there is often a very dark side to beauty.

Betty Mas Bonita

*Spoilers*
Ugly Betty is over. The show ended well, with a good finalization for most of the characters.

Betty moved to London to start a magazine. Daniel left Mode, and Wilhemena got the magazine, and a little bit of humanity.

The show was part sitcom, part soap, so it had trouble finding and keeping an audience. I still loved it though. But like most of the good television of the past four or five years, the writer's strike seemed to deal it a huge death blow. Television schedules weren't regular anymore. When the split seasons finally aired, who the hell knew when they were on?

I want to thank ABC for keeping the show going as long as they did. Hulu kept me in touch through most of my missed times and my TiVo conflicts.

In spite of it all, the show reached me. I loved its portrayal of social conflicts, corporate ambition, and body image issues. It had the perfect knack of getting to the heart of issues while keeping its audiences entertained.

I for one will miss the red glasses on my screen each week.

Remembering Dixie Carter, or Do You Know Who Shirley Chisholm Is?

As a gay kid growing up in a repressive conservative household, Designing Women was the technicolor heroin to my impressionable youth.

When I found out Dixie Carter died, I was sad. Even though Ms. Carter's personal politics were actually much to the right of her DW alter ego Julia Sugarbaker, she (or more appropriately the writers of Designing Women) still taught me a lot about the unspoken pieces of US History.

Dixie Carter reminded me of my oldest sister Katherine. Kath and I both seemed to view the world in a somewhat skewed perspective, both metaphorically and physiologically due to our shared affliction of astigmatism. Kath was brash, but well-meaning, and today she conducts Julia-style dressings down of social mores on her own blog.

I was much more the reserved type. I was much more akin to Annie Potts' MaryJo on the show. I was reasonably informed, but less daring. I often felt stressed and put up with a lot that I shouldn't have.

When I finally got the gumption to get out, I did. But my abiding love and affection for my family means that there's no remaining ill will, even though we rarely see eye to eye. Even Kath and I rarely meet on the political spectrum, except for social issues. In a strange coincidence, Kath moved to Tennessee, which is actually Dixie Carter's home state. Kath also started ascribing to the Libertarian point of view, which is very much in line with that of Ms. Carter.

I prefer the fictional side of Ms. Carter. I am an unapologetic liberal. I believe in a strong federal government, not a namby-pamby network of nincompoop state legislators. But that is a topic for another day.

I want to thank Designing Women. The actors, writers, producers. Everyone helped me learn about America. I first learned about great women through that show -- Eleanor Roosevelt, Emily Dickinson, and Shirley Chisholm, just to name a few. The show inspired me to learn more about these women.

A couple of years ago, I chanced upon a copy of a DVD documenting the life of Shirley Chisholm. It was a video store clearance item, so I picked it up for under $5. It was money well-spent. Not only were the people of Designing Women correct in idealizing her, they didn't nearly go far enough. With all of the polarized and hateful, racists pundits going around decrying the "tyranny" of Obama in 2010, think back to what the country was like in the spring of 1972. The Vietnam War was in its death throes, Watergate was still just a hotel, and a black congresswoman from New York decided to run for President, against all the insurmountable odds, just because she wasn't going to let America maintain the status quo.

Though Ms. Carter is gone, I want to thank her again for allowing me to grow up inspired and with hope. And Ms. Carter, if you see Ms. Chisholm up in heaven, I hope you give her a high five from me.

In Space, No One Can Hear Me Throw Up

Aliens is on AMC tonight. It came on and Chad started watching it. Although I am a huge fan of Sigourney Weaver, but I had never seen any of the Alien movies, so I stuck around.

It was all going great. Bill Paxton, Paul Reiser, and a slew of other interesting actors who never really did much of anything else. I had no idea what the movie was even about, but I know that Aliens is the sequel to Alien.

This movie did have some great effects, especially being made 25 years ago. Everything was going great, until they took a flamethrower to a colonist who dies as an alien baby comes out of her stomach. I quietly left the living room and took my laptop to my bedroom to watch Kathy Griffin on Larry King Live (via YouTube).

The over-arching purpose of the Alien cinematic franchise (other than the obvious, make a shitload of money) seems to be to freak people out and make them afraid.

That is where I part ways with Aliens, and most horror movies. I swear sometimes, I have the constitution of a 60 year-old woman. But more than that, I have enough tension and stress in my life that watching a person covered in goo have a disgusting creature bursting from their digestive system seems like my idea of horror, which thefreedictionary.com defines as "an intense, painful feeling of repugnance and fear." I couldn't agree more.

Why do we have to be entertained by such terrible and unpleasant things? Moreover, why do we let people profit from our most visceral and profound emotions? I'd rather enjoy the pleasant things in life. Red wine, Ben & Jerry's, cheese, a nice canoe trip at Chain O' Lakes, and Sigourney Weaver in Working Girl. There are a thousand things I would rather do than subject my brain to terror, especially terror that's censored for TV and interrupted by commercials.

(If you click on the link, you can go to the Wikipedia page.)

106

I have 106 friends on Facebook.

This is a strange world in which we live. This friend count is more or less accurate. Some of these people I haven't seen in years, perhaps decades, but I do know all of these people.

I guess where I run into problems is that word "Friend." I think that friends are something that are all too often taken for granted. I have a Facebook friend in San Francisco, a Facebook friend in Mexico, and other Facebook friends all over. I really don't think you can cultivate deep friendships with people across these massive expansive distances, even when connected electronically.

I have very few friends I hang out with on a regular basis, and that's kind of the way I prefer it. But at the same time, I lament the distance between many of the other friends who I only ever see on Facebook. I'd love to be in Istanbul with my friend Shay (totally heart you, girl) but I am willing to settle for browsing through her holiday snaps on her Facebook page.

Instead of the classic telephone call, I suppose Facebook really is the new way to Reach Out and Touch Someone.

Charlie's Angels Aware

I loved singing and performing. I always have. I took singing lessons, I was in children's choir at church, performed in school plays and talent shows; I loved being in front of people. I think in some ways I've been very much a drama queen, hell, I've even thought about being a drag queen, but that moment has thankfully passed.

When I was a very young child, I would take the wooden spoon out of the drawer in the kitchen and pretend it was my microphone. The fireplace hearth was my stage. My parents are particularly fond of a song I made up about wanting to get a kiss from a jungle woman. Though I don't remember it myself very well, I guess it's probably a factual account, but I'm just old enough that we didn't have a camcorder yet to verify such an event. I guess in retrospect it would have made a much better story if I actually sang "Fire" by Jimi Hendrix.

In kindergarten, I put together a band called the Hot Buns. I think this was actually a name of a band from an episode of the TV show "Gimmie a Break" so I don't really think I should have been credited for my originality. The punchline was later that year, my buns really were hot after a paddling. The Christian school I went to used a name on the board -> checkmark by name -> aggregation of checkmarks = paddling system of punishment. It was probably not a big deal. I talked a lot. I was very chatty along with my annoying precociousness.

When I grew up a little, my parents put me in Children's Choir at church. It was much better than listening to the pastor's 45 minute prayers or impossibly intellectual sermons, so I was okay with being there. Although I often wanted to stay home so I could watch reruns of Charlie's Angels.

I remember Pat, the lady in charge of the choir was very enthusiastic about teaching us music. But we never learned anything useful. She taught us the words using a gigantic poster sized easel with a mix of words and rebuses. It was all handwritten and must have taken weeks, but at the time, I despised the pictogram learning process, but it helped me learn with both sides of my brain, an incredible gift. For all the benefits of cross-brain learning, we were never taught how to read music. It was all learned by ear. Later I took piano lessons and learned music, but until I was 9 I didn't know middle c from my middle finger.

But the absolute best aspects of Children's Choir were putting on costumes and doing choreography. Once, our church did Angels Aware, a cornball musical about how God was going to come and save the earth. I will forever remember all of the Ten Commandments in order, as long as someone gives me enough time to sing them out in my head. With the sparkly gold Christmas garland halos, the dry ice cloud effects, and the choreography, I was quite literally in a form of prepubescent gay heaven. Too bad my brother and one of my sisters were also there.

It was around the time I was growing out of my family's K-Tel Dumb Ditties album and transitioning to popular music and 60s tunes my sister was into. I was also into Christian pop for a while, but I got over that when I turned 15 or 16.

As I grew up more and more, my taste in music evolved into what can only be described
as the quintessential gay boy trying to fit into the world around him. My favorite song until I was 15 was "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now" by Starship. It came on the radio once in fifth grade. I was typically staying in from recess and helping the teacher clean the chalkboards with another student named Gabe. I started to dance and lip sync and Gabe just started laughing. I was unapologetic about my enthusiasm. The teacher was out of the room, and I probably wasn't supposed to be listening to a secular radio station anyway, so I just didn't care. Now I've realized that what I really loved was that the sexes of the singing voices were so indeterminate. Grace Slick's voice to an eleven year old may as well have been that of another man. Can you imagine the enthralling power this had on my sexually confused brain?

In high school, I got bolder. I was an avid fan of the B-52s, the notoriously gay party band from the Athens, Georgia music underground that billed itself as the "World's Greatest Party Band." To me, they were. I bought every CD I could get my hands on. Almost every Taco Bell paycheck went to a B-52s CD in one of those clunky, anachronistic CD long boxes.

The B-52s made me lose my young queer mind. I would dance and groove and sing along anywhere I heard their music. At the time I was puzzled why more of their songs didn't make it on the radio, but going back through their albums today, I realize, that they aren't that great. Fred Schneider, the lead singer can't carry a tune. He's got a kind of gravelly voice that makes me think of Suzanne Pleshette or Bea Arthur. Plus, their music was kind of subversive. It was positively dripping with lots of sexual innuendo. They have a song titled "Dirty Back Road." Incidentally, I didn't put that together with gay sex until a few weeks ago when I saw the CD case in my rack. I like to think I was progressive, but I was more naive than even I had imagined.

Sometime when I was about 15, I saw the movie Heathers for the first of what would prove to be an innumerable number of times. The movie was vividly absurdist and surreal, but funny as all hell. At the end, Sly and the Family Stone covered Que Sera Sera, and did an amazing job. It became my all-time favorite song. To this day it retains that title, in spite of 17 years of music inundating me from all conceivable media. The song was so utterly perfect because it sounded like an utter mess. In the slick world of the late 80s and early 90s music, the blues, funk and rhythm fused in my brain to turn me into a musical adult.

About the time I discovered Sly and the Family Stone, I stopped listening to Christian pop. I loathed the concept of it, for one thing. Even now, perhaps especially now I don't think it is in any way beneficial to anyone to package the message of gospel in mass-market crap music.

I went away to college and started listening to college type music. I got into Ben Folds Five, the Indigo Girls, Cake, Guster and Jimmy Buffett, just about everything. I got into dance music a little bit also, being that I did start going to gay bars and getting my dance groove on for real.

Now I feel sometimes that I have lost that musical feeling. In a world dominated by personalized access to music, I feel that we need more people willing to go out there and perform music, rather than just consume it. I think I would like to learn how to play an instrument. I only ever learned how to play the snare drum. The piano didn't really stick for some reason. I think playing music, as well as singing and dancing connect us to something larger than ourselves. I think this larger art is something the world needs more of.

Maybe I can gather up the Kindergarten gang and reform the Hot Buns. The band name carries a lot more irony now than it did in 1983. I imagine that our first number one hit will be a cover of the B-52s classic "Dirty Back Road."