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Thursday, March 31, 2005
"They are creating a deep and terrible sorrow that is unbearable," Shlomo Amar, Israel's Sephardic chief rabbi, said yesterday at a news conference in Jerusalem attended by Israel's two chief rabbis, the patriarchs of the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox and Armenian churches, and three senior Muslim prayer leaders. "It hurts all of the religions. We are all against it."
Abdel Aziz Bukhari, a Sufi sheik, added: "We can't permit anybody to come and make the Holy City dirty. This is very ugly and very nasty to have these people come to Jerusalem."
-- New York Times
If that's all you knew of the article, you might think these were moderate, peace-loving religious figures who'd joined forces to condemn a radical, hate-mongering, anti-Semitic or anti-Arab or anti-somethingorother group that was planning to converge on Jerusalem for nefarious purposes. But no: in fact, it's these guys (and yes, they're all guys) who are doing the hating. They're holding hands and singing "Kum By Freaking Ya" and telling anyone who'll listen how evil homosexuals are and insisting that the international gay pride festival currently scheduled for August should be cancelled.
Calling us ugly and nasty? As opposed to what--all those sweet lil' suicide bombers and mosque murderers that make Jerusalem such a great place to live? Pot, please meet kettle.
Wednesday, March 30, 2005
THINGS I HATE RIGHT NOW
NOSTALGIA: This is nothing new. I say this all the time. But I used to say it because I had this, like, moral aversion to nostalgia. Now I understand that the problem is much more serious. See, last week during a tech rehearsal, some folks started reminiscing about Schoolhouse Rock, and of course they broke into a chorus of "Interplanet Janet," "Conjunction Junction," and that adjective song that Blossom Dearie did. And I started feeling nauseous. Honest-to-goddess: nauseous. (Interesting side note: the "algia" of "nostalgia" technically comes from the Greek word "algos," meaning "pain.") So apparently I'm allergic to nostalgia. Too bad, because there great money to be made hosting dance nights with earnestly retro themes.
LIVE OAK TREES: In parks, they're fine. On plantations, they're fine. When they're hanging over my backyard, shedding leaves and dropping stinging caterpillars and providing a home for loud, noisy crows, however...well, that's a different story.
STUPID PEOPLE: It's like they've been hibernating all winter and have suddenly awoken, but they're not looking for food, they're looking for ways to annoy me.
Saturday, March 26, 2005
TWO THINGS
1. You know how you're watching TV and there's a story on the news about a child molester and they show a pic and it's some typically dirty old man and you think, "Wow, that's a dirty old man"? Well apparently, my generation has now entered the child molester age. Funny, it seems like just yesterday when we were the ones being molested...
2. We opened last night. It wasn't always pretty, and it wasn't always like we meant it to be, but we made it. Come join us, won't you?
Tuesday, March 22, 2005
Man Taken For Mental Evaluation After Chasing Gulls Naked!
I swear, we didn't plan that as a publicity stunt or anything. I was just out feeding the birds and...well, you can read the rest.
Monday, March 21, 2005
The language of persecution is a galvanizing force for groups of all sorts: political, religious, ethnic, sexual, and otherwise. Still, given martyrdom's recent associations with Islamic extremism and the religious right's marked fear/loathing of Muslims, it's a bit unsettling to stumble across The Voice of the Martyrs--a Christian site that, with very few changes, could easily be designed to recruit suicide bombers for Jesus.
Sunday, March 20, 2005
I'm so behind on email that I'm just getting around to one sent about a week ago by my friend Elizabeth, the de facto curator at the Southern Food and Beverage Museum. In said email, she mentions a New York Times article by David Brooks, one of the most admirable, thoughtful, level-headed, socially progressive Republicans I know (and no, believe it or not, those aren't all oxymorons).
It's a beautiful piece Mr. Brooks has written, summing up some of the feelings I have about life in general and New Orleans culture in particular. I'm posting it here in its entirety because it'll be moved to the NYT archive soon and only available for paying customers. (It's also available at something called the Daily Breeze, but, like, who are those people?) Anyway read it, ignore it, whatever. Frank Rich still ranks first in my book, but David's jumped a peg....
SATURDAY NIGHT LITE
By David Brooks
Let me tell you a story to illustrate that we are living in a pusillanimous age. I was in New Orleans last Saturday night, dining with a wonderful group of people at a culinary landmark called Antoine's. Our host had arranged for a remorseless avalanche of delicious food, served in prodigious 19th-century style. There were about six appetizers, including oysters, foie gras and various lobster confabulations. There were main courses aplenty - fish, then crab, then steak.
Then dessert floated onto the table: a meringue pie roughly the size of a football helmet. And with it came coffee, but not just any coffee. It was called "devil's brew." A copper bowl was put in the middle of the table with some roiling mixture of brandy-ish spirits inside. Coffee was poured in and the concoction set aflame.
The waiter thrust a ladle into the inferno and lifted up long, dripping streams of blue fire, hoisting the burning liquid into hypnotizing, showy cascades. He poured out a circle of flame onto the tablecloth in front of us. It was a lavish pyre of molten, inebriating java and then, when he swung around to where I was sitting, I turned and asked the climactic question:
"Is it decaf?"
I was sitting there in an orgy of excess. My head was fogged with wine, bourbon, conversation and a couple of hours at the craps tables at Harrah's, but strong is the power of the zeitgeist. So I did what all of us middle-aged Prufrocks do when coffee follows dinner. I asked, "Is it decaf?"
In this circumstance, this was like Nero pausing during the incineration of Rome to worry about the dangers of secondhand smoke. This was like Henry VIII, lying amid a great mound of gnawed bones and empty steins, remarking, "I'll take the low-carb mead." This is like the Marquis de Sade fretting nervously over his leather collection because it might be an affront to animal rights.
If 18,000 calories and four kinds of booze didn't kill me, there was no way a smidgen of caffeine was going to keep me awake.
And yet we live in the age of the lily-livered, in which fretting over things like excessive caffeination is built into the cultural code.
I blame the people at the top for setting the tone. We live in an age in which the White House is staffed by tidy-desked, white-shirted, crisply coiffed StairMaster addicts, whose idea of sensual decadence is an extra pinch of NutraSweet in the lunchtime iced tea. We've got a president whose personal philosophy is: freedom is God's gift to humanity, but bedtime is 9:30.
This isn't the empire of an American Caesar; it's the empire of faux Caesar salad.
I blame parents. Kids are raised amid foam corner protectors and schooled amid flame-retardant construction paper. They're drugged with a vast array of pharmaceuticals to keep them from becoming interesting. They go from adult-structured tutorials to highly padded sports practices to career-counselor-approved summer internships.
I blame the titans of corporatism. Fitness is now the prime marker of capitalist machismo, so the higher reaches of corporate America are filled with tightly calved Blackberries in human form, who believe that extremism in pursuit of moderation is no vice. They have become such obsessive time-maximizers that all evening, in what used to be known as social life, they keep an eye on the need to be up, fit and early, for the next day's productivity marathon.
I blame the arbiters of virtue. Sometime over the past generation we became less likely to object to something because it is immoral and more likely to object to something because it is unhealthy or unsafe. So smoking is now a worse evil than six of the Ten Commandments, and the word "sinful" is most commonly associated with chocolate.
Now we lead lives in which everything is a pallid parody of itself: fat-free yogurt, salt-free pretzels, milk-free milk. Gone, at least among the responsible professional class, is the exuberance of the feast. Gone is the grand and pointless gesture.
But at least we have New Orleans. After stumbling out of Antoine's, some of us headed across the street to a piano bar run by Gennifer Flowers, Bill Clinton's old flame. And there was Gennifer herself in a black leather miniskirt, belting out a song called "Ya Gotta Have Boobs."
It was a reminder that no matter how dull and responsible you become, an alternative and much stranger moral universe is always just one slippery step away.
Friday, March 18, 2005
An open letter to the Irish
Dear Irishmenandwomen of New Orleans:
Please stop celebrating now.
Don't get me wrong, I love you guys. You're always good for a joke or a drink or a joke about drinking. And baby, no one has looked that good in green since Tawny Kitaen.
But yo, seriously, cut it out.
Your parades, they're all over the place. Everywhere I go, every backstreet I take to avoid you, I turn the corner, and you're there. It's a little like Aliens, but with green beer.
And your music at these parades--where's the "Danny Boy"? Where's the Clannad? Where's the U2, for freakincrissake? All I hear is Lionel Richie, and honey, he may be black, but he ain't black Irish.
I'm asking you nicely, now. St. Paddy's Day is over and done. Please give me back my life and my streets and my regular, horse piss-colored beer. Don't make me come out there with my tam-o-shanter and my cudgel--I'll go totally druidic on your asses. I mean it.
Sincerely,
A Partially Irish American Who's Totally Over It
Thursday, March 17, 2005
Hey, if you think I'm quiet now, just wait 'till next week.
Despite all the stomach-churning and nail-biting though, when we finally get on stage and start freaking out the squares, it'll be, like, totally worth it.
Wednesday, March 16, 2005
And for the spam du jour, we have:
Call out Gouranga be happy!!!
Gouranga Gouranga Gouranga ....
That which brings the highest happiness!!
I don't know what it means, but it certainly is optimistic. It'd be nice if the spammer included a phone number, though, just so I could call and complain should happiness not arrive in 4 - 6 weeks as promised.
Monday, March 14, 2005
And now, a word from Mr. Steve...
Hello, boys and girls! Mr. Steve here again, filling in for that scatterbrained faggotini who just can't turn down a good project. Honestly, people: either that boy learns to say "no" every once in a while, or he ought to start packing his bags for Whitfield.
But issues of mental stability aside, as he was dashing out the door, Richard said I had free reign to discuss whatever I liked today, so naturally, Mr. Steve has chosen to discourse on his favorite topic, etiquette--specifically, etiquette and the telephone. Lesson number one: the lost art of how and when to answer the phone.
Conversing by phone is simply another way of communicating with friends, family, and complete strangers. You may not be able to shake their hand, and they may not be able to witness your grimace when they begin recounting the oft-recounted tale of their sciatic woes, but nevertheless, phone conversations are a form of social interaction and come with their own list of dos and don'ts.
It is especially important that you, the recipient of the call, greet your caller appropriately. Even if you have caller identification devices attached to your phone and can see that the caller is actually your brother Herbert, who can only be calling to borrow money to support his exotic dancer girlfriend, answering with a curt "What do you want?" is never appropriate. Nor, I think, is the generic and timid, "Hello?" I suggest devising your own unique greeting. Personally, I recommend answering as "the help." Nothing elicits quite so much respect from callers as a throaty, haughty "Mr. Steve's residence, who may I say is calling?" Adopting foreign affectations is also acceptable, as in the French "Allo?" and Mr. Steve's favorite, the Japanese "Moshi moshi?"
Choosing when to answer the telephone is also particularly important--not necessarily for your caller, but for those in your physical presence. If your Aunt Sophie has driven all the way down from Schenectady to inform you that you figure prominently in her estate plans, opting to answer a ringing phone as she regales you with the madcap antics of the recent Casino Night Celebration sponsored by the Lady Banks' Rose Cultivators Society of Terre Haute might diminish your share of the eventual loot or have you cut from the will altogether. On the other hand, should you find yourself in your bedchamber, entertaining a mortician with whom you were sent on a blind date and with whom you agreed to canoodle because he looked like fun but have lately begun to realize that he's no more fun than your average mortician, taking a phone call might be the most discreet way of suggesting that he put back on his gabardine and scurry back to the morgue.
A final note on answering: if you are the sort of person to use a cellular telephone device--and from the looks of you, you are--do not under any circumstances answer calls during the burning-of-Atlanta scenes in Gone with the Wind, especially if you happen to be at a very special, one-night-only cinematic screening with surround sound at the Odeon Cineplex on 3rd Street. Such crimes are simply beyond the pale.
Thursday, March 10, 2005
He's back! He's back! After a long, long hiatus, the Vegetable Man is back!
Just when I thought things were getting a little too gentrifaggotized around here, a sign that there's still a neighborhood under all the new paint and crepe myrtle bougieness.
Maybe I'm romanticizing him a bit too much. Maybe I'm overlooking the fact that he's a poor, possibly unbalanced black man living in the South, just managing to scrape by. But screw that--his voice makes me happy.
Wednesday, March 09, 2005
A note to the many moldy musclequeens of the world: if you happen to pass me on the street and I happen to utter, "Ay, yi, yi! El Mutante!", then yes, sweetie, even though my Spanish may be way off, I'm totally talking about you.
Monday, March 07, 2005
Some delectable spampoetry, courtesy of the boyfriend:
Her odd shaped t-shirt adheres or maybe a shining sony show its value.
His expensive bra smiles however, any given purple red picture run or
a round laptop is angry.
Mine white underwares looks around.
Any round-shaped kitchen lies however, mine white spoon stares.
Any noisy bicycle arrives.
Any shining recycle bin lies.
Mine stupid sport shoes stinks.
His small stupid sofa arrives.
A given round green gun stands-still at the place that a given
expensive soft wine arrives.
Our noisy car sleeps while our children purple picture stares.
Sunday, March 06, 2005
Frangoulis' producer on his new "Follow Your Heart" CD is Emanuele Ruffinengo, who seems determined to squander this talent on the same feckless, drill-bore sentiment that made Whitney Houston such a terror in the 1992 Black & Decker solo "I Will Always Love You."
-- CNN
Black and Decker solo? I don't think I've ever heard a more accurate description of that drill bit of a diddy. Hedwig would totally agree.
Friday, March 04, 2005
Here's a stoneresque thought: when I string together a series of words to make a sentence, chances are pretty good that, if the sentence is of any length, it's practically unique. The longer the sentence, the better the chances. Take, for example, this innocuous phrase:
It should come as no surprise that Mrs. Higginbotham, a chronic agoraphobe with a nasty case of narcolepsy (the result of a traumatic childhood injury to her windpipe of which she refuses to speak), never earned her driver's license.
Now google it (don't forget the quotation marks). See? No one's ever written that before--or at least no one's written it and posted it to the web.
That's kinda nifty, if you ask me: endless possibilities for expression. Steer clear of cliches and catchphrases, and most of what you say will be your own.
And no, I'm not baked. As luck would have it, I do have Rolling Kansas playing muted in the background, but all I can think of is, "Dag, that James Roday's cute."
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
Yes, folks, it's that time of year--time for the most hootin'est, hollerin'est thespian face-off since Portia de Rossi went toe-to-toe with Ellen Degeneres: DramaRama12. If you're in the N-to-the-izzO this weekend, mosey on down to the Contemporary Arts Center and the Louisiana Children's Museum to get your fill of theatre, dance, performance art, and all things in-between. It's cheap, it's boisterous, it's boozy, and as an added bonus (aka "lagniappe"), you'll get a sneak-peek of our new show, The Gulls. What's not to love about that?
I'm asking you nice. Remember, I know where you live.
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