Art Basel Miami, Day 1: Wongs and Ratts

Bienvenido a Miami! First on the agenda: Cuban coffee. My delightful former girlfriend (DFG) whisked me from the airport to Abuela’s in Miami Beach, where we picked up a cortadita for her and a not-too-sweet Cubano for me.

World's tiniest coffee cups.

On to DFG's airy new 12th floor pad, with expansive views of the bay dotted with sailboats, where we met up with DFG’s adorable current girlfriend (ACG). We clinked celebratory flutes of champagne on the balcony, which has a way-too-low wall – cue paralyzing vertigo – then headed to dinner at Bloom in Wynwood. 
On the way they pointed out the apartment building that passes for the Miami Police Department on Dexter, the show that has taught me everything I know about Miami. Most of which, apparently, is wrong, but I don't care, because Jennifer Carpenter.

Wynwood is a former industrial zone which emptied out when manufacturing moved to China, then filled back up when enterprising souls turned warehouses into galleries, shops and bars. It boasts a monthly art walk, buildings covered in arty graffiti and milling crowds of art-watchers in skinny jeans and platform wedges.

Bloom serves up cocktails in Mason jars, Latin/Asian fusion cuisine and a fabulous old-school jazz quartet. At dinner, ACG thanked me for being a Wong. They laughed at my quizzical expression. A Wong, I learned, is not (always) a Chinese person but their handy descriptor (the result of a texting typo) for an ex-lover who didn’t work out. But sometimes exes aren’t wrong – they serve their purpose, then we move on. So, an ex who’s right at the time, I argued, is a Ratt.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had my share of Wongs. I’ve certainly been one...once or twice.

This makes me happy.

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.

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.

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!

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?

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.

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!

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.

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.

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!

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.

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...

...like I said, dominoes.

Two boys wearing makeup.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

And the whole world rejoices.

My Alaska vs. Sarah Palin’s Alaska.

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.

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

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!

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.

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

Sarah Palin “debates.”

Courtesy of Adennak over at the Daily Kos:




















’Nuf said.

Scotch vincit omnia.

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.

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°

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

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

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.

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

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.