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.

Meet Zelda.

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

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

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

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

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

Small Wonder.

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

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

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

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

If, indeed.

Swoon, part 2.

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









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

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

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

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

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

The crush-worthy Rachel Maddow.

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

My fellow Americans, I give you Rachel Maddow.










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

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

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

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

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

My new obsession.

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

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

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

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

Hot gal of the day?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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













and, mercifully, the reverse is also true.

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

The hoarder.

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

I guess someone had infringed on her privacy.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The woman is a MAID.