What Were They Thinking? (Part Two)

Come Sit On My Heart

What Were They Thinking?

Blink

I went to see Avatar with my partner the other day and I was reminded why seeing movies in American theaters is becoming an increasing challenge.

Oh certainly the rudeness, the noise, the entitlement, the lack of empathy - and yanno the rudeness - before the curtains open. Obviously not everywhere, but lots of places. Enough places.

Avatar is subtle as a mallet to the skull. That doesn't mean it's not an effective little piece of political theater. It is. I have proof.

Behind me, directly behind me, sat two African American couples in their early 30's. Only one of the four spoke for any length of time at all, but he more than made up for the other three's silence.

"This film has an environmentalist agenda," he announced, evenly. "It's just bleeding heart liberalism covertly apologizing for American and British colonialism. It's also an unasked for apologia to native Americans. It posits the idea what if the natives had driven the Americans out. James Cameron wants the natives to drive out the invaders and win."

I was abashed. Me and my cosy assumptions about the lessons of history are always challenged in America. But before I could even process this I witnessed a further perplexing exchange.

A young woman, also of color, leaned over the chair next to me and asked the two couples if they could move in just one seat, permitting her to sit next to her boyfriend. It would be so nice of you, oh please. The four were in the middle of the aisle, this wouldn't make a massive difference, she suggested, quite reasonably. After all the theatre was completely packed. It would be much appreciated.

The talkative one spoke for the group. "I'm quite comfortable where I am," he said. Then he looked away.

"Sorry, what?" said the young woman.

"I'm quite comfortable."

"You're comfortable? Well, that's nice. Would you like to help me too?"

"No," he said. The woman beside him spoke. "We're not moving," she said.

The young woman looked startled that she shared the planet with people this selfish and unapologetic about it too. She shook her head in wonder. They blinked back at her. Stalemate. Five minutes later, wouldn't you know, they were talking about the church they attend on Sunday's. They don't like that new pastor one little bit. He's always bringing in singers. There's no need for singers if the message is strong.

The New Boy

Based on a story by Roddy Doyle

Fall For Dance

Members of the Paul Taylor Dance Company in "Offenbach Overtures," which continues through Oct. 3 at New York City Center, 131 West 55th Street, Manhattan; (212) 581-1212; nycitycenter.org.

Any Excuse

Largerfeld Lady

Jesus As Revenge

Last week I got into a cab on Long Island (you had to wait in line at the stand). My driver wore dark glasses; moments earlier I overheard him telling another driver that his kids had been "taken" from him. He wore black sneakers with small holes on either side. He walked with a loping gracelessness, as though he couldn't wait to be out of other people's scrutiny. Right, I thought, Long Island is weird enough - I really don't need this - but I'm late for an event - so I got in.

Politicians are liars, he said. So are celebrities. So is the woman I married. The only stand up guy left in the goddamn world is Jesus. JE-SUS. I don't know if you agree or disagree with me. I don't actually care either. Jesus is the man and he will JUDGE us all and those who don't know it will burn in HELL. Shall I say it again? You need me to say it again?

Oh do shut the fuck up, I thought, it's raining.

You know, some people have gotten into an argument with me about this, he said. Imagine. But I just gotta tell them how I feel. I have to show them. I really can't let it pass. Why should I?

Christ.

And you see all this economic turmoil (he said "turmoil")? Jesus is going to say to the greedy, and to the sinners, and to the city councilmen, and to the politicians: you are all going to burn in HELL. That day is coming. That day of rapture.

He sounded like he was getting an erection, but that would have required irony, and they don't do irony on Long Island. They do absolute certainty LIKE THIS FOR EMPHASIS, SEE?

Then he hit his steering wheel, hard, for emphasis, see. Thinking of poor unfortunate Jesus being mocked was making him physically angry - or was it the other way around? You could actually see all the bubbling anger which he kept calling Christian love in the veins of his neck.

Orestes Pursued by the Furries

- after Adolphe William Bouguereau

GENDER ANALYZER

We guess fastlad.blogspot.com is written by a woman (56%), however it's quite gender neutral. Try to guess the gender of the person writing your own blog: GENDERANALYZER

It's All Because (The Gays Are Getting Married)

The Fire Next Time

"I do not mean to be sentimental about suffering--enough is certainly as good as a feast--but people who cannot suffer can never grow up, can never discover who they are. That man who is forced each day to snatch his manhood, his identity, out of the fire of human cruelty that rages to destroy it knows, if he survives his effort, and even if he does not survive it, something about himself and human life that no school on earth--and, indeed, no church--can teach. He achieves his own authority, and that is unshakeable."

- James Baldwin

The Empty House Of The Stare

Yesterday was a long but quite satisfying day. After work I grabbed a quick coffee and hopped on the W train around 28th Street. It was after eight so there were quite a few seats. Three young men got on moments after me and choose to stand. They were all in their early 20's.

Oh no, not one of those stories, you say. Well it isn't.

In Ireland we'd probably call these three lads Crusties. Straight white dudes with dreadlocks, skinny jeans, reggae motifs sown onto their bags, more than a few visible stains of God knows what about their person, hippie throwbacks sans the altruism. Total outcasts. Whatever.

One of them leans too close to me. In New York there's an unspoken subway etiquette. We prize our personal space. This dude is clueless, he has his back to me, his elbow - standing - is much too close to my face. He's only hovering there for a few seconds but it's already a lifetime, long enough for me to know he's a little entitlement monster. But it's nothing personal, he doesn't know anyone else is alive, that's all.

When they sit down I hear them say this: "I made a bomb yesterday with lighter fluid." The other two smile approvingly. "Heh, look what I bought," says another one, and he pulls out a knuckle duster. The talk goes on like this. They have big boners for violence. They really want to hurt people. Setting a bomb would be so cool.

Another one asks: "How close did you come to seriously hurting someone?" The other two smile approvingly. "I broke this one guys nose. I stamped on it like this. Blood everywhere." He demonstrates with his boot. Another says: "There was this couple at a party. Man they were so annoying. Everything they said, I just wanted to kill them." The other two smiled approvingly. Actually smile is overstating it, they sort of sneered, the smiles never reached their eyes, which had, I noticed, no real expression, and it's not drugs, it's illness. I have no doubt where their lives are leading them.

Just when I'm thinking of telling them they seriously need to get laid one of them says: "I really want to see a bomb go off, man. Just imagine."

Involuntarily, in my mind's eye, I see the white flash and the black smoke and the red blood on the streets. The thing you never forget is the smell. No need to go into the details. I'm suddenly glaring at them. Stupid, cruel unempathetic idiot fuckwits. You wouldn't last five minutes in the Bogside. They'd send you home crying, babies. There are 10 years olds there tougher than you.

Not for the first time, I reflect, that in this great country there's a terrifying gulf between rhetoric and reality. And I reflect that having nothing but sea to shining sea on either side has made the place more than a little insular. And that this proud nations ostentatious religiosity may be nothing more than the reflex of it's overarching capitalism. Anyway, as I occasionally do, I thought of Yeats:

We are closed in, and the key is turned
On our uncertainty; somewhere
A man is killed, or a house burned,
Yet no clear fact to be discerned:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

A barricade of stone or of wood;
Some fourteen days of civil war;
Last night they trundled down the road
That dead young soldier in his blood:
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build in the empty house of the stare.

Nice White Lady

If celebrities lived in the Midwest

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Days

What are days for?

Days are where we live.
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

- Philip Larkin

Some People Are Ducks

When I was a teenager in Donegal back in the 1980's my father decided, the way you do, that it would be fun to keep some ducks. We certainly had the land for it, and he had - he decided - the right duck keeping temperament. 

You have to have the right duck keeping temperament. Ducks are not for the faint of heart.

For one thing, ducks are massively wilful contrarians. I've never seen another living thing, including metropolitan opera singers, who can throw a temper tantrum like a duck. Among their notable shortcomings: Ducks are creatures of habit, ducks detest change. Any kind of change, in their meals, the weather, the hour when the postman passes - if it's one minute off it's usual rhythm expect to hear about it.

Our ducks had a little path they took to the water every morning, regular as clockwork. First they raced out off the duck house,  looked around cautiously, stretched a cautious wing, then commenced that godawful peevish quacking. This was part of the soundtrack of my adolescence. 

One morning, I recall, there was a twig on the path to the water. It had fallen from a tree. It was just a little twig, perhaps six inches end to end. The females arrived at it first, followed by the drakes. They peered at it. They froze. A huge silence descended. I marvelled that the morning had come to a complete standstill. 

It was established - God knows how - that the twig had not been there yesterday. The smallest one, a caustic little brown female, became their spokesperson. She let out such a caterwaul, such a supernatural blast, that you could have heard her in Poland. Then the others joined her too. 

After that, their protest lodged, they all marched back to the duck house, and waited in silence, far away from the massively offending twig that had not been there yesterday.

The morning had begun in error. It was up to someone else to fix it.

Craigslist as Poetry performed by Maya Angelou

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Disenfranchised Grief

My brother has Borderline Personality Disorder. People with BPD create chaos, whirlwinds of rage and distress that cannot be stemmed, only withstood. Helplessly, over decades, I've watched him consume himself. I knew the day would come when he would lash out, too.

When I returned home to Ireland last summer I finally saw the scale of the ruination my brother left behind. Literal ruination. Our home, which has stood at the shoreline of north Inishowen for over 300 years, looked like a coda in a Charles Dickens novel. The drive was strewn with fallen branches, the garden had grown wild, windows were broken, the place was an echoing husk.

I won’t describe how I felt here. I’ll just say what I saw. The door was locked. Home. He’d sold it. He made my father sign a will a week before he died. He told no one. He pocketed the money, bought a house, a car, showed himself a high time flying to Europe, to South America, Africa too. The house had sold for over a million dollars. It was a complete reversal of fortune, he told himself, one that he richly deserved.

His wife, an astute individual who had married him the year before, divorced him  quickly, taking half. They had both moved on a year before I took the walk to the front door.

Now I was standing outside my old home with my partner, who could see what this was costing me and was gracious beyond words. I wanted, I told him, to see it One Last Time. We walked to the back of the house. A single rhododendron bush, planted years earlier by my father, had somehow fought its way out of the towering brambles and was blooming absurdly. The moment I noticed it my partner found an open door.

We went in. MY BPD brother had left behind odd little memorials to himself: a few of his garish old self-portraits, prominently placed, - like shrunken heads on spikes, I remember thinking – indicating his might and significance. It was such an odd thing to do. Every room had one. I Lived Here. Look It’s Me. Boo. 

The staircase had collapsed so we had a fairly dangerous time of it getting to the high second floor, which was still solid. As soon as we ascended we realized we couldn’t go back down. Trapped. It was too gothic.

I walked to my bedroom. It was completely stripped, as he promised it would be: all my journals, books, dairies, photos, letters, everything gone, even the wallpaper. He’d sent me an email the year before telling me he had burned everything belonging to me. “It was the only thing to do,” he wrote. He included a hyperlink on Amazon that led to a book that he claimed had helped him work through his grief. He did this to make me feel bad, rather than make himself feel better. In the middle of my old bedroom (a room filled with extraordinary memories) he’d placed another effigy. I threw it out.

While I was walking from room to room my partner was looking for a way to get us out safely since the staircase had collapsed. I never saw him look so resolved to do something in his life. I walked to my father’s bedroom. Another effigy. I threw it out.

Disenfranchised Grief. It’s a marvelous phrase. Grief that remains unexpressed or hidden. Gay boys know all about it. I know all about it. I wasn’t sure how I felt about all this. I’m still not. It was, of course, ghastly beyond words, but there was more to it. It felt like an exorcism too.

My partner found a way out. Feet first though a narrow crawl space in the back bedroom. Exactly like a birth canal. The exaggerated symbolism made us laugh.

Outside it was the most marvelous June day. Vasty clouds sailed over the sparkling lake. As though nothing bad had ever happened, or could.

It's awful. You can't do a fucking thing about it. Be on your way.

As I dusted myself off and we looked around us for the last time a few of the neighbors kids spotted us. “Don’t go into that house,” one of them shouted. “It’s haunted.”

Latchmaker, 1850's

Circa 1850s occupational portrait of a latchmaker, photographer unknown. One of 25 occupational portraits in the Library of Congress daguerreotype collection. Image culled from Shorpy, a photo blog.

A Memory

One late October, just before Halloween, I remember my father raking leaves. It was early evening, the sky was overcast and the air was absolutely still, not a puff of wind, dry twigs cracked and split under my shoes as I walked toward him.

He was very mysterious to me. Stoic, self-contained, not given to chatter; dressed in an overcoat and a cloth cap he gathered the large brown sycamore leaves into handy pyres and set fire to them one by one.

I loved that. The dense white smoke rising up in tall plumes like a spirit set free from a bottle. Sometimes, not often, the leaves would catch fire and burn steadily. First they would glow red at the edges, then flame in the center and seem to dematerialize in a ring of fire before your eyes.

He rarely said a word. He set about his tasks with enormous concentration: off to the shed for the wheelbarrow; back to the shed for the rakes; for a difficult job he’d bring out a long gas burner; sometimes he’d stand back and survey all his work.

Our terriers would race through the orchard together. A black rook would eye us as we passed. Neighbors would stop at the gate and say a few words. We’d hear the church bell chime the half hour. Stillness, silence, himself and myself. Eventually he’d light a cigarette and his gaze would fall on me. “Everything changes,” he told me that day. “Everything.”

Leviticus 18

Lawrence King, 15

It’s a commonplace in contemporary reporting: when it comes to matters of sexual orientation, American teenagers are more liberal than their seniors. We’ve all seen countless articles that prophecy that, when they grow to voting age, these nascent progressives will transform the nation: marriage equality will, we’re told, become a reality.

But what proof do we have that teenagers in American high schools are not every bit as bullying, shaming and intolerant as the adults that sired them were decades earlier? Why would we accept they’re more inoculated against a political and religious culture that has menaced and marked gay people as a handy vote catcher?

Yesterday Lawrence King, a 15 year old gay boy, was shot in the head, twice, at point blank range by his 14 year old classmate. That the classmate felt emboldened enough – culturally sanctioned enough – to act like this tells you all you need to know.

The shooting happened in an district of southern California, and not in Montgomery Alabama; it happened in full view of a classroom full of 20 other students. Some of those other students actually told the kid he better “watch out” on the day that he was shot dead by his unnamed assailant.

"He would come to school in high-heeled boots, makeup, jewelry and painted nails -- the whole thing," said Michael Sweeney, 13, an eighth-grader. "That was freaking the guys out."

We can’t have that now, can we? God forbid that some otherwise completely unaffected straight boy should ever suffer a moment’s fucking discomfort. No, there was only one solution. Everyone would understand.

Ionian Song

Just because we have broken their statues,
just because we have driven them out of their temples,
the gods did not die because of this at all.
O Ionian land, it is you they still love,
it is you their souls still remember.
When an August morning dawns upon you
a vigor from their life moves through your air;
and at times an ethereal youthful figure,
indistinct, in rapid stride,
crosses over your hills.

- Constantine P. Cavafy (1911)

Gay Belfast

Fuck Off

I can't decide which part of this Dermitage advertisement (which I just saw on Yahoo's homepage) is more offensive: the assumption it makes about American credulity or the misguided expectation that millions of us will now want to do anything other than telephone their board members and call them all a bunch of distended sheep's droppings.

Dedication

To the strange woman unselfconsciously eating salted soup crackers on the 7 train this morning; you gladdened my heart far more than you will ever know.

Happy New Year.

Swan Park

I haven't spent a Christmas of this new century in Ireland. But if I was in Donegal today this is the first place I'd go. It's called the Castle Bridge. It's about 300 yards from the house where I grew up. 

The Keep in the center of this photograph dates from the early 1500's, one of the many surprisingly hardy remnants of the old Gaelic order. It belonged to the O'Doherty clan. There are two castles behind it - one standing, one in ruins. 

I had a memorable kiss on that bridge one September evening, but that night I wasn't thinking about the many people who had crossed it or how they might have fared. 

Tonight I am.

*(Image culled from Inishindie, a remarkable gardening blog.)

The Importance of Being Important

Titles interest me, and in particular honorifics, those impressive multi-syllabic mouthfuls that people have bestowed upon them by toadying underlings (or that, more often, they claim for themselves). I’m thinking of fascist dictators, British royalty and of course the Catholic clergy.

It can be said with certainty that Catholics have cornered the market on honorifics with the most bling. For your information and edification, here’s how to address:

A Deacon is just plain old Mister X.
A Priest is Father X.
A Bishop is Bishop X. Also His Excellency, His Lordship or The Most Reverend.
An Archbishop is Your Grace.
A Cardinal is Cardinal X but also Your Eminence. If you write to a Cardinal you must begin with His Eminence, First Name Cardinal Last Name.
A Pope is Holy Father or Your Holiness. (Your Holiness!) You must never never never say a Pope’s name whilst in a conversation with him. If you do you’ll be read by the Vatican clergy, who can make the House of Ninja look like rank amateurs.
Address all letters to His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI. (I know I do).

Monarchs aren’t nearly as much fun. They don’t dress as arrestingly, and their titles carry a sulphurous hint of militarism that’s a little too obvious.

Your Imperial Majesty
Your Imperial and Royal Highness
Your Illustrious Higness, Your Illustriousness

Fascinating, eh? And don’t forget the Orange Order and their natural kinsmen in the Ku Klux Klan, who share bizarre, paternalistic sounding honorifics like:

Worshipful Master, which is, I assure you, not a Tom of Finland title, but an actual honorific. This honorific becomes even more amusing if you’ve ever looked at a district lodge. Only a bunch of humorless heterosexual men in tight fitting suits could address each other thusly without laughing.
Grand Master is I think the very top Kahuna, and not the seminal rap artist of the 1980’s.

Of course the biggest, most blinged out honorifics usually – but not always – belong to the boys. Because honorifics are intended to signify and to intimidate, and to end discussion rather than encourage it. Don’t laugh at me, eh? If you laugh – and oh you should – then they’re not doing their work.

Commodore 64

Sorry to trip up your day with a little involuntary nostalgia but have a look at this.

It’s a Commodore 64. It attached to your color TV. It could do nothing. It was the last word in sound and graphics in 1983. Which, face it, was a long time ago.

I had to have one. Fuck knows why. I’d have been much better off with an Apple Mac. But my Da thought computers belonged on Space 1999 and not in Donegal, and I was amazed that I got him to purchase it for me.

There were games on it. Crap ones. You could also make your TV display a rapidly changing, epilepsy inducing spectrum. Fuck knows why you’d have wanted to. Data was stored on bizarre looking floppy disc that had huge holes in the center, like old 45 records with the center torn out.

No one on my street had one. After I played with it for 20 minitues, I didn’t want one either.

Passive-Aggressive Notes

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Thanksgiving 2007

We had a Connecticut Thanksgiving. It was 65 degrees out. The foliage would normally have cleared by late November, but the unseasonably warm weather has encouraged it to linger on. The vivid colors of these trees were inexpressibly wonderful.

Marine Lance Corporal James Blake Miller

Luis Sinco wonders if his photograph of a jaded and bleeding Marine in Falluja helped to sour an American dream.

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Nads For Men

Lost your Nads? At Duane Rede you can buy some more for $8.99. Whatta country!

Boy With A Basket Of Fruit

- Caravaggio c. 1593.

The critic Robert Hughes memorably described Caravaggio's boys as "overripe bits of rough trade, with yearning mouths and hair like black ice cream."