INTERNATIONAL ROCK CITY

TOP THINGS - 2005

Might as well add my topisms, since most everyone else is.

Top Movie: WALK ON WATER (although it was released on the film festival circuit in 2004, it played in San Francisco in 2005)

Top Album: TEAM SLEEP

Top Country: Spain

Top Prosecuter: Patrick J. Fitzgerald

Top Priest: Reverend Leonard Walker

Top Sportsperson: Venus Williams

Top Sports Team: Detroit Pistons

Top Blog: Sully, of course

Top Humanitarian Organization: International Red Cross

Top Outrageous News Stories: HERE

Top Asshole: Pope Benedict XVI

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

A NEW YEAR'S REQUEST TO SONGWRITERS

Please stop using the following cliches or any variation thereof in your future works:

"Shine"...

"Believe"...

"Your eyes"...

"Love from above"...

"Like the Sun"...

"Like the rain"...

"I bleed"...

"Wounds won't heal"...

"Fall from grace"...

Or any lyric ever written in a Burt Bacharach song.

Please. Don't. Thank you.

LYING TO CHILDREN ABOUT SANTA CLAUS

On Good Morning America this morning, four children where brought into the studio to demonstrate a new Christmas phone service where the parents can ring the North Pole and put Santa on the phone for their kids.

Slice:

Your children have made their lists for Santa Claus, but can they be sure he actually received them? Perhaps a phone call from Santa would ease their worries. Four kids joined the anchors for Friday's "Around the Watercooler" to listen to a call from Santa arranged through SantaSpeaking.com. Santa "knew" plenty of details about their hobbies, interests and the names of family members. He also told one of the boys to spend more time on his homework. Wow, Santa really does see everything!

* * * *

Everyone in the studio and the millions of people watching the program knew the kids were being lied to. The kids themselves looked wide-eyed and confused. I was disturbed. It's one thing to lie to your kids in the privacy of your own home. It's another thing all together to manipulate their sensitive, fragile emotions on national television. And isn't Christmas, at its core, a celebration of Jesus? What would Jesus say about lying? Would he say, "thou shalt deceive thy children to perpetuate materialistic self-serving capitalism?" Ralph Reed probably thinks so.

I'm not so sure.

TO RUSSIA WITH LOVE

My buddy, Ian, on assignment for the Peace Corps in Pavlodar, Kazakhstan - and one of my favorite people on this earth - has written a very powerful entry in his blog. Most of his posts have been witty and fun. This one is not. It does, however, illustrate his powerful empathy for people, which sometimes overwhelms him, but will ultimately spread greatness throughout this country upon his return.

Slice:

a gigantic cloud is growing, apparently from the ground. it is huge, easily the largest thing you have ever seen. its colors are on the edges of color. where orange becomes red and where blue becomes violet. they are vivid, bright, and captivating. you cannot take your eyes from it, it is amazing. it is beautiful.

the cloud, in the shape of a mushroom you have now realized, grows in size until it stands many kilometers into the air. it doesn't move, there is no wind. it also doesn't dissipate. it just stays there, as if it is waiting for you to go along with your day.

after some time you comply and begin to play again with your friends, but all the while sneaking glances over your shoulder at this giant beautiful mushroom cloud standing over your small town.

STAND UP

Sully's take on Brokeback Mountain:

BROKEBACK: I saw it last night. Maybe my hopes were too high, but the movie didn't quite sustain itself for the time it took, I felt. The short story accomplished it all with more concision and thereby with more punch. But the movie, as you'd expect with Ang Lee, had enormous integrity. Heath Ledger was magnificent in his indirection - this was a rare movie in which the anguish of the outwardly conforming, "straight-acting" gay man was exposed in all its raw pain. Three scenes remain in my mind. There's a shot after the two men leave each other for the first time when Ennis [Ledger] stays upright and walks nonchalantly as his lover drives away. But then, as soon as his beloved is out of sight, he collapses in emotional pain, punching a wall in agony, even then having to deflect the suspicion of a stranger. The moment when they reunite - its passion, its need, its depth - ravishes with insight into what love truly is. Then there's the scene when Ennis' wife finally confronts him - and you can see the damage done to so many lives by the powerful, suffocating evil of homophobia. So many lives. Sometimes I start to imagine how much accumulated human pain has been inflicted for so many centuries on so many gay hearts and souls, and then I stop. It's too much. We are slowly healing; but some wounds will never heal; and they are inscribed on the souls of millions in the past - the ones who persecuted, the ones who suffered, the ones who never let themselves be loved - or saw it briefly once, feared it and lived their lives in the lengthening shadow of their regrets. Yes, these were souls whose backs were broken. And now a new generation stands up.

* * * *

*Sigh* I love Sully.

I’ve been wrecked by this film, having lost my great love to the machismo homophobia of small town Brazil. But I’m so grateful for this movie, as it gives us a chance to frame the gay rights debate away from advocacy for our sex lives into advocacy for our love lives and our emotional health. We can point to this film and say, see? - we do love. I disagree, though, that the film doesn’t sustain itself for its length. If it were any shorter it would merely be a selection of melodramatic vignettes, like any soap opera. Instead, being stretched out like the scenery, we are able to experience the vastness of the context, and the exquisite subtleties between the emotional breakdowns. It’s a fucking brilliant film.

SANITY RULES

The judge in the Dover Area School Board trial ruled that so-called "intelligent design" cannot be taught in biology class as it violates the separation of church and state. How? Because, as the judge put it:

"We find that the secular purposes claimed by the Board amount to a pretext for the Board's real purpose, which was to promote religion in the public school classroom"

* * * *

Hmmm, what gave it away? Could it have been when one of the school board members claimed the school board owed it to Jesus for having died on the cross to teach "intelligent design" in biology classes?

BROKEBACK

From the review in the New York Times:

One tender moment's reprieve from loneliness can illuminate a life.

* * * *

It's some heavy shit. A lot has been said about this movie. Many are arguing that it should be seen not as a gay film, but a film about universal themes of love and loss. But this IS a gay movie. The pain the characters endure is a direct consequence of specifically the gay condition, and that's important. Straight people can surely identify with the feelings of lonliness and loss and a love that cannot "be", but this story is about GAY love. Not gay sex, of course, but gay love. Yes, it exists, in spite of what homopobes and today's sex-centric gay mainstream culture will tell you. Thankfully this film will contribute to a general understanding of that.

Personally, it makes me think of Gilberto. Though the film takes place in Wyoming during the sixties, when homosexuality didn't even have the term "gay" to describe it, this story is not about history. It's about now. And that's why it hurts.

THUNDERSTORM

A very rare treat in San Francisco. I've woken this morning to the rumbling crash and pounding rain of a glorious thunderstorm! And I was standing in the back of my apartment at the very large, wide window looking out across Eureka Valley and the Mission and the various shaped rooftops flooded in the assault and mist blanketing the downtown skyscrapers and FLASH! Lightnening strikes very very close and then BOOM! I'm done standing next to the window.

THAT'S A GOOD QUESTION

Slate blogger Mickey Kaus has been going on and on about why he doesn't want to see Brokeback Mountain - and it's NOT BECAUSE HE'S A HOMOPHOBE!

Mickey asks his readers:

If homosexuality is in the genes, is aversion to homosexuality in the genes?

* * * *

Not a homophobe. Right.

This comment from this post says it all.

FOR SHAME

Ah-nuld, the most ridiculous politican since Jeffrey Fieger, has wasted yet another opportunity to be a person, rather than a politician. He's allowing a man who is a major force for good and a symbol of redemption in the underworld of criminal gangs to be murdered. Not only is it wrong to kill Stanley Tookie Williams just because it is wrong to kill, the reverberating consequences of killing such a powerful symbol of hope in the african-american community will be severe. What kind of message does this send to those most vulnerable to gang seduction? "The system" is against you anyway, so might as well.

Emil Amok argues why the Asian American community in particular should protest this killing.

Schwarzenegger disgusts me. He's demonstrated in his two years in office that he is nothing but a shill for corporatism and a social hypocrite who talks like a libertarian but actually sucks on wing-nuts. He's a man who projects an image of leadership through Hollywood swagger and theatrical campaigning, but when it comes time to walk the walk, he's nothing but a fuckin' amoral wimp, and quite literally, a killer of hope.