Coming down the mountain

A Rock and Roll Invervention
Look: there's something I've been meaning to talk to you about. I'm worried about us. It's okay, we're all friends here. Hip friends. And like hip friends, we like hip, contemplative music.

Freak-folk, folktronica, post-folk. Whatever. We like hip, accessible music. Brit-pop, new-wave, neo-wave, no-wave. Whatever.

We like genres.

We like to put music into little bins like the bins mean something and then draw conclusions as though square-pegging a sound or a movement adds something to it. It's almost like making music ourselves. It's not enough anymore to be consumers, we also have to be critics. All of us.

We like to be hip by association. Or rather, in as much as we, the consumer, are responsible for our buying trends, we create hip. We are the pop King Makers. We. Our web logs. King Makers.

But this is exhausting, and sometimes we just want to rock a little. Sure we do. Come on. We're all friends here.

It's hard to decide what's going to be the new thing all the time. All that buying. It's hard to decide who lives and dies. Every once in a while we want to put down that pissy, moany pop and that glitchy, schizophrenic hip hop and just rock our faces off. Without cynicism or commentary or psychoanalysis. Uno, dos, tres, catorce. Like that.

Sometimes we want to bang around, thrash, not caring what number comes after tres. Like Bono. But he's a little wiener, so not like him. Like other people who rocked and didn't care. Old people. They knew how to rock.

Sometimes it's good to rock like our parents rocked. Like their parents rocked. To Lynyrd Skynyrd and Chuck Berry. Sometimes we need to.

We need to rock like music means something beyond the categories we place around it. We need to rock without constraints or distinctions. Holistically. Wholeheartedly. We need to rock like Buddha would have. Rock like Foghat did.

Sometimes it's good to get in a massive-ass truck with a lift kit and speakers mounted in the wheel wells and spin brodies on our neighbors’ lawns. That narc's lawn who busted up the keg on state land.

Back in the hills there. After the big game. Just before graduation.

Come on, it's okay. We're all friends here. Every once in a while we want to rock like we don't know any better. Own it. It's alright.

Do you feel better? Let it out.

We want to rock, yes. God, yes. But we've forgotten how. We've lost our way. We tried to double back, through lo-fi and delta blues. We even started listening to Tool again, but it was no good. We couldn't find our way. But it's okay. It'll be fine.

Black Mountain is here.

They'd like to show us how to rock again.

Read the full thing here.

Bigot mayor not "gay", merely has "relations" with "men"

Spokane Mayor Jim West, a 20 year veteran in the war against gay rights, admitted to making sex with male humans on Thursday.

Still, he said, "I wouldn't characterize me as 'gay.'"

There are larger allegations of molestation which he has, of course, denied. He also apparently trolled Gay.com soliciting man-friends with the promise of signed sports memorabilia. While there, West offered internships to the man [undercover investigator] he was courting.

I won't bore you with the tawdry details but will point out with some satisfaction the immense hypocrisy and self-loathing of this wretched and pitiable human being. I wonder if West agreed with most of president Bush's supporters when they said the most important thing ithe last election were, "moral issues."

Moral issues evidently not being the same as morals. Or ethics.

The story is national:
New York Times
USA Today

But the best headline award goes to Editor & Publisher, for the following:

After 3-Year Probe, Spokane Paper Alleges Sex Abuse by Mayor

The longest, hottest probe ever, to be sure.

UPDATE [11:11]: One of his Gay.com screennames, Cobra62nd, has the following profile [yes I registered at Gay.com to get this info]:

Sexuality

Bisexual

I'm looking for

Men

Interested in

. . . I am a really typical str8 acting/looking guy that just happens to be attracted to the same.

How "Out" are you?

Not out at all yet

West might want to update that last one. Other than that it's just about as boring a profile as you'd expect from a gay republican politician.

Read the full thing here.

Uneasy Education

Pedro Almodóvar is a grave robber. Stalking the scorched, neglected earth at society's fringes, his pace is easy, assured. He's been at this a while; he knows what to look for. Turning the soil, he plumbs down past the debris flung aside by polite society to glimpse what lies beneath. Just under the drug addiction, the fetishism, the gender crises – the tawdry desolation – he finds shards of humanity so bright and tenderly polished that they reflect back at us images of ourselves.

Except we're, you know, in drag with a needle stuck in our arm.

His latest film, “Bad Education”, is a disturbing and frank exploration of victimization and obliterated innocence. The narration isn't linear, but the film can be broken into three historically distinct sections. The first centers on the destructive forces of abuse and molestation. Two boys, Ignacio and Enrique, have their adolescent journeys of self-discovery stopped short by the most powerful figure in their life: the priest who runs the boarding school they attend. As the only father figure, spiritual or otherwise, in the whole movie, Father Manolo should be the ground upon which the boys grow into men. Instead he exploits them and leaves them wandering and broken, unsure of who they are.

Some sixteen years later, wearing lipstick and a skirt, Ignacio still hasn't figured that out. He is a writer now, or so he says, as he stumbles unannounced into Enrique's production company. He wants Enrique to make the story he has written about them into a movie.

The middle section, between childhood and their reunion, is the focus of that story. Enrique is unsure at first, but after reading it through, decides eventually that the story needs telling. The details soon come into dispute, though, and as Enrique looks deeper into Ignacio's past, it's unclear exactly whose story he's been telling.

The narrative and direction are cunning and complimentary. As Almodóvar folds in pieces of Ignacio's story and Enrique's movie, reality and fantasy become a vivid tapestry of delusion and coercion, expectation and desperation, hope and loss. After a while, it becomes hard to tell truth from fiction in the stories upon stories, but it's never tough to spot what's real. Almodóvar works it into every steeled gaze, every set jaw, every furtive glance, every posture and every pose. In his world, no one is innocent, no one is brave. Each character, in his own way, is a coward and an opportunist, relying heavily on past martyrdom to wash away present sins.

The redemption narratives these men spin for themselves are as twisted as the priest who set them on their paths, and Almodóvar suggests an institution that insists we will have salvation if we remain obedient has more wrong with it than a few pedophiles. For these men at least, there will be no happy ending.

The journey, though, might prove cathartic.

Even if his stories were linear and his direction flat, Almodóvar would be important because he forces the audience to admit the humanity and history of people we see every day and turn away from. There is no respite for those two hours. These oddities, these stage decorations from the periphery of our lives, become people. Like us they are tired, soul-hungry, beautiful, strange and despicable. Their selfishness and self-destructiveness are horrifying for the frankness of depiction and because we know how they feel.

“La Mala Educación” is on DVD now after getting nowhere near a Sandpoint or Spokane theater – it probably played nowhere between Seattle and Minneapolis. It might have hit Boise, those magnificent bastards. That's okay, though, we don't need their theaters. We are patient and technology is the great equalizer.

Rent “Bad Education”, along with any other Almodóvar film you haven't seen, and get a good look at yourself.

Read the full thing here.

God plus Hutch is enough

TGtSDSaaMCC [Thank God the seven deadly sins are a medieval Catholic construct] or the Reverend Doctor Ken Hutcherson might be dead.

The noted ecclesiastical fag-basher [wrath] and megachurch [greed?] bully pulpit claims that he alone [pride] steered Microsoft from supporting a gay rights bill before the Washington State legislature. The company, who had supported the measure the last two years and was generally regarded one of the most gay-friendly companies to work for, took a "neutral" stance.

Microsoft said he had nothing to do with the change. Hutch calls that a "flat out lie" and proclaims "God plus Hutch is enough."

Also, comparing the fight for gay rights to the fight for rights by all other people/sexes/creeds/whatever really makes him mad:

"You tell me what I went through as an African-American, when they talk about discrimination, compared to what gays go through with discrimination - it's the difference between night and day, not even close," Dr. Hutcherson said. "I even get upset when people say, 'Well, you got to understand what they go through.' Not when they've chosen to do what they do. They can stop choosing what to do what they do, and they can hide it anytime they want. They can hide their homosexuality. Could I take a 'don't ask don't tell' policy as an African-American?"

Yes. They called it 'passing', lots of people did it. There is even some evidence [perhaps planted by Satan or the pope--or both--like dinosaur fossils] that gay people have not chosen this life.

He also looks to weigh about 300 pounds [sloth? gluttony?].

Thankfully, to some in the new [old] American Christian Right, arrogance, pride, conspicuous consumption, blind hatred, war-mongering jingoism, etc are virtues, not vices.

Hopefully the progressive Christian ground swell that people like the Reverend Jim Wallis are championing comes. Soon.

Tangentially--in a nod to abstinence-plus--I never, ever, condone bumper stickers, but if you're going to do it anyway, do it right.

Read the full thing here.