This is my Live Journal. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
This is where I go to say personal and off-topic things that don't really belong on the M-Brane blog and which are too long to say on Twitter.
One of the downsides of listening to two hours of NPR's Morning Edition every morning while I am getting my workday started is that they break periodically for local station news updates, which here in St. Louis means news of the alternately deadly dull and utterly enraging shenanigans in our state capital. This week, our heavily GOP-dominated state house of representatives passed a dumbass piece of legislation requiring all driver license exams to be administered in English only. As it stands now, such exams can be administered in eleven different languages. This is just one manifestation of the English-only craze that GOP bigots have added to their stock-in-trade in the last decade or two, but it's also one of the very dumbest, and this is the very dumbest justification for it: To paraphrase the bill's proponents, "it will make the roads safer because if we know that everyone can read and speak English fluently then we will know that they can read and understand the road signs."What most Missouri Republican state reps (most, not all: 11 of them crossed over to oppose the bill) and five Democratic reps obviously do not know is that road signs are pretty much the same everywhere on the planet! And pretty much anyone who knows at all how to drive a car--even functionally illiterate drivers in any language!--can read and understand them. I have been to a bunch of different countries in my life, and I have driven cars in some where English was not the native language. And I am not fluent in any other language. Yet I was somehow able to master the feat of safely driving in this scary furr-eign language environment, in part because all the goddamned signs looked pretty much like all the equivalent ones in the Good Ol' You Ass of Ay.
I don't know much about the history of traffic control, but evidently at some point after the advent of the automobile, most of the planet agreed on the same basic concept for road signage. Also, the very fact that a lot of new Americans in Missouri--the people from Vietnam and Bosnia and Mexico and Honduras and Afghanistan and many other places who do a lot to make my city a diverse and interesting place to live--have been able to pass driving tests and get licenses while taking tests administered in their native languages proves that the other side's argument is legless. It's about bigotry and political opportunism, using a disfavored group of people--in this case, recent immigrants--to trump a phony threat and use the law the "correct" it and, in doing so, drum up voting fervor among their base and driving wedges between people who otherwise have no reason to quarrel.
It's so obvious, it's almost a cliche to even say it, but almost everyone here is the child of an immigrant. But in Missouri in particular I wonder where the hell any of its white-folk get off bringing up language when so few of them are more than a generation or two or three away from foreign-speaking forebears. This city is chockablock with Euro-descended Catholics, not one of which likely had grandparents hailing from England. And there's plenty of them in the neighborhood in which I work who speak English--when they choose to speak English--with a lovely and obvious Italian accent. And they drive just fine, too. (Well, at least as well as most people in this town do.)
As state rep Chris Kelly D-Columbia said, “This bill has no purpose, except jingoism. I hope the body will rise above its lowest common denominator and defeat this ill-advised piece of legislation.” But the body did not defeat it. Now it rests with the Senate, which will hopefully end it. And if not, our Governor will probably veto it. But even if so, and it dies there, what a waste of time and what an exercise in exposing our state's ugliest underbelly. They do it to the immigrants, they do it to the gays--they are bullies. I hate bullies.
By the way, that image up there is a Chinese stop sign. I have no idea what it "says" but I sure as hell know what it means.
In case you came back here after reading Brandon's really terrific and intelligent essay, I'll continue. The National Organization for Marriage is a huge piece of crap. To wit:
That douchebag is Brian S. Brown. According to the NOM website he "serves as President of the National Organization for Marriage. Prior to coming to NOM in 2007, Brian was the executive director of the Family Institute of Connecticut. During the five years he was with the Family Institute, he developed it into one of the largest statewide pro-family organizations in the Northeast....Brian and his wife Susan have seven young children." So it sounds like Brian S. Brown has enjoyed aplenty the alleged benefits of "traditional" marriage. That's fine with me, but what's not fine with me is that he and his organization somehow think that it's any of their fucking business if someone else--someone NOT like him and his wife--also want to enjoy those traditional values. And that NOM is an out-and-out hate group (almost forgot about that).
Which brings me, gradually, to my main point and the meaning of the title of this post. A few days ago when I first caught the news on the radio about the action in Washington, NPR ran a segment featuring an openly gay WA state legislator, addressing his colleagues, and very graciously framing the debate in terms something like this paraphrase: "This is an issue about which reasonable people may disagree, and the opponents of samesex marriage are NOT bigots. They're just reasonable people that we're having a reasonable disagreement with." That's not at all a direct quote, but it's the sense of it.
And I couldn't disagree more. Too often, in the interest of being more "reasonable" than the people on the other side, progressives overreach in assuming that the other side is actually composed of reasonable people reasonably disagreeing with us. NOM belies all of this. There is no rational reason for opposing samesex marriage other than the simple fact that the opponents think that gay people are gross and disgusting and would like us to return to the closet (NOT going to happen), and they think it's "reasonable" to have the public vote on our individual rights when, generally, it's pretty much unheard of otherwise for basic rights to be subjected to a popular vote. It is entirely founded on bigotry and that fact doesn't change no matter how many flotillas of Bibles to which they set sail in an effort to say it has a "reasonable" basis. These are the ideological descendants of the same people who clung screaming to the past when women got the right to vote a century ago. And just think if women could NOT vote now. Maybe there would have been no political activist career for this lovely:
According to NOM's website, this charmer is Maggie Gallagher "co-founder of the National Organization for Marriage, which the Washington Post has called the "preeminent" national organization fighting to protect marriage as the union of husband and wife. NOM's formal mission is "protecting marriage and the faith communities that sustain it," but as Maggie likes to put it, "we fight gay marriage—and win."
But what she is, in fact, is a giant bigot. She is not a reasonable person having a reasonable disagreement with me. The entire premise of their attack--that samesex marriage somehow destroys "real" marriage--is a total canard. It is a lie, a fraud, a cover for the plain and simple and totally obvious fact that these people just plain think that people like me and my partner of 12 years are gross and disgusting and they just don't like us. Well, bitch, the feeling is mutual, because...DAMN! So, in summary, I reject the reasonable-people-reasonably-disagreeing position and instead take the rather more hardline stance that it is none of the fucking business of NOM and their ilk how my partner and I live our lives and that they can take their "traditional" values and fuck right the hell off. (And that's why I invited all y'all to read Brandon's much more intellectually rigorous article instead of mine.)
"9/10/2002" (posted originally on 9/11/09)
Eight years ago today, I was executive chef and restaurant manager at the Saint Louis Art Museum. The phone rang that morning, and it was my co-worker Sharon calling from our corporate office, where she was attending a meeting. She said, "Bring the TV upstairs and turn it on. Something's going on. It looks like a plane crashed into the World Trade Center." We kept a TV in our storage area for the purpose of renting it to clients who needed A/V for meetings in our private dining room. I looked at online news first and saw the initial story on one of the news websites. I clicked to another page and saw the updated news stating that a second plane had hit the second tower. I brought the TV up into the cafe's kitchen and for the next couple of hours all work stopped as my staff and I learned of the third plane crashing into the Pentagon and the fourth one whose fate was unclear for a while, and watched the Trade Center towers crumble to the ground. There were rumors and misinformation moving about as well: perhaps military aircraft had shot down a hijacked plane, perhaps there were many more planes en route to suicide collisions. Someone said that there had been a car bomb at the State Department.
The Art Museum shut down at noon that day as a security precaution, as did similar venues around the city such as the Missouri Botanical Garden and the Arch. Some of my colleagues and I, not knowing what else to do with the rest of the day, met at a bar and drank away much of the afternoon, peering at TVs occasionally, waiting for more news. What we all noticed that afternoon, and what I will never forget, was the strange quiet that resulted from no aircraft in the sky. In St. Louis, as in most cities with big airports, there is a constant, faint underlying drone of air traffic. It's unnoticeable until it's gone, and that was the first time it was ever gone.
Almost one year later, on the tenth of September 2002, I was still in that job at the Art Museum. A disagreeable customer, a lady who was one of a group of six ladies, started raising hell over our policy of not providing separate checks. It was bad enough that I was summoned by their server to try to smooth it over. With great, dripping disdain, she said to me, and I shit you not, "I can't believe that you would put everybody through this, and on the anniversary of 9/11, too!" And she sneered at me. For putting them "through this." Of course, I am a total professional in customer service situations, so I held back and did not reply thus: "Put you through what, you dumb disgusting ghoul? You think your sad-sack piece-of-shit little problem is somehow worth mentioning in the same breath as 9/11? Because you didn't get a separate check for your six dollar lunch? Well, fuck you. And look at a calendar. Today is nine-TEN!"
I'm sure there are still douchebags all over America trying to form self-righteous and ridiculous connections between their stupid, petty problems and 9/11, and the anniversary itself is certainly the day of days for it. But I'd ask those folks to instead show a little goddamned respect. And maybe consider for just one day that the whole fucking world isn't all about them. And when they get their lower lips all a-tremble about 9/11, how about shedding a tear or two for all the thousands of our soldiers and the tens of thousands of other people worldwide who have had to die in this endless war that we have fought ever since that awful day and will probably never quit fighting during the lifetimes of anyone alive today.
Zack Kopplin is hereby inducted into the M-Brane SF Pantheon of Anti-Douchebags for his work to repeal Louisiana's dumb "Science Education Act," a ridiculous law that smooths the imposition of Creationism and other whack-job anti-science ideas on public school kids. Visit the website and read about what he is doing. In particular, take note of his post of May 24 in which he directly challenges Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (Dumbass-MN) to produce evidence of the existence of any of the Nobel laureate scientists whom she claims endorse "intelligent design." You need to read this. This kid absolutely nails it. It is one of best rebukes to the anti-science political class that I have read in ages.
Aside from his obvious intelligence and the professional-grade handling of his campaign, I really dig the fact that he called out Bachmann specifically. She is a serious nutcase and a pathological creator of bullshit. She's so cracked that she makes Sarah Palin look semi-reasonable. Will she deign to answer Kopplin's challenge? I seriously doubt it, because I bet she is just barely sane enough to know that he would completely flatten her in a direct debate, because he has the facts and she has none. In fact, I am going to just go ahead and say that Michele Bachmann is terrified of Zack Kopplin and what he represents. She lies awake at night thinking about him and the threat he poses. "Do they ALL have brains?" she frets, tossing and turning, wondering how many more kids could easily debunk her every statement. She thinks that she should be President of the United States, but she is too much of a coward to take on a high school kid because she knows she would lose.
And why would she lose? Aside from the fact that she has no command of facts, it's because Creationism is a bunch of nonsense that no one with a science education, and no serious scientist on Earth believes in. That's why they don't want kids in America to learn any real science: because they will then quit believing in rubbish. You can call it "creation science" or "intelligent design" all day long, but it will still be a pile of balderdash having about as much to do with science as I have to do with Grammy Award-winning singing. The fact that we even have a debate about this topic at all in this country is a big smoldering beacon of our national downfall. Hey, America: wake up and let the kids learn real science, yo. Your future's at stake.
Here, before I go off like a lunatic, read this item by a more reasonable person, from whose site I snagged that pic.
The TV commercial itself, part of what they say is a pull-out-all-the-stops binge of ad-o-malia about "creme," is disgusting. It is in its every detail cynically aimed at its target customer. Watch as a not-too-young and yet not-too-old Woman With a Family smiles she prepares a delicious dinner by dumping a package of "Cooking Creme" into a pan of chicken bits and veggies, (which themselves look like they came pre-prepared from a package), stirs for a moment and declares dinner accomplished. The product, the "creme," is cream cheese thinned out with various additives and enhanced with "flavor profiles." It is Abomination.
OK. Deep breath. But I need to say at least this: "creme" is not pronounced the same way as "cream." Also, it is not an English word at all. Kraft would have pissed me off only maybe 60% as much with this dumb product if they had called it "cooking CREAM" instead of "cooking CREME." But remember smiling Woman With a Family from the TV ad? She's so dumb that she thinks it's all fancy and French when it's spelled "creme." Or so Kraft wants you to believe.
Anyone who craves chicken with some creamy goo on it may say so in comments here, and I will happily post a recipe matching that description but using better and less expensive ingredients.
My pet project, the M-Brane SF Double: The New People/Elegant Threat is finally close enough to publication (due out May 31) that I can start a pre-order special for it here at the M-Brane website. Featuring short novels by Alex Jeffers and Brandon H. Bell, the Double is a print book designed in the fashion of the old Ace Doubles series. For well over a year, I have been working on making this idea into a real book that people can hold in their hands and set on a shelf. Even in the undeniable age of the ebook, I think there is still a lot of value in the physical book as an object in and of itself, so I tried to make a really nice one. Also, since I thought the old Ace series was super-cool both content-wise and object-wise, I have long wanted to make something similar. While the old Ace books did not always feature content of uniformly excellent quality, they did provide a venue for a lot of really fantastic literature to get published under the cover of a cheap sf paperback--which is better than it never having been seen at all. Sitting right nearby me are copies of Doubles containing the first publications of items like Samuel Delany's Captives of the Flame and Ursula LeGuin's Rocannon's World. I don't really expect very many people to be as captivated by the Double concept as I am, but I hope enough people will buy it so that I can at least recover its cost and pay the authors a few bucks. But I do know that I'm not the only one who thinks that the novella or short novel is a great medium for speculative fiction in general and science fiction in particular. The length (both Jeffers' and Bell's entries are about 30,000 words) allows for a lot more world-building and character development than a short story usually allows, but it doesn't demand the huge, convoluted plot-lines that epic-length books do. If this first attempt at a Double goes well, I may do a series of them.
Food dreams: Most of these lately have been literal and work-related, but a couple notable exceptions: 1) I dreamt that I visited a new restaurant located in a small corner of an ancient colluseum-style building which specialized entirely in egg salad. They had dozens of formulations of egg salad and many different styles of bread. There was an egg salad with copious smoked trout and capers and dill in it, served on a toasted rye bagel. There was another one mixed with pulled pork and chili pepper mayonnaise, wrapped in a thick fresh flour tortilla with avocados. Another one was a mixture containing yogurt, cucumber, mint and "gyro meat" served with wedges of grilled pita. I could go on and on, but you get the point. A total egg salad concept restaurant. I wonder if such a thing exists. As one who loves egg salad, I think it's a brilliant idea; 2) I prepared a cookbook for publication, compiling its text and images on a large device like an iPad, but huge. It was embedded in the steel surface of a work table and was probably at least a meter wide. In a larger version of my home kitchen, Jeff assembled show plates of our new dishes and photographed them. As he took pictures they instantly appeared on my table-sized screen and I slid them into place on pages with my fingers.
Sex dreams: These happen constantly, but are usually unremarkable unless there is an odd juxtaposition of sex and location, or an unexpected partner. 1) One recent dream involved a sex act with a non-human phenomenon which is difficult to describe. In the dream, it was called a "variable state wave," and it took the form of a hazy reddish-orange, luminous field in which I was partially enveloped. It responded to my actions, and me to its, but it was not an item of technology, not some kind of strange sex toy. I understood it to have a sentience though I could not communicate verbally with it. But it was totally interactive: I wanted something from it, but it also wanted something from me, and I intuitively understood its desires. It made sense in the dream context, and even though it seemed like nonsense after I awoke, I kept remembering it with some enthusiasm later in the day. 2) I found on a website a series of black-and-white videos of myself engaged in various auto-erotic activities. It developed that various people that I know in real life were aware of the site containing these videos and had seen them. I felt some anxiety that I did not know how these videos were made nor how they got posted online. But a conversation with a friend allayed any fears I had about it when he assured me that the videos had been up for years and that they were well regarded as examples of my "creativity" by everyone who knew me.
Water dreams: While I generally like the food dreams and the sex dreams, I do not like the water dreams and I do not like that I seem to be in a new phase of them. "Water dreams" is my name for a broad category of dreams in which almost anything can be happening, but they always involve traveling somewhere, usually by car, and finding myself in some kind of swamped terrain where the road gradually becomes covered by water and where bodies of water appear and widen around me and make it constantly more difficult to get anywhere. The mood of these dreams ranges from merely frustrating to truly terrifying. I don't know why these happen, but they have recurred my entire life. I wonder if the water is some kind of archetype that my subconscious employs to illustrate stress or feelings of not being in control of things. Whatever it is, I don't like it. When one of these occurs during early morning sleep, when I am getting closer to wakefulness, I can sometimes wake myself out of it. Yesterday morning, I was stuck in one of these situations, and within the dream itself, I looked at myself as if in a mirror and said, "You're not having this dream anymore. It's not happening. You don't need to find a way around the water. Just wake up." And I woke up.
I'm not sure that I've mined much inspiration out of any recent dream activity, but I may add the egg salad restaurant into my current work-in-progress. And I if I ever had a bunch of extra money and wanted to open a restaurant again, I just might make it real!
My favorite line from the review is, "By and large the sensibility is ‘literary,’ and the quality is high (the two, of course, not always the same thing)..." I could not agree more, and would say so even if I weren't its publisher. Instead of starting small and slowly growing it like I did over two years with M-Brane SF, Brandon had the vision and daring to bring FU to life, full-blown, immediately with the first issue. This first issue is not just a first effort with a few hints of greatness, a mere promise of the future. It is from cover-to-cover a work of great quality, and once more people find out about this first issue and see the second (due soon), I believe that FU will suddenly move from being an obscure new publication that no one knows about yet to a leading, defining periodical of its genre.
One other point: If you are a reader of fiction but think you're not especially into fantasy, you might be wrong. When I started M-Brane SF, I broadly excluded fantasy in favor of science fiction because I felt that the sf genre in particular needed a new outlet and it's what I wanted to read more of; also, I didn't want to read a lot of wizard/dragon/magic or Tolkienesque or Jordanesque story submissions, because I am not a big fan of that particular subset of fantasy (though I have, in fact, run a fair number of stories that might be more fantastic than science fictional over our 26 issues). If you read the review at Future Fire, it will give you a sense of what sort of fantasy editor Brandon Bell is into, and it's the kind that I, a reader who isn't always drawn to the genre, likes as well.
My current work-in-progress—that novella that I have posting section of on Facebook and on my LJ—involves a Lovecraftian cult in the background of the story, and I decided to talk about the sexual practices and mores of this cult. I thought some kind of “magic” involving sex would be fun to add into the mix. So yesterday, I was looking into the matter of “sex magic” and “auto-erotic” spiritual practices, including those promulgated by the occult groups with which Aleister Crowley was involved in the early years of the 20th century. Somehow my research got a bit sidetracked, and I stumbled upon a gay porn site, one of the really funny ones that evidently originate in a non-English-speaking country, but where all the text on the site has been translated—very poorly—into English. The site contained several rather wordy paragraphs of text, supposedly describing various videos that one could see a preview of or download. Oddly, all of the pics accompanying the text blocks were on a single theme: medical examinations, randy doctors and their lovely patients. But the accompanying text described a much wider range of activities, or at least seemed to from what I could glean.
As I read through these bizarre paragraphs of near-nonsense, weirdly computer-translated, I found them strangely interesting in their syntax and word choice. There were broken sentences of 12 or 15 words of sheer gibberish, but then this might be followed by a phrase or clause that seemed almost lovely. I started to imagine that this text could work for live performance if one wanted to present a ridiculous parody of a pretentious Beat poetry or slam poetry reading. I imagined William S. Burroughs sitting in a smoke-hazed café somewhere in 1960, stoned on heroin, listening to a young poet reciting this text, someone in the background tapping on a bongo drum.
So I copy/pasted several paragraphs of text from the porn site, and spent about ten minutes editing them into the following gay erotic “poem,” overbearingly titled “Learning My Opener-Word: Nut-Fogged Impressions of the Orgy Years in the Twink Gay Fora…A Found Poem.” I did not add any language to what I snagged from the porn site. All I did was delete words and add punctuation, emphasis and capitalization occasionally. I didn’t even rearrange the order in which I found it, or mix sentences from different paragraphs. What follows is exactly as I found it, in the order I found it, just with my minor edits. Now, I would like for someone to perform a live café reading of it and capture it on video and post that video online. Then it will be Art, man!
The piece itself contains some sexually explicit language, so reader discretion is advised. Oddly, however, considering its source, it ended up not being as crazily pornographic as it might have been.
And now, without further delay, my newest work, “Learning My Opener-Word: Nut-Fogged Impressions of the Orgy Years in the Twink Gay Fora…A Found Poem.”
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